"Byronic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said his lordship, frowning a tense, Byronic frown. "That's what you've done—soured my whole bally life. I've had a rotten time. I've had to go about touching my friends for money to keep me going. Why, I owe you a fiver, don't ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... of ways. I'm not sure that one of the best isn't to keep away for a bit. Even if she doesn't want you just now, when you are there, she may get to want you when you aren't. I don't think I should go on the mournful Byronic plan if I were you; I don't think it would suit your style; you're too heavily built to stand leaning against the chimney-piece, gazing at her ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... be confessed, odious and ridiculous when you think of the lonely yet cheerful sceptic pacing his vionnet, and composing essays and verses as he walked. Prisoner for prisoner, even if both were real, the un-Byronic Bonivard is much more to my mind. But the poet had to make a Byronic Bonivard, being of the romantic time he was, and we cannot blame him. The love of his sentimentality pervades the region; they have named the nearest hotel after ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... one could hardly have accused the little snipe of making his own eyelashes. He wore a very loose-trousered knickerbocker suit of navy-blue; a white silk shirt or blouse, loose also, with a turned-down Byronic collar and a careless black bow underneath. He had extremely small hands, tanned brown, and on the least finger of one was a seal ring. My impression of this youthful tourist was that in age he might be anywhere between thirteen and seventeen, and I was sure that he would be the better for ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... digested, and the alimentary canal, become superfluous, has disappeared. Again, the males of most Rotifers have no digestive apparatus; as a German naturalist has remarked, they devote themselves entirely to the "Minnedienst," and are to be reckoned among the few realisations of the Byronic ideal of a lover. Finally, amidst the lowest forms of animal life, the speck of gelatinous protoplasm, which constitutes the whole body, has no permanent digestive cavity or mouth, but takes in its food anywhere; and ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... preferences and dislikes of his tyrants he succeeded, however, in bluffing through most of his recitations with the loyal support of Beekstein. But The Roman was not thus to be circumvented, and as Dink, in the Byronic period of grief, had no heart for florid improvisations of the applause of the multitude he contented himself, whenever annoyed by his implacable persecutor, The Roman, by rising and saying ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... were free Paragot left us, and went off by himself; whereupon I, mimetic as an ape, rejected the humble Blanquette's invitation to take a walk with her, and strolled moodily into the town with Narcisse at my heels. A dog fight or two and a Byronic talk with a little towheaded flower-seller who gave me a dusty bunch of cyclamen—as a porte-bonheur she said prettily—whiled away the time until the people began to drift out of the Wonder Houses to dress for dinner. I lingered at the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... tone to the ideas and language as well as to the manners of those about him. He had imported from his travels a certain development of the Britannic personality with its icy barriers, also a tone of Byronic pessimism as to life, together with English plate, boot-polish, ponies, yellow gloves, cigars, ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... and a big, dark, Byronic-looking dragoman came round and proposed a barbaric dance to our people. Ali Cocash was his name, and he described this dance as an imitation of a fierce and bloody orgy, such as the Bedouins indulge in after a great victory. They were to ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were flaming like ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... degree, proud, haughty, and subject to fits of Byronic despair and morbid gloom. For these traits we must look back to the Norman Conquest from which he traced his descent in an unbroken line, while, on the side of his maternal grandmother, he was the seventh in descent from Pocahontas, the Indian ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... indeed, with a friendly wholeness that demanded something more than mere cordial applause of her favorite poet. Some intimation of a sympathy with her view of the other poet came to seem not ungraceful. During one of the reader's pauses to impress upon them the splendors of the Byronic imagery, and eke its human heart-warmth, good Aunt Delia, with defiant looks about ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... beaux Not made of the poetic stuff That sports an Apollonian nose, And wears a sleek Byronic cuff. ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... indeed?" I echo. We are here not to form our characters or to improve our minds, but to let them relax; and when we see anything which opposses the Byronic ideal of Venice (the use of the concertina as the national instrument having this tendency), we deliberately close our eyes to it. I have a proper regard for truth in matters of fact like statistics. ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... combined a constructive imagination with the more technical qualities of his art; and the result of this period of aesthetic training was a volume of short poems produced, we are told, when he was only twelve, in which the Byronic ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... winter. One member of this group, Mr. John Glover Drew, was ambitious, and urged the presentation of something more serious and edifying than merely amusing trifles, and, accordingly, an excursion was made into the realm of the melodrama. Glover, as he was called, was intensely Byronic, after the fashion of the times, and he prepared a succession of thrilling scenes from Byron's sensational poem, "The Corsair," for presentation by his fellow players. This melodramatic production was staged with all the pasteboard ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... thought; sorrow, the positive reality of life; pleasure, the world's illusion; death, the negation of the will to live. Espronceda shared all of these ideas. It is often impossible to say how much of his suffering is a mere Byronic pose, and how much comes from the reaction of an intensely sensitive nature to the hard facts of existence. There is evidence that he never lost the zest of living; but in his writings he appears as one who has been completely disillusionized by literature, love, politics, and every experience ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... conciliatory, Kierkegaard vehement. Bjoernson's peasant novels, which are a continuation of Grundtvig and Blicher, are, by their harmony and their peaceable relations to all that is, an outcome of love of common sense; they have the same anti-Byronic stamp as the School of Common Sense. The movement comes to us ten years later. But Bjoernson has simultaneously something of Romanticism and something of Realism. We have not men to place ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... not forget to mention Fisher, the sub-editor of The New Yorker, and, in his own estimation, the most important person upon that journal. He was what might be called a literary fop, and was much given to the production of highly-wrought, Byronic poems and sketches. I remember hearing that some one called one day at the office, and asked to see the ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... round on a triumph of ill-assortment. He came here partly out of old friendship for his hostess, but chiefly for fear of seeming to avoid a section of society which at least took itself seriously. There was no question of a Byronic descent on Chelsea; these people would ever cringe before the face of success and disparage behind its back, as they had always done; they made a suburb and called it a school. For ten years Eric had listened to their theories and ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... lady a hearing,' said a shabby art-student, magisterially. He seemed not ill-pleased when he had drawn a certain number of eyes to his long hair, picturesque hat, and flowing Byronic tie. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... poet will be judged in the future, was yet to come; but the work which made his name, which is stamped with his sign-manual, and which has come to be regarded as distinctively and characteristically Byronic, preceded maturity ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... threw the artist into a cold perspiration. Finally he acquired the knack of it, and never troubled himself at all about it. He understood at a word how each wanted himself portrayed. If a man wanted Mars in his face, he put in Mars: he gave a Byronic turn and attitude to those who aimed at Byron. If the ladies wanted to be Corinne, Undine, or Aspasia, he agreed with great readiness, and threw in a sufficient measure of good looks from his own imagination, which does no harm, and for the sake of which an artist is even forgiven a lack ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of exceptional interest to the student of English Literature, written as it was under the profound influence of Byron and being itself a study of the Byronic type of character. ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life writing them up. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... he had apparently forgotten her, had made himself conspicuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried the Byronic gesture. Then, after Commencement, meeting her unexpectedly, he had ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... that he was not, that he was rather a splendid and Byronic figure in the grip of ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... the finest test of high poetic quality, when purified and spiritualized, has no Byronic bitterness, no selfish morbidness, no impenetrable gloom, but in his own ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... thus posed for and received in full measure the horrified admiration of the public. But in spite of all this melodramatic clap-trap the romances, like 'Childe Harold,' are filled with the tremendous Byronic passion, which, as in 'Childe Harold,' lends great power alike to their ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... special painstaking. For a time you fall yourself into this very unfortunate hallucination; you cultivate it after the usual college fashion, by drinking a vast deal of strong coffee and whiskey-toddy, by writing a little poor verse in the Byronic temper, and by studying very late at night with ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... former sinful state. He wanted to sell them to me with all their sins, and eventually I did buy his copy of Byron for fifty cents, after borrowing and becoming so enamoured of it that I felt I could not live without the book. The Byronic moods and fashion I imitated to the best of my ability. I began to turn down my Sunday linen collar which had stood up to my ears, and to wear my hair long and careless; whereas formerly, I had brushed ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... nice things, but beyond that their tastes were rather colorless. I am glad to see one red-blooded newspaper man, in the person of "Landy Rivers," of San Francisco, break into fiction; a real live reporter with no sentimental loyalty for his "paper," and no Byronic poses about his vices, and no astonishing taste about his clothes, and no money whatever, which is the natural and normal condition of all reporters. "Blix" herself was just a society girl, and "Landy" took her to theatres and parties and tried to make himself ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... alternations of hope, despair, and resignation, which were confided to her in their weekly conferences. But there came a time when Laurie ceased to worship at many shrines, hinted darkly at one all-absorbing passion, and indulged occasionally in Byronic fits of gloom. Then he avoided the tender subject altogether, wrote philosophical notes to Jo, turned studious, and gave out that he was going to 'dig', intending to graduate in a blaze of glory. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... "What a Byronic head," whispered the author of "The Transformed" to D.O.V.E.; "and was there ever such a curl of the lip, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the most expensive description. And, at the end of a week, she just quietly kicked him out. He hung about in Antibes for three days. He was cured of the idea that he had any duties towards La Dolciquita—feudal or otherwise. But his sentimentalism required of him an attitude of Byronic gloom—as if his court had gone into half-mourning. Then his appetite suddenly returned, and he remembered Leonora. He found at his hotel at Monte Carlo a telegram from Leonora, dispatched from London, saying; "Please return as soon as convenient." He could not understand ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... mentioned, but among them was the Knight of the Holston—Athelstanic in build—in black stockings, white negligee shirt, with Byronic collar, and a broad crimson sash tied with a bow at his right side. There was the Knight of the Green Valley, in green and gold, a green hat with a long white plume, lace ruffles at his sleeves, and buckles on dancing-pumps; a bonny fat knight of Maxwelton Braes, in Highland ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... round, diminishing mirrors—of the life of a century ago. There is poetry of the Lake School fashion, exhortations to Bideford and Woody Bay, to Lynton or "The Beauties of Devon"; there is more poetry of the Byronic fashion, fierce and satiric invective (yet never, be it understood, transgressing the bounds of decency or good manners!) against the lady of the poet's affection; there are stories, in which love and virtue triumph over temptation and evil-doing; there is, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... handsome, a Byronic sort, both in beauty and temperament, with a dash perhaps of insanity, John Wilkes Booth, had long meditated killing the President. A violent secessionist, his morbid imagination had made of Lincoln another Caesar. The occasion called for a Brutus. While Lincoln ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... campaigning with the Army of the Faith in Spain. And there was certainly the uncle with the romantic title and the great inheritance, and the cousin—the Miss Seraphina, whom he would probably marry. I imagined him an aristocratic scapegrace, a corsair—it was the Byronic period then—sailing out to marry a sort of shimmering princess with hair like Veronica's, bright golden, and a face like that of a certain keeper's daughter. Carlos, however, knew nothing about his cousin; he cared little more, as far ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... poets Byron at first with him held the chief place. Boyish verses, written under the Byronic influence, were gathered into a group when the writer was but twelve years old; a title—Incondita—was found, and Browning's parents had serious intentions of publishing the manuscript. Happily ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... and motioned me to be seated again. I sat down, but it was only for the purpose of observing him an instant; I saw it was time I should return to my sister. Miss Spencer's cousin was a queer fellow. Nature had not shaped him for a Raphaelesque or Byronic attire, and his velvet doublet and naked neck were not in harmony with his facial attributes. His hair was cropped close to his head; his ears were large and ill-adjusted to the same. He had a lackadaisical carriage and a sentimental droop which were ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... Cowper's allusion to the matinee a l'anglaise certainly proves that he had at any rate forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth in French literature.[61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in the Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseau assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done into splendid prose. His pictures ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of a semicolon, or comma, for the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its excessive employment about twenty years ago. The Byronic poets were all dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, exaggerated its use into the grossest abuse—although his very error arose from the philosophical and self-dependent spirit which has always distinguished him, and which will even yet lead ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... Then came the romantic story of his being deeply in love with a nurse who had been killed, that he was heartbroken and inconsolable and a changed man. Was it wonderful that on his return to Petrograd she should feel again that old Byronic (every Russian is still brought up on Byron) romance? She did not like him, but—well—Vera was a staid old-fashioned thing.... Perhaps they all misjudged him; perhaps he really needed comfort and consolation. He certainly seemed kinder than he used to be. But, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... difficulties also in the way of him who would play the Byronic young gentleman. He must be supernaturally wicked—or rather must have been; only, alas! in the unliterary grammar of life, where the future tense stands first, and the past is formed, not from the indefinite, ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the wig both got into their writing. Perruque was the nickname applied to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who wore their hair long and flowing—cheveaux merovigiennes—and affected an outre freedom in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence in matters of taste and opinion. Its careless roll, which left the throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fellow, surrounded by all the elegances of life, I had not thought of as the domicil of the Muses. Mr. Hoffman impressed me as being very English in his appearance and manners. His forehead is quite Byronic in its craniological developments. His eye and countenance are of the most commanding character. Pity that such a handsome man, so active in everything that calls for the gun, the rod, the boat, the horse, the dog, should have been shorn of so essential a prerequisite ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... first, as he stood with her little turquoise ring in his hand and an odd light in his eye that might have enlightened her; but she was looking toward the door, where the young gentleman from San Francisco, in a Byronic pose, was staring gloomily at Irene dancing with a rival, and so joying in the dance that she had forgotten all ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... a tall, lank, loose-jointed man, with long black hair that lay well over his Byronic collar. He had a humorous eye and a cavernous mouth that was always twisting itself into grimaces, alternately side-splitting and terrifying. On occasions he would use the birch—and very thoroughly, too, ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... amphitheatre, rugged and overbearing like Titans turned to stone. They seem, indeed, to wear a sombre insolence of demeanour as though the aspect of human kind moved them to lofty contempt. And in their magnificent desolation they offer a fit environment for the exploits of Byronic heroes. The handsome villain of romance, seductive by the complexity of his emotions, by the persistence of his mysterious grief, would find himself in that theatrical scene most thoroughly at home; nor did Prosper Merimee fail to seize the opportunity, for the mountains ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... searching for novelty, John Masefield created something startling and new by going back to 1385 and The Canterbury Pilgrims. Employing both the Chaucerian model and a form similar to the practically forgotten Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote in rapid succession, The Everlasting Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), Dauber (1912), The Daffodil Fields (1913)—four astonishing rhymed narratives and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... almost poetic refinement were the characteristics of the face, an unusual type for the frontier. With thoughtful gray eyes set deep under a jut of brows and a nose as finely cut as a woman's, it was of a type that, in more sophisticated localities, men would have said had risen to meet the Byronic ideal of which the world was just then enamored. But there was nothing Byronic or self-conscious about David Crystal. He had been born and bred in what was then the Far West, and that he should read poetry and regard life as an undertaking ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... sketched in a Byronic pose, was offering to public admiration his dark locks floating in the breeze, a bare throat, and the unfathomable brow which every bard ought to possess. Victor Hugo's forehead will make more persons shave their heads than the number of incipient marshals ever killed by the glory ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... compositions, and among other works, had written the greater part of a novel. This book, written under the influence of his youthful embarrassments, amatory and pecuniary, was of a very fierce, gloomy and passionate sort—the Byronic despair, the Wertherian despondency, the mocking bitterness of Mephistopheles of Faust, were all reproduced and developed in the character of the hero; for our youth had just been learning the German language, and imitated, as almost all clever ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has not often been done. We are told how, after a long absence from Suffolk, he rode sixty miles from his house to have a dip in the sea. Some of his poems appear to be positively impregnated with a briny, or rather perhaps a tarry, odour. The sea which he loved was by no means a Byronic sea. It has no grandeur of storm, and still less has it the Mediterranean blue. It is the sluggish muddy element which washes the flat shores of his beloved Suffolk. He likes even the shelving beach, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... to eat in the house. When Abraham appeared before me at that time, "his countenance was fallen," as the quaint, strong language of Scripture expresses it. He made no complaints, however, and indulged in no Byronic allusions to destiny. Indeed, he said very little, but merely drooped and cowered, as if the wolf at the door and the shadow of death within it were rather more than he could face at one and the same time. It soon became evident, however, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... could find none to offer up the charitable prayers necessary for their deliverance, breathed through their notes. Sometimes a despair so inconsolable is stamped upon them, that we feel ourselves present at some Byronic tragedy, oppressed by the anguish of a Jacopo Foscari, unable to survive the agony of exile. In some we hear the shuddering spasms of suppressed sobs. Some of them, in which the black keys are exclusively taken, are acute ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... strict morality; also a species of Oriental charm which so much captivated Madame de Stael." It will occur to most that the apologist of the Russian fair "doth protest too much." The poet in all probability wrote the offending stanza in a fit of Byronic "spleen," as he would most likely himself have called it. Indeed, since Byron, poets of his school seem to assume this virtue if they have it not, and we take their utterances under its influence for what they ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and Malvolio." Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz or their yet later equivalents, compared with which "le spleen" of the French Byronic age was gay, done so much for us? Is there to be no laughter left in literature free from the preoccupation of a sham real- life? So it would seem. Even what the great master has not shown us in his work, that your critic convinced of pathos is resolved to see in it. By ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... the aisle, saw her jump up the little ladder onto the stage, watched her vanish into the swirl of the dance. He reached for a cigarette, opened his case, and found it empty. He uttered a mirthless, Byronic laugh. The ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... whether he would, when his day came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest (Monsignor Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the most distinguished), or with his hands clasped behind his head, a more pagan and Byronic attitude. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... paper, on quite an important page, and there was over a column of it. But in his nervous excitation his eyes had missed it. His eyes now read it. Over half of it was given up to a discussion of the Don Juan legend and the significance of the Byronic character of Haidee—obviously written before the performance. A description of the plot occupied most of the rest, and a reference to the acting ended it. "Miss Rose Euclid, in the trying and occasionally beautiful ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... interesting country has by no means entirely drained the cup. After thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will do him no great harm to think of her for a while as panting both for a future and for a balance at the bank; aspirations supposedly much at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, aesthetic manner of considering our eternally attaching peninsula. He may grant—I don't say it is absolutely necessary—that its actual aspects and economics are ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation to the diary and the album; it is nevertheless true ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of him after her stolen glance in the morning, she longed to do that which he dreaded she would try to do—attempt his reformation. Not that she cared for him personally, or that she had grown sentimentally interested in his Byronic style of wretchedness. So far from it, her happy and healthful nature was repelled by his diseased and morbid one. She found him what girls call a "disagreeable man." But she yearned toward a sinning, suffering soul, found in any ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... composure. At any rate, when I came downstairs, it was in a broken voice that he wished me the compliments of the season, and a little later on, when he paid his visit of ceremony at breakfast, he was far from cheerful: even Byronic, I might almost say, in ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of Homo Sapiens—an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have been completely Byronic—more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of Provencal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He was jealous of ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... sentimental generalization,—which is much more Byronic than Dantesque,—one hardly knows which version to call more truly poetical; but for a faithful rendering of the original conception one can hardly hesitate to give the palm ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... consist of a kind of sporting opera called King Tims the First, which is the tragedy of an emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in ottava rima, called The Fields of Tothill, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get his story under weigh; and miscellaneous pieces. Some of these latter are simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written in Peter Corcoran's earlier days. The most characteristic and the best deal, however, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... and interested in her neighbor and her evident rivalry with the long-haired cubist, whom she now saw daintily picking his way across the court, in velveteen jacket and Byronic collar with the loose flowing tie common in the Latin Quarter. In his hand he held a stiff bouquet of red and yellow chrysanthemums, which, bowing low, he presented to Jo as she jerked the door open at ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... to experience a revulsion of low feelings to which he was ever prone. He is soon in a sort of Byronic fit, and he continues in a strain with which we should have not credited the 'gay classic friend of Jack Wilkes' and of that Sienese signora, unless he had turned evidence against himself. He declared his feelings to Paoli, as he had done to Johnson, whose curt advice ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... was forty he married a beautiful girl of twenty. She had ideas about art and poetry, and was passing through her Byronic stage, before Byron did, and taking it rather hard, when her parents gave her in troth to Heinrich Schopenhauer, the rich merchant. It was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... easy, unclassical, and, on {226} the other hand, too little touched with Byronic or revolutionary feeling, even to suggest the age of Pitt, Napoleon, Canning; he was too sensible, too orthodox, too firmly based on fact and on the past, to have any affinity with our own transitionary politics. Like Peel, although in a less degree, he had at once a firm body of opinions, a keen ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... who displayed a curious tendency to drift in between Benham and Amanda, a literary youth with a Byronic visage, very dark curly hair, and a number of extraordinarily mature chins, a girl-friend of Betty's who had cycled down from London, and who it appeared maintained herself at large in London by drawing for advertisements, and a silent colourless ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... music in her heart, the taste of the honey of the remote moon comes to her lips; but it comes, alas! with the bitter taste of several years of matrimonial prose. In every married woman there is a poet disillusioned of his muse. Hence the Byronic smile on her face at the sight of the happiness shining in the eyes of ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... public as Zola's one prominent characteristic—of this, Galt has absolutely nothing, his preoccupation being uniformly with beauty in one form or another, whether of matter or of spirit. With him, a gloom which, did we not fear to be less than just to Galt we might denominate Byronic, fills perhaps the place of Zola's pessimism. Next, of that misbegotten passion for the painter's brush which has vitiated so much of modern French writing, and of which Zola in inferior works has even more than his due share, the novel of Ringan Gilhaize shows equally no trace. ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... today, with which techniques and media are organized and used, tends to throw the mind away from a "common sense" and towards "manner" and thus to resultant weak and mental states—for example, the Byronic fallacy—that one who is full of turbid feeling about himself is qualified to be some sort of an artist. In this relation "manner" also leads some to think that emotional sympathy for self is as true a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... arm-chair, a long nine in his mouth, from which he incessantly puffed an immense volume of smoke. Prompt's face was a perfect picture of edge-tools; and with his easy air generally, his hands stowed away in the ample pockets of his nether garments; his passion for the Byronic—made known by the extravagant roll of a turn-down shirt collar—and his bushy hair thrown back on a veiny and narrow forehead that seemed to have been cut away to fit his hat, had an appearance ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... existences crushed out by the heartless conduct of man, Blanche expiring of dismay almost as soon as she is led from the altar, Rose burying herself and her despair in a convent. The then favorite heroes of romance were of the French Byronic type—young men of fortune who have exhausted life before they are five-and-twenty, whose minds are darkened by haunting memories of some terrific crime, but who are none the less capable of all the virtues and great elevation of sentiment on occasion. None of these requisitions are left ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... disguises) and they picture him as a proud, mysterious stranger, carelessly generous, fiendishly wicked, profoundly melancholy, irresistibly fascinating to women. Byron is credited with the invention of this hero, ever since called Byronic; but in truth the melodramatic outcast was a popular character in fiction long before Byron adopted him, gave him a new dress and called him Manfred or Don Juan. A score of romances (such as Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian in England, and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland in America) had ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Farewell, Byronic youth! You are not of so frail a stuff as you have seemed. You shall thirst by day and hunger by night. You shall keep vigil on the sands of the Gulf and on the banks of the Potomac. You shall grow brown, but prettier. You shall shiver in loathsome tatters, yet ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... does not lie in mad Byronic passion, or in terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction" of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment from all interests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our own emotion. And this emotion, for the sake ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... This seemed flat blasphemy to Shelley, whose idealism was mixed with Byronic misanthropy. "Nor was there aught the world contained of which ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... not only steeped to the lips in Byronic poetry, but he has also a very familiar acquaintance with the remarkable characters who formed 'the Byronic set,' and he knows the manners and customs of the Regency epoch to an extent that gives him full mastery of his ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... 'That dark, Byronic-looking creature who came with you? I should not have imagined him capable of anything sociable. Letitia, shall I send my maid to the rectory, or can ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which we render as "The Magic Skin." Published in 1831, it is the earliest in date of his veritable masterpieces, and the finest in conception. There is no novel more soberly true to life than this strange fairy tale. His hero, the Marquis de Valentin, is a young aristocrat of the Byronic type. He rejects the simple joys and stern realities of human existence; he wants more than life can give. He gets what he wants. He obtains a magic skin which enables him to fulfil his every wish. But in so doing he uses up his vital ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... anguish and Miss Patty's incomparable attractions were brought forward in verses of various degrees of mediocrity. They were also equally varied in their style and treatment; one being written in a fierce and gloomy Byronic strain, while another followed the lighter childish style of Wordsworth. To this latter class, perhaps, belonged the following lines, which, having accidentally fallen into the hands of Mr. Bouncer, were pronounced by him to be "no end good! first-rate fun!" for the little gentleman ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... appreciate the wit and sentiment of the people. But his wit is so truly French in its lightness and sparkling, feathering vivacity, that one like me, accustomed to the bitterness of English tonics, suicidal November melancholy, and Byronic wrath of satire, cannot appreciate him at once. But when used to the gentler stimuli, we like them best, and we also would live awhile in the atmosphere of music and mirth, content if we have "bread for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... produce any but agreeable sensations; but it is a melancholy fact that the saloon emptied and the state-rooms filled, and the number of promenaders daily diminished. People began to find the sea "an unpleasant fact." I heard no more Byronic quotations about its "glad waters," or comments on the "splendid run"—these were changed into anxious questions as to when we should reach Liverpool? and, if we were in danger? People querulously complained of the ale, hitherto their delight; abused the meat; ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... emancipated from human limitations, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by the influences of nature, triumphantly seeking its own or shattered in magnificent despair. In her novels of the first period, George Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant. In Indiana and its immediate successors, consciously or unconsciously, she declares to the world what a beautiful soul M. Dudevant condemned to sewing on buttons; in Jacques she ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... cottage in the Apennines to the senate-house itself, was defied by a mere boy! Throughout his career Caesar displayed always a singular indifference to life. He had no sentimental passion about him, no Byronic mock-heroics. He had not much belief either in God or the gods. On all such questions he observed from first to last a profound silence. But one conviction he had. He intended, if he was to live at all, to live master of himself in matters which belonged to himself. Sylla might ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... however one of those sentimental beings belonging to the Byronic or German school. His mind was rather energetic than tender; it was rather ardent than despairing. The son of a brave country gentleman who had devoted fortune and life to the cause of legitimacy, and after having ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... more reasonable, amiable, and kind, in this as in most respects, can not exist than herself; but nevertheless, when I went to bed last night I sat by my open window, looking at the moon and thinking of my social duties, and then scribbled endless doggerel in a highly Byronic mood to deliver my mind upon the subject, after which, feeling amazingly better, I went to bed and slept profoundly, satisfied that I had given "society" a death-blow. But really, jesting apart, the companionship of my own family—those I live with, I mean—satisfies ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... differentiates the Arnoldian variety of Wordsworthianism—the note which rings from Resignation to Poor Matthias, and which is a very curious cross between two things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian enthusiasm and the Byronic despair. But of this[4] more when we have had more of its examples before us. The second piece in the volume must, or should, have struck—for there is very little evidence that it did strike—readers of the volume as something at once ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... to say as much for the captain and crew of the Avenger. Cain is not only not a pirate, but he is not a human being. He is a Byronic or even a Michael Scottish hero—an impossible monster, compounded of one virtue and a thousand crimes. There never was any such person, and even on paper he is not tolerable for more than a paragraph ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... be idle, and perhaps undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that the ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... likeness of an unusually handsome man with waving hair of an eccentric length and bold dark eyes smiling straight out of the picture as if he were just about to speak to the Arethusa who worshipped it. He wore a Byronic sort of collar, with a wide tie, and his shoulders were draped in an Italian military cape, effectively thrown back from the one wide frog that clasped it just below the flowing ends of the tie. So he was not like other fathers; ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... took place as to the title of the work. "What do you think," said Mr. Disraeli, "of the 'Psychological Memoir'? I hesitate between this and 'Narrative,' but discard 'History' or 'Biography.' On survey, I conceive the MS. will make four Byronic tomes, according to the pattern you were kind enough to show me." The work was at length published in 4 vols., foolscap 8vo, with the title of "Contarini ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... never failed to provoke his keenest irony and bitterest sarcasms. In his last years he even became cynical and rugged and vulgar, in which we may of course trace the influence of his tavern associates. It is to his credit that he did not sink into Byronic misanthropy and bitter self-lacerating scorn, or even ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... is in the rhymed Byronic metre, mostly in couplets. In order not to sacrifice anything of the meaning I have chosen to ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... arrow from her bow. Her draperies are of indefinite color, the rose and lilac and amber of sunset. Her face, it will be noted, though she stands against the moon, is lighted from in front. In that fact lies the secret of the illumination. For this picture was supposedly painted at that one Byronic hour of the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... said, with kind intent: "Why sing forever of these trivial things? For better music was your piping meant; Will you confess such earth-restricted wings? Strike some Byronic chord, sublime and deep, Find in ethereal flight the upper air, And speak to us some word that we may keep Within our ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... man. Over the world he goes on his solitary expeditions, hunting animals, hunting men, making notes of what foreign armies are doing, what are the chief thoughts occupying the minds of distant and dangerous tribesmen, and he never goes about it blusteringly or with the Byronic mystery of the stage detective. He trusts to his sense of humour—to his smile—first; after that, and only when there is no hope for it, do those hard jaws of his lock with a snap, the eyes light up with resistless determination, ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... sentimental drover, who walked by my side, cynically quoted Byronic verses suitable to the occasion—to death—and asked with pathetic humour whether we thought the dead man's ticket would be recognized "over yonder." It was a G.L.U. ticket, and the general opinion was ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... enjoyed these little scenes, as a variation in his part; they represented the Byronic element in the somewhat artificial poetry of his existence; but to the boy, though he was dimly aware of their theatricality, they represented more. The Doctor made perhaps too little, the boy possibly too much, of the reality and gravity ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... infatuation, borrowed from Balzac or Dumas fils, to fear from me. The benchers of the Inner Temple will tell you that Robert Audley is troubled with none of the epidemics whose outward signs are turn-down collars and Byronic neckties. I say that I wish I had never entered my uncle's house during the last year; but I say it with a far more solemn meaning ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... was good, and we glided smoothly through the pretty old town of Puerta de Santa Maria, with its big bodegas and Byronic associations. Across the Guadalquivir, where it tumbles into the Atlantic, dashing through an aromatic forest of umbrella pines we came out at Queen Isabel's white, Moorish looking Puerto Real. Thence, distant Cadiz on its rock appeared to change position bewilderingly, ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... an Italian illustrator, who lodged and painted in studio-apartments in Washington Square, South. He had studied in the Julian School and the Beaux Arts, and wore a shock of dark curls, a Satanic black mustache, and an expression of Byronic melancholy. The melancholy, he explained to Samson, sprang from the necessity of commercializing his divine gift. His companions were various, numbering among them a group of those pygmy celebrities of whom one has never heard until by chance he meets them, and of whom their intimates ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... meet adversity with songs of resignation. At times, he faces indignantly the hostile world with a satire as stinging as that of Juvenal. He dares attack with Byronic boldness every idol that his enemies worship. Often he strikes at the whole people with Archilochean bitterness and parries blow for blow like Hipponax. At times, he even seems to approach the rancor of Swift. But then he immediately throws away his whip and transcends ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... pallor, which had so forcibly struck him at their first meeting. He could not refrain from admiring the severe beauty of his features, the only defect, or rather the principal quality of which was the pallor. Truly, a Byronic hero! Franz could not, we will not say see him, but even think of him without imagining his stern head upon Manfred's shoulders, or beneath Lara's helmet. His forehead was marked with the line that indicates the constant presence of bitter ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... husbands. His voice had seductive charm. He could twang the guitar and fence like ten devils. A gamester, too. In a word, a figure out of the Renaissance, when the deed trod hard on the heels of the word. One of his self-portraits shows him in a Byronic collar, the brow finely proportioned, marked mobile features, sombre eyes—the ideal Don Juan Tenorio to win the foolish heart of an Emma Bovary or a bored noblewoman. Another, with its savage eye—it is a profile—and big beaver head-covering, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker |
