"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... go so far as * * in his postscript, who pretends that no great poet ever had immediate fame, which, being interpreted, means that * * is not quite so much read by his contemporaries as might be desirable. This assertion is as false as it is foolish. Homer's glory depended upon his present popularity: he recited,—and without the strongest impression of the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and given it to tradition? Ennius, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... formerly received gifts from suitors, but collects similar instances from foreign nations and ancient times. He goes back to the commonwealths of Greece, and attempts to press into his service a line of Homer and a sentence of Plutarch, which, we fear, will hardly serve his turn. The gold of which Homer speaks was not intended to fee the judges, but was paid into court for the benefit of the successful litigant; and the gratuities which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a voluptuary. The best of his work is day-dreams of love and art. The degree to which his genius fed itself upon art and day-dreams of art is suggested by the fact that the most perfect of his early poems, written at the age of twenty, was the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, and that the most perfect of his later poems was the Ode on a Grecian Urn. His magic was largely artistic magic, not natural magic. He writes about Pan and the nymphs, but we do not feel that they were shapes of earth and air to him, as they ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... lose something by this. The great books of the world do not lend themselves well to making over. "Tales from Shakespeare" are apt to leave out Shakespeare's genius, and "Stories from Homer" are not Homer. In cutting the doublet to fit, the most precious part of the fabric is in ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... wrapped it in tissue paper she held it for a moment pressed close to her, and began a song she had heard from the negroes as they sat around their light-wood fire after their day's work was done. It was a weird melody which Homer Smith had caught up and revised and modernized, with a change of words in some places, and made her sing, knowing it would bring thunders of applause. She heard the roar now, and saw the audience and the flowers falling around her, and with an expression of ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... these famous warriors endeavour to satisfy at once the contradictory tastes of their patrons for marvels and for truth. Their works are a collection of attested prodigies. They are unanimous in putting aside Homer's story, which does not contain enough miracles to please them, and, being in consequence little disposed to leniency, they reject the whole of it as apocryphal. I confess, says one of them, that ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... exactly followed the advice which Longinus gives to a great writer:—"Whenever you have a mind to elevate your mind, to raise it to its highest pitch, and even to exceed yourself, upon any subject, think how Homer would have described it, how Plato would have imagined it, and how Demosthenes would have expressed it; and when you have so done, you will then, no doubt, have a standard which will raise you up to the dignity of anything ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Carneades, a solitary kingdom, (which he doubtless would keep to himself): Domitian says that nothing is more grateful, (not even killing flies); Aristotle affirms that beauty is better than all the letters of recommendation in the world: Homer, that it is a glorious gift of nature; and Ovid calls beauty a favour bestowed by the gods, which this same Ovid shows the gods to have been jealous of among mortals." Certainly the moderns do not wage war for a beautiful woman, as did the ancients: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... succeed each other. The whole country consists of high pointed hills, at one time appearing in the form of pyramids, at others of a globular or conical form, and seeming as it were under the protection of some neighbouring mountain, such as Peak Homer, or another lying north-by-west of it, and even a third farther inland. Liberal as nature has been in the adornment of these parts, the industry of the Japanese seems not a little to have contributed to their beauty; for nothing indeed can equal the extraordinary ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts distilled honey; and that once when Pindar lay asleep the bees dropped honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the promised Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about the butter in the original), that he might know good ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... thundered the obscure voice, shaking the tree so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once. "I call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand Homer ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... vulgar, too, Mrs. Legend," said John Effingham, "since it made a palpable allusion to all those vulgar incidents that associate themselves in the mind, with these said common-place isles. The arts, philosophy, poetry, eloquence, and even old Homer, are brought unpleasantly to one's recollection, by such an ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Ennius too in everlasting verse Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be, Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare, But only phantom figures, strangely wan, And tells how once from out those regions rose Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears And with his words unfolded Nature's source. Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp The purport of the skies—the law behind The wandering courses of the sun and moon; To scan the powers that speed all life below; ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... paradise, is constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no pleasure in Nature. This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very limited; in the very year (1795) in which the essay appeared in The Hours, he was asking Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with special reference to Homer and Xenophon. ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Perhaps it was a good paper and perhaps it was bad enough to make Homer turn over in his grave. I've studied and mulled over notebooks until I'm incapable of forming an opinion of anything. How thankful little Phil will be when all ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... appeal to what is permanent in human nature—which, while suiting the taste of the day, contain truths and beauty deeper than the opinions and tastes of the day; but even temperary success implies a certain temporary fitness. In Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakspeare, Cervantes, we are made aware of much that no longer accords with the wisdom or the taste of our day—temporary and immature expressions of fluctuating opinions—but we are also aware of much that is both true and noble now, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the inhabitants of Judea have been dispersed to the ends of the earth, but the New Testament has survived and increased in its influence among men. The glory of Athens and Sparta, the grandeur of the Imperial City, are a long-lost memory, but the poetry of Homer and Virgil, the oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, abide with us forevermore. Whatever America holds that may be of value to ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living, and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one thought, health itself. I think that all noble things are the result ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... over me to speak to him, and I knew there was one sign which he would recognise and understand. It was the Saint Andrew's Cross, which I made by crossing my arms. He immediately came to me and we conversed briefly as the time would permit, in the old language of Homer and Plato, which all patriotic Greeks love. He asked me if I was a Papa, and was pleased when I said, "Yes." I introduced him to my companions in the coach, and he greeted them warmly; and as the train began to move on we bade each other farewell. We may never meet again, but ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... remembered'; I was but too much afraid 'I say') that so 'great a slip' might be attended with 'still greater' and 'worse': for 'your' Horace, and 'my' Horace, the most charming writer that ever lived among the 'Pagans' (for the 'lyric kind of poetry,' I mean; for, the be sure, 'Homer' and 'Virgil' would 'otherwise' be 'first' named 'in their way') well observeth (and who understood 'human nature' better ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... of Italian principalities, its atrophy was not apparent to the eye. It could still boast of magnificent pageants, trains of noble youths and ladies moving through its stately palaces and shady villa-gardens, academies of learned men discussing the merits of Homer and Ariosto and discoursing on the principles of poetry and drama. Bernardo Tasso read his Amadigi in the evenings to the Duchess. The days were spent in hunting and athletic exercises; the nights in masquerades ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... painting, and thereby becomes conscious of itself. Among the ancients, for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human interests before they turned to the representation of nature, and even then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place. And yet, from the time of Homer downward, the powerful impression made by nature upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions. The Germanic races which founded their states on the ruins of the Roman Empire were thoroughly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... winning lines on some contemporary folly or frivolity, does a man take up some piece of work hopelessly unremunerative, foredoomed to failure as far as money or fame go, some dealing with the classics of the world, Homer or Aristotle, Lucian or Moliere. It is like a bath after a day's toil, it is tonic and clean; and such studies, if not necessary to success, are, at least, conducive to mental health and self-respect ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... course, is natural, for they had been in the world, had loved and suffered, so long before us that they seem a part of that antenatal mystery out of which we sprang. When they speak of their old love-stories, it is as though we were reading Homer. It sounds so long ago. We are surprised at the vividness with which they recall happenings and personalities, past and gone before, as they tell us, we were born. Before we were born! Yes! They belong to that mysterious epoch of time—"before we were born"; and unless ...
— Different Girls • Various
... subject of reading however my mind had strong contentions with itself: poetry, and the belles lettres, Homer, Horace, Virgil, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Tasso, Ariosto, Racine, Moliere, Congreve, with a long and countless et caetera, were continually tempting me to quit the barren pursuits ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... should have done the deed, Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair. Have not I made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander's love and Oenon's death? And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then, or basely despair? I am resolved; ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... to Scipio Africanus, who returned to Rome in B.C. 132. When Scipio received at Numantia the news of the death of Tiberius, he is reported to have exclaimed in the verse of Homer[62]— ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... went on; and as Homer, in our school-boy ear, sang the mournful truth, that 'as are the generations of the forest leaves so are the succession of men,' the Dangerfield efflorescence had no sooner disappeared, and that dry leaf whisked away down the stairs, than Cluffe and Puddock ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and said, "Here rests the greatest singer in the world; over his tomb will I spread my fragrance, and on it I will let my leaves fall when the storm scatters them. He who sung of Troy became earth, and from that earth I have sprung. I, a rose from the grave of Homer, am too lofty to bloom for a nightingale." Then the nightingale sung himself to death. A camel-driver came by, with his loaded camels and his black slaves; his little son found the dead bird, and buried the lovely ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... detested river with waves of blood, the dire lamentations, the cries for a drop of water, the devouring worm, all the tortures of the guilty and the somewhat insipid pleasures of the just, reminds one of the scenes in the under world so vividly described by Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Yama is defeated (Sect. XXVI.) by the giant, not so much by his superior power as because at the request of Brahma Yama refrains from smiting with his deadly weapon the Rakshas enemy to whom that God had once given the promise that ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the way that Homer did. (This cartoon, by the way, caused Punch to be excluded for a while from the ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... of the seventeenth century, and during nearly the whole of the eighteenth, the literature of Rome exercised an imperial sway over European taste. Pope thought fit to assume an apologetic tone when he clothed Homer in an English dress, and reminded the world that, as compared with Virgil, the Greek poet had at least the merit of coming first. His own mind was of an emphatically Latin order. The great poets of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Virtue?'—or rather, to restrict the enquiry to that part of virtue which is concerned with the use of weapons—'What is Courage?' Laches thinks that he knows this: (1) 'He is courageous who remains at his post.' But some nations fight flying, after the manner of Aeneas in Homer; or as the heavy-armed Spartans also did at the battle of Plataea. (2) Socrates wants a more general definition, not only of military courage, but of courage of all sorts, tried both amid pleasures and pains. Laches replies that this universal ...
— Laches • Plato
... difficulties of the mother language of the Aryans that he could thus write to Ryland, with more than a mere scholar's enthusiasm, of one of the two great Vedic epics:—"I have read a considerable part of the Mahabarata, an epic poem written in most beautiful language, and much upon a par with Homer; and it was, like his Iliad, only considered as a great effort of human genius, I should think it one of the first productions in the world; but alas! it is the ground of faith to millions of the simple sons ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... originals of the most excellent masters; the same rule is also applicable to all the other arts and sciences which adorn the commonwealth; thus, whoever aspires to a reputation for prudence and patience, must imitate Ulysses, in whose person and toils Homer draws a lively picture of those qualities; so also Virgil, in the character of AEneas, delineates filial piety, courage, and martial skill, being representations of not what they really were, but of what they ought to be, in order to serve as models ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... inevitable; and you would have it inevitably if you could invert history, and put Chaeronea in the place of Salamis. But there is no reason why you should eventually get Lysippian and Praxitelean sculpture instead of Egyptian or Assyrian, say, in the time of Homer, whenever that may have been. For the causes which forced Greek sculpture along the line leading to Praxiteles and Lysippus were not yet at work; and had other forces, say, a preference for stone work instead of clay and bronze work, a habit of Persian or Gaulish garments, of Lydian effeminate ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Grecian chieftains and princes returned home. The poets represent the gods as withdrawing their protection from the hitherto favored heroes, because they had not respected the altars of the Trojans. So, many of them were driven in endless wanderings over sea and land. Homer's Odyssey portrays the sufferings of the "much-enduring" Odysseus (Ulysses), impelled by divine wrath to ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... religious services figure in this work? Worship has always played an important part in the life of human beings. Whether man is in Babylonia worshipping the stars, or in Egypt at the Isis-Osiris shrine, or whether he ascends Mount Olympus with Homer, he is a worshipper. He may ascend to the indescribable, unthinkable realms with Plotinus or he may with twentieth century enlightenment claim allegiance to the God designated Father of all. Yet he worships. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... patching together, sometimes aided by other boys, I could work into any subject. Much attention was paid to learning by heart the lessons of the previous day; this I could effect with great facility, learning forty or fifty lines of Virgil or Homer, whilst I was in morning chapel; but this exercise was utterly useless, for every verse was forgotten in forty-eight hours. I was not idle, and with the exception of versification, generally worked conscientiously ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... mouldering in the scented darkness of an Egyptian tomb, clasped in the withered hands of some long-dead lover. Some Greek monk at Athos may even now be poring over an ancient manuscript, whose crabbed characters conceal lyric or ode by her whom the Greeks spoke of as 'the Poetess' just as they termed Homer 'the Poet,' who was to them the tenth Muse, the flower of the Graces, the child of Eros, and the pride of Hellas—Sappho, with the sweet voice, the bright, beautiful eyes, the dark hyacinth-coloured hair. But, practically, the work of the marvellous singer of Lesbos is entirely lost ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... you wouldn't mind going back, Homer," said Mrs. Waddle, and they looked at each other as in the days of ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... from the whole country-side received an invitation—all being needed to "heave up," at the boss carpenter's pompous word of command, the ponderous timbers seemingly meant to last forever. A feast followed, with contests of strength and agility worthy of description on Homer's page. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... — N. success, successfulness; speed; advance &c (progress) 282. trump card; hit, stroke, score; lucky hit, fortunate hit, good hit, good stroke; direct hit, bull's eye; goal, point, touchdown; home run, homer, hole-in-one, grand slam; killing [make money], windfall bold stroke, master stroke; ten strike [U.S.]; coup de maitre [Fr.], checkmate; half the battle, prize; profit &c (acquisition) 775. continued success; good ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... just That here, in memory of all books which lay Their sure foundations in the heart of man, Whether by native prose, or numerous verse. That in the name of all inspired souls— From Homer the great thunderer, from the voice That roars along the bed of Jewish song, And that more varied and elaborate, Those trumpet tones of harmony that shake Our shores in England—from those loftiest ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... oldest way is, of course, by one person repeating a poem or other literary composition he has made to another; and thus literature is stored away, not upon book-shelves, but in the memory of living men. Homer's poems are said to have been preserved in this way to the Greeks for five hundred years. Father chanted them to son; the sons to their sons; and so on from generation to generation. The next way of ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... which had so long tormented him, and scarcely able to sustain longer the burthen of his armor, he calmly awaited his fate. A troop of the enemy advanced soon afterwards, and Aremberg fell, covered with wounds, fighting like a hero of Homer, single-handed, against a battalion, with a courage worthy a better cause and a better fate. The sword by which he received his final death-blow was that of the Seigneur do Haultain. That officer having just seen his brother slain before his eyes, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Rationalist or Naturalistic View of the Bible.—The Bible is not inspired at all, or at least in no way differing from any other book. Its authors were inspired, perhaps, just as Homer, or Thucydides, or Cicero were inspired, but not differently. It has no authority, therefore, over any other book, and is just as liable to be in error as any other. If you should bind in one volume the histories of Herodotus, Tacitus, Gibbon, and Mr. Bancroft, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the fortress of Carlaverock, on the Scottish border, by EDWARDI., in the year 1300. In addition to very curious descriptions of the muster of the Royal troops at Carlisle, their march northwards, and the incidents of the siege (which last have a strange resemblance to what Homer has recorded of incidents that took place during the siege of Troy), this Roll gives some graphic personal sketches of the princes, nobles, bannerets, and knights, whose banners and shields of arms are set forth ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... little aware what storms were brewing in two bosoms upstairs in the study—in Pen's, as he sate in his shooting jacket, with his elbows on the green study-table, and his hands clutching his curly brown hair, Homer under his nose,—and in worthy Mr. Smirke's, with whom he was reading. Here they would talk about Helen and Andromache. "Andromache's like my mother," Pen used to avouch; "but I say, Smirke, by Jove I'd cut off my nose to see Helen;" and he would ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the custom mentioned by Homer, of hauling their vessels on shore with the prows resting on the beach; having done this, they place the mast lengthwise across the prow and the poop, and spread the sail over it, so as to form a tent; beneath these tents they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... certain degree enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek Rhapsodists, according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping knife while he shouts his death-song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales and Germany exercised over their auditors seems to modern readers ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was made in choice Romaic—and which, doubtless, sounded much more heroic and elegant in that idiom than in simple English, was highly applauded by his followers—indeed, had they ever heard of Homer, they would have considered it equal in substance and talent to anything ever uttered by the most valiant of the heroes he speaks of. It was scarcely concluded, however—and they were still discussing the subject, when the man ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... reported of the Emperor Claudius, that he retained in memory all Homer, Sallust, Demosthenes, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... would be able to undergo the severe ordeal; and if we consider what changes would be required to adapt them to the altered hours, we shall find that they will be all in favour of good taste, and on the side of nature and simplicity. The day is a holy thing; Homer aptly calls it [Greek: ieron aemar], and it still retains something of the sacred simplicity of ancient times. It is, at all events, less sophisticated and polluted than the modern night, a period which ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... Gaea and Poseidon, a monster mentioned in Homer and later identified with the whirlpool Charybdis, in the Strait of Messina off the NE coast of Sicily. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... sapis; hoc tibi dictum Tolle memor: certis medium et tolerabile rebus The Poet thus, from faults scarce ever free, Becomes a very Chaerilus to me; Who twice or thrice, by some adventure rare, Stumbling on beauties, makes me smile and stare; Me, who am griev'd and vex'd to the extreme, If Homer seem to nod, or chance to dream: Tho' in a work of length o'erlabour'd sleep At intervals may, not ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... lunch felt so sick of scribble, scribble, scribble whilst adventure sat seductive upon my doorstep that I fluttered forth. At 2 o'clock boarded H.M.S. Savage (Lieutenant-Commander Homer) and, with Aspinall and Freddie, steered for Gully Beach. We didn't cast anchor but got into a cockleshell of a small dinghy and rowed ashore under the cliffs, where we were met by de Lisle. Along the beach men were either bathing or basking mother-naked on the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... summons the spirits of the wilderness to return it in thunder. As truly say that storms can exhaust the sky, as that poems can exhaust the blue dome of poesy. We doubt, too, the dictum that the earliest poets are uniformly the best. Who knows not that many prefer Eschylus to Homer; and many, Virgil to Lucretius; and many, Milton to Shakspeare; and that a nation sets Goethe above all men, save Shakspeare; and has not the toast been actually given, "To the two greatest of poets—Shakspeare and Byron?" To settle the endless questions connected with ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... nature. Anonymous' interest is in the way the mind works and the way people customarily act. So also when he talks about reason, he is thinking only of what is acceptable to a logical, healthy mind. He has no thought of identifying nature or reason with the traditional Rules or with Homer. On the contrary, he is willing to set both of them quite apart from, or even in opposition to the Rules (with a qualifying concession that they may sometimes meet), and he definitely renounces obligation to show that Shakespeare bears any relation ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... hate the Greek classics, which have the like tales? For Homer also curiously wove the like fictions, and is most sweetlyvain, yet was he bitter to my boyish taste. And so I suppose would Virgil be to Grecian children, when forced to learn him as I was Homer. Difficulty, in truth, the difficulty of a foreign tongue, dashed, as it were, with ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... virtue and piety. The language seems to fall short of his ideas; he pours along, familiarizing the terms of philosophy, with bold inversions, and sonorous periods; but we may apply to him, what Pope has said of Homer: "It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it: like glass in the furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude, as the breath within is more powerful, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... of a fair woman Ilion suffered unspeakable tortures. But to us a single song of Homer is worth more than all these Hebrew writings. And yet a Trojan war of the intellect has been kindled concerning them. Here freedom of investigation, yonder with Hoogstraten and Tungern, fettering of the mind. Among us, the ardent yearning to hold aloft ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... here you are bringing an indictment against me. On my honor as a journalist, I have launched above a hundred articles against the writers you speak of; but I confess that in attacking them it was to attempt something like criticism. Be just; if you condemn them, you must condemn Homer, whose Iliad turns on Helen of Troy; you must condemn Milton's Paradise Lost. Eve and her serpent seem to me a pretty little case of symbolical adultery; you must suppress the Psalms of David, inspired by ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... cities in Greece asserted that they were the birthplace of Homer, the national poet, so a number of cities disputed for the honor of being the birthplace of Rashi, or of having been his residence, or the scene of his death. Worms claimed him as one of its rabbis, Lunel, thanks to a confusion of names, has passed as his birthplace, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... asserted that they did not steal it. It is dimly hinted in the verse of a certain ancient, that there was a time in a remoter antiquity "ere thieves were feared"; yet even this is cautiously quiet as to their non-existence. Homer, recounting traditions old in his time, chuckles with narrative delight over the boldness, wit, and invention of a great cattle-stealer, and for his genius renders him the ultimatum of Greek tribute, intellectually speaking, by calling him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... been enjoying since you left me, the most exquisite entertainment, in the perusal of the noble works of Ossian, the greatest poet, in my opinion, that ever composed, and who exceeds Homer, Virgil, and Milton. He transports us by the grandeur of his sublime, or by some sudden start of tenderness he melts us into distress: Who can read, without the warmest emotions, the pathetic complaints of ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... attention until figure-painting had declined. Vitruvius mentions that the ancients had some very important wall-paintings consisting of simple landscapes, and that others had landscape backgrounds with figures illustrating scenes from the poems of Homer. But we have no reason to believe that Greek landscape-painting was ever more than scenic or decorative work, and thus fell far short of what is now the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... serpent (symbol of visitors!); but alas! without the health which would make the long peace one filled with work. As for me, I vegetate mostly. I get up at six to stroll out for an hour before breakfast, leaving Madonna in bed with Dante or Homer, and quite insensible to the attractions of before-breakfast walks. With my cigar I get a little reading done, and sometimes write a little; but the forenoon is usually sauntered and pottered away. When Madonna has satisfied her inexhaustible ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... them, when the Moral hath so required. But besides this kind of Fable, there is another in which the Actors are Passions, Virtues, Vices, and other imaginary Persons of the like Nature. Some of the ancient Criticks will have it, that the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer are Fables of this Nature: and that the several Names of Gods and Heroes are nothing else but the Affections of the Mind in a visible Shape and Character. Thus they tell us, that Achilles, in the first Iliad, represents Anger, or the Irascible Part of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... day for Homer's Idyl. Very well, Mr. Vivian, to-day being the seventeenth, and the old lady's birthday the twentieth, you have three days, or rather nights, of steady ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... was beautifully adorned for her marriage, and her bridesmaids received holiday garments. Homer, Odyss. VI. 27. Besides which, after the bath, which both bride and bridegroom were obliged to take, she was anointed with sweet-smelling essences. Thucyd. II. 15. Xenoph. Symp. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... necessary to add that the sons of Pandu as well as Karna, were, like the heroes of Homer, god-born chiefs. Some god inspired the birth of each. Yudhishthir was the son of Dharma or Virtue, Bhima of Vayu or Wind, Arjun of Indra or Rain-god, the twin youngest were the sons of the Aswin twins, and Karna was the son of Surya the Sun, but was believed by himself and by all others ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... wedding guests roaming through a corn-field, peasants studied from life, with an epic look of the heroes of Homer about them—had so far remained his masterpiece. The picture had brought about an evolution in art, for it had inaugurated a new formula. Coming after Delacroix, and parallel with Courbet, it was a piece of romanticism tempered ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... comfortable sitting-room in the Hotel Wellington—Homer and Juvenal (in the original) ranked on the piano-top beside De Vere Stackpole novels and other contemporary literature called to mind that though Brahms and Beethoven violin concertos are among ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... Lawless, flinging the book which Archer held out to him at a bust of Homer adorning the top of my bookshelves, which it fortunately missed—"Frank, old boy! it's all right—you're not to have a bullet through your lungs this time—shake hands, old fellow! I'm so glad about ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... lissome and slender in shape than her brothers. Her mien was quite peculiar to herself, owing to her somewhat long face, her eyes slanting slightly in the Chinese fashion, and of a green like that of the eyes of Pallas Athene, on whom Homer invariably bestows the title of glaukopis, her velvety black nose, of as fine a grain as a Perigord truffle, and her incessantly moving whiskers. Her coat, of a superb black, was always in motion and shimmered with ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... be thought of for a moment. It's a pity that she couldn't have a chance here—but how could she! I had thought she might marry a gentleman, but I dare say she'll do as well as the rest of her friends—as well as Mary B., for instance, who married—Homer Pettifoot, did you say? Or maybe Billy Oxendine might do for her. As long as she has never known any better, she'll probably be as well satisfied as though she married a rich man, and lived in a fine house, and kept a carriage and servants, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Shakespeare to that by Tennyson. At leading theatres in London there have been produced in the last few years poetic dramas written in blank verse on themes drawn from such supreme examples of the world's literature as Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Inferno. Signs have not been wanting of public anxiety to acknowledge with generosity these and other serious endeavours in poetic drama, whatever their precise degree of excellence. But such premisses ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... which the hero gathers his vital lightning and forges his mordant bolt. Genius claims and rules these instants, and the gods are on the side of those who boldly grasp loose wisdom and bind it into sheaves of judgment. Cleggett (whom Homer would have loved) was the first to recover his poise. He came to his decision instantaneously. A lesser man might have lost all by rushing after his retreating enemies; a lesser man, carried away by excitement, would have pursued. Cleggett did not relax his grasp upon the ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... 19:32. "Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man." The Lacedemonians had a law that aged persons should be reverenced like fathers. See also Homer Iliad 15:204 et ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... English Bible contains a religion does not affect its standing as literature. Homer and Virgil are Greek and Roman classics, yet each of them contains a definite religion. You can build up the religious faith of the Greeks and Romans out of their great literature. So you can build up the religious faith of the Hebrews and the early Christians from ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... finish, monsieur," said Bussy; "it was very well for Homer's heroes, who were demigods, to talk before they fought; but I am a man—attack me, or let ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... between Heroic Greece, the Greece of the Achaeans, and the Egypt of the Ramessids. This connection, rumoured of in Greek legends, is attested by Egyptian relics found in the graves of Mycenae, and by very ancient Levantine pottery, found in contemporary sites in Egypt. Homer himself shows us Odysseus telling a feigned, but obviously not improbable, tale of an Achaean raid on Egypt. Meanwhile the sojourn of the Israelites, with their Exodus from the land of bondage, though not yet ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... have no myths; no heroes. They look back on no Heroic Age, no Achilles, no Agamemnon, and no Homer. The past is vacant. The have not even a 'Wacht am Rhein' or 'Marseillaise' to chaunt in chorus with quickened step and flashing eye. No; nor even a ballad of the hearth, handed down from father to son, to be sung at home festivals, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... question with a laugh. "But I wasn't always a tobacco- grower, and there were poets before Homer, who is about the only one I've ever read. It's true I've tried to lose the little education I ever had—that I've done my best to come down to the level of my own cattle; but I'm not an ox, after ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... revelation of the slights which George II delighted to inflict upon her. Swift described the writer of the scandal as a "stupid, infamous, scribbling woman";[24] Peterborough writing to Lady Mary Montagu in behalf of his friend, the English Homer, sneered at the "four remarkable poetesses and scribblers, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Haywood, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Ben [sic]";[25] and Pope himself pilloried the offender to all time in ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... copies of the effusion to be printed and circulated at Court. I will include it in these Memoirs, as it cannot but prove entertaining. The heroes of Greece, and even of Troy, possibly delivered their compliments in somewhat better fashion, if we may judge by the version preserved for us by Homer. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 'Speaking of Homer, whom he venerated as the prince of poets, Johnson remarked that the advice given to Diomed[384] by his father, when he sent him to the Trojan war, was the noblest exhortation that could be instanced in any heathen writer, and comprised ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... book containing a vast amount of information relating to insect life—the life story of the spider, the fly, the bee, the wasp, and other insects—told by one who was at once a lover of nature, a great scientist, and a most entertaining writer. Maeterlinck calls Fabre the "insects' Homer," and declares that his work is as much a classic as the famous Greek epic, and deserves to be known and studied ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... their painter was deficient in originality, it was not the fault of this academy so much as of the academician. In difficult doubts they had recourse to Lodovico, whom Lanzi describes in his school like Homer among the Greeks, fons ingeniorum, profound in every part of painting. Even the recreations of the pupils were contrived to keep their mind and hand in exercise; in their walks sketching landscapes from nature, or amusing themselves with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... refugees to Belgium and France holds the essence of a thousand tragedies. From the days of Homer down to those of Longfellow, with his story of Evangeline, literature has recounted the sad lot of lovers torn from one another's arms and all the rest of their lives going every whither in search of the beloved one, only to find the lost and ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, 3 vols. (1911), which is our most important document showing Lincoln in his Cabinet. Important sidelights on his character and development are shown in Ward Hill Lamon, "Recollections of Lincoln" (1911); David Homer Bates, "Lincoln in the Telegraph Office" (1907); and Frederick Trevor Hill, "Lincoln as a Lawyer" (1906). A bibliography of Lincoln is in the twelfth volume of the latest edition ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... plan, they had senators, magistrates, leaders of armies, and ministers of state; but no men of fortune. Like the heroes of Homer, they distributed honours by the measure of the cup and the platter. A citizen who, in his political capacity, was the arbiter of Greece, thought himself honoured by receiving a double portion of plain entertainment at supper. He was active, penetrating, brave, disinterested, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... told this Rezu also that now he had naught to fear save his own axe and therefore he counselled him to guard it well, since if it was lifted against him in another's hands it would bring him down to death, which nothing else could do. Like to the heel of Achilles whereof the great Homer sings—have you ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Homer not only nod, but snore. Thus does Teufelsdroeckh, wandering in regions where he had little business, confound the old authentic Presbyterian Witchfinder with a new, spurious, imaginary Historian of the Brittische Journalistik; and so stumble on perhaps the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... soul is blest, And heavenly Pallas breathes within her breast; In wonderous arts than woman more renowned, And more than woman with deep wisdom crowned. HOMER. ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... what looked rather like a wild-goose chase. But it paid to keep the run of Cedar Street in those days; one might find anything. The gilded black walnut was pushing the old mahogany out of good houses; Wyant and Homer Martin were occasionally raising the wind by ventures in omnibus sales; then there were old masters which one cannot mention because nobody would believe. But that particular morning the Corot had no ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... in a remarkable manner; because, in the absence of conventionalities and in the presence of absolute and imminent necessities, all real qualities come to the surface as they never would have done under different circumstances. In the early life of the Greeks, Homer found his Penelope; in the pioneer days of the Pacific ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... we find not only Voltaire, Rousseau, Lesage, Marmontel, and other favourite French authors, but also all the masterpieces of European literature, ancient and modern, which at that time enjoyed a high reputation in the French literary world—Homer and Demosthenes, Cicero and Virgil, Ariosto and Camoens, Milton and Locke, Sterne ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... originally not liable to such a perversion; for the authour having occasion in that part of his work to mention the havock made by rats and mice, had introduced the subject in a kind of mock heroick, and a parody of Homer's battle of the frogs and mice, invoking the Muse of the old Grecian bard in an elegant and well-turned manner. In that state I had seen it; but afterwards, unknown to me and other friends, he had been persuaded, contrary to his own better judgement, to alter it, so as to produce ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... one of those erudite poets and wise men of letters whom the gay Alexandrians who thronged the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus called "The Pleiades." Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus, Theocritus, Lycophron, Nicander, and Homer son of Macro, were the other six. From his circle of clever people, the king, with whom he had become a prime favorite, called him to be chief custodian over the stores of precious books at Alexandria. These libraries, we may recall, were ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... far from it that I believe no interpretations of Greek religion have ever been so affectionate, none of Roman religion so reverent, as those which will be found at the base of my art teaching, and current through the entire body of my works. But it was from the Bible that I learned the symbols of Homer, and the faith of Horace; the duty enforced upon me in early youth of reading every word of the gospels and prophecies as if written by the hand of God, gave me the habit of awed attention which afterwards made many passages ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... will be just as classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured. There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the door of Hazlitt's lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's "Anecdotes," Pope and Addison appear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... said Eleanor. "But I fear we shall not find the effect for which we have hoped. It is of the lotos fruit that Homer and Tennyson have written." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... tragedies of AEschylus; of the fifty-four orations of Isaeus; of the three hundred and ninety-one speeches of Lysias; of the hundred and eighty treatises of Theophrastus; of the eighth book of the conic sections of Apollonius; of Pindar's hymns and dithyrambics; and of the five and forty tragedies of Homer Junior. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at your word," said Howard, and a second battle began. As we do not delight in fields of battle, or hope to excel, like Homer, in describing variety of wounds, we shall content ourselves with relating, that after five pitched battles, in which Oliver's champion received bruises of all shapes and sizes, and of every shade ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... pipes. What was the best way to colour them, the advantages of colouring them, the beauty of the 'culotte,' the coolness it gave to the smoke, &c. We listened to the venerable sage - he was then forty-three and we only five or six and twenty - as we should have listened to a Homer or an Aristotle, and he thoroughly enjoyed our ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... and the opening lines of the poem are among the best of Tennyson's blank verse lines, and therefore among the best that English poetry contains. The description owes some of its beauty to Homer. In its earlier form, in the volume of 1832-3, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... from place to place. The diapason which we thought so extensive, appears, on inquiry, to consist of only a few notes, and the changes that may be rung upon them, may almost be counted upon the fingers. Homer's fables are near of kin to those of Shakspeare; the legends of ancient Greece find their details mirrored exactly in the traditions of Spain, Scotland, and Scandinavia. Whether in the remoter fogs of the past some glimmering ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... whilst others were magnanimous. McPherson, the historiographer of early Britain, cannot help but contrast the superior manliness of the heroes of Ossian in his graphic description of the ancient Caledonians, when compared to the brutality of Homer's Greek heroes. The traditions upon which Bergmann undertakes to found the origin of the rite of circumcision are all connected with the inhuman and brutish passions that animated our barbarous ancestry. The first incident given is the Egyptian traditional tragedy, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... fascinates by violating all the rules which convention assigns to viatic narrative. It traverses the most affecting regions of the world, and describes no one of them: the Troad—and we get only his childish raptures over Pope's "Homer's Iliad"; Stamboul—and he recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden Horn to the Assassin whose serail, palace, council chamber, it washes; Cairo— but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem—but Pilgrims have vulgarized the Holy Sepulchre into ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... was commenced. As to metrical epitaphs it is needless to say that I drew upon the legitimate materials of authentic English versification. Up to the Spring of 1914, I had never allowed a Spring to pass without reading Homer; and I feel that this familiarity had its influence both as to form and spirit; but I shall not take the space now to pursue this ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Shakespere's drama on the theme of Chaucer's poem), may be said to belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of Troy divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on late Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative in favour of the Trojans—the supposed ancestors of half the nations of Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... letters in all times. A valuable essay might be written on the Dog's Place in Literature; in the poetry of the East, hundreds of years before Christ, the dog's faithfulness was more than once celebrated. One of the most marvellous passages in Homer's Odyssey is the recognition of the ragged Ulysses by the noble old dog, who dies of joy. In recent years, since the publication of Dr. John Brown's Rab and his Friends (1858), the dog has approached an apotheosis. Among innumerable sketches and stories ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Homer, had he sung his impressions of the ancient Egyptians? or of Thackeray, had he novelized the life of the Babylonians? It is an ancient blindness, with an ancient wall to bruise one's head. It is only those who seek ointment of the consecrated clay that gives back sight, who see ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Battles have become so wearisome? Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible developement of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. Battles ever since Homer's time, when they were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at, worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome bloody Battles does History strive to represent; or even, in a husky way, to ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... man is possibly deficient in virtue, therefore he shall not be subject to public law, but to private caprice: as if this were a school of virtue, and not eminently an occasion of vice. Truer far is Homer's morality, who says, that a man loses half his virtue on the day he is made a slave. As to the pretence that slaves are not fit for freedom, those Englishmen who are old enough to remember the awful predictions which West ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... of Homer came in for its share of consideration at the hands of Antoine and Charles Coypel, who made of it a set of five scenes. It was Romanelli, the Italian, who painted a similar set, a hundred years before, for Cardinal Barberini, which set came to America in the Ffoulke collection. After ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... for the purpose of transporting into Europe a hundred and seventy myriads of barbarians. A sea contracted within such narrow limits may seem but ill to deserve the singular epithet of broad, which Homer, as well as Orpheus, has frequently bestowed on the Hellespont. * But our ideas of greatness are of a relative nature: the traveller, and especially the poet, who sailed along the Hellespont, who pursued the windings of the stream, and contemplated the rural scenery, which appeared ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... dramatist of the reign of Henry VIII., and of his remarkable poem The Spider and the Fly. The Pretie Paradoxe, by Synesius, next commences, and extends as far as sign. D. v. b. This portion of the tract is, of course, merely a translation, but it includes a passage or two from Homer, cleverly rendered into English verse. Here we come to the word Finis, and here, I take it, it was originally intended that the tract should end; but as it was thought that it would hardly be of sufficient bulk for the money (4d., or ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... This was his resource for carrying off the extreme inward tremor which he really felt. His hostess brought out Plaxmau's designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton of Harvard, [Footnote: The book may have been Felton's Homer with Flaxman's drawings, issued in 1833.] and the party made an ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... a long way from Lucretius. We do not ask if other Iliads have perished; or if poets before Homer have vainly sung, becoming a prey to all-consuming time. We move in a greater history, the landmarks of which are not the birth and death of kings and poets, but of species, genera, orders. And we set out these organic events not according ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... exordium, I feel a little ashamed of my hero, and could wish, for the credit of my tale, it were not more necessary to invoke the historic muse of Fielding, than that of Homer or Tasso; but imperious Truth obliges me to confess, that Tallien, who is to be the subject of this letter, was first introduced to celebrity by circumstances not favourable for the comment of my ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... from a distance, appeared an unbroken line of flame. A warmer fire, a more desperate series of combats, was never witnessed in modern warfare. It was in great part conducted hand to hand, like the battles of antiquity, of which Livy and Homer have left such graphic descriptions. The cavalry could not act, from the multitude of hedges and copses which intersected the theatre of conflict. Breast to breast, knee to knee, bayonet to bayonet, they maintained ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... debris I have found the head of a bear exquisitely sculptured out of a block of marble. It is in an unfinished state. When did bears inhabit the peninsula? Strange to say, the Maya does not furnish the name for the bear. Yet one-third of this tongue is pure Greek. Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? Or who took to Greece that of the Mayas? Greek is the offspring of Sanscrit. Is Maya? or are they coeval? A clue for ethnologists to follow the migrations of the human family on this old continent. Did the bearded ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... care in reading the proofs, and trust that any errors that may have crept in are very few. If any such should occur, I can only plead, in the words of Horace, that "good Homer sometimes nods," or, as the bishop put it, "Not even the youngest curate in my ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... she called to her help all her powers of resistance. From that day she would retreat behind the line of duty, conjugal fidelity, honor, and all the other fine sentiments which would need numbering after the fashion of Homer. At the first attack, all this household battalion would make a furious sortie; should I succeed in overthrowing them and take up my quarters in the trenches, there would then be a gathering of the reserve force, and boiling oil ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was a doctor. Let me show you a remarkable volume—centuries old—this folio copy of Hippocrates, translated from the original Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin. My favorite reading, however, is purely literary—the book of books—the incomparable Homer. Alexander the Great kept his Homer in a golden box; I keep mine in my head, sir, or perhaps I should say, in my heart. I have committed to memory the greater part ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... quiet day on the mountain, reading Homer, and admiring the view. Towards nightfall he descends to Overstone and spends a few of his remaining pence in a frugal meal. Then, as the moon dips behind the shoulder of Wild Pike, he betakes himself, with ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... discourse. Never before did I completely understand what Demosthenes meant by laying such stress on delivery. You are to bring before you the venerable figure of the preacher; his blindness, constantly recalling to your recollection old Homer, Ossian, and Milton, and associating with his performance the melancholy grandeur of their geniuses; you are to imagine that you hear his slow, solemn, well-accented enunciation, and his voice of affecting trembling melody; you are ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself. Directorates, Consulates, Emperorships, Restorations, Citizen-Kingships ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... study. As soon as the fire was made in the sitting-room of the inn, which was at half-past four in the morning, he took possession, and studied German until breakfast-time, which was half-past seven. When the other boarders had gone to business, he sat down to Homer's Iliad, of which he knew nothing, and with only a dictionary to ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos), She would turn a new side to her mortal, Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman— Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, Blind to Galileo on his turret, Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats—him, even! Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal— When she turns round, comes again in heaven, Opens out anew for worse or better! Proves she like some portent of an iceberg Swimming full upon the ship it founders, Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals? Proves she ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... was very little used in any way during this long period of nine hundred years, are furnished in various allusions contained in poems and narratives that were composed during those times, and committed to writing afterward. In the poems of Homer, for instance, there is no allusion, from the beginning to the end, to any monument or tomb containing any inscription whatever; although many occasions occur in which such inscriptions would have been made, if the events described were real, and the art of writing ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... about that—but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in— Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never read Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined against the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The poor devils had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was in him. Those ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... is as if one should be so enthusiastic a lover of poetry as to care nothing for Homer ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... his worth was great, his honour such, The love his Country ought him, was as much. Then let none disallow of these my straines Whilst English blood yet runs within my veins, O brave Achilles, I wish some Homer would Engrave in Marble, with Characters of gold The valiant feats thou didst on Flanders coast, Which at this day fair Belgia may boast. The more I say, the more thy worth I stain, Thy fame and praise is far beyond my strain, O Zutphen, Zutphen that most ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... every one has the same right (I use the term of the country) to see it that another has. I had Mr. Wendeborn's book in my pocket, and it, at least, enabled me to take a somewhat more particular notice of some of the principal things; such as the Egyptian mummy, a head of Homer, &c. The rest of the company, observing that I had some assistance which they had not, soon gathered round me; I pointed out to them as we went along, from Mr. Wendeborn's German book, what there was most worth seeing here. The gentleman who conducted us took little ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... quadrature must not be forgotten. Aristophanes, in the Birds, introduces a geometer who announces his intention to make a square circle. Pope, in the Dunciad, delivers himself as follows, with a Greek pronunciation rather strange in a translator of Homer. Probably Pope recognized, as a general rule, the very common practice of throwing back the accent in defiance of quantity, seen in ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... whenever I think of my rencounter with William this morning. Mr. Gunnell had set me Homer's tiresome list of ships; and, because of y'e excessive heate within doors, I took my book into y'e nuttery, to be beyonde y'e wrath of far-darting Phoebus Apollo, where I clomb into my favourite filbert seat. Anon comes William through y'e trees without seeing me; ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... South for her treatment of the colored man, whom she has extensively favored with office, Boston, at least, has now had the first opportunity of practicing her doctrine; and let us hope that the man's name—Homer—will be classical enough to counteract ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... Giles' Church lie Chapman, the earliest and best translator of Homer; and Andrew Marvell, the wit and patriot, whose poverty Charles II. could not bribe.—Who would suppose that the Borough was the most classical ground in the metropolis? And yet it is undoubtedly so. The Globe Theatre was there, of which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... are too far removed from Homer's times to judge of his language. I trust to Quintilian in that respect, who ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... problem to many, Menage wrote an Epigram on this occasion, the sense of which is, that as many different sects claimed his religion, as there were towns which contended for the birth of Homer: ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... Homer says of them that they were a "divided people dwelling at the ends of the earth toward the setting and the rising Sun." Although it is possible at the present time to discover very many of the facts bearing upon the civilization of this ancient people, it is impossible ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... the Turkish Government remain, if by her standing Islamism may fall! that we may carry back a purer literature to the land of Homer, a purer law to the land of Moses, and the Gospel of Christ to the land of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... next. I had never declared myself, they said. Was I for Home Rule? I said we must first review Mr. GLADSTONE's numerous writings about HOMER, and then come to Home Rule. "HOMER stops the way!" Were Mr. GLADSTONES Homeric theories compatible with a rational frame of mind? Here I felt very strong, and animated with a keen desire to impart information. The deputation said all this was ancient history. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... who adorn their conversation, even with women, by happy quotations of Greek and Latin; and who have contracted such a familiarity with the Greek and Roman authors, that they, call them by certain names or epithets denoting intimacy. As OLD Homer; that SLY ROGUE Horace; MARO, instead of Virgil; and Naso, Instead of Ovid. These are often imitated by coxcombs, who have no learning at all; but who have got some names and some scraps of ancient authors by heart, which they improperly and impertinently retail in all companies, in hopes of passing ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... might well have been said that the gaiety of nations was eclipsed; but to his contemporaries Rabelais appeared less as the enormous humourist, the buffoon Homer, than as a great scholar and man of science, whose bright temper and mirthful conversation were in no way inconsistent with good sense, sound judgment, and even a habit of moderation. It is thus that he should still ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden |
