"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perhaps her most perfect sonnet, she beseeches the winds to convey to her beloved ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... reading his extempore verses is something like Trissotin in Les Femmes savantes (see vol. III.) reading his sonnet for the Princess Uranie. But Mascarille comments on the beauties of his verses with the insolent vanity of a man who does not pretend to have even one atom of modesty; Trissotin, a professional wit, listens in silence, ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... of the frigate thought their captain spoony, and the captain's clerk of the Tudor was guilty of a most reprehensible breach of confidence, if he spoke the truth, in whispering that he had one day discovered on the commander's desk a sonnet addressed to Stella's eyebrow. The fact, however, was doubted, as Captain Babbicome had never been suspected of possessing the slightest poetical talent, nor had a book of poetry ever been ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... experiments. Some of it is written in a loose, swinging couplet, some in quatrains, some in blank verse, some in the choice, picked prose made the fashion by Lyly. It contains more lyrics than any other Shakespearean play. One of the lyrics, a sonnet in Alexandrines, is the fruit of a real human passion. The lyric at the end of the play is the loveliest thing ever said about England. If this play and most of the other plays were modern works, the Censor would not allow them ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... before the object depends on its being carried forward in the mind to assist in forming an image of the object, it must happen that if, from length or complexity, it cannot be so carried forward, the advantage is not gained. The annexed sonnet, by Coleridge, is defective ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... is more imaginative, but her utter scorn of form in composition makes her work, unique as it is, less satisfying. Mrs. Jackson was a favorite with Emerson, and he is said to have liked best among her poems this sonnet, "Thought." ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... remarkable how strongly the conviction of permanence, and the preference for the inward conception over external beauty are expressed in this fine sonnet; and also that the reason given for accepting the discipline of love is that experience shows how it "hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts." In such a love poem—the object of which might very well have been Jesus—I seem to find more of the spirit of his religion, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... this among other flim-flams for more than a year in my note-book, I submitted it in a letter to the examination of a friend; his answer was as follows:—"Your canon is ingenious, especially in the line taken from the sonnet. I doubt it however, much, and rather believe that sound is often sympathetically, and as it were unconsciously, adapted to sense. Moreover, monosyllables are redundant in our tongue, as you will see in the scene you quote. In King John, Act III. Sc. 3., where the ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... this epigram, as Dyce showed, Davies is glancing at a sonnet of Drayton's "To the Celestiall Numbers" in Idea. Jonson told Drummond that "S. J. Davies played in ane Epigrame on Draton's, who in a sonnet concluded his mistress might been the Ninth [sic] Worthy; and said he used a phrase like ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... rainbows, and makes our dingy alleys for awhile bright as the streets of the New Jerusalem; and yet, if five years after we seek for what its incandescence has left us, we find, maybe, a newly helpful epithet, maybe a fancy, at most a sonnet. Nothing strikes one more, unless, perhaps, the obverse, when we see some trifling pebble-cast ripple into eternity, some fateful second prolific as the fly aphis. And so I find it all again exampled in these old accounts. The books that mean most for Narcissus to-day could be carried in the ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... forbidden to "dissemble or cloke;" and the bead-roll of the lawyer, who huddles together "give, devise, and bequeath," lest the cunning of litigants should evade any single verb. The works of the poets yield still better instances. When Milton praises the Virtuous Young Lady of his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves her only to "pity and ruth," it is not for the idle filling of the line that he joins the second of these nouns to the first. Rather he is careful to enlarge and intensify his meaning by drawing on the stores of two nations, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... in that of private grief, he would have gone on, with a pause here and there for certainty of spelling, to the conclusion of the poem, had not Lottie sprung up, with her imploring face suffused by her discovery, for the first time, of the identity of her secret lover and the escape of his sonnet from her pocket. It was too late! There he stood before her unmistakably proved, and herself unmistakably proving in what estimation she held his ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... join the social train, With lip that wears a kindred smile; And a gay sonnet's lively strain, Does oft ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... express my heartiest thanks to Signore Pasquale Villari for valuable assistance kindly rendered in the interpretation of some difficult passages of Campanella, and to Signore V. de Tivoli for calling my attention to the sonnet of Michael Angelo deciphered by him on the back of a drawing in the Taylor ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... by a modest preface, and a "Sonnet inscribed to the memory of the Rev. J. Saffery," which is ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... ambition had been frenetically stirred. The fortunes such men as Maundering and Piffle and Drool made! And all he had accomplished so far had been the earnest support of the postal service. Far back at the beginning he had been unfortunate enough to sell a sonnet for ten shillings. Alack! You sell your first sonnet, you win your first hand at cards, and then the ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... Musie, tir'd wi' mony a sonnet On gown, an' ban', an' douce black-bonnet, [sedate] Is grown right eerie now she's done it, [scared] Lest they should blame her, An' rouse their holy thunder on it, And ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... reckoning. The more important metrical tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular iambic movement of blank verse; weak and light endings; and, most ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... sobbing and howling like a demoniac, but never asking to be untied; until, at the end of a fortnight or three weeks, he was rewarded, most characteristically, by being at once delivered of all love for his lady, and inspired with the idea for a sonnet. ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... you knew about such things," he began, clearing his throat, and all unconscious of the rapid approach of Mr. Chester, "it is upon sleep. It is done in the sonnet form, a very beautiful measure which I have made my own. I ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... loveliness, and I cannot prevent it. Let me read to you some lines,' he said, picking up a piece of manuscript which was lying on the table. 'It is in Italian, but I will translate it for you.' 'No,' said I; 'read it as it is written; I understand Italian.' Then he read the opening lines of a sonnet which was written to Laura in the shadow. He read about ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... If I had the misfortune to be a poet, I should now be obliged to rush out in a fit of inspiration, hide myself in the kennel, and, at a safe distance from all exciting causes, write a passionate sonnet, while the fox kept biting my heels. But, as I am no poet, I prefer to enjoy the beautiful when it is before me, to putting it into rhyme." And again he looked admiringly ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... it you? Why, you are so happy, singing your love sonnet to your lady's eyebrow, that you didn't see a thing but the moon, did you? And who is the fair one who ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... scenes amid For rest and peace he hankers, Amari aliquid His joys aesthetic cankers: Whate'er he sees, he knows He has to write upon it A paragraph of prose Or possibly a sonnet: ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... us-the self-existent, true, original love, the making love. But I have felt all you say. I used to lie in bed and imagine the earth alive and carrying me on her back, till I fell asleep longing to see the face of my nurse. Once, the fancy turned into a dream. I will try to recall a sonnet I made the same night, before the dream came: it will help you to understand it. I was then about nineteen, I believe. I did not care for it enough to repeat it to you, and I fear we shall find it ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... your writing business," said Rivington; "you couldn't have applied to a better shop. What I don't know about little old New York wouldn't make a sonnet to a sunbonnet. I'll put you right in the middle of so much local colour that you won't know whether you are a magazine cover or in the erysipelas ward. When do you ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... to some degree, loses her keynote, becomes embittered and perplexed. The equilibrium of soul and body is disturbed; and she fortifies herself in an obstinate idealism that cannot come to terms with the assaults of life. No single sonnet expresses absolute truth from even her own point of view. The verses present the moods, misconceptions, extravagances, revulsions, reveries—all the obscure crises whereby she reaches a state of illumination and reconciliation regarding the enigma of love as it is, making her transition ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... very hasty glance through many sheets had shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind, which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she knew the facts ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... I will not write a sonnet, Singing their beauty as a poet might do: I just detest those on Aunt Nipson's bonnet, Because they are like her,—all gray and blue, Dusty and pinched, and fastened on askew! And as for heaven's own buttercups and daisies, I am not ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... [Footnote 2: This Sonnet, by the author of this sketch of Schiller's life, was written for the Chicago Schiller Celebration of 1905, but has ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... interpretation of the Italian, while Mr. Norton instinctively chooses for the rendering of Dante's tenderness and simplicity a diction almost as purely Saxon as that of the Bible. This gives the prose of "The New Life" with all its proper archaic quality; and those who read the following sonnet can well believe that it is not unjust to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... hash," said Mrs. Dawe. "It may not be art, but I do wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I'm hungry." ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... she wrote, some years later; 'how that name recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet—William Cowper—may be counted as ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... concerned, it was found upon experiment, that there was nothing he stopped at. Under a sharp pressure, and when the necessary question of the Play required it, and nothing else would serve, it was found that he could compose 'a sonnet' as well as a state paper, or a decision, or a philosophical treatise. He wrote a sonnet for Essex, addressed to Queen Elizabeth, on one very important occasion. If it was not any better than those attempts at lyrical expression in another department of song, which he has ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of Britain." Compare also Wordsworth's "Sonnet to Wycliffe," and the lines, attributed to an unknown writer of Wycliffe's time: "The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea; And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, Wide ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... already set in, but there was a moon in the cold grey sky, that I could almost have thanked in a sonnet for a light which I felt was never more welcomely dispensed, when I thought of the cross roads and dreary country I had to pass before I reached the longed for haven of Chester Park. After I had left the direct road, the wind, which had before been piercingly ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would be no stranger to such thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... admired the gladiator. It also assumed that genius combined with force of character released men from the shackles of ordinary morality."[2254] Cellini was a specimen man of his age. He kept religion and morality far separated from each other.[2255] Varchi wrote a sonnet on him which is false in fact and in form, and displays the technical and conventional insincerity of the age.[2256] The augmentative form of the name Lorenzaccio expresses the notion that he was great, awful, and wicked.[2257] His biographer says that he was a "mattoid."[2258] ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... without noticing Kranitski's emotion, "is a sonnet from Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil). There is in her ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... founded at the Essex Head, in Essex street, where an old servant of Mr. Thrale's was the landlord. "Its principles (he said) were to be laid in frequency and frugality; and he drew up a set of rules, which he prefaced with two lines from a Sonnet ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... when the sweet tranquillity of evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind ... composed the following sonnet, which, having committed it to paper, he, the next evening ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... work. Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is that of Rossetti. In the course of the House of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sonnet ever wooed, To win your gold no usurer e'er sighed No coxcomb e'er with plaints your steps pursued, For you, Arcadian ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... would be better than to go through life with a girl who didn't feel there are some things no fellar can do; and one of them, that he can't put a word like crimpy in his sonnet." ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... and Wordsworth's sonnet, 'In the Pass of Killicranky,' in which the aspiration for 'one hour of that Dundee' is prompted by the fear of ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... Would it be too much to ask you to spare me one of your old pens—one with which you had dashed off some sweet sonnet! ...
— Three Hats - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Alfred Debrun
... main chance before they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write nobile after his Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... was sure that Peter's love for his wife, though perhaps that of a primitive man, was of the true Portuguese stamp, and with this view composed the following pleasing Sonnet: ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... at any rate, their editions of his works were got up in the most slovenly manner. In particular, the table of contents was drawn up like a short-hand bill of parcels. By accident the book lay open at a part of this table, where the sonnet beginning— ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Kangourou to exhibit his wares and expatiate on their merits. There is the daughter of a wealthy China merchant, a young woman of great accomplishments who can write "commercially" and has won a prize in a poetic contest with a sonnet. She is, consequently, very dear—100 yen, say $100—but that is of no consequence; what matters is that she has a disfiguring scar on her cheek. She will not do. Then there is Mlle. Jasmin, a pretty girl of fifteen years, who can be had for $18 or $20 a month (contract cancellable ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the rather unusual combination of the Artist and the Moralist, both elements being marked in his writings to a very high degree. The famous and oft-quoted sonnet by his friend, the late Mr. Henley, gives a ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lion lived and almost died, In yonder ruin gray o'erbent by time, But that a troubadour, a servant tried, His well-loved master sought through every clime; Nor sought in vain, for by a simple rhyme, A soft tuned sonnet, in a dungeon cold, Imprisoned here he found him for no crime, And saved. The ruins past, I now behold Prague's lofty palaces ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... my meed,—to die for love of thee, As when the sun goes down upon the sea And finds no mate in all the realms of earth. I, too, have look'd on Nature in its worth And found no resting-place in all the spheres, And no relief beyond my sonnet-tears,— The soul-fed shudderings of my lonely harp That knows the gamut now of ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... time she proved one of his most bountiful benefactors; and he as grateful an acknowledger of it. You may take one testimony for what I have said of these two worthy persons, from this following Letter and Sonnet. ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... thought, that, where all else perished, Odes, Idyls, Lines, Stanzas, this one Sonnet to the stars should be miraculously reserved for such ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... love-locks of Prince Rupert's aid-de-camp, who died at Naseby manfully in his harness—now, contrasting strangely with the elaborately powdered peruke and delicate lace ruffles of Beau Livingstone, the gallant, with the whitest hand, the softest voice, the neatest knack at a sonnet, and the deadliest rapier at the court of good Queen Anne. Nay, you could trace it in the features of many a fair Edith and Alice, half counteracting the magnetic attraction of their ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... with the extatic joy of a maniac—'[Greek: Eureka, Eureka]'; and, throwing down a scroll, rushed as precipitately out of the room. The scroll was of vellum; the title to the contents of it was penned in golden letters, and softly-painted bunches of roses graced each corner. It contained a sonnet to love, and another to friendship; but a principal mistake which struck us, on the very threshold of our critical examination, was that he had incorrectly entitled these sonnets. Friendship should have been called love, and love, friendship. We had no sooner made the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to dwell upon his transcendent genius, he had always recoiled from touching the subject. I said that I was prepared for this, after his tribute which stands to-day unequaled, and I recalled his own lines from his sonnet: ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... Dirge in Cymbeline, sung by Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead 87 Verses written on a Paper which contained a Piece of Bride-cake, given to the Author by a Lady 89 To Miss Aurelia C——R, on her Weeping at her Sister's Wedding 91 Sonnet 91 Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare 92 On our late Taste ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... the brown thrashers flitted about slyly and silently for a few days, apparently to make sure that the coast was clear of danger; having done which, they burst into their dithyrambs with a will. Out in the woodland the gorgeous scarlet tanager announced his arrival one morning with a lively sonnet, which was heard long before the singer was seen; whereas his cousin, the summer tanager, uttered only his quaint alarm-call, "Chip-burn, chip-burn," and was excessively shy, dashing wildly away as I approached, unwilling to vouchsafe a wisp of song. Once ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... seems to me; but among the verses of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet and the friend of Charles Lamb, I lately chanced upon a sonnet "written on hearing it remarked that the scenery [of Kingly Bottom] was too gloomy to be termed beautiful; and that it was also associated with dolorous recollections of Druidical sacrifices." In this poem Barton takes a surprisingly novel line. "Nay, nay, it is not gloomy" he begins, and the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... portrait of his fair young mistress, and we have more than one proof of the admiration which the Florentine master's work excited among his contemporaries. In the Rime of the court-poet, Bellincioni, we find the following sonnet evidently inspired by this picture and bearing the inscription: "On the portrait of Madonna Cecilia, painted by Maestro Leonardo." The poet seeks to appease Dame Nature's wrath at the sight of this portrait, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... on my wrist gazing up at me with silly languor. Thereupon, when he presently quitted us, I took the red chalk and wrote his wife's name on a clear place in front of the face and beneath it the image of a birch rod; and on the morrow he brought with him a right pleasant Sonnet, which I scarce had pardoned had he not offered it so humbly and read it in so sweet a voice. And, being plainly interpreted, it was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to and fro in the confined space of the chamber allotted to him at Whitehall, and this sonnet, one of the most beautiful which he ever wrote, will express better than any other words what effect his sister's ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... When poets appear in his stories, they are rarely estimable characters. For Lucien de Rubempre he has only little sympathy. The three specimens of Lucien's verse given in the novel he procured from his acquaintances. The sonnet to Marguerite was composed by Madame de Girardin; the one to Camellia, by Lassailly, and that to Tulipe, by ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... and of philosophic grasp. And when she failed, it was often by reason of the nobility of her aim itself, of the volume of her own learning, of the intensity of her own standard of perfection. Her passages in prose are studied with the care that men usually bestow on a sonnet; her accessories and landscapes are patient and conscientious transcripts of actual spots of country and town; her drama is a problem of ethical teaching, subtly elaborated, and minutely probed. In these ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Devonshire was a woman of real noble impulses and generous emotions, and had a true sympathy for what is free and heroic. Coleridge has some fine lines addressed to her,—called forth by a sonnet which she composed, while in Switzerland, on ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... accomplished woman, and her vivacious and sympathetic nature was hardly less remarkable than her personal charm. There is evidence enough that she made a considerable impression upon the young English statesman, who, indeed, wrote a sonnet about her. Lord John's verdict on Italy and the Italians is pithily expressed in a hitherto unpublished extract from his journal:—'Italy is a delightful country for a traveller—every town full of the finest specimens of art, even now, and many marked by remains of antiquity near one another—all ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... about concoction of a moving sonnet in praise of Monna Vittoria de' Pazzi. Desperation loaned him extraordinary eloquence (as he complacently reflected) in addressing this obdurate woman, who had held out against his love-making ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... brother's beautiful sonnet "Freiheit und Gesetz." (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'Gesammelte Werke', bd. iv., s. 358, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... common sense entered the brain of the flower of chivalry. You might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, "the noblest old street in England," as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, aunt Celia was armed for the fray,—a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. (I wish Baedeker didn't give such full information about what one ought to read before ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the best light possible, she unwrapped the little red book he had given her a few days before, and began to read, eagerly, one of the two wonderful sonnet sequences of which the ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... own. His sole relaxations were those of a retiring, mild, and pensive temper, and were limited to a ramble, almost always solitary, among the woods and hills, in praise of which, he was sometimes guilty of a sonnet, but rather because he could not help the attempt, than as proposing to himself the fame or the rewards which attend the successful poet. Indeed, far from seeking to insinuate his fugitive pieces into magazines and newspapers, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... coming day. A hundred anonymous writers of Gloriana's time produced verses as good as the best of either Wyatt or Surrey; but these two at least discovered the way which, once found, became comparatively easy to tread. They introduced the sonnet, learnt from Petrarch; Surrey (the same who was executed on the eve of Henry's death) wrote the first English blank verse. The moribund tradition of the successors of Chaucer continued to find better exponents in Scotland than in ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Madame Ubaldini having raised a scandalous story of two persons whom she saw together in Mr. Mann's garden at one of his assemblies, and a scurrilous sonnet having been made upon the occasion, the Florentine ladies for some time pretended that it would hurt their characters to come any ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... European morals, lent his great name to a great delusion, when he attempted in a passage too well known, to garland the prostitute as the protectress of pure women. Edwin Arnold, the paganizing English poet, put Lecky's folly into verse, writing a sonnet in praise of the harlot as the purest of all women—a sort of devil's compliment ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... did not belie his reverence intellectually for Shakspeare; and in his younger days we know that he had spoken more enthusiastically of Shakspeare, than he ever did again of any uninspired author. Not only did he address a sonnet to his memory, in which he declares that kings would wish to die, if by dying they could obtain such a monument in the hearts of men; but he also speaks of him in his Il Penseroso, as the tutelary genius of the English stage. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... novelty would require. Consider, in the first place, how conclusive it is of the feeblest sort of genius that these people should employ themselves, from morning to night, in spinning their small strains, scraps of verse, song, and sonnet, and invariably on such subjects of commonplace, as can not admit of originality, and do not therefore task reflection. Not an infant dies or is born, but is made the subject of verse; nay, its smiles and tears are put on record; ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... repeat here the closing lines of Keats's famous sonnet to Homer, in which a great poet has admirably depicted the scene, though, by a strange error, giving the credit to Cortez instead ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... Joshua, of which Mr Burnet, in his second edition, has given a plate—loses "the dignity of the lawgiver in the savage." Such was the state of art to the foundation of the Eclectic School by the Caracci—an attempt to unite the excellences of all schools. The principles are perpetuated in a sonnet by Agostino Caracci. The Caracci were, however, in their practice above their precepts. Theirs, too, was the school of the "Naturalists." Ludovico is particularly praised for his solemnity of hue, most suited to his religious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... form? Here you will find it in absolute perfection. Edfu is the consecration of form. In proportion it is supreme above all other Egyptian temples. Its beauty of form is like the chiselled loveliness of a perfect sonnet. While the world lasts, no architect can arise to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the calm of faultlessness, more serene with a just serenity. Or so it seems to me. I think of the most lovely ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... very element Of bondage, that here holds me pent, I'll make my furious sonnet: I'll turn my noose To tightrope use And madly ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... mare, Meg, A better never lifted leg, Tam skelpit on through dub and mire, {149a} Despising wind, and rain, and fire; Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet; Whiles glowering round wi' prudent cares, Lest bogles catch him unawares: Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry. By this time he was 'cross the foord, Whare in the snow the chapman smoored, {149b} And past the birks and meikle stane Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane: ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... suffered her wishes to mislead her judgment; and the present conduct of Hippolitus convinced her, that she had mistaken admiration for a sentiment more tender. She believed, too, that the musician who had addressed her in his sonnet, was not the Count; and thus at once was dissolved all the ideal fabric of her happiness. How short a period often reverses the character of our sentiments, rendering that which yesterday we despised, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... reexamines; and repeats this operation over and over again. What is he doing? He is copying a beauty which he has seen in the invisible world, and which he is attempting to bring out from its hiding so that the men who have no eyes except for the sensuous may also see it. In my library is an original sonnet by John G. Whittier. In almost every line are erasures and interlineations. In some cases the careful poet has written a new line and pasted it over the rejected one. What does this mean? It means that he has discovered a truth of moral beauty and is attempting ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... projects advanced any farther, possibly because they conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King himself. As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539] ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the Muses, would you Charm the Plains With Chearful Lays, or Sweet Condoling Strains; Or with a Sonnet make the Vallies ring, To Welcome home the Goddess of the Spring? Or wou'd you in sublimer Themes engage, And sing of Worthies who adorn the Age? Or, with Promethean Boldness, wou'd aspire To Catch a Spark of the Celestial Fire That Crowned the Royal ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... Sterling exhorted, "in religion and radicalism." He saw life differently; more practically, if more selfishly; to one rhapsodizing about the "plain living and high thinking" of Wordsworth's sonnet, he answered: "You know that you prefer dining with people who have good glass and china and plenty of servants." For Tennyson's poetry he even then felt admiration; quotes, nay, misquotes, in "Eothen," from the little known "Timbuctoo"; {3} and from "Locksley Hall"; and ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... considered so if they had been married," replied the gentleman. "Mammas have no mercy on each other in those delicate manoeuvrings. Well, he waltzed with her always; and bent over her—willow-fashion; looked with her at the moon; and wrote a sonnet which she took to herself, for it was addressed 'To mine own dear ——;' and then when, about eight weeks afterwards, we met him at the dejeuner at Sally Lodge, he was as entranced with Lizzie Grey's guitar as he had been with ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... a sonnet to the princess, who regarded him wide-eyed. The troll came back from a tunnel after he finished, and said curtly: "This way." Cappen took the girl's hand and followed her into a pitchy, ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... not so much for the thing done, which often perishes with the doing, as for the doer. The poet with a hidden longing to express or a story to tell, who binds himself to the curious limitations of the Italian sonnet, in giving evidence of his powers, excites greater admiration than though he had not ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... September Shah, To the Shakspeare Snow-Storm, The Solution Song of Nature Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan Sonnet of Michel Angelo Buonarotti Sphinx, The Spiritual Laws Summons, The Sunrise Sursum Corda ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... from the Effusions, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison with the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must be honestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among the least satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. The Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrast in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax of Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, it is wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which a sonnet should enclose ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... poets together. Shelley, "responding like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment," had his chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to begin to dim Harriet's. Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st he wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which "one detects already the little rift in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... vital factor in the development of his dramatic art, and that this could not be said either of Lord Pembroke or Lord Southampton. Indeed, whoever he was, he could not have been anybody of high birth, as was shown very clearly by the 25th Sonnet, in which Shakespeare contrasting himself with those who are "great princes' favourites," says quite ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life. The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset. A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dish mop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself. The stars never look so bright as they do from the kitchen door after the ice-box pan is emptied and the whole place is 'redd up,' as ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Trelawney, the friend of Byron, is made to talk thus! Both Trelawney and Odysseus the noble Greek, to whom he addresses himself, were more likely to participate in the "indignation of a high-minded Spaniard," so vividly expressed by a high-minded Englishman in the following sonnet:— ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... obscured. It is just what happens every day when the glare of the sunlight, revealing to us every little flower and leaf and insect, shuts out from us the great universe of God which stands forth in the midnight sky. Do you know Blanco White's famous sonnet? He is imagining what Adam must have felt as the first night fell on the earth. All the beautiful world that he had known for but a day was vanishing from him into darkness. Was the end of all things ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... relation between a song and a house which are made after a good model, because they are like this good model, though each after its kind; even so there is a perfect relation between things made after a bad model. Not that the bad model is unique, for there are many; but each bad sonnet, for example, on whatever false model it is formed, is just like a ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... early days of renascent humanism, the first to renew the pastoral tradition, broken for some ten centuries, was Francesco Petrarca. It is not without significance that the first modern eclogues were from the same pen as the sonnet 'Fontana di dolore, albergo d'ira,' expressive of the shame with which earnest sons of the Church contemplated the captivity of the holy father at Avignon; for thus on the very threshold of Arcadia ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... numb. Although the inkpot be full, his stomach may be empty. And yet from this window, lately, a poem was cast upward to the moon. And youth and truth still rhyme in these upper rooms. Linda's voice is still the music of a sonnet. Still do the roses fade, and love is always like the constant stars. And once, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... print Leasure, although both editions read leasure; and in the Vacation Exercise, l. 71, Times for times. Also where the employment or omission of a capital is plainly due to misprinting, as too frequently in the 1673 edition, I silently make the correction. Examples are, notes for Notes in Sonnet xvii. l. 13; Anointed for anointed in Psalm ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... serving long and bravely under him. The conquest of the Azores is described as a fiercely won but brilliant victory over all the islands; and Cervantes immortalized the genius and gallantry of the admiral in a sonnet. ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... harvest, though there are weeds enough to be extirpated, and hard enough furrows to be ploughed. We know what has been done in the field of physical science. It has made the world infinite. The days of the old pagan, "suckled in some creed outworn," are regretted in Wordsworth's sonnet; for the old pagan held to the poetical view that a star was the chariot of a deity. The poor deity, however, had, in fact, a duty as monotonous as that of a driver in the Underground Railway. To us a star is a signal of a new world; it suggests universe beyond ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... transmuted to gold." In letters or conversation, as well as in his verse, Browning's love of color was always in evidence. "He dazzles us with scarlet, and crimson, and rubies, and the poppy's 'red effrontery,'" said an English critic; "with topaz, amethyst, and the glory of gold, and makes the sonnet ache with the luster of blue." When, in the haunting imagery of memory pictures, after leaving Florence, he reverted to the gardens of Isa Blagden, on Bellosguardo, the vision before him was of "the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the wall under the olive trees." ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... sank, never to return. I dashed off the jests well enough, but somewhere between the keys and the types they were lost, and the results, when I came to scan the paper, were depressing. And once I tried a sonnet on the keys. Exactly how to classify the jumble that came out of it I do not know, but it was curious enough to have appealed strongly to D'Israeli or any other collector of the literary oddity. More singular than the sonnet, though, was the fact that ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... dishevelment. At the Villa Mellini is the famous lonely pine which "tells" so in the landscape from other points, bought off from the axe by (I believe) Sir George Beaumont, commemorated in a like connection in Wordsworth's great sonnet. He at least was not an unimaginative Briton. As you stand under it, its far-away shallow dome, supported on a single column almost white enough to be marble, seems to dwell in the dizziest depths of the blue. Its pale grey-blue boughs and its silvery stem make a wonderful ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... decorative work often had difficulties to contend with, which arose from the form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... to introduce the sonnet, which Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth employed with such power in after times. Blank verse was first used in England by the Earl of Surrey, who translated a portion of Vergil's AEneid into that measure. When Shakespeare took up his pen, he found that vehicle ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... which induced us to regard "Manawyd" as a proper name in a former stanza, has caused us to leave "Gwanar" untranslated in this place. It is not improbable, however, from the shortness of this sonnet, that the line containing the name of its hero may have been lost. In that case we should translate "chwerthin wanar," "their leader laughed." That Gwanar was occasionally used as a proper name by the ancient Britons, ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... midst of such unbroken satisfaction, your companion, suffering and smiling, full of life and keenness, poor thing, in her arm-chair, delighted to listen, when you came in from a ride and read her a good sonnet, genuine poetry, fresh from nature, which you had pencilled on your saddle, or lying flat in the grass, as we are now—only without this horrible din of waggons ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... very accomplished, thoroughly understands commercial writings, and has at her finger ends more than two thousand characters of learned writing. In a poetical competition she gained the first prize with a sonnet composed in praise of 'the blossoms of the black-thorn hedges seen in the dew of early morning.' Only, she is not very pretty: one of her eyes is smaller than the other, and she has a hole in her cheek, resulting from an illness ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... was hard, but he bade himself have patience; and he composed an ode for the nuptials of his late pupil, which, together with a brief sketch of her ancestral history, he had elegantly printed, according to the Italian usage, and distributed among the family friends; he also made a sonnet to the bridegroom, and these literary ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... I was inditing a 'sonnet to your eyebrow,' or rather to your lids, they were so delicately tinted, and so much in unison with the extreme dejection of your entire bearing. I confess, unkind as it may sound, they moved me to laughter. ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... of the sarcophagus of which is full of small figures, with some larger ones above. In this tomb rests the body of M. Cino d'Angibolgi, doctor of laws, and a very famous man of letters in his day, as M. Francesco Petrarca testifies in the sonnet: ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... flower of chivalry; you might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, 'the noblest old street in England,' as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, Aunt Celia was armed for the fray—a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. (I wish Baedeker and Murray didn't give such full information about what one ought to read before one ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... me about him—when he was young," Lady Brigit Mead continued, her thick-looking white eyelids, eyelids that the hapless Mr. Babington compared in his twenty-second sonnet to magnolia-petals, drooping till her lashes made ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the Furioso swears Such chat as this offends his ears It rather doth become this Age To talk of bloodshed, fury, rage, And t' drink stout healths in brim-fill'd Nogans. To th' downfall of the Hogan Mogans. With that the Player doffs his Bonnet, And tunes his voice as if a Sonnet Were to be sung; then gently says, O what delight there is in Plays! Sure if we were but all in Peace, This noise of Wars and News would cease; All sorts of people then would club Their pence to see a Play that's ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... penny-a-liner, be implored in more abject terms? Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Scudery, Le Fevre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend. Brebeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief. Hesnault, author of the "Avorton," a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... especially lyric, with its wealth and interplay of rhyme, affords a fine opportunity for the printer to mediate between the poet and his public, and this he has been able to do by mere indention and leading, without resorting to distinction of type. The reader of a sonnet or ballad printed without these two aids to the eye is robbed of his rightful clues to the construction of the verse. It seems hardly possible that a poem could have been read aloud from an ancient manuscript, at sight, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... attracted many writers, and not a few poems have been written upon it. Wordsworth's sonnet on the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... to go on writing immortal poetry. If I were immortal, I might, but that fool thing was the result of about ten years' hard labor. I tried to make a sonnet of it, but I gave up at the end of the decade and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... talked, but about the something kindling in them, which never got expressed. His theory of writing was this:—"No good writer can ever be translated." He used to quote triumphantly from Shakespeare's 130th. Sonnet. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... of Titian, the majesty and dignity of Leonardo da Vinci, and the fresh beauty of Angelica Kauffmann. I liked best the romantic head of Raphael Mengs. In one of the rooms there is a portrait of Alfieri, with an autograph sonnet of his own on the back of it. The house in which he lived and died, is on the north bank of the Arno, near the Ponte Caraja, and his ashes rest ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... green and growing things had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a bougainvillea vine its sonnet. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Pope brought to perfection, and to which he gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact that any other form was employed. The sonnet, for instance, disappeared entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets wished to be daring and irregular, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... dispositions and habits of Alfieri and those of the noble poet of England, no less remarkable coincidences might be traced; and the sonnet in which the Italian dramatist professes to paint his own character contains, in one comprehensive line, a portrait of the versatile author of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, Il Fiore. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to the imitations and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury |
