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More "Idyl" Quotes from Famous Books



... shell," was obliged to go to Rome in order to get the necessary instruction in cameo-cutting. There her genius developed so much that she began to model in clay, and soon became a successful sculptor in marble. Lucy Larcom, in her "Idyl of Work," says ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... Frothingham has done a good service, and done it well, in translating this famous idyl, which has been justly called 'one of the most faultless poems of modern times.' Nothing can surpass the simplicity, tenderness, and grace of the original, and these have been well preserved in Miss Frothingham's version. Her success is worthy of the highest praise, and ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott

... Idyl of "The First Navigator," supplied Sestini with the Story, in all its details; but he versified it with surprizing facility: and, as far as I could judge, with great spirit and elegance. He added, too, some trifling circumstances, and several little traits, the naivete ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... artless amusements the day passed, a day that remains forever an idyl of simple loveliness to me, such as any man is the richer for having known. When darkness overtook us, we made for ourselves the softest of ferny beds, and slept serenely, untroubled by anything, under the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... simple race, painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. The Cossacks is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... Weimar. At the outbreak of the French Revolution he accompanied the Duke of Weimar in one of the campaigns against France. The thrilling atmosphere of the Revolution furnished him with a literary background for his epic idyl, "Hermann und Dorothea." Goethe's subsequent journey to Italy, which was a turning-point in the poet's career, was commemorated in his "Letters from Italy"—a classic among German books of travel. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... esteemed friend called the Captain, who is for the moment without suitable employment for his ability and energy. Edward can give him just the needed work, with great advantage to the property, and would like to do so. Charlotte fears that the presence of the Captain may disturb their pleasant idyl, but finally yields. She herself has a niece, Ottilie, a beautiful girl whom no one understands and who is not doing well at her boarding-school. Charlotte would like to have the girl under her own care. After much debate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles Henry, after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and tribulations and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like Christian's burden. The idea is a pretty one, theoretically, ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... A prose idyl is the term which best describes the courtly and pastoral character of Lodge's "Rosalynde," the last work of fiction of any importance which distinctly bears the impress of euphuism. Published in 1590, the ten editions through which it passed during ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... return, although I sat late before the dying fire. Thinking over the evening, the idea came to me that perhaps, after all, he did admire my protegee, and, being a romantic old woman, I did not repel the fancy; it might go a certain distance without harm, and an idyl is always charming, doubly so to people cast away on a desert island. One falls into the habit of studying persons very closely in the ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... from such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in Tennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... all-pervading monotheistic principle of the nation paralyzed the free and easy marshalling of gods and heroes of the Greek drama. Nevertheless, traces of dramatic poetry appear in the oldest literature. The "Song of Songs" by many is regarded as a dramatic idyl in seven scenes, with Shulammith as the heroine, and the king, the ostensible author, as the hero. But this and similar efforts are only faint approaches to ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... finest contribution to the national idea was the apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building of the Ship." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem is an idyl of the ship-building folk and the sea; the consummation is the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching of the ship, christened "The Union"—emblem of the wife's and husband's voyage begun together on the sea of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—"flat-nosed bees," as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl—and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... of one without whom he felt it impossible to exist. Numberless are the stratagems he contrived, and incredible the ingenuity with which they were executed; the freshness of his romance was itself an exquisite idyl. . . . Victor never despaired; but in the midst of his anticipations he was overwhelmed ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... "it is a charming and poetic idyl which you present to me. We should flee far from the world, eh? We should go to an unknown spot and try to regain paradise lost. How long would that happiness last? A season during the springtime of our youth. Then autumn would come, sad and harsh. Our illusions ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... bureaucracy of that Baltic province was recruited mostly from German JUNKERS. German fairy tales and stories, rich in the miraculous deeds of the heroic knights of Kurland, wove their spell over the youthful mind. But the beautiful idyl was of short duration. Soon the soul of the growing child was overcast by the dark shadows of life. Already in her tenderest youth the seeds of rebellion and unrelenting hatred of oppression were to be planted in the heart of Emma Goldman. Early she learned to know the beauty of the State: she ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... the truth to themselves; they were ignorant as yet that they were commencing the first chapter of their life-idyl. Fern had a vague sense that the room was brighter when Erle was there looking at her with those kindly glances. She never owned to herself that he was her prince, and that she had found favor in his eyes. She was far too humble for that; but she knew the days were somehow glorified and transfigured ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... that retains its fragrance. He seems to have taken Shirley as his master; but desire in the pupil's case outran performance. It is, indeed, a pitiful fall from the Grateful Servant, a honey-sweet old play, fresh as an idyl of Theocritus, to the paltry faded graces of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... Lady Orlay kindly. She was noting, with her quick and clever eyes, that Netty seemed happy and was exquisitely dressed. She was quite ready to be really interested in this idyl. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... to myself, And strove some vain regrets to bridle, 'Though now laid dusty on the shelf, Was hero once of such an idyl! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... Velazquez in his tour through Italy. The most charming picture of Veronese is a Venus and Adonis, which is finer than that of Titian,—a classic and most exquisite idyl of love and sleep, cool shadow and golden-sifted sunshine. His most considerable work in the gallery is a Christ teaching the Doctors, magnificent in arrangement, severely correct in drawing, and of a most vivid ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... been nearly always splendidly successful. In analytic studies of high, middle, and low life he has not his superior. In the novel of intrigue and sensation he is easily a master, while he succeeds at least fairly in a form of fiction at just the opposite pole from this, to wit, the idyl ('Le Lys dans la vallee'). In character sketches of extreme types, like 'Gobseck,' his supremacy has long been recognized, and he is almost as powerful when he enters the world of mysticism, whither so few of us can follow him. As a writer of novelettes he is unrivaled and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... by far the most important work of Mrs. Browning is Aurora Leigh: a long poem in nine books, which appeared in 1856, in which the great questions of the age, social and moral, are handled with great boldness. It is neither an epic, nor an idyl, nor a tale in verse: it combines features of them all. It presents her clear convictions of life and art, and is full of philosophy, largely expressed in the language of irony and sarcasm. She is an inspired advocate of the intellectual claims of woman; and the poem is, in some degree, an autobiography: ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... down in Maine. Beyond Portland. And Mr. Hammond and his company are there making my 'Seaside Idyl.'" ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson

... of Bread is a revolutionary idyl, a beautiful outline sketch of a future society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. It is, in Kropotkin's own words, "a study of the needs of humanity, and of the economic means to satisfy them." Read in conjunction with the same author's "Fields, Factories ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... a vivid picture of Revolutionary scenes. The story is a strong one, a thrilling one. It causes the true American to flush with excitement, to devour chapter after chapter, until the eyes smart, and it fairly smokes with patriotism. The love story is a singularly charming idyl. ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... 1804. Here, in the society of a lovely woman, who was passionately devoted to him, and amid beautiful scenery, he devoted himself to practicing and composition, also giving much study to the guitar (the favorite instrument of his inamorata), on which he became a wonderful proficient. This charming idyl in Paganini's life reminds one of the retirement of the pianist Chopin to the island of Majorca in the company of Mme. George Sand. It was during this period of his life that Paganini composed twelve of his finest ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... their glow. His contemplation, intent upon objects of peaceful beauty, and undisturbed by rude anxieties and vehement passions, suggested only kindred reproductions to the creative faculty by which it was vivified; so that the whole man was not only a poet, but, as it were, a poem,—a living idyl, calling into pastoral music every reed that sighed and trembled along the stream of life. And Helen was so suited to a nature of this kind, she so guarded the ideal existence in which it breathes! All the little cares ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... suffered, and endured, and overcome? How can you know what I have had to give up and put away from me? It's easy enough for you to draw your skirts around you, but what can a woman bred as you have been bred know of what I've had to fight against and keep under and cut away? It was an easy, beautiful idyl to you; your love came to you only when it should have come, and for a man who was good and worthy, and distinctly eligible—I don't mean that; forgive me, Ellen, but you drive me beside myself. But he is good and he believes himself worthy, and I say that myself before ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... one evening George Sand, who sometimes thought aloud when with Chopin—this being her way of chatting—spoke of the peacefulness of the country and unfolded a picture of the rural harmonies that had all the charming and negligent grace of a village idyl, bringing, in fact, her beloved Berry to the fireside of the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony. The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls throw aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... bright and animated and gave themselves up heartily to the beautiful idyl for which they had met together under the shadow of the noble trees in the fragrant woods of Rheinsberg. No gayer, lovelier shepherds and shepherdesses were ever seen in Arcadia, than those of Rheinsberg to-day. They laughed, and jested, and performed ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed of expressing it except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, in the idyl, in the drama. Prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian purposes. Even oratory and history were almost rhythmic; and mere prose was too humble an instrument for those whom the Muses cherished. The Alexandrian vignettes ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... filled me with confusion. At the remembrance of my injustice and of her love, even the tears came into my eyes; I hastened to implore pardon of her, doubly and trebly: and I turned this incident into an idyl, [Footnote: Die Laune des Verliebten, translated as The Lover's Caprice, see p. 241.] which I never could read to myself without affection, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... tragic idyl, and of flight and hot pursuit, And the jingle of the bridle, and cuirass, and spur on boot, As our horses's hooves struck showers from the flinty bowlders set In freshet ways with writhing reed and ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... worthy of notice, as forming a transition towards the new comedy,) one of which was called the Flower, and was probably therefore neither seriously affecting nor terrible, but in the style of the idyl, and pleasing. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... month after this, simultaneously with the announcements by cable of the instant success in London of "A Western Idyl," that Miss Cuyler retired from the world she knew, and disappeared into darkest New York by the way of Rivington Street. She had discovered one morning that she was not ill nor run down nor overtaxed, but just mentally tired of all things, and that what she needed was change ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis

... meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rustic dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful score and tenderly described in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... were wrong there could not be within us such peace. That Aniela does not call it by its proper name means nothing; it is there all the same. The whole day passed for us like an idyl. Formerly I disliked Sundays; now I find that a Sunday, from morning until night, may be like a poem, especially in the country. Soon after breakfast, we went to church in time for the early mass. My aunt followed in our rear; even Pani Celina, profiting by the fine weather, was wheeled thither ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... has the key to fairy-land, a feeling for nature which we thought romantic and modern, and in his lyrics the native wood-notes wild of his own 'Mousa lochmaia' (the muse of the coppice). The chorus of the Mystae in the 'Frogs,' the rustic idyl of the 'Peace,' the songs of the girls in the 'Lysistrata,' the call of the nightingale, the hymns of the 'Clouds,' the speech of the "Just Reason," and the grand chorus of birds, reveal Aristophanes as not ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... not at first undeceived;—the disillusion is long delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity about you,—for idyllic scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval forest, and ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... went on, alas, it came more and more to seem that the Dorothea idyl had not been meant to be taken as a work of realism. The "treffliches Maedchen" was perhaps too kind-hearted; her emotions were too voluminous for so small a house, her personality seemed to spread ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... is scarcely a distinction. To have a superfluity is not a distinction. But in those moments when we have a clear vision of life, that which seems to us most admirable and desirable is the simplicity that endears to us the idyl of Nausicaa. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Ruth, which was formerly, in the Jewish collections, regarded as a part of the Book of Judges, is a beautiful pastoral idyl of the same period. Its scene is laid in Judea, and it serves to show us that in the midst of all those turbulent ages there were quiet homes and gentle lives. No sweeter story can be found in any literature; maternal tenderness, filial affection, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... the counselor sent to Janina a bouquet, a box of candy, and a letter inviting her to supper at the "Idyl," mentioning that Topolski and Majkowska were ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... heavy brows; the courage of a lion back of those patient, kindly aspects; and, long before he was of legal age, a leader. His first love was a Rutledge; his wife was a Todd. Let the romancist tell the story of his romance. I dare not. No sadder idyl can be found in all the short and ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... escape. It is prosaic, because it is seen as the understanding sees it, as an aggregate only, apart from its vital connection; it matters little whose the understanding is. The artist must be alive only to the totality of the impression, blind and deaf to all outside of that. He must believe that the idyl he sees in the landscape is there because he sees it, and will appear in the picture without the help of demonstration. The danger is, that from weakness of faith he will fancy or pretend that he sees something else, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... seducing my susceptible friend here. Like many of us, he has been captivated by her naturalness, her naivete, her clear good eyes,—that look of nature that is always art! May I relate the idyl of your tragic passion, dear ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... It really did. And then, besides—ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess you always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage—an idyl of blissful poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... several hundred pages of an extravaganza entitled, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, and then, having got his superabundant vitality reduced (it was likely to expend itself in these weird mental exploits), he settled down one day and wrote that really tender and beautiful idyl, Eve's Diary, which he had begun, or at least planned, the previous summer at Tyringham. In a letter to Mr. Frederick A. Duneka, general manager of Harper & Brothers, he tells something of the manner of the story; also his revised opinion of Adam's Diary, written in '93, and originally published ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... to go to the Engadine and see for himself how matters looked. He could stay at Saint Moritz, or even Samaden, so as not to disturb Marcello's idyl, and Marcello could come down alone to see him. He should probably meet acquaintances, and would give them to understand that he had come in order to get rid of Regina and save his stepson from certain destruction. ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford

... my dear duke, a most charming idyl; in true Watteau style, I will be the sweet shepherdess, and lead your highness by a little ribbon. But ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... poetic effusion of Mr. Hosea Biglow was preceded by the "Idyl of the Bridge and the Monument," which set forth another side of American feeling at the British words and deeds consequent on the unauthorized capture, by Commodore Wilkes, of the "Trent," conveying ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... name, though it sounds lively, is as unfamiliar as the Author's. Probably from this combination of circumstances, Timothy's Quest has, as far as my Baronite's quest goes, escaped the notice of the English Reviewer. That is his personal loss. The book is an almost perfect idyl, full of humanity, fragrant with the smell of flowers, and the manifold scent of meadows. It tells how Timothy, waif and stray in the heart of a great city, escaped from a baby-farm to whose tender cares he had been committed; how, in a clothes-basket, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various

... 'round the range, I finds Falstaff an' Pistol in Long's Canyon; Prince Hal is on the Caliente; while Hotspur—an' his air is both wise an' sad- -is tamely where he belongs on the Upper Red. An' now recallin' how I comes to plunge into this yere idyl, I desires to ask you-all, however Prince Hal brings Faistaff to the wars that time, if cattle ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... two posts of rough wood. She was sorting a heap of dark and light-colored roots, which lay in her lap. Near her was a wheel, which turned in a high wooden fork. A wryneck made fast to it by a little chain, and by springing from spoke to spoke kept it in continual motion.—[From Theocritus' idyl: The Sorceress.]—A large black cat crouched beside her, and smelt at some ravens' and owls' heads, from which the eyes had not long since ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... prose translation of the "Odyssey" the exquisite idyl of Nausicaa and her Maids, and the discovery of himself by Ulysses. Perhaps the picture came out more clearly than ever before; at any rate, it filled my whole day with delight, and to-day I seem to have heard some sweetest good tidings, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... change of circumstances which must have given him greater leisure as well as better opportunities of culture, he has published but two poems in the last five years,—an Ode for the ter-centenary anniversary of Shakspeare's birth, and the sacred idyl of "Jephthah's Daughter." The former is a production the spirit of which is worthy of its occasion, although, in execution, it is weakened, by an overplus of imagery and epithet. It contains between seven and eight hundred lines. The grand, ever-changing music of the Ode will not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... inspiration from the harmonies of water notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its influence in investing his fetes champetres with the grace of the idyl. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... execution and literary excellence, both "The Market Place" and "Gloria Mundi" are vastly inferior to "The Damnation of Theron Ware," or that exquisite London idyl, "March Hares." The first 200 pages of "Theron Ware" are as good as anything in American fiction, much better than most of it. They are not so much the work of a literary artist as of a vigorous thinker, a man ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... time you did," she broke in again. "It may be beautiful here—inside these walls—an unbroken idyl of peace and contentment, but it isn't life. It's just existence, that's all. If I were a man, I'd want to do a man's work in the world. I wouldn't want to miss an hour of it, childhood, boyhood or manhood. I'd want ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... been the prettiest idyl to us onlookers," she wrote to Lady Adeline. "Love at first sight with both of them, and their first glimpse of each other was in church, which we all take to be the happiest omen that God's blessing is upon them, and will sanctify ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... happy, homely life, the sweet centre of her own bright little world, Dely passed the first year of her wedded life, and then the war came! Dreadful pivot of almost all our late lives! On it also this rude idyl turned. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... and fascination to him. Dr. Eben was not usually given to concerning himself much as to other people's opinion of him: but he found himself for ever wondering what Hetty Gunn thought of him; whether she were beginning to lose any of her old prejudice against him; and whether, after this sea-side idyl were over, he should ever see her again. The more he pondered, the less he could solve the question. No wonder. The simple truth was that Hetty was not thinking about him at all. She had accepted the whole ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson

... again, the Poem. That Poem is an American Classic! It is the Epitome of Self-Sacrifice for the Sake of a Vital Cause! It is the one Idyl of the Middle-West! It is thoroughly America! It is intensely Indiana! Pardon the Plea! But Prepare the Way! Turn the ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley

... to appreciate perfectly the interesting qualities of this angelic woman, whose gentle, unselfish character left on me an impression that can never fade... Her life, like her nature, was calm and uniform. Her character fascinated the Emperor and bound him down to her." This loving idyl, a sort of interlude in the tragedy of war, may have suited Constant's taste, but it was hardly of a nature to please Josephine, who, like most jealous people, knew almost always what she wanted to know, and from the Tuileries found means to watch ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... never been written, Whittier would have composed his "Snow-Bound," no doubt; and the latter only recalls the former on account of that genuine home-atmosphere which surrounds both these exquisite productions. After a perusal of this new American idyl, no competent critic will contend that we lack proper themes for poetry in our own land. The "Snow-Bound" will be a sufficient reminder to all cavillers, at home or abroad, that the American Muse need not travel far ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... idyl of humble life and enduring love, laid bare before us, very real and pure, which in its telling shows us some strong points of Welsh character—the pride, the hasty temper, the quick dying out of wrath.... We call this a well-written story, interesting alike through its romance ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp. If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... "This idyl becomes true," Kautsky says, "only if we grant that but one side of the opposed forces [the proletariat] is growing and increasing in strength, while the other side [the capitalists] remains immovably fixed to the same spot." But he believes that the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... of his Wings—and since that, if the Fiat be indeed issued agaynst us, no Stronghold, though guarded with triple Walls of Circumvallation, like Ecbatana, nor pastoral Valley, that might inspire Theocritus with a new Idyl, can hide us, either by its Strength or its Obscurity, from the Arrow of the Destroying Angel; ye, therefore, seeing these Things cannot be spoken agaynst, ought to be quiet, and do Nothing rashly. Wherefore, I pray ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... I am to have a new one." And then we can hear, or think we hear, the young man begin in a low and modest tone the story of "Edward Fane's Rosebud," or "The Seven Vagabonds," or perchance (O tearful, happy evening!) that tender idyl of "The Gentle Boy!" What a privilege to hear for the first time a "Twice-Told Tale," before it was even once told to the public! And I know with what rapture the delighted little audience must have hailed the advent of every fresh indication that genius, so seldom ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... I cannot find words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture—its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden richness of its coloring. The most tragic situation has here again been alchemized by Luini's magic into a pure idyl, without the loss of power, without the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... The little idyl was the talk of the villagers before it came to the squire's ears. When he questioned Alfred the young man confessed it readily enough. He loved Miss Percival, and she didn't mind waiting. Mr. Thorne was not altogether displeased, for, though his intercourse with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... its own way was an idyl, and it managed to achieve a singular beauty. The absurdity that clung to everything connected with Dirk Stroeve gave it a curious note, like an unresolved discord, but made it somehow more modern, more human; like a rough joke thrown into a serious scene, it heightened ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... Eben was not usually given to concerning himself much as to other people's opinion of him: but he found himself for ever wondering what Hetty Gunn thought of him; whether she were beginning to lose any of her old prejudice against him; and whether, after this seaside idyl were over, he should ever see her again. The more he pondered, the less he could solve the question. No wonder. The simple truth was that Hetty was not thinking about him at all. She had accepted the whole situation with frankness and good sense: she ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous

... and philosophic life in London succeeded to the Rhode Island idyl. In 1734 he returned to Ireland for the last time, and dwelt for eighteen years in his bishopric of Cloyne in studious seclusion with his family, wandering among the myrtle-hedges his own hand planted, reading Plato and Hooker, teaching his cherished daughter, suffering from domestic losses, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... not saying unmeaning things to fill the time. This tale of laborious days bounded by the fires of sunrise and sunset, this struggle with the primal forces of storm and flood, this passage across a panorama unrolling in ever wilder majesty, was the setting for her love idyl. The joy of her mounting spirit broke out in an answering cry that flew across the river to David like the call of an ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... admire Chiefly, I think, in your idyl, so to speak, Is the cool modesty that checks your youthful fire,— Absence of ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... said, with a little lip-curl of disappointment. "He thinks he ought to remember, and he is trying—trying because Grantham said something that made him think he ought to try. But it's no use. It was only a little summer idyl, and we have both ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... I believe I have it in me, I believe I have sufficient devotion and ability, not only to keep alive the flame of his love in our solitary life, far from the world, but even to make it burn stronger and brighter. If I am mistaken, if this splendid idyl of love in hiding must come to an end—an end! what am I saying?—if I find Gaston's love less intense any day than it was the evening before, be sure of this, Renee, I should visit my failure only on myself; no blame should attach to him. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac

... Luz," he read. "So, that is her name. But I never asked it. Identity would have blighted the idyl." ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... ballad, verse, distich, lyric, elegy, eclogue, idyl, madrigal, epic, ode, georgic, cid, rondeau, epilogue, epigram, elegiac, roundelay, dithyramb, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... all the sweetness and placidity that go with such bodies of water, on the one hand, and all their bold and rugged scenery on the other. In summer, a passage up or down its course in one of the day steamers is as near an idyl of travel as can be had, perhaps, anywhere in the world. Then its permanent and uniform volume, its fullness and equipoise at all seasons, and its gently-flowing currents give it further the character of a lake, or of the sea itself. Of the Hudson ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... thus indicated, passed outward to the next of kin in certain circumstances. There are many deeply interesting accounts of readjustment of family life through the taking over by the living of duties once undertaken by the dead. The lovely idyl of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz, shows this widely spreading brother-duty. Here the mother-in-law, so sweet and so wise that her sons' wives loved her deeply, shrewdly manages a contact between Ruth and Boaz to the lasting ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... recalling so much to my mind, I experienced more than anything else a feeling of annoyance, almost of resentment, that the fisherman should appear, however remotely, to disturb the serenity of these last few days in which I had to live out my Wallencamp idyl. ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... questions of the Indian boy and the replies of his nurse, the good Nikomis, are not confined to the life of the aborigines. Every spirited boy is a Hiawatha, and in one form or another goes through the same experiences that Longfellow has represented with such consummate art in his American epic-idyl. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... milk. For her soul was still in her beautiful face, her eyes limpid and bright as stars, and the simple meal so served reminded him of the plain dignified feasts of the old rural deities. He told himself as he watched her, that he was living a fairer idyl than ever ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr

... man, now occupying a prominent position in life, who said, as he bade her tenderly good-bye, that he would never forget her, no matter what woman reigned by his fireside, or what children played on his hearth. Perhaps, in his stately library, no book was so welcome on a winter's evening as an idyl of rural life, no picture so pleasing as that of some Maud Muller raking hay or receiving the dumb caresses of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... one, this dull-eyed one has come to the cemetery on her day off—to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a poignant kind. Let us pray God there is nothing pathologic here and that this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might dream of ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... self-restrained and severely controlled as it is, shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M. Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid, contented. He calls his life the "charmante promenade" which the "cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no cruelties ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... ventured beyond dates, and quinces, and syrups, which may be thought easy to be brought in by a poet. In his idyl of "Audley Court" he gives a most appetizing description of a pasty ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... of my maunderings. But before I conclude them, may I ask you to give all our kindest regards to Lowell, and to express our admiration for the Yankee Idyl. I am afraid of using too extravagant language if I say all I think about it. Was there ever anything more stinging, more concentrated, more vigorous, more just? He has condensed into those few pages ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebeian tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance, his first idyl. It was delightful. The long hours he passed alone with Trina in the "Dental Parlors," silent, only for the scraping of the instruments and the pouring of bud-burrs in the engine, in the foul atmosphere, overheated by the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... the Gaelic English as it fell from the tongues of Irish lads and lasses, whether in note of sorrow or of sport, had already begun to touch with winsome tenderness the stolid Saxon hearts, when that idyl of their country's penal days, 'The Bit o' Writin',' was sent out from the O'Hara fireside. The almost instantaneous success and popularity of their first stories speedily broke down the anonymity of the Banims, and publishers became ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Meister," wrote the dramas, "Iphigenie," "Egmont," and "Torquato Tasso," and his "Reinecke Fuchs." To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong the continuation of "Wilhelm Meister," the beautiful idyl of "Hermann and Dorothea," and the "Roman Elegies." In the last period, between Schiller's death in 1805 and his own, appeared "Faust," "Elective Affinities," his autobiographical "Dichtung und Wahrheit" ("Poetry and Truth"), his "Italian Journey," much scientific work, ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... us an idyl of forest trails, cloud-swept mountains, glacier-born cascades, gentle Selish and heart-broken Indian chiefs, born to learn their day is past. The book will widen the circles of those who regret the passing of the brave, free life ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman

... symphony, which was well received at London in 1895. To her credit may be placed many smaller works of real merit, among them a worthy violin sonata. Amy Elsie Horrocks, born in Brazil, brought out her orchestral legend, "Undine," in 1897. She has also composed incidental music to "An Idyl of New Year's Eve," a 'cello sonata, variations for piano and strings, several dramatic cantatas, a number of songs, and many piano and violin pieces. Besides doing this, she has won fame as a pianist. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson

... and an observer. The Great Desert is no desert to her: no square foot of it is barren. Even the sage-brush has a charm, if only from its dim likeness to a miniature olive tree, both being glaucous and hoary. An oasis of irrigated clover on Humboldt River is made a theme for an idyl. The vast rocks, when bare even of moss, are at least rich and various in tint and form, and have plenty of meaning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... at himself; then laughed as he shook his head and exclaimed, "Behold, the tragedy hero in the purple with one foot in an idyl!" and wished the assembled company pleasant slumbers for the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... brought out an edition of Not a Man and Yet a Man and The Rape of Florida, adding to these a collection of miscellaneous poems, Drifted Leaves, and in 1901 he published An Idyl of the South, an epic poem in two parts. It is to be regretted that he did not have the training that comes from the best university education. He had the taste and the talent to benefit from such culture ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... maiden and reveal the presence of the lover," says Miss Alice Fletcher, who has written some entertaining and valuable treatises on Indian music and love-songs.[244] Mirrors, too, are used to attract the attention of girls, as appears from a charming idyl sketched by Miss Fletcher, which I will reproduce here, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... Thus Drennen's idyl began. Ygerne, staring straight out before her with wide, unseeing eyes, spoke swiftly, her voice a low monotone that fitted in well with the musing eyes. She loved him; she told him so in a strangely quiet tone and Drennen, wishing to believe, believed and thrilled under her ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory

... woman will not resign her name at the marriage altar, and it will be told in future years of these two great souls who were the first to recognize the dignity of human individuality. The domestic life of this couple who set up the standard of absolute equality of husband and wife was an exquisite idyl, fragrant with love and tenderness, a poem whose rhythm was not marred, a divine melody that rose above the discords and dissensions of domestic life upon the lowlands where man is the ruler ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... Asnieres, when they had found a young man in the Seine; he was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and he held fast in his clinched hand a lock of gold hair. Now, there was a man who knew how to die gracefully, and make his death an idyl!" ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... and spare form. Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... hanging out millions of emerald pendants, and the sky showed that exquisite, tender luminousness that only the northern sky knows when the sun travels towards the north. Only singing-birds were lacking to complete the idyl of spring. Stonor, all alone in a beautiful world, lifted up his voice to ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... the North British Review. In 1855 he published 'Horae Subsceivae,' which contained, among medical biography and medico-literary papers, the immortal Scotch idyl, 'Rab and his Friends.' Up to this time the unique personality of the doctor, with its delightful mixture of humor and sympathy, was known only to his own circle. The appearance of 'Rab and his Friends' revealed it to the world. Brief as it is in form, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poeme ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... either by the Chaplain or his wife; so the latter spoke to the Englishman, and told him how matters stood in Lispeth's heart. He laughed a good deal, and said it was very pretty and romantic, a perfect idyl of the Himalayas; but, as he was engaged to a girl at Home, he fancied that nothing would happen. Certainly he would behave with discretion. He did that. Still he found it very pleasant to talk to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things to her, and call her pet names while he was getting ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... the old orchard a little limp, worn volume that held a love story. It was the first thing of the kind he had ever read to her, for in the first novel he had lent her the love interest had been very slight and subordinate. This was a beautiful, passionate idyl exquisitely told. ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... without intending it, and I have taken without your knowledge. Do not regret the accident which has enriched another. This concealed idyl of the hills was mine, as I supposed, but I acknowledge your equal right to it. Shall we share the possession, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... as the Veronese at Venice; and his picture is truer to the premium standard. The painting shows a pampered animal, with over-red blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to breast such "salt sea-foam" as flashes on the Idyl of Moschus. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... fairly afloat upon the gentle stream of an idyl? Shall I watch the banks as they glide past, and record each fairy-headed flower that looks at its image in the wave? Or shall I mow them down and sweep them together ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... his marriages that the first was an idyl, the second a romance and the third a fairy-tale. Others said harsher things. But Asta Grundtvig paid no attention to the scandal mongers. A very earnest Christian woman herself, she devoted all her energy to create a real Christian home for ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... long intervals the great earth sighed dreamily in its sleep. All about, the feeling of absolute peace and quiet and security and untroubled happiness and content seemed descending from the stars like a benediction. The beauty of his poem, its idyl, came to him like a caress; that alone had been lacking. It was that, perhaps, which had left it hitherto incomplete. At last he was to grasp his song in all its entity. But suddenly there was an interruption. Presley had climbed the fence at the limit of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... friend called the Captain, who is for the moment without suitable employment for his ability and energy. Edward can give him just the needed work, with great advantage to the property, and would like to do so. Charlotte fears that the presence of the Captain may disturb their pleasant idyl, but finally yields. She herself has a niece, Ottilie, a beautiful girl whom no one understands and who is not doing well at her boarding-school. Charlotte would like to have the girl under her own care. After much debate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the pathetic idyl, wrought out amidst harsh discord, had found its earthly close in the family vault at Windsor, amidst the lamentations of the whole nation. Princess Charlotte, the candid, fearless, affectionate girl, whose youth had been clouded by the sins and follies of others, but to whom the country had ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... It was an idyl of Theocritus, very well known by Agias, and without the least hesitation he took up the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... to flow around her heart and rise to her lips with a taste that was repulsive, and to her brain with a thought that was bitter: Why is this world as it is? Why is it not different? But perhaps it was different somewhere else, but not for her? She had ceased to believe in an idyl. She had looked too long, and from too near a point, at the tragedy and irony of things to preserve faith in idyls. Maybe there were idyls somewhere, but not in the sphere where she lived—they were not ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... me of three friends of my own childhood—'Robinson Crusoe,' 'The Swiss Family Robinson,' and 'Masterman Ready'—and I would be glad to know that all, old and young, who have enjoyed those immortal tales would take to their hearts this last idyl of an island."—Sara Andrew Shafer, in the N.Y. Times ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various

... we were poor. It was not strange that I should marry, said those who knew the step I had taken; but that I should follow that old idyl; and accept the destiny of a garret and a crust with a poet, was incredible! Therefore, being apart from the diversions of society, I had many idle hours. One day when my husband was sitting at the receipt of customs, for he had obtained ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poeme de l'extase," with its oceanic ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... dates, and quinces, and syrups, which may be thought easy to be brought in by a poet. In his idyl of "Audley Court" he gives a most appetizing description of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... The progress of his idyl suffered a check when the great senatorial fight came on in the Legislature. Attacked by a combination of rivals, Brander was given the fight of his life. To his amazement he discovered that a great railroad corporation, which ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... lovely womanhood. "The Shanar Dancing Girl" was first written for the Friends in Council, a literary club of Kansas City, Mo. It has received the encomiums of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John J. Ingalls and others for its beauty of expression and dramatic qualities. "Invocation," an April idyl; "The Sea-shell;" and "Mountain Born" sing of the love of nature. "In the Conservatory;" "My Summer Heart;" and "Tired of the Storm" hint of sorrow and unrest and longing. Then in 1886, "Compensation" was written. "Irma's Love For ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker

... The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for the future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally a slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. Cojo, her uncle, was a ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... not safely read aloud to his mother and sisters." So says a late English critic, to which another adds, that if he has somewhat gone out of fashion of late years, the more's the pity for the school-boy of the period. What Defoe is in Robinson Crusoe—realistic idyl of island solitude—that, in his romantic stories of wilderness life, is his ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid

... life, so unbearable to the former, was by them converted into poetry. Although the ancient idyls and the family scenes of English authors were at first imitated, this style of poetry retained an essentially German originality; the hero of the modern idyl, unlike his ancient model, was a fop tricked out with wig and cane, and the domestic hero of the tale, unlike his English counterpart, was a mere political nullity. It is perhaps well when domestic comforts replace the want of public life, but these poets hugged ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... [20] The first is from a poem in free-verse, Meditation, by | | Richard Aldington; the second is blank verse, from the Small | | Sweet Idyl in Tennyson's Princess; the third is from | | Henley's Margaritae Sorori (also in free-verse); the fourth | | is from DeQuincey's English Mail-Coach, Dream Fugue IV | | (prose); the fifth is from Milton's Samson Agonistes, ll. | | 1092 ff. (blank verse); the sixth is from Browning's ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, Ivan Ivanovitch. When a boy he had read in Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr Badman" the story of "Old Tod", and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, Ned Bratts. It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some subject ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... as the village story—as we shall term it for brevity's sake—which has won a permanent place in literature by the side of its older brothers and sisters, and has even entirely driven out the fanciful pastoral or village idyl of old. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... Beneath an idyl of Moschus, of all places in the world, Macaulay notes the fact of Peel being First Lord of the Treasury; and he finds space, between two quotations in Athenaeus, to commemorate a Ministerial majority of 29 on the Second Reading of the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... her beautiful face like the luminous face of an angel, Smote through the pained gloom of his heart like a hurt to the sense, there. Languidly clung about by the half-fallen shawl, and with folded Hands, that held a few sad asters: "I sigh for this idyl Lived at last to an end; and, looking on to my prose-life," With a smile, she said, and a subtle derision of manner, "Better and better I seem, when I recollect all that has happened Since I came here in June: ...
— Poems • William D. Howells

... of this tender idyl, which, even if I am a confirmed bachelor, set my heart beating within my breast, produced no other effect upon the new author than an insolent somnolence which would not disappear until he suddenly raised his imperious voice to admonish ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various

... under the Shadowe of his Wings—and since that, if the Fiat be indeed issued agaynst us, no Stronghold, though guarded with triple Walls of Circumvallation, like Ecbatana, nor pastoral Valley, that might inspire Theocritus with a new Idyl, can hide us, either by its Strength or its Obscurity, from the Arrow of the Destroying Angel; ye, therefore, seeing these Things cannot be spoken agaynst, ought to be quiet, and do Nothing rashly. Wherefore, I pray you, Wife and Daughters, get you to your Knees, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... three weeks of rest and quietness, doing some desultory fishing and shooting but spending most of my time in a hammock slung under some of the giant Fichten, when my sylvan idyl was disturbed by the red-faced, stub-nosed ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... blousy one, this dull-eyed one has come to the cemetery on her day off—to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a poignant kind. Let us pray God there is nothing pathologic here and that this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story of Bathsheba and Uriah—lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke; the years declining under heavy shadows. How full of lifeblood it all is! Every chapter is an idyl, an ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... lady had looked too much at her companion and too little at the way, and so they had been upset. Both jumped up lightly. Anton raised the sledge, and they were soon galloping onward once more. But the sledge-idyl was ended. Lenore looked steadily before her, and Anton occupied himself in shaking the snow out ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... contribution to the national idea was the apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building of the Ship." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem is an idyl of the ship-building folk and the sea; the consummation is the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching of the ship, christened "The Union"—emblem of the wife's and husband's voyage begun together on ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... of the idyl?" Hildebrand asked, quietly, when the King had run to the end of his rhapsody. Again Robert ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... and toiled for her, and with her, found the best of all that a larger life brings to many. The Priest, of course, could have easily annihilated the two, but he hesitated. There was something in the hearts of his people with which he dare not tamper. So the two had been able to live their idyl in peace, though Flores slept always with one eye open ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... quoting from it I must explain somewhat; otherwise you might not be able to imagine what it means, because it was written to be read by those only who are acquainted with Theocritus and the Greek idylists. Perhaps I had better say something too, about the word idyl, for the use of the word by Tennyson is not the Greek use at all, except in the mere fact that the word signifies a picturing, a shadowing or an imagining of things. Tennyson's pictures are of a purely imaginative kind in the "Idyls of the King." But the Greek poets who first invented ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... heat,—let us seek cooler air beneath the shade of yonder cypresses, whose dark-green boughs shut out the glaring sky. We'll talk of love and poesy and tender things till sunset, . . I will recite to thee a ballad of mine that Niphrata loved,—'tis called 'An Idyl of Roses,'...and it will lighten this hot and heavy silence, when even birds sleep, and butterflies drowse in the hollowed shelter of the arum-leaves. Come, wilt thou? ... To- night perchance we shall have little time ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... amusements the day passed, a day that remains forever an idyl of simple loveliness to me, such as any man is the richer for having known. When darkness overtook us, we made for ourselves the softest of ferny beds, and slept serenely, untroubled by anything, under the light ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... ardent was he in his wooings, that he would leave his flocks to wander at will, while he sang his uncouth lays from the hilltops to Galatea in the bay below. Her only answers were words of scorn and mockery. See Andrew Lang's translation of Theocritus, Idyl VI, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... cap! It wasn't just the mushy sentiment of a convalescent, either. Three grand weeks afterwards I waited around, going walks with her in the park, taking her on foolish steamer rides, sending her flowers, notes, candy. We were rare spoons, and she was as good as she was witty. There was an idyl for you! Then, when I woke up one day—why, I ran away without a word! What else could I do? I was bound for an Australian sheep ranch. And there I went. Since then not a whisper of her. By now it's quite likely she's the wife of some lucky dog of a doctor, and never gives me a thought. So ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... interpretations of it. Yet he was not in love! No! He was too poor and too level headed for that! And he was unaffectedly and materially tired, too, when he reached the road again, and rested, leaving the spring and its little idyl behind. ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte

... still filled with clay, dropped to her side, and a tableau endured for a minute or two, suggesting a remote period, a Persian idyl, mayhap. With a smile on her lips she stared at the living model. The chatoyant eyes of the leopard stared back, a flicker of restlessness in their brilliant yellow deeps. The tip of ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... a little light into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob "know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket, as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... says the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—"flat-nosed bees," as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl—and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... nurse, the good Nikomis, are not confined to the life of the aborigines. Every spirited boy is a Hiawatha, and in one form or another goes through the same experiences that Longfellow has represented with such consummate art in his American epic-idyl. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... and there a musk-rose or a violet that retains its fragrance. He seems to have taken Shirley as his master; but desire in the pupil's case outran performance. It is, indeed, a pitiful fall from the Grateful Servant, a honey-sweet old play, fresh as an idyl of Theocritus, to the paltry faded graces of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... an idyl or a legend belonging to it," a pretty, dark-eyed girl with a Boston accent said to Kirkwood, one moonlight evening late in summer when the river was low, as they drifted softly down between its dim shores. "Poor little Bear River! did nothing human ever happen near you to give ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... here, but by no means too long to be read many times over, is "Pampinea," an idyl in which the poet's fancy plays lightly and gracefully with the romance of life in Boccaccio's Florentine garden, and returns again to the beauty which inspired his dream of Italy, as he lay musing beside our northern sea. The thread of thought running through the poem is slight as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... better nor worse. Youth might fade, honors take wing, the face of nature change, but Hans, Gargantuan Hans, appeared but a figure in an eternal present! Gazing at that substantial landmark, the soldier was carried back in thought over the long period of separation to a forest idyl; a face in the firelight; the song of the katydid; the drumming of the woodpecker. Dreams; vain dreams! They had assailed him before, but seldom so sharply as now in a ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... is worthy of notice, as forming a transition towards the new comedy,) one of which was called the Flower, and was probably therefore neither seriously affecting nor terrible, but in the style of the idyl, and pleasing. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You could have ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... mind's faith that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of 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 ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the publication of a complete translation of the Divina Commedia in terza rima. With Primel el Nola (1852) he included poems written under Italian influence, entitled Les Ternaires (1841), but in the rustic idyl of Marie (1836) turned to Breton country life; in Les Bretons (1845) he found his inspiration in the folklore and legends of his native province, and in Telen-Aroor (1844) he used the Breton dialect. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... means by which he might catch a glimpse of one without whom he felt it impossible to exist. Numberless are the stratagems he contrived, and incredible the ingenuity with which they were executed; the freshness of his romance was itself an exquisite idyl. . . . Victor never despaired; but in the midst of his anticipations he was overwhelmed by a ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... not to the poetical extent, at least in some proportion, its moral and its meaning. The wood-cutter did not cut down so many trees a day, that the Hamadryads had not time to make their plaints heard; the shepherd tended his sheep, and did no jobs or chores the while; the idyl had a chance to grow up, and modulate his oaten pipe. But now the poet must be at the whole expense of the poetry in describing one of these positions; the worker is a true Midas to the gold he makes. The poet must describe, as ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess you always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage—an idyl of blissful poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... exclaimed the emperor, with troubled mien. "I had forgotten that I had a home." This question had awakened him from his idyl. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... the Medium," cannot be called a poem. It would not be possible to write satire, epic, idyl, not even elegy, upon that "rat-hole philosophy," as Mr. Emerson once styled the new fetichism of the mahogany tables. It has not one element that asks the sense of beauty to incorporate it, or challenges the weapon of wit to transfix it. It is humiliating, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... soon entered, in dishevelled dress and with a countenance expressive of great anxiety and fatigue. After a few words, which Chateaubriand rather contemptuously records as an "idyl upon the pleasures of country life," Chateaubriand repeated what he had said to ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... in the continuation of "Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances." The first contributions that Julie sent from her new home were, "An Idyl of the Wood," and "The Three Christmas Trees."[11] In these tales the experiences of her voyage and fresh surroundings became apparent; but in June 1868, "Mrs. Overtheway" was continued by the ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden

... of tragic idyl, and of flight and hot pursuit, And the jingle of the bridle, and cuirass, and spur on boot, As our horses's hooves struck showers from the flinty bowlders set In freshet ways with ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... was no flower in the garden of girls as sweet as his white snowdrop. He felt, if he could only afford to buy a lighter for himself, they might marry, and the bride's life might be saved. But it was out of the question, and perhaps the idyl would have ended in tragedy, had he not confided his troubles to his master. That master, as it happened, had a lighter which he'd fitted up with a motor. He'd used it all summer, and got his money's worth of ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... The following idyl, extemporized by one of Stanley's black soldiers, on the occasion of reaching Lake Nyanza, possesses more energy of movement, perspicuity of style, and warm, glowing imagery, than any song of its character we have yet met with from the lips of unlettered Negroes. It is certainly a noble ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... fresh spring grass and buds bursting into life beneath my feet, with the murmur of the glad young river in my ears, I stood and gazed upon the faces of those lovers of five hundred years ago, whose love was as a spring-time idyl. For they met in the spring, they parted in the spring, their intercourse was like the mingling of young winds with woodland violets; and, dust and ashes though they have been for centuries, they still prefigure to our hearts the eternal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... The lovely idyl of Ruth is in sharp contrast with the bloody and turbulent annals of Judges. It completes, but does not contradict, these, and happily reminds us of what we are apt to forget in reading such pages, that no times are so wild but that in them are quiet corners, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... best, representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... it came more and more to seem that the Dorothea idyl had not been meant to be taken as a work of realism. The "treffliches Maedchen" was perhaps too kind-hearted; her emotions were too voluminous for so small a house, her personality seemed to spread all over it. She would sing Hungarian love-ditties ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... hear the larks shrill-warbling o'er the mead Their silver sonnets from their golden throats; And in my boyhood's clover-fields I hear The twittering swallows and the hum of bees. Ah, sweeter to my heart and to my ear Than any idyl poet ever sung, The low, sweet music of their melodies; Because I listened when my soul was young, In those dear meadows under maple trees. My heart they molded when its clay was moist, And all my life the hum of honey-bees Hath waked ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... youth. George Sand's village novels, in contrast with her novels on Marriage. The popular tone and the landscape drawing here, which, for that matter, are all derived from Rousseau, lead on into a tranquil idyl. Works like Ponsard's Lucrece and Augier's Gabrielle show the reaction from Romanticism. In the tragedy it is Lucrece, in the modern play, Gabrielle, upon whom the action hinges. In Ponsard and Augier ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... Baby" is not an idyl. It is a tragedy. It breathes the spirit of Malthus, only the spirit is transformed into one of pity for the victim of life rather than one of preservation of the nation. We are not, in this book, the victim of the baby. The baby ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... convents would have been to an Athenian quite inexplicable. They had, in short, an open and childlike conception of religion; and, as such, it was a sunny conception. Any one who will take the trouble to compare an idyl of Theokritos with a modern pastoral, or the poem of Kleanthes with a modern hymn, or the Aphrodite of Melos with a modern Madonna, will realize most effectually what ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... they dwelt for another four weeks. The ancient garden had doubtless many a dream of love to keep, but none sweeter or truer than the idyl of Tyrrel and Ethel Rawdon. They were never weary of rehearsing it; every incident of its growth had been charming and romantic, and, as they believed, appointed from afar. As the sum-mer waxed hotter the beautiful place took on an appearance of royal color and ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr

... sonnet, ballad, verse, distich, lyric, elegy, eclogue, idyl, madrigal, epic, ode, georgic, cid, rondeau, epilogue, epigram, elegiac, roundelay, dithyramb, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... spring: the old tree of music was to put forth young green leaves: in the bed of harmony thousands of flowers were to open their smiling eyes upon the new dawn: and silvery trickling springs were to bubble forth with the vernal sweet song of streams—a very idyl. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... of their glow. His contemplation, intent upon objects of peaceful beauty, and undisturbed by rude anxieties and vehement passions, suggested only kindred reproductions to the creative faculty by which it was vivified; so that the whole man was not only a poet, but, as it were, a poem,—a living idyl, calling into pastoral music every reed that sighed and trembled along the stream of life. And Helen was so suited to a nature of this kind, she so guarded the ideal existence in which it breathes! All the little cares and troubles of the common practical life she ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... as a vivid picture of Revolutionary scenes. The story is a strong one, a thrilling one. It causes the true American to flush with excitement, to devour chapter after chapter, until the eyes smart, and it fairly smokes with patriotism. The love story is a singularly charming idyl. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... at that time," M. Beugnot goes on, "as if Heaven had given him every means of securing happiness. A son had just been born to him, whose future the poets were justified in foretelling in their own way. The child who inspired the Mantuan poet with the idyl, or rather with the magnificent prophecy, Sicelides Musae, etc., was but an humble creature by the side of this infant, who to the most impressive pride of race added enormous, newly acquired glory, such as the world had never seen." ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... [Footnote: Od. vi. 244.—Translated by Butcher and Lang.] About the whole scene there is a freshness and a fragrance as of early morning, and a tone so natural, free and frank, that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuries sicken and faint, like candle-light in the splendour ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... the dying fire. Thinking over the evening, the idea came to me that perhaps, after all, he did admire my protegee, and, being a romantic old woman, I did not repel the fancy; it might go a certain distance without harm, and an idyl is always charming, doubly so to people cast away on a desert island. One falls into the habit of studying persons very closely in the ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... elect of the earth. But I loved you then, Hermia, I love you now, and I've told you so. I hadn't meant to, but I'm not sorry. I'm glad that you know it—even though your smiles deride me; even though I know I've spoiled your idyl here and made a mockery of my ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... himself. If others were losing, he was not. He was in love with the fine old hall. The simple, sylvan character of its daily life charmed his poetic instincts. The sweet, hot days on the fells, with a rod in his hand, and Charlotte and the squire for company, were like an idyl. The rainy days in the large, low drawing-room, singing with Sophia, or dreaming and speculating with her on all sorts of mysteries, were, in their way, equally charmful. He liked to walk slowly up and down, and to talk to her softly of things obscure, cryptic, ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... begin by saying something on the first, next, to allude to the second, and, after finishing with all three, to take the name of the whole set and match it with a line, no matter whether it be from some stanza or roundelay, song or idyl, set phrases or proverbs. But they must rhyme. And any one making a mistake will be ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... have proved as epoch-making as the modest little volume called "Synnoeve Solbakken," which appeared in the book shops of Christiania and Copenhagen in 1857. It was a simple tale of peasant life, an idyl of the love of a boy and a girl, but it was absolutely new in its style, and in its intimate revelation of the Norwegian character. It must be remembered that until the year 1814, Norway had for centuries been politically united ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... exterior; the soul of a prose poet behind those heavy brows; the courage of a lion back of those patient, kindly aspects; and, long before he was of legal age, a leader. His first love was a Rutledge; his wife was a Todd. Let the romancist tell the story of his romance. I dare not. No sadder idyl can be found in all the short and simple annals of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... consists of love-poems, or poems dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. Love among the Ruins, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a lover's meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the contrast of its surroundings. The lovers meet in a turret among the ruins of an ancient city, and the moment chosen is immediately before ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... are very interesting in this connection: "When I am in the mood for thinking deeply I read 'The Minister's Wooing.' But 'The Pearl of Orr's Island' is my favorite. It is the most charming New England idyl ever written." ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... The crocuses were in bloom, the poplar trees hanging out millions of emerald pendants, and the sky showed that exquisite, tender luminousness that only the northern sky knows when the sun travels towards the north. Only singing-birds were lacking to complete the idyl of spring. Stonor, all alone in a beautiful world, lifted up his voice to ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... very page de Contes is the life of the wedded poets, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it is difficult to realize that this immortal idyl of Poetry, Genius, and Love was less than fifteen years in duration, out of his seventy-seven, and her fifty-five years of life. It is a story that has touched the ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... was born, the end which Fate forced upon him, to me, was inevitable. Each word and act of the three weeks of his parents' love-idyl must reflect in the character and life of the child. Little by little the baby King grew before my mental vision until I saw at last there was no escape from his importunity and I allowed the insistent Boy—masterful even from his inception—to shape himself at his own sweet will. ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous

... of the Rev. Dr. Smith, and others, to the wisdom of his choice. But it does not appear that he consulted them beforehand. If love were not too cunning for that, what would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its wonder and freshness for every generation? Let us be thankful that in every man's life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul, that makes him a poet while ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... object, by carrying on his work in Europe; he could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home, he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at such ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick

... again, they had prayed for one another, mingled one in the other with so ardent a desire for mutual happiness that, for a moment, they had attained to the very depths of the love which gives and immolates itself. And now their long, tear-drenched tenderness, their pure idyl of suffering, was ending in this brutal separation; she on her side saved, radiant amidst the hosannas of the triumphant Basilica; and he lost, sobbing with wretchedness, bowed down in the depths of the dark crypt in an icy, grave-like ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... not tell in detail how the next few days passed. The little idyl concerns no one but myself—and one other—and there is no reason to desecrate them by bawling its delicate folds abroad. Suffice it to say that we went on through Deya to Soller, and then taking mules, climbed the mountain passes to the convent ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... Great Desert is no desert to her: no square foot of it is barren. Even the sage-brush has a charm, if only from its dim likeness to a miniature olive tree, both being glaucous and hoary. An oasis of irrigated clover on Humboldt River is made a theme for an idyl. The vast rocks, when bare even of moss, are at least rich and various in tint and form, and have plenty ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... sculpture and by charming poetry, but always without backgrounds or distant receding perspectives. In Galilee were wanting the marble, the practiced workmen, the exquisite and refined language. But Galilee has created the most sublime ideal for the popular imagination; for behind its idyl moves the fate of humanity, and the light which illumines its picture is the sun ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... replied the Prince; "it is a charming and poetic idyl which you present to me. We should flee far from the world, eh? We should go to an unknown spot and try to regain paradise lost. How long would that happiness last? A season during the springtime of our youth. Then autumn ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... there could not be within us such peace. That Aniela does not call it by its proper name means nothing; it is there all the same. The whole day passed for us like an idyl. Formerly I disliked Sundays; now I find that a Sunday, from morning until night, may be like a poem, especially in the country. Soon after breakfast, we went to church in time for the early mass. My aunt followed in our rear; even Pani Celina, profiting by ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... Thoroughly business-like in every sense! My dear young lady, if you expect me to preserve my legal gravity you must not be so humorous; it is beyond the self-control of even a fusty conveyancer. And what part in this financial idyl ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... another side to their idyl, and Marianne mentioned it to her husband. She had chatted with Madame Angelin, and it appeared that the latter wished to enjoy life, at all events for the present, and did not desire to be burdened with children. Then Mathieu's worrying thoughts once more came back to ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... hungering for justice, possessed by the dream that haunted him, the sublime and unattainable conception of the destruction of the old society, of Paris chastened by fire, of the field dug up anew, that from the soil thus renewed and purified might spring the idyl ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals and Shephera's Pipe (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's Romeo and Juliet (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... "The Deserted Village" had never been written, Whittier would have composed his "Snow-Bound," no doubt; and the latter only recalls the former on account of that genuine home-atmosphere which surrounds both these exquisite productions. After a perusal of this new American idyl, no competent critic will contend that we lack proper themes for poetry in our own land. The "Snow-Bound" will be a sufficient reminder to all cavillers, at home or abroad, that the American Muse need not travel far away for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... and pansy. A century later the prizes offered were an amaranthus of gold of the value of 400 livres, for the best ode, a violet of silver, valued at 250 livres, for an essay in prose, a silver pansy, worth 200 livres, for an eclogue, elegy or idyl, and a silver lily of the value of sixty livres, for the best sonnet or hymn in honor of the Virgin Mary,—for religion is mixed up with merriment, and heathen with Christian rites. He who gained a prize three times was honored with the title of Doctor en gaye science, the name given to ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... precious. Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp. If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... first undeceived;—the disillusion is long delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity about you,—for idyllic ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... way was an idyl, and it managed to achieve a singular beauty. The absurdity that clung to everything connected with Dirk Stroeve gave it a curious note, like an unresolved discord, but made it somehow more modern, more human; like a rough joke thrown into a serious ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... literature. It is a realistic romance of the folk of the forest—a romance of the alliance of peace between a pioneer's daughter in the depths of the ancient wood and the wild beasts who felt her spell and became her friends. It is not fanciful, with talking beasts; nor is it merely an exquisite idyl of the beasts themselves. It is an actual romance, in which the animal characters play their parts as naturally as do the human. The atmosphere of the book is enchanting. The reader feels the undulating, whimpering music of the forest, the power of the shady silences, the dignity of the beasts ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... sixteenth century. Samuel Usque was a fugitive from the Inquisition, and his dialogues, "Consolations for the Tribulations of Israel" (written in Portuguese, in 1553), are a long drawn-out sigh of pain passing into a sigh of relief. Usque opens with a passionate idyl in which the history of Israel in the near past is told by the shepherd Icabo. To him Numeo and Zicareo offer consolation, and they pour balm into his wounded heart. The vividness of Usque's style, his ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... was elected a member of the French Academy in 1891, succeeding to the chair of Octave Feuillet. Some of his writings are: 'Aziyade,' written in 1879; the scene is laid in Constantinople. This was followed by 'Rarahu,' a Polynesian idyl (1880; again published under the title Le Mariage de Loti, 1882). 'Roman d'un Spahi (1881) deals with Algiers. Taton-gaye is a true 'bete-humaine', sunk in moral slumber or quivering with ferocious joys. It is in this book that Loti has eclipsed Zola. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, as all over ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... sent to Janina a bouquet, a box of candy, and a letter inviting her to supper at the "Idyl," mentioning that Topolski and Majkowska were ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... rather than themselves. The talent for sarcastic epigram is hereditary with the people. The pointed style of Martial was handed down through successive generations. The epigram in his hands was no longer a mere inscription, an idyl, or an elegy; it had lost its ancient grace, but it took on a new energy, and it set the model, which the later Romans knew well how to copy, of satire condensed into wit, in lines each of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... that by the time spring had passed into summer, sumptuous wildflowers succeeding the first little scrubby daisy, a blessed idyl of quaint child life, dear to Simon's heart, had grown out of the chance meeting on the hillside. It was as if Simon's clearing were a charmed circle into which no evil could enter, to which no echo of the greed and brutality ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... asked Lady Orlay kindly. She was noting, with her quick and clever eyes, that Netty seemed happy and was exquisitely dressed. She was quite ready to be really interested in this idyl. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the few short words with which it began—"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"—to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with which it ended, it was ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom









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