"Idyllic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brief pages, or a picture of rural life, or a glimpse of that literary hell from which he had just escaped and to which he was soon to return. He changed his tone and his subject with amazing versatility, from the bitterest satire to idyllic sweetness, or to a pleasant kind of clever naivete which is truly his own. We see him musing among the firs and the pine-trees of his native Provence, or riding on the top of the diligence under the scorching sun and listening, in a Sterne-like fashion, to the conversation which took place between ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... golden age from which Saturn and the ancient deities had been expelled by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumaean Sibyl stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes—to a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian religions ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... been in my head to connect Clough with that Cumner country, and, when I began, I was carried irresistibly into this form. You say, truly, that there was much in Clough (the whole prophetic side, in fact) which one cannot deal with in this way.... Still, Clough had the idyllic side, too; to deal with this suited my desire to deal again with that Cumner country. Anyway, only so could I treat the matter this time. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... pines. Exceedingly soft and grey, with rose-tinted weft of steam upon its summit, stood Vesuvius above us in the twilight. Something in the recent impression of the dimly-lighted supper-room, and in the idyllic simplicity of this lantern-litten journey through the barley, suggested, by one of those inexplicable stirrings of association which affect tired senses, a dim, dreamy thought of Palestine and Bible stories. The feeling of the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... around Gulval Church and Vicarage. In this respect the place actually rivals Tresco, and the fields of narcissi are as luxuriant as those of the Scillies. Much of this soil is worked by hand, in the good old-fashioned style, whose results always seem better than those of machinery. It is quite an idyllic corner of land, with a tangible outcome that goes to the markets in the shape of early vegetables and spring flowers. Below stretches the wide Bay, with its gem, the Mount, of which it is so glorious a setting. There is another gem ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... into this thundery atmosphere of coming conflict, of hopes and doubts, of sundering ties and fearful looking forward, that Richard and Katherine Hyde came, from the idyllic peace and beauty of their Norfolk house. But there was something in it that fitted Hyde's real disposition. He was a natural soldier, and he had arrived at the period of life when the mere show and pomp of the profession had lost all satisfying ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... second phrase—give a tragic intensity of feeling. With the fourth variation there enters that spirit of playfulness so characteristic of Beethoven—the movement being, in fact, a miniature Scherzo. The fifth and last variation is an idyllic revery in which the composer reviews and amplifies the many beautiful fancies which his imagination has conceived, and closes with a coda, based on the motive of the main ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... use florid and sentimental language like this. The soft light, the reposeful surroundings, the homelike influence of the Villa Mon Repos—all had conspired to put him into an uncommonly idyllic mood of mind. He felt disposed to linger with the kindly stranger who seemed so much more communicative and affable than on the occasion of those theatricals. He lit a cigarette and watched, for a while, the flow of life through that gateway. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... proportion. With the advent of the ophthalmoscope, for instance, how innumerable and complicated appear the diseases of the eye. Are we justified in concluding, then, that in the "good old times" of our great-grandmothers—that idyllic time when women must have been at least free from the reproach that they, solely and unaided, were destroying the hopes of the race—that myopic, hypermetropic and astigmatic eyes were not in existence? ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic youth to get married as easily as to get dinner—and as hard to get unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned too long at seaside resorts and missed the last train home could wake up a preacher and be ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... I said, "it was the thunder which put me off coming to see you as Bottom and Mrs. Melhuish as Titania in the most idyllic surroundings I can imagine." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... the end of one fjord lies the village of Risano, an idyllic spot, whence a road is in the course of construction to Niksic. All the worthy Bocchese are absolutely Montenegrin in sympathy, and Austria has had much trouble with these ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... Their idyllic Creation had been mangled into a roughhouse Riot, in which Disorderly Conduct alternated with the shameless Gyrations ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... done, for I have been making inquiries on the subject. It is all done out of sheer rectitude—out of a rectitude which is magnified to the point of the younger son believing that he has been RIGHTLY sold, and that it is simply idyllic for the victim to rejoice when he is made over into pledge. What more have I to tell? Well, this—that matters bear just as hardly upon the eldest son. Perhaps he has his Gretchen to whom his heart is bound; but he cannot marry ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is lost; and if I dare say so of any play of Sophocles', I scarce regret it. It is well, perhaps, that we have no second conception of the scene, to interfere with the simplicity, so grand, and yet so tender, of Homer's idyllic episode. ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... other—until some little thing, a cut chin or a missing paper, startled the pure and natural man out of his veneer, dancing and blaspheming, with the most amazing consequences. Only a proven saint should marry a girl-wife, and his motives might be misunderstood. The idyllic wife is a beautiful thing to read about, but in practice idylls should be kept episodes; in practice the idyllic life is a little too like a dinner that is all dessert. A common man, after a time, tires of winsome worship; ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... a tributary of the Murrumbidgee, which takes its rise in the Cordillera, south of Bathurst. By the beginning of June, gold began to pour into Bathurst; but Mr. Hardy, the chief commissioner, was able to report an almost idyllic peace and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... us the story of the gentle Cardinal and his snuffbox, have we had anything as idyllic as Meredith Nicholson's 'The Poet.'"—New York ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... willing to forego your "brothers," as you call the trees, and this vision of hidden peace? Would it pain you to leave them and come with me into this great solitude of people which we call New York? How in that idyllic retreat should I keep my heart and mind on the stern purpose I have set before me? There, indeed, the world and all the concerns of mankind would sink so far from my care, would fade into the mist of such utter illusion, that I know not how I could ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... enemy entirely inactive, and the wood, with its oxlips and other spring flowers, its budding branches unscarred by shell fire, was a picture of charm rare in modern warfare. Forty-eight hours only were spent in this idyllic spot before we returned to Romarin to the accompaniment of the roar of mines, artillery, and concentrated rifle fire and machine gun fire, which heralded the sudden outbreak of the Battle of Hill 60, 4 miles to the north, just before sunset on April 17th. Our relief ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... false standards of morality are attacked with great vigor, yet the plot is so interesting for its own sake that the book gives no suspicion of being a problem novel. The descriptions of natural scenery are idyllic in their charm, and form a fitting ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but after an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the British infantry surrounding them—it was a cheery bivouac among the trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of burning wood—the lieutenant ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... picturesqueness absent from the dreary plains of Galicia and Poland and Flanders. Austrians, Hungarians and Italians fought in a land known throughout the world to tourists for its grandeur of scenery, its towering, snow-clad peaks, and idyllic lakes and valleys. It was warfare where the best soldier was the man most able to surmount the natural difficulties and take advantage of the natural protection of the ground. The official statements of the Italian and Austrian war offices told of feats of mountaineering, and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... who write today but have written novels. Yet the gesture of the grand style of Valera is palsied, except, perhaps, for the conservative Quixote, Ricardo Leon, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as Jose Maria Salaverria, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... laughed heartily at the story of his dressing up in woman's clothes." A dull, garrulous husband, boring people with stories of which they were sick; a childish little wife, trying to make the best of things, and laughing over the stale old jokes; this is what may be called the idyllic moment in the wedded life of Charles Edward and Louise. What would she have felt, that strong, calm lady, growing old far off in the Isle of Skye, had she been able to see what Bonstetten saw; had she heard the Count and Countess of Albany laughing, the one with the laughter of an old sot, the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Sommers and Alves would be the first to leave the Keystone. Although the sultry June weather made them think longingly of the idyllic days at Perota Lake, the journey to Wisconsin was out of the question. Struggle as he might, Sommers was being forced to realize that they must give up their modest position in the Keystone. And one day the proprietor hinted broadly that she had other uses for their room. They had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... vitality, and is the pivot on which every member of the house turns. Blessed with an adoring husband, and healthy, handsome, obedient children, who come to her for everything and tell her anything, her life seems idyllic. ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... to know how to prepare dainty and tempting dishes wholesomely, and then to serve your guests with such beauty of manner, such graciousness of courtesy, that they will remember the meal they have taken with you as idyllic in its ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... whole system of College management was changed. Mr. BURROWES from a tyrant turned into the most amiable of men. The Undergraduates became idyllic. Even Dr. GORGIAS submitted to the benign influence of the Fairy JOGGINS. But it is noticeable that Mr. BURROWES who still resides at St. Michael's, objects to any mention of the Christmas of 1874. This is the only exception to his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until a letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's approval, Jaffery ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... an idyllic spot, quite innocent of the terrors with which the night had endowed it. A pebbled half-moon of beach was set in among rugged bluffs; the verdant forest crowded down to it from behind. Tiny crystal wavelets lapped ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... All-round idyllic peace did not reign at Kwang-tung-hsien, where I rested over Sunday. Contacts in social conditions gave rise ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... that "The King" made a stir in literary and social circles, and quite noticeably fluttered the dovecotes of conventionality and conservatism. Such plain speaking and such deadly earnestness of conviction were indeed far removed from the idyllic simplicity of the peasant tales and from the poetical reconstructions of the legendary past. Eight years later, Bjoernson prefaced a new edition of this work with a series of reflections upon "Intellectual ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... "It sounds idyllic," the girl forced herself to say lightly, but her teeth met with a snap, and her fingers gripped the rough surface of the stones, for she remembered how Trenholme had said of her that she "reveled in the sunlight, in the golden air, in the scents of trees ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... were free and equal, owning their land in common, debating and deciding in folkmoots the issues of peace and war, electing their kings (if any), and obeying them only so far as they inspired respect. These idyllic arrangements, if they ever existed, did not survive the stress of the migration and the struggle with the Celts. War begat the king, and soon the church baptized him and confirmed his power with unction ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... state of Europe is consequently a state of latent war between two groups of nations, of which one is temporarily prostrate and both are naively exhorted to join hands and play a helpful part in an idyllic society of nations. This expectation is the delight of cynics and the despair of those serious reformers who are not interested politicians. Heretofore the most inveterate optimists in politics were the revolutionaries. But they have since been outdone by the Paris world-reformers, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... no longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many watchings." Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American adventure which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled "What is an American"—was ending tragically in civil war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose "Journal," praised by Charles ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the bench that was shaded by the old elderberry tree. Visually, the situation had all the characteristics of an idyllic courtship. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... to be compared with {414} that of the novel, the music to which Massenet has set it is so marvellously adapted to its lyric and idyllic qualities, that one is inclined to forget its deficiencies while listening to the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... and other non-dramatic poetry belongs almost wholly to the first period. It consists mainly of short pieces scattered through the idyllic tales and saga-plays that nearly make up the sum of his activity in its purely creative and poetic phase. Some of these lyrics strike the very highest and purest note of song, and have secured lasting ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... may notice, dwells upon the ART of the poem; and this perhaps, is what at first sight will strike the student most. He chose as a foundation for his work those laments of Bion for Adonis, and of Moschus for Bion, which are the most pathetic products of Greek idyllic poetry; and the transmutation of their material into the substance of highly spiritualized modern thought, reveals the potency of a Prospero's wand. It is a metamorphosis whereby the art of excellent but positive poets has been translated into the sphere of metaphysical imagination. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the action of the Legislature," he said, following his modest custom of disclaiming foreknowledge of the events he shaped; "but in my opinion any measure which ignores the legitimate expectation of patronage on the part of the party in power is too idyllic for ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... be tempted to interpose the remark that the aspect which things thus wore for ourselves was in one respect quite illusory. They may say that the idyllic contentment which we thus attributed to the cottagers was the very reverse of the truth, and that the thatch of their dwellings, however pleasing to the eye, really shrouded a misery to which history shows few parallels. Such ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... How should he ever atone for such an unwarrantable action? Had it been the outcome of any ordinary flirtation, he would have felt no such scruples, but the encounter, though short, had been one of singular idyllic charm until he had by his own rash act spoilt it. A few minutes passed thus in self contemplation appeared like an eternity. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... who was evidently a very fine woman, and that of a gentleman whose left hand appeared to be passed well into her arm while his right, behind him, made jerky motions with the stick that it grasped. Maisie's fancy responded for an instant to her friend's idea that the sight was idyllic; then, stopping short, she brought out with all her clearness: "Why ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... the Prefect slowly, "was a man of deservedly high reputation, in fact one of the pillars of the Royalist party. He had a wife who adored him, a large family whom he adored, and they all lived an idyllic country life. Well, one day the Count's coat, his hat, his pocket-book (which was known to have been full of bank-notes, but which was now empty) were found on the parapet of a bridge near his chateau. It was given out—it was believed that a dastardly crime had been committed. And ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... "La Petite Fadette." It was her contribution to the hatreds and agitations of the time—she gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it—an "Ideal of calmness and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of far niente, followed by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty and perfects, and interprets, the isolated and small events and facts ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... flung its shadow across these idyllic days. Before I was fully aware of it I had drawn very near to the first great junction-point of my life, my graduation from Densmore Academy. We were to "change cars," in the language of Principal Haime. Well enough for the fortunate ones who were to continue the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... most idyllic of all Shakespeare's comedies, the Forest of Arden is not merely the setting; it is the central force of the play, the power which brings laughter out of tears and harmony out of discord. It reminds us of Sherwood forest, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... most of those conditions of her life that people were always telling her were ideal. They spoke of her as the only child in a way that implied congratulations on the undivided inheritance—and that reminded her how she had always wanted a sister. They talked of her idyllic life on a blue-grass stock-farm—when she was wheedling from her father a winter in Washington. They envied her often when they had the very thing she wanted—or, at least, she didn't have it. They enlarged on her popularity, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... earliest, and certainly the best, protest against some modern fashions in shooting is to be found in "The Moors." In the same series, the visit to the hill cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the fashion to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his pictures of rural and humble life. The passages on Oxford, to go to a slightly different but allied subject, in "Old North ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... medieval life, of feudalism at its best and Christianity at its best, stands, as in a microcosm, transfigured, judged, and measured. To most men, the "Paradise Lost," with all its mighty music and its idyllic pictures of human nature, of our first-child parents in their naked purity and their awakening thought, is a serious and ungrateful task—not to be ranked with the simple enjoyments; it is a possession to be acquired only by habit. The ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... book had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him—there begins a romance of the rarest idyllic quality. ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... by this time returned to France, and was never more to ply the avocations of the American farmer. In the interval, much had happened to this victim of both the revolutions. Though the Letters are distinguished by an idyllic temper, over them is thrown the shadow of impending civil war. The Farmer was a man of peace, for all his experience under Montcalm in Canada (and even there his part was rather an engineer's than a combatant's); he long hoped, therefore, that peaceful counsels ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... bomb in the idyllic village. Plans were made of the wedding date and elaborate ceremony. The village Luga had never witnessed yet a marriage ceremony of this magnitude. The American bride was like a fairy princess of some ancient times. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... island or islands whereon they were to found a Socialistic Utopia, where they were to pluck the wild goat by the beard, pay no rent to the native owners of the soil, and, letting their hair grow down their backs, lead an idyllic life and loaf around generally. Such a mad scheme could have been conceived nowhere else but ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... retire into the solitude of religious meditation, and to abandon the art which he had practised with such success. He was not yet forty, his genius was apparently still developing, but his great career was at an end. Towards the close of his life he produced two more plays—Esther, a short idyllic piece of great beauty, and Athalie, a tragedy which, so far from showing that his powers had declined during his long retreat, has been pronounced by some critics to be the finest of his works. He wrote no more for the stage, and he died eight years later, at the age of sixty. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... too! With the additional offence Of being now a sort of dazed idyllic bard That poses in a window, contemplating thence The silly noon-day sky ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... of the idyllic hours of Eric's wooing were spent in the old orchard; the garden end of it was now a wilderness of roses—roses red as the heart of a sunset, roses pink as the early flush of dawn, roses white as the snows on mountain peaks, roses full blown, and roses in ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... expressed in the last election," met with approval on every side. The "Anti-Revolutionary" lion lay down with the "Christian-Historical" lamb; the "Liberal" bear and the "Clerical" cow fed together; and the sucking "Social-Democrat" laid his hand on the "Reactionary" adder's den. It was idyllic. Real progress looked ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... apparently not forgotten, in spite of his anxiety, to heave the lead and to mark the date in his log-book. This prematurely modern measuring and counting cannot be thought by any one to make the narrative more lifelike; it simply destroys the illusion. All that is idyllic and naive is consistently stripped off the legend as far as possible. As the duration of the flood is advanced from forty days (JE) to a whole year, its area also is immeasurably increased. The Priestly Code states with particular emphasis that it was quite universal, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Blougram's Apology', and 'The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church', and not admit that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form—a form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of much of the verse of 'The Ring and the Book', especially that of the monologues ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the women would immediately offer him food, and it was a breach of etiquette to decline to eat it. This custom was strictly observed all over the continent and in the West India Islands, and was often remarked upon by the early discoverers, in whose minds it was apt to implant idyllic notions that were afterward rudely disturbed. The prevalence of hospitality among uncivilized races has long been noted by travellers, and is probably in most cases, as it certainly was in ancient America, closely connected ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... murmured the Major lazily. "Didn't you read that supreme article in Punch a while ago? Well, it was about a doctor who invented a drug that could turn his patients into anything they chose for the holidays. A worried mother of a family lived an idyllic month at a farm as a hen, with six children as chickens, food and lodging provided gratis; a portly dowager enjoyed a rest cure as a Persian cat at a country mansion; some lively young people spent a fortnight as sea-gulls, while the hero of the article was just ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... as was the Calvert policy, did not altogether escape Indian troubles. She had to contend with no such able chief as Opechancanough, and she suffered no sweeping massacres. But after the first idyllic year or so there set in a small, constant friction. So fast did the Maryland colonists arrive that soon there was pressure of population beyond those first purchased bounds. The more thoughtful among the Indians may well have ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... an engaged girl is behaving with perfect correctness when she allows a man she has only just met to take her to supper at the Savoy, even if she did know him slightly years and years ago. It is very idyllic to suppose that a childhood acquaintance excuses every breach of decorum, but I was brought up to believe otherwise. I don't wish to be vulgar, but what it amounts to is that this girl was having supper—supper! In my days girls ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... such allusions abound in his diary and private correspondence, we must turn to "The Cossacks," and "Conjugal Happiness" for the exquisitely elaborated rural studies, which give those early romances their fresh idyllic charm. ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... apart from its impressive natural splendours, is rich also in idyllic and pastoral landscape, it has, as yet, but little "countryside." I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think I am right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of nature's making, but rather a collaboration resulting from nature and man living ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... that Mary Ann should be unable to maintain herself—or be maintained—at this idyllic level. But her fall was aggravated by two circumstances, neither of which had any particular business to occur. The first was an intimation from the misogamist German Professor that he had persuaded another of his old ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... of honor and acting like a king and a Christian. Any other policy than his own would have seemed to him foolish and cowardly. To hear his courtiers, one would have said that the age of gold had returned in France; the felicitations offered him took an idyllic tone. The Count of Chabrol, Prefect of the Seine, said to him, January 1, 1825, at the ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... probable—nay, almost certain, that I shall be accused of drawing an idyllic picture of native life from first impressions, which, if I had only had sufficient subsequent experience among the people, I should have entirely altered. All I can say is, that although I did not live among them ashore, we had a number of them on ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... calm idyllic pages of the Gospels, apart from some knowledge of contemporary history, is to miss one of their deepest lessons—that such piety and beneficence were set in the midst of a most tumultuous and perilous age. Those times were ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... the promise that he will write of her what has never yet been written of any woman. This anticipates, perhaps, the Divine Comedy, which was yet to be written, wherein Beatrice was his guide through Paradise and where he accords her a place higher than that of the angels. It may mar the somewhat idyllic simplicity of this story to add that Dante was married some years later to Gemma Donati, the daughter of a distinguished Florentine family, but such was the case. Little is known of her, however, as Dante never speaks ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... crowded with flowers of that bright metallic tint which distinguishes the flora of northern climes. Through the centre of this Eden ran the wide main street, fringed with poplars and elms and chestnuts. No polluting brewery or smoky factory, with its hideous architecture, marred the idyllic beauty of the miniature town—for everything which is not a city is a town in New England. The population obviously consisted of well-to-do persons, with outlying stock-farms or cranberry meadows, and funds snugly invested in ships ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... not affect the charm of their idyllic life at The Lookout. The precipice over which they hung was as charming as ever in its poetic illusions of space and depth and color; the isolation of their comfortable existence in the tasteful yet audacious habitation, the pleasant routine of daily tasks and amusements, all tended to make ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... sleep. In any case, it's more important that you should hear something about your new life. It's not all as innocent and idyllic as this. If you intend to go through, you ought to be instructed ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... at last; actual "Emigration of the Salzburgers:" and Germany—in these very days while the Crown-Prince is at Berlin betrothing himself, and Franz of Lorraine witnessing the EXERCITIA and wonders there—sees a singular phenomenon of a touching idyllic nature going on; and has not yet quite forgotten it in our days. Salzburg Emigration was all in motion, flowing steadily onwards, by various routes, towards Berlin, at the time the Betrothal took place; and seven ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... larger plates I cannot refrain from mentioning the St. Jerome, B. 60, with its homely seclusion as of Duerer's own best parlour in summer time which not even the presence of a lion can disturb; the idyllic and captivating St. Hubert, B. 57; the august and tranquil Cannon, B. 99: and lastly, perhaps, in the little Horse, B. 96, we come upon a theme and motive of the kind best suited to Duerer's peculiar powers, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... character and archaic charm; the multitude of dependents calls forth, in the present day at any rate, much of kindly solicitude, and though the unvarying sameness of existence sometimes proves the serpent which destroys the peace of the idyllic Eden in young and eager hearts, the ramifications of the large family party, gathered under one roof, mitigate the monotony of daily tasks, and supply the necessary mental friction. Work in the nutmeg-woods begin at 5 a.m., when a pealing bell summons the labourers to ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... period, people who read the idyllic pictures in ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye’ of the life of a gipsy gentleman working as a hedge-smith in the dingle or by the roadside seem to forget that Borrow was then working not for amusement, but for bread, and they forget how scant the bread must have been that could be bought ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... is discovered lying behind a wall of sandbags. On one side are the sandbags, and on the other an idyllic spring scene, with flowers and orchards seen in the half-light of a spring morning. The dawn breaks gently, and soon bullets begin to ping through the air, flattening themselves against the sandbags, or passing over CECIL's head. ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... an idyllic charm in these pictures so simply and gracefully sketched. She sees with the vision of one lying down to sleep after a life of pain, and dreaming of the green fields, the blue skies, the running brooks, the trees, the flowers, that make so beautiful a background for youthful loves and ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... French peasant has great virtues, but he has the defects of his virtues, and his home life is far from idyllic. He is laborious, shrewd, enduring, frugal, self-reliant, sober, honest and capable of intense self-control for a distant reward; but that reward is property in land, in pursuit of which he may become as pitiless as ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... idyllic scene completes what I may call the exterior version of the Plattner story—its exoteric aspect. It is quite unnecessary to enter here into all the details of his dismissal by Mr. Lidgett. Such details, with the full names and dates and references, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... had one sad sweet time at the Deans, talking over old days and the tea in the back-yard, when there had been Nora and the pussy, and the one who was not. It was rather sad to outgrow childhood. Ah, how merry they had been! What a simple idyllic memory this was to be for all her later years! Mrs. Reed always lived in First Street to her; and Tudie Dean used to go up and down the street, a blessed, beautiful ghost. The little girl was quite sure she would not be afraid to ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... what had happened as a signal interposition of Heaven in his favor. A quiet life, a comfortable home, the love of friends and of a pretty woman, certainly deserved some thanks. He however was soon hurried from this idyllic existence by the ardor of his youth, and the prospect of an adventurous career. To some men a peaceable life does not seem existence. They are like certain birds, which show themselves only ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... don't move and spoil the picture," he cried. "Oh, you idyllic pair! And what are you playing? Cribbage! If I had been challenged to guess the game you would have selected for your after-dinner entertainment, I ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole sound, healthy, large outdoor being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him—there begins a romance, troubled and interrupted, yet of the rarest idyllic quality. ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... was just going to strike the stern: "Excuse me; just so; the sea's rising fast, isn't it?—Oh, dear, yes; of course they are; they're all heathen and cannibals. You couldn't imagine to yourself the horrible bloodthirsty rites that may this very minute be taking place upon that idyllic-looking island, under the soft waving branches of those whispering palm-trees. Why, I knew a man in the Marquesas myself—a hideous old native, as ugly as you can fancy him—who was supposed to be a god, an incarnate god, and was worshipped accordingly with profound devotion by all the other ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... what about Acetyl-Salicylic, And what of Calomels and Soda Sals? Existence had been even less idyllic Without those powerful and faithful pals! Why, midst the fevers of the Struma plain you Furnished the greater part ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... and a woman selling hot cocoa on a table in the furrow. A strange country, where everything was mingled—the smoke from the frying-pan and the evening vapor, the noise of quoits on the head of a cask and the silence shed from the sky, the city barrier and the idyllic rural scene, the odor of manure and the fresh smell of green wheat, the great human Fair and Nature! Germinie enjoyed it, however; and, urging Jupillon to go farther, walking on the very edge of the road, she would constantly step in among the grain to enjoy the fresh, cool sensation of the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... clayey ground which it watered. Such was the modesty of its course that a little brighter green and fresher grass a few feet away from it were the only indications of its presence. Nothing was wanting to make this an idyllic place for a rendezvous, neither the protecting shade, the warbling of birds in the trees, the picturesque landscape surrounding it, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... live in idyllic happiness in a charming old ivy-grown manor house in Sussex, with level lawns and shady rose arbours, they still retain that old cottage at Idsworth, where a plausible excuse has been given to the country folk for "Mr. Maltwood" having been compelled ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... Aasta was of the kindest and proudest, and is lovingly described by Snorro. A pretty idyllic, or epic piece, of Norse Homeric type: How Aasta, hearing of her son's advent, set all her maids and menials to work at the top of their speed; despatched a runner to the harvest-field, where her husband Sigurd was, to warn him to come home and dress. How Sigurd ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... The shops are idyllic, too, as if Nature had seized even the man of trade and made him subservient to her designs. The general draper's, where I fitted myself out for a day or two quite easily, is set back in a tangle of poppies and sweet peas, Madonna lilies and Canterbury bells. The shop itself ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... and deftly touched with a gentle humor. It is a dainty book—daintily illustrated."—New York Tribune. "A wholesome, bright, refreshing story, an ideal book to give a young girl."—Chicago Record-Herald. "An idyllic story, replete with pathos and inimitable humor. As story-telling it is perfection, and as portrait-painting it is true to the ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... fascinate the reader, seem to be written in characters of blood and fire. The descriptions of the plague-stricken land and the conflagration of the headsman's house must be numbered among the finest passages that have ever flowed from Jokai's pen. But the mild, idyllic strain, so characteristic of Jokai, who is nothing if not romantic, runs through the sombre and lurid tableau like a bright silver thread, and the denouement, in which all enmities are reconciled, all evil-doers are punished, and Gentleness and Heroism receive their ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... simple for me, sir," said the visitor, in his high-pitched voice, and speaking a little through his nose. "What can be more idyllic than to drive through the glowing sunset, and find such a meal as this waiting for me—broiled fish, ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... be said for the old order of things," admitted Renmark. "If a person could unite the advantages of what we call civilization with the advantages of a pastoral life, he would inaugurate a condition of things that would be truly idyllic." ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... completely, but enough to remove grounds for lover's fretfulness. He passed idyllic days in halcyon weather. Often she would send her gondola to fetch him from the Grand Hotel, where he was staying. Now and then, most graciously audacious of princesses, she would come herself. On such occasions ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the red maple strew the ground, and the cotton of the early everlasting drifts upon the air." For several days there was but little change. "Getting toward the high tide of summer. The air well warmed up, Nature in her jocund mood, still, all leaf and sap. The days are idyllic. I lie on my back on the grass in the shade of the house, and look up to the soft, slowly moving clouds, and to the chimney swallows disporting themselves up there in the breezy depths. No hardening in vegetation yet. The moist, hot, fragrant breath of the fields—mingled odor of blossoming grasses, ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... various phases of this theme, the Breton cycle includes many shorter works termed lais, which also treat of love, and were composed by Marie de France or her successors. The best known of all these "cante-fables" is the idyllic Aucassin et Nicolette, of which a full account is embodied in ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... and Mr Freeland Moore, who had played together for so many years, were idyllic lovers, though he had a wife in America, and she a husband who had gone his ways. To them there were no further stages of love than those which are shown to the Anglo-American public. For them there were but Romeo and Juliet ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... will, in the nick of time, and wounds his rival. Adeline finds a peaceful home in the chateau of M. La Luc, who proves to be Theodore's father. Here the reader awaits impatiently the final solution of the plot. Once we have been inmates of a Gothic abbey, life in a Swiss chateau, however idyllic, is apt to seem monotonous. In time Mrs. Radcliffe administers justice. The marquis takes poison; La Motte is banished but reforms; and Adeline, after dutifully burying her father's skeleton in the family vault, becomes mistress of the abbey, but prefers ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... from Rome to Naples during the early days of May is idyllic. In the smiling sunshine they rushed on through wide meadows covered with luxuriant verdure and vineyards flushed with delicate greens. After they had passed Capua, which is magnificently situated on a wide plain,—amphitheatre-like within its half-circle of lovely hills, ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... is a tender and beautiful romance of the idyllic. A charming picture of life in a Welsh seaside village. It is something of a prose-poem, true, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... German poet and scholar, born in Mecklenburg; spent most of his life in Heidelberg; his fame rests chiefly on his idyllic poem "Luise" and his translations, particularly ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... was aware that people had been robbed and roughly handled, even in idyllic Lacville, when leaving the Casino after an especial stroke ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... not do so? There is nothing romantic or idyllic about it, but a good, wholesome, plain sort of life, that is likely to make an honest painter of him, and bring both of you some well-earned money. And you might have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... General That sent me back. It was a form of vanity for which I was properly punished. That Morgan was right was demonstrated as soon as he left me. I was seated against a tree by the side of the road eating a sandwich, an occupation which seems almost idyllic in its innocence but which could not deceive the Germans. In me they saw the hated Spion, and from behind me, across a ploughed field, four of them, each with an automatic, made me prisoner. One of them, who was an enthusiast, pushed his gun deep into my stomach. With the sandwich still ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... of herself regarding places and people; his, permeated with the fresh, exhilarating atmosphere of the mountains, and pervaded by a vigor and virility which roused Kate's admiration, yet led her to wonder if this could be the same lover who had won her childish heart in those idyllic days. Each realized the fact that notwithstanding their love, notwithstanding their stanch comradeship, at present they were little more than strangers. Darrell's love for Kate was a reality, but her personality, so far as he could recall ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... a most idyllic village, garrisoned with the noblest beeches I ever saw. Hilaire Belloc, whose "Path to Rome" we liked so much, stayed at Slinden, writing delightful things about Sussex. I mean to get and read all I can, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... intensely worshiped, had, in his conception of them, little connection with the activities of life: truth, simplicity, order, purity and peace were ideas that occupied his soul only to fill it with a horror of reality, with yearnings for an idyllic repose, with dreams of a state which he persuaded himself had been the original condition of the race, in which virtue and right must prevail through the mere absence of occasion for wrong ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... monotonous chant of the old women who were zigzagging a dance before her. With the gayly striped blankets lying on the ground, the strings of beads, wampum, and highly colored feathers hanging from the trees, and the flickering lights and shadows, it was an innocent and even idyllic picture, but the more experienced Peter saw in the performances only the uncertain temper and want of consecutive idea of playing animals, and the stolid unwinking papoose in his sister's lap gave his ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... allows, are the rest to forego glamour? Or because, to view the matter differently, psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a man falls in love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care for property rights, are we to suspect the idyllic in literature wherever we find it? Life is full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle reverence ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... swindling lonely white men on small islands out of their coconut oil, and unarmed merchantmen out of their stores—came to Apia in an armed ship with a Malay crew. From that moment Hayes' life became less idyllic. Hayes and Pease conceived a most violent hatred of each other, and poor old Mr Williams was really worried into an attack of elephantiasis (which answers to the gout in those latitudes) by his continual efforts to prevent the ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... unlike anything in Mark Twain's former work. It was pure romance, a beautiful, idyllic tale, though not without his touch of humor and humanity on every page. And how breathlessly interesting it is! We may imagine that first little audience—the "two good-mannered and agreeable children," drawing up in their little chairs by the fireside, hanging on every paragraph of the adventures ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... passed in recent times, thought that a place which was good enough for Benedictine monks to walk in might, with a little fresh masonry, be made fit for pigs to feed and sleep in. But an end had come to this idyllic state of things. The cloisters of Carennac had just been placed on the list of historic monuments. The adjoining church had been ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... grumpy in such surroundings was certainly black ingratitude. It was an idyllic place. My pavilion was a sort of Trianon, a Marie Antoinette bower, all flowers and gold. Fresh green woods grew about it; a lake stretched before it; swans dotted the water where trees were mirrored, and there were marble steps and ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... sky nearly all the way from Skagway to Port Townsend, and this was regarded as "seasonable summer weather." With bright sunshine this journey through a calm inland sea, gliding smoothly through fjords of incomparable beauty, surrounded by every luxury, would be idyllic. As it is, cold, rain and mist generally render this so-called pleasure trip one of monotony and discomfort, where passengers are often compelled to seek shelter throughout the day in smoke-room or saloon. Swathed ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and part of her mantle clinging around his neck. In this attitude they remained quiet for some moments, slightly rocking from side to side like a metronome; a movement, I fancy, peculiarly bucolic, pastoral, and idyllic, and as such, I wot, observed ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... Oh, nothing much. But I was thinking how you come in touch With life at the first dinner in the fall, When you get back, first, as you can't at all Later along. But you, of course, won't care With your idyllic pleasures. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... the summer air from above, like a dove's note from a treetop, to apologize to Lawton's girl. The incongruity now was in forcing into this Arcadian incident anything savouring of conventionality at all. It had been so idyllic, this talk of the sun fairy and the cloud; so like a passage from an old book of legends, this dainty episode in the great, strong, Western breezes, under the great, strong, Western sky. Everything should be ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... in them you will grant at once. Then there is a Breton[17] poet whose name Robert and I have both of us been ungrateful enough to forget—we have turned our brains over and over and can't find the name anyhow—and who, indeed, deserves to be remembered, who writes some fresh and charmingly simple idyllic poems, one called, I think, 'Primel et Nola.' By that clue you may hunt him out perhaps in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' There's no strong imagination, understand—nothing of that sort! but you have a sweet, fresh, cool sylvan feeling with him, rare among Frenchmen of his class. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... described in this book, who, having taken a direction upward, keep it, and cannot be bent downward nor aside. But, then, the reverse of the picture is of a blackness that would appall one who came to it with any idyllic ideas of the purity and peaceful ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... garden outside. How calm and still it seemed! Had he wandered there, years before, with a beating heart, in search of his destiny, merely to find it at last after the humiliation of a public scandal? Had his idyllic, almost mystical romance, with all its aspirations, grace, and unspeakable strength, been given to him just to be called from the house-tops and discussed in the streets? Was this the end of all sublime ideals? ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... opera-house was given over to the fantastic revels of the ballet in an attempt to typify the apotheosis of the automobile. This was rather a rash venture in prognostication, for it may be easy enough to "apotheosize" the horse, but to what idyllic heights the automobile is destined to ultimately ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... declined. But in the midst of universal mediocrity, a few names shine with distinguished lustre. Among them that of Poot (1689-1732) is commonly cited with those of Hooft and Vondel. He was a young peasant, whose rare genius found expression in a sweet and unaffected style. He excelled in idyllic and erotic poetry, and while he has no rival in Holland, he may perhaps be compared to Burns in Scotland, and Beranger in France. The theatre of Amsterdam, the only one of the country, continued to confine itself to translations or imitations from the French. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... I think Chopin knew too little of his music to be appreciably influenced by him. At any rate, I fail to perceive how and where the influence reveals itself. Of Field, on the other hand, traces are discoverable, and even more distinct ones of Hummel. The idyllic serenity of the former and the Mozartian sweetness of the latter were truly congenial to him; but no less, if not more, so was Spohr's elegiac morbidezza. Chopin's affection for Spohr is proved by several remarks in his letters: ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... own spirit of calm and content. The storm and stress of life is forgotten; all is holiday humor. We are in the midst of a Shakespearian comedy, with its alternations of humor and sentiment, its joyous atmosphere, its idyllic simplicity; the forest of Arden has come to us. It was written to celebrate his engagement to the Countess Therese. In it he is inspired by the very genius of happiness. It is as if, having obtained his heart's desire, he invites ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... especially to her husband. In matters of men and women he was thoroughly innocent, with the simplicity of the old-time man of the small town and the country; he fancied that, while in grocery matters and the like the world was full of guile, in matters of the heart it was idyllic, Arcadian, with never a thought of duplicity, except among a few obviously wicked ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... 'La Sonnambula' is rather foolish, but it suited Bellini's idyllic style, and the work is perhaps the happiest example of his naif charm. Amina, a rustic damsel, betrothed to Elvino, is a confirmed somnambulist, and her nocturnal peregrinations have given the village in which she dwells the reputation of being haunted by a spectre. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... This Lyric Idyl of 'Solomon's Song,' together with some narrated stories of the same idyllic spirit, are united in a single volume of this series under the name of ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... Most idyllic, I vow!" exclaimed the captain. "Who would have thought, Peter, to have beheld such a sight in these seas! 'Tis a childhood dream come back again! 'Tis like the lads and maids sporting on the village green! Ah, the lambs! the innocents! There is no war for them. It does my ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... him to lunch with me in any case," she said calmly; and this was true. But it was to have been a repetition of yesterday; quiet and peaceful, and idyllic. "He is a Mr. Hilliard who has—been detailed by a friend of my father's to show me some places he knows. That's his car. If you and your friends would care to join us, I should be delighted of course." Then she turned away, moving back a step or two nearer ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... soil presents a modern artistic problem which can be solved neither by the experimental method, according to which naturalism investigated the milieu as a causal factor, nor by the amateurishly descriptive processes of idyllic poetasters and local favorites, but must be intuitively grasped by the penetrating ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism, and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel of his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised his notion of the situation. A curious interview ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... in this manner, more or less determined the form, the Germans sought everywhere. They had handled few national subjects, or none at all. Schlegel's "Hermann" only showed the way. The idyllic tendency extended itself without end. The want of distinctive character with Gessner, with all his great gracefulness and child-like heartiness, made every one think that he could do something of the same kind. Just ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... but few traces,—some wrecks of giant walls, some excavated tombs, some shrines, where monks still sing and pray above the relics of the founders of once world-shaking, now almost forgotten, orders. Here at Mentone there is none of this; the idyllic is the true note, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... pursued, the works of Plato and his great rivals being diligently studied, while in a later age the innovation of Neoplatonism was abundantly debated and taught. A new school of poetry also arose, most of its followers being mechanical versifiers, though the idyllic poets of Sicily sought these favoring halls. Most famous among the philosophers of Alexandria was the maiden Hypatia, who had studied in the still active schools of Athens, and taught the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle and the then popular tenets of Neoplatonism—her ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... more swiftly than any of its predecessors had done since I came to this idyllic spot. House-cleaning began on Monday, and under Mrs. Grundy's experienced eye the half-dozen negresses employed in the work moved with alacrity and precision. But what with beating carpets, scrubbing floors, and turning things topsy-turvy in general, the task was not accomplished with any considerable ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... the Muse of tragedy; (5) Terpsichore, the Muse of choral dance and song; (6) Erato, the Muse of erotic poetry; (7) Polyhymnia, the Muse of the sublime hymn; (8) Urania, the Muse of astronomy; (9) Thalia, the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry. The custom of invoking the Muses, at the beginning of poems, is derived ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... towards one another, but the pastoral of tradition lies in its essence as far from the human document of humble life as from a scientific treatise on agriculture or a volume of pastoral theology. Thus the tract which lies before us to explore is equally remote from the idyllic imagination of George Sand, the gross actuality of Zola, and the combination of simple charm with minute and essential realism of Mr. Hardy's sketches in Wessex. Nor does the adoption of the pastoral label suffice to bring within the fold the fanciful animalism ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the red scourge of bondage fly, Nor deign to live a burdened slave!" Our father rode again his ride On Memphremagog's wooded side; Sat down again to moose and samp In trapper's hut and Indian camp; Lived o'er the old idyllic ease Beneath St. Francois' hemlock-trees; Again for him the moonlight shone On Norman cap and bodiced zone; Again he heard the violin play Which led the village dance away, And mingled in its merry whirl ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... phase of our little idyllic studies, as we watch the groups and couples intent upon a picnic at the sea-side or among the Jersey villages. Here is a representative family party which I followed with my eyes, and still farther with my imagination, on their way to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... these country people ignore all the beauties and graceful associations that are around them—they don't even know of the existence of this idyllic village." ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... religious service, in which poetry, music, pantomime, and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of [Page 12] dramatic art, to the refreshment of men's minds. Its view of life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration of those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as men and women and when men and women were as gods. As to subject-matter, its warp was spun largely from the bowels of the old-time mythology ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... realist, but rather a man blinded by pessimism; and his novels, though generally powerful and sometimes fascinating, are not pleasant or wholesome reading. From the reader's view point some of his earlier works, like the idyllic love story Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), are the most interesting. Hardy became noted, however, when he published Far from the Madding Crowd, a book which, when it appeared ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... forlorn. The place tells of poverty, perversity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming terrace I have mentioned—a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy flags and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet hills—stood there ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... place within a few years. In our own day we have seen the legend of one of the greatest heroes of history modified several times in less than fifty years. Under the Bourbons Napoleon became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist, a friend of the humble who, according to the poets, was destined to be long remembered in the cottage. Thirty years afterwards this easy-going hero had become a sanguinary despot, who, after having usurped power and destroyed liberty, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Gissing returned in 1888 to the more sentimental and idealistic palette which he had employed for Thyrza. Renewed recollections of Tibullus and of Theocritus may have served to give his work a more idyllic tinge. But there were much nearer sources of inspiration for A Life's Morning. There must be many novels inspired by a youthful enthusiasm for Richard Feverel, and this I should take to be one of them. Apart from the idyllic purity of its tone, and its sincere idolatry of youthful love, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing |
