 | Hugh Walker - English poetry - 1895 - 352 pages
...class ; and it was because he thought Shelley wanted it that he described that fascinating poet as " a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain". Whether he was right or wrong as to Shelley, Arnold was right in his general proposition. No visions... | |
 | William Caldwell - Philosophy, Modern - 1896 - 560 pages
...clouds, but which itself remains merely in the clouds, is nothing that man can appreciate. It is " a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain," to use the words of Matthew Arnold about Shelley — if what he said is strictly true, which may be... | |
 | William Caldwell - 1896 - 610 pages
...clouds, but which itself remains merely in the clouds, is nothing that man can appreciate. It is " a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain," to use the words of Matthew Arnold about Shelley — if what he said is strictly true, which may be... | |
 | William Henry Hudson - English literature - 1896 - 244 pages
...compare the entire essay on Shelley in the same volume, with its famous description of that poet as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." It will be remembered also that Arnold expressed dissatisfaction with Wordsworth's Immortality Ode,... | |
 | Israel Zangwill - Jewish literature - 1896 - 408 pages
...Grant Allen, man of science as he is in his spare moments, is more like Matthew Arnold's Shelley, a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. So complex is the problem which seems to him so simple, that it is not improbable that the present... | |
 | Matthew Arnold - English essays - 1897 - 460 pages
...enduring and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature, insecure in his sense of worldly values, " a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." ' The essay on Heine helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the volatile beauty of Heine's songs,... | |
 | William Macneile Dixon - English literature - 1898 - 258 pages
...field of pure abstractions. Shelley too was in the void (the figure is borrowed from Jouberfs), ' a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.' Or again, Marcus Aurelius, had he known the Christian writings, would have ' found in the Gospel of... | |
 | John Clark Ridpath - Literature - 1898 - 704 pages
...essay rightly termed by Saintsbury " the most crotchety of all his essays," has called Shelley " a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." In the early part of the century Southey considered himself a benefactor of society in denouncing him.... | |
 | William Peterfield Trent - Criticism - 1899 - 320 pages
...close of this essay on Byron that the famous phrase which has been already quoted first occurs : " Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." When some years after he had occasion to repeat this phrase Arnold underscored the word ineffectual.... | |
 | William Peterfield Trent - Criticism - 1899 - 312 pages
...radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, 40 no less than in life, he is 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.' " Here is a sentence for us as neatly turned as Mr. Rossetti's, as positive in its expression of individual... | |
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And in poetry, no less than in life, he is * a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. 
