Treatises on Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric: Being the Articles Contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7th EdBlack, 1839 - 381 pages |
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admitted Æneid ancient appears argument Ariosto Aristotle beauty Boccacio century character charm chivalry Cicero Clara Reeve comic composition critical Ctesiphon Demosthenes discourse drama effect eloquence Encyclopædia Britannica English epic excitement exhibited extravagant fact fancy feeling fiction French genius Goethe grace Greece hearers Hesiod Homer human humour Iliad imagery imagination imitations impression incidents influence interest invention Italian language less literature lyric lyric poetry manner ment merit mind Minnesingers modern moral nature novel novelists observation orator oratory painting passion peculiar period personages Petrarch philosophy Pindar poem poet poetical poetry possess present principles probably produced proof prose Provençal qualities racter reasoning remarkable render rhetoric rhetorical Induction romance satire says scarcely scenes Scott seems sense sentiment Sir Walter Scott Smollett Spanish Spanish poetry speaker spirit Sterne style success tale taste tion tone truth verses Voltaire whole words writer
Popular passages
Page 25 - Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the body. And, as the magic lantern acts best in a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most completely in a dark age.
Page 200 - Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head ; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.
Page 3 - Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.
Page 13 - The law under which the processes of Fancy are carried on is as capricious as the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be appositely produced or fortunately combined. Fancy depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and images ; trusting that their number, and the felicity with which they are linked together, will make amends for the want of individual value...
Page 54 - Hesperus ! thou bringest all good things — Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer, To the young bird the parent's brooding wings, The welcome stall to the...
Page 115 - Mais elle était du monde où les plus belles choses Ont le pire destin ; Et rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses, L'espace d'un matin.
Page 2 - POETRY is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth ; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
Page 13 - But the imagination is conscious of an indestructible dominion ; the soul may fall away from it, not being able to sustain its grandeur ; but if once felt and acknowledged, by no act of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished. Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, imagination to incite and support the eternal.
Page 34 - ... .Then said he unto me, prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, Son of man, and say to the wind, thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
Page 358 - It is rapid harmony, exactly adjusted to the sense. It is vehement reasoning, without any appearance of art. It is disdain, anger, boldness, freedom, involved in a continual stream of argument. And of all human productions, the orations of Demosthenes present to us the models which approach the nearest to perfection.