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afterwards ballads beauty became began belongs Beowulf blank verse Cædmon called Canterbury Tales century characters Chaucer Church comedy Court Cowper criticism death delight died drama Dryden Edward element Elizabethan England English literature English poetry English prose English tongue Essay Faerie Queen feeling French genius George George Gascoigne Greek grew Henry Henry VIII human humour imagination imitation influence interest John King land language Latin Layamon literary lived Lord love of nature manner Milton moral Norman novel old English Ormulum painting Paradise Lost passion philosophy plays poem poetic poets political Pope published pure Puritan Queen reign religion religious represented Revolution Richard III rime romance Samson Agonistes satire scenery Scotch Shakespeare Shelley Shepheardes Calender society songs sonnets Spenser spirit story story-telling style subjects tale Tamburlaine thing Thomas thought tion took translation verse whole William Wordsworth write written wrote
Popular passages
Page 120 - It was said of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among Men ; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee-houses.
Page 5 - we mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent men and women arranged in a way that shall give pleasure to the reader.
Page 121 - Johnson, though, indeed, upon a smaller scale. At this time I think he had published nothing with his name, though it was pretty generally known that one Dr. Goldsmith was the author of An Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, and of The Citizen of the World, a series of letters supposed to be written from London by a Chinese.
Page 15 - I spent my whole life in the same monastery," he says, "and while attentive to the rule of my order and the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or writing.
Page 74 - Epistles, 1598, Not content with these, he set himself to glorify the whole of his land in the Polyolbion, thirty books, and more than 30,000 lines. It is a description in Alexandrines of the ' tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned isle of Britain, with intermixture of the most remarkable stories, antiquities, wonders, • pleasures, and commodities of the same, digested into a poem.
Page 7 - Every English man and woman has good reason to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in prose and poetry. Every one who can write a good book or a good song may say to himself : ' I belong to a great company which has been teaching and delighting men for more than a thousand years.
Page 7 - English men and women thought and felt, and then wrote down in good prose or beautiful poetry in the English language. The story is a long one. It begins about the year 670 and it is still going on in the year 1875. Into this little book, then, is to be put the story of 1200 years.
Page 156 - Nothing could be better. On Shelley, also, Mr. Stopford Brooke has an excellent sentence. He says of his lyrics : ' They form together the most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess.
Page 161 - Keats marks the exhaustion of the impulse which began with Burns and Cowper. There was no longer now in England any large wave of public thought or feeling such as could awaken poetry. We have then, arising after his death, a number of pretty little poems, having no inward fire, no idea, no marked character. They might be written by any versifier at any time, and express pleasant indifferent thought in pleasant verse. Such were Mrs. Hemans's poems, and those of LEL, and such were Tennyson's earliest...