"Poetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Australia has not, the armed interference of the Home Government in its quarrels with the natives—a race once bold and warlike, able to hold their own awhile even against the English soldiers, gifted with eloquence, with a certain poetic imagination, and no inconsiderable intelligence. It seemed, too, at one moment as if these Maoris would become generally Christianised; but the kind of Christianity which they saw exemplified in certain colonists, hungry for land and little scrupulous as to the means by which they could gratify ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... altar, with true Spartan devotion, I have sacrificed my blood. Come then, and from thy vast, luxuriant stores, in long antiquity piled up, pour forth the rich profusion. Open thy Maeonian and thy Mantuan coffers, with whatever else includes thy philosophic, thy poetic, and thy historical treasures, whether with Greek or Roman characters thou hast chosen to inscribe the ponderous chests: give me a while that key to all thy treasures, which to thy Warburton ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... three places, meanwhile, has he his fair share of that mysterious chemical agent without which health is impossible, the want of which betrays itself at once in the dull eye, the sallow cheek—namely, light. Believe me, it is no mere poetic metaphor which connects in Scripture, Light with Life. It is the expression of a deep law, one which holds as true in the physical as in the spiritual world; a case in which (as perhaps in all cases) the laws of the visible world are the counterparts of those of the invisible ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of Victorian lyrical poetry are apt to find fault with its lack of spontaneity. It is true that we cannot pretend to discover on a greensward so often crossed and re-crossed as the poetic language of England many morning dewdrops still glistening on the grasses. We have to pay the penalty of our experience in a certain lack of innocence. The artless graces of a child seem mincing affectations in a grown-up woman. But the poetry ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... and defenceless inhabitants of Garonne, gratifying a greed of gain by blood and rapine. The gallant deeds of Sir Walter de Manny, of Sir John Chandos, the fame of Edward himself, only make darker by contrast the desolation and suffering by which their glory was purchased. The poetic illusion inspired by Froissart's chronicles of knightly deeds and manners is rudely torn when we read Petrarch's description of France after the battle of Poitiers; "I could not believe that this was the same France which ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... united in the same person to partake the mistaken sympathy which so many writers evince for the follies or vices of genius; nor will it much longer tolerate the opinion, that the possession of the finest imagination, or the highest poetic capacity, must necessarily be accompanied by eccentricity. It may, indeed, be difficult to convert a poetical temperament into a merchant, or to make the man who is destined to delight or astonish mankind by his conceptions, sit quietly over a ledger; but the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... has his romance, his high poetic feeling, and above all his manly dignity. Visit him, and you will find him without coat or waistcoat, unshorn, in ragged blue trousers and old flannel shirt, too often bearing on his lantern jaws the signs of ague and sickness; but he will stand upright before you and speak to you with all the ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... mountains and the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona is not very great. No mediaeval mystery haunts these castles sculptured by the hand of Nature. No famous romancer has lighted on their cliffs the torch of his poetic fancy. No poet has yet peopled them with creatures of his imagination. We can, unfortunately, conjure up from their majestic background no more romantic picture than that of some Pueblo Indian wooing his dusky bride. Yet they are not without some reminiscences of heroism; for valiant men, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... did not attempt more things of the kind. His ode to Carolina, and certain orations, will never be forgotten. Judge Robert Strange was also possessed of similar gifts. Philo Henderson, Walker Anderson and Abraham F. Morehead were largely gifted in poetic power. Each of them, at rare intervals, indulged in compositions that show what might have been accomplished had they been authors by profession and not mere literary amateurs. The State, while possessing a number of excellent musicians, has not produced many musical compositions of ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... sympathy, or solace. She foresaw for her child only a future of degradation. Having a strong, clear mind, without any imagination, she believed that she beheld an inevitable doom. The tart remark and the contemptuous comment on her part, elicited, on the other, all the irritability of the poetic idiosyncrasy. After frantic ebullitions, for which, when the circumstances were analysed by an ordinary mind, there seemed no sufficient cause, my grandfather always interfered to soothe with good-tempered commonplaces, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... inaugurated by young Victor Hugo, who, but the year before, had been crowned as "Maitre des jeux floraux" for a prize poem on Henri IV. Now Chateaubriand, in his journal "Le Conservateur," welcomed him as "Un enfant sublime." By his own romantic followers Hugo was hailed as chief of their poetic "Bataillon Sacre." During the same year the poet, then barely nineteen, married Mademoiselle Foucher, a girl ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... respectable gentlemen had daughters. I confess to doing more than half the talking, but as to the laugh that follows, not a bit. Last night I thought they would go wild, and I too laughed myself into silent convulsions, when I recited an early effusion of my poetic muse for their edification. Miriam made the bedstead prance, fairly, while Anna's laugh sounded like a bull of Bashan with his head in a ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... is full of hope, and grace, and tender sentiment. If I had in the least poetic gift, I know I could improvise under such an inspiration (each girl nudges her sweetheart) something worthy to—to—Is there no poet among us? [Each youth turns solemnly his back upon the other, and raises his hands in benediction over his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... low, melodious voice, and with some of that poetic imagery which marks the language, more or less, of all North American Indians, the girl began to speak—raising her eyes wistfully the while to the sky, as if she were communing with her own thoughts rather than ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... man!" {This disturbed my mind but} what exercised me most was the fear that Eumolpus would find out what was going on and, being a very sarcastic individual, might revenge my supposed injury in some poetic lampoon, (in which event his ardent zeal would without doubt expose me to ridicule, and I greatly dreaded that. But while I was debating with myself as to the best means of preventing him from getting at the facts, who should suddenly come in but the man himself; and he was not uninformed ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... conviction that the Messiah would arise among the beggars and cripples of Rome. Simlai, who was born in Palestine, and migrated to Nehardea in Babylonia, was more of a poet than a lawyer. His love was for the ethical and poetic elements of the Talmud, the Hagadah, as this aspect of the Rabbinical literature was called in contradistinction to the Halachah, or legal elements. Simlai entered into frequent discussions with the Christian Fathers on subjects of ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... beauty of Mrs. Lennox and the devotion of her husband were on every tongue. But married is not mated, and the best part of Jessy Lorimer's beauty had never touched Will Lennox. Her pure, simple, poetic temperament he had never understood, and he felt in a dim, uncertain way that the noblest part of his wife ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... on this passage, says: "The sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and culture; it was not suggested by the facts"—for Mrs. Orr, who had read the documents from which Browning made the poem, says: "Unless my memory much deceives me, her ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... strange flash in her dark eyes as she surveyed the young socialist. With his long hair, his pale classical face, his sad poetic eyes, he was indeed a handsome fellow of a type seldom seen. The fact that his clothes were unconventional in their cut and that he wore a negligee shirt with a soft wide collar detracted not a whit from his ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... charming book.... Will delight equally the artistic and the poetic, the historical and the antiquarian, the picturesque and the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... youngest, almost as these words are written, has gone singing to lay down his life for his country's cause. Although no definite chronological limit has been set, and Meredith at least began to write in the middle of the nineteenth century, the intention has been to represent mainly those poetic tendencies which have become dominant as the influence of the accepted Victorian masters has grown weaker, and from which the poetry of the future, however it may develope, must in turn take its start. It may be helpful ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... of instruction employed by Miss Edgeworth and her followers. In "Garden Amusements" the conversation was interrupted by a note criticising a quotation from Milton as savoring too much of poetic license. Cowper also gained the anonymous critic's disapproval, although it was his point of view and not his ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... in the method of his inferences, he attained the poetic quality only by the audacity with which he conceived the whole sublime extension of his premises. The contrast was a strange one between the careful, the almost petty fineness of his personal surrounding—all ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... her success, after a long struggle, and the unexpected, inexplicable manner in which she had abandoned it. It was to recall, too, the delightful evenings I had spent under her influence, the pleasure I had had in the passion of her "Juliet," the poetic charm of her "Viola"; the graceful witchery of her "Rosalind"; how I had smiled with her "Portia"; laughed with her "Beatrice"; wept with her "Camille"; in fact how I had yielded myself up to her magnetism with that ecstatic pleasure in which one gets ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... peculiarly successful in depicting in words natural scenery or phenomena. The result is, that in his highest flights, while he is often grand and affecting, full of life and power, he never shows the creative imagination. But if he falls short on the poetic side, there is the counterbalancing advantage that there is never a false note nor an overwrought description which offends our taste and jars ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... to point out what all men discern more or less distinctly, how important are diction and expression in all works of fancy and fiction and how both branches, poetic and prosaic, delight in beauty adorned and allow in such matters the extreme of liberty. A long study of Galland and Torrens, Lane and Payne, convinced me that none of these translators, albeit each could claim his special merit, has succeeded in preserving ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... denounced by Thomas Heywood for stealing his translations of Ovid's Ars Amatoria and De Remedio Amoris. Arthur Melville Clark, in correcting this error, pointed out that these stolen translations of Ovid should not be confused with The Scourge, an original poetic composition based on Book X of a quite different work by Ovid, The Metamorphoses. Clark concluded that "H. A. or A. H. was probably the editor, not the author, although he may have made certain corrections and additions, as the title-page of the ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... became for life a professional author. His enemies afterwards reproached him bitterly for his mean circumstances at this period of his life, and asserted that he was a mere drudge to Herringman. He, at all events, did little in his own proper poetic calling for two years. A poem on the Coronation of Charles, well fitted to wipe away the stain of Cromwellism, and to attract upon the poet the eye of that Rising-Sun, whose glory he sang with more zeal than truth; a panegyric on the Lord Chancellor; and a satire on the Dutch; were ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... promenade the halls, playing. Their dress reminds me, in its effect, of that of our American Indians, and their playing is wild and barbaric. It had a striking effect among these wide halls and corridors. There is nothing poetic connected with the history and position of the family of which the fair owner of the halls does not feel the power, and which she cannot use with artistic skill in heightening the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... will hardly occasion surprise that, in looking over the battle-pieces in the foregoing collection, I have been tempted to withdraw or modify some of them, fearful lest in presenting, though but dramatically and by way of poetic record, the passions and epithets of civil war, I might be contributing to a bitterness which every sensible American must wish at an end. So, too, with the emotion of victory as reproduced on some pages, and particularly toward the close. It should not be construed into ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... poetic Edda the tragic tale of Balder is hinted at rather than told at length. Among the visions which the Norse Sibyl sees and describes in the weird prophecy known as the Voluspa is one of the fatal mistletoe. "I behold," ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune, from cripplehood and beggary to paragonship and the throne. The invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the other life ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... which they flourish, who sometimes rise to the surface of ocean, and seated on the craggy rocks, sing sweet ballads to charm away the life of the unwary mariner. Leyden, a Scottish poet, imagines one of these charming denizens of the deep to describe, in the following poetic language, the attractions of this ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... the Committee for their poetry. "The Funeral of John Bixby," by Stephen Vincent Benet, and "The Duke's Opera," by "Jacques Belden" (the first an allegorical fantasy and the second a poetic-romance) are at the head of this division. With these should be included Don Marquis's "Death and Old Man Murtrie," for its sardonic allegory, and "The Designs of Miramon," by James Branch Cabell, for ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... writer of whom we have any information was Peter Bulkley, who was born in England in 1583 and died in 1659 in Massachusetts, and wrote Latin Poetry and Sermons. The earliest poetic volume written in this country was by Anne Bradstreet, of Boston, born 1612, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... rose and once more Robert fell under the great writer's spell. Vivid action and poetic speech claimed him anew, and for the moment he forgot St. Luc. When the second act was finished, and while the applause was still filling the hall, he cast a fearful glance toward the place where he had seen the chevalier. Then, in truth, he rubbed his eyes. No St. Luc was there. The chair ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... latticed window. If she dropped for him her glove or handkerchief, he was in the seventh heaven. As his intents were not honorable nor his purpose marriage, it made no difference whether the lady was married or single, young or old. Whether the love remained upon a Platonic and purely poetic basis depended, of course, entirely upon the lady and her watchful relatives. If the family were poor and the lover rich, these things might have a bearing. We hear of alliances in those days, not dishonorable, where the husband was complacent and looked upon it as a distinction ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... beautiful to see how these citizens, rough and sordid as many of them were, rose to the poetic value of the situation. As one of them, who had seen (and loved) the girl, told of her youth and beauty, they all stood in rigidly silent attention. "She's hardly more than a child," he explained, "but you never saw ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... of my heart, art thou dead from me—art thou dead from me?" An expression, we think, under any circumstances, not to be surpassed in the intensity of domestic affection which it expresses; but under those alluded to, we consider it altogether elevated in exquisite and poetic beauty above the most ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... mercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of natural history had continued and man's fancy had played with the planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have had a planetary patriotism, in which the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... We have neither poetic genius nor space of paper to go through the whole of the alphabet; we merely throw out the above four lines—and were we not assured that they are better lines, far more musical, than any to be found in BULWER'S SIAMESE TWINS, we should blush much ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... It was poetic justice, then, that allotted to St. Vincent the arrangement of the responsible expedition which, in 1798, led to the celebrated Battle of the Nile; in its lustre and thorough workmanship the gem of all naval exploits. To him it fell to choose for ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... respected them from the bottom of her heart, without knowing them, with a poetic exaltation, with a hereditary devotion, with all the sensibility of a well-born woman. She was kindly in every feeling of her soul. She had no child, and ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... however poetic, never slaked a dry throat. To enjoy Caprona's romantic suggestions we must have water, and so we came in close, always sounding, and skirted the shore. As close in as we dared cruise, we found fathomless ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... encumbering the plans of improvement; but the late Duke of Orleans came to visit the castle, and had not the heart to give consent that any of the old walls, still standing, should be swept away. He looked at the place with true poetic and antiquarian feeling, and arrested the hand of the mason, who would have destroyed that part called La Chancellerie, which extends between the donjon of Gaston Phoebus to the Tour Montauzet. The prince represented to his father his ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... to offer his guests, only bread, cheese, and small, black olives; but there was plenty of good red wine, and when the time of brindisi was come Salvatore and Gaspare called for health after health, and rivalled each other in wild poetic efforts, improvising extravagant compliments to Maurice, to the absent signora, to Maddalena, and even to themselves. And with each toast the wine went down till ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the point of separation between the poetic and the artistic temper. The artist or the art-critic, discriminating still, even among these raw materials of human creation, derives an elaborate and subtle delight from the suggestiveness of their colours, their ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... in his troubles from the grand old poetry of the Hebrew Bible, which awakened peaceful echoes in his own poetic soul. His chosen "crony" in his latter years, though much younger than himself, was Charles Marsh, a New Hampshire man. Well educated, polished by travel, and free from pecuniary hamper, Marsh was a most delightful companion, and his wit, keen as Saladin's cimeter, never ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... minds possess this imaging faculty in anything like equal measure will have an important bearing on the public speaker's study of this question. No man who does not feel at least some poetic impulses is likely to aspire seriously to be a poet, yet many whose imaging faculties are so dormant as to seem actually dead do aspire to be public speakers. To all such we say most earnestly: Awaken your image-making gift, for even in the most coldly logical discourse it is sure to ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... fundamental principle of creative work in his statement that the purpose of art is to fulfil the incomplete designs of nature—that is, aid nature by using her speech, yet telling her story the way she ought to have told it but did not. This is his great doctrine of "poetic justice." ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... 'Little Blue', an unknown thread of a stream, twenty miles from Red river, where he constructed fortifications on the open prairie, erected a saw-mill remote from any timber, and devoted himself to gastronomy and poetic meditation, with elegant accompaniments..."] ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... was almost affected. This man represented the Germany that he had many times imagined, a sweet and tranquil Germany composed of burghers, a little heavy and slow perhaps, but atoning for their natural uncouthness by an innocent and poetic sentimentalism. This Blumhardt whom his companions called Bataillon-Kommandeur, was undoubtedly the good father of a large family. He fancied him walking with his wife and children under the lindens of a provincial square, all listening with ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not make fun of a poetic legend, Larry. You have to believe everything over here or you do not get the worth of your money," ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the pier I had not met the good old Morel, and I was not thinking of the planets at all. It had just come over me with dreadful distinctness that from now on my life could never, never be the same. When I had first parted from Roger and Margarita, the poetic strangeness of their surroundings, the shock of all the discoveries I had just made, the relief of finding our friendship secured on a new footing, nay, the very darkness of the mild evening through which I was rowed away from them after that exciting day, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... feeling plasticity, within limits, to be a mode of life like another—certainly better than some, and particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he had really come for—this inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the style, charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even the high wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him right with himself when there was something quite distinct from these things that kept ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... "secundum legem omnis substantia ipsius ad Publicum devoluta est"; a little later Rabennonus, for having killed a man, "medietas omnis illius substantiae ad Publicum devoluta est." In consequence, in poetic justice and for the good of his soul and the king's, Hildeprandus quite arbitrarily presents "omnem praedictam illorum substantiam, qualiter secundum legem juste et rationabiliter, ad Publicum devoluta est," to the Monastery of Farfa "pro mercede Domnorum nostrorum Regum et nostra." ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. [239] Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... And, as she opened the window the breeze came fresh from the bay, catching, as it came, the fragrance of the clover and flowers, which had an exhilarating effect upon those who inhaled its fragrance. In fact, her words were emphasized by the silent but poetic eloquence ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... "Poetic simile: I'm going fast," conceded Kirkwood; but he did not smile. It was becoming quite too serious a matter for laughter. For her sake, he was in the game "for keeps"; especially in view of the fact that everything—his own heart's inclination included—seemed to conspire to keep him in it. Of course ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... profession that is overworked. The hours are long and holidays and vacations are few and far between. Mother gets a great deal of maudlin sympathy and not enough tangible aid, says a writer in the Housekeeper. Our poetic conception of the true mother is that her whole life is bound up in the welfare of her children and her family. At what age are her children not, for her, a matter of serious concern? She has ever had plenty of material which she can manufacture into worry and heartaches. Many ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... my poetic sole alluz finds vent in song. Did ever poet who delited in tombs, and dark, rollin streams, and consumption, and blighted hopes, and decay, and sich themes, ever hev such a pick of subjects ez I hev at this time? ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... after-dinner speakers. [Laughter.] If there is one thing I feel I can enjoy more than another, it is standing upon firm land and speaking to those whose life is on the sea, to these "toilers of the deep." There is in this a sort of poetic justice, a sentimental retribution; for on their element I am never able to stand up, and, owing to certain gastronomic uncertainties, my feelings on that element are just the reverse of those I experience at the present moment. For ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... even in one place, Greek. In these days when our educations have been so dummed down, I find this unhelpful. To read a quotation from a good English poet is a joy and a pleasure, so why go elsewhere for a poetic quotation, except it be to ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... perfectly. But though she has lived in England, and travelled much, there is nothing to indicate that she has been touched in any way by Christianity. She has had, therefore, only Hinduism from which to get poetic thoughts connected with religion. She is evidently a true poet, and if there had been anything in the religion capable of suggesting poetic ideas she would have certainly found it. She has undoubtedly a mind of great refinement, so that all that ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... Poetic justice had been dealt to Diaper the poet. He thought of all he had sacrificed for this woman—the comfortable quarters, the friend, the happy flights. He could not but accuse her of unfaithfulness in leaving ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pressing him with some enthusiasm for Victor Hugo,—an enthusiasm, one is glad to think, which time does nothing to weaken. Mr. Mill, admitting, though not too lavishly, the superb imaginative power of this poetic master of our time, still counted it a fatal drawback to Hugo's worth and claim to recognition that 'he has not brought forward one single practical proposal for the improvement of the society against ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... who had passed several years of his life in that region, is more precise in his description. He says the wine has changed itself here (Black Sea) into a solid frozen mass; one gives it to drink by pieces. Fearing of being accused of poetic exaggeration he appeals to the testimony of two ancient governors of Moesia, who could establish the facts like himself. The author who would give such accounts of the Black Sea in our days would ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.' But to return to the question you have raised, there being then amongst us no stimulus to painstaking labour, whether in desire of fame or in pressure of want, such as have the poetic temperament, no doubt vent it in song, as you say the bird sings; but for lack of elaborate culture it fails of an audience, and, failing of an audience, dies out, of itself, amidst the ordinary ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... all the landscape. The river gleamed and sparkled; the mountains flamed like the plumage of some tropical bird. The world was transfigured. The earth and his old materiality became the foundation-stones on which his awakened mind, kindled and made poetic, should rear an airy, yet enduring, structure of beauty, consecrated to Amy. He had loved nature before, but it had been to him like a palace in which, as a dull serving-man, he had employed himself in caring ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... in being short poems, generally treating of love, and making special use of a refrain and the repetition of words and lines. They differ in the number of verses in a stanza, of stanzas In the poem, and the order and number of rhymes. Their poetic value is not great because the poet so easily lost sight of his subject in ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... back, or loosened hair—mere morsels of color and light—all took on a new beauty. Even landscape with him became more significant. His master, Bellini, had been realistic enough in the details of trees and hills, but Giorgione grasped the meaning of landscape as an entirety, and rendered it with poetic breadth. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... plain that such a religion was fitted rather to stifle than to foster artistic and speculative views. When the Greek had clothed the simple thoughts of primitive times with human flesh and blood, the ideas of the gods so formed not only became the elements of plastic and poetic art, but acquired also that universality and elasticity which are the profoundest characteristics of human nature and for this very reason are essential to all religions that aspire to rule the world. Through such means the simple view of nature became ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... with pasticcerie and bonbons. He has one hand on the lyre, and the other on his stomach, for the homage of the goddesses has made him somewhat sick; his eyes, you observe, are cast heavenwards, partly by reason of poetic inspiration, and partly ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the poetic temperament. He was human and emotional and—he was weak. Had he lived two centuries later he might have fancied, and may be with truth, that he suffered from neurasthenia. In the full-blooded days of the early Georges the complaint was "vapours," otherwise liver, but ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... must, if sane, be locked up as a thief, and if mad, locked up as a madman, they sighed, and were convinced that until the world should have been improved by a new infusion of romance, and a stronger feeling of poetic justice, that Mr John ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... poetry: bad is superabundant. The demand is for short and telling effusions in plain, direct and intelligible English, speaking to feelings possessed by everybody, and placing incidents, scenes and creatures, familiar or exceptional, in a poetic light, bright and warm rather than fierce or dazzling. The millions are waiting to be stirred and charmed, and will be very thankful to the singer who shall do it for them. Studied obscurity of thought and language, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... the Ideal is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape this same Ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? Oh, thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth—the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here, or nowhere,' couldst thou ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... introduced in Christian times; second, we have no reason to suppose that King Cormac designated his noble work by this name; and third, even could this be proven, the much maligned Keating removes any difficulty by the simple and obvious remark, that "it is because of its having been written in poetic metre, the chief book which was in the custody of the Ollamh of the King of Erinn, was called the Saltair of Temair; and the Chronicle of holy Cormac Mac Cullinan, Saltair of Cashel; and the Chronicle of Aengus Ceile De [the Culdee], Saltair-na-Rann ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... the moral instinct, brings him incessantly back to nature; and it is precisely the poetical faculty that is united to this instinct by the ties of the closest relationship. Thus man does not lose the poetic faculty directly he parts with the simplicity of nature; only this faculty acts out of him in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... he gives rein to his poetic imagination, and breaks out in an exquisite lyric, a lyric which has hardly any closer relation to the circumstances than its truth to ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... which I refer. But ask any child to read the lines we have hammered out below, and tell you what they mean! Nay, ask any man to do it, and see if he can do it. Probably not one in a hundred usual readers, could 'read and translate' the word-stilts with which we have trammelled our poetic feet, except with the aid of patient and repeated communion with his English dictionary. There are, however, no words employed here which may not be found in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... story is that of the Cenci. The beautiful Beatrice Cenci—celebrated in the painting of Guido, the sixteenth century romance of Guerrazi, and the poetic tragedy of Shelley, not to mention numerous succeeding works inspired by her hapless fate—will always remain a shadowy figure and one ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... put on their tweed cloaks, and Gypsy listened to the wind, and thought it was very poetic and romantic, and that she was perfectly happy. And just as she had lain down again there came a great gust of rain, and one of the rivulets that were sweeping down the mountain splashed in under the canvas, and ran right through the middle of ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... date of composition. It has been said that a true taste for Shakespeare is like the creation of a special sense; and this saying is nowhere better approved than in reference to his subtile variations of language and style. He began with what may be described as a preponderance of the poetic element over the dramatic. As we trace his course onward, we may discover a gradual rising of the latter element into greater strength and prominence, until at last it had the former in complete subjection. Now, where positive external evidence is wanting, it is mainly ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... known to me, there is no writer who appears more ruthlessly and fearlessly himself, and the self thus presented to us is as paradoxical and rebellious as it is poetic and picturesque. Such a nature, one would think, must be the final blossoming of powerful hereditary tendencies, converging silently through numerous generations to its predestined climax. All we know is that Hamsun's forebears were sturdy ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... I said nothing. If the day which sees the rising of the Southern blacks comes to this generation, that negro will be among the leaders. He sang to me several of the songs current among the negroes of the district, and though of little poetic value, they interested me, as indicating the feelings of the slaves. The blacks are a musical race, and the readiness with which many of them improvise words and melody is wonderful; but I had met none who possessed ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... a hot pome an' a good wan. What I like about Kipling is that his pomes is right off th' bat, like me con-versations with you, me boy. He's a minyit-man, a r-ready pote that sleeps like th' dhriver iv thruck 9, with his poetic pants in his boots beside his bed, an' him r-ready to jump out an' slide down th' pole th' minyit th' ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... exist—popular festivals and the like—which keep alive the memory of past events, and, in certain circumstances, are sufficient to verify them to generations far removed in time. Events of a stirring character, when they are embodied in songs of an early date, may be transmitted orally, though in a poetic dress. Songs and legends, it may be added, even when they do not suffice to verify the incidents to which they refer, are valuable as disclosing the sentiments and habits of the times when they originated, or were cherished. The central fact, the nucleus of the tradition, may be historical ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the muse—she saw it upward rise, Though marked by none but quick poetic eyes; (So Home's great founder to the heavens withdrew, To Proculus alone confessed to view); A sudden star it shot through liquid air, And drew behind a ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... first were writ, They e'er converted one hard-hearted wit? Yet the world's mended well; in former days Good prologues were as scarce as now good plays. For the reforming poets of our age, In this first charge, spend their poetic rage: Expect no more when once the prologue's done; The wit is ended ere the play's begun. You now have habits, dances, scenes, and rhymes; High language often; ay, and sense, sometimes. As for a clear contrivance, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... in his recent "Politik," imitates the direct inference of Buckle when he ascribes the absence of artistic and poetic development in Switzerland and the Alpine lands to the overwhelming aspect of nature there, its majestic sublimity which paralyzes the mind.[19] He reinforces his position by the fact that, by contrast, the lower mountains and hill country of Swabia, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... and unartificial trend of mind, Marion must naturally turn to either nature or human merit for the selection of her Camp Fire name. She was not sufficiently mature to pick a poetic idea from the achievements of men, and so it fell to nature to supply a quaint notion as a foundation ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... high poetic character of these poems, as a whole, is surprising. As a unit, the collection makes an impression which even a genius of the highest order would not be adequate to produce.... Measured by poetic richness, variety, and merit of the selections contained, the collection is a rarely good ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... taste of the nineteenth century, about disguises and surprises and bounty and plots and rescues and such like, something must be pardoned to one whose experience had already been so greatly out of the common, and whose nature was far too childlike and poetic, and developed in far too simple a surrounding of labour and success, difficulty and conquest, danger and deliverance, not to have more than the usual amount of what is called ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... awhile, and then went on with one of those strange bursts of rhetorical eloquence that Zulus sometimes indulge in, which to my mind, full though they are of vain repetitions, show that the race is by no means devoid of poetic instinct ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... is the Inn, which separates Bavaria from Austria: flanked on the south by the Tyrolese Alps, on the north by Bohemia and the Danube, its narrow front is covered by the three fortified places of Passau, Braunau, and Salzburg. Lloyd, with some poetic license, compares this frontier to two impregnable bastions whose curtain is formed of three fine forts and whose ditch is one of the most rapid of rivers. He has exaggerated these advantages; for his epithet of "impregnable" was decidedly disproved ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... that. Miss BARBARA HOFFE'S Melisande—a difficult part, because she was the only other-worldly person in the play and the only one in desperate earnest—was very cleverly handled. In her most exalted moments of poetic rapture she was never too precious, and when called upon for a touch of corrective humour was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... my father's death—my mother followed him to the tomb in a few months—when the fearful night came which surprised me by Honorine's farewell letter. What poetic delusion had seduced my wife? Was it through her senses? Was it the magnetism of misfortune or of genius? Which of these powers had taken her by storm or misled her?—I would not know. The blow was so terrible, that for a month I remained stunned. Afterwards, reflection counseled me to continue ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... torrent of fact, speculation and high-spirited enthusiasm concerning Idaho in general and the future of the Liza Lu in particular. More than that, by and by his cheerful, half-impudent manner threatened to turn poetic. ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... manly sincerity, that he could not read "Vaudracour and Julia" with pleasure. This was a pity and Matthew Arnold's loss. For a strict Wordsworthian, while utterly conserving his reverence for the most poetic of poets, can discover a keen ecstasy in the perusal of the unconsciously funny lines which Wordsworth was constantly perpetrating. And I would back myself to win the first prize in any competition for Wordsworth's funniest line with a quotation from "Vaudracour and Julia." My prize-line ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself apparent. . . . In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against the pagan worship of broken marble statues—the democrat denies that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages. The sublime ruins of the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of America, which punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for the benefit of the State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw from the punishments which it inflicted the passing pleasure ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... shaking his head, said, "Annay, annay!" Kit did the same. They then both shook hands with them, shaking their heads all the time very mournfully, and still repeating the sad "Annay!" It is no poetic fiction to add, that the little black eyes of the pretty savages were glistening with tears. Kit and Wade then got into the boat, and we shoved off amid sorrowful cries from the ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... reserved for the poet-painter of the Liber Studiorum to show what depths of homely pathos, and what exquisite picturesqueness of gnarled and knotted line, could be found in a pollard willow, and for Tennyson to reveal the poetic expressiveness of the tree as denoting a solemn and pensive landscape, such as that amid whose "willowy hills and fields" rose ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... may become both the support and master of her whole life. It is a question of general sentiments of indefinite nature, of a powerful desire to become a mother and enjoy domestic comfort, to realize a poetic and chivalrous ideal in man, to gratify a general sensual need distributed over the whole body and in no way concentrated in the sexual organs or in ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... his long-sought "Northwestern Passage to China," how he must have gazed with blended wonder and awe at the distant Catskills as their sharp lines came out, as we have seen them many a September morning, bold and clear along the horizon, and learned in gentle reveries the poetic meaning of the blue Ontioras or "Mountains of the Sky." How fondly he must have gazed on the picturesque hills above Apokeepsing and listened to the murmuring music of Winnikee Creek, when the air was clear as crystal and the banks seemed ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... of all defensive armour, is far the most prominent. They were often painted with devices, such as Hamlet's shield, Hildiger's Swedish shield. Dr. Vigfusson has shown the importance of these painted shields in the poetic ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Slavonic names, the reader is referred to the explanations given in the preface to the first volume. The foot-notes added by the translator have been placed in square brackets. The poetic quotations by the author have been reproduced in English verse, the translation following both in content and form the original languages of the quotations as closely as possible. As in the case of the first volume, a number of editorial changes have become necessary. The material ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... the services of the community as a whole, and the Roman Catholic Church has so far endorsed and substantiated his opinion as to forbid family relations to its priests and significant servants. He conceived of a poetic devotion to the public idea, a devotion of which the mind of Aristotle, as his criticisms of Plato show, was incapable, as a substitute for the warm and tender but illiberal emotions of the home. But while the Church made the alternative ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... first line? How many other feet are there containing the same number of syllables? Examine the feet that contain three syllables. On which syllable is the accent placed when there are three syllables in the foot? A poetic foot of three syllables which bears the accent on the third syllable is called an anapestic foot. The meter of this poem, then is anapestic tetrameter, varied by an added syllable in most of the odd-numbered lines and by an iambic foot at the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... temple must have been singularly noble and imposing. Never had a church so grand a body of poetry as this of the Hebrews, which they heard in the very sonorous words of David, Moses, Isaiah and Ezekiel, with all the subtle suggestion of a vernacular as employed by minds of the first poetic order. The Hebrew parallelism afforded exactly the kind of formula in which one congregation could most effectively ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... with Sorell, described in the last chapter, was of great importance to Connie's after history. It had placed her suddenly on a footing of intimacy with a man of poetic and lofty character, and had transformed her old childish relation to him—which had alone made the scene possible—into something entirely different. It produced a singular effect upon her that such a man should care enough what befell her to dare to say ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... employed Beauvouloir to teach him the mysteries of natural science; she herself superintended his studies, regulating them according to her child's strength, and enlivening them by teaching him Italian, and revealing to him little by little the poetic beauties of that language. While the duke rode off with Maximilien to the forest and the wild-boars at the risk of his life, Jeanne wandered with Etienne in the milky way of Petrarch's sonnets, or the mighty labyrinth of the ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... species-selection was the work of Le Couteur and Patrick Shirreff, and is now in general use in practice where it has received the name of variety-testing. This clear and unequivocal term however, can hardly be included under the head of natural selection. The poetic terminology of selection by nature has already brought about many difficulties that should be avoided in the future. On the other hand, the designation of the process as a natural [744] selection of species complies as closely as possible with existing terminology, and does ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries |
