"Rhapsody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not talk of Shakespeare, what is to be said by us punier men who are compelled to peep about for matter of discourse? "Everything is inadequate." That perhaps is the reason why talk about Shakespeare, even from the sanest of men, is apt to convert itself into perfervid rhapsody. Meanwhile, from those whose sanity is less assured, it runs to the delirium of some harebrained cipher of Shakespeare-Geheimnis, and an amused world is asked to listen while some female Dogberry asserts that the truth, too long concealed, has been proved, and it will soon go near ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert Underwood Johnson—whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can never be forgotten—and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But les jeunes prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that "free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... of J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy Night Morning at the Window The Boston Evening Transcript Aunt Helen Cousin Nancy Mr. Apollinax Hysteria Conversation Galante ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... robusta). These trees grow so close together that the forest is difficult to penetrate, especially after the rains, when the undergrowth is dense and rank. Very beautiful is the Bhabar, and very stimulating to the imagination. One writer speaks of it as "a jungle rhapsody, an extravagant, impossible botanical tour de force, intensely modern in its Titanic, incoherent magnificence." It is the home of the elephant, the tiger, the panther, the wild boar, several species of deer, and of many strange ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at later date. However, Tess ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... demonstrated whether the young men were egged by novelty or genuine coveting. When he hinted that she may have appealed to that secret lust for the macabre that exists somewhere in all men, Clavering had scowled at him so ferociously that he had plunged into rhapsody and ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... pines across the batch a language older than the oldest script of man. Cuckoos shouted in the wind-riven larches, green beyond imagining, at the back of the chapel. A blackbird meditated aloud in high rhapsody, very leisured, but very tireless, on matters deeper than the Coppice Pool far below, deep as the mystery of the chipped, freckled eggs in his nest in the thorn. In and out of the yellow broom-coverts woodlarks played, made their small flights, and sang their small ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... day of the ponderous Mycenaean shield; the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with breastplate and light round buckler." [Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. x.] We cannot guess how he found these things out, for corslets are as common in one "rhapsody" as in another when circumstances call for the mention of corslets, and are entirely unnamed in the Odyssey (save that the Achaeans are "bronze-chitoned"), while the Odyssey is alleged to be much later than the Iliad. As for "the iron age," no "rhapsodist" ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... rhapsody of most lovers—with that genuine emotion which bespoke his sincerity, and touched the heart of De Vlierbeck so deeply that he grasped his hand and implored him to ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... written a wild, rambling, unfinished rhapsody, called "The Devil's Drive" the notion of which I took from Person's "Devil's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... weather-beaten, and wretchedly attired; her eyes were inflamed with weeping, and her looks displayed that wildness and peculiarity which denote distraction. Advancing to Sir Launcelot, she fell upon her knees, and, clasping her hands together, uttered the following rhapsody in the most vehement ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... discovering to him who I was, and that I had written a Life and Times of Captain Seth Brewster, which my publisher, and several independent critics he kept in his employ, had praised into an unprecedented sale, though it was indeed the veriest rubbish, his pent up enthusiasm gushed forth in a rhapsody of joy. I told him, too, that two sonnets which I had written, over the signature of Mary, had been published in the "New Bedford Mercury," the editor of which very excellent paper said they were charming, though he never paid me a penny for them. It may interest ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... never dreamed of doing before. In a little chapel, beside the main edifice, is the stone fount where the infant Jeanne was baptized. Fastened to the wall there hangs a remnant of the iron balustrade, that Jeanne's hands must have rested on during the hours that she passed in rhapsody, seeing what never was seen on land or sea. A few steps from the church stands the cot where the maid was born, almost as humbly as the Christ Child. Entering through the small doorway, you see the room in which Jeanne first opened ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... me, sir," said Peveril; "and if so, I think I may fairly ask you your purpose in thus bearing me company, and the meaning of all this rhapsody. If it be mere banter, I can endure it within proper limit; although it is uncivil on the part of a stranger. If you have any farther purpose, speak it out; I am ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... certain confusion in the arrangement of the matter, and the want of sufficient expansion in the development of some of its leading suggestions. But it must be judged as the earnest utterances of a poet, rather than a grave didactic treatise. With the purpose which the author had in view, a spice of rhapsody is no defect. He presents a beautiful example of the smiling wisdom of which he is such an eloquent advocate. He has an intuitive sense of the genial and joyous aspects of life, and has no sympathies to waste on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the cutting criticism that his work is "hardly national." [Footnote: Wendell, Literary History of America (1911), pp 495-498.] And so with all other histories, one dismisses him as the author of a vague rhapsody called "The Marshes of Glynn," another exalts him as a poet who rivals Poe in melody and far surpasses him in thought or feeling. Evidently there is no settled criticism of Lanier, as of Bryant or Longfellow; he is not yet secure in his position among the elder poets, and what we record here ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... from this rhapsody of the worthy friar. The count de Cabra, being instructed in the complicated arrangements of the king, marched forth at midnight to execute them punctually. He led his troops by the little river that winds ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... could never close his eyes for the horrible unearthly sounds that assailed him. Singing, swearing, howling like wild beasts! His right-hand neighbour reasoned high of faith and works, ending each pious argument with a sudden rhapsody of oaths and never slept a wink. His left-hand neighbour alternately sang, and shouted, "Cain was a murderer, Cain was a murderer;" and howled like a wolf, making night hideous. His opposite neighbour had an audience, and every now and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... owing to habits of gallantry. Of one alleged point of resemblance there is no evidence. The loveliness assigned to Shakespeare's youth was not, as far as we can learn, definitely set to Pembroke's account. Francis Davison, when dedicating his 'Poetical Rhapsody' to the earl in 1602 in a very eulogistic sonnet, makes a cautiously qualified reference to the attractiveness of his person ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... sculptor, being at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along, Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which had come ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... fired to sing The snail's discreet degrees, A rhapsody of sauntering, A gloria of ease; Proclaiming their's the baser part Who consciously forswear The delicate and gentle art ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... persuasion!" she rippled. "See how thou art shaken into thyself, man. What! No phrase of lackadaisical rapture! Why, I looked to see thee invert thine incorporate satin in an airy rhapsody—upheld and kept unruffled by some fantastical twist of thine imagination. Oh, Fancy—Fancy! Couldst not e'en sustain thy knight cap-a-pie!" and she laughed the harder as she saw her lover's ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... use of any other organs; but you are to know, that this learned problematist was brother to him, who, preaching at St. Mary's, Oxford, took his text out of the history of Balaam, Numb. xxii., "Am I not thine ass?" Dear Sir, pardon this rhapsody of, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... was something strangely suggestive about the look of it,—but exactly of what, Miss Darley either could not or did not try to think. The subject of the paper was The Mountain,—the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody. It showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage scenery of the region. One would have said that the writer must have threaded its wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... been misinformed; I had not the least hand in the answer to my Lord Bath's Rhapsody: it is true the booksellers sold it as mine, and it was believed so till people had 'read it, because my name and that of Pulteney had been apt to answer one another, and because that war was dirtily revived by the latter in his libel; but the deceit soon vanished; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... know the usual custom of publishers, had in the meantime taken away his MS. and offered it to other publishers in London, evidently to try whether he could not get a better bid for his book. Even Jeffrey thought it "was too much of the nature of a rhapsody, to command success or respectful attention." The publishers thought the same. Carlyle took the MS. to Fraser of Regent Street, who offered to publish it if Carlyle would give him a sum not exceeding L150 sterling. He had already ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... impressed with my companion's remarkable singleness of purpose. Everything was a pretext for some wildly idealistic rhapsody or reverie. Nothing could be seen or said that did not lead him sooner or later to a glowing discourse on the true, the beautiful, and the good. If my friend was not a genius, he was certainly a monomaniac; and I found as great a fascination in watching the odd lights and shades ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... years,—to have fought all the devils and clasped all the angels of its delirium,—and then, just at the point when the white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of spring and temper in it. All this I thought my ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... writings of Miss Cicely Hamilton, the distinguished actress, with the publications of the Pankhurst family. The former expresses a claim that, except for prejudice, a woman is as capable a citizen as a man and differing only in her sex; the latter consist of a long rhapsody upon the mystical superiorities of women and the marvellous benefits mankind will derive from handing things over to these sacred powers. The former would get rid of sex from most human affairs; the latter would make what ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... creature, with but small resemblance to the lady of moods, mystery, and passion who is so overworked in our modern literature. No one dreamt of going into hysterics over the veining of a leaf, or penning a rhapsody on the outline of a rain-cloud; nor could it yet be said that, 'if everybody must needs blab of the favours that have been done him by roadside, and river-brink, and woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell were ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... from its grief in a moment shall cease, And the soul hush its cries in the cadence of peace, And the life with the laughter of rhapsody blest Shall rejoice through the years in the ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have been the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, after answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the length of ladies' dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his contributor's 'story,' and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as justice, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of his rank, for a flourish to the proposal of honourable and immediate marriage. He cannot wait. This is the fatal condition of his love: apparently a characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them in the signs extended to us. The minds of these august ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... other parts of the pulpits, makes the contrast of this relief more effective; but, even so, this scene of the Ascension is fraught with dramatic emphasis. The Descent of the Holy Ghost is less interesting. There is a monotony in the upraised hands, while the feeling of devotional rhapsody is perhaps unduly enforced. The relief of the Maries at the Tomb, which occupies the western end of this pulpit, is almost Pisanesque in the relative size of the people to the architecture. There is a combination of trees and pilasters seeming to support the long low roof ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... been individual instances of inefficiency, and even failure of character, in some officers of the Government during a period of seventy years, as is the case in all Governments, but such instances were few, if they occurred at all, and such as to afford no just pretext for the rhapsody and insinuations of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... a long while on the piano, at first a bravura from the operas, then some classical pieces, Liszt's "Twelfth Rhapsody," and finally ended with the artless music of Oppel's "A Summer's Night in Berezovka"—a piece she used to play to Ivanov when she ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... entirely depended on her own natural resources. Those to whom this oratory is not new, have no need of our reporting any of it; and those to whom it is a perfect mystery, boast a "state the more gracious," and are the more happy in their ignorance. None of this rhapsody, however, although teeming with blasphemy and abuse, had any effect on Garrick, and he would have remained unmoved had she not terminated in the following manner, which so excited the laughter of the collected mob, and disconcerted "the soul of Richard," that, without another ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... was respected. Similarly, God gave him the work of formulating each of the ten commandments. Slowly the moral treasure grew. The jurist gave law, the poet sang songs, the prophet poured out his rhapsody, the patriot and martyr died for principle, and the roll of the heroes lengthened. At last the pages of Jewish history were filled with names glowing and glorious as the nights ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... in his rhapsody by the approach of a pleasant faced lad of about his own age who was dressed from head to foot in white and wore a little white cap, across the front of which was printed in ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... perennial debate the man of the world commonly triumphs; he plays for the stakes that are on the table, and does not put faith in deferred gains. For something like two hundred years Sir William Temple's triumph was almost complete. Now things have changed, and Glanvill's rhapsody comes nearer to the truth. Wireless telegraphy, radium, the discoveries of bacteriology, and not least the conquest of the air, have taken the edge off the sallies of the wit, and have verified ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... of the adored Ossian. But the overmastering influence in him at this time was the genius of Shakespeare, as it had been interpreted for him by Herder. Goethe's unbounded admiration for Shakespeare had already found expression in the rhapsody composed in Strassburg to which reference has been made, and to the circle of men and women who had gathered round his sister, he communicated his enthusiasm. Their enthusiasm took a form perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the time. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Discontinuity.— N. discontinuity; disjunction &c. 44; anacoluthon[obs3]; interruption, break, fracture, flaw, fault, crack, cut; gap &c. (interval) 198; solution of continuity, caesura; broken thread; parenthesis, episode, rhapsody, patchwork; intermission; alternation &c. (periodicity) 138; dropping fire. V. be discontinuous &c. adj.; alternate, intermit, sputter, stop and start, hesitate. discontinue, pause, interrupt; intervene; break, break in upon, break off; interpose &c. 228; break the thread, snap the thread; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... drew a map of the Indian paradise for me, and described its pleasant prairies and crystal rivers, its countless herds of fat buffalo and horses, its perennial and luxuriant grass, and other charms dear to an Indian's heart, in a rhapsody that was almost poetry. Another, an obscure man of the Cathead Sioux, is believed to have seen the hole through which issue the herds of buffalo which the Great Spirit calls forth from the centre of the earth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... on it dirges Longer let Eolus play; Touch it, and those notes of sadness Change to joyous rhapsody! And tho' the grape, the gift of Autumn, Has been prest to crown the bowl— Still in thy tresses shine its clusters, While down thy snowy neck ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... authorized you to suspect any part of this rhapsody to be true—I have not said you were ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... on to relate the conclusion of Frank's rhapsody, but he took great pains to convince me that if there was ever a high-principled, pure-minded, much-injured individual, that exemplary character was the gentleman now walking by my side; and I was convinced, but at ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... imagine to arise is, How far in any given age we may presume the functions of the poetical composer and the musical deliverer to have been united. We cannot perceive that any possible relation between a rhapsody considered as a section of a poem and the whole of that poem, or any possible relation which this same rhapsody considered as a thing to be sung or accompanied instrumentally could bear to the naked-speaking rehearsal of the same poem or to the original text of that poem, ever can affect the main ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... time for another question Kilkee passed his arm within mine, and led me along the corridor, pouring out, the entire time a whole rhapsody about the practical joke of my late illness, which he was pleased to say would ring from one end of Europe ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... the stranger pausing at their door cut short her rhapsody and sent her, the table, and Bo'sn, promptly out of doors, because when any of the sailor's old cronies called to see him, there wasn't room in "the littlest house" for all. So, from the narrow sidewalk beyond the door, the child listened to the talk within, not much of it being ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... the above wild rhapsody, (which is given at length in order to show the temptations with which the old libertine sought to allure his intended victim,) he had kneeled at her feet, and, despite her resistance, encircled her ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... never yet seen—a thoroughly scientific University, in which every branch of human knowledge should be clearly taught on a positive basis—a school where literature and art would be ennobled and refined by elevation from mysticism, 'rhapsody,' and obscurity, to their true position as historical developments and indices of human progress. We are pleased to see that in the plan proposed, provision would be made for two classes of persons—those who enter the school with the view ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Of course here Mr. Pen went off into a rhapsody through which, as we have perfect command over our own feelings, we have no reason to follow the lad. Of course, love, truth, and eternity were produced: and words were tried but found impossible to plumb the tremendous depth of his affection. This ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a Manhattanese as a sailor, I shall not run into rhapsody on the subject of the beauties of the inner or outer bay of this prosperous place. No man but one besotted with provincial conceit could ever think of comparing the harbour of New York with the Bay of Naples; nor do I know two places, that have ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... appeared to relieve him, and he sank back into his chair somewhat calmer. I could understand nothing of all that rhapsody, knowing, as I did, that his son Archibald had died from natural causes. "It is a severe blow," I said, in as soothing a tone as I could assume—"a very great disappointment; still, you are secured from extreme ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green line of Scott's novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were the first books I ever owned—long, long before I could appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the story. Perhaps ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and on it he would be his own God. Rose did not share these feelings. She went to church each Sunday and read her Bible daily with a simple faith that defied derision. Once, when she was gone, Martin idly hunted out the Song of Solomon. His lips curled with contempt at the passionate rhapsody. He knew a thing or two, he allowed, about these wonderful Roses of Sharon and this Song of Songs. Lies, all lies, every word of it! Yet, in spite of himself, from time to time, he liked to reread it. He fancied this was because ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... anxious, he moped, grew miserable, and contracted a slight malarial fever which for the next six or seven years never entirely relaxed its hold on him. Among his papers has recently been found the long, wild, pessimistic rhapsody to which reference has already been made and in which there is talk of suicide. The plaint is of the degeneracy among men, of the destruction of primitive simplicity in Corsica by the French occupation, of his own isolation, and of his yearning to see his friends once more. Life is no longer ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... called Kepler's third law. It welds the planets together, and shows them to be one system. His rapture on detecting the law was unbounded, and he breaks out into an exulting rhapsody:— ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... 7th of May, a month after Danton's death, Robespierre delivered a long speech before the Convention, a speech that marks his apogee. It was a high-flown rhapsody on civic morality and purism. Voltaire and the Encyclopedists were bitterly attacked; Jean Jacques Rousseau was deified. The State should adopt his religious attitude, his universal church of nature. In that church, nature herself is the chief priest and there ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... magazine, the Dark Blue, of July 1871, may be found a characteristic review by Swinburne of Solomon's strange rhapsody, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, his only literary work, now a great rarity. This is the longest, and with one exception the most interesting, tribute to Solomon ever published. 'Since the first years of his early and brilliant celebrity as a young ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... volume to the Poetical Miscellanies published in England at the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. A few of the lyrics here collected are, it is true, included in "England's Helicon," Davison's "Poetical Rhapsody," and "The Ph[oe]nix' Nest"; and some are to be found in the modern collections of Oliphant, Collier, Rimbault, Mr. W.J. Linton, Canon Hannah, and Professor Arber. But many of the poems in the present volume are, I have every reason to believe, unknown even to those ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... though she has neither blonde complexion, nor blue eyes. Instead she is a morena, or brunette, with eyes and hair of the darkest. But she is also a beauty, of the type immortalised by many bards—Byron among the number, when he wrote his rhapsody on ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... Is this all rhapsody, or is it in part true report? There is evidently no answer to the question so conceived. But if it were to express my own religious feeling it would have some specific proportion of literal and metaphorical significance, according ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... if they could be used with a chance of being understood. But, unfortunately, the ability to comprehend a great work, as a whole, is even rarer in music than in poetry. The little taking bits of melody are all that is thought of or perceived; the great epos or rhapsody, the form and meaning of the entire composition,—which is a work of Art in no other sense than a poem is one, except that it uses, instead of speech, musical forms, of greater variety and symmetry,—are not at all understood. Nor is the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... signal for laying by all reserve, and I prostrated myself before this divinity with all the adoration of a profound devotee, and poured out such a rhapsody of love and admiration, as to leave no doubt in her mind of the tenderness of my heart, the acuteness of my wit, and the excellence of my taste. In short, the emir's widow had every reason to be satisfied with the choice ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... abounds with sentimental common-places, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of the 'Seasons' the book generally opens of itself with the rhapsody on love, or with one of the stories (perhaps 'Damon and Musidora'); these also are prominent in our collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his Work, which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice. Pope, repaying praises which ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in a heptarchy, A rhapsody of nations to supply, Among themselves maintain'd eternal wars, And still the ladies loved ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... her skirt, Sissy was able to chaperon her senior all the more effectively at Crosby Pemberton's party. Irene danced like a thing whose vocation is motion. She was a twig in a rain-storm, a butterfly seeking sweets, a humming-bird whose wing beat the air with a very rhapsody of rhythm. She was on the floor with the first note Professor Trask struck, and she danced down the side of the little hall, when the waltz was over and all the other couples had seated themselves, as though the meter of the music ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... rhapsody, the allowances and deductions above referred to must be heavy; and, according to a custom honoured both by time and good result, it is well to get them off first. That peculiarity of being a novelist only par interim, much more than Aramis was a mousquetaire, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... mother listened with surprise to what her son told her; but when he talked of asking the princess in marriage, she could not help bursting out into a loud laugh. Alla ad Deen would have gone on with his rhapsody, but she interrupted him. "Alas! child," said she, "what are you thinking of? you must be ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... the meadow I sat down again, hoping for one more song, and then came the crown of the whole morning, the choicest reserved for the last. A bird sailed out from behind the daisies, passed over my head, and delivered the most bewitching rhapsody I had yet heard. Not merely once did he honor me, but again and again without pausing, as if he intended to fill me as full of bobolink rapture as he was himself. His voice was peculiarly rich and full, and, what amazed me, his first three notes were an exact reproduction ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... profligates; in another, the brand plucked from the burning. He is designated in Mr Ivimey's History of the Baptists as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow. Mr Ryland, a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into the following rhapsody:—"No man of common sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "A brilliant, airy, and spirituelle manner varied with striking flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem, now deeply impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up into almost an actual flight of rhapsody, rendered the delivery of this poem a rich, nearly a dramatic entertainment." This was no less true in later years when he read some of his poems in New York at Bishop Potter's, then rector of Grace Church, or of the reading of the poem at the doctors' dinner given to him ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... like head and tail of it—we are astounded by a declaration from the Holy Spirit, speaking of himself, that he is "not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." It would be long before we should find in educated rhapsody—of which there are specimens enough—such a thing as a person of the Trinity taking merit for moral courage enough to stand where St. Peter fell. The following declaration comes next—"I will judge between cattle and ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... what may be broadly termed "orientalism," which includes the Hindu, Moorish, Siamese, and Gypsy, the latter embracing most of southeastern European (Roumania, etc.) types. Liszt's "Second Rhapsody," opening section, divested of orientalism or gypsy characteristics, is merely of the savage ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... when Wirt wrote this rhapsody, he was unable, as he tells us, to procure from any quarter a rational account of the line of argument taken by Patrick Henry, or even of any other than a single topic alluded to by him in the course of ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... the romantic character which the novel assumed in the hands of Sir Walter Scott. It expresses, however, adequately enough the view which the popular novelists prior to Scott took of their own productions. Cervantes, though in his own great work attaining that rhapsody of grotesqueness which lies on the edge of poetry, had yet established the idea of the novel as the antithesis of romance. These novelists, accordingly, if they are not always telling the reader (like Fielding), seem yet to be always thinking to themselves, how perfectly natural their stories ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... is really the third play of a trilogy, Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment quite unlike that which characterizes the other two. Henry V is really a dramatized epic, an almost lyric rhapsody cast in the form of dialogue. Falstaff has disappeared from view, and is recalled only by the affecting story of his death. This episode, however, brief as it is, reveals the love which the old knight evoked from his companions, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... broke in once more to ask what she was talking about. When the substance of the Snowden rhapsody was given her, she nodded—as well as her several chins would permit her to ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... moulins;" and defied, like a man, the political popery of Austria. The estimate which Goethe forms of the poets of the time, of Gleim and Uz, of Gessner and Rabener, and more especially of Klopstock, Lessing, and Wieland, should be read in the original, as likewise Herder's "Rhapsody on Shakspeare." The latter contains the key to many of the secrets of that new period of literature, which was inaugurated by Goethe himself and by those who like him could dare to be classical by being true ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... fenced with him admirably. She did not need Arabella's coachings in her dealings with him; he was quite uncultured, and infinitely more appreciated what her old father had been used to call her "horse sense" than he would have done her finest rhapsody upon Nietzsche. Mrs. Cricklander had indeed with him that delightful sense of rest and ceasing from toil that being herself gave. She felt she could launch forth into as free a naturalness as if she had been selling little ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... of the excluded, far more sentient portion at least, to the altogether inferior and less sentient, and upon the ground of that faculty builds the vision of its redemption! If it could be so, then how should the seeming apostle's affected rhapsody of hope be to us other than a mere puff-ball of falsest rhetoric, a special-pleading for nothing, as degrading to art as objectless ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... the twilight of Auerbach's cellar, what burlesques had lately been played at the theatre, and whether such and such a beer-garden was still to the fore; whereas he heard only analyses of overtures, and descriptions of the uses of particular musical instruments, and a wild rhapsody about moonlit seas, the sweetness of French horns, the King of Thule, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... accompanied by Mr. Waldershare and Endymion, went to the Cedars by water. It was a delightful afternoon of June, the river warm and still, and the soft, fitful western breeze occasionally rich with the perfume of the gardens of Putney and Chiswick. Waldershare talked the whole way. It was a rhapsody of fancy, fun, knowledge, anecdote, brilliant badinage—even passionate seriousness. Sometimes he recited poetry, and his voice was musical; and, then, when he had attuned his companions to a sentimental pitch, he would break into ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... it will be enough to dislodge the notion before it gets fixed in us." Then said I, "Which of his words has moved you most? For the fellow seemed to rampage about, in his anger and abusive language, with a long disconnected and rambling rhapsody drawn from all sources, and at the same ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's French Revolution is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is history. Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, as much as it is with Miss Austen. Ruskin ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... loses the sense of outward things. In this condition of trance the sense of time vanishes, there is, he asserts, no such thing, no past or future, only now, which is eternity. In The Story of my Heart, a rhapsody of mystic experience and aspiration he describes in detail several such moments of exaltation or trance. He seems to be peculiarly sensitive to sunshine. As the moon typifies to Keats the eternal essence in all things, so to Jefferies the ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... cries to God which ends with a sort of rhapsody of pleading prayer, entitled "Sagesse," begins—and one does not feel that it is ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... experience depends upon the synthetical unity of phenomena, that is, upon a synthesis according to conceptions of the object of phenomena in general, a synthesis without which experience never could become knowledge, but would be merely a rhapsody of perceptions, never fitting together into any connected text, according to rules of a thoroughly united (possible) consciousness, and therefore never subjected to the transcendental and necessary unity of apperception. Experience ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Jimmy had managed to stammer his shame-faced confession. "We'll make it a double wedding. I can be ready to-morrow, so far as I'm concerned." And then followed another rhapsody upon the fitness of Zoie as the keeper of his future home and hearth, and the mother of his future sons and daughters. In fact, it was far into the night when the two friends separated—separated in more than one sense, as they ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... Ecstasy of Conn, a rhapsody so called) dixit: "A Tailcend shall come who will found cemeteries, make cells new, and pointed music-houses, with conical caps [bencopar], and have princes bearing croziers." "When these signs shall come," said they, "our adoration and our gentility ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... strong on his second rhapsody when he was interrupted by another high-speed entrance. It ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... To this rhapsody of strange but impressive vulgar eloquence I listened, with rapture, for nearly an hour; selecting and noting down the passages that I thought most remarkable, many of which were too extravagant, if repeated, to be believed. In the height of these effusions, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... writing by a few purple passages such as the famous rhapsody on the Mona Lisa, conceiving it as always thus heavy with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and particularly running water, "green fields—or children's ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... thus lightly discussed. I hardly know whether I was more startled at first hearing, in little dainty namby pamby tones, a profession of Atheism over a teacup, or at having my attention called from a Johnny cake, to a rhapsody on election and ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... said I, as calmly as I could, in reply to this strange rhapsody, "will ye be sae kind as tell me what a' this means?" An' first I looked at the dochter, wha was still lyin on the sofa, wi' her face buried wi' fricht in the cushions, and then at the mother, wha was sittin in a chair, starin at me, an' gaspin for breath, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... with a gulp of morning air and found no better words for his rhapsody than: "Gee, but ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... conversationalist was the author of several airy and graceful productions in verse, which were published anonymously, such as Lines written at Ampthill Park, in 1818; Advice to Julia, a letter in Rhyme, in which he sketched high life in London, in 1820. He also published Crockford House: a rhapsody, in 1827. Moore in his Diary has embalmed numerous examples of his satiric wit. Henry Luttrell died ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... he said presently, breaking in on Mr. Martel's rhapsody. "Miss Eleanor's young yet. Don't you believe she will get ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... be various exhibitions: one man, like Homer, will exhibit a rhapsody, another a performance on the lute; one will have a tragedy, and another a comedy. Nor would there be anything astonishing in some one imagining that he could gain the prize by exhibiting a puppet-show. Suppose these competitors to meet, and ...
— Laws • Plato
... went on without noticing this rhapsody, 'if you breathe one word or utter one sound by which suspicion can fall on Mr. Blake, my promise is forfeited; if you stay here after to-morrow, or attempt to see me within this and next Christmas Eve, my promise ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... bee-hunter had experienced a good deal of uneasiness on the score of what might befall his betrothed. Margery was sufficiently beautiful to attract attention, even in a town; and more than one fierce-looking warrior had betrayed his admiration that very day, though it was in a very Indian-like fashion. Rhapsody, and gallant speeches, and sonnets, form no part of Indian courtship; but the language of admiration is so very universal, through the eyes, that it is sufficiently easy of comprehension. It was possible that some ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... not allow himself to be betrayed, and he does not indulge in rhythmical prose or rhapsody, though occasionally his writing has a truly poetical quality resulting from the quiet but deep feeling which rises in connection with a subject on which the mind has long brooded with affection, as in the tribute to Oxford at the beginning of the Essay on Emerson. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... sudden whelming thrust, Or at the end of a corrupting calm, But oftentimes anticipates and, entering flowers and trees Upon a hillside or along the brink Of streams, encounters instances Of its eventual enterprise: Inhabits the enclosing clay, In rhapsody is caught away On a great tide Of beauty, to abide Translated through the night and day Of time and, by the anointing balm Of earth, to ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... hand and I tiptoed to a cradle of gold and ivory—it certainly seemed so to my inexperienced eyes—the nurse parted the curtains, and there I saw—I saw—but my son, you will think I exaggerate—I saw the most exquisite baby in the universe. You laugh at an old bachelor's rhapsody! In reality I don't care much for children. But that child, that supreme morsel of humanity, was too much for me. I stood and stared and stood and stared, and all the while the tiny angel was smiling in my eyes, oh! ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... over me as I sat growing more and more convinced that Louis' talk to me was a boyish rhapsody, and yet I knew then, as I had before known, that my own heart was touched by his presence. If he had been older, I should have felt that heaven had opened; as it was, I longed to be full of hope and to dream of days to ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... point—where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody? And what are we to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tears of misery to those of joy"); she omitted a clause which offered a weak motivation of Elinor's father's will (the possibility of her marrying, while hardly more than a child, one of her guardian's sons); she curtailed the extravagance of a rhapsody on the perfect happiness which Woodville and Elinor would ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... strange, even to her, who was so well accustomed to the unreasoning, exaggerated rhapsody of a lover, to hear him; his rage against himself, his entire hopelessness; and as for her, she knew not how to stop him, or how to help him; she could but listen ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... with. Between him and these assaults on his almost proverbial kindness stood the Princess, and the list of his great musical productions during this period, to say nothing of his literary work, like the rhapsody on Chopin, is the tale of what the world owes her for her devotion. The relations between Liszt and the Princess were frankly acknowledged, and by the world as frankly accepted, as if they were two exceptional beings in whom one could pardon things which in the case of ordinary mortals ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb |
