United States or Kyrgyzstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He makes an amusing figure with a black cloak wrapped round his little body in Byronic folds, and a soft hat of black plush on his head, a Vesta Tilley quickness informing both his movements and his speech, as he nips forward in conversation with a friend, the arms, invisible beneath their cloak, pressed down in front of him, his body leaning forward, his peering eyes dancing behind their spectacles.
In her novels of the first period, George Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant.
John Richard Jefferies becomes Richard Jefferies; Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson becomes Robert Louis Stevenson. But Borrow could touch nothing without transmuting it. For example, in his Byronic period, when he was about twenty years of age, he was translating "romantic ballads" from the Danish.
He smiled, poor boy, a Byronic smile, with a curl of the upper lip such as suited the part, and saw himself abandoned by the authorities with what he felt to be a lofty disdain; and he relapsed into such studies as pleased him most, and set prescribed books and lectures at defiance.
As Annie thought much of him after her stolen glance in the morning, she longed to do that which he dreaded she would try to do attempt his reformation. Not that she cared for him personally, or that she had grown sentimentally interested in his Byronic style of wretchedness. So far from it, her happy and healthful nature was repelled by his diseased and morbid one.
During a considerable part of it she appears hovering about the thin line that separates some kinds of wit and passion from madness; writing more novels, burning her hero's effigy and letters, and then clamouring for a lock of his hair, or a sight of his portrait; separated from, and again reconciled to, a husband to whose magnanimous forbearance and compassion she bears testimony to the last, comparing herself to Jane Shore; attempting Byronic verses, loudly denouncing and yet never ceasing inwardly to idolize, the man whom she regarded as her betrayer, perhaps only with justice in that he had unwittingly helped to overthrow her mental balance.
His hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his eighteenth-century comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill participation in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne, how silly and artificial is all this! There is no genuine feeling in it: he attires himself in tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat.
Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have been completely Byronic more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of Provencal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld painted pictures!
Once, only, you were completely the artist, impregnating your work with a fine glow of life, making it deeply dignified and impassioned, sincere and firm, profoundly moving. For you, too, there was the cardinal exception. For you there was the "Faust Symphony." The work is romantic music, the music of the Byronic school par excellence.
But we do not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there is a definite stage direction "Enter Tyrant." Nor do we behold a deus ex machina who is certain to do all that is mild and just. The King in the ballad is in a state of virile indecision.
Word Of The Day