"Sonnet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with an innocent impertinence, justified myself by Horace, so I will now justify myself by Wordsworth, whose famous sonnet written on Westminster Bridge is sufficient proof that he could feel the charm of cities as deeply as the charm of Nature. 'Earth hath not anything to show more fair,' wrote Wordsworth, and of a truth London has moods and moments of almost unearthly beauty, perhaps unparalleled by any vision ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... sure I must, but I always could get myself out of them again. Why, I'll tell you an instance of it.—You must know I was once a journeyman sonnet-writer to Signor Squallini. Now, his method, when seized with the furor harmonicus, was constantly to make me sit by his side, while he was thrumming on his harpsichord, in order to make extempore verses to whatever air he should beat out to his liking. I remember, one morning, as he was ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... I will not write a sonnet, Singing their beauty as a poet might do: I just detest those on Aunt Nipson's bonnet, Because they are like her,—all gray and blue, Dusty and pinched, and fastened on askew! And as for heaven's own buttercups and ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... He is not even blind," Angelina said to herself, as he examined the shilling which she gave him. "Begone, for Heaven's sake!" added she, aloud, as he left the room;—and "leave me, leave me to repose." She threw up the sash, to taste the evening air; but scarcely had she begun to repeat a sonnet to her Araminta—scarcely had she ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... marble tomb in the principal church of Pistoia, the body of the sarcophagus of which is full of small figures, with some larger ones above. In this tomb rests the body of M. Cino d'Angibolgi, doctor of laws, and a very famous man of letters in his day, as M. Francesco Petrarca testifies in the sonnet: ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... Queen's hands in order to soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret feelings. When the Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "though I profess not to be a poet," he "prepared a sonnet tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord." It was an awkward thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the counsels of those who hated him. He complains that many people thought him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... as he lighted on the Castle of St. Angelo: his enemy doubtless fell crushing through the roof and so downwards. He is as natural as blank verse—that bronze angel-set, rhythmic, grandiose. You'll see, some day or other, he's a great sonnet, sir, I'm sure of that. Milton wrote in bronze; I am sure Virgil polished off his Georgics in marble—sweet calm shapes! exquisite harmonies of line! As for the Aeneid; that, sir, I consider to be so many bas-reliefs, mural ornaments which affect me ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his being the father of his son. Of the boy's mother we have only obstructed glances and glimpses through half-flung lattices in the gloaming. Raphael was her only child. She was scarce twenty when she bore him. In a sonnet written to her, on the back of a painting, Raphael's father speaks of her wondrous eyes, slender neck, and the form too frail for earth's rough buffets. Mention is also made of "this child born in purest love, and sent by God to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... thought, that, where all else perished, Odes, Idyls, Lines, Stanzas, this one Sonnet to the stars should be miraculously reserved for such ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... apprehended might prove critical, he passed the remaining hours till day-dawn beneath a tree opposite her apartment, watching the passing and repassing lights in the chamber. During the period in which a life so passionately valued was in danger, he paraphrased Petrarch's celebrated sonnet, narrating a dream whose prophecy was accomplished by the death of Laura. It took place the night on which the vision arose amid his slumber. Dr. Darwin extended the thought of that sonnet into ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... these sonnets was that which is now as familiar as honey on the lips of every lover of suave songs—I mean that sonnet which begins ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... offer some peculiarities. He has one composed of lines of six syllables, others of eight, besides those considered regular in French, consisting, namely, of twelve syllables. The following sonnet addressed to Roumania appears to ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... coarsest of terms for what the French nuns prettily termed un sonnet; I find ung sonnet also in Nov. ii. of the Cent nouvelles Nouvelles. Captain Lockett (p. 32) quotes Strepsiades in The Clouds {Greek} "because he cannot express the bathos of the original (in the Tale of Ja'afar ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Eureka]'; and, throwing down a scroll, rushed as precipitately out of the room. The scroll was of vellum; the title to the contents of it was penned in golden letters, and softly-painted bunches of roses graced each corner. It contained a sonnet to love, and another to friendship; but a principal mistake which struck us, on the very threshold of our critical examination, was that he had incorrectly entitled these sonnets. Friendship should have been called love, and love, friendship. We had ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of rhyme, affords a fine opportunity for the printer to mediate between the poet and his public, and this he has been able to do by mere indention and leading, without resorting to distinction of type. The reader of a sonnet or ballad printed without these two aids to the eye is robbed of his rightful clues to the construction of the verse. It seems hardly possible that a poem could have been read aloud from an ancient manuscript, at sight, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... He resented this, as an invasion of his privacy; it was inconsistent with his hermit-instinct. Thyrsis wished no women in his life save the muses with their star-sewn garments. He had been fond of a line from a sonnet to Milton: ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the floor. The poet's fingers may be numb. Although the inkpot be full, his stomach may be empty. And yet from this window, lately, a poem was cast upward to the moon. And youth and truth still rhyme in these upper rooms. Linda's voice is still the music of a sonnet. Still do the roses fade, and love is always like the constant stars. And ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Some of it is written in a loose, swinging couplet, some in quatrains, some in blank verse, some in the choice, picked prose made the fashion by Lyly. It contains more lyrics than any other Shakespearean play. One of the lyrics, a sonnet in Alexandrines, is the fruit of a real human passion. The lyric at the end of the play is the loveliest thing ever said about England. If this play and most of the other plays were modern works, the Censor would not allow them to be performed publicly. The men and women ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed party strife and embittered the last years ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... bead-worker indeed, a girl of the lowest classes, pooh! She might be a Venus, but she could be nothing to him. And he himself made merry over his romantic adventure, which Narcisse sought to arrange in a kind of antique sonnet: A beautiful bead-worker falling madly in love with a young prince, as fair as sunlight, who, touched by her misfortune, hands her a silver crown; then the beautiful bead-worker, quite overcome at finding him as charitable as handsome, dreaming of him incessantly, and following ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... engaged in such a conversation, I was resolved to turn my pain into a pleasure and to divert myself as well as I could with so very odd a fellow. "You must understand," says Ned, "that the sonnet I am going to read to you was written upon a lady, who showed me some verses of her own making, and is, perhaps, the best poet of our age. But you ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... hand of Andrea, with the body of the sarcophagus full of little figures, and some larger figures above; in which tomb is laid to rest the body of Messer Cino d' Angibolgi, Doctor of Laws, and a very famous scholar in his time, as Messer Francesco Petrarca testifies in that sonnet: ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... to recognise the hand of the master. And in his admiration there was a trace of a frank envy, a certain unresentful humiliation—the feeling which he could remember to have experienced many times in the old days, when he put aside the sonnet he had just finished for some fashionable magazine, and took down from his limited bookshelf the little time-worn volume which contained the almost forgotten work of a poet whose name would have fallen strangely on the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... in Amalia's music. Certain melodies that she said her father had made he loved especially, and sometimes she would accompany them with a plaintive chant, half singing and half recitation, of the sonnet which had inspired them, and which had been woven through them. It was at these times that Larry listened with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on the fire, and Harry with his eyes on Amalia's face, while the cabin ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... and dignity of Leonardo da Vinci, and the fresh beauty of Angelica Kauffmann. I liked best the romantic head of Raphael Mengs. In one of the rooms there is a portrait of Alfieri, with an autograph sonnet of his own on the back of it. The house in which he lived and died, is on the north bank of the Arno, near the Ponte Caraja, and his ashes rest in ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... posterity will never mention. Look at the names you have insulted! Look at this letter from Montaigne to Boetius, so illegible that it has never been printed; look at that billet of Henry IV. to the Duchesse de Verneuil; and that Sonnet of Malherbe, written entirely by Bacon's own hand; that letter from Madame de Maintenon to Father Le Tellier; that order from the Prince the night before the battle ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... meant, as a catharsis of passion, in which is latent a whole philosophy of art. To some extent he also finds the story of the Passionate Pilgrim "replete with the deepest knowledge of the passions of early adolescence" The series culminates in Sonnet 116, which makes love the sole beacon of humanity. It might be said that it is connected by a straight line with the best teachings of Plato, and that here humanity picked up the clue, lost, save with some Italian poets, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... master's lazy son, on whom even love and entire self-sacrifice—lifelong too—on the part of a great lady, cannot prevail to do more in his father's craft than one exquisite picture of herself, inscribed with a sonnet renouncing the pencil thenceforth—is the best told story in the book. But Gautier would certainly have done it even better. Margot, in the same fatal way and, I fear, in the same degree, suggests the country tales of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... leader, the Advocate Armellini, who pronounced the downfall of the Pope from his temporal sovereignty. This consistorial advocate had, six times over, solemnly sworn fidelity to the Pontiff. He had even composed in honor of the Papacy a sonnet, in which are read these remarkable words: "I spoke with Time, and asked it what had become of so many empires, of those kingdoms of Argos and Thebes and Sidon, and so many others which had preceded or followed them. For only answer, Time strewed ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... is art there, but I don't think it is very deliberate art. I don't believe they were written SLOWLY. Of course one can hardly be breathless in a sonnet. The rhymes are all stretched across the ground, like wires, and one has to ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... about form? Here you will find it in absolute perfection. Edfu is the consecration of form. In proportion it is supreme above all other Egyptian temples. Its beauty of form is like the chiselled loveliness of a perfect sonnet. While the world lasts, no architect can arise to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the calm of faultlessness, more serene with a just serenity. Or so it seems to me. I think of the most lovely buildings I know in Europe—of the Alhambra at ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... told that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry." I protest that I find the note of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture," in his two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce not less marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in The Task and elsewhere in Cowper's works a note of enthusiasm for human brotherhood, for man's responsibility for man, for universal kinship, that had scarcely any place in literature ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... words. There were mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... this profession for seventeen years, but although he still retains connection with it in a consulting capacity, he has given up its active practice to be the publisher and editor of a small magazine called 'The Sonnet', which he founded. Mr. Fisher has written some of the finest sonnets that have appeared in America in recent years and has brought out the first collection of them under the title, "Sonnets: A ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... genius combined with force of character released men from the shackles of ordinary morality."[2254] Cellini was a specimen man of his age. He kept religion and morality far separated from each other.[2255] Varchi wrote a sonnet on him which is false in fact and in form, and displays the technical and conventional insincerity of the age.[2256] The augmentative form of the name Lorenzaccio expresses the notion that he was great, awful, and wicked.[2257] His biographer says that ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... his grey mare, Meg, A better never lifted leg, Tam skelpit on through dub and mire, {149a} Despising wind, and rain, and fire; Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet; Whiles glowering round wi' prudent cares, Lest bogles catch him unawares: Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry. By this time he was 'cross the foord, Whare in the snow the ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... quite a dandy of a book. Some seventy pages of drawing-paper— fifty-five of which are impressed each with a single sonnet in all the luxury of type, while the rest are decked out with vignettes of nymphs in clouds and bowers, and Cupids in rose-bushes and cockle-shells. And all these coxcombries are the appendages of, as it seems to us, as little intellect as the rings ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... by translating a sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoja, in which Michelangelo humorously describes the discomforts he endured while engaged upon the Sistine. Condivi tells us that from painting so long in a strained attitude, gazing up at the vault, he lost for some time the power of reading except ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... verse which, originally Italian or French, have now so abundantly and so admirably been practised in England that we can no longer think of them as exotic, having found so many exponents in the Victorian period that they are pre-eminently characteristic of it. "Scorn not the Sonnet," said Wordsworth to his contemporaries; but the lesson has not been needed in the second half of the century. The sonnet is the most solid and unsingable of the sections of lyrical poetry; it is difficult ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... Whereas, blindfolded, take a London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow Cockney's hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose—and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt—one week's earth—washed off the feet of a pretty young girl on a Saturday night, at a single ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... companies to being that prominent gentleman's confidential private secretary was, of course, a very big one. He hugged it secretly at first alone. On the journey back from the City to the suburb where he lived, Minks made a sonnet on it. For his emotions invariably sought the safety valve of verse. It was a wiser safety valve for high spirits than horse-racing or betting on the football results, because he always stood to win, and never to lose. Occasionally he sold these bits of joy for ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... reading his extempore verses is something like Trissotin in Les Femmes savantes (see vol. III.) reading his sonnet for the Princess Uranie. But Mascarille comments on the beauties of his verses with the insolent vanity of a man who does not pretend to have even one atom of modesty; Trissotin, a professional wit, listens in silence, but with secret pride, to the ridiculous exclamations ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... self-existent, true, original love, the making love. But I have felt all you say. I used to lie in bed and imagine the earth alive and carrying me on her back, till I fell asleep longing to see the face of my nurse. Once, the fancy turned into a dream. I will try to recall a sonnet I made the same night, before the dream came: it will help you to understand it. I was then about nineteen, I believe. I did not care for it enough to repeat it to you, and I fear we shall find ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... are by no means contemptible. A sonnet, "To a Bird, that haunted the Water of Lacken, in the Winter," which Charles Lamb transcribed in one of Coleridge's note-books, should be set over against the absurd lines, "On the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... should come round and remonstrate with Mr. Chesterton. On my arrival I found him sitting on the stairs, where he had been for two hours, greatly incommoding passers up and down and deaf to all requests to move on. It appeared that he had written a sonnet to his wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give her. He was not however satisfied with the last line, but was determined to perfect it before entering her room ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Would it be too much to ask you to spare me one of your old pens—one with which you had dashed off some sweet sonnet! ...
— Three Hats - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Alfred Debrun
... in all probability they were written, or at any rate inspired by him. Gautier also wrote for Balzac, who had absolutely no faculty for verse, the supposed translation of two Spanish sonnets in the "Memoires de Deux Jeunes Mariees," and the sonnet called "La Tulipe" in "Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris." On his side, Balzac defended Gautier on all occasions, and in 1839 dedicated "Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan," then called "Un Princesse Parisienne," "A Theophile Gautier, son ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Down the Curtain The Telegraph Post Breaking on the Shore Hurrah! for the Rifle Corps Be Careful when you Find a Friend Brotherly Love England and France Against the Stream Wrecked in Sight of Home Sonnet Sebastopol is Won Hold Your Tongue My Mother's Portrait Never More Lines on the Death of the Rev. Canon Jenkins, Vicar of Aberdare Filial Ingratitude The Vine and the Sunflower POETIC PROVERBS: I.—Danger in Surety II.—A ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... let one of the Morgans into my house. Miss Letitia wrote a letter of four pages, and Miss Sophia enclosed a sonnet. Nothing would do. I resolved to keep Martha all to myself; and, for fear of other adventures in the bower, I gave her positive orders not to leave the house. I set people to watch her. I threatened to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... half-shut, curved eyelids. In this picture, where the Madonna blesses the kneeling Leonello d' Este, we see how Pisanello acted on Jacopo and, through him, on Venetian art. The connection between the two masters has been established in a very interesting way by Professor Antonio Venturi's discovery of a sonnet, written in 1441, which recounts how they painted rival portraits of Leonello, and how Bellini made so lively a likeness that he was adjudged the first place. The landscape in the Louvre picture is advanced in treatment, and with its gilded ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... it, Songbird," answered Tom. "I've heard you make up poetry worth ten times that. Don't you remember that little sonnet you once composed, entitled 'Who Put Ink in Willie's Shoes?' ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... chapels,' I say, 'are in the wild wood; she is the abbess of the forest nymphs,' 'chaste and fair, the maiden of the precise life.' How odd! The classical scholar and I both say the same things; and I add a sonnet to Artemis in this aspect, rendered by me from the Hippolytus of Euripides. Could a classical scholar do more? Our author then says that the Greek sportsman 'surprised the beasts in their lairs' by night. Not very sportsmanlike! I don't find it in Homer or in Xenophon. Oh for exact references! ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... in a sonnet with admirable skill, so admirable that we say to ourselves—"Give me the picture or the sonnet, not both. They blot out one another." But to describe a picture is not to write about art. The one place where he does go down to its means ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... lady of your dreams were white, I fancied you were drawing a portrait of Isabelle Ray. All the girls, your old friends, to whom I have shown At Sea, send you their compliments, to which I join my own. Each of them will beg you to write her a sonnet; but first of all, in virtue of our ancient friendship, I ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... seems to me; but among the verses of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet and the friend of Charles Lamb, I lately chanced upon a sonnet "written on hearing it remarked that the scenery [of Kingly Bottom] was too gloomy to be termed beautiful; and that it was also associated with dolorous recollections of Druidical sacrifices." In this poem Barton takes a surprisingly novel line. "Nay, nay, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... but had "to study to live." He became a practising lawyer, but he did not like the profession. He feared "the bar would be his bier;" it absorbed time which he thought should be dedicated to better ends. We think we find the expression of his heart in the lines of the so-called Shakespeare Sonnet: ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... breath of the wind on High Fell!' cried Robert,—it was so new to her, the dear voice with this accent in it of yearning depression! 'I want more of the spirit of the mountains, their serenity, their strength. Say me that Duddon sonnet you used to say to me there, as you said it to me that last Sunday before our wedding, when we walked up the Shanmoor road to say good-bye to that blessed spot. Oh! how I sit and think of it sometimes, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... graver sort are excited only to sing, raise their voice, and tune their words into a sonnet. But enthusiasm quite changes the body and the voice, and makes it far different from its usual constitution. Hence the very Bacchae use measure, and the inspired give their oracles in measure. And we shall see very few madmen but are frantic in rhyme ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... genius, which we deny, what are letters as indications of a man’s character? Of all modes of expression is not the epistolary mode that in which man’s instinct for using language “to disguise his thought” is most likely to exercise itself? There is likely to be far more deep sincerity in a sonnet than in a letter. It is no exaggeration to say that the common courtesies of life demand a certain amount of what is called “blarney” in a letter—especially in an eminent man’s letter—which would ruin a sonnet. And this must be steadily borne in mind at ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... wrestled with poetry morning, noon, and night, and he made himself a horrible nuisance to his old cronies. Wilson complained bitterly about their study being "simply fizzing with poetry." Grim sprang a poem or a sonnet, or a tribute or some other forsaken variety of poetry, on pretty well everything about the place. He "did" the dawn and worked round to the sunset. He had a little shy at the church and the tombstones, and wrote about the ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... here to express my heartiest thanks to Signore Pasquale Villari for valuable assistance kindly rendered in the interpretation of some difficult passages of Campanella, and to Signore V. de Tivoli for calling my attention to the sonnet of Michael Angelo deciphered by him on the back of a drawing in ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... much vulgar glorification, is, after all, a secondary quality. It is posterior to imagination,—it is one of the means by which imagination seeks to realize its ends. Some animals reason, or seem to do so: but the most cultivated ape or donkey has not yet composed a sonnet, or a symphony, or "an arrangement in green and yellow." Man still retains a few prerogatives, although, like Aesop's stag, which despised the legs that bore it away from the hounds, and extolled the antlers that entangled it ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... children's story, in Mark Twain's boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's Esmond, in Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his Hamlet, in a sonnet of Dante's Vita Nuova or in his Inferno. AEsop's communication of his point of view is final. So is Defoe's communication of mental pictures. So is Mark Twain's of that Mississippi pilotage. So is Kipling's in his Drums of the Fore and Aft, or his Mandalay. These men ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... this epigram, as Dyce showed, Davies is glancing at a sonnet of Drayton's "To the Celestiall Numbers" in Idea. Jonson told Drummond that "S. J. Davies played in ane Epigrame on Draton's, who in a sonnet concluded his mistress might been the Ninth [sic] Worthy; and said he used a phrase like Dametas ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Or the throbbing mischief will my heart betray." This being a fair and honest specimen of Easley's early attempts at versification, it was said of him by those best qualified to judge, that had he but stuck to the pulpit and sonnet writing, he would in time have become an adept, for he could compose pathetically enough, and so regulate his points as to make his theology appear quite profound. But he had a weakness which ran to the getting of gold, and this betrayed him into the commerce of literature, where ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... up in ever statelier—and grander ranks to greet the travelers as they descended—the silent, vast forest, without note of bird or chip of squirrel, only the wind tossing the great branches high overhead in response to the sonnet. Is there any region or circumstance of life that the poet did not forecast and provide for? But what would have been his feelings if he could have known that almost three centuries after these lines were penned, they would be used to express the emotion of an unsentimental traveler ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the case of the symmetry of a temple, an arch, or an altar. It may be in the simultaneous stirring of the senses, the imagination, and the intellect, by the presentation of an idea suffused with music and emotion, as in the case of an ode by Wordsworth or a sonnet by Milton. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... sonnet to write to the eyebrow of a lady—no, Caroline: you do not know her—and I must have perfect solitude, by the side of still water, in the moonlight. So I am going down to the long pool; and I must on no account be interrupted. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... Hilda broke that spell. Carried away by the excitement of the moment she started to her feet, and stood erect in the carriage, and then burst forth into that noble paraphrase which Byron has made of the glorious sonnet of Filicaja: ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... morals, lent his great name to a great delusion, when he attempted in a passage too well known, to garland the prostitute as the protectress of pure women. Edwin Arnold, the paganizing English poet, put Lecky's folly into verse, writing a sonnet in praise of the harlot as the purest of all women—a sort of devil's compliment to ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... of pirates, says of Lafitte: "He never committed an act of piracy in his life; he was [before he went to Barataria] a blacksmith, and knew no more about sailing a ship or even the smallest kind of a boat than he knew about the proper construction of a sonnet.... It is said of him that he was never at sea but twice in his life: once when he came from France, and once when he left this country, and on neither occasion did he sail under the Jolly Roger." According to Stockton, Lafitte, when ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the tune of 'Madame ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... took orders and married, but in the following year he died. Most of the poems in the little volume which his friends put through the press in the year 1800 are written in standard English. They display a mind of considerable refinement, but little originality. In the form of ode, elegy, eclogue, or sonnet, we have verses which show tender feeling and a genuine appreciation of nature. But the human interest is slight, and the author is unable to escape from the conventional poetic diction of the eighteenth century. Phrases like "vocal groves," "Pomona's rich bounties," or "the ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... with Smith the sculptor and others at the adjoining table, began slowly, and with an insolent drawl, reciting a sonnet. She was black as the night. Even her hands looked swarthy. There were yellow lights in her eyes. Her voice was guttural, and she pronounced English with a strong German accent, although she had no German blood in her veins and had never been in Germany. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... tuneful spirit seemed to assert itself, and passing from smooth prose to smoother poetry, sonnet, song, or psalm, flowed down the page in cadences stately, sweet, or solemn, filling the reader with delight at the discovery of a gift so genuine, yet so shyly folded up within itself, unconscious ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... you." To which Mr. Salterne answered with some truth, "That she was none of his choosing, nor of Mr. Cary's neither." And so the dor being given, the belligerents parted laughing, but the war remained in statu quo; and not a week passed but, by mysterious hands, some nosegay, or languishing sonnet, was conveyed into The Rose's chamber, all which she stowed away, with the simplicity of a country girl, finding it mighty pleasant; and took all compliments quietly enough, probably because, on the authority of her mirror, she considered them ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... thy flowing numbers, when breathing around, Awaken such echoes as these never found; A chord in my bosom, thy sonnet has stirred, Which never was touched by the notes of ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... gardens,—which is yours?" he questioned. "All day I have been wondering. That is the single thing that really stirs me here, that really gives me a feeling—its association with you. All day I have been hearing a sonnet of Ronsard's—do you remember it?—Voicy le bois. But I wish I knew which villa is your villa, which garden is your garden. Why did n't I find out before I was driven from Paradise? I could easily find out here by inquiring, I suppose. But your name is too sacred. I can't profane it by ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... had a cat we know because he wrote a sonnet to her. Alfred de Musset's cats are apostrophized in his verses. Dr. Johnson's Hodge held a soft place for many years in the gruff old scholar's breast. And has not every one heard how the famous Dr. ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... often had difficulties to contend with, which arose from the form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he was ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... they have no particular connection with the story. They are both very short, the first contains an adventure on the road, and the last Mr. Papillon's banishment under the Alien Act from a ministerial misconception of a metaphysical sonnet. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... the Eastern delight in hyperbole, the Eastern fertility of invention: Portuguese literature is completely classic in spirit, avoiding all exaggeration, all offences against taste, and confining itself to classic forms, such as the pastoral, the epic and the sonnet. Many Moorish customs survive in Portugal to this day, but they have not become so closely assimilated there as in Spain to the character of the people. The cruelty which has always marked the Spanish race is no part of the Portuguese national character, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the plague with commendable assiduity, and in the very year when he declares it absolutely essential to his peace of mind to die for good and all, taking refuge in the fortress of Capranica, from a wholesome dread of having his throat cut by robbers. There is such a difference between dying in a sonnet with a cambric handkerchief at one's eyes, and the prosaic reality of demise certified in the parish register! Practically it is inconvenient to be dead. Among other things, it puts an end to the manufacture ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Sevigne, Madame de Scudery, Le Fevre, talked, wrote, and spared no expense for their dear friend. Brebeuf, the poet, who had neither influence nor money, took to his bed and died of grief. Hesnault, author of the "Avorton," a sonnet much admired in those days, and translated with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... the house, and wandered about some cold, gloomy rooms, in one of which Vittorio had happened to be born. We saw his portrait, and a sonnet in his own handwriting, which Mr. Barrymore translated for Maida, and would for me, perhaps, only I was too proud to interrupt. Altogether I should have felt quite out of it if it hadn't been for Sir Ralph. After our talk about the worm and other things, he couldn't help guessing what my feelings ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... natures tried in the crucible of poverty. Once admitted as an equal among such elect souls, Lucien represented beauty and poetry. They admired the sonnets which he read to them; they would ask him for a sonnet as he would ask Michel Chrestien for a song. And, in the desert of Paris, Lucien found an oasis ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... French? As one grows older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but think of the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's—or was it Cortez's?—discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "Nicholas Nickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found "Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two Cities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough for my taste, yet better than anything else that anybody ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... farthest. [Exit HEURESIS.] O heavens! how have I been troubled these latter times with women, fools, babes, tailors, poets, swaggerers, gulls, ballad-makers! They have almost disrobed me of all the toys and trifles I can devise. Were it not that I pity the multitude of printers, these sonnet-mongers should starve for conceits for all Phantastes. But these puling lovers—I cannot but laugh at them, and their encomiums of their mistresses. They make, forsooth, her hair of gold, her eyes of diamond, her cheeks of roses, her lips of rubies, her teeth of pearl, and her whole ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... who relates the circumstance, was unable to satisfy her with sixty blows of a large sledge-hammer. He afterwards used the same weapon with the same degree of strength, for the sake of experiment, and succeeded in battering a hole in a stone wall at the twenty-fifth stroke. Another woman, named Sonnet, laid herself down on a red-hot brazier without flinching, and acquired for herself the nickname of the Salamander; while others, desirous of a more illustrious martyrdom, attempted to crucify themselves. M. Deleuze, in his critical history of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... was sure that Peter's love for his wife, though perhaps that of a primitive man, was of the true Portuguese stamp, and with this view composed the following pleasing Sonnet: ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... lady, is it a fitting vehicle for so much weight of expression? I admire, as do you, the sonnet, but I can never be brought to believe that Milton could have compressed ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Walter Scott pictures him in "Kenilworth," the young seeker after royal favor, graceful, slender, restless, somewhat supercilious, with a sonnet ever ready on his lips to delight his friends or an epigram to ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... numbers as high as two hundred thousand, and contemporary poetry as well as history has celebrated this pious assemblage of Christians of every nation, language, and age around the tomb of their fathers in the faith. "The old man with white hair goeth far away," says Petrarch (Sonnet xiv.), "from the sweet haunts where his life hath been passed, and from his little family astonished to find their dear father missing. As for him, in the last days of his age, broken down by weight of years and a-weary ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... inherited his literary talent largely from his father's family, but there is interesting proof that even in his grandfather's day it was inherent also in his Balfour ancestors. The minister of Colinton wrote verses in his youth, and a sonnet preserved by his surviving son and daughter is interesting as a proof of his earnest mind and his literary skill. It was written on the fly-leaf of a folio copy of Pearson on the Creed, presented to him by his friend, the Reverend ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... Whiles croonin' my sonnet amang the whin bushes, Whiles whistling wi' glee as I pou'd the green rashes; The whim o' the moment kept me aye frae sorrow, What I wanted at night was in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back, after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it were a problem in mathematics; he ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... earliest and best Anglo-Saxon scholars in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so far as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though he showed these neither in letter writing nor in the direction which Tennyson incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances (invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called "Fanny"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and with brilliant success to the stage which might almost be said to be hers by inheritance,[43] ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... certainly gave them no encouragement. The midshipmen of the frigate thought their captain spoony, and the captain's clerk of the Tudor was guilty of a most reprehensible breach of confidence, if he spoke the truth, in whispering that he had one day discovered on the commander's desk a sonnet addressed to Stella's eyebrow. The fact, however, was doubted, as Captain Babbicome had never been suspected of possessing the slightest poetical talent, nor had a book of poetry ever been seen in ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... The following of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, Il Fiore. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... you might choose the cleanly-bred, healthy, upright, jaunty athlete, and sigh in vain for a companion who could either sob or rejoice with you over the glory of a sonnet, a picture, or a statue; or else you might choose the slightly effete and partly neurotic poet or artist, and languish unconsoled, away from the joys of the fine, clean, stubbornly healthy body. The kind of fire that led to elopements, to wild and clandestine love-making, could now, with too ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... his sweeping, vigorous strokes! Among the studies I remarked that day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just lost her only child,—a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief. A sonnet, which I could not help writing on this sketch, gave rise to our long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged. Everybody feels that his life, as told by Mr. Taylor, with its terrible catastrophe, is a stern lesson to young artists, an awful warning that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... restlessly pacing to and fro in the confined space of the chamber allotted to him at Whitehall, and this sonnet, one of the most beautiful which he ever wrote, will express better than any other words what effect his sister's ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... the first edition of his works to have been published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, and our principal artist painted a large original portrait in oils ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... we talked, but about the something kindling in them, which never got expressed. His theory of writing was this:—"No good writer can ever be translated." He used to quote triumphantly from Shakespeare's 130th. Sonnet. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... told him he ought to do his rubaiyatting at home, and he made a scene, to avoid which I hastened with my guest over to the billiard-room; and there, stretched at full length on the pool-table, was Robert Burns trying to write a sonnet on the cloth with chalk in less time than Villon could turn out another, with two lines start, on the billiard-table with the same writing materials. Now I ask you, gentlemen, if these things are to be tolerated? ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... impress the auditors with wonder and delight, and they remained for some time motionless, in expectation of hearing more; but, finding the silence continue, they resolved to see who it was who had sung so agreeably, and were again detained by the same voice regaling their ears with this sonnet:— ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of the famous "Per me si va"[495]; another passage is imitated from the "Teseide" of Boccaccio; "Anelida and Arcite" contains several stanzas taken from the same original; "Troilus and Criseyde" is an adaptation of Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; Chaucer introduces into it a sonnet of Petrarch[496]; the idea of the "Legend of Good Women" is borrowed from the "De claris Mulieribus" of Boccaccio. Dante's journeys to the spirit-world served as models for the "Hous of Fame," where the English poet is borne off by an eagle of golden hue. In it Dante is mentioned ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... way Scatters rare gifts and asks no pay— Yet who to Death will write a sonnet? If any dare, Let him take care No foolish ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay |
