"Erse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the end of the eighteenth century, and ends at the Battle of Trafalgar. Will's family originate from Shetland, a group of islands to the north of mainland Britain. Kingston mistakenly believes that they speak Erse on Shetland, which is not the case: Erse is spoken in Ireland, being similar to the Gaelic spoken ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... and general admiration are excited by poems, affirmed to be from the Erse of Ossian. Chatterton, with characteristic promptitude, instantly publishes, not imitations, but a succession of genuine translations from the Saxon and Welsh, with precisely the same language and imagery, though the Saxon and Welsh were ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... to rehearse, Your wily snares an' fechtin fierce, Sin' that day Michael did you pierce, Down to this time, Wad ding a' Lallan tongue, or Erse, In prose ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... made of wheat and honey being one of their intoxicants. This method of preparing mead (or metheglin) is current to this day among our peasantry. Another drink was made from barley, and this, he tells us, they called [Greek: koyrmi], the word still used in Erse for beer, under the form cuirm. Dioscorides the physician, who records this (and who may perhaps have tried our national beverage, as he lived shortly after the Claudian conquest of Britain), pronounces ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... is sometimes prized by persons in humble stations may be gathered from an occurrence mentioned to me by a female friend. She had an opportunity of benefiting a poor old woman in her own hut, who, wishing to make a return, said to her daughter in Erse, in a tone of plaintive earnestness, 'I would give anything I have, but I hope she does not wish for my Broach!' and uttering these words she put her hand upon the Broach which fastened her kerchief, and which she imagined had attracted the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed, he has the gift of tongues, and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; he would like to get into the Office for Foreign Affairs, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher forms of poetic diction through five centuries has made simple expression extremely difficult. I am therefore ready to believe that in Welsh, as in Gaelic and in Erse, the poets have still wide fields of lyric, epic, and dramatic art untilled. We have seen, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Provencal poets capable of producing simple and thrilling numbers which are out of the reach of their sophisticated ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... closed in winter and warmed by stoves, forms a huge and airy exercise-hall for the convalescent patients. As for the cooking-facilities, they are something prodigious, at least in the sight of ordinary kitchens, leaving nothing to be desired, unless it were that discriminating kettle of the Erse king, that could cook for any given number of men and apportion the share of each to his rank and needs. Such a kettle might make the "extra-diet" kitchen unnecessary; otherwise, I can hardly tell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... books; the others, be the number six or eight, to consist entirely of separate treatises, each giving a critical biblio-biographical history of some one subject. I will, with great pleasure, join you in learning Welsh and Erse: and you, I, Turner, and Owen, might dedicate ourselves for the first half year to a complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations, that are the native growth of Britain. If the ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... black-letter folios, the treasure of great libraries and of jealously hoarded private collections. Much was in dialects little understood-forgotten forms of speech-Old French, Middle High German, Old Norse, medieval Latin, the ancient Erse and Cymric tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an almost total lack of apparatus for the study of this literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as follows: "Extensive influence of poetic genius over the remotest and most uncivilized nations; its connection with liberty and the virtues that naturally attend on it. [See the Erse, Norwegian, and Welsh fragments; the Lapland and American songs.]" He also quotes Virgil, Aen. vi. 796: "Extra anni solisque vias," and Petrarch, Canz. 2: "Tutta lontana dal camin del sole." Cf. also Dryden, Thren. August. 353: "Out of the solar walk and Heaven's highway;" Ann. Mirab. ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... besides this Highland goddess were two Scotchmen, who could not speak a word of any language but their own Erse; and to complete his astonishment at this allegorical entertainment, with the dessert there entered a little horse, and galloped round the table; a hieroglyphic I cannot solve. Poniatowski accounts for this profusion of kindness by his great-grandmother ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... doings to rehearse, Your wily snares an' fechtin' fierce, Sin' that day Michael did you pierce, Down to this time, Wad ding a Lallan tongue, or Erse, In ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... languages were used for literary communication in the British Islands; two Celtic tongues spoken by nations of that race, who still occupied large portions of the country; Latin, as elsewhere the organ of the church and of learning; and Anglo- Saxon. The first of the Celtic tongues, the Erse or Gaelic, was common only to the Celts of Ireland and Scotland, where it is still spoken. The second, that of the Cymrians or ancient Britons, has been ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Erse term for a wooden anchor with a stone in it, but in later times is applied to ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... languages might have originated in the adoption of that of Rome by the British provincials. In answer to this I refer in the first place to Lloyd's reasoning, quoted in the note," viz. that the same similarity exists between the Latin and the Erse [see Newman, in the Classical Museum, vol. vi.]. "In the second place to the fact, that Wales and Cornwall do not appear to have been occupied, like the rest of England, by the Romans."... "Still, however, the long residence of the Romans in the island, with the known influence always produced ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... submitted to John Home (q.v.), the author of Douglas, certain writings which he represented to be translations from ancient Gaelic poems. By the help of Home and some of his friends M. was enabled to pub. a considerable number of his Fragments of Poetry translated from the Gaelic and Erse Languages. These were received with profound and widely-spread interest, and gave rise to a controversy which can hardly yet be said to be settled. While some authorities received them with enthusiastic admiration, others immediately ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the Mount, and again from the Lizard towards Helston and Falmouth." The inevitable happened, just as somewhat the same process has taken place in Wales, in Ireland, and in the Scottish Highlands. In these three countries the old tongue had the aid of a powerful literature. Welsh and Erse may be very long in dying out, as we hope they will be; yet nothing can prevent the people of Wales and Ireland becoming bi-lingual, and this can only have one ultimate result. Commercially, a single language is necessary to the nation, and there has never been any doubt as to which that language ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... from Nutt's "Voyage of Bram" (I. 162) and partly from Joyce's "Ancient Celtic Romances." The latter, however, allows Maelduin sixty comrades instead of seventeen, which is Nutt's version. There are copies of the original narrative in the Erse language at the British Museum, and in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The voyage, which may have had some reality at its foundation, is supposed to have taken place about the year 700 A.D. It belongs to the class known as Imrama, or sea-expeditions. Another of these is the voyage ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaay? Proputty, proputty, proputty—that's what I ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... battle, or whose menfolk were imprisoned in the gaol at Halifax, there arose such a wail of distress as to call forth the attention of the Provincial Congress, which at once put forth a proclamation, and ordered it translated into the "Erse tongue," in which it was declared that they "warred not with those helpless females, but sympathized with them in their sorrow," and recommended them to the compassion of all, and to the "bounty of those who had aught to spare ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... the birds,—their own notes, it may be, photographed on their swelling breasts like the musical notes on the harp-shell,—written in bright, almost audible colors on the petals of flowers,—harmonies, melodies, for ear and eye? Has this language, older than Erse, older than Sanscrit, ever got translated? I am afraid, dear, the key has been turned in the lock, and thrown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... a signal for a renewal on a more impressive scale of the uproar that she had heard while opening the door. The air was full of voices. The cook was expressing herself in Norwegian, the parlour-maid in what appeared to be Erse. On a chair in a corner the scullery-maid sobbed and whooped. The odd-job man, who was a baseball enthusiast, was speaking in terms of high praise of Eustace's ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse |
