In middle life each man wrote a long elegiac work centering on the death of someone very near his heart: Tennyson's In Memoriam su...rely corresponds to Brahms' German Requiem.... At the other extreme you will no doubt think of Brahms' fiery Hungarian dances and graceful Viennese waltzes: in the work of Tennyson there are similar pieces, in broad dialect with touches of rough comedy and unbuttoned jollity, in particular "The Northern Farmer." Between these extremes, in the work of each man, lies a single masterpiece, strange but characteristic. Tennyson's Maud is what he calls a monodrama, a set of lyrics spoken by one man, telling the story of tragic love. In 1869 Brahms lost the beautiful Julie Schumann: the result was his famous Alto Rhapsody, an extended lyric, in fact a monodrama on the agonies of loneliness in a heart thirsty for love. The nineteenth century was a nationalist era, so both Brahms and Tennyson wrote pieces we should now call jingoistic: they are seldom played or read today, but they are part of the total picture. For Brahms the best known was his Triumph Song, written after the German conquests of France. For Tennyson, it was "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and other galloping and shouting lyrics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My travel's history, Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,... Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak--such was my process-- And of the cannibals that each other eat, The anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, ...but will proceed no further.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of spe...ech and slow of tongue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do not be discouraged, if in a thousand instances you find your kindness rejected and wronged, your good evil-spoken of, and the h...and you extend for the relief of others, cast insultingly away; the benevolence which cannot outlive these trials of its purity and strength, is not like the self-sacrifice of him, who went about doing good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Miss Dudley ... gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid- ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is d...oing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second-rate amateur and will never be any thing more, though she has done one or two things which I give you my word I would like to have done myself. She picks up all she knows without an effort and knows nothing well, yet she seems to understand whatever is said. Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity. I notice that the lines of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all end with a slight upward curve like a yacht's sails, which gives a kind of hopefulness and self-confidence to her expression. Mind and face have the same curves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Western hospitality prevails; it is reminiscent of the kind displayed earlier here by a host who said to an unexpected guest, "Str...anger, you take the wold skin and the chaw o' sowbelly--I'll rough it."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »