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The volume of lyrics includes many pieces of imperfect quality and slight value, personal tributes and occasional productions, but it includes also those national songs that every Norwegian knows by heart, that are sung upon all national occasions by the author's friends and foes alike, and that have made him the greatest of Norway's lyric poets.

But, while he wrote nothing that was not beautiful, his masterpieces are based only on themes furnished by the lyrics of such poets as Goethe, Heine, and Rilckert. It is related, in connection with his friendship with Mayrhofer, one of his rhyming associates of these days, that he would set the verses to music much faster than the other could compose them.

For even beauty is not to be thrust upon us; she is not to solicit us or offer herself thus to the first comer; and in the most admired of those flying lyrics she is thus immoderately lavish of herself. "He lays himself out," wrote Francis Thompson in an anonymous criticism, "to delight and seduce. The great poets entice by a glorious accident . . . but allurement, in Mr.

The discourses of the Dervish are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory. In Persian Poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense.

This is the narrower interpretation of the theory. When the notion of the good is liberalized so as to include innocent happiness as well as the strictly ethical and religious values, beauty is conceded to belong to pictures of fair women and children, and to lyrics and romances, provided there is nothing in them to shock the moral sense.

She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which were my pet literature at that time.

The various periods of English lyric poetry are covered, as has been already noted, by the general treatises of Rhys, Reed and Schelling. Old English lyrics are well translated by Cook and Tinker, and by Pancoast and Spaeth. W. P. Ker's English Literature; Mediaeval is excellent, as is C. S. Baldwin's English Mediaeval Literature. John Erskine's Elizabethan Lyric is a valuable study.

We have but a handful of the lyrics of Sappho and of the odes of Pindar, while the fragments of lyric verse gathered up in the Greek Anthology tantalize us with their reminder of what has been lost beyond recall. Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition, we are equally impressed with the enduring influence of the few lyrics that have survived.

Any one who is sceptical of the Courtly derivation of the Italian popular song may, besides consulting the admirable book of Prof. d'Ancona, compare with the contents of Tigri's famous "Canti popolari Toscani," the following scraps of Sicilian and early Italian lyrics:

Whereupon he unlocked the door into the bedroom, whence had come the tuneful lyrics, threw it wide open, and revealed to my astonished gaze no less an object than a large talking-machine still engaged in the strenuous fulfilment of its noisy mission. "What the dickens!" I said. "It's attacked to my front-door," said Raffles, silencing the machine.