Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
In what a very different manner from that of Calame was this same Swiss scenery treated by the numerous artists who painted Alpine views at the beginning of this century! They tried almost everywhere to depress the high mountains into hilly country, and they furnish a lanscape commentary to Gessner's Idyls rather than to the gigantic scenery of the Alps as we conceive it at present.
That his songs, as a whole, are comparable in inherent artistic consequence with his sonatas, or with such things as the "Woodland Sketches," the "Sea Pieces," and the "New England Idyls," I do not believe, although I readily grant the beauty and fascination of many passages, and of certain pages in which he is incontestably at the height of his powers.
Applying this to the pastoral idyls of the sentimental poet, we see why these poems, whatever amount of art and genius be displayed in them, do not fully satisfy the heart or the mind. An ideal is proposed in it, and, at the same time, the writer keeps to this narrow and poor medium of pastoral life.
She had looked too long, and from too near a point, at the tragedy and irony of things to preserve faith in idyls. Maybe there were idyls somewhere, but not in the sphere where she lived they were not for her! To yearn for that which perhaps did not exist at all, which most assuredly did not exist for her! What a "rheumatism of thought" that would be!
One reads a sketch like "The Stout Gentleman," in every way a typical work, for anything but incident or plot. The Hudson River idyls, it may be granted, have somewhat more of story interest, but Irving seized them, ready-made for his use, because of their value for the picturesque evocation of the Past.
It stands midway between the lyrics and the idyls in being a poem of most studied and elaborate artifice, in which Catullus has chosen, not the statelier and more familiar rhythms of the hexameter or elegiac, but one of the Greek lyric metres, of which he had already introduced several others into Latin.
And, in the meantime, a change was passing upon Lancelot. His morbid vanity that brawl-begotten child of struggling self-conceit and self-disgust was vanishing away; and as Mr. Tennyson says in one of those priceless idyls of his, before which the shade of Theocritus must hide his diminished head, 'He was altered, and began To move about the house with joy, And with the certain step of man.
But now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves.
The hand that penned the "Story of the Guard" could not hold the pen of the Proclamation or the Farewell Address, or the narrative of the Rocky-Mountain Expedition. Nevertheless, it has done well. Let its work lie on our tables and dwell in our hearts with the "Idyls of the King," the Aeolian memories of a chivalry departed blending with the voices of the nobler knighthood of our time.
This year's Academy Exhibition contained Millais's "Black Brunswicker," Landseer's "Flood in the Highlands," and Phillips's "Marriage of the Princess Royal," now in the great corridor at Windsor Castle. "The Idyls of the King," much admired by the Prince, were the poems of the year.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking