"Poetically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and poetry would hardly have attracted his study had it not been that his mind was as truly philosophically and scientifically accurate, as it was poetically sensuous and imaginative. In a letter to Mr. E. C. Stedman he complained that "in all directions the poetic art was suffering from the shameful circumstance that criticism was without a scientific basis for even the most elementary of ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... that the Greek tragedy had its origin in the chorus; and though in process of time it became independent, still it may be said that poetically, and in spirit, the chorus was the source of its existence, and that without these persevering supporters and witnesses of the incident a totally different order of poetry would have grown out of the drama. The abolition of the chorus, and the debasement of this sensibly powerful organ into ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the great common experiences of life. Both of them were really simple, brought up in old-fashioned simple ways, easily touched, responsive to all that high spiritual education which flows from the familiar incidents of the human story, approached poetically and passionately. As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife's room, the occasional restless movements of the small brown head against her breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country silence, he felt all the deep familiar currents ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... striking scenery without being deeply moved by it. As for the mere candles, if placed on a deal dresser or shop-counter, they might have failed to touch him; but if burning in some lyke-wake beside the dead, or in some vaulted crypt or lonely rock-cave, he also could not have looked other than poetically on them. I have seen him awed into deep solemnity, in our walks, by the rising moon, as it peered down upon us over the hill, red and broad, and cloud-encircled, through the interstices of some clump of dark firs; and have observed him become suddenly ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... certain absolutely personal ideas, as much his own as the ideas of Browning or Meredith, though they were fewer in number. One of these, for example, was the fact that he was the first of all poets (and perhaps the last) to attempt to treat poetically that vast and monstrous vision of fact which science had recently revealed to mankind. Scientific discoveries seem commonly fables as fantastic in the ears of poets as poems in the ears of men of science. The poet is always a Ptolemaist; for him the sun still rises and the earth stands ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Street. They were a pair of majestic-looking men; and though Longfellow was nearly a head shorter than Sumner, his broad shoulders gave him an appearance of strength, as his capacious head and strong, finely cut features evidently denoted an exceptional intellect. He wore his hair poetically long, almost to his coat collar; and yet there was not the slightest air of the Bohemian about him. They seemed to be oblivious of everything except their conversation; and if this could have been recorded it might prove to be as interesting as the poetry of the one ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he informed me that he too, had used the image,—perhaps referring to his poem called "The Twins." He thought Tennyson had used it also. The parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the "Boston Evening Transcript" for October 23, 1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the Atlantic, one to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... own mask was as different as possible from those others, the common sort, in which he saw the purveyors of "adulterous lust," and with which, now as then, he would have nothing whatever {122} to do. His "Lady" alone, even without her brothers, makes that clear. What she says may not be so poetically attractive as the speech of Comus; but it has just the note of exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great ethical and spiritual outbursts, and plainly utters the other and stronger side of his convictions. The truth is that from the very beginning to the very end of ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... could only feel. To him the lark is to the bird-world's companionship and music what the angels are to the spirit land. He has read and dreamed of both from his childhood up. He has believed in both poetically and pleasantly, sometimes almost positively, as real and beautiful individualities. He almost credits the poet of his own country, who speaks of hearing "the downward beat of angel wings." In his facile faith in the substance ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... grey coat, and brown hat, and blue spectacles, all the colours of man and boat being philosophically arranged, and as part of a complicated and secret plot upon the liberties of that unseen, mysterious, and much-considered goujon which is poetically imagined to be below. It has baffled all designs for this last week, for it is a wily monster, but this morning it is most certainly to ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... of wind as air in motion; they thought of it as the breath and sound of some living creature. When we say that the wind "whistled in the keyhole," or "kissed the flowers," or "drove the clouds" before it, we are using poetically the language our forefathers ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... found the right field in which to do justice to her powers. The dry technique in music was a stumbling-block of which she was impatient. History and literature she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to check, and much to stimulate, this dominant, imaginative faculty. Her youthful attempts at original composition she quickly discarded in disgust; but it seemed almost a law of her mind that whatever was ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... even in thought." This is a subject quite unknown, I believe, before the fifteenth century, and not commonly met with since, but there are some instances. On one of the carved stalls of the Cathedral of Amiens it is very poetically treated. (Stalles d'Amiens, p. 205.) Mary is seated on a throne under a magnificent canopy; Joseph, kneeling before her and presented by two angels, pleads for pardon. She extends one hand to him; in the other is the volume of the Holy Scriptures. ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... matters. And now—" Paula sighed and erased the sigh with her smile—"and now, I'm done. Consider yourself acquainted. And, oh, if you encounter our sages more intimately, a word of warning, especially if the encounter be in the stag room: Dar Hyal is a total abstainer; Theodore Malken can get poetically drunk, and usually does, on one cocktail; Aaron Hancock is an expert wine-bibber; and Terrence McFane, knowing little of one drink from another, and caring less, can put ninety-nine men out of a hundred under the table and go ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... time so remote that "distance lends enchantment to the view," seems to be almost universal. It is this feeling of reverence for the old that makes it so interesting to us, and leads us to look at things of the past poetically rather than practically; although it is true that sometimes the interest taken in inconvenient and uncomfortable articles arises rather from their age than from anything else. But oftentimes the very simplicity, solidity, and strength ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... the Saturday after her return, just when Tom had spread his microscope apparatus over the table, and claimed Mary's assistance in setting up objects; and she avoided his eye when Mary and Averil did what he poetically called rushing into each other's arms, whilst she bestowed her greetings on Leonard ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... however great, they seem close to each other. The stars—the events—strike us and remain in our eye, little modified by the difference of dates. An historic drama is, therefore, a collection of events borrowed from history, but connected together in respect of cause and time, poetically and by dramatic fiction. It would be a fine national custom to act such a series of dramatic histories in orderly succession, in the yearly Christmas holidays, and could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism, which under a positive term really implies nothing but a negation ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... of the Attic king Erectheus, gathering flowers with her companions. Seized with love for her, he carried her off to his grotto. Plato, by the mouth of Socrates, rejects a rationalist interpretation of this myth. According to this explanation, an outward, natural fact is poetically symbolised by the narrative. A hurricane seized the king's daughter and hurled her over the rocks. "Interpretations of this sort," says Socrates, "are learned sophistries, however popular and usual they may be.... For one who has pulled to pieces one of these mythological ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... among the classics of musical literature. The most important is his "Opera and Drama," written in 1851. This is a full discussion, in singularly vigorous and clear language, of the entire nature of opera as poetically conceived and as practically carried out by the previous masters, and as proposed to be carried out by Wagner himself. Many of Wagner's writings have now been translated into English. His opera texts are highly esteemed by his admirers, and respected by all. As a poet the general opinion ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... term; there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables by the utmost possible leniency of construction. 'Composure,' 'Et Caetera,' and several more, are merely similes poetically elaborated. So, too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather and grandchild: the child, having treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes back to find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful: at the same time, the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ability to see things poetically. To him the rays of the rising sun were not only shining but "laughing on the roof" of his home. His imagery is rich and skillfully applied. Many of his hymns abound in striking similes. Their outstanding characteristic, however, is ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... of this physical and absolutely innocent life, this mental and moral life so poetically extended. A child by form, a man in mind, he was equally angelic under either aspect. By his mother's influence his studies had removed his emotions to the region of ideas. The action of his life took place, therefore, ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... moment, the idea of some departed friend, some tender recollection when the soul was most alive to tenderness, intruded unawares into his thoughts, the sorrow which it produced is artlessly, yet poetically ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... recognize the influences of the country in which they were born upon the great masters in music, as well as in the other arts; that we will be able to distinguish the peculiar and predominant traits of the national genius more completely developed, more poetically true, more interesting to study, in the pages of their compositions than in the crude, incorrect, uncertain, vague and tremulous sketches of ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... south of Pennsylvania furnished but 50,493, hence the sentiment prevailing in Massachusetts would naturally be very powerful in determining any question pertaining to the army. When the country sprang to arms in response to that shot fired at Lexington, the echoes of which, poetically speaking, were heard around the world, the free Negroes of every Northern colony rallied with their white neighbors. They were in the fight at Lexington and at Bunker Hill, but when Washington came to take command of the army he soon gave orders that no ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... these Greek art represents as moving earthward on great spreading pinions. Victory came by the air. When Demetrius, King of Macedonia, set up the Winged Victory of Samothrace to commemorate the naval triumph of the Greeks over the ships of Egypt, Greek art poetically foreshadowed the relation of the air service to the fleet ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... the outside, and not made actually to live. "His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not created and made poetically alive, yet deceptively enacted as a good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much. It were a long chapter to ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... has decided that "'Filbert' is a barbarous compound of phillon or feuille, a leaf, and beard, to denote its distinguishing peculiarity, the leafy involucre projecting beyond the nut." But in the times before Shakespeare the name was more poetically said to be derived from the nymph Phyllis. Nux Phyllidos is its name in the old vocabularies, and Gower ("Confessio Amantis") ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... was put to death can only be likened to that of the lover in Heinrich von Kleist's poetically sublime, but morally atrocious, tragedy, Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... Miss Britton's arrival Barbara was allowed to go downstairs, and, after having once been out, her health came back "like a swallow's flight," as Mademoiselle Therese poetically, though a little ambiguously, described it. She and her aunt spent as much time out of doors as possible, going for so many excursions that Barbara began to know the country round quite well; but, though many of the drives were beautiful, none seemed ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... return to us, however, was a triumph; she had no sense of having acted injudiciously or unbecomingly; she was ready to recount to every one, in vague and veiled language, how she had been able to testify for the Lord 'in the very temple of Belial', for so she poetically described the Crystal Palace. She was, of course, in a state of unbridled hysteria, but such physical explanations were not encouraged amongst us, and the case of Susan Flood awakened a great deal ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... use of it that the Roman Catholics say they do of the pictures and images of their saints, which is, only to remind them of those; for the adoration they disclaim. Nay, I will go further, as the transition from Popery to Paganism is short and easy, I will classically end poetically advise you to invoke, and sacrifice to them every day, and all the day. It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain; and, I doubt, the best of us here have more ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... lady, of the name of Rukminee, and the marriage is thus poetically described. Rukminee has written a letter, filled with love, and sent it by the hand of a Brahmin, to the Root of Joy, Krishna: — "The Brahmin having arrived at Duarika, perceives that the town is in the midst of the ocean, and on the four sides of it there ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... men with whom I have spoken on the subject. As yet all they have done has been to make frequent "pacts with death," to perform unauthorised strategical movements to the rear whenever they have been sent to the front, to consume much liquor, to pillage houses, and—to put it poetically—toy with Amaryllis in the trench, or with the tangles of Nearas' hair. Their General, Clement Thomas, is doing his best to knock them into shape, but I am afraid that it is too late. There are cases in which, in defiance of the proverb, it is too ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... (in 1695) produced a subject for all the writers—perhaps no funeral was ever so poetically attended. Dryden, indeed, as a man discountenanced and deprived, was silent; but scarcely any other maker of verses omitted to bring his tribute of tuneful sorrow. An emulation of elegy was universal. Mary's praise was not confined to ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... style be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer without them. The stanzas in Childe Harold on Waterloo are full of the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents of war—the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it may be said; yet the great difficulty ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... not strange to reflect, that hardly an evening passes in London or Paris but one of those cottages is painted for the better amusement of the fair and idle, and shaded with pasteboard pines by the scene-shifter; and that good and kind people,—poetically minded,—delight themselves in imagining the happy life led by peasants who dwell by Alpine fountains, and kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock? that nightly we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra of peasants, in gay ribands ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... with machines for the rest of its natural life, and of the people who will have to live under the roof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the way of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that we, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally safe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take comfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around us. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our gates the great ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... quiet. Still, life was seldom anything but a gay adventure to Rebecca, and she started afresh every morning to its conquest. She was not exacting; the Asmodean feat of spinning a sand heap into twine was, poetically speaking, always in her power, so the mile walk to the pink-house gate, and the tryst with freckled, red-haired Clara Belle Simpson, whose face Miss Miranda said looked like a raw pie in a brick oven, these commonplace incidents were sufficiently exhilarating to brighten ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "Poetically expressed, if not justly imagined, cousin Jack," returned the laughing Eve; "but you have forgot to add, and a heart full of feeling for ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'Your mother,' she said poetically, 'makes me think of snow melting before the sun. In fact, I can't look at her without thinking of snow and snowdrops and—and graves. Last spring I said to Mrs. Banks, "She won't see the leaves fall," I said, and Mrs. Banks agreed. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... Donal, "—for the sake o' auld langsyne, whan I was, as I ever will be, sair obligatit till ye—but i' that ye say noo, ye're sair wrang: ye wasna speykin' poetically, though I ken weel ye think it, or ye wadna say 't; an' that's what garred me tak ye up. For the verra essence o' poetry is trowth, an' as sune's a word's no true, it's no poetry, though it may hae on the cast ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... of this method, which, as a rule, is Scott's, and, scientifically, the method is not defensible. Thus, having three ballads of rescues, in similar circumstances, with a river to ford, Scott confessedly places that incident where he thinks it most "poetically appropriate"; and in all probability, by a single touch, he gives poetry in place of rough humour. Of all this Motherwell disapproved. (See Kinmont ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... another letter, he descants still more poetically upon his gardener with the enlarged soul. He says, "It is from this simple man, this tall and stout rustic, twenty-three years of age, enfeebled by disease, or rather by sorrow, and therefore the more predisposed to be affected by any great natural agent, — it is from this man, I repeat, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... harmonized entirely with his own. It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated talk of original, poetically minded young ladies had repelled and bored him. At his first meeting with Malvine Marker he had thought that she was the wife for him, and since he had become friendly with her and her circle, he said to himself, "This ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... appears to us the most spirited and nervous of all Schiller's ballads, with the single exception of "The Diver;" and if its interest is less intense than that of the matchless "Diver," and its descriptions less poetically striking and effective, its interior meaning or philosophical conception is at once more profound and more elevated. The main distinction, indeed, between the ancient ballad and the modern, as revived and recreated by Goethe and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... within easy reach of a goose and in an atmosphere of herbs of a savoury character, it seemed unnatural to me that she should deliberately turn her back upon all these good things to listen to Mr. TREE'S poetically (but lengthily) expressed views upon liberty. I could but wonder why her choice had not fallen upon the goose on the table. Mr. BROOKFIELD as Louis the Eleventh, incidentally suggests that that wily monarch was guilty of a crime with which he has not hitherto ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... "The Succube." But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to feel those "last enchantments" which whispered to Arnold from Oxford towers, maugre his "strong sense of the irrationality of that period." The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth's character is portrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the drama are the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... woman stands correspondingly higher. Nevertheless, the views concerning the relations of the two sexes have remained at bottom the same. Professor L. von Stein published a book,[68]—a work, be it said in passing, that corresponds ill with its title—in which he gives a poetically colored picture of modern marriage, as it supposedly is. Even in this picture the subaltern position of woman towards the "lion" man is made manifest. Stein says among other things: "Man deserves a being that not only loves, but also understands him. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... the Swiss women of the mountains entitled to their reputation for beauty. If strength, proportions on a scale that is scarcely feminine, symmetry that is more anatomically than poetically perfect, enter into the estimate, one certainly sees in some of the cantons, female peasants who may be called fine women. I remember, in 1828, to have met one of these in the Grisons, near the upper end of the valley of the Rhine. This woman had ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... roomy pair of black nether garments. The booksellers' watch must have been the size of an onion. Iron-gray ribbed stockings, and shoes with silver buckles completed is costume. The old man's head was bare, and ornamented with a fringe of grizzled locks, quite poetically scanty. "Old Doguereau," as Porchon styled him, was dressed half like a professor of belles-lettres as to his trousers and shoes, half like a tradesman with respect to the variegated waistcoat, the stockings, and the watch; and the same odd mixture appeared in the man himself. He united ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... mere vehicle. And, finally, poetry being poems, we are to think of a poem as it actually exists; and, without aiming here at accuracy, we may say that an actual poem is the succession of experiences—sounds, images, thoughts, emotions—through which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can. Of course this imaginative experience—if I may use the phrase for brevity—differs with every reader and every time of reading: a poem exists in innumerable degrees. But that insurmountable fact lies in the nature of things and ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... he is as ungrateful as a king, because I have been taking his part all this time at a great cost of domestic emeutes. So you would have known, if you had received my letters. The coup d'etat was a grand thing, dramatically and poetically speaking, and the appeal to the people justified it in my eyes, considering the immense difficulty of the circumstances, the impossibility of the old constitution and the impracticability of the House of Assembly. Now that's ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... he cannot much commend the version of Heywood, as poetically elegant, as he has chosen a measure of fourteen syllables, which ever sounds harsh to the ears of those that are used to heroic poetry, yet, says he, I must do the author this justice, to acquaint the world, that he endeavours to give Seneca's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... himself, or a noun of multitude. If it be singular, and used only personal as a proper name, it consequently implies one imperial devil, monarch or king of the whole clan of hell, justly distinguished by the term DEVIL, or as our northern neighbours call him "the muckle horned deil," and poetically, after Burns "auld Clootie, Nick, or Hornie," or, according to others, in a broader set form of speech, "the devil in hell," that is, the "devil of a devil," or in scriptural phraseology, the "great red dragon," the "Devil or Satan." ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... in Havana with a heart elated by the prospect of such kindnesses and hospitalities as are poetically supposed to be the perquisite of travellers. You count over your letters as so many treasures; you regard the unknown houses you pass as places of deposit for the new acquaintances and delightful friendships which await you. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... but a different thing from any of them, something hardly namable, out of whose formlessness the heavens and all the worlds in them came to be. And by necessity into that same infinite or indefinite existence, out of which they originally emerged, did every created thing return. Thus, as he poetically expressed it, "Time brought its revenges, and for the wrong-doing of existence all things ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... allegiance. Furthermore he had the inestimable advantage of finding the mechanical structure of instrumental music carefully formulated by his predecessors. The stone had been quarried, the rough cutting done and the blocks lay ready for a genius to use in the erection of his own poetically conceived edifice. And these forms were still fresh and vigorous; they had not yet hardened into formalism. In Beethoven's works we rarely find form employed for its own sake, as a mere "tour de force" of skilful workmanship, rather is it made to adapt itself to the individual needs of the composer. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... such a woman, too strong to suffer little, too unimaginative to suffer poetically. There are those who might say that she exaggerated the gravity of the position, that, since Giovanni had always been faithful to her, had acknowledged his error and repented of it so sincerely, there was no reason why she should ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... so poetically inclined would naturally fall every now and then without being aware of it into metrical composition; Bracciolini frequently does so: for instance: writing to his friend Niccoli from London, he says that at that ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the deeds of Bellerophon and Hercules, sung in epic and tragic poetry? In vain therefore should we seek in this restriction to parody any distinctive peculiarity of the so-called Middle Comedy. Frolicsome caprice, and allegorical significance of composition are, poetically considered, the only essential criteria of the Old Comedy. In this class, therefore, we shall rank every work where we find these qualities, in whatever times, and under whatever circumstances, it may ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of Maria speaking poetically? But her words did indeed seem to be the truth. In spite of the embarrassment of her situation and the flutter of her feelings, she was in a state of composure unexampled. Albinia had just gratified her greatly by a few words on Captain Pringle's evident ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... explain myself. The generality of people cannot see or feel poetically, they want fancy, and therefore fly from solitude in search of sensible objects; but when an author lends them his eyes, they can see as he saw, and be amused by images they could not select, though lying ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... practised the most beautiful songs; and on many an evening Barop or Middendorf told us of the places through which we were to pass, their history, and the legends which were associated with them. They were aided in this by one of the sub-teachers, Bagge, a poetically gifted young clergyman, who possessed great personal beauty and a heart capable of entering into the intellectual life of the boys who were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wonder, then, that a woman like Ida de la Molle was /facile princeps/ among such company, or that Harold Quaritch, who was somewhat poetically inclined for a man of his age, at any rate where the lady in question was concerned, should in his heart have compared her to a queen. Even Belle Quest, lovely as she undoubtedly was in her own way, paled and looked shopgirlish ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... deceive me when he told me that James Harrington was plighted to another. I spoke of it to-day trembling as the words left my mouth. My husband laughed pleasantly, and answered 'oh, child, that was a love ruse. I had a vague fancy that the young fellow might be in my way, and so disposed of him poetically. There was nothing in it. The fellow has not spirit enough to win ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... or how keenly the ex-Confederate may feel over the "lost cause," the warm-blooded son of Kentucky will fight as bravely under the flag of the republic as will his frozen-featured brother from Minnesota, and the dreamy individual who gazes poetically upon the placid waters of Puget Sound will shout as loudly for one country, and one allegiance to its glorious emblem, as will the gilded youth whose republicanism is artistically refreshed by a constant vision of the Statue ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... is theatrically no less than dramatically conceived. Theatrically it is far superior to Swinburne's "Chastelard" (not to speak of his interminable musical verbiage in "Bothwell") but it is paler, colder, and poetically inferior. The voluptuous warmth and wealth of color, the exquisite levity, the debonnaire grace of the Swinburnian drama we seek in vain. Bjoernson is vigorous, but he is not subtile. Mere feline amorousness, such as Swinburne ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the emperor of the press, as you poetically call it: but, between ourselves, confess it,—Do not the Tory writers beat your Whigs hollow? You talk about ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... covered gallery leading from the upper story of the palace into that of the prisons, and which, from its being appropriated to the passage of the accused from their cells to the presence of their judges, has been so poetically, and it may be added so pathetically, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Dinah and Lousteau should live apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically—in disgust, in the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest which is traditionally ascribed to women. ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... does mean," Mr. Croyden returned heartily. "The name refers to the delicate color of the ware. 'Sky after a summer rain' was what the Chinese sometimes poetically called it. It is a porcelain of wonderful rarity and beauty. Some of it even ranges to as deep hue as apple-green. One does not find much of it now, for it is a very choice and expensive variety; nor was it widely made. The ware ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... exile, as she deemed it, sometimes taking up his residence for several months in the neighborhood of the nunnery; and a long vacation of many weeks she had every winter spent at home with him on the rich and beautiful plantation poetically known as The Rim, because, seen from several of the adjacent places, it occupied the whole southern horizon. The last vacation, however, she had passed with her adopted father travelling in France, whither some affairs called him; but, of all the splendid monuments and records of civilization ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... visit to Styx and go thence to the eternal mountains? Such a revolution in a man's affairs, as I have somewhere written, would set anybody singing. When we get installed, Lloyd and I are going to print my poetical works; so all those who have been poetically addressed shall receive copies of their addresses. They are, I believe, pretty correct literary exercises, or will be, with a few filings; but they are not remarkable for white-hot vehemence of inspiration; tepid works! respectable versifications of very proper and even original ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sutures, but to the forehead, which is poetically compared with a page of paper upon which Destiny writes ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... better proof can be needed to establish the superiority of the Teuton than the fact that after such meals he can produce such music? Cabbage salad is a horrid invention, but I don't doubt its utility as a means of encouraging thoughtfulness; nor will I quarrel with it, since it results so poetically, any more than I quarrel with the manure that results in roses, and I give it to Irais every day to make her sing. She is the sweetest singer I have ever heard, and has a charming trick of making up songs as she ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... resumed Fu-Manchu, "we call this quaint fancy the Six Gates of joyful Wisdom. The first gate, by which the rats are admitted, is called the Gate of joyous Hope; the second, the Gate of Mirthful Doubt. The third gate is poetically named, the Gate of True Rapture, and the fourth, the Gate of Gentle Sorrow. I once was honored in the friendship of an exalted mandarin who sustained the course of joyful Wisdom to the raising ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... language as indicating a freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of the universe compared with which the Apocalypse ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... from the water's edge to the summit, which however is about as high as the cone. This side is well defended by forts and batteries. Mr Barrow's description of the magnificent scenery of this harbour, is perhaps somewhat poetically conceived, but may be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... waters coming and going upon the black rocks below, he became aware of a form rising from the waves. The figure was too far off for him to see it clearly, but judging from the costume, it was a female figure, and promptly the mind of Charles, poetically inclined, turned to thoughts of Venus—or Aphrodite, as he, being a gentleman of delicate taste would have preferred to term her. He saw the figure disappear behind a head-land, but still waited. In about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour it reappeared, ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... Reformed Church, or, as Arthur gayly called her to her face, a Dutch Deformed Woman, was too simple and sincere in her religious faith to tolerate with equanimity the thought that any one of the name of Merlin should be domiciled in the House of Sin, as she poetically described the ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... deep circles, had that evening brightened those premature ruins by the cleverest contrivances of the article Paris. She had taken it into her head, like other deserted women, to assume a virgin air, and recall by clouds of white material the maidens of Ossian, so poetically painted by Girodet. Her fair hair draped her elongated face with a mass of curls, among which rippled the rays of the foot-lights attracted by the shining of a perfumed oil. Her white brow sparkled. She had applied an imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... quite needless to remind those who have ever seen it of the features of that most poetically suggestive spot, and I can hardly hope to enable any who have not seen it to form an adequate idea of its exceeding beauty. It is just within the city wall, niched in an angle of it, in the immediate vicinity of the Porta San Sebastiano, but it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... of the advertisement were genuine, the chance ought not to be lost for lack of further inquiry. So I sat down there and then and wrote a letter to the poetically-named Dewy and Moss, asking some questions in detail about the boat, and, in particular, where she ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... convention met in St. Louis June 14-16. The first day the suffragists staged their "walkless parade," which the press poetically called "the golden lane," as the 6,000 white-robed women who formed a continuous lane from the convention headquarters in the Jefferson Hotel to the Coliseum where the convention was held carried yellow parasols and wore yellow satin sashes. They gave resplendent ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Classically, Poetically, and Practically. Containing Numerous Curious Dishes and Feasts of all Times and all Countries, besides Three Hundred Modern Receipts. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... shortly this way than in prose itself; and nothing is more certain, than that much of the force as well as grace of arguments or instructions, depends on their conciseness. I was unable to treat this part of my subject more in detail, without becoming dry and tedious; or more poetically, without sacrificing perspicuity to ornament, without wandering from the precision, or breaking the chain of reasoning: If any man can unite all these without diminution of any of them, I freely confess he will compass a thing above ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... twenty—would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing the poet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by, the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grossly unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... may be termed thick porridge, that would have been ample allowance for a hundred ordinary men. Before commencing, San-it-sa-rish desired an aged medicine-man to make an oration, which he did fluently and poetically. Its subject was the praise of the giver of the feast. At the end of each period there was a general "Hou! hou!" of assent—equivalent to the hear! hear! ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the works belonging to this class of so-called "visionary" writings is the Fis or "Vision" which goes under the name of the famous Irish saint, Adamnan, who was poetically entitled the "High Scholar of the Western World." This particular vision, the Fis Adamnain, is remarkable among other things for its literary quality, which is far superior to anything of the time, and for the fact that it represents "the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... very beautiful thought for my little girl to have!" Mrs. Edson exclaimed, smoothing Elsie's hair lovingly. "And, yes, that is the truth, put very poetically. Love is sweet, like the honey that it replaces—at least it is for us human beings. Probably with the animals it is not of just the same quality that it is with us, for they do not act as if it were, but at least the animals are an improvement ...
— Every Girl's Book • George F. Butler
... body. That this also influences the activity of the imagination, Goethe has indicated in his statement to Schiller: "Impressions must work silently in me for a very long time before they show them selves willing to be used poetically.'' ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the Lame, to his enemies, by a 'Tenda' of that colour, before he gave battle. Or we will call it 'Gli,' or 'I Carbonari,' if it so please you—or any other name full of 'pastime and prodigality,' which you may prefer. * * * Let me have an answer. I conclude poetically, with the bellman, 'a merry Christmas to you!"'—Lord Byron to Mr. Moore, in his Life of the Noble ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... betrayal I begot unknown to me a son who, whilst as ignorant as myself of our relationship, has come to be the evil genius of my life, to cross and thwart me, and finally to help to pull me down in ruin. It is just—poetically just. My full and resigned acceptance of that fact is the only atonement I ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have poetically symbolised their relation. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... pleasure of meeting some hundred of them, dressed. It was presumed that the baths were the subject of the entertaining conversation; for I read in a charming little work which sets forth the delights of Leuk, that La poussee forms the staple of most of the talk. La poussee, or, as this book poetically calls it, "that daughter of the waters of Loeche," "that eruption of which we have already spoken, and which proves the action of the baths upon the skin,"—becomes the object, and often the end, of all conversation. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... K." (apparently Kirke, a Pembroke man), to The Shepherd's Calendar, that he went to his friends in the north after leaving Cambridge and spent a year or two there, falling in love with the heroine, poetically named Rosalind, of The Calendar, and no doubt writing that remarkable book. Then (probably very late in 1578) he went to London, was introduced by Harvey to Sidney and Leicester, and thus mixed at once in ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... German "du"; for him she was still his little friend. But to her the moment was too poignant for speech. The terrible passages in the last writings of this greatest of autobiographers, which she had hoped poetically colored, were then ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... unusual and striking to a native of Europe, that I must not omit some notice of it, if for no other purpose than to convey to the mind of the reader one of the many unpleasant but wonderful accompaniments of a residence in these latitudes, so poetically, and indeed so truthfully, apostrophized as "the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... work of Korolenko's appeared, called: "In Bad Company,"—a sort of autobiography which added to his renown. The story, poetically simple, is laid in a provincial town. The hero is a little, seven-year-old boy called Volodya. He is the son of the local judge. The mother has been dead for a long time, and the father, in his sorrow, more or less loses track of his children, who ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... read on to the end of the story and was quite thrown back upon herself by the account of the miracle which followed. It was a beautiful story, she said to herself, poetically written, graphically described, but as to believing it to be true, she could as soon have accepted the "Midsummer Night's Dream" as having actually ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... encroached upon the borders of the white cravat: but the soul of Tupman had known no change—admiration of the fair sex was still its ruling passion. On the left of his great leader sat the poetic Snodgrass, and near him again the sporting Winkle; the former poetically enveloped in a mysterious blue cloak with a canine-skin collar, and the latter communicating additional lustre to a new green shooting-coat, plaid neckerchief, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... examining whether what has been said or done by some one is poetically right or not, we must not look merely to the particular act or saying, and ask whether it is poetically good or bad. We must also consider by whom it is said or done, to whom, when, by what means, or for what end; whether, for instance, it be to secure a greater ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... which, whenever the train stopped, Kate wrote with all her might. For Kate had a desire to convince Sylvia Joanna that one was much happier without being a countess, and she thought this could be done very touchingly and poetically by a fable in verse; so she thought she had a very good idea by changing the old daisy that pined for transplantation and found it very unpleasant, into ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... impression of it seems to be that the little girl was rather weak in intellect for eight years old, or a little perverse. Whereas Browning's "An incident of the French camp" appeals to them by pride of courage as it does to us by pathos. It may not be a gem, poetically speaking, but it lives. As children grow older it is only fair to allow them some choice in what they learn and recite, to give room for their taste to follow its own bent; there are a few things which it is well that every one should know ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... school, said "Here is Plato's man." From this joke there was added to the definition "With broad flat nails." Even this definition is just as faulty, as it does not exclude many species of the monkey. Again it was thought that man was the only being who laughs. Says Addison, poetically: "Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above and below him are serious." But scientists refuse to accept this distinction as accurate. "Man is ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... hundred and ten epithets poetically applied to the nightingale and its song, collected by MR. BEDE, permit me to add ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... stand near and observe Him, or say, 'Ye highly-placed guests, come and see'. He left the head people, as we should say, and took the common servants. 'Fill up the jars; draw it out; carry it to the governor; pass it round', was His simple command. And the water was turned into wine. Some one has poetically said, 'The modest water saw its Lord, and blushed'; but it was more than that, for His was the ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... became Austrian, the Tyrolese bore his remains back to his native Alps. A handsome monument of white marble was erected to his memory in the church at Innsbruck; his family was ennobled. Count Alexander of Wurtemberg has poetically described the restoration of his remains to the Tyrol, for which he so ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... will, I trust, pardon the following lovely quotation, so finely describing echoes, and so poetically accounting for ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... silent dew-laden fields and down into the garden paths, where she paced for two hours back and forth among the aromatic perfumes of the great yellow June lilies. There might have been a bit of poetry in it under other circumstances, but Keturah was not poetically inclined on that occasion. The events of the night had so roused her soul within her, that exercise unto exhaustion was her ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... railing accusation? And why not teach us to help what the laws cannot help?—Why teach us to hate a Nero or an Appius, and not an underselling oppressor of workmen and betrayer of women and children? Why to love a Ladie in bower, and not a wife's fireside? Why paint or poetically depict the horrible race of Ogres and Giants, and not show Giant Despair dressed in that modern habit he walks the streets in? Why teach men what were great and good deeds in the old time, neglecting to show them any good for themselves?—Till these ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... hugged himself in the security of his fortress, the web of his destiny was weaving. So true is it, as he himself used, no less pathetically than poetically to express it, "misfortune will find you out, if ye were hid in ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... revered Rugge, told fortunes on a pack of cards which she always kept in her pocket, and acted occasionally in parts where age was no drawback and ugliness desirable,—such as a witch, or duenna, or whatever in the dialogue was poetically called "Hag." Indeed, Hag was the name she usually took from Rugge; that which she bore from her defunct husband was Gormerick. This lady, as she braided the garland, was also bent on the soothing system, saying, with great sweetness, considering that her mouth was full of pins, "Now, deary, now, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Shepherds," belonging to Mr. Wentworth Beaumont, and the "Judgment of Solomon," in the possession of Mr. Ralph Bankes at Kingston Lacy, Dorsetshire. The former (of which an inferior replica with differences of landscape exists in the Vienna Gallery) is one of the most poetically conceived representations of this familiar subject which exists. The actual group of figures forms but an episode in a landscape of the most entrancing beauty, lighted by the rising sun, and wrapped in a soft atmospheric haze. The landscapes ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... appears, was, so to speak, the inverse inspiration of the stirring lines "The Lost Leader." Browning's strong sympathies with the Liberal cause are here portrayed with an ardor which is fairly intoxicating poetically, but one feels it is scarcely just to the mild-eyed, exemplary Wordsworth, and perhaps exaggeratedly sure of Shakespeare's attitude on this point. It is only fair to Browning, to point out how he himself ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... torment shall be as clean and orderly as the cleanest and most orderly place I know in Ireland, which is our poetically named Mountjoy prison. Well, perhaps I had better vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... and skill—the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty "two-handed engine at the door" of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, "poetically" or, "in a spiritual sense," the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. In Biblical phrase, Zeno (who probably had a strain of Semitic blood in him) was the "father of all such as reconcile." No doubt Philo and his followers were eminently religious ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... complexions: others make a difference, rejecting only amongst freshwater fish, eel, tench, lamprey, crawfish (which Bright approves, cap. 6), and such as are bred in muddy and standing waters, and have a taste of mud, as Franciscus Bonsuetus poetically defines, Lib. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the year 1817, an article appeared in the Quarterly Review, written, I believe, by Walter Scott, doing great honour to him, and no disgrace to me, though both poetically and personally more than sufficiently favourable to the work and the author of whom it treated. It was written at a time when a selfish man would not, and a timid one dared not, have said a word in favour of either; it was written by one to whom temporary public opinion had ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... warmth, descending through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no penetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or accident, or ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... credit for much tact in endeavouring to make a gentleman of AEneas, and succeeding too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many noble and many touching works. In this passage we also obtain the great Latin poet's opinion of the ameliorating effect of "collections." The hero of the AEneid knew immediately ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... the bank, as it passes, the Mississippi steamboat looks like a large hotel, or mansion of many windows, set adrift and moving majestically—"walking the water like a thing of life," as it has been poetically described. Some of the larger ones, taking into account their splendid interior decoration, and, along with it their sumptuous table fare, may well merit the name oft bestowed upon ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Oh, glorious! Glorious!" All this brightness has its attendant shadow, and deep from the childish heart comes that true note of pathos, the ever memorable toast of Tiny Tim, "God bless Us, Every One!" "The Cricket on the Hearth" strikes a different note. Charmingly, poetically, the sweet chirping of the little cricket is associated with human feelings and actions, and at the crisis of the story decides the fate and fortune of ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... courtesans I had read Boccaccio and Bandello; above all, I had read Shakespeare. I had dreamed of those beautiful triflers; of those cherubim of hell. A thousand times I had drawn those heads so poetically foolish, so enterprising in audacity, heads of harebrained mistresses who wreck a romance with a glance, and who pass through life by waves and by pulsations, like the sirens of the tides. I thought of the fairies of the modern tales, who are always drunk with love if not ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset |
