"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Parnassus, but deliriously maintained that she had been born in the home counties—nay, in the neighbourhood of Uxbridge. Her every phrase was a deplorable commonplace, and, on the physician applying a stethoscope and begging her to attempt some verse, she could give us nothing better than a sonnet upon the expansion of the Empire. Her weakness was such that she could do no more than awake, and that feebly, while she professed herself totally unable to arise, to expand, to soar, to haunt, or to perform any of those exercises which are proper ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms? Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Scudery, Le Fevre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend. Brebeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief. Hesnault, author of the "Avorton," a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... of a ten-dollar note beside that in the hands of the auctioneer; on condition, however, that she should never mention it.' Of course she kept her word! . . . HOW seldom it is that one encounters a good sonnet! Most sonnetteers of our day are like feeble-framed men walking in heavy armor; 'the massy weight on't galls their laden limbs.' We remember two or three charming sonnets of LONGFELLOW'S; PARK BENJAMIN has been unwontedly felicitous in some ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... one of our earliest and best Anglo-Saxon scholars in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so far as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though he showed these neither in letter writing nor in the direction which Tennyson incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances (invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called "Fanny"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and with brilliant success to ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... it be too much to ask you to spare me one of your old pens—one with which you had dashed off some sweet sonnet! ...
— Three Hats - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Alfred Debrun
... Pope brought to perfection, and to which he gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact that any other form was employed. The sonnet, for instance, disappeared entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced—a ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... with this, the sonnet on Pompeii has the effect of a strong complementary color,—for instance, like orange against dark blue. It echoes the pathetic reverie that we feel on beholding the monuments of the mighty past. It contains not the pathos of yesterday, nor ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... a friend who,—volunteering such a service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality in a side-column of short criticisms on sonnet the First, and starting off the beginning three lines with, of course, 'bad, worse, worst'—made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Babe" "What do I love?" A Sailor's Song Another Once more, then farewell! Henry, on the Departure of his Wife from Calcutta Sonnet On the Regret of Youth Elegy on Sophia Graham To Miss Rouse Boughton To the Same To the River which separates itself from the Dee at Bedkellert The Old Man's Farewell Song—Distance from the Place of our Nativity. The Old Shepherd's Recollections Reflection ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... altogether I'm glad she writes, since it fills her with enthusiasm until the articles come back, and up to now she had not written poetry. But, as I say, I leaned upon a broken reed, for when, the next day, I asked her what she was writing, she laughed and showed me a sonnet. ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... belongings with the feeling that intelligence was a flimsy shield against the brutal force of authority. The law in search of prey cared nothing for such civilized refinements as intellect or self-respect. As well try to stop a tiger with a sonnet. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... Although the inkpot be full, his stomach may be empty. And yet from this window, lately, a poem was cast upward to the moon. And youth and truth still rhyme in these upper rooms. Linda's voice is still the music of a sonnet. Still do the roses fade, and love is always like the constant stars. And once, this!—surely ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... seemed to assert itself, and passing from smooth prose to smoother poetry, sonnet, song, or psalm, flowed down the page in cadences stately, sweet, or solemn, filling the reader with delight at the discovery of a gift so genuine, yet so shyly folded up within itself, unconscious that its modesty was the surest token of its worth. More than once Sylvia laid her ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... the result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially Wyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither had any theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays the completest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber," "banner," and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), but making a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth," not on the penultimates, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... war-horse, as the first twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your seats please!' or—better still—'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does not stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron road. There is one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the insides of ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... work as manager and actor thrown in, and his poems as a thing apart. The quality of "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" brought him into the company of the country's great sonneteers; he was inspired to give attention to the sonnet form and made it one of the vehicles for the expression of his most beautiful thoughts. The most were written about the year with which we are now dealing, 1594. In accordance with the custom of the time, they were not printed immediately, but ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... portico of the Franciscan convent, in Granada, is to be seen a large marble slab, on which a sonnet is engraved, the first two lines ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... We've ten days more to go. Let's stick it out as we've begun. It has been best for us, for the office, for the business. The next time you find yourself choked up with a stock of fancy adjectives, write a sonnet to me. Work ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... and having grown stout and wheezy is eventually carried off by a common cold in an odour of pastilles. He will be buried in a wicker-work coffin covered with lilies, and a rival Dilettante having written a limp and limping sonnet to his memory, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... know Mr. Presley's verse, Mr. Hartrath. You should, believe me. You two have much in common. I can see so much that is alike in your modes of interpreting nature. In Mr. Presley's sonnet, 'The Better Part,' there is the same note as in your picture, the same sincerity of tone, the same subtlety ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... was merely burdensome, and ornamental. Such as could afford it, spent their lives in the cities or at the royal court where they rarely did anything worth while, unless it were to invent an unusually delicate compliment or to fashion a flawless sonnet. Their morals were not of the best—it was almost fashionable to be vicious—but their manners ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Edinburgh, or Glasgow Cockney's hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose—and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt—one week's earth—washed off the feet of a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... noble Colonna palace the personality most vividly present to-day is that of Vittoria Colonna, making good the boast of Michael Angelo's sonnet,— ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... poet. On the whole, his stanzas are characterized by a full and sonorous ring, although effects of delicate grace are not wanting (67). Platen is one of the greatest masters of form in German literature and is unrivalled as a master of the sonnet. ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... grandeur that its banks unfold, Wordsworth's feelings can be understood as he halted upon Westminster Bridge in the early morning and looked down the Thames upon London: its mighty heart was still and its houses seemed asleep as the tranquil scene inspired the great poet to write his sonnet: ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... temple." After a year he writes, "I have not written any poetry this whole summer. Old Mrs. Themis says that I shall not visit any more at the Miss Muses. I'll see the old catamaran hanged, though, but what I will, and I'll write a sonnet to my old shoe directly, out of mere desperation. Pity and sympathize with me." And on March 28, 1843, we find him ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Prison Association in New-York. Correspondence with Governor Young. Preaching in Sing Sing Chapel. Anecdotes of Dr. William Rogers. Interesting Cases of Reformed Convicts. Letter from Dr. Walter Channing. Anecdotes of William Savery and James Lindley at the South. Sonnet by William L. Garrison. His sympathy with Colored People turned out of the Cars. A Methodist Preacher from the South. His Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Law. His Domestic Character. He attracts Children. His Garden described in a Letter to L.M. Child. ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... occasional passages, cannot reconcile us (for I find most people of the same mind) to verse, and especially rhymed verse as a medium of sustained expression, what chance has any one else? It seems to me that a sonnet is the utmost length to which ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... pretty long one. My opinion now, as you are anxious to know it, is, that it was a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was, raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced as an eternal jewel into the great vault of her lover's immortal Philosophy, which was to travel much farther and agitate far ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the Hotel Grande Bretagne, Bellagio. CULCHARD is sitting by one of the pillars, engaged in constructing a sonnet. On a neighbouring seat a group of smart people are talking over their acquaintances, and near them is another visitor, a Mr. CRAWLEY STRUTT, who is watching his opportunity ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... were nearly ready, and would be handed over to John Clare, on a given day, at the Dolphin inn, Stamford. Accordingly, on the day named, Clare went over to Stamford, his heart fluttering high with expectations. When Mr. Henson handed him the 'Address to the Public,' with the 'Sonnet to the Setting Sun' on the other side, both neatly corrected and printed in large type, he was beside himself for joy. In its new dress, his poetry looked so charmingly beautiful, that he scarcely knew it again. His hopes rose to the highest pitch when he found that the admiration of his printed ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... of Alfieri and those of the noble poet of England, no less remarkable coincidences might be traced; and the sonnet in which the Italian dramatist professes to paint his own character contains, in one comprehensive line, a portrait of the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... your sonnet on Cartesian geometry roused even the math-fiend to compassion. And don't you remember Professor Squeeler, whose heart seemed to leap with delight whenever he could tell you that, in spite of incessant toil on your part, he had ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... I Was in Eden" Opportunity—Ingalls' Famous Sonnet Opportunity—Poem Osteopathy, The Claims of Palmistry, The Mysteries of Palm-Reading, Chart for Parliamentary Law, Principles, of Patent, How to Obtain a Philosophical Facts Phrenology, Dr. Spurzheim's Physical Exercise Piano, ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... appointment as Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland in March, 1813, through Lord Lonsdale's "patronage" (see his letter, March 6, 1813). The Excursion was dedicated to Lord Lonsdale in a sonnet dated July ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... my Piozzi[1] home at last; he looks thin and battered, but always kindly upon me, I think. He brought me an Italian sonnet written in his praise by Marco Capello, which I instantly translated of course; but he, prudent creature, insisted on my burning it, as he said it would inevitably get about the town how he was praised, and how Mrs. Thrale translated and echoed ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... interplay of rhyme, affords a fine opportunity for the printer to mediate between the poet and his public, and this he has been able to do by mere indention and leading, without resorting to distinction of type. The reader of a sonnet or ballad printed without these two aids to the eye is robbed of his rightful clues to the construction of the verse. It seems hardly possible that a poem could have been read aloud from an ancient manuscript, at sight, with proper inflection; yet ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... following of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, Il Fiore. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... must draw the line there.' She gave me a look that made my heart ache, and went straight to my desk and took out of a pigeon hole a lot of papers,—odes upon your cruelty, Isabel; songs to you; sonnets,—the sonnet, a mighty poor one, I'd made the day before,—and threw them all into the grate. Then she turned to me again, signed adieu with mute lips, and passed out. I could hear the bottom wire of the poor thing's hoop-skirt clicking against each step of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ballad. But even where Wilde was right, he had a way of being right with this excessive strain on the reader's sympathy (and gravity) which was the mark of all these men with a "point of view." There is a very sound sonnet of his in which he begins by lamenting mere anarchy, as hostile to the art and civilisation that were his only gods; but ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... are broad and thy lakes fringed with grasses, The glint of the waves of the bright Santa Fe, With her edging of cypress and long-floating mosses, Forever are murmuring a sonnet to thee. ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... joyful knocks? It is but reasonable you should ax, Because it soundeth like a paradox. Hear, then, bright virgin! if the rain comes down, 'Twill wet the roads, and spoil my morning ride; But it will also spoil thy bran-new gown, And therefore cure thee of thy cursed pride. Moral—this sonnet, if well understood, Shows the same thing may bring ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... write notes on Wordsworth's sonnets—the greatest sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warn editors how they print this one sonnet; "I wished to share the transport" is by no means an uncommon reading. Into the history of the variant I have not looked. It is enough that all the suddenness, all the clash and recoil of these impassioned ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society The Deserted Village Prologue of Laberius On a Beautiful Youth struck Blind with Lightning The Gift. To Iris, in Bow Street The Logicians Refuted A Sonnet Stanzas on the Taking of Quebec An Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize Description of an Author's Bedchamber On seeing Mrs. *** perform in the Character of **** On the Death of the Right Hon.*** An Epigram. Addressed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... night' vi. Hero to Leander vii. The Mystic viii. The Grasshopper ix. Love, Pride and Forgetfulness x. Chorus 'The varied earth, the moving heaven' xi. Lost Hope xii. The Tears of Heaven xiii. Love and Sorrow xiv. To a Lady sleeping xv. Sonnet 'Could I outwear my present state of woe' xvi. Sonnet 'Though night hath climbed' xvii. Sonnet 'Shall the hag Evil die' xviii. Sonnet 'The pallid thunder stricken sigh for gain' xix. Love xx. English War Song xxi. National Song xxii. Dualisms xxiii. ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the forces that you may, And lay incessant battery to her heart; Plaints, prayers, vows, ruth, and sorrow, and dismay,— These engines can the proudest love convert. 421 SPENSER: Amoretti and Epithalamion, Sonnet xiv. ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... is introduced by a modest preface, and a "Sonnet inscribed to the memory of the Rev. J. Saffery," which is ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... sat down to study he found himself in a more cheerful mood than he had been in for many a day, though he could not help wondering what had become of Leo. As he went on thinking where the boy could be he was inspired to write what he called a sonnet upon the subject. Here ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... to gratify a young ambition, I introduced the poet to Mr. Gladstone, and that great man, who never damned with faint praise, pronounced that this was the finest thing written about London since Wordsworth's Sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge." ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Lyly are placed on a par by J. Eliote, a friend of the former; in the sonnet, in Stratford-at-Bow French, he wrote in ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the soul; and it may be because they know this, that artists are inclined to go afield in search of difficulties to be overthrown, that they set themselves problems, that they accept limitations. Herein we may see a cause for the long popularity of the sonnet, with its restricted scheme of rimes. Herein, again, we may see a reason for the desire of the novelist to try his fate as a dramatist. "To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws," so Mr. James once declared, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Ne'er making new faults, and ne'er mending old, Rebukes my spirit, bids the daring Muse Subjects more equal to her weakness choose; Bids her frequent the haunts of humble swains, Nor dare to traffic in ambitious strains; Bids her, indulging the poetic whim In quaint-wrought ode, or sonnet pertly trim, 120 Along the church-way path complain with Gray, Or dance with Mason on the first of May! 'All sacred is the name and power of kings; All states and statesmen are those mighty things Which, howsoe'er ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... in giving out energy gives each man about an equal portion. But that ability to throw the weight with the blow, to concentrate the soul in a sonnet, to focus force in a single effort, is the possession of God's Chosen Few. Chopin put his affection, his patriotism, his wrath, his hope, and his heroism into his music—as if the song of all the forest birds could be secured, sealed and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... be partly possessed by them; to be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics. This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy entertainment ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... fail, I think, to admit that it has merits which makes its great success intelligible. If we read it as a purely English poem, the sustained vivacity and emphasis of the style give it a decisive superiority over its rivals. It has become the fashion to quote Chapman since the noble sonnet in which Keats, in testifying to the power of the Elizabethan translator, testifies rather to his own exquisite perception. Chapman was a poet worthy of our great poetic period, and Pope himself testifies to the "daring fiery ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... would have told it. Le Fils du Titien—the story of the great master's lazy son, on whom even love and entire self-sacrifice—lifelong too—on the part of a great lady, cannot prevail to do more in his father's craft than one exquisite picture of herself, inscribed with a sonnet renouncing the pencil thenceforth—is the best told story in the book. But Gautier would certainly have done it even better. Margot, in the same fatal way and, I fear, in the same degree, suggests the country tales of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... kneeling Leonello d' Este, we see how Pisanello acted on Jacopo and, through him, on Venetian art. The connection between the two masters has been established in a very interesting way by Professor Antonio Venturi's discovery of a sonnet, written in 1441, which recounts how they painted rival portraits of Leonello, and how Bellini made so lively a likeness that he was adjudged the first place. The landscape in the Louvre picture is advanced in treatment, and with its gilded mountain-tops, its stag and its town upon the hill-side, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... in his eighteenth sonnet on Durdon as a worthy compeer of the country parson of Chaucer, and in the seventh book of the Excursion an abstract ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... was restlessly pacing to and fro in the confined space of the chamber allotted to him at Whitehall, and this sonnet, one of the most beautiful which he ever wrote, will express better than any other words what effect his sister's counsel ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Margrave of Baden, was a partisan of the Calvinistic Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, who was chosen King of Bohemia in 1619, and is known as the "Winter King." As the sonnet shows, the defeated Protestants set high hopes on the Margrave of Baden, who commanded an army of 20,000 men; but he was soon defeated by the imperial forces and died in ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... out of the bitterness of this reconstruction period that I penned the following sonnet to the memory of JOHN M. DANIEL, editor of the Richmond Examiner, to which paper I contributed more than threescore editorial articles during ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... R. Stockton, who made a great specialty of pirates, says of Lafitte: "He never committed an act of piracy in his life; he was [before he went to Barataria] a blacksmith, and knew no more about sailing a ship or even the smallest kind of a boat than he knew about the proper construction of a sonnet.... It is said of him that he was never at sea but twice in his life: once when he came from France, and once when he left this country, and on neither occasion did he sail under the Jolly Roger." According to Stockton, Lafitte, when he gave up his blacksmith shop ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed party strife and embittered the last years of Buerger himself; but even Schiller admits ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... in Amalia's music. Certain melodies that she said her father had made he loved especially, and sometimes she would accompany them with a plaintive chant, half singing and half recitation, of the sonnet which had inspired them, and which had been woven through them. It was at these times that Larry listened with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on the fire, and Harry with his eyes on Amalia's ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... Pistoia, the body of the sarcophagus of which is full of small figures, with some larger ones above. In this tomb rests the body of M. Cino d'Angibolgi, doctor of laws, and a very famous man of letters in his day, as M. Francesco Petrarca testifies in the sonnet: ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... really vital factor in the development of his dramatic art, and that this could not be said either of Lord Pembroke or Lord Southampton. Indeed, whoever he was, he could not have been anybody of high birth, as was shown very clearly by the 25th Sonnet, in which Shakespeare contrasting himself with those who are "great princes' favourites," says quite ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... frigate thought their captain spoony, and the captain's clerk of the Tudor was guilty of a most reprehensible breach of confidence, if he spoke the truth, in whispering that he had one day discovered on the commander's desk a sonnet addressed to Stella's eyebrow. The fact, however, was doubted, as Captain Babbicome had never been suspected of possessing the slightest poetical talent, nor had a book of poetry ever been seen in ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... Saturday, who were then at a milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;—and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... the series is entitled a "Sabbath Sonnet." It was composed by Mrs. Hemans a few days before her death, and dictated to her brother. It ends in these words—-fit words for the last utterances of a ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... more dominant Mrs. Vandervelde. But it so happened, that a gifted young Italian lost his heart at sight to her red hair and green eyes, and discovering that she had no heart of her own—at least, none for him—he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless passion. The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young man was swept into a gust of fame; all Italy read his verse and sympathized with him. The object of a popular poet's romantic ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... and the well-known lines 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill'. With much that is of the highest poetic value, many memorable lines and touches of his unique insight into nature, the volume yet showed considerable immaturity. It contained indeed, if we except one perfect sonnet, rather a series of experiments than any complete and finished work. There were abundant faults for those who liked to look for them, though there were abundant beauties too; and the critics and the public chose rather to concentrate their ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... about their writings that we talked, but about the something kindling in them, which never got expressed. His theory of writing was this:—"No good writer can ever be translated." He used to quote triumphantly from Shakespeare's 130th. Sonnet. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... fashion, always necessary and necessary to everyone. But once these universal unchanging needs supplied, a great many others become visible: needs to the individual or to individuals and races under definite and changing circumstances. The sonnet or the serenade are useful to the romantic lover in the same manner that carriage-horses and fine clothes are useful to the man who woos more practically-minded ladies. The diamonds of a rich woman serve ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Leonora cannot know 5 That I have written a sonnet to her fame, In which I ... Venus and Adonis. You should not take my gold and serve ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... without discovering in his plays a quite definite and personal attitude towards life. Shakespeare is no Absolute Divinity, reconciling all oppositions and transcending all limitations. He is not that "cloud-capped mountain," too lofty to be scanned, of Matthew Arnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and passionate artist, using his bitter experiences to intensify his insight, and playing with his humours and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he was doomed to unmask. The best way of indicating the personal mood which emerges as his ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... have guessed from what the March Hare has just said, we give larger measure than was the custom under the private ownership of Pegasus. Quatrains have been increased from four lines to twenty-three, and the old stingy fourteen-line sonnet has been enlarged to fifty-four lines. We have also passed an ordinance requiring that poems shall say what they mean, which is a vast improvement on the old private control method whereunder anybody was allowed to write rhymes which nobody could understand—like that thing of Miss Arethusa ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... definite forms for complete short compositions, known as fixed forms. The most common are the ballade, rondel, rondeau, and triolet, developed especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and revived in our own, and the sonnet, introduced from Italy ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... himself would have appreciated, it was reserved for a sincere admirer of the humourist to play the part of detective. In 1812 Dr. John Ferriar published his Illustrations of Sterne, and the prefatory sonnet, in which he solicits pardon for his too minute investigations, is sufficient proof of the curiously reverent spirit in which he ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... With him he also made a pedestrian tour in Wales in 1791. Jones afterwards became the incumbent of Soulderne, near Deddington, in Oxfordshire; and Wordsworth described his parsonage there in the sonnet, beginning "Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends." (See Wordsworth's note to the sonnet 'Composed ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... with Pope Leo X, Giovanni made a portrait of the lady that he loved, so lifelike that, even as Simone Sanese had been celebrated in the past by the Florentine Petrarca, so was Giovanni deservedly celebrated in his verses by this Venetian, as in the following sonnet: ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... Harriet. "I was sick of the music and folly, and had retired to the summerhouse with Peggy Duckworth, who had brought a sweet sonnet of Mr. Ambrose ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the "Rose of Torridge," as she was called. There was not a young gallant for ten miles round who would not have gone to Jerusalem to win her, and not a week passed but some nosegay or languishing sonnet was conveyed into the Rose's chamber, all of which she stowed away with the simplicity of a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... poured out to the uncomplaining forest, which rose up in ever statelier—and grander ranks to greet the travelers as they descended—the silent, vast forest, without note of bird or chip of squirrel, only the wind tossing the great branches high overhead in response to the sonnet. Is there any region or circumstance of life that the poet did not forecast and provide for? But what would have been his feelings if he could have known that almost three centuries after these lines were penned, they would be used to express the emotion of an unsentimental traveler ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with the body of the sarcophagus full of little figures, and some larger figures above; in which tomb is laid to rest the body of Messer Cino d' Angibolgi, Doctor of Laws, and a very famous scholar in his time, as Messer Francesco Petrarca testifies in that sonnet: ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... remarkable instances is that of Rossetti. In the course of the House of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool winds and winter sunshine, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... undertake a campaign of municipal house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits home she suggested that her mother's club invite to address ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... his grey mare, Meg, A better never lifted leg, Tam skelpit on through dub and mire, {149a} Despising wind, and rain, and fire; Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet; Whiles glowering round wi' prudent cares, Lest bogles catch him unawares: Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry. By this time he was 'cross the foord, Whare in the snow the chapman smoored, {149b} And past the birks and meikle stane Whare drunken Charlie ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... the majesty and dignity of Leonardo da Vinci, and the fresh beauty of Angelica Kauffmann. I liked best the romantic head of Raphael Mengs. In one of the rooms there is a portrait of Alfieri, with an autograph sonnet of his own on the back of it. The house in which he lived and died, is on the north bank of the Arno, near the Ponte Caraja, and his ashes rest in ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... reader goes further, let him turn to Sonnet xvii. in Mr. Swinburne's series of "Sonnets on English ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... who would pay for favors with phrases and runs aside to rhyme a sonnet every time he wins the kiss of a lip. What ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the tune ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... written at Ravenna, and at the suggestion of the Guiccioli, to whom it is dedicated in a sonnet, prettily but inharmoniously turned. Like all his other best performances, this rugged but masterly composition draws its highest interest from himself and his own feelings, and can only be rightly appreciated by observing how fitly ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... knell, nor flowers from blossoming bowers to wave over his grave or show their bloom upon his tomb. We have rhyming dictionaries,—let us have one from which all rhymes are rigorously excluded. The sight of a poor creature grubbing for rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious, rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel. Work, work of some kind, is the business of men and women, not ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... period of Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in the play of HENRY V.; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene, would ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... character of Francis. It has rather the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman, because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline, because the artist cannot ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... with but trifling variations, except in those cases where there was nothing specially characteristic to make this desirable (as e.g., in the case of Islwyn, where I have thrown some of my translations into sonnet form) or where—as in the Song of the Fisherman's Wife—the metre, even if it could be reproduced, would not in English harmonise with the meaning. I ought perhaps to ask pardon beforehand for the audacity with which I have treated Ieuan Glan ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... the hand of the master. And in his admiration there was a trace of a frank envy, a certain unresentful humiliation—the feeling which he could remember to have experienced many times in the old days, when he put aside the sonnet he had just finished for some fashionable magazine, and took down from his limited bookshelf the little time-worn volume which contained the almost forgotten work of a poet whose name would have fallen strangely ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... arrival in Milan, Lodovico employed him to paint the portrait of his fair young mistress, and we have more than one proof of the admiration which the Florentine master's work excited among his contemporaries. In the Rime of the court-poet, Bellincioni, we find the following sonnet evidently inspired by this picture and bearing the inscription: "On the portrait of Madonna Cecilia, painted by Maestro Leonardo." The poet seeks to appease Dame Nature's wrath at the sight of this portrait, in which the painter has represented the lovely maiden "listening, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... was already distinguished; two others, Mr. Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training and technical power than he; but he was, nevertheless, the brain and soul of the enterprise. What these young men proposed was excellently propounded in the sonnet by "W. M. R.," which they prefixed to their little literary venture, the "Germ," in 1850. Plainly to think even a little thought, to express it in natural words which are native to the speaker, to paint even an insignificant object as it is, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... that she is sending a packet to you, and I beg leave to send you the enclosed sonnet, though, to tell you the real truth, the sonnet is a mere pretence, that I may have the opportunity of declaring with how much respectful esteem I have the honour ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... "What lovely hypocrite have we among us? What Lady Pure Innocence, wondering with the rest of the world?—and all the while Cleon's latest sonnet hot against her heart! Is ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston |
