"Idyllic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of our school-days and our fortunes. I told her how I had gone down to the city, how I had prospered, of my adventures in the world, of my marriage—dealing very gently with my relations with the late Mrs. Stanhope—of my bereavement and present idyllic existence. And she told me of herself, how she had lived on and on in the little cottage, caring only for the support and education of her niece, Phyllis Kinglake, an orphan for nearly twenty years. "You remember Sylvia?" she said, with ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... an idyllic charm in these pictures so simply and gracefully sketched. She sees with the vision of one lying down to sleep after a life of pain, and dreaming of the green fields, the blue skies, the running brooks, the trees, the flowers, that ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico. A month later he caught a bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of December 12 he peacefully ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... you are! Well, they are romantic—romantic like a gentle poem, like an idyllic tale; but I deny that they are romanticistic. Their whole lives deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as the every-day realities. But the lives of those others who make all life costly by refusing their share of its work ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of the idyllic hours of Eric's wooing were spent in the old orchard; the garden end of it was now a wilderness of roses—roses red as the heart of a sunset, roses pink as the early flush of dawn, roses white as the snows on mountain peaks, roses ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the right scale. It was part of the general desire for justice that fermented within her, the passion for progress; and it was also in some degree her interest in Verena—a suspicion, innocent and idyllic, as any such suspicion on Miss Birdseye's part must be, that there was something between them, that the closest of all unions (as Miss Birdseye at least supposed it was) was preparing itself. Then his being a ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... orthodox trench warfare. The weather was bright, the enemy entirely inactive, and the wood, with its oxlips and other spring flowers, its budding branches unscarred by shell fire, was a picture of charm rare in modern warfare. Forty-eight hours only were spent in this idyllic spot before we returned to Romarin to the accompaniment of the roar of mines, artillery, and concentrated rifle fire and machine gun fire, which heralded the sudden outbreak of the Battle of Hill 60, 4 miles ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist, or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic picture of rural life, entitled Shore Acres, a melodramatic scene in a lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play. The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... and Enid live in idyllic happiness in a charming old ivy-grown manor house in Sussex, with level lawns and shady rose arbours, they still retain that old cottage at Idsworth, where a plausible excuse has been given to the country folk for "Mr. Maltwood" having been compelled to change his name. No pair in the ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... in search of exhilaration and beauty, Alsace offers attractions innumerable, sites grandiose and idyllic, picturesque ruins, superb forests, old churches of rare interest and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... beginning the conditions of factory labor for New England at the point where work was initiated, were, as compared with those of England, almost idyllic. The Lowell workers came from New England farms, many of them for the sake of being near libraries and schools, and thus securing ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... I am broken-hearted to think he's spoiling Nancy's dreams for him. There was something so idyllic in them. And ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... should be given a trial. Seeing that if he did not succeed in paying the proposed interest promptly the property once more became theirs, so they thought, and that he assumed all obligations—taxes, water rents, old claims, a few pensions—it appeared in the light of a rather idyllic scheme. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... inhabited a little wooden house on wheels, far out on the wintry downs, and saw no faces but such as were sheepish and woolly and mute; ant when he and Martha were married, she was going to carry his dinner out to him every day, two miles; and after it, perhaps he would smoke my pipe. It seemed an idyllic sort of existence, for both the parties concerned; but a pipe of quality, a pipe fitted to be part of a life such as this, could not be procured (so Martha informed me) for a less sum than eighteen ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... said, "is full of idyllic and magnetic influence—and see, when you look behind you at the front of the schloss how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendor, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... delicately she steps, lest she hurt one of the little limbs! And, meanwhile, mark the driver—for though the old pig pretends to ignore any such coercion, as men believe in free-will, yet there is a fate, a driver, to this idyllic domestic company. But how gentle is he too! He never lets it be seen that he is driving them. He carries a little switch, rather, it would appear, for form's sake; for he seldom does more with it than tickle the gravely striding posteriors of the quaint little ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but after an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the British infantry surrounding them—it was a cheery bivouac among the trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of burning wood—the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the train, speeding away with a sardonic yell over the misery of the passengers yet standing up in it, left us to walk across the quiet fields and pleasant lanes to Benicia Street, through groups of little idyllic Irish boys playing base-ball, with milch-goats here and there ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the crowd. The transformation occasionally takes place within a few years. In our own day we have seen the legend of one of the greatest heroes of history modified several times in less than fifty years. Under the Bourbons Napoleon became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist, a friend of the humble who, according to the poets, was destined to be long remembered in the cottage. Thirty years afterwards this easy-going hero had become a sanguinary despot, who, after having usurped ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... in his "Life of Story"[125] is less pictorial, but he is characteristically subtle in his rendering of the facts. He brings us back, however, to Browning as seen in society. He speaks of the Italian as a comparatively idyllic period which seemed to be "built out," though this was not really the case, by the brilliant London period. It was, he says, as if Browning had divided his personal consciousness into two independent compartments. The man of the world "walked abroad, showed himself, talked, right resonantly, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... years the secretary to the president issues a list of faculty publications, ranging from verse and short stories in the best magazines to papers in learned reviews for esoteric consumption only; from idyllic novels, such as Margaret Sherwood's "Daphne", and sympathetic travel sketches like Katharine Lee Bates's "Spanish Highways and Byways", to scholarly translations, such as Sophie Jewett's "Pearl" and Vida D. Scudder's "Letters of St. Catherine of Siena", ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... origin lost in allegory. The Bible, one of the oldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology of a very significant kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back their family tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing there beside the tree of life, another tree called the tree of knowledge. Of what character this knowledge was is inferable from the sudden self-consciousness that followed the partaking ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... treating in the same verse-form of the dactylic hexameter and in a way partly epic and partly idyllic a story of love and domestic interests in a contrasting setting of war and exile, was modeled on Hermann and Dorothea, so the latter poem was suggested by J. H. Voss' idyl Luise, published first in parts in 1783 and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... seated under a tree appeared to me like an edition of the Corpus Juris with closed clasps. The road began to take on a more lively appearance. Milkmaids occasionally passed, as did also donkey-drivers with their gray pupils. Beyond Weende I met the "Shepherd" and "Doris." This is not the idyllic pair sung by Gessner, but the duly and comfortably appointed university beadles, whose duty it is to keep watch and ward so that no students fight duels in Bovden, and, above all, that no new ideas (such as are generally obliged to remain in quarantine for several decades ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... It was written like Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way of episode, among the wars of Israel. Greenfield Hill, 1794, was an idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It is not quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson, and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious and tame. Byron was amused that there ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Birch in "Select Papyri," part ii. pls. ix. to xix. Before considering the details of the story, we should notice an important question about its age and composition. That it is as old as the XIXth Dynasty in its present form is certain from the papyrus; but probably parts of it are older. The idyllic beauty of the opening of it, with the simplicity and directness of the ideas, and the absence of any impossible or marvellous feature, is in the strongest opposition to the latter part, where marvel is piled on marvel in ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... up the drive seemed suddenly to lift. Whipped away perhaps by the edged wind that rushed past her from England to Ireland sinking in the sea—a wind to cut you to the bone; discovering sensation in every marrow; stinging her to clear thought.... That idyllic life with Mother and Dad—the world to one another and none else in the world beside—had been rather the creation of circumstance than of design. Dad's people were furious when he married Mother; in defiance of ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... sick. Each moment added to the emotion which was growing in him, an emotion which was a composite of disgust and of anguish. Jeanne—Thorpe! An eternity of difference seemed to lie between those two—Jeanne, with her tender beauty, her sweet life, her idyllic dreams, and Thorpe, the gang-driver! In his own soul he had made a shrine for Jeanne, and from his knees he had looked up at her, filled with the knowledge of his own unworthiness. He had worshiped her, as Dante might have worshiped Beatrice. To him she was the culmination of all that ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... everybody else. They had one sad sweet time at the Deans, talking over old days and the tea in the back-yard, when there had been Nora and the pussy, and the one who was not. It was rather sad to outgrow childhood. Ah, how merry they had been! What a simple idyllic memory this was to be for all her later years! Mrs. Reed always lived in First Street to her; and Tudie Dean used to go up and down the street, a blessed, beautiful ghost. The little girl was quite sure she would ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... scientifically, to know how to prepare dainty and tempting dishes wholesomely, and then to serve your guests with such beauty of manner, such graciousness of courtesy, that they will remember the meal they have taken with you as idyllic in its simplicity, beauty ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... rhythmic, and, though pleasant to hear, very hard for ordinary mortals to understand. The fisherfolk, with their strapping and stalwart forms, their bronzed and weather-beaten features, their dark, idyllic eyes, their tanned and swarthy skins, their odd and old-world garb, together with their general air of being the daughters of the ocean and the sons of the storm, seem to be a race by themselves. And he who tarries long enough among them to become ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... feeling of compassion disturb his sombre breast? The man was not wholly evil; he loved flowers (I have been told) and sweet music (he was himself no mean performer on the harpsichord); and, let it be frankly admitted, the idyllic nature of the scene stirred him profoundly. Mastered by his better self he would have returned reluctantly up the tree, but ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... (which might, like Atala and Rene themselves, have been isolated with great advantage), and excepting likewise the passages concerning Outougamiz and Mila—which possess, in considerable measure and gracious fashion, what some call the "idyllic" quality—I have found it, on more than one attempt, difficult to take much interest in Les Natchez, not merely for the reasons already given, but chiefly owing to them. Rene's appearances (and he is generally in background or ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the great green van rolled forth upon the country roads, bound for an idyllic spot by the river where Diane had planned to camp a week, two men appeared upon the wide, white-pillared Sherrill porch, smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands below bright with morning ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... as was the Calvert policy, did not altogether escape Indian troubles. She had to contend with no such able chief as Opechancanough, and she suffered no sweeping massacres. But after the first idyllic year or so there set in a small, constant friction. So fast did the Maryland colonists arrive that soon there was pressure of population beyond those first purchased bounds. The more thoughtful among the Indians may well have taken alarm lest ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... of Modern Painters": "In Marie Collaert's pictures may be found quiet nooks beneath clear sky-green stretches of grass where the cows are at pasture in idyllic peace. Here is to be found the cheery freshness ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... tranquil and idyllic there—until the house door opened and a line of men filed out, bringing to his shameful end a human creature who shambled with ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the time—she gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it—an "Ideal of calmness and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of far niente, followed by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... religion and piety, could best be promoted throughout the establishment by never seeming to differ with the lady of the house. To all outward appearances, therefore, and for the first few weeks, at least, housekeeping in the Philippines seemed something almost idyllic, and Mrs. Brent was in ecstasies over the remarkable virtues of ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... Like It.—Of this most idyllic of all Shakespeare's comedies, the Forest of Arden is not merely the setting; it is the central force of the play, the power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony out of discord. It reminds ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... tuneful with love,—and as she sang, there mingled with the everlasting murmur of the trees the faint sound of a muffled bass, borne upon the south wind like a distant drum-beat, responsive to a bugle. So she led for some months a very pleasant idyllic life, face to face with a strong, vivid memory, which gave everything and asked nothing. These were doubtless to be (and she half knew it) the happiest days of her life. Has life any bliss so great as this pensive ecstasy? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... alone flung its shadow across these idyllic days. Before I was fully aware of it I had drawn very near to the first great junction-point of my life, my graduation from Densmore Academy. We were to "change cars," in the language of Principal Haime. Well enough for the fortunate ones ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... an allegorical drama. It pictures the love of Solomon to a princess, typifying, as many believe, the love of Christ to the Church. Read Ephesians 5 and be prepared to answer questions thereon. Richard Moulton describes it as containing seven idyllic poems. ...
— A Bird's-Eye View of the Bible - Second Edition • Frank Nelson Palmer
... is a tender and beautiful romance of the idyllic. A charming picture of life in a Welsh seaside village. It is something of a prose-poem, true, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... tender or the robustious type of thought. In particular THIS query has always come home to me: May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not religious optimism be too idyllic? Must ALL be saved? Is NO price to be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all 'yes, yes' in the universe? Doesn't the fact of 'no' stand at the very core of life? Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... terrace-roof of every tenement and allows our curious glances to take in the whole interior. This is perhaps the best proof of their power. Finally, the picture- gallery opens with a series of weird and striking adventures and shows as a tail-piece, an idyllic scene of love and wedlock in halls before ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Teapots, how made dangerous. Ten, the upper. Tesephone, banished for long-windedness. Thacker, Rev. Preserved, D.D. Thanks get lodged. Thanksgiving, Feejee. Thaumaturgus, Saint Gregory, letter of, to the Devil. Theleme, Abbey of. Theocritus, the inventor of idyllic poetry Theory, defined. Thermopylaes, too many. 'They'll say' a notable bully. Thirty-nine articles might be made serviceable. Thor, a foolish attempt of. Thoreau. Thoughts, live ones characterized. Thumb, General Thomas, a valuable member ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of "The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross Purposes," where we have a peasant ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... enjoyment he must give up all others: two unlimited desires are too great for his little heart. Every fresh joy costs him the sum of all previous joys. The present moment is the sepulchre of all that went before it. An idyllic hour of love is an ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... alarmed for his own reputation than for the reputation of the women with whom he was familiar. There was a fatal preponderance of self in all his intimacies: many women came to learn from him, but he never condescended to become a learner in his turn. And so there is not anything idyllic in these intimacies of his; and they were never so renovating to his spirit as they might have been. But I believe they were good enough for the women. I fancy the women knew what they were about when so many of them followed after Knox. It is not simply because ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "obscuring the sun in their flight." Crevecoeur had by this time returned to France, and was never more to ply the avocations of the American farmer. In the interval, much had happened to this victim of both the revolutions. Though the Letters are distinguished by an idyllic temper, over them is thrown the shadow of impending civil war. The Farmer was a man of peace, for all his experience under Montcalm in Canada (and even there his part was rather an engineer's than a combatant's); he long hoped, therefore, that peaceful counsels would prevail, and that England and ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... melancholy jests, which obliging biographers constantly represent as flashes of wit from a husband too much in love not to be profuse, never deluded anybody who visited that home. It is absurd to transform Mme. Heine into an idyllic character, whilst the poet himself never dreamed of representing her in that guise. Why poetize at the expense of truth?—especially when truth brings more honour ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... camp, an idyllic scene was being enacted. A woolly black lamb with a particularly engaging facial expression was being hospitably entertained by all our men with the exception of the chef. They formed an admiring ring round it, taking turns in feeding it with bersim, and patting its delightfully ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... not affect the charm of their idyllic life at The Lookout. The precipice over which they hung was as charming as ever in its poetic illusions of space and depth and color; the isolation of their comfortable existence in the tasteful yet audacious habitation, the pleasant routine of daily tasks and ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... allows, are the rest to forego glamour? Or because, to view the matter differently, psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a man falls in love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care for property rights, are we to suspect the idyllic in literature wherever we find it? Life is full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle reverence with desire for the object of his affections, is nothing but an idealized property ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... as they turned away. Clyde waited until they were out of sight, and then descended. The morning adventure had given her food for thought. Until then she had been deceived by the smooth current of life at Chakchak. It had seemed an idyllic, carefree existence. Although she had known of the trouble, it had seemed far in the background; it was a skeleton which had not obtruded itself. Now, by accident, she had surprised it stalking abroad in the ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him—there begins a romance of the rarest idyllic quality. ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... anything in Mark Twain's former work. It was pure romance, a beautiful, idyllic tale, though not without his touch of humor and humanity on every page. And how breathlessly interesting it is! We may imagine that first little audience—the "two good-mannered and agreeable children," drawing up in their little chairs by the fireside, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... "how these country people ignore all the beauties and graceful associations that are around them—they don't even know of the existence of this idyllic village." ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... This idyllic love of nature, this marked preference for the country over the city, however peculiar in a highway robber, are characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to age. Not only do his comedies lead us ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Death. It is not, however, as a dramatist that Lodge is remembered, but as a writer of pastoral romance. Here the discursive and idyllic quality of his genius, both in verse and prose, was to find complete and unhampered expression. Of the pastoral romances that Lodge produced during the next decade "Rosalynde" is by far the most important. The author wrote it, he tells us, while he was on ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... the beautiful forms in which the gifted artist has clothed the words rather than the thoughts of the writer,—out of the coarse real, lifting the scenes into the sweet ideal,—and out of the commonest, rudest New-England life, bringing the purest and most charming idyllic song. We did ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... and deftly touched with a gentle humor. It is a dainty book—daintily illustrated."—New York Tribune. "A wholesome, bright, refreshing story, an ideal book to give a young girl."—Chicago Record-Herald. "An idyllic story, replete with pathos and inimitable humor. As story-telling it is perfection, and as portrait-painting it is ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... this thundery atmosphere of coming conflict, of hopes and doubts, of sundering ties and fearful looking forward, that Richard and Katherine Hyde came, from the idyllic peace and beauty of their Norfolk house. But there was something in it that fitted Hyde's real disposition. He was a natural soldier, and he had arrived at the period of life when the mere show and pomp of the profession had lost all satisfying charm. He had found a quarrel worthy of his sword, ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... soundness of technique mark a coming master. Wall C is given up to a display by Charles Walter Stetson, which shows, more strongly than any other in the American section, that tendency to the decorative and the idyllic which is to be noted as so strong in recent painting. On wall D are three works of George deForest Brush, a man who has been but little influenced by the more radical tendencies. "The Potter" is interesting for the painstaking and minute finish of ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... for it was only by evolution that he expected progress, and he felt somewhat indifferent as to what political means might bring about the scientific society of to-morrow. And in like way Bache did not seem particularly fond of the Anarchists, though he was touched by the idyllic dream, the humanitarian hope, whose germs lay beneath their passion for destruction. And, like Barthes, he also flew into a passion with Mege, who since entering the Chamber had become, said he, a mere rhetorician and theorist, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... woman. This anticipates, perhaps, the Divine Comedy, which was yet to be written, wherein Beatrice was his guide through Paradise and where he accords her a place higher than that of the angels. It may mar the somewhat idyllic simplicity of this story to add that Dante was married some years later to Gemma Donati, the daughter of a distinguished Florentine family, but such was the case. Little is known of her, however, as Dante never speaks of her; and while there is no reason to suppose that their ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... fascinate the reader, seem to be written in characters of blood and fire. The descriptions of the plague-stricken land and the conflagration of the headsman's house must be numbered among the finest passages that have ever flowed from Jokai's pen. But the mild, idyllic strain, so characteristic of Jokai, who is nothing if not romantic, runs through the sombre and lurid tableau like a bright silver thread, and the denouement, in which all enmities are reconciled, all evil-doers are punished, and Gentleness and ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... of chivalry is about as near the truth as the idyllic pictures of blameless Hindus that they hold up in Parliament, I fancy. Well, Bob, we can't say you haven't told me what to expect. If I do call upon you for help, you'll know it's a mere ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... of half-bitter exultation. Life for him has been such a mistake, and that not through any fault of his own. It held no especial charm for him. All its sweetness has been concentrated within one short idyllic period; but even that could not have lasted—even to it would have come disillusionment. Lilith would never learn his fate. It, and that of those with him, would vanish, as others had done, into the mysteries of this great mysterious ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... considerations to weigh. Bridget went to sleep with the smell of his tobacco—and yet did not seem to mind it in the least—coming in whiffs through the door cracks and filling her nostrils. She too dreamed—a vivid dream, but by some law of contrariety, not of any idyllic camping ground in the Never-Never Land. She dreamed that she was seeing the Carnival at Nice—a medley of dancing waves, azure sky, palms, gold-laden orange trees and white green-shuttered houses—flowers, CONFETTI, masks, grotesque ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... week passed more swiftly than any of its predecessors had done since I came to this idyllic spot. House-cleaning began on Monday, and under Mrs. Grundy's experienced eye the half-dozen negresses employed in the work moved with alacrity and precision. But what with beating carpets, scrubbing floors, and turning things topsy-turvy in general, the task was not ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... instinctive simplicity and virtue, of childlike devotion to great objects, of patriarchal simplicity of manners, of all that is loveable in the books of men like Vespasiano da Bisticci and Leon Battista Albert; of so much that seems like the realization of the idyllic home and merchant life of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," by the side of all the hideous lawlessness and vice of the despots and humanists; that makes the Renaissance so drearily painful a spectacle. The presence of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... summer residence of Duke Ernest II.), brought us to the little village, which lies so snugly hidden in its own orchards that one might almost pass without discovering it. The afternoon was warm and sunny, and a hazy, idyllic atmosphere veiled and threw into remoteness the bolder features of the landscape. Near at hand, a few quaint old tile-roofed houses rose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... idea, was behind it all. She had not heard of Brandywine, or Bunker Hill, or Lexington, or Concord; but something like a waft of their significance had blown through her mind. A great change was coming into her idyllic life. She was indistinctly aware of it, as we sometimes are of an approaching storm, while yet the sky is sweetly blue and serene. When she reached home the house was full of people to whom M. Roussillon, in the gayest of moods, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... nearly all the way from Skagway to Port Townsend, and this was regarded as "seasonable summer weather." With bright sunshine this journey through a calm inland sea, gliding smoothly through fjords of incomparable beauty, surrounded by every luxury, would be idyllic. As it is, cold, rain and mist generally render this so-called pleasure trip one of monotony and discomfort, where passengers are often compelled to seek shelter throughout the day in smoke-room or ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... latent one. As to Schubert, I think Chopin knew too little of his music to be appreciably influenced by him. At any rate, I fail to perceive how and where the influence reveals itself. Of Field, on the other hand, traces are discoverable, and even more distinct ones of Hummel. The idyllic serenity of the former and the Mozartian sweetness of the latter were truly congenial to him; but no less, if not more, so was Spohr's elegiac morbidezza. Chopin's affection for Spohr is proved by several remarks in his letters: thus on one occasion (October 3, 1829) he calls ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Their idyllic Creation had been mangled into a roughhouse Riot, in which Disorderly Conduct alternated with the shameless ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... you not see that that is impossible? It is daylight; is, then, the carriage to open and the empress to alight with one slipper on her feet, to be triumphantly conducted into the house? Ah, my friend, all Europe would smile at the idyllic empress who accompanied her husband on his journey in ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... but the Camoens of the lyrics and the sonnets, where the passion of tenderness finds its supreme utterance. Braga has noted five stages of development in Joao de Deus's artistic life—the imitative, the idyllic, the lyric, the pessimistic and the devout phases. Under each of these divisions is included much that is of extreme interest, especially to contemporaries who have passed through the same succession ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... which gradually estranged from her the hearts of the Russians. They felt that it was no Russian who reigned over them; and because they had no occasion to tremble and creep in the dust before her, they almost despised her, and derided the idyllic sentiments of this good German princess who wished to realize her fantastic dreams by treating a horde of ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... be imagined. Flowers of every kind, delicious fruits, and on every side the most pleasing prospects, together with perfect love, made their hermitage a paradise on earth. Here the exiles led an idyllic existence until sought out by Bharata, who, learning from his mother on his return home the ruin she had wrought in the Raj, had indignantly spurned her, and hastened to Dandaka. The old Raja had died from grief soon after the departure of the exiles, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... what can I really tell you? Mere words fail to tell you of the completeness of our happiness. It is idyllic—that is all ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... Ego?' Recent associations have rendered you idyllic. I can recall a period when 'love in a cottage' was the target that challenged the keenest arrows of your satire. Rich little Kittie has my warmest congratulations. Will ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... little story—childish or idyllic as you please—of sunshine and colour, of beguiling birds beguiling sea, of sleep, and uneasy awakening when the cloud-bank rising westward devoured the fair face of heaven, of mist and fruitless seeking, even some word of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... cry, Claim the first right which Nature gave, From the red scourge of bondage fly, Nor deign to live a burdened slave!" Our father rode again his ride On Memphremagog's wooded side; Sat down again to moose and samp In trapper's hut and Indian camp; Lived o'er the old idyllic ease Beneath St. Francois' hemlock-trees; Again for him the moonlight shone On Norman cap and bodiced zone; Again he heard the violin play Which led the village dance away, And mingled in its merry whirl ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the melodies that had been growing through two centuries in Italy [says Symonds] are concentrated in the songs of the Amyntas and the Pastor Fido. The idyllic voluptuousness which permeated literature and art steeps their pictures in a golden glow. While we recognise in both these poems—the one perfumed and delicate like flowers of spring, the other sculptured ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... be tempted to interpose the remark that the aspect which things thus wore for ourselves was in one respect quite illusory. They may say that the idyllic contentment which we thus attributed to the cottagers was the very reverse of the truth, and that the thatch of their dwellings, however pleasing to the eye, really shrouded a misery to which history shows few parallels. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... It was idyllic, their little love affair—their big love affair, if one judged by their measure. It was tender, sweet, and because it was their secret, because there was no word of doubt or of distrust from those who were ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... lied so long about 'the idyllic' in farm life, and said so much about the 'independent American farmer' that he himself has remained blind to the fact that he's one of the hardest-working and poorest-paid men in America. See the houses ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... of relation existed between Katie and Marie for several years. About the time the girl went to Kenilworth and had her idyllic experience, Katie married. Nick was a good sort of a man, easy and happy, and a sober and constant labourer. Katie had saved some money, in her careful German way, had even a bank-account of several hundred ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... to elaborate this idyllic portrayal, I may merely note, briefly and sympathetically, how this rural joy was troubled by the passing away of a dear woman friend who resided with them, and then by the death of his esteemed and careful consort. He laid these dear ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... however, the colossal development and transformation of commercial society in England began with the consolidation of the English monarchy. Where M. Guizot sees only soft repose and idyllic peace, the most violent conflicts, the most drastic revolutions, were in reality developing. First of all, under the constitutional monarchy manufactures underwent an expansion hitherto undreamed of, in order then to make way ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of her childhood Emma Goldman passed in a small, idyllic place in the German-Russian province of Kurland, where her father had charge of the government stage. At the time Kurland was thoroughly German; even the Russian bureaucracy of that Baltic province was recruited mostly from German ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... of the Greek drama, was wanting in their heroes. The theory that the Song of Songs, that canticle of canticles of love, was a pastoral play had no lodgment in his mind; the poem seemed less dramatic to him than the Book of Job. The former sprang from the idyllic life of the northern tribes and reflected that life; the latter, much more profound in conception, proved by its form that the road to a real stage-play was insurmountably barred to the Hebrew poet. What poetic field was open to him then? ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... card castle came to the cloth. Here was a genuine case of true idyllic boy and girl love, that had strengthened and ripened with mature years. Annie had no more given me a thought—what an ass, what an idiot I am! But really, I think Catherine's cruelty has turned my brain. I am become ready to plunge into ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... Sylvie smiled, but there was a look of pain in her eyes, "He has an idyllic house buried in the Foret St. Germain, and he wants me to take possession . . . you know the rest! He is a villain? Yes—he is like Miraudin, who has a luxurious flat in Paris and sends each lady of his harem there in turn. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... difficult to do justice to its peculiarities in a translation. Our impressions of it may perhaps be best summed up by saying that it is the farthest remove from oratory, and the nearest approach to poetry, of any prose not professedly idyllic or lyric with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Heard use florid and sentimental language like this. The soft light, the reposeful surroundings, the homelike influence of the Villa Mon Repos—all had conspired to put him into an uncommonly idyllic mood of mind. He felt disposed to linger with the kindly stranger who seemed so much more communicative and affable than on the occasion of those theatricals. He lit a cigarette and watched, for a while, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... asleep and dreaming of Gertrude and of his idyllic summer in England, when his bedroom door was forced open and he was roughly roused ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... But I was thinking how you come in touch With life at the first dinner in the fall, When you get back, first, as you can't at all Later along. But you, of course, won't care With your idyllic pleasures. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... women lived beneath the pure light of Phoebus, their ancestral god. Pallas protected them, and golden Aphrodite favored them with beauty. Olives are not, however, by any means the only trees which play a part in idyllic scenery. The tall stone pine is even more important.... Near Massa, by Sorrento, there are two gigantic pines so placed that, lying on the grass beneath them, one looks on Capri rising from the sea, Baiae, and all the bay of Naples sweeping round to the base of Vesuvius. Tangled ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... most meditative, the most prophetic of all poets, in whose epic the panorama of medieval life, of feudalism at its best and Christianity at its best, stands, as in a microcosm, transfigured, judged, and measured. To most men, the "Paradise Lost," with all its mighty music and its idyllic pictures of human nature, of our first-child parents in their naked purity and their awakening thought, is a serious and ungrateful task—not to be ranked with the simple enjoyments; it is a possession to be acquired only by habit. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... needs or their fancies? Most of the time they themselves don't know much about their innermost moods, and blunder out of one into another, sometimes with catastrophic results. And then who is more surprised than they? However, Tomassov's case was in its nature quite idyllic. The fashionable world was amused. His devotion made for him a kind of social success. But he didn't care. There was his one divinity, and there was the shrine where he was permitted to go in and out without ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... find Iceland a real Arcadia in regard to its inhabitants, and rejoiced at the anticipation of seeing such an Idyllic life realised. I felt so happy when I set foot on the island that I could have embraced humanity. But ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... same kind of a town on a larger and richer scale—trim bungalow houses, for the most part, spread out among gardens full of roses, honeysuckle, and syringa. But at the station all day and night the scene was not idyllic. Every hour train after train moved away—stores and firewood in front, horses next, and luggage vans for the men behind. The partings from lovers and wives and children must be imagined. They are bad enough ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... Marster's" household, as the old man unfolds it to his listeners, is one of almost idyllic beauty. There was the white-pillared "big house" in a grove of white oaks on the brow of a hill with a commanding view of the whole countryside. A gravelled driveway led down to the dusty public road where an occasional stagecoach rattled by ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... a religious service, in which poetry, music, pantomime, and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of [Page 12] dramatic art, to the refreshment of men's minds. Its view of life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration of those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as men and women and when men and women were as gods. As to subject-matter, its warp was spun largely from the bowels of the old-time mythology into cords through which the race ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... with toast and marmalade, and nodded. He is a good-looking boy, four-and-twenty—idyllic age! He has sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead over his head, an olive complexion, and a keen, open, clean-shaven face. He wore a dark-brown lounge suit and a wine-coloured tie, and looked immaculate. I remember him as the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... subject-matter more frequently from mythology, or from still more fanciful fictions—had he made always the same happy choice as that in his Achilles in Scyros, where, from the nature of the story, the Heroic is interwoven with the Idyllic, we might then have pardoned him if he invariably depicts his personages as in love. Then should we, if only we ourselves understood what ought to be expected from an opera, willingly have permitted him to indulge in feats of fancy still more venturesome. By his tragical pretensions ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... reticence of the relation of the sexes and the problem of marriage. Certain social abuses and false standards of morality are attacked with great vigor, yet the plot is so interesting for its own sake that the book gives no suspicion of being a problem novel. The descriptions of natural scenery are idyllic in their charm, and form a fitting ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... obstacles in the path of this idyllic friendship; possibly he did not observe it. In his eyes Margaret was still a child,—a point of view that necessarily excluded any consideration of Richard. Perhaps, however, if Mr. Slocum could have assisted invisibly at a pretty little ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... heart by confessing that his own opinion agreed with that of every other artist, of the critics, and the public. He said to me in the garden before breakfast, 'If Wenceslas cannot exhibit a masterpiece next season, he must give up heroic sculpture and be content to execute idyllic subjects, small figures, pieces of jewelry, and high-class goldsmiths' work!' This verdict is dreadful to me, for Wenceslas, I know, will never accept it; he feels he ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... greedily enjoyed his cheap comfort; Finkenbein shut one eye and lived on the surface of things; Holdria positively bloomed in eternal peace of mind, and increased daily in amiability, in appetite, and in weight. It would have been an idyllic state of things—but the haggard ghost of the dead manufacturer was hovering about. The hole was ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... should he ever atone for such an unwarrantable action? Had it been the outcome of any ordinary flirtation, he would have felt no such scruples, but the encounter, though short, had been one of singular idyllic charm until he had by his own rash act spoilt it. A few minutes passed thus in self contemplation appeared like an eternity. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... eighteenth century, when savage tribes in various parts of the world first began to be visited, extravagantly romantic views widely prevailed as to the simple and idyllic lives led by primitive peoples. During the greater part of the nineteenth century the tendency of opinion was to the opposite extreme, and it became usual to insist on the degraded ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... valley from a distance one would fain believe it to be in reality, as in appearance, an idyllic garden of Arcadian innocence and happiness, and, forgetting the disillusions of maturer years, dream that all human hearts are as transparent as its atmosphere, and that all life is no less sweet ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... exercised a self-restraint consonant with the consideration he had displayed at the birth of his heir. He was the squire and constant attendant of his spouse, her riding-master even, and often her playfellow in the romps of which she was still fond. Scenes of idyllic bliss were daily observed by the keen eyes of the attendants. The choice of governesses, tutors, and servants for the little prince was personally superintended by his sire, and every detail of the feeding, dressing, and airing of the prospective emperor was ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... he would soften as soon as he was ordained and in full swing of clerical work. But he did not. His education had by this time sufficiently ousted his humanity to keep him quite firm; though his mother might have led an idyllic life with her faithful fruiterer and greengrocer, and nobody have been anything the worse ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... this most idyllic of all Shakespeare's comedies, the Forest of Arden is not merely the setting; it is the central force of the play, the power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony out of discord. It reminds ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... with their gossips. Soon the cliffs of the southern headland grow duskier and more remote; the sea fades to a cold uniform gray; the colours of the brown twilight marsh and the violet hills are lost in one another; and so, with a refreshing breath of idyllic peacefulness, the stirring week came to an end. "Its evening closed on a quiet scene of school routine, as if doubt and risk, turmoil and confusion and fear, weary head and weary hand, had not been known in the place. The wrestling-match against time was over, and happy dreams came ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... archaic charm; the multitude of dependents calls forth, in the present day at any rate, much of kindly solicitude, and though the unvarying sameness of existence sometimes proves the serpent which destroys the peace of the idyllic Eden in young and eager hearts, the ramifications of the large family party, gathered under one roof, mitigate the monotony of daily tasks, and supply the necessary mental friction. Work in the nutmeg-woods begin at 5 a.m., when a pealing bell summons ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings |
