"Homeric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... professional good faith to their intercourse with their paymaster? The secret service agent of transparent frankness, who could not bear to deceive his neighbor, would not hold his post for a day. He would be a subject for Homeric laughter. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... perceiving, the imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,—what an expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes human beings. But he in whose narrow brain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... This, it might be argued, shows that he attributes to each such inert material object a soul, whose relation to the object is analogous to that of the human soul to the body. But such an inference, we think, would not be justified. As with the Homeric Greeks, the principle of intelligence and life is not to be altogether identified with the ghost, or shade, or shadowy duplicate of the human form that is conceived to travel to the Kayan Hades. The soul seems to be rather an inextended invisible principle; for, as the procedure ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... The celebrated shield is supported by Vulcan on the anvil, and displayed to Thetis, who is seated, whilst a winged female figure standing at her side points out to her with a rod the marvels of its workmanship. Agreeably to the Homeric description the shield is encircled with the signs of the zodiac, and in the middle are the bear, the dragon, etc. On the ground are the breast-plate, the greaves and ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... than the Greeks of the Homeric age: something better than the Sandwich or Tonga islanders when they were visited by Captain Cook. Inferior to the former in arts, in polity, and, above all, in their domestic institutions; superior to the latter as having the use of cattle and being ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... to Candide about the works of Homer. He ought not to have left in so many combats; they were as like one another and as tedious as those in the Iliad, besides being much noisier, at least we are not told that the Homeric heroes were accompanied by a muscular pianist, fully armed, and by the incessant stamping of clogged boots. Nevertheless the majority of the audience enjoyed the fights, for no Sicilian ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... whole story, which was highly appreciated by all his hearers. And so it was that a smile began to go round, until at length it deepened and developed into laughter, and so went on deepening and broadening and intensifying, until at last the laughter grew, if not Homeric, at least loud enough and long enough for ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... in the spring of 553, Teia fought a last and desperate battle over the grave of sunken cities, in view of the Gulf of Naples. At the head of a small host, he fought from early morn to noon. It was like a battle of Homeric warriors. Then he could no longer support the weight of twelve lances in his shield, and, calling to his armour-bearer for a fresh shield, he fell transfixed by a lance. The next day the remnant of the army, save a thousand who fought their ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... Mother Nature must have fed color to Healy. He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla. Prisms of English flashed with terrible attraction. It was a Homeric curse of all nations. Parts of it were dainty, too, as a butterfly dip. Cairns was hot and courageous under the spell. The whole train of mules huddled and fell to trembling. A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... wonderfully pure air than water; and after tasting, Marius was told many mysterious circumstances concerning it, by one and another of the bystanders:—he who drank often thereof might well think he had tasted of the Homeric lotus, so great became his desire to remain always on that spot: carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative of its fine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and it flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... bounty, like the Lord of Burleigh. He lives like that fine old English gentleman who had an old estate, and who kept up his old mansion at a bountiful old rate. He lives in a grand wholesale manner; he lives in round numbers; he lives like a hero. Everything is Homeric about him. He establishes himself firmly in the land with great joy and plenty; and he gathers round him all that makes life full-toned and harmonious, from the grand timbre of draught-ale and the organ-thunder of hunting, to the piccolo and tintinnabulum of Poker and maraschino. ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... tired and pleasantly sore, you eat what seems ambrosia, be it only tinned beef; and drink nectar, be it only distilled from terrestrial hops or coffee berries, and inhale as culminating luxury balmy fumes which even the happy Homeric gods knew ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... struggles, a section of the down-pipe came away in his hand, so that he was left clinging to the gutter with one foot in the air and twelve feet of piping swaying in his arms—then our control gave way and we let ourselves run before a tempest of Homeric laughter. We clasped one another; we leaned against walls; we stamped upon the ground; we fought for breath; tears streamed from our eyes. All the time, in a loud militant voice, Berry spoke of building ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... motionless in this meadow watching the yellowing sky, I was aware of an Homeric contest quite close to me. Two rabbits wore engaged in a terrific battle. They kicked and they scratched and made the most furious attacks on each other. The fur flew and the ground resounded to their thuds. First one seemed to be winning and then the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... the plot of Clarissa in terms of the Iliad, but judges subtle and complex characters by an over-simplified standard of decorum and censures Lovelace as an intricate combination of Achilles and Ulysses! His unnecessary labors to show that Richardson is not really Homeric illustrate the sterile application of epic canons to the novel that vitiates much early criticism ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... universe is dwarfed by the imminence of the All: so nothing seems very serious which is only personal and, since all things which we apprehend must become in some sense personal, nothing is very important. The procession of human effort becomes a spectacle at sight of which Homeric laughter may sometimes be permissible, but tears never. If a man once gives way to weeping in Keewatin, he will weep always. Only by the exercise of a self-restraint which at first seems brutal can life be ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... chain of days is one: The seas are still Homeric seas; Thy skies shall glow with Pindar's ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... poetry; chiefly those of the Schlegels, of Bopp, and of De Chezy. I was struck with the singularity and captivated by the extreme beauty, as it appeared to me, of some of the extracts, especially those from the great epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in their Homeric simplicity so totally opposite to the ordinary notions entertained of all eastern poetry. I was induced to attempt, without any instruction, and with the few elementary works which could be procured, the Grammars of Wilkins and Bopp, the Glossaries of Bopp and Rosen (Mr. Wilson's ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... 218 and 201 had its share of religious ceremonial, and the Sibylline books, which had hitherto been, in theory at least, merely an alternative method of religious procedure permitted to exist alongside of the older and more conservative forms, became now the order of the day. Like a Homeric picture in which the quarrels of the gods in Olympus run parallel to the battles of Greeks and Trojans on the plains of Troy, so every victory which Rome won over Hannibal on the field of battle was bought at the price of a victory ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... Sharnall the organist played, and the choir-men and choristers sang, day by day, entirely for clerk Janaway's benefit, because there was no one else to listen to them. Yet, if a stranger given to music ever entered the church at such times, he was struck with the service; for, like the Homeric housewife who did the best with what she had by her, Mr Sharnall made the most of his defective organ and inadequate choir. He was a man if much taste and resource, and, as the echoes of the singing rolled round the vaulted roofs, a generous critic thought little ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... described as one of the most affecting ever spoken in the Senate. Describing the scene to his daughter, Burr said that tears flowed abundantly, but Burr must have described what he wished to see. American politicians are not Homeric heroes, who weep on slight provocation; and any inclination to pity Burr must have been inhibited by the knowledge that he had made himself the rallying-point of every ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... escaped from, and more. And now what a contrast! Saturdays and Sundays were my own, and I could worship in the Hebrew or Mohammedan temple, just as I chose; and for the rest of the week I should have all day, after four hours' pleasant culling of Horatian and Homeric flowers, to devote to some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... German ideas had passed thus over our heads there ensued disgust and mournful silence, followed by a terrible convulsion. For to formulate general ideas is to change saltpetre into powder, and the Homeric brain of the great Goethe had sucked up, as an alembic, all the juice of the forbidden fruit. Those who did not read him, did not believe it, knew nothing of it. Poor creatures! The explosion carried them away like grains of dust into the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... on the ground-floor of the Pavilion de Flore, the windows of which looked on the corner of the Pont Royal and on the gate into the Tuileries gardens. From these windows the quaintest sights were to be seen, not the least entertaining of which were the Homeric struggles of the sentries of the National Guard, absolute slaves to their orders, to prevent dogs which were not led by a string from following their owners into the Tuileries gardens, in which struggles the bold city guard, in spite of prodigies of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... I could eat a whole ox, like the Homeric hero, but I shall have to content myself with a piece of hard bread. Don't you know that a man can't live all the time on bread alone? I ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... though it occupies more than 160 lines, is intensely rapid and vigorous; indeed it is the one genuinely exciting combat in Latin epic, and forms a refreshing contrast to the pseudo-Homeric or pseudo-Vergilian combats before the walls of Thebes. In no other portion of the Thebais does Statius attain to such success, with the exception of the passage already quoted descriptive of the death of Amphiaraus. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... was worth while to see that even in no great mood, the force of his leadership was recognised and reserve power of the man fully felt. Like every Achilles, Gladstone was held by the heel when dipped. One may well feel that he came short as a theologian. The scholars slight his Homeric disquisitions. Consistency was a virtue which he probably too often scouted, but his high purpose, his spotlessness of spirit, and strong control of men no one can gainsay. In the slang of the street of that time he was the "G.O.M.," the Grand Old Man as well to ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim "revue" lacks something of the patience of its creator, and our Mephistopheles, marking ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... globe, and the aerial ocean by which it is surrounded, man should have been impressed by the aspect of the vault of heaven, and the uniform and regular movements of the sun and planets. Thus the word Cosmos, which primitively, in the Homeric ages, indicated an idea of order and harmony, was subsequently adopted in scientific language, where it was gradually applied to the order observed in the movements of the heavenly bodies, to the whole universe, and then finally to the world in which this harmony was reflected to us. According ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... that of the Indians, he thus makes the relative force of the latter about twenty-five times as great as it really was, and converts a clever ambuscade, whereby the whites gave a smart drubbing to a body of Indians one fourth their own number, into a Homeric victory over a host six times as numerous ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... lore and Heroic legend, we learn that Homer knew "no destiny fighting with the gods, or unless in the shape of death, defying them,"—and that the "Nemesis often inaccurately rendered as revenge, was after all but self-judgment, or sense of moral law." Even in the dim Homeric dawn, Conscience found personification. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Leben und Thaten des allerdurchlauchtigsten gc. Konigs von Preussen Frederici Wilhelmi (Hambug und Breslau, 1735), pp. 223, 319.] Fancy that scene in History; Friedrich Wilhelm for comic-symbolic Dramaturgist. Gods and men (or at least Houyhnhnm horses) might have saluted it; with a Homeric laugh,—so huge and vacant is it, with a suspicion of real humor too:—but the men were not permitted, on parade, more than a silent grin, or general irrepressible rustling murmur; and only the gods laughed inextinguishably, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... in the German language than the illimitable weavers of prose. The line or the stanza reins up the poet tightly to his theme, and will not suffer him to expatiate. Gradually, therefore, Pope came to read the Homeric Greek, but never accurately; nor did he ever read Eustathius without aid from Latin. As to any knowledge of the Attic Greek, of the Greek of the dramatists, the Greek of Plato, the Greek of Demosthenes, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... titanic thing we can't grasp it," said the doctor. "What were the scraps of a few Homeric handfuls compared to this? The whole Trojan war might be fought around a Verdun fort and a newspaper correspondent would give it no more than a sentence. I am not in the confidence of the occult powers"—the doctor threw Gertrude a twinkle—"but ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... good and useful swordsmiths and base and bad goldsmiths seems a merely modern explanation: Weland could both forge swords and make ornaments of metal. Starcad's loathing for a smith recalls the mockery with which the Homeric ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Homeric figure, of the remote countryside in which I was born, had the true Spirit of Democracy and shed its light abroad in the Senate of the United States and the Capitol at Albany. He carried the candle of the Lord. It ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... seriousness, in an article on "The Four Ages of Poetry," contributed in 1820 to a short-lived journal, "Ollier's Literary Miscellany." The four ages were, he said, the iron age, the Bardic; the golden, the Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, in which he himself lived. "A poet in our time," he said, "is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted to explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and completeness of description which gives us the very physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is. Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces, which keeps him from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foe who deals hard knocks, In a combat scarce Homeric: It's not the Boer, who snipes from rocks, But fever known ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... episode into Latin. It sounds quite Homeric. Did you keep the tail as a trophy? If we want to excite you we'll just say 'Rats'. Please let us know when you're on the warpath again and we'll come to see the fun;" and Dick dodged round an apple tree ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... she were partly on the back. The clever and tasteful artist had painted her nether parts with so much skill and truth that no one could have wished for anything more beautiful; I was delighted with that portrait; it was a speaking likeness, and I wrote under it, "O-Morphi," not a Homeric word, but a Greek one ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have no right to suppose that Sophocles thought of the involuntary parricide and metrogamy as the people in his play do. Indeed, considering the general tone of his contemporaries and friends, we may safely assume that he did not. But at ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... vociferations, and hurried on as fast as they could to the castle. They were all silent, as they walked through the garden, though Anna Vassilyevna sighed a little. But when they reached the carriages and stood still, they broke into an irrepressible, irresistible fit of Homeric laughter. First Shubin exploded, shrieking as if he were mad, Bersenyev followed with his gurgling guffaw, then Zoya fell into thin tinkling little trills, Anna Vassilyevna too suddenly broke down, Elena could not help smiling, and ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... months as a pair of old boots," said the poet, smiling. "But stay, you shall not come from Havre to Paris to see Canalis without carrying something back with you. Warrior!" (Canalis had the form and action of an Homeric hero) "learn this from the poet: Every noble sentiment in man is a poem so exclusively individual that his nearest friend, his other self, cares nothing for it. It is a treasure which is his ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... rifles were emptied they used them as clubs and struggled on till overwhelmed by numbers. Near the western wall of the fort stood Travis, in the corner near the church stood Crockett, both fighting like Homeric heroes. Old Betsy had done an ample share of work that fatal night. Now, used as a club, it added nobly to its record. The two heroes at length fell, but around each was a ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... classes: political, theological, and literary—the last including, and indeed chiefly consisting of, his books and articles upon Homer and the Homeric question. All the political writings, except his books on "The State in its Relations to the Church" and "Church Principles Considered in their Results," belong to the class of occasional literature, being pamphlets or articles produced with ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... beginning to lose its venomous power. She suffered still, but her suffering was softened by resignation. There is a limit to the capacity for pain in every mind. Diana had borne her share of grief; she had, in Homeric phrase, satiated herself with anguish and tears; and to those sharp throes and bitter torments there had succeeded a passive sense of ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... for its values chiefly upon its form. To say that the Psalms and the Gospels have no value or little value for the world apart from the original form and language in which they were written would, of course, be absurd. Is it any less absurd to say that the study of the Homeric poems, the Attic tragedies, the works of Thucydides and Plato would have little value for students unless this literature were studied in the original language? These questions cannot properly be ignored any longer by teachers of ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... made their exit, and were hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter of notoriety, also, that all these gods were and had been liable to the taint of sorrow for the death of their earthly children, (as the Homeric Jupiter for Sarpedon, Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for her blooming Rhesus;) all were liable to fear; all to physical pain; all to anxiety; all to the indefinite menaces of a danger not measurable.[Footnote: ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Tom's doomed appearance before the magistrate, Dame Bakewell had an interview with Austin, who went to Raynham immediately, and sought Adrian's counsel upon what was to be done. Homeric laughter and nothing else could be got out of Adrian when he heard of the doings of these desperate boys: how they had entered Dame Bakewell's smallest of retail shops, and purchased tea, sugar, candles, and comfits ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... certain works of genuine fame can only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations, or have ceased to be. Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may use an Homeric phrase, has expressed a ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... flying men or women, no women in gauze, either; everything quite in good taste and genteel. Just wait, now; you'll hear it all in an orderly way—which I myself did not, however. 'One-eyed?' I told you, just now, that it was all in good taste and genteel. No, no; nothing Homeric—no sheep, and no sirens. Now, I'm really tired, and you'll not succeed in starting me on a story that'll take six or eight hours to tell, even if we do not stop to discuss matters as we progress. To-morrow, as I before said, we will get from Peters all other possible facts, and no doubt we ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the translation into English of the immortal Homeric cycle has tempted many pens. Among the best known versions are those of Pope, Chapman, and Cowper. But this matter has been so thoroughly debated by Mr. Frederic Harrison in his delightful volume 'The Choice of Books,' that I will refrain from poaching upon his ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... springing to his feet, after he had completed his Homeric repast, "this chile feels strong enuf to face the devil hisself, an' tharfor he needn't be backward 'bout the encounterin' o' a angel. So hyar goes to find out Frank Hamersley, an' how he's farin'. Anyhow, I'll take the deer along in case thar mout be a scarcity o' eetables, though ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... company with TIM HEALY, protested against this as tyrannical proceeding. Irish Members massed below Gangway howled with delight. Their turn come now. Long they groaned under Prince ARTHUR'S iron heel. Now they've got him down, and dance round him with shouts of exultation and Homeric bursts of laughter. Hardly can his voice be heard above the din; but he pegs along, finally turning his back on jubilant mob below Gangway; addresses himself to SPEAKER, edging in a sentence amid comparative pauses ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... in less time than it takes to write it, one of those Homeric struggles of one man against twenty, which are none the less heroic because the Ajax is a convict, and the Trojans merely ordinary sailors. Shaking his assailants to the deck as easily as a wild boar shakes ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... originally formed the whole interior accommodation of the Latin house, was the -atrium-, that is, the "blackened" chamber, with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals, and the hearth; and precisely similar is the Homeric —megaron—, with its household altar and hearth and smoke-begrimed roof. We cannot say the same of ship-building. The boat with oars was an old common possession of the Indo-Germans; but the advance to the use of sailing vessels can scarcely be considered to have ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in their essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility to this character, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... ingenious translation of the Iliad. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem—having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words—in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he interested ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... small a home area steps in to arrest the national development, which then fades and decays. To this rule Great Britain and Japan are notable exceptions, owing partly to the unusual size of their insular territory, partly to a highly advantageous location. Minoan Crete, in that gray antiquity when Homeric history was still unborn, gave out of its abundance in art, government, laws and maritime knowledge to the eastern Mediterranean world, till the springs of inspiration in its own small land were exhausted, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... read this book, will read it again and again. It contains much that is addressed to the deepest feelings of our common nature, and, despite of the long interval of time which lies between our age and the Homeric—despite the manifold changes of customs, habits, pursuits, and the advances that have been made in civilization and art—despite of all these, the universal spirit of humanity will recognize in these scenes much of that true poetry ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Alcaeus, to take a conspicuous part in politics and war; or even, as in the Age of Anne, to shine among wits and in society. Life has become, perhaps, too specialised for such multifarious activities. Indeed, even in ancient days, as a Celtic proverb and as the picture of life in the Homeric epics prove, the poet was already a man apart—not foremost among statesmen and rather backward among warriors. If we agree with a not unpopular opinion, the poet ought to be a kind of "Titanic" force, wrecking himself on his own passions ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... ii. 205, and have noticed the infusion of the leaves for washing the dead (ibid. ii. 105): this is especially the use of the "Ber" in India, where the leaves are superstitiously held peculiarly pure. Our dictionaries translate "Sidr" by "Lote-tree"; and no wonder that believers in Homeric writ feel their bile aroused by so poor a realisation of the glorious myth. The Homerids probably alluded to Hashish ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... proceeding from wholes, according to the progression delivered by theologists of the intellectual kings. Further still, in the Cratylus he follows the traditions of theologists respecting the order of the divine processions. But in the Gorgias he adopts the Homeric dogma, respecting the triadic hypostases of the demiurgi. And, in short, he every where discourses concerning the gods agreeably to the principles of theologists; rejecting indeed the tragical part of mythological ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... Landor express his great liking for "The Curse of Kehama." One may obtain an idea of how this admiration was reciprocated, from Southey's criticism on "Gebir," in the Critical Review for September, 1799. Of Gebir's speech to the Gadites, he says: "A passage more truly Homeric than the close of this extract we do not remember in the volumes of modern poetry." He took the entire poem as a model in blank verse. After Southey's death, Landor used his influence with Lord Brougham to obtain a pension for the family, in justice to the memory of one who had added to the fame ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... that of the conventional epic. Apollonius seems to have carefully studied Homeric glosses, and gives many examples of isolated uses, but his choice of words is by no means limited to Homer. He freely avails himself of Alexandrian words and late uses of Homeric words. Among his contemporaries Apollonius suffers ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... fact shows how steadfast effort may prevent a man from writing away his originality and his freshness of manner. Observe the sad results of an antagonistic proceeding for even the mightiest of brains. Sir Walter Scott was building up his brain until he was forty years old; then we had the Homeric strength of "Marmion," the perfect art of the "Antiquary," the unequalled romantic interest of "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy," "Ivanhoe," "Quentin Durward." The long years of steady production drained that most noble flood of knowledge ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... to warm up. It was roasted three hours, and well done, for I tasted it. It is so long since I tasted fresh beef that forgetfulness is possible; but I fancied this to be successful. I tried to imagine that I liked the Homeric repast, and certainly the whole thing has been far more agreeable than was to be expected. The doubt now is, whether I have made a sufficient provision for my household. I should have roughly guessed that ten beeves would feed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... speech has lost its vigor and died. Young men did not learn set speeches in the days when Sophocles and Euripides were searching for words in which to express themselves. In the days when Pindar and the nine lyric poets feared to attempt Homeric verse there was no private tutor to stifle budding genius. I need not cite the poets for evidence, for I do not find that either Plato or Demosthenes was given to this kind of exercise. A dignified ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... which he fell we cannot lift a finger, 'Tis idle on the question any longer here to linger; 'Tis true the South has freely bled, her sorrows are Homeric, oh! Her case is like to his of ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... as much doubt about the history of "The Thousand and One Nights" as that which veils the origin of the Homeric poems. It is said that a certain Caliph Shahryar, having been deceived by his wife, slew her, and afterwards married a wife only for one day, slaying her on the morning after. When this slaughter of women had continued ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... his head he wore one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth century, which frightened the enemy with their fanciful crests. His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could have disputed with Nestor's Homeric vessel the redoubtable title ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... could have written these well-known lines. But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... 'the mother of flocks' in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, and Polybius had described the softening effects of music upon its rude inhabitants. See some interesting remarks on the snbject by J. E. Sandys, in his lectures on the Revival of Learning, Cambridge, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... grim mystery and surmise; and when there is no chance of either proving or disproving a case I dare say one man's word answers quite as well as another's. At all events, we have your grandfather's testimony as chief actor and eye-witness against the inherited convictions of our somewhat Homeric young neighbour. For eighteen years before the war Mr. Fletcher was sole agent—a queer selection, certainly—for old Mr. Blake, who was known to have grown very careless in the confidence he placed. When the crash came, about three years after the war, the old gentleman's ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... ten or twelve years ago, I examined the literary objections to Homeric unity. These objections are chiefly based on alleged discrepancies in the narrative, of which no one poet, it is supposed, could have been guilty. The critics repose, I venture to think, mainly on ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... his small cycling friend had vanished. Charteris was conscious of a feeling of envy towards her. She was doing the journey comfortably on a bicycle. He would have to walk it. Walk it! He didn't believe he could. The strangers' mile, followed by the Homeric combat with the two Hooligans and that ghastly sprint to wind up with, had left him decidedly unfit for further feats of pedestrianism. And it was eight miles to Stapleton, if it was a yard, and another mile from Stapleton to St Austin's. Charteris, having once more invoked the ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... deflower it of its glory and glossy plumes. It is hard to yield up prejudices and preconceptions, however false; and the writer himself in doing so confesses to the cost of a struggle of no ordinary violence. It was hard to give up the Homeric illusion, and believe that Greeks were men, not demigods—hard to recognise in the organ-man and the opera-singer the descendants of those heroes portrayed in the poetic pictures of a Virgil; and yet in the days of my dreamy youth, when I turned my face to ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... a truly Homeric struggle, for it seems to have lasted for round after round. It lasted, I have been able to gather, until Climmie was worsted and down on his back crying "Enough!" Which Poppsy reports Dinkie made him say three times, until Doreen nodded and said she'd ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... earnest is to run the risk of being absurd. Even a Wit is pacified when he is thus dexterously coaxed into poetry disguised as mere playful exaggeration, and feels quite safe in following the fortune of a game of cards in place of a sanguinary Homeric battle. Ariel is still alive, but he adopts the costume of the period to apologise for his eccentricities. Poetry thus understood may either give a charm to the trivial or fall into mere burlesque; and though Pope's achievement is an undeniable ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... alive!" cried the old Homeric hero of Janina, leaping with joy; and his words, passing from mouth to mouth, spread yet more terror amid Kursheed's soldiers, already overwhelmed by the horrible spectacle ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The word spoke is omitted here.] *[Footnote: Homer is famous for such comparisons as these. If you ever come across the term "Homeric simile," you may know that it means such a long, carefully worked out comparison ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... do those shilling table d'hotes is a mystery which I have never solved, though I have visited "below" on one or two occasions and talked with the chefs. There are about a dozen cafes now which, for the Homeric shilling, give you four courses, bread ad lib, and coffee to follow. And it is good; it is a refection ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... it was good to be within doors, and to dry one's coat by the peat embers. We insisted on our hostess partaking of supper, which we served up to her in bed; then Sandie and I, the girl and the man, set ourselves down by the table and stretched forth our hands, in the Homeric phrase, 'to the ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... turned the other way; all the crowd pressed forwards against the ropes which the lantern-bearers drew taut to fence off the course. A pistol-shot cracked out. Someone cried, "They're off!" and a murmur grew and rolled nearer—rising, as it approached, from a murmur into great waves—waves of Homeric laughter. ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... conscious analysis of feeling attempted:—the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentiment of the situation. Inexperienced critics have often named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial, from its apparent simple facility: but first-rate excellence in it (as shown here, in 196, 156, and 129) is in truth one of the least common triumphs of Poetry.—This style should be compared with what is not less perfect in its way, the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... particular the plastic arts have shown that they can live by mass action, and flourish under an intolerant faith. Communist artists of the future may erect public buildings surpassing in beauty the mediaeval churches, they may paint frescoes, organize pageants, make Homeric songs about their heroes. Communist art will begin, and is beginning now, in the propaganda pictures, and stories such as those designed for peasants and children. There is, for instance, a kind of Rake's Progress or "How she became a Communist," in which the Entente leaders make a sorry and ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... the heroic Greeks into the heart of ancient Troy did not enclose a braver band than were these modern youths shut within the ironsides of the old tramp steamer which bore them into the camp of their enemies somewhere near the supposed site of the Homeric city. ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... It is obvious that when he found himself in the congenial company of Trelawny, Williams, Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his heaven. Byron, who had some right to express ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... who indulged in bold and independent speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the Homeric deities. He flourished at the time of our history and lived to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some fragments of his writings above. He committed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... idea of the Grecian civilization was that it sprung, like Minerva, full armed from the brow of Zeus. It seemed to have no tangible beginning. The fabled kings and heroes of the Homeric Age, with their palaces and strongholds, were said to have been humanized sun-myths; their deeds but songs woven by wandering minstrels to win their meed of bread. Yet there has always been a suspicion among scholars that this view was wrong. The more we study the moral aspects of humanity the more ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... and Latin writings rather than upon the great Homeric epic itself, the story, which had already undergone many changes to suit the ever-varying public taste, was further transformed by the Anglo-Norman trouvere, Benoit de Sainte-More, about 1184. He composed a poem of thirty thousand lines, in which he related ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... works, mischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration. Poetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body of things to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world, though no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision, congenial to many early impulses and dreams of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... he has a mint of reasons: ask. It pleased me well enough." "Nay, nay," said Hall, "Why take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? These twelve books of mine Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth, Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt." "But I," Said Francis, "picked the eleventh from this hearth, And have it: keep a thing, its use will come. I hoard it as a sugar-plum ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... European Greeks were first to blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right? We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life, manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous story, divine or human, is first planted in fact, not in ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and—for one of her graces—she had the feminine expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed, something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her father, and the sense of the bitter actuality ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... explored in Brazil, seen service in the Boer War, hunted in India and Africa—matters of experience of which he never spoke. Upon this occasion, however, evidently taking Monty's recital word for word as literal truth, and excited by it into a Homeric mood, he might tell a story. The cowboys almost fell upon their knees in their importunity. There was a suppressed eagerness in their solicitations, a hint of something that meant more than desire, great as it was, to hear a story told by an English lord. Madeline divined instantly that ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... from whose decisions there was no appeal. He gave to the divine and heroic character in painting, what Polycletus had given to the human in sculpture by his Doryphorus, a canon of proportion. Phidias had discovered in the nod of the Homeric Jupiter the characteristic of majesty, inclination of the head. This hinted to him a higher elevation of the neck behind, a bolder protrusion of the front, and the increased perpendicular of the profile. To this conception Parrhasius fixed a maximum; that point from which descends the ultimate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... The Homeric apa? ?e?? mue?a with initial m are 78, but were they as numerous in proportion to Homer's whole world of words as Shakespeare's are, they would run up to 186; that is, to more than twice as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Georgics nor elsewhere has he the merit of striking originality; his chief excellence consists in the skillful handling of borrowed materials. The AEneid, or adventures of AEneas after the fall of Troy, is an epic formed on the model of the Homeric poems. It was founded upon an old Roman tradition that AEneas and his Trojans settled in Italy, and were the founders of the Roman name. In the first six books the adventures of Ulysses in the Odyssey are the model, and these books contain more variety ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... of the peoples of Asia Minor is from the Homeric poems (about 900 B.C.). The Chalybeans were in Pontus; west of them, the Amazonians and Paphlagonians; west of these, the Mysians; on the Hellespont, small tribes related to the Trojans; on the AEgean, the Dardanians and the Trojans (on the north), the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the coast and was welcomed as a leader by the peasants in arms. Three other leaders rose to prominence. First, in the eyes of the people, came Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis. Surrounded by his nine sons, this sturdy chieftain appeared like one of the old Homeric kings. Second in popular favor was Kolokotrones, a typical modern Clepht, cunning and treacherous, but a born soldier. The ablest political leader was Maurokordatos, a man of some breadth of view and foresight, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... father at his initiation into her mysteries.... She lies on the ground out-of-doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with the dew. She grows young again every spring, yet is of great age, the wrinkled woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... picture of Aude watching the fight, and the miraculous intervention of the angel. He has, on the other hand, inserted the barbaric incident of the fight with trees. He has eliminated, that is to say, the tender and the religious elements from the story and made it simply the narrative of a Homeric combat, with more than a touch of the grotesque. Nevertheless, he has retained the characteristic incident of the chivalrous behaviour of Roland in sending for a new sword for his enemy and in giving him time for rest, a trait which finds a parallel in ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... began by undertaking the education of a horse that gave him no very definite results. But, in 1900, he became the owner of a Russian stallion who, under the name of Hans, to which was soon added the Homeric and well-earned prefix of Kluge, or Clever, was destined to upset all our notions of animal psychology and to raise questions that rank among the most unexpected and the most absorbing problems which ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... The Homeric Design of the Shield of Achilles, by William Watkiss Lloyd. A dissertation on a subject immortalised by the poetry of Homer and the sculpture of Flaxman, which will well repay our classical readers for the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... start. As it began, so it continued. All through the great struggle the Conservatives were hopelessly behind us. As the enthusiastic Mathers afterwards remarked, "We were right on the top of them the whole time." It was a stirring and Homeric contest. To a staunch Liberal it was one that gave unalloyed satisfaction, for all through the great fight there was the amplest evidence that the flowing tide was on the side ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... largely justified. For if matter is inert, brute, dead—it certainly seems preposterous to speak of its having within it the potency of life—using "life" as a synonym for living organisms, including man. The nature-mystic is overwhelmed with Homeric laughter. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... which was told to us, will serve to show how popular legends grow up, in virtue of the tendency there is to reduce a whole battle to a collision between two generals, just as in the Homeric age, or in Shakespeare: The Crown Prince of Prussia was fighting very bravely at Woerth, in the front ranks. That he threw the Turcos into confusion was the result of a ray of sunlight falling on the silver eagle on his helmet. The Arabs thought it a sign from Heaven. Macmahon, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... bit of it; they are capital, and you are a regular genius, as we all agree," cut in the Homeric Miss Cutter. ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... sight, both horse and rider, as they rose together over the green swells of the prairie; a picture more like that of some Homeric hero than a savage ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... The Homeric account of the building of the barrow of Hector (Il. xxiv.) brings vividly before us the scene so often suggested by the examination of the tumuli of prehistoric times. During nine days wood was collected and brought, in carts drawn by oxen, to the site of the funeral pyre. Then the pyre ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... conceptions "morality," "duty," "right," "wrong," etc, are very late in appearance, presupposing as they do a power of reflection and abstraction which develops only in man and with a considerable civilization. Even in the Homeric poems, which reflect a degree of mental cultivation in some respects equal to our own, these concepts hardly appear. But ages earlier, far back in the course of animal evolution, there emerged phenomena which ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... visions. It "thinks highly of the soul," but in the natural, not the metaphysical, sense. It is the attitude of Rabelais and Montaigne, not the attitude of Wordsworth or Browning. It is the tone we know so well in the Homeric poems. It is the tone of the Psalms of David. We hear its voice in "Ecclesiastes," and the wisdom of "Solomon the King" is full of it. In more recent times, it is the feeling of those who veer between our race's traditional hope and the dark gulf of eternal silence. It is the "Aut Christus aut ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... century of the Christian era lies the old Homeric world! By the magic of the Ionian minstrel's verse that world is still visible to the inner eye. Through the clouds and murk of twenty centuries and more, it is still possible to catch clear glimpses of it, as it lies there in the golden sunshine of the ancient days. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... many ups and downs. Lachmann in the year 1816 was the first to bring scientific criticism to bear on the question of the Nibelungenlied and its origin. Applying to it the same methods as had recently been used by Wolf in his criticism of the Homeric poems, he thought he was able to discover as the basis of the complete epic a cycle of twenty separate lieder, ballads or shorter episodic poems, on the strength of which belief he went so far as to publish an ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... a majesty so divine!—the skin rivaling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... under fiction and allegory.... Hesiod's gods are thus not only the animated parts of the world, but also the other things of nature personified and deified, or abusively called gods and goddesses."[163] The same is true both of the Orphic and Homeric gods. "Their generation of the gods is the same with the generation or creation of the world, both of them having, in all probability, derived it from ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... who is not admirable in his way. The palaces, the arms, the horses, the sacrifices, are always excellent. The women are always stately and beautiful. The ancestry and the history of every one are honourable and good. The whole Homeric world is clean, clear, beautiful, and providential, and no small part of the perennial charm of the poet is that he thus immerses us in an atmosphere of beauty; a beauty not concentrated and reserved for some extraordinary ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... and stood well to the front of controversy in Julian's days. When the rescript came out which forbade the Galileans to teach the classics, they promptly undertook to form a Christian literature by throwing Scripture into classical forms. The Old Testament was turned into Homeric verse, the New into Platonic dialogues. Here again Apollinarius was premature. There was indeed no reason why Christianity should not have as good a literature as heathenism, but it would have to be a growth of many ages. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... just what no automaton can do. Many of our readers have, however, seen a young lady in the shop-windows, or entertained her in their own nurseries, who professes to be this hitherto impossible walking automaton, and who calls herself by the Homeric-sounding epithet Autoperipatetikos. The golden-booted legs of this young lady remind us of Miss Kilmansegg, while their size assures us that she is not in any way related to Cinderella. On being wound up, as if she were a piece of machinery, and placed on a level surface, she proceeds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... 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 in his "House of Fame," regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... either in the learned or in modern languages. I have read of a man who, being by his ignorance of Greek compelled to gratify his curiosity with the Latin printed on the opposite page, declared that from the rude simplicity of the lines literally rendered he formed nobler ideas of the Homeric majesty than from the laboured elegance of polished versions. Those literal translations were always at hand, and from them he could easily obtain his author's sense with sufficient certainty and among the readers of Homer the number is ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... all interpreters, who lifted the entire Socrates out of the street, as a popular theme and song, to exhibit him in endless and impossible modifications—namely, in all his own disguises and multiplicities. In jest, and in Homeric language as well, what is the Platonic Socrates, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and in as unfavorable a condition to accept comfort from a wife and children as poor Christian in the first three pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress." With a superhuman effort he opens his book, and in the twinkling of an eye he is looking into the full "orb of Homeric or Miltonic song;" or he stands in the crowd—breathless, yet swayed as forests or the sea by winds—hearing and to judge the pleadings for the crown; or the philosophy which soothed Cicero or Boethius in their afflictions, in exile, prison, and the contemplation ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... passages. Then came another even finer series called Mirgorod, which won the admiration of Pushkin. Next he planned a "History of Little Russia" and a "History of the Middle Ages," this last work to be in eight or nine volumes. The result of all this study was a beautiful and short Homeric epic in prose, called Taras Bulba. His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life. After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... English are still in their camp, little dreaming of surprise, the maiden rushes on them, conquers and disperses them. Here passes a scene between Johanna and Montgomery, a young Welsh knight, who begs for his life in a truly Homeric manner—pleading his youth, the anguish of his mother, and the sweet bride he had left upon the Severn. It is quite Homeric, professedly and successfully so, and therefore quite out of place. The Welsh knight speaks in a most unknightly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... connected by telegraph, at the time of the incident, with the distant mainland. In the force was a particularly folly young captain. One night he went to a dance, and, as the sleeping accommodation was exhausted, he passed the night, like a Homeric hero, on a couch beneath the echoing loggia. Next day, contrary to his wont, he was in the worst of spirits, and, after moping for some time, asked leave to go a three days' voyage to the nearest telegraph station. His commanding ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... latter ones have greatly relieved me on the subject you speak of. They only make me long, with an extreme Homeric longing, to be at Pisa,—I mean such an one as Achilles felt when he longed to be with his father,—sharp in his very limbs. We have secured a ship, the David Walter, which will call for us here, and sets sail from London in a fortnight. I have written by to-day's ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... observation, were not necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and need for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or remark that turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine substitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of an epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have given him forty ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Mr. Elkins as the best practical joke he had ever heard of; and Cornish suggested that for a man to stop in Homeric laughter on Broadway might be pleasant for him, but was embarrassing to his companions. By this time Cornish himself was better-natured. Jim took charge of our movements, and commanded us to a dinner with him, in the nature of a celebration, ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... its side, ended by discovering death; and to discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final, in their character, marking not the start but the close of a civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo—of ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... difference, either in their diction or in their conception; and it is easy to be perceived, that old and young have been nursed from their infancy on tales of "the days of yore." Some passages of Philip's ballads are really Homeric.[51] Fortunately, the period is past when our admiration for hyperborean poetry needed to be justified by its similarity with the classics. We have learned that real poetry is not spell-bound to names, nor to any nation ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... at once pathetic and humorous and contemptuous, augmented Kurt's Homeric mood. He understood that she would not even let him, for a moment, have a ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Still others, lining up on either side of one of the great brown tree trunks, carried it bodily to its appointed place. From one end of the rear to the other, shouts, calls, warnings, and jokes flew back and forth. Once or twice a vast roar of Homeric laughter went up as some unfortunate slipped and soused into the water. When the current slacked, and the logs hesitated in their run, the entire crew hastened, bobbing from log to log, down river to see about it. Then they broke the jam, standing surely on the edge of the great darkness, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... pamphleteer. Harsnett, Bishop, the exposer of Darrell. Hartley, exorcist, friend of Darrell. Haudicquer, genealogist. Hlot, poet. Hemmerlin, Felix, satirist. Heron, Robert, voluminous author. Histriomastix. Homeric victims. Huss, John, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... comprehensible plane. The situations with which he deals, the passions, ambitions, satisfactions, which he portrays, belong, in one form or another, to all men, or at least are easily grasped by the imaginations of all men. It has often been said that Scott is the most Homeric of English poets; so far as the claim rests on considerations of style, it is hardly to be granted, for nothing could be farther than the hurrying torrent of Scott's verse from the "long and refluent music" ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... indifferent as to what he ate. The real was almost effeminate in movement, though not in figure; he had the Greek features, but his blue eyes had a cold, weary expression in them. He was dainty in eating, and had anything but a Homeric appetite. However, Molly's hero was not to eat more than Ivanhoe, when he was Friar Tuck's guest;' and, after all, with a little alteration, she began to think Mr. Osborne Hamley might turn out a poetical, if not a chivalrous ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... an attack on Adarama was received on this same afternoon. It appeared that the Arabs had been repulsed by the Abyssinian irregulars raised by Colonel Parsons. Glowing details were forthcoming, but I do not propose to recount the Homeric struggles of the 'friendlies.' Little in them is worthy of remembrance; much ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... as at the behest of the Homeric Jove himself, half a dozen Irises started up to carry the ruler's message; but again Miss Pew's mighty tones resounded in ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... that is likely to be comforting. What history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization, simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed, what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Diodorus, the Greek historical compiler. He describes the natives as hospitable and civilized. They mined tin, which was bought by traders and carried through Gaul to the south-east, and may, as suggested here, have been used in their armour by the warriors during the Homeric ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... is still safe to assume things, I will go on to suggest to you that the Satyricon was planned, on the Homeric model, in twenty-four books, and will leave you to—in the striking words used recently by The Times of the Japanese earthquake—"grope for analogies" between the text which follows and the fifteenth and sixteenth books of the Odyssey, which you ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... favourite to another. (25) Caesar performed the solemn rites of the great Latin festival on the Alban Mount during his Dictatorship. (Compare Book VII., line 471.) (26) Dyrrhachium was founded by the Corcyreams, with whom the Homeric Phaeacians have been identified. (27) Apparently making the Danube discharge into the Sea of Azov. See Mr. Heitland's Introduction, p. 53. (28) At the foot of the Acroceraunian range. (29) Caesar himself says nothing of this adventure. But it is mentioned by Dion, Appian and ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... is ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is), in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,—(he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to look out upon the great story of human nature), he ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... only increased. He wished to make some remark, but he did not know himself what he wanted to say. Topandy, however, burst into a Homeric laugh, in which he ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... majesty of conception, sober directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness—the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation—for which the similitudes ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... quarrel over the results of the game or over some "love affair." Fair Helen and unprincipled, gay, thoughtless Paris were here by the Golden Gate. The old story is constantly repeating itself since the Homeric days. Duels were fought betimes as a consequence, and the issue for one or both of the combatants was generally fatal. Gambling in those days was, from a worldly stand-point, the most profitable business, that ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... new world, alert, restless, full of Homeric youth, full of the lust of life and adventure, floated three flags. The old war of France and Spain still smoldered along the great waterway into the South. The flag of Great Britain had withdrawn ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... special time, (4) from their character and personality. Most of what they said makes dry reading to-day, but we shall occasionally find passages, like Patrick Henry's apotheosis of liberty, which speak to the ear of all time and which have in them something of a Homeric or ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of marked infirmities and extravagances, the book remains a superior, perhaps a great work. The writer can look at a human existence with childlike, all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her, beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse, descended ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various |
