"Swinburne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... saw much of an old New York friend, the now late Lorimer Graham. When he died, Swinburne wrote a poem on him. He was a man of great culture and refined manner. There was something sympathetic in him which drew every one irresistibly into liking. It was his instinct to be kind and thoughtful to every one. He gave me letters to Swinburne, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... continued the delicate-looking old lady, in her sweet, refined voice, "I was very much under the influence of the Passionate School—Swinburne, Rossetti, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and so on—at the time that I wrote. My husband never wished me to publish them. He didn't like them—he didn't understand them. I don't mind admitting to you, dear, that since I lost him I have sent one or two of the less—well—shall we ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... have no association with it whatever. 'The Sick Stockrider,' 'From the Wreck,' and 'Wolf and Hound' are colonial experiences, finely described. But most of the remaining poems, while they owe something to Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, are not in ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... also to lay a hand upon her budding hopes of life and future. The mother's background she found more difficult to place, and the only glimpse she could get of it was through Nancy's possession of four books left from that forlorn woman's more forlorn estate: the Bible, Swinburne's poems, "Adam Bede" and "Household Hints." That she had been superior to Tom might be accepted without question, and why she married him was simply one of those anomalies ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... as Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging of spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the unshrinking gaze which Dante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body of Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre. Tennyson, like De Gu['e]rin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both Maurice de Gu['e]rin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in common, send us ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... editions of Landor and Swift, then came two large volumes on Leonardo da Vinci. Raising his eyes, the parson read through the titles of Mr Browning's work. Tennyson was in a cheap seven-and-six edition; then came Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, two novels by Rhoda Broughton, Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, and Smollett; the complete works of Balzac, Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Salammbo, L'Assommoir; add to this Carlyle, Byron, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... obscurity was expelled to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... friendship of many of the most illustrious spirits of his time—Essex, Prince Henry, Bacon, Jonson, Webster, among the number—and it has been his good fortune to draw in after years splendid tributes from such successors in the poetic art as Keats and A. C. Swinburne. ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... roaming about the fields, and especially of tracing to their sources the wooded gullies abounding in our Somersetshire country. On such solitary rambles I was always accompanied by a poet, in my pocket. On the occasion I am going to describe, Swinburne in his Poems and Ballads was my ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity might be a ruin, but after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, like Swinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancy I am one of the few who still take off ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... of Tennyson and Swinburne, we passed into a false freedom that had at its heart a repudiation of all law and standards, for a parallel to which one turns instinctively to certain recent developments in the political world. We may hope ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... cities; since it can easily be perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or cruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted himself to a greengrocer instead of to greens. Swinburne would have been a better moralist if he had worshipped a fishmonger instead of worshipping the sea. I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar to the philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be playful, but is seldom ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... fairly say I have finished it," she said. "That is, omitting Swinburne—Beowulf to Browning—I rather like the two B's myself. Beowulf to Browning," she repeated, "I think that is the kind of title which might catch one's eye on a ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... imitable; in the present age of revivals, a clever versifier is capable of adopting the manners of his leading contemporaries, or that of any poet from Spenser to Shelley or Keats. The quantity of work scarcely distinguishable from that of the worst passages in Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne, seems to be limited only by the supply of stationery at the disposal of practised performers. That which makes the imitations of Pope prominent is partly the extent of his sovereignty; the vast number of writers who confined ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... a job any more than to have his meals ready promptly and spread a report that the other candidate's wife had once been a shoplifter. They are no more adapted for business and politics,' says I, 'than Algernon Charles Swinburne is to be floor manager at one of Chuck Connor's annual balls. I know,' says I to Andy, 'that sometimes a woman seems to step out into the kalsomine light as the charge d'affaires of her man's political job. But how does it come out? Say, they have a neat little ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... follows Ruskin, a Carlyle tempered by the spirit of Hellenic art without the balance of Hellenic calm. In what Ruskin has to say on how we live and think, his sentences are one and all of Grecian form, but the breath they breathe is Hebrew. I read in Swinburne this ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... of Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity and a striving after wind, and there is no profit under the sun." The Preacher and Omar and Swinburne are pathetically human, and we who are also human respond to their finality, to their quizzical indifference and their stinging resentment. We also say, "Vanity of vanities," and bow our heads murmuring "Ilicet," and stretch out our hands to "turn down an empty glass," but all this in twilight ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... almost certain to disappoint on first acquaintance. In fact it may be described as mean and shabby! Other and competent judges have felt the charm of this old Seagate and one—Algernon Charles Swinburne—has immortalized it in his glowing lines "On the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Mr. Burne-Jones, have never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr. William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter," and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years, Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a galaxy of talent in poetry and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever acknowledged the beneficent ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... soberness and simplicity increase, as we proceed in the editions of the sonnets. Drayton's chief attempt in the jewelled or ornamental style appeared in 1595, with the title of Endimion and Phoebe, and was, in a sense, an imitation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Hero and Leander is, as Swinburne says, a shrine of Parian marble, illumined from within by a clear flame of passion; while Endimion and Phoebe is rather a curiously wrought tapestry, such as that in Mortimer's Tower, woven in splendid and harmonious colours, wherein, however, the figures attain no clearness or subtlety ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... others laughed so heartily, that I could not go on; and the next stage the bold colonel got outside with the guard and never came in till we reached Limerick. I'll never forget his face, as he got down at Swinburne's Hotel. 'Good-by, Colonel,' said I; but he wouldn't take the least notice of my politeness, but with a frown of utter defiance, he turned on his heel and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... might have become in French a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, as it is in the original Portuguese. As to the text, without emulating the pedantry of the critic who added a fourth season to Shelley's three, and thereby provoked a splendid outburst of wrath from Swinburne, we may assume that in passages where Vicente appears to have gone out of his way to avoid a required rhyme, this is merely a case of corruption repeated in successive editions. Thus in the Auto Pastoril Portugues, where Catalina minha dama rhymes ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... vultures wheeled overhead, their black shadows gliding across the glaring white of the dry river-bed." Often he would sink into his rocking-chair, grimy and hot after the day's work, and read Keats and Swinburne for the contrast their sensuous music offered to the vigorous realities about him; or, forgetting books, he would just rock back and forth, looking sleepily out across the river while the scarlet crests of the buttes softened to rose and then to lavender, and lavender gave ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... he planned an appeal to eternity. He knew "Emaux et Camees" as pious folk their Bible; he felt that naught endured but art. So he became a pagan, and sought for firmness and delicacy in the texture, while aiming to fill his verse with the fire of Swinburne, the subtlety of Rossetti and the great, clear day-flame of Gautier. A well-nigh impossible ideal; yet he cherished it for twice ten years, and at forty ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Stock it is a sign for an immediate spread of Bolshevism, and consequent depreciation in all Government securities. If one day I plan to make a voyage to Cythere—I will surely catch a cold in my head the night before and, instead of quoting Swinburne, shall only sneeze and say, "Dearest, I do hope I didn't splash you!" I fully expect to wake up and find myself rich and famous—the day I "wake up" to find myself dead! And of course, like everybody with a grievance, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... stanza, was less often an adept at the lighter and more rushing lyrical measures. He is infinitely more at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming but difficult foot. The note is the old one of yearning rather than passionate melancholy, applied in ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... is all the more remarkable when we compare his writing on Shakespeare with Swinburne's book published during the same year. Swinburne has only words of contempt for the investigations of the New Shakespeare Society, whom he characterizes as "learned and laborious men who could hear only with their fingers. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... launch left them, and that they, together with ten others, clung to it, but all had either been washed off or died except themselves. There were also two other rafts, on one of which were three warrant officers, and on the other Captain Raynsford and Lieutenants Swinburne and Salter; but it was found impossible to disengage the rafts from the rigging to which they were attached, and the unfortunate men ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... of that neighborhood) were daily invited to meet her. It was a mere accident which had introduced her to my mother's house. Happening to hear from my sister Mary's governess [1] that she and her pupil were going on a visit to an old Catholic family in the county of Durham, (the family of Mr. Swinburne, who was known advantageously to the public by his "Travels in Spain and Sicily," &c.,) Mrs. Lee, whose education in a French convent, aided by her father's influence, had introduced her extensively to the knowledge of Catholic families in England land, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... is futile for his readers to apply any other test. Yet the influence of this verse has been wide and important, extending to most lyric poets of the last half-century, including such masters as Rossetti and Swinburne. ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... delight. He knew that he was dicing with Death, but that was the very essence of his ideal; and he knew that if Death won the throw, his ideal was crowned and consummated, for ever safe from the withering touch of time, or accidental soilure. If it had been given to Swinburne to fall, rifle in hand, on, say, the field of Mentana, we should have been the poorer by many splendid verses, but the richer by a heroic life-story. And would his lot have been the less enviable? Nay, surely, much the more. That ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... calls himself with a rather Hibernian coaxingness, is what has been called a cantefable—that is to say, it is not only obviously written, like verse romances and fabliaux, for recitation, but it consists partly of prose, partly of verse, the music for the latter being also given. Mr Swinburne, Mr Pater, and, most of all, Mr Lang, have made it unnecessary to tell in any detailed form the story how Aucassin, the son of Count Garin of Beaucaire, fell in love with Nicolette, a Saracen captive, who has been bought by the Viscount of the place and brought up as his daughter; how Nicolette ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... to say much of Shakespeare's Arthur," says Swinburne. "There are one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would be fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk. The niche set apart for them to inhabit in our secret hearts ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... trial through which Italy has been passing, my thoughts have often strayed to Asolo in the Trevisan, the scene of Pippa Passes, by the late ROBERT BROWNING (whom I knew well). "Italy, what of the night?" wrote my old friend SWINBURNE. "Morning's at seven!" replies Pippa. Those brave words have heartened ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... for poetry, because of his strong preference for prose as a vehicle of thought and expression. He, however, greatly admired Byron, Shelley, and Scott, and paid a passing compliment to Swinburne, except as to the too fiery amatory ardor of his first poems; but he considered Tennyson, with all his polish, little better than a versifier, and said his plays of "Dora" and "The Cup" would have been "nice enough as spectacles without words." For those great ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... Burns composed with definite melodies in mind; Shelley often began with a little tune which he gradually crystallized into words; Schiller tells us that inspiration often came to him first in the form of music. Tennyson, Swinburne, and others, have chanted rather than read their poetry aloud. And even Browning, who sometimes appears to prefer discord to music, is found to have studied not only the science of music, but also ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... either side. I saw a rabbit cross the road, and I saw a slow weasel track him, and heard the squeak of despair which bunny uttered when the fascinating pursuer, as I now imagine, first fixed upon him what Mr Swinburne calls "the bitter blossom of a kiss." I very clearly remember an adder, with a bunch of its young, disporting in the sunlight; but there was nothing to alarm a child, and everything to charm and enlist the fancy. The sunlight fell ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... many geniuses have been epileptic. These talented victims, are less rare than the public suppose, owing to the jealous care with which symptoms of this disease are guarded. Socrates, Julius Caesar, Mahomet, Joan of Arc, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Byron, Swinburne, and Dostoieffsky are but a few among many great names in the world of art, religion and statecraft. Epileptic princes, kings and kinglets who have achieved unenviable notoriety might be named by scores, Wilhelm II being the ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... head irritably when his sister Janey entered, and then quickly bent over his book (Swinburne's "Chastelard"—just out) as if he had not seen her. She glanced at the writing-table heaped with books, opened a volume of the "Contes Drolatiques," made a wry face over the archaic French, and sighed: "What ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... Death For the Anniversary of John Keats' Death Silence The Return Fear Anadyomene Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens To an Aeolian Harp To Erinna To Cleis Paris in Spring Madeira from the Sea City Vignettes By the Sea On the Death of Swinburne Triolets Vox Corporis A Ballad of Two Knights Christmas Carol The Faery Forest A Fantasy A Minuet of Mozart's Twilight The Prayer ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... he reads a political poem by a modern master, and discovers to his horror that he fails to understand what it is all about. Moreover, this very free critic cannot abide Browning and the later works of Tennyson; nor can he admire Mr. Swinburne. This is dreadful; but worse remains behind. With grief and terror this penitent declares that he cannot tolerate "The Pilgrim's Progress" or "Don Quixote"; and he goes on to say, "How much of Milton seems trash, also Butler, very much ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the wood itself that harmonizes with her thoughts. The bare trees, the fast-decaying leaves beneath her feet, all speak of death and change. Swinburne's exquisite lines ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... also engaged on a "Historia Amoris." There is an interesting passage relating to the names of great writers. Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always "in two syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne ... Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan." The reader is permitted to ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Smollett was soothed when he came under its spell. It should enable us to touch finger-tips, perhaps make closer acquaintance, with Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, Hans Holbein, Thomas Shadwell (forgotten laureate), Carlyle, Whistler, Edwin Abbey, George Meredith, Swinburne, Holman Hunt, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, Oscar and Willie Wilde, Count d'Orsay, George Eliot, and a host of lesser but equally adorable personalities whose names must come "among those present." It should show us its famous places. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Christians. Members of the various so-called 'churches,' seem to know everything except their Bibles. Mention a passage in Spenser, William Wordsworth, Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, or even Swinburne, William Watson, Charles Fox, Carleton, or Lowell, and they can pick the volume off the shelf in an instant, and the next instant, they have the book open at your quotation. But quote Jude or Enoch, or Job on salt with our eggs, and they go fumbling about in the mazes of Leviticus, ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... critics as Mr. Emerson and Mr. Lowell may be carped at by some who fancy that every American enjoys a peculiar sense of complacency when rescuing an English genius from the neglect of his own countrymen. If Mr. Browning and Mr. Swinburne have been conspicuous in their admiration, it might be urged that neither of them has too strong a desire to keep to that beaten highroad of the commonplace, beyond which even the best guides meet with pitfalls. Southey's praises of Landor were sincere and emphatic; but it must ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this; any more than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style. The first taste we had of it was in this play of Arms and the Man; but even at the very first it was evident that there was much ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... themselves with college laurels; they read what pleased them, they did not read 'for the schools.' In short, this behaviour at college is the rule among men who are to be distinguished in literature, not the exception. The honours attained at Oxford by Mr. Swinburne, whose Greek verses are no less poetical than his English poetry, were inconspicuous. At St. Andrews, Murray read only 'for human pleasure,' like Scott, Thackeray, Shelley, and the rest, at Edinburgh, Oxford, ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... T. SWINBURNE, the poet, has written to J. M. Samuels, chief of the Department of Horticulture at the World's Columbian Exposition, proposing the columbine as the Columbian Exposition and national ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... and the "Mystic and Somber Dolores" and the "Belle Dame sans Merci"; for a month was keen on naught else. The world became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look at Princeton through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and Swinburne—or "Fingal O'Flaherty" and "Algernon Charles," as he called them in precieuse jest. He read enormously every night—Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... production a "History of the Civil Wars" of York and Lancaster, a poem in seven books; is called the "Well-Englished Daniel," and is much admired for his style; in prose he wrote a "History of England," and a "Defence of Rhyme," which Swinburne pronounces to be "one of the most perfect examples of sound sense, of pure style, and of just judgment in the literature of criticism"; he is associated with Warner and Drayton as having given birth to "a poetry which has devoted itself to extol the glory ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Venice, a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni; but in taking Don Juan for his "hero," he took the name only, and disregarded the "terrible figure" "of the Titan of embodied evil, the likeness of sin made flesh" (see Selections from the Works of Lord Byron, by A.C. Swinburne, 1885, p. xxvi.), "as something ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... charm of Blake's poetry, as well as of his drawings, was not fully appreciated until late in the Nineteenth Century. Charles Lamb, to be sure, declared, "I must look upon him as one of the extraordinary persons of the age," but his full worth was not recognized until Swinburne and Rossetti took up his cause. In America, Charles Eliot Norton, at Harvard, was Blake's ablest expounder. Famous are James ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Milton and Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,—by virtue of a cosmic force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,—you cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise; nor was the brain-mind of either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth's. There was an evolution upward and inward; from Chaucer's school-boy vision, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... also wrote to the Times on behalf of "the Profession" of Letters, reminding Sir Edward of the names of Swinburne and William Morris, Hardy and Stevenson, Creighton and Gardiner, and asking what would be the feelings of the learned gentleman if Meredith or Leslie Stephen (of whose existence he was perhaps unaware) should put the question ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... says Swinburne, "will not fail to mark the points of likeness and of difference between the faces of the two friends; both models of noble manhood.... Beaumont the statelier and serener of the two, with clear, thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose, with a little ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... omnipotence of beauty and charm which triumph over the wrath of Menelaus, are the subjects of Landor's verse. But Helen, as a woman, has hardly found a nobler praise, in three thousand years, than Helen, as a child, has received from Mr. Swinburne in "Atalanta in ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... wandering minstrels, it was translated into all the Continental idioms, and became the theme of many poets, even of later times. Since the days when Godfried of Strasburgh wrote his version of the story it has been versified by many others, among whom, in our days, are Matthew Arnold and Swinburne. While the general outline of these various versions remains the same, the legend has undergone many transformations, but Wagner has preserved many of the fundamental ideas of the myth, which is intended to illustrate the overpowering force ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... another influence, earlier and vaguer than his influence on Socialism. He represented what was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The word "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward. They used the mediaeval imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion. Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... turn to Shelley's published letters we shall find abundant expressions of hostility to and contempt for religion. Those letters may deserve the praise of Matthew Arnold or the censure of Mr. Swinburne; but, in either case, they may be taken as honest documents, written to all sorts of private friends, and never intended for publication. Byron's letters were passed about freely, and largely written for effect; Shelley's were written under ordinary conditions, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... professionalism has tended to level the quality of work. The mass of thoroughly competent criticism issued to-day has raised enormously the general tone of the press; but genuine men of letters are seldom employed to welcome, or stifle, a newcomer; though Meredith, and more frequently Swinburne, have on occasion elected to pronounce judgment upon the passing generation; as Mrs. Meynell or Mr. G.K. Chesterton have sometimes said the right thing about their contemporaries. The days when postcard notices from Gladstone secured a record in sales are over; and, from ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of blooming flowers on either hand. Drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked, and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make his favorite drink—champagne and burgundy, half and half. He was running to poetry that evening—Keats and Swinburne. Finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by Dowson—"I ran across it today. It's the only thing of his worth while, I believe—and it's so fine that Swinburne must have been sore when he read it because ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of Professor A. T. Smox,' or '516. Baines Bryce, Esq.'? ... Who IS Baines Bryce? ... Nobody ever heard of him before. He may be a retired pork-butcher for all any one knows! Portraits, even of celebrities, are a mistake. Take Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, the man who, when left to himself, writes some of the grandest lines in the English language, HE had his portrait in the Academy, and everybody ran away from it, it was such an unutterable hideous disappointment. It ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... emotion. You may discover the same quality in such books as Spencer's First Principles. You may discover it everywhere in literature, from the cold fire of Pope's irony to the blasting temperatures of Swinburne. Literature does not begin ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... ordered that the useless mouths (bouches inutiles) should leave the city. Of course thousands left. We who remained expected we should have to go into the ranks. I liked the excitement of the thing, and stayed through it all. Meanwhile, Dr. John Swinburne, who was formerly, I believe, a health officer of New York, had been invited to take charge of the American hospital at Paris. Dr. Evans's tents were pitched in the Avenue de l'Imperatrice, in the place where the dog-show used to be. This ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... these matters Swinburne sheds light through the medium of a sound critical judgment, in a style no less conspicuous for its fascination than by reason of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... is sufficiently diversified, and it forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his work. But it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his learning and knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor Swinburne—perhaps not even Milton—was a better scholar. He is one of the earliest of English writers to hold and express different theories about literature. He consciously appointed himself a teacher; was a missionary of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... 1796,' and as it stands the thing is assuredly the work of Burns. The refrain and the metrical structure have been used by Scott (Rokeby, IV. 28), Carlyle, Charles Kingsley (Dolcino to Margaret), and Mr. Swinburne (A Reiver's Neck ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... sustenance mainly—never entirely—from the lower level, say a play of Shakespeare's, is translatable without too great a loss of character. If it moves in the upper rather than in the lower level—a fair example is a lyric of Swinburne's—it is as good as untranslatable. Both types of literary expression may be great ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... Mr. Swinburne quotes the following passage from a description given by one of the daily papers of a certain murderer who at the time was attracting great attention ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example set before all young writers in the width of literary sympathy displayed by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in criticism, the attitude we should all seek to preserve; not only in that, but in ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down Lamb's Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, and, turning to Mr. Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the world—that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other men's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... than in intellect. In him the hobbledehoy period had been unusually prolonged, and strangers at court were astonished to see a prince of nineteen years of age running after a footman to tickle him while his hands were full of dirty clothes.[Footnote: Swinburne, i. 11.] The clumsy youth grew up into a shy and awkward man, unable to find at will those accents of gracious politeness which are most useful to the great. Yet people who had been struck at first only with his awkwardness were sometimes astonished to find in him a certain amount of education, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... speech; no, not even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we pity Othello even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... music, an evening spent half within and half without the music-room, cigarettes sparkling, like glowworms on the terrace, tall talk from Mr. Meander, long quotations from his own muse and that of Rossetti, a little Shelley, a little Keats, a good deal of Swinburne. The festivities were late on this second evening, as Mr. Smithson had invited a good many people from the neighbourhood, but the house party were not the less early on the following morning, which was the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... overwhelming native interests of their own. The Greek tragedy tended more and more to become the merely literary survival that it was in France under Louis Quatorze, that it has been in our own day in the hands of Mr. Arnold or Mr. Swinburne. But one more poet of remarkable genius carries on its history into the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... genius will not subside into the Level that covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens, with all his genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the contemporary poets—Tennyson, Browning, or Swinburne—seem to have entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... poverty, tamed her spirit, and Swinburne telling of her, years after, speaks of "her matchless loveliness, courage, endurance, humor and sweetness—too dear and sacred to be profaned by any attempt ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... criticisms. Mr. Watts-Dunton—who added his mother's name of Dunton to his own in later life—was the son of a solicitor of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire. In early life he was himself a solicitor, which profession he happily abandoned for literature. His friendship with Algernon Charles Swinburne is one of the romances of the Victorian era. His affectionate solicitude doubtless kept that great poet alive for many a year beyond what would otherwise have been his lot. Watts-Dunton was, as we have seen, introduced to Borrow by Hake. He has written ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... the close of their lives. While the poetic world altered around them, while two generations of poets made new schools of poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected by these schools. There is nothing of Arnold and Clough, of Swinburne, Rossetti or Morris, or of any of the others, in Browning or Tennyson. There is nothing even of Mrs. Browning in Browning. What changes took place in them were wrought, first, by the natural growth of their own character; secondly, by the natural development of their ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... suffered from the absurd devotion of Kinglake. Kinglake writes (he says) of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe "as if he were describing the all-compelling movements of some divinity or providence." What nonsense has been talked about Millais' landscapes, Whistler's nocturnes, Swinburne poetry—all excellent enough in their way, and requiring to be praised according to their merits, with a reserve as to their faults. The practice of puffing tends to destroy all sort of proportion in criticism. When single sentences or portions of sentences of apparently unqualified praise are ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... authors' names, read fragments of text, caressing the volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once, recognized a book he had read. For the rest, they were strange books and strange authors. He chanced upon a volume of Swinburne and began reading steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face glowing. Twice he closed the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the author. Swinburne! he would remember that name. That fellow had eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flashing ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... revel in its great difficulty. I would love to have lived in those bygone days, when first society was inducted into the mysteries of art and, not losing yet its old and elegant tenue, babbled of blue china and white lilies, of the painter Rossetti and the poet Swinburne. It would be a splendid thing to have seen the tableaux at Cromwell House or to have made my way through the Fancy Fair and bartered all for a cigarette from a shepherdess; to have walked in the Park, straining my eyes ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... and gloves, and making their dresses out of bedroom curtains and marrying rich men, still rushes down the easy descent to failure. The sceptical curate is at large, and is disbelieving in everything except the virtues of the young woman who "has a history." Mr. Swinburne hopes that one day the last unbelieving clergyman will disappear in the embrace of the last immaculate Magdalen, as the Princess and the Geni burn each other to nothingness, in the Arabian Nights. ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... the fourteen years between Men and Women and The Ring and the Book poets of a new kind appear; William Morris's Defense of Guinevere, The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise, and Swinburne's early poems are alien to the work of Browning in form, subject-matter, and ideals. The fact is, the more definitely we try to place Browning in his literary environment the more distinctly do we perceive that he was sui generis among his contemporaries. He combined in striking fashion ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... massage of philosophy, will not be ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet, Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in this opening decade ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... pride and a pleasure to me to rescue this fine old play from undeserved oblivion. There is but one living poet whose genius could treat worthily the tragical story of Nero's life and death. In his three noble sonnets, "The Emperor's Progress," Mr. Swinburne shows that he has pondered the subject deeply: if ever he should give us a Tragedy of Nero, we may be sure that one more deathless contribution would be ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... Commons. House, all unconscious of what is in store for it, wantons at play. Innumerable questions on paper. SUMMERS coming up fresh with batch of new conundrums. PATRICK O'BRIEN "having had his attention called" to some verses by SWINBURNE, proposes to read them. House wickedly delighted at prospect of SWINBURNE being haltingly declaimed with North Tipperary accent localised by companionship with the Town Commissioners of Nenagh; SPEAKER thinks it might be funny, but wouldn't be business; so PATRICK: having ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... domed palace—Harrod's Stores—and then over Putney Bridge, passing Swinburne's house, whose outside is as deceiving as an oyster-shell that hides a pearl; through Epsom, Charles the Second's "Brighton" (which I've been reading about in a volume of Pepys Sir Lionel has given me), to Leatherhead, along the Dorking Road, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... about London society, about modern literature, and the fashions of the day; and all this was as fascinating to Lesley as it was novel. He talked to her about plays and music and pictures; and he read poetry to her. Modern poetry, of course: a little Browning, and a good deal of Rossetti and Swinburne. For amorous and passionate poetry pleased him best; and he knew that it was likelier to serve his ends than verse of the more masculine and intellectual kind. Lesley rather preferred Browning and Arnold to Oliver's favorites, ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... playwright John Ford, the poet Algernon Swinburne once said: "If he touches you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture forever." So it is, for me and ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... volumes. It was a delightful little miniature library. Facing him, six rows of black oak shelves held a fine collection of classical literature; on his left, the lower shelves contained rare editions of the early English dramatists, and the upper ones were given up to poetry, from Chaucer to Swinburne. The right-hand shelves were wholly French, from quaint volumes of troubadours' poetry to Alfred de Musset and De Maupassant. It was here Paul spent most of his time when at ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... jolly," I admitted contentedly. "I think really, artists—people with the artist's brain—do enjoy everything tremendously. They have such a much wider field of desires, as you say; and fewer limitations. They 'weave the web Desire,' as Swinburne says, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the last discovery of modern culture is that Scott's prose is commonplace; that the young men at our universities are far too critical to care for his artless sentences and flowing descriptions. They prefer Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Mallock, and the euphuism of young Oxford, just as some people prefer a Dresden shepherdess to the Caryatides of the Erechtheum, pronounce Fielding to be low, and Mozart to be passe. As boys love lollipops, so these juvenile fops love to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... and quaint - I've passion and fervour and grace - From Ovid and Horace To Swinburne and Morris, They all of them take a back place. Then I sing and I play and I paint; Though none are accomplished as I, To say so were treason: You ask me the reason? ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... listener I could find, one such story lasting three years. I was an omnivorous reader, but my favorite reading was poetry. At 7 I could repeat the greater part of Longfellow's poems; Scott followed; then Milton captivated me when I was 14; then came Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, and Morris. Later came the Greek and Latin poets. From 7 years on I wrote verses to my father. Till 8 years I was excessively timid of the dark and, indeed, of all loneliness. This passed, however, and developed into an extreme ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Swinburne, "I venture to affirm that the world has nothing like them, and can never have; that they are of the highest kind, and of their own. They are jewels of the diamond's price, flowers of the rose's rank, but unlike any ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... my feet; out of courtesy I stooped to pick them up, and then raising my hat I saluted the dark-eyed donor, but a few paces on I gave them away to a ragged child. Of all flowers that bloom, they were, and still are, the most insupportable to me. What is it the English poet Swinburne says— ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... divided humorists 'into three categories or classes; those who are not worth reading at all; those who are worth reading once, but once only; and those who are worth reading again and again and for ever.' This remark was made to Swinburne, who quotes it in his all too brief Recollections of Professor Jowett. Swinburne says that the starting-point of their discussion was the Biglow Papers, which 'famous and admirable work of American ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... a quiet read At Booty Shelley's poetry; [12] I thinks that Swinburne at a screed Is really almost too-too fly; At Signor Vagna's harmony [13] I likes a merry little flutter; I've had at Pater many a shy; In fact, ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... most lovely and fervid of all imaginative panegyrics."—Swinburne's "Study of Shakespeare," ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... wide, in the end, it seems to me, much exceeding that of Millais and that of Holman Hunt; but it is a question in which of his two functions—poet or painter—it was most effective. I have heard Swinburne say that but for Rossetti's early poetry he would never have written verses, but this I think must be taken conditionally. Swinburne has the poetic temperament so decided and so individual, and his musical quality is so exalted, that it was impossible that he should not have shown it at ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... "felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms." Theodore Watts wrote: "Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne, speaks of the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... plants and her poets. Poetry was precious food to her, and Mr. Churchouse, who also appreciated it, had led her to his special favourites. For the present, therefore, Estelle was content with Longfellow and Cowper and Wordsworth. The more dazzling light of Keats and Shelley and Swinburne had yet to ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... Ritter Gluck to meet us to-day, and he has not yet arrived. It shall not be said of me that I was ever wanting in respect to genius as transcendent as his. I must beg of my distinguished guests to await his arrival before going to dinner." [Footnote: Swinburne, vol. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Swinburne, almost exclusively lyrical, a dexterous and enchanting versifier, inspired by the ancient Greeks, generally evinced a highly original poetic temperament, and Dante Rossetti, imbued with mediaeval inspiration, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Mr Swinburne, writing in The Athenaeum for May 13, 1876, made an interesting comment upon one of Lamb's suggestions in the foregoing document. It contains, he remarks, "a singular anticipation of one of the most famous passages in the work of the greatest master of our own age, the scene of the portraits ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... have you turned commercialist, petite soeur? If it is a question of starving, I can always paint another. I do not sell this one, voila tout. If it were only mine, I would have five lines of Swinburne under it for title. They express her ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... always kept it in a corner of the table drawer and it was there now. Gemma smiled her rare slow smile as she put it in her purse. There was a photograph of her aunt—Olive's mother—on the dressing-table, and a Tauchnitz edition of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon lay beside it, the embroidered tassel of the marker being one of Astorre's pitiful little gifts. She swept them off on to the floor and poured the contents of the ink-stand over them. She had acted on a spiteful ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Aegidius"—that wise, kind, tender face; the other an admirable photogravure of Durer's "Selbstbildnis." The books were mainly to do with his favourite historical period—the Later Roman Empire. There was some poetry—an edition of Browning, Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Ernest Dowson, Rossetti, Francis Thompson. There was an edition of Hazlitt, a set of the Spectator, one or two novels, Henry Lessingham and The Roads by Galleon, To Paradise ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... Professor Frazer and culture. Next morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes, rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... nothing so improving as the society of one's equals or superiors. Stimulated into mental activity by her associates in the world in which she now moved, Mary's genius expanded, and ideas but half formed developed into fixed principles. As Swinburne says of Blake, she was born into the church of rebels. Her present experience was her baptism. The times were exciting. The effect of the work of Voltaire and the French philosophers was social upheaval in France. The rebellion of the colonies and the agitation for reform at home ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... have been scanty, but they were wonderful. O'Shaughnessy, Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Gilbert, and, I think Swinburne were there. A poetic and artistic atmosphere pervaded the front of the house as well as ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Times. With illustrations 1 50 The Children's Fairy Geography—With hundreds of beautiful illustrations 2 50 Carleton's Popular Readings—Edited by Mrs. Anna Randall Diehl 1 50 Laus Veneris, and other Poems—By Algernon Charles Swinburne 1 50 Longfellow's Home Life—By Blanche Roosevelt Machetta 1 50 Hawk-eyes—A comic book by "The Burlington Hawkeye Man." Illustrated 1 50 Redbirds Christmas Story—An Illustrated Juvenile. By Mary J. Holmes 50 The Culprit ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... are certainly intelligible; but the results of applying them with logical consistency are rather terrifying. Andrew Lang says somewhere that the logical consequence of the formal theory of art in all its nakedness would make Tennyson the youth, Swinburne, and Edgar Poe the greatest poets of the world, and those delicious effusions of Edward Lear, "The Jumblies" and "On the Coast of Coromandel," masterpieces. Yet if we allow the idealists to pass sentence, what shall become of our treasures in "Kubla Khan," or "Ueber allen Gipfeln," ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... reader finds me less lively than he had—shall I say uncharitably?—hoped for, let him take into account that, to quote the splendid but sensuous phrase of Swinburne, I have always been stupidly prone to prefer "the lilies and languors of virtue" to "the roses and raptures ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... readily see how much literature, and especially poetic literature, occupied his attention. Shakespeare, Dryden, Lessing, Rousseau, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Carlyle, Percival, Thoreau, Swinburne, Chaucer, Emerson, Pope, Gray,—these are the principal subjects of his prose, and the range of topics indicates the catholicity ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... You may do without that of course—without culture and taste and perception; but in that case you'll be nothing but a vulgar cabotine, and nothing will be of any consequence." He had a theory that the great lyric poets—he induced her to read, and recite as well, long passages of Wordsworth and Swinburne—would teach her many of the secrets of the large utterance, the mysteries of rhythm, the communicableness of style, the latent music of the language and the art of "composing" copious speeches and of retaining her stores of free breath. He held in perfect sincerity ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... D'Annunzio and Pascoli, antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parnassian reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear in the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... confession and absolution in accordance with the forms of the Catholic Church? The solemn searching of the heart gives to Mary's character a saintly dignity, as of one already beatified, and invests the whole scene with an incomparable pathos.[122] Swinburne makes his Mary declare, in angry scorn of woman's ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Lament of Tasso; Shelley, Song for Tasso; James Thomson, B. V., Tasso to Leonora.] have received most attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's Andre Chenier, and Alfred Lang's Gerard de Nerval come ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... than the century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles. One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact that for at least two centuries—from ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... with either. Women and marriage and breaches of marriage appear indeed; but the earlier Graal stories are dominated by the most ascetic virginity-worship, and the earlier Arthur-stories show absolutely nothing of the passion which is the subject of the magnificent overture of Mr. Swinburne's Tristram. Even this story of Tristram himself, afterwards fired and coloured by passion, seems at first to have shown nothing but the mixture of animalism, cruelty, and magic which is characteristic of the Celts.[32] ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... poetry that stand out in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe's "Dark tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir''; there are some queer twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of Swinburne: ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... were no other boarders at the little farmhouse. She sat for hours in the summer evenings in the square yard filled with apple trees that bordered the highway, carefully posed over a book, but with her keen eyes always on the road. She read Browning, Emerson, Swinburne. Once he found her with a book that she hastily concealed. He insisted on seeing it, and secured it. It was a book on brain surgery. Confronted with it, she blushed and ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... themselves to sound literature. It is equally rejected by Mr. Spedding, the chief authority on Bacon; by Mr. H. H. Furness, the learned and witty American editor of the 'Variorum Shakespeare;' by Dr. Brandes, the Danish biographer and critic; by Mr. Swinburne, with his rare knowledge of Elizabethan and, indeed, of all literature; and by Mr. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare's latest biographer. Therefore, the first point which strikes us in the Baconian hypothesis is that its devotees are nobly careless of authority. We do not dream of converting them, but it ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Hamilton. Periodical Writings: the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and Westminster Reviews, and Blackwood's Magazine. Physical Science: Brewster, Herschel, Playfair, Miller, Buckland, Whewell.—Since 1860. I. Poets: Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne, Dante Rossetti, Robert Buchanan, Edwin Arnold, "Owen Meredith," William Morris, Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Procter, Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, Mary Robinson, and others. 2. Fiction: "George Eliot," McDonald, Collins, Black, Blackmore, Mrs. Oliphant, Yates, McCarthy, Trollope, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... He has read Swinburne and Tennyson and is very sure he won't have anything but "a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair." Then, of course, there is the "classic profile," the "deep, unfathomable eyes," the "lily-white ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... better than nature. He painted everything tolerably, and nothing excellently; he has given us no gift, struck for us no light, and though he has produced one or two valuable works, of which the finest I know is the Marine in the possession of Sir J. Swinburne, they will, I believe, in future have no place among those considered ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Gurneys, possessed of as much real intellectual life as London can boast of to-day. What, again, might not be said of the influence upon writers from afar. Read Kingsley's Hereward the Wake, Mr. Swinburne's Midsummer Holiday, Charles Dickens' description of Yarmouth and Goldsmith's poetical description in his Deserted Village, where clearly Houghton was intended. {153} These, and a host of other memories touch the heart of all good East Anglians, but that East ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... old Tennyson. And yonder is the identical Swinburne you used to spout from, too. Lord, Jack, it seems a century since I used to listen by the hour to The Triumph ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... in his garret, Millet without the sou, set down in immortal work. At last, when the time is ripe, some connoisseur sees the picture, blows the dust from the book, and straightway blazons his discovery. Mr. Swinburne, so to speak, blew the dust from 'Wuthering Heights'; and now it keeps its proper rank in the shelf where Coleridge and Webster, Hofmann and Leopardi have their place. Until then, a few brave lines of welcome from Sydney Dobell, one fine verse of Mr. Arnold's, one notice ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... said, used to beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the mother because she persisted in living with the daughter and pretending to be fond of her. As for his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, are they not writ large in the four books of the Dunciad? Mr. Swinburne is indeed able to find in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species of holy war, waged, as he says, in language which is at all events strong, 'against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... among the elements: when the music is insistent, the thought is obscured; when the images are elaborate, their meaning is lost to sight; when the thought is subtle or profound, it rejects the image and is careless of sound. Swinburne's poetry is full of philosophy, but is so sensuous and musical that we miss its thoughts; Browning is too subtle a thinker to be a musician. The complexity of poetry is the source of its strength, lending it something of the inwardness ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... writer,—nothing else by which he may sustain himself till he forms a high standard of his own. Not that he should attempt direct imitations, which are almost always failures as such, however attractive in other respects; witness Swinburne's "Atalanta." But the true use of Greek literature is perpetually to remind us what a wondrous thing literary art may be,—capable of what range of resources, of what thoroughness in structure, of what perfection in detail. It is a remarkable fact, that the most penetrating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... vision it must falsify it one way or another; it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles. I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... recognition even from such men as Thackeray, and if the greater Emily had to wait for Swinburne and posterity it was inherited consumption that carried her off in her youth. Although much has been made of their poverty I don't think they were so badly off for their times. The parsonage is a well-built stone house, their father had his salary, and the villagers told ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of love's ecstasy, its despair, its bereavement, its appetite, its scorn, so happy sometimes are the unexpected metrical changes and experiments herein adopted, that the younger poet might suggest discreet comparisons with the earlier Swinburne." ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire, decorum, respectability, solvency—and compulsory Greek at the Little Go—as his father had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he had said a thing or two in the modern vein, affected the socialism of William Morris and learnt some Swinburne by heart, it was out of a conscious wildness. He did not wish to be a prig. He had taken a far more genuine interest ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... Anarchy," "St. Paul and Protestantism," "Literature and Dogma," &c.; a man of culture, and especially literary culture, of which he is reckoned the apostle; died suddenly at Liverpool. He was more eminent as a poet than a critic, influential as he was in that regard. "It is," says Swinburne, "by his verse and not his prose he must be judged," and is being ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of tone, has enlarged the means of musical expression. This is especially shown in the characteristic use he makes of the orchestra in its lower ranges. As Brahms, for depth of thought, was compared with Browning, so Tchaikowsky may well be likened to such poets as Shelley and Swinburne, so exquisite is his instinct for tonal beauty and for delicacy of shading. At times, to be sure, he fairly riots in gorgeous colors—this being the result of his Slavic blood—but few composers have been able to achieve such ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down Lamb's Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, and, turning to Mr. Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the world—that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd |
