"Catullus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have, more judiciously, attempted to preserve the personality of the classical divinities have failed from a different cause. They have been imitators, and imitators at a disadvantage. Euripides and Catullus believed in Bacchus and Cybele as little as we do. But they lived among men who did. Their imaginations, if not their opinions, took the colour of the age. Hence the glorious inspiration of the Bacchae and the Atys. Our minds are formed by circumstances: and I do not believe that it would ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Greek was not accomplished easily and without force: the Graecising was carried even to the length of a clumsy intermixture of the two languages. Gradually only was the poetical style smoothed and softened, and in Catullus we still perceive the last traces of its early harshness, which, however, are not without a certain rugged charm. Those constructions, and especially those compounds which were too much at variance with the internal structure of the Latin, and failed ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... link-boy at marriages, also a "night-cap" drunk before bed and lastly an effeminate; one who perambulavit omnium cubilia (Catullus). See Encolpius' pun upon the Embasicete in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... also a large quarto, but of a very different character. It is the Baskerville impression of the elegiac poets,—Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius: Birmingham, 1772. No books are more delightful to sight and touch than the Baskerville classics. This Catullus of mine is printed on the softest and glossiest post paper, with a mighty margin of two inches and a half at the side, and rich broad letters,—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... of neatness belonged to Isaura, and brought to mind the well-known line of Catullus when on recrossing his threshold he invokes its welcome,—a line thus not inelegantly ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... picture of his early years here.[1] His education would seem to have been good, but ordinary; and it is very doubtful if he ever went to a university.[2] Besides the authors mentioned in the Epistle to Henry Reynolds, he was certainly familiar with Ovid and Horace, and possibly with Catullus: while there seems no reason to doubt that he read Greek, though it is quite true that his references to Greek authors do not prove any first-hand acquaintance. He understood French, and read Rabelais and the French sonneteers, and he seems to have ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... apple-trees which cast a rich shade on the deep spring grass. The orchard had the impressiveness of those old religious groves, dedicated to the strange worship of sylvan gods, gods to be found now only in Horace or Catullus, and in the hearts of young poets to whom the beautiful antique Latin ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... in every way worthy of that most witty of mankind, Samuel Butler. This,' he continued, tapping a protuberance which I had remarked over his chest, 'is not a natural deformity, but is a copy of that inestimable "Hudibras," which combines the light touch of Horace with the broader mirth of Catullus. Heh! what think you ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... description of a lady's dressing-room; yet in a production of these days, unstamped with such venerable names, will stop their noses, with all the signs of loathing and abhorrence, at a bare mention of the china chamber-pot;—who applauded Catullus, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucan, for their spirit in lashing the greatest names of antiquity; yet, when a British satirist, of this generation, has courage enough to call in question the talents of a pseudo-patron in power, accuse him ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than literature—life—it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... which the envy of fate aims immediately at the fair. The mistress of Catullus wept for her sparrow many centuries ago, and lapdogs will be sometimes sick in the present age. The most fashionable brocade is subject to stains; a pinner, the pride of Brussels, may be torn by a careless washer; a picture may drop from a watch; or the triumph of a new suit ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... takes his cue From Dame Bovary's bourgeois troubles; There's Bourget, dyed his own sick "blue," There's Loti, blowing blue soap bubbles; There's Mendes[6] (no Catullus, he!) There's Richepin,[7] sick with sensual passion. The Dismal Throng! So foul, so free, Yet sombre all, as is ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... curis Ut possis animo quemvis sufferre laborem. CATULLUS . . . . Nostra fatiscat Laxaturque chelys, vires instigat alitque Tempestiva quies, major ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... all. Their natural charms were no longer merchantable. She of whom Catullus speaks in connection with the lofty souled descendants of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... to choose you to edit and bring out Sir Richard Burton's translation of Catullus, because you collaborated with him on this work by a correspondence of many months before he died. If I have hesitated so long as to its production, it was because his notes, which are mostly like pencilled cobwebs, strewn all over his Latin edition, were ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... accounts of the African war and of the war in Spain, composed by persons who were unquestionably present in those two campaigns. To these must be added the "Leges Juliae" which are preserved in the Corpus Juris Civilis. Sallust contributes a speech, and Catullus a poem. A few hints can be gathered from the Epitome of Livy and the fragments of Varro; and here the contemporary sources which can be entirely depended upon ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... which are often quoted with a kind of holy horror, as though a pontifex maximus might not hold any opinion he pleased about death, and as though his doubt were not the common doubt of innumerable thinking men of the age.[835] Catullus wrote of death as "nox perpetua dormienda"; Lucretius, of course, gloried in the thought that there is no life beyond. In the following century the learned Pliny could write of death as the relapsing into the same nothingness as before we were born, and could ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... they discovered Tivoli, which was the abode of so many celebrated men, of Brutus, of Augustus, of Mecenas, and of Catullus; but above all, the abode of Horace, for it is his verse which has rendered this retreat illustrious. The house of Corinne was built over the noisy cascade of Teverone; at the top of the mountain, opposite her garden, was the temple of ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... all my faculties: Lesbia, when once in thy presence, I have not left the power to tell my distracting passion: my tongue becomes torpid; a subtle flame creeps through my veins; my ears tingle in deafness; my eyes are veiled with darkness." Catullus, Epig. li. 5] ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto Venere; ... and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess than ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... this dead city of stones and the sea that wrought so on his spirit. Tourgenieff was right; only the young should come here, not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he recalled the lines of Catullus—the sad, stately plaint of the classic world, like the suppressed sob ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... teachers. He studied all classic literature. "The AEschylean drama had no attraction for him; he reveled in the rich and elegant strains of Virgil, and of the many toned lyre of Horace and the silver lute of Catullus." From the full and inexhaustible fountain of English letters he drank unceasingly. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, and, later, Tennyson were his ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... change in the character of the Mella—a river anciently so remarkable for the gentleness of its current that it was specially noticed by Catullus as flowing molli flumine—deserves more than a passing remark. This river rises in the mountain-chain east of Lake Iseo, and traversing the district of Brescia, empties into the Oglio after a course of about seventy miles. The iron-works in the upper valley of the Mella ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... groan at anything. Whatever comes to us is in the order of things, and the sound man accepts it as his lot. Yes, even Death—of which he says noble things. The old melodious weeping of the poets—Moschus over his mallows, and Catullus with his 'Soles occidere et redire possunt'—Whitman has no touch of that. Noble grief there is in him, and noble melancholy can come upon him, but acquiescence is his last word. He holds that all is good, because it exists, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... in soft guise, surrounded by a choir Of virgins melting, not to Vesta's fire, With sparkling eyes, and cheek by passion flush'd, Strikes his wild lyre, while listening dames are hush'd? 'Tis Little! young Catullus of his day, As sweet, but as immoral, in his lay! * * * * * * * Yet kind to youth,... She bids thee 'mend thy ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... literature a wide field was left over which an intending author might safely range. The direct influence on poetry must have been exceedingly small. If we review the great poets of the Augustan and republican periods, we shall find little save certain epigrams of Catullus that could not safely have been produced in post-Augustan times. Moreover, when we turn to what is actually known of the attitude of the early emperors towards literature, the balance does not seriously incline against them. It may be said without hesitation of the four emperors ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... and had the honour to be set forth the second time by Cicero, so great a father of the Commonwealth; although himself disputes against that opinion in his own writings. Nor was the satirical sharpness or naked plainness of Lucilius, or Catullus, or Flaccus, by any order prohibited. And for matters of state, the story of Titus Livius, though it extolled that part which Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed by Octavius Caesar of the other faction. But that Naso was by him banished in ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... thumbed no more, E'en Catullus has no choice! There is endless, precious lore, Such as I ne'er knew before, In the music ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus: ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... elegiac, and indeed all sorts of poetry in the persons of Virgil, Horace, Varius, Ovid, and many others, especially if we take into that century the latter end of the commonwealth, wherein we find Varro, Lucretius, and Catullus; and at the same time lived Cicero and Sallust and Caesar. A famous age in modern times for learning in every kind was that of Lorenzo de Medici and his son Leo the Tenth, wherein painting was revived, and poetry flourished, and the ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... identified with the Thomas Achelly who contributed verses to Watson's Hecatompathia and various sententious fragments to England's Parnassus, among them a not very happy rendering of those lines of Catullus which might almost be taken as a motto to pastoral poetry ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the foundations of a knowledge of her which refined both his enjoyment and his descriptions; and the elegiac sentimental style, which we see developed in Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, first came to light in the great lyrist Catullus. In Imperial times feeling for Nature grew with the growth of culture in general; men turned to her in times of bad cheer, and found comfort in the great sky spaces, the constant stars, and forests that trembled with awe of the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... and their tender melancholy tone. A little apart is Esteban Manuel de VILLEGAS (1589-1669), an admirer of the Argensolas, "en versos cortos divino, insufrible en los mayores," who is known for his attempts in Latin meters and his successful imitations of Anacreon and Catullus. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... any solid reason, that the plural Britannise used for Britain in the "Confession" can only refer to Great Britain, because that country was sub-divided by the Romans into five distinct provinces. The reason given cannot be convincing, because Catullus, who died in the year 54, used the plural for Britain before the Roman sub-divisions were made, when he wrote, "Nunc timent Galliae, timent Britanniae"—Caesar, "the Gauls and the Britons fear." ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... cylindrical box, called scrinium and capsa, or capsula, in which the manuscripts were placed vertically, the titles at the top. Catullus excuses himself to Manlius for not having sent him the required verses, because he had with him only one box of his books. It is evident that a great number of volumes might be comprised in this way within a small space; and this may tend to explain the smallness of the ancient libraries—at ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... he also led them into the desert, upon promising them that he would show them signs and apparitions. And as for the other Jews of Cyrene, he concealed his knavery from them, and put tricks upon them; but those of the greatest dignity among them informed Catullus, the governor of the Libyan Pentapolis, of his march into the desert, and of the preparations he had made for it. So he sent out after him both horsemen and footmen, and easily overcame them, because ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... [foundation], and in this are they worthy of imitation: whom neither the smooth-faced Hermogenes ever read, nor that baboon who is skilled in nothing but singing [the wanton compositions of] Calvus and Catullus. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace |
