United States or Uruguay ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Only in the true historian, the student who, like Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the right motive of useful research.
After a year he writes, "I have not written any poetry this whole summer. Old Mrs. Themis says that I shall not visit any more at the Miss Muses. I'll see the old catamaran hanged, though, but what I will, and I'll write a sonnet to my old shoe directly, out of mere desperation. Pity and sympathize with me."
For, indeed, before they engaged in battle, the king first did sacrifice to the Muses, in all likelihood to put them in mind of the manner of their education, and of the judgment that would be passed upon their actions, and thereby to animate them to the performance of exploits that should deserve a record.
But the sons of toil drove few bargains or hard with the sons of the Muses. The best poets fared worst, for the crowd sympathised not with their temper, nor with their diction, and they were like to die of starvation and so achieve speedy recognition. But the minor poets, too, were in sore strait. The market was exceedingly limited. Sellers were many and buyers few.
He studies the lock-history of the door. "Lots of people have broken in here," he muses. He passes over the rules well he knows them! The electric lights on the street throw dim shadows on the gas-lit wall factories, depots, vessels, docks, saw-mills. The phantasmagoria pleases Mr. Harpwood. "At 6 o'clock," he smiles, "I shall be the most powerful man in these parts.
But he was not allowed to get to the end of this evidence of his skill, for Euphorion the door-keeper of the palace, Euphorion the father of Pollux, ran hastily into the hall of the Muses with a letter in his hand which he gave to the architect. "To be read without an instant's delay," he added, bowing with theatrical dignity to the assembled artists.
Well, when a man inquires for D'Hénault's poems and is half-pleased because I have the book, and half-annoyed because he must needs buy it ! An epicurean rogue by his lip, a true son of the Muses. And suppose there is a letter from England, quoth I, with the seal of the Royal Society!" "Is there a letter from England?" "Thou hast not been to thy lodging?
What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses, and one of the beloved of Apollo?
You may laugh, but by the nine Muses it was just like that. Then Papias grew tired and cross and kept asking where Agne was, till at last he began to cry.
A long list of obscure names, if we except those of Marnix and Houwaert, is mentioned as belonging to this period, their works mostly didactic or controversial. Houwaert, a Catholic, one of the avowed friends and partisans of the Prince of Orange, courted the Muses in the hottest days of civil strife.
Word Of The Day