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More "Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Idiot, "the one aim of his life has been to be original, and he couldn't reconcile that with epic poetry." ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... at night; it turns the mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Mother Hubbard's dog is well again - what did I tell you? Pleurisy, pneumonia, and all that kind of truck is quite unavailing against a Scotchman who can write - and not only that, but it appears the perfidious dog is married. This incident, so far as I remember, is omitted from the original epic - ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his senses there!' He sat for eighteen months (age still little above twenty); but privately employed his time, not in repentance, or in serious legal studies, but in writing a Poem on his Henri Quatre. 'Epic Poem,' no less; LA LIGUE, as he then called it; which it was his hope the whole world would one day fall in love with;—as it did. Nay, in two years more, he had done a Play, OEDIPE the renowned name of it; which ran for forty-eight nights' (18th November, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... continued discourses of individuals, excepting when the latter run into the lyrical. They are a complete model of the dramatic use of this species of verse, which, in English, since Milton, has been also used in epic poetry; but in the latter it has assumed a quite different turn. Even the irregularities of Shakspeare's versification are expressive; a verse broken off, or a sudden change of rhythmus, coincides with some pause in the progress of the thought, or the entrance of another mental disposition. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... at country fairs were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,—no, not by the strongest party,—neither then could king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,—by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... surprised therefore to find that the Russians, in becoming acquainted with foreign literature, became imitators and plagiarists. In this kind of work their natural pliancy of mind and powerful histrionic talent made them wonderfully successful. Odes, pseudo-classical tragedies, satirical comedies, epic poems, elegies, and all the other recognised forms of poetical composition, appeared in great profusion, and many of the writers acquired a remarkable command over their native language, which had hitherto been regarded ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... prose show a quite different process of development. In prose, connected narrative has found free expression. In poetry, the epic process is neglected. Besides the formal dirge and highly developed lyric songs (often accompanied and interpreted by dance), the characteristic form is the eulogistic hymn, designed to honor an individual ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him; and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say about Paradise found?" Whereupon the poet wrote his second epic. ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... mingled yarn of human life, tragedy is never far asunder from farce; and it is amusing to retrace in immediate succession to this incident of epic dignity, which has its only parallel by the way in the case of Vasco de Gama, (according to the narrative of Camoens,) when met and confronted by a sea phantom, whilst attempting to double the Cape of Storms, (Cape of Good Hope,) a ludicrous passage, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... are quantities of wild creatures—quail, rabbits, doves, and ground squirrels and, unfortunately, a number of social outcasts. Never shall I forget an epic incident in our history—the head of the family in pajamas at dawn, in mortal combat with a small black-and-white creature, chasing it through the cloisters with the garden hose. Oh, yes, there is plenty of adventure still left, ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... Within a few months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who wants them must buy them at Tonson's ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Freneau stands almost alone, though Connecticut, to be sure, boasted of her Dwight, her Trumbull, and her Barlow. The "Connecticut wits" are interesting personalities; but the society which could read, with anything akin to pleasure, Dwight's Conquest of Canaan—an epic in eleven books with nearly ten thousand lines—was more admirable for its physical endurance than for its poetical intuitions. Latrobe was quite right when he wrote that in America the labor of the hand took precedence over that of ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... to our Roman authors, we can not more happily begin than with Vergil, who of all their poets and ours in the epic style, is without any doubt the one who comes nearest to Homer. Tho obliged to give way to Homer's heavenly and immortal genius, yet in Vergil are to be found a greater exactness and care, it being incumbent on him to take more pains; so that what we lose on the side of eminence ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... Berta I should go to London oftener,' said Picotee, to turn the conversation. 'But she lives mostly in the library. And, O, what do you think? She is writing an epic poem, and employs ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... journalists, novelists, playwrights, college professors, and scientific masters, will doubtless furnish the century to come with one of its most curious and interesting fields of study. It is an episode in evolution which may indeed be termed dramatic, this fifth act of the nineteenth-century epic of France,—or it might be called, of Paris; the story of its pilgrimage from revolution to evolution. M. Melchior de Vogue, himself one of the apostles of the new life, or of the new work in the old life, of France, describes the preparation of the national soil for the growth ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... an undertaking. He produces something which may be delicious in detail but is pretty sure to be unsatisfactory as a whole. He fails to fill his space. His work has the vice of Sidney's Arcadia and the Religio Medici: it is good to dip into. You cannot write an epic as though ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion. What I think of Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem. A hero must be human. Napoleon ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... there are in Canada some fifty thousand; of Icelanders, easily twenty thousand; and so quickly do they merge with Canadian life that you forget they are foreigners. I was a child in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and their rise has been a national epic. I do not believe the first few hundreds had fifty dollars among them. They slept under high board sidewalks for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties on vacant lots the next day. In these they housed the first winter. Though we Winnipeggers did not realize it, it ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... redolent with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus, slightly expurgated though it be, and adapted for the intelligence of youthful minds. Howard Pyle's illustrations render ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... listened to the stupendous epic of a long-lost world. Now I found speech to voice the question ever with me, the thing that lay as close to my heart as did the welfare of Larry, indeed the whole object of my quest—the fate of Throckmartin and those who had passed with him into the Dweller's ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... between Bennington and Troy. Whatever crudities of expression, inaccuracies of rhythm, faults of arrangement, and violations of dramatic law met us from time to time, the earnest purpose of the writer carried us over them all. The book has a fine flavor of the Elizabethan age,—a sustained epic rather than dramatic character, an affluence of quaint, original images; yet the construction was frequently that of a school-boy. In opulence and maturity of ideas, and poverty of artistic skill, the work stands almost alone in literature. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... silver-topped cut crystal bottles. The sight of these afflicted men carrying their heavy burdens from the station to the prison at Pretoria was both amusing and dramatic. At times their speech reached the epic. ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... lost twenty-five thousand men in killed, wounded, and prisoners, one hundred pieces of artillery, and an immense number of wagons, fled in dismay. This terrific conflict has been immortalized by the noble epic of Campbell, which is now familiar wherever the English language ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... of poets, England's glory, Mr. Hayley, that is you!" "Ma'am, you carry all before you, Lichfield swan, indeed you do!" "In epic, elegy, or sonnet, Mr. Hayley, you're divine!" "Madam, take my word upon it, You yourself are all ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... struggles in the International between those who became known later as the anarchists and the socialists remind one of certain Greek stories, in which the outstanding figures seem to impersonate mighty forces, and it is not impossible that one day they may serve as material for a social epic. We all know to-day the interminable study that engages the theologians in their attempts to describe the battles and schisms in the early Christian Church. And there can be no doubt that, if socialism fulfills the purpose which its advocates have in mind, these early struggles in its ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... we understand how Browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... which we must be directed in the nobler branches of our art. Upon this principle the Roman, the Florentine, the Bolognese schools, have formed their practice; and by this they have deservedly obtained the highest praise. These are the three great schools of the world in the epic style. The best of the French school, Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun, have formed themselves upon these models, and consequently may be said, though Frenchmen, to be a colony from the Roman school. Next to these, but in a very different style of ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... swearing much has also been said. But there is one department of oath-making in which he stands unrivalled and unapproachable; I mean the alibi. There is where he shines, where his oath, instead of being a mere matter of fact or opinion, rises up into the dignity of epic narrative, containing within itself, all the complexity of machinery, harmony of parts, and fertility of invention, by which your true ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... Andaman Islands—believed that the earth was at first sterile and dry, all the water having been swallowed by a gigantic frog or toad which was compelled, by queer stratagems, to regurgitate it. These are little children's imaginings. Among the Hindoos the same myth takes the form of an alluring epic—the dragon watching over the celestial waters, of which he has taken possession, is wounded by Indra after a heroic battle, and restores ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... science of war seems to be conceded to him; he is allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his courage ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stand-point of moral idealism the universe resumes something of its pristine ruggedness and grandeur. If, as James says, "the world appears as something more epic than dramatic," the dignity of life is enhanced and not diminished on that account.[19] Life is not a spiritual exercise the results of which are discounted in advance; but is actually creative, fashioning ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Naples—that of Manso, Marquis of Villa,—where Tasso found a home, and where John Milton was entertained at a later day by that hospitable nobleman. I wonder, if he had come to the Villa Nardi and written on the roof, if the theological features of his epic would have been softened, and if he would not have received new suggestions for the adornment of the garden. Of course, it is well that his immortal production was not composed on this roof, and in sight of these seductive shores, or it would have been more strongly flavored with classic mythology ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... race, it stood on tiptoe, eager for adventure and discovery— sending ships to the ends of the world, and round the world, on messages of commerce and friendship, and encouraging with applause and rewards that wonderful spirit of scientific invention, which was the Epic of the youthful nation. The skies of Italy were not bluer than the skies above it; the sunshine of Arcadia not brighter or more genial. It was a city of beautiful, and even splendid, homes; and all ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... sway over the minds of poets from the Elizabethan age onwards. Spenser writes his 'Faerie Queene' "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline," and Milton's audience, fit but few, is composed of scholars whose ears have been attuned to the harmonies of epic verse from their first lisping of Virgilian hexameters, or of latter-day Puritans, like John Bright, who overhear in 'Paradise Lost' the echoes of a faith ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... were more inclined to comment on writings of the past than to produce original work. Literature was engaged in taking stock of itself. Homer was, of course, professedly admired by all, but more admired than imitated. Epic poetry was out of fashion and we find many epigrams of this period—some by Callimachus—directed against the "cyclic" poets, by whom were meant at that time those who were always dragging in conventional and commonplace epithets ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... that the Inspector-General became a sort of comedy-epic in the land of the Czars, the land where each petty town-governor is almost an absolute despot, regulating his persecutions and extortions according to the sage saying of the town-governor in the play, "That's the way God made the world, and the Voltairean free-thinkers can talk against ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... in a mist of fable. According to Suidas he was a contemporary of Kroesus, though Herodotus assigns to him a much remoter antiquity. The latter authority describes him as visiting the northern peoples of Europe and recording his travels in an epic poem, a fragment of which is given here by Longinus. The passage before us appears to be intended as the words of some Arimaspian, who, as belonging to a remote inland race, expresses his astonishment that any men could be found bold enough to commit themselves to the mercy of the sea, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... his hand On Everard's shoulder, with 'I hold by him.' 'And I,' quoth Everard, 'by the wassail-bowl.' 'Why yes,' I said, 'we knew your gift that way At college: but another which you had, 25 I mean of verse (for so we held it then), What came of that?' 'You know,' said Frank, 'he burnt His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books'— And then to me demanding why? 'Oh, sir, He thought that nothing new was said, or else 30 Something so said 'twas nothing—-that a truth Looks freshest in the fashion of the day: God knows: he has a mint of reasons: ask. It pleased me well enough,' ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... though in some he has in vain sacrificed poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats highest when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... greatness, that for our particular Iliad you prove a very nutshell Homer indeed. For I must not disguise it from you that this is exactly the case. It was Homerus in nuce first; and the pitiful purport of the epic results less from any smallness in the action celebrated than from that important law, not, perhaps, wholly new to your own observation, which forbids a pint-measure to contain more than a pint, though you dip it full from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... gold," the residence of Agamemnon, whence he ruled over "many islands and all Argos," [Footnote: Iliad II, 108] is seen to have had no merely legendary preeminence. So conspicuous, in fact, does Mycenae appear in the light as well of archaeology as of epic, that it has become common, somewhat misleading though it is, to call a whole epoch and a whole civilization "Mycenaean." This "Mycenaean" civilization was widely extended over the Greek islands and the eastern portions of continental Greece in the second millennium ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... don't know!" Francis declared, a little impatiently. "The woman is the mystery, of course. Probably my brain was a little over-excited when I came out of Court, and what I imagined to be an epic was nothing more than a tissue of exaggerations from a disappointed wife. I'm sure I'm doing the right thing to go there.... What about a four-ball ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is not a single ballad, but a conglomeration of several, forming a short epic. Ballads representing its component parts are not now extant; although on the other hand there are later ballads founded on certain episodes in the Gest. The compiler availed himself of incidents from other traditional sources, but he produced ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... The Times strongly demurred to the statement that KLINGSOR was an Arabian. The great authority on KLINGSOR was the anonymous thirteenth-century epic poem on Lohengrin, the father of Parsifal, and he had no doubt (1) that the author was either a Czecho-Slovak or a Yugo-Slav; (2) that KLINGSOR, as the etymology suggested, was of the latter race. In these circumstances the attempt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the term he himself used, and that is the only reason why I have recorded it. Indeed, this deservedly great man was, in some sense, my schoolfellow, for he came in the evening to learn French of Monsieur Cherfeuil. He was then engaged to translate an epic, written by one of the Buonapartes, into English verse. I believe that engagement never was carried into effect, notwithstanding the erudite pains Mr —- took to qualify himself to perform it successfully. No man could have laboured more to make himself master of the niceties of the Gallic ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... write the epic of the Devil's Antechamber; I abode there but ten days, as we reckon time. On a cool and clear Easter Sunday morning the summons came to go forth to further adventures. Accompanied by three deputies, but ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Wandering Jew, an epic, the joint production of himself and Captain Medwin, a school-boy production, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, and his first story, Zastrozzi, are the first books of the poet; and their history ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... murmured Mr. Simeon, smiling. "I see you are off upon one of your hobbies. . . . But you will not tell me that the fine rugged epic of Beowulf, to which the historians trace back all that is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so early as Alfred's time. That ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by W, Jackson of Edinburgh. (One of the stock exhibits at "Memory Hall"—as 22 St. James's Place was playfully called by some of the owner's friends—was Milton's receipt to Symmons the printer for the five pounds he received for his epic. This, framed and glazeds hung, according to Lady Eastlake, on one of the doors.[47]) A fourth rare book was William Bonham's black-letter Chaucer, a folio which had been copiously annotated in MS. ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... for war; the "Odyssey" for wandering; but where is the great domestic epic? Yet it is but commonplace to say, that passions may rage round a tea-table, which would not have misbecome men dashing at one another in war-chariots; and evolutions of patience and temper are performed at the fireside, worthy to be compared with the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. Men have worshipped ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... Beethov-ian, in its ruggedness, the Chopin of this C minor study is as far removed from the musical dandyisms of the Parisian drawing rooms as is Beethoven himself. It is orchestral in intention and a true epic of the piano. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... from a soldier brother who had taken part in that epic of human gallantry had apparently inspired the Young Doctor. He pointed ahead with a dramatic gesture at the cliffs. "Yonder are the Turks! See, they fly, they fly!" A pair of agitated cormorants, sunning themselves on the rocks, flew seaward with outstretched ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Press of all countries urged on, one against the other, brutally deaf to their misery, representing them as glad and cheerful when they had reached the extreme of human suffering, magnifying them into heroes of epic proportions (before they donned their dingy garb of war they were "lice" that had to be "combed out"), endowing them with absurdly impossible virtues—when they were just ordinary human beings in misfortune with no ambition except ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... time. Even before peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took "the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for the British ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... a gesture of throwing the disreputable epic at my head, and I curved my arm in an attitude only too ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the music in the public estimation. Weber himself, however, was by no means a man to disregard the tenor of the words and characters he was to associate with his music, and was greatly charmed with his English coadjutor's operatic version of Wieland's fairy epic. He was invited to come over to London and himself superintend the production of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and he wrote a number of plays, the very names of which are now forgotten. Few men indeed so well known in his own day have sunk into such insignificance in ours. He wrote eight books of a long and unfinished epic called Gideon, which I suppose no one in the present century has had the hardihood to read; like Young he wrote a poem on The Judgment Day, a theme attempted also, shortly before his death, by John Philips, and that, after his kind, he produced a Pindaric ode goes without saying. A long poem ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... years to learn—that hot rum when taken on a cold and empty stomach must be treated with respect; in fact, a certain amount of coyness is not out of place. Mid was soon being supported on a chair while he delivered an epic on the "soul of a jellyfish"; he was then tossed in the "sacred blanket" and put through other Bedouin initiations; after which he was tucked comfortably in Jock's bed, while Jock, bound hand and foot and rolled in blankets, made horrid Highland remarks ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... washed up to us by the ages, that epic in marble, expressed all that words refused to say: the father and the children in the toils of Fate; the hand upholding for a moment the crushing coil of the serpent, the face raised to a sky devoid of God or pity; the agony, the sweat ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... will say that for the diagram of the squaw hitch and of the diamond hitch I am indebted to an article by Mr. Stewart Edward White in Outing of 1907, and one by Mr. I. J. Bush in Recreation of 1911; for the "medicine song" and several of the star legends, to that Blackfeet epic, "The Old North Trail," by Walter McClintock; for medical and surgical hints, to Dr. Charles Moody's "Backwoods Surgery and Medicine" and to the American Red Cross "First Aid" text-book; for some of the lore, to personal experiences; ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... nothing of the Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann's 'Streifereien') that their 'Dschangariade' is the finest of all epic poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr. Johnson's efforts as a biographer. Consequently, we cannot be ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... In April, the month of piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion, collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not inquireing scrupulously (you will ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... just as he ridicules in 2 Henry IV. Tamburlaine's rant about the kings who draw his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is 'below criticism.' No sort of ridicule was intended. 'The lines, as epic narrative, are superb.' It is true that the language is 'too poetical—the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama'; but this is due to the fact that Shakespeare had to distinguish the style of the speech from that ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... tonight. Malachi Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... always from original sources, has taken the L.L. text of the tale as the basis of her narrative, but much material has been worked into its texture, not only from the L.U. version of the Tain and fragments of other versions, but from very many other Irish epic sources. Some of the material so used has not yet been edited. The object always has been to bring out the great human interests of the story ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... strike us—paradoxical as it may sound to say so—about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its modernness. Of its very nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy or History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and restraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... village, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for the White Rose." His ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... Lied," and in a series of lays of the Icelandic Edda. A matchless warrior, a Dragon-killer and overthrower of Giants, who possesses a magic sword, he conquers the northern Nibelungs and acquires their famed gold hoard. In the great German epic he is the son of Siegmund and Siegelinde, who rule in the Netherlands. Going Rhine-upward to Worms, to Gunther, the King of the Burgundians, he woos and wins Kriemhild, the beautiful sister of that king, after having first ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his Africa. He was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the "old Mantuan," of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost, whose Latin "Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, and who was imitated by a writer who passed for a poet ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... shows him to have been at Hastings by the side of Harold, to have won fame there, to have continued the fight for English liberty as leader of the English patriots, and to have earned a place in the unsung English epic. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... in a lantern, properly used, probably saved both our lives, the lives of some thousands of your brave troops, the fate of the campaign, and, with it, half the thrones of Europe, trembling on the chance of a first campaign. I shall yet have some of my mystical countrymen writing an epic on my Flemish lantern." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... nations. That peculiar simplicity, centrality, and intensity which caused them to originate Monotheism from two independent centres, the only systems of pure Monotheism which have had power in history,—while the same characteristics made their poetry always lyrical, never epic or dramatic, and their most vigorous thought a perpetual sacrifice on the altars of the will,—this had strongly impressed us; and we seemed to find in it a striking contrast to the characteristic genius of the Aryan or Indo-Germanic nations, with their imaginative interpretations of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Beowulf. The inexperienced teacher will find a splendid version, "The Story of Beowulf," ready-made in Wyche's Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them. To work from the complete epic, use any of the translations by Child, Tinker, Gummere, or Hall. "Perhaps it is not too much to assert . . . that in its lofty spirit, its vigor, and its sincerity, . . . it reflects traits which are distinctive of English-speaking people ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... some of us will have been so talked by the more superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die Gotterdammerung as the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more Wagnerian than all the other three sections put together, as not to dare notice this startling atavism, especially if we find the trio-conjurations more exhilarating than the metaphysical discourses of Wotan in the ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... the Finnish epic, Kalevala, Nasshut throws the Lemminkainen into the waters of the river of the dead. Lemminkainen was dismembered, but his mother fished out the pieces, one of which was missing, put them together and brought them to life in her womb. According to Stucken's ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... which will read like the romance it really is. The essayists will turn to it with joy. And the poets will discover new aspects of beauty which have been hidden from them through the ages; and as men's experience "in the wide fields of air" increases, epic material which will tax their most ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... vast epic of the Cosmos, evoked when the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"—an epic printed in stars on blue abysses of illimitable space; in illuminated type of rose leaf, primrose petal, scarlet ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... which you alone know the secret. Three other choruses of the same kind as that of the Blacksmiths, which should sum up the most poetical methods of human activity, and which should be called (unless you advise otherwise) Labourers, Sailors, and Soldiers, would form a lyric epic of which the genius of Rossini or Meyerbeer would be proud. I know I have no right to make any such claim, but your kindness to me has always been so great that I have a faint hope of obtaining this new and glorious favor. If, however, this work would give you even an hour's trouble, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... primitive and essential things will never, anywhere, wholly cease, while mankind lasts. And thus it is that Brown's Ode to the Steam Plough, Jones' Sonnet Sequence on the Automatic Reaping Machine, and Robinson's Epic of the Piscicidal Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper depths of emotion in us. The subjects chosen by these three great poets do not much impress us when we regard them sub specie aeternitatis. Smith has ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... moments of sympathy, their parents would be revealed to them in sudden lights of pathos and old romance. They would listen to some old love-affair of their mother's as though it had been their own, or go out of their way to make their father tell once more the epic of the great business over which he presided, and which, as he conceived it, was doubtless a greater poem than his son would ever write. Yet still even in such genuine sympathy, there was a certain imaginative effort to be made. The gulf between the ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... have the secret of his hold upon the minds of men. He knows how to tell a story, said Professor Hart, in the discussion previously referred to, in Cleveland. He has "an epic unity of plan," writes Professor Jebb. Herodotus has furnished delight to all generations, while Polybius, more accurate and painstaking, a learned historian and a practical statesman, gathers dust on the shelf or is read as a penance. Nevertheless, it may be ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the two Babylonian epics, fragments of which were found on clay tablets in a royal library at Nineveh. The epic of the Creation tells how the god Marduk overcame a terrible dragon, the symbol of primeval chaos, and thus established order in the universe. Then with half the body of the dead dragon he made a covering for the heavens and set therein ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... The epic, most synthetic of literary productions, is no longer in fashion, because, perhaps, of the growing rarity of heroes. On the contrary, simplisme is now deforming the greatest germs in the drama and romance. The weakness ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... all astonishing that in these conditions we find no national epic and no national drama, but a gradual growth of a poetry saturated with physical realism and the final appearance of a dramatic form equipped with the most potent charms of sensuous art. It was in such a period that a special kind of public was developed. ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... from which Saturn and the ancient deities had been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions than with her own. The golden age of the Hebrews was in ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... The story of Ravana is told in the Ramayana, which with the Mahabarata form the two great epic poems of the Hindoos; the latter was written by Vyasa, ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... book-lover: knowing Dante, Boccaccio, and in some degree "Franceys Petrark, the laureat poete," who "enlumined al Itaille of poetry," Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid—his favourite author—and Boethius; as well as Guido delle Colonne's prose epic of the story of Troy, the poems of Guillaume de Machaut, the Roman de la Rose, and a work on the astrolabe by Messahala.[1] We have some excellent pictures of Chaucer's habit of reading. When his day's work is done he goes home and buries ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... bent, And faithless Memory her illusions lent, So vast the outlines of Tradition grew That History wondered at the shapes she drew, And veiled at length their too ambitious hues Beneath the pinions of the Epic Muse. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sequel to La Curee and deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a note of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... child would cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the great child, must cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety; that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross of wood that redeemed ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture, something mysteriously moving and epic.... ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... civilized, the study of liberal accomplishments flourished, having been first introduced by the Bards, the Eubages,[49] and the Druids. The Bards were accustomed to employ themselves in celebrating the brave achievements of their illustrious men, in epic verse, accompanied with sweet airs on the lyre. The Eubages investigated the system and sublime secrets of nature, and sought to explain them to their followers. Between these two came the Druids, men of loftier genius, bound in brotherhoods according to the precepts and example of Pythagoras; ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... story which has been told so often, but which never palls in its interest—that life of the maiden through whose instrumentality France regained her place among the nations. No poet's fancy has spun from out his imagination a more glorious tale, or pictured in glowing words an epic of heroic love and transcendent valour, to compete with the actual reality of the career of this simple village maiden of old France: she who, almost unassisted and alone, through her intense love of her native land and deep pity for the woes of her people, ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... an epic time in the West, a time when the others had been boys. Naturally a quiet man, he had had little to say. He also was known as a dangerous man, and when a quiet and dangerous man seems inclined to talk, it is sometimes worth while ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem of man's destiny and God's ways with him here on this earth, and all in such free, flowing outlines, grand in its simplicity and its epic melody and repose of reconcilement! There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eye-sight and vision for all things—material things no less than spiritual; the horse—'thou hast ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... novel before I was twenty-five. I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art; There married the banker's daughter, And later became president of the bank— Always looking forward to some leisure To write an epic novel of the war. Meanwhile friend of the great, and lover of letters, And host to Matthew Arnold and to Emerson. An after dinner speaker, writing essays For local clubs. At last brought here— My boyhood home, you ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... grave of Davis will spring a massive monument, which will forever remain a landmark in American history,— aye, in the mighty epic of the world! More imposing cenotaphs have risen, costlier mausoleums have charmed the eye, more gigantic monuments have aspired to kiss the clouds; but to the student of mankind none were more significant, to the historian none more interesting, to the poet none will appeal more powerfully through ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to call the author of the 'Love Letters' a new poet. His published volume is a work of immense promise. His fancy is splendid.... The 'Love Letters' are twelve poems, separate, and yet intrinsically one. It is a compound lyric, with an epic theme and somewhat of an epic cast. The theme is the triumph of woman's love. It is the story of love's redemption. It has something of the tone, colour, and luxuriance of Solomon's Song; both, too, have the same theme, ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... Homer's manner, we cannot see why this passage, and indeed the whole poem, should not be thought as good as any one of the episodes in the "AEneid." We are not comparing Mr. Arnold with Virgil: for it is one thing to have written an epic and another to have written a small fragment; but as a working up of a single incident it may rank by the side of Nisus and Euryalus, and deeper chords of feeling are touched in it than Virgil ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the swords of the Greeks in a scene of indescribable carnage and terror. Cassandra and the Trojan women, driven to take shelter in the temple of Cybele, slay themselves rather than fall into the hands of their captors. 'La Prise de Troie' is perhaps epic rather than dramatic, but as a whole it leaves an impression of severe and spacious grandeur, which can only be paralleled in the finest inspirations of Gluck. In the second division of the work, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... to find two works of Art designed more essentially on the same principle than Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral. The Bible narrative transposed into the forms of a Greek epic, required the genius of a Milton to make it tolerable; but the splendour of even his powers does not make us less regret that he had not poured forth the poetry with which his heart was swelling in some form that would have freed him from the trammels which the pedantry of his age imposed ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... and y are both lost. Hence tenesi becomes tenes, and ten the so-called Attic future. Bopp, Vergleich-Grammatik, first ed., p.903. In Latin we have traces of a similar future in forms like fac-so, cap-so, etc. See Neue, Formenlehre, ii. p.421. The Epic dialect sometimes doubles the s when the vowel is short, aidessomai. But this can hardly be considered a relic of the original si, because the same reduplication takes places sometimes in the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... have been strange enough; but in this hour, when no one knew where or how this voyage would end! A real tragedy or some absurd trifle? Probably a trifle; trifles dug more pits than tragedies. Perhaps tragedy was mis-named. What humans called tragedy was epic, and trifles were real tragedies. And then there were certain natures to whom the trifle was epical; to whom the inconsequent was invariably magnified nine diameters; and having made a mistake, would die rather than ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... that speciment that our schoolmaster ain't simply flirtin' with the muses when he originates that epic; no sir, he means business; an' whenever I throws it into the selectmen, I does it jestice. The trustees used to silently line out for home when I finishes, an' never a yeep. It stuns 'em; it shore fills ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... which as yet are incomplete, Describing all the fight in epic style) When the Billycock was going, she'd a dozen prizes towing (Or twenty, as ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... of man does not admit of being put into an equation with cash. The greatest feat, to my mind, an Englishman ever performed was the writing of Paradise Lost. How much did John Milton get in money for his incomparable epic during his lifetime? Five Pounds: and if he had got five million pounds, the recompense would have been absolutely inadequate. History, however, has indemnified Milton for the neglect and poverty he endured. He has shot ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... by his epic poem "Africa," but it is not read today, even by scholars, except in fragments to see how deep are the barren ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of Highland minstrelsy admit of simple classification. The Duan Mor is the epic song; its subdivisions are termed duana or duanaga. Strings of verse and incidents ([Greek: Rhapsodia]) were intended to form an epic history, and were combined by successive bards for that purpose. The battle-song (Prosnuchadh-catha) was the next in importance. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... what woman or what child—that has not heard of the prowess of the Lord of Aquila? Your knightly deeds in the wars 'twixt Pisa and Florence, your feats of arms and generalship in the service of the Venetians, are matters for the making of epic song." ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... for him flow with the wine of gladness; he had no fellowship with the nuptial banquet as painted by Veronese. His pencil shunned the Song of Miriam and the Dance of the Daughter of Herodias; it could not pass, like the pen of England's epic poet, with a light fantastic touch from "Il Penseroso" to "L'Allegro;" his walk was narrow as a convent cloister; his art was attuned to the ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... rescues, and was certain to give rise to a ballad, which would contain much the same formulae as the other two. The ballad-maker, like Homer, always uses a formula if he can find one. But Kinmont Willie is so much superior to the two others, so epic in its speed and concentration of incidents, that the question rises, had Scott even fragments of an original ballad of the Kinmont, "much mangled by reciters," as he admits, or did he compose the whole? No MS. copies exist at Abbotsford. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... of his noble ideas, borrowing its dress and ornament from the external world. He is a poet especially through the heart, by the force with which he rushes in and carries you with him. Goethe is especially an epic; no doubt he paints the passions with admirable truth, but he commands them; like the god of the seas in Virgil, he raises above the angry waves his calm and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... task, as I have said, to write the history of the great Rising. That has been done by abler men, who were at the centre of the business, and had some knowledge of strategy and tactics; whereas I was only a raw lad who was privileged by fate to see the start. If I could, I would fain make an epic of it, and show how the Plains found at all points the Plateau guarded, how wits overcame numbers, and at every pass which the natives tried the great guns spoke and the tide rolled back. Yet I fear it would be an epic without a hero. There was no leader left ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... In Maghas' epic, The Death of Sisupala, plants and animals lead the same voluptuous life as the 'deep-bosomed, wide-hipped' girls ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... cynical pieces, a number of love songs no whit inferior to those of the Book of Songs, romances, and scorching political satires. The Romanzero (1851) is not unfairly represented by such a masterpiece as The Battlefield of Hastings. And from this last period we have two quasi-epic poems: Atta Troll (1847; written in 1842) and Germany (1844), the fruit of the first of Heine's two trips ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the grandest moment in the life of Sister Alexander's mother was when her mistress said, "Agnes, will you follow me if I buy your husband?" Fifteen hundred dollars to buy a rebellious slave in order to unite a slave couple. It's epic. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... to his feet, putting down his still half-full glass. "I'll make this epic story short, Max. As you said, the two actually valid methods of rising above the level in which you were born are in the Military and Religious Categories. Like you, even I couldn't ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... be done? About the geography of my present abode I knew, perhaps, as much as the public at large know about the Coppermine river and Behring's straits. The world, it was true, was before me, "where top choose," admirable things for an epic, but decidedly an unfortunate circumstance for a very cold gentleman in search of a blanket. Thus thinking, I opened the door of my chamber, and not in any way resolved how I should proceed, I stepped forth into the long corridor, which was ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... St. James was now, in the comprehensive sense of the phrase, a public character. Some choice spirits took the hint from the public feeling, and determined to dine on the public curiosity. A Sunday journal was immediately established. Of this epic our Duke was the hero. His manners, his sayings, his adventures, regularly regaled, on each holy day, the Protestant population of this Protestant empire, who in France or Italy, or even Germany, faint at the sight of a peasantry testifying their gratitude for a day of ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... his Oriental experiences in an epic of fresh and thrilling sensations has written,—"If a man be not born of his mother with a natural Chifney bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society,—a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the protection of the powerful Uguccione, lord of Pisa, while he wrote the Purgatorio. The second part of his epic dealt with the region lying between the under-world of torment and the heavenly heights of Paradise itself. Here the souls of men were to be cleansed of their sins that they might be pure ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... great division of the poetic realm. Beyond it lies still another; for there are spiritual harmonies which the mind alone cannot compass, and which the senses alone cannot interpret. The hand-books know little of spiritual harmonies, and do not go beyond their academic classifications of lyric and epic, and their catalogues of pentameters, hexameters, or alexandrines. But the student can for himself push his observation beyond, and come to the poetry of the higher imagination, where he can be forgetful of the mere form and disdainful of the merely logical relations, where his spirit can ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... whole, sustains a lofty level of creative vigour, and is dignified, moreover, with something of the epic flavour, as the old order is seen breaking up under the advance of new ideas and revolutionary enthusiasms.... Among the best books that the present age is ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... been, from the first, entitled an "Oriental Romance." A much worse mistake (because wilful, and with no very charitable design) was that of certain persons, who would have it that the poem was meant to be epic!—Even Mr. D'Israeli has, for the sake of a theory, given in to this very gratuitous assumption:—"The Anacreontic poet," he says, "remains only Anacreontic ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... choose your tavern for lunch with expert care. And when new ground is covered and new troops are seen, we capture sometimes those sharp delightful moments of thirsting interest that made the Retreat into an epic and the ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... portrayal of the most subtle shades of passion (the one treasury left untouched by our predecessors)—for all this the modern novel affords free scope. How far superior is all this to the cut-and-dried logic-chopping, the cold analysis to the eighteenth century!—'The Novel,' say sententiously, 'is the Epic grown amusing.' Instance Corinne, bring Mme. de Stael up to support your argument. The eighteenth century called all things in question; it is the task of the nineteenth to conclude and speak the last word; and the last word of the nineteenth century has ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... sung his lays, and the epic resumes its story. The time-relations are not altogether good in this long passage which describes the rejoicings of "the day after"; but the present shift from the riders on the road to the folk at the hall is not very violent, and is of a ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... consisting of four stanzas and a couplet, are no more Sonnets than they are Epic Poems. The Sonnet is of a particular and arbitrary construction; it partakes of the nature of Blank Verse, by the lines running into each other at proper intervals. Each line of the first eight, rhimes four times, and the order in which those rhimes should fall is ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Italian poets. Our translations may be fine, scholarly, dignified and the rest of it, but they bear little semblance to the originals. Dryden's version of the 'Aeneid' may be read, not as a translation but as an epic in the English of a great poet; and to those who are masters of sufficient Latin to explore the ancients by the help of commentaries, Conington's translation will be of assistance. Horace is utterly untranslatable, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... story of a single adventure in the career of Gilgamesh. The whole story is a composite product, and it is possible that some of the stories are artificially attached to the central figure. (See GILGAMESH, EPIC OF.) ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; the cathedrals that have remained are but the standard from which we may imagine the loving perfection to which every ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... near, Albano's scarce divided waves Shine from a sister valley; and afar The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves The Latian coast, where sprung the Epic war, "Arms and the man," whose reascending star Rose o'er an empire; but beneath thy right Fully reposed from Rome; and where yon bar Of girdling mountains intercepts thy sight, The Sabine farm was tilled, the ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... made, it is true, between the poet and other artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase- painter reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... her epic poet, I think he will sing the omnibus; but the poet who sings the hansom must be of a lyrical note. I do not see how he could be too lyrical, for anything more like song does not move on wheels, and its rapid rhythm suggests the quick play ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the contrary, in the very extent of its sphere, can better measure itself with the Universe, and create with epic profusion. In an Iliad there is room even for a Thersites; and what does not find a place in the great epic of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... further. It was an age when literary men were more inclined to comment on writings of the past than to produce original work. Literature was engaged in taking stock of itself. Homer was, of course, professedly admired by all, but more admired than imitated. Epic poetry was out of fashion and we find many epigrams of this period—some by Callimachus—directed against the "cyclic" poets, by whom were meant at that time those who were always dragging in conventional and commonplace epithets and phrases peculiar to epic poetry. Callimachus was in accordance ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... whole series of this second Gothic war and the victory of Narses, (l. iv. c. 21, 26—35.) A splendid scene. Among the six subjects of epic poetry which Tasso revolved in his mind, he hesitated between the conquests of Italy by Belisarius and by Narses, (Hayley's ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... position to the highest place in the pantheon is afforded by Vishnu, a nature god of some sort, described in the early documents as traversing the universe in three strides. Relatively insignificant in the earlier period and in the Upanishads, he appears in the epic, and afterwards, as the greatest of the gods, and, in the form of his avatar Krishna, becomes the head of a religion which has often been compared with Christianity in the purity of its moral conceptions. By his side in this later time stands his rival Civa, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Roman Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Hebrew poetry, epic and lyrical, was thus antagonistic to the drama. So, also, Dr. Chrysander contends, was the Hebrew himself. Not only had he no predilection for plastic creation, his life was not dramatic in the sense illustrated in Greek tragedy. He lived a care-free, sensuous existence, and either ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... part of the wall have three heavenly nymphs standing in a stately manner with arms interlaced. A series of sculptures which has been preserved almost intact on the inner side of the parapet wall of the Siva Temple is a repetition of the first part of the Rama legend as told in the Indian epic, "Ramayana," and it is thought that the corresponding series of the other temples may have represented the sequel to that history. A ponderous cornice richly ornamented, which is now almost gone, runs over this ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... two thousand years for an idea is a privilege that has been accorded only to Israel—'the soldier of God.' That were no tragedy, but an heroic epic, even as the prophet Isaiah had prefigured. The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom of an Israel unworthy of his sufferings. And this was the Israel—the high tragedian in the comedy sock—that I tried humbly to typify ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... man-eaters as told by Col. Patterson. A lion story is usually a tale of adventures, often very terrible and pathetic, which occupied but a few hours of one night; but the tale of the Tsavo man-eaters is an epic of terrible tragedies spread out over several months, and only at last brought to an end by the resource and determination of ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... the most natural and indigenous productions of a true author's mind, is, by common consent, an epic poem: verily, a wearisome, unnecessary, unfashionable bit of writing. Nevertheless, let my candour humbly acknowledge that, for the larger canticle of two mortal days, I was brooding over, and diligently brewing up, a right happy, capital, and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fifteenth century Florentine Art, in six octavo volumes; an analysis of the Attic art of the fifth century B.C. in three volumes; an exhaustive history of northern thirteenth-century art, in ten volumes; a life of Sir Walter Scott, with analysis of modern epic art, in seven volumes; a life of Xenophon, with analysis of the general principles of education, in ten volumes; a commentary on Hesiod, with final analysis of the principles of Political Economy, in nine volumes; and a general description of the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... here be remarked that they have been constructed, as a rule, from very unsanctified timber, as may be seen from the examples we have heretofore given. Not only the people and the priests but the poets have paid their tribute to Yermak's fame, epic poems having been written about his exploits and his deeds ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Farm," is among them what the star Sirius is in the already glorious heavens of a November midnight. As a thing of beauty, of simple grandeur, of wild strength, of heroic nobility, as a song, in short, I do not hesitate to affirm that it finds its like only in the Iliad. It is an epic song, and a song not of an individual soul but of a whole nation. Written down it was indeed by the hands of Gogol, but composed it was by the whole of Little Russia. As the whole of heroic Greece sings in the wrath of Achilles, so the whole of Cossakdom, which in its robust truth and manly simplicity ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... are represented, and they also consist of dancing, by which religious fervor is produced, and they give rise to music, romance, poetry, and drama. Thus it is that the esthetic arts have their origin in mythology. The epic poem and the symphony are lineal descendants of the dance, and the dance arises as the first form of worship, born of the mythic conception of the powers ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... and he is not the last, of our picturesque historians. It was in 1837 that Carlyle, who four years before had startled the English-reading public by his strangely worded, bewildering "Sartor Resartus," brought out his astonishing "History of the French Revolution"—a prose poem, an epic without a hero, revealing as by "flashes of lightning" the ghastly tragedy and comedy of that tremendous upheaval; and in 1845 he followed up the vein thus opened by his lifelike study of "Oliver Cromwell," which was better received ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... epic did not end a day too soon. There was no more life left in it; and God had something better in store for England. Raleigh's ideal was a noble one: but God's was nobler far. Raleigh would have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed her very vitals by that ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... modern progressive hopes out of this static medievalism is one of the epic occurrences of history. The causes which furthered the movement seem now in retrospect to be woven into a fabric so tightly meshed as to resist unraveling. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see at least some of the major factors which furthered ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... the most pathetic, King Lear the most terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth. There needs no ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us this. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... her life with sunshine; the universe could not be foiled in its attempt. Young love argues from effect to cause, and so limitless seemed the strength of his sentiment that the simplicity of her mind and the susceptibility of her girlhood were to him like some epic poem which arouses men to passion and strong deeds. Ignominiously bound as he was, his heart lightened; all doubt of his mission to love her and its ultimate success passed from him. He turned the handle and pushed the door ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... was called the Academy, and into these he only admitted the masters, following the guidance of his own eccentric judgment quite as much as he followed traditional estimate. Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton of course had undisputed possession of the department devoted to the "Kings of Epic," as he styled them. Sophocles, Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he admitted to his list of "Kings of Tragedy." Lope he rejected on literary grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency bad. He rejected Rabelais ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... 1881. Completed the scientific course at the Nebraska Normal College 1897; received the degree of Litt.D. from the University of Nebraska 1917. Declared Poet Laureate of Nebraska by a joint resolution of the Legislature, Apr. 1921, in recognition of the significance of the American epic cycle upon which he has been working for eight years. Winner of the prize of five hundred dollars offered by the Poetry Society of America for the best volume of poetry ("The Song of Three Friends") published by an American in 1919. Has ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... be sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest heads ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... solemn epic has numerous instances of it:—Hector in "Iliad" xi, 297, is setting the Trojans on "like dogs at a wild boar or lion." In xi, 557, Ajax retreating slowly from the Trojans is compared to an ass who has gone to feed in a field, and whom the boys find great difficulty in driving out, "though they ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Hutton and continued with rare skill and patience by Lyell, the dominant view of the past history of the earth was catastrophic. Great and sudden physical revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the end of every geological epoch was signalised by a cataclysm, by which every living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand-new creation when ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... reigns in it. A noble book! All men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem of man's destiny and God's ways with him here on this earth, and all in such free, flowing outlines, grand in its simplicity and its epic melody and repose of reconcilement! There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eye-sight and vision for all things—material things no less than spiritual; the horse—'thou hast clothed his neck with thunder;' ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... that has ever passed through them; here it is only Io, daughter of Inachus, loved by Zeus and hunted by the gadfly, who fled outcast through the East. Her story is told in Aeschylus' Prometheus and in a magnificent chorus of his Suppliant Women. (See Rise of the Greek Epic, pp. 247 ff.) ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of the race from which ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... written in a single metre, the elegiac couplet, the metre appropriated to inscriptions from the earliest recorded period.[1] Traditionally ascribed to the invention of Archilochus or Callinus, this form of verse, like the epic hexameter itself, first meets us full grown.[2] The date of Archilochus of Paros may be fixed pretty nearly at 700 B.C. That of Callinus of Ephesus is perhaps earlier. It may be assumed with probability that ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of youth. He is frightened enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element of fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is the central spirit of the Bronte novel. It is the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the small outlook and the small creed, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import? Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of "documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's "Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present general aesthetic attitude and inspiration, and must share not only the romanticists' impatience with ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... I should go to London oftener,' said Picotee, to turn the conversation. 'But she lives mostly in the library. And, O, what do you think? She is writing an epic poem, and employs ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... experiences in an epic of fresh and thrilling sensations has written,—"If a man be not born of his mother with a natural Chifney bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society,—a time for not liking tamed people,—a time for not dancing quadrilles,—a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... and wrote epic poetry. I assume that you have found it worth while to discontinue that habit, for I never see your name among the publishers' announcements. But your poetry used to be magnificent when you recited it in the shadow of the deserted fives-court; and I believe you ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... well as the false one had done, and all their attempts of this kind seemed, rather to debase religion than heighten poetry. Spenser endeavoured to supply this with morality, and to make instruction, instead of story the subject of an epic poem. His execution was excellent, and his flights of fancy very noble and high. But his design was poor; and his moral lay so bare, that it lost the effect. It is true, the pill was gilded, but so thin that the colour and the taste were easily discovered.—Mr. Rymer ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the novel is told in a very charming love story which has 'Barbara Worth' for its inspiration. With her winning the author has deftly interwoven an epic of national reclamation work ...
— The Uncrowned King • Harold Bell Wright
... about the sorrers of step-children, but I ain't never come up with no epic as yet portrayin' the sufferin's of a step-ma. If I had a talent like your husband's got, I'll be blest if I wouldn't do it. What I went through with them children aged me ten years ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... noble English tongue, Who holdest seizin of our speech, Whose epic Mowgli first did reach The valves of all ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga and epic, how shall we ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... his own bedroom, when no alien eye penetrated his solitude, his bitterness was epic and terrible. In the consistency of that egotism which had first made, then unmade him, there was no room for remorse; no possibility of self-accusation. If his star was to set it would set on his last terrific stand against the squares of the enemy, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... reigning beauty; but she was not at all averse to the literary entertainments of this salon, in which her own fascinations were so delightfully sung. She found the flattering verses of Voiture more to her taste than the stately epic of Chapelain, took his side warmly against Benserade in the famous dispute as to the merits of their two sonnets, "Job" and "Urania," and won him a doubtful victory. The poems of Voiture lose much of their flavor in translation, but I venture to give ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... i.e. John my Darling, than by his proper name. Of all Jock Mo-ghoal's stories Jock Mo-ghoal was himself the hero; and certainly most wonderful was the invention of the man. As recorded in his narratives, his life was one long epic poem, filled with strange and startling adventure, and furnished with an extraordinary machinery of the wild and supernatural; and though all knew that Jock made imagination supply, in his histories, the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... have heard Professor Forbes's book on Glaciers called an epic poem, and not without reason: but what gives that noble book its epic character is neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but the discovery of those laws: the methodic, truthful, valiant, patient battle between man and nature, his final victory, his wresting from ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... beautiful god, was done to death by a stroke of mistletoe, 101 sq.; story of Balder in the older Edda, 102 sq.; story of Balder as told by Saxo Grammaticus, 103; Balder worshipped in Norway, 104; legendary death of Balder resembles the legendary death of Isfendiyar in the epic of Firdusi, 104 sq.; the myth of Balder perhaps acted as a magical ceremony; the two main incidents of the myth, namely the pulling of the mistletoe and the burning of the god, have perhaps their counterpart in popular ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... given choice of the tasks we try, Gathering grain or chaff; One of her favoured servants toils at an epic high, One, that a child ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... opposite, form, is also within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present, but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example, in examining Paradise Lost considers in order the fable, the characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he considers the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... there are quantities of wild creatures—quail, rabbits, doves, and ground squirrels and, unfortunately, a number of social outcasts. Never shall I forget an epic incident in our history—the head of the family in pajamas at dawn, in mortal combat with a small black-and-white creature, chasing it through the cloisters with the garden hose. Oh, yes, there is plenty of adventure ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... There was no one within hearing. "I asked Mazarin for this mission simply because I feared to remain in Paris and dare not now return. Your poet put his name upon a piece of paper which might have proved an epic but which has turned out to be pretty poor stuff. This paper was in De Brissac's care; was, I say, because it was missing the morning after his death. To-morrow, a week or a month from now, Mazarin will have it. And . . ." Victor drew his finger ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... later on. Prose and poetry are to have new developments. Romances are to show us heroic ideals. Lyrics of joy, of sorrow, of passion, of emotion natural and spiritual, are to be sung. The sense of beauty is to grow. The drama is to arise from beginnings to be but faintly traced in early days. Epic poetry is to take a great place. Character modified, enriched by foreign strains, is to mould a noble literature—noble through many and many a gift and grace. A great poet is to arise with sympathies large and wide, to show us, in verse most musical, in words full meaning, with that grace of ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... man they rouse into resistance, as by a personal provocation and insult. And if it happens that these opposite effects show themselves in cases wearing a national importance, they raise what would else have been a mere casualty into the tragic or the epic grandeur of a fatality. The superb character, for instance, of Caesar's intellect throws a colossal shadow as of predestination over the most trivial incidents of his career. On the morning of Pharsalia, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... indescribable carnage and terror. Cassandra and the Trojan women, driven to take shelter in the temple of Cybele, slay themselves rather than fall into the hands of their captors. 'La Prise de Troie' is perhaps epic rather than dramatic, but as a whole it leaves an impression of severe and spacious grandeur, which can only be paralleled in the finest inspirations of Gluck. In the second division of the work, 'Les Troyens a Carthage,' human interest is paramount. Berlioz was an enthusiastic student ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... language of Greece, which became so powerful in the development of the Roman literature and Roman civilization and, in the later Renaissance, a powerful engine of progress. Associated with the language is the literature of the Greeks. The epic poems of Homer, the later lyrics, the drama, the history, and the polemic, all had their highest types presented in the Greek literature. Latin and modern German, English and French owe to these great originators a debt of gratitude for ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... pleasing duty to be able to corroborate to some extent, Mr. F. Bayham's favourable report. Fancy sketches and historical pieces our young man had eschewed; having convinced himself either that he had not an epic genius, or that to draw portraits of his friends, was a much easier task than that which he had set himself formerly. Whilst all the world was crowding round a pair of J. J,.'s little pictures, a couple of chalk heads were admitted into the Exhibition (his great picture of Captain Crackthorpe ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... public. I find character and life in it. There is no poem or novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion. What I think of Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem. A hero must be ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... was I who changed them! The shock of poverty was terrible at first, not because I set too much value on money, nor because I was unwilling to work, but because I felt I had no power of attack. My nature was introspective, I lived in an epic of my own creation. My strength and my courage were wrapped up in dreams, and seemed to have no relation to the practical world. I could have faced the devil himself for an ideal, but to make my own ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... history of the great Rising. That has been done by abler men, who were at the centre of the business, and had some knowledge of strategy and tactics; whereas I was only a raw lad who was privileged by fate to see the start. If I could, I would fain make an epic of it, and show how the Plains found at all points the Plateau guarded, how wits overcame numbers, and at every pass which the natives tried the great guns spoke and the tide rolled back. Yet I fear it ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... smoke and flame into the lurid sky all around the horizon. Up to the foot of the mountains the sea covered the vast plain; and the action of these waves of fire and steaming floods forms a natural epic of the grandest order. Prodigious quantities of ashes and cinders were discharged from the craters; and these, deposited and hardened by long pressure under water, formed the reddish-brown earthy rock called tufa, of which the seven hills ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... fugitive pieces; but noyour fugitive poetry is apt to become stationary with the bookseller. It should be something at once solid and attractivenone of your romances or anomalous noveltiesI would have you take high ground at once. Let me see: What think you of a real epic?the grand old-fashioned historical poem which moved through twelve or twenty-four books. We'll have it soI'll supply you with a subjectThe battle between the Caledonians and RomansThe Caledoniad; or, Invasion Repelled;let that be the titleit ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus. Howard Pyle's illustrations render the spirit of the Homeric age with ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... from the Bhagavad Gita, that glorious episode in the mighty civil war which shattered India, and left her defenceless against the successive invaders who were to complete her fall. This great epic poem introduces to us Arjuna, a noble prince, about to take part in the strife. The two armies, arrayed for battle, are on the point of engaging, arrows have already begun to pierce the air. In the opposing ranks Arjuna sees cherished relatives, dear friends, and revered teachers, whom destiny ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Mardi over, a remarkable nose is a prominent feature: an ever obvious passport to distinction. For, after all, this gaining a name, is but the individualizing of a man; as well achieved by an extraordinary nose, as by an extraordinary epic. Far better, indeed; for you may pass poets without knowing them. Even a hero, is no hero without his sword; nor Beelzebub himself a lion, minus that lasso-tail of his, wherewith he catches his prey. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... muse, with as keen a relish as the most devout Christian does the hymns of Dr. WATTS. Melody comes of Heaven, and is a gift vouchsafed to all generations, and all kinds of men. In proof of this, let us adduce a single extract from the great epic of the Hawaiian poet, POPPOOFI, entitled ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... literary composition. Some time ago he had thought it would be a mighty fine thing to be a poet, and had tried his hand at verse. Finding he possessed some facility, he decided that he was a poet, and at once started an epic poem in rhyme on the Life of Nelson, the material being supplied by Southey. This morning he did ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the setting. Mr. MACKENZIE is an overlord of words, old and new, bending them to strange and unexpected uses, yet always avoiding affectation by the sheer vitality of his strength. As for the matter of these first chapters, one might say that nothing whatever happens in them. They are an epic of adolescence wherein growth is the only movement. Events are for the second half of the volume. Here Michael has come down from Oxford, and has set himself to find and rescue by marriage the girl Lily, whom (you remember) he loved as a boy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... Ravana is told in the Ramayana, which with the Mahabarata form the two great epic poems of the Hindoos; the latter was written by Vyasa, and the former ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Veda; the Brahmanic literature, with the supplementary Upanishads, and the S[u]tras or mnemonic abridgments of religious and ceremonial rules; the legal texts, and the religious and theological portions of the epic; and the later sectarian writings, called Pur[a]nas. The great heresies, again, have their own special writings. Thus far we shall draw on the native literature. Only for some of the modern sects, and for the religions of ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... morning, and it would seem also that they thought that the waters mentioned in the story signified the rain. But why do they speak of these acts as heroic deeds, exploits of a mighty warrior, in the same tone and with the same epic fire as when they sing of Indra's battles in times near to their own, real battles in which their own forefathers, strong in their faith in the god, shattered the armies of hostile Aryan tribes or the fortresses of dark-skinned natives? The personality of Indra and the spirit in which his deeds ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... and virtue; Milton and Cromwell; Milton's clear logic; his tenacity; his scurrility, and its excuse; his fierce and fantastic wit; reappearance of these qualities in Paradise Lost; the style of his prose works analysed and illustrated; his rich vocabulary; his use of Saxon; the making of an epic poet 39 ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the Chanson de Roland gives me infinite pleasure—particularly the Introduction, treating of the national epic and of the Mahabharata which, it seems, tells of the fight between the ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... bodies - is an old and thoroughly Hindu repertory. It is the rude beginning of that fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio, produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last development, the novel - that prose-epic of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... procession, in the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis Stevenson's Balfour cousins as something very precious! The occasion was the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, in 1874, and, yellow and faded, the Epic still graces my Every Day Book, and, as one reads its inspiriting lines, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a note ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... Petrarca, born 1304, died 1374; for his Latin epic poem on the carer of Scipio, called "Africa," he was solemnly crowned with the poetic laurel in the Capitol of Rome, on Easter-day ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... with conscience, no turning towards the light, no sorrowful confessions at all. He has given us a great deal, but it is not too much to say that what he rejected, a Catholic poet would have seized with delight as the purplest patches of his epic, and the climax to which ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... amongst the nobility attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, like eels, are accustomed to being skinned, whereas the well-born ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... It does not stagger me to hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty mind,' or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen,' and 'the blessed Behmen.' 'In speculative power,' says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system surpasses everything of the kind ever written.' Some of his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON ploughed with Behmen's heifer, but had not the boldness ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... towards getting a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Beristain, will be confirmed. Mexico, he says, was the sunflower of Spain. When in her principal universities there were no learned men to fill the mathematical chairs, Mexico could boast of Don Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora: when in Madrid there was no one who had written a good epic poem, in Mexico the Bernardo ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has, in his epic of the Oberon made admirable use of much the ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Resemble the walls the builders, buffeted, stern, and worn. To us they left the law, Order, simplicity, obedience, And the wall is the bond they gave the nation At its birth of courage and unflinching faith. Before the epic here inscribed began, They wrote their course upon a trackless sea. O, tiny craft, bearing a nation's seed! Frail shallop, quick with unborn states! Autumn was mellow in the fatherland when they set sail, And winter deepened as they neared the West. Out of the desert sea they came ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... years; Heaven and hell rolled into one, glory and blood and tears; Life's pattern picked with a scarlet thread, where once we wove with a grey To remind us all how we played our part in the shock of an epic day? ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... so infantine that many people thought it impossible, at first sight, that he could be a man of sense or genius. He was as eager about a new paper to his wife's drawing-room, or his own new wig, as about a new tragedy or a new epic poem.' He adds, that he was 'capable of the most profound conversation, when circumstances led to it. He had not the least desire to shine, but was delighted beyond measure to shew other people in their best guise to his friends. "Did not I shew you the lion well to-day?" used he to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... from the west; and the only obstacle that prevented that spur being occupied in full by the enemy was a small tower, used for signalling purposes and occupied by a few Sikhs. The story of that little post is an epic in itself; surrounded on all sides, isolated from all help, with scanty food, and at the end no water, for six days and nights ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... disaffected, ran full tilt towards the solemn equipage of the Duke, which the projecting lance threatened to perforate from window to window, at the risk of transfixing as many in its passage as the celebrated thrust of Orlando, which, according to the Italian epic poet, broached as many Moors as ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the qualities which can powerfully affect Englishmen. Not only were the Poets of our most national age dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems. Take away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury Tales become indeed, what they have been most untruly called, mere versions of French or Italian Fables. Milton may have ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... for me to bring forward many close parallels between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and Beowulf and the Njal's saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... short epic of the Persian Empire, ending alas! as all human epics are wont to end, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... that an inordinate love of decoration finds its opportunity and its snare. To keep the most elaborate comparison in harmony with its occasion, so that when it is completed it shall fall back easily into the emotional key of the narrative, has been the study of the great epic poets. Milton's description of the rebel legions adrift on the flaming sea is a fine instance of the difficulty ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... a poet now, whose ready rhymes. Like Tommy Moore's, came tripping to their places— Reeling along a merry troll of chimes, With careless truth,—a dance of fuddled Graces; Hear it—Gazette, Post, Herald, Standard, Times, I'd write an epic! Coffee for its basis; Sweet as e'er warbled forth from cockney throttles Since ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... worthy also of being called the Great—a sovereign who voluntarily conceded liberty to his people, and founded it on bases which all the inglorious artifices of his successors have been unable to undermine—but, alas! such men, like Epic poets, seem destined to succeed but ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... thocht it took as muckle natural genius to mak a jug of punch as an epic poem, sic as Paradise Lost, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... matieres, are French in their early treatment, with the exception of the national work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms, except those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse folk-epic, are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the best literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but that which all the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... for romance—for epic and tragic poetry—in the lives of those pioneer women! The lonely cabin in the depths of the forest; the father away; the mother rocking her babe to sleep; the howling of the wolves; the storm beating on the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... deterred from heroic poetry. There was another monarch of this island (for he did not fetch his heroes from foreign countries) whom he considered as worthy the epic muse, and he dignified "Alfred" (1723) with twelve books. But the opinion of the nation was now settled; a hero introduced by Blackmore was not likely to find either respect or kindness; "Alfred" took his place by "Eliza" in ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... attempt to reach the diction of the 'Paradise Lost', or aspire to the tremendous style of Shakespeare. You must not confound things, though. A Lyric diction is one thing—a Dramatic diction is another, requiring the utmost force and conciseness of expression,—and Epic diction is still another; I conceive it to be something between the Lyric and Dramatic, with all the luxuriance of the former, and all the ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Are we not mortal, and are not books immortal? Homer's harp is broken and Horace's lyre is unstrung, and the voices of the great singers are hushed; but their songs—their songs are imperishable. O friend! what moots it to them or to us who gave this epic or that lyric to immortality? The singer belongs to a year, his song to all time. I know it is the custom now to credit the author with his work, for this is a utilitarian age, and all things are by the pound or the piece, and ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... me that Gogol's emphasis on the heroic rather than on the historical—Gogol is generally discounted as an historian—would give the reader a proper approach to the mood in which he created "Taras Bulba," the finest epic in Russian literature. Gogol never wrote either his history of Little Russia or his universal history. Apart from several brief studies, not always reliable, the net result of his many years' application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic in prose, Homeric in ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... acquired a taste for chatting, and I loved to hear the recital of his adventures in the polar seas. He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... hitherto been a sealed book to the mere English reader. Mr. Lettsom has however just published a most successful translation of it under the title of The Fall of the Nibelungers. Few will rise from a perusal of the English version of this great national epic—which in its present form is a work of the thirteenth century—without being struck with the innate power and character of the original poem; and without feeling grateful to Mr. Lettsom for furnishing them with so pleasing and spirited a ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... chosen two from which to reprint brief passages. The first is Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, the simple and straightforward personal narrative of one whom all must now concede to have been a very great man; the other is that human and poignant epic of the stranger from Denmark who became one of us and of whom we as a people are tenderly proud. The Making of an American is in some ways a unique book; concrete, specific, self-revealing and yet dignified; a book that one could wish that ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... wooing and winning of Naida, the raid of Yaklus and his warriors, the rescue of the captured Naida, and the final victory, celebrated by ceremonial dances, are all described. The action is rapid and the story is told in the direct, simple style of the true epic. Illustrated with thirty ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... would praise and pension ME; but envy be still! Your existence was made happy indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Hotel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished Epic. "Who, indeed," says a sympathetic author, M. Theophile Gautier, "who could expect less than a miracle from a man so deeply learned in the laws of art—a perfect Turk in the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the great?" Bishops and politicians combined ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect with its quadrennial changes. The just budded Freshmen of the class of '64 could hardly without help decipher "The Rebelliad," which in the Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day. The good old gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes of the college-speech of their grandsons. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... but be interlaced in sense or sound sufficiently to carry on the narrative. The result, to some tastes, is a medium quite unsurpassed for the particular purpose. The only objection to it at all capable of being maintained, that I can think of, is that the total effect is rather lyrical than epic. And so much of this must be perhaps allowed as comes to granting that Scott's verse-romance is rather a long and cunningly sustained and varied ballad than an ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... indicated by its title: the 'Exodus' is the period of development for Israel from a family to a nation, and towards the close of the period Balaam, an outsider, bears witness in spite of himself to the growing numbers of the nation and to its glorious future.—In literary form it is a 'mixed epic' or 'canti-fable': a story in prose that breaks into verse at appropriate places. (Compare the expression took up his parable: the parable is an undefined term for a more specialised literary form ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... in charge," Ludovick asked, "and whence did you come?" Fearing he might seem motivated by vulgar curiosity, he explained, "I am doing research for an epic poem." ...
— The Blue Tower • Evelyn E. Smith
... lowest Fishes, but we bring together two kinds of animals so remote from each other in structure that the wildest imagination can scarcely fancy a transition between them. A comparison may make my meaning clearer as to the relative standing of these groups. The Epic Poem is a higher order of composition than the Song,—yet we may have an Epic Poem which, from its inferior mode of execution, stands lower than a Song that is perfect of its kind. So the plan of certain branches is more comprehensive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... derivation of the name from "Nasika," a nose, in allusion to the fate which here overtook the demon Shurpanakhi. It is altogether too savage an appellation for a city whose purity was established in the "Krita Yuga," and whose fame is coeval with that of the great protagonists of Hindu myth and epic. The great city of religion in the West stood upon seven hills, the holy city of the East stood upon nine; and the famous rivers which flow past them whisper in each case of a heritage of undying renown. Fancy hand in hand perhaps with a substratum of historical truth ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... a picturesque village, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... the greater part of Bjoernson's poetry not dramatic in form were both published in 1870. One of them was the collection of his "Poems and Songs," the other was the epic cycle, "Arnljot Gelline," the only long poem that he has written. The volume of lyrics includes many pieces of imperfect quality and slight value,—personal tributes and occasional productions,—but ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... dreams inspire the bard Who rolls the epic song; Friendship and truth be my reward— To me no bays belong; If laurell'd Fame but dwells with lies, Me the enchantress ever flies, Whose heart and not whose fancy sings; Simple and young, I dare not feign; Mine be the rude yet heartfelt strain, "Friendship is ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought." This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration than ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of modern times is but a small fraction of the long epic of human history. If, as seems highly probable, the conservative estimates of recent scientists that mankind has inhabited the earth more than fifty thousand years [Footnote: Professor James Geikie, of the University of Edinburgh, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... nevertheless intended a sly touch of irony upon his proverbially prosing character. He therefore determined to "be up to him," as the fancy have it; and having somewhere found the copy of an obsolete satirical epic which an enamored snuff-taker had once addressed to a mistress, who could reciprocate the interjection over her ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself. Such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas. The frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the experience. The poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the general staff riding by, who kept his vision fixed on the aim, that is, the victory that sooner or later would be celebrated to the clinking of glasses—why, from that point of view Weixler was right! It must make him indignant to have events of such epic grandeur made ridiculous by such a chicken-hearted creature as Simmel and degraded into a doleful ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... riddle to him. Of all the great Russian writers not one has contributed more to the interpretation of the enigmatical soul of the moujik than Russia's great poet, Nekrassov, in his life-work the national epic, Who can be ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... became a sort of comedy-epic in the land of the Czars, the land where each petty town-governor is almost an absolute despot, regulating his persecutions and extortions according to the sage saying of the town-governor in the play, "That's the way God made the world, ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... made by Orr was epic. At all other good stews it was recalled and discussed, but never did a stew come up to the stew that we so scrupulously divided among us on the bright morning of Sept. 12, 1914, ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... declare him to be the only mathematician capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded in jumping down his own throat. With all these talents, however, he is so far from being considered ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem,—man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true everyway; true eyesight and vision for all things; material things no less than spiritual: the Horse—"hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?"—he "laughs ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... plays of William Shakespeare"? says the reader—"O no! The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill," and he throws the book aside. In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has never attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has excelled upon the tight-rope. A marked example of triumph over this is the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On the face of the matter, I should have advised him to imitate the pleasing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of hurry like ours the appearance of an epic poem more than five thousand lines in length cannot but be regarded as remarkable. Whether such a form of art is the one most suited to our century is a question. Edgar Allan Poe insisted that no poem should take more than an hour ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of folly will lurk and sprout to confound us Our comedies are frequently youth's tragedies Partake of a morning draught Patronizing woman Play second fiddle without looking foolish Pride is the God of Pagans Propitiate common sense on behalf of what seems tolerably absurd Rare as epic song is the man who is thorough in what he does Read one another perfectly in their mutual hypocrisies Rebukes which give immeasurable rebounds Recalling her to the subject-matter with all the patience ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... same kind as that of the Blacksmiths, which should sum up the most poetical methods of human activity, and which should be called (unless you advise otherwise) Labourers, Sailors, and Soldiers, would form a lyric epic of which the genius of Rossini or Meyerbeer would be proud. I know I have no right to make any such claim, but your kindness to me has always been so great that I have a faint hope of obtaining this new and glorious favor. If, however, this work would give you even an hour's trouble, please ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... the Arrakan Pagoda to-day, but a pleasant looking man came on board with a chitsaya harp; I had to try and make a jotting of him. G. and Captain Turndrup brought him. He sat and played tunes for hours—epic tunes, which I'd have given anything to remember. His boat-shaped harp of thirteen strings was tuned in minor thirds, so you could readily pick out Celtic tunes on it. I am told Sir Arthur Sullivan came here and listened to his music and made many notes. The harp belonged to Prince Dabai, Thebaw's ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... historical fact, if fact it be," said Arthur. "I always thought he wrote it in English, and that the poem was of the epic order." ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... saw the Cone of Battle hurling itself toward Roger's planetoid. They saw the pirate fleet rush out to do battle with Triplanetary's massed forces, and with bated breath they watched every maneuver of that epic battle to its savagely sacrificial end. And that same battle was being watched, also with ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... downright wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are States, and which is written on this continent ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... lost wars, finds triumphant expression in Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's Voyages, that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the emphasis of Tamburlaine are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher, for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for us the England of the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... The Roman Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... write the history of the great Rising. That has been done by abler men, who were at the centre of the business, and had some knowledge of strategy and tactics; whereas I was only a raw lad who was privileged by fate to see the start. If I could, I would fain make an epic of it, and show how the Plains found at all points the Plateau guarded, how wits overcame numbers, and at every pass which the natives tried the great guns spoke and the tide rolled back. Yet I fear it would be an epic without a hero. There was no leader left ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... read parts of Homer, 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 ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the history of Ireland as the epic, not of a futile and defeated, but of an indomitable ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... ghostly figure, paced along the edge of sand that ran round the islet, the purple but cloudy poetry which was his native element was piled up at its thickest upon his soul. The unique island and the endless sea emphasized the thing solely as an epic. There were no ladies or policemen here to give him a hint either of its farce or ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... leaders, and here was a pivotal point in his life. Had not Washington persuaded him to remain "just for the present" in America, he might have played a part in Carlyle's best book, that book which is not history, but more—an epic. So, among the many obligations that America owes to Washington, must be named this one of pushing Thomas Jefferson, the scholar and man of peace, into the political embroglio and shutting the door. Then it was that Hamilton's taunting temper awoke a ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... what we do. You may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the spoilers and the despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse each other before they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much like a savage, seldom speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since 1789 France has been trying to make man believe, against all evidence, that they are equal. To say ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... research, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of labors I have myself come to know something of the life that Roosevelt knew thirty-five ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is the great defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types. How hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of an epic. It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of a genuine lyric. Whitman, himself the most democratic poet of the modern world, felt this deficiency in the literature of the later democracies, and lamented the absence of great heroic figures. The poets have ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... peace, let us approach a great name among our English singers of liberty. Swinburne stands in the foremost rank. In a collection of "English Songs of Italian Freedom," edited by Mr. George Trevelyan, who himself has so finely narrated the epic of Italy's redemption—in that collection Swinburne occupies a place among the very highest. No one has paid nobler tribute to the heroes of that amazing revolution. No one has told the sorrow of their failures with more sympathetic rage, or has poured so burning ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his Africa. He was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the "old Mantuan," of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost, whose Latin "Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... with folded arms (this one seldom thinks to the purpose); another sits cross-legged, brows lowered: another must put his head into his hand, and so keep it up to thinking mark: another must twiddle a bit of string, or a key; grant him this, he can hatch an epic. This commandant must draw himself up very straight, and walk six paces and back very slowly, till the problem was solved: I suspect he had done a good bit of sentinel work ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... brooding and solemn tenderness. The "Song" and "A.D. MDCXX." (a memoir of the notorious galleon of the Pilgrims) are in a lighter vein. The tonal plangency, the epic quality, of these studies is extraordinary,—exposing a tendency toward an orchestral fulness and breadth of style that will offer a more pertinent theme for comment in a consideration of the sonatas. Their littleness ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,—anything will serve the purpose. Divide et impera is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... have attained very high eminence in various walks of his sublime art; his works are very numerous, and as diverse in their form as in their spirit; he is sometimes a romantic, sometimes a legendary, sometimes an epic, sometimes a satiric, and sometimes a dramatic poet;—in most, if not in all, of these various lines he has attained the highest eminence as yet recognised by his countrymen; and, consequently, whatever impression may be made upon our readers by the present essay at a transfusion of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Restauraw is one of the few superior hostelries of the Territory. Mrs. Rucker, its charming proprietress, is a cook who might outrival even that celebrated chef, now dead, M. Soyer. Her pies are poems, her bread an epic, and her beans a dream, Mrs. Rucker has cooked her way to every heart, and her famed establishment is justly regarded as the bright particular gem in ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... wore in his buttonhole a dainty blue flower whose name I do not know; and as he bowed distantly to Charles, whom he surveyed through his eyeglass, the gleam of a big diamond in the middle of his shirt-front betrayed the fact that the Briar-rose school, as it was called (from his famous epic), had at least succeeded in making money out of poetry. He explained to us a little later, in fact, that he was over in New York to look after his royalties. "The beggars," he said, "only gave me eight hundred pounds on my last volume. I couldn't stand that, you know; for a modern bard, moving ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... of sculpture and painting, by which their mythic beings are represented, and they also consist of dancing, by which religious fervor is produced, and they give rise to music, romance, poetry, and drama. Thus it is that the esthetic arts have their origin in mythology. The epic poem and the symphony are lineal descendants of the dance, and the dance arises as the first form of worship, born of the mythic conception of the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... marrying, breeding, and above all living! "All of life is good!" Each one of these millions had its own drama, each to itself, as hers had been to her, with that tragic importance of being lived but once from the germ to the ultimate dust. Each one was its own epic, its own experience, and its own fulfilment. As Renault once said, "Any of the possibilities may lie in a human soul." And in that was the hope and the faith for Democracy,—the infinite ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... battle with white gaiters; The Conscripts here, with green and pear-shaped tufts. Who marched to battle with their gaiters black. Like a poor prisoner, who falls a-dreaming Of vast and murmuring forests, with a tree Fashioned of shavings, taken from a doll's house, I build my Father's Epic with these soldiers. ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... the great Sanskrit epic, King Santanu is said to have walked by the side of the river one day, where "he met and fell in love with a beautiful girl, who told him that she was the river Ganges, and could only marry him on condition he never questioned her conduct. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... is the prose of this literature, especially the Sagas. The saga is a prose epic, characteristic of the Norse countries. It records the life of a hero, told according to fixed rules. As we have said, the sagas were based upon careers run in Iceland's stormy time. They are both mythical and historical. In the mythical group are, among others, ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... encouragement, as we shall see, Harrington was urged to complete his version of the Orlando Furioso, and she willingly accepted in the year 1600 the dedication of Fairfax's admirable translation of the great epic of Tasso. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... could write you a letter of comfort, I would sit down to it with as much pleasure, as I would to write an epic poem of my own composition that should equal the Iliad. Religion, my dear friend, is the true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... his humanity, Horace remains. Epic Virgil, appealing to the traditions of a living race of nobles and to the carefully hidden, sober vanity of the world's absolute monarch, does not appeal to modern man. The twilight of the gods has long deepened ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... attempted to scale with success. And when it is considered, that many languages, and many sciences, must contribute to the perfection of poetical composition, it will appear less strange. The lofty Epic, the pointed Satire, and the more daring and successful flights of the Tragic Muse, seem reserved for the bold ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... otherwise had better be relieved. It is the precept that the German Army itself taught and practiced at Ypres and Verdun. On July 1st a question was answered for anyone who had been in the Manchurian war. He learned that those bred in sight of cathedrals in the civilization of the epic poem can surpass without any inspiration of oriental fatalism or religious fanaticism the courage of the land of ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... then, for heroine' clamoured he, 'And make her some great Princess, six feet high, Grand, epic, homicidal; and be you The Prince to win her!' 'Then follow me, the Prince,' I answered, 'each be hero in his turn! Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream.— Heroic seems our Princess as required— But something made to suit with Time and place, A ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... volcano goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic[1] of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a story addressed not to the closet-reader, but to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, was the oli; ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint of the bitter ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... name. It is a gathering-up of all that men could do. It has fifty roofs, it has a gigantic signal tower, it has blank walls like precipices, and round arch after round arch, and architrave after architrave. It is like a good and settled epic; or, better still, it is like the life of a healthy and adventurous man who, having accomplished all his journeys and taken the Fleece of Gold, comes home to tell his stories at evening, and to pass among his own people the years that are left to him of his age. It has experience and ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!—Open this far-famed Book!—I have done so at random, and the beginning of the 'Epic Poem Temora,' in eight Books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course of a stream is ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... once upon a time your poet launched a great epic in his mind. Alas, I was not careful, and it struck your ringing anklets and came to grief. It broke up into scraps of songs and lay scattered at your feet. All my cargo of the stories of old wars was tossed by the laughing waves ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... than in beating Shorty. After all, he concluded, it wasn't the reward of the game but the playing of it that counted. Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... I was allowed to do nothing save read, from morning to night. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe, I read almost all the old romances, old plays, and epic poetry, in that formidable collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in which it has been my lot to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... is unsafe to say. The composition itself is a poem—a romance—an epic. This is against the historical value of its subject-matter. Then, it has taken its present form under the hands of a Christian. This is against its value as cotemporaneous evidence. Thirdly, it has the character, to no small extent, not only of a rhapsody, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... "That does not seem to have been the opinion of the Beast Epic," said she, and the entrance of Babie prevented them from ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet Vernede, yet even ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... Serendib,) the khan gives some notices of the legends connected with its history, which show a more extended acquaintance with Hindu literature than the Moslems in India in general take the trouble of acquiring. Among the rest he alludes to the epic of the Ramayuna, and the bridge built by Rama (or as he calls him, Rajah Ram Chunder) for the passage of the monkey army and their redoubled general, Huniman, from the Indian continent into the island, in order to deliver from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... stand before that picture of Turner's in the National Gallery. The late Mr. Froude believed in a good time coming when the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find their bard and sit enshrined in 'great English national epic as grand as the Odyssey' It may be, but as yet our poets have achieved but a few sea-fights, marine adventures, and occasional pieces, which wear a spirited but accidental look, and suggest the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on horseback, songs of war and its sufferings. These songs have nothing of the excessive formalism and aestheticism of the Chinese, but give expression to simple emotions in unpolished language with a direct appeal. The epic of the Turkish peoples had clearly been developed already, and in north China it produced a rudimentary ballad literature, to which four hundred years later no less attention was paid than to the emotional world of ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... be sure, boasted of her Dwight, her Trumbull, and her Barlow. The "Connecticut wits" are interesting personalities; but the society which could read, with anything akin to pleasure, Dwight's Conquest of Canaan—an epic in eleven books with nearly ten thousand lines—was more admirable for its physical endurance than for its poetical intuitions. Latrobe was quite right when he wrote that in America the labor of the hand took precedence ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... a single ballad, but a conglomeration of several, forming a short epic. Ballads representing its component parts are not now extant; although on the other hand there are later ballads founded on certain episodes in the Gest. The compiler availed himself of incidents from other traditional sources, ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... periods aloud before committing them to the white pages of his day-book; and more than once, unfaithful to Clio, the muse of history, he invoked in his transports the divine Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Land acquired a taste for chatting, and I loved to hear the recital of his adventures in the polar seas. He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... the same principle that the humours of children are indulged to keep them out of mischief. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe I read almost all the romances, old plays, and epic poetry in that formidable collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in which it has been my lot to be ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Revolt of Islam, so puzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of its mythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable race of men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epic of revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in that elaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or after Shelley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free their countrymen comes ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Sordavala Festival, an accurate representation of a native wedding of a hundred years ago was given, perhaps for the reason that the performers were thus naturally enabled to introduce many of the bridal songs contained in their great epic poem, Kalevala, and their collection of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... historians, unable to confirm the exaggerations of the Brahmans, and yet reluctant to detract from the epic renown of their country by disclaiming its stupendous dimensions, attempted to reconcile its actual extent with the fables of the eastern astronomers by imputing to the agency of earthquakes the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... going to watch. I'm going to watch one of the epic events of our time—" For a moment Beardsley was solemn, almost shocked, as a thought struck him. "In a way it will be sad. Yes, it will! ECAIAC is about ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... of the incident described in the last chapter was to strengthen the bond between John and Desmond. Desmond had the epic from Fluff, from the Caterpillar, and finally from ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... proclaims To gaping crowds the glory of their names,— 'Tis then the mem'ries of warriors die, And fall—alas!—into obscurity, Until the poet, in whose verse alone Exists a world—can make their actions known, And in eternal epic measures, show They are not yet forgotten here below. And yet by us neglected! glory gloomed, Thy name seems sealed apart, entombed, Although our shouts to pigmies rise—no cries To mark thy presence echo to the skies; Farewell to Grecian ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... as to style; and being translated from a kindred tongue is delightful as mere language. In its rude joviality, and simple and direct delineation of character, it is a thoroughly good representative of the famous ancient Beast Epic.' The edges of this book, and of all subsequent books, were trimmed in accordance with the invariable practice of the early printers. Mr. Morris much ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... makes a machine and the man who flies one are the heroes of the epic of flight. Next to them, all credit must be given to the public-spirited financiers and patrons who encouraged flight, especially to those of them who were not deceived, and knew that they are the servants, not the masters, of the conquerors of the air. As ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... of Mr. Meeker in this enterprise was to induce people to mark the famous old highway. To him it represented a great battle ground in our nation's struggle to win and hold the West. The story of the Oregon Trail, he rightly felt, is an American epic which must be preserved. Through his energy and inspiration and the help of thousands of loyal men and women, school boys and school girls, substantial monuments have now been placed along the greater part ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... disappear. So strong was this impulse that, where the Highlands were concerned, men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were pronounced to be ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them. There was something epic in it. It recalled to the mulatto's mind some of Fabre's lovely descriptions. It reminded him of two or three books on entomology which he had left in his mother's cabin. He felt he ought to go after them while the spiders ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Greeks) distinctly affirm that the day upon which Romulus founded the city was the 30th of the month. The Greeks likewise tell us that on that day an eclipse of the sun took place, which they think was that observed by Antimachus of Teos, the epic poet, which occurred in the third year of the sixth Olympiad. In the time of Varro the philosopher, who of all the Romans was most deeply versed in Roman history, there was one Taroutius, a companion of his, a philosopher and mathematician, who had especially devoted himself to the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... heroic age of Europe—the Jerusalem Delivered is its epic poem. Then alone its warriors fought and died together. Banded together under a second "King of men," the forces of Christendom combated around the Holy City against the strength of Asia drawn to its defence. The cause was nobler, the end greater, the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... poetry; to point out, and prophecy the man, who was born for no less an undertaking, and whom posterity shall bless for its accomplishment. Methinks, I am already taking fire from such a character, and making room for him, under a borrowed name, amongst the heroes of an epic poem. Neither could mine, or some more happy genius, want ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... obligation to Boccaccio in the Troilus and Criseyde, about a third of which is borrowed from the Filostrato. Nor is it a little remarkable that the same man, that in the Teseide and Filostrato founded the chivalrous epic, should also and in the same period of his literary activity, have written the first and not the least powerful and artistic of psychologic romances, for even such is ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Homer, had them carefully written down, and placed them in a public library, so that the Greeks could read them whenever they pleased. Until then these poems had only been recited, and no written copy existed. Pisistratus, therefore, did a very good work in thus keeping for our enjoyment the greatest epic ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... the true story of one of the greatest of English heroes, a story which shows him to have been at Hastings by the side of Harold, to have won fame there, to have continued the fight for English liberty as leader of the English patriots, and to have earned a place in the unsung English epic. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... you can," said I, "a poet who can order his supper between the lines of his tragedy, or discuss the weather whilst he is composing epic verses." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... great sanctuary of Boro-Boedoer which marks the traditional epoch between Buddhism and the later Hinduism, including Sakya Munyi among the avatars of Vishnu. The sacred trees and lions carved here on the walls of the temple quadrangle, give place in the galleries to scenes from the great Hindu epic of the Ramayan. The familiar form of Ganesh, the elephant-headed God of Wisdom, looms from the shadows of a vaulted shrine; Nandi, the sacred bull, stands beneath a carven canopy, and the great memorial of a bygone faith contains the identical galaxy of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... he, in Odes and Epic Poems, are not introduced only to illustrate and embellish the Discourse, but to amuse and relax the Mind of the Reader, by frequently disengaging him from too painful an Attention to the Principal Subject, and by leading him into other agreeable Images. Homer, says he, excelled ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... us a great epic, or a great painting, or a great musical composition, but she has given us a great dance-poem, which is at the same time a painting and a song. Oh, you poor starved, blind soul, to be deprived of such beautiful spectacles. How I pity you, and how I pray you to give your children the privileges ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... taken by their chief Meng-ts'u under the Sung Dynasty; the Mongols made of their country the kingdom of Chaghan-djang. Li-kiang is the territory of Yue-si Chao, called also Mo-sie (Moso), one of the six Chao of Nan-Chao. The Moso of Li-kiang call themselves Ho. They have an epic styled Djiung-Ling (Moso Division) recounting the invasion of part of Tibet by the Moso. The Moso were submitted during the 8th century, by the King of Nan-Chao. They have a special hieroglyphic scrip, a specimen of which has been given by Deveria. (Frontiere, p. 166.) A manuscript ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... consider to have been an example of sustained invective such as one rarely encounters in this degenerate age. Well, her next essay in creative composition is my supper, which will be an equally spirited impromptu. To-morrow she will darn and sew me an epic; and her desserts will continue to be in the richest lyric vein. Such, sir, are the poems of Lisa, all addressed to me, who came so near to gallivanting ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... fire," a periphrasis for woman that bears gold on her arm. (2) "Skates that skim." etc.. a periphrasis for ships. (3) "Odin's mocking cup," mocking songs. (4) An allusion to the Beast Epic, where the cunning fox laughs at the flayed condition of his stupid foes, the wolf and bear. We should say, "Don't stop to speak with him, but rather beat ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... the epic struggle of my compatriots against Greeks and Turks, and I took part with them in order to obtain these national institutions. And did you come there in Ochrida, and everywhere in Macedonia protected by our valiant army of Lule Bourgas and Chataldja, to perform the duty ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... preceded by nine defective verses which probably preserve old epic turns of expression. The dialect is Bavarian, the theme that of Psalm XC, 2. The manuscript dates from the year 814. Wessobrunn was the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... In the epic grandeur of such pictures as these there is something akin to sadness, though assuredly Millet did not mean them to be sad. Did he not say of the "Woman Carrying Water": "I have avoided, as I always ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... otherwise. Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import? Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of "documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's "Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present general aesthetic attitude and inspiration, and ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... something grandly terrible about it all. It was a barbaric invasion, an army, each man fighting for his own hand under the banner of gold. It was conquest. Every day, as I watched that human torrent, I realised how vast, how irresistible it was. It was Epic, it was Historical. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... spent in preparing the first edition, published in 1804-07. The work was based chiefly on Washington's own diaries and letters and secret archives and it told not simply the epic story of this great life but the truth about the birth of our nation. Marshall later spent fifteen years revising the first edition, verifying to the last detail every chapter, page and paragraph ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... L'Argent, which is the sequel to La Curee and deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... discovery of America by Columbus and the circumnavigation by Magellan can hardly be attributed to him, yet they were the consequences of a truly philosophical reasoning. But the investigation of Nature is an affair of genius, not of rules. No man can invent an organon for writing tragedies and epic poems. Bacon's system is, in its own terms, an idol of the theatre. It would scarcely guide a man to a solution of the riddle of AElia Laelia Crispis, or to that of the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... their lives to bring the little one ashore; and how the Brewsters had taken her into their home and brought her up. It was a simple tale and simply told, but the heroism of the romance touched it with an epic quality that gripped the listener's imagination and sympathies tenaciously. And now the waif snatched from the grasp of the covetous sea had blossomed into this exquisite being; this creature beloved, petted, and well-nigh spoiled ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... as any rover described in gay, romantic screeds, but, when my fitful life is over, no epic will narrate my deeds. Condemned to silent heroism, I go my unmarked way alone, and no one hands me prune or prism, as token that my deeds are known. But yesterday my teeth were aching, and to the painless dentist's lair I took my way, unawed, unquaking, and ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... Benfy, clearing his throat, "has, in his epic of the Oberon made admirable use of much the same idea, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... in the dusk, and red hair. Perhaps this was why she was her father's favourite. She and Walter were especial chums; Di was the only one to whom he would ever read the verses he wrote himself—the only one who knew that he was secretly hard at work on an epic, strikingly resembling "Marmion" in some things, if not in others. She kept all his secrets, even from Nan, and told him ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... life. In allegorical interpretation persons are transformed into ideas and their history into a system of philosophy. The Greek philosophers had applied this method to Homer since the fourth century B.C.E., in order to read into the epic poet, whose work they regarded almost as a Divine revelation, their reflective theories of the universe. And doubtless the Jewish philosophers were influenced by ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... said little save to guide Beatrice and warn her of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet, he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that, were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death such as no Homer ever dreamed, no ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... The Age which produced the Faerie Queene II. The Author of the Faerie Queene III. Study of the Faerie Queene: 1. A Romantic Epic 2. Influence of the New Learning 3. Interpretation of the Allegory 4. The Spenserian Stanza 5. Versification 6. Diction and Style ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... of this amazing horse and predatory cow. Somewhere near the middle of the epic little Royal Beaudry usually dropped asleep. The rhythmic tale always comforted him. These nameless animals were very real friends of his. They had been companions of his tenderest years. He loved them with a devotion from which no fairy tale could ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... do, let me know," responded Hippy, "and I'll write an epic poem about you that will make the world sit up and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... mob died down. The sight of Horatia (I beg her pardon humbly, Madame Tallafferr) in the path smote them with misgivings. As in Macaulay's immortal, if somewhat jingly epic, "those behind cried 'Forward' and those before cried 'Back'!" That single hale and fiery old lady held them. No more could those two hundred ruffians have defied the challenge of her contemptuous eyes than they could have advanced into the flaming ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... deeds, or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, a refinement ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Greek calm is hard to find. "For repose and serenity of mind," says a modern author, "we must go back to the Greek temple and statue, the Greek epic and drama, the Greek oration and moral treatise; and modern education will never become truly effectual till it brings more minds into happy contact with the ideal of a balanced, harmonious development of all the powers of mind, body, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... generates mythology; in union with imagination and reason, it gives birth to theology and cosmogony; in union with imagination, reason, and experience, it is the source of philosophy; in union with the same, together with the artistic sense and high degrees of imaginative sympathy, it creates epic poetry and art. Its total outcome, however, may be included under the term Belief. And it results from an assumed validity of consciousness, that universal belief is always an indication of universal truth. At the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary labors, which ripened yearly, Pye tried his hand at an epic,—the subject, King Alfred,—the plot and treatment not greatly differing from those which Blackmore brought to the same enterprise. The poem passed at once from the bookshop to the trunk-maker,—not, however, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis Stevenson's Balfour cousins as something very precious! The occasion was the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, in 1874, and, yellow and faded, the Epic still graces my Every Day Book, and, as one reads its inspiriting lines, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... according to the modern canons of criticism, the Reviewer is expected to show his immense superiority to the author reviewed, and at the same time to relieve the tediousness of narration, by turning the epic, dramatic, moral story before him into quaint and lively burlesque." (Quarterly, May, 1809.) In his review of the Life and Works of John Home he speaks of "the hackneyed rules of criticism, which, having crushed a hundred poets, will never, it may be prophesied, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... contribution to the history of India, published by Mr Wheeler,(15) gives a complete insight into this interesting topic; and this passage of the ancient Sanskrit epic forms one of the most wonderful and thrilling scenes ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... race of giants. Their like has hardly been seen in any other epoch of that sublime scrimmage called history. Five or six names may be selected from the list of the early American prophets whose deeds and outcry, if reduced to hexameters, would be not the Iliad, not the Jerusalem Delivered, but the Epic ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... received two parcels; the Chanson de Roland gives me infinite pleasure—particularly the Introduction, treating of the national epic and of the Mahabharata which, it seems, tells of the fight between the spirits of ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... sets to work on the world-famous Sacred and Profane Love, and shows us the Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus—that wearisome imitation of the similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea—the sumptuously attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)—sits at the fountain in unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and holding ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of Queen Guenever. In like manner the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic {24} handling by such ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Verse.—When rhyme is omitted, we have blank verse. This is the most dignified of all kinds of verse, and is, therefore, appropriate for epic and dramatic poetry, where it is chiefly found. Most blank verse makes use of the iambic pentameter measure, but we find many exceptions. Read the following examples of blank verse so as to show ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... persons themselves, speaking and acting upon the stage: in the epic, on the contrary, the poet only relates the different adventures of his characters. It is natural to be delighted with fine descriptions of events, in which illustrious persons and whole nations are interested; and hence the epic poem had its origin. But we are quite differently ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... as to the site of the town which was so long besieged by the Greeks; and certain sceptical spirits even went so far as to deny that there ever was such a person as Homer at all, or that if there were, he wrote the epic poem which has borne his . name so long. Tradition, however, was pretty constant in pointing to the hill of Hissarlik as the site on which Troy was built. Strabo was quite an exception in relegating the town to the lower end of the ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... classes—literary, philosophical, historical. On the "literary" studies he expatiates at great length: to begin with, the historian must "have read with attention the great models." Which great models? Daunou "does not hesitate" to place in the front rank "the masterpieces of epic poetry;" for "it is the poets who have created the art of narrative, and whoever has not learnt it from them cannot have more than an imperfect knowledge of it." He further recommends the reading of modern novels; "they will teach the method ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... beautiful paint of natural truths. In Chardin's case—by him the relativity of mundane things was accepted with philosophic phlegm—an onion was more important than an angel, a copper stew-pan as thrilling as an epic. And then the humanity of his youth holding a fiddle and bow, the exquisite textures of skin and hair, and the glance of the eyes. You believe the story told of his advice to his confrere: "Paint with sentiment." But he mixed his sentiment with lovely colours, he is one of the chief ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... thyself free of Manhood's guild, Pull down thy barns and greater build, Pluck from the sunset's fruit of gold, Glean from the heavens and ocean old, From fireside lone and trampling street Let thy life garner daily wheat, The epic of a man rehearse, Be something better than thy verse, And thou shalt hear the life-blood flow From farthest ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... tendency sometimes given is that the Negro is only a generation from slavery. It should not be forgotten that individuals of every other race in history have at some time been held slaves. The bondage of Israel is to-day only an epic poem. The Greek Slave adorns simply a niche in some palace of art. The Servii of Rome instructed the masters of the world. The Anglo-Saxon has not only worn the Roman and Norman collars, but individuals ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... literary revival took place which brought back the old glories of the age of Sargon. Once more new editions were made of standard works, poets arose to celebrate the deeds of the monarch, and books became multiplied. Among the literary products of the period was the great Chaldaean Epic in twelve books, recording the adventures of the hero Gilgames, and embodying the Chaldaean story ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... familiar only with the Northern standpoint. But he has not the least appreciation of the anti-slavery spirit in its heroic phase. On the wrongs of the slave he is silent, while upon the sins of the carpet-bagger he is eloquent. This one-sidedness robs of its significance what should be the American epic ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... and poetically told legends of Ireland's epic hero Fionn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, and a book for story-telling or reading aloud. "Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... giving a pretty complete outline of the founder of the Teutonic race we have in our notes given all the Heimskringla sketch of the Black Sea Odin. We have done this, not only on account of the material it furnishes as the groundwork of a Teutonic epic, which we trust the muses will ere long direct some one to write, but also on account of the vivid picture it gives of Teutonic life as shaped and controlled by ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... the public estimation. Weber himself, however, was by no means a man to disregard the tenor of the words and characters he was to associate with his music, and was greatly charmed with his English coadjutor's operatic version of Wieland's fairy epic. He was invited to come over to London and himself superintend the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... written on the fly-leaf of the MS., "I would not wish to hurt the honest pride of any Italian; but the works of a great genius are the property of all ages and all countries: and I hope it will be recorded to future ages, that England possesses the original MS. of one of the four greatest epic poems the world has produced, and, beyond all doubt, the only one of the four now existing." There is no date to this MS. The first printed edition of the Gerusalemme is ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... of the wild buffalo is morose and uncertain, and such is its strength and courage that in the Hindu epic of the Ramayana its onslaught is compared to that of the tiger.[1] It is never quite safe to approach them, if disturbed in their pasture or alarmed from their repose in the shallow lakes. On such occasions they hurry into line, draw up in defensive array, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... of his reverence for poets and poetry. Mangone was finally taken, and beaten to death with hammers at Naples. He and his like are the heroes of much popular verse, written in ottava rima, and beginning with the traditional epic invocation to the muse. A fine example is "The most beautiful history of the life and death of Pietro Mancino, chief of Banditti," which has remained popular with the people ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... brethren than to the French whose language they use. Charles de Coster, who may be considered as the father of this particular branch of the school, published in 1868 the Legend of Ulenspiegel, which is nothing but a prose epic in which the legendary character of Owliglass is identified with one of the heroes of the sixteenth century revolution against Spain. Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913), in his best novels, deals with the manners and customs of the Flemish peasantry. The very soul of Flanders shines ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... armes" is meant, I suppose, the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. Posterity will think the horrors of civil war compensated by the pleasure of reading Lucan's epic! ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... politics and literature of the country that it is valuable. Above all, it possesses the crowning quality displayed usually in creative poetry alone, of presenting a vivid mind picture of the character of the men with whom it deals. It has been called the 'Epic of the Sudan.' It lacks the charm of form, but in all else the description is well merited. Its pages are a treasure house of information for the careful student, and the volume may be read many times without ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Kuli range recount the episode of the ingenuous troutling which, having apparently conceived a violent passion for the Colonel, literally forced itself upon the hook seven times within a short afternoon. Captains on the Sultanitza Planina rehearse the epic incidents of how the Colonel snatched victory from defeat after pursuing for three miles an infuriated pike which had wrenched the very rod from his grasp. Subalterns in the chill wilds of Cologne, adding picturesque details to an already artistic story, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... saw it; for most of the world it came as an illimitable multitude of incoherent, loud, and confusing impressions. But all the time he was at least doing his utmost to see the war, to simplify it and extract the essence of it until it could be apprehended as something epic and explicable, as ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... our pleasing duty to be able to corroborate to some extent, Mr. F. Bayham's favourable report. Fancy sketches and historical pieces our young man had eschewed; having convinced himself either that he had not an epic genius, or that to draw portraits of his friends, was a much easier task than that which he had set himself formerly. Whilst all the world was crowding round a pair of J. J,.'s little pictures, a couple of chalk heads ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem, "Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement. Voltaire afterward said that he would not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... With a view of giving a pretty complete outline of the founder of the Teutonic race we have in our notes given all the Heimskringla sketch of the Black Sea Odin. We have done this, not only on account of the material it furnishes as the groundwork of a Teutonic epic, which we trust the muses will ere long direct some one to write, but also on account of the vivid picture it gives of Teutonic life as shaped and ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... and political life should never enter into them, except as a subordinate element; but there is a border-land between the two, in which politics and society act and react on each other, and it is from this field that the great subjects for epic and dramatic poetry have always been reaped. Hawthorne only knew of this by hearsay. Of the strenuous conflict that continually goes on in political centres like London and New York, a struggle for wealth, for ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in 'this world which is'—so Peter informed us before his conversion to ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... LINCOLN went his way, leaving behind him a trail of glory, shining like the sun; in the path of which, freed through the mandate of his great soul, MARCHED FOUR MILLION NEGROES, now swollen to twelve, their story, the saddest epic of the ages, of whom and in behalf of whom their children; the generation now and those to come, this History was collated and arranged. It is an EVANGEL proclaiming to the world, their unsullied patriotism; their rapid fire loyalty, that through all the years of the ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... above all, Fandor, coupled with his friend, detective Juve, had either distinguished himself gloriously or covered himself with ridicule, but in either case he had attracted public attention by his epic combats with the most deadly personality of the age—the ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... but the forcible interest culminated in the total consumption of this pie, and the bursting of this boy. Truly he was a fine sight, Barbox Brothers, with serious attentive face, and ear bent down, much jostled on the pavements of the busy town, but afraid of losing a single incident of the epic, lest he should be examined in it ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... the classical translations that used to make him inaccurate, a scrap of a very boyish epic about King Arthur, beginning with a storm at Tintagel, sundry half ballads, the verses he was suspected of, and never would show, that first summer at Hollywell, and a very touching vision of his fair young mother. Except a translation or two, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rather epic than dramatic in his powers, there can be no question as to Wagner's rank. The performance of the "Nibelungenring," covering "Rheingold," "Die Walkueren," "Siegfried," and "Goetterdaemmerung," was one of the epochs of musical ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... like a descending wind, and leave him physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an instance of the poetical temper in its most unbridled form. A glance through the enormous range of his collected works is like an excursion into chaos. We are met almost at the threshold by a colossal epic, Creation, Man and the Messiah (1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes, by descriptive pieces which embrace the universe, by all the froth and roar and turbidity of genius, with none of its purity ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the rear, in her haste to engage the enemy. Before she came up she commenced the action at a long range, and very abruptly—for an effective rhetorician of Aunt Becky's sort, jumps at once, like a good epic poet, in medias res; and as Nutter, who, like all her friends in turn, experienced once or twice 'a taste of her quality,' observed to his wife, 'by Jove, that woman says things for which she ought to be put in the watch-house.' So now and here she maintained ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 1718. "Nos pretres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense; Notre credulite fait toute leur science." Act IV., Scene I.] For several years Voltaire went on writing, with increasing reputation. In 1723, his great epic poem, "La Henriade," was secretly circulated in Paris.[Footnote: Desnoiresterres, Jeunesse, 297.] The author was one of the marked men of the town. At the same time his reputation must have been to some extent that of a troublesome ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... tufts. Who marched to battle with their gaiters black. Like a poor prisoner, who falls a-dreaming Of vast and murmuring forests, with a tree Fashioned of shavings, taken from a doll's house, I build my Father's Epic with these soldiers. ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... Morning," which means that they understood the cows to signify the light of morning, and it would seem also that they thought that the waters mentioned in the story signified the rain. But why do they speak of these acts as heroic deeds, exploits of a mighty warrior, in the same tone and with the same epic fire as when they sing of Indra's battles in times near to their own, real battles in which their own forefathers, strong in their faith in the god, shattered the armies of hostile Aryan tribes or the fortresses of dark-skinned natives? The ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... "Most epic poets plunge in medias res, (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road), And then your hero tells, whene'er you please, What went before—by way ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... works I would fain finish the Christabel, Alas! for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem—Jerusalem ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... prose, preceded by nine defective verses which probably preserve old epic turns of expression. The dialect is Bavarian, the theme that of Psalm XC, 2. The manuscript dates from the year 814. Wessobrunn was the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... my Novel because its failure really is a mystery. But I am not at all more fortunate in the reception of my poetry. I have tried it every way—ballades by the bale, sonnets by the dozen, loyal odes, seditious songs, drawing-room poetry, an Epic on the history of Labducuo, erotic verse, all fire, foam, and fangs, reflective ditto, humble natural ballads about signal-men and newspaper-boys, Life-boat rescues, Idyls, Nocturnes in rhyme, tragedies in blank verse. Nobody will print them, or, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... kinship to the Greek stories as the Old English Apollonius of Tyre, which was probably or rather certainly in the original Greek itself. The sources of French "romance"—I must take leave to request a "truce of God" as to the application of that term and of "epic" for present purposes—appear to have been two—the Saint's Life and the patriotic or family saga, the latter in the first place indelibly affected by the Mahometan incursions of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The story-telling ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... some bearing on the central theme. It is the principle which excludes all extraneous matter, and demands that all threads converge toward the climax. Classical violations of Unity may be found in the episodes of Homer and other epic poets of antiquity, as well as in the digressions of Fielding and other celebrated novelists; but no beginner should venture to emulate such liberties. Unity is the quality we have lately noted and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... castle in Wilhelmsthal. Though in Vienna honors came later, Hebbel felt himself to be during these years at the summit of his existence. In 1855 he bought a country home at Orth near Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, and to the idyllic atmosphere of that retreat he owed the inspiration for the epic poem Mother and Child (1857), his gentlest treatment of a tragic theme. In 1857 he issued a definitive edition of his Poems, dedicated to Uhland, "the first poet of the present time." In 1854 Genoveva, in modified form, was successfully ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... be likened to a series of lyrics sung by separate singers, which, coalescing, at last make a vigorous chorus, and this, attracting many from afar, swells and is prolonged, until presently it assumes the dignity and proportions of epic song." ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... the Symphony depends largely upon the attitude of the hearer. In this work we are not to look for the sublimity and emotional depth of a Bach or Beethoven any more than we expect a whimsical comedy of Aristophanes to resemble an epic poem of Milton. But for daring imagination, for rhythmic vitality and certainty of orchestral effect, it was and remains a work[234] ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and Gown" you look in vain For epic or heroic strain. Not ours to scale the heights sublime, Which hardly masters dare to climb; We only sing of youth and joy, And love,—the credo of ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... epitaph appended already, as Bluphocks assures me—"Here a mammoth-poem lies, 15 Fouled to death by butterflies." His own fault, the simpleton! Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly.—AEsculapius, an Epic. Catalogue of the drugs: Hebe's plaister—One strip Cools 20 your lip. Phoebus's emulsion—One bottle Clears your throttle. Mercury's ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... brought the old man to weeping! And the tear was so genuine, so convincing, so majestic that it induced in Edwin a blank humility. He was astounded, mystified; but he was also humbled. He himself was never told, and he never learnt, the explanation of that epic tear. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the tales is slight; yet who can think of the Greeks without remembering the story of Troy, or of Rome without a backward glance at AEneas, fabled founder of the race and hero of Virgil's world-famous Latin epic? Any understanding of German civilisation would be incomplete without knowledge of the mythical prince Siegfried, hero of the earliest literature of the Teutonic people, finally immortalized in the nineteenth century through the ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... the literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the idea of a God ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Caesar Scaliger is perhaps typical: "'And the most noble, of course, are hymns and paeans. In the second place are songs and odes and scolia, which are concerned with the praises of brave men. In the third place the epic, in which there are heroes and other lesser personages. Tragedy together with comedy follows this order; nevertheless comedy will hold the fourth place apart by itself. After these, satires, then exodia, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... countries. His book is excellent for its manner, while in respect of matter the author has drawn information from all accessible sources, and digested it with judgment and impartiality. Thus he has produced a worthy contribution to that great but yet unwritten work, so full of both tragic and epic elements, the Annals of Labor. What a noble book might be made by some competent writer who should ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... other words, that feeling should take a concrete shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators was denied them. But they remain consummate masters in their own restricted province: delicate observers of externals, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... solid merit, which long held their place. In August, 1792, he accompanied the duke to the campaign in the Ardennes. In 1793 he went with his master to the siege of Mainz. Goethe took the old German epic of Reynard the Fox, with which he had long been familiar, and which, under the guise of animals, represents the conflicting passions of men, and ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home was a paradise where ten impressive persons—the models, it may be, of antediluvian patriarchs—reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... delivery in reciting apt bits of poetry and other quotations adding to the pleasure of hearing his accounts rendered. He gave us modern versions of the Greek myths and hero legends, of Cadmus and Thebes, of Jason and the Golden Fleece, of the Trojan epic, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the sons of AEsculapius; they were soldiers as ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... just where Jeffrey is apt to fail; though he affects to be a dictator, he is really a follower of the fashion. He could put up with Rogers's flattest 'correctness,' Moore's most intolerable tinsel, and even Southey's most ponderous epic poetry, because admiration was respectable. He could endorse, though rather coldly, the general verdict in Scott's favour, only guarding his dignity by some not too judicious criticism; preferring, for example, the sham romantic business of the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Cortez, is the work of Charles Cary Rumsey. The grim, stern and epic history of the bold, arrogant adventurer who was merciless in success and dauntless in failure is ruggedly suggested by this figure, mounted upon a heavily armored charger and advancing with drawn sword. The fact that Pizzaro was a member of Balboa's party ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... more than anything else in the world, to be in the midst of heroic effort. The gods had set the stage for epic action that night, and his spirit was big with desire for bigness. It was very hard to promise to put goloshes upon his ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... lofty strain, of earlier days, I spread the King's or Hero's praise, And struck the martial Chords with epic fire: But farewell, Hero! farewell, King! Your deeds my lips no more shall sing, For Love alone shall be ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... this simple and practical man amid the more mystical western problems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an element which clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. He had many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this—that he was the last man in the world to be the epic poet. There is something almost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands at every turn as the symbol of the special trials and the modern transfiguration of England; from ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... impressionist. The value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a hundred ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him; and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say about Paradise found?" Whereupon the poet wrote his second epic. ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... Stafford Northcote, Disraeli himself never made any vain pretensions to be devoted to pursuits for which he did not care a rap. He once dreamt of an epic poem, and his early ambition urged him a step or two in that direction, but his critical faculty, which, despite all his monstrosities of taste, was vital, restrained him from making a fool of himself, and he forswore the muse, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... one of the very best of his works as to style; and being translated from a kindred tongue is delightful as mere language. In its rude joviality, and simple and direct delineation of character, it is a thoroughly good representative of the famous ancient Beast Epic.' The edges of this book, and of all subsequent books, were trimmed in accordance with the invariable practice of the early printers. Mr. Morris much preferred ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... pregnant outlines, the future history of a world. And one of these two episodes,—that which relates to the creation of all things,—must have as certainly had a place in human history as in the master epic of England. Man would have forever remained ignorant of many of those events related in the opening chapters of Scripture, which took place ere there was a human eye to witness, or a human memory to record, had he ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... miles long, is by universal confession the richest treasure-house the ransackers of the whole earth have yet brought to light. "The wealth of Ormuz or of Ind," immortalised by Milton's most majestic epic, the wealth of the Rand completely eclipses, and nothing imagined in the glowing pages of the "Arabian Nights" rivals in solid worth the sober realities now being unearthed along this uninviting ridge. It fortunately was not in the power of the Boer Government to carry off this ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... four months later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... young man; more than once he and Bob had scandalized Broadway; some of their exploits were epic. Now he ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... in his ear the glorious myths of yore With all the rhythmic burdens that they bore, Will be retold, replete with joy and woe;— Ulysses' voyage will ring with epic peal, And the strange tale of Argo's wandering keel; Of high-banked Tyrian galleys will he know, Of Roman triremes, and of many a band The Vikings led from their far norland strand;— Stories of strife and love in ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... fourth generation. And they were all one family; one sole little nation, assembling in joy and pride to celebrate that diamond wedding, the rare prodigious nuptials of two heroic creatures whom life had glorified and from whom all had sprung! And what an epic, what a Biblical numbering of that people suggested itself! How even name all those who entered the farm, how simply set forth their names, their ages, their degree of relationship, the health, the strength, and the hope that they had brought ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... write frequently, sending me large specimens of an epic poem which he was then composing, and desiring my remarks and corrections. These I gave him from time to time, but endeavor'd rather to discourage his proceeding. One of Young's Satires was then just published. I copy'd and sent him a great part of it, which set in a strong light the ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... just dead, having lived just long enough to close the eyes of Wordsworth, who paid the debt to nature but a week or two before. Poor Col., but two days before he died he wrote to a bookseller proposing an epic poem on the "Wanderings of Cain," in twenty-four books. It is said he has left behind him more than forty thousand treatises in criticism and metaphysics, but few of them in a state of completion. They are now destined, perhaps, to wrap up spices. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... scholarship; but he has in general preferred the later and more polished period—that of Kalidasa and the dramatists—to the ruder, yet in my opinion, not less curious and poetical strains of the older epic bards. ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... art's,—the immortality of love. The immortality of art indeed is one of those curious illusions of man's self-love which a moment's thought dispels. Art, who need be told, is as dependent for its survival on the survival of its physical media as man's body itself—and though the epic and the great canvas escape combustion for a million years, they must burn at last, burn with all the other accumulated shadows of time. What we call immortality in art is but the shadow of the soul's immortality; but the immortality of love is that ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... paint at the Arrakan Pagoda to-day, but a pleasant looking man came on board with a chitsaya harp; I had to try and make a jotting of him. G. and Captain Turndrup brought him. He sat and played tunes for hours—epic tunes, which I'd have given anything to remember. His boat-shaped harp of thirteen strings was tuned in minor thirds, so you could readily pick out Celtic tunes on it. I am told Sir Arthur Sullivan came ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... subject for senior students of literature to write about, and "My Favourite Elopement in Fiction" would be outside the purview of any of her girls. She would substitute instead (with my permission), "The Debt of Literature (as well as Science) to DARWIN" and "My Favourite Piece of Epic Poetry." In fine, if I did not really mind, she would herself set all the questions and I should examine the answers. She thought that the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic written by the finger of God upon the strata ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the Aeneid, to celebrate it—its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, three-quarters of a century later, turned over in his mind the plan of an English epic on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to forsake the singing of English origins for the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Zealand. He wrote a good deal of verse before leaving England and after his return, but "Ranolf and Amohia" is the only poem showing traces of Australian influence. It is a miscellany in verse rather than an epic, and contains some fine descriptions ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Yet Gedaliah made up in style for his lack of historical method. The "Chain of Tradition" is a picturesque and enthralling book, it is a warm and cheery retrospect, and even deserves to be called a prose epic. Besides, many of his statements that were wont to be treated as altogether unauthentic have been vindicated by later research. Azariah di Rossi, on the other hand, is immortalized by his spirit rather than his actual contributions to historical literature. He came of an ancient family ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... Beatrice and warn her of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet, he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that, were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death such as no Homer ever dreamed, no Virgil ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... ever passed through them; here it is only Io, daughter of Inachus, loved by Zeus and hunted by the gadfly, who fled outcast through the East. Her story is told in Aeschylus' Prometheus and in a magnificent chorus of his Suppliant Women. (See Rise of the Greek Epic, pp. 247 ff.) ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... troubles he wrote "All is well:" a noble religious poem equal to the hymn of Cleanthes or the twelfth ode of Horace; and in one of his earlier essays he speaks of tragedy as possessing such beauty and grandeur that he is almost ready to believe it is the proper goal and destination of earthly life. In "Epic Philosophy" he says: "Strife is around man, and strife is within him; the lightning thrusts its blazing scymitar through his roof, the thief creeps in at his door, and remorse at his heart. Who, looking on these things, does not ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... ways cannot be determined beforehand. By the study of painting and etching and drawing merely, we could not foresee that there is also possible an art like sculpture, and by studying epic and lyric poetry we could not construct beforehand the forms of the drama. The genius of mankind had to discover ever new forms in which the interest in reality is conserved and yet the things and events are so completely changed that they are separated ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... his children one after another until only one now remains, he worked and he saved. He bought a lot and built a house to rent; then he built another house; then he bought the land where his shop stands and rebuilt the shop itself. It was an epic of homely work. He took part in the work of the church and on election days he changed his coat, and went to ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... ourselves," replied Agony readily. "I think it's perfectly epic to have such a secret. We wouldn't divulge it for ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... chorus. After a short pause, cries of "Howe! Howe!" Nothing short of an oration would satisfy. The secretary rose and delivered something which would take some investigation to classify either as an epic, oration, or burlesque. They wanted variety and such it was. A puzzled expression rested on Lieutenant Trevelyan's face as he tried to follow Mr. ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... single poet; Ossian is one of the principal poets in the collection but the whole is merely ascribed "to the bards" (see pp. v-vi). It is also evident from the Preface that Macpherson was shifting from the reluctant "translator" of a few "fragments" to the projector of a full-length epic "if enough encouragement were given for ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of his class for the quantity of youthful verse produced. At the age of eight, he was writing blank verse in praise of flowers; at twelve, he began an epic which extended to six ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... not the most difficult part of her task. Thanks to the stores of information derived from the abbe and to his prodigious memory for facts, Patience had a passable knowledge of the outlines of universal history. But what he had great trouble in grasping was the connection and difference between epic poetry and history. At first he was indignant at the inventions of the poets, and declared that such impostures ought never to have been allowed. Then, when he had realized that epic poetry, far from leading ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... years for an idea is a privilege that has been accorded only to Israel—'the soldier of God.' That were no tragedy, but an heroic epic, even as the prophet Isaiah had prefigured. The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom of an Israel unworthy of his sufferings. And this was the Israel—the high tragedian in the comedy sock—that I tried humbly to typify ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... in the streams—down by St. Roch and up by Ville Marie—chansons of two hundred years ago mark the strokes of labour as of the evening hour when the professional village story-teller cries "cric-crac" and begins his tale of the loup-garou, or rouses the spirit of a pure patriotism by a crude epic of some valiant atavar; when the parish fiddler brings them to their feet with shining eyes by the strains of O Carillon. They are not less respectful to the British flag, nor less faithful in allegiance because they ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be described by varying Flaubert's phrase of "epic realism": it is romantic realism. The weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct, definite, realistic way, the realism which ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Chees-a-kee, is related to have been conducted a la AEneus, in Virgil, to the halls of the spirits and to have seen them all assembled in the spacious wigwam. Had some bard taken up the tale of this fortunate individual, the literature of the red man might have boasted an epic ranking perhaps with the AEneid or ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... direct influence upon Jefferson. Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely what we knew well enough ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... being who never was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes. He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... their chief Meng-ts'u under the Sung Dynasty; the Mongols made of their country the kingdom of Chaghan-djang. Li-kiang is the territory of Yue-si Chao, called also Mo-sie (Moso), one of the six Chao of Nan-Chao. The Moso of Li-kiang call themselves Ho. They have an epic styled Djiung-Ling (Moso Division) recounting the invasion of part of Tibet by the Moso. The Moso were submitted during the 8th century, by the King of Nan-Chao. They have a special hieroglyphic scrip, a specimen ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... been swallowed by a gigantic frog or toad which was compelled, by queer stratagems, to regurgitate it. These are little children's imaginings. Among the Hindoos the same myth takes the form of an alluring epic—the dragon watching over the celestial waters, of which he has taken possession, is wounded by Indra after a heroic battle, and ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... compositions, each of which is an individual inexpressible by logic, are resolved into universals and abstractions, such as costumes, landscapes, portraits, domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes, deserts, tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic, knightly, idyllic facts, and the like. They are often also resolved into merely quantitative categories, such as little picture, picture, statuette, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, garland of sonnets, poetry, poem, story, romance, and ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation. Only Slavicized Ragusa and indomitable Montenegro kept alive the imagination of the nation which was brought back to life by the half-religious, half-national Slovene poets of the sixteenth century, by the Ragusan epic poet [Gundulic], by the incessant demands of successive diets of the ever-weakening Croatia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the progressive and zealous Serbs of Hungary, who ever since the fifteenth century in increasing numbers made their home there, refugees ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... depend, like the effects in the sky, on unexpected and fugitive circumstances, which have no connection with each other except the background against which they rest, though all are necessarily mingled with the events of this history,—truly a household epic, as great to the eyes of a wise man as a tragedy to the eyes of the crowd, an epic in which you will feel an interest, not only for the part I took in it, but for the likeness that it bears to the destinies of so vast ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... and Syriac versions to the East. It became widely popular during the middle ages, and was worked into poetic form by many writers in French and German. Alberich of Besancon wrote in Middle High German an epic on the subject in the first half of the twelfth century, which was the basis of the German "Pfaffe" Lamprecht's "Alexanderbuch," also of the twelfth century. The French poets Lambert li Court and Alexandre de Bernay composed, between 1180 and 1190, a romance ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... one year's imprisonment in the Bastille on account of a satirical poem on Louis XIV., and in confinement wrote an epic poem, La Henriade. Some other storms raised by his works, such as his Lettres Philosophiques and his Epitre a Uranie, he weathered by flight, or by unscrupulously denying their authorship. The rest of his works, contained in seventy volumes, do not ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... change of style which emerges in, say, Pindar and Aeschylus when compared with what we know of Corinna or Thespis. More objectively and definitely it can be traced in a remarkable change of dialect. The old Attic poets, like Solon, were comparatively little affected by the epic influence; the later elegists, like Ion, Euenus, and Plato, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... 'twister' off the hills gets ready to do business in a 20-knot sou'wester it sends no messenger boys ahead to distribute its itinerary handbills." There is no fault of style which these few lines do not display. They combine, with a singular success, commonness and pomp. The epic poets of old were wont to illustrate the life of man by the phenomena of nature. The vulgar American reverses the process—he illustrates nature from ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... if one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be a small thing to die? Not that there is not a passion of a quite other sort, much less epic, far more dramatic and intimate, that comes out of the very frailty of perishable women; out of the lines of suffering that we see written about their eyes, and that we may wipe out if it were but ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... every source on which they could lay their hands. There were to be found in each of these collections a certain number of works which were unique, either because the authors were natives of the city, or because all copies of them had been destroyed in the course of centuries—the Epic of Grilgames, for instance, at Uruk; a history of the Creation, and of the battles of the gods with the monsters at Kutha: all of them had their special collections of hymns or psalms, religious and magical formulas, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the University Museum secured by purchase a large six column tablet nearly complete, carrying originally, according to the scribal note, 240 lines of text. The contents supply the South Babylonian version of the second book of the epic sa nagba imuru, "He who has seen all things," commonly referred to as the Epic of Gilgamish. The tablet is said to have been found at Senkere, ancient Larsa near Warka, modern Arabic name for and vulgar descendant of the ancient name Uruk, the Biblical Erech mentioned in Genesis X. 10. This ...
— The Epic of Gilgamish - A Fragment of the Gilgamish Legend in Old-Babylonian Cuneiform • Stephen Langdon
... is the ancient kingdom of the Kurus which flourished along the upper course of the Ganges; and the historical fact on which the Epic is based is a great war which took place between the Kurus and a neighbouring tribe, the Panchalas, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... time scheme). When it follows an accented syllable it is called masculine; when it follows an unaccented syllable it is feminine; when it occurs within a line it is called medial; when it occurs after an 'extra' unstressed syllable it is called epic (though as frequent in drama as in epic), as— ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... felt greatly flattered when he got the large box, and the same evening, after coming home from his work in the fields, sat down to inspect the manuscripts sent for his perusal. However, he did not get far, but fell asleep over the first dozen pages of the first epic. He honestly tried again the second evening, but with the same result as before; and on the third day relinquished the attempt in despair, accusing himself for his want of intelligence. Soon after, Mr. Preston made his appearance. He was a tall, thin man, with red whiskers and a ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... confessed that these stories have a certain permanent literary quality, most successful in "Earthbred," "Joseph's House," and "A Widow Woman." These three collections make it tolerably clear that Mr. Evans will find his true medium in the novel, where an epic breadth of material is at hand to fit ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... soothing throes of literary composition. Some time ago he had thought it would be a mighty fine thing to be a poet, and had tried his hand at verse. Finding he possessed some facility, he decided that he was a poet, and at once started an epic poem in rhyme on the Life of Nelson, the material being supplied by Southey. This morning he did ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... to answer questions about storks and their habits. He had tired of them in a moment, and was passionately interested in mules. "There ought to be an epic written about the mules of North Africa!" he exclaimed. "I tell you, it's a great subject. Look at those poor brave chaps struggling to pull carts piled up with casks of beastly Algerian wine, through that sea of mud, which probably goes all the way through ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... reproach of rhyme; a year or two before he was eagerly defending it;[34] again a few years, and he will utterly condemn and drop it in his plays, while retaining it in his translations; afterwards his study of Milton leads him to think that blank verse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes to try it with Homer, but at last translates one book as a specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme! But the charm of this great advocate is, that, whatever side he was on, he could always find excellent reasons for it, and state them with great force, and ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... a scene of indescribable carnage and terror. Cassandra and the Trojan women, driven to take shelter in the temple of Cybele, slay themselves rather than fall into the hands of their captors. 'La Prise de Troie' is perhaps epic rather than dramatic, but as a whole it leaves an impression of severe and spacious grandeur, which can only be paralleled in the finest inspirations of Gluck. In the second division of the work, 'Les Troyens a Carthage,' human interest is paramount. Berlioz was an enthusiastic ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... form the basis of the great Scandinavian epic, the Volsunga Saga, and have supplied not only the materials for the Nibelungenlied, the German epic, and for countless folk tales, but also for Wagner's celebrated operas, The Rhinegold, Valkyr, Siegfried, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you would hear of him even now. Oh, sir! such a portrait as he painted the other day! But I must tell you all about it." And therewith Lionel plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy, and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of the whole story,—now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... express themselves, when we try to generalise, in a series of curves, alternate rises and declines, which may be repeated again and again. In English literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic, Deor's Complaint, Beowulf, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf. From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull poetic pedantries of the age which ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... of the game but the playing of it that counted. Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... was penetrating impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke, erecting walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers into marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads to-day, fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other, dictating love-letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a collection of witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated Greece; mingling initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the cymbals clashed, coquetting with those terrible virgins who awoke the tempest; not ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... great cathedral inspires Michael Angelo's great dome; a Divine Saviour and His transfiguration exalt Raphael; Paradise explains Dante; listening to the sevenfold Hallelujah chorus of God arouses the sweep and majesty of Milton's epic; the woes of three million slaves made eloquence possible for Phillips and Beecher. The saving of a Union, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, represented ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... he had passed through an epic time, one of the great periods of his life. He wondered now how he had been able to carry out such a plan, how he had managed to summon up courage and resources enough, and he felt that the good spirits of earth and air and water ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... history of the ninth century as one of the upholders of Breton independence, and known to tradition as 'the Prop of Brittany,' is the subject of a remarkable series of ballads or hero-tales in the Barzaz-Breiz which together constitute what is almost an epic. These tell of his life, death, adventures, travels, and the marvellous feats of derring-do he accomplished. In some measure he is to Breton legend what Arthur is to British or Holger to that of Denmark. That he is familiar to Breton tradition there can be no question, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Beowulf is the oldest poem in the English language. It is our "old English epic"; and, like much of our ancient verse, it is a war poem. The author of it is unknown. It was probably composed in the fifth century— not in England, but on the Continent— and brought over to this island— not on paper or on parchment— ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... entirely recovered Nero commanded his presence at Antium, whither the court was going for the hot summer months. Nero was ambitious to write an immortal epic poem which should rival the "Odyssey," and in order that he might describe realistically a burning city, gave a secret command while he was in Antium that Rome should ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... the various spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the applause of a court, although it neither possessed judgment nor feeling for the merits of a writer, nor for poetical beauties; and he complains at the same time that this court had neither duly estimated his tragedies nor his epic poems. It is characteristic both of the court and of Voltaire that he eagerly pressed himself forward for admission to its favor, and sought to attract attention by a work which be himself called a piece of trash, and that the court extended its approbation and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... the eighteenth century was a period of predominant English influence. The first half of the century had fostered this ascendency through the popularity of the moral weeklies, the religious epic, and the didactic poetry of Britain. Admiration for English ideals was used as a weapon to combat French dominion in matters of taste, till a kind of Anglomania spread, which was less absolute than the waning Gallomania had been, only in such measure as the nature ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... epithets, and variety of metaphors, tropes, and figures were uttered between these well-matched opponents, that an epic bard would have found his account in listening to the contest; which, in all probability, would not have been confined to words, had it not been interrupted for the sake of a young woman of an agreeable countenance and modest carriage; who, being shocked at some of their flowers of speech, and ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... beliefs of ancient Chaldea were collected together in later times and an attempt made to combine them into a philosophical system. What this was like we learn from the opening lines of the epic which recounted the story of the Creation. In the beginning, we are told, was the chaos of the deep, which was the mother of all things. Out of it came first the primeval gods, Lakhum and Lakhamu, whose names had been handed down from the Sumerian age. Then came ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... rigid fidelity to her individual vision and personal conviction which constituted her strength. There are always stupid, well-meaning busybodies in the world, who go about making question of the sonneteer why he does not attempt something epic and homicidal, or worrying the carver of cherry-stones to try his hand at a Colossus; but though they disturb and discompose, they luckily do no material harm. They did no material harm to Kate Greenaway. She yielded, no doubt, to pressure put upon her to try figures on a larger scale; to ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... of England will never fetch another king from thence." Adieu! my dear child. I am sensible that I write you short letters, but I write you all I know. I don't know how it is, but the wonderful seems worn out. In this our day, we have no rabbit women-no elopements-no epic poems,(744) finer than Milton's-no contest about harlequins and Polly Peachems. Jansen (745) has won no more estates, and the Duchess of Queensberry is grown as tame as her neighbours. Whist has spread an universal opium over the whole nation; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... had listened to the stupendous epic of a long-lost world. Now I found speech to voice the question ever with me, the thing that lay as close to my heart as did the welfare of Larry, indeed the whole object of my quest—the fate of Throckmartin and those who had ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Complaint, and Husband's Message), the Wanderer is the most artistic, and best portrays the gloomy contrast ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... variously designated than Comus. Milton himself describes it simply as "A Mask"; by others it has been criticised and estimated as a lyrical drama, a drama in the epic style, a lyric poem in the form of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is explained partly by its complex charm and many-sided interest, and partly ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... self-concentrated, more dramatical in spirit, if not in form, it will not have the qualities which can powerfully affect Englishmen. Not only were the Poets of our most national age dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems. Take away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury Tales become indeed, what they have been most untruly called, mere versions of French or Italian Fables. Milton may have been right in changing the form of the Paradise Lost,—we ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... are dependent on poetic execution—the whole difference is in the degree; there is only one way of feeling, which varies from more to less; even the diversity of external forms changes nothing in the quality of aesthetic impressions. Whether the form be lyric or epic, dramatic or descriptive, we can receive an impression either stronger or weaker, but if we remove what is connected with the nature of the subject, we shall always be affected in the same way. The feeling we experience is absolutely identical; it proceeds entirely from one single and the same ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... most pretentious kind of narrative poetry; it tells in serious verse of the great deeds of a popular hero. The Iliad, the Aeneid, Beowulf, Paradise Lost are important epics. The Idylls of the King is in the main an epic poem. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Laius and the Oedipus, may have been of such high merit as to make up for defects observable in the one that still survives. In any case, we can hardly err in accepting Dr. Verral's judgment that "the story of Aeschylus may be, and in the outlines probably is, the genuine epic legend of ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up and down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew more and more fabulous and epic. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... is a literal reprint from Keightley's Library edition. Print, binding, and size all render the tasteful little book a pleasant form in which to possess the greatest epic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the old pleasures. Wagner began again to feel more and more his isolated position. The complete misunderstanding of Tannhaeuser, which he began to write when he first arrived in Dresden, and the refusals of the work by other cities, Berlin among them, declaring it "too epic," rendered this sense of isolation complete. The recurrence of such experiences as these showed him how far his art was still removed from its ideal and his contemporaries from the comprehension of their ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... clever young friend's intrusion. Cattle-food, indeed! As if beans, oats, warm mashes, and a ball, are to be pushed down a man's throat just as he is meditating on the great social problem, or (for I think it was my epic I was going to touch up) just as he was about to soar to the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that of Greece and Rome rather than on that of ancient Israel. But he had been perfectly willing to accept that fate—and to remodel the form and style of the book of Job on what he considered the pattern of the classical epic. ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... by the epic, where heroic deeds, or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the perfect samples of heroic verse, of famous songs and stories woven into an epic poem, are to be found in Homer.[17] Nowhere, in the whole range of the world's poetry, can we see such splendid impersonations of primitive life and character treated artistically. Yet the plot is simple enough. Agamemnon, the chief commander of the Greek army, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... will put faith in him; but the imitator will neither know nor have faith—neither science nor true opinion can be ascribed to him. Imitation, then, is devoid of knowledge, being only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic and epic poets are imitators in ...
— The Republic • Plato
... my friend, irreverently. "In Shakespeare's day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and discharged the cook with an epic. But not for B'way ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... whole household, gathered together at their spinning, weaving, and so on, would listen to one of their number who told anew some old story of adventure or achievement. In very truth the saga is a prose epic, and marked by every quality an epic should possess. Growing up while the deeds of dead heroes were fresh in memory, most often recited before the sharers in such deeds, the saga, in its pure form, never goes from what is truth to its teller. Where ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... dress-hats. When he speaks of his hero as having assumed the feather, he means that he has donned the uniform of a soldier. He has come to town, in other words, to enlist. Then behold the transformation! He begins at once to act irrationally. The whole epic paints in never-fading colors the disastrous effect upon the intellect of putting on soldier-clothes. You will pardon me, my friends, if I speak thus plainly, but I must open to you the hidden wisdom of your ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... heroes of song sung by the poets, like those of Homer and Virgil. The early German hero was Siegfried, and the song or epic that celebrates his deeds is called the Nibelungen Lied. Its ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
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