"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... considerations than the deliberate purpose to use as far as possible any single element of our language. Such a purpose degenerates into affectation, and becomes a mannerism. The following extract from a sonnet by Addison Alexander shows what may be done by short Anglo-Saxon words; but, because of its lack of musical rhythm and fine poetic quality, it is not to be ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Crusaders The Children Band ('The Crusaders') The Rock of Cashel The Right Use of Prayer The Church Sonnet ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Summer The Sea of Death To an Absentee Lycus the Centaur The Two Peacocks of Bedfont Hymn to the Sun Midnight To a Sleeping Child To Fancy Fair Ines To a False Friend Ode—Autumn Sonnet—Silence Sonnet Sonnet—to an Enthusiast To a Cold Beauty Sonnet—Death Serenade Verses in an Album The Forsaken Song Song Birthday Verses I Love Thee Lines False Poets and True The Two Swans Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy Song The Water Lady Autumn I Remember, I ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... detailed review nor can justice here be done to all that honest, earnest, hopeful effort of the world-loving artist - he who delights in the myriad phases of our lovely-terrible life, who naively labors to bring forth his sonnet of praise. Be kind to him all ye who contemplate, and remember how much easier it is to criticize than to - be intelligently sympathetic. It is all for you. Take what you like, and leave the rest without pollution. It may serve to comfort and to ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... of Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in the play of Henry V.; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene would be quite in character for a man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the Queen's hands in order to soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret feelings. When the Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "though I profess not to be a poet," he "prepared a sonnet tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord." It was an awkward thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the counsels of those who hated him. He complains that many people thought him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Music all through life affected him most powerfully, and he states that his tragedies were almost invariably planned by him when under its influence. It was about this time that he composed his first sonnet, which was made up of whole or mutilated verses of Metastasio and Ariosto, the only two Italian poets of whom he knew any thing. It was in praise of a certain lady to whom his uncle was paying his addresses, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... lead 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 ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... that the adherents of either party, after perusing them, might easily recognize him as their own advocate. Thomas Seaton Donoho, of whom I shall speak presently, was a warm friend of Mr. Kingman and the constant recipient of his hospitality. Among his poems is a graceful sonnet entitled ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars you might read up on "Romeo and Juliet," and Abraham Lincoln's thrilling sonnet about "You can fool some of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... born in 1300 and set to music Dante's sonnet "Amor che nella mente," was one of the cantori a liuto. Minuccio d'Arezzo, mentioned by Boccaccio, was another. Here again we must recur to the observations of Burney and the examinations of Ambros. The former records ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... Clovis, "I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested itself as ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... said. "Presently I shall read the sonnet, 'Pace non trovo, e non ho da far guerra,' ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... rubaiyatting at home, and he made a scene, to avoid which I hastened with my guest over to the billiard-room; and there, stretched at full length on the pool-table, was Robert Burns trying to write a sonnet on the cloth with chalk in less time than Villon could turn out another, with two lines start, on the billiard-table with the same writing materials. Now I ask you, gentlemen, if these things are to be tolerated? Are ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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, he blushed at his poetical attempts ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... holding horses outside of the theater, and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock testimony—Ben Jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays themselves, the actors who had published them—but he refused to accept any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that Shakespeare ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... is, that it was a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was, raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced as an eternal jewel into the great vault of her lover's immortal Philosophy, which was to travel much farther and agitate far longer than his royal pupil's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in literature. He throws back to much in the past, while in the van of modern thought. What, to illustrate, could be more of the present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence, "Modern Love"? And are not his women, as a type, the noblest example of the New Woman of our day—socially, economically, intellectually emancipated, without losing their distinctive feminine ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... them some of these rimed words of mine; wherefore I, thinking on their nobleness, resolved to send to them and to make a new thing which I would send to them with these, in order that I might fulfil their prayers with the more honor. And I devised then a sonnet which relates my condition, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... being quite at my ease when I spoke to him, why how could you ask such a question? I trembled both in my soul and body. But he was very kind, and sate near me and talked to me as long as he was in the room—and recited a translation by Cary of a sonnet of Dante's—and altogether, it was quite a dream! Landor too—Walter Savage Landor ... in whose hands the ashes of antiquity burn again—gave me two Greek epigrams he had lately written ... and talked brilliantly and prominently until Bro (he and I went together) abused him for ambitious singularity ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Macdonnel or Galasp." In this line of Sonnet XI, Milton seems to speak of three different persons, but in reality they are one and the same; i.e., Macdonnel, son of Colkittoch, son of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... profession for seventeen years, but although he still retains connection with it in a consulting capacity, he has given up its active practice to be the publisher and editor of a small magazine called 'The Sonnet', which he founded. Mr. Fisher has written some of the finest sonnets that have appeared in America in recent years and has brought out the first collection of them under the title, "Sonnets: A First ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... as in the case of the symmetry of a temple, an arch, or an altar. It may be in the simultaneous stirring of the senses, the imagination, and the intellect, by the presentation of an idea suffused with music and emotion, as in the case of an ode by Wordsworth or a sonnet by Milton. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially Wyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither had any theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays the completest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber," "banner," and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), but making a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth," not on the penultimates, but on the mere "eth." In the following poems ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... may be avoided in a second series. I have retained the metres of the originals with but trifling variations, except in those cases where there was nothing specially characteristic to make this desirable (as e.g., in the case of Islwyn, where I have thrown some of my translations into sonnet form) or where—as in the Song of the Fisherman's Wife—the metre, even if it could be reproduced, would not in English harmonise with the meaning. I ought perhaps to ask pardon beforehand for the audacity with which I have treated Ieuan Glan ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... tracing in part the development of this Italian tragedy, there remains the charm of Dante's simplicity, and were one to ask, who, among the moderns, have partially reflected his passion, I should turn to Keats' insatiable thirst for beauty in his sonnet, "A Dream, After reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca," and his account of it in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats (February 14, 1819), and to Carlyle's appreciation of tragedy and love, in "The ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there"... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 'em here—defy you not to smile. Look," cried her ladyship, drawing out of her reticule a caricature, which she put into Caroline's hand; and, whilst she was looking at it, Lady Frances went on speaking rapidly. "Only a sketch, a scrawl in pencil, while they thought I was copying a Sonnet to Wisdom—on the worst bit of paper, too, in the world—old cover of a letter I stole from Lady Trant's reticule while she was at cards. Mr. Temple, you shall see my chef-d'oeuvre by and by; don't look at the reverse of the medal, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... flowers? 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 good ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... be driven by a poet's verses, as Bubonax was, to hang himself; nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets; that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... no doubt her work might have appeared with a very pretty collection of well-deserved poetical praises in its introductory pages. As old customs linger longest in places like this, I hope she and you will not think it quite extravagant to send a single sonnet on ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... 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 come already? But lo, a stupendous ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... 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. Ah! that reminds me," says Cecil, her expression changing to one ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... washed her hands and smoothed her dress and hair with trembling fingers, she became quite friendly with her pain—in a sense, even proud of it, and jealous for it. It was a sign of mature life—of something more than mere school-girlishness. Like the lover in the Elizabethan sonnet, 'She had been vexed, if ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... can survive perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, boldly states that ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... or words to that effect. Yet after she was dead he said he had wasted his life in loving her. I remember the whole of the sonnet because it cost me two days' labor in the railway between Avignon and Nice. ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... this night, ile put in practise: Therefore, sweet Protheus, my direction-giuer, Let vs into the City presently To sort some Gentlemen, well skil'd in Musicke. I haue a Sonnet, that will serue the turne To giue the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... "Queen's Arms Tavern," No. 71, Cheapside, the poet Keats once lived. The second floor of the house which stretches over the passage leading to this tavern was his lodging. Here, says Cunningham, he wrote his magnificent sonnet on Chapman's "Homer," and all the poems in his first little volume. Keats, the son of a livery-stable keeper in Moorfields, was born in 1795, and died of consumption at Rome in 1821. He published his "Endymion" (the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... and apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character, and give new impulse and direction to personal force and individual sense. These were written when I was twenty and twenty-one years of age, and the sonnet sequence of 'A Lover's Diary' was begun when I was twenty- three. They were continued over seven years in varying quantity. Sometimes two or three were written in a week, and then no more would be written ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the aid of rouge. Yet he deceives nobody, and having grown stout and wheezy is eventually carried off by a common cold in an odour of pastilles. He will be buried in a wicker-work coffin covered with lilies, and a rival Dilettante having written a limp and limping sonnet to his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... should ax, Because it soundeth like a paradox. Hear, then, bright virgin! if the rain comes down, 'Twill wet the roads, and spoil my morning ride; But it will also spoil thy bran-new gown, And therefore cure thee of thy cursed pride. Moral—this sonnet, if well understood, Shows the same thing may ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... 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 in ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... without forming any separate class, or exercising any materially visible political power. Masons or butchers might establish a government,—but never troubadours: and though a good knight held his education to be imperfect unless he could write a sonnet and sing it, he did not esteem his castle to be at the mercy of the "editor" of a manuscript. He might indeed owe his life to the fidelity of a minstrel, or be guided in his policy by the wit of a clown; but he was not the slave ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... it lay, through wet and dry, As empty as the last new sonnet, Till by and by came Mercury, And, having mused upon it, "Why, here," cried he, "the thing of things In shape, material, and dimension! Give it but strings, and, lo, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... naturally in two parts; the first is a sonnet sequence describing the author's capture with his battalion in the great March Offensive, his weary tramp as a prisoner, and internment in a German camp; the second consists of a series of meditative sonnets on these inevitably suggested by close confinement. The poems ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... one-sided. The exquisite literary faculty of Charles Lamb revelled in detecting beauties which had been covered with the dust of oblivion during the reign of Pope. His appreciation was intensified by that charm of discovery which finds its typical utterance in Keats's famous sonnet. He was scarcely a more impartial judge of Fletcher or Ford than 'Stout Cortes' of the new world revealed by his enterprise. We may willingly defer to his judgment of the relative value of the writers whom he discusses, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... black-and-white straw hat, and bow down to the ground. The first glance in return was always to see whether he was sober. The Hutchinsons must remember him. He was one of the audience, when they held their concert under the sycamores in Mr. Harrison's grounds at Ambleside; and he thereupon wrote a sonnet,[A] doubtless well known in America. When I wanted his leave to publish that sonnet, in an account of "Frolics with the Hutchinsons," it was necessary to hunt him up, from public-house to public-house, early in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... which are to this day deeply graven on the heart of every Italian patriot, and which, during the sanguinary contest of 1848, beguiled the weary march of the troops, and animated the combatants in the conflict. He was the first who had the courage to forsake the old beaten track of insipid sonnet-making. His poems stand alone, unrivalled in the novelty of their language and conception, and in the noble spirit which pervades every line. Few Italians can repeat his Clarina, his Matilde, or the Hermit ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of pirates, says of Lafitte: "He never committed an act of piracy in his life; he was [before he went to Barataria] a blacksmith, and knew no more about sailing a ship or even the smallest kind of a boat than he knew about the proper construction of a sonnet.... It is said of him that he was never at sea but twice in his life: once when he came from France, and once when he left this country, and on neither occasion did he sail under the Jolly Roger." ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... appreciation of the beautiful, and imaginative quality. A sonnet entitled 'Dreams' is peculiarly full of sympathy and feeling." — 'The Sun', ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... about the hand are tragic. Remember the light play of words in "Romeo and Juliet" where the dialogue, flying nimbly back and forth, weaves a pretty sonnet about the hand. And who knows the hand, if not ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... ask me for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear, Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon? Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere? For your sake, I would go and seek the year, Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune, Blown sands of drifted hours, which the ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... passed for the author of this sonnet: neither the justness of the sentiment, nor turn of it, are surprisingly beautiful; but as it contained some truths that flattered the genius of the nation, and pleased those who interested themselves for the fair sex, the ladies were all desirous ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... at any rate inspired by him. Gautier also wrote for Balzac, who had absolutely no faculty for verse, the supposed translation of two Spanish sonnets in the "Memoires de Deux Jeunes Mariees," and the sonnet called "La Tulipe" in "Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris." On his side, Balzac defended Gautier on all occasions, and in 1839 dedicated "Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan," then called "Un Princesse Parisienne," "A Theophile Gautier, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... are chosen, permits M. 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 ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch[708] or Ariosto,[709] filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... know what to say, I do not know which sonnet I prefer; I have taken horrible pains with all of them.... But you, which ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... 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
... the forces that you may, And lay incessant battery to her heart; Plaints, prayers, vows, ruth, and sorrow, and dismay,— These engines can the proudest love convert. 421 SPENSER: Amoretti and Epithalamion, Sonnet xiv. ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... "That sonnet, Abate, Beautiful, I am quite exhausted by it. Your phrases turn about my heart And stifle me to swooning. Open the window, I beg. Lord! What a strumming of fiddles and mandolins! 'Tis really a shame to stop indoors. Call my maid, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... magazine unique amongst the publications of the United. Devoted wholly to poetry, it contains some of the finest short verses to appear this season, whilst even the crudest part of its contents possesses some undoubted merit. The opening poem, a delightful and ornate nature sonnet entitled "The Brook," professes to be a translation from the Spanish, a claim borne out by the use of the word "jasmine" in a place where the metre throws the accent anomalously on the last syllable, as in the corresponding Spanish word "jazmin." The sentiment of the whole is exquisite, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... rather the blank pain without accident or period, without point or salience to draw from stunned nature her last energies of resentment. It is well for me that this misery is short-lived, and that either by thinking on that ideal love I know the miracle of the twenty-ninth sonnet, or, struggling with instant effort out of the toils, try to see myself as I appear to others, one who should scorn to sit in thirst when there are wells yet ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... handling complex problems, and a fine sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any reason for supposing that the author would have made a ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... 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 ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... what might be called striking incident, than any of the others, being all but wholly occupied by the enquiries respecting the marriage of Panurge. But this gives it a "unity" which is of itself attractive to some tastes, while the delightful sonnet ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... ever statelier—and grander ranks to greet the travelers as they descended—the silent, vast forest, without note of bird or chip of squirrel, only the wind tossing the great branches high overhead in response to the sonnet. Is there any region or circumstance of life that the poet did not forecast and provide for? But what would have been his feelings if he could have known that almost three centuries after these lines were penned, they would be used to express ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland in March, 1813, through Lord Lonsdale's "patronage" (see his letter, March 6, 1813). The Excursion was dedicated to Lord Lonsdale in a sonnet dated July ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... knowledge, but I dare say all the English have told you, he has a very particular understanding: I really don't believe they meant to impose on you, for they thought so. As to Bondelmonti, he is much less; he is a low mimic; the brightest cast of his parts attains to the composition of a sonnet: he talks irreligion with English boys, sentiment with my sister [Lady Walpole], and bad French with any one that will hear him. I will transcribe you a little song that he made t'other day; 'tis pretty enough; Gray turned it into Latin, and I into English; you ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... sing or say In sonnet sad or sermon chill, "Alas, alack, and well-a-day, This round world's but a bitter pill." Poor porcupines of fretful quill! Sometimes we quarrel with our lot: We, too, are sad and careful; still We'd rather ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... daily, as 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"; ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... aloud, at unholy midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been known to break his windows with bottles, and then to throw in all that remained of the cold meats of a supper party, without interfering with the divine afflatus. When the college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends it to the Editor of the Nineteenth Century, and it returns to him after many days. At last it appears in print, in College Rhymes, a collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or irregular intervals, and was ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... Twofold, because consisting of a double note. Compare Wordsworth's sonnet, To the Cuckoo, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... said Margaret suddenly—Allcraft pushed every paper from him in a paroxysm of delight, and looked up—"and I think we were agreed in our opinion of that great poet. What a sweet thing is this! Did you ever read it? It is the sonnet on the Sonnet." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Review" says, "If the centennial year could disclose all its triumphs, music would shine among its garlands. A hundred years ago was a voiceless void for us compared with the native voices and native workers who now know a sonnet ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the English giant,' said Charles aside to an attendant: then turning eagerly to Sidney, whose transcendent accomplishments had already become renowned, Charles welcomed him to court, and began to discuss Ronsard's last sonnet, showing no small taste and knowledge of poetry. Greatly attracted by Sidney, the King detained the whole English party by an invitation to Walsingham to hear music in the Queen-mother's apartments; and Berenger, following in the wake of his friends, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Spanish ballads and plays show the Eastern delight in hyperbole, the Eastern fertility of invention: Portuguese literature is completely classic in spirit, avoiding all exaggeration, all offences against taste, and confining itself to classic forms, such as the pastoral, the epic and the sonnet. Many Moorish customs survive in Portugal to this day, but they have not become so closely assimilated there as in Spain to the character of the people. The cruelty which has always marked the Spanish race is no part of the Portuguese national character, which is conspicuous rather for the "gentler-sexed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... art belong the sonnet of Arvers, and "The Soul," by Sully-Prudhomme. Musset, in his grace or pathos, is not inferior to Victor Hugo. There are, even in his faults, certain effective boldnesses to which the author of "Notre Dame de Paris" cannot aspire. Whence, then, comes the immense distance between these ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... between the closing part of this passage, about our deafness to the music of the stars, owing to the "muddy vesture," and the sonnet of Blanco White which speaks of the starry splendors to which our eyes are blinded by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... "Q," ask Henry James. Lo! I say to all facile gabblers about the "art of the short story," as the late "C.-B." said to Mr. Balfour: "Enough of this foolery!" It is of a piece with the notion that a fine sonnet is more ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... in Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers debate whether the song they hear is of the nightingale or the lark; the aubade, with the two other great forms of love-poetry then floating in the world, the sonnet and the [220] epithalamium, being here refined, heightened, and inwoven into the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour they give to the things of ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... personality drawing his judgment away from purely aesthetic standards? Again, consider the case of Keats. For us the facts of his life must color almost every line he wrote. How are we to determine whether his sonnet, When I Have Fears, is great poetry or not, so long as it fills our minds insistently with the pity of his love for Fanny Brawne, and his epitaph ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... have got my Piozzi[1] home at last; he looks thin and battered, but always kindly upon me, I think. He brought me an Italian sonnet written in his praise by Marco Capello, which I instantly translated of course; but he, prudent creature, insisted on my burning it, as he said it would inevitably get about the town how he was praised, and how Mrs. Thrale translated ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... subjective element in the 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 ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... sonnet to the beautiful ears of a pretty cousin to the commencement of the tragedy of Panthea and Abradatus, were written at that time; but I owe The Poem of the World special gratitude, for it kept me from many a folly, and often held ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... out, the twentieth sonnet, with its reference to the "one thing to my purpose nothing," is alone enough to show that Shakespeare was not a genuine invert, as then he would have found the virility of the loved object beautiful. His sonnets may fairly be compared to the In Memoriam of Tennyson, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... at Ravenna, and at the suggestion of the Guiccioli, to whom it is dedicated in a sonnet, prettily but inharmoniously turned. Like all his other best performances, this rugged but masterly composition draws its highest interest from himself and his own feelings, and can only be rightly appreciated by observing how fitly many of the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the tune of 'Madame ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... bird medley; but later her crafty instinct would seem to warn her that silence is more to her interest in the pursuit of her wily mission. In June, when so many an ecstatic love-song among the birds has modulated from accents of ardent love to those of glad fruition, when the sonnet to his "mistress's eyebrow" is shortly to give place to the lullaby, then, like the "worm i' the bud," the cow-bird begins her parasitical career. How many thousands are the bird homes which are blasted in her ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... seeing much that is lovely and gracious in the orthodox fancies of religion. Much depends, of course, upon the nature of the person who holds them. No belief could be beautiful in a mind that is unlovely. A sonnet of Shakespeare can be no better than a burned cinder in such a mind as Mrs. Ramshorn's. But there is Mr. Wingfold, the curate of the abbey-church! a true, honest man, who will give even an infidel like me fair play: nothing that finds acceptance with him can be other than noble, whether it be ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... 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
... to think of that most courteous one, and thinking of her, there fell upon me a sweet sleep, in which a marvellous vision appeared to me." The poet described the vision in verse—it was Love carrying a sleeping lady in one arm and in the other the burning heart of Dante. He wished that the sonnet he wrote should be answered by "all the faithful followers of love," and was gratified by the prompt reply of Guido Cavalcanti, who had won renown ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Italian of Butler's "Seven Sonnets" (except Nos. I. and V.), by Ingroja. In manuscript. His translation of Sonnet I. is printed with the "Seven Sonnets." He could not manage Sonnet V. I think the repetitions of ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... undignified departures from sane conduct to which a misguided vanity and an ill-controlled curiosity had led him. He sat for a space thinking how very Hellenic and Italian and Neronic, and all those things, he had been. Even now—might one not try a sonnet? A penetrating voice to echo down the ages, sensuous, sinister, and sad. For a space he forgot Elizabeth. In the course of half an hour he spoilt three phonographic coils, got a headache, took a second ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... for receiving the bow of a man he despises; and with his mistress for enjoying a little harmless ridicule of her friend, when her back is turned. He tells a conceited poet that he prefers the sense and simplicity of an old ballad to the false wit of a modern sonnet—he proves his judgment to be just—and receives a challenge from the poet in reward of his criticism. Such a character, placed in opposition to the false and fantastic affectations of the day, afforded a wide scope for the satire of Moliere. The situation somewhat resembles that of Eraste, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... have given up poetry, except now and then to write a drinking song, some gay sonnet or some innocent epigram; I compose sermons, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... kept 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, ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... some peculiarities. He has one composed of lines of six syllables, others of eight, besides those considered regular in French, consisting, namely, of twelve syllables. The following sonnet addressed to Roumania appears to be ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... palace the personality most vividly present to-day is that of Vittoria Colonna, making good the boast of Michael Angelo's sonnet,— ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... No! This sonnet is evidently written in reference to the writer's mask or pseudonym which would continue to have immortal life (even though he himself might be forgotten) as ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... that prominent gentleman's confidential private secretary was, of course, a very big one. He hugged it secretly at first alone. On the journey back from the City to the suburb where he lived, Minks made a sonnet on it. For his emotions invariably sought the safety valve of verse. It was a wiser safety valve for high spirits than horse-racing or betting on the football results, because he always stood to win, and never to lose. Occasionally he sold these bits of joy for half a guinea, his wife pasting ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new force upon his perceptions.—Read the sonnet, if you please;—it is Wordsworth all over,—trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his works to have been published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... across his memory, the Master had a mind to employ them in his peroration (giving them a Christian trend, of course) in place of the sonnet he had meant to quote. This would involve reconstructing a longish paragraph; but they had touched his mood, and he spent some time pacing to and fro under the trees before his taste rejected them as facile and even ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... most galliard, pleasant, and merry prince: his queens Marguerit (as we show else wheir) was thought to play by him. On a tyme as he was making himselfe merry dancing a ballat wt some of his nobility, each being obliged to make a extemporary sonnet as it cam about to him to dance, the our-word[248] being, un cucou mene un autre, it fel the Marquis of Aubigni (who was of Scots progeny, his goodsire was Robert Stuart Mareschal of France under Francois ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... brocade dressing-gown; took one lingering last look at the little mirror, and descended into the parlour. I drew a writing-table to me, and penned a long letter to Knowehead, another to Redrigs, and had half-finished a sonnet to Madeline. The day was nearly past, and she had not yet ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... Europe. Among these travellers during the reign of Henry the Eighth were Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. These courtiers possessed the poetical faculty, and therefore paid special attention to literary form. As a result they introduced the Sonnet of the Petrarchan type into England. The amorous verse of the inhabitants of these sunny climes took hold of the young Englishmen. Many men of rank and education, who did not regard themselves as of the world ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... belong, like 'Lenore,' to the literary inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed party strife and embittered the last years of Buerger himself; but even Schiller ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... of this Sonnet compare Hamlet's "Give me that man That is not passion's slave," etc. Shakespeare's writings show the deepest sensitiveness to passion:—hence the attraction he felt in the contrasting effects ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... was restlessly pacing to and fro in the confined space of the chamber allotted to him at Whitehall, and this sonnet, one of the most beautiful which he ever wrote, will express better than any other words what effect his sister's ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... be sure I must, but I always could get myself out of them again. Why, I'll tell you an instance of it.—You must know I was once a journeyman sonnet-writer to Signor Squallini. Now, his method, when seized with the furor harmonicus, was constantly to make me sit by his side, while he was thrumming on his harpsichord, in order to make extempore verses to whatever air he should beat out to his liking. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... for the trivial libel upon the Prince Regent, that Keats, who was coming over to Enfield, met me, and, turning, accompanied me back part of the way to Edmonton. At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison." Unless I am utterly mistaken, this was the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly can I recall the conscious look with which he hesitatingly offered ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... 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
... the present day depends chiefly on his lyrical poems, which served as models to all the distinguished poets of southern Europe. They are restricted to two forms: the sonnet, borrowed from the Sicilians, and the canzone, from the Provencals. The subject of almost all these poems is the same—the hopeless affection of the poet for the high-minded Laura. This love was a kind of religious and enthusiastic passion, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... wonder that Longfellow wrote a sonnet to Mrs. Fanny Kemble upon her Readings. Those evenings were indeed "happy," and "too swiftly sped." Mrs. Kemble's ample person draped in gold-colored silk, her flowing black hair folded and braided in some large style about her head, her rich and ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... that wonderful sonnet?" I cried, hardly interrupting him, for when he came to the end of it, he paused with ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... such a conversation, I was resolved to turn my pain into a pleasure and to divert myself as well as I could with so very odd a fellow. "You must understand," says Ned, "that the sonnet I am going to read to you was written upon a lady, who showed me some verses of her own making, and is, perhaps, the best poet of our age. ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... a pious sonnet, which he was penitent for having composed in an illness; he seemed to be ashamed of having thought for a moment upon God at the sight of his lightning, and blushed at the weakness. The mistress ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the baron, 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)
... flowing hair in battle, I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand, Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds, (I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,) Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious, After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color, Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers, Thou yieldest ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... dedicated to Philip Sidney, who 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. That there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... logic which Godwin gave to the world in 1793 in the first edition of Political Justice. Wordsworth read and studied and continually discussed it. Southey confessed that he "read and studied and all but worshipped Godwin." Coleridge wrote a sonnet which he afterwards suppressed in which he blesses his "holy guidance" and hymns Godwin "with ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... him a roll of parchment, which he glanced critically over, and handed to the queen for her autograph. That royal lady spread the vellum on her knee, took the pen and affixed her signature as coolly as if she were inditing a sonnet in an album. Then his highness, with a face that fairly scintillated with demoniac delight, stood up and fixed his eyes on the ghastly prisoner, and spoke in a voice that reverberated like the tolling of a death-bell ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... have been made on the self-respect and delicate sensibility of a feminine soul by this other sonnet, which is clumsy and bombastic because it is full ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... effect of the whole; no verse stands out obstinately from its fellows, but all are knit firmly, yet lightly, together: and a line of magnificent strength fitly closes a magnificent passage. Hardly a sonnet of Shakespeare or Mr. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... through the Press, but too late for insertion in the class of miscellaneous ones to which they belong." In 1884, Archbishop Trench edited the sonnets, with an admirable introductory "Essay on the History of the English Sonnet"; but, while Wordsworth gave no title to the 3rd and the 4th of the six, "composed as the Volume was going through the Press,"—either in his edition of 1838, 'or in any subsequent issue' of his Poems—his editor did so. He gave what are really excellent titles, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... 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
... a radical 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 approval into English ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... undertake a campaign of municipal house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits home she suggested ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... my sonnet amang the whin bushes, Whiles whistling wi' glee as I pou'd the green rashes; The whim o' the moment kept me aye frae sorrow, What I wanted at ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... popular on the other side, that his 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 passion ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... made a neat appearance on the page; but the question at once occurred to me, What is indentation in verse for? Is it not a guide to the eye, to enhance the proper recurrence of the rhyme (and in the ode to show as well rhythm)? If we are to have a mere arbitrary arrangement of the sonnet, why not the same in a poem of regular or inverted quatrains, or of the Persian quatrain, which is now always given in ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... study he found himself in a more cheerful mood than he had been in for many a day, though he could not help wondering what had become of Leo. As he went on thinking where the boy could be he was inspired to write what he called a sonnet upon the subject. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... sonnet, come, piper, and play us a spring, For now I think upon it, these R's turn'd out their King; But now is come about, that once again they must turn out, And not without justice and reason, that every one home to his prison. Sing hi ho, Harry Martin, (74) a burgess of the bench, There's ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... felonious tradesman he laid atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to their base metal: he stole from the two years published text of Love's Labour's Lost, and reproduced with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet of Longavile, the "canzonet" of Biron, and the far lovelier love-song of Dumaine. The rest of the ragman's gatherings, with three most notable exceptions, is little better for the most part than dry rubbish or disgusting refuse; unless a plea may haply ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... he serves himself. In dealing with college students in California, one is impressed by their boundless ingenuity. If anything needs doing, some student can do it for you. Is it to sketch a waterfall, to engrave a portrait, to write a sonnet, to mend a saddle, to sing a song, to build an engine, or to "bust a bronco," there is someone at hand who can do it, and do it artistically. Varied ingenuity California demands of her pioneers. Their native originality has been intensified by circumstances, ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... have thought, that, where all else perished, Odes, Idyls, Lines, Stanzas, this one Sonnet to the stars should be miraculously reserved for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thereupon to Mr. Yates; trips abroad; his London residences; his last letter to Tennyson; revisits Asolo; Palazzo Rezzonico; his belief in immortality; his death, Thursday, Dec. 12th, 1889; funeral in Westminster Abbey; Sonnet by George Meredith; new star in Orion; R. Browning's place in literature; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... only has no sonnet ever wooed, To win your gold no usurer e'er sighed No coxcomb e'er with plaints your steps pursued, For you, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... statue of Moses,—of which, who has not heard? I must confess I never was so disappointed by any work of art as I was by this statue, which is easily accounted for. In the first place, I had not seen any model or copy of the original; and, secondly, I had read Zappi's sublime sonnet, which I humbly conceive does rather more than justice to its subject. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... of the wind on High Fell!' cried Robert,—it was so new to her, the dear voice with this accent in it of yearning depression! 'I want more of the spirit of the mountains, their serenity, their strength. Say me that Duddon sonnet you used to say to me there, as you said it to me that last Sunday before our wedding, when we walked up the Shanmoor road to say good-bye to that blessed spot. Oh! how I sit and think of it sometimes, when life seems to be going crookedly, that rock on the fell-side where I found you, and caught ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gooseberry and currant bushes, with potatoes and pease. The scent of the sunset came in reality from a cheval de frise of wallflower on the coping of the low stone wall behind where she was sitting with her Milton. She read aloud in a low voice that sonnet beginning "Lady that in the prime of earliest youth." As she finished it, a voice, as low, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... absent from his latest 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 cool winds and winter sunshine, and stood silent awhile. These sonnets ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one of the smartest vessels in the navy, was assigned to take him to Malta. He had, before he left Abbotsford itself, an affecting interview with Wordsworth, which occasioned Yarrow Revisited and the beautiful sonnet, 'A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,' and had no doubt part in the initiation of the last really great thing that Wordsworth ever wrote—the Effusion on the deaths of Hogg, Coleridge, Crabbe, Lamb, and Scott himself, in 1835. Some stay was made with the Lockharts in London, and a little ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... fame, but not of a creditable kind. Born at Arezzo in 1492, he followed the trade of a bookbinder; but not confining his labour to the external adornment of books, he acquired some knowledge of letters. He began his career by writing a satirical sonnet against indulgences, and was compelled to fly from his native place and wander through Italy. At Rome he found a temporary resting-place, where he was employed by Popes Leo X. and Clement VII. Then he wrote sixteen gross sonnets on the sixteen obscene pictures ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... care about 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 buildings I know in Europe—of the Alhambra at Granada, of the ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... had missed his sonnet. She laid it almost tenderly in a conspicuous place on his table, and put a bronze head of Pallas Athene on it to keep it down. Then she wondered again whether he enjoyed the bookshop, whether he enjoyed making catalogues raisonnes, whether he enjoyed himself generally, and she hoped ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... self-education. Some of his Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious. His second sonnet records ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... fronted by a cleared space, which is usually mossy. To this it brings its colorful treasures, sometimes a score of bright star blossoms, which are renewed when faded and replaced by others. All this has, probably, something to do with courtship, which should inspire a sonnet. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... 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
... introduced to him, and he gave me a very friendly welcome. He could speak Italian very well, and during the carnival he chewed me great kindness. He presented me with a gold snuffbox as a reward for a very poor sonnet which I had written for his dear Grizellini. This was her family name; she was called Tintoretta because her ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Security 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
... of thanking those authors who have so kindly responded to requests for permission to use selections from their works: to President Wilson, for a sonnet from Spring Wild Roses, and for Our Ideal; to Mr. Charles Sangster, for two sonnets from Hesperus; to Mr. John Reade, for two poems from The Prophecy of Merlin; to Mr. Charles Mair, for the scenes ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... a hundred years hence. Glorious material here for art of every kind! 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 ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... a man the burden of one of those names, the glory of which he cannot reasonably expect to eclipse or even to equal, you crush him beneath the weight. If a poet were called John Milton or William Shakspeare, he could not dare to publish even a sonnet. No: the choice of a name lies between the two extremes of ludicrous insignificance and oppressive renown. For this reason I have ordered the family pedigree to be suspended on yonder wall. Let us examine it with care, and see whether, among the Chillinglys themselves or their alliances, we can ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Council relating to the Piedmontese Massacre, May 1655: Sudden Demand on Milton's Pen in that Business: His Letter of Remonstrance from the Protector to the Duke of Savoy, with Ten other Letters to Foreign States and Princes on the same Subject (Nos. LIV.-LXIV.): His Sonnet on the Subject.—Publication of the Supplementum to More's Fides Publica: Account of the Supplementum, with Extracts: Milton's Answer to the Fides Publica and the Supplementum together in his Pro Se Defensio, Aug. 1655: Account of that Book, with Specimens: Milton's Disbelief ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... eminently social being, or because he was the exceptionally handsome, among the many less so; or be condemned to overpraise for what is after all but an indication to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a very lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of what Brooke might have been, but it is not the reason to be doomed to find all things wonderful in him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. And the envoye of the Vita Nuova is the promise of the Commedia. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)—"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 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 assumed ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... afternoon Ravenel, while polishing a ragged line of a new sonnet, reclined by the window overlooking the besieged garden of the unmercenary baron. Suddenly he sat up, spilling two rhymes and ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... Burial-place. deg. A Fragment Blessed are they that Mourn No Man knoweth his Sepulchre A Walk at Sunset Hymn to Death The Massacre at Scio deg. The Indian Girl's Lament deg. Ode for an Agricultural Celebration Rizpah The Old Man's Funeral The Rivulet March Sonnet.—To— An Indian Story Summer Wind An Indian at the Burial-place of his Fathers Song—"Dost thou idly ask to hear" Hymn of the Waldenses Monument Mountain deg. After a Tempest Autumn Woods Sonnet.—Mutation Sonnet.—November Song of the ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... friendship more deeply rooted, more inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister," composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... region of clouds and lifts her face and hands towards the light. Through an opening in the sky a broad beam of sunshine falls upon her. Following its direction, she seems to be looking through the opening into some glad vision beyond. Like the figure of Hope in Swinburne's sonnet, she ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... although the girl might love him, he did not love her. A bead-worker indeed, a girl of the lowest classes, pooh! She might be a Venus, but she could be nothing to him. And he himself made merry over his romantic adventure, which Narcisse sought to arrange in a kind of antique sonnet: A beautiful bead-worker falling madly in love with a young prince, as fair as sunlight, who, touched by her misfortune, hands her a silver crown; then the beautiful bead-worker, quite overcome at finding him as charitable as handsome, dreaming of him incessantly, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... would have told it. Le Fils du Titien—the story of the great master's lazy son, on whom even love and entire self-sacrifice—lifelong too—on the part of a great lady, cannot prevail to do more in his father's craft than one exquisite picture of herself, inscribed with a sonnet renouncing the pencil thenceforth—is the best told story in the book. But Gautier would certainly have done it even better. Margot, in the same fatal way and, I fear, in the same degree, suggests the country tales of Musset's own ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The sonnet may be briefly defined as a rimed poem in iambic pentameter, containing fourteen lines, divided into the octave of eight lines and the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... gentleman to-day at dinner, to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper; but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire it: but, without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it be none of your own, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the prosperity of Rome, he knelt before the throne, and received from the senator a laurel crown, with a more precious declaration, "This is the reward of merit." The people shouted, "Long life to the Capitol and the poet!" A sonnet in praise of Rome was accepted as the effusion of genius and gratitude; and after the whole procession had visited the Vatican, the profane wreath was suspended before the shrine of St. Peter. In the act or diploma [14] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... it, and paw the platform. Dear to me as the bugle-note to any war-horse, as the first twittering of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your seats please!' or—better still—'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to Newhaven or Dover—a sonnet for every station one does not stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron road. There is one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the insides of engines; but he will not do at all. I look for ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm |
