"Modernness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In spite of the neat prosperity nowadays, and the sign-posts which tell you everything you can possibly want to know about directions, it is easy to read the faded print of that long serial romance of generations. Old houses tell it, old trees tell it, old names tell it, and the very modernness of the new things emphasizes the heroic drama of the past. Think, for instance, of the boulder monument at Fairfield, commemorating its birth in 1639 and its burning by ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... last? The motion of angelic hosts must be like the movement of this ode, combining in some marvellous and mysterious way the swiftness of lightning with the stately progress of a pageant white with the blinding white light of an awful Presence. The note of modernness is the quality which is most likely to mislead us in forecasting favorably the durability of contemporary poetry, appealing as it does to so many personal issues irrelevant to the standards of immortal art. This is precisely the note ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson |
