"Poetical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the packing business was still on the bottle, and when the hogs that came to Chicago got only a common-school education and graduated as plain hams and sides and lard and sausage. Literature hadn't hit the hog business then. It was just Graham's hams or Smith's lard, and there were no poetical brands or ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... that the peculiar circumstances of the case caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made it very much more to me than it could be to persons born in England with all its poetical literature to browse on, I am at the same time convinced that this is not the sole ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... were owing. Among the latter Ammon and Bast seem to have received his especial veneration, and, on the other hand, we read in these inscriptions that the gods were very willing to grant the wishes of their favorite. A poetical description of the wars he waged with the Cheta is to be found in long lines of hieroglyphics on the south wall of the hall of columns of Rameses II. at Karnal, also at Luxor and in the Sallier Papyrus, and an epic poem referring to his mighty deeds in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 1848. The following Sunday John Quincy Adams attended public worship at the Capitol, and on Monday, the 21st, he was, as usual, in his seat when the House was called to order. During the preliminary business he was engaged in copying a poetical invocation to the muse of history for one of the officials, and he appeared to be in ordinarily good health. A resolve of thanks to the generals of the Mexican War came up, and the clerk had read, "Resolved by the House that"—when he was arrested by the cry of "Look to Mr. Adams!" ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... not one cent either for tribute or defense; his lordship swore at them heartily, but they heeded him not; and he found himself in the shoes of the ousted Dutch Governor in an another sense than he desired. And then was poetical justice made complete; for who should appear before the helpless forts but Evertsen with a Dutch fleet! New York, New Jersey and Delaware surrendered to him almost with enthusiasm, and the work of England seemed ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the "chiente," to use the most poetical, if not the most accurate word, was singularly clean for an establishment set up by a bachelor, in so remote a part of the world. The honey, in neat, well-constructed kegs, was carefully piled along one side of the ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... the largest of which was thirteen inches in circumference by actual measurement. So you see they have apples as well as oranges in Italy; only, apples are practical, so they are generally omitted in the poetical descriptions of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... had begun to suspect my visitor's identity, and was mechanically opening the drawer of our poetical department. ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... episode in his existence that night appeared to the Greek—scarcely a mere episode, for it seemed to him that it absorbed into itself all the true poetry of his life as regarded the past, and gave him new aspirations and hopes as regarded the future. To Lycidas the remembrance of his poetical triumph in the Olympic arena, the plaudits which had then filled his soul with ecstatic delight, was little more than to a man is the recollection of the toys which amused his childhood. The Greek had been brought face to face ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... Byron, in one of his note-books (quoted by Moore, 'Life', p. 20), "were much more oratorical and martial than poetical; and Dr. Drury, my grand patron (our head-master), had a great notion that I should turn out an orator, from my fluency, my turbulence, my voice, my copiousness of declamation, and my action. I remember that my first declamation astonished ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Raleigh to Spencer at Kilcolman increase the interest attached to the place, and are not in the slightest degree questionable.[3] To the advice of Raleigh the publication of the first books of the Fairy Queen has been ascribed; and the existence of a poetical intercourse between such minds, and in such distracting scenes, is a delightful recollection that almost warms ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... dreaming life. But what if the dream life became more or less permanent to the exclusion of all other memories and sensations? We should then get a case of insanity in which hallucination would be symptomic. (The dream state is more or less permanent with certain poetical temperaments, and if there is any insanity attaching to it at all, it consists in the inability to react.) Imagination, deep thought and grief are as much anaesthetic as chloroform. But the closing of the external channels of ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... of enjoying alone that true Felicity of Mind, which belongs to an absolutely Vertuous and Gallant Man, by that, and the lively Notions of Honour Imprinted in your Soul, you are above Ambition, and can Form Kings and Heroes, when 'ere your delicate Fancy shall put you upon the Poetical Creation. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... no reason why he should not rhyme as well as he, for the author had no more school-craft than himself. Writing of this song a few years later, he called it puerile and silly; and his verdict as a poetical one was correct. Still, considered as a song, this artless effusion possessed one merit of which he himself was probably not conscious: it was inspired by his feeling and not by his reading, by the warmth and purity of his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... had escaped. Of course, it was all in vain. The magic handwriting of Messrs. Fenwick Skrimshaw and William Page, backed by all the power of English law, soon got the upper hand, and the criminal 'addicted to poetical prosings' was led away, and thrust into the gaol ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... charge that Shakspeare was an unregulated genius, full of great absurdities and great beauties, is contained in Hudson's ironical statement of it: "He has sometimes been represented as a sort of inspired and infallible idiot, who practiced a species of poetical magic without knowing what he did or why he did it; who achieved the greatest wonders of art, not by rational insight and design, but by a series of lucky accidents and lapsus naturae; who, in short, went through life stumbling ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... selection, and his ideal of female beauty is not a very sympathetic one. His personages are cold and devoid of expression, their gestures are rather meaningless, but by means of light and air and exquisite colour he gives the poetical touch which all ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... of those books of which literary dreamers are apt to grow fanatically fond—books by the old English writers, full of phrases and conceits half quaint and half sublime, interspersed with praises of the country, imbued with a poetical rather than orthodox religion, and adorned with a strange mixture of monastic learning and aphorisms collected from the weary experience ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that these splices often proved more sound than the original cable. After this data had been duly registered, the bight was lowered over the side of the ship and we were again under way, "dragging our tail behind us" like the poetical sheep ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... weapons by his side. His relatives, seated around, each harangues the deceased; and if he has been a great warrior, recounts his heroic actions nearly to the following purport, which in the Indian language is extremely poetical and pleasing: ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... Peyton—for she would be there in some vague capacity—would say, "Really, now, I don't see but what we were very lucky in having such a boy as Clarence with us. I begin to understand him better." And Harry, who, for purposes of vague poetical retaliation, would also drop in at that moment, would mutter and say, "He is certainly the son of Colonel Brant; dear me!" and apologize. And his mother would come in also, in her coldest and most indifferent manner, in a white ball dress, ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... he was a mere invention of Henry of Saltrey is uncertain. Saltrey's account is precise as to the various stages through which Owain passed, and it is a vulgar rendering of the common stories of visits to purgatory, of which Dante's is the highest and most poetical version. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... not ignorant of the common form of poetical dedications, which are generally made up of panegyrics, where the authors endeavour to distinguish their patrons, by the shining characters they give them, above other men. But that, my lord, is not ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... his, followed his faithful sister-spirit to a better world, Lady Hesketh, that model of a third friend, built, in St. Edmund's Chapel, where he was buried, a monument displaying two tablets, both bearing poetical inscriptions; one dedicated to William Cowper, the other to Mary Unwin. The friendship of Garrick and Mrs. Clive is memorable for its sprightliness, sincerity, unbroken harmony-saving a few momentary quarrels ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... this practice in some cases may be inferred from a parity of reason, in this manner. If it be lawful (as by the best authorities it plainly doth appear to be), in using rhetorical schemes, poetical strains, involutions of sense in allegories, fables, parables, and riddles, to discoast from the plain and simple way of speech, why may not facetiousness, issuing from the same principles, directed to the same ends, serving to like purposes, be likewise used blamelessly? If those ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... homage to the popular pastor of the "Garnisonkirche." His wedding-, christening-, and burial-sermons were masterpieces of oratory; though plainly conceived and plainly delivered and free from all and every unctious pathos, they abounded with thought, true feeling, and poetical beauty. Frommel was destined to speak at the graves of most of the great leaders of the war of 1870-71, including Prince August of Wrttemberg, Moltke, Roon, Alvensleben, Kirchbach, and Kameke; the danger to become, on such occasions, a panegyrist, he has always judiciously ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... the Stoics, as against the Epicureans, and of such modern theorists as Butler, who make virtue, and not happiness, the highest end of man. With him, discipline was an end in itself, and not a means; and he endeavoured to soften its rigour by his poetical and elevated Idealism. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... much earlier date than Nicholas Breton. Percy partly printed it from William Byrds's Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs of Sadnes (no date, but 1588 according to Ames), with some additions and improvements (?) from a B.L. copy in the Pepysian collection. I have met with it in some early poetical miscellany—perhaps Tottel, or England's Helicon—but cannot just now refer ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... you would study Shakespeare more, it might freshen up your sermons somewhat, and lift them from the commonplace. I cannot but think you are degenerating. The first discourse I heard you preach was filled with poetical fancies and literary allusions, and the language was flowery and beautiful. Your preaching seems to have changed of late; last Sabbath, for example, it was mere 'talk' without rhetoric or eloquence; the most ignorant in the church could have understood them. I thought you would receive a call ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... great book. We all know of Thomas Carlyle's great work, 'The French Revolution.' Of this wonderful production it has been said that 'It is a history of the French Revolution and the poetry of it, both in one; and, on the whole, no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in England.' I wonder if we have all heard of the tragedy of this great book and the sorrow which came to ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... nowhere are the eternal, underlying truths upon which art rests so clearly discerned and nobly defined as in Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice; and nowhere do we find such poetical or beautiful descriptions. Yes, one should read these earlier books of Ruskin's, if it be but for the pleasure they give. All theories of art are useless for the American student who has not been abroad: the object ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... even in a cattle-truck, or a luggage van. And when I got there I could easily earn my own living. I'd make ballads and sing them in the streets. The Italians would give me lyres—that's the Italian kind of shilling, they spell it with an i. It shows how poetical they are out ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... souls have place'—this, with Mr. Browning, is something more than a mere poetical conceit. It is the condensed expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art. Like the lovers of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... keenly sentient period, but the convictions and interests—the moral passion. One certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of Emerson's orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American mind, and they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a magic, and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... and storms—entering, it seems, into the plan, and influenced by the same principles of poetical justice as had governed the king—drove the boat, with its terrified mariner, back again across to the mouth of the Baltic, as they had brought Lothbroc to England. The boat was thrown upon the beach, ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... this from "the best people" living there; and yet more solemn assurances from the two venerable churches, Presbyterian and Episcopalian, whose grave-stones, upright or recumbent, or in family rows, say, in epitaphs Latinized, poetical, or pious, "We belonged to the society of Princess Anne." That, at least, is the impression left on the visitor as he wanders amid their myrtle and creeper, or receives, on the wide, loamy streets, the bows of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... had built so many glorious expectations on each as, night after night, shivering with cold and faint with sickness, he had persisted in gathering from his mind, and arranging laboriously, the brightest and most powerful of his poetical fancies, and hoped, and was often almost sure, they would spread broadly, and be felt deeply in the world. But there they had all returned to him—there they lay, unknown, unheard of—they were only so much ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... laughed. "What a wonderful man he is!" said the Comte to Madame Urbain. "As poetical as ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... those with whom he was familiar. He spoke of the Cuchullin Hills, and the stern beauty of Loch Corruisk, with tears in his eyes. "Ah," he said, "I have no wish but to see them once again. Who is the lady with you—the lily?" he asked, for he spoke English imperfectly, and preferred his own poetical tongue. "May your path be always bright, lady!" he said, as he shook my hand warmly at parting; "and ye'll come and see me when ye come again, and bring me tales from the old country." The simple wish of Donnuil Dhu has often recurred to me in the midst of gayer ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Buddha by Asvaghosha is a poetical romance of nearly ten thousand lines. It relates the miraculous conception of the Indian sage, by the descent of a spirit on his mother, Maya,—a woman of great purity of mind. The child was called Siddartha, or "the perfection of all things." ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... been remarked, that "while he faithfully followed nature through all her varieties, and exposed, with inimitable skill, the infinite follies and vices of the world, he was in himself an example of many virtues." And the following poetical tribute by David Garrick is ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... offspring of mankind. Therefore would I be apt to believe, for less than a hundred francs, that those are the very same stones by means whereof Deucalion and Pyrrha restored the human race, in peopling with men and women the world, which a little before that had been drowned in the overflowing waves of a poetical deluge. This stirred up the valiant Justinian, L. 4. De Cagotis tollendis, to collocate his Summum Bonum, in Braguibus, et Braguetis. For this and other causes, the Lord Humphrey de Merville, following of his king to a certain warlike expedition, whilst he was in trying ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... singular-looking creature named Turpey, who was struggling along upon a wound-pension, having, when only a senior midshipman, lost the sight of one eye and the use of one arm through the injuries he received at some unpronounceable Pah in the Maori war. The other was a sad-faced poetical-looking man, of good birth as I understood, who had been disowned by his family on the occasion of his eloping with the cook. His name was Carr, and his chief peculiarity, that he was so regular in his irregularities that he could always tell ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... nerves ... for these four years, has rendered me incapable.... In my original proposals I undertook to publish this work in two books. [In the introduction he says, as I have just quoted, one book.] Poetical {215} matter hath increased upon me to such a degree, in the genial climate of Languedoc, as to have enabled me to compose several more books on this interesting subject, all which I purpose presenting ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... in England was called to the fact that the French had settlements in Acadia. Sir William Alexander, afterwards the Earl of Stirling, a favourite of King James the Fourth of Scotland and First of England, and an author of several poetical tragedies, wished {95} to follow the example of Sir Frederick Gorges, one of the promoters of the colonisation of New England. He had no difficulty in obtaining from James, as great a pedant as himself, ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... the poetical representations: but the history at bottom relates to sacred towers, dedicated to the symbolical worship of the serpent; where there was a perpetual watch, and a light ever burning. The Titans, [Greek: Titanes], ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... 1829 marked an advance in poetical composition. For his father's birthday he made a book more elaborate than any, sixteen pages in a red cover, with a title-page quite like print: "Battle of Waterloo | a play | in two acts | with other small | Poems dedicated to his father | by John ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... after interdicting them and thereby designating them to evil curiosity, which explains the contagious rottenness of the century. Ah! I well recognised there some of the ideas of our distinguished and poetical relative, that dear Viscount Philibert de la Choue. A man of letters, yes! a man of letters! Literature, mere literature! I beg God to forgive him, for he most surely does not know what he is doing, or whither he is going with his elegiac Christianity for talkative working men and young persons ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of the valets, with letters to the court of Louis, announcing the arrival of the Ladies of Croye at Liege. At length his natural buoyancy of temper returned, much excited by the title of an old romaunt [a poetical romance] which had been just printed at Strasbourg, and which lay beside him in the window, the ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Greek does not possess. Vergil also lacks that purely pagan enjoyment of life; in its place there is a tender melancholy that suggests the passing of the golden age. This difference of treatment, this added grace and charm, which are always mentioned as peculiarly Vergil's own, united with his poetical feeling, and skill in versification, are sufficient to absolve him from the reproach of a ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... to say," replied Adrian, recovering himself, "I was going on to 'the thing that makes day of my darkness' or something of that sort—some poetical game, you know—and then I thought what a many things I could write if I could write them myself, and shut them in the envelope for Gwen alone, that I can't say now, though the dearest sister ever man had yet writes ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Ovid of the production of animals from the mud of the Nile seems to be of Egyptian origin, and is probably a poetical account of the opinions of the magi or priests of that country; showing that the simplest animations were spontaneously produced like chemical combinations, but were distinguished from the latter by their perpetual improvement by the power of reproduction, first by ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... seems to have been neglected, perhaps because Birkbeck Hill did not include it in his Johnsonian Miscellanies, is A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the Late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., with Notes. This poem of three hundred and four lines was written by John Courtenay (1741-1816). First published in the spring of 1786 ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... excellent. He made Jack a present of old Tusser's Hundred Points of good Husbandrie, which has furnished him with reading ever since, and is his text-book and manual in all agricultural and domestic concerns. He has made dog's ears at the most favourite passages, and knows many of the poetical ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... friends have bestowed upon him. There are others so excessively modest, that they deliver the character of the person departed in Greek or Hebrew, and by that means are not understood once in a twelvemonth. In the poetical quarter, I found there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets. I observed indeed that the present war had filled the church with many of these uninhabited monuments, which ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... Gwilym! I am much indebted to him, and it were ungrateful on my part not to devote a few lines to him and his songs in this my history. Start not, reader, I am not going to trouble you with a poetical dissertation; no, no! I know my duty too well to introduce anything of the kind; but I, who imagine I know several things, and amongst others the workings of your mind at this moment, have an idea that you are anxious to learn a little, a very little, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... was in declamation: his attitude and delivery, and power of extemporizing, surprised even critical listeners into unguarded praise. "My qualities," he says, "were much more oratorical and martial than poetical; no one had the least notion that I should subside into poesy." Unpopular at first, he began to like school when he had fought his way to be a champion, and from his energy in sports more than from ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Nairne, must ever speak to hearts that are true to nature. I am desirous of bringing before my readers at this time the name of a Scottish poet, which, though in Mr. Laing's list, I fear is become rather a reminiscence. It is fifty years since his poetical pieces were published in a collected form. I am desirous of giving a special notice of a true-hearted Scotsman, and a genuine Scottish poet, under both characters. I look with a tender regard to the memory of the Rev. JOHN SKINNER of Langside. He has written little in ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... unceasingly the white foam of the rapids; sound there was none save their thunder. The majesty and beauty of the scene fascinated me, and I stood leaning with my back against a rock pinnacle watching it. Do not imagine it gave rise, in what I am pleased to call my mind, to those complicated, poetical reflections natural beauty seems to bring out in other people's minds. It never works that way with me; I just lose all sense of human individuality, all memory of human life, with its grief and worry and doubt, and become part of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... creeping out into the garden after dark—especially upon moonlight nights. The moon, indeed, was for him always a positive magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain to those of a robuster attitude. Evidently, Apollo is to the full as poetical as Diana; but it is not a question of poetry in the matured and intellectual sense of the word. It is a question of a certain solid and childish fancy. The sun is in the strict and literal sense invisible; that is to say, that ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... conduct and machinery of such things are too artificial and stilted for modern tastes. Stately masques are no longer performed in earls' mansions; and when a sovereign enters a city, a fair lady, with wings, representing Loyalty, does not burst out of a pasteboard cloud and recite a poetical address to Majesty. In our theatres the pantomime, which was originally an adumbration of human life, has become degraded. Symbolism has departed from the boards, and burlesque reigns in its stead. The Lord Mavor's Show, the last remnant ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... that she who had begun by terrifying me, in order to get me to bed, and out of her way, should end by being forced to suffer some restraint to cure me of my terrors: but Fowler did not understand or relish poetical justice, or any kind of justice: besides, she had heard that Lady de Brantefield was in want of a nursery-maid for the little Lady Anne Mowbray, who was some years younger than Master Harrington, and Fowler humbly represented to my mother that she ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... staying at the Clifton House, then," said Ralston, "and I came down to Table Rock, alone, just after midnight, and sat there from the beginning to the end of the obscuration. You should have seen"—and here his undeniable though repressed poetical temperament began to show itself in his cheek and eye—"you should have seen the dull, dismal shadow gradually creeping over the rapids as the disk grew smaller, every flashing wave seeming to be touched with a ghastly reflection ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... could possibly venture upon. At the same time I knew how difficult it was to bring about changes of ideas and systems amongst large masses of the people; but notwithstanding all these things, I was of the same opinion as a great poetical countryman of my friend ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... express exception. These he never cared for, or regarded as the noble knowledges for a king or man. History and Moral Speculation; what mankind have done and been in this world (so far as "History" will give one any glimpse of that), and what the wisest men, poetical or other, have thought about mankind and their world: this is what he evidently had the appetite for; appetite insatiable, which lasted with him to the very end of his days. Fontenelle, Rollin, Voltaire, all the then French lights, and gradually others that lay deeper in the firmament:—what suppers ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... The poetical temper, on the other hand, lets itself go with a more passive receptivity; and permits the formless, wordless brooding of the vast earthpower to work its magic upon it, in its own place and season. Not, however, in any destruction of the defining ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... judicious writer; for the former is thereby tacitly warned against any expectation of plot or denouement, and so secured against disappointment, whilst the latter is relieved from the (to him) impossible task of investing prosaic people with romance, and a generally hap-hazard economy with poetical ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Mr. Benny, absorbed in poetical composition, had either failed to hear the explosion at the gate, or had heard and paid no heed to it. He wondered why Master Clem should need ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in this last line itself, of one of the famous Arnoldian catchwords of later years. It has far more than lies even in its repetition, with fuller detail, of what has been called the author's main poetic note of half-melancholy contemplation of life. It has, once more, the interest of poetry—of poetical presentation, which is independent of any subject or intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion—rather than in matter, in sense, in ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of nature the agency of deity. The imagination of the Greeks peopled all the regions of earth and sea with divinities, to whose agency it attributed those phenomena which our philosophy ascribes to the operation of the laws of nature. Sometimes in our poetical moods we feel disposed to regret the change, and to think that the heart has lost as much as the head has gained by the substitution. The poet Wordsworth thus ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... 1778 between Mr. Mason, executor of Thomas Gray the poet, and Mr. Murray, who had published a "Poetical Miscellany," in which were quoted fifty lines from three passages ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... continued Lestocq. "We have transferred Biron to another colony, and Herr Munnich will occupy the poetical pleasure-house of ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... coldness of temperament but of a deliberate philosophy. The pregnant force of his language in dealing with those dearest to him—his wife, his sister, his brother—is proof enough of this. The frequent allusions in his correspondence to the physical exhaustion brought on by the act of poetical composition indicate a frame which, though made robust by exercise and temperance, was by nature excitable rather than strong. And even in the direction in which we should least have expected it, there is reason to believe that there were capacities of feeling in him which never broke ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... the objects of nature, and how their imaginative touches show insight and give a pleasure above mere science. Spenser's catalogue of the trees is worth knowing by heart. All the vicissitudes of the changing months have their apt poetical descriptions if we only look for them. Cowper, Thomson, and Wordsworth might be especially recommended to pupils for their brilliant word-painting of landscape. I cannot think of a finer adjunct to the teaching ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the subject of poetical agents, I will also say some words of our poetical flatterers, though the same persons frequently occupy both the one office and the other. A man of the name of Richaud, who has sung previously the glory ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... him in prose and verse. A great eater and a fine drinker, he found himself obliged to do penance at St. Monnica's rather frugal table. But when the fever of inspiration took hold of him, he forgot eating and drinking, and in his poetical thirst he would would have drained—so his master says—all the fountains of Helicon. Licentius had a passion for versifying: "He is an almost perfect poet," wrote Augustin to Romanianus. The former rhetorician knew the world, and the way to ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... poet we contemplate him, Coppee belongs to the group commonly called "Parnassiens"—not the Romantic School, the sentimental lyric effusion of Lamartine, Hugo, or De Musset! When the poetical lute was laid aside by the triad of 1830, it was taken up by men of quite different stamp, of even opposed tendencies. Observation of exterior matters was now greatly adhered to in poetry; it became especially descriptive and scientific; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the check without a word, hoisted his fat portmanteau on the driver's seat, and then disappeared in the van. In a minute he reappeared. On the back of one of his poetical ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... Mrs.-Governor-Micheltorena-Carmen-de-Haro. And then there was "parol" evidence, and plenty of it; witnesses who remembered everything about it,—namely, Manuel, Miguel, and the all-recollecting De Haro; here were details, poetical and suggestive; and Dame-Quicklyish, as when his late Excellency, sitting not "by a sea-coal fire," but with aguardiente and cigarros, had sworn to him, the ex-ecclesiastic Miguel, that he should grant, and had granted, Garcia's request. There ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... I deduce from all these stories, and these poetical fictions, and the manner in which I speak of them in the course of this dissertation, sufficiently vouch that esteem, and give as true and certain only what is so in fact; and that I do not wish to impose on my reader, by relating many things which I myself ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... history of exploration have we a more poetical account of the launching of a ship for distant lands: "Then they have stored her well with food and water, and pulled the ladder up on board, and settled themselves each man to his oar and kept time to Orpheus' harp; and away across the bay they rowed southward, while the people ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... natural and easy; a host of myths 'abounding in points of attachment to human experience and in genial interpretations of life, yet lifted beyond visible nature and filling a reported world believed in on faith,'[54] adorned religion with an artistic and poetical embroidery very congenial to the nations of the South. But a monarchy essentially Oriental in its constitution is unsuited to modern Europe. Its whole scheme is based on keeping the laity in contented ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers (-As plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I believe his was after they had been cooped ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... discovered that it was impossible to understand the allusions in English literature without a knowledge of the Bible. What would "Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader who had never known the beauty of the story of Ruth? And the lilies of the field, permeating all poetical literature, would have lost all their perfume if one knew nothing about the Song ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... had never been long together on the way before he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the English poets. "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle atheistical in his opinions. His 'Queen Mab,' sir, is quite an atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer. With the works of Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine poet. Keats—John Keats, sir—he was a very fine poet." With such references, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his own knowledge, he would beguile ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... This poetical view of digging drains, meets us at every turn, and we are beset with inquiries for these wonderful implements. We do not intimate that Mr. Gisborne, and those who so often quote the above language, are not reliable. Mr. Gisborne "is an honorable ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... Boardman, showing his teeth, fine and even as grains of pop-corn, in a slight sarcastic smile. "Sort of poetical justice," ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... lovers, she hoped to kindle their zeal in serving their Queen. They who mock at her claims to adoration as the Lady of the land are ungrateful to a policy which preserved the tone of English society for a generation romantic, poetical, and chivalrous. In pursuance of her usual system, and in innocence of any vice but vanity, she was sure to invite the language of passion from the owner of genius and looks like Ralegh's. She played upon his Christian name, writing it as she and others ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... best were the good-natured and robust men with a generic interest in the young, who could set a clean-minded, wholesome, and hearty example. But Hugh was not of this type. His mind was full of mystical and poetical ideas of religion, and his artistic nature was intent upon expressing them. He was successful in a way, because he had by this time a great charm of frankness and simplicity; he never had the least temptation to draw social distinctions, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... returning from Cathay told of the same marvel and travelers who stayed at home and wrote about what they had not seen, like Sir John Maundeville, misunderstood these reports and elaborated a legend of a tree that bore live lambs as fruit. Here, for instance, is how a French poetical botanist, Delacroix, described it in 1791, as translated ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... form a poetical book of twenty-one hymns in which the angels of the religion, "the worshipful ones" (Yazatas, Izads), are glorified, and the heroes of former days. Much of the material of the Yashts is evidently drawn from pre-Zoroastrian sagas which have been remodeled and adopted, worked over ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... your purse out of a pocket in your petticoat at the back. But when Aunt Victoria sat down and read the Bible aloud, Beth became absorbed, and would even read whole chapters again to herself in order to remember how to declaim the more poetical passages as Aunt Victoria did—all of which she relished with the keenest enthusiasm. Unfortunately for Beth, however, Aunt Victoria was strongly Calvinistic, and dwelt too much on death and the judgment for her mental health. The ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... personage Childe Harold, he was so far perfectly knightly in his attributes—"No waiter, but a knight templar."[9] By the by, I fear that Sir Tristrem and Sir Lancelot were no better than they should be, although very poetical personages and true knights, "sans peur," though not "sans reproche." If the story of the institution of the "Garter" be not a fable, the knights of that order have for several centuries borne the badge of a Countess of Salisbury, of indifferent memory. So much for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... hearing of the supposed wife (for the real Selbourne has been married privately) and his supposed friend, both supposing him false, mightily abuse him, all being still in the dark. At length the real Selbourne enters, and all supposition ends, as does the farce, poetical justice being administered upon the captain by courtesy, by the bailiffs who arrest him. Thus he, at last, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... Hurrell pronounced him. He had lost five years, so far as classical training was concerned, by the mismanagement of the Archdeacon himself. Still, he was only seventeen, and there was time to repair the waste. He was sent to a private tutor's in preparation for Oxford. His tutor, a dreamy, poetical High Churchman, devoted to Wordsworth and Keble, failed to understand his character or to give him an interest in his work, and a sixth year was added to the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... children of Niobe; at another time she was coy and melting as Luna shining tenderly upon Endymion. This fair creature, this lustrous Phoebe, was only young as yet, nor had nearly reached her full splendor: but crescent and brilliant, our young gentleman of the University, his head full of poetical fancies, his heart perhaps throbbing with desires undefined, admired this rising young divinity; and gazed at her (though only as at some "bright particular star," far above his earth) with endless delight ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Berners, who had charge of the eloquence "business" of that stage, and dealt in pathos, tears, white pocket handkerchiefs, and poetical quotations. He drew a most heart-rending picture of the broken-spirited husband and father, rejected by an unforgiving wife and ill-conditioned children, becoming a friendless and houseless wanderer over the wide world; in danger of being driven, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... spectacles dimmed with tears, transferred them to her commonplace book, among choice receipts for cookery and medicine, favourite texts, and portions from High Church divines, and a few songs, amatory and jacobitical, which she had carolled in her younger days, from whence her nephew's poetical TENTAMINA were extracted, when the volume itself, with other authentic records of the Waverley family, were exposed to the inspection of the unworthy editor of this memorable history. If they afford the reader no higher amusement, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... compositions the artist has already attained great and peculiar excellence, but in these, as might be expected from the subject, the fantastic element forms the groundwork of the whole. These mystical subjects are conceived in a singularly poetical spirit; the wonderful and monstrous meet us in living bodily forms. Some of them exhibit a power of representation to the eye, and a grandeur of conception the more surprising, since the shapeless exuberance of the scriptural visions might easily have led the artist astray, as has indeed ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of the sort common in Japan, spacious, airy clean, without furniture, but with good braziers, miniature tea-services, clean matting, screens ornamented with poetical mottoes, which even when translated were almost unintelligible to us, friendly hosts, and numerous female attendants. If the traveller brings his own cook with him, as we did, he can live very comfortably, as I have before stated, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... literary form: the young man, from that time forward, feels as if he had reached his consummation as a being not only able, but actually invited, to speak and to converse. The subject he selects obliges him either to express his judgment upon certain poetical works, to class historical persons together in a description of character, to discuss serious ethical problems quite independently, or even to turn the searchlight inwards, to throw its rays upon his own development and to make a critical report of himself: in short, a whole world of ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... rough, plain or obscure, simple or grand, feeble or strong," he contends, "but principles are immutable." By his principles, therefore he would, be judged. "Whittier, for instance," he continues, "is highly poetical, exuberant, and beautiful. Stuart is solemn, pungent, and severe. Wright is a thorough logician, dextrous, transparent, straightforward. Beriah Green is manly, eloquent, vigorous, devotional. May is persuasive, zealous, overflowing ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... me that night better than now. You said that in me you had found the fair haven of your desires, where your bark, long tossing in cross seas, and beating against adverse winds, would cast anchor and be at rest. The phrase sounded poetical if enigmatical, but it pleased me somehow; what did it mean, Bigot? I have puzzled over it many times ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was such as to lead George Eliot to begin on another historical subject, though she was probably induced to do this much more by its fitness to her purposes than by the public reception of the novel. This time she gave her work a poetical and dramatic form. The Spanish Gypsy was written in the winter of 1864-5, but was laid aside for more thorough study of the subject and for careful revision. She had previously, in 1863, written a short story in verse, founded on the ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... enough in itself. It is found, more or less, in every race, and is especially vigorous wherever an impoverished, orphaned stock is aware of the existence of a powerful, dominating, gigantic kinsman beyond a mountain range.[6] Unfortunately, however, this exaltation did not remain an empty poetical dream in the bosom of our ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... is for the greater part a collection of Hawaiian songs and poetic pieces that have done service from time immemorial as the stock supply of the hula. The descriptive portions have been added, not because the poetical parts could not stand by themselves, but to furnish the proper setting and to answer the questions of those who ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... first, enthusiastic in the cause of the Pope, but who now burned for war, and, ere long, imparted to the revolution a character of fitful fanaticism and absurd sympathies. The day was spent in magniloquent addresses, which affected the style of ancient types, urgent exhortations to war, poetical orations, rounds of applause, rapturous demonstrations. The result was, lists for the enrolment of volunteers; the establishment in the different quarters of the city of tables for receiving patriotic offerings, and a threatening demonstration against the Quirinal Palace, where it ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... reserves the "warlike praefectures of Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul, from the extremity of Greece to the Caledonian rampart, and from the rampart of Caledonia to the foot of Mount Atlas." That is to say, in less poetical cadence, (Gibbon had better have put his history into hexameters at once,) Valentinian kept under his own watch the whole of Roman Europe and Africa, and left Lydia and Caucasus to his brother. Lydia and Caucasus never did, and never could, form an Eastern Empire,—they were merely ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... for that. In a way, the position in which we stand to each other is a kind of poetical justice. I don't blame myself, either, for I always did loathe a cad and Stokes is a cad par excellence. He visited, more or less on suffrance, at two or three houses where I used to go a good deal, in my palmy days. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... face, as if her eye loved to dwell on me, gazes with the eye of a gazelle or a young hare, and the baby lips below outlie the hoariest male fox in the Old Jewry. But, to complete the delusion, all my sweethearts and wives are romantic and poetical skin-deep—or they would not attract me—and all turn out vulgar to the core. By their lovers alone can you ever know them. By the men they can't love, and the men they do love, you find these creatures that imitate sentiment so divinely ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... dignified styles of the epic, the drama, the lyric, the history, or the philosophical discussion. Equal to the highest creations, they refused to tolerate anything lower; and they knew not the novel, because their poetical notions were never left in a nebulous, prosaic state, but were always developed ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... envy, malice, and the entire hell-brood claiming kin to these, seem dead within him, or at least asleep; while gentleness, kindness, benevolence, together with a sort of sentimental religionism, constitute his habitual frame of mind. If a man has a poetical gift, opium almost irresistibly stirs it into utterance. If his vocation be to write, it matters not how profound, how difficult, how knotty the theme to be handled, opium imparts a before unknown power of dealing with such a theme; and after completing his task a man reads his own composition ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... was penance to the North Country dame, used to a hardy rough life in her sea-side tower, with absolute rule, and no hand over her save her husband's; while the young and outspoken Queen, bred up in the graceful, poetical Court of Aix or Nancy, looked on her as no better than a barbarian, and if she did not show this openly, reporters were not wanting to tell her that the Queen called her the great northern hag, or that her rugged unwilling curtsey was said to look as if she were stooping to draw water at a ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... November, aged fifty-eight. Schwab was the friend of Uhland. His death was very sudden. On the morning of the day on which he was summoned, he had entertained a party of his friends at breakfast, and read to them passages of a translation into German verse, which he was making of the poetical works ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... were not an Humane Species or Men. And tho' Homer, who first mentioned them, calls them [Greek: andres pygmaioi], yet we need not understand by this Expression any thing more than Apes: And tho' his Geranomachia hath been look'd upon by most only as a Poetical Fiction; yet by assigning what might be the true Cause of this Quarrel between the Cranes and Pygmies, and by divesting it of the many fabulous Relations that the Indian Historians, and others, have loaded it with, I have endeavoured to render it a true, at least a probable ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... quality, Bettina, though not herself of heroic mold, enters the society of the great heroines and speaks to posterity. Ariadne on the island of Naxos lives not more truly in Ovid's poetical Epistles, than Bettina in the Correspondence. But Bettina has not, like Ariadne, had immortality conferred upon her through the verses of two great poets. She has rather taken it for herself, as Goethe said she was wont to do, in anticipating every gift. It ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Markgraf Ruedger between obedience to his feudal superior and fidelity towards his friends and guests; and, above all, the canto of the death of Siegfried. This last is different, intensely different, from the rugged and dreary monotony of the rest; this most poetical, almost Spenserian or Ariostesque realization of the scene; this beautiful picture (though worked with the needle of the arras-worker rather than with pencil or brush) of the wood, the hunt, the solitary fountain in the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... "With any luck it'll give us a bit of a Crystal Palace Bank Holiday exploit to-night—we sail at midnight, you know. It will be rather gorgeous if the old bonfire will oblige. Red fires, white and silver moonlight—why Naples is making me get poetical," he added, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... little more than a year, and then returned home, where he may be said to have loitered, for two years, in a state very unworthy his uncommon abilities. He had already given several proofs of his poetical genius, both in his school-exercises and in other occasional compositions. Of these I have obtained a considerable collection, by the favour of Mr. Wentworth, son of one of his masters, and of Mr. Hector, his school-fellow and friend; from which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... century of our history, Bishop Berkeley, who, it will be remembered, had resided for some time in Newport, in Rhode Island, wrote his well-known "Verses on the Prospect of Planting ARTS and LEARNING in AMERICA." The last stanza of this little poem seems to have been produced by a high poetical inspiration:— ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... couldn't bear to see the poor girl stripping herself of everything. She wouldn't; she replied that she loved you, and she wouldn't be unfaithful to you for anything in the world. All that is very pretty, very poetical, but one can't pay one's creditors in that coin, and now she can't free herself from debt, unless she ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... forth Hasisadra's perils is one of twelve; and, since each of these represents a month and bears a story appropriate to the corresponding sign of the Zodiac, great weight must be attached to Sir Henry Rawlinson's suggestion that the epos of Izdubar is a poetical ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... poetical influence. I think the person who wrote this, was adapted to intellectual pursuits,—a man of fine powers of mind, but not fully progressed in thought. As far as he knew, at the time of this writing, he was appreciative of your suggestions, and of scientific ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... after knowing other things. You often think, I doubt not, in quiet hours, what would become of your children, if you were gone. You have done, I trust, what you can to care for them, even from your grave: you think sometimes of a poetical figure of speech amid the dry technical phrases of English law: you know what is meant by the law of Mortmain; and you like to think that even your dead hand may be felt to be kindly intermeddling yet in the affairs of those who were your dearest: that some little sum, slender, perhaps, but ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realise ourselves as experiments of the species for the species, just in so far ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... finest of his generation, and vowed the time could not be far off when he would unite the imaginative energy of his first long poems with the nightingale quality of his later, and produce one of the greatest poetical dramas in the language. But the man had been cast into outer darkness. Society had dropped him, and the young Queen would not permit his name to be mentioned in her presence. That gentle spirit, the Countess of Blessington, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... from the house of the gobernadorcillo, in front of which a platform had been erected for the recitation of a loa, or religious poem, in honor of the Patron Saint. Ibarra had previously declined with pleasure an invitation to hear this poetical composition, as he had preferred to witness the procession from the house of Captain Tiago with Maria Clara and her friends. But, as His Excellency wished to hear the loa, there was no other remedy for Ibarra but to console himself ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... Pindaric made its first appearance the latter end of last year (1778). It is well calculated to rouse the martial spirit of the nation, and is now reprinted with considerable additions.' Gent. Mag. July, 1779, p. 357. In 1781 he published another volume of his poems with a poetical preface, in which he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... rolled incessantly across the green cloth; from an inner room came the unmistakable click of a roulette-wheel. Men talked loudly of their projects and ambitions shortly to be accomplished. An epic poet was about to publish his magnum opus, the birth of a new star in the poetical firmament; a speculator had made his great coup—to-morrow he would have the wheat ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... how well the gown became her eyes, bringing out all the deeper colour in them. Lucinda had magnificent eyes. Once Romney had written a sonnet to them in which he compared their colour to ripe blueberries. This may not sound poetical to you unless you know or remember just what the tints of ripe blueberries are—dusky purple in some lights, clear slate in others, and yet again in others the misty ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the bride and groom, proceeding to particulars which greatly delight the young men, but which cause Ona to blush more furiously than ever. Jokubas possesses what his wife complacently describes as "poetiszka vaidintuve"—a poetical imagination. ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... reflecting a moment, 'I mean by nothing in them those who don't care about anything solid. This is an instance: I knew a man who had a young friend in whom he was much interested; in fact, they were going to be married. She was seemingly poetical, and he offered her a choice of two editions of the British poets, which she pretended to want badly. He said, "Which of them would you like best for me to send?" She said, "A pair of the prettiest earrings in ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... interested in this subject, so full of historical and classical, as well as poetical associations, I would mention that a late Master of Caius College, Cambridge, the Rev. Dr. Davy, printed some years since, for private circulation, a small pamphlet entitled Observations on Mr. Fox's Letter to Mr. Grey, in which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... Julia Bryant with a thousand poetical excellences. That she felt an interest in him—one so good as she—was enough to confirm all the noble resolutions he had made, and give him strength to keep them; and as he seated himself by the brook, he thought over his faults, and renewed his determination to uproot them ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... one of the most learned associates of the Academy of Inscriptions, has given much the same opinion, but he nevertheless adds: "Whatever may be their authorship, the fables in question are historic in the sense that they relate to real facts of which they are a poetical expression, a romantic development, conceived with the idea of popularizing the Frankish kings among the Gallo-Roman subjects." It cannot, however, be admitted that a desire to popularize the Frankish ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... the old Scotch school; that is, none of your modern agriculturists who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce guidman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments: the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a cast which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... his "Life of Swift," after citing with approval Delany's character of him, as he describes him to Lord Orrery, proceeds to say: "In the poetical works there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... examination of the clay and colours of which it is made. The attempt to be effective by means of the matter used, thereby ministering to this evil propensity of the public, is absolutely to be censured in branches of writing where the merit must lie expressly in the form; as, for instance, in poetical writing. However, there are numerous bad dramatic authors striving to fill the theatre by means of the matter they are treating. For instance, they place on the stage any kind of celebrated man, however stripped of dramatic incidents his life may have been, nay, sometimes without ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... no magazines and daily papers, each reeling off a serial story. Once a week, "The Columbian Sentinel" came from Boston with its slender stock of news and editorial; but all the multiform devices—pictorial, narrative, and poetical—which keep the mind of the present generation ablaze with excitement, had not then even an existence. There was no theatre, no opera; there were in Oldtown no parties or balls, except, perhaps, the annual election, or Thanksgiving festival; and when winter came, ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is nearly a full century since Berkely, bishop of Cloyne, turning towards this fair land which we now inhabit, the eyes of a prophet, closed a few lines of poetical inspiration ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... motive in publishing the few poems and fragments included in these volumes, was to make a supplement to the collected edition of Coleridge's poetical works. In these fragments the reader will see the germs of several passages in the already published poems of the author, but which the Editor has not thought it necessary to notice more particularly. 'The Fall of Robespierre', a joint composition, has been so long in ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... accidental which may be here to-day and gone to-morrow. If he is to come before us as an artist, he must do so as a poet or creator of that which is not, as well as a mirror of that which is. True, experience in all kinds of poetical work shows that the less a man creates the better, that the more, in fact, he makes, the less is he of a maker; but experience also shows that the course of true nature, like that of true love, never does run smooth, and that ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... buttons and bullets. He picked up himself many little relics, and was fortunate in purchasing a grand cross of the legion of honour. But the most precious relic was presented to him by my wife—a French soldier's book, well stained with blood, and containing some poetical effusions, called "Troubadours," which he found so interesting that he translated them into English, and they were introduced into his "Paul's Letters;" on the publication of which he did her the honour of sending her a copy, with a most flattering letter, to say, "that he considered her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... postpone their departure to the last possible moment, and, so far from looking with smiles upon what they are about to leave for ever, they will leave it with very great reluctance, and in monstrous bad humor. As for regarding their children with any such notions as those you dwell upon with such poetical raptures, they will infinitely prefer transmitting for themselves their names and qualities to the very end of the chapter. Ask any one of them the question now, and he will tell you that an immortality, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... Miss St. Just, now that we are alone, what I said just now of the pleasure which I have had during the last month. I am not poetical, or given to string metaphors together; and I could only go over the same dull words once more. But I could ask, if I were not asking too much, leave to prolong at least a shadow of that pleasure to the last moment. That I shall die shortly, and of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest, Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... cynical expressions; for the man whose soul is ennobled by true heroism, possesses a heart as tender as it is firm. His calmness under the most trying circumstances, and his uniform sweetness of manner, were almost poetical. They manifested 'the most sustained tenderness of soul that ever caressed the chords of a lyre.' In council he was temperate and patient, and his words fell softly and evenly as snow-flakes, like the sentences that fell ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... and faculties. More recently ST. HILAIRE has published a paper in which he speaks of the immutability of species as a conviction that is on the decline, and that the age of CUVIER is on the close. Carried away by what Professor PHILLIPS has called a poetical conjecture that cannot be proved, this writer propounded the speculation that the present crocodiles are really the offspring of crocodilian reptiles, the difference being merely the effect of physical conditions, especially operating during ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... court, became the language of poetry. The earliest compositions in that language continue for a while to bear the stamp of the clerical poetry of a former age. The first Middle High-German poems are written by a nun; and the poetical translation of the Books of Moses, the poem on Anno, Bishop of Cologne, and the "Chronicle of the Roman Emperors," all continue to breathe the spirit of cloisters and cathedral towns. And when a new taste for chivalrous romances was awakened ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... his poems, entitled Le Pote sans fard, ou Discours satyriques sur toutes sortes de sujets (Paris, 2 vols., in-12). His satire was very biting and not a little scurrilous, and was famous for the quantity rather than the quality of his poetical effusions. We give the following example of his skill, in which he discourses upon the different effects which age ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Poetical legends, generally founded on, and blended with, traditionary facts, help us to form some idea of the character and habits of the aboriginal races; but history, and even tradition, seldom carry us further back in the review of past ages than the arrival ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... sunlight! There's a grand poetical idea for you. Nan has been more in the open than any of you; and the sunlight has filled her brain, and her ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... musical genius, which extracts surprising harmony from the rudest of sources, the clapping of hands, the clanking of chains, the resonance of lasso wood, and perforated shells, seems to invest everything with a resident spirit of peculiar power. Accordingly, his mythologies are most numerous and poetical—his entire catalogue of superior gods alone, embracing a more extended length than the Assyro-Babylon Alphabet, ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... upbringing. The little girl has been accustomed to a form of religion and to an attitude toward the things of religion that are beautiful, but austerely beautiful. She is an imaginative child; and she caught eagerly at the poetical element thus, for the first time, associated with prayer. "Tell me ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... you have succeeded in contriving your characters, so as to be fit objects of imitation, if virtuous, and if vicious, so as to be proper examples for deterring others from the like practices, we shall find the principal ones extremely faulty, generally quite destitute of poetical probability, and in a word, far short of the Homeric standard. Homer's characters are for the most part drawn beyond the life; but the art with which he has reduced them to truth, and probability, is surprising. He has prodigiously exaggerated the bodily strength of Ajax, but then ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... highly delighted with this effort of the Captain's in the poetical way, and they all declared if that wasn't a song they "would like to ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of ideas. No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was capable of being told by the pencil. He seized on, and struck off with grace and precision, just that point of view which ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... that the learned Justice, knowing his taste for the poetical and fanciful, and his aptitude at the harmony of language, often erred in his judicial writings and treatises, by avoiding beauty of expression, in fear lest the dignity of his subject should be injured by too much association with the creatures of fancy. We have known most ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... "Poetical justice might overtake one or both of us—such things have happened before, though not often. Or, say, misfortune or death might mistake us for honest, hard-working mugs with big families to keep, and cut us off ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson |
