"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his reverence for poets and poetry. Mangone was finally taken, and beaten to death with hammers at Naples. He and his like are the heroes of much popular verse, written in ottava rima, and beginning with the traditional epic invocation to the muse. A fine example is "The most beautiful history of the life and death of Pietro Mancino, chief of Banditti," which has remained popular with the people ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... brethren than to the French whose language they use. Charles de Coster, who may be considered as the father of this particular branch of the school, published in 1868 the Legend of Ulenspiegel, which is nothing but a prose epic in which the legendary character of Owliglass is identified with one of the heroes of the sixteenth century revolution against Spain. Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913), in his best novels, deals with the manners and customs of the Flemish peasantry. The very soul of Flanders shines ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... armes" is meant, I suppose, the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. Posterity will think the horrors of civil war compensated by the pleasure of reading Lucan's epic! ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... politics and literature of the country that it is valuable. Above all, it possesses the crowning quality displayed usually in creative poetry alone, of presenting a vivid mind picture of the character of the men with whom it deals. It has been called the 'Epic of the Sudan.' It lacks the charm of form, but in all else the description is well merited. Its pages are a treasure house of information for the careful student, and the volume may be read many times without ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Kuli range recount the episode of the ingenuous troutling which, having apparently conceived a violent passion for the Colonel, literally forced itself upon the hook seven times within a short afternoon. Captains on the Sultanitza Planina rehearse the epic incidents of how the Colonel snatched victory from defeat after pursuing for three miles an infuriated pike which had wrenched the very rod from his grasp. Subalterns in the chill wilds of Cologne, adding picturesque details to an already artistic story, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... saw it; for most of the world it came as an illimitable multitude of incoherent, loud, and confusing impressions. But all the time he was at least doing his utmost to see the war, to simplify it and extract the essence of it until it could be apprehended as something epic and explicable, as ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... our pleasing duty to be able to corroborate to some extent, Mr. F. Bayham's favourable report. Fancy sketches and historical pieces our young man had eschewed; having convinced himself either that he had not an epic genius, or that to draw portraits of his friends, was a much easier task than that which he had set himself formerly. Whilst all the world was crowding round a pair of J. J,.'s little pictures, a couple of chalk heads ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem, "Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement. Voltaire afterward said that he would not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... With a view of giving a pretty complete outline of the founder of the Teutonic race we have in our notes given all the Heimskringla sketch of the Black Sea Odin. We have done this, not only on account of the material it furnishes as the groundwork of a Teutonic epic, which we trust the muses will ere long direct some one to write, but also on account of the vivid picture it gives of Teutonic life as shaped and ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... and political life should never enter into them, except as a subordinate element; but there is a border-land between the two, in which politics and society act and react on each other, and it is from this field that the great subjects for epic and dramatic poetry have always been reaped. Hawthorne only knew of this by hearsay. Of the strenuous conflict that continually goes on in political centres like London and New York, a struggle for wealth, for ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in 'this world which is'—so Peter informed us before his conversion to ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... LINCOLN went his way, leaving behind him a trail of glory, shining like the sun; in the path of which, freed through the mandate of his great soul, MARCHED FOUR MILLION NEGROES, now swollen to twelve, their story, the saddest epic of the ages, of whom and in behalf of whom their children; the generation now and those to come, this History was collated and arranged. It is an EVANGEL proclaiming to the world, their unsullied patriotism; their rapid fire loyalty, that through all the years of the ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... above all, Fandor, coupled with his friend, detective Juve, had either distinguished himself gloriously or covered himself with ridicule, but in either case he had attracted public attention by his epic combats with the most deadly personality of the age—the ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... but the forcible interest culminated in the total consumption of this pie, and the bursting of this boy. Truly he was a fine sight, Barbox Brothers, with serious attentive face, and ear bent down, much jostled on the pavements of the busy town, but afraid of losing a single incident of the epic, lest he should be examined in it ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... the classical translations that used to make him inaccurate, a scrap of a very boyish epic about King Arthur, beginning with a storm at Tintagel, sundry half ballads, the verses he was suspected of, and never would show, that first summer at Hollywell, and a very touching vision of his fair young mother. Except a translation or two, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rather epic than dramatic in his powers, there can be no question as to Wagner's rank. The performance of the "Nibelungenring," covering "Rheingold," "Die Walkueren," "Siegfried," and "Goetterdaemmerung," was one of the epochs of musical ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... like a descending wind, and leave him physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an instance of the poetical temper in its most unbridled form. A glance through the enormous range of his collected works is like an excursion into chaos. We are met almost at the threshold by a colossal epic, Creation, Man and the Messiah (1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes, by descriptive pieces which embrace the universe, by all the froth and roar and turbidity of genius, with none of its purity ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the rear, in her haste to engage the enemy. Before she came up she commenced the action at a long range, and very abruptly—for an effective rhetorician of Aunt Becky's sort, jumps at once, like a good epic poet, in medias res; and as Nutter, who, like all her friends in turn, experienced once or twice 'a taste of her quality,' observed to his wife, 'by Jove, that woman says things for which she ought to be put in the watch-house.' So now and here she maintained ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 1718. "Nos pretres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense; Notre credulite fait toute leur science." Act IV., Scene I.] For several years Voltaire went on writing, with increasing reputation. In 1723, his great epic poem, "La Henriade," was secretly circulated in Paris.[Footnote: Desnoiresterres, Jeunesse, 297.] The author was one of the marked men of the town. At the same time his reputation must have been to some extent that of a troublesome ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... tufts. Who marched to battle with their gaiters black. Like a poor prisoner, who falls a-dreaming Of vast and murmuring forests, with a tree Fashioned of shavings, taken from a doll's house, I build my Father's Epic with these soldiers. ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... Morning," which means that they understood the cows to signify the light of morning, and it would seem also that they thought that the waters mentioned in the story signified the rain. But why do they speak of these acts as heroic deeds, exploits of a mighty warrior, in the same tone and with the same epic fire as when they sing of Indra's battles in times near to their own, real battles in which their own forefathers, strong in their faith in the god, shattered the armies of hostile Aryan tribes or the fortresses of dark-skinned natives? The ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... "Most epic poets plunge in medias res, (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road), And then your hero tells, whene'er you please, What went before—by way ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... works I would fain finish the Christabel, Alas! for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem—Jerusalem ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... prose, preceded by nine defective verses which probably preserve old epic turns of expression. The dialect is Bavarian, the theme that of Psalm XC, 2. The manuscript dates from the year 814. Wessobrunn was the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... my Novel because its failure really is a mystery. But I am not at all more fortunate in the reception of my poetry. I have tried it every way—ballades by the bale, sonnets by the dozen, loyal odes, seditious songs, drawing-room poetry, an Epic on the history of Labducuo, erotic verse, all fire, foam, and fangs, reflective ditto, humble natural ballads about signal-men and newspaper-boys, Life-boat rescues, Idyls, Nocturnes in rhyme, tragedies in blank verse. Nobody will print them, or, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... kinship to the Greek stories as the Old English Apollonius of Tyre, which was probably or rather certainly in the original Greek itself. The sources of French "romance"—I must take leave to request a "truce of God" as to the application of that term and of "epic" for present purposes—appear to have been two—the Saint's Life and the patriotic or family saga, the latter in the first place indelibly affected by the Mahometan incursions of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The story-telling ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... some bearing on the central theme. It is the principle which excludes all extraneous matter, and demands that all threads converge toward the climax. Classical violations of Unity may be found in the episodes of Homer and other epic poets of antiquity, as well as in the digressions of Fielding and other celebrated novelists; but no beginner should venture to emulate such liberties. Unity is the quality we have lately noted and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... castle in Wilhelmsthal. Though in Vienna honors came later, Hebbel felt himself to be during these years at the summit of his existence. In 1855 he bought a country home at Orth near Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, and to the idyllic atmosphere of that retreat he owed the inspiration for the epic poem Mother and Child (1857), his gentlest treatment of a tragic theme. In 1857 he issued a definitive edition of his Poems, dedicated to Uhland, "the first poet of the present time." In 1854 Genoveva, in modified form, was successfully ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... be likened to a series of lyrics sung by separate singers, which, coalescing, at last make a vigorous chorus, and this, attracting many from afar, swells and is prolonged, until presently it assumes the dignity and proportions of epic song." ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... the Symphony depends largely upon the attitude of the hearer. In this work we are not to look for the sublimity and emotional depth of a Bach or Beethoven any more than we expect a whimsical comedy of Aristophanes to resemble an epic poem of Milton. But for daring imagination, for rhythmic vitality and certainty of orchestral effect, it was and remains a work[234] ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and Gown" you look in vain For epic or heroic strain. Not ours to scale the heights sublime, Which hardly masters dare to climb; We only sing of youth and joy, And love,—the credo of ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... epitaph appended already, as Bluphocks assures me—"Here a mammoth-poem lies, 15 Fouled to death by butterflies." His own fault, the simpleton! Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly.—AEsculapius, an Epic. Catalogue of the drugs: Hebe's plaister—One strip Cools 20 your lip. Phoebus's emulsion—One bottle Clears your throttle. Mercury's ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... brought the old man to weeping! And the tear was so genuine, so convincing, so majestic that it induced in Edwin a blank humility. He was astounded, mystified; but he was also humbled. He himself was never told, and he never learnt, the explanation of that epic tear. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the tales is slight; yet who can think of the Greeks without remembering the story of Troy, or of Rome without a backward glance at AEneas, fabled founder of the race and hero of Virgil's world-famous Latin epic? Any understanding of German civilisation would be incomplete without knowledge of the mythical prince Siegfried, hero of the earliest literature of the Teutonic people, finally immortalized in the nineteenth century through the ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... epic or climb a mountain is merely a dogged thing; the result is more interesting to most than the process. Mountains, being cloud-compellers, are rain-shedders, and the shed water will not always flow with decorous gayety in dell or glen. Sometimes it stays bewildered in a bog, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the idea of a God ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Caesar Scaliger is perhaps typical: "'And the most noble, of course, are hymns and paeans. In the second place are songs and odes and scolia, which are concerned with the praises of brave men. In the third place the epic, in which there are heroes and other lesser personages. Tragedy together with comedy follows this order; nevertheless comedy will hold the fourth place apart by itself. After these, satires, then exodia, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... countries. His book is excellent for its manner, while in respect of matter the author has drawn information from all accessible sources, and digested it with judgment and impartiality. Thus he has produced a worthy contribution to that great but yet unwritten work, so full of both tragic and epic elements, the Annals of Labor. What a noble book might be made by some competent writer who should ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... other words, that feeling should take a concrete shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators was denied them. But they remain consummate masters in their own restricted province: delicate observers of externals, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... solid merit, which long held their place. In August, 1792, he accompanied the duke to the campaign in the Ardennes. In 1793 he went with his master to the siege of Mainz. Goethe took the old German epic of Reynard the Fox, with which he had long been familiar, and which, under the guise of animals, represents the conflicting passions of men, and ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home was a paradise where ten impressive persons—the models, it may be, of antediluvian patriarchs—reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... delivery in reciting apt bits of poetry and other quotations adding to the pleasure of hearing his accounts rendered. He gave us modern versions of the Greek myths and hero legends, of Cadmus and Thebes, of Jason and the Golden Fleece, of the Trojan epic, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... from the writings of Homer of the state of medicine in his time, although we need hardly expect to find in an epic poem many references to diseases and their cure. As dissection was considered a profanation of the body, anatomical knowledge was exceedingly meagre. Machaon was surgeon to Menelaus and Podalarius was the pioneer of phlebotomy. Both were regarded as the sons of AEsculapius; they were soldiers as ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... just where Jeffrey is apt to fail; though he affects to be a dictator, he is really a follower of the fashion. He could put up with Rogers's flattest 'correctness,' Moore's most intolerable tinsel, and even Southey's most ponderous epic poetry, because admiration was respectable. He could endorse, though rather coldly, the general verdict in Scott's favour, only guarding his dignity by some not too judicious criticism; preferring, for example, the sham romantic business of the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Cortez, is the work of Charles Cary Rumsey. The grim, stern and epic history of the bold, arrogant adventurer who was merciless in success and dauntless in failure is ruggedly suggested by this figure, mounted upon a heavily armored charger and advancing with drawn sword. The fact that Pizzaro was a member of Balboa's party ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... more than anything else in the world, to be in the midst of heroic effort. The gods had set the stage for epic action that night, and his spirit was big with desire for bigness. It was very hard to promise to put goloshes upon his ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... lofty strain, of earlier days, I spread the King's or Hero's praise, And struck the martial Chords with epic fire: But farewell, Hero! farewell, King! Your deeds my lips no more shall sing, For Love alone shall be ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... this simple and practical man amid the more mystical western problems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an element which clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. He had many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this—that he was the last man in the world to be the epic poet. There is something almost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands at every turn as the symbol of the special trials and the modern transfiguration of England; from ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... impressionist. The value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a hundred ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him; and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say about Paradise found?" Whereupon the poet wrote his second epic. ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... Stafford Northcote, Disraeli himself never made any vain pretensions to be devoted to pursuits for which he did not care a rap. He once dreamt of an epic poem, and his early ambition urged him a step or two in that direction, but his critical faculty, which, despite all his monstrosities of taste, was vital, restrained him from making a fool of himself, and he forswore the muse, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... one of the very best of his works as to style; and being translated from a kindred tongue is delightful as mere language. In its rude joviality, and simple and direct delineation of character, it is a thoroughly good representative of the famous ancient Beast Epic.' The edges of this book, and of all subsequent books, were trimmed in accordance with the invariable practice of the early printers. Mr. Morris much preferred ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... pregnant outlines, the future history of a world. And one of these two episodes,—that which relates to the creation of all things,—must have as certainly had a place in human history as in the master epic of England. Man would have forever remained ignorant of many of those events related in the opening chapters of Scripture, which took place ere there was a human eye to witness, or a human memory to record, had he ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... miles long, is by universal confession the richest treasure-house the ransackers of the whole earth have yet brought to light. "The wealth of Ormuz or of Ind," immortalised by Milton's most majestic epic, the wealth of the Rand completely eclipses, and nothing imagined in the glowing pages of the "Arabian Nights" rivals in solid worth the sober realities now being unearthed along this uninviting ridge. It fortunately was not in the power of the Boer Government to carry off this ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... four months later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... young man; more than once he and Bob had scandalized Broadway; some of their exploits were epic. Now he ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... in his ear the glorious myths of yore With all the rhythmic burdens that they bore, Will be retold, replete with joy and woe;— Ulysses' voyage will ring with epic peal, And the strange tale of Argo's wandering keel; Of high-banked Tyrian galleys will he know, Of Roman triremes, and of many a band The Vikings led from their far norland strand;— Stories of strife and love in ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... fourth generation. And they were all one family; one sole little nation, assembling in joy and pride to celebrate that diamond wedding, the rare prodigious nuptials of two heroic creatures whom life had glorified and from whom all had sprung! And what an epic, what a Biblical numbering of that people suggested itself! How even name all those who entered the farm, how simply set forth their names, their ages, their degree of relationship, the health, the strength, and the hope that they had brought ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... write frequently, sending me large specimens of an epic poem which he was then composing, and desiring my remarks and corrections. These I gave him from time to time, but endeavor'd rather to discourage his proceeding. One of Young's Satires was then just published. I copy'd and sent him a great part of it, which set in a strong light the ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... just dead, having lived just long enough to close the eyes of Wordsworth, who paid the debt to nature but a week or two before. Poor Col., but two days before he died he wrote to a bookseller proposing an epic poem on the "Wanderings of Cain," in twenty-four books. It is said he has left behind him more than forty thousand treatises in criticism and metaphysics, but few of them in a state of completion. They are now destined, perhaps, to wrap up spices. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... scholarship; but he has in general preferred the later and more polished period—that of Kalidasa and the dramatists—to the ruder, yet in my opinion, not less curious and poetical strains of the older epic bards. ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... art's,—the immortality of love. The immortality of art indeed is one of those curious illusions of man's self-love which a moment's thought dispels. Art, who need be told, is as dependent for its survival on the survival of its physical media as man's body itself—and though the epic and the great canvas escape combustion for a million years, they must burn at last, burn with all the other accumulated shadows of time. What we call immortality in art is but the shadow of the soul's immortality; but the immortality of love is that ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... paint at the Arrakan Pagoda to-day, but a pleasant looking man came on board with a chitsaya harp; I had to try and make a jotting of him. G. and Captain Turndrup brought him. He sat and played tunes for hours—epic tunes, which I'd have given anything to remember. His boat-shaped harp of thirteen strings was tuned in minor thirds, so you could readily pick out Celtic tunes on it. I am told Sir Arthur Sullivan came ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... subject for senior students of literature to write about, and "My Favourite Elopement in Fiction" would be outside the purview of any of her girls. She would substitute instead (with my permission), "The Debt of Literature (as well as Science) to DARWIN" and "My Favourite Piece of Epic Poetry." In fine, if I did not really mind, she would herself set all the questions and I should examine the answers. She thought that the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic written by the finger of God upon the strata ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the Aeneid, to celebrate it—its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, three-quarters of a century later, turned over in his mind the plan of an English epic on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to forsake the singing of English origins for the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Zealand. He wrote a good deal of verse before leaving England and after his return, but "Ranolf and Amohia" is the only poem showing traces of Australian influence. It is a miscellany in verse rather than an epic, and contains some fine descriptions ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Yet Gedaliah made up in style for his lack of historical method. The "Chain of Tradition" is a picturesque and enthralling book, it is a warm and cheery retrospect, and even deserves to be called a prose epic. Besides, many of his statements that were wont to be treated as altogether unauthentic have been vindicated by later research. Azariah di Rossi, on the other hand, is immortalized by his spirit rather than his actual contributions to historical literature. He came of an ancient family ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... from a soldier brother who had taken part in that epic of human gallantry had apparently inspired the Young Doctor. He pointed ahead with a dramatic gesture at the cliffs. "Yonder are the Turks! See, they fly, they fly!" A pair of agitated cormorants, sunning themselves on the rocks, flew seaward with outstretched necks. "Lead ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Beatrice and warn her of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet, he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that, were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death such as no Homer ever dreamed, no Virgil ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... epic are apt to overlook the immense influence exercised on its author by his early Sorrentine days and surroundings. The Gerusalemme Liberata contains, as we know, a full account of the First Crusade and constitutes an apotheosis of Godfrey de Bouillon, first Christian King of Jerusalem; but ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... ever passed through them; here it is only Io, daughter of Inachus, loved by Zeus and hunted by the gadfly, who fled outcast through the East. Her story is told in Aeschylus' Prometheus and in a magnificent chorus of his Suppliant Women. (See Rise of the Greek Epic, pp. 247 ff.) ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... poetry; to point out, and prophecy the man, who was born for no less an undertaking, and whom posterity shall bless for its accomplishment. Methinks, I am already taking fire from such a character, and making room for him, under a borrowed name, amongst the heroes of an epic poem. Neither could mine, or some more happy genius, want encouragement under ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... troubles he wrote "All is well:" a noble religious poem equal to the hymn of Cleanthes or the twelfth ode of Horace; and in one of his earlier essays he speaks of tragedy as possessing such beauty and grandeur that he is almost ready to believe it is the proper goal and destination of earthly life. In "Epic Philosophy" he says: "Strife is around man, and strife is within him; the lightning thrusts its blazing scymitar through his roof, the thief creeps in at his door, and remorse at his heart. Who, looking on these things, does not ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... ways cannot be determined beforehand. By the study of painting and etching and drawing merely, we could not foresee that there is also possible an art like sculpture, and by studying epic and lyric poetry we could not construct beforehand the forms of the drama. The genius of mankind had to discover ever new forms in which the interest in reality is conserved and yet the things and events are so completely changed that they are separated ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... his children one after another until only one now remains, he worked and he saved. He bought a lot and built a house to rent; then he built another house; then he bought the land where his shop stands and rebuilt the shop itself. It was an epic of homely work. He took part in the work of the church and on election days he changed his coat, and went to ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... ourselves," replied Agony readily. "I think it's perfectly epic to have such a secret. We wouldn't divulge it for ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... chorus. After a short pause, cries of "Howe! Howe!" Nothing short of an oration would satisfy. The secretary rose and delivered something which would take some investigation to classify either as an epic, oration, or burlesque. They wanted variety and such it was. A puzzled expression rested on Lieutenant Trevelyan's face as he tried to follow Mr. ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... single poet; Ossian is one of the principal poets in the collection but the whole is merely ascribed "to the bards" (see pp. v-vi). It is also evident from the Preface that Macpherson was shifting from the reluctant "translator" of a few "fragments" to the projector of a full-length epic "if enough encouragement were given for ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of his class for the quantity of youthful verse produced. At the age of eight, he was writing blank verse in praise of flowers; at twelve, he began an epic which extended to six ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... not the most difficult part of her task. Thanks to the stores of information derived from the abbe and to his prodigious memory for facts, Patience had a passable knowledge of the outlines of universal history. But what he had great trouble in grasping was the connection and difference between epic poetry and history. At first he was indignant at the inventions of the poets, and declared that such impostures ought never to have been allowed. Then, when he had realized that epic poetry, far from leading ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... years for an idea is a privilege that has been accorded only to Israel—'the soldier of God.' That were no tragedy, but an heroic epic, even as the prophet Isaiah had prefigured. The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom of an Israel unworthy of his sufferings. And this was the Israel—the high tragedian in the comedy sock—that I tried humbly to typify ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... in the streams—down by St. Roch and up by Ville Marie—chansons of two hundred years ago mark the strokes of labour as of the evening hour when the professional village story-teller cries "cric-crac" and begins his tale of the loup-garou, or rouses the spirit of a pure patriotism by a crude epic of some valiant atavar; when the parish fiddler brings them to their feet with shining eyes by the strains of O Carillon. They are not less respectful to the British flag, nor less faithful in allegiance because they ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be described by varying Flaubert's phrase of "epic realism": it is romantic realism. The weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct, definite, realistic way, the realism which ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Chees-a-kee, is related to have been conducted a la AEneus, in Virgil, to the halls of the spirits and to have seen them all assembled in the spacious wigwam. Had some bard taken up the tale of this fortunate individual, the literature of the red man might have boasted an epic ranking perhaps with the AEneid or ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... direct influence upon Jefferson. Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse toward writing his Western stories came to him after reading the delightful pages of a French romancer. But all this tells us merely what we knew well enough ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... being who never was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes. He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... their chief Meng-ts'u under the Sung Dynasty; the Mongols made of their country the kingdom of Chaghan-djang. Li-kiang is the territory of Yue-si Chao, called also Mo-sie (Moso), one of the six Chao of Nan-Chao. The Moso of Li-kiang call themselves Ho. They have an epic styled Djiung-Ling (Moso Division) recounting the invasion of part of Tibet by the Moso. The Moso were submitted during the 8th century, by the King of Nan-Chao. They have a special hieroglyphic scrip, a specimen ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... been swallowed by a gigantic frog or toad which was compelled, by queer stratagems, to regurgitate it. These are little children's imaginings. Among the Hindoos the same myth takes the form of an alluring epic—the dragon watching over the celestial waters, of which he has taken possession, is wounded by Indra after a heroic battle, and ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... compositions, each of which is an individual inexpressible by logic, are resolved into universals and abstractions, such as costumes, landscapes, portraits, domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes, deserts, tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic, knightly, idyllic facts, and the like. They are often also resolved into merely quantitative categories, such as little picture, picture, statuette, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, garland of sonnets, poetry, poem, story, romance, and ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation. Only Slavicized Ragusa and indomitable Montenegro kept alive the imagination of the nation which was brought back to life by the half-religious, half-national Slovene poets of the sixteenth century, by the Ragusan epic poet [Gundulic], by the incessant demands of successive diets of the ever-weakening Croatia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the progressive and zealous Serbs of Hungary, who ever since the fifteenth century in increasing numbers made their home there, refugees ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... depend, like the effects in the sky, on unexpected and fugitive circumstances, which have no connection with each other except the background against which they rest, though all are necessarily mingled with the events of this history,—truly a household epic, as great to the eyes of a wise man as a tragedy to the eyes of the crowd, an epic in which you will feel an interest, not only for the part I took in it, but for the likeness that it bears to the destinies of so vast ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... and Syriac versions to the East. It became widely popular during the middle ages, and was worked into poetic form by many writers in French and German. Alberich of Besancon wrote in Middle High German an epic on the subject in the first half of the twelfth century, which was the basis of the German "Pfaffe" Lamprecht's "Alexanderbuch," also of the twelfth century. The French poets Lambert li Court and Alexandre de Bernay composed, between 1180 and 1190, a romance ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... one year's imprisonment in the Bastille on account of a satirical poem on Louis XIV., and in confinement wrote an epic poem, La Henriade. Some other storms raised by his works, such as his Lettres Philosophiques and his Epitre a Uranie, he weathered by flight, or by unscrupulously denying their authorship. The rest of his works, contained in seventy volumes, do not ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... change of style which emerges in, say, Pindar and Aeschylus when compared with what we know of Corinna or Thespis. More objectively and definitely it can be traced in a remarkable change of dialect. The old Attic poets, like Solon, were comparatively little affected by the epic influence; the later elegists, like Ion, Euenus, and Plato, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... 'twister' off the hills gets ready to do business in a 20-knot sou'wester it sends no messenger boys ahead to distribute its itinerary handbills." There is no fault of style which these few lines do not display. They combine, with a singular success, commonness and pomp. The epic poets of old were wont to illustrate the life of man by the phenomena of nature. The vulgar American reverses the process—he illustrates nature from ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... if one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be a small thing to die? Not that there is not a passion of a quite other sort, much less epic, far more dramatic and intimate, that comes out of the very frailty of perishable women; out of the lines of suffering that we see written about their eyes, and that we may wipe out if it were but ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... every source on which they could lay their hands. There were to be found in each of these collections a certain number of works which were unique, either because the authors were natives of the city, or because all copies of them had been destroyed in the course of centuries—the Epic of Grilgames, for instance, at Uruk; a history of the Creation, and of the battles of the gods with the monsters at Kutha: all of them had their special collections of hymns or psalms, religious and magical formulas, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the University Museum secured by purchase a large six column tablet nearly complete, carrying originally, according to the scribal note, 240 lines of text. The contents supply the South Babylonian version of the second book of the epic sa nagba imuru, "He who has seen all things," commonly referred to as the Epic of Gilgamish. The tablet is said to have been found at Senkere, ancient Larsa near Warka, modern Arabic name for and vulgar descendant of the ancient name Uruk, the Biblical Erech mentioned in Genesis X. 10. This ...
— The Epic of Gilgamish - A Fragment of the Gilgamish Legend in Old-Babylonian Cuneiform • Stephen Langdon
... is the ancient kingdom of the Kurus which flourished along the upper course of the Ganges; and the historical fact on which the Epic is based is a great war which took place between the Kurus and a neighbouring tribe, the Panchalas, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... time scheme). When it follows an accented syllable it is called masculine; when it follows an unaccented syllable it is feminine; when it occurs within a line it is called medial; when it occurs after an 'extra' unstressed syllable it is called epic (though as frequent in drama as in epic), as— ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... felt greatly flattered when he got the large box, and the same evening, after coming home from his work in the fields, sat down to inspect the manuscripts sent for his perusal. However, he did not get far, but fell asleep over the first dozen pages of the first epic. He honestly tried again the second evening, but with the same result as before; and on the third day relinquished the attempt in despair, accusing himself for his want of intelligence. Soon after, Mr. Preston made his appearance. He was a tall, thin man, with red whiskers and a ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... confessed that these stories have a certain permanent literary quality, most successful in "Earthbred," "Joseph's House," and "A Widow Woman." These three collections make it tolerably clear that Mr. Evans will find his true medium in the novel, where an epic breadth of material is at hand to fit ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... soothing throes of literary composition. Some time ago he had thought it would be a mighty fine thing to be a poet, and had tried his hand at verse. Finding he possessed some facility, he decided that he was a poet, and at once started an epic poem in rhyme on the Life of Nelson, the material being supplied by Southey. This morning he did ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... to answer questions about storks and their habits. He had tired of them in a moment, and was passionately interested in mules. "There ought to be an epic written about the mules of North Africa!" he exclaimed. "I tell you, it's a great subject. Look at those poor brave chaps struggling to pull carts piled up with casks of beastly Algerian wine, through that sea of mud, which probably goes all the way through ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... reproach of rhyme; a year or two before he was eagerly defending it;[34] again a few years, and he will utterly condemn and drop it in his plays, while retaining it in his translations; afterwards his study of Milton leads him to think that blank verse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes to try it with Homer, but at last translates one book as a specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme! But the charm of this great advocate is, that, whatever side he was on, he could always find excellent reasons for it, and state them with great force, and ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... a scene of indescribable carnage and terror. Cassandra and the Trojan women, driven to take shelter in the temple of Cybele, slay themselves rather than fall into the hands of their captors. 'La Prise de Troie' is perhaps epic rather than dramatic, but as a whole it leaves an impression of severe and spacious grandeur, which can only be paralleled in the finest inspirations of Gluck. In the second division of the work, 'Les Troyens a Carthage,' human interest is paramount. Berlioz was an enthusiastic ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... form the basis of the great Scandinavian epic, the Volsunga Saga, and have supplied not only the materials for the Nibelungenlied, the German epic, and for countless folk tales, but also for Wagner's celebrated operas, The Rhinegold, Valkyr, Siegfried, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... I am sure of it; and if you lived in London, you would hear of him even now. Oh, sir! such a portrait as he painted the other day! But I must tell you all about it." And therewith Lionel plunged at once, medias res, into the brief broken epic of little Sophy, and the eccentric infirm Belisarius for whose sake she first toiled and then begged; with what artless eloquence he brought out the colours of the whole story,—now its humour, now its pathos; with what beautifying sympathy he adorned the image of the little vagrant ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... express themselves, when we try to generalise, in a series of curves, alternate rises and declines, which may be repeated again and again. In English literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic, Deor's Complaint, Beowulf, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf. From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull poetic pedantries of the age which ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... of the game but the playing of it that counted. Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... was penetrating impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke, erecting walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers into marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads to-day, fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other, dictating love-letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a collection of witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated Greece; mingling initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the cymbals clashed, coquetting with those terrible virgins who awoke the tempest; not ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... great cathedral inspires Michael Angelo's great dome; a Divine Saviour and His transfiguration exalt Raphael; Paradise explains Dante; listening to the sevenfold Hallelujah chorus of God arouses the sweep and majesty of Milton's epic; the woes of three million slaves made eloquence possible for Phillips and Beecher. The saving of a Union, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, represented ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... became a sort of comedy-epic in the land of the Czars, the land where each petty town-governor is almost an absolute despot, regulating his persecutions and extortions according to the sage saying of the town-governor in the play, "That's the way God made the world, and the Voltairean free-thinkers can talk against it ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... he had passed through an epic time, one of the great periods of his life. He wondered now how he had been able to carry out such a plan, how he had managed to summon up courage and resources enough, and he felt that the good spirits of earth and air and water ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... history of the ninth century as one of the upholders of Breton independence, and known to tradition as 'the Prop of Brittany,' is the subject of a remarkable series of ballads or hero-tales in the Barzaz-Breiz which together constitute what is almost an epic. These tell of his life, death, adventures, travels, and the marvellous feats of derring-do he accomplished. In some measure he is to Breton legend what Arthur is to British or Holger to that of Denmark. That he is familiar to Breton tradition there can be no question, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Beowulf is the oldest poem in the English language. It is our "old English epic"; and, like much of our ancient verse, it is a war poem. The author of it is unknown. It was probably composed in the fifth century— not in England, but on the Continent— and brought over to this island— not on paper or on parchment— ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... entirely recovered Nero commanded his presence at Antium, whither the court was going for the hot summer months. Nero was ambitious to write an immortal epic poem which should rival the "Odyssey," and in order that he might describe realistically a burning city, gave a secret command while he was in Antium that Rome should ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... the various spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the applause of a court, although it neither possessed judgment nor feeling for the merits of a writer, nor for poetical beauties; and he complains at the same time that this court had neither duly estimated his tragedies nor his epic poems. It is characteristic both of the court and of Voltaire that he eagerly pressed himself forward for admission to its favor, and sought to attract attention by a work which be himself called a piece of trash, and that the court extended its approbation and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... Epic events have a stunning quality. They paralyse the faculties. For a moment there was a pause. The world stood still. Mr. Brewster bubbled inarticulately. Mr. Gossett dried himself sketchily with a napkin. The ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... the eighteenth century was a period of predominant English influence. The first half of the century had fostered this ascendency through the popularity of the moral weeklies, the religious epic, and the didactic poetry of Britain. Admiration for English ideals was used as a weapon to combat French dominion in matters of taste, till a kind of Anglomania spread, which was less absolute than the waning Gallomania had been, only in such measure as the nature ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... epithets, and variety of metaphors, tropes, and figures were uttered between these well-matched opponents, that an epic bard would have found his account in listening to the contest; which, in all probability, would not have been confined to words, had it not been interrupted for the sake of a young woman of an agreeable countenance and modest carriage; who, being shocked at some of their flowers of speech, and ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... beliefs of ancient Chaldea were collected together in later times and an attempt made to combine them into a philosophical system. What this was like we learn from the opening lines of the epic which recounted the story of the Creation. In the beginning, we are told, was the chaos of the deep, which was the mother of all things. Out of it came first the primeval gods, Lakhum and Lakhamu, whose names had been handed down from the Sumerian age. Then came ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... rigid fidelity to her individual vision and personal conviction which constituted her strength. There are always stupid, well-meaning busybodies in the world, who go about making question of the sonneteer why he does not attempt something epic and homicidal, or worrying the carver of cherry-stones to try his hand at a Colossus; but though they disturb and discompose, they luckily do no material harm. They did no material harm to Kate Greenaway. She yielded, no doubt, to pressure put upon her to try figures on a larger scale; to ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... of England will never fetch another king from thence." Adieu! my dear child. I am sensible that I write you short letters, but I write you all I know. I don't know how it is, but the wonderful seems worn out. In this our day, we have no rabbit women-no elopements-no epic poems,(744) finer than Milton's-no contest about harlequins and Polly Peachems. Jansen (745) has won no more estates, and the Duchess of Queensberry is grown as tame as her neighbours. Whist has spread an universal opium over the whole nation; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... had listened to the stupendous epic of a long-lost world. Now I found speech to voice the question ever with me, the thing that lay as close to my heart as did the welfare of Larry, indeed the whole object of my quest—the fate of Throckmartin and those who had ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Complaint, and Husband's Message), the Wanderer is the most artistic, and best portrays the gloomy contrast ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... variously designated than Comus. Milton himself describes it simply as "A Mask"; by others it has been criticised and estimated as a lyrical drama, a drama in the epic style, a lyric poem in the form of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is explained partly by its complex charm and many-sided interest, and partly ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... self-concentrated, more dramatical in spirit, if not in form, it will not have the qualities which can powerfully affect Englishmen. Not only were the Poets of our most national age dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems. Take away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury Tales become indeed, what they have been most untruly called, mere versions of French or Italian Fables. Milton may have been right in changing the form of the Paradise Lost,—we ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... are dependent on poetic execution—the whole difference is in the degree; there is only one way of feeling, which varies from more to less; even the diversity of external forms changes nothing in the quality of aesthetic impressions. Whether the form be lyric or epic, dramatic or descriptive, we can receive an impression either stronger or weaker, but if we remove what is connected with the nature of the subject, we shall always be affected in the same way. The feeling we experience is absolutely identical; it proceeds entirely from one single and the same ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... most pretentious kind of narrative poetry; it tells in serious verse of the great deeds of a popular hero. The Iliad, the Aeneid, Beowulf, Paradise Lost are important epics. The Idylls of the King is in the main an epic poem. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... In Maghas' epic, The Death of Sisupala, plants and animals lead the same voluptuous life as the 'deep-bosomed, wide-hipped' girls with ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his courage and integrity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Laius and the Oedipus, may have been of such high merit as to make up for defects observable in the one that still survives. In any case, we can hardly err in accepting Dr. Verral's judgment that "the story of Aeschylus may be, and in the outlines probably is, the genuine epic legend of ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up and down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew more and more fabulous and epic. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... is a literal reprint from Keightley's Library edition. Print, binding, and size all render the tasteful little book a pleasant form in which to possess the greatest epic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the old pleasures. Wagner began again to feel more and more his isolated position. The complete misunderstanding of Tannhaeuser, which he began to write when he first arrived in Dresden, and the refusals of the work by other cities, Berlin among them, declaring it "too epic," rendered this sense of isolation complete. The recurrence of such experiences as these showed him how far his art was still removed from its ideal and his contemporaries from the comprehension of their ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... clever young friend's intrusion. Cattle-food, indeed! As if beans, oats, warm mashes, and a ball, are to be pushed down a man's throat just as he is meditating on the great social problem, or (for I think it was my epic I was going to touch up) just as he was about to soar to the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that of Greece and Rome rather than on that of ancient Israel. But he had been perfectly willing to accept that fate—and to remodel the form and style of the book of Job on what he considered the pattern of the classical epic. ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... by the epic, where heroic deeds, or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the perfect samples of heroic verse, of famous songs and stories woven into an epic poem, are to be found in Homer.[17] Nowhere, in the whole range of the world's poetry, can we see such splendid impersonations of primitive life and character treated artistically. Yet the plot is simple enough. Agamemnon, the chief commander of the Greek army, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... all astonishing that in these conditions we find no national epic and no national drama, but a gradual growth of a poetry saturated with physical realism and the final appearance of a dramatic form equipped with the most potent charms of sensuous art. It was in such ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... will put faith in him; but the imitator will neither know nor have faith—neither science nor true opinion can be ascribed to him. Imitation, then, is devoid of knowledge, being only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic and epic poets are imitators in ...
— The Republic • Plato
... my friend, irreverently. "In Shakespeare's day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and discharged the cook with an epic. But not for B'way ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... the great Sanskrit epic, King Santanu is said to have walked by the side of the river one day, where "he met and fell in love with a beautiful girl, who told him that she was the river Ganges, and could only marry him on condition he never questioned her conduct. To this he, with a truly royal gallantry, agreed; ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... whole household, gathered together at their spinning, weaving, and so on, would listen to one of their number who told anew some old story of adventure or achievement. In very truth the saga is a prose epic, and marked by every quality an epic should possess. Growing up while the deeds of dead heroes were fresh in memory, most often recited before the sharers in such deeds, the saga, in its pure form, never goes from what is truth to its teller. Where ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... dress-hats. When he speaks of his hero as having assumed the feather, he means that he has donned the uniform of a soldier. He has come to town, in other words, to enlist. Then behold the transformation! He begins at once to act irrationally. The whole epic paints in never-fading colors the disastrous effect upon the intellect of putting on soldier-clothes. You will pardon me, my friends, if I speak thus plainly, but I must open to you the hidden wisdom of your ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... heroes of song sung by the poets, like those of Homer and Virgil. The early German hero was Siegfried, and the song or epic that celebrates his deeds is called the Nibelungen Lied. Its ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth |
