FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • More 'Elegy' Quotes from Famous Books

... young Memon bridegroom unto the house of the bride. Thus is it ever in this city of strange contrasts. Life and Death in closest juxtaposition, the hymn in honour of the Prophet's birth blending with the elegy to the dead. Bag-pipes are not unknown in the Musalman quarters of Bombay; and not infrequently you may watch a crescent of ten or twelve wild Arab sailors in flowing brown gowns and parti-coloured head-scarves treading a measure to the rhythm of the bagpipes blown by a younger ...

— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... centuries the political changes of Europe. One morning when the sun was flooding the building and casting the colours of the windows in rich patterns on the floor, I sat under the gallery at the west end and read Shelley's great elegy. I remember those wonderful last lines and I thought how, like an unshattered temple, the great works of literature survive the tempests of national strife. My mind was carried far away, beyond the anxieties and sorrows ...

— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... with Dr. Adams and his party, ten of us in all. We drove afterward to see the country church-yard, where Grey wrote his elegy and where he now lies buried. This was a most charming little trip and we all enjoyed it exceedingly. The young folks gathered leaves and ...

— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... exquisite in poetical feeling and musical gifts. The character is the nearest one gets in Hebrew to the best heroines of the troubadours. Immanuel and she exchange verses, but the path of flirtation runs rough. They are parted, she, woman-like, dies, and he, man-like, sings an elegy. Even more to Immanuel's credit is his praise of his own wife. She has every womanly grace of body and soul. On her he showers compliments from the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs. If this be the true man revealed, then his light verses of love addressed to other ...

— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... the choicest specimen of Elizabethan "Billingsgate" that has come down to us. It was a versatile pen that could turn from passages like these to the epic narrative of the duel, or Tamyra's lyric invocation of the "peaceful regents of the night" (II, ii, 158), or Bussy's stately elegy upon himself, as he dies standing, propped ...

— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... the world to-day devoted students are working at the hidden history of the lyric, for example, and of certain subdivisions of this species, such as the elegy, as it flowered long ago in Greece and as it has flourished in most of the literatures of modern Europe. To the "natural historian" of literary art, these subdivisions of a species are becoming ...

— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... Various Subjects, with the Prince of Parthia," printed in Philadelphia by one Henry Miller.[4] The volume contained a life written by Evans, a critical estimate written by Dr. Smith, of the College of Philadelphia, and an Elegy from the pen of John Green, who had been previously complimented by Godfrey in a poem entitled "A Night Piece." The whole spirit of the publication was one of friendly devotion and of firm belief in the permanency of Godfrey's position ...

— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey

... great French epicure, knew coffee as few men before him or since. In his historical elegy, contained in Gastronomy as a Fine Art, or the Science of Good Living, ...

— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... unsatisfied passions and imaginary sufferings.[6] And in estimating the influences which had prepared the way for this mental disposition, Goethe emphasizes the influence of English literature. Young's "Night Thoughts," Gray's "Elegy," Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," even "Hamlet" and his monologues haunted all minds. "Everyone knew the principal passages by heart, and everyone believed he had a right to be just as melancholy as the Prince of Denmark, even though he had seen no ghost and ...

— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... dearest friends fall out; they will endure all other things to be common, goods, lands, moneys, participate of each pleasure, and take in good part any disgraces, injuries in another kind; but as Propertius well describes it in an elegy of his, in this they will suffer ...

— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... the expression of a deeply troubled heart. The yaravie has been imitated by the Spaniards in their own language, and some of the imitations are very beautiful; but they have not been able to reach the deep melancholy of the Quichua elegy. The modern poetry of the Indians is inferior to the old; the words are a mixture of Quichua and Spanish, and are scarcely intelligible. The Spanish words have often Quichua terminations affixed to them; on the other hand, sometimes ...

— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... the songs repay study, they are rather marked by a pianistic meditation than a strictly lyric emotion. "Aufmunterung zur Freude" is a tame allegretto; "Wehmuth" is better; "Taeuschung" is a short elegy of passion and depth; "Ruhe in der Geliebten" is best in its middle strain where it is full of rich feeling and harmony. The ending is cheap. "Der gefangene Saenger" is only a slight variant at first on the "Adieu" credited to Schubert; it ...

— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... upon looking up the church which gave rise to Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," intending when we got there to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, and being ...

— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... a special elegy to be read at the grave," he rumbled eagerly. "When and where did the ...

— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature. His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent ...

— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... man, "I was never strong at literature. To save my life I could not tell you who wrote 'Gray's Elegy.'" ...

— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... discovery. It reveals New harmonies, new analogies. It links Far things and near, not in unnatural chains, But in those true accords which still escape The plodding reason, yet unify the world. I caught some glimpses of this mystic power In verses of your own, that elegy On Tycho, and that great quatrain of yours— I cannot quite recall the Latin words, But made it roughly mine in ...

— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... through the window to the dying day, and lightly sighed. The time was April's end, and had been squally, with violent storms; but the last onslaughts of the north-wester had routed the rain-clouds. The day was dying under a clear saffron sky, and a thrush piped its mellow elegy. Miss Percival heard him, and listened, smiling with her lips, and with her eyes also which the serene light soothed. Her lips barely moved, just relaxed their firm embrace, but no more. She held the light gratefully with her eyes, seemed unwilling to lose a moment of it, wistful to ...

— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369), and a few years earlier the poet of the "Vision" had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was ...

— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... force. I allude especially to the monorhyme, Rim continuat or tirade monorime, whose monotonous simplicity was preferred by the Troubadours for threnodies. It may serve well for three or four couplets but, when it extends, as in the Ghazal-cannon, to eighteen, and in the Kasidah, elegy or ode, to more, it must either satisfy itself with banal rhyme words, when the assonants should as a rule be expressive and emphatic; or, it must display an ingenuity, a smell of the oil, which assuredly does not add to the reader's pleasure. It can perhaps be done and it ...

— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... "snowy," or what you will which expresses colour, and not scientific fact)— every time, we repeat, this is done, the poet descends from the objective and dramatic domain of song, into the subjective and reflective one of elegy. ...

— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... is, of course, the old story which is ever new. The civil wars have inspired many pathetic compositions, and poems like Salome Urena's apostrophe to the ruins of colonial times, Bienvenido S. Nouel's elegy on the ruins left by the late revolutions, and Enrique Henriquez' "Miserere!", gems of verse, are veritable cries of anguish at the desolation wrought by fratricidal strife. Perhaps it is the poets' ...

— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... Peterborough On the Union On Mrs. Biddy Floyd The Reverse Apollo Outwitted Answer to Lines from May Fair Vanbrugh's House Vanbrugh's House Baucis and Philemon Baucis and Philemon The History of Vanbrugh's House A Grub Street Elegy The Epitaph A Description of the Morning A Description of a City Shower On the Little House A Town Eclogue A Conference To Lord Harley on his Marriage Phyllis Horace, Book IV, Ode ix To Mr. Delany An Elegy To Mrs. Houghton Verses written on ...

— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field intervening between narrative and song. Multifarious didactic poems were written. Small half-heroic, half-erotic epics were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic of the philological source whence it sprang, in which the poet more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings, predominantly sensuous, ...

— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... bright; and the general, under the clear starlight, visited his stations, to make his final inspection and utter his last words of encouragement. As he passed from ship to ship, he spoke to those in the boat with him of the poet Gray, and the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' "I," said he, "would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow;" and, while the oars struck the river as it rippled in the silence of the night air under ...

— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... roots so high." This he said because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that orthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five letters and post-cards from kind correspondents ...

— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... these is to know a very different Brann from the author of "The Bradley-Martin Bal Masque" or "Garters and Amen Groans." The Brann who wrote "Life and Death," by that work alone, wins to undying fame as surely as does Grey by his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." I have combed my memory in vain to match it from an American pen. A few paragraphs from Ingersoll, a few pages from Poe, a few stanzas from Whitman—but make your own search and your own comparisons; and if, in your final ranking, Brann ...

— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... steer's work is (At least in this world) finished; The gross amount of turkies Is sensibly diminished: The holly-boughs are faded, The painted crackers gone; Would I could write, as Gray did, An Elegy thereon! ...

— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.

... Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751). (Facsimile of first edition and of portions of ...

— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe

... striplings glance Conceitedly on Tania fair, And views amongst themselves advance Unfavourable unto her. But one buffoon unhappy deemed Her the ideal which he dreamed, And leaning 'gainst the portal closed To her an elegy composed. Also one Viazemski, remarking Tattiana by a poor aunt's side, Successfully to please her tried, And an old gent the poet marking By Tania, smoothing his peruke, To ask her name ...

— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... of these are a series of sonnets called Astrophel and Stella, of which his latest critic says: "As a series of sonnets, the Astrophel and Stella poems are second only to Shakespeare's; as a series of love-poems, they are perhaps unsurpassed." Spenser wrote an elegy upon Sidney himself, under the title of Astrophel. Sidney's prose is among the best of the sixteenth century. "He reads more modern than any other author of that century." He does not use "ink-horn terms," or cram his sentences with Latin or ...

— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter's collection, "Shed no tears o'er that tomb." A recent critic has referred this poem of reprobation also to Branwell Bronte—as if Emily could possibly have ...

— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... that on this occasion, when the balance might be held as finally struck, and when the nation, by its own voluntary act, had recognized the position which its poet, through all time coming must maintain, it would have been felt as a vast and serious omission if the last elegy had not been uttered by the greatest vindicator of his fame. It was so uttered, and none but those who listened to that address can conceive the effect which it produced. Elsewhere than in these ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... whose spotless fame Invites a stone to learn her name: The rigid Spartan that denied An epitaph to all that died, Unless for war, in charity Would here vouchsafe an elegy. She died a wife, but yet her mind, Beyond virginity refined, From lawless fire remain'd as free As now from heat her ashes be: Keep well this pawn, thou marble chest; Till it be call'd for, let it rest; ...

— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... through the folds of muslin and broadcloth! But it takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover. There are a great many cruel things besides poverty that freeze the genial current of the soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless, slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all round it. The one Reader's hand may shelter the flame; the one blessed ministering spirit with the vessel ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... with his family to Geneva; distinguished himself there in the course of the Reformation as a pastor, a preacher, professor of Hebrew, and a professor of Theology; translated the Bible into Italian and into French; a nephew of his was a school-fellow and friend of Milton, who wrote an elegy on his untimely ...

— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the ballads. Nowadays a poet makes a poem, and it is printed with his name upon the title-page. The poem belongs to him, and is known by his name. We say, for instance, Gray's Elegy, or Shakespeare's Sonnets. But many people helped to make the ballads. I do not mean that twenty or thirty people sat down together and said, "Let us make a ballad." That would not have been possible. But, ...

— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... coarse talk and jokes. Nature was ever dear to him; the walks round Eton were his chief recreation, and we can well conceive how he would feel in the lovely and peaceful churchyard of Stoke Pogis, where undoubtedly he would read Gray's Elegy. These feelings would not be sympathised with by the average of schoolboys; but, on the other hand, it is not apparent why Shelley should have changed his character, as the embryo poet would also necessarily not care for all their tastes. In short, the education at a public school of that day must ...

— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... off in relays, ladies furst, as they hain't room fer all to onct, but Hank, here, claims he's got grub enough on hand so all will git a chanct to shove right out ag'in their belt. An' I might say right here in doo elegy of our feller townsman that Hank c'n set out as fillin' an' tasty a meal of vittles as anyone ever cocked a lip over, barrin', of course, every ...

— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx

... Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was, I observe, written as long ago as 1838, so that it can be reproduced without much danger of hurting the feelings of those who may have known and loved the subject of this touching elegy. The name of the victim was Port, and the circumstances of his death ...

— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... Othello. Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates Adolphe with a "Just as you like!" uttered in tones whose sweetness is something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who utters elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile is elegiac, her silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are a few examples, wherein every household will find some of its ...

— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... she could not carry it to her mouth without fainting. The anatomist Gavard was not able to eat apples without convulsions and vomiting. It is said that Erasmus was made ill by the ingestion of fish; but this same philosopher, who was cured of a malady by laughter, expressed his appreciation by an elegy on the folly. There is a record of a person who could not eat almonds without a scarlet rash immediately appearing upon the face. Marcellus Donatus knew a young man who could not eat an egg without his lips swelling ...

— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... remains: and I think that perhaps the most wholesome attitude is to be grateful for what in the way of work, of precept, of example these men achieved, and to leave the mystery of their faults to their Maker, in the noble spirit of Gray's Elegy:— ...

— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Comus"—L'Allegro representing the Cavalier, and Il Penseroso the Puritan element. This is true only in a limited sense. It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud's crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard ...

— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... table. When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray's Elegy and ...

— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... Eclogue, written probably in 41 B.C., is a very melodious Daphnis-song that has always been a favorite with poets. It has been and may be read with entire pleasure as an elegy to Daphnis, the patron god of singing shepherds. Those, however, who in Roman times knew Vergil's love of symbolism, suspected that a more personal interest led him to compose this elegy. The death and apotheosis of Julius ...

— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... A Funeral Fantasie Fantasie—To Laura To Laura at the Harpsichord Group from Tartarus Rapture—To Laura To Laura (The Mystery of Reminiscence) Melancholy—To Laura The Infanticide The Greatness of the World Fortune and Wisdom Elegy on the Death of a Young Man The Battle Rousseau Friendship Elysium The Fugitive To Minna The Flowers The Triumph of Love (A Hymn) To a Moralist Count Eberhard, the Groaner of Wurtemburg ...

— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... circumstances. There are, no doubt, writers in the present age, who, did they meet with proper encouragement, might be capable of producing what would last to posterity, and be read and admired by them. We have some good poets, such as the authors of Elfrida, the Church-yard Elegy, and the Poem on Agriculture; a performance which would have been highly valued in an Augustan age, and is the best, perhaps the only Georgic in our language. By the great manner in which the author has executed the first part of his noble plan, he has shewn himself sufficiently able for the ...

— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous

... are at all times interesting, if not constantly reliable. After a reading of Gray's "Elegy" by a fourth standard class, the boys were asked what was meant by "fretted vaults," and one youth replied—"The vaults in which these poor people were buried; their friends came and fretted over them." Asked what he understood by "Elegy," another boy in ...

— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... Dinner in a Quick Lunch Room The Hemp Poor Devil! Ghosts of a Lunatic Asylum The White Peacock Colors A Minor Poet The Lover in Hell Winged Man Music The Innovator Love in Twilight The Fiddling Wood Portrait of a Boy Portrait of a Baby The General Public Road and Hills Elegy for ...

— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet

... fox-hunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any ...

— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... who Hampden was, and what he had done to make him famous enough to be mentioned in such a poem as Gray's Elegy. Probably a great general, John decided, who had led vast armies ...

— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various

... Paris have been at all times extravagance and credulity itself. They looked upon this young villain as a martyr, and at once dedicated an elegy to him, in which I was compared with Medea, ...

— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... in His inimitable elegy, which every reader will immediately recollect. Can it be imagined, that nature, which does nothing in vain, nor indeed without a reference to the being who is eminently signalized as lord of the lower creation, has been at pains to decorate these spots, but in anticipation, if ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... remained in their cells till noon, after which they both reappeared like men who had got rid of a burden. The true secret of their retirement revealed itself the morning after, when each of two great newspapers, with which they were severally connected, was found to contain long columns of elegy on the irreparable loss which the country had just suffered—compositions implying a suggestion on the part of each of the elegists that a poet existed who was not unfit to repair it. That same day after luncheon the two competitors departed. ...

— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... whose eminence was once allowed by the eminent, and whose accomplishments were confessed by the accomplished, in the latter part of a long life supported himself by an uncommon expedient. He had a standing elegy and epithalamium, of which only the first and last were leaves varied occasionally, and the intermediate pages were, by general terms, left applicable alike to every character. When any marriage became known, Settle ...

— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... military career was truly an amazing one!; pluck honor.... slightly misquoted from Shakespeare, "King Henry IV, Part I," Act I, Scene 3, line 202; chill penury.... slightly misquoted from Thomas Gray, "Elegy in a ...

— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper

... paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,—and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray, the Homer of Pope, and the ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... Anonymous An Honest Yorkshireman. Henry Carey From "Snaith Marsh" Anonymous When at Hame wi' Dad Anonymous I'm Yorkshire too Anonymous The Wensleydale Lad Anonymous A Song 1. Thomas Browne A Song 2. Thomas Browne The Invasion: An Ecologue Thomas Browne Elegy on the Death of a Frog David Lewis Sheffield Cutler's Song Abel Bywater Address to Poverty Anonymous The Collingham Ghost Anonymous The Yorkshire Horse Dealers Anonymous The Lucky Dream John Castillo The Milkin'-Time J. H. Dixon I Niver can call Her my Wife Ben ...

— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... of American History," in this series, S142. [2] "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour; The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Gray, "Elegy" (1750) "I would rather be the author of that poem," said Wolfe, "than to have the glory of beating the French to-morrow." Wolfe and Montcalm were both mortally wounded and died within a ...

— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... that was June, And cold is August's panting heart of fire; And in the storm-dismantled forest-choir For thine own elegy thy winds attune Their wild and wizard lyre: And poignant grows the charm of thy decay, The pathos of thy beauty, and the sting, Thou parable of greatness vanishing! For me, thy woods of gold and skies of ...

— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... Clorinda by the sentimental Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So, again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant stories of filthy intrigue or lewd jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello will gabble off occasionally ...

— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... an admirer of eloquence [c]; I hold it venerable, and even sacred, in all its shapes, and every mode of composition. The pathetic of tragedy, of which you, Maternus, are so great a master; the majesty of the epic, the gaiety of the lyric muse; the wanton elegy, the keen iambic, and the pointed epigram; all have their charms; and Eloquence, whatever may be the subject which she chooses to adorn, is with me the sublimest faculty, the queen of all the arts and sciences. But this, Maternus, is no apology for ...

— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus

... came to Philadelphia, in 1723, he was first employed by one Keimer, an eccentric genius, as a pressman, for he was then printing an elegy of his own composition, on the death of Aisquila Rose—and as he had but one small font of types, and used no copy, but composed the elegy in the press, he could not employ him in the composition. Keimer was a visionary, whose mind was frequently elevated above the little concerns ...

— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks

... specimen of Sir John Denham's Poetry, his Elegy on his much loved and admired friend Mr. ...

— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... Christianity. On the present occasion we are not met by so continued and regular a determination of insult, though there are atrocities to be found in the poem quite enough to make us caution our readers against its pages. Adonais is an elegy after the manner of Moschus, on a foolish young man, who, after writing some volumes of very weak, and, in the greater part, of very indecent poetry, died some time since of a consumption: the breaking down of an infirm constitution having, in all probability, ...

— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... unto his work and to his labour until the evening. Until the evening—and then, like the cows, he comes home. It is this sense of harmony between the coming of the cows on the one hand, and all their environment on the other, that gave Gray the opening thought for his 'Elegy ...

— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... not come to this conclusion without much thought. She composed an Ode to Despair, an Elegy to an Unhappy Woman, and a Triolet to Interfering Dukes, before her mind was made up. She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a ...

— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne

... bloody revenge of Conall Cearnach for the death of Cuchullin. This may be considered as the sequel of the preceding story, and of equal authority and antiquity. It is written in the very same style, and contains a beautiful elegy on Cuchullin ...

— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... v. 1, p. 71, is printed an Elegy on Cunedda, the work of one who had actually partaken of his royal munificence, who had received from him "milch cows, horses, wine, oil, and a host of slaves." The writer with respect to the martial prowess of his ...

— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin

... buried in the sepulcher of his fathers, when he had lived thirty-nine years, and of them had reigned thirty-one. But all the people mourned greatly for him, lamenting and grieving on his account many days; and Jeremiah the prophet composed an elegy to lament him, [10] which is extant till tills time also. Moreover, this prophet denounced beforehand the sad calamities that were coming upon the city. He also left behind him in writing a description of that destruction of our nation which has lately happened in our days, ...

— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... more to address thee, or hear thy kindly replying, Brother! O e'en than life round me delightfuller yet, 10 Ne'er to behold thee again! Still love shall fail not alone in Fancy to muse death's dark elegy, closely to weep. Closely as under boughs of dimmest shadow the pensive Daulian ever moans Itys ...

— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus

... the second elegy of his first book, gives the following account of the powers ascribed ...

— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. In Memorabilia he ...

— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... mournful speech, the wail of tree, The words the winds and waters say, Make up that general elegy, Whose burden is decay. ...

— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... to himself: 'True enough, it 's elegy—though we perform it through a trumpet; and there's not a doubt of our being down or having knocked the world ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... this horror and terror I saw one little incident which made me smile, though it was sad too; an idyl which might be an elegy. Three hired carriages descended the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. It was a wedding. In the first carriage was the bride, young and pretty, in tears; in the second, the bridegroom, looking anything but pleased. As the horses were proceeding slowly on account of the hill, I approached ...

— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... England, and proceeded to India as a chaplain. In addition to his chaplaincy, he held the office of preceptor to one of the native princes of Hindostan. He died at Bhoog, in the kingdom of Cutch, on the 25th of September 1830; and if we add that he was a man of remarkable learning, his elegy may be transcribed ...

— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... of our nouns have the article a or the prefixed to them in prose-writing and in conversation, they in general become personified even by the omission of these articles; as in the bold figure of Shipwreck in Miss Seward's Elegy ...

— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... those words "religion's," "Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good fortune. And yet we know that Paradise Lost is a greater work than this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own elegy. ...

— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater

... to him Od. i. 33 and Ep. i. 4. Horace was doubtless attracted by the frank nature of Tibullus (Ep. i. 4, 1, 'Albi, nostrorum sermonum candide iudex'), and by the community of taste which led them both to imitate the classical Ionic rather than the Alexandrian elegy. Horace corroborates the statement of Life i. ('insignis forma cultuque corporis observabilis') that Tibullus had a ...

— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... of the family, that he was descended from John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who was beheaded 22 February, 1553." Such belief was held for a time, but was afterward disallowed by Anne Bradstreet. In her "Elegy upon Sir Philip Sidney," whose mother, the Lady Mary, was the eldest daughter of that Duke ...

— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... blameless life, an eminent Preacher, of universal learning, and one of those principally concerned in the new Translation of the Bible." He became Bishop of Winchester in 1619, and died in 1626, being buried at S. Saviour's, Southwark. Milton has a Latin elegy upon his death, written when the poet was in his seventeenth year. Dean Duport[4] has also a short poem in the form of an epitaph on him, in which occur ...

— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting

... edition of 1837, and afterwards, the last, "Bright Flower! whose home is everywhere," is ranked among the "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection." They should manifestly be placed together. Wordsworth's fourth poem 'To the Daisy', which is an elegy on his brother John, and belongs to a subsequent year—having no connection with the three preceding poems, will be found in its ...

— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... account arrived in England of Captain Cook's decease, two poems were published in celebration of his memory; one of which was an Ode, by a Mr. Fitzgerald, of Gray's Inn. But the first, both in order of time and of merit, was an Elegy, by Miss Seward, whose poetical talents have been displayed in many beautiful instances to the public. This lady, in the beginning of her poem, has admirably represented the principal of humanity by which the captain was actuated in ...

— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... her equipage sweetness and common sense retains her bloom captivating as Lady Townley moved in polite circles ill-health, dies in Lower Grosvenor Street laid in State in the Jerusalem Chamber interred in Westminster Abbey Oldfield, Anne, elegy by Richard Savage Opera, Italian Operatic singers Oxford and the drama actors contribute to St. Mary's ...

— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... so long, may play one freak more, throw you into London, or some spot near it, and there snug-ify you for life. 'Tis a selfish but natural wish for me, cast as I am "on life's wide plain, friend-less." Are you acquainted with Bowles? I see, by his last Elegy (written at Bath), you are near neighbours. "And I can think I can see the groves again—was it the voice of thee—Twas not the voice of thee, my buried friend—who dries with her dark locks the tender tear"—are ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... of grief, of tender, spiritual love, of faith and peace, of the heart's heaven smiling through tears, is this tone-elegy! So should the passion-music close, and not with fugue of praise and triumph like an oratorio. How sweetly, evenly, the harmony flows on,—a broad, rich, deep, pellucid river, swollen as by countless rills from all the loving, ...

— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... I fear me, I saw this genus and species in Cambridge before now: I'll take no notice of him now. [Aside.] By the faith of a gentleman, this is pretty elegy. Of what age is the day, fellow? Sirrah boy, hath the groom saddled my hunting hobby? Can Robin hunter tell where ...

— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... But Poe was able actually to improve the language of inspiration, whilst transmitting uninjured the poetic conception. Those stanzas in Grey's 'Elegy' which convey from him to us the psychic wave of poetic impulse, may have been hundreds of times altered in their wording, through seven years of tentative effort; and it is possible that he succeeded in retaining the original feeling—the poem is certainly artistic. But the feeling conveyed by ...

— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... with the men," said The Infant. "He had them all down in rhyme as soon as ever they had done anything. He was a great bard. He was always ready with an elegy when we picked up a Boh - ...

— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... there had appeared Gray's "Elegy," Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," Fielding's "Amelia" and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." Here was menu to fit most palates, and the bill-of-fare was duly discussed in all social gatherings of the upper circles. The afflicted ones fed on Gray; the repentant quoted ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... 2. This is in a minor key and instead of representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire. The prevailing tone of the composition rather is that of an elegy—the burial of fond hopes. Stephen Heller, pianist and composer, tells of meeting Chopin in the store of a Paris music publisher. Heller had come in to order all the valses. Thereupon Chopin asked ...

— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... plaited his hair and spake, saying, "I am a descendant of Ali;" and he entered the city along with the caravan from Hijaz, saying, "I come a pilgrim from Mecca;" and he presented a Casidah or elegy to the king, saying, "I have composed it!" The king gave him money, treated him with respect, and ordered him to be shown much flattering attention; till one of the courtiers, who had that day returned from ...

— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... the coffin yet rests on the earth's outer surface, enter the chapel whither these void remains of our dear sister departed are borne by the smug undertaker's gentlemen, and pronounce an elegy over that bedizened box of corruption? When the young are stricken down, and their roses nipped in an hour by the destroying blight, even the stranger can sympathise, who counts the scant years on the gravestone, or reads the notice in the ...

— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... reached a high degree of civilization at a very early period. They have always been distinguished by a love of poetry, especially for the elegy, and they abound in tales, legends and proverbs. Until the middle of the twelfth century they had their own independent kings, since then they have been alternately conquered by the Russians and Swedes; but like the Poles, ...

— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis

... return to Paris to his old studies, he was detained by the king, and made tutor to James his natural son. In the mean time, an elegy made by him, at leisure times, came into the hands of the Franciscans; wherein he writes, that he was solicited in a dream by St. Francis, to enter into his order. In this poem there were one or two passages that reflected on them very severely; ...

— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... to cross the Atlantic. We did not say that The Spoon River Anthology was a new book, but that it was a new book from America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy ...

— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... achievement—perhaps (accepting the definition offered) the supreme achievement of its century. Its success, so the great critic of its day thought, lay in its appeal to "the common reader"; and though no friend of Gray's other work, Dr. Johnson went on to commend the "Elegy" as abounding "with images which find a mirrour in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo." Universality, clarity, incisive lapidary diction—these qualities may be somewhat staled in praise of the "classical" style, yet it is precisely in these traits ...

— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray

... Rome in 1821. Every reader knows his history and the cause of his death. Shelley says, in the preface to his elegy: ...

— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... names of the professors at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale called Carola, published as the work he was engaged on at the ...

— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... Song,'" demanded the ladies. This is a beautiful Tagal elegy of married life, but sad, painting its miseries rather than its joys. The men clamored for it too, and Victoria had a lovely voice; but she was hoarse. So Maria Clara was ...

— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... or ed. A.—In the old copies this elegy is marked "Elegia v." The fifth elegy (beginning "Nox erat et somnus," &c.) was not contained in ...

— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... been sculptured on this tomb, though it belongs to a woman: but the daughters of heroes may have their monuments adorned with the trophies of their fathers; what a beautiful union is that of innocence and valour! There is an elegy of Propertius which paints better than any other writing of antiquity, this dignity of woman among the Romans, more imposing, more pure than the worship paid to them during the age of chivalry. Cornelia, dying in her youth, addresses to her husband the ...

— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... American bird, and not the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of ...

— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... upon you and flattery falls sweet on your ear, and you are in danger of forgetting the final end of all ambition read "Grays Elegy." ...

— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt

... trace Polish proverbs, Polish turns of phrase. Tears were seen to rise to his eyes as, gazing at the beautiful panorama from a favourite spot of his in the Jura, a French friend recited Arnault's elegy on the homeless and wandering leaf, torn from the parent oak, in which the Pole read the story of his own exile. Education of the lower classes, for which he had already made so strong a stand, continued to be one of the matters in which he most keenly interested himself. ...

— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner

... pillow-cases were embroidered in silks of different colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings; but at that period lace was, professedly, only made by nuns for the service of the Church, and ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... the Fates have wrought, Unless the Fates themselves should weep and wish Their curbless power had been controlled in this? For thy loss, worthiest Lord, no mourning eye Has flood enough; no muse nor elegy Enough expression to thy worth can lend; No, though thy Sidney had survived his friend. Dead, noble Brooke shall be to us a name Of grief and honour still, whose deathless fame Such Virtue purchased as makes us to be Unjust to Nature in lamenting thee; Wailing ...

— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various

... quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular coincidence, the news of his decease reached the United States simultaneously with the arrival of the ship in James River with the colossal bronze statue of Washington, ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... profits as he could derive from writing for periodical publications. There is no reason to suppose that he was indebted to Lyttelton for more than the commendation of his genius, and for some criticism on his poems; and even this favour was denied to the most beautiful among them, his Elegy on Mary, Queen of Scots. The cause assigned for the exclusion was, that poetry should not consecrate what history must condemn, a sacred principle if it he applied to the characters of those yet living, but of more doubtful obligation ...

— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... press, on which Franklin exercised his skill in repairing, and a small worn-out font of type. Keimer himself, who seems to have been a grotesque compound of knave and crank, was engaged at once in composing and setting up in type an elegy on the death of a prominent young man. He is the only poet to my knowledge who ever used the composition-stick instead of a pen for the vehicle of inspiration. The elegy may still be read in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia, and on perusing it we ...

— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More

... period. People had become fairly tired of the jingle of Pope's imitators, and the new era had not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated ...

— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his mother, "are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort are a jolly, lively kind of animals, more industrious than Italians usually ...

— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... hand as the rest. To be sure, these two are not numbered, so that I was long undecided as to just what their proper position might be. At one time I imagined they must belong at the middle of the cycle where at the end of Elegy XIII Priapus' mother summons her son. Obviously Goethe, just returned north from his two years in Italy (1786-88), and alienated from prim, courtly friends (especially since he had taken a girlfriend into his cottage), had no thought of publication ...

— Erotica Romana • Johann Wolfgang Goethe

... others. My father never was a great admirer of Shakspeare, the English idolatry of whom he used to attack with some severity. He cared little for any English poetry except Milton (for whom he had the highest admiration), Goldsmith, Burns, and Gray's Bard, which he preferred to his Elegy: perhaps I may add Cowper and Beattie. He had some value for Spenser, and I remember his reading to me (unlike his usual practice of making me read to him) the first book of the Fairie Queene; but I took little pleasure in it. The poetry of the present century he saw ...

— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... not the long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman"; past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous "Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How those lines run in one's head this bright summer evening, as from our railway carriage we note the great ...

— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... genius. The true principles of criticism have long ago established the doctrine, that the composition of a beautiful song, or even of a perfect epigram, deserves to be considered as difficult a task, and as rare an achievement, as the production of an ode or of an elegy; and though it may be objected that, for the purposes of translation, the song is generally much more ungrateful than the more imposing production, yet we could not consider ourselves as fulfilling our promise, (of holding up to our countrymen a faithful mirror of Pushkin's poetry,) ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... applicable to those amphibious animals that haunt the banks of rivers and the shores of the sea, and was probably used by the prophet with a reference to the seal species, which suckle their young in the manner described in his pathetic elegy. ...

— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... but the combatants were soon separated; the actors and their antagonists fell on each other's necks, and a Homeric poet, who had compiled an elegy for the evening on the "Gods coerced by the hosts of the new superstition," made up simply of lines culled from the Iliad and Odyssey, seized this favorable opportunity. He had begun to read it at the ...

— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... wrote him a fine elegy (p. 115); and Domitius Marsus a neat epigram. The former promised him an immortality equal to Homer's; the latter sent him to Elysium at Virgil's side. These excessive eulogies are the more remarkable in that Tibullus stood, proudly or indolently, aloof ...

— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... passing the colleges at Eton, and seeing the boys out playing cricket; had an excellent opportunity to think how true Gray's poem on the Prospect of Eton is to boy-nature then, now, and forever. We were bent upon looking up the church which gave rise to his Elegy in a Country Churchyard, intending, when we got there, to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, ...

— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Romans. I find, especially, that the Italians come nearer to them; perhaps, because they are more proper than others to refine on pleasure. This is the character of the nation, of the truth of which I shall give no other proof than the last lines of an elegy, written by Samazarius, a Neapolitan gentleman." The sense of which ...

— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus

... Persian nm, as to make it ridiculous to suppose that they sprang from the same root. We must confess," he adds, "that these researches are very obscure and uncertain, and you will allow, not so agreeable as an ode of Hafez, or an elegy of Amr'alkeis." In a letter, dated 1787, he says: "You will be surprised at the resemblance between Sanskrit ...

— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... in 1535-6, he must have died in 1564. The tablet referred to also contains Buchanan's lines. Omnia quae longa, &c., celebrating his learning, and lamenting his premature fate. Dempster likewise quotes these lines and another elegy on his death, by Buchanan. (Opera, vol. ii. pp. 106, 120,) and says, that Alexander Cockburn, who had spent several years abroad, published various works, of which he had only seen three, the titles of which he specifies; but he mistakes the date of his death, in placing it in 1572, and ...

— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... deepest feelings in the world about it. The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy, which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave. Our Poet Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate things: for example in ...

— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... Salamander To Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough On the Union On Mrs. Biddy Floyd The Reverse Apollo Outwitted Answer to Lines from May Fair Vanbrugh's House Vanbrugh's House Baucis and Philemon Baucis and Philemon The History of Vanbrugh's House A Grub Street Elegy The Epitaph A Description of the Morning A Description of a City Shower On the Little House A Town Eclogue A Conference To Lord Harley on his Marriage Phyllis Horace, Book IV, Ode ix To Mr. Delany An Elegy To Mrs. Houghton Verses written on a Window On another ...

— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... and more frequently quoted, than those of any other English poet. Where is the person who does not remember with feelings approaching to enthusiasm, the impressions made on his youthful fancy by the enchanting language of the "Elegy written in a Country Church-yard?" Who can ever forget the impressions with which he first read the narrative of the "hoary-headed swain," and the deep emotion felt on perusing the pathetic epitaph, "graved on the stone, beneath ...

— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... Anthology was a new book, but that it was a new book from America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the boarding-house of the Autocrat ...

— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale called Carola, ...

— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... compass of religious poetry, Milton's and Klopstock's not excepted, nothing can be found to surpass the elegy of Zion," says a modern writer, a non-Jew.[9] This soul-stirring "Lay of Zion," better than any number of critical dissertations, will give the reader a clear insight into the character and spirit of Jewish ...

— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... despair had sunk into a softened recollection, that it was possible even to breathe forth that wail over the Flowers of the Forest which all Scotland knows. In the first shock of such an appalling event there is no place for elegy. There was a broken cry of anguish throughout the country, echoed from castle and cottage, where the poor women clung together, mistress and maid equal in the flood of common loss: and there was at the ...

— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... wrote, as I have said, the descriptive allegorical poem which gave Botticelli ideas for his "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". He lives chiefly by his Latin poems; but he did much to make the language of Tuscany a literary tongue. His elegy on the death of Lorenzo has real feeling in it and proves him to have esteemed that friend and patron. Like Pico, he survived Lorenzo only two years, and he also was buried in Dominican robes. Perhaps the finest feat of Poliziano's life was his action in slamming the ...

— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... during his hard struggle to read the masters, and when, without malice, I quoted a chunk of Grey's 'Elegy' to him, the poor devil's jaw fell, he withdrew his blank refusal to sell the place to me, pocketed my cheque, packed his grip, and slouched off then and there, looking as if a charge of dynamite had blown his chest away. ...

— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... when Eumolpus, who was himself almost drunk, was seized with the notion of satirizing bald pates and branded rascals, but when he had exhausted his chilly wit, he returned at last to his poetry and recited this little elegy upon hair: ...

— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... describes the heavens and the earth, the stars in their constellations, the arrangement of time in the official calendar, with some geography, mythology, and cosmogony. In the fifteenth century the King of Tezcuco published sixty hymns in honor of the Supreme Being, with an elegy on the destruction of a town, and another on ...

— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... Writer of Epic and Elegy.—Epic poetry narrates in grand style the achievements of heroes—the poet telling the story as if present. It is simple in construction and uniform in meter, yet it admits of the dialogue and the episode, and though ...

— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated further without destroying all spontaneous impulse. ...

— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry. Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is crowded with lines worn smooth ...

— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... and damaged, and his fount of English types nearly worn out. Possessing much more ingenuity than Keimer, and understanding a printing-press much better, he went to work, and in a short time put it into decent order for service. Keimer was composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, an excellent young man who worked for Bradford, and who had recently died; and he agreed to send for Benjamin to print it off when it was ready. With this arrangement, Benjamin returned to Mr. Bradford to eat and lodge. ...

— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer

... Cervantes's death, an exceptionally fine collection of editions of his works and of rare plates illustrating episodes from them. Notable among the books was a first edition of his earliest published poems, four redondillas, a copla and an elegy, on the death, October 3, 1568, of Elizabeth de Valois, third wife of Philip II, and sister of Charles IX of France.[13] Dark rumors were afloat for some time that she had been poisoned by order of her husband. Among the other treasures in the Hispanic Museum exhibition was the earliest imprint ...

— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz

... his elegy upon the death of Thyrza, "far too beautiful," says Moore, "and too pure to have been inspired by a mortal being," what pathos, what sensitiveness! What charm in his sonnets to Guinevre! What soft melancholy, what profound and intimate ...

— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... the light. Born and nurtured in penury, inured to hardship, coarse food, and scanty clothing,—the story of his youth is full of pathos. Small wonder that when asked in his later years to tell something of his early life, he replied by quoting a line from Gray's Elegy: ...

— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... all fitting into harmony with the movement of his body. So came the chants and songs of work and of triumph. For the dead warrior the moan of lamentation fitted itself to the slower moving to and fro of the mourner, and hence came the elegy. In its first expression this was but inarticulate, half action, half music, dumbly voicing the emotion through the senses; its rhythms were all for the ear and it had little meaning beyond the crude representation of some ...

— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... wrists tight at the clasp of her waist, and letting her chin fall on her throat, shook her body fretfully, much as a pettish little girl might do. Wilfrid grimaced. "Tick-tick" was not a pathetic elegy ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... consisted of an old shattered press and one small, worn-out font of English, which he was then using himself, composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, before mentioned, an ingenious young man, of excellent character, much respected in the town, clerk of the Assembly, and a pretty poet. Keimer made verses too, but very indifferently. He could not be said to write them, for his manner was to compose them ...

— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... masterpiece, which had been begun in England, under the encouragement of Sidney, probably before 1580. The knightly Sidney died heroically at the battle of Zutphen, in 1586, and Spenser voiced the lament of all England in the beautiful pastoral elegy Astrophel which he composed in memory of "the most noble and ...

— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... initial letter has only become silent in these later lazy centuries. The Romans turned it into Uriconium; but after their departure, it was captured and burnt to the ground by a party of raiding West Saxons, and its fall is graphically described in the wild old Welsh elegy of Llywarch the Aged. The ruins are still charred and blackened by the West Saxon fires. The English colonists of the neighbourhood called themselves the Wroken-saetas, or Settlers by the Wrekin—a word analogous to that of Wilsaetas, or Settlers by the Wyly; Dorsaetas, or Settlers ...

— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... civilization, in a republic just rising to the glories of empire, was to be sacrificed to the mad notion of petty "State Sovereignty," by a sworn band of desperadoes. How sad when other generations would ask, where is the Federal Government, to be answered only by poets, who would sing her elegy, as in the past they have sang ...

— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer

... He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy ...

— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... slow journeys; and there, in the cooler air of his own country, under its skies of milkier blue, the sweetest flower of his genius sprang up. There have been poets whose whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteen lines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem; and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted ...

— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... in hiding under straw, when this disgrace befell me, or he may have noted that I was too raw and young an Atlas to carry the first-class Family Mansion in a knowing manner. Be this as it may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did to the youth in Gray's Elegy—he marked me for his own. And the way in which the Beadle did it, was this: he summoned me as a Juryman ...

— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic ...

— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without considering their deserts.' I believe this to be strictly and equally true of the appeal which Poetry makes to each of us, child or man, in his degree. As Johnson said of Gray's "Elegy," it 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' It exalts us through the best of us, by telling us something new yet not strange, something that we recognise, something that we too ...

— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... But there was a craving for the expression of individual feeling. Hence, lyrical poetry re-appeared, not in the shape of religious songs, as in the old time, but in a form to touch all the chords of sentiment. Two new types of verse appeared,—the Elegiac and the Iambic. At first the elegy was probably a lament for the dead. It was accompanied by the soft music of the Lydian flute. The instruments which the Greeks had used were string-instruments. The early Greek elegies related to a variety of themes,—as war, ...

— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... is a yarahui or mournful elegy, of which there are so many in the Quichua language. The singers of them ...

— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham

... looking upon the monuments of the dead. We step not aside to inspect a tomb, or pause to be saddened by an elegy. The noble pile in the foreground is rather an emblem of age than of mortality; and the interest with which we perambulate its ruins is not the less pleasurable because we do not know much that is certain of its antiquity, its founders, or ...

— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... This vehement elegy, in which truth was mingled with deception, completely duped the marquise. Claude Vignon had told Conti the reasons for his departure, and Beatrix was, of course, informed of them. She determined therefore to behave with generosity ...

— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... Hafsa, of this family, who made such a mistake (in a poet depending on the beneficence of the exalted) as to commit himself to the sweeping statement, in his elegy on the death of Maan, the Emir, that patronage had died with him. "It is said," Ibn Khallikan relates, "that Marwan, after composing this elegy, could never gain anything by his verses, for, as often as he celebrated the praises of a khalif or of any other ...

— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... was then entering the unknown future. A few moments after, and the soul of George Almont was summoned to leave its earthly tenement. When the small procession that had followed his remains to their last resting-place turned from the new-made grave, the two following lines from Gray's Elegy came unbidden ...

— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell

... Sepulchral altars.—Ver. 480. The 'sepulchralis ara' is the funeral pile, which was built in the form of an altar, with four equal sides. Ovid also calls it 'funeris ara,' in the Tristia, book iii. Elegy xiii. line 21.] ...

— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... Stoke Poges, and I want you to see it, for it's such a lovely spot. Probably you have all learned in school parts of Gray's 'Elegy,' and very likely you never cared or thought much about the poem. Even if that's true, you can't possibly help loving this peaceful, beautiful place, in which ...

— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson

... whole Canadian population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which he would "rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;" but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, "So much the better; then I shall not live to see ...

— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... to address Job, "Art thou indeed Job, a king equal in rank with ourselves?" And when Job said Aye, they broke out into lamentations and bitter tears, and all together they sang an elegy, the armies of the three kings, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, joining in the choir. Again Eliphaz began to speak, and he bemoaned Job's sad fortune, and depicted his friend's former glory, adding the refrain to each sentence, "Whither hath departed ...

— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... winter slew him, we do not know. In 1601 Fitzgeoffrey published a short Latin elegy on Nash in his "Affaniae," alluding in happy phrase to the twin lightnings of his armed tongue and his terrible pen; and Nash had six lines of tempered praise in "The Return from Parnassus." But all we know of the cause or manner of Nash's death has to be collected from a passage in "A Knight's ...

— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... would do honour to the greatest name in our literature, but it proved incontestibly that Tickell, as a poet, was superior to the master whom he so loved and honoured. His reputation hangs upon this elegy, which Fox pronounced perfect.[34] The Prospect of Peace, which passed through several editions, had at one time a considerable reputation, not assuredly for its poetry, but because it appealed to ...

— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... yaravie is in singing; both convey the expression of a deeply troubled heart. The yaravie has been imitated by the Spaniards in their own language, and some of the imitations are very beautiful; but they have not been able to reach the deep melancholy of the Quichua elegy. The modern poetry of the Indians is inferior to the old; the words are a mixture of Quichua and Spanish, and are scarcely intelligible. The Spanish words have often Quichua terminations affixed to them; on the other hand, sometimes the Quichua words are inflected after ...

— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... Nancy was gone; and Harry Esmond blushed that he had not a single tear for her, and fell to composing an elegy in Latin verses over the rustic little beauty. He bade the dryads mourn and the river-nymphs deplore her. As her father followed the calling of Vulcan, he said that surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an ugly shrew, as he remembered ...

— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful ...

— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... do indeed flow musically. I wish I had his poems here. I should like to read to you his Elegy on the Ruins of an Ancient Castle. It is an imitation of Gray's Elegy. You have ...

— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... wonder and sneer at him; but amongst our little circle of friends we may be sure he found admiring listeners. The young General had the romance of a boy on many matters. He delighted in music and poetry. On the last day of his life he said he would rather have written Gray's Elegy than have won a battle. We may be sure that with a gentleman of such literary tastes our friend George would become familiar; and as they were both in love, and both accepted lovers, and both eager for happiness, no doubt they must have had many sentimental conversations ...

— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sad elegy would have continued for hours, had not a servant approached with letters, which he distributed, two to Arthur Mordaunt and one to Mr. Winterham. A close observer might have seen that two of the envelopes were identical. Arthur ...

— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... the same hand as the rest. To be sure, these two are not numbered, so that I was long undecided as to just what their proper position might be. At one time I imagined they must belong at the middle of the cycle where at the end of Elegy XIII Priapus' mother summons her son. Obviously Goethe, just returned north from his two years in Italy (1786-88), and alienated from prim, courtly friends (especially since he had taken a girlfriend into his cottage), had no thought ...

— Erotica Romana • Johann Wolfgang Goethe

... hoped through a dreary twelvemonth. With the ripe autumn closed the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular coincidence, the news of his decease reached the United States simultaneously with the arrival of the ship in James River with the colossal bronze statue ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... a hieroglyphical Elegy on the Dumps, consisting of one thousand and one lines; the characters,—herons, weeping-willows, and ravens, supposed to have been traced by a quill ...

— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... distinguished personage, as Thomas Jefferson, for example, he soon has the eyes and the ears of the world; whilst others, more worthy, perhaps, in all the elements of true greatness, are left unnoticed and unknown. This thought awakens my recollection of a stanza in Gray's 'Elegy.' It touches tenderly and beautifully upon the neglect and lack of appreciation often experienced by real beauty, virtue and goodness. Here is ...

— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... Castilian tongue. A favorite theme is, of course, the old story which is ever new. The civil wars have inspired many pathetic compositions, and poems like Salome Urena's apostrophe to the ruins of colonial times, Bienvenido S. Nouel's elegy on the ruins left by the late revolutions, and Enrique Henriquez' "Miserere!", gems of verse, are veritable cries of anguish at the desolation wrought by fratricidal strife. Perhaps it is the poets' sorrow at the misfortunes of their country which is the cause of the note of sadness so often ...

— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... English, and German literature, and find no niche for the Bible, superior to all in moral elevation and literary charm and inspiration? "Ruth" is easily the superior of "Paul and Virginia" or "Vicar of Wakefield." "Lamentations" is as noble an elegy as sorrow has set to words; the Gospels are not surpassed by Boswell's "Johnson" in power of recreating the subject of the biography; the Psalms sing themselves without aid of harp or organ; "The Acts" is a ...

— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... that does that for me," she replied. "I am not the same, I feel queer; besides I am never two days alike. To-day I have the air of a mad woman, and to-morrow shall be as grave as an elegy. I change with the weather, I don't know why. You see, I am capable of anything, according to the moment. There are days when I would like to kill people,—not animals, I would never kill animals,—but people, yes, and other days when I weep at a mere thing. ...

— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... terse and sometimes obscure epigrams; he utters them in a didactic tone, as of one who can speak with the commanding voice of Delphic wisdom. The moralizing of Bacchylides is rather an utterance of quiet meditation, sometimes recalling the strain of Ionian gnomic elegy. ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... Barley Broth Calf's Heart The Christmas Pudding Apple Pie Lobster Salad Stewed Steak Green Pea Soup Trifle Mutton Chops Barley Water Boiled Chicken Stewed Duck and Peas Curry The Railway Gilpin Punch Elegy Punch The Boa and the Blanket Punch The Dilly and the D's Punch A Book in a Bustle Punch Stanzas for the Sentimental. Punch 1. On a Tear which Angelina observed trickling down my nose at Dinner-time 2. On my refusing Angelina a kiss ...

— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... fall into the background. So when the world has admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet. De minimis non curat might be applied to such cases without any very violent extravagance. The first thought that must always rise to the mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous ...

— Milton • John Bailey

... him, and frowned on me, I then had been that heavy fool, not he: Just this had been my funeral elegy. Thy arts and falsehood I before did know, But this last baseness was concealed till now; And 'twas no more than needful to be known; I could be cured by such an act alone. My love, half blasted, yet in time would shoot; But this last tempest rends ...

— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... beloved by his pupils and associates, and was identified with the brilliant group—Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell,—each of whom has written of him. Lowell considered his 'Elegy on Agassiz,' written in Florence in 1874, among his best verses; Longfellow wrote a poem for 'The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz,' and Holmes 'A Farewell to Agassiz' on his departure for the Andes, whose affectionate and humorous ...

— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Northern elegies are less sweet or less thrilling in their grief than those of England in the kindred forms of verse. It is enough to think of Gudrun's Lament in the "Elder Edda," or of Sonatorrek, Egil Skallagrimsson's elegy on the death of his two sons. It was not any congenital dulness or want of sense that made the Sagas generally averse to elegy. No mere writer of Sagas was made of stronger temper than Egil, and none of them need have been ashamed of lamentation ...

— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... hair and spake, saying, "I am a descendant of Ali;" and he entered the city along with the caravan from Hijaz, saying, "I come a pilgrim from Mecca;" and he presented a Casidah or elegy to the king, saying, "I have composed it!" The king gave him money, treated him with respect, and ordered him to be shown much flattering attention; till one of the courtiers, who had that day returned ...

— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... the miscellaneous poetry of this period, without some notice of the "Coplas" of Don Jorge Manrique, [28] on the death of his father, the count of Paredes, in 1474 [29]. The elegy is of considerable length, and is sustained throughout in a tone of the highest moral dignity, while the poet leads us up from the transitory objects of this lower world to the contemplation of that imperishable existence, which Christianity has opened ...

— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... half-famished, Guy rubbed hands that would have felled an ox, and chuckled out, "Such fun!" If we stuck in a bog, if we were caught in a thunder-storm, if we were pitched head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break in, Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder heart never ...

— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... intimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to any tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic or elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let us suppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written a sweeter elegy than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of a friend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, "Go to, I will be Sophocles"; can we imagine that the tragic result would have been other than tragical indeed for the credit of his gentle ...

— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... be called a poem. It would not be possible to write satire, epic, idyl, not even elegy, upon that "rat-hole philosophy," as Mr. Emerson once styled the new fetichism of the mahogany tables. It has not one element that asks the sense of beauty to incorporate it, or challenges the weapon of wit to transfix ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... Henry Carey From "Snaith Marsh" Anonymous When at Hame wi' Dad Anonymous I'm Yorkshire too Anonymous The Wensleydale Lad Anonymous A Song 1. Thomas Browne A Song 2. Thomas Browne The Invasion: An Ecologue Thomas Browne Elegy on the Death of a Frog David Lewis Sheffield Cutler's Song Abel Bywater Address to Poverty Anonymous The Collingham Ghost Anonymous The Yorkshire Horse Dealers Anonymous The Lucky Dream John Castillo The Milkin'-Time J. H. Dixon I Niver can call Her my Wife Ben Preston ...

— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... India as a chaplain. In addition to his chaplaincy, he held the office of preceptor to one of the native princes of Hindostan. He died at Bhoog, in the kingdom of Cutch, on the 25th of September 1830; and if we add that he was a man of remarkable learning, his elegy may be ...

— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... turn, under the patronage of that most cultured family, the Herberts, Breton being a protege of "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," whom Browne (and not Ben Jonson, as is commonly said) eulogised thus in elegy. George Wither, being Browne's intimate friend, was presumably not unappreciated by the kinsfolk of George Herbert. Thus do they appear as in ...

— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)

... was asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':— ...

— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... There was an old damaged press, on which Franklin exercised his skill in repairing, and a small worn-out font of type. Keimer himself, who seems to have been a grotesque compound of knave and crank, was engaged at once in composing and setting up in type an elegy on the death of a prominent young man. He is the only poet to my knowledge who ever used the composition-stick instead of a pen for the vehicle of inspiration. The elegy may still be read in Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia, and on perusing it we may ...

— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More

... Pope. Cf. "Biographia Literaria," ch. 2: "I felt almost as if I had been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated Elegy. I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I can not read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer ...

— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under the year 1106: 'Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers.' Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow. This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb. Now, even before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss written between the lines. This gloss quotes, for the explanation of obsolete words, ...

— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... parents almost as much as children, when we advised that a great deal of poetry should not be read by very young pupils; the labour and difficulty of explaining it can be known only to those who have tried the experiment. The Elegy in a country church-yard, is one of the most popular poems, which is usually given to children to learn by heart; it cost at least a quarter of an hour to explain to intelligent children, the youngest of whom was at the time ...

— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... at all times interesting, if not constantly reliable. After a reading of Gray's "Elegy" by a fourth standard class, the boys were asked what was meant by "fretted vaults," and one youth replied—"The vaults in which these poor people were buried; their friends came and fretted over them." Asked what he understood by "Elegy," ...

— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... many other pieces, Jeffreys's Elegy, the Letter to the Lord Chancellor exposing to him the sentiments of the people, the Elegy on Dangerfield, Dangerfield's Ghost to Jeffreys, The Humble Petition of Widows and fatherless Children in the West, the Lord Chancellor's Discovery and Confession made ...

— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... woe, worn out, upon his chilling banks "Her limbs extending. There her very griefs, "Pour'd with her tears, still musically sound. "Mourning, her words in a soft dying tone "Are heard, as when of old th' expiring swan "Sung his own elegy. Wasted at length "Her finest marrow, fast she pin'd away; "And vanish'd quite to unsubstantial air. "Yet still tradition marks the spot, the muse "Of ancient days, still Canens call'd the place, "In honor of the ...

— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... is an elegy of a typical pioneer scholar of the Renaissance period, sung by the leader of the chorus of disciples, and interspersed with parenthetical directions to them, while they all bear the body of their master to its appropriate burial-place on the highest mountain-peak. A humorous sense of disproportion ...

— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning

... Song for the Princess Charlotte of Wales" was only surpassed in feebleness by Coleridge's "Israel's Lament." Campbell composed a laboured elegy, which was "spoken by Mr ... at Drury Lane Theatre, on the First Opening of the House after the Death of the Princess Charlotte, 1817;" and Montgomery wrote a hymn on "The Royal Infant, Still-born, ...

— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's," "Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good fortune. And yet we know that Paradise Lost is a greater work than this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own elegy. There is ...

— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater

... for sombreness or radiancy? Well, he takes words, and by selecting them, by combining them, by harmonizing them with a master's hand, he sets before us certain magic phrases wrought into a song, an ode, an elegy, or whatsoever form of creation is most apt and true, and he makes us see just what he sees and feel just what he feels, printing it all upon our own ...

— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... which find their material in external events and circumstances. Epic poetry is written in a grand style, generally in pentameter, or hexameter; while the lyric adopts any verse that suits the emotion. The principal classes of lyric poetry are the song, the ode, the elegy, ...

— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... ancient poem, printed among those of Taliesin, called the "Elegy of Owain ap Urien," and containing several very beautiful and spirited passages ...

— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... period which suggest genius and influence. Edward Young had just published his "Night Thoughts," Thomson, the poet and author of "The Seasons," and Isaac Watts had just passed away, Lord Littleton had written "The Conversion of St. Paul," Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" was being eagerly read by the people, Blackstone's famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England," had made a profound impression, Johnson had completed his "Dictionary" and Oliver Goldsmith was writing his immortal works. There were others who were ...

— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean

... the men," said The Infant. "He had them all down in rhyme as soon as ever they had done anything. He was a great bard. He was always ready with an elegy when we picked up a Boh - ...

— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... long been exercising myself in writing, improving my style, arranging my thoughts, and enabling myself to communicate the knowledge I might amass. Of sermons I had written some dozens; and the most arduous of the efforts of poetry had been attempted by me; from the elegy to the epic poem, each had suffered my attacks. And, though I myself was not so well satisfied with my performances as to complete these daring labours, yet, I had so far familiarised myself to a selection of words, and phrases, as to be able to compose with much more facility than ...

— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... carpenters, the fox-hunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any time ...

— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... imagination" in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century—of Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the abstraction remains an abstraction. But in Coleridge's poem all nature is alive with the life of men. Other elements of "that ...

— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... had received from the detective in the elucidation of baffling crime mysteries. It arose from an entirely different cause. Wolfe is supposed to have said that he would sooner have been remembered as the author of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" than as the conqueror of Quebec. Mr. Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English Review than the chief constable of Norfolk. His tastes were bookish; Nature had intended him for the librarian ...

— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... squarely to supply the want. The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail, if he ...

— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its depth ...

— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... of Array for this county, and on May 28, 1645, had the honour of entertaining his sovereign at Cotes, after which he was fined 1114l. by the parliamentary sequestrators. He was the last of the family who resided at Cotes; and amongst his poems is "An Elegy on the Death of my never enough lamented master, King Charles I." The others are chiefly of a melancholy turn. Sir Henry, his second son, died soon after his father, unmarried; whereupon his title and estate went to his next brother Sir Gray, ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various

... Preface Dedication The Wrexham Eisteddfod and the "Death of Saul" Historical Note DEATH OF SAUL Episode the First Episode the Second Episode the Third Episode the Fourth Palm Sunday in Wales Elegy on the late Crawshay Bailey, Esq. Nash Vaughan Edwardes Vaughan; a Monody Monody on the Death of Mrs. Nicholl Carne Elegiac Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Grenfell In Dreams Mewn Cof Anwyl: on the Death of John Johnes, Esq., of Dolaucothy Elegiac In Memoriam To Clara E.H.R. A.R. Venus and Astery ...

— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... Life of Guildford, 220.; Jeffreys' Elegy; Luttrell's Diary; Oldmixon, 762. Oldmixon was in the crowd, and was, I doubt not, one of the most furious there. He tells the story well. Ellis Correspondence; Barnet, ...

— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... much," said the Reverend John. "I've seen McTurk being hounded up the stairs to elegise the 'Elegy in a Churchyard,' while Beetle and ...

— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... doctrine of life. What he felt at the time may be inferred from a striking essay upon the 'Wealth of Nature,' which he contributed to the 'Saturday Review' of September 24, 1859.[76] It may be considered as a sermon upon the text of Gray's reflections in the 'Elegy' upon the 'hearts once pregnant with celestial fire' which lie forgotten in the country churchyard. What a vast work has been done by the unknown! what must have been the aggregate ability of those who, in less than thirty generations, have changed the England of King Alfred into ...

— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... whom he had so much cause to regard as a rival. What a proof of the victory of love over self is his saying, 'Thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee'! (1 Samuel xxiii. 17). Truly did David sing in his elegy, 'Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'; for in that old world, in which the relations between the sexes had not yet received the hallowing and refinement of Christian times, much of what is ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... disagreeable mission to the unfriendly court of Philip II., where the mortifications which he encountered, joined to the insalubrity of the climate, so impaired his health that he found himself obliged to solicit his recall, which he did in an Ovidian elegy addressed to the queen. The petition of the poet was granted, but too late; he sunk under a lingering malady in October 1565, a few months ...

— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... handkerchiefs, sheets, and pillow-cases were embroidered in silks of different colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings; but at that period lace was, professedly, only made by ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the "Elegy" used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. "The streets," he wrote home to his mother, "are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much that a coach can hardly pass. ...

— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... in 1821. Every reader knows his history and the cause of his death. Shelley says, in the preface to his elegy: ...

— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... suffered a heavier fate. The latter class, consisting of his commentary on his consulship and his history of his own times, is altogether lost. Of the former, which consisted of the heroic poems Halcyone, Limon, Marius, and his Consulate, the elegy of Tamelastes, translations of Homer and Aratus, epigrams, etc., nothing remains, except some fragments of the Phaenomena and Diosemeia of Aratus. It may, however, be questioned whether literature has suffered much by these losses. We are far, indeed, from speaking contemptuously ...

— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... versifiers, agreed that Grotius excelled in Poetry. Scaliger acknowledged his epigrams were admirable[46]. Casaubon being informed that Grotius had written some verses on the death of Theodore Beza, says, "he heard with infinite pleasure that so great a man had his elegy written by so great a poet[47]." Baudius calls him the darling friend of the Muses, and acquaints us that Scaliger thought some of his small poems equal to the best of the ancients[48]. Gerard Vossius speaks of him as the greatest poet of his age, and the prince of poetry. ...

— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny

... seventy-three—and of these last alone can we say that they are in any degree readable; and they are courtly, far-fetched, neat, and that is all. Six hymns remain, and a few fragments of the elegies: but the most famous elegy, on Berenice's hair, is preserved to us only in a Latin paraphrase of Catullus. It is curious, as the earliest instance we have of genuinely ungenuine Court poetry, and of the complimentary lie which does not even pretend to be true; the flattery ...

— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... The elegy of Tickell, maliciously called by Steele "prose in rhyme," is alike inspired by affection and fancy; it has a melodious languor, and a melancholy grace. The sonnet of Gray to the memory of West is a beautiful ...

— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... still hopping about the bush, when the consultation was suddenly brought to a close, by a prophetic view of the portfolio of drawings fresh from boarding-school—moths and roses on embossed paper;—to say nothing of the album, in which I stood engaged to write an elegy on a Java sparrow, that had been the favorite in the family for three days. I rung for gilt-edged, pleaded a world of ...

— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various

... labor which "charms the storms of the soul," (DER SEELE STURM BESCHWORT,) he sought without doubt forgetfulness, which occupation, by rendering the memory torpid, may sometimes procure, though it cannot destroy the sense of pain. At the close of that fine elegy which he names "The Ideal," a poet, who was also the victim of an inconsolable melancholy, appeals to labor as a consolation when a prey to bitter regret; while expecting an early death, he invokes occupation as the last resource against ...

— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... they modulate only from Berlin to Braunschweig and around to Leipzig. While the songs repay study, they are rather marked by a pianistic meditation than a strictly lyric emotion. "Aufmunterung zur Freude" is a tame allegretto; "Wehmuth" is better; "Taeuschung" is a short elegy of passion and depth; "Ruhe in der Geliebten" is best in its middle strain where it is full of rich feeling and harmony. The ending is cheap. "Der gefangene Saenger" is only a slight variant at first on the "Adieu" credited to Schubert; it is ...

— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... The other elegy is shorter and less striking in conception, but gives a similar impression of the importance assigned to Louis de Berquin's ...

— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... Theatres with dulness groan, Embrio's half-form'd, a Progeny unknown: Fine things for nothing, transports out of season, Effects un-caus'd, and murders without reason. Here Worlds run round, and Years are taught to stay, Each Scene an Elegy, each Act a Play.[45] Can the same Pow'r such various Passions move? Rejoice, or weep, 'tis ev'ry thing for Love. The self-same Cause produces Heav'n and Hell: Things contrary as Buckets in a Well; One up, one down, one empty, ...

— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... fortunate bards who obtain fame and honor during life. His learning was deep, his reading extensive, his acquaintance with mankind large. "To him," says Denham in his famous elegy, ...

— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... of Wakefield' sixty years ago was 'uncollected'; a quarter of a century ago it sold for L5; ten years ago it was worth L10; in 1891 a remarkably tall and clean copy, in the original calf as issued, sold at Sotheby's for L94. Gray's 'Elegy,' 1751, sold for L1 16s. in 1888, and for L70 since then. Apropos of this 'Elegy,' there are only three uncut copies known, and one of these was obtained by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Q.C., a few years ago by a stroke of great good luck. He ...

— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect, which was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed; and then three years of school-mastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised—at least, for the few who care to read modern Latin poetry—in his elegy on "The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities." The wretched regent-master, pale and suffering, sits up all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and thumping his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the four-o'clock bell, ...

— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... is perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood abounds in examples of this sort of fun—only that his analogies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the ...

— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... "Maid of Orleans" appeared on the stage, to be followed in 1803 by the "Bride of Messina," and in 1804 by his last great work, his "William Tell." During the same time Schiller composed his best ballads, his "Song of the Bell," his epigrams, and his beautiful Elegy, not to mention his translations and adaptations of English and French plays for the theatre at Weimar. After his "William Tell" Schiller could feel that he no longer owed his place by the side of Goethe to favor and friendship, ...

— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... inclined to quarrel with Gray's way of passing his life, and the poet who had produced so exquisite a masterpiece as the Elegy had a fair right to spend the rest of his days as he pleased. But the temptations to confound a finicking dilettantism with the 'art to live' are so strong, that it is worth while to correct the Rector's admiration for Gray by looking on another picture—one of Gray's most famous contemporaries, ...

— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... Troth with the Dead Dissolute Submergence The Enkindled Spring Reproach The Hands of the Betrothed Excursion Perfidy A Spiritual Woman Mating A Love Song Brother and Sister After Many Days Blue Snap-Dragon A Passing Bell In Trouble and Shame Elegy Grey Evening Firelight ...

— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... inexperienced and clear give variety to the sameness of the English words. —Gray, in the Elegy, has ...

— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... up the church which gave rise to Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," intending when we got there to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, and being stopped ...

— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... say who made the ballads. Nowadays a poet makes a poem, and it is printed with his name upon the title-page. The poem belongs to him, and is known by his name. We say, for instance, Gray's Elegy, or Shakespeare's Sonnets. But many people helped to make the ballads. I do not mean that twenty or thirty people sat down together and said, "Let us make a ballad." That would not have been possible. But, perhaps, one man heard a story and put it into verse. Another then heard it and added something ...

— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... official striplings glance Conceitedly on Tania fair, And views amongst themselves advance Unfavourable unto her. But one buffoon unhappy deemed Her the ideal which he dreamed, And leaning 'gainst the portal closed To her an elegy composed. Also one Viazemski, remarking Tattiana by a poor aunt's side, Successfully to please her tried, And an old gent the poet marking By Tania, smoothing his peruke, To ask her ...

— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... demands, unsatisfied passions and imaginary sufferings.[6] And in estimating the influences which had prepared the way for this mental disposition, Goethe emphasizes the influence of English literature. Young's "Night Thoughts," Gray's "Elegy," Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," even "Hamlet" and his monologues haunted all minds. "Everyone knew the principal passages by heart, and everyone believed he had a right to be just as melancholy as the ...

— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... said, "told me last term that her favorite poem in English literature, is 'Gray's Elegy' on account of it's being so full of calm. Sometimes I think that Sylvia Courtney is rather ...

— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham

... the Heights of Abraham—news of the repulse and subsequent success of, received by Pitt on the same day (note)—presentiment of death upon the mind of, i. 297; impromptu stanzas composed by, on the eve of the attack—Gray's Elegy quoted by, on his way to the Heights of Abraham, i. 298; last words and death of, i. 299; and Montcalm, joint monument erected to the memory of—biographical notice of (note), ...

— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... Longer than it was wont, this side the plain, Belike they mean, since my best friend must die, To shed their silver drops as he goes by. Not all this day here, nor in coming hither, Heard I the sweet birds tune their songs together, Except one nightingale in yonder dell Sigh'd a sad elegy for Philocel. Near whom a wood-dove kept no small ado, To bid me, in her language, 'Do so too'— The wether's bell, that leads our flock around, Yields, as methinks, this day a deader sound. {275} The little sparrows which ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various

... abuses. October: On poetry, which Cuddy says has no encouragement, and laments that Colin neglects it, being crossed in love. November;[TN-174] Colin, being asked by Thenot to sing, excuses himself because of his grief for Dido, but finally he sings her elegy. December: Colin again complains that his heart is desolate because Rosalind loves ...

— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... romantically ascribed to Remus, but which antiquarians generally accord, in conformity with the inscription which it bears, to Caius Cestius, a tribune of the people, who is remembered for nothing else than his sepulchre. In his elegy of Adonais, Shelley, in alluding to the resting-place of Keats beside this remarkable monument, brings in, with rare poetical power, the idea of the word pyramid being derived from [Greek: pyr], and signifying the ...

— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... woods of America to the land of Columbus—from the vineyards of France to the valleys of Yorkshire—as almost to induce a belief in his power of ubiquity.—Allan Cunningham, sympathizing with the sorrows of one "who never told her love," and weaving a tearful elegy over her flower-strewn grave, or painting the fiercer incidents of piratical warfare, on the ocean's solitudes.—Felicia Hemans, her lyre musically blending the song of sounding streams with the spontaneous melody of the "feathered choir" composing ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various

... pamphlets, or in books printed at Mr. Daniel's private press in Oxford. In these, as in all Mr. Bridges's poems, there is a certain austere and indifferent beauty of diction and a memory of the old English poets, Milton and the earlier lyrists. I remember being greatly pleased with the "Elegy on a Lady whom Grief for the ...

— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang

... lady. "I never found any one before who could translate them." She then said she would show me some English lines written on the daughter of a friend of hers who was lately dead, and put some printed lines in a frame into my hand. They were an Elegy to Mary, and were very beautiful, I read them aloud, and when I had finished she thanked me and said she had no doubt that if I pleased I could put them into Welsh—she then ...

— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... the Fruit of a Good Education:—Diderot was ravished by such themes. The last picture he describes as a proof that compositions of that kind are capable of doing honour to the gifts and the sentiments of the artist.[31] The Girl bewailing her dead bird throws him into raptures. "O, the pretty elegy!" he begins, "the charming poem! the lovely idyll!" and so forth, until at length he breaks into a burst of lyric condolence addressed to the weeping child, that would fill four or five ...

— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... There is again, a nobleness of thought, a courageous aim at high and, in a strict sense manly, excellence in many of the writers:—nor can that period be justly termed tame and wanting in originality, which produced poems such as Pope's Satires, Gray's Odes and Elegy, the ballads of Gay and Carey, the songs of Burns and Cowper. In truth Poetry at this as at all times was a more or less unconscious mirror of the genius of the age; and the brave and admirable spirit of Enquiry which made the eighteenth century the turning-time ...

— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... "Sunrise" is an elegy to James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States, who died on September 19, 1881, from a gunshot wound received in an assassination attempt ...

— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... said that Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified and prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer—as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist—ever born of ...

— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... like a special elegy to be read at the grave," he rumbled eagerly. "When and where did the interment ...

— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... thought in His inimitable elegy, which every reader will immediately recollect. Can it be imagined, that nature, which does nothing in vain, nor indeed without a reference to the being who is eminently signalized as lord of the lower creation, has been at pains to decorate these spots, but in anticipation, if one may use ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... access to him chiefly about noon, when the musicians had ceased playing; but one of the best among them tells us how they also pursued him when he walked in his garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber, and if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him with a mendicant ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole population of Olympus. For Leo, prodigal of his money, and disliking to be surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed a generosity in his gifts which was fabulously exaggerated in the hard times that ...

— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... he was asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':— ...

— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... man, was not of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature. His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent with the tendency ...

— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... she comes she brings a book with her, gilt-edged and bound in green morocco like the Byron we read when we were children, or in red morocco like the Elegant Extracts out of which we used to translate Gray's "Elegy," and the "Battle of Hohenlinden," and Cunningham's ...

— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... come for him. How he must have listened to the musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phaedra, formed and re-formed continually in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines are too far from us. These almost chimerical beings withdraw from ...

— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... its classical perfection. Grainger, who translated Tibullus, discusses the possibility of using the "alternate" stanza, but ends by saying that he has generally "preferred the heroic measure, which is not better suited to the lofty sound of the epic muse than to the complaining tone of the elegy."[441] Hoole chooses the couplet for his version of Ariosto, because it occupies the same place in English that the octave stanza occupies in Italian, and because it is capable of great variety. "Of all the various styles used by the best poets," he says, "none seems so well adapted to the mixed ...

— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead, serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be stimulated further without destroying all spontaneous impulse. The reaction to a more masculine and passionate ...

— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... he has learned his A. B. Cs. With time and care, good house-keepers could be made of many of them, and it is too bad to see so many clever, naturally gifted, bright creatures left in ignorance and misery. I think it was in Gray's Elegy that I read the line: "How many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on ...

— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney

... of the "short and simple annals of the poor." But those of whom Gray spoke rest peacefully in the "country churchyard;" their spirits are in heaven, and their history is embalmed in his own immortal Elegy. But these records are of those who yet live and suffer—"Martyrs without ...

— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin