"Literary composition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appearing so—to make philosophers trifle, and triflers philosophize—to exhibit precept in action—and to surprise the judgment through the medium of the passions and the love of the marvellous,—ought to be the purposes of those who cultivate this interesting branch of literary composition. ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... letter I wrote, composing it slowly and carefully—for like most medical men I am a bad hand at literary composition—I sought her forgiveness, and asked for an immediate interview. The wisdom of being so precipitous never occurred to me. I only know that in those night hours over my pipe I resolved to forget once and for all that letter I had discovered among the "dead" man's effects, and determined ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... that he continues to employ himself in literary composition. Among other pieces not published in England, he has written an ode on the death of Lord Byron, a copy of which he presented me, but which I unfortunately lent—and lost. A small edition was printed at Paris for private circulation. He has also written an unpublished poem in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... write and it was Saturday, and all the events of the week had naturally enough unsettled his mind, and indisposed him for sermon-writing. When the events of life come fast upon a man, it is seldom that he finds much pleasure in abstract literary composition, and the style of the Curate of St Roque's was not of that hortatory and impassioned character which sometimes gives as much relief to the speaker as excitement to the audience. So he got up in the early sweetness of the summer morning, when nobody but himself was astir in the house, with ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... not have passed muster as a literary composition, but their extreme appropriateness to the occasion, combined with the action of the hockey-sticks, completely brought down the house. The applause was thunderous, and the last verse was encored twice over. Undoubtedly it was the ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... of the side windows; occasionally at the back one, in which case Johnny was quite welcome to look. Raymond had more desks than one, and books everywhere on the walls between them. He had a strong bent toward study, and was even beginning to dip into literary composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He had been reading lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... and Adonis" "the first heir of his invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort at literary composition. He should not have said it. It has been an embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. They have to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family—1586 or '87—age, twenty-two, or ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... be a confession I'm going to write," he said, grinning at Neal. "It's going to take me a long time, I reckon, but you said I had something like ten hours for sleep, so I guess I can spare two or three for this effort at literary composition. I figure, sheriff, that this'll be ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... of the century may be reckoned as contained in the reign of George II. (1727-1760). It was more remarkable than the preceding for vigor of thinking and often for genuine poetic fancy and susceptibility, though inferior in the skill and details of literary composition. Samuel Johnson produced his principal works before the close of this period. Among the novelists, Richardson alone had anything in common with him. Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are equally distant from the dignified pomp of his manner and the ascetic elevation of his morality. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... written copies, and had thus passed beyond their authors' control; for the law then recognised no natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without reference to the author's wishes. Thorpe's career as a procurer of neglected 'copy' had begun well. He made, in 1600, his earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe's translation of the 'First Book of Lucan.' On May 20, 1609, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... asked me, sir, to point out a subject for the pencil, and I feel the difficulty of complying with your request; although I am not certainly unaccustomed to literary composition, or a total stranger to the stores of history and tradition, which afford the best copies for the painter's art. But although sicut pictura poesis is an ancient and undisputed axiom—although poetry and painting ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... this Monsieur Heger had no time. Charlotte then spoke; she also doubted the success of the plan; but she would follow out Monsieur Heger's advice, because she was bound to obey him while she was his pupil."[8] Charlotte soon found a keen enjoyment in this species of literary composition, yet Emily's devoir was the best. They are, alas, no longer to be seen, no longer in the keeping of so courteous and proud a guardian as Mrs. Gaskell had to deal with; but she and Monsieur Heger both have expressed their opinions ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... exaggerated eulogy, has said, "would have been our greatest allegory if the earlier allegory had never been written," the "Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus." Superior to "The Pilgrim's Progress" as a literary composition, this last work must be pronounced decidedly inferior to it in attractive power. For one who reads the "Holy War," five hundred read the "Pilgrim." And those who read it once return to it again and again, with ever fresh delight. It is a book that never tires. One or two perusals ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... mother having been previously called to her rest. In the stocking of the farm, he received very considerable assistance from the profits of a guinea edition of "The Queen's Wake," of which the subscribers' list was zealously promoted by Sir Walter Scott. At Altrive he continued literary composition with unabated ardour. In 1817, he published "The Brownie of Bodsbeck," a tale of the period of the Covenant, which attained a considerable measure of popularity. In 1819, he gave to the world the first volume of his "Jacobite Relics," the second volume not appearing till 1821. This work, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... in verse, a form of literary composition foreign to Balzac's talent. Even during the months he laboured at his task, he confessed to Laure, 'midst his sallies of joking, that what he was writing teemed with defective lines. He polished and repolished, however, hoping to overcome these drawbacks, upheld by his invincible ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham's visit, Katharine had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother's habits of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables every morning at ten o'clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secluded hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the paper, and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... for two hours at the sea, and staring the Foreign Militia out of countenance. Having disposed of these important engagements, I sat down at one of the two windows of my room, intent on doing something desperate in the way of literary composition, and writing a chapter of unheard-of excellence - with which the present ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... which happened in the fifth year of their prosperity, he had chosen to retire on a small pension, to inhabit again (but alone) the waterside cottage which in old days the children had filled to overflowing, and to potter at literary composition in the wooden outhouse where he had been used, after office hours, to eke out his 52 pounds salary ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... find the most learned Father of the Church using "volumen" in an unusual acceptation, not as a whole work, nor a part of a literary composition rolled into a scroll among the ancients, or separately bound among ourselves, but a division of a subject in the same "volume," just as Cornelius Nepos, once, and once only,—in his Life of Atticus (16),—speaks of the sixteen "books" of Letters which Cicero addressed ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... consider some of those general principles of thought end expression which are essential to distinctively literary composition; and first the relation between imagination ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the reader's mind. We must not hold the invention of the quipus too lightly, when we reflect that they supplied the means of calculation demanded for the affairs of a great nation, and that, however insufficient, they afforded no little help to what aspired to the credit of literary composition. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... whose infancy was visited by personal infirmity, and whose health after this period seemed long very precarious, I am, nevertheless, the only survivor. The best loved, and the best deserving to be loved, who had destined this incident to be the foundation of a literary composition, died 'before his day,' in a distant and foreign land; and trifles assume an importance not their own when connected with those who have been loved ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... obedience to some inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source of all veritable eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor for many years to come of any irresistible inclination for literary composition. We find him, indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a slight skill in writing,[98] but he only thought of it as a possible recommendation for a secretaryship to some great person. He also appears to have practised verses, not for ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... character generally given of Claudius before his elevation to the throne, we should not readily imagine that he was endowed with any taste for literary composition; yet he seems to have exclusively enjoyed this distinction during his own reign, in which learning was at a low ebb. Besides history, Suetonius informs us that he wrote a Defence of Cicero against the Charges of Asinius Gallus. This appears to be the only tribute ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... that in the field of artistic excellence, in literary composition, in the arts of government and legislation, and even in the realm of philosophical speculations, the ancients were our schoolmasters, and that among them were some men of most marvelous genius, who have had ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... things, above all, were neglected: they failed to realize (as did France also) the continual development of a healthy language, though the ancients had glimpses of this; and they failed (this in contrast to France) to comprehend the radical differences between the various forms of literary composition. Therefore the pre-classical period still left enough to be ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... passed through the autograph-album stage of development, we became interested in another sort of literary composition. It was a book in which we recorded the names of our favorite book, author, poem, statesman, flower, name, place, musical instrument, and so on throughout an entire page. That experience was really valuable and caused us to do some thinking. It would be well, I think, to use ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... the subject of productive literature. Now, of the hours that remain when all the necessary demands of human life have been supplied, it is but a portion, perhaps a small portion, that can be beneficially, judiciously, employed in productive literature, or literary composition. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin |
