"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the school the plans for the campaign were perfected, and when it was out they met in the White Garden, known to the directory as Tompkins Square, the traditional duelling-ground of the lower East Side; and there ensued such a battle as Homer would have ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... race of men, negro-like in many particulars, yet differing from the negroes in others, and specially marked by their dwarfish stature, which is indicated in the name of Pygmies, usually given them. These diminutive beings were known as long ago as the days of Homer, and their legendary combats with the cranes are spoken of by him in his poems. He was not aware of what is known now, that these forest dwarfs would disdain the cranes as antagonists, and are quite capable of overcoming the lordly elephant. In truth, they know ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... have 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 story ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... 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
... quality; present, at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then, regarded ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... compositions all of the same kind, and equally, if not more, trifling than your's. A catalogue of them would look like a Bible genealogy, and were I to undertake the task of giving it, I should be obliged to invoke the muse, as Homer does before he begins the catalogue of the ships in his second Iliad. How long the currency of such compositions may continue, how many may be annually poured forth from the press, is more than any man can say, without being endued with the spirit of prophesy. But, without making any such pretensions, ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... on the part of artists who were, after all, contemporaries either of Sappho or Pindar. And it is more probable that the sculptors of Aegina were still embarrassed about the modelling of lips and cheeks than that, having Homer by heart, they imagined his heroes to die silently ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... 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 at my classics, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... this does not signify that these books are valueless. When it was discovered that the Homeric writings were not all the work of Homer, the value of the Homeric writings was not affected. As pictures of the life of that remote antiquity they had not lost their significance. The value of these Mosaic books is of a very different sort from that of the Homeric writings, but the discoveries of the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... 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. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for you; but, as Homer represents Minerva as taking away darkness from the eyes of Diomedes; that he might distinguish a God from a man, so it is necessary that he should first take away the darkness from your mind, and then bring near those things by which ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... he says to the critic; 'the book is a patriotic fraud, of no value except to the historian of literature. But how do you know that our Lord quoted it as true in the strict sense? In fact He quoted it as literature, as a Greek might have quoted Homer, as an Englishman ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Escot, helping himself at the same time to a slice of beef, "concerning which I will candidly acknowledge I am as profoundly ignorant as the most dogmatical theologian possibly can be, I just wish to observe, that the pure and peaceful manners which Homer ascribes to the Lotophagi, and which at this day characterise many nations (the Hindoos, for example, who subsist exclusively on the fruits of the earth), depose very strongly in favour of a ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... 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 work ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... informed that he has completed studies on Huysmans and Leconte de Lisle; he is also engaged on a "Historia Amoris." There is an interesting passage relating to the names of great writers. Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always "in two syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne ... Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan." The reader is permitted ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... by such psychological valets come poorly off; they are brought down by these their attendants to a level with, or, rather, a few degrees below the level of, the morality of such exquisite discerners of spirits. The Thersites of Homer who abuses the kings is a standing figure for all times. Blows—that is, beating with a solid cudgel—he does not get in every age, as in the Homeric one; but his envy, his egotism, is the thorn which he has to carry in his flesh; and the undying ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... exclaimed one of the undergraduates, very thoughtlessly. "Why, my dear Colonel Prowley, you are blinder than ever he was! Don't you know that recent scholarship has demonstrated Homer to be nobody in particular? The 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are mere agglomerations of the poetical effusions of a variety of persons; and doubtless all of them could see as well as you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... lived in a city of Asia Minor, not far from Mount Ida, as old Homer tells us in his grand and beautiful poem, a king who had fifty sons and many daughters. How large his family was, indeed, we cannot say, for the storytellers of the olden time were not very careful to set down the actual and exact truth, their chief object being to give ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... religion, by many a fanciful skeptic, has been called barren and gloomy; but setting aside all the legends of the Jews, and confining ourselves entirely to the generally received Scriptures, there will be found sufficient food for an imagination warm as that of Homer, Apelles, Phidias, or Praxiteles. It is astonishing that such rich materials for poetry should for so many centuries have been so little ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... man this must be—thought I—to whom my tremendous hero turns tail. The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and condescended to say, "Rab, my man, puir Rabbie,"—whereupon the stump of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were comforted; the two friends were reconciled. "Hupp!" ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... Ye!, by Seumas MacManus (Frederick A. Stokes Company). Many of these chimney-corner stories are older than Homer, but Mr. MacManus has retold them in the language of the roads, and this pageant of tinkers and kings, fairies and scholars, lords and fishermen march by to the sound of the pipes and the ribald comments of little boys along the road. The quality of this ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Monkbarns" has not suffered from this disparagement. The "British Critic" pledged its reputation that Scott was the author. If an argument were wanted, "it would be that which has been applied to prove the authenticity of the last book of the Iliad,that Homer must have written it, because no one else could." Alas! that argument ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... has degraded the characters of his original, instead of ennobling them. The camp scenes are adapted from Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye; and the challenge of Hector was taken from some translation of Homer, probably that by Chapman. An earlier lost play on this subject by Dekker and Chettle is mentioned in contemporary reference. We do not know whether Shakespeare drew anything from it or not. Scattered hints were ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... to add, that the 'Rape of the Lock' was not borrowed from the 'Lutrin' of Boileau. That was impossible. Neither was it suggested by the 'Lutrin.' The story in Herodotus of the wars between cranes and pigmies, or the Batrachomyomachia (so absurdly ascribed to Homer) might have suggested the idea more naturally. Both these, there is proof that Pope had read: there is none that he had read the 'Lutrin,' nor did he read French with ease to himself. The 'Lutrin,' meantime, is as much below the 'Rape of the Lock' in brilliancy of ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Homer, an' all the poets Have sung for ages the praise av woine; But if they iver had tasted whiskey, They'd have called it the ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... than usual, on account both of the fatigue of my journey and of the lateness of the hour. In my sleep, I suppose in consequence of our conversation (for generally our thoughts and utterances by day have in our sleep an effect like that which Ennius describes in his own case as to Homer, [Footnote: The first verse of the Annales ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... world expecting to find men just such as Moses and Paul have represented them will never be disappointed. If you are contented to read nothing but your Bibles, well, you have it all there. But if you will read any other books, read Homer and Shakespeare. They come nearer, in my estimation, to Moses and Paul, in their delineations of human character, than any other authors I am acquainted with. I would have every young man read Shakespeare. I have always taught ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... subsistence, was below the region of such prizes, and was obliged in later years not only to write inferior books for money, but to sell himself and act as a spy upon his fellows. One great man, it is true, made an independence by literature. Pope received some L8000 for his translation of Homer, by the then popular mode of subscription—a kind of compromise between the systems of patronage and public support. But his success caused little pleasure in Grub Street. No love was lost between the poet and the dwellers in this dismal region. Pope ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... it ten minutes later, and, the calls on her time being many, remained out so long that at half-past six she hadn't come back. At that hour, on the other hand, Scott Homer knocked at her door, where her maid, who opened it with a weak pretence of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him, as a lesson well learnt, that he hadn't been expected till seven. No lesson, none the less, could prevail against his native art. He pleaded fatigue, her, the maid's, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... of recognizing the family as the unit of social treatment is presented in Edward T. Devine's Principles of Relief, and in Homer Folks's Care of ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... with the sea. They were a magnificent race, healthy-minded realists—and kept strictly to the evidences of their senses without adding anything transcendental. The sea only appealed to their ear. Homer's adjectives for the sea are only expressive of sound—the resounding, the jubilant, the loud-rushing; hardly more than once does he allude to the gloomy or ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... immortal productions of the great creators of the European languages. Dante led the way in Italy, and gave to the world the "Divine Comedy"—a masterpiece of human genius, which raised him to the rank of Homer and Virgil. Petrarch followed in his steps, and, if not as profound or original as Dante, yet is unequalled as an "enthusiastic songster of ideal love." He also gave a great impulse to civilization by his labors ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... monarch to a woman nearly a score of years older than himself. It is true that the courtier's pen of Brantome ascribes to her all the freshness of youth even at the close of the reign of Henry the Second. His eulogium, however, is scarcely more worthy of credit than Homer's praise of the undiminished personal beauty of Helen, when, twenty years subsequently to the departure of the expedition to Troy, the Ithacan prince found her reigning again at Sparta. But of the influence which Diana possessed over Henry there could be no doubt. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... a radiant face, however, and Charlotte could hear him moving about his study; now rolling out a grand march of musical Greek syllables from Homer or Euripides, anon breaking into some familiar verse of Christian song. And, when tea was served, he went up-stairs for the ladies, and escorted them to the table with a manner so beaming and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Elijah-like, draw down his fire direct from heaven, but kindled with brands, borrowed from Greek and Hebrew altars, the inspiration which sent up the incense-poetry of a Lost Paradise. And all the while that Maro sang 'Arms and the Man,' a refrain from the harp of Homer was sounding in his ears, unto whose tones so piously he keyed and measured his own notes, that oftentimes we fancy we can hear the strains of 'rocky Scio's blind old bard' mingling in the Mantuan's melody. If thus it has ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... right the Second, Vanquished by Fortune, lies here now graven in stone, True of his word, and thereto well renound: Seemly in person, and like to Homer as one In worldly prudence, and ever the Church in one Upheld and favoured, casting the proud to ground, And all that ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... of it were in verse. This is in accordance with a principle which is stated by Herbert Spencer on a different but related theme, that "Ornament was before dress," the artistic instincts underlying and preceding the utilitarian preoccupations. History indeed was first poetry, as we had Homer before Thucydides, and as in all countries the traditions of the past take the form of metrical, and generally musical, recitation. An excellent and polished school of prose writers is the product of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... published anything new?" Adams answered, "He had heard great commendations of that poet, but that he had never read nor knew any of his works."—"Ho! ho!" says the gentleman to himself, "have I caught you? What!" said he, "have you never seen his Homer?" Adams answered, "he had never read any translation of the classicks." "Why, truly," reply'd the gentleman, "there is a dignity in the Greek language which I think no modern tongue can reach."—"Do you understand Greek, sir?" said Adams hastily. "A little, sir," ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... years ago among our own ancestors in Europe. At that time there were no kings claiming a "divine right" to govern their fellow men. The chiefs were those whose courage, strength, and skill in war made them to be chosen "rulers of men," to use old Homer's phrase. If their sons did not possess these qualities, they remained among the common herd. But there came a time when, here and there, some mighty warrior gained so much wealth in cattle and in slaves taken in battle, that {35} he was able to bribe some of ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... time ago, Professor Doerpfeld announced to the world that he had discovered on the island of Ithaca, off the west coast of Greece, the ruins of the palace of Ulysses, Homer's half-mythical hero of the Odyssey. The German archaeologist has traced the different rooms of the palace and is convinced that here is the very place to which the hero returned after his wanderings. Near it several ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... the Spanish dress and veil worn by Miss Montenero, associated as it was with painting and poetry, did certainly appear to me more picturesque and graceful. In favour of the veil, I had all the poets, from Homer and Hesiod downwards, on my side; and moreover, I was backed by the opinion of the wisest of men, who has pronounced that "a veil addeth to beauty." Armed with such authority, and inspired by love, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... Achilles departed, now that his rage had left him, weeping maudlin tears of disappointed passion, to comfort his "bruised soul" with the immortal lines of Homer, for when he was not merely a brute Domitian fancied himself a poet. It was perhaps as well for his peace of mind that he could not see the face of Saturius, as the chamberlain comforted his bruised shoulders ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... proper moods, is his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they sprang, and perhaps to only one special display of that gift, that he owes his immortality. We are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last hyperbolic honour—hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking of a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision far enough forward through time—that the comparative ease with which it is to be earned has itself come to be exaggerated. There are so many "deathless ones" about—if I may put the matter familiarly—in ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... to 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
... supposed Zoology, Botany, and Mineralogy of Aesthetic, and of universal history judged from the aesthetic standpoint. The whole history of concrete art and literature has also been dragged into those Aesthetics and generally mangled; they contain judgments upon Homer and Dante, upon Ariosto and Shakespeare, upon Beethoven and Rossini, Michelangelo and Raphael. When all this has been deducted from them, our treatise will no longer be held to be too meagre, but, on the contrary, far more copious than ordinary ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... with you so far as I may. Our reason for advertising for information regarding Miss Mona Forester was this: I received recently a communication from a lawyer in London, desiring me to look up a person so named, and stating that a certain Homer Forester—a wool merchant of Australia—had just died in London while on his way home to America, and had left in his lawyer's hands a will bequeathing all that he possessed to a niece, Miss Mona Forester, or her heirs, if she was not living. The date and place of her birth ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... week an untoward circumstance happened, which, while it increased his popularity, diminished a good deal (as he thought) his chance of success. The fourth-form were learning a Homer lesson, and Barker, totally unable to do it by his own resources, was trying to borrow a crib. Eric, much to their mutual disgust, still sat next to him in school, and would have helped him if he had chosen to ask; ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. Engineer, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the critical historian tries to drive back into that limbo, where an imaginary Homer flirts with a fabulous Pocahontas, we are asked to place the alleged one love of Schubert's life. Few composers have been so overweighted with poverty or so gifted with loneliness as Franz Schubert. His joy was spasmodic and short, but his ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... "You are a very polite little girl, Jessie. Look at this one; this is called 'Homer,' but you need not call it Mr. or Mrs., ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Angelique, giving a glance in the great Venetian mirror before her. Her freshly donned robe of blue silk, edged with a foam of snowy laces and furbelows, set off her tall figure. Her arms, bare to the elbows, would have excited Juno's jealousy or Homer's verse to gather efforts in praise of them. Her dainty feet, shapely, aspiring, and full of character as her face, were carelessly thrust forward, and upon one of them lay a flossy spaniel, a privileged pet of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the Grecian muse unrivall'd reigns, To Britain let the nations homage pay; She felt a Homer's fire in Milton's strains, A Pindar's rapture in ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... some to science, some to be rulers of men. Some men are brimful and running over with harmonies that will live forever. Other men's hearts beat in unison with the symphonies of the spheres, and Homer and Milton and Dante become household words. You seek another expression of the good that is in you. You will be painters and sculptors. Color, form, and mass are to you what the pen, the sword, and the lute are to those others who have gone before, or are now around you. Your mission is ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... where did you come from, and whither are you bound?"—the question which from Homer's days has been put to the wayfarer in strange lands—is likewise the all-absorbing question which man is ever asking of the universe of which he is himself so tiny yet so wondrous a part. From the earliest times the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... and twisted his mustache till the ends were like needle-points. "Horns of Panurge! as Victor would say; is it possible for any man save Homer to be in two places at once? Possibly I am to race for some other end of France. I like it not. Mazarin thinks because I am in her Majesty's Guards that I belong to him. Plague take him, ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... words his epitaph, Sublimely simple, nobly plain; Who adds to them but addeth chaff, Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could bring to that one simple phrase What were not rather loss than gain; That elegy so briefly fine, That epic writ ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the worse was it for the good people of Napoule. They never suspected their misfortune, not having read in Homer how a single pretty woman had filled all Greece and Lesser ...
— The Broken Cup - 1891 • Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke
... in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being the mere imitator of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... brief call at Homer, in Cook Inlet, one of the starting points for the famous Kenai shooting grounds. This inlet was named for the renowned voyager, who hoped that it would furnish a water passage ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... with their ILIAD. Where is a truer poet than Homer? Yet the worship of him became a positive bane to independent creative thought. What good things could be written about the withering influence of Homer upon the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... which eternity cannot fill. Others succeed to his fame—but never to the exact place which he held in the world's eye;—they may be greater than the one we have lost—but they are not he. Shakspeare built not his throne on the same site as Homer—nor Scott on that whence Shakspeare looked down upon the universe. The gap which Scott leaves in the world is the token of the space he filled in the homage of his times. A hundred ages hence our posterity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... likely he had been measuring himself with the writers he had studied, and found himself not inferior. The great misfortune of his life, as he confessed himself, was never to have an aim. He had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were like gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave. Now, however, we have come to a period of his life when he certainly did have an aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as soon as it was recognised. It was not a question of ploughing ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... this, or any like expression, to be found in Homer? If so, I should feel much obliged to any of your correspondents who would favour ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... perfected into the system to which it is now degraded. The wives and daughters of the wealthiest would not then disdain to fabricate material for the household linen, carrying us far back into simpler, if not happier times, when Homer sung, and kings' daughters found a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... to pry into the Book of Fate assumes grosser forms. Mr. Bryce tells us that Western newspapers devote a special column to the advertisements of astrologers and soothsayers, and assures us that this profession is as much recognised in the California of to-day as in the Greece of Homer. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and seas in unison And sound athwart life's tideless harbour-bar Out where our songs fly free Across time's bounded sea, A boundless flight beyond the dim sun's car, Till all the spheres of night Chime concord round their flight Too loud for blasts of warring change to mar, From stars that sang for Homer's birth To these that gave our Landor ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 21). But perhaps Harte's most successful attempt to elevate The Dunciad comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in whose Discourse the account of the "progress" of satire is confined almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the ancestry of The Dunciad from Homer, the greatest epic poet, obviously enhances Pope's satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending Dryden's account to the present, Harte ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... I 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 ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... husband, Candida, took her abroad and gave her every advantage in music, both in Paris and Italy. When he died she married Homer Smith, an American, who was associated with him in some way. After his return to America he got up what was known as the 'Homer Troupe.' He dropped his last name, thinking the Smith Troupe would not sound as well as Homer. His wife was the drawing card. She had a wonderful voice as a girl, ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... manner of Boswell, only much shorter, his opinions on one or two subjects briefly given, some quotations and criticisms. I was much struck with his criticisms on Virgil, whom he seems to have held in great contempt, and to have regarded as inferior to Ovid. He says, 'Take away his imitation of Homer, and what do you leave him?' Of Homer his admiration was unbounded, although he says that he never read the whole of the 'Odyssey' in the original, but that everything which is most admirable in poetry is to be found in Homer. I care the less about remembering these things ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... 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 ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... and a few other Greek authors, constituted the treasure from which a few favored individuals in the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration. The former, as is well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, though a very bad one, vas made at Petrarch's suggestion, and with Boccaccio's help, by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato. But with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries, the systematic ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... of a later generation find themselves in antagonism to the mores of their ancestors. In the Homeric poems cases are to be found of disapproval by a later generation of the mores of a former one. The same is true of the tragedies of the fifth century in respect to the mythology and heroism in Homer. The punishment of Melantheus, the unfaithful goatherd, was savage in the extreme, but when Eurykleia exulted over the dead suitors, Ulysses told her that it was a cruel sin to rejoice over slain enemies.[143] In the Iliad boastful shouts over the dead are frequent. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Not that my father could be indifferent to the value of this practice, in giving a thorough knowledge of these languages, but because there really was not time for it. The verses I was required to write were English. When I first read Pope's Homer, I ambitiously attempted to compose something of the same kind, and achieved as much as one book of a continuation of the Iliad. There, probably, the spontaneous promptings of my poetical ambition ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... the 142d paragraph, and the remarks about "specific" diseases, the answer, if any is necessary, seems very simple. An inflammation of a serous membrane may give rise to secretions which act as a poison, whether that be a "specific" poison or not, as Dr. Homer has told his young readers, and as dissectors know too well; and that poison may produce its symptoms in a few hours after the system has received it, as any may see in Druitt's "Surgery," if they care to look. Puerperal peritonitis may produce such a poison, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume." The circumstances which led to A FIRST YEAR being written have been fully described by Mr. Festing Jones in his sketch of Butler's life prefixed to THE HUMOUR OF HOMER (Fifield, London, 1913, Kennerley, New York), and I will only briefly recapitulate them. Butler left England for New Zealand in September, 1859, remaining in the colony until 1864. A FIRST YEAR was published ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... the distinctness of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of AEschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardours even under the ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... presence and in many cases consecrated it with their blood. Poverty is a blessing, not an evil, a benison from the Father's hand if accepted in the right spirit. Instead of retarding, it has elevated literature in all ages. Homer was a blind beggarman singing his snatches of song for the dole of charity; grand old Socrates, oracle of wisdom, many a day went without his dinner because he had not the wherewithal to get it, while teaching the youth of Athens. The divine ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... whirled somewhat slower, this circle becomes interrupted in one part; and then the time taken up in such a revolution of the stick is the same that the observer uses in changing his ideas: thus the [Greek: dolikoskoton enkos] of Homer, the long shadow of the flying javelin, is elegantly designed to give us an idea of its velocity, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Cooper; do you not know Mr. Cooper? Let me introduce you to him.' 'Cooper,' said I to myself; 'can it be that I am within five paces, and that there, too, are the feeble of the race around which his genius has shed a halo like that of Homer's own heros?' I was fresh from 'The Mohicans,' and my hand trembled as it met the cordial grasp of the man to whom I owed so many pleasing hours. I asked about the Indians. 'They are poor specimens,' said he; 'fourth-rate at best in their own woods, and ten-times worse for the lives they are leading ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... the side of Mr. Drax Homer, Edgar Allan Poe is a fumbler, and Gaboriau the veriest tiro. In these supremely arresting pages Mr. Drax Homer voices the cosmic mystery with unerring skill, and ranges over the whole gamut ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... political writer, was English; but his "Paradise Lost and Regained," his "Samson," his "Ode on the Nativity," his "Comus," bear no reference to the land of his birth. Dryden's best-known work to- day is his "Alexander's Feast." Pope has come down to us as the translator of Homer. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the great quartet of English novelists of the last century; but Smollett, in his preface to "Roderick Random," after an admiring allusion to the "Gil Blas" of Le Sage, goes on to say: ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... muse! Old Homer sung unto the lyre; Tyrtaeus, too, in ancient days; Still warmed by their immortal fire, How doth our patriot spirit blaze! The oracle, when questioned, sings; So our first steps in life are taught. In verse we soothe the pride of kings, In verse ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... of her manifold sciences, be able to show me one book before Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod, all three nothing else but poets. Nay, let any history he brought that can say any writers were there before them, if they were not men of the same skill, as Orpheus, Linus, and some others are named, who having been the first of that country that made pens ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... have passed from human view; 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 posterity ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... absorbed in those ringing notes that stole along the passage and entered by the open door and surrounded him like lightsome fairies. Into his right ear they poured their charm; in his left ear they completed their work. Virgil was forgotten; old Homer might never have existed. ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... age Horace alludes rather disparagingly to his schooldays in Rome: he was taught, he says, out of a translation from Homer by an inferior Latin writer (Ep. II, i, 62, 69), and his master, a retired soldier, one Orbilius, was "fond of the rod" (Ep. II, i, 71). I observe that the sympathies of Horatian editors and commentators, themselves mostly schoolmasters, are with Orbilius as a much enduring paedagogue ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... the same time, we may really be honester than those who have led us to expect this or that of him, and more truly his friends. I wish the time might come when we could read Shakespeare, and Dante, and Homer, as sincerely and as fairly as we read any new book by the least known of our contemporaries. The course of criticism is towards this, but when I began to read Shakespeare I should not have ventured to think that he was not at every moment great. I should no more have thought of questioning ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sheltered by soft, gray fur. We look up at these fleecy clusters, freed from the brownish budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as "a beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... drive pipe down in the bottom of the well, hoping to find artesian water which will rise into the well from some lower stratum. This method has been successfully employed in the village of Homer, New York, where the public supply formerly came from a dug well twenty feet in diameter. The supply becoming deficient, pipe wells were driven in the bottom and an excellent supply of water found fifty feet below ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... an excellent author. Victorius was justified by his scholarship and the present editor has no such claim to attention: he, therefore, makes the confession frankly (to anticipate perhaps such criticism as Bentley's "a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but don't call it Homer") and offers the little book to those who love the country, and to read about the country amidst the crowded life of towns, with the hope that they may find in it some measure of the pleasure it ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the emirs of the east, or the barons of the west, there is reason to suspect that the origin of the tale must be sought in Greece. Europe has been guided by the mind of Hellas in every age, from the days of Homer to those of Tzetzes; and its power has been maintained by addressing the feelings common to the whole human race—feelings long cherished in Greece after they had been banished from western society ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... does it matter! They passed who with Homer Poured out the wine at the feet of their idols: Passing, what found they? To-come a misnomer, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... and keeps the same side toward us. 10. Hunger rings the bell, and orders up coals in the shape of bread and butter, beef and bacon, pies and puddings. 11. The history of the Trojan war rests on the authority of Homer, and forms the subject of the noblest poem of antiquity. 12. Every stalk, bud, flower, and seed displays a figure, a proportion, a harmony, beyond the reach of art. 13. The natives of Ceylon build houses of the trunk, and thatch roofs with the leaves, of the cocoa-nut palm. 14. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... under Law from B.C. 1491 to the Christian ra,) proves to have been a marvellously precocious Infant. He wrote the Song of Moses in the year of his birth. Nay, he built pyramids,—had a Literature, Arts, and Sciences,—ages before he was born!... While yet an infant, he sang with Homer, and carved with Phidias, and philosophized with Aristotle,—as none have ever sung, or carved, or philosophized since. Times and fashions have altered, truly; but these three men are still our ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... was Mr. Slowcoach the formidable man, that Mr. Verdant Green had anticipated; and by the time that he had turned a piece of Spectator into Latin, our hero had somewhat recovered his usual equanimity of mind and serenity of expression: and the construing of half a dozen lines of Livy and Homer, and the answering of a few questions, was a mere form; for Mr. Slowcoach's long practice enabled him to see in a very few minutes if the freshman before him (however nervous he might be) had the usual average of abilities, and was up to the business ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... of Golias was given at the period in which they flourished most. Viewed in his literary capacity, this chief was further designated as the Archpoet. Of his personality we know as little as we do of that of Homer. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... say that it is still an open question whether it has a right to exist, and no one has yet settled it.... Neither you nor I, nor all the critics in the world, have any trustworthy data that would give them the right to reject such literature. I do not know which are right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lopez da Vega, and, speaking generally, the ancients who were not afraid to rummage in the "muck heap," but were morally far more stable than we are, or the modern writers, priggish on paper but coldly ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Vergil and began Homer. I had studied these poets by myself already, but found many slack ends that only the aid and guidance of a professor could clear up. And, allowing for their narrow religious viewpoints, real or affected, in order to ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... improvements obtained for the Megarian the title of inventer of comedy, with about the same justice as a similar degree of art conferred upon the later Thespis the distinction of the origin of tragedy. The study of Homer's epics had suggested its true province to tragedy; the study of the Margites, attributed also to Homer, seems to have defined and enlarged the domain of comedy. Eleven years after Phrynichus appeared, and just previous to the first effort of Aeschylus (B. C. 500), Epicharmus, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... case. Julius prints childrens' primers. Harriet makes ladies' bonnets. The servant beats the man's horse. The horse kicks the servant's master. The boy struck that man's child. The child lost those boys' ball. The tempest sunk those merchants' vessels. Pope translated Homer's Illiad. Cicero procured Milo's release. Alexander conquered Darius' army. Perry met the enemy's fleet. Washington obtained his ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... the distinguished translator of Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides, who more than any one of his epoch advanced the movement of Greek and Latin learning, which, whilst it had the effect of arresting the development of Italian literature, enriched Europe by opening up to it the sources of ancient erudition, ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... perfection in the English edition of Jacob Behmen. The frontispiece is a full-length likeness of the author of the Holy War, with his whole soul laid open and his hidden heart 'anatomised.' Why, asked Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold in our day has echoed the question—why does Homer still so live and rule without a rival in the world of letters? And they answer that it is because he always sang with his eye so fixed upon its object. 'Homer, to thee I turn.' And so it was with Dante. And so it was with Bunyan. Bunyan's Holy War has its great and abiding and commanding ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... chap with a nose of richest vintage. The portrait is brown in tone and without charm. The Susanna Bathing is famous, but it is not as attractive as Simeon in the Temple, with its masterly lighting, old gold in the gloom. The Homer never fails to warm the cockles of the imagination. What bulk! What a wealth of smothered fire in the apparel! The big Saul listening to the playing of David is still mystifying. Is Saul smiling or crying behind the uplifted cloak? ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... only the office of stage-manager. Twice he took part in the action, once as the blind old Thamyris playing on the harp, and once in his own lost tragedy, the "Nausicaa." There in the scene in which the Princess, as she does in Homer's "Odyssey," comes down to the sea-shore with her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then to play at ball— Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one thing he could do better than any there—and, dressed in women's clothes, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... doubt it would be quite Ossianic—equal to any of the abusive scenes in Homer. But, my dear Harding, how are you? You are come to eat your Christmas dinner with ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... and the diamond. Likewise does history teach us that from the morass of poverty the commonest types of men have passed from stage to stage through the refining processes of experience till they have dazzled the world with their magnificence. Whether it be a slave like AEsop, a beggar like Homer, a peasant like Raphael, or a marble-cutter like Socrates, we see them at last wearing the diadem ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... winter, 'nd there wuz fever all around us. The Baxters lost their little girl, and Homer Thompson's children had all been taken down. Ev'ry night 'nd mornin' we prayed God to save our darlin'; but one evenin' when I come up from the wood-lot, the Old Man wuz restless 'nd his face wuz hot 'nd he talked ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... and held out his hand to a young woman, completely enveloped in a green silk mantle heavily embroidered with gold. She raised the hand extended towards her to her lips, and kissed it with a mixture of love and respect. Some few words passed between them in that sonorous language in which Homer makes his gods converse. The young woman spoke with an expression of deep tenderness, while the count replied with an air of gentle gravity. Preceded by Ali, who carried a rose-colored flambeau in his hand, the new-comer, who was no other than the lovely Greek who had been Monte Cristo's ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... continents lift the bars. Single-handed, they accomplish what nations dared not hope; with Titan strides they scale the stars and succeed where millions fail. In art they live, the makers of new periods, the dreamers of new styles. They make themselves the vocal sun-glasses of God. Homer and Shakespeare, Hugo and Balzac—they concentrate the dispersed rays of a thousand lesser luminaries in one singing flame that, like a giant torch, lights ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... of Factory Inspector, L. Homer, October, 1844: "The state of things in the matter of wages is greatly perverted in certain branches of cotton manufacture in Lancashire; there are hundreds of young men, between twenty and thirty, employed as piecers and otherwise, who do not get more than 8 or 9 shillings a week, while ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... drinking, attacked Sergeant Legendre, who, thrusting his sabre into the Russian's neck, laid him dead at his feet. M. de. Sgur, in his story of the campaign of 1812, has General Koulnieff making a dying speech worthy of Homer. I was within a few feet of Sergeant Legendre when he drove his sabre into Koulnieff's throat, and I can certify that the General fell without uttering a word. The victory achieved by General Albert's infantry and the 23rd was complete. The enemy had at least ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... after the daily dreadful lines, the bread and butter 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 ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... of virtues, they ranked wisdom and ready wit almost as high. Achilles was the strongest of the Grecian warriors at the siege of Troy, but there was another almost as strong, equally brave, and far shrewder of wit. This was Ulysses. It was he who ultimately brought about the capture of the city. Homer speaks often of him in his "Iliad;" and the bard's second great work, the "Odyssey," is devoted entirely to the wanderings of Odysseus, or, as we have learned from the Romans to call him, Ulysses. Whether he was a real person or only a creation of the poet's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... a-trudging through the world in a monk's cowl and a friar's frock. On the same page from which Cicero had thundered, a monk now discoursed. Where Livy's pictured narrative had been, you found only a dull wearisome legend. Where the thunder of Homer's lyre or the sweet notes of Virgil's muse had resounded, you heard now a dismal croak or a lugubrious chant. Such was the strange metamorphosis which the ancients were compelled to endure at the hands of the' monks; and such was the way in which they strove ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... with the ancients?" said the king. "Which, then, do you think the greatest and most renowned of that epoch—Homer or Virgil?" ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... says, "I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and much of Homer and the accordion, a week passed over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and again from leaden skies the snowflakes were sifted over the land. Day by day closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked from their prison over drifted walls of ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... upholders of the genuineness of the dialogue will find in the Hippias a true Socratic spirit; they will compare the Ion as being akin both in subject and treatment; they will urge the authority of Aristotle; and they will detect in the treatment of the Sophist, in the satirical reasoning upon Homer, in the reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that vice is ignorance, traces of a Platonic authorship. In reference to the last point we are doubtful, as in some of the other dialogues, whether the author is ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... question, for it was such a battle as the annals of warfare can hardly parallel. Each officer, as he was able to collect twenty or thirty men around him, advanced into the midst of the enemy, where they fought hand to hand, bayonet to bayonet, and sword to sword, with the tumult and ferocity of Homer's combats before the walls of Troy. Attacked unexpectedly in the dark, and surrounded by enemies before we could arrange to oppose them, no order or discipline of war could be preserved. We were mingled with the Americans before we could tell whether they were friends ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... poetry and works of imagination. Like the mothers of the Ettrick Shepherd and of Burns, she repeated to her son the traditionary ballads she knew by heart; and, so soon as he was sufficiently advanced, his leisure hours were usually spent in reading Pope's translation of Homer aloud to her, which, with the exception of a few ballads and some of Allan Ramsay's songs, was the first poetry he made acquaintance with. It must often have been with anxiety, and sometimes not without a struggle, that ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the object of learning the language, which by reason of its subtlety lends itself most readily to diplomatic purposes, the most expressive language, to my thinking, that the world has yet evolved, not excepting the much-vaunted tongue in which Homer wrote. Phillip and I had been boys together, and of all the comrades of my youth I should have selected him the last to distinguish himself in statecraft. He was a quiet, unobservant, and, as previously noted, self-absorbed man, with a sense of the picturesque, which took the form of ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... task-reading, and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us on to the end of his long performance. This effect, of which every one is conscious, is usually ascribed to the change of manners: but manners have more changed since Homer's age; and yet that poet remains still the favorite of every reader of taste and judgment. Homer copied true natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... account with God, without mediation of priest or sacrament. Another element in this new dogma was the simpler, and yet more profound, psychology of the new age. The shift of emphasis from the outer to the inner is traceable from the earliest age to the present, from the time when Homer delighted to tell of the good blows struck in fight to the time when fiction is but the story of an inner, spiritual struggle. The Reformation was one phase in this long process from the external to the internal. The debit and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... onelie of this, but alsoe of al other letteres, quhilk is alwayes ane. But we sound it alwayes ane, and therfoer better. Ad that their sound of it is not far unlyke the sheepes bae, quhilk the greek symbolizes be eta not alpha, be: not ba. See Eustat. in Homer. ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... "I can almost parallel your description from the 'Iliad' of Homer. I won't pretend that I can give you the Greek, and no doubt it would be Greek to you. I'll get even with you, Webb, however, and read an extract from Pope's translation," and he also made an excursion to the library. Returning, he said, "Don't ask me for the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... fond of the Anglo-Saxon poetry which abounded in those days. The poems were legends, ballads, and tales, which described the exploits of heroes, and the adventures of pilgrims and wanderers of all kinds. These poems were to Alfred what Homer's poems were to Alexander. He loved to listen to them, to hear them recited, and to commit them to memory. In committing them to memory, he was obliged to depend upon hearing the poems repeated by others, for he himself could ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... but "becoming." This has been the doctrine, not of Protagoras only, but of all philosophers, with the single exception of Parmenides; Empedocles, Heracleitus, and others, and all the poets, with Epicharmus, the king of Comedy, and Homer, the king of Tragedy, at their head, have said the same; the ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... developed a liking for books. His father taught a class composed of his children and some boys in the neighborhood, and when Theodor became old enough to join it he soon outstripped the rest, giving his father no little pride by his fluent rendering of Homer. Theodor Fliedner was not quite fourteen years old when the sudden death of the father changed the whole life of the family, and left the mother with eleven children to maintain and educate. Now began for Fliedner ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... implicitly, when he supposes this idea to be retained in central Greek theology. 'Athena' originally meant only the dawn, among nations who knew nothing of a Sacred Spirit. But the Athena who catches Achilles by the hair, and urges the spear of Diomed, has not, in the mind of Homer, the slightest remaining connection with the mere beauty of daybreak. Daphne chased by Apollo, may perhaps—though I doubt even this much of consistence in the earlier myth—have meant the Dawn pursued by the Sun. But there is no trace whatever of this first idea ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Before Homer sang there were heroes; but they are not known; no poet celebrated their fame. It is just so with the beauties of nature, they must be brought into notice by words and delineations, be brought before the eyes of the multitude; get a sort of world's patent for what they are, and then ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... approval were read from John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor, of England; Professor Homer B. Sprague, of Cornell University; Bishop Simpson, of the Methodist church; Senator Matthew H. Carpenter, and many other distinguished persons. A number of senators and representatives addressed the meetings, as did also Hon. A.G. Riddle, of the District of Columbia, Rev. Samuel J. May, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... not then study the work of a great historian, or great poet, any more than you can now study that of a great painter, but at heavy cost. If you wanted a book, you had to get it written out for you, or to write it out for yourself. But printing came, and the poor man may read his Dante and his Homer; and Dante and Homer are none the worse for that. But it is only in literature that private persons of moderate fortune can possess and study greatness: they can study at home no greatness in art; and the ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... absolutely necessary, in fewer yeeres then he had proposed for his absence, yett he had first made himselfe master of the Greeke tounge (in the Latine he was very well versed before) and had reade not only all the Greeke Historians, but Homer likewise and such of the Poetts, as were worthy to be perused: Though his fathers death brought no other convenience to him, but a title to redeeme an estate, morgaged for as much as it was worth, and for which he was compelled ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... Homer; Prince of Poetts. In his Iliads, and Odysses. Translated according to the Greeke, By Geo: Chapman. De ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... Millbank was the last thought of Coningsby, as he sank into an agitated slumber. To him had hitherto in general been accorded the precious boon of dreamless sleep. Homer tells us these phantasms come from Jove; they are rather the children of a distracted soul. Coningsby this night lived much in past years, varied by painful perplexities of the present, which he could neither subdue nor ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... command of human nature. Many of the Greek and Roman classics made their appearance in English translations, which were favourably received as works of merit; among these we place, after Pope's Homer, Virgil by Pitt and Wharton, Horace by Francis, Polybius by Hampton, and Sophocles by Franklin. The war introduced a variety of military treatises, chiefly translated from the French language; and a free country, like Great Britain, will always abound with political tracts and lucubrations. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a truth beyond all question, that, when at one time Rome was the abode of all the virtues, many of the nobles, like the Lotophagi, celebrated in Homer, who detained men by the deliciousness of their fruit, allured foreigners of free birth by manifold attentions of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... said the poetical gentleman, with a preparatory flourish of his ruler, "have possessed localities famous in the history of literature:—as Athens, in Greece; the Island of Scio, where Homer first saw the light; and Stratford, where Shakspeare appeared. Now, sir, reasoning from analogy, which is the finest possible way of reasoning, we must conclude that Virginia has such a locality, and I leave you to decide the probable situation of ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... "this is George's Homer, and he bade me tell you that he coonted yir freendship ain o' ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... promontory before the west wind still give the idea of a flowing stream, as they did in Homer's days. Here beneath the cliff, standing where beach and sand meet, it is still; the wind passes six hundred feet overhead. But yonder, every larger wave rolling before the breeze breaks over the rocks; a white line of spray rushes along them, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... will happen now? Goodness me! 'tis most unpleasant! Anyhow, it is for me! She is pretty, I don't doubt it; Yet I would rather have My pipe and a page of Homer! ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... 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 found to be recorded on the Egyptian monuments, was probably part of the great contemporary ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... after the 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 ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... towns that have laid claim to being his birthplace. M. Jean Reynaud, the distinguished French philosophical writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, once said that Basil Valentine, like Ossian and Homer, had many towns claim him years after his death. He also suggested that, like those old poets, it was possible that the writings sometimes attributed to Basil Valentine were really the work not of one man, but of several individuals. There are, however, many objections to this theory, the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... write about 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 Homer was a "marvellous clerk," but ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... is going to happen, and I may spend the next year or two in a Confederate prison. I don't think my Uncle Homer would cry his eyes out if such should be my fate, for he has lost several vessels and cargoes of cotton on my account," ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... extended up all through the three stories of the castle. At the upper end of the hall was the grand painted window, sixty feet high, on which was delineated the pilgrimage of Duke Bogislaff the Great to Jerusalem, all painted by Gerard Homer; [Footnote: A Frieslander, and the most celebrated painter on glass of his time.] and round on the walls banners, and shields, and helmets, and cuirasses, while all along each side, four feet from the ground, there were painted on the walls ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... 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. It will prove interesting to note the stimulation of this instinct under the supervision ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... 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 of the ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin |
