"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nine Muses the order flies. One can hear it on every side. "Telegraph!" The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of art and "types," the epigrams of human nature, crowding us all into ten or twelve people. The epic is telescoped into the sonnet, and the sonnet is compressed into quatrains or Tabbs of poetry, and couplets are signed as masterpieces. The novel has come into being—several hundred pages of crowded people in crowded sentences, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... fate of Venice, the struggle of Hofer, the resistance of Spain, give no unworthy expression to some of the best of the many and varied motives that animated England in her long struggle with Bonaparte. The sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture concludes with some of the noblest lines in the English language. The strong verses on the expected death of Mr. Fox are alive with a magnanimous public spirit that goes deeper than the accidents of political opinion. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... too much to ask you to spare me one of your old pens—one with which you had dashed off some sweet sonnet! ...
— Three Hats - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Alfred Debrun
... met with a bitter disappointment. She had brought back a pretty sketch of the Pelasgic or Cyclopean Gate at Segni, which, as she believed, all other artists had completely overlooked. Now, at Marseilles, she met Lady Frances Fenwick, who showed her her album, in which appeared, between a sonnet and a dried flower, the very gate in question, brilliantly touched in with sienna. Miss Lydia gave her drawing to her maid—and lost ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... sure that Peter's love for his wife, though perhaps that of a primitive man, was of the true Portuguese stamp, and with this view composed the following pleasing Sonnet: ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... orders and married, but in the following year he died. Most of the poems in the little volume which his friends put through the press in the year 1800 are written in standard English. They display a mind of considerable refinement, but little originality. In the form of ode, elegy, eclogue, or sonnet, we have verses which show tender feeling and a genuine appreciation of nature. But the human interest is slight, and the author is unable to escape from the conventional poetic diction of the eighteenth century. Phrases like "vocal groves," ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... Nine, Parnassus, Helicon[obs3], Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry[obs3]. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee[obs3], epopoea, ode, epode[obs3], idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, anacreontic[obs3], sonnet, roundelay, rondeau[Fr], rondo, madrigal, canzonet[obs3], cento[obs3], *monody, elegy; amoebaeum, ghazal[obs3], palinode. dramatic poetry, lyric poetry; opera; posy, anthology; disjecta membra poetae song[Lat], ballad, lay; love song, drinking song, war song, sea song; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... consideration which induced us to regard "Manawyd" as a proper name in a former stanza, has caused us to leave "Gwanar" untranslated in this place. It is not improbable, however, from the shortness of this sonnet, that the line containing the name of its hero may have been lost. In that case we should translate "chwerthin wanar," "their leader laughed." That Gwanar was occasionally used as a proper name by the ancient ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... gestures, what entertainment he had, how kindly she used him in such a place, how she smiled, how she graced him, and that infinitely pleased him; and then he breaks out, O sweet Areusa, O my dearest Antiphila, O most divine looks, O lovely graces, and thereupon instantly he makes an epigram, or a sonnet to five or seven tunes, in her commendation, or else he ruminates how she rejected his service, denied him a kiss, disgraced him, &c., and that as effectually torments him. And these are his exercises between comb and glass, madrigals, elegies, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... invented a correspondence between his brother and Essex, which was to fall into the Queen's hands in order to soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret feelings. When the Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "though I profess not to be a poet," he "prepared a sonnet tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord." It was an awkward thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the counsels of those who hated him. He complains ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hand in evidence of your love," said Claudio, producing a feeble sonnet which Benedick had written to his sweetheart. "And here," said Hero, "is a tribute to Benedick, which I picked out ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... means contemptible. A sonnet, "To a Bird, that haunted the Water of Lacken, in the Winter," which Charles Lamb transcribed in one of Coleridge's note-books, should be set over against the absurd lines, "On the Poems ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... talents were quickly forgotten in the blaze of his own beloved "Tassino's" popularity, so that he is now chiefly remembered as the sire of a poetic genius, as one of the great Vittoria's favourite satellites and as the author of an oft-quoted sonnet to his intellectual mistress. Bernardo Tasso did not marry until the somewhat mature age of forty-seven, when, as we have already said, he espoused the daughter of the Tuscan house of Rossi, by whom he had two children; a daughter, Cornelia, and the immortal Torquato, who ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... conjoined as third partner); and that, by practice, men have tended to trust Poetry, for an interpreter, more and more above Music, while Dancing has dropped out of the competition. The ballad, the sonnet, have grown to stand on their merits as verse, though their names—ballata, sonata—imply that they started in dependence upon dance and orchestra. This supersession of music by verse, whether as ally or competitor, ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as in other places, I have not preserved the monorhyme, but have ended like the English sonnet with a couplet; as a rule the last two lines contain a "Husn ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of Reading Gaol' And here's a sonnet, 'It was not like your great and gracious ways'—? Coventry Patmore. Well, young man, you've ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... to drive home," she said, with a firm voice, and a smile which if anyone care to understand, let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer shabby un-London-like man for a fortune teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room, not to his Plato, not ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... one of the few English poets (alone in this respect among the greatest) who have not sung of Love. His only English love-poem, the sonnet To the Nightingale, is his earliest and poorest sonnet. He elected in his later poems to sing of Marriage, its foundation in reason, its utility, its respectability and antiquity as an institution, and, above all, its amazing dangers. He has ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most of his poetry had been written, that 'all the apparent contradictions in my work are resolved ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... wages war against mediaeval capitalism, as embodied in the persons of the abbot-landholders, and against the class legislation of Norman game laws which is enforced by the King's sheriff. The lyric poetry of the century is not the courtly Troubadour song or the Petrarchian sonnet, but the folk-song that sings from the heart to the heart of the beauty of Alysoun, "seemliest of all things," or, in more convivial mood, accounts good ale of more worth than a ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... myself (loc. cit.), dilates on Artemis as 'sister of Apollo.' 'Her chapels,' I say, 'are in the wild wood; she is the abbess of the forest nymphs,' 'chaste and fair, the maiden of the precise life.' How odd! The classical scholar and I both say the same things; and I add a sonnet to Artemis in this aspect, rendered by me from the Hippolytus of Euripides. Could a classical scholar do more? Our author then says that the Greek sportsman 'surprised the beasts in their lairs' by night. Not very sportsmanlike! ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... different from his own. His sole relaxations were those of a retiring, mild, and pensive temper, and were limited to a ramble, almost always solitary, among the woods and hills, in praise of which, he was sometimes guilty of a sonnet, but rather because he could not help the attempt, than as proposing to himself the fame or the rewards which attend the successful poet. Indeed, far from seeking to insinuate his fugitive pieces ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... entered the brain of the flower of chivalry. You might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, "the noblest old street in England," as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, aunt Celia was armed for the fray,—a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. (I wish Baedeker didn't give such full information about what one ought to read before one can approach these places in a proper spirit.) When we had done High Street, we went ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the angels, must hear such words. There were mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... George Moore, ask Eden Phillpotts, ask "Q," ask Henry James. Lo! I say to all facile gabblers about the "art of the short story," as the late "C.-B." said to Mr. Balfour: "Enough of this foolery!" It is of a piece with the notion that a fine sonnet is more difficult ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... heard of this song long ago, and had it celebrated in appropriate verse. But so far only one Southern poet, Wilde, has accredited the bird this song. This he has done in the following admirable sonnet:— ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... volume may be avoided in a second series. I have retained the metres of the originals with but trifling variations, except in those cases where there was nothing specially characteristic to make this desirable (as e.g., in the case of Islwyn, where I have thrown some of my translations into sonnet form) or where—as in the Song of the Fisherman's Wife—the metre, even if it could be reproduced, would not in English harmonise with the meaning. I ought perhaps to ask pardon beforehand for the audacity with which I have treated Ieuan ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... Browning Society established 1881; Browning's letter thereupon to Mr. Yates; trips abroad; his London residences; his last letter to Tennyson; revisits Asolo; Palazzo Rezzonico; his belief in immortality; his death, Thursday, Dec. 12th, 1889; funeral in Westminster Abbey; Sonnet by George Meredith; new star in Orion; R. Browning's place in ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... destined to go out in wretchedness and ignominy; the latter's fecundating activities had never been allowed full scope, but something of his spirit of adventure into new literary fields was doubtless caught by the younger man. Buerger's attempts at naturalizing the sonnet, for instance, are interesting in view of the fact that Wilhelm Schlegel became the actual creator of this literary form among the Germans. Schlegel's own pursuits as a student were prevailingly in the field of Hellenism, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... declared; "if I have insulted you let me heal over the wound with the best jest, yet! John hath written a sonnet on Philadelphus' wife and our Lady Amaryllis is truing his meter for him. Ha! Gods! What a place this is for a child to be brought up! I would not give a denarius for my morals when I am grown. There's ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... depths the lost chord sank, never to return. I dashed off the jests well enough, but somewhere between the keys and the types they were lost, and the results, when I came to scan the paper, were depressing. And once I tried a sonnet on the keys. Exactly how to classify the jumble that came out of it I do not know, but it was curious enough to have appealed strongly to D'Israeli or any other collector of the literary oddity. More singular than the sonnet, though, was the fact ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... the pale, enthusiastic face of Raphael, the stern vigor of Titian, the majesty and dignity of Leonardo da Vinci, and the fresh beauty of Angelica Kauffmann. I liked best the romantic head of Raphael Mengs. In one of the rooms there is a portrait of Alfieri, with an autograph sonnet of his own on the back of it. The house in which he lived and died, is on the north bank of the Arno, near the Ponte Caraja, and his ashes rest ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... following of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, Il Fiore. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Emancipation.—So are Scotsmen. Whereas, blindfolded, take a London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow Cockney's hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose—and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt—one week's earth—washed off the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... twists of intrigue attract us; we love to ruffle it in silk as well as in mail or in homespun. The voices and faces of fair women make music and beauty for our ears and our eyes; we love the harp and the lute as well as the mavis and throstle in the hedgerow, and we pore as diligently over a sonnet as thou dost over a ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... and highly emotional manner. Depth of benevolent feeling is unhappily no proof of fitness for handling complex problems, and a fine sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any reason for supposing that the author would have made a competent Commissioner ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... enough furrows to be ploughed. We know what has been done in the field of physical science. It has made the world infinite. The days of the old pagan, "suckled in some creed outworn," are regretted in Wordsworth's sonnet; for the old pagan held to the poetical view that a star was the chariot of a deity. The poor deity, however, had, in fact, a duty as monotonous as that of a driver in the Underground Railway. To us a star is a signal of a new world; it suggests universe ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... his choosing, nor of Mr. Cary's neither." And so the dor being given, the belligerents parted laughing, but the war remained in statu quo; and not a week passed but, by mysterious hands, some nosegay, or languishing sonnet, was conveyed into The Rose's chamber, all which she stowed away, with the simplicity of a country girl, finding it mighty pleasant; and took all compliments quietly enough, probably because, on the authority of her mirror, she considered ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... half its population exasperated enemies of England, and the rest but doubtful friends, and with the legitimate sovereign of that country, "the daughter of debate, who discord still did sow,"—[Sonnet by Queen Elizabeth.]—a prisoner in Elizabeth's hands, the central point around which treason was constantly crystallizing itself, it was not strange that with the known views of the Queen on the subject of the reformed Dutch ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... life in the most direct, indispensable and unvarying fashion, always necessary and necessary to everyone. But once these universal unchanging needs supplied, a great many others become visible: needs to the individual or to individuals and races under definite and changing circumstances. The sonnet or the serenade are useful to the romantic lover in the same manner that carriage-horses and fine clothes are useful to the man who woos more practically-minded ladies. The diamonds of a rich woman serve to mark her status quite as much as to please ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... use; he must get up. So, striking a light, he was presently deep in the composition of a fiery sonnet. It was evidently that which had caused all the phosphorescence. But a sonnet is a mere pill-box; it holds nothing. A mere cockle-shell,—and, oh, the raging sea it could not hold! Besides being confessedly an art-form, duly licenced to lie, it was apt to be misunderstood. ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... to undertake a campaign of municipal house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits home she suggested that her mother's club invite ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... talk of Moliere, and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which was damping conversation, the old poet—how the splendid brow and the white hair come back to me!—fell to quoting from the famous sonnet scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte—"Morbleu! vil complaisant, vous louez des sottises"; then the admirable fencing between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his contempt for ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... experiments. Some of it is written in a loose, swinging couplet, some in quatrains, some in blank verse, some in the choice, picked prose made the fashion by Lyly. It contains more lyrics than any other Shakespearean play. One of the lyrics, a sonnet in Alexandrines, is the fruit of a real human passion. The lyric at the end of the play is the loveliest thing ever said about England. If this play and most of the other plays were modern works, the Censor would not allow them to be performed publicly. The men and women converse ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Edition of Shakespeare's Works 78 Dirge in Cymbeline, sung by Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead 87 Verses written on a Paper which contained a Piece of Bride-cake, given to the Author by a Lady 89 To Miss Aurelia C——R, on her Weeping at her Sister's Wedding 91 Sonnet 91 Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare 92 On our late Taste ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Amaryllis Kosmos Zola The Pity of the Leaves Aaron Stark The Garden Cliff Klingenhagen Charles Carville's Eyes The Dead Village Boston Two Sonnets The Clerks Fleming Helphenstine For a Book by Thomas Hardy Thomas Hood The Miracle Horace to Leuconoe Reuben Bright The Altar The Tavern Sonnet George Crabbe Credo On the Night of a Friend's Wedding Sonnet Verlaine Sonnet Supremacy The Night Before Walt Whitman The Chorus of Old Men in "Aegeus" The Wilderness Octaves Two Quatrains ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... our supplement to-day a sonnet from the pen of Willie Shakespeare, son of our esteemed townsman, Squire John Shakespeare. Willie is now located in London, and is recognized as one of the brightest constellations in the literary galaxy of the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... to him who knows what love is, and which it is vain to try to explain to others. Love delights, because to him who loves it is a pleasure to love; and he who really loves would not cease from loving. This is referred to in the following sonnet: ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... whom they were written. They were copied and preserved with the greatest care in the albums of kings and queens, and some of them were translated into foreign languages. The poem which we quoted first was translated as an Italian sonnet in the thirteenth century, and has been published in Franc Trucchi's ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... know me: therefore I decree That they shall suffer.' Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream. Then if we study Nature we are wise. Thus do the few who live but with the day: The scientific animals are they. - Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... earl, when the sweet tranquillity of evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind ... composed the following sonnet, which, having committed it to paper, he, the next evening ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... editions read leasure; and in the Vacation Exercise, l. 71, Times for times. Also where the employment or omission of a capital is plainly due to misprinting, as too frequently in the 1673 edition, I silently make the correction. Examples are, notes for Notes in Sonnet xvii. l. 13; Anointed for anointed ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... in, but there was a moon in the cold grey sky, that I could almost have thanked in a sonnet for a light which I felt was never more welcomely dispensed, when I thought of the cross roads and dreary country I had to pass before I reached the longed for haven of Chester Park. After I had left the direct road, the wind, which had before been piercingly keen, fell, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this book is to provide an anthology of English lyrical poetry earlier than the advent of the Sonnet with Wyatt and Surrey during the sixteenth century. It includes 152 poems, ranging between 1225 and 1550 A.D., an essay on Some Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric by E. K. CHAMBERS, and ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... steps forth from a region of clouds and lifts her face and hands towards the light. Through an opening in the sky a broad beam of sunshine falls upon her. Following its direction, she seems to be looking through the opening into some glad vision beyond. Like the figure of Hope in Swinburne's sonnet, she ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... as if the lady of your dreams were white, I fancied you were drawing a portrait of Isabelle Ray. All the girls, your old friends, to whom I have shown At Sea, send you their compliments, to which I join my own. Each of them will beg you to write her a sonnet; but first of all, in virtue of our ancient ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... the rank growth of comment and reflection about it. Such research is illuminating for those who do not believe in the teaching of composition; and if it begins at home, so much the better. And finally, the technique of writing has to do with the whole, whether sonnet, or business letter, or report to a board of directors. How to lead one thought into another; how to exclude the irrelevant; how to weigh upon that which is important; how to hold together the whole structure so that ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... School-master. "And only shows how in weak hands so beautiful a thing as the sonnet ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... Dyce showed, Davies is glancing at a sonnet of Drayton's "To the Celestiall Numbers" in Idea. Jonson told Drummond that "S. J. Davies played in ane Epigrame on Draton's, who in a sonnet concluded his mistress might been the Ninth [sic] Worthy; and said he used a phrase like Dametas in Arcadia, who said, For wit his Mistresse might be a ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... if you knew about such things," he began, clearing his throat, and all unconscious of the rapid approach of Mr. Chester, "it is upon sleep. It is done in the sonnet form, a very beautiful measure which I have made my own. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... to go home by himself. He would never exactly reply to Philip's eager questioning, but with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple, pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young lady called Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and Pheidias because to describe ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... be perceived, that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in Italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word 'fruitless' for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... I like flowers? I will not write a sonnet, Singing their beauty as a poet might do: I just detest those on Aunt Nipson's bonnet, Because they are like her,—all gray and blue, Dusty and pinched, and fastened on askew! And as for heaven's own ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... die for love of thee, As when the sun goes down upon the sea And finds no mate in all the realms of earth. I, too, have look'd on Nature in its worth And found no resting-place in all the spheres, And no relief beyond my sonnet-tears,— The soul-fed shudderings of my lonely harp That knows the gamut ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... homely companionship with gooseberry and currant bushes, with potatoes and pease. The scent of the sunset came in reality from a cheval de frise of wallflower on the coping of the low stone wall behind where she was sitting with her Milton. She read aloud in a low voice that sonnet beginning "Lady that in the prime of earliest youth." As she finished it, a voice, as low, said, almost ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... a song neither, it's a sort of an epigram, or rather an epigrammatic sonnet; I don't know what to call it, but it's satire. Sing ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... in his apparel, according to the rank in society he held; and, hungering after the notice of his friends, they fed him on soft sonnet and relishing dedication, till Harvey ventured to publish a collection of panegyrics on himself—and thus gravely stepped into a niche erected to Vanity. At length he and his two brothers—one a divine and the other a physician—became ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... was from Wordsworth's Sonnet on London Bridge, of course," she smiled up at him. "You ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... now, as Walter Scott pictures him in "Kenilworth," the young seeker after royal favor, graceful, slender, restless, somewhat supercilious, with a sonnet ever ready on his lips to delight his friends or an epigram to ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... of Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in the play of HENRY V.; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene, would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life capping verses ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Songbird," answered Tom. "I've heard you make up poetry worth ten times that. Don't you remember that little sonnet you once composed, entitled 'Who Put Ink in Willie's Shoes?' It was great, ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... is our country's style) in this warm shine I lie, and dream of your full Mermaid wine. Oh, we have water mix'd with claret lees, Brink apt to bring in drier heresies Than beer, good only for the sonnet's strain, With fustian metaphors to stuff the brain, So mix'd, that, given to the thirstiest one, 'Twill not prove alms, unless he have the stone. I think, with one draught man's invention fades: Two cups had quite spoil'd Homer's Iliades. 'Tis liquor that will find ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... poetic quality. These are, first of all, the two poems that originally appeared in the Century, Mother Night and O Black and Unknown Bards, and The White Witch and The Young Warrior. The first of these four poems is a sonnet well rounded out. The second gains merit by reason of its strong first and last two stanzas. The White Witch chooses a delicate and difficult theme, but contains some very strong stanzas. The Young Warrior is a ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... the baron, without noticing Kranitski's emotion, "is a sonnet from Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil). There is in ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... The West Wind The Burial-place. deg. A Fragment Blessed are they that Mourn No Man knoweth his Sepulchre A Walk at Sunset Hymn to Death The Massacre at Scio deg. The Indian Girl's Lament deg. Ode for an Agricultural Celebration Rizpah The Old Man's Funeral The Rivulet March Sonnet.—To— An Indian Story Summer Wind An Indian at the Burial-place of his Fathers Song—"Dost thou idly ask to hear" Hymn of the Waldenses Monument Mountain deg. After a Tempest Autumn Woods Sonnet.—Mutation Sonnet.—November Song of the Greek ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes, deserts, tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic, knightly, idyllic facts, and the like. They are often also resolved into merely quantitative categories, such as little picture, picture, statuette, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, garland of sonnets, poetry, poem, story, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... near them, and their glances caused him strange emotions. He resented this, as an invasion of his privacy; it was inconsistent with his hermit-instinct. Thyrsis wished no women in his life save the muses with their star-sewn garments. He had been fond of a line from a sonnet to Milton: ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... eyelids. In this picture, where the Madonna blesses the kneeling Leonello d' Este, we see how Pisanello acted on Jacopo and, through him, on Venetian art. The connection between the two masters has been established in a very interesting way by Professor Antonio Venturi's discovery of a sonnet, written in 1441, which recounts how they painted rival portraits of Leonello, and how Bellini made so lively a likeness that he was adjudged the first place. The landscape in the Louvre picture is advanced in treatment, and with its gilded mountain-tops, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves were shot. Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the Duke's! Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So-and-so, Who is Dante, deg. Boccaccio, deg. Petrarca, deg. St. Jerome deg. and Cicero, deg. deg.48 "And moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the skirts of St. Paul has reached, deg. deg.49 Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... of the tawny flowing hair in battle, I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand, Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds, (I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,) Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious, After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color, Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers, Thou ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the same spirit, that he did. Petrarch, the next greatest after Dante, is chiefly celebrated for his lyrical poems, which were used as models by all the most celebrated poets of the South of Europe. They are written in two forms, the canzone taken from the Provencals, and the sonnet, taken from the Sicilians. Petrarch kept up a wide correspondence with the literary men of Europe; and through his influence a sort of literary republic arose which joined together the literati of many different countries. Boccaccio, next in rank to ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... my brother's beautiful sonnet "Freiheit und Gesetz." (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'Gesammelte Werke', bd. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... into Italian of Butler's "Seven Sonnets" (except Nos. I. and V.), by Ingroja. In manuscript. His translation of Sonnet I. is printed with the "Seven Sonnets." He could not manage Sonnet V. I think the ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... turned, as if for relief from a bitter theme, to the book in his hand. He read aloud, from the sonnet out of which they ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... go to the market for every little service, perforce he serves himself. In dealing with college students in California, one is impressed by their boundless ingenuity. If anything needs doing, some student can do it for you. Is it to sketch a waterfall, to engrave a portrait, to write a sonnet, to mend a saddle, to sing a song, to build an engine, or to "bust a bronco," there is someone at hand who can do it, and do it artistically. Varied ingenuity California demands of her pioneers. Their native ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... four years. During his visits to London it was the habit of the two schoolfellows to meet at a tavern near Smithfield, the "Salutation and Cat" to discuss the topics dear to both: and it was about this time that Lamb's sonnet to Mrs Siddons, his first appearance in print, was published in ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... future good depends: Serve him. And so my sonnet ends, With, thank ye, thank ye, honest friends, For all your ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... and a house which are made after a good model, because they are like this good model, though each after its kind; even so there is a perfect relation between things made after a bad model. Not that the bad model is unique, for there are many; but each bad sonnet, for example, on whatever false model it is formed, is just like a woman ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman, because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline, because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of benediction, this conflict between lights, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... from the Greek Anthology have been published in the Fortnightly Review, and the sonnet on Colonel Burnaby appeared in Punch. These, with pieces from other serials, are reprinted by the courteous permission ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... to bring the baronet to a point. He had observed that Miss Keeldar looked pensive and delicate. This new phase in her demeanour smote him on his weak or poetic side. A spontaneous sonnet brewed in his brain; and while it was still working there, one of his sisters persuaded his lady-love to sit down to the piano and sing a ballad—one of Sir Philip's own ballads. It was the least elaborate, the least affected—out ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... poets and poetesses according to their thinking were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of Rome. As they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and picturesque as they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an ode with the sweet patience of their race,—for they were all Italians,—it occurred to the most conscious man among them that here was something uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had been flattered. There had been ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... first to introduce the sonnet, which Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth employed with such power in after times. Blank verse was first used in England by the Earl of Surrey, who translated a portion of Vergil's AEneid into that measure. When Shakespeare took up his pen, he found that vehicle of poetic expression ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... that time hath flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode and elegy and sonnet." ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... said Clovis, "I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... the one I made a sonnet out of afterward! By Jove, I'd forgotten where that idea came from. You may know the lines perhaps? They're in the fourth volume of my ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... events and circumstances. Epic poetry is written in a grand style, generally in pentameter, or hexameter; while the lyric adopts any verse that suits the emotion. The principal classes of lyric poetry are the song, the ode, the elegy, and the sonnet. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... bow of a man he despises; and with his mistress for enjoying a little harmless ridicule of her friend, when her back is turned. He tells a conceited poet that he prefers the sense and simplicity of an old ballad to the false wit of a modern sonnet—he proves his judgment to be just—and receives a challenge from the poet in reward of his criticism. Such a character, placed in opposition to the false and fantastic affectations of the day, afforded a wide scope for the satire of Moliere. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of Britain." Compare also Wordsworth's "Sonnet to Wycliffe," and the lines, attributed to an unknown writer of Wycliffe's time: "The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea; And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, Wide as the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... trivial libel upon the Prince Regent, that Keats, who was coming over to Enfield, met me, and, turning, accompanied me back part of the way to Edmonton. At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison." Unless I am utterly mistaken, this was the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly can I recall the conscious look ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... that his children after him will differ quite as much in teaching and practice from the modernity of to-day. It has been the fashion to regard this changeableness with wistful regret. So Wordsworth sings in his sonnet on Mutability: ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... sure I must, but I always could get myself out of them again. Why, I'll tell you an instance of it.—You must know I was once a journeyman sonnet-writer to Signor Squallini. Now, his method, when seized with the furor harmonicus, was constantly to make me sit by his side, while he was thrumming on his harpsichord, in order to make extempore verses to whatever ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... was not till some years afterwards that we find the local tyrant bound over in sureties to leave the two lawful proprietors of these funds alone. So far as can be made out, Mary's grant to Buchanan was almost identical in date with the publication of the Psalms and the sonnet which he placed at their head: a graceful and royal return for the compliment, quite in harmony with the customs of the time. Both events occurred, as would appear, in the year 1564, when all was still well with the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... from a Greek play by Euripides, called 'Hellene,' as did the author of the sonnets. There is, we need not say, no Greek play of the name of 'Hellene.' As Mr. Holmes may conceivably mean the 'Helena' of Euripides, we compare Sonnet cxxi. with 'Helena,' line 270. The parallel, the imitation of Euripides, appears ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... enthusiast," he next averred,—Rosa would have said, very unnecessarily—"the tricks of sighing lovers are beyond—or beneath—my imitation. I could not 'write a sonnet to my mistress' eyebrow,' or move her to tearful pity by sounding declarations of my adoration of her peerless charms, and my anguish at the bare imagination of the possibility that these would ever be another's. But, so far as the earnest affection and sincere esteem of an honest man can ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... contract! I wuss it was. But, oh! Mr Tickler, to see the cretur sittin wi' a pen in 's hand, and pipe in 's mouth, jotting down a sonnet, or odd, or lyrical ballad! Sometimes I put that black velvet cap ye gied me on his head, and ane o' the bairns's auld big-coats on his back; and then, sure aneugh, when he takes his stroll in the avenue, he is ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... we have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the general ars artium and common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult to speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in literature (which drags with so wide a net) all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... morals, lent his great name to a great delusion, when he attempted in a passage too well known, to garland the prostitute as the protectress of pure women. Edwin Arnold, the paganizing English poet, put Lecky's folly into verse, writing a sonnet in praise of the harlot as the purest of all women—a sort of devil's compliment to ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... single day's journey, though it had cost him eighteen. The Georgians held the album between them, and favored us with the few specimens of its contents which they considered ridiculous enough to be worth hearing. One extract met with deserved applause. It was a 'Sonnet to the Snow on Mount Washington,' and had been contributed that very afternoon, bearing a signature of great distinction in magazines and annals. The lines were elegant and full of fancy, but too ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I found this identical note in Mr. Coleridge's hand writing, and which is here given to the reader; suggesting that this note, like the Sonnet to Lord Stanhope, was written in that portion of C.'s life, when it must be confessed, he really was hot with the French Revolution. Thus ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Baltimore jail, April 17, 1830, in default of a fine of $50 with $50 costs. Undaunted in his captivity, he continued to write his protest against slavery and to record in verse his feelings. His famous sonnet, "The Immortal Mind," was written with pencil upon the walls of his cell. Liberated at the expiration of forty-nine days, through the generosity of Arthur Tappan, of New York, who paid his fine, Garrison visited Boston ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... that Spenser was married in 1593. We cannot be sure of the year, but we know, from the 266th verse of the Epithalamion, that the day was the feast of St. Barnabas, June 11 of the Old Style. In the 74th sonnet we are directly told that the lady's name was Elizabeth. In the 61st, she is said to be of the "Brood of Angels, heavenly born." From this and many similar expressions, interpreted by the laws of Anagram, and taken in conjunction with various circumstances ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... answered for the English giant,' said Charles aside to an attendant: then turning eagerly to Sidney, whose transcendent accomplishments had already become renowned, Charles welcomed him to court, and began to discuss Ronsard's last sonnet, showing no small taste and knowledge of poetry. Greatly attracted by Sidney, the King detained the whole English party by an invitation to Walsingham to hear music in the Queen-mother's apartments; and Berenger, following ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fled to the drawing-room to philander with Mrs. Grey; and the man of science and the African had already retired to the intellectual idiocy of a May Fair "At Home." The novelist was silent, for he was studying a scene; and the poet was absent, for he was musing a sonnet. ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... first of all these sonnets was that which is now as familiar as honey on the lips of every lover of suave songs—I mean that sonnet which ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy |
