"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whole, sustains a lofty level of creative vigour, and is dignified, moreover, with something of the epic flavour, as the old order is seen breaking up under the advance of new ideas and revolutionary enthusiasms.... Among the best books that the present age is ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... been, from the first, entitled an "Oriental Romance." A much worse mistake (because wilful, and with no very charitable design) was that of certain persons, who would have it that the poem was meant to be epic!—Even Mr. D'Israeli has, for the sake of a theory, given in to this very gratuitous assumption:—"The Anacreontic poet," he says, "remains only Anacreontic ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... choose your tavern for lunch with expert care. And when new ground is covered and new troops are seen, we capture sometimes those sharp delightful moments of thirsting interest that made the Retreat into an epic and the ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... portrayal of the most subtle shades of passion (the one treasury left untouched by our predecessors)—for all this the modern novel affords free scope. How far superior is all this to the cut-and-dried logic-chopping, the cold analysis to the eighteenth century!—'The Novel,' say sententiously, 'is the Epic grown amusing.' Instance Corinne, bring Mme. de Stael up to support your argument. The eighteenth century called all things in question; it is the task of the nineteenth to conclude and speak the last word; and the last word of the nineteenth century has ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... sung his lays, and the epic resumes its story. The time-relations are not altogether good in this long passage which describes the rejoicings of "the day after"; but the present shift from the riders on the road to the folk at the hall is not very violent, and is of a ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... consisting of four stanzas and a couplet, are no more Sonnets than they are Epic Poems. The Sonnet is of a particular and arbitrary construction; it partakes of the nature of Blank Verse, by the lines running into each other at proper intervals. Each line of the first eight, rhimes four times, and the order in which those rhimes should fall is ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Italian poets. Our translations may be fine, scholarly, dignified and the rest of it, but they bear little semblance to the originals. Dryden's version of the 'Aeneid' may be read, not as a translation but as an epic in the English of a great poet; and to those who are masters of sufficient Latin to explore the ancients by the help of commentaries, Conington's translation will be of assistance. Horace is utterly untranslatable, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... story of a single adventure in the career of Gilgamesh. The whole story is a composite product, and it is possible that some of the stories are artificially attached to the central figure. (See GILGAMESH, EPIC OF.) ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; the cathedrals that have remained are but the standard from which we may imagine the loving perfection to which every ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... near, Albano's scarce divided waves Shine from a sister valley; and afar The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves The Latian coast, where sprung the Epic war, "Arms and the man," whose reascending star Rose o'er an empire; but beneath thy right Fully reposed from Rome; and where yon bar Of girdling mountains intercepts thy sight, The Sabine farm was tilled, the ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... made, it is true, between the poet and other artists in this respect. Monsieur Perrot says, "The vase- painter reproduces what he sees; while the epic poets endeavoured to represent a distant past. If Homer gives swords of bronze to his heroes of times gone by, it is because he knows that such were the weapons of these heroes of long ago. In arming them with bronze ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... her epic poet, I think he will sing the omnibus; but the poet who sings the hansom must be of a lyrical note. I do not see how he could be too lyrical, for anything more like song does not move on wheels, and its rapid rhythm suggests the quick play ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the contrary, in the very extent of its sphere, can better measure itself with the Universe, and create with epic profusion. In an Iliad there is room even for a Thersites; and what does not find a place in the great epic of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... further. It was an age when literary men were more inclined to comment on writings of the past than to produce original work. Literature was engaged in taking stock of itself. Homer was, of course, professedly admired by all, but more admired than imitated. Epic poetry was out of fashion and we find many epigrams of this period—some by Callimachus—directed against the "cyclic" poets, by whom were meant at that time those who were always dragging in conventional and commonplace epithets and phrases peculiar to epic poetry. Callimachus was in accordance ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... whole series of this second Gothic war and the victory of Narses, (l. iv. c. 21, 26—35.) A splendid scene. Among the six subjects of epic poetry which Tasso revolved in his mind, he hesitated between the conquests of Italy by Belisarius and by Narses, (Hayley's ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... position to the highest place in the pantheon is afforded by Vishnu, a nature god of some sort, described in the early documents as traversing the universe in three strides. Relatively insignificant in the earlier period and in the Upanishads, he appears in the epic, and afterwards, as the greatest of the gods, and, in the form of his avatar Krishna, becomes the head of a religion which has often been compared with Christianity in the purity of its moral conceptions. By his side in this later time stands his rival Civa, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Roman Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Hebrew poetry, epic and lyrical, was thus antagonistic to the drama. So, also, Dr. Chrysander contends, was the Hebrew himself. Not only had he no predilection for plastic creation, his life was not dramatic in the sense illustrated in Greek tragedy. He lived a care-free, sensuous existence, and either ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... part of the wall have three heavenly nymphs standing in a stately manner with arms interlaced. A series of sculptures which has been preserved almost intact on the inner side of the parapet wall of the Siva Temple is a repetition of the first part of the Rama legend as told in the Indian epic, "Ramayana," and it is thought that the corresponding series of the other temples may have represented the sequel to that history. A ponderous cornice richly ornamented, which is now almost gone, runs over this ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... two thousand years for an idea is a privilege that has been accorded only to Israel—'the soldier of God.' That were no tragedy, but an heroic epic, even as the prophet Isaiah had prefigured. The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom of an Israel unworthy of his sufferings. And this was the Israel—the high tragedian in the comedy sock—that I tried humbly to typify ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... man-eaters as told by Col. Patterson. A lion story is usually a tale of adventures, often very terrible and pathetic, which occupied but a few hours of one night; but the tale of the Tsavo man-eaters is an epic of terrible tragedies spread out over several months, and only at last brought to an end by the resource and determination of ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... the most natural and indigenous productions of a true author's mind, is, by common consent, an epic poem: verily, a wearisome, unnecessary, unfashionable bit of writing. Nevertheless, let my candour humbly acknowledge that, for the larger canticle of two mortal days, I was brooding over, and diligently brewing up, a right happy, capital, and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fifteenth century Florentine Art, in six octavo volumes; an analysis of the Attic art of the fifth century B.C. in three volumes; an exhaustive history of northern thirteenth-century art, in ten volumes; a life of Sir Walter Scott, with analysis of modern epic art, in seven volumes; a life of Xenophon, with analysis of the general principles of education, in ten volumes; a commentary on Hesiod, with final analysis of the principles of Political Economy, in nine volumes; and a general description of the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... here be remarked that they have been constructed, as a rule, from very unsanctified timber, as may be seen from the examples we have heretofore given. Not only the people and the priests but the poets have paid their tribute to Yermak's fame, epic poems having been written about his exploits and his deeds ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Farm," is among them what the star Sirius is in the already glorious heavens of a November midnight. As a thing of beauty, of simple grandeur, of wild strength, of heroic nobility, as a song, in short, I do not hesitate to affirm that it finds its like only in the Iliad. It is an epic song, and a song not of an individual soul but of a whole nation. Written down it was indeed by the hands of Gogol, but composed it was by the whole of Little Russia. As the whole of heroic Greece sings in the wrath of Achilles, so the whole of Cossakdom, which in its robust truth and manly simplicity ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... are represented, and they also consist of dancing, by which religious fervor is produced, and they give rise to music, romance, poetry, and drama. Thus it is that the esthetic arts have their origin in mythology. The epic poem and the symphony are lineal descendants of the dance, and the dance arises as the first form of worship, born of the mythic conception of the powers ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... and he is not the last, of our picturesque historians. It was in 1837 that Carlyle, who four years before had startled the English-reading public by his strangely worded, bewildering "Sartor Resartus," brought out his astonishing "History of the French Revolution"—a prose poem, an epic without a hero, revealing as by "flashes of lightning" the ghastly tragedy and comedy of that tremendous upheaval; and in 1845 he followed up the vein thus opened by his lifelike study of "Oliver Cromwell," which was better received ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... epic did not end a day too soon. There was no more life left in it; and God had something better in store for England. Raleigh's ideal was a noble one: but God's was nobler far. Raleigh would have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed her very vitals by that ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... modern progressive hopes out of this static medievalism is one of the epic occurrences of history. The causes which furthered the movement seem now in retrospect to be woven into a fabric so tightly meshed as to resist unraveling. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see at least some of the major factors which furthered ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... the most pathetic, King Lear the most terrible, Hamlet the subtlest and deepest work of Shakespeare, the highest in abrupt and steep simplicity of epic tragedy is Macbeth. There needs no ghost come from the grave, any reader may too probably remark, to tell us this. But in the present generation such novelties have been unearthed regarding Shakespeare that the reassertion of an old truth may seem to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... her life with sunshine; the universe could not be foiled in its attempt. Young love argues from effect to cause, and so limitless seemed the strength of his sentiment that the simplicity of her mind and the susceptibility of her girlhood were to him like some epic poem which arouses men to passion and strong deeds. Ignominiously bound as he was, his heart lightened; all doubt of his mission to love her and its ultimate success passed from him. He turned the handle and pushed the door ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... was called the Academy, and into these he only admitted the masters, following the guidance of his own eccentric judgment quite as much as he followed traditional estimate. Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton of course had undisputed possession of the department devoted to the "Kings of Epic," as he styled them. Sophocles, Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he admitted to his list of "Kings of Tragedy." Lope he rejected on literary grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency bad. He rejected Rabelais ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... 1881. Completed the scientific course at the Nebraska Normal College 1897; received the degree of Litt.D. from the University of Nebraska 1917. Declared Poet Laureate of Nebraska by a joint resolution of the Legislature, Apr. 1921, in recognition of the significance of the American epic cycle upon which he has been working for eight years. Winner of the prize of five hundred dollars offered by the Poetry Society of America for the best volume of poetry ("The Song of Three Friends") published by an American in 1919. Has ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... be sung another golden age, The rise of empire and of arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest heads ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... solemn epic has numerous instances of it:—Hector in "Iliad" xi, 297, is setting the Trojans on "like dogs at a wild boar or lion." In xi, 557, Ajax retreating slowly from the Trojans is compared to an ass who has gone to feed in a field, and whom the boys find great difficulty in driving out, "though they ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Hutton and continued with rare skill and patience by Lyell, the dominant view of the past history of the earth was catastrophic. Great and sudden physical revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the end of every geological epoch was signalised by a cataclysm, by which every living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand-new creation when ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... reigns in it. A noble book! All men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem of man's destiny and God's ways with him here on this earth, and all in such free, flowing outlines, grand in its simplicity and its epic melody and repose of reconcilement! There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eye-sight and vision for all things—material things no less than spiritual; the horse—'thou hast clothed his neck with thunder;' ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... that has ever passed through them; here it is only Io, daughter of Inachus, loved by Zeus and hunted by the gadfly, who fled outcast through the East. Her story is told in Aeschylus' Prometheus and in a magnificent chorus of his Suppliant Women. (See Rise of the Greek Epic, pp. 247 ff.) ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of the race from which ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... written in a single metre, the elegiac couplet, the metre appropriated to inscriptions from the earliest recorded period.[1] Traditionally ascribed to the invention of Archilochus or Callinus, this form of verse, like the epic hexameter itself, first meets us full grown.[2] The date of Archilochus of Paros may be fixed pretty nearly at 700 B.C. That of Callinus of Ephesus is perhaps earlier. It may be assumed with probability that ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... great epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of youth. He is frightened enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element of fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is the central spirit of the Bronte novel. It is the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the small outlook and the small creed, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import? Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of "documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's "Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present general aesthetic attitude and inspiration, and must share not only the romanticists' impatience with ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... I should go to London oftener,' said Picotee, to turn the conversation. 'But she lives mostly in the library. And, O, what do you think? She is writing an epic poem, and employs ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... that speciment that our schoolmaster ain't simply flirtin' with the muses when he originates that epic; no sir, he means business; an' whenever I throws it into the selectmen, I does it jestice. The trustees used to silently line out for home when I finishes, an' never a yeep. It stuns 'em; it shore ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... experiences in an epic of fresh and thrilling sensations has written,—"If a man be not born of his mother with a natural Chifney bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society,—a time for not liking tamed people,—a time for not dancing quadrilles,—a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... and wrote epic poetry. I assume that you have found it worth while to discontinue that habit, for I never see your name among the publishers' announcements. But your poetry used to be magnificent when you recited it in the shadow of the deserted fives-court; and I believe you ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... well as the false one had done, and all their attempts of this kind seemed, rather to debase religion than heighten poetry. Spenser endeavoured to supply this with morality, and to make instruction, instead of story the subject of an epic poem. His execution was excellent, and his flights of fancy very noble and high. But his design was poor; and his moral lay so bare, that it lost the effect. It is true, the pill was gilded, but so thin that the colour and the taste were easily discovered.—Mr. Rymer ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the novel is told in a very charming love story which has 'Barbara Worth' for its inspiration. With her winning the author has deftly interwoven an epic of national reclamation work ...
— The Uncrowned King • Harold Bell Wright
... about the sorrers of step-children, but I ain't never come up with no epic as yet portrayin' the sufferin's of a step-ma. If I had a talent like your husband's got, I'll be blest if I wouldn't do it. What I went through with them children aged me ten years ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... noble English tongue, Who holdest seizin of our speech, Whose epic Mowgli first did reach The valves of all ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga and epic, how shall we ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... his own bedroom, when no alien eye penetrated his solitude, his bitterness was epic and terrible. In the consistency of that egotism which had first made, then unmade him, there was no room for remorse; no possibility of self-accusation. If his star was to set it would set on his last terrific stand against the squares of the enemy, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... reigning beauty; but she was not at all averse to the literary entertainments of this salon, in which her own fascinations were so delightfully sung. She found the flattering verses of Voiture more to her taste than the stately epic of Chapelain, took his side warmly against Benserade in the famous dispute as to the merits of their two sonnets, "Job" and "Urania," and won him a doubtful victory. The poems of Voiture lose much of their flavor in translation, but I venture to give ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... i.e. John my Darling, than by his proper name. Of all Jock Mo-ghoal's stories Jock Mo-ghoal was himself the hero; and certainly most wonderful was the invention of the man. As recorded in his narratives, his life was one long epic poem, filled with strange and startling adventure, and furnished with an extraordinary machinery of the wild and supernatural; and though all knew that Jock made imagination supply, in his histories, the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... have heard Professor Forbes's book on Glaciers called an epic poem, and not without reason: but what gives that noble book its epic character is neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but the discovery of those laws: the methodic, truthful, valiant, patient battle between man and nature, his final victory, his wresting from ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... beautiful god, was done to death by a stroke of mistletoe, 101 sq.; story of Balder in the older Edda, 102 sq.; story of Balder as told by Saxo Grammaticus, 103; Balder worshipped in Norway, 104; legendary death of Balder resembles the legendary death of Isfendiyar in the epic of Firdusi, 104 sq.; the myth of Balder perhaps acted as a magical ceremony; the two main incidents of the myth, namely the pulling of the mistletoe and the burning of the god, have perhaps their counterpart in popular ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... given choice of the tasks we try, Gathering grain or chaff; One of her favoured servants toils at an epic high, One, that a child ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... opposite, form, is also within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present, but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama, and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example, in examining Paradise Lost considers in order the fable, the characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he considers the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... there are quantities of wild creatures—quail, rabbits, doves, and ground squirrels and, unfortunately, a number of social outcasts. Never shall I forget an epic incident in our history—the head of the family in pajamas at dawn, in mortal combat with a small black-and-white creature, chasing it through the cloisters with the garden hose. Oh, yes, there is plenty of adventure ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... There was no one within hearing. "I asked Mazarin for this mission simply because I feared to remain in Paris and dare not now return. Your poet put his name upon a piece of paper which might have proved an epic but which has turned out to be pretty poor stuff. This paper was in De Brissac's care; was, I say, because it was missing the morning after his death. To-morrow, a week or a month from now, Mazarin will have it. And . . ." Victor drew his finger ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... later on. Prose and poetry are to have new developments. Romances are to show us heroic ideals. Lyrics of joy, of sorrow, of passion, of emotion natural and spiritual, are to be sung. The sense of beauty is to grow. The drama is to arise from beginnings to be but faintly traced in early days. Epic poetry is to take a great place. Character modified, enriched by foreign strains, is to mould a noble literature—noble through many and many a gift and grace. A great poet is to arise with sympathies large and wide, to show us, in verse most musical, in words full meaning, with that grace of ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... man they rouse into resistance, as by a personal provocation and insult. And if it happens that these opposite effects show themselves in cases wearing a national importance, they raise what would else have been a mere casualty into the tragic or the epic grandeur of a fatality. The superb character, for instance, of Caesar's intellect throws a colossal shadow as of predestination over the most trivial incidents of his career. On the morning of Pharsalia, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... indescribable carnage and terror. Cassandra and the Trojan women, driven to take shelter in the temple of Cybele, slay themselves rather than fall into the hands of their captors. 'La Prise de Troie' is perhaps epic rather than dramatic, but as a whole it leaves an impression of severe and spacious grandeur, which can only be paralleled in the finest inspirations of Gluck. In the second division of the work, 'Les Troyens a Carthage,' human interest is paramount. Berlioz was an enthusiastic student ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... language of Greece, which became so powerful in the development of the Roman literature and Roman civilization and, in the later Renaissance, a powerful engine of progress. Associated with the language is the literature of the Greeks. The epic poems of Homer, the later lyrics, the drama, the history, and the polemic, all had their highest types presented in the Greek literature. Latin and modern German, English and French owe to these great originators a debt of gratitude for ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... pleasing duty to be able to corroborate to some extent, Mr. F. Bayham's favourable report. Fancy sketches and historical pieces our young man had eschewed; having convinced himself either that he had not an epic genius, or that to draw portraits of his friends, was a much easier task than that which he had set himself formerly. Whilst all the world was crowding round a pair of J. J,.'s little pictures, a couple of chalk heads were admitted into the Exhibition (his great picture of Captain Crackthorpe ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... public. I find character and life in it. There is no poem or novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion. What I think of Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem. A hero must be ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... was I who changed them! The shock of poverty was terrible at first, not because I set too much value on money, nor because I was unwilling to work, but because I felt I had no power of attack. My nature was introspective, I lived in an epic of my own creation. My strength and my courage were wrapped up in dreams, and seemed to have no relation to the practical world. I could have faced the devil himself for an ideal, but to make my own ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... history of the great Rising. That has been done by abler men, who were at the centre of the business, and had some knowledge of strategy and tactics; whereas I was only a raw lad who was privileged by fate to see the start. If I could, I would fain make an epic of it, and show how the Plains found at all points the Plateau guarded, how wits overcame numbers, and at every pass which the natives tried the great guns spoke and the tide rolled back. Yet I fear it ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... smoke and flame into the lurid sky all around the horizon. Up to the foot of the mountains the sea covered the vast plain; and the action of these waves of fire and steaming floods forms a natural epic of the grandest order. Prodigious quantities of ashes and cinders were discharged from the craters; and these, deposited and hardened by long pressure under water, formed the reddish-brown earthy rock called tufa, of which the seven hills ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... fugitive pieces; but noyour fugitive poetry is apt to become stationary with the bookseller. It should be something at once solid and attractivenone of your romances or anomalous noveltiesI would have you take high ground at once. Let me see: What think you of a real epic?the grand old-fashioned historical poem which moved through twelve or twenty-four books. We'll have it soI'll supply you with a subjectThe battle between the Caledonians and RomansThe Caledoniad; or, Invasion Repelled;let that be the titleit ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus. Howard Pyle's illustrations render the spirit of the Homeric age with ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... from the Bhagavad Gita, that glorious episode in the mighty civil war which shattered India, and left her defenceless against the successive invaders who were to complete her fall. This great epic poem introduces to us Arjuna, a noble prince, about to take part in the strife. The two armies, arrayed for battle, are on the point of engaging, arrows have already begun to pierce the air. In the opposing ranks Arjuna sees cherished relatives, dear friends, and revered teachers, whom destiny ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Mardi over, a remarkable nose is a prominent feature: an ever obvious passport to distinction. For, after all, this gaining a name, is but the individualizing of a man; as well achieved by an extraordinary nose, as by an extraordinary epic. Far better, indeed; for you may pass poets without knowing them. Even a hero, is no hero without his sword; nor Beelzebub himself a lion, minus that lasso-tail of his, wherewith he catches his prey. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... muse, with as keen a relish as the most devout Christian does the hymns of Dr. WATTS. Melody comes of Heaven, and is a gift vouchsafed to all generations, and all kinds of men. In proof of this, let us adduce a single extract from the great epic of the Hawaiian poet, POPPOOFI, entitled ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... literary composition. Some time ago he had thought it would be a mighty fine thing to be a poet, and had tried his hand at verse. Finding he possessed some facility, he decided that he was a poet, and at once started an epic poem in rhyme on the Life of Nelson, the material being supplied by Southey. This morning he did ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the setting. Mr. MACKENZIE is an overlord of words, old and new, bending them to strange and unexpected uses, yet always avoiding affectation by the sheer vitality of his strength. As for the matter of these first chapters, one might say that nothing whatever happens in them. They are an epic of adolescence wherein growth is the only movement. Events are for the second half of the volume. Here Michael has come down from Oxford, and has set himself to find and rescue by marriage the girl Lily, whom (you remember) he loved as a boy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... Ravana is told in the Ramayana, which with the Mahabarata form the two great epic poems of the Hindoos; the latter was written by Vyasa, and the former ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Veda; the Brahmanic literature, with the supplementary Upanishads, and the S[u]tras or mnemonic abridgments of religious and ceremonial rules; the legal texts, and the religious and theological portions of the epic; and the later sectarian writings, called Pur[a]nas. The great heresies, again, have their own special writings. Thus far we shall draw on the native literature. Only for some of the modern sects, and for the religions of ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... morning, and it would seem also that they thought that the waters mentioned in the story signified the rain. But why do they speak of these acts as heroic deeds, exploits of a mighty warrior, in the same tone and with the same epic fire as when they sing of Indra's battles in times near to their own, real battles in which their own forefathers, strong in their faith in the god, shattered the armies of hostile Aryan tribes or the fortresses of dark-skinned natives? The personality of Indra and the spirit in which his deeds ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... and virtue; Milton and Cromwell; Milton's clear logic; his tenacity; his scurrility, and its excuse; his fierce and fantastic wit; reappearance of these qualities in Paradise Lost; the style of his prose works analysed and illustrated; his rich vocabulary; his use of Saxon; the making of an epic poet 39 ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the Chanson de Roland gives me infinite pleasure—particularly the Introduction, treating of the national epic and of the Mahabharata which, it seems, tells of the fight between the ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... bodies - is an old and thoroughly Hindu repertory. It is the rude beginning of that fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio, produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last development, the novel - that prose-epic of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... procession, in the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis Stevenson's Balfour cousins as something very precious! The occasion was the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, in 1874, and, yellow and faded, the Epic still graces my Every Day Book, and, as one reads its inspiriting lines, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... epic poet of Samos, who flourished at the end of the 5th century B.C. After the fall of Athens he settled at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, where he was the associate of Agathon, Melanippides, and Plato the comic poet. The only work that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on a note ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... Petrarca, born 1304, died 1374; for his Latin epic poem on the carer of Scipio, called "Africa," he was solemnly crowned with the poetic laurel in the Capitol of Rome, on Easter-day ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... with conscience, no turning towards the light, no sorrowful confessions at all. He has given us a great deal, but it is not too much to say that what he rejected, a Catholic poet would have seized with delight as the purplest patches of his epic, and the climax to which ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... amongst the nobility attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, like eels, are accustomed to being skinned, whereas the well-born ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... It does not stagger me to hear his disciples calling him, as HEGEL does, 'a man of a mighty mind,' or, as LAW does, 'the illuminated Behmen,' and 'the blessed Behmen.' 'In speculative power,' says dry DR. KURTZ, 'and in poetic wealth, exhibited with epic and dramatic effect, Behmen's system surpasses everything of the kind ever written.' Some of his disciples have the hardihood to affirm indeed that even ISAAC NEWTON ploughed with Behmen's heifer, but had not the boldness ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... towards getting a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Beristain, will be confirmed. Mexico, he says, was the sunflower of Spain. When in her principal universities there were no learned men to fill the mathematical chairs, Mexico could boast of Don Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora: when in Madrid there was no one who had written a good epic poem, in Mexico the Bernardo ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has, in his epic of the Oberon made admirable use of much the ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Resemble the walls the builders, buffeted, stern, and worn. To us they left the law, Order, simplicity, obedience, And the wall is the bond they gave the nation At its birth of courage and unflinching faith. Before the epic here inscribed began, They wrote their course upon a trackless sea. O, tiny craft, bearing a nation's seed! Frail shallop, quick with unborn states! Autumn was mellow in the fatherland when they set sail, And winter deepened as they neared the West. Out of the desert sea they came ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... years; Heaven and hell rolled into one, glory and blood and tears; Life's pattern picked with a scarlet thread, where once we wove with a grey To remind us all how we played our part in the shock of an epic day? ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... so infantine that many people thought it impossible, at first sight, that he could be a man of sense or genius. He was as eager about a new paper to his wife's drawing-room, or his own new wig, as about a new tragedy or a new epic poem.' He adds, that he was 'capable of the most profound conversation, when circumstances led to it. He had not the least desire to shine, but was delighted beyond measure to shew other people in their best guise to his friends. "Did not I shew you the lion well to-day?" used he to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... from the west; and the only obstacle that prevented that spur being occupied in full by the enemy was a small tower, used for signalling purposes and occupied by a few Sikhs. The story of that little post is an epic in itself; surrounded on all sides, isolated from all help, with scanty food, and at the end no water, for six days and nights ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... disaffected, ran full tilt towards the solemn equipage of the Duke, which the projecting lance threatened to perforate from window to window, at the risk of transfixing as many in its passage as the celebrated thrust of Orlando, which, according to the Italian epic poet, broached as many Moors as ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the qualities which can powerfully affect Englishmen. Not only were the Poets of our most national age dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems. Take away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury Tales become indeed, what they have been most untruly called, mere versions of French or Italian Fables. Milton may have ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... for me to bring forward many close parallels between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and Beowulf and the Njal's saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... short epic of the Persian Empire, ending alas! as all human epics are wont to end, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... that an inordinate love of decoration finds its opportunity and its snare. To keep the most elaborate comparison in harmony with its occasion, so that when it is completed it shall fall back easily into the emotional key of the narrative, has been the study of the great epic poets. Milton's description of the rebel legions adrift on the flaming sea is a fine instance of the difficulty ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... nothing of the Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann's 'Streifereien') that their 'Dschangariade' is the finest of all epic poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr. Johnson's efforts as a biographer. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... a poet now, whose ready rhymes. Like Tommy Moore's, came tripping to their places— Reeling along a merry troll of chimes, With careless truth,—a dance of fuddled Graces; Hear it—Gazette, Post, Herald, Standard, Times, I'd write an epic! Coffee for its basis; Sweet as e'er warbled forth from cockney throttles Since ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... worthy also of being called the Great—a sovereign who voluntarily conceded liberty to his people, and founded it on bases which all the inglorious artifices of his successors have been unable to undermine—but, alas! such men, like Epic poets, seem destined to succeed but ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... thocht it took as muckle natural genius to mak a jug of punch as an epic poem, sic as Paradise Lost, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... matieres, are French in their early treatment, with the exception of the national work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms, except those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse folk-epic, are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the best literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but that which all the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... for romance—for epic and tragic poetry—in the lives of those pioneer women! The lonely cabin in the depths of the forest; the father away; the mother rocking her babe to sleep; the howling of the wolves; the storm beating on the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... deterred from heroic poetry. There was another monarch of this island (for he did not fetch his heroes from foreign countries) whom he considered as worthy the epic muse, and he dignified "Alfred" (1723) with twelve books. But the opinion of the nation was now settled; a hero introduced by Blackmore was not likely to find either respect or kindness; "Alfred" took his place by "Eliza" in ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... attempt to reach the diction of the 'Paradise Lost', or aspire to the tremendous style of Shakespeare. You must not confound things, though. A Lyric diction is one thing—a Dramatic diction is another, requiring the utmost force and conciseness of expression,—and Epic diction is still another; I conceive it to be something between the Lyric and Dramatic, with all the luxuriance of the former, and all the ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Are we not mortal, and are not books immortal? Homer's harp is broken and Horace's lyre is unstrung, and the voices of the great singers are hushed; but their songs—their songs are imperishable. O friend! what moots it to them or to us who gave this epic or that lyric to immortality? The singer belongs to a year, his song to all time. I know it is the custom now to credit the author with his work, for this is a utilitarian age, and all things are by the pound or the piece, and ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... me that Gogol's emphasis on the heroic rather than on the historical—Gogol is generally discounted as an historian—would give the reader a proper approach to the mood in which he created "Taras Bulba," the finest epic in Russian literature. Gogol never wrote either his history of Little Russia or his universal history. Apart from several brief studies, not always reliable, the net result of his many years' application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic in prose, Homeric in ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... acquired a taste for chatting, and I loved to hear the recital of his adventures in the polar seas. He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... hitherto been a sealed book to the mere English reader. Mr. Lettsom has however just published a most successful translation of it under the title of The Fall of the Nibelungers. Few will rise from a perusal of the English version of this great national epic—which in its present form is a work of the thirteenth century—without being struck with the innate power and character of the original poem; and without feeling grateful to Mr. Lettsom for furnishing them with so pleasing and spirited a ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... chosen two from which to reprint brief passages. The first is Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, the simple and straightforward personal narrative of one whom all must now concede to have been a very great man; the other is that human and poignant epic of the stranger from Denmark who became one of us and of whom we as a people are tenderly proud. The Making of an American is in some ways a unique book; concrete, specific, self-revealing and yet dignified; a book that one could wish that ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... wooing and winning of Naida, the raid of Yaklus and his warriors, the rescue of the captured Naida, and the final victory, celebrated by ceremonial dances, are all described. The action is rapid and the story is told in the direct, simple style of the true epic. Illustrated with thirty ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... would praise and pension ME; but envy be still! Your existence was made happy indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Hotel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished Epic. "Who, indeed," says a sympathetic author, M. Theophile Gautier, "who could expect less than a miracle from a man so deeply learned in the laws of art—a perfect Turk in the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the great?" Bishops and politicians combined ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect with its quadrennial changes. The just budded Freshmen of the class of '64 could hardly without help decipher "The Rebelliad," which in the Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day. The good old gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes of the college-speech of their grandsons. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... but be interlaced in sense or sound sufficiently to carry on the narrative. The result, to some tastes, is a medium quite unsurpassed for the particular purpose. The only objection to it at all capable of being maintained, that I can think of, is that the total effect is rather lyrical than epic. And so much of this must be perhaps allowed as comes to granting that Scott's verse-romance is rather a long and cunningly sustained and varied ballad than an ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... indicated by its title: the 'Exodus' is the period of development for Israel from a family to a nation, and towards the close of the period Balaam, an outsider, bears witness in spite of himself to the growing numbers of the nation and to its glorious future.—In literary form it is a 'mixed epic' or 'canti-fable': a story in prose that breaks into verse at appropriate places. (Compare the expression took up his parable: the parable is an undefined term for a more specialised literary form ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... in charge," Ludovick asked, "and whence did you come?" Fearing he might seem motivated by vulgar curiosity, he explained, "I am doing research for an epic poem." ...
— The Blue Tower • Evelyn E. Smith
... lowest Fishes, but we bring together two kinds of animals so remote from each other in structure that the wildest imagination can scarcely fancy a transition between them. A comparison may make my meaning clearer as to the relative standing of these groups. The Epic Poem is a higher order of composition than the Song,—yet we may have an Epic Poem which, from its inferior mode of execution, stands lower than a Song that is perfect of its kind. So the plan of certain branches is more comprehensive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various |
