"Elegiac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... circulated among us before Parliament met, on which the speech of the honorable member from Maidstone commented this evening. I quite sympathize with him; it was one of the most interesting contributions to our elegiac literature I have heard for some time. But is it in this house only that we find these indications of the want of maturity in our views upon this subject? Our tables are filled at this moment with propositions of eminent members ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... and found in the "Lyrical Ballads" "vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of "Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published—no prime favorite, I ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Virgin, The Wandering Beauty, The Unhappy Mistake. She was working at high pressure, and 1688 still saw a tremendous literary output. Waller had died 21 October, 1687, at the great age of eighty-one, and her Elegiac ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... feeling of beauty which was but faintly known to the human heart in those ages of the world when all other feelings of beauty were most perfect; and accordingly we find, in the most pathetic strains of their elegiac poetry, lamentations over the beauty intensely worshipped in the dust, which was to lie for ever over its now beamless head. But to the Christian who may have seen the living lustre leave the eye of some beloved friend, there must have shone a beauty in his latest ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... acquaintances, gained the mastership of a provincial school. Rodolphe, who was the child of prodigality, always spent his allowance in four days; and, not choosing to abandon his holy but not very profitable profession of elegiac poet, lived for the rest of the month on the rare droppings from the basket of Providence. This long Lent had no terrors for him; he passed through it gaily, thanks to his stoical temperament and to the imaginary treasures which he expended every day while waiting ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... machine of a mint, came down with her own sharp, heavy stamp on every opinion her sister put out. She was matter-of-fact, positive, and declarative to the highest degree, while her sister was naturally inclined to the elegiac and the pathetic, indulging herself in sentimental poetry, and keeping a store thereof in her thread-case, which she had cut from the "Christian Mirror." Miss Roxy sometimes, in her brusque way, popped out observations on life and things, with a droll, hard quaintness that took one's breath a ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... foreign to the pagan story. On this point Tegnr: "Another peculiarity common to the people of the North is a certain disposition for melancholy and heaviness of spirit common to all deeper characters. Like some elegiac key-note, its sound pervades all our old national melodies, and generally whatever is expressive in our annals, for it is found in the depths of the nation's heart. I have somewhere or other said of Bellman, the most national of ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... expedition, near a wild hut or shealing, at the head of Loch Eriboll. Here he found its only inmate a poor asthmatic old man, stretched on his pallet, apparently at the point of death. As he sat by his bed-side, he "crooned," so as to be audible, it seems, to the patient, the following elegiac ditty, in which, it will be observed, he alludes to the death, then recent, of Pelham, an eminent statesman of George the Second's reign. As he was finishing his ditty, the old man's feelings were moved in a way which will be found in the appended note. This is one of Sir ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... dialogue, without narrative— (1) Dialogues in the common epic measure—Balder's Doom, Dialogues of Sigurd, Angantyr—explanations in prose, between the dialogues 112 (2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure: (a) vituperative debates—Lokasenna, Harbarzli (in irregular verse), Atli and Rimgerd 112 (b) Dialogues implying action—The ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through the literature of the mid-century, the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... yet know not, what they say: Know not, yet know, the fire's tongue And the rain's elegiac song, And the white language of the spray, And all the wind meant yesterday— Yea! wiser he, when the day ends, Who shared it with those ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... among the verse-writers of her generation. "Thoreau's Flute," printed in the Atlantic, has been called the most perfect of her poems, with a possible exception of a tender tribute to her mother. Personally, I consider the lines in memory of her mother one of the finest elegiac ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... of the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village love. But though the satirist might find ample scope for his wit in anatomizing the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... historian with confidence in the truly historical character of the successive literary productions of ancient India. As in Greece there is an epic age of literature, where we should look in vain for prose or dramatic poetry; as in that country we never meet with real elegiac poetry before the end of the eighth century, nor with iambics before the same date; as even in more modern times rhymed heroic poetry appears in England with the Norman conquest, and in Germany the Minnesaenger rise and set with ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... musical effect sufficient to show, that, if he had bestowed more leisure, he might have rendered the whole of Goethe's masterpiece in its original measure, at least as agreeably as the Faust has been presented to us hitherto. Mr Coleridge's felicity, both in the Elegiac metre and a slight variation of the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the same year Queen Mary died. Upon that occasion Mr. Congreve produced an elegiac Pastoral, a composition which the admirers of this poet have extolled in the most lavish terms of admiration, but which seems not to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... certainly have chosen no more felicitous form after once departing from that of his original. He has almost re-created the stanza for his purpose, giving it new movement, and successfully adapting to the exigencies of dialogue and of narrative what has hitherto chiefly been associated with elegiac and didactic poetry. Something of this may be seen in the following passages (from the description of the transit through the frozen circle of Caina), which moreover appear to us among the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... said about the title. I have not interpreted the term lyric so rigidly as to exclude sonnets, ballads, elegiac verse, or even pieces of almost pure description. If I had held to the strictest sense of lyric, this book would never have been compiled; for I suspect nothing will strike the reader more forcibly than the fact that, despite the excellence ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... transition from Africa to a favorable environment in Boston, in 1773 published her Poems on Various Subjects, which volume she followed with several interesting occasional poems.[1] For the summer of this year she was the guest in England of the Countess of Huntingdon, whose patronage she had won by an elegiac poem on George Whitefield; in conversation even more than in verse-making she exhibited her refined taste and accomplishment, and presents were showered upon her, one of them being a copy of the magnificent 1770 Glasgow folio edition of Paradise ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... arranged and celebrated than a score of the most brilliant suitors expressed, in prose and in verse, their regret at having lost beyond recall Mademoiselle de Tonnai-Charente. Such elegiac effusions seemed to me unspeakably ridiculous; they should have explained matters earlier, while the lists were still open. For persons of this sort I conceived aversion, who were actually so clumsy as to dare to tell me that they had forgotten ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... once the Elegiac's theme; From thence 'twas used to sing of love's young dream: But who that dainty measure first put out, Grammarians differ, and 'tis ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... starting his story "in the middle of things." In the first part he creates the atmosphere of the uncanny, introduces the more important characters, and presents a striking situation. Part Second, the most admired, is elegiac in nature. It pleases by its simple melancholy. This part and the dramatic tableau of Part Three explain the cause of the duel with which Part One begins. Part Four resumes the thread of the narration where it was broken off in Part One, and ends with the Dance of Death which forms the climax of ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... hero wore In spite of all this elegiac stuff; Let not seven stanzas written by a bore Prevent your ladyship from taking snuff. 1751 BYRON: Lines ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... been said that poetry and song are divided into three periods of a nation's history, that the Epic has to do with the first awakening of a people, telling of their legends, or of some great deeds in remote antiquity. This is followed by the second stage, which embraces elegiac and lyric poetry and arose in stirring and martial times, during the development of new forms of government, when each individual wanted to express his own thoughts and wishes; and the third is the drama, which can only be born in a period ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Justin, seem to be Italian, but rather made at pleasure; so that I doubt whether the story be really of Italian growth. The adventure of the pear-tree I find in a small collection of Latin fables, written by one Adoiphus, in elegiac verses of his fashion, in the year 1315. . . . Whatever was the real origin of the Tale, the machinery of the fairies, which Chaucer has used so happily, was probably added by himself; and, indeed, I cannot help thinking that his Pluto and ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... the spirit of a gentleman." As theologian he wrote a treatise on The Conversion of St. Paul which, a hundred years later, was described as being "still regarded as one of the subsidiary bulwarks of Christianity." As poet he won the praise of Gray for his tender and elegiac verse. Thomson sang of his "sense ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... funeral—or, at least, others had made her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery a deux, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we heard, two months ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... 'Do not be elegiac,' interrupted Logan. 'I know. Still, I am rather sorry for people's people. The unruly affections simply poison the lives of parents and guardians, aye, and of the children too. The aged are now so hasty and imprudent. What would not Tala have given ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... begin with three elegiac couplets headed Titulus Bibliothece, probably placed over the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. But as compared with the love-lays of the Dramatic Lyrics or Men and Women there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry. A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the St Martin's Summer, where the late ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the opera of Camilla had been sprung from a fresh Italian well; neither the elegiac-melodious, nor the sensuous-lyrical, nor the joyous buffo; it was severe as an old masterpiece, with veins of buoyant liveliness threading it, and with sufficient distinctness of melody to enrapture those who like to suck the sugarplums of sound. He would indeed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Wood, is a pleasant and urbane bit of light verse; while "Percival Lowell," by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, is an abominably dull elegiac piece of heavy verse. Edwin Gibson's "Sonnet to Acyion" deserves keen attention as the work of a capable and rapidly developing young bard. "Real versus Ideal" is a bright metrical divertissement by John Russell, which suffers through the omission of the opening ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... disordered eyes the woods of Roscarna, the river, and the lake took on a melancholy tinge. Though this aspect of them was new to her, it is hardly strange that she should have seen them thus, for the beauty of Roscarna is really of an elegiac kind, an autumnal beauty of desertion and of decay. As for Slieveannilaun, she dared not look ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they breathe all ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... silly, simply silly. He couldn't understand, couldn't account for it. What possessed him to get a regular scare like this? It was too absurd for words. Sentiment?—Yes, by all means a reasonable amount of it, well in hand and thus capable of translation—if the fancy took you—into nicely turned elegiac verse; but a scare, a scare pure and simple, wasn't to be tolerated! And he got up, standing astraddle to brace himself against the swinging of the train, while he stretched, settling himself in his clothes—pulled down the fronts of his waistcoat, buttoned the jacket ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... sculptur'd art; Make it, O Learning, thy abode, Thy gems through it impart. There may the bards of tragic name Forever flourish, Graecia's fame— With Homer's deathless lay! Here Maro with heroic glow, And Naso's elegiac flow ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... in the last paragraph was his article 'The Death of Jean,' his last serious writing, and one of the world's most beautiful examples of elegiac prose.—[Harper's Magazine, Dec., 1910,] and later in the volume, 'What Is Man ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... us pictures of regal grief, and gives grandeur to humiliation and penalty. Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us. His humbler minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of "Lycidas" to the elegiac verse of Tennyson. George Herbert still speaks to this generation as two centuries ago he spoke to his own. His quaint verses gather new beauties from time as they come to us redolent with the prayers and aspirations of many successions of the wives, mothers ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... chairmen of Edina's town You curious draw, and make 'em justly speak, To use a vulgar phrase, as clean's a leek; Or smart Epistles, Fables, Songs you write, All put together handsome trim and tight; Or when your sweetly plaintive muse does sigh, And elegiac strains you happy try; Or when in ode sublime your genius soars, Which guineas brings to Donaldson by scores; Accept the thanks of ME, as quick as sage, Accept sincerest thanks for ev'ry page, For ev'ry page?—for ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... words once more Called forth the praise of men, where praise is due; Your great elegiac, tragically true, Must leave all Britain prouder than before; And, in spite of all that breaking hearts deplore, And all that anguished consciences must rue, One arrowed gladness surely pierces through From London's centre ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... and Broglio will have the full use of all his men! "Defection [plainly treasonous to your Liege Lord and Nation]! horrible to think of!" cried the French Public; the Court outwardly taking a lofty tragic-elegiac tone, with some air of hope that his Prussian Majesty would perhaps come round again, to the side of his afflicted France! Of which, except in the way of helping France and the other afflicted parties ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which he did not, however, survive to publish. After an illness of fifteen weeks, of a pulmonary complaint, he died on the 14th April 1835, in his thirtieth year. His remains were interred in the churchyard of Strachan, Kincardineshire, where a tombstone, inscribed with some elegiac verses, has been erected to his memory. The "Tales of the Glens" were published shortly after his decease, under the editorial care of the late Mr James M'Cosh, of Dundee, editor of the Northern Warder newspaper; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... GRAY (1716-1771), the greatest elegiac poet of the century, was born in London in 1716. His father was a "money-scrivener," as it was called; in other words, he was a stock-broker. His mother's brother was an assistant-master at Eton; and at Eton, under the care of this uncle, Gray was brought up. One of his schoolfellows was the famous ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Ireland a warmly appreciative friend, if indeed he had not known Bryskett before their going to Ireland. Bryskett too, perhaps, was acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney; for two of the elegies written on that famous knight's death and printed along with Astrophel in the elegiac collection made by Spenser were probably of Bryskett's composition, viz., The Mourning Muse of Thestylis, where 'Liffey's tumbling stream' is mentioned, and the one entitled A Pastoral Eclogue, where Lycon offers to 'second' Colin's ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... comfort, and which, for at least a quarter of a century, has served her as a home. It was completed before Whitsunday, and I then deliberated on setting myself to seek after employment of a more remunerative kind, with just a little of the feeling to which we owe one of the best-known elegiac poems in the language—the "Man was made to Mourn" of Burns. "There is nothing that gives me a more mortifying picture of human life," said the poet, "than a man seeking work." The required work, however, came direct in my way without solicitation, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, of seven and fourteen lines, come first; and the manuscript terminates with an unfinished poem of seven stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the manuscript as 'The twenty-first and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia.' Archdeacon Hannah, in his Courtly Poets from Ralegh to Montrose, concludes, with some hesitation, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... James Graham, the great marquis of Montrose, over whom some lowly bard has poured forth the following elegiac verses. To say, that they are far unworthy of the subject, is no great reproach; for a nobler poet might have failed in the attempt. Indifferent as the ballad is, we may regret its being still more degraded by many apparent corruptions. There seems an attempt ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... those trees emblematic of mourning almost lost their significance. At last, however, one felt that the light was fading, that the somber silhouettes of the cypresses were more visible than their poetic embellishment. And finally, with the darkness, a breeze seemed to bring a long sigh from those elegiac branches, together with a perfume of the roses that had become unapparent, wet with dew as ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... alma; Recuerdos y esperanzas, 1899, Garnier, Paris). The romantic pessimist, Manuel Gutierrez Najera (d. 1888), was tormented throughout life by the vain quest of happiness and the thirst of truth. His verses, which are often elegiac or fantastic, are highly admired by the younger generation of Mexican poets. In a letter to the writer of this article, Blanco-Fombona praises Gutierrez Najera above all other Mexican poets (Poesias, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... Fairfax's daughter; Cowley wrote also a sonnet for the bride. In December he obtained, by influence of friends, the degree of M.D. from the University of Oxford, and retired into Kent to study botany. Such study caused him then to write a Latin poem upon Plants, in six books: the first two on Herbs, in elegiac verse; the next two on Flowers, in various measures; and the last two on Trees, in heroic ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all, represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Georgie!" she exclaimed. "You have been investing!" and as she came across the room for a closer view, "Is it—is it Lucy?" she asked half timidly, half archly. But the next instant she saw whose likeness was thus set forth in elegiac splendour—and she was silent, except for a ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... by the turtle-dove, swan, phoenix, and eagle, in verses that very closely resemble Shakespeare's account of the funereal functions fulfilled by the same four birds in his contribution to Chester's volume. This resemblance suggests that Shakespeare's poem may be a fanciful adaptation of Roydon's elegiac conceits without ulterior significance. Shakespeare's concluding 'Threnos' is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in his Mad Lover in the song 'The Lover's Legacy to ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... oppression which always falls on me at the sight and sound of the cataract of human beings and vehicles, running so fiercely in the paved channels of London. A beautiful poem, but how immeasurably sad, an invocation to the memory and to the spirit of Robert Browning, not speaking of him in an elegiac strain as of a great poet who had lived his life to the full and struck his clear-toned harp, solemnly, sweetly, and whimsically too, year after year; but as of something great and noble wholly lost and separated from the ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and the style of such better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... telegram which announced Mr. Poland's death was received, he tried to comfort her by words that were so peculiarly elegant and sombre, that, in spite of Laura's wishes to think otherwise, they struck her like an elegiac address that had been carefully prearranged and studied; and when the tidings of poor little Bertha's death came, it would occur to Laura that Mr. Beaumont had thought his first little address so perfect that he could do no better than to repeat it, as one might use an appropriate ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... reflective lyric prompted by the death of some one. Tennyson's In Memoriam is a collection of elegiac lyrics. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... a descendant, and from which we have made some extracts, contain numerous poetical compositions worthy of being presented to the public. A vein of humour pervades the majority of his verses; in the elegiac strain he is eminently plaintive. He is remembered as a man of excellent dispositions and eminent social qualities: he sung with grace the songs of his country, and delighted in humorous conversation. His elder brother was proprietor of Garnkirk, and his son, who bore the same ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... verse, again, may either combine different metres or consist of but one kind—but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... lower classes had better read Dr. Johnston's translation of those Psalms, another elegant writer of the Scots nation, instead of Ovid's Epistles; for he has turned the same Psalms, perhaps, with greater elegancy, into elegiac verse, whereof the learned W. Benson, esq. has lately published a new edition; and I hear that these Psalms are honoured with an increasing use in the schools of Holland and Scotland. A stanza, or a couplet of those writers would now and then stick upon the minds ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... probably from the same root as the German lied. The word was originally applied to a form of elegiac French poetry, much imitated by ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... stanzas about an echo repeating a cuckoo's voice.... Then we have Elegiac stanzas "to the spade of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... held throughout the Napoleonic era. In 1813, he became a member of the Jolly Topers of the Caveau, then the resort of the most distinguished literary men of Paris. On the fall of Napoleon, Beranger took it upon himself to sing the glory of the fallen empire in elegiac strains. A severe reprimand was administered to him by the government. His second series of Napoleonic songs, published in 1821, cost him his place and three months' confinement in the prison of St. Pelagie, while his third (1828) subjected him to nine months' imprisonment in ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... are still extant. They are written in the Elegiac measure; yet the sense is not, as in other Poets, always bound in by the Couplet; but often breaks out into the succeeding verse: a practice, that certainly gives variety and animation to the measure; and which has been successfully imitated in the rhime ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... and inoffensive a kind that we should as soon think of making prize of a thrush in a bed of strawberries. We are much afraid that the tendency of the present age towards the facetious has contributed not a little to the dearth of sonnets and the extermination of the elegiac stanza. So long as friend Michael Angelo Titmarsh has the privilege of frequenting the house of Mrs Perkins and other haunts of fashionable and literary celebrity, Poseidon Hicks will relapse into gloomy silence, and Miss Bunion refrain from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... matter and form, are sufficiently uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one side, a desire to use a rejuvenated heroic, either in couplets or in various combined forms, the simplest of which is the elegiac quatrain of alternately rhyming lines, and the most complicated the sonnet; while between them various stanzas more or less suggested by Italian are to be ranked. Of this thing there has been and will be no end as long as English poetry lasts. The attempt to arrange the old and apparently almost ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... stage—in which are displayed, for instruction and amusement, all the passions, feelings, errors, and virtues of the human race in real life; lyric poetry, or that suited to music, as songs, odes, &c; didactic, or instructive; elegiac, or sentimental, and affecting; satirical, or censorious; epigrammatic, or witty and ludicrous; and pastoral, or descriptive of ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... dawdles away his day in a manner not unpleasant to him; and I really am persuaded he has a conscience that would gild the inside of a dungeon. The feats of our bare-legged warriors in the late War [BERG-SCHOTTEN, among whom I was a Colonel], accompanied by a PIBRACH [elegiac bagpipe droning MORE SUO] in his outer room, have an effect on the old Don, which would delight you." [Keith, i. 129; "Dresden, 25th February, 1770:" to his ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his mind wandered back to the last night scene which he surveyed on the bloody shores of the River Raisin. He gave up the heroic part and became the schoolboy again, and commemorated his sorrows for his lost friends in verse, like some passionate, heart-broken lover. These elegiac strains were never intended for any but the eye of mutual friends, whose sympathies, like his own, poured out tears with their plaints over the dead. We give some of these lines of his boyhood, to show that the heroic youth had a bosom not ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... His music is evidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is cautious and traditional. Even those who are not professionally on the side of the musical anarchs find it somewhat unventuresome, too smooth and soft and elegantly elegiac, too dull. And in substituting for revolutionism a formula for musical progress less suggestive of violent change, more suggestive of a process like the tranquil, gradual and orderly unfolding of bud into blossom, was not M. Rachmaninoff ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... poured forth his elegiac strains upon the fate of the widowed bridegroom, on which subject, after a long and querulous effusion, the poet arrives at the sound conclusion, that if Baldoon had walked on foot, which it seems was his general custom, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Prince of Life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression which he had made upon them in life and in death; at the most could only have given it an elegiac voice, but could by no possibility have changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... come down to us is of later date than the commencement of the Second Punic War, and consists almost exclusively of works fashioned on Greek models. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies are bad ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness. Hence bards, like Proteus long in vain tied down, Escape in monsters, and amaze the town. Hence miscellanies spring, the weekly boast Of Curll's chaste press, and Lintot's rubric post:[186] Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines,[187] Hence journals, medleys, mercuries, magazines; Sepulchral lies, our holy walls to grace, And new-year odes,[188] and all the Grub Street race. In clouded majesty here Dulness shone; Four guardian virtues, round, support her throne: Fierce champion ...
— English Satires • Various
... composing in the ancient languages: and he therefore never acquired that knack of versification which is sometimes possessed by clever boys whose knowledge of the language and literature of Greece and Rome is very superficial. It would have been utterly out of his power to produce such charming elegiac lines as those in which Wellesley bade farewell to Eton, or such Virgilian hexameters as those in which Canning described the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it may be doubted whether any scholar has ever, at twenty, had a more solid and profound ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Fregate, La Serieuse, Madame de Soubise, and Dolorida, please me especially. The last has an elegiac sweetness and finish, which are rare. It also makes a perfect gem of a cabinet picture. Some have a fine strain of natural melody, and give you at once the key-note of the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Syracuse at his patron's request. Hiero died in 467, the year of the Seven against Thebes; but after 458, when the Oresteia was exhibited at Athens, we find the poet again in Sicily for the last time. In 456 he died, and was buried at Gela; and on his tomb was placed an epitaph in two elegiac couplets saying: "Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela; of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak, or the long-haired Persian who knows ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Caturras and Gaspar, pieces as witty as anything in Bocage but free from Bocage's coarse impiety, will always interest literary students. But it is as the singer of love that Joao de Deus will delight posterity as he delighted his own generation. The elegiac music of Rachel and of Marina, the melancholy of Adeus and of Remoinho, the tenderness and sincerity of Meu casta lirio, of Lagrima celeste, of Descalca and a score more songs are distinguished by the large, vital simplicity which withstands time. It is precisely in the quality ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... categories of epic, dramatic, lyric, and so forth, have a natural propriety, and should be adhered to. It may sometimes seem doubtful to which of two categories a poem belongs; whether this or that poem is to be called, for instance, narrative or lyric, lyric or elegiac. But there is to be found in every good poem a strain, a predominant note, which determines the poem as belonging to one of these kinds rather than the other; and here is the best proof of the value of the classification, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of Merchant Taylors', Minor tate, ingenio at stupendus, Sapphic, Heroic, Elegiac,—what ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with them or to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to retract his superlative claims for ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... used to feel them in old times; but which they do not feel as their forefathers felt—a sort of poetical Tractarianism, in short. Their metre betrays them, as well as their words; in both they are continually wandering, unconsciously to themselves, into the elegiac—except when on one subject, whereon the muse of Scotia still warbles at first hand, and from the depths of her heart—namely, alas! the barley bree: and yet never, even on this beloved theme, has she risen again to the height ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up. Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... is concerned with the disparity or contrast between reality and the ideal. If the poet is mainly interested in the real, we have, in the broad sense, satire, which may be pathetic or humorous. If he dwells more upon the ideal, we have elegiac poetry—elegiac in the narrower sense, if the ideal is conceived as a distant object of longing, idyllic if it is portrayed as a present reality. The second part of the essay is devoted to a review of the sentimental poets of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... of the elegiac distich the caesura is always penthemimeral. In the iambic trimeter (consisting of three dipodia or pairs of feet), both in Greek and Latin, the most usual caesura is the penthemimeral; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... devoted to the personal attachments of love or friendship. A friend delighted to twine his name with the name of his friend. Crashawe, the poet, had a literary intimate of the name of Car, who was his posthumous editor; and, in prefixing some elegiac lines, discovers that his late friend Crashawe was Car; for so the anagram of Crashawe runs: He was Car. On this quaint discovery, he has indulged all the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the palate! Universal Sweet! Gastronomy's delectable Gioconda! Since with submission loyally I greet And follow out the regimen of RHONDDA, I cannot be considered indiscreet If I essay, but never go beyond, a Brief elegiac tribute to a sway By sterner ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... the pieces omitted are of elegiac character. Of this class, he could find a place for such pieces only as were dedicated to the most distinguished of the persons falling in battle, or such as are marked by the higher characteristics of poetry—freshness, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... character. The beeches with their smooth white bark twisted their tops together. Ash trees softly curved their bluish branches. In the tufts of the hornbeams rose up holly stiff as bronze. Then came a row of thin birches, bent into elegiac attitudes; and the pine-trees, symmetrical as organ pipes, seemed to be singing a song as they swayed to and fro. There were gigantic oaks with knotted forms, which had been violently shaken, stretched themselves ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... fortieth Olympiad, and the early inscriptions are rude and unskilfully executed; nor can we even assure ourselves whether Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, Kallinus Tyrtaeus, Xanthus, and the other early elegiac and lyric poets, committed their compositions to writing, or at what time the practice of doing so became familiar. The first positive ground which authorizes us to presume the existence of a manuscript of Homer, is in the famous ordinance of Solon, with regard to the rhapsodies at the Panathenaea: ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... were appropriated to the unequal numbers [of the elegiac]: afterward [love and] successful desires were included. Yet what author first published humble elegies, the critics dispute, and the controversy still waits the ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... a rare adventure," commented the other. "Wandering in the country; the beautiful country, where I was reared; away from the madness of courts. Already I hear the wanton breezes sighing in Sapphic softness and the forests' elegiac murmur. Tell me, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and the present volume is one more illustration of the place which has always been occupied in English literature by the gifted amateur. The stories in the present volume all lead back by implication to the golden age, and if Mr. Nevinson's mood is elegiac, he never ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... soonest attained; and as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most commended: whereof some were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not scarce, whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which what it is there be few who know ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Elegiac poetry has an honorable place in Roman literature. To this school belongs Ovid, [Footnote: Born B.C. 43. Died A.D. 18.] whose "Metamorphoses" will always retain their interest. He, with that self- conscious ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... like the lover of Bombyca in Theocritus, believed in having an image of himself and an image of the beloved. Into the heart of the female image he thrust magic powders, and he said that this was common, lovers adding songs, "partly elegiac, partly malicious, and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Drinkwater, born in 1882, is best known as the author of Abraham Lincoln—A Play (1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most of them meditative and elegiac ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... architecture and other sciences among his accomplishments; the latter spread out in literature, as "Sohrab and Rustum," "Empedocles on Etna," "Tristram and Iseult," as well as "Balder Dead" attest. The quatrain prefixed to the volume containing the narrative and elegiac poems be-tokens what joy Arnold had in his literary work, and indicates why these ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... 1357, Petrarch received a letter from Benintendi, the Chancellor of Venice, requesting him to send a dozen elegiac verses to be engraved on the tomb of Andrea Dandolo. The children of the Doge had an ardent wish that our poet should grant them this testimony of his friendship for their father. Petrarch could not refuse the request, and composed fourteen verses, which contain a sketch of the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... he shows himself at the age of seventeen so soaked in Spenser and Spenser's school that, when his baby niece dies and he sets himself to make her an elegy, what he gives us is these graceful verses conveying as much as a boy of seventeen can catch of the lovely elegiac ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... candle-sticks have been traced by inheritance. It is not likely that she was "rich in this world's goods" through her marriage, but she had a husband whose fidelity to state and religion have ever been respected. To his memory Rev. John Cotton wrote some elegiac verses; Justin Winsor has emphasized the honor which is still paid to the name of John Alden in Duxbury and Plymouth: [Footnote: History of Duxbury; Winsor.] "He was possessed of a sound judgment and of talents which, though not brilliant, ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... youth. The young, male body droops forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real, satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Destree, Leon Clim, Valrosche, Aman, Regnard, Pradel, Romilly, and Marchegeay, the manager. They were all there, Madame Ravaud, Madame Doulce, Ellen Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, Louise Dalle, Fagette, Nanteuil, kneeling, robed in black, like elegiac figures. Some of the women were reading their missals. Some were weeping. All of them brought to the coffin of their comrade at least the tribute of their heavy eyes and their faces pallid from the cold of the morning. Journalists, actors, playwrights, whole families of those artisans ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... talked vaguely of the things he was going to do in the future, but with less conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no longer believed in him: when he had drank two or three glasses of whiskey he was inclined to be elegiac. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... conventional piece of work than the seventeenth- century dialogues, and the use which is made of the local idiom is more restricted. Yet it is not without historic interest. Composed at a time when the Enclosure Acts were robbing the peasant farmer of his rights of common, the poem is an elegiac lament on the part of the Snaith farmer who sees himself suddenly brought to the brink of ruin by the enclosure of Snaith Marsh. To add to his misery, his bride, Susan, has deserted him for the more prosperous rival, Roger. As much of the poem is in standard English, ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... mastered its content? The Preludes are a perfect field for the "prospector"; though Essipoff and Arthur Friedheim played them in a single program. Nor must we overlook the so-called hackneyed valses, the tinkling charm of the one in G-flat, the elegiac quality of the one in B minor. The Barcarolle is only for heroes. So I do not set it down in malice against the student or the everyday virtuosos that he—or she—does not attempt it. The F minor ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... neighbours round admire his shrewdness For songs of loyalty and lewdness; Outdone by none in rhyming well, Although he never learn'd to spell. Two bordering wits contend for glory; And one is Whig, and one is Tory: And this, for epics claims the bays, And that, for elegiac lays: Some famed for numbers soft and smooth, By lovers spoke in Punch's booth; And some as justly fame extols For lofty lines in Smithfield drolls. Bavius[16] in Wapping gains renown, And Maevius[16] reigns ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Constance. "At thirty? What do you expect? She looks like an elegiac figure weeping on a tombstone. I can't stand the sight of her. And it's all kept up to make herself interesting. Edwin Hay has been ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... Solon, vexed at the disgrace, and perceiving thousands of the youth wished for somebody to begin, but did not dare to stir first for fear of the law, counterfeited a distraction, and by his own family it was spread about the city that he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy which ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Twice six.—Ver. 72. These were the 'Dii consentes,' mentioned before, in the note to Book i., l. 172. They are thus enumerated in an Elegiac couplet, more consistent with the rules of prosody than ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Dorchester Church seems also to have been a maker of elegiac verse; for after the decease of Rev. Richard Mather, the pastor, and one of the ablest divines of colonial New England, the church records contain the two complimentary stanzas quoted below, the first being an evident ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... levelled against them. His "Poems of Jeshurun" published in He-Asif for 1888, alive with emotion and patriotic ardor, as well as his Haggadic legends, must be put in the first rank. After him comes Menahem M. Dolitzki, the elegiac poet of Zionism, the singer of sweet "Zionides." [Footnote: Poems published in New York, in 1896.] Then a young writer, snatched away all too early, Mordecai Zebi Manne, who was distinguished for his tender lyrics ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... long would he stay, And long lock'd in silence his tongue; Then he humm'd an elegiac lay, Or a Psalm penitential he sung: But if with his Friends he regal'd, His Mirth, as his Griefs, knew no bounds; In no Tale of Mark Sargent he sail'd, Nor in ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pudic goddess. There ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... and established peace and good-will in the city, for which good service, not only all the citizens in general bestowed extraordinary honors upon him, but the exiles, apart by themselves, erecting his statue in brass, inscribed on it these elegiac verses: — ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... quote from the elegiac tributes which appeared in the public press after Lord Leighton's death, and invidious to repeat certain unkind and unjust strictures which marred the otherwise unanimous note of appreciation. It is obvious that an artist with so strongly marked a personality must needs have ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... shed of a station, a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and an adjacent cemetery, thickly populated (according to a local legend) with the bodies of people who have died of old age while waiting for their trains. This elegiac locality was visited, many years ago, by the Honorable E.J. Phelps, once ambassador of the United States to the court of St. James's. He was allotted several hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his consequent meditations moved him to the ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... upon the Edomites, iv. 21, 22, who behaved so cruelly after the siege (Ps, cxxxvii. 7). In the last poem the city, after piteously lamenting her manifold sorrows, v. 1-18, beseeches the everlasting God for deliverance therefrom, v. 19-22. [Footnote 1: In the Hebrew elegiac metre, as in the Greek and Latin, the second line is shorter than the first—usually three beats followed by two.] [Footnote 2: An unconvincing attempt has been made to refer the last two chapters to the Maccabean age—about ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... gave this poem to the world as his own answer to the doubts and questionings of men. This universal human interest, together with its exquisite form and melody, makes the poem, in popular favor at least, the supreme threnody, or elegiac poem, of our literature; though Milton's Lycidas is, from the critical view point, undoubtedly a more ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... elegiac mood stole over him. He looked on at his own death; he saw the grave dug hastily in the hot sand; he heard the roll of the Dead March, and the rattling of the rifles. In all probability these details would be omitted, but they helped to glorify the dream. He was a mourner ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... will often accomplish what force and fury can never effect. (Fable of the Sun and the Wind. Boreas et Sol.) This is one of forty two fables ascribed to AEsop, which Avienus, a Latin poet who lived in the age of Theodosius turned into elegiac verse. The employment of apologues, which is sanctioned by scripture, seems to be a natural mode of imparting instruction. These arrest the attention, disarm prejudice, give to unwelcome truths a pleasing form and imprint deeply on the memory the lesson that is intended ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... I will go into the vast field of literature. I think men of letters frequently owe all their characteristics to their peculiar mode of life. Comic poets must be of one kind, tragic poets of another, and elegiac, of the uncertain class. The most elegiac and the most comic are only separated by ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... made equal if not greater progress in the early ages of Grecian history. Hesiod lived B.C. 735; and lyric poetry flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, especially the elegiac form, or songs for the dead. Epic poetry was of still earlier date, as seen in the Homeric poems. The AEolian and Ionic Greeks of Asia were early noted for celebrated poets. Alcaeus and Sappho lived on the Isle of Lesbos, and were surrounded with admirers. Anacreon ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... brought him fame were Locksley Hall, Lady Godiva, Ulysses, The Two Voices and Morte d' Arthur. The latter was the seed of the splendid Idylls of the King. Five years later he published The Princess, with its beautiful songs, and three years after In Memoriam the greatest elegiac poem in the language, in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... were supposed to be the product of the same (or a similar) faculty, irrespective of the date of composition. Thus one group was entitled "Poems of the Fancy," another "Poems of the Imagination," a third "Poems proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection," a fourth "Epitaphs and Elegiac Pieces," again "Poems on the Naming of Places," "Memorials of Tours," "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," "Miscellaneous Sonnets," etc. The principle which guided him in this was obvious enough. It was, in some respects, a most natural arrangement; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... dispositions. Nature bestowed on him a profound genius, a solid judgment, and a wonderful memory. Several authors report[17] that being employed to review some regiments he retained the name of every soldier. He was but eight years old, when, in 1591, he wrote some elegiac verses, very pretty for that age: afterwards he thought them not good enough to publish. M. le Clerc informs us, that he had seen a copy of them in the possession of a very able man, who purposed to write the life ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... misunderstanding, his misunderstanding, this charming culture that he had carefully erected like a fence about himself and his dear ones? Could one learn how to live here? As he passed Lisa, he heard her say in her elegiac fashion, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... THEOGNIS, an elegiac poet of Megara; flourished in the second half of the 6th century B.C.; lost his possessions during a revolution at Megara, in which the democrats overpowered the aristocrats, to which party he belonged; compelled to live in exile, he found solace in the writing of poetry full of a practical and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Be shed for him. The virgin in her bloom Cut off, the joyous youth, and darling child, These are the tombs that claim the tender tear And elegiac songs. But Adams calls For other notes of gratulation high; That now he wanders thro' those endless worlds He here so well descried; and, wondering, talks And hymns their Author with his glad compeers. Columbia's boast! whether with angels ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... the memory of William Shenstone, Esquire, In whose verse Were all the natural graces. And in whose manners Was all the amiable simplicity Of pastoral poetry, With the sweet tenderness Of the elegiac. ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Catholic devotion and inspiration. The "Credo," as if built on a rock, should sound as steadfast as the dogma itself; a mystic and ecstatic joy should pervade the "Sanctus;" the "Agnus Dei" (as well as the "Miserere" in the "Gloria") should be accentuated, in a tender and deeply elegiac manner, by the most fervent sympathy with the Passion of Christ; and the "Dona nobis pacem," expressive of reconciliation and full of faith, should float away like sweet-smelling incense. The Church composer is both preacher and priest, and what the ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... that Lorand had written to me that he did not wish the elegiac tone of our first gathering to be disturbed by the voice of the stoics of Lankadomb, yet he had invited the whole Epicurean alliance here—a fact which was likely to give a dithyrambic ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only reality then is the family, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... autobiographical poem, which was afterwards named by Mrs. Wordsworth 'The Prelude', was finished. In that year also Wordsworth wrote the 'Ode to Duty', 'To a Sky-Lark', 'Fidelity', the fourth poem 'To the Daisy', the 'Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm', the 'Elegiac Verses' in memory of his brother John, 'The Waggoner', and a few ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... whose systems of physics then occupied the learned world—M. de Saussure and Marat. But science was not sufficient for his mind, which overflowed with sensitiveness, and which Barbaroux poured forth in elegiac poetry as burning as the noonday, and vague as the horizon of the sea beneath his view. There is felt that southern melancholy whose languor, is closer allied to pleasure than weakness, and which resembles the songs of man seated ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... murdered by an infuriated mob, in the fourth year of Henry VII.; he having, as lord lieutenant of the county, levied a tax on the people by order of his sovereign, for carrying on the war in Bretague. Skelton, poet-laureat to Henry VIII. lamented his death in some elegiac lines. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... "Spare us your elegiac tones," said the Parrot giggling. "Rather speak of something at which one may laugh heartily. Laughing is an infallible sign of the highest degree of mental development. Can a dog, or a horse laugh? No, ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... that the predominant note in Tuckerman's poetry is elegiac; rather is it a note of tender, wistful, and scrupulously accurate contemplation of the New England countryside, mingled with spiritual speculation. But as the volume closed with the elegiac poems, and as thereafter no more poems were published, it may be surmised that the poet's ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... this etude Kleczynski thinks there are traces of weariness of life, and quotes Orlowski, Chopin's friend," He is only afflicted with homesickness." Willeby calls this study the most beautiful of them all. For me it is both morbid and elegiac. There is nostalgia in it, the nostalgia of a sick, lacerated soul. It contains in solution all the most objectionable and most endearing qualities of the master. Perhaps we have heard its sweet, highly perfumed measures too often. Its interpretation is a matter of taste. Kullak has written ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... into sundry more special denominations; the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they like best to write in; for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numerous kind of writing which ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... same. After holding the ear of Europe for many years, he has fallen at the present time completely into the background, and outside the frontiers of Italy his works are rarely heard. Bellini had no pretensions to dramatic power. His genius was purely elegiac in tone, and he relied entirely for the effect which he intended to produce upon the luscious beauty of his melodies, into which, it must be admitted, the great singers of his time contrived to infuse a surprising amount of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Beethoven, or Haendel, or Gluck, or even Schubert. He has all the charm of an Umbrian painter, as is shown in L'Enfance du Christ, as well as sweetness and inward sadness, the gift of tears, and an elegiac passion. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... plucked these elegiac blooms, There where he rests 'mid comrades fit and few, And thence I bring this growth of classic tombs, An offering, friend, to you— You who have loved like me his simple themes, Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain, And loved the land ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... chin in verse. His muse was singularly prolific and her progeny various. He roamed recklessly through the realm of poesy. Every style seemed his—blank verse and rhyme, ode and epic, lyrical and tragical, satiric and elegiac, sacred and profane, sublime and ridiculous, he was equally good at all. His poetry might not perhaps have stood a very strict classification, but he produced a fair, marketable sample, which deserved (his ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... a fine disposition, my honoured friend, to send you an elegiac epistle; and want only genius to ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... appearance of the 1842 volume of Tennyson's verse the poet's bosom friend, Arthur Hallam, died at an immature age at Vienna, and his death was the subject of much brooding in noble, elegiac verse, written, as was Milton's 'Lycidas,' to commemorate the loss of one very dear to the poet. In "In Memoriam," as all know, Tennyson sought to assuage his grief and give fine, artistic expression to his profound sorrow at the loss of his companion and friend; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... elegiac strain Softly sings of mental pain, And mournful diapasons sail On the faintly dying gale. But, ah! the soothing scene is o'er, On middle flight we cease to soar, For now the muse assumes a bolder sweep, Strikes on the lyric string her sorrows deep, In strains ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the grave, consign to the grave, lay in the tomb, entomb, in tomb; inhume; lay out, perform a funeral, embalm, mummify; toll the knell; put to bed with a shovel; inurn[obs3]. exhume, disinter, unearth. Adj. burried &c. v.; burial, funereal, funebrial[obs3]; mortuary, sepulchral, cinerary[obs3]; elegiac; necroscopic[obs3]. Adv. in memoriam; post obit, post mortem[Lat]; beneath the sod. Phr. hic jacet[Lat][obs3], ci-git[Fr]; RIP; requiescat in pace[Lat]; "the lone couch of his everlasting sleep" [Shelley]; "without a grave- unknell'd, uncoffin'd, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus |
