"Racine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... way—so mystical, in fact, that it enabled each to discover that the bloody sacrifice of Mosaism was forbidden, not enjoined. The most minute likenesses have been pointed out between these two sects by all Catholic writers from Eusebius to the poet Racine... Was there any connection between these two sects? It is difficult to conceive that there can be two ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... effect will be finer, when you see me act it. Pardon me if I am vain enough to feel assured that my little play will touch my husband's heart as ever Racine, Shakespeare, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... for the Crown a copyright of less than half that length. Go to Rome. My noble friend would give more than twice as long a term to Cicero's juvenile declamation in defence of Roscius Amerinus as to the Second Philippic. Go to France. My noble friend would give a far longer term to Racine's Freres Ennemis than to Athalie, and to Moliere's Etourdi than to Tartuffe. Go to Spain. My noble friend would give a longer term to forgotten works of Cervantes, works which nobody now reads, than ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... beautiful sound. This being the case, everything that we might call distinctly poetical, all those things which are precious to us in Shakespeare, or Marlowe, or Webster, in Goethe or Schiller, nay, even, occurring at intervals, in Racine himself, at least as much as mere psychology or oratory or pathos, appeared to Alfieri in the light of mere meretricious gewgaws, which took away from the interest of dramatic action without affording him any satisfaction ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... turning away from her comrade, opened her French dictionary and plunged into the difficulties of her page of translation from Racine. ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... to the warm-hearted Christian people of Wisconsin was at the State Association, met at Racine Sept. 24. Finding on my arrival a large representation of ladies gathered to celebrate the anniversary of their Foreign Missionary Society, I felt sure that there must be also an active sympathy for the work in our own land, and I was not disappointed. On the following day, at a special ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... of the Debierre Report, adopted by the French Senate on 21 Oct., 1916, may be quoted in this connexion: "La revolution Salonicienne vue de pres, n' est rien. Elle est sans racine, sans lendemain probable. Venizelos est tres amoindri. La Grece, dont les officiers et les soldats ne veulent pas se battre, est avec Constantin."—Mermeix, Le Commandement Unique, Part ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy, or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... public, on that exalted pedestal which it has not ceased to occupy. It was in 1759, in a journal entitled 'Litteraturbriefe,' that Lessing first claimed for Shakespeare superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modern poets. Lessing's doctrine, which he developed in his 'Hamburgische Dramaturgie' (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols. 8vo), was at once accepted by the ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... us such a natural, living Phaedra that we were all strongly moved. How fine a part it is! As a youngster I used to learn verses from 'Phaedra' by heart. I am told that in France devotion to classical tradition is growing weaker, and that Moliere and Racine are more and more seldom played. What a pity! Our people, on the contrary, remain faithful to their great poets and enjoy their works. After school comes college, and after college—the theatre. ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... for moral instruction.[6] He therefore boldly proposed that English tragic poets should henceforth use the chorus in the manner of the ancients, since it is "the root and original, and ... certainly always the most necessary part of Tragedy."[7] Moreover he praised (as had Dacier) the example of Racine, who had introduced the chorus into the plays that he had written for private performance, by the young ladies of St. Cyr—Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691). As is well known, he even went so far as to write the synopsis of what inevitably would have been an absurd ...
— The Preface to Aristotle's Art of Poetry • Andre Dacier
... Little Chemist's widow, Madelinette Lajeunesse had become the greatest singer of her day. But what had put the severest strain upon the modesty of Pontiac was the fact that, on the morrow of Madelinette's first triumph in Paris, she had married M. Louis Racine, the new Seigneur ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is rich in talents; they injure each other perhaps by their multitude; but posterity, judging with more calmness, will see much to admire. Thus we do justice to the great productions of Racine and Moliere which when written were ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... ignorant girl, but her intuitive perceptions were quick, and she knew when she was depreciated and misunderstood. On a certain afternoon he read her some beautiful poetry under the awning, and was interested to know whether she had any taste for poetry. Bessie confessed that at school she had read only Racine, and felt shy of saying what she used to read at home, and he dropped the conversation. He drew the conclusion that she did not care for literature. At their first meeting it had seemed as if they might become cordial friends, but she soon grew diffident of this much-employed stranger, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... criticisms were either collective apotheoses or collective executions. One day it was Mademoiselle Rachel they put on the black list for three months, and they raised up against her Madame Ristori, declaring that she was as superior to Rachel as Alfieri was to Racine. Then 'twas the Gymnase Theatre they put in Coventry, for having spoken disrespectfully of newspaper-writers. Another day Monsieur Scribe was their victim, to punish him for fatiguing with his dramatic longevity the young men, the new-comers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... converted he saw and painted supernatural things with the same carnal and robust incisiveness. The half-lights of Symbolist mysticism are remote from his hard glare. As a dramatist he drew upon and exaggerated that which in Aeschylus and Shakespeare seems to the countrymen of Racine nearest to the limit of the terrible and the brutal permissible in art: a princess nailed by the hands like a sparrow-hawk to a pine by a brutal peasant; the daughter of a noble house submitting to a loathed marriage with a foul-mouthed plebeian in ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... festivity of imagination, and a simplicity of heart, that made him proof against its rubs and trials. He was an excellent scholar; well acquainted with Latin and Greek, and fond of the modern classics. His book was his elysium; once immersed in the pages of Voltaire, Corneille, or Racine, or of his favorite English author, Shakespeare, he forgot the world and all its concerns. Often would he be seen in summer weather, seated under one of the trees on the Battery, or the portico of St. Paul's church in Broadway, his bald head uncovered, his hat lying by his ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... ruleth the raging of the sea, knows also how to check the designs of the ungodly. I submit myself with reverence to His Holy Will. O Abner, I fear my God, and I fear none but Him.—RACINE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... austerity of the nuns of Port-Royal, have been much celebrated all over Europe. Yet they all give evidence for a miracle, wrought on the niece of the famous Pascal, whose sanctity of life, as well as extraordinary capacity, is well known. The famous Racine gives an account of this miracle in his famous history of Port-Royal, and fortifies it with all the proofs, which a multitude of nuns, priests, physicians, and men of the world, all of them of undoubted credit, could bestow upon it. Several men of letters, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... brother write you that we went together to the first representation of Britannicus? Some admirers of Racine had praised the piece so much to me, that not being able to get a box, I sent my valet at ten o'clock to keep a place for me. I thought that I should never reach the Hotel de Bourgogne, although I left my carriage at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil: without Chapelle and Mauvillain, who ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... her geraniums and roses at the window, or going out to drive. On the evening in question, a very large audience greeted the tragedienne, and she was received, with much enthusiasm. She appeared in a tragedy of Racine, in which she had once been preeminently distinguished. Magnificently dressed, and adorned with splendid jewels, trophies of her younger days, when her favors were sought by those who could afford to bestow such gifts, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... industry. I also made myself master of the theories of rectangular coordinates and some of the differential processes applying to them, which only a few of the best of the university mathematicians then wholly possessed. In Classical subjects I read the Latin (Seneca's) and English Hippolytus, Racine's Phedre (which my sister translated for me), and all other books to which I was referred, Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Bentley, Dawes &c., made verse translations of the Greek Hippolytus, and was constantly on the watch to read ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... gentleman, Cesare de Rusticis, who, thanks to Concini, had secured a royal patent for canalising the Oise from La Fere to Chauny. They got a notable advocate, M. Louis Vrevin, to draw up a protest against the enterprise in the most florid and elaborate fashion of the Plaideurs of Racine, and by dint of bombarding the King's Council with the names of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Xerxes, Sesostris, Cleopatra, Cicero, Tertullian, and others, got, in 1625, what we in America now call an 'injunction,' putting a stop to the works begun by this foreigner, who ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... when all the illusions of the name of Louis are exhausted, and in this country, where his Augustan age has seldom been regarded with much enthusiasm, who can seriously address himself to the perusal of his great tragedians, Corneille and Racine—or of his great comedians, Moliere and Regnard—or if his great poets, Boileau and La Fontaine—or of his great wits, La Rochfaucauld and La Bruyere—or of his great philosophers, Des Cartes and Pascal—or ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to conceive the pit of a London theatre stirred to fury by an innovation in diction in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the Francais or the Odeon, where the severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of Moliere or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... you for a minute." The train was slowing up for Racine. His telegram was all ready except for the address. He rushed into the ticket office, added the address and had it sent collect, and had plenty of time to ...
— Ted Marsh on an Important Mission • Elmer Sherwood
... Spanish works, on philosophy, history and les belles lettres. No one had a higher respect for the classics than he; the odes of Horace, the poems of Virgil and the orations of Cicero were as familiar to him as the best sermons of Bossuet or the tragedies of Racine. On the right was another room, with a piano and organ, to which the family devoted much attention, and lovers of music were certain of hearing there excellent ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Corneille exceedingly well performed. The actors who did the parts of Don Juan and Sganarelle were excellent, and the scene with M. Dimanche, wherein he demands payment of his bill, was admirably given. I have also seen the Plaideurs of Racine, a very favourite piece of mine; every actor played his part most correctly, and the scene between the Comtesse de Pimbeche and Chicaneau and L'Intime wherein the latter, disguised as a Bailli, offers himself to be kicked by the former, was given ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... "Phedre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phedre," Racine anticipated Sarah Bernhardt. If the part had been made for her by a poet of our own days, it could not have been brought more perfectly within her limits, nor could it have more perfectly filled those limits to their utmost edge. It is one of the greatest parts in poetical drama, and it is ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... out with one of the speeches of Racine's Phaedra, hushing her companions on the instant. "You'll be the English Rachel," said Basil ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Louvois and Torcy were his statesmen. The lustre of the exploits of these illustrious men, in itself great, was much enhanced by the still greater blaze of fame which encircled his throne, from the genius of the literary men who have given such immortal celebrity to his reign. Corneille and Racine were his tragedians; Moliere wrote his comedies; Bossuet, Fenelon, and Bourdaloue were his theologians; Massillon his preacher, Boileau his critic; Le Notre laid out his gardens; Le Brun painted his halls. Greatness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... indeed! not at all like your father, though, who never paid a compliment in his life. Your clothes, by the by, are in exquisite taste: I had no idea that English people had arrived at such perfection in the fine arts. Your face is a little too long! You admire Racine, of course? ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... poet, Racine, having one day returned from Versailles, where he had been on a visit, was waited upon by a gentleman with an invitation to dine at the Hotel de Conde. "I cannot possibly do myself that honour," said the poet; "it is some time since I have been with my ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... consulted. I am, therefore, resolved to become either a great composer, like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; a renowned painter, like Titian, Carrache, or Veronese; or a great poet, like Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Dante, Milton, Goethe, and Racine." ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... poet. He thought little of Milton's minor poems, and less of the old ballads collected by Percy, but he had great admiration for Pope, believed Gray, if he had only written a little more, would have been the greatest poet in the English language, and thought Racine's Phaedrus the finest tragedy extant in any language in the world. His own great test of literary beauty was the principle he lays down in his Essay on the Imitative Arts, that the beauty is always in the proportion of the difficulty perceived ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... from Chaucer through Tennyson; from Luther through Goethe; from Rabelais through Victor Hugo; from Bryant and Irving through Hawthorne and Longfellow! How much they will translate from Homer and Virgil and Tacitus; from Schiller, Racine, Fenelon, and Moliere! How much philosophy they will read from Darwin, Spencer, Huxley! How they will trace the stars in the heavens, and the marks of God's fingers on the rocks and sands! How they will separate into their parts water and air, plants ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... honoured Racine and Boileau with a private monthly audience. One day the king asked what there was new in the literary world. Racine answered, that he had seen a melancholy spectacle in the house of Corneille, whom he found dying, deprived even of a little broth! ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... or an Euripides, than such individuals as your father, because, theatres we have, but no tribunals for public harangues.[6] You have hissed the tragedy of Cataline; when you shall see Phaedrus played, you will probably agree that the part of Phaedrus, in Racine, is infinitely superior to the model you have known in Euripides. I hope, also, that you will agree our Moliere surpasses your Terence. By your permission, I shall have the honour of escorting you to the opera, where you will be astonished to hear ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... Charlevoix; in his Life of Marie de l'Incarnation, should extract them in full, as matter of edification and evidence of saintship. Her recent biographer, the Abb Casgrain, refrains from quoting them, though he mentions them approvingly as evincing fervor. The Abb Racine, in his Discours l'Occasion du 192me Anniversaire de l'heureuse Mort de la Vn. Mre de l'Incarnation, delivered at Quebec in 1864, speaks of them as transcendent proofs of the supreme favor of Heaven.—Some of the pupils of Marie de l'Incarnation also had mystical ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... the German and French?—for the whole endeavour in this country has been toward a closer adherence to nature. In France and in Germany the ancient method of declamation still prevails, and the great speeches of Goethe and Schiller and Racine and Corneille are to all intents and purposes intoned. No doubt this sounds very fine in German and French, but how would you like it ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... les eaux va boivant, L'arbre la boit par sa racine, La mer salee boit le vent, Et le Soleil boit la marine. Le Soleil est beu de la Lune, Tout boit soit en haut ou en bas: Suivant ceste reigle commune, Pourquoy donc ne boirons-nous ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... distinction between the narrative and the dramatic form, is acknowledged to be wonderful. He did not steal the precious material from the treasury of history, to debase its purity,—new-stamp it arbitrarily with effigies and legends of his own devising and then attempt to pass it current, like Dryden, Racine, and the rest of those poetical coiners: he only rubbed off the rust, purified and brightened it, so that history herself has been known to receive it back ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... saying a few words in whispers to one another, which at other times would have been overheard. In the evening the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, the books chosen being chiefly works of history, or the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, as being most suitable to form the minds and tastes of the children; and sometimes Louis himself would seek to divert them from their sorrows by asking the children riddles, and finding some amusement in their attempts to solve them. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Petrarch and Tasso. These were followed, in France, by Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Voltaire, La Fontaine and Delille; in England, by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Young, Collins, Gray, Byron, Coleridge, &c; in Scotland, by Sir Walter Scott; in Ireland, by Thomas Moore; in ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... of thirty years' hard labour of an eminent scholar:[80] the Travels of Cyrus, Telemachus, Belisarius, and Numa Pompilius, are also, though in very different degrees, useful and interesting. The plays of Corneille and Racine, Alfieri, and Metastasio, on historical subjects, will make a double impression on your memory by the excitement of your imagination. All ought to be read about the same time that you are studying those periods of history to which they refer. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... stone of the district, have, one and all, an air of dignity and prosperity which gives animation to the landscape. The very names are among the most pleasant to the ear, and often among the most illustrious in the language. Our great men of letters, La Fontaine and Racine, Pope Urban II, who preached the First Crusade, and other statesmen and princes, all born in the province, had already made it a genuinely historic spot; and the memory of the battles fought by Napoleon at Chateau-Thierry ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... of the science into his mystic writings. His sect was revived in England in the eighteenth century through the efforts of William Law. Saint-Martin translated into French two of his Latin works under the titles L'Aurore naissante, ou la Racine de la philosophie (1800), and Les trois principes de l'essence divine (1802). The originals had appeared nearly two hundred years earlier,—Aurora in 1612, and ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... his patriotic love of every detail of the life around him; and though the Latin that he uses might well have been exchanged for his own language, it must be remembered that even when Malherbe and Corneille, Racine and Boileau, were writing French, the older language kept a firm hold on such men as de Thou, Descartes, Bossuet, Arnauld, and Nicole, who desired to appeal to European audiences. "Victurus Latium debet habere liber" was their motto; and ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... art in a small circle which contained his fellow-workers Verrio and Laguerre, the architects Blondel and Le Notre, and sculptors Girardon, Puget, Desjardins, and Coysevox, whose works had done so much to beautify the new palace of the king. Close to the door, Racine, with his handsome face wreathed in smiles, was chatting with the poet Boileau and the architect Mansard, the three laughing and jesting with the freedom which was natural to the favourite servants of the king, the only subjects who might walk unannounced and without ceremony into ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... more. The person of the last anointed is no more also; and I flatter myself I am not alone, even in this kingdom, when I wish that it may please the Almighty neither by the hands of His priests nor His nobles (I allude to a striking passage of Racine) to raise his posterity to the rank of his ancestors, and reillume ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... home a Russian bride, Maria Paulovna, and for her reception he wrote The Homage of the Arts—a slight affair which served its purpose well. The reaction from these Russophil festivities left him in a weakened condition, and, feeling unequal to creative effort, he translated Racine's Phedre into German verse, finishing it in February, 1805. Then he returned with great zest to his Russian play Demetrius, of which enough was written to indicate that it might have become his masterpiece. But the flame had burnt itself out. Toward ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... best known; four exquisite overtures, "Ruy Blas," "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," "Hebrides," and "Melusina;" the very dramatic cantata, "The Walpurgis Night;" a long list of beautiful songs for one or more voices; the incidental music to Racine's "Athalia;" a very large collection of sacred music, such as psalms, hymns, anthems, and cantatas; several beautiful trios and other specimens of chamber-music; and the lovely "Songs without Words," which are to be found upon almost every ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... she wanted first to buy her lunch at the corner of Rue Racine, where they keep good little buns. He hauled ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... right and left; omitted, compressed, rearranged, and occasionally inserted additions of his own devising. Wycherley's memory had been enfeebled by illness, and now played him strange tricks. He was in the habit of reading himself to sleep with Montaigne, Rochefoucauld, and Racine. Next morning he would, with entire unconsciousness, write down as his own the thoughts of his author, or repeat almost word for word some previous composition of his own. To remove such repetitions thoroughly would require a ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... and hair that just missed being black, a clear complexion and fine color, and a small line of mustache. As to manners he was really charming, and so well-read that Mr. Winthrop Adams took to him at once. He was conversant with Voltaire and Rousseau, the plays of Racine and Moliere, and the causes that had led to the French Revolution, and had been in Paris through the famous "Hundred Days." Of course he was ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... his favourites, let me also speak of his dislikes; Racine, whom he cannot bear; Molire, whom he does not really like; Buffon, whom he frankly detests for his too fluent prose, his ostentatious style, and his vain rhetoric. The only naturalist whom he might really have delighted in, had he possessed his works ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... of the Bannockburn Medical Crusade what manner of life their preachers lead; speak to the Racine Gospel Agency, those lean Americans whose boast is that they go where no Englishman dare follow; get a Pastor of the Tubingen Mission to talk of his experiences—if you can. You will be referred to the ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his epigram. Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance. I almost blush to think that M. Despreaux, M. Racine, and M. de Moliere, the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor jest, and assail you. Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble. Other poets, as popular ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... endures, it is not alone that he was the greatest lyric poet of a great literary period. Apart from the wit and fancy of his creations—apart from the philosophy, wisdom, and knowledge of human nature that so delighted Moliere, Boileau and Racine—his Fables disclose the goodness and simplicity of one who lived much with Nature, and cared nothing for the false splendors of the court. Living most of his life in the country, the woods, and streams and fields ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... than you did," was her reply. We were all omnivorous readers, and the old-fashioned accomplishment of reading aloud was cultivated by both brothers and sisters. I was the only one who could translate French at sight, thanks to Miss Phin's giving me so much of Racine and Moliere and other good French authors in my ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... in his domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles,—the days of powdered wigs and long cues,—when French ballet-dancers gave the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage,—when Boileau was the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Moliere perpetuated in tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism. They are far, those times when Frederick the Great wrote French at which Voltaire laughed, and could find no better occupation for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the elements which he has fused with such mighty power, [72] the rich beauty, the fierce passion, the fixed resolve. Dido is his greatest effort: and yet she is not an individual living woman like Helen or Ophelia. Like Racine, Virgil has developed passions, not created persons. The divine gift of tender, almost Christian, feeling that is his, cannot see into those depths where the inner personality lies hidden. Among the traditional characters few call for remark. The gods maintain on the whole their Homeric attributes, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... sail for Troy, Artemis, being angry with their commander King Agamemnon, becalmed their ships at Aulis. The seer Calchas thereupon declared that the goddess could be propitiated only by the death of Iphigeneia, the daughter of Agamemnon. This legend forms the theme of tragedies by Euripides, Racine, and Goethe. ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... are now lost arts. A sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and wonderful. They would touch up a little being with such skill that its father could not have known it. Et que meconnaitrait l'oeil meme de son pere, as Racine says in bad French. Sometimes they left the spine straight and remade the face. They unmarked a child as one might unmark a pocket-handkerchief. Products, destined for tumblers, had their joints dislocated in a masterly manner—you would ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but through hard drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine. This skill, together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of numbers and geometrical figures, was the most brilliant ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of debt, and three other wars that have grown out of it, and that do not seem so near to a conclusion. They say that Monsieur de Maurepas, who is dying, being told that the Duc de Lauzun had brought the news of Lord Cornwallis's surrender, said, from Racine's "Mithridate" I think:— ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... reign, was flattered at having such a man as Voltaire among his subjects. But still he feared him, and had but little esteem for him. He could not help saying, "Moreover, I have treated him as well as Louis XIV. treated Racine and Boileau. I have given him, as Louis XIV. gave to Racine, some pensions, and a place of gentleman in ordinary. It is not my fault if he has committed absurdities, and has had the pretension to become a chamberlain, to wear an order, and sup with a King. It is not the fashion ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... in this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman, clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians, Corneille, Shakespeare, Voltaire's verses on the death of Adrienne Lecouvreur, and whatever in modern literature appealed to him as elegant or fraught with passion. But in all these creations it was one image, and one ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... singing tipsy catches and assaulting the watch on his way. The chorus of Wasps, the visible embodiment of a metaphor found also in Plato's 'Republic,' symbolizes the sting used by the Athenian jurymen to make the rich disgorge a portion of their gathered honey. The 'Plaideurs' of Racine is an imitation of this play; and the motif of the committal of the dog is borrowed by Ben Jonson ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with too dismal and melancholy thoughts about them." Certain numbers of "The Spectator" were expressly devoted to the discussion of this subject, in the interest, it is now apparent, of Ambrose Philips, who had brought upon the stage an adaptation of Racine's "Andromaque," and who enjoyed the zealous friendship of Addison and Steele. To the tragedy of "The Distressed Mother," as it was called, which can hardly have been seen in the theatre since the late Mr. Macready, as Orestes, made his first bow to a London audience ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... recollections, amused them for a moment. They pictured once more Astier-Rehu at his desk, with streaming brow, his cap well on the back of his head, and a yard of red ribbon relieved against the black of his gown, emphasising with the solemn movements of his wide sleeves the well-worn joke from Racine or Moliere, or his own rounded periods in the style of Vic't-d'Azir, whose seat in the Academie he eventually filled. Then Freydet, vexed with himself for laughing at his old master, began to praise his work as an historian. ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... a hopeless task. It is melodramatic music, which becomes most fluent when there is least occasion for it, and which makes its best appeal when the heroine declaims above it in the speaking voice (as she does in the climax of the third act, when Adrienne recites a speech from Racine's "Phdre" in order to accuse the Princess of adultery), when it inspires the heroine carefully and particularly to blow out every light in a large drawing-room, or when it accompanies a ballet which is neither a part of the play nor an incidental divertissement, but only ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... were not uncomfortable in their generations. Chaucer and Shakespeare lived happy lives and sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism waited for its hour of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived unmolested when the hour of triumph passed and that of reprisals succeeded. Racine was a royal pensioner; Goethe a chamberlain and the most admired figure of his time. Of course, if you hold that these poets one and all pale their ineffectual fires before the radiant Shelley, our argument must go a few steps farther ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that unconquerable love of the Absolute which possesses all true poets, Racine seeks in God alone the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... you go by the 5 p.m. train,' Marie said. 'That will take you into Liverpool at 10:15. There's an hotel at the railway station. Didon has got our tickets under the names of Madame and Mademoiselle Racine. We are to have one cabin between us. You must get yours to-morrow. She has found out that ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... France. Albovine, as we have seen, has every mark of the heroic drama, except the couplet; and Albovine was written seven years before the first masterpiece of Corneille, one year before his first attempt at tragedy. A superficial likeness to the drama of Corneille and, subsequently, of Racine may doubtless have given wings to the popularity of the new style both with Davenant and his admirers. But the heroic drama is, in truth, a native growth: for good or for evil, to England alone must be given the credit of its birth. Dryden, no doubt, more than ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... to applaud images and sentiments that are communicated through their own peculiar forms of speech, it becomes a stranger to distrust his own knowledge, rather than their taste. I dare say that were I more accustomed to the language, I might enjoy Corneille and Racine, and even Voltaire, for I can now greatly enjoy Moliere; but, to be honest in the matter, all reciters of heroic French poetry appear to me to depend on a pompous declamation, to compensate for the poverty of the idioms, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a monarch was idolized and authors wrote only for courts and scholars: Bossuet, with his rhetorical graces; La Bruyere, with his gallery of characters, not one of which was moulded among the people; De la Rochefoucauld's maxims, drawn from the arcana of fashionable life; Racine, whose heroes die with an immaculate couplet and speak the faint echoes of Grecian or Roman sentiment! When politics became common property, and the walls of a prescriptive and conventional system fell, how wild ran speculation and sentiment in the copious and superficial ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... vous recevoir dimanche prochain rue Racine 3. C'est le seul jour que je puisse passer chez moi, et encore je n'en suis pas absolument certaine. Mais j'y ferai tellement mon possible, que ma bonne etoile ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... of our best schools to call their teachers "professors." An institution like Phillips Exeter or Andover can scarcely be said to assume more than it is entitled to in putting itself on an equality with Hobart College or Racine. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... a most quaint and charming old lady, as cheerful and full of vivacity as many a girl of seventeen. She kissed Janet on both cheeks when the Major introduced her; asked whether she was fiancee; complimented her on her French; declaimed a passage from Racine; put her poodle through a variety of amusing tricks; and pressed Janet to assist at her luncheon of cream cheese, French roll, strawberries and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... Romanticists; their object being—revolt from conventional standards and a complete expression of their own personalities. Hugo, as he says in the famous preface to Cromwell, was tearing down the plaster which hides the facade of the fair temple of art; Dumas had just demolished Racine; Gericault and Delacroix, by their daring conceptions, were founding our modern school of painting. Into this maelstrom of revolution, Berlioz—he of the flaming locks, "that hairy Romantic" as Thackeray calls him—flung himself with temperamental ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... man set me down at the corner of the Rue Racine. I have never met him again; I have never learned ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... Euripides and other Grecian dramatists; and, if we are to believe a Schlegel, it is in beauty and effect a mere echo or reverberation from the finest strains of the old Grecian music. That it is somewhat nearer to the Greek model than a play after the fashion of Racine, we grant. Setting aside such faithful transcripts from the antique as the Samson Agonistes, we might consent to view Goethe as that one amongst the moderns who had made the closest approximation to the Greek stage. Proximus, we might say, with Quintilian, but with him we must add," ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... was useless. He had left in the root! "Ah, mademoiselle," he exclaimed, "quelle Tragdie!" But the patient, though suffering acute agony, was worthy of the occasion. She did not pause for an instant in her comment—"Une Tragdie de Racine!" ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Governors of some of the Western States to disburse money in their sections, sent me out into the Northwest with a sort of roving commission to purchase horses for the use of the army. I went to Madison and Racine, Wis., at which places I bought two hundred horses, which were shipped to St. Louis. At Chicago I bought two hundred more, and as the prices paid at the latter point showed that Illinois was the cheapest market—it at that time producing a surplus over home demands—I determined to make Chicago ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... haven't got Massinger, you have nothing to do but go to the first bibliotheque you can light upon at Boulogne, and ask for it (Gifford's edition); and if they haven't got it, you can have "Athalie," par Monsieur Racine, and make the best of it; but that "Old Law" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... true name. George Ives was a Wisconsin boy from near Racine. Both he and Plummer were twenty-seven years of age when killed, but they had compressed much evil into so short a span. Plummer himself was a master of men, a brave and cool spirit, an expert ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... why verse is a higher kind of literary perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of rigorous forms. We may add that verse itself is perfected, in the hands of men of poetic genius, in proportion to the severity of this mechanical regulation. Where Pope or Racine had one rule of metre, Victor Hugo has twenty, and he observes them as rigorously as an algebraist or an astronomer observes the rules of calculation or demonstration. One, then, who touches the style of a generation acquires no ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... other hand, to love and prefer Racine, ah! that is, no doubt, to love above all things, elegance, grace, what is natural and true (at least relatively), sensibility, touching and charming passion; but at the same time is it not also, to allow your taste and your mind to be ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... first year were French, German, history, English composition and English literature. In the French course I read some of the works of Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Alfred de Musset and Sainte-Beuve, and in the German those of Goethe and Schiller. I reviewed rapidly the whole period of history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, and in English literature studied ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... imagination; that he had created too much. He would make a second experiment, in which he would enforce his theory with more vigour. In the composition of Paradise Lost he must have experienced that the constraint he imposed upon himself had generated, as was said of Racine, "a plenitude of soul." He might infer that were the compression carried still further, the reaction of the spirit might be still increased. Poetry he had said long before should be "simple, sensuous, impassioned" (Tractate of Education). Nothing enhances ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... scene, many a comedy even, may be referred to this simple type. Read the speech of Chicanneau in the Plaideurs: here we find lawsuits within lawsuits, and the mechanism works faster and faster—Racine produces in us this feeling of increasing acceleration by crowding his law terms ever closer together—until the lawsuit over a truss of hay costs the plaintiff the best part of his fortune. And again the same arrangement occurs in certain scenes ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... his celebrity. Molire, who was at once a playwright and an actor, delighted the court with comedies in which he delicately satirized the foibles of his time. Corneille, who had gained renown by the great tragedy of The Cid in Richelieu's time, found a worthy successor in Racine, the most distinguished perhaps of French tragic poets. The charming letters of Madame de Svign are models of prose style and serve at the same time to give us a glimpse into the more refined life of the court. In the famous memoirs of Saint-Simon, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... avec un Abrege des Vies du Cardinal de Richelieu, Vaugelas, Corneille, Ablancourt, Mezerai, Voiture, Patru, la Fontaine, Boileau, Racine Et autres Illustres ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other interests. Co-ordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of Corneille and Racine held forth small allurements, and even psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather than the study of personality and influence. That was a noon class, and it always ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... explanatory notes, were put into the prince's hands, to inform him of what happened in the commencement of society. These were his evening studies. In the mornings he read the French poets, Boileau, Moliere, Corneille, and Racine. Racine, as we are particularly informed, was, in the space of one year, read over a dozen times. Wretched prince! Unfortunate Racine! The abbe acknowledges, that at first these authors were not understood with the same ease as the preliminary lessons had been: every ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... had been seen in literature since the Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and Racine. There were idyllic features in Fenelon's Telemachus, and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... subjects, which makes all the operas seem exactly alike, was the result of a certain literary reform which had tended to standardise opera libretti under the influence of Racine, and it was really a movement towards dignity and dramatic unity after the monstrous confusion of the earlier Venetian operas. As to the conventionality of the music, and its forms of air and recitative, it can only be said that all serious Italian music was written in these forms; ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... their laurels at the royal feet, a Bossuet and a Boileau check the flow of independent thought to bask them in the beams of the royal smile, a Fenelon retiring with saddened brow to record for posterity the truths which he was not permitted to utter to the royal ear, a Racine shrinking from the cold glance of the royal eye and going home to die of a broken heart. Here Louis had signed the decree which sent his dragoons to force his Protestant subjects to the mass and the confessional; here he had received ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... which Providence has placed him. The splendour of human intelligence, the loftiness of genius, shine no less by contrast than by harmony with the age. The stoic and profound philosopher is not diminished by an external debasement. Virgil, Petrarch, Racine are great in their purple; Job is still greater on ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... perpetually describes the exemplary patience of those female captives, who gave their charms, and even their hearts, to the murderers of their fathers, brothers, &c. Such a passion (of Eriphile for Achilles) is touched with admirable delicacy by Racine.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... that he would talk about the next day's battle. Not at all: he discussed literature with Junot, who was familiar with all the new tragedies; he had a good deal to say about Raynouard's Templars, about Racine, Corneille, and the fate of the ancient drama. Then, by a singular transition, he began to talk about his Egyptian campaign. "If I had captured Acre," he said, "I should have put my army into long trousers, and have made it my sacred battalion, my Immortals, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... to have been well equipped for the business. He had never read a word of Greek, and he achieved the distinction of criticising modern writing without a single reference to the works of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare. The extraordinary thing is that the book was welcomed, and when a quarrel was struck over his claim that the Letters of Phalaris (which he could not ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... so that I must dine with my dear wife and children." "But my good sir," replied the gentleman, "several of the most distinguished characters in the kingdom expect your company, and will be anxious to see you." On this, Racine brought out the carp and showed it to his visitor, saying, "Here, sir, is our little meal; then say, having provided such a treat for me, what apology could I make for not dining with my poor children? Neither they nor my wife could have ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... and some of the illustrations for a fine edition of Racine, and painted a picture of AEneas and Anchises in the Burning ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... adds (ib. p. 49l):—'Godwin, Lofft, and Thelwall are the only three persons I know (except Hazlitt) who grieve at the late events'—the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. He found long after his death 'a MS. by him in these words:—"Rousseau, Euripides, Tasso, Racine, Cicero, Virgil, Petrarch, Richardson. If I had five millions of years to live upon this earth, these I would read daily with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... beauty sank into his heart, as he wandered higher across Mont Racine's velvet shoulder. And the contrast stirred memories of his recent London life. He thought of the scurrying busy-bodies in the 'City,' and he thought of the Widow Jequier attacking life so restlessly in her garden at that very minute. That ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... list: Homer, Aschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Plutarch; Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, Petrarch; Cervantes, Calderon, Camoens; Moliere, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire; Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant; Swedenborg; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and perhaps Burns and Byron; ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... des Shakespeare, mit einigen bescheidenen Vernderungen, unsern Deutschen bersetzt htte, ich weiss gewiss, es wrde von bessern Folgen gewesen sein, als dass man sie mit dem Corneille und Racine so bekannt gemacht hat. Erstlich wrde das Volk an jenem weit mehr Geschmack gefunden haben, als es an diesen nicht finden kann; und zweitens wrde jener ganz andre Kpfe unter uns erweckt haben, als man von diesen zu rhmen weiss. Denn ein Genie ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... the married life which began in 1872—my first sight of Taine, the great French historian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation of the Curators of the Taylorian Institution to give a series of lectures on Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately after the surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have been hoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Taine crossed to England the insurrection of the Commune ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... between the spontaneous thrill of the artist and the receptive enthusiasm of his public with an air of artificiality. Thus, a generation brought up on Wordsworth could hardly believe in the genuineness of Racine. Our fathers and grandfathers felt, and felt rightly, that art was something that came from and spoke to the depths of the human soul. But how, said they, should deep call to deep in Alexandrines and a pseudo-classical ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... the most famous and lasting literary quarrels of the era. Perrault, in praising the writers of his own age, ventured to disparage some of the great authors of the ancient classics. Boileau lashed himself into a fury of opposition and hurled strident insults against the heretic. Racine, more adroit, pretended to think that the poem was a piece of ingenious irony. Most men of letters hastened to participate in the battle. No doubt Perrault's position was untenable, but he conducted his defence ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault |
