"Poet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... makes is no doubt the most modest of the four. He has not Shakespeare's absolute universality, and in fact not merely the poet's tongue, but the poet's thought seems to have been denied him. His sphere is not the ideal like Milton's. His irony, splendid as it is, falls a little short of that diabolical magnificence which exalts Swift to the point whence, in his own way, he surveys all the kingdoms ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... thinking that I wished to run down Eton; and his repetition on behalf of Eton, with this idea in his head, of the strains of his heroic ancestor, Malvina's Oscar, as they are recorded by the family poet, Ossian, is unnecessary. "The wild boar rushes over their tombs, but he does not disturb their repose. They still love the sport of their youth, and mount the wind with joy." All I meant to say was, that there were unpleasantnesses in uniting the keeping a boarding-house with ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... "there's to be the most interesting lecture by that Hindu poet. And it's so much more comfortable here than ashore. This boat is ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead; And the wise men seeking out marvels, and the poet's teeming head; ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... different powers of mind. We find a parallel to this elsewhere. Both in literature and in art men may be in the best sense productive, and yet may be poor critics. We are often wofully disappointed when we attend a lecture on poetry by a poet, or one on painting by ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and shocked. It is the attribute of the poet to seem always living, always a friend. Leonard felt as if some one very dear had been suddenly torn from his heart. He tried to console his mother; but her emotion was contagious, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hathen people. Here we call such as you a 'hathen Chinee,' and there was a Californan poet that wrote a whole piece about the likes of you. Children speak it at school. Here is the ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Thus far the poet;[43] but the legend does not end there. The boasts of the masons were so arrogant after the cathedral was completed that Radul, or Neagu (for he is called by both names), gave orders for the scaffolding to be removed, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... accuser, "by Socrates as if the poet enjoined us to abstain from no work wicked or ignoble; do everything for ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... cushions of the divan with her limbs slackened and listless. When the dancers came and postured before us, she threw them a jewel and bade them begone before they had given a half of their performance, and the poet, a silly swelling fellow who came to sing the deeds of the day, she ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... man be more just than God?" asks the poet-patriarch. May men rid themselves of an incubus which God never can throw off? Do mortals know more than God, that they may declare ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... in the corners of newspapers I looked for poetic emotion, nor even to the singers in the streets. It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... distant colony, or to capture the State through a small State department, or to destroy all voting through a vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise who resists this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender, and happy (in an echo of the Roman poet) who remembers ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the fact; as it is, he never alludes to the exact locality. Even L4,000 a year was quite inadequate to keep up this lady's extravagant style of living. The gaming at her house ran high; it is reported that the guests left money under their plates to pay for what they had eaten. St. Evremond, poet and man of the world, was frequently there, and he seems to have constituted himself "guide, philosopher, and friend" to the wayward lady. She was only fifty-two when she died in 1699, and the chief records of her life ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... expostulation is construed into contempt. Honey itself is searching in sore and ulcerated parts; and the wisest and most judicious counsels prove provoking to distempered minds, unless offered with those soothing and compliant approaches which made the poet, for instance, characterize agreeable things in general, by a word expressive of a grateful and easy touch, exciting nothing of offense or resistance. Inflamed eyes require a retreat into dusky places, amongst colors of the deepest shades, and are unable to endure the brilliancy of light. So fares ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... early summer the bobolinks respond to every poet's effort to imitate their notes. "Dignified 'Robert of Lincoln' is telling his name," says one; "Spink, spank, spink," another hears him say. But best of ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Bo. "Nell Rayner, do you see any green in my eyes? Spring to come! Yes, the poet said in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. But that poet meant a ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... nobile fratrum. They talked of Werther and his sorrows; the Emperor appreciatively, and with a knowledge of detail. It is said that the latter took exception to some one passage in particular; which one is not known. The poet had probably just risen from penning the "Elective Affinities," and seemed to recognize his dazzling host as a creature familiar with such ties, transcending the bounds of nations, the trammels of commonplace ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... I want my boy to be? Oft is the question asked of me, And oft I ask it of myself— What corner, niche or post or shelf In the great hall of life would I Select for him to occupy? Statesman or writer, poet, sage Or toiler for a weekly wage, Artist or artisan? Oh, what Is to become his future lot? For him I do not dare to plan; I only ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest
... her life written by Wolfhard, a devout priest of Aichstadt, in the following century, about the year {470} 890, again by Adelbold, nineteenth bishop of Utrecht, (of which diocese Heda calls her patroness;) thirdly, by an anonymous author; fourthly, by the poet Medibard; fifthly, by Philip, bishop of Aichstadt; sixthly, by an anonymous author, at the request of the nuns of St. Walburge of Aichstadt. All these six lives are published by Henschenius. See also Raderus, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... some account of the Lambs' visit to Winterslow, but the passage belongs probably to the year following. In his essay "On the Conversation of Authors" he likens Lamb in the country to "the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths." "The country people thought him an oddity, and did not understand his jokes. It would be strange if they had, for he did not make any, while he stayed. But when he crossed the country to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... and reaches From my body still and pale, Fain to hear what tender speech is In your love to help my bale. O my poet, Come and show it! Come, of latest love, to glean ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... were it for nothing but to be allowed to witness the curious scenes, the startling occurrences, the humorous bizarrerie of cross-purposes, the conceits, the foibles, the triumphs of the creature man. Moore the poet has somewhere said, that he would not consent to live his life over again, except upon the condition that he were to be gifted with less love and more judgment—probably forgetting that in that case he would not have been the author ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... poet or philosopher, the artist, I fancy, would feel his helplessness. In the city he may find wonderful picturesqueness to invite his pencil, but when he stands face to face alone with Nature he will discover that he has no ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... latter authority, that only one survived him, who was thence surnamed Burd alane, which signifies either unequalled, or solitary. A Consolation, addressed to Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, a poet and scholar who flourished about the middle of the sixteenth century, and who gives name to the Maitland MSS., draws the following parallel betwixt his domestic misfortunes and those of the first ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... whom he could persuade by his munificent offers (but rarely fulfilled) to suffer the burden of his eccentricities. Frederick was not content with playing the part of patron, but must himself also be poet, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... knowledge goes, I have uniformly found them inseparable. It was also ornamented with the waving verdure of rich corn-fields and meadows, not pretermitting phatie-fields in full blossom—a part of rural landscape which, to my utter astonishment, has escaped the pen of poet, and the brush of painter; although I will risk my reputation as a man of pure and categorical taste, if a finer ingredient in the composition of a landscape could be found than a field of Cork-fed phaties or Moroky blacks in full bloom, allowing a man to judge by the pleasure ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... presently made it equally immovable from above. Thus for outlet or for inlet that way was irrevocable barred; and as I write now I know that I am not less irrevocable severing myself from one portion of my past. For, says the Persian poet, "A finished book is a sealed casket. To it nothing can be added. From it nothing can be taken away. Therefore should we pray to Allah that ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... exceptions were made: the Queen, her son (his father omits the usual formula of "our dearest and firstborn son," and even the title of Earl of Chester), and the Earl of Kent, "queux nous volons que soent sauuez si auant come home poet." According to Froissart, the Queen's company could not make the port they intended, and landed on the sands, whence after four days they marched (ignorant of their whereabouts) till they sighted Bury Saint Edmunds, where they remained three days. Miss Strickland tells a rather striking tale ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... habitually live on their estates or in St. Petersburg, collect in the town, and enliven a little the ordinary society. But as Christmas approaches the deputies disperse, and again the town becomes enshrouded in that "eternal stillness" (vetchnaya tishina) which a native poet has declared to be the essential characteristic of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... have already written last year. Among the fifty or sixty guests there were many who were here then. In addition there are Duke d'Albe, with his daughters; Baron Beyens, the Belgian Minister; Mr. Mallet, of the English Embassy, Mr. Due of the Swedish Legation; the poet, Prosper Merimee; and many, of course, I ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... may be able to avail ourselves of such of their observations as can be reduced to practice in education. With respect to the arts, imagination may be considered practically in two points of view, as it relates to our taste, and as it relates to our talents for the arts. Without being a poet, or an orator, a man may have a sufficient degree of imagination to receive pleasure from the talents of others; he may be a critical judge of the respective merits of orators, poets, and artists. This sensibility to the pleasures ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... mere concrete encyclopaedia from Pliny or Gesner to Diderot or Chambers, vast subjective reorganisations of knowledge, philosophic systems, now appear. Similarly, the mere observations of the senses and their records in memory become transformed into the images of the poet, the imagery too of the artist, for art proper is only thus born. That mere imitation of nature, which so commonly in the graphic arts (though happily but rarely in music) has been mistaken for [Page: 84] art, thus modestly returns to its proper place—that ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... are strange and beautiful thoughts for a little boy to think, and so people who couldn't think anything of the sort themselves, if they tried for a hundred years, think them queer. But keep on thinking them, Paul . . . some day you are going to be a poet, I believe." ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wandering attention to either St. Lucius or St. Lawrence. Scarcely had he made his way into the nave of the building, when he beheld something that appeared to him far more interesting than paintings or relics. An English poet has said that at times there is revealed to us a glimpse of paradise in a woman's face, and it was such a rare blessing that was at this moment vouchsafed unto Count Larinski. He was not a romantic man, and yet he remained ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... said the Man, "me, the heir of all the ages, as the poet called me. Why, you nasty little animal, do you know that I have killed hundreds like you, and," he added, with a sudden afflatus of pride, "thousands of other creatures, such as pheasants, to say nothing of deer and larger game? That has been my principal occupation since I ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... transportation. It excited vast interest in Great Britain, and was dramatised at a London theatre. The prisoners, who wage war with society, regarded the event with exultation; and long after, a song, composed by a sympathising poet, was propagated by oral tradition, and sung in chorus around the fires in the interior. This version of the story made the capture a triumph of the oppressed over their oppressors. The stanzas set forth the sufferings of the prisoners by the cruelty of their masters, who they ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... Sunday sermon. He was a handsome man, with a long, fair face, and dreamy eyes; his wife, Josephine, in the days when she thought she was in love with him, used to call him Melanchthon—that was not many years ago, and he still resembled in appearance the poet of the Reformation. But his features had now lost their fine serenity, and he was glad when his bitter and troubled thoughts on the doctrine of justification—a subject he had chosen for its bearing on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... The poet of the day was a woman, Mrs. I. S. Bartlett, who gave The True Republic. In every possible way the men showed their honor and appreciation of the women, and from this noble attitude ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... on to say how once, when going through a village school, he asked one of the children what a babugnia was, and nobody could tell him, not even the teacher himself. He then asked what a pithecus was, and no one knew even that, although he had quoted the poet Himnitz, 'The weakwitted pithecus that mocks the other beasts.' Such is the deplorable ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... his dreams he had been crossing high passes with her; he had halted suddenly and stayed her mule. In his dream because he was a man of letters and a poet it was always a mule, never a train de luxe. "Look," he had said, "below there,—Italy!—the country you have ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... this is all nonsense! Night doesn't last always; day has got to break some time or other. Every silver lining has a cloud behind it, as the poet says; and that remark has always cheered me; though —I never could see any meaning to it. Everybody uses it, though, and everybody gets comfort out of it. I wish they would start something fresh. Come, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the dog Argus was told two thousand years ago by the great Greek poet, Homer. Argus may not have been a real dog, but the poet must have known some dog like him or he could not have told the story ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... the present day more than the carefully elaborated and highly finished work of his friend, who wrote only when he found a suitable topic. And if Addison's art is of a higher standard than Steele's, it is to Steele that we owe Addison. A minor poet and the author of a book of travels and of an unsuccessful opera, Addison found no opportunity for his peculiar genius until his friend provided the means in the Tatler. It is tolerably certain that he would himself never have taken the necessary step of founding a periodical ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Franklin was not a poet. He could scheme easily, but even his rhymes were poor. His sense of delicacy was quite obtuse, but perhaps not more so, than we ought to expect from the unrefined times in ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... company, whose directors had all been selected for their religious bias rather than their business qualifications, burst at one fell coup, almost in the very hour of my return home, dissipating into thin air, as the Latin poet has it, all the savings of a lifetime which my mother had invested in the swindle—the provision left behind by my father, when he died, for her use, and the subsequent benefit of my sister and myself. The devout ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... judgments, is at once an indispensable branch of moral education and an indispensable condition of moral progress. But this is the function, not so much of the scientific moralist, as of the parent, the instructor of youth, the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, the journalist, the artist, and, above all, of ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... revolution. Three of the leading poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, were deeply infected by its spirit, and indulged in their youth fantastic dreams of a social millennium; Wordsworth, especially, who in his maturer years could be justly described as the priest of nature-worship and the poet of rural life, had imbibed violent republican ideas during a residence of more than a year in France. These were passing off in 1798, when he published, jointly with Coleridge, the volume of Lyrical Ballads containing ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the "Cottar's Saturday Night" should have stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars." The "Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shall quote is from the mournful Jeremiah, to which I shall add two other lines, for the purpose of carrying out the figure, and showing the intention of the poet. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... perishable things, are as great as the weavers of immortal words—not so well remembered, of course, for posterity has only the words. Poets and highbrows scorn them, but living women who can see the living men are not so foolish. They are apt to prefer the maker to the writer. They reward the poet with a smile and a compliment, but give their lives to the manufacturers, the machinists, the merchants. Then the neglected poets and their toadies the critics grow sarcastic about this and think that they have ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... Paul).... He is a great and marvellous genius—a poet such as a nation produces once in a thousand years. He is the most imaginative, the profoundest, the most productive poet that has ever sprung from the French race."—P. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... unconscious of her loveliness, but palpitating with the sensuous joy of living, she might have been a wood nymph, issuing vivid, vital, from the fancy of a mediaeval poet. The sunlight flecked her beautiful young body with fluttering patches as of palpitant gold leaf. The crystal water splashed in answer to the play of her lithe limbs and fell about her as in showers of ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... and abused by monarchs and other tyrants than the masculine sex, Beatrice Dante's departed wife was found as most suitable Heavenly messenger by whom the great prophecy in the 33d and last Song of Purgatory was communicated to the Poet and most remarkable Prophet Dante, and my mother was found most suitable to deliver the above mentioned communication and to make greater impression than any other Heavenly messenger upon me, when the first message was to be delivered to understand ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... writing her heart out in her little, white, lilac-curtained room of the old house above the Spaniard's Road, Derek, of whom she wrote, was walking along the Malvern hills, hurrying upward in the darkness. The stars were his companions; though he was no poet, having rather the fervid temper of the born swordsman, that expresses itself in physical ecstasies. He had come straight out from a stormy midnight talk with Sheila. What was he doing—had been the burden of her cry—falling ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he proved unfaithful, and she was one of the last I heard of who died of pining away. It used to be much talked of in my young days. Perhaps now that it is not, it more often occurs. 'Speranza' was Lady Wilde, a fluent poet and essayist, who survived her husband the archaeologist. One of her children inherited much of her talent, but bears a chequered fame. I always thought the wit of Oscar Wilde anything but Irish, and was always glad it possessed no national ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... Frier of Trinitie Church in London, was in great loue with the studies of good Artes, and tooke paines in them and learned them. And at last by his continuall endeauour and long exercise therein, he grewe to bee such an Oratour and Poet, as fewe were in that age liuing, by reason whereof hee grew in fauour with Richard then King of England, and vndertooke that long voyage with him into Palestina and Syria against the Turkes. From whence being returned againe into England, hee faithfully described both in ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... sir," says Cabby, turning about, "where King Chawles did use to 'unt wild boars. Fav'rite walk of Halexander Pope, sir, the poet, and Doctor Watts, which wrote ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... in part to his very unconventional training, Robert Buchanan entered on life with a strange freshness of vision. Nothing in ordinary human life seemed common or mean to him, and this sense of wonder, combined with a power of judgment much steadier than his father's, made him a poet of considerable genius. "Undertones," published in 1863, and "Idylls and Legends of Inverburn," which appeared two years later, made him famous. The same qualities which he displayed in his poetry Buchanan exhibited in his earliest and best novels. "The Shadow of the Sword," published ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... comparative obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature, for all the world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk. The most I said was that he was no doubt not a woman's poet: to which she rejoined aptly enough that he had been at least Miss Bordereau's. The strange thing had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive: it was as if I had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or the famous Lady Hamilton, ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... long oppressed the Hanse Towns, was renewed; and yet the delegates of the French Government were the first to cry out, "The people of Hamburg are traitors to Napoleon: for, in spite of all the blessings he has conferred upon them they do not say with the Latin poet, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Tennyson—she wasn't the daughter of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the poet-laureate of England, but was as sweet as any one of that gentleman's poems—had been to the city; and she had brought home so many wondrous improvements that her two little bosom friends, Lu Medway and Kathie Dysart, were almost struck ...
— Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land and other Stories • Ellis Towne, Sophie May and Ella Farman
... centre medallion is in a rich color, set in a field of ivory or other solid color, and decorated with floral forms. The sharply defined corner areas and the borders also contain floral designs in attractive colors. Sometimes cartouches with lines from a Persian poet or birds and animal forms are ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... though I were a mile off, Lawrence, as though this were simply an impersonal discussion. I am speaking to you—of you. You avoid me whenever you can. I don't often get a chance of speaking to you. You shall listen now. You live the life of a poet and a scholar, they tell me. You live in a beautiful home, you take care that nothing ugly or disturbing shall come near you. You are pleased with it, aren't you? You think yourself better than other men. Well, you are making a big mistake. A ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nine months' march has never been written, and it never will be, for the full data cannot be supplied. But here is material waiting for some coming English Homer or Milton to crystallize into one of the world's noblest epics; and it deserves the master hand of a great poet artist to do ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... circumstance, I conceive our author's catch was improperly so called.], is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet: their love is ardent; but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, or rather fanaticism, has produced a Phyllis Wheatly; but it could not produce a poet. Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... hearts to thee. The mockbird sees thy tenderness Of deed; doth with melodiousness, In many tongues, thy praise express. And all the while, his dappled wings He claps his sides with, as he sings, From perch to perch his body flings: A poet he, to ecstasy Wrought by the sweets ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... be finished in thirty-six more. He liked the business of watching it better by night than by day; because the days were often hot, but such a mild and beautiful night as the last was just right. Here a poet might make verses with moonlight in them, and a gleam of fierce firelight flickering through. It is a shame to use this brilliant, white, almost transparent marble in this way. A man said of it, the other day, that into ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... finally, he asks to improve his little book to the best of his ability. Duerer had before this rendered him service in designing his coat of arms for a woodcut and furnishing a frontispiece to his translation of Eusebius' "Life of St. Jerome." He was, moreover, a poet, author of "an often-translated song"; he wrote verses to discourage Duerer from spending his time in producing the doggerel rhymes which at one time he was moved to attempt,—framing poems of didactic import, and publishing one or two on separate sheets with a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... must say that there is no analogy between the two cases. The Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave. He is still the master of his own body, and can say with the poet, "The hand of Douglass is his own." "The world is all before him, where to choose;" and poor as may be my opinion of the British parliament, I cannot believe that it will ever sink to such a depth of infamy as ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... a delightful pair of poems by Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply, and The Tables Turned, which show how another poet ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... that Nature never intended Edward for a poet. His next adventure was a futile endeavour to scale the wall of Eltham Palace, and seize the King; and the third was his share in Constance's theft of the Mortimers. He and his sister were both arrested, and all his lands, goods, and chattels confiscated. ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... of South-Saxon ancestry,—dashed with Scotch through his grandmother, whose maiden name was Douglas, and who is said to have been a woman of more than ordinary energy of character. As a Scot, I should like to trace him to that spreading family apostrophized by the old poet in such beautiful words,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... in Cumberland the poet lost his friends, and thinking to find them at a certain tavern he popped his head in at the door. Seeing no one there but three strangers, he apologized, and was about to retire, when one of the strangers called out, "Come in, Johnny Peep." This invitation ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... taste; but poetry was discouraged by their leaders. Several of the extant letters of Severus of Antioch show that that patriarch did his best to banish that art from his church. His attitude may be gathered from the following quotation.[1] "As to Martyrius, the poet, ... I wish you to know that he is a trouble to me and a nuisance. Indeed in the case of the others also who follow the same profession, and were enrolled in the holy clergy of the Church that is with us, I have debarred ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... religious act, every where degenerated into an occasion for unseemly revelry, in fact, into a sort of rustic saturnalia. And yet, when we look at this remain of the olden time, as observed at Ambleside, we are tempted to say with the poet,— ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... which John Clare, the "Peasant Poet" of our county, left behind him, was one in which he desired that the Editor of his "Remains" should dedicate them "to Earl Spencer, with the ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... to them in practice, is still too distinct from each to be identified with any of them. In regard to dignity and interest, these higher studies seem to have greatly the advantage over particular grammar; but who is willing to be an ungrammatical poet, orator, or logician? For him I do not write. But I would persuade my readers, that an acquaintance with that grammar which respects the genius of their vernacular tongue, is of primary importance to all who would cultivate a literary ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... press, I was re-reading Dante (as is my custom every year or two), and came upon that other passage (in the Paradiso, and therefore not known to more than a few of the thousands who know the Francesca one) in which the poet refers to the explanation between Lancelot and the Queen. It had escaped my memory (though I think I may say honestly that I knew it well enough) when I passed the sheet: but it seemed to me that perhaps some readers, who do not care much for "parallel ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... has grottos, waterfalls, winding paths, magnificent greenhouses, fountains, a riviere, pavilions, aviaries, terraces, charmilles, berceaux, enfin tout! One feels like saying, "Mein Liebchen, was willst du mehr?" as the poet Heine says. The park is surrounded by a saut de loup (a sunken wall about twenty feet high like "la Muette" in Paris). There is no need of putting up sign-boards with "No trespassing here" as no one could scale the walls of the saut de loup, so we feel very safe, especially when ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... women, not in that way; I've heard him say so," explained Alexander the Poet. "His opinion is that women are the artists of Society—delightful as entertainers, but ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... room the Oldest Member gazed at him with a grave sadness through the smoke of his pipe. His eye was deep and dreamy—the eye of a man who, as the poet says, has seen Golf ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... be taught by a French dancing-master, whose art made him at once shudder and laugh. HORACE, by his own confession, was a very awkward rider, and the poet could not always secure a seat on his mule: METASTASIO humorously complains of his gun; the poetical sportsman could only frighten the hares and partridges; the, truth was, as ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... person, as if spoken by the Divine Being. The passionate enthusiasm and religious earnestness of the prophet are plainly seen in these strange writings. Sometimes, however, he sinks into the mere Arabian story-teller, whose object is the amusement of his people. He is not a poet, but when he deals with the unity of God, with the beneficence of the Divine Being, with the wonders of Nature, with the beauty of resignation, he exhibits a glowing rhetoric, a power of gorgeous imagery, of pathos, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... her hands, she having labored assiduously in exercising those talents committed to her keeping. In after years we find the following: "Her gifts were so varied that she was both a composer and musician, a novelist and poet." The friend of Lady Rosamond Bereford was not to be affected by the emotions of Lady Rosamond Seymour. The past was a sealed casket, forever sacred to the intrusion of the present. This was the state of feeling that existed between those noble women ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... sudden death," together with a silver spoon in his mouth at his natal hour, had made Ahmed a shah; and this Ahmed was the grandfather of our own pet Soojah. In such a genealogy there is not much for a poet-laureate to found upon, nor very much to make a saint out of. Ahmed, after a splendid and tumultuous reign of twenty-six years, died of cancer in 1773. His son Timour feigned distractedly for twenty years. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... the Insurgents there are many orders. To rise to the supreme passion of revolt, two conditions are indispensable: to possess the heart of a poet, and to be subdued by poverty to the yoke of ignoble labour. But many who fall short of the priesthood have yet a share of the true spirit, bestowed upon them by circumstances of birth and education, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... discontent is there ... in the centre, the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to everyone ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... an ordinary man. He was, in truth, in the language of the poet Lowell, a "new birth of our new soil." His greatness did not consist in growing up on the frontier. An ordinary man would have found on the frontier exactly what he would have found elsewhere—a commonplace ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... said the father of Juliana, "great men treated actors like servants, and, if they offended, their ears were cut off. Are we, in brave America, returning to the days when they tossed an actor in a blanket or gave a poet a hiding? Shall we stifle an art which is the purest inspiration of Athenian genius? The law prohibits our performing and charging admission, but it does not debar us from taking a collection, if"—with a bow in which dignity and humility were admirably mingled—"you deem the laborer ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... wilt not pass any basilica, bath, library, or book-shop without seeing a poet gesticulating like a monkey. Agrippa, on coming here from the East, mistook them for madmen. And it is just such a time now. Caesar writes verses; hence all follow in his steps. Only it is not permitted to write better verses than Caesar, and for that reason I fear ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... resumed her discourse, which had been interrupted by a more than usually copious flow of tears. "Moreover, O husband, we are old, and what are the enjoyments of the stricken in years? Truly quoth the poet— ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... sot and sage, Hark to the roar of War! Poet, professor and circus clown, Chimney-sweeper and fop o' the town, Into the pot and be melted down: Into the ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... up the brae of preferment than what this house of Croftangry hath done, quhilk shame not to carry in their warlike shield and insignia of dignity the tools and implements the quhilk their first forefathers exercised in labouring the croft-rig, or, as the poet Virgilius calleth it eloquently, in subduing the soil, and no doubt this ancient house of Croftangry, while it continued to be called of that Ilk, produced many worshipful and famous patriots, of quhom I now praetermit the names; it being my purpose, if God ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... not a dry eye when he was done. That touch about thinking of them and the Yawning Jaws, and grappling hand to hand with The White Death—why, the man was a poet, no matter what his enemies said; and, as though to prove it, Abe Cone sniffled so everybody looked ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... night," given artistic expression to this quite remarkable love mania—this is the correct designation for it. Ricarda Huch in her "Bltezeit der Romantik" makes the striking statement that from this poet's figures one must "tear away the labels stuck upon them and name them altogether Ludwig Tieck, for in truth they are only refractions of this one beam." One may hear for example how Sternbald felt: "The orb of the moon stood exactly ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... one is more heroic than a surfeit of the other. There may be a divinity in the grape which excuses excess, but if so, one would expect it to be there even before the grape had been trodden on by somebody else. Yet no poet ever hymned the man who tucked into the dessert, or told him that he was by way of becoming a jolly good fellow. He is only by way of becoming ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... fantastic imagery, sentiment alike exaggerated and a thousand leagues removed from nature. He considered, and still considers, Pierre Corneille to be a blind enthusiast of the ancients, whom we deem great since we do not know them. In his eyes, this declamatory poet was a republican more by virtue of his head than his heart or his intention,—one of those men more capricious than morose, who cannot reconcile themselves to what exists, and prefer to fall back upon bygone generations, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... as is never used in New England, but is universal in the South and West. It has on its side the authority of two kings (ego sum rex Romanorum et supra grammaticam), Henry VIII. and Charles I. This were ample, without throwing into the scale the scholar and poet Daniel. Them was used as a nominative by the majesty of Edward VI., by Sir P. Hoby, and by Lord Paget (in Froude's 'History'). I have never seen any passage adduced where guess was used as the Yankee uses it. The word was familiar ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... i.e. "not wholly given up to depth, but well curved"; depth is not everything unless the ribs be also curved. Schneid. cf. Ov. "Met." iii. 216, "et substricta gerens Sicyonius ilia Ladon," where the poet is perhaps describing a greyhound, "chyned like a bream." See Stonehenge, pp. 21, 22. Xenophon's "Castorians" were more like the Welsh ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... ever whisper such unpleasant realities to the lover of ease—to the poet, the author, the musician, the man of books, of refined taste and gentlemanly habits. Yet he took the hint, and began to bestir himself with the spirit and energy so characteristic of the glorious North, from ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... former Love As she lay by her husband's side; I asked her if life pleased her, now She was rid of a poet wrung in brow, And crazed with ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... there was an active member much noted for his long prayers, sermons, and harangues. He was a leather-seller in London, his name Praise-God Barebone. This ridiculous name, which seems to have been chosen by some poet or allegorist to suit so ridiculous a personage struck the fancy of the people; and they commonly affixed to this assembly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... that doesn't number in its roll a poet. Company M had a good poet. Local customs and the local atmosphere appealed to him, and he has thus recorded his impression of ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... to be surprising. But since I have seen what these people can do with their wooden spears, and them badly pointed, and not of a very hard nature, I have not the least exception to any one passage in that great poet on this account. But, if I see fewer exceptions, I can find infinitely more beauties in him; as he has, I think, scarce an action, circumstance, or description of any kind whatever, relating to a spear, which I have not seen and recognised among these people; as their ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... in Composition, knew very well that many an elegant Phrase becomes improper for a Poet or an Orator, when it has been debased by common Use. For this Reason the Works of Ancient Authors, which are written in dead Languages, have a great Advantage over those which are written in Languages that are now spoken. Were there any mean Phrases or Idioms in Virgil and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet, was as tragic as his life had been. After the death of his wife, Poe had engaged himself to marry a wealthy lady in Richmond, and the wedding day was fixed. On his way to New York to settle up affairs in anticipation of his ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... true, surprise cannot be felt, though there is abundance of cause for regret, that little is known of a poet whose merits were not appreciated until after his decease: whose powers were destroyed by a distressing malady at a period of life when literary exertions begin to be rewarded and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... many verses of a forbidden poet named Alfred de Musset. The strange quality of these verses troubled me, and yet I was fascinated by them. In class he would whisper them, in a scarcely perceptible voice, into my ear; and although my conscience accused me, I used to allow him ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Poet, who had never been Dabling beyond the Height of Ballading; Who, in his brisk Essays, durst ne'er excel The lucky Flight of rhyming Doggerel, Sets up with this sufficient Stock on Stage, And has, perchance, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... its own use. No amount of study of the principles of barter will make a man a great merchant. One can study painting and learn all the characteristics and methods and schools of the art and yet not be able to paint a picture. No amount of study of poetry will make a man a poet. So the crafty men of action "contemn studies," and the wise men who use them look beyond them for their value. "English literature," said a noted professor not long ago, "cannot be taught"; and certain ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... life!—No need, miss, to hurry," she said, shifting the polite side of her toward Emily, who returned at the moment. "The visits of the trains to your station here are like the visits of the angels described by the poet, 'few and far between.' Please excuse the quotation. You wouldn't think it to look at me—I'm ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... poet, Charles Sprague, was born in Hingham, Mass.,—the home of four generations of his ancestors,—December 22, 1753, and died in Boston, June 20, 1844. He was a mason by trade, and was athletic and tall of stature. His share in the tea party he thus related to his son: "That evening, ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... him, three months before our account of him begins, to the centre of Harley Street. With his fortune and ambition, we must do him the justice to say, his liberality equally increased. He was a patron, and, would have travelled fifty miles to entertain a poet at his table; he had music-masters (without any other pupils) who were Mozarts and Handels for his daughters—Turners and Landseers (whose names were yet unknown) to teach them drawing—for, by a remarkable property possessed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... The poet Longfellow tells us, in one of his short poems, "learn to labor and to wait." I have labored through about twenty-five courses at this table, and then I have waited until this hour, in the hope that I might be spared the inevitable ordeal. But when the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... The usher of the school got preferment, and his successor happened to be well read, both in the dead and living languages. This person, whose name was Wilmot, was not only a good scholar and an amiable man but an excellent poet. He had an affection for me, and I almost worshipped him. He was assiduous to teach me every thing he knew; and fortunately I was no less apt and eager to learn. Having already made a tolerable proficiency ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... that when I converted my castle into a printing office, the next transformation Would be into an hospital for the "filles repenties" from Mrs. Naylor's and Lady Fitzroy's.(826) You will treat the enclosed I trust with a little more respect; not for the sake of the hero, but of the poet. The poet, poor soul! has had a relapse, but is again recovering. As I know no earthly history, you must accept the sonnet as if it was written into my letter; and therefore supposing this the end of the third page, I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... not that the French Cardinal, who is at the same time a poet, and whom the pope, the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... Yet all these make up a kind of community and live together as friends and neighbours, and every now and again they show themselves amenable to good influences, and characters of humble mark and power arise among them. To those who sympathise with the poet who sings of the ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and of my own surname of Sapiens—it really consists in the fact that I follow Nature, the best of guides, as I would a god, and am loyal to her commands. It is not likely, if she has written the rest of the play well, that she has been careless about the last act like some idle poet. But after all some "last" was inevitable, just as to the berries of a tree and the fruits of the earth there comes in the fulness of time a period of decay and fall. A wise man will not make a grievance of this. To rebel against nature—is not that ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... princess." I replied, "in the garb of a pilgrim, how can I desire the riches of this world, which you offer me unasked, and which I refuse?" He then said, "The desire of worldly goods forsakes the heart of no one, for which reason some poet has ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli |
