A Handbook of English Literature

Front Cover
William Hall Griffin
C. Lockwood and son, 1897 - Literary Criticism - 384 pages
 

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Page 306 - Look once more ere we leave this specular mount Westward, much nearer by south-west, behold Where on the ^Egean shore a city stands Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil ; Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence...
Page 169 - Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic — yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Page 227 - He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, He saw thro' his own soul. The marvel of the everlasting will, An open scroll, Before him lay : with echoing feet he threaded The...
Page 296 - So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, And made their bends adornings ; at the helm A seeming mermaid steers ; the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, Enthron'd i...
Page 88 - Let there be lig;ht, and light was over all; Why am I thus bereav'd thy prime decree? The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon. When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Page 73 - THIS fable my lord devised, to the end that he might exhibit therein a model or description of a college, instituted for the interpreting of nature, and the producing of great and marvellous works, for the benefit of men; under the name of Solomon's House, or the College of the Six Days
Page 306 - And eloquence, native to famous wits Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, City or suburban, studious walks and shades. See there the olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long ; There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound Of bees...
Page 217 - History of Civilisation in England and France, Spain and Scotland. By HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE. 3 vols. crown 8vo. 24?.
Page 148 - Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick.
Page 115 - whispers through the trees': If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,' The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with ' sleep': Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

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