"Idyllic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this idyllic consummation of the longing for love, there is the other, the ecstatic consummation of mutual rapture. It almost blots out individual consciousness in the singly (no longer doubly) felt, body and soul entrancing ecstasy; it is such sheer delight that pleasure is no longer ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... ashamed—the hole-and-corner time, the time when the parochial spirit was abroad and no German burgher saw beyond the village church and the village pump; the Biedermeier time (that comic figure of the German Punch), the time of genuine German philistinism, when the people were lapped in an idyllic repose and were content, as many are to-day, with the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... themselves, have been isolated with great advantage), and excepting likewise the passages concerning Outougamiz and Mila—which possess, in considerable measure and gracious fashion, what some call the "idyllic" quality—I have found it, on more than one attempt, difficult to take much interest in Les Natchez, not merely for the reasons already given, but chiefly owing to them. Rene's appearances (and he is generally in background or foreground) ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... common; that in the early stages of human history, when man, as yet unfallen, was conceived as living in the Garden of Eden in perfect innocency, common property amply satisfied his sinless and unselfish moral character; that by the Fall lust and greed overthrew this idyllic state, and led to a continued condition of internecine strife, and the supremacy of might; that experience gradually brought men to realise that their only hope towards peaceful intercourse lay in the actual division of property, and the establishment of a system ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... wander helplessly about for hours among densely foliaged trees without being able to find his destination. He would see the beds beside him everywhere thickly planted with flowers in full bloom, and at every turn he would come upon arcades of jasmine with idyllic benches underneath, or marble statues of ancient divinities overgrown with creeping gobaeas, or pyramids of modish flowers piled one on the top of the other. In one place he would behold masterly reproduced ruins, with agaric and cactus monsters planted amongst them. In another place he would ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... of Denmark; the people there seem to me to be happy, despite everything, and the country not to be over-populated. In any case, the population finds ample means of outlet in sea-life and emigration. Denmark is an idyllic little country. Now you want to declare war there. My thoughts seek down in dark places, and I ask myself whether I really believe that truth does any good, whether in my secret heart I am convinced that strife is better than stagnation? I admire Oliver Cromwell, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... retire into the solitude of religious meditation, and to abandon the art which he had practised with such success. He was not yet forty, his genius was apparently still developing, but his great career was at an end. Towards the close of his life he produced two more plays—Esther, a short idyllic piece of great beauty, and Athalie, a tragedy which, so far from showing that his powers had declined during his long retreat, has been pronounced by some critics to be the finest of his works. He wrote no more for the stage, and he died eight years later, at the age of sixty. It ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... any case, it's more important that you should hear something about your new life. It's not all as innocent and idyllic as this. If you intend to go through, you ought to be instructed about ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... her eyes on a handkerchief of costliest lace, "you see my—that is, the Duchess, is of such a romantic temperament, so enamoured of rural scenes, idyllic meadows, pretty shepherdesses, and the like—all the court makes merry at her foible. She thought to astonish Paris to-night by a lavish display of sweet simplicity—did Monsieur see it? That big dark place ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... Bathsheba: 'Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma'am?' No, I cannot say my readings of Hardy have been good for me here. There is Jude the Obscure now, a masterpiece of heart-bowing tragedy that. And, especially insidious in my case, there are passages like this from that other tragedy in the idyllic vein, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... great green van rolled forth upon the country roads, bound for an idyllic spot by the river where Diane had planned to camp a week, two men appeared upon the wide, white-pillared Sherrill porch, smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands below bright with morning sunlight. To the east lay the silver glimmer ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... was given over to the fantastic revels of the ballet in an attempt to typify the apotheosis of the automobile. This was rather a rash venture in prognostication, for it may be easy enough to "apotheosize" the horse, but to what idyllic heights the automobile is destined to ultimately ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... had to pay their entrance fees; here a little, naive, ten-year-old girl among her toys in the kitchen of her parents' modest white cottage in a lovely country village! I never felt a more uncanny, nerve-irritating atmosphere than in Palladino's squalid quarters, and I do not remember more idyllic, peaceful surroundings than when I sat between Beulah and her sister through bright sunny mornings in their mother's home with their cat beside them and the pet lamb coming into the room from the meadow. There everything suggested fraud, and when at my second ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... idyllic spot, as I soon discovered, of fine rolling country, well wooded and watered, the road of macadam, rising slowly from the entrance gates, turning here and there through a succession of natural parks, along the borders of a lake of ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... girlish apology and a foolish color which annoyed her more than the appearance of familiarity. But they were now getting well down into the valley; the court of the little hotel was already opening before them; their unconventional relations in the idyllic world above had changed; the new one required some delicacy of handling, and she had an idea that even the simplicity of the young stranger might ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... chant of the old women who were zigzagging a dance before her. With the gayly striped blankets lying on the ground, the strings of beads, wampum, and highly colored feathers hanging from the trees, and the flickering lights and shadows, it was an innocent and even idyllic picture, but the more experienced Peter saw in the performances only the uncertain temper and want of consecutive idea of playing animals, and the stolid unwinking papoose in his sister's lap gave his sentiment a ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... that he was in the right, obeying the voice of honor and acting like a king and a Christian. Any other policy than his own would have seemed to him foolish and cowardly. To hear his courtiers, one would have said that the age of gold had returned in France; the felicitations offered him took an idyllic tone. The Count of Chabrol, Prefect of the Seine, said to him, January 1, 1825, at the grand reception at ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Ego?' Recent associations have rendered you idyllic. I can recall a period when 'love in a cottage' was the target that challenged the keenest arrows of your satire. Rich little Kittie has my warmest congratulations. Will Prince remain ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... was lost as they turned away. Clyde waited until they were out of sight, and then descended. The morning adventure had given her food for thought. Until then she had been deceived by the smooth current of life at Chakchak. It had seemed an idyllic, carefree existence. Although she had known of the trouble, it had seemed far in the background; it was a skeleton which had not obtruded itself. Now, by accident, she had surprised it stalking abroad in the ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but after an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the British infantry surrounding them—it was a cheery bivouac among the trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of burning wood—the lieutenant insisted upon leading the way to the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... child, I know well that the ductile artistic nature takes shape very early. The coloring of childhood stains every painter's canvas who paints from the heart. You can never call any other place home, Giotto, but this idyllic corner of ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Josephine, "do you not see that that is impossible? It is daylight; is, then, the carriage to open and the empress to alight with one slipper on her feet, to be triumphantly conducted into the house? Ah, my friend, all Europe would smile at the idyllic empress who accompanied her husband on his journey in such ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... some rare old tome— Maniacs shrewd or imbecilic, Urban, pastoral, or idyllic, Richly clad or dishabillic, Heed the summons bibliophilic— ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... is too deeply read in mediaeval scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth century love poetry was idyllic and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary in the strong ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... multitude of dependents calls forth, in the present day at any rate, much of kindly solicitude, and though the unvarying sameness of existence sometimes proves the serpent which destroys the peace of the idyllic Eden in young and eager hearts, the ramifications of the large family party, gathered under one roof, mitigate the monotony of daily tasks, and supply the necessary mental friction. Work in the nutmeg-woods begin at 5 a.m., when ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... nor do I remember seeing him again more than once, many years ago. There was still in the clerical figure, which was very strange to me, the old sweetness of smile and address; there was some talk of the idyllic days, some warm words of hearty good will, but our interests were very different, and, parting, we went our separate ways. For a generation we lived in the same city, yet we never met. But I do not lose the bright recollection of Ernest the Seeker, nor forget the frank, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... beautiful romance of the idyllic. A charming picture of life in a Welsh seaside village. It is something of a prose-poem, ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... balsam boughs was not such an idyllic process as they had expected. In the first place, they were blowing around at such a rate that it was hard to catch hold of them, and then when one was grasped firmly the others lashed out so furiously that they were driven back again and again. Furthermore, those which ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... seem to be written in characters of blood and fire. The descriptions of the plague-stricken land and the conflagration of the headsman's house must be numbered among the finest passages that have ever flowed from Jokai's pen. But the mild, idyllic strain, so characteristic of Jokai, who is nothing if not romantic, runs through the sombre and lurid tableau like a bright silver thread, and the denouement, in which all enmities are reconciled, all evil-doers are punished, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... making inquiries on the subject. It is all done out of sheer rectitude—out of a rectitude which is magnified to the point of the younger son believing that he has been RIGHTLY sold, and that it is simply idyllic for the victim to rejoice when he is made over into pledge. What more have I to tell? Well, this—that matters bear just as hardly upon the eldest son. Perhaps he has his Gretchen to whom his heart is bound; ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... move and spoil the picture," he cried. "Oh, you idyllic pair! And what are you playing? Cribbage! If I had been challenged to guess the game you would have selected for your after-dinner entertainment, I should ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... He accepted the fact that she was Mrs. Porter's niece. That she might also be somebody's daughter or sister had not struck him. The look on Bailey's face somehow brought it home to him that the world was about to step in and complicate the idyllic simplicity of ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... with simpler art than any of his modern brethren, can change the prose of our dull, practical life into poetry; he can turn lyrical at a moment's notice. He possesses the power of transmuting the commonplace into the idyllic, by merely clapping on his cap and turning his back on the haunts of men. He has retained a singular—an almost ideal sensitiveness, of mental cuticle—such acuteness of sensation, that a journey to a field will oftentimes yield him all the flavor of a long voyage, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... carried through the streets, with people thronging about its feet. How delicately she steps, lest she hurt one of the little limbs! And, meanwhile, mark the driver—for though the old pig pretends to ignore any such coercion, as men believe in free-will, yet there is a fate, a driver, to this idyllic domestic company. But how gentle is he too! He never lets it be seen that he is driving them. He carries a little switch, rather, it would appear, for form's sake; for he seldom does more with it than tickle the gravely ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... It was idyllic, their little love affair—their big love affair, if one judged by their measure. It was tender, sweet, and because it was their secret, because there was no word of doubt or of distrust from those who were older and wiser, they brought to it all ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Quiller-Couch the spirit of the "Delectable Duchy". He was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in "Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... and certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a slightly different but allied ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... his mother Aasta was of the kindest and proudest, and is lovingly described by Snorro. A pretty idyllic, or epic piece, of Norse Homeric type: How Aasta, hearing of her son's advent, set all her maids and menials to work at the top of their speed; despatched a runner to the harvest-field, where her husband Sigurd was, to warn him to come home and dress. How Sigurd was ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... threw no obstacles in the path of this idyllic friendship; possibly he did not observe it. In his eyes Margaret was still a child,—a point of view that necessarily excluded any consideration of Richard. Perhaps, however, if Mr. Slocum could have assisted invisibly at a pretty little scene which took place in the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... lost; and if I dare say so of any play of Sophocles', I scarce regret it. It is well, perhaps, that we have no second conception of the scene, to interfere with the simplicity, so grand, and yet so tender, of Homer's idyllic episode. ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and the happy peasant-girl of Trianon had been unchanged in heart; but those to whom she had given her heart, those who had joined in her harmless amusement in her village there, were changed! They had cast aside the idyllic masks with which the good- natured and confiding queen had deceived herself. They were no longer friends, no longer devoted servants; they were mere place- hunters, intriguers, flatterers, not acting out of ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... in simple idyllic fashion. Another party is neglected, and even a German passed by, to the great astonishment of Marcia. She has called home several times, but they have been out, not always together, though she chooses ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... in Cleversulzbach, a secluded little village, nestling among the Suabian hills. Here the poet, with his mother and sister, lived an idyllic existence, his most frequent visitor the Muse. Ill health forced him to resign in 1843, and Moerike once more became a wanderer. During these years love again crossed his path, and to be able to marry—his pension ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... change. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many watchings." Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American adventure which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled "What is an American"—was ending tragically in civil war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose "Journal," praised ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... practical as well as romantic considerations to weigh. Bridget went to sleep with the smell of his tobacco—and yet did not seem to mind it in the least—coming in whiffs through the door cracks and filling her nostrils. She too dreamed—a vivid dream, but by some law of contrariety, not of any idyllic camping ground in the Never-Never Land. She dreamed that she was seeing the Carnival at Nice—a medley of dancing waves, azure sky, palms, gold-laden orange trees and white green-shuttered houses—flowers, ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Leonard, to welcome the coming witnesses. Far up into the fastnesses of the Big Horn had gone the couriers from the frontier forts, bearing brief orders that had come by telegraph, and even Winthrop's command, having an almost idyllic time of it hunting and fishing in the mountains, was required to yield up some of its officers and men at the beck of the law. A long ride had these fellows to Fetterman and thence over the Medicine Bow to Rock Springs. Davies was of this party, but Cranston and Corporal Brannan ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... Mary Ann should be unable to maintain herself—or be maintained—at this idyllic level. But her fall was aggravated by two circumstances, neither of which had any particular business to occur. The first was an intimation from the misogamist German Professor that he had persuaded another of his old pupils to include a prize symphony by Lancelot in the programme of a Crystal Palace ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic youth to get married as easily as to get dinner—and as hard to get unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned too long at seaside resorts and missed the last train ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... gradually estranged from her the hearts of the Russians. They felt that it was no Russian who reigned over them; and because they had no occasion to tremble and creep in the dust before her, they almost despised her, and derided the idyllic sentiments of this good German princess who wished to realize her fantastic dreams by treating a horde of barbarians as ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... and put away, everyone sat on the beach, watching the sky darken. First one star and then another came out, and the scene was one of idyllic beauty. And then, as if to complete it, a yacht appeared, small, but beautiful and graceful, steaming toward them. Its sides were lighted, and from its deck came the music of a violin, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart
... nowadays," he records, shortly before beginning the work, "this valley in which I dwell seems like a vast basin filled with golden Sunshine as with wine;" and, happy in the companionship of his wife and their three children, he led a simple, refined, idyllic life, despite the restrictions of a scanty and uncertain income. A letter written by Mrs. Hawthorne, at this time, to a member of her family, gives incidentally a glimpse of the scene, which may properly find a place here. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wonder that Vanamee had loved her, and less wonder, still, that his love had been so intense, so passionate, so part of himself. Angele had loved him with a love no less than his own. It was one of those legendary passions that sometimes occur, idyllic, untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of trees, natural as dew-fall, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way of episode, among the wars of Israel. Greenfield Hill, 1794, was an idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It is not quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson, and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... This has often been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist, or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic picture of rural life, entitled Shore Acres, a melodramatic scene in a lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play. The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... transformed by the imagination of the crowd. The transformation occasionally takes place within a few years. In our own day we have seen the legend of one of the greatest heroes of history modified several times in less than fifty years. Under the Bourbons Napoleon became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist, a friend of the humble who, according to the poets, was destined to be long remembered in the cottage. Thirty years afterwards this easy-going hero had become a sanguinary despot, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... most of them cosy interior scenes, some of the faces five feet from chin to forehead in the more personal episodes, yet exquisitely fair. Fill in the out-of-door scenes and general gatherings with the appointments of an idyllic English fisher-village, and you will get an approximate conception of what we mean by the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture, or the Intimate Picture, as I ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... know how to prepare dainty and tempting dishes wholesomely, and then to serve your guests with such beauty of manner, such graciousness of courtesy, that they will remember the meal they have taken with you as idyllic in ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... weather was bright, the enemy entirely inactive, and the wood, with its oxlips and other spring flowers, its budding branches unscarred by shell fire, was a picture of charm rare in modern warfare. Forty-eight hours only were spent in this idyllic spot before we returned to Romarin to the accompaniment of the roar of mines, artillery, and concentrated rifle fire and machine gun fire, which heralded the sudden outbreak of the Battle of Hill 60, 4 miles to the north, just before ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... be willing to forego your "brothers," as you call the trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leave them and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call New York? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on the stern purpose I have set before me? There, indeed, the world and all the concerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into the mist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could write with seriousness about them. ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... live in idyllic happiness in a charming old ivy-grown manor house in Sussex, with level lawns and shady rose arbours, they still retain that old cottage at Idsworth, where a plausible excuse has been given to the country folk for "Mr. Maltwood" having been ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... really beautiful are the conditions of life among these people may be seen from the idyllic record of the Zuni Indians given by Mr. Cushing.[62] He describes how the Zuni girl, when taking a fancy to a young man, conveys a present of thin hewe-bread to him as a token, and becomes his affianced, or as they say "his-to-be." He then sews ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... McCarter made her fame secure. It is a great picture of a thrilling time, and a series of events of historic significance. Its pages are redolent of the sweet air and wide landscapes; the pictures come and go of idyllic childhood, of growing love, of Indian danger, of jealousy, of massacre, and of the movement toward the settled life of the plains. It is a poignant and winning record of the price ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... peculiarities in a translation. Our impressions of it may perhaps be best summed up by saying that it is the farthest remove from oratory, and the nearest approach to poetry, of any prose not professedly idyllic or lyric ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... And Sylvie smiled, but there was a look of pain in her eyes, "He has an idyllic house buried in the Foret St. Germain, and he wants me to take possession . . . you know the rest! He is a villain? Yes—he is like Miraudin, who has a luxurious flat in Paris and sends each lady of his harem there in turn. How angry you look! But, my dear, I am not going to the house ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... missions; or in tending her garden, where were growing many vegetables and fruits for their use. The birth of their child brought an added joy to their already overflowing life of happiness. But this kind of life could not last forever, even in that idyllic land of ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... to me." A mystery Cranmer must remain. Perhaps the "crowds" and "Voices" are not the least excellent of the characters, Tennyson's humour finding an opportunity in them, and in Joan and Tib. His idyllic charm speaks in the words of Lady Clarence to the fevered Queen; and there is dramatic ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Chalice as a very good fellow and he liked to talk to her, but it had never seemed to him possible to enter into a closer relationship. One Sunday they had all gone with a tea-basket into the forest, and when they came to a glade which was suitably sylvan, Miss Chalice, because it was idyllic, insisted on taking off her shoes and stockings. It would have been very charming only her feet were rather large and she had on both a large corn on the third toe. Philip felt it made her proceeding a little ridiculous. But now he looked upon her quite differently; there was something softly ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... was her contribution to the hatreds and agitations of the time—she gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it—an "Ideal of calmness and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of far niente, followed by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... sea, lapping against the shore below the palace walls, suggested a whole train of pleasing and poetical fancies, and he strolled along the dewy grass paths, under tangles of scented shrubs and arching boughs of pine, giving himself up to such idyllic dreams of life and life's fairest possibilities, as only youthful and imaginative souls can indulge in. He was troubled and vexed by his father's warning, but not sufficiently to pay serious heed to it. His 'secret' was safe so far;—and all he had to do, so he considered, was ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... rest to forego glamour? Or because, to view the matter differently, psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a man falls in love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care for property rights, are we to suspect the idyllic in literature wherever we find it? Life is full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle reverence with desire for the object of his affections, is nothing ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... her management of it. She is full of vitality, and is the pivot on which every member of the house turns. Blessed with an adoring husband, and healthy, handsome, obedient children, who come to her for everything and tell her anything, her life seems idyllic. ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... missed!" said Mary frankly. "She is the sweetest and most charming little lady I have ever met, and I am proud to number her among my friends. Golden Gate is such an idyllic little spot, too. We go there so often that I fear Miss Sally will think we mean to outwear our welcome. We hope to have her visit us in town this winter. Well, good-by for now. I'll tell Miss Sally I've met you. She will be pleased ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... proportion as he is a good poet, will confess to be clumsy, tawdry, ineffectual? Was there no poetry in these Puritans because they wrote no poetry? We do not mean now the unwritten tragedy of the battle-psalm and the charge; but simple idyllic poetry and quiet home-drama, love-poetry of the heart and the hearth, and the beauties of everyday human life. Take the most commonplace of them: was Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby, of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen, because his father had thought fit to give him an ugly and silly ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... Vane. "It's the most idyllic picture I've ever even thought of. There's only one thing. I feel I must speak about it and get it over." He looked so serious that for a moment her face clouded. "Do not forget—I entreat of you, do not forget—your ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... in fingers of steel worked by a real passion for tone. Gyp sat on the divan and listened. She was out of his sight there; and she looked at him, wondering. He was playing Schumann's Child Music. How could one who produced such fresh idyllic sounds have sinister intentions? And presently ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... beautiful, and to her the world was full of beauty. Especially did she love the sea. All her life was spent beside it, and it was ever her delight. It must have been from her that my own love of nature came as a heritage to me, giving me capacity to take and keep those prairie scenes of idyllic beauty ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole sound, healthy, large outdoor being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him—there begins a romance, troubled and interrupted, yet of the rarest idyllic quality. ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... idyllic as by day. The queen and her ladies, relieved of the dreary presence of the king who still remained at Paris, revelled in an unwonted freedom. Concerts, suppers and dances were the rule and moonlight cavalcades to the heart of the forest, or promenades on ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... has conquered power, has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder all the many-coloured feudal bonds which united men to their 'natural superiors,' and has left no tie twixt man and man but naked self-interest and callous cash payment."—The ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... In almost idyllic manner were spent the years of Pasha's coltdom. They were years of pasture roaming and bluegrass cropping. When the time was ripe, began the hunting lessons. Pasha came to know the feel of the saddle and the voice of the hounds. He was taught the long, easy lope. He learned how to gather ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... his subject-matter more frequently from mythology, or from still more fanciful fictions—had he made always the same happy choice as that in his Achilles in Scyros, where, from the nature of the story, the Heroic is interwoven with the Idyllic, we might then have pardoned him if he invariably depicts his personages as in love. Then should we, if only we ourselves understood what ought to be expected from an opera, willingly have permitted him to indulge in feats of fancy still more venturesome. By his tragical pretensions ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... informed with a beauty which purged his memory of the evil loveliness of Egypt and restored gravity and dignity to his conception of human life. He was struck by what Plato would have called the Doric strain in the harmonies of outline and colour. Idyllic scenes he had already run across in his walks out from the city, scenes formed and reformed by the lovely occupations of farm and vineyard and pasture. But the lyric note so familiar to him in Italy seemed always overborne by a deeper. Whether it was because ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... asked himself if he should not look on what had happened as a signal interposition of Heaven in his favor. A quiet life, a comfortable home, the love of friends and of a pretty woman, certainly deserved some thanks. He however was soon hurried from this idyllic existence by the ardor of his youth, and the prospect of an adventurous career. To some men a peaceable life does not seem existence. They are like certain birds, which show ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... came to the cloth. Here was a genuine case of true idyllic boy and girl love, that had strengthened and ripened with mature years. Annie had no more given me a thought—what an ass, what an idiot I am! But really, I think Catherine's cruelty has turned my brain. I am become ready to plunge into ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... is not without its idyllic memory. It was created by the ever-delightful pen of Steele. Who can forget the picture he draws of his sister Jenny and her lover Tranquillus and their wedding morning? "The wedding," he writes, "was wholly under my care. After the ceremony ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... with the types and humors of New England. Different writers would contribute different tones: Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled the dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... allegorical drama. It pictures the love of Solomon to a princess, typifying, as many believe, the love of Christ to the Church. Read Ephesians 5 and be prepared to answer questions thereon. Richard Moulton describes it as containing seven idyllic poems. ...
— A Bird's-Eye View of the Bible - Second Edition • Frank Nelson Palmer
... rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Probably at the very moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking heavily with ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... bright metallic tint which distinguishes the flora of northern climes. Through the centre of this Eden ran the wide main street, fringed with poplars and elms and chestnuts. No polluting brewery or smoky factory, with its hideous architecture, marred the idyllic beauty of the miniature town—for everything which is not a city is a town in New England. The population obviously consisted of well-to-do persons, with outlying stock-farms or cranberry meadows, and funds snugly invested ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of literary genius. Their virility and right feeling are unmistakable, and insensibly teach the practice of a silent and kindly forbearance towards the foibles of our fellow-creatures. The names alone of the principal characters in Geoffry Hamlyn recall scene after scene in their idyllic life to which it refreshes the mind to return. There is Major Buckley, a hero of Waterloo, gigantic in stature, refined, calmly courageous—a fitting leader of the settlement; Mrs. Buckley, high-bred, stately, ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... 'What are we waiting for, you and I?' No, I don't know which of them said it. They were married at Easter: Sunday-school children throwing cowslips—quite idyllic. All the old ladies from the Mother's Mutual Twaddle Club came and shed fat tears. They presented a tea-set; maroon with blue roses—most 'igh ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... sentimental novel by the popular English novelist that she had looked at when it first appeared came to its conclusion in this number. And it not having met with the expected popular approval, for all its sentiment, Mr. Gossom had abandoned the idyllic in favor of a startling series of articles on "Our National Crimes," plentifully and personally illustrated. Mr. Gossom would have preferred to prolong the sentimental note,—"pleasant reading," as he called it; personally ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... a benediction that breathes into our minds somewhat of its own spirit of calm and content. The storm and stress of life is forgotten; all is holiday humor. We are in the midst of a Shakespearian comedy, with its alternations of humor and sentiment, its joyous atmosphere, its idyllic simplicity; the forest of Arden has come to us. It was written to celebrate his engagement to the Countess Therese. In it he is inspired by the very genius of happiness. It is as if, having obtained his heart's desire, he invites us to ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... an idyllic charm in these pictures so simply and gracefully sketched. She sees with the vision of one lying down to sleep after a life of pain, and dreaming of the green fields, the blue skies, the running brooks, the trees, the flowers, that ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... characteristic little figure reminiscent of the opening of the Love-Song in the Indian Suite for Orchestra (Op. 48). The theme is punctuated by little flute-like embellishments. The middle section, poco piu lento, is idyllic, with a perfectly balanced, swaying rhythm. In playing this portion, the left hand should describe an equal series of semicircles as it alights first on the low chord, and then on the single note two octaves higher. The opening theme returns with the ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... just as was the Calvert policy, did not altogether escape Indian troubles. She had to contend with no such able chief as Opechancanough, and she suffered no sweeping massacres. But after the first idyllic year or so there set in a small, constant friction. So fast did the Maryland colonists arrive that soon there was pressure of population beyond those first purchased bounds. The more thoughtful among the Indians may well have taken alarm lest their ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... order to throw suspicion even upon the seeking spirit, and to invite people to join in the more comfortable pastime of finding. His eye opened to the joy of Philistinism; he saved himself from wild experimenting by clinging to the idyllic, and opposed the restless creative spirit that animates the artist, by means of a certain smug ease—the ease of self-conscious narrowness, tranquillity, and self-sufficiency. His tapering finger pointed, without any affectation of modesty, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and Death. It is not, however, as a dramatist that Lodge is remembered, but as a writer of pastoral romance. Here the discursive and idyllic quality of his genius, both in verse and prose, was to find complete and unhampered expression. Of the pastoral romances that Lodge produced during the next decade "Rosalynde" is by far the most important. The author wrote it, he tells us, while he was on a freebooting ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... practical aberrations from them, he yet intensely worshiped, had, in his conception of them, little connection with the activities of life: truth, simplicity, order, purity and peace were ideas that occupied his soul only to fill it with a horror of reality, with yearnings for an idyllic repose, with dreams of a state which he persuaded himself had been the original condition of the race, in which virtue and right must prevail through the mere absence of occasion for wrong or temptation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... startled the pure and natural man out of his veneer, dancing and blaspheming, with the most amazing consequences. Only a proven saint should marry a girl-wife, and his motives might be misunderstood. The idyllic wife is a beautiful thing to read about, but in practice idylls should be kept episodes; in practice the idyllic life is a little too like a dinner that is all dessert. A common man, after a time, tires ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... on the Abercrombie, a tributary of the Murrumbidgee, which takes its rise in the Cordillera, south of Bathurst. By the beginning of June, gold began to pour into Bathurst; but Mr. Hardy, the chief commissioner, was able to report an almost idyllic peace and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Woodhouse, with a population of ten thousand people, and three generations behind it. This space of three generations argues a certain well-established society. The old "County" has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one great and inaccessible magnate, the local coal owner: three generations old, and clambering on the bottom step of the "County," kicking off the mass below. Rule ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... In this idyllic existence, in which, as I have said, there is no ambition, several other ills are also wanting. There is, for instance, no News in the village. The village is without the pale of intelligence. This must indeed be bliss. Just ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... the author's usual plan, whereby a heavy book was followed by a light one, La Terre was succeeded by Le Reve, a work at the other extreme of the literary gamut. As La Terre is of the earth, earthy, so is Le Reve spiritual and idyllic, the work of a man enamoured of the refined and the beautiful. It has indeed been described as the most beautiful work written in France during the whole of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... with a naive remembrance only of the chivalry of this idyllic indiscretion, "when I look at you I can understand how a knight could battle ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... expenditure not worth considering, but, mind you, in the course of the summer it will run up to some two hundred roubles. Of course, to be in the lap of Nature is worth any money—I don't dispute it . . . idyllic and all the rest of it; but of course, with the salary an official gets, as you know yourself, every farthing has to be considered. If you waste a halfpenny you lie awake all night. . . . Yes. . . I receive, my dear sir—I haven't the honour of knowing ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... lilac-hazed cliffs and summits in the superb morning light. And the Reading route, also, takes you through a green Shakespearean land of beauty, oddly different from the flat scrubby plains traversed by the Pennsy. Consider, if you will, the hills of the idyllic Huntington Valley as you near Philadelphia; or the little white town of Hopewell, N.J., with its pointing church spire. We have often been struck by the fact that the foreign traveller between New York and Washington ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley |
