United States or Moldova ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


In the great poet’s will, five of his friends have bequests of memorial rings. Rings were at this time an almost necessary part of the toilet of a gentleman; they indicated rank and character by their style or their devices. Hence the wills and inventories of the era abound with notices of rings, many persons wearing them in profusion, as may be seen in the portraits painted at this time.

Like Aphrodite rising from the sea foam.” The answer came from Democrates, who seemed to look away, avoiding the poet’s keen glance. “And yet her father gave her to the son of his bitter enemy?” “Hermippus of Eleusis is sensible. It is a fine thing to have the handsomest man in Hellas for son-in-law.”

Or another brave speech and convincing argument? Had I the tongue of Nestor and the wisdom of Thales, would those doltish Dorians listen?” Again the knock, still again Simonides. The dapper poet’s face was a cubit long. “Oh, grief to report it! Cimon sends a boat from his ship the Perseus.

“I am not ashamed of my father, sir,” spoke the taller Athenian; “Hellas has not yet forgotten Miltiades, the victor of Marathon.” “Then I clasp the hand of Cimon, the son of the saviour of Hellas.” The little poet’s eyes danced. “Oh! the pity I was in Thessaly so long, and let you grow up in my absence. A noble son of a noble father! And your frienddid you name him Democrates?” “I did so.”

That is the reading of the poet’s riddle as he gave it to me. He thought that ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ would probably be enough of biography for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I might do.”

May your souls be illumined by the light of the Words of God, and may you become repositories of the mysteries of God, for no comfort is greater and no happiness is sweeter than spiritual comprehension of the divine teachings. If a man understands the real meaning of a poet’s verses such as those of Shakespeare, he is pleased and rejoiced.

The less amiable specimens of this spurious religion are those which we meet not unfrequently in my own country. I can use with all my heart the poet’s words, “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still;” but to those faults no Catholic can be blind. We find there men possessed of many virtues, but proud, bashful, fastidious, and reserved.

Echoes of the poet’s personal emotion are heard in Jacek’s tale of his passion for Eva; and an ardent love of country permeates the poem and breaks out again and again with lyric force. On the other hand the book is faithful to reality in its picture of Lithuanian manners and customs; the great romantic poet is at the same time the first realistic novelist of Poland.

At the present time, when newspapers and novels alone are read, it is not the poet’s verses which most people read, but paragraphs about what the author and his wife and childreneat and drink and avoid”: a time when, if the poet’s verses are read at all, it is the accidents rather than the essentials of the work that seem primarily to concern the public.

The fact seems to be, however, that the poet’s power of reaching, as Scott reached, his own ideal expression per saltum, or reaching it slowly and tentatively, is simply a matter of temperament. For whose verses are more loose-jointed than Byron’s? whose diction is more commonplace than his?