"Cowper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the social hero, the triumphant dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame D'Arblay. Yet it is relieved by its inherent humanity, its fellowship and feeling. Dr. Johnson's piety is delightfully full of human nature—far too full to please the poet Cowper, who wrote of the Prayers and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... had done so, he could not have carried it before parliament, and the country were prepared for it. Up to this period the temper of the public mind may be discovered in these noble sentiments of the poet Cowper:— ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... with acknowledgment of his kindness in seeking to have the missing volume replaced, so that it might have a chance of readers in such glorious company and in all-famous Oxford. The closing Epode may be given in the skilful, though rather lax, rendering of Cowper:— ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. Books are not seldom talismans and spells. —COWPER. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... Things Eugene Field The Duel Eugene Field Holy Thursday William Blake A Story for a Child Bayard Taylor The Spider and the Fly Mary Howitt The Captain's Daughter James Thomas Fields The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm William Cowper Sir Lark and King Sun: A Parable George Macdonald The Courtship, Merry Marriage, and Picnic Dinner of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren Unknown The Babes in the Wood Unknown God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop Robert Southey The Pied ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... Royal George, of 100 guns, came on, stern and majestic, seeking some fitting antagonist. This was the great ship that afterwards sank ignobly at its anchorage at Spithead, with "twice four hundred men," a tale which, for every English boy, is made famous in Cowper's immortal ballad. But what an image of terror and of battle the Royal George seemed as in the bitter November storm she bore down on the French fleet! Hawke disdained meaner foes, and bade his pilot lay him alongside Conflans' flagship, Le Soleil Royal. Shoals were foaming ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's,—Thomson's, Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's,—and it will be found, from the want of the same insight into "the hidden soul of harmony," to be mere ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Cruden's Condensed Concordance. Eadie's Analytical Concordance. The Psalmist: a Collection of Hymns. Valuable School Books. Works for Sabbath Schools. Memoir of Amos Lawrence. Poetical Works of Milton, Cowper, Scott. Elegant Miniature Volumes. Arvine's Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes. Ripley's Notes on Gospels, Acts, and Romans. Sprague's European Celebrities. Marsh's Camel and the Hallig. Roget's Thesaurus of English Words. Hackett's Notes on Acts. M'Whorter's Yahveh Christ. Siebold and ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... Mrs. Charles, Frances Ridley Havergal, Anna Letitia Waring, Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Anne Procter, Mme. Guyon, Theodore Monod, Matthew Arnold, Edwin Arnold, William Shakespeare, John Milton, George Gordon Byron, Robert Burns, William Cowper, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Francis Quarles, Frederick W. Faber, John Keble, Charles Kingsley, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, John Gay, Edward Young, Thomas Moore, John Newton, John Bunyan, H. Kirke White, Horatius Bonar, James Montgomery, Charles Wesley, Richard ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... departed friend. Dear me! Labuntur anni, indeed!" His fig tree, which some one else had planted, his laburnum—a slip from one at Rickmansworth, the seat of the late Lord Mayor Burgess—a catalpa seedling from Panshanger, which the late Lady Cowper did him the honour to present with her own hands: as Sanchia said afterwards to Melot, his garden was rather like a cemetery of ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... classics of English verse, the result would immediately be reflected in his own compositions. As yet, he claims to be independent of scholarly tradition, but we must remind him of the Latin epigram of Mr. Owen, which Mr. Cowper thus translated under the title ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... time, in tears. Dulcie, who only cried on great occasions, in great sorrow or great joy—not above half-a-dozen times in her life. Dulcie, whom the smallpox could not spoil, with her pretty forehead, cat's eyes, and fine chin. Does that description give you an idea of Dulcie—Dulcie Cowper, not yet Madam, but any day she liked Mistress Dulcie? It seems expressive. An under-sized, slight-made girl, with a little face clearly, very clearly cut, but round in all its lines as yet; an intelligent face, an enthusiastic face, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... printed on coarse paper, with a flaming picture on the title-page. John Clare scarcely knew that there were any other books than these and the few he had seen at Glinton school in existence; he had never heard of Shakespeare and Milton, Thompson and Cowper, Spenser and Dryden; and, therefore, with the natural eagerness of the young mind just awoke to its day dreams, eagerly plunged into the new realm of fancy. The effect soon made itself felt upon the ardent ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... Life of Cowper; that is to say, the first Volume. It is not a book to be read by every man at the fall of the leaf. It is a fearful book. Have you read it? Southey hits hard at Newton in the dark; which will give offence to many people: but I perfectly agree with him. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Her head adorned with lappets, pinned aloft, And ribands streaming gay, superbly raised, Indebted to some smart wig-weaver's hand For more than half the tresses it sustains."—COWPER. ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... by the coach a new number of an interesting periodical publication, and walked forward on the highway to meet it, with the impatience which Cowper has described as actuating the resident in the country when longing for intelligence from ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was perhaps more sarcastic and more witty; Cowper undoubtedly more tender and more gentle; but Lady Mary had qualities all her own. She had powers of observation and the gift of description, which qualities are especially to be remarked in the letters she wrote when abroad with her husband on his Mission to the Porte. She had ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... a showy phrase, and "when I became ambitious of the title of Lavengro and strove to deserve it" was cut down to "when I became a student." When he wrote of Cowper in the third chapter he said, to justify Cowper's melancholy, that "Providence, whose ways are not our ways, interposed, and with the withering blasts of misery nipped that which otherwise might have terminated in fruit, noxious ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... gate of the town, where he has had the honour several times to lodge and entertain the late King William of glorious memory in his returning from Holland by way of Harwich to London. Their recorder is Earl Cowper, who has been twice Lord High Chancellor of England. But his lordship not residing in those parts has put in for his deputy,—Price, Esq., barrister-at-law, and who dwells in the town. There are in Colchester eight churches besides those which are damaged, and five meeting-houses, ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... to get hold of two foxes this week—a fine dog fox and his vixen wife; and among other things, I have been looking up Cowper's glands, the supposed absence of which in the dogs has always "gone agin' me." Moreover, I have found them (or their representatives) in the shape of two small sacs, which open by conspicuous apertures into the urethra immediately behind the bulb. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... them to retain and to cherish this inestimable gift of a native poet, and to repair, as far as possible, the wrongs which suffering or neglect had inflicted on him. The Lounger had at that time a wide circulation in Scotland, and penetrated even to England. It was known and read by the poet Cowper, who, whether from this or some other source, became acquainted with the poems of Burns within the first year of their publication. In July, 1787, we find the poet of The Task telling a correspondent that ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... Their noble birth; conduct us to the tombs Of their forefathers, and from age to age Ascending, trumpet to their illustrious race." COWPER. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... no living descendants in the male line from the great authors, artists, statesmen, soldiers, of England. It is stated that there is not one such descendant of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Butler, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, or Moore; not one of Drake, Cromwell, Monk, Marlborough, Peterborough, or Nelson; not one of Strafford, Ormond, or Clarendon; not one of Addison, Swift, or Johnson; not one of Walpole, Bolingbroke, Chatham, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Grattan, or Canning; not ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Meynell lost between 2 and 3,000; what the rest did I don't know. They abuse both you and me about the tie,(105) and Hare says, it was the damned[e]st thing to do at this time in the world. I told them, as Lord Cowper said in his speech to the Condemned Lords in the year 16—, "Happy had it been for all your Lordships had you lain under so indulgent a restraint." It is difficult for me to say which was the kindest thing you ever did ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... top of the hill, and viewed with 'reverted eyes' the beautiful prospect that lay bathed in golden sunshine behind us. Cowper says, with that boldness of expressing in poetry the commonest and simplest feelings, which is perhaps one great secret of ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... he rendered to the cause which we also love, we will be devoutly thankful. If we have gotten any good from the life which he lived before us, we can show it by the growing warmth and completeness of our own enlistment in the same cause. Cries Mrs. Browning at Cowper's grave: ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... the aptitude of our language for that light and gay epistolary style, which was before supposed peculiarly to belong to our Gallic neighbours. There may be letters of a higher order in our literature than those of Walpole. Gray's letters, and perhaps Cowper's, may be taken as instances of this; but where shall we find such an union of taste, humour, and almost dramatic power of description and narrative, as in the correspondence of Walpole? Where such happy touches upon the manners and characters of the time? Where ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of such instances was that of the Reverend John Newton of Olney, the friend of Cowper the poet. It was long subsequent to the death of both his parents, and after leading a vicious life as a youth and as a seaman, that he became suddenly awakened to a sense of his depravity; and then it was that the lessons which his mother had given him when a child sprang up vividly ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker; —Peregrine Pickle, Launcelot Greaves, and Ferdinand, Count Fathom, I still want; but, as I said, the veriest ordinary copies will serve me. I am nice only in the appearance of my poets. I forget the price of Cowper's Poems, but, I believe, I must have them. I saw the other day, proposals for a publication, entitled Banks's New and Complete Christian Family Bible, printed for C. Cooke, Paternoster Row, London. He promises at least to give in the work, I ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... The City train-bands were often the subject of ridicule by the wits. See "Harleian Misc." i. 206, Cowper's "John Gilpin," and Nos. 38, 41. Tothill Fields, Westminster, and the Artillery Ground, Finsbury, were the usual ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... mark; nor stops for aught, But now and then with pressure of his thumb, To adjust the fragrant charge of a short tube, That fumes beneath his nose; the trailing cloud Streams far behind him, scenting all the air.—COWPER. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... me and turned away in the blinding storm to the Snowy Range, where he said he was going to camp out for a fortnight; a man of great abilities, real genius, singular gifts, and with all the chances in life which other men have had. How far more terrible than the "Actum est: periisti" of Cowper is ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definite pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. "The Royal George" went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf that holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother's portrait is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... he would, for the present, deal only with the greatest of these. He took it for granted that those listening were all agreed that mankind would be advantaged in their minds or manners by a more or less familiar acquaintance with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; he himself did not mind adding Scott to the list, whose poetry he found much better than his prose. To bring about an acquaintance which might very profitably ripen into intimacy, he would have each of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... perhaps the closest parallel, and yet it is far inferior to Lanier's, as every reader of the two will admit. If one wishes to make further comparisons, he may find sunrise poems in the following authors: Blake, Cowper, Emerson, Hood, Keats, Longfellow, Southey, Thompson, Willis, etc. I may add that an interesting, though superficial article on 'The Poetry of Sunrise and Sunset' may be found in 'Chambers's Edinburgh Journal', 22, ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... cut a tunnel, three feet wide and six feet high, from our front door to the sidewalk opposite. It was a beautiful cavern, with its walls and roof inlaid with mother-of-pearl and diamonds. I am sure the ice palace of the Russian Empress, in Cowper's poem, was not a more ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... what he brings; his one concern Is to conduct it to the destined inn; And having dropp'd the expected bag, pass on—— To him indifferent whether grief or joy." COWPER: Description ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... longer echo to his voice; This record of his fate, exulting view— He died worn out with vain pursuit of you. 'Yes,' the indignant shade of Fop replies, 'And worn with vain pursuits, man also dies.'" COWPER. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... attainment. Still, I cannot help being struck with an impression that Mr. Huxley appears to cite these terms of Micah as if they reduced the work of religion from a difficult to an easy program. But look at them again. Examine them well. They are, in truth, in Cowper's words: ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... Seasons, a finely illustrated edition, whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them the most beautiful things that ever were. My father read passages of the book aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself. For the matter of that he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything but good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got no harm; we get harm from the evil we understand. He loved Burns, too, and he used to read aloud from him, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... obliged for his intended kindness, but at the same time I preferred going to chapel, as I wished to see all I could for my money. After that I went to the house of prayer like any church-going belle (this is what Cowper must have meant, for how could a bell go to church?) every Sunday, and every other day during the week. Had the chapel been of larger dimensions I should have gone daily, but it was too small to hold all the prisoners, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... "I think it was Cowper, but I'm not sure," answered Hester. "It can't be quite true though. I suspect man has more to do with the unmaking than the making of either. We have reason to be glad he has not come near enough to us yet to destroy either ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the sum into its solid worth, And if it weigh the importance of a fly, The scales are false, or algebra a lie." COWPER. ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... them Puritans at the close of the sixteenth, and Methodists at the close of the eighteenth. Doubtless the vintners and the shipmen of Chaucer's day, the patrons and purveyors of the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of Cowper's, like their successors after them, were not specially anxious to distinguish nicely between more or less abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... education were utterly different from his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later Tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with "Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The Revolt of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest recognition both from readers ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... in a picture a hundred times copied, the copyists never reverting to the original. You cannot look into this eighteenth century poetry, excepting, of course, a great proportion of the poetry of Cowper and Thompson, without being struck with the sort of agreement that nothing should be said naturally. A certain set form and mode was employed for saying things that ought never to have been said twice in the same way. Wordsworth resolved ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... France, educated by the Jesuits, a stanch Catholic; wrote the "Argenis," a Latin romance, much thought of by Cowper, translated more than ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... also a tablet to his memory, erected in 1834, with an inscription by Southey. Among the monuments one finds two names which shine, it may be said, by reflected light—that of Mrs. Draper, Sterne's "Eliza," and Lady Hesketh, Cowper's devoted friend and cousin. A bust of Southey finds a place here as a tribute of respect in his native town; and the name of Sydney Smith comes to mind, who was a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... not according to present rules, but precedents for its irregularities are to be found in the doings of the seventeenth century, notably in the trial of Spencer Cowper by the same Judge Hatsel, and I have done my best to represent the habits of those country gentry who were not infected by the evils ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... names of those educated at Westminster includes Dryden, Bishop Atterbury, Cowley, Warren Hastings, Gibbon, Thomas Cowper, Charles Wesley, Lord John Russell, and many others well known wherever the English ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... summer's day all too short to get through the reading she had to do before her return to town. Now there were only the well-bound little-read English Classics, which were weeded out of her father's library to fill up the small book-shelves in the drawing-room. Thomson's Seasons, Hayley's Cowper, Middleton's Cicero, were by far the lightest, newest, and most amusing. The book-shelves did not afford much resource. Margaret told her mother every particular of her London life, to all of which Mrs. Hale ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of Dante, has just been here. He says that he visited Cowper's residence at Olney lately, and that his garden room, which suggested mine, is incredibly small, and not near so pretty. Come and see. You know, of course, that the 'Modern Antiques' in Our Village were Theodosia and Frances Hill, sisters ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... such a palace Aristaeus found Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale Of his lost bees to her maternal ear. Cowper, The Ice ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... seems to have been duly esteemed and appreciated by his contemporaries; and every tasteful scholar will concur in the opinion that his truly elegant Sapphics deserve a place among the few volumes of modern Latin verse, which he would place near Cowper's more extensively known favourite, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... out of cities to hedgerows and the woods and wild-flowers,—there is the secret of perennial poetry. And Tennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden as elaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. The best of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennyson appears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return to nature, as the phrase goes, means taking ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... and, flattering myself that we should proceed comfortably and rapidly, I gave orders to march. After much continued difficulty in urging and assisting our horses to drag the cart through the boggy road, we arrived, at about one o'clock in the morning, at Cowper's Plains, about ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... the country church-yard immortal in song alone, but has laid himself to rest with all the memories of that imperishable strain around him, beneath as green a sod as wraps the head of the humblest peasant for whom his muse implored 'the passing tribute of a sigh.' The pensive shade of Cowper beckons to the groves of Olney; and the melancholy ghost of Chatterton, (kindred to Cowper only in his woes and his genius,) has fled from the crowded thoroughfares of London, where he sank oppressed in the turmoil of life, to haunt forever, in the eyes of the dreaming enthusiast, those dim aisles ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... conical glass. A stuffed bird, a robin redbreast, perched on a frosted tree in the midst of these pale tropical offerings, glared at you with beady eyes. Antimacassars and other things of horror were in the room. Also a centre table upon which might have been found Cowper's poems, the Bible, Beecher's sermons, and an illustrated book about the Holy Land by some hardworking reverend. It was Aunt Jane's living-room; in it she had rocked and knitted for more than half a century. There were a few pictures ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Whig of the old school: he thought the Tory boroughs ought to be thrown open. He was generally considered a sensible man. He had read Blackstone, Montesquieu, Cowper's Poems, and The Rambler; and he was always heard with great attention in the House of Lords. In his moral character he was a bon Vivant, as far as wine is concerned; for choice eating he cared nothing. ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... since the day when the decision of Mr. Flint had separated him from his friend. When risen, he searched in a white wooden box, which stood at the foot of his bed, and contained his few possessions. He drew thence a pair of sempstress's scissors. These, with an odd volume of Cowper's poems, were all that remained to him of the woman he had loved—of the mother of his child—of his happy little home of other days. Two articles, totally useless to Sam; the scissors could only be of service ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... enough to all these; we refer to the treasures of our elder and better authors. If our young medical student would take our advice, and for an hour or two twice a week take up a volume of Shakspeare, Cervantes, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Montaigne, Addison, Defoe, Goldsmith, Fielding, Scott, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Helps, Thackeray, &c., not to mention authors on deeper and more sacred subjects—they would have happier and healthier minds, and make none the worse doctors. If they, by good fortune—for ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... would be new acquaintance for us. We are not old enough to remember "Wilkes and 45;" the cap of liberty is now seldom introduced into our national arms, and this and all such emblems are fast fading away. People who used to spout forth Cowper's line and a half on liberty, have given up the profession, and all men are at liberty to think as they please. Still ours is neither the golden nor the silver age of liberty: it is more like paper and platina liberty, things which have the weight ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... Cowper said, forty or fifty years ago, that he dared not name John Bunyan in his verse, for fear of moving a sneer. To our refined forefathers, we suppose, Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse, and the Duke of Buckinghamshire's Essay on Poetry, appeared to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... to his subject or not, Burns's descriptions of external nature are to a high degree marked by actual experience and observation. Even remembering Thomson in the previous generation and Cowper and Crabbe in his own, we may safely say that English poetry had hardly seen such realism. Its quality will be conceived from a few passages. Take the well-known description of the flood from The ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... his letters, the poet Cowper says: 'The ballad is a species of poetry, I believe, peculiar to this country.... Simplicity and ease are its proper characteristics.' Here we have one of the earliest attempts to define the modern meaning of a 'ballad.' Centuries of use and misuse of the word have left us no ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... his "Life of Cowper," has fallen into the mistake of supposing Blair one of the imitators of Young. Now, in fact, Blair's poem was 'written' before the "Last Day" of Young, or the "Night Thoughts" had appeared. Its originality is indeed one of its greatest merits and charms. The author ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... and modern, were pressed between its leaves. Here was a rose from Eve's bridal bower, and all those red and white roses which were plucked in the garden of the Temple by the partisans of York and Lancaster. Here was Halleck's Wild Rose of Alloway. Cowper had contributed a Sensitive Plant, and Wordsworth an Eglantine, and Burns a Mountain Daisy, and Kirke White a Star of Bethlehem, and Longfellow a Sprig of Fennel, with its yellow flowers. James Russell Lowell had ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hide-and-go-seek among its pretty furnishings throughout the midway hours. Even on cold, cloudy days there was still good cheer, for a big log fire crackled on the ample hearth beneath the oaken mantel, whereon a glowing iron had etched Cowper's invitation ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... hedge-row; and Sir Uvedale Price has urged me to spare a hoary maple which lords it over a half-acre of flat land. Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and Switzer for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the walling, and Smith of Deanston the ploughing. Burns embalms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn for me in a tangled wilderness. Knight names my cherries, and Walton, the kind master, goes with me over the hill to a wee brook that bounds down under hemlocks and soft maples, for "a contemplative man's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... and Miss Shuler addressed the convention and the public meeting in the evening, over which Mrs. Daniels presided. Twenty-four leagues were reported, largely the fruit of the organization work done during the year by Mrs. Mary O. Cowper of Durham, who had the assistance of Miss Mary E. Pidgeon, a national organizer. During the year a series of related suffrage papers were prepared by members of the Greensboro league and distributed by the State league among the different branches. Miss ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... unfrequently spoken of with admiration by those who know little of them but the episodes. The chief interest of the 'Task' is to be sought for in other sources than its descriptions, notwithstanding the curiosa felicitas of Cowper's diction. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... But these are no recreations for me. True they are healthy to the body; but not to the morals. This I say confidently, although some of my readers may smile, and call it an affectation of sensibility. Yet with Cowper, ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... In the Task, Cowper alludes to the story of Aristaeus, when speaking of the ice-palace built by the Empress Anne of Russia. He has been describing the fantastic forms which ice assumes in connection with ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... back from seeking the radical remedy. How easy it is to write or tell the diagnosis of such a case! but to be reconciled to the true mode of treatment, the prognosis, as doctors say, there is the difficulty, while I doubt not Cowper ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... animal, running away on the least alarm; but, poor fellow, he is too often caught by the dogs and killed, notwithstanding his swift running. It is rather difficult to tame Hares, but there is a very amusing account of three, named Puss, Tiney, and Bess, written by the poet Cowper, who kept them for some time, and one day you shall read about them. The colour of the Hare in this country is usually brown, but white Hares are found in very cold countries. The Hare does not burrow like the rabbit, but makes a kind of ...
— Tame Animals • Anonymous
... of the hymns of the church but of many poems that are not suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side—these and many others—have ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... prevent any risk of the enemy creeping up and sniping us in our sleep; still, with barbed wires round the hill, hung with old tins, and trenches and sangars to protect the position, we feel pretty safe, although the gallant Cowper of the Queen's has gone down with one company to reinforce Sandspruit ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... the year before I came here, where I had to room with a girl who almost drove me to distraction. She was a mild, modest little thing, who, as Cowper says: ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... with mechanical inking appliances were devised and patented, the most notable of which were those of Rutt, Bacon, Cowper, Applegath, and Napier, but the mechanical imperfections of these presses unfitted them for the better grades ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... to a bull.] [GREEK HERE] Homer Il. xvii 522 As when some vig'rous youth with sharpen'd axe A pastur'd bullock smites behind the horns And hews the muscle through; he, at the stroke Springs forth and falls. Cowper's Translation. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the John Gilpin in Cowper's poem?" cried John, excitedly. "He lived here, did he? And where ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... Cowper contributed much to the cause when he wrote the "Negro's Complaint," and thus excited the compassion of his numerous readers. Wedgewood aided the work, when he caused cameos to be struck, representing a kneeling African ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... Empress of Russia, Catherine II., in a magnificent freak, built a palace of ice, which was a nine-days' wonder. Cowper has given a poetical description of it in The ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... are next devoted to the modern Dutch and German school. In these is Denner's head of an old woman, which Cowper celebrates in a pretty poem—a marvel of faithful reproduction. One would think the old lady must have sat at least a year, till he had daguerreotyped every wrinkle and twinkle. How much better all this labor spent on the head of ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... couplets—of the same period, the time when he was yet in the early twenties of his age, Lamb shows himself an apt disciple of Cowper (to whom, by the way, he addressed a brief poem in this form "On His Recovery from an Indisposition"). These, however, were but the steps of a born writer learning his craft by more or less conscious imitation, and Lamb was not long in ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... hitherto she had been obliged to content herself with the ballads of Bamborough and the surrounding neighbourhood. Now, however, her brothers sent her such books as she could revel in—namely, the poetic works of Goldsmith, Cowper, Milton, and Shakespeare. She especially enjoyed her favourite author, Goldsmith, and passed many a pleasant hour in the lonely lighthouse-tower, reading the "Traveller" and the ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... had, even in childhood, ever been known to a light. She looked a little older than she really was; but that might arise from a certain air of dignity and the aforesaid aquiline nose. She generally wore short mittens. She never read any poetry but Goldsmith's and Cowper's. She was not amused by novels, though she had no prejudice against them. She liked a play and a pantomime, with a slight supper afterwards. She did not like concerts nor operas. At the beginning of the winter she selected some book to read, and some piece of work to commence. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... last mentioned writer, and his coadjutor Cowper, that we owe the first account of a man-like ape which has any pretensions to scientific accuracy and completeness. The treatise entitled, "'Orang-outang, sive Homo Sylvestris'; or the Anatomy of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Medici, a new edition, with its sequel, Christian Morals, and resemblant passages from Cowper's Task. By Mr Peace, Bristol. The text of this inestimable author is here cleared of its many errors, and the volume contains ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... the picturesque "Peasant's Nest" described by Cowper in his Task, pays one natural penalty for the rare beauty of its site. It pants on a rock whose gorges of lime are the seat of a perpetual thirst. In vain have the suffering natives sunk seven basins ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... in the habit of talking about the good old times of their ancestors, and the degeneracy of their contemporaries. This is in general merely a cant. But in 1756 it was something more. At this time appeared Brown's Estimate, a book now remembered only by the allusions in Cowper's Table Talk and in Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. It was universally read, admired, and believed. The author fully convinced his readers that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters: and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and Cowper—belong wholly to it; and "Lady Mary"—our most famous she-ditto—belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... give much from William Cowper. His poems—graceful always, and often devout even when playful—have few amongst them that are expressly religious, while the best of his hymns are known to every reader of such. Born in 1731, he was greatly influenced by ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... must needs stand adjourned at midnight. When twelve o'clock struck, Sir Ellis was still in the full flow of his turgid eloquence. His speech was constructed on the principle of, and (except, perhaps, in the matter of necessity) resembled, the long bridge in Cowper's "Task"— ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... all probability, but the word one which none but a poet could have used. There are reminiscences of Cowper's grand and simple lines on the "Loss of the Royal George," of Campbell's "Battle of the Baltic," of Tennyson's "Charge of the Six Hundred," not one of which but has a pleasing effect in the midst of such vigorous pictures as the new poet has given us fresh from the terrible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... no longer, Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard, and stronger Than the color of our kind. Slaves of gold! whose sordid dealings Tarnish all your boasted powers, Prove that you have human feelings, Ere you proudly question ours. W. Cowper. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... were Lady Morley the wit and Lady Cowper the humorist, and Lady Ashburton, who tamed Carlyle; Lady Jersey, the queen of fashion, and the two sister-queens of beauty, Lady Canning and Lady Waterford; Lady Tankerville, who as a girl had taken refuge in England from ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... whole valley of the Saco, river of the oak and elm, lies spread before the vision. The grand outlines of the gorge, the winding road through the whole extent, the leaping cascades flashing in the sunshine, all appear before the eye as in a picture. One feels like exclaiming with Cowper: ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... now examine two instances of the kind of teaching with which I am dealing and its results. The first is that of the poet Cowper, and anyone who takes the trouble to read his life as written by Southey will find the whole piteous tale fully drawn out. Southey hated the Catholic Church, of which, by the way, he knew absolutely nothing, but he had sufficient sense to reject the teachings of Calvinism. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... Thomas the Rhymer, are printed as an appendix to the preface. Scott intended to base his story on an ancient legend, found in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, concerning the horn and sword of Thomas of Hercildoune. Cannobie Dick, a jolly horse-cowper, was led by a mysterious stranger through an opening in a hillside into a long range of stables. In every stall stood a coal-black horse, and by every horse lay a knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword in his hand. All were as still and silent as ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray, and Cowper—belong wholly to it; and 'Lady Mary'—our most famous she-ditto—belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more remarkable than the ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... gallery of eminent mystics, but to investigate the chief types of mystical thought, it will not be necessary for me to describe her life or make extracts from her writings. The character of her quietism may be illustrated by one example—the hymn on "The Acquiescence of Pure Love," translated by Cowper:— ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... bread is deemed such dainty fare, That ev'ry prudent traveller His wallet loads with many a crust. COWPER. ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... thy friends." She spake. I drawing from beside my thigh My faulchion keen, with death-denouncing looks Rushed on her; she with a shrill scream of fear Ran under my raised arm, seized fast my knees, And in winged accents plaintive thus began: "Say, who art thou," etc.—Cowper's Odyss. x. 320. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... commemorative tablet recently placed there raises the question whether the rooms on the north or on the south side of the staircase are properly described as "two pair right." Some years before Oliver Goldsmith removed to Brick Court, the Temple was the residence of another poet—William Cowper. His attempted suicide there in 1763 shows how bad for his melancholy temperament was a solitary life in chambers. Charles Lamb, on the other hand—as we see, for instance, from his essay on the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... patronage of fashion, the great piece of water really looked natural, companionable, refreshing: you began to breathe; to unbutton your waistcoat, loosen your neckcloth, quote Chaucer, if you could recollect him, or Cowper, or Shakspeare, or Thomson's "Seasons;" in short, any scraps of verse that came into your head,—as your feet grew joyously entangled with fern; as the trees grouped forest-like before and round you; ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was aptly said, tenants' improvements were landlords' perquisites, and where point was lent to the differences by the fact that the few properties on which the equipment of the holdings was provided by the landlord were known as "English-managed estates," and the number of these, Lord Cowper told the House of Lords in 1887, could ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... defense of the rights of dumb animals, and there was one piece in the school Reader in which he must have found a sympathetic chord, and which was probably one of those that he loved to recite. It was written by the sad poet Cowper, ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... evening. And ever as it made a motion onwards, it found the nation more civilized, (else the change would not have been effected,) and raised them to a still higher civilization. The next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in his poem on Conversation. He speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant hour for dinner—the hour for the lautiores and the lepidi homines. Now this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... volume of Cowper and found his account of the three pet hares. Ellen read it, and then several of his smaller pieces of poetry. Then followed a long talk about hares and other animals; about Cowper and his friends and his way of life. Time passed swiftly ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... And thence a knot of wild flowers bear away; Anxious enquire where Clarkson, friend of man, Or all-accomplished Jones his race began; If of the modest mansion aught remains Where Heaven and Nature prompted Cowper's strains; Where Roscoe, to whose patriot breast belong [12] The Roman virtue and the Tuscan song, Led Ceres to the black and barren moor Where Ceres never gained a wreath before[1]: With curious ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... its dead await the morning of the resurrection. Yet, while contrasting the trees and atmosphere here with the comparatively stunted, puny foliage of England, and the chilly skies of a northern clime, I thought with Cowper respecting my own dear, but far ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... So wrote the charming Cowper, giving us to understand, by the drift of the context, that he intended the remark as having a moral as well as a physical application; since, as he there intimates, in "gain-devoted cities," whither naturally flow "the dregs and feculence of every land," and where ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate. The masses were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to protest against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of half-pitying poetic sentiment. How deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for freedom. The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... Buchanan Read (1822-1872), such lines as "the hilly Bosphorus," and "... For the hills of Ancient Asia through my trembling tears glimmer like fabrics...." As early as 1855, he had written for the U.S. Gazette and North American, an article on Read comparing his "New Pastoral" with the poetry of Cowper and Thompson. But Read to-day is familiar because of his "Sheridan's Ride." We are told that Boker had a work-room where he delighted ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... universal emancipation. A gentleman, by name Benjamin Lundy, published at that time an anti-slavery paper in Greenville, East Tennessee; which paper had an extensive circulation. About that time, I gathered up my anti-slavery juvenile doggerel, corrected it, as well as I could,—selected poems from Cowper and others, on the subject; forwarded the manuscript to the aforesaid B. Lundy, and the result was, a little volume of anti-slavery poems. But the abolition excitement broke out in the North, and the South took the alarm. The mouths of clergymen were closed in the ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... will laugh at winter when we hear The grim old churl about our dwellings rave: Thou, from that "ruler of the inverted year," Shalt pluck the knotty sceptre Cowper gave, And pull him from his sledge, and drag him in, And melt the icicles ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... Boadicea,' says father. 'She remains always young.' And he began to speak the lines out of Cowper, he did—waving his stick like an old trump—and famous ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... china-shop to all the dingy chefs-d'oeuvre of a Wedgwood, or the quaint shepherds and shepherdesses of Chelsea. As for books, were there not four or five resplendent volumes primly disposed on one of the tables; an illustrated edition of Cowper's lively and thrilling poems; a volume of Rambles in Scotland, with copper-plate engravings of "Melrose by night," and Glasgow Cathedral, and Ben Nevis, and other scenic and architectural glories of North Britain; a couple of volumes of Punch, and an illustrated ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... and hearing are generally admitted to be homologous, both with each other and with the various dermal appendages; hence these parts are liable to be abnormally affected in conjunction. Mr. White Cowper says "that in all cases of double microphthalmia brought under his notice he has at the same time met with defective development of the dental system." Certain forms of blindness seem to be associated with the colour ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... illustration of DRYDEN in his admirable character of SHAKESPERE.] He should trace her in all her windings, in her deepest recesses, in all her varied forms. It was thus that LUCRETIUS and VIRGIL, that THOMSON and COWPER were enabled to unfold their scenery with such distinctness and truth: and on this plan, while wandering through his native fields, attentive to 'each rural sight, each rural sound,' has Mr. BLOOMFIELD built ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... be of service to him, claimed him as his property. This led to the matter being taken up; a suit was instituted; and by a decision of the Court of King's Bench, slavery could no longer exist in England. That became law in 1772. The poet Cowper has some beautiful lines on ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... birthplace of that William Enfield, whose 'Speaker' was the terror and delight of more than one generation of England's ingenuous youth. Lord Chancellor Thurlow, of the rugged eyebrows and the savage look, and fellow-clerk with the poet Cowper, was born at Ashfield, an obscure village not far off. Robert Bloomfield, who wrote the 'Farmer's Boy,' came from Honington, where his mother kept a village school, and where he became a shoemaker. Capel Loft, an amiable gentleman of literary sympathies and pursuits, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... "The poet Cowper was a great friend to animals. Many of his most beautiful letters to his friends have very pleasant passages about his pretty tortoise shell kitten, and his distress that she would grow up into a cat, do ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... station is Berkhamsted. Cowper the poet was born here, his father was rector of the parish. Berkhamsted Castle is part of the hereditary property of the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. At this castle William the Conqueror, after the battle of Hastings, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... COWPER, WILLIAM, a celebrated English poet, originally intended for a lawyer, and appointed as Clerk of the Journals in the House of Lords at the age of 31 years, but his constitutional timidity prevented him from accepting it. He had to be placed in a lunatic asylum for ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... polished writers hesitated to name our incomparable allegorist, on account of his humble name and education. Thus Cowper sang— ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... be present at the meeting of the Book Club next week? was the next question. Then followed the recommendation to choose Southey's "Life of Cowper," unless she were inclined to be philosophical, and startle the ladies of St. Ogg's by voting for one of the Bridgewater Treatises. Of course Lucy wished to know what these alarmingly learned books were; and as it is always ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... their offices." Soon after his appointment to the seals, Somers took possession of this mansion at the north-west corner of the Fields; and after him Lord Keeper Sir Nathan Wright, Lord Chancellor Cowper, and Lord Chancellor Harcourt used it as an official residence. But the arrangement was not acceptable to the legal dignitaries. They preferred to dwell in their private houses, from which they were not liable to be driven by ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... of a poet are worthy to behold the celebrated valley of Llangollen, where we next proceeded, after having drawn largely on the firm of Messrs. Wordsworth, Cowper, Thomson, and Co. for language to pay a due tribute of admiration to this surpassing scene,—but who has a genius equal to the majesty of nature? I thought of the Mahometan who turned back when he observed some such rich and fertile plain, saying, he had been only promised one Paradise, and did not ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... continued his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have appointed him General for life, had it not become ineffectual by the resolution of Lord Cowper, who refused ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson |
