"Spenser" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Shakespeare, William Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire Shenstone, William Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Shirley, James Sidney, Sir Philip Smollett, Tobias Southern, Thomas Southey, Robert Spencer, William R. Spenser, Edmund Sprague, Charles Steers, Miss Fanny Sterne, Laurence Suckling, Sir John Swift, Jonathan Sylvester, Joshua Taylor, Henry Tennyson, Alfred Tertullian Theobald, Louis Thomson, James Thrale, Mrs Tickell, Thomas Trumbull, John Tuke, Sir Samuel Tusser, ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... works, and walked and talked with the Old Man of the Mountain, know that perfectly well. You have perhaps been under his roof, at Rydal Mount? I have; and over his dining-room fireplace I observed, as hundreds of his visitors must have done, five portraits—Chaucer's, Bacon's, Spenser's, Shakspeare's, and Milton's, in one line. On the same line is a bust on the right of these, and a portrait on the left; and there are no other ornaments on that wall of the apartment. That bust and that portrait are both of Southey, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name and dedication which the brother gave to his principal work are an imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental philosopher, Robert Boyle, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... who would expect any thing poetical from East Smithfield? Yet there was born the most poetical even of poets, Spenser. Pope was born within the sound of Bowbell, in a street no less anti-poetical than Lombard-street. So was Gray, in Cornhill. So was Milton, in Bread-street, Cheapside. The presence of the same great poet and patriot has given ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... in Welsh. And in 1588 there had appeared, by the help of Archbishop Whitgift, the Welsh Bible of William Morgan. It was the appearance of this Bible that aroused the first real welcome to the Reformation. But the Reformation that gave England a Spenser and a Shakespeare aroused no new life in Wales, not a single hymn ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... of Grey's arrival in Ireland, the name of Raleigh ceased to be obscure. Sir William Pelham retired on September 7, and Lord Grey, who had brought the newly famous poet, Edmund Spenser, with him as his secretary, marched into Munster. With his exploits we have nothing to do, save to notice that it must have been in the camp at Rakele, if not on the battle-field of Glenmalure, that Raleigh began his momentous friendship with Spenser, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... printing in 1678, and gavest to the world in 1683? Thou gavest John Chalkhill for the author's name, and a John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Winchester, being eighty years of his age, in 1679. Now thou speakest of John Chalkhill as "a friend of Edmund Spenser's," ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... principle of selection in each case. It jarred upon her when, as the gentlemen loitered about, waiting for the evening meal, they came and looked at the titles, with careless remarks that the superintendent was a youth of taste, and a laugh at the odd medley—Spenser, Shakspeare, 'Don Quixote,' Calderon, Fouque, and ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Spenser transferred romantic fiction into the region of allegory, and gave to English literature the immortal "Faery Queen." In our own day the "Idyls" of Tennyson have made the legends of Arthur a part of our common thought, and the Knights of the Round Table familiar in almost every household. The ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... includes among the reviews of this period Sir Thomas Pope Blount's remarkable Censura Celebrium Authorum (1690). That popular bibliographical dictionary of criticism (reprinted 1694, 1710 and 1718) is only remembered now for its omission of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton from its list of "celebrated authors." Neither that volume nor the same author's De Re Poetica (1694) finds a proper place in a list of periodicals. They should be grouped with such works as Phillips' Theatrum Poetarum ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears—there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... was organized by a Pageant Master, our mutual friend the dignitary. Therein Asia, King Solomon and Sheba's Queen, were represented. Africa was relegated to her proper Cinderella and Plantation Chorus part. 'Poor creatures!' Spenser said, with a grimace, and ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Shakspeare, then wrote those plays, which, for moral wisdom and knowledge of the human soul, appear to us almost to be dictated by the voice of inspiration. The prince of philosophers too, the great miner and sapper of the false systems of the middle ages, Francis Bacon, then commenced his career, and Spenser dedicated to Elizabeth his "Fairy Queen," one of the most truly poetical compositions that genius ever produced. The age produced also great divines; but these did not occupy so prominent a place in the nation's eye as during ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... [Paradise Lost]; nothing in nature is unbeautiful [Tennyson]; silently as a dream the fabric rose [Cowper]; some touch of nature's genial glow [Scott]; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire [Hamlet]; through knowledge we behold the World's creation [Spenser]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... this historic principle, it would have been sufficient to consider the greatest authors, such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope; but it occurred to me, while keeping this principle before me, to give also a connected view of the course of English literature, which might, in an academic curriculum, show students how and what to read for themselves. Any attempt beyond this ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... shatters up into a hundred echoes, till the air is live with sound! You love madrigals, and whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old. So do I. Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare: but oh that you could hear this madrigal! If you must have 'four parts,' then there they are. Deeped-mouthed bass, rolling along the ground; rich joyful tenor; wild wistful alto; and leaping up here and there ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... But Mr. Spenser was too wise to enter into any particulars, and merely informed Mrs. Fothergill that she would know in ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... seemed, the Sorority of the Camellia Buds had turned itself from a society instituted for mutual protection and fun into a Crusaders' Union, pledged, like Spenser's Red Cross Knight, to avenge the wrongs of distressed damsels in the junior forms. The ring of battle certainly added a spice of excitement to their secret. It was much more interesting to interfere personally on behalf of their protegees than to place debatable matters before the ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... must learn these things if he is to be considered literate. In the course of such study, one also becomes acquainted with English literature. With literature it is enough to merely be acquainted with the subject. One need not know the works of Chaucer or Spenser intimately—unless one is preparing to specialize in the English literature of the writers of that era. Frankly, sir, I should hate to have my speech colored by the flowery phrases of that time, and the spelling of that day would flunk me out of First ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... not be afraid of using a dictionary. A dictionary? A dozen; at all events, until Dr. Murray's huge undertaking is finished. And even then, for no one dictionary will help us through some authors—say, Chaucer, or Spenser, or Sir Thomas Browne. Let us use our full lexicon, and Latin dictionary, and French dictionary, and Anglo-Saxon dictionary, and etymological dictionary, and dictionaries of antiquity, and biography, and geography, and ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... all the arts and sciences, and concludes that the moderns are equal to the ancients in poetry, and in almost all other things excel them. [Footnote: Among modern poets equal to the ancients, Hakewill signalises Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marot, Ronsard, Ariosto, Tasso (Book iii. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... contemptible and tiresome a character as a professed wit: the one is always contriving something to laugh at, the other is always laughing at nothing. An excess of levity is as impertinent as an excess of gravity. A character of this sort is well personified by Spenser, in the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... for, here are Sir William Temple, Lord Chatham, Fox and Wilberforce, among statesmen; of soldiers there are Prince Rupert and Monk; of Indian fame, here are Lord Lawrence and Lord Clyde; of sailors, Blake, Cloudesley Shovel, and Lord Dundonald. Of poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Prior, Addison, Gay, Campbell. Of historians and prose writers, Samuel Johnson, Macaulay, Dickens, Livingston, Isaac Newton. Many others there are to look for, notably the great poet Tennyson, buried here ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... She finally walked over Raleigh's coat, and later wiped her feet on him. E. had a sister by the name of Mary, who was better looking, and less fortunate. E. was queen when the pipe was introduced into England. Other and less important events of her reign were: Shakespeare, Spenser, and Virginia. Died an old maid. Heir: ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... it with shouts of laughter. Some future one, which studies and imitates Shakespeare instead of anatomising him, and which gradually awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man named Edmund Spenser once wrote a poem, the like of which the earth never saw before, and perhaps may never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce in the verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination in this matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... any of the eternal poets should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... does not disdain the image "fair as the moon, clear as the sun," and those who have seen a moon in the sky of Arabia will thoroughly appreciate it. We find it amongst the Hindus, the Persians, the Afghans, the Turks and all the nations of Europe. We have, finally, the grand example of Spenser, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... glistened as he looked upon a couple who were obviously becoming attached, and who seemed made for each other. He thought how high the proud and chivalrous character of Ravenswood might rise under many circumstances in which HE found himself "overcrowed," to use a phrase of Spenser, and kept under, by his brief pedigree, and timidity of disposition. Then his daughter—his favorite child—his constant playmate—seemed formed to live happy in a union with such a commanding spirit as Ravenswood; and even ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... of the victor. Theseus discovered her, praying, says Plutarch, in childish innocence or folly, to the plants and bushes, and promising, if they would shelter her, never to destroy or burn them. A graceful legend, that reminds us of the rich inventions of Spenser. But Theseus, with all gentle words and soothing vows, allured the maiden from her retreat, and succeeded at last in obtaining her ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... investments. The King having come to his own again, Butler obtained permission in November 1662 to print the first part of 'Hudibras.' The quaint title of this poem has attracted much curious cavil. The name is used by Milton, Spenser, and Robert of Gloucester for an early king of Britain, the grandfather of King Lear; and by Ben Jonson—from whom Butler evidently adopted it—for a swaggering ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... corruptions of Italian life, mingled with homesickness for the pleasant sights and quiet air of his native Anjou, inspired the two collections of sonnets which are his best, the Antiquits romaines, translated by Spenser in ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... in the Platonic sense of the word, a spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, "as the wise Spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. This, of course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India, fighting its way down through Greek ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... hopelesse all in vaine, Did to him pace sad battle to darrayne; Disarmd, disgraste, and inwardly dismayde, And eke so faint in every ioynt and vayne, Through that fraile fountaine which him feeble made.' SPENSER. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Maro's strain, And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign; Great George's acts let tuneful Gibber sing; For nature formed ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... achievement to compass the wind on the heath, the sunshine and the rain. We know the dark background, the mystery and the awe of the forest, how powerfully they are suggested to us by some old writers and some modern ones, such as Spenser and Fouque, by the author of The Pathfinder and Thoreau; the scent of the soil, once again, in rain and in shine, is it not conveyed to us with an astonishing distinctness, that is the product of a literary endowment of the rarest order, by such writers as Izaak Walton and Robert ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... most permanently rooted and with heartiest reason for being—the copious cycle of Arthurian legends, or the almost equally copious Charlemagne cycle, or the poems of the Cid, or Scandinavian Eddas, or Nibelungen, or Chaucer, or Spenser, or bona fide Ossian, or Inferno—probably had their rise in the great historic perturbations, which they came in to sum up and confirm, indirectly embodying results to date. Then however precious to "culture," the grandest of those poems, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... work, rather than of a painting in oil, it has nevertheless a unity of plot, a sustained interest, and a uniform elevation of style, which distinguishes it from all the poetry of the period. Our own Spenser has imbibed the spirit of some of its most beautiful passages; and several striking coincidences between his Faerie Queen and the Rinaldo can be traced, particularly in the account of the lion tamed by Clarillo, and the well-known incident of Una and the lion in Spenser. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... which Wordsworth brought away from Cambridge are such as had already found expression more than once in English literature; for it has been the fortune of that ancient University to receive in her bosom most of that long line of poets who form the peculiar glory of our English speech. Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Marlowe; Dryden, Cowley, and Waller; Milton, George Herbert, and Gray—to mention only the most familiar names—had owed allegiance to that mother who received Wordsworth now, and Coleridge ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... grand old countenance of Homer; the shrunken and decrepit form but vivid face of AEsop; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais's smile of deep-wrought mirth, the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes; the all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric structure; the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyan, moulded of homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire,—were those that chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would disappear, Wordsworth's pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would be in risk of summary suppression. We may doubt whether much would be left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted, and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad daylight. The principle which Pope ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Bunyan is, as D'Israeli has called him, the Spenser of the people, and whether or not his work is the poetry of Puritanism, the best evidence of the merit of the "Pilgrim's Progress" appears, as Dr. Johnson has shrewdly pointed out, in the general and continued ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... take my advice," said my friend, "you will humbly endeavour not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in the country. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... he advises Stoddard on January 7, 1850, "read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age as ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Spenser alludes to Ariadne's crown, though he has made some mistakes in his mythology. It was at the wedding of Pirithous, and not Theseus, that the Centaurs ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those of them which relate to the siege of Troy, with the exquisitely rich and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... to his own complete translation of the same poem from Addison, complimented him by saying—"After his bees, my later swarm is scarcely worth hiving." He published, too, a poem on "King William," and an "Account of the Principal English Poets," in which he ventures on a character of Spenser ere he had read his works. It thus is, as might have been expected, poor and non-appreciative, and speaks of Spenser as a poet pretty nearly forgotten. Some time after this, he collected a volume, entitled, "Musae Anglicanae," in ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the founder of a new school of poetry, of a high class. It is true that, unless Buckhurst and Spenser had gone before him, he could not have written as he has done; yet he is an inventor very distinct from both. He calls his odes descriptive and allegorical; and this characterises them truly, but too generally. The personification of abstract qualities ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... more destructive to the zoological pretensions of the unicorn, than are to the same pretensions in the lion our many popular crazes about his goodness and magnanimity, or the old fancy (adopted by Spenser, and noticed by so many among our elder poets) of his graciousness to maiden innocence. The wretch is the basest and most cowardly among the forest tribes; nor has the sublime courage of the English ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... considered by the incoming Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana this evil character is attributed to that portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue of damsels and the like—such seem to have been the Gondwana woods to the ancient ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... and of the features which constitute good literature. The second contains a history of English Literature from the earliest times, with complete selections from the works of the five great founders of English Literature: Chaucer, Spenser, ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and "the source whence every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot, Spenser's early model). In England, it exercised an influence only inferior to that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the form of poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This extraordinary literary influence admits of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... commanded to be kept in the ark for a memory, and offered before it. Dixon, in his 'History of the Church of England,' states that it was the universal custom in the early period of the church to demand memories to be celebrated, and Spenser's tales refer to the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... of English authors in poetry and prose who were touched and kindled by the Horatian flame would amount to a review of the whole course of English literature. It would begin principally with Spenser and Ben Jonson, who in some measure represented in their land what the Pleiad meant in France, and Opitz and his following in Germany. "Steep yourselves in the classics," was Jonson's counsel, and his ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... evidence thoughts, and are themselves as much coarser and lower than the outspoken utterances of Shakespeare's ideal women—whom they assume to criticise and condemn—as the smooth and subtle rhymes of Swinburne and Joaquin Miller are below the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... which in Sidney, Spenser, and many more attached itself to then-great Gloriana, had in these young men, all either secretly or openly reconciled to Rome, found its object in that rival in whom Edmund Spenser only beheld his false Duessa ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the Battle of Ramillies is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza. An uniform mass of ten lines thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding. His imitation of Spenser, which consists principally in I WEEN and I WEET, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient nor modern. His mention of Mars and Bellona, and his comparison of Marlborough ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... prayer-book, Shakespeare, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Lowell's Fable for Critics, Walton's Complete ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... interval between Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit is not distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a factitious interest to his writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst's 'Induction ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... from the hoaxer to the hoax, we shall conclude with this proposition.—All readers of Spenser must know that the true Florimel lost her girdle; which, they will remember, was found by Sir Satyrane—and was adjudged by a whole assemblage of knights to the false Florimel, although it did not quite fit her. ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... to imitate SPENSER in the measure of his verse, and in the harmony, simplicity, and variety, of his composition. Antique expressions I have avoided; admitting, however, some old words, where they seemed to suit the subject; ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbe. He was buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the sway o' the bonny boady o' the knicht, 'at it was nae man, but a wuman.—Ye see, mem, sin I cam frae Daurside, I hae been able to get a grip o' buiks 'at I cudna get up there; an' I hed been readin' Spenser's Fairy Queen the nicht afore, a' yon aboot the lady 'at pat on the airmour o' a man, an' foucht like a guid ane for the richt an' the trowth—an' that hed putten 't i' my heid maybe; only whan I saw her, I kent her, an' her name wasna Britomart. She had a twistit brainch o' blew berries aboot her ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart; Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed completely over the fatal facility ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... disclaimed, for his own part, any belief that they were poems. Enthusiasts, however, have been found to declare that Emerson 'moves more constantly than any recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since Milton and Spenser no man—not even Goethe—has equalled Emerson in this trait.' The Problem, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends all contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry, they say, is like Westminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey is inferior in boldness.' Yet, strangely enough, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... whatever that dost armes professe, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse, In choice and change of thy beloved dame. Spenser, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is for a combined volume of poems by Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. The Spenser poems will shortly be available as a ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... 749; Description de l'Amerique, par Denys. 1672, p. 27. Orignac was used interchangeably with elan, the name of the elk of northern Europe, regarded by some as the same spccies.—Vide Mammals, by Spenser F. Baird. But the orignac of Champlain was the moose. Alce Americanus, peculiar to the northern latitudes of America. Moose is derived from the Indian word moosoa. This animal is the largest of the Cervus family. The males are said to attain the weight of eleven or twelve hundred pounds. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... cloak, or mantle, as described by Thady, is of high antiquity. Spenser, in his 'View of the State of Ireland,' proves that it is not, as some have imagined, peculiarly derived from the Scythians, but that most nations of the world anciently used the mantle; for the Jews used it, as you may read of Elias's mantle, &c.; the Chaldees also used ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... transformation should ever be neglected or minimized or forgotten or crowded out is the more strange because one keeps running on it outside religion as well as within. John Keats, when eighteen years old, was handed one day a copy of Spenser's poems. He never had known before what his life was meant to be. He found out that day. Like a voice from heaven his call came in the stately measures of Spenser's glorious verse. He knew that he was meant to be a poet. Upon this master fact that men can be inwardly transformed ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Poesie some Reflections of his own on Epic Poets. Herein he speaks under the head Epic Poetry of Chaucer, in whose time language was not capable of heroic character; or Spenser, who "wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide, besides using a stanza which is in no wise proper for our language;" of Sir William Davenant, who, in Gondibert, "has some ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Dr. Livingstone derided) are familiar to every geographer from Spenser's "Mole" to the Poika of Adelberg and the Timavo near Trieste. Hence "Peter Wilkins" borrowed his cavern which let him to Grandevolet. I have some experience of Sindbad's sorrows, having once attempted to descend ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... I cried. "The only way to get a style is by writing. Mac, I should cut out all the lectures about Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, and let the children write during the English period . . . if I had periods, which I wouldn't. I don't want style from kiddies; I want to see them create in their own way. If they are free to create they will form ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... literature he was master of Shakespeare and Milton, of our earlier dramatic authors; of many picturesque and interesting passages from our old historical chronicles; and was particularly well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on romantic fiction, of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination, before the passions have roused themselves, and demand poetry of a more sentimental description. In this respect his acquaintance ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... of Cicero. The finest of Paul Akers's creations executed during his stay in Rome are 'St. Elizabeth of Hungary,' which represents the princess at the moment the roses have fallen to the ground; 'Una and the Lion,' an illustration of the line in Spenser's ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Prose is read So good as that by Advertising bred, And every Verse Sapolian poets sing Brings laurel wreaths once twin'd for Spenser's head. ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... courage, give a cook notice, but not the time-spirit who makes our poets. We may be sure—to appropriate an idea of the late Sir James Stephen—that if Robert Browning had lived in the sixteenth century, he would not have written a poem like 'The Ring and the Book'; and if Edmund Spenser had lived in the nineteenth century he would not have written a poem like ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Englander, can never approach the old country without a kind of thrill and pulsation of kindred. Its history for two centuries was our history. Its literature, laws, and language are our literature, laws, and language. Spenser, Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, were a glorious inheritance, which we share in common. Our very life-blood is English life-blood. It is Anglo-Saxon vigor that is spreading our country from Atlantic to Pacific, and leading on a new era in the world's development. America ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... driven them by an anathema from the neighborhood, because their songs interrupted his nocturnal meditations. But the memory of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, (once proprietor of Knole,) the best poet of his time, and 'the immediate father-in-verse of Spenser,' sufficiently redresses the stigma of so churlish a proscription, and the nightingales may well claim perpetual franchise under sanction of a name to which the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... half critical, half biographical. We do not always agree with his literary judgments; but we find in him what is very rare in our time, the power of justly appreciating and heartily enjoying good things of very different kinds. He can adore Shakespeare and Spenser without denying poetical genius to the author of Alexander's Feast, or fine observation, rich fancy, and exquisite humor to him who imagined Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley. He has paid ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ran .... and fatally did vow To wreake her on the mayden messenger Whom she had caused be kept as prisonere. SPENSER. ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... capital, but in the domain of poetry, which I take to be a nation's best guaranteed stock, it may safely be said that there are but two shrines in England whither it is necessary for the literary pilgrim to carry his cockle hat and shoon—London, the birthplace of Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Blake, Keats, and Browning, and Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. Of English poets it may be said generally they are either born in London or remote country places. The large provincial ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... rightly served." The relation, though not held to be disgraceful, involved sometimes bitter mortifications, and seems to us inconsistent with self-respect. We remember how it was resented in modern times, though in a much milder form, by Edmund Spenser, Dr. Johnson, and the poet Crabbe. Even between a Horace and a Maecenas it must have caused occasional embarrassment: we find the former, for instance, dedicating poems to men whose character he could not respect, but to whom, as his patron's associates, he was ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... explored the treasures of classic lore in music and literature. Homer, Herodotus, Plato, she has read, with Tasso and his chivalrous lays, and Spenser and his stately verse. In music, Glueck and Gretry, Beethoven and Boieldieu's dulcet tones have helped to fashion ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... noting and recording what it is probable the personage before me might most desire to have concealed. Indeed, his figure was so closely veiled and wimpled, either with a mantle, morning-gown, or some such loose garb, that the verses of Spenser ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... "Dictionary," thus explains the word belive: "Speedily, quickly; it is still common in Westmoreland for presently, which sense, implying a little delay, like our expression of by and by, was formerly the general acceptation of the word." Spenser uses it not unfrequently— ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... literature—English classics, will supply the place, we deny it; for there is not an English classic of value to an artist, who was not, to his very heart's core, embued with a knowledge and love of the ancient literature. We might instance but two, Spenser and Milton—the statute-books of the better English art—authors whom, we do not hesitate to say, no one can thoroughly understand or enjoy, who has not far advanced in classical education. We shall never cease to throw out remarks of this kind, with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Baron de la Motte Fouque, one of the foremost of the minstrels or tale-tellers of the realm of spiritual chivalry—the realm whither Arthur's knights departed when they "took the Sancgreal's holy quest,"—whence Spenser's Red Cross knight and his fellows came forth on their adventures, and in which the Knight of la Mancha believed, ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... seen. "In coming down," he says, "it galloped so hard that, in my opinion, I never saw hare, deer, sheep, or any other animal, I declare to you for a certainty, run with such speed as it did." Edmund Spenser, the poet of The Faerie Queene, writing in 1596, bears this striking testimony to the Irish horse-soldier and inferentially to the Irish horse: "I have hearde some greate warriours say, that, in all ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme," he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Clay by blood." Another chivalry is coming into the world besides that felt by a strong man for a beautiful woman. It is that felt by strong women for their weaker and less fortunate sisters. It is the chivalry foreshadowed by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, in Britomart, the noble knight, herself a woman, who rescued Amoretta and devoted herself to the help of all weak ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... phrase is found in Dryden's "Ode to St. Cecilia," and also in Spenser, Faerie Queene, book iv. canto x. verse 21. Where does ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... was for Spenser, by his quaint device To spiritualize the passionate, and subdue The wild, coarse temper of the British Muse, By meet diversion from the absolute: To lift the fancy, and, where still the song Proclaimed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... churchyard of Beaconsfield, where lay the remains of Edmund Waller, the poet. He was fond of talking of great statesmen—of Walpole, of Pulteney, and of Chatham. Some one had said that Chatham knew nothing whatever except Spenser's Faery Queen. "No matter how that was said," Burke replied to one of his visitors, "whoever relishes and reads Spenser as he ought to be read, will have a strong hold of the English language." The delight of ...
— Burke • John Morley
... other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author's poems, as equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of modern criticism. We would ask, was there the slightest comparison between Shakespeare, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not any.- -The two poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and of TARQUIN AND LUCRECE appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... once drowned in a horse-race on the ice, and hence the name Parda, for the old Hollanders along the Hudson seemed to have had a musical ear, and delighted in accumulating syllables. (The word pard is used in Spenser for spotted horse, and still ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... to recognize no great general principles of criticism, but to found all his judgments on mere prejudice and passion. He thought Cowper "no poet," pronounced Spenser "a dull fellow," and placed Pope above Shakespeare. Byron's line on Crabbe is inscribed on the poet's tombstone at Trowbridge. Perhaps some foreign visitor on reading the inscription may be surprized at his own ignorance when he learns that it is not the author of Macbeth ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... who has power to enmesh the heart of the most constant swain and doom him to perish miserably for love of her. Beware of the fountains and of the wells of this forest of Broceliande, for there she is most commonly to be encountered, and you may know her by her bright hair—"like golden wire," as Spenser says of his lady's—her red, flashing eyes, and her laughing lips. But if you would dare her wiles you must come alone to her fountain by night, for she shuns even the half-gloom that is day in shadowy Broceliande. The peasants when they speak ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... enter, where they found The accursed man low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullen mind. SPENSER. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... havoc we should have made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man. Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse; Shakespeare ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... succeeded in making some proselytes. In London, he lodged at the house of the French ambassador, and went frequently to court, where he maintained his footing by pretending to be smitten by the mature charms of the queen. Among his English friends were Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Fulke Greville, Dyer, Spenser, and Temple, and it has even been asserted that his system to a certain degree influenced Bacon, and may be traced in the Novum Organon.* This is, however, an erroneous view, for Bacon's term "form" means no more than law, for the form ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Orpheus, and so needs to be curbed in time. 'Medio tutissimus ibis', saith Naso,—a maxim the non-observance of which cost him the pain and disgrace of exile. And you should strive to impress the truth of it upon Clarian; spare no pains to rouse him. This seclusion is what I most dread. The poet Spenser hath made all his viler passions dwellers in caves and darkness, and with truth; for solitude is fatal, where there are morbid and melancholic tendencies. A very wise German, remarking upon the text, 'It is not good for man to be alone,' added, very finely,—'and above all, it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... it be, Whether in earth laid up in secret store, Or else in heav'n, that no man may it see With sinful eyes, for feare it to deflore, Is perfect Beautie.—SPENSER. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... and simple Chaucer's child, Dear heritor of Spenser's tuneful reed, With soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled The weary soul of man in troublous need, And from the far and flowerless fields of ice Has brought fair flowers to ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... you mean Spenser. There is a force and beauty in some of his images and descriptions, equal to any in those writers you have seen him converse with. But he had not the art of properly shading his pictures. He brings the minute and disagreeable parts too much into sight; and mingles too frequently vulgar ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... noo for new, and gives to view and few so indescribable a mixture of the two sounds with a slight nasal tincture that it may be called the Yankee shibboleth. Voltaire says that the English pronounce true as if it rhymed with view, and this is the sound our rustics give to it. Spenser writes deow (dew) which can only be pronounced with the Yankee nasality. In rule the least sound of a precedes the u. I find reule in Pecock's 'Repressor.' He probably pronounced it rayoole, as the old French word from which it is derived was very likely to be sounded ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... He went cross-gartered, with a silken rose At golden lovelock, diamond brooch at hat Looping one side up very gallantly, And changed his doublet's color twice a day. Ill fare had given his softer senses edge; Good fortune, later, bade him come to dine, Mild Spenser's scholar, Philip Sidney's friend. So took he now his ease; in Devonshire, When Town was dull, or he had need at heart For sight of Wyndham Towers against the sky; But chiefly did he bask him by the Thames, For there ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... travelled presented the aspect of a street in which a fair is held. Pipers came forth to play before him in a style which was not exactly that of the French opera; and the villagers danced wildly to the music. Long frieze mantles, resembling those which Spenser had, a century before, described as meet beds for rebels, and apt cloaks for thieves, were spread along the path which the cavalcade was to tread; and garlands, in which cabbage stalks supplied the place of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the exiled Orleans family, shows vestiges of the taste of Kent, who always accredited very much of his love for the picturesque to the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet of the "Faerie Queene" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... laughed and chattered, and gurgled of love and happiness, while over all rose the swelling chorus of the birds. Surely never had they piped so gladly in this glad world before—not even for the gentle Spenser, though he says: ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... considerable credit to Master Simon's suspicions. Lady Lillycraft is very fond of quoting poetry, and the conversation often turns upon it, on which occasions the general is thrown completely out. It happened the other day that Spenser's Fairy Queen was the theme for the greater part of the morning, and the poor general sat perfectly silent. I found him not long after in the library, with spectacles on nose, a book in his hand, and fast asleep. On my approach, he awoke, slipt the spectacles ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving |
