United States or Guinea-Bissau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Mary came of a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his tottering constancy. Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's life.
Furnivall, a great Shakespearean scholar, was so kind as to write me the following letter about Portia: "Being founder and director of the New Shakespeare Society, I venture to thank you most heartily for your most charming and admirable impersonation of our poet's Portia, which I witnessed to-night with a real delight.
Since, however, the church and the law allowed him but one, he must more drastically monogamize his heart and this he found enormously difficult. It was the poet's triangle with the two dear charmers over again.
And Poe, who, with all the great poet's faults, possessed none of his few genial features, has painted the fatal skull and cross-bones upon our banners, that should own only the oriflamme. Yet it is Poe whom the English critic honors as exceeding all our authors in intensity, and approaching more nearly to genius than they all. Now may St. Loy defend us!
It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly, I replied. No, said he, far from it. I said written, but I did not say copied. Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an instant in the poet's soul.
I resign that fancy," said the minstrel, with another half-sigh. "It was not indeed wholly, but in great part the hope of the poet's fame that made me a truant in the way to that which destiny, and such few gifts as Nature conceded to me, marked out for my proper and only goal. But what a strange, delusive Will-o'-the-Wisp the love of verse-making is!
When we read, now-a-days, of the great poet's being so politely received by Can Grande, lord of Verona, and sitting at his princely table, we are apt to fancy that nothing but his great poetry procured him the reception, and that nobody present competed with him in the eyes of his host.
The former contains stirring war songs, like "The Defence of Lucknow," and pictures of wild passionate grief, like "Rizpah"; the latter is notable for "Romney's Remorse," a wonderful piece of work; "Merlin and The Gleam," which expresses the poet's lifelong ideal; and several exquisite little songs, like "The Throstle," and "The Oak," which show how marvelously the aged poet retained his youthful freshness and inspiration.
And the intelligent visitor will be one with the great lovers of Shakespeare, living and dead, from Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and Milton down to Matthew Arnold and our own contemporaries, even though his contribution to the poet's praise be no more than a little note in a private diary.
In the hall of the Silver Flagon the distracted landlord wrung his hands above the slain poet's body, while the flames of the four and twenty candles danced and flickered on the table. Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle. It joined with another and a larger road at right angles. David stood, uncertain, for a while, and then took the road to the right.
Word Of The Day