"Epical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... written in Danish is dated 1386; and the Act of Union at Kalmar, written in 1397, is the most important piece of the vernacular of the 14th century. Between 1300 and 1500, however, it is supposed that the Kjaempeviser, or Danish ballads, a large collection of about 500 epical and lyrical poems, were originally composed, and these form the most precious legacy of the Denmark of the middle ages, whether judged historically or poetically. We know nothing of the authors of these poems, which treat of the heroic adventures of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... his stories were cast, requiring each number of three chapters to be "assorted," like sugar-plums, with grave and gay, so as to tell just enough but not too much, made a highly-wrought scheme almost impossible. It is plain that Charles Dickens had nothing of that epical gift which gave us Tom Jones and Ivanhoe. Perhaps the persistent use of the serial form shows that he felt no interest in that supreme art of an immense drama duly unfolded to a prepared end. In Pickwick there neither was, nor could ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... was undertaken from a desire to lay before the English-speaking people the full treasury of epical beauty, folklore, and mythology comprised in The Kalevala, the national epic of the Finns. A brief description of this peculiar people, and of their ethical, linguistic, social, and religious life, seems to be called ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it may be the barest history in a splendid epical setting: the point to remember is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only of men can convert dead things into life. And now we will ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett |
