"Victor Hugo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this Captain Brown should have his Pinturicchio? Well, might it not be so since Victor Hugo, living in exile, had also given Brown an apotheosis? Abigail also had Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, who was preaching the doctrine of brotherhood, democracy, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... without hesitation the school of Dickens, that it has been the first to strike the key-note with a firm and skillful hand. Its excellence would stand out with undimmed lustre had it not, as its gloomy background, the French school of Victor Hugo and Balzac, that opposite of "the poetry of despair," as Goethe calls it. Here again, in this new English school, has the genius of Kingsley alighted. Most of his novels belong to it. And, besides himself and Dickens, there stand forth as its most brilliant members ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... eyes, and when I looked again I thought an angel stood on the threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in Victor Hugo—a happy angel with finger upon ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... of pity for the soldiers "out there" as they have slushed home through the streets on rainy nights; but they have never realised what mud means, for no photograph can tell its slimy depth, and even the pen of a Zola or a Victor Hugo could give ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... to Nieuport. It is like some town one sees in a horrible nightmare. Hardly a house is left standing, but that does not describe the scene. Nothing can fitly describe it except perhaps such a pen as Victor Hugo's. The cathedral at Nieuport has two outer walls left standing. The front leans forward helplessly, the aisles are gone. The trees round about are burnt up and shot away. In the roadway are great holes which shells have made. The very cobbles of the street are scattered by them. Not ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... example, imposed on later writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers, capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself alike to the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... and trim for Sunday, and opened for the master brilliant possibilities in the way of a jaunt to Bomsey or Winchester—Miss Wendover gave a dinner to all the school children under twelve. She had taken up Victor Hugo's theory that a substantial meat dinner, even on one day out of seven, will do much to build up the youthful constitution and to prevent scrofulous diseases. Moved by these considerations, she had fitted up a disused barn as a rustic dining-hall, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... penance: there was nothing sacred to his inquiries, from the authority of the Popes of Avignon to the stigma miracle of the Seraphic St. Francis. He was an enfant terrible; Revolutionist Rousseau had infected him; Victor Hugo the Excommunicate was his literary idol; hidden and forbidden sweets made their way by subterranean passages to his appetite; he was the leader of a group who might some day give trouble to the Reverend gentlemen who managed the "nation Canadienne." ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... leadership was at first unquestioned, was like the huge cannon on the man-of-war, in Victor Hugo's story, that had broken from its moorings in the storm, and become a terror to those whom it formerly defended. He was indeed a great gun, from whom in the time of the Stamp Act had been sent the most powerful bolts against unconstitutional oppression. With lashings parted, ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... Victor Hugo, in his famous travels on the Rhine, visiting Cologne, gives a learned account of what he DIDN'T see there. I have a remarkable catalogue of similar objects at Constantinople. I didn't see the dancing dervishes, it was Ramazan; nor the howling dervishes at Scutari, it was Ramazan; nor ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drama, which arose in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, holds at present the first place in France. Its chief exponents have been Victor Hugo, the two Dumases, Sardou and Octave Feuillet. Between them and the followers of the Classic School there was for some time a lively war. The latter wanted to exclude the Romanticists from the Theatre Francais, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... a black crimson Victor Hugo, pricked her fingers and said "Damn!" With my penknife I cut the stalk and handed her the rose, which ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... note), we read:—"He [Wagner] was not proud enough to be able to suffer the truth about himself. Nobody had less pride than he. Like Victor Hugo he remained true to himself even in ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... extraordinary ruins, delicate and chiseled like jewels, fine as lace and enormous as mountains, those fabulous, divine monuments which are so graceful that one falls in love with their form like one falls in love with a woman, and that one feels a physical and sensual pleasure in looking at them. As Victor Hugo says, "Whilst wide-awake, I ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... compensations of destiny are very familiar to me: I have often observed them. Man is nothing but contradiction: the less he knows it the more dupe he is. In consequence of his small capacity for seeing things as they are, Quinet has neither much accuracy nor much balance of mind. He recalls Victor Hugo, with much less artistic power but more historical sense. His principal gift is a great command of imagery and symbolism. He seems to me a Goerres [Footnote: Joseph Goerres, a German mystic and disciple of Schelling. He published, among other works, "Mythengeschichte ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... face downward on island stones. With the enthusiastic help of my children, I made a dummy stuffed with pine cones, and let him float at the end of a rope. Never a tentacle, let alone octopus, appeared. I had to rest content with Victor Hugo's stirring picture in "The Toilers ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... {270c} Victor Hugo's Les Miserables may be most pleasantly read in the 10 volumes, translated by M. Jules Gray, published by ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... the unities preserved. Further, there is in both of them exactly that resolute comprehension and exposition of tragic meaning which is the virtue of the short epics. The tragic contradiction in them could not be outdone by Victor Hugo. It is no wonder that the story of Rosamond and Albovine king of the Lombards became a favourite with dramatists of different schools, from the first essays of the modern drama in the Rosmunda of Rucellai, passing by the common way of the novels of Bandello to the Elizabethan stage. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... to mak the words, fause loon, When minstrels we have barely twa; And Lamartine is in Paris toun, And Victor Hugo far awa?" ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, complete outer walls and complete inner (these, elaborately ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... Even Victor Hugo added his hero-worship, in this curious letter: "The giant salutes the giant! The enemy salutes the enemy! The friend sends ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... sojourn at Boulogne, he had visited Aix-la-Chapelle, the city where Charlemagne's relics are entombed, and where Victor Hugo in some of his sublimest verse has pictured Charles V. kneeling in prayer to catch the spirit of the mediaeval hero. Thither went Napoleon, but in no suppliant mood; for when Josephine was offered the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... nature—inherited apparently from her mother, Madame Sallambier—we can hardly be astonished when Balzac writes to Madame Hanska, in 1835, that if her misfortunes do not kill her, it is feared they will destroy her reason. Nevertheless, she outlived her celebrated son, and is mentioned by Victor Hugo, when he visited Balzac's deathbed, as the only person in the room, except a nurse ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... We are very much plagued by our Treaty with France. Victor Hugo has written a book against Louis Napoleon, which will exasperate him much, and which he publishes here; we can hardly keep Victor Hugo here after that.[38] The great plague of all these affairs is their constant return without the least advantage to any one from the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... didn't I tell ye I was a poor scholar,' said the young Irish sham-student-beggar to the gentleman who refused him alms because he could not read. In the same strain, as it seems to us, Victor Hugo might reply to the wearied readers of these tales: 'Why, do they not call themselves miserable?' Miserable indeed is the 'Marius' installment now before us—a mere sensation plot, brilliantly patched here and there with the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... employing words no doubt varies with the individual, and depends upon the relative balance of auditory, visual or tactile images in his mind. Swinburne often impresses us as working primarily with the "stuff" of word-sounds, as Browning with the stuff of sharp-cut tactile or motor images, and Victor Hugo with the stuff of visual impressions. But in each case the poet's sole medium of expression to us is through verbal symbols, and it is hard to get behind these into the real workshop of the brain where each poet is busily minting ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... not drama, nor character, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highest achievement of romance to be the embodiment of 'character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.' His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was that narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that are for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay or homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... "Pad, oh! pad me with hot biscuits!" The loose coat swung and sighed for forbidden fruit: "Fill me with fat!" A dry, coppery face found pointed expression in the nose, which hung like a rigid sentinel over the thin-lipped mouth,—like Victor Hugo's Javert, loyal, untiring, merciless. No traitorous comfits ever passed that guard; no death-laden bark sailed by that sleepless quarantine. The small ferret-eyes which looked nervously out from under bushy brows, roaming, but never resting, were of the true Minerva tint,—yellow-green. The encircling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... showed me a number of the newest works, which had been presented to him, through the medium of David, as gifts from the most distinguished men of the romantic school. I saw works by St. Veuve, Ballanche, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Alfred de Vigny, Jules Janin, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have removed every medieval outwork which had grown up around and rendered it lifelike; it now rises perpendicular and abrupt from the white surface of the square. Unless you had been told that it was the Notre Dame of Victor Hugo you would not look at its exterior twice. The interior is another matter. In external form Notre Dame cannot enter into competition with Canterbury. The barrack-like Hotel des Invalides, the tomb of Napoleon—was ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... thoughts for internal, company. After a morning service prolonged far beyond the hour of matins, led by the sweet and solemn Milton, I read Miss Martineau's last tale, founded upon the history of Toussaint L'Ouverture, in whom I have been interested. I have just read Victor Hugo's "Bug Jargal," his first novel, and also based upon the insurrection of St. Domingo. I feel that Miss Martineau's picture is highly colored, but the features must be correct. A strong, sad, long-suffering, far-seeing ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... James Avenue, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad Coolies of Trinidad Coolie Servant Coolie Merchant Church Street, St. George, Grenada Castries, St. Lucia 'Ti Marie Fort-de-France, Martinique Capre in Working Garb A Confirmation Procession Manner of Playing the Ka A Wayside Shrine, or Chapelle Rue Victor Hugo, St. Pierre Quarter of the Fort, St. Pierre Rivire des Blanchisseuses Foot of La Pell, behind the Quarter of the Fort Village of Morne Rouge Pell as seen from Grande Anse Arborescent Ferns on a Mountain Road 'Ti Canot The ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... orator's head at the Rostra, a thing not unlikely to have been done by a man to whose nature such grim irony was thoroughly congenial. [Sidenote: Stories of Sulla.] He evinced it on this occasion in another way, which may have suggested to Victor Hugo his episode of Lantenac and the gunner. He gave the slave who betrayed Sulpicius his freedom, and then had him hurled from the Tarpeian Rock. After this he set to work to restore such order as would enable him to hasten to ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... "I think it's Victor Hugo who says that the heart is the only bird that carries its cage," said Pelle, "but your heart refuses to take it when there is most ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... I say, believed that they had destroyed Malherbe and left the Classic a ruined, antiquated thing. They were in error. Victor Hugo himself, the leader, who most believed the classic to have become isolated and past, was yet, in spite of himself, constrained by it. Lamartine lived in it. After all the fantastic vagaries of mystics and realists and the rest, it is ruling to-day with increasing ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... nothing and drank nothing during the day, and by nine o'clock I had matured the plan that we carried into execution. It may be that I owed something to the fact that I had just completed the reading of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," containing such vivid delineations of the wonderful escapes of Jean Valjean, and of the subterranean passages of the city of Paris. This may have led me to the line of thought that terminated in the plan of escape adopted. ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... wishes to surprise genius labouring to give birth to perfection, one should consult the later editions of Victor Hugo's works and note the countless emendations he made after their first publication—here a more fitting word substituted, there a line recast, elsewhere an entire verse ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... one can. In this book Daudet simply smashes idols, tears down illusions, dances gleefully on sacred traditions, and I lay awake half the night reading him,—and forgot the advancing Germans. The book comes down only to 1880, so most of the men he writes about are dead, and most of them, like Victor Hugo, for example, ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... prospect of sudden riches was the attraction that drew them. England and the Continent were represented by some of the first families. A dozen were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge; there were two young relatives of Victor Hugo; there were a number of scions of the impoverished nobility of Bohemia; and several hundred Americans. Among the latter was William Morris Stewart, a Marysville lawyer, who was afterwards to become a ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... work-day world—the fanes wherein the very air seems redolent of devotion, and peopled with phantoms of the past! 'Spite of all disparagement, there is something grand and solemn about them. After service, I ascended one of the towers to the gallery immortalised by Victor Hugo's wonderful romance. The day was declining, and sunset had already commenced. The galleries were crowded with students and respectable operatives and bourgeois, with their wives and children. Every face was bathed in ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... of one's spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and "conviction of sin" that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man's interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo makes his Mahomet say:— ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... is refreshing for once to find an Englishman telling the story of Waterloo entirely from the French side, and speaking, for example, of left and right as if he had been—as in imagination he was—by the side of Napoleon instead of Wellington. Even M. Victor Hugo can see more merit in the English army and its commander. A radical, who takes Napoleon for his polar star, must change some of his theories, though he disguises the change from himself; but a change of a different kind came over Hazlitt as ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... by driving the typical king off the stage, only to make room for the generalisation of a shopkeeper? This was not the path that led to romanticism, to Andre Chenier, to De Vigny, to Lamartine, to Victor Hugo. Theophile Gautier has told us that the fiery chiefs of the romantic school who suddenly conquered France at the close of the Restoration, divided the whole world into flamboyant and drab. In the literature of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... planned to make this an old-fashioned discursive novel, say of the Victor Hugo variety, the second chapter would expend itself upon a philosophical discussion of Fat and a sensational showing of how and why the presence or absence of adipose tissue, at certain important crises, had altered the ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... Cade, Shan O'Neill, William the Silent, John Hampden and Pym, the Highlanders of the Forty-five, Robert Emmet and Wolf Tone and Parnell, Bolivar, John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Kossuth, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Danton, Victor Hugo, and the Russian revolutionists? These are haphazard figures of various magnitude, but all have the quality of rebellion in common, and all have been honoured with affectionate glory, romance, and even ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... to receive; and those who are first will be those who with lowly spirit serve most deeply. Heaven will be a place of boundless activity. "His servants shall serve him." The powers trained here for the work of Christ will find ample opportunity there for doing their best service. Said Victor Hugo in his old age, "When I go down to the grave, I can say, like so many others, 'I have finished my day's work;' but I cannot say, 'I have finished my life.' My day's work will begin again next morning. My tomb is not a blind alley, it is a thoroughfare; it closes ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... Victor Hugo gives the following impressive description of a death in the quicksand off certain coasts of ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... their lyres. Barthelemy, himself, the future author of the Nemesis, celebrated in enthusiastic verses the monarchical and religious solemnity; Lamartine, future founder of the Second Republic, published Le Chant du Sucre ou la Veille des Armes; Victor Hugo, the future idol of the democracy, sang his dithyrambic songs. Yet, in this concert of enthusiasm there were some discordant notes. Beranger circulated his ironic song Le Sacre de ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... event, in its course, to me. I was looking one evening, at bedtime, over the banisters, from the upper story into the hall below, with tiptoe eagerness that caused me to overbalance myself and turn over the rail, to which I clung on the wrong side, suspended, like Victor Hugo's miserable priest to the gutter of Notre Dame, and then fell four stories down on the stone pavement of the hall. I was not killed, or apparently injured, but whether I was not really irreparably damaged no human ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... scattered fragments of conversations, on either side met my ear, I was able to form some not very inaccurate conception of what insanity may be. Politics and literature, Mexican bonds and Noblet's legs, Pates de perdreaux and the quarantine laws, the extreme gauche and the "Bains Chinois," Victor Hugo and rouge et noir, had formed a species of grand ballet d'action in my fevered brain, and I was perfectly beside myself; occasionally, too, I would revert to my own concerns, although I was scarcely able to follow up any train of thought for more than a few ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Xenophon the son of Grylus, is the prototype, and Xenophon himself a sort of ancient Victor Hugo in this matter ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... French are dotingly fond of children," said Mrs. Follingsbee. "It's a national peculiarity; you can see it in all their literature. Don't you remember Victor Hugo's exquisite description of a mother's feelings for a little child in 'Notre Dame de Paris'? I never read any thing more ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... for. Michelet said, "My heart is full of her;" Balzac wrote a drama at her solicitation; Lamartine, taking to himself a published compliment which she had intended for another, replied with twenty beautiful stanzas; Victor Hugo wrote to her, "You are poetry itself;" Mademoiselle Mars, when past the age of public favor, took from her the plain counsel to retire with kindness and actual thanks; Dumas wrote a preface for her; Madame Recamier obtained her pension; the brilliant Sophie Gay, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... giving the light to Victor Hugo, to Charles Nodier, and Cuvier," ran the article, "Brittany of producing a Chateaubriand and a Lammenais, Normandy of Casimir Delavigne, and Touraine of the author of Eloa; Angoumois that gave birth, in the days of Louis XIII., to our illustrious fellow-countryman ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... happiness. He read much, often aloud in the evening—fairy-tales, of which he was devotedly fond, legendary lore of different countries, mediaeval romances, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs, Victor Hugo, Heine; and also Mark Twain. Later, in the spring, the days were devoted partly to composition and partly to long walks with his wife in the beautiful Frankfort woods, where was suggested to MacDowell the particular mood that found embodiment, many years later, in one of the last ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... be suggested at once. Notice Newman's first sentence describing Attica: "A confined triangle, perhaps fifty miles its greatest length, and thirty its greatest breadth." Like this is the beginning of the description of the battle of Waterloo by Victor Hugo. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my roof." Chopin refers to Sand as "My hostess," and signs himself "Ton vieux." In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that "le telegraphe electro-magnetique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats extraordinaires." He revels in puns ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... indifferences, Mrs. Errington included a definite indifference to the sufferings of those less fortunate than herself. Legacies came to her as often as mendicants to Victor Hugo's Bishop of D——. She received them with a quiet greediness so prettily concealed at first that nobody called it vulgar. As time went on this greediness grew to gluttony. Mrs. Errington began to feel that fatal influence which came upon the man who built walls with his gold, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of Naples constantly increases its list of prohibited books. Among the works now excluded, Humboldt's Cosmos, Shakspeare, Goldsmith, Heeren's Historical Treatises, Ovid, Lucian, Lucretius, Sophocles, Suetonius, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, E. Girardin, G. Sand, Lamartine, Valery's L'Italie, Goethe, Schiller, Thiers, A. Dumas, Moliere, all the German philosophers, and Henry Stephens's ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... these thrilling revelations that Victor Hugo intended to apply these so wonderfully appropriate lines? Was it he who bestowed upon Fabre, according to a poetic tradition, the name of "the Homer of the insects," which fits him ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... comme l'oiseau pose pour un instant Sur des rameaux trop freles, Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant, Sachant qu'il a des ailes.—VICTOR HUGO. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... before the reader a great variety of human beings, so that a sense of teeming existence is given, a genuine imitation of the spatial complexity of life, if not of its depths. It is this effect, afterwards conveyed in fuller measure by Balzac, by Dickens, by Victor Hugo and by Tolstoy, that gives us the feeling that we are in the presence of a master of men, whatever his ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... conviction sure. He opened the desk. His letter was nearly the first document he saw. It looked affrighting, awful. He dared not read it, to see whether its wording was fortunate or unfortunate. He departed, mystified. Upstairs in his bedroom he had a new copy of an English translation of Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame," which had been ordered by Lawyer Lawton, but would not be called for till the following week, because Lawyer Lawton only called once a fortnight. He had meant to read that book, with due precautions, in bed. But he could not fix attention ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... forms of superstition, and on one occasion we have their two accounts of the miraculous removal of a pillow in Claire's room, Claire avowing it had moved while she did not see it; and Shelley attesting the miracle because the pillow was on a chair, much as Victor Hugo describes the peasants of Brittany declaring that "the frog must have talked on the stone because there was the stone it talked upon." The result might certainly have been injurious to Mary, who was awakened by the excited entrance of Claire ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... but the slighter attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the torch could still be carried. It is not of course for the countrymen of Byron and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than for those of Victor Hugo, to say nothing of those of Edmond Rostand, to forget the occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all seem denied and only favour and facility recorded; but it would take more of these than we can begin to set in a row to purge us of that prime determinant, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... and subdue the section of bridge, I was reminded of Victor Hugo's splendid description of the sailor's battle with a ship's gun gone adrift in a night of storm. But there was a difference, I found that Hugo's narrative had stirred me more profoundly than was I stirred by this actual struggle ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... literary taste and aspiration. But Rousseau's genius acted as a powerful solvent of the classic tradition. Chateaubriand's influence was felt on the same side, continuing Rousseau's. George Sand, too, and Lamartine, were forces that strengthened this component. Finally, the great personality of Victor Hugo proved potent enough definitively to break the spell that had been so long and so heavily laid on the literary development of France. The bloodless warfare was fierce between the revolutionary Romanticists and the conservative Classicists in literary style, but the victory seemed at last ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... background. He sought from it an accompaniment, in the musical sense of the term, to the movements of his soul; and being somewhat prone to melancholy, his taste seems to have favoured sombre landscapes, stormy and tragical. The entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand, Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since it would be difficult to discover in him ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... opens out. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the penetrating, shattering, {213} tragically challenging note of appeal. They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle, "qui parle au precipice et que le gouffre entend," and the strenuous mood awakens at the sound. It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Its ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... on account of this snobbishness, which had something childish about it, that he sometimes became involved in discussions, not only with my aunt, but also with several of his friends, Victor Hugo among others, who could not bring themselves to forgive him for thinking more of the great and illustrious families with which his marriage had connected him than of his own genius and marvelous talents. Hugo most unjustly accused my aunt of encouraging this "aberration," ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... desolate rocks called the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the ever-bland Madeira and the over-bright Bahamas. The varied company of the isles embraces even Wight, where Cockney consumptives go to get out of the mist, and the Norman group consecrated to cream and Victor Hugo. The author's good descriptive powers are assisted by a number of drawings, many of which are finely done and well discriminate the local character of the different places, latitudes and circumstances ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... useful acrostic to the revolutionary party, who shouted "Viva Verdi," when they meant "Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D' Italia." "Ernani," produced at Venice in 1844, also scored a success, owing to the republican sentiment in the libretto, which was adapted from Victor Hugo's "Hernani." Many works followed in quick succession, each arousing the enthusiasm of the audiences, chiefly when an opportunity was afforded them of expressing their feelings against the Austrian rule. Only with his sixteenth opera did Verdi win the supremacy ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... 1832, Victor Hugo, in a speech before the Court of Commons, where he was trying to compel the government to let "Le Roi s'amuse" be given, spoke thus of the Imperial government: "Then, sirs, it is great! The Empire, in its administration ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... his achievements, by coercive measures—as, again for example, by means of a praetorian guard of partisans, such as Klopstock first created for himself in the Goettinger "Hain," but which was most effectively organized by Wagner, and such as Victor Hugo, imitating the German model, possessed in the Young Guard which applauded Hernani. Another method of enforcing his mastery is the organization of a systematic reign of terror, consisting of bitter satires, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... whatever humane or lovable traits prisoners may exhibit, they are after all criminals! The existence in a lost soul of good qualities or impulses side by side with evil ones has long been recognized. Victor Hugo illustrated the discovery in his Jean Valjean, it was a staple with Dickens, Bret Harte's heroes are all of that type, it was the inspiration of much of Charles Reade's eloquence, Kipling has more than a touch ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Republic, M. Grevy, to Prince Oscar and the Vega men then in Paris.—Wednesday the 7th. Dinner given to a numerous and select company of French savants by the then President of the Geographical Society and of the Institute, M.A. Daubree.—Thursday the 8th. Dinner to a small circle at Victor Hugo's house, where the elderly poet and youthful-minded enthusiast in very warm, and I need not say eloquent, words congratulated me on the accomplishment of my task. Reception there the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... bored graces of French society under Louis XV, more easily found their interpretation in the almond which in a manner summed up this epoch; then, after the ennui and jadedness of the first empire, which misused Eau de Cologne and rosemary, perfumery rushed, in the wake of Victor Hugo and Gautier, towards the Levant. It created oriental combinations, vivid Eastern nosegays, discovered new intonations, antitheses which until then had been unattempted, selected and made use of antique nuances which it complicated, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... other—the ancient halls of the corporations of Brussels, among which that of the brewers shows supreme by reason of the luxury of its carvings and the care wherewith its beauty and solidity have been maintained throughout the centuries. In one of the simplest houses of the square Victor Hugo first took refuge after the great catastrophe of the coup d'etat. It bore the number 27. A tobacco-shop occupied the ground floor. The poet's parlor was furnished in a style of bald simplicity, with chairs and a sofa covered with black haircloth. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more poetical than ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... ancestor and no pupil worthy of the name. He indulges in a dainty pessimism and is most of all an impressionist, not of the vogue of Zola—although he can be, on occasion, as brutally plain as he—but more in the manner of Victor Hugo, his predecessor, or Alphonse Daudet, his lifelong friend. In Loti's works, however, pessimism is softened to a musical melancholy; the style is direct; the vocabulary exquisite; the moral situations familiar; the characters not complex. In short, his place is unique, apart ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and exclude him. His work is practically certain to stand as archetypal for many future poetic efforts—so great is his power as an originator, so fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably the largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor Hugo's Legende des Siecles alone might be named with it for largeness, and even that with much less of a new starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman breaks with all precedent. To what he himself perceives and knows he has a personal relation of the intensest kind: ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... before Constantine was reached, a severe illness invalided him. He was a liberal in politics, the sincere friend of the working-classes, and was on intimate terms with men of letters, even with Victor Hugo, in spite of his advanced opinions. He was a patron of art and artists. Some beautiful table-pieces that he had ordered, by Barye, are now in the gallery of Mr. W. S. Walters, of Baltimore, they not having been completed when he died. His wife charmed every one by her good sense, ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... will dare call us 'infidels,' since Bishop Simpson, Henry Ward Beecher, and Dr. Tyng champion our cause, and proclaim it 'woman's duty to vote for the good of humanity'? Who will now dare sneer while the leading minds of Europe—among them Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Mazzini, Victor Hugo—must share the odium with ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in fact, this pair of sabots, over which you make so merry, is the creation of the shoemaker, the work of his genius, the expression of his thought; to him it is his poem, quite as much as "Le Roi s'amuse," is M. Victor Hugo's drama. Justice for all alike. If you refuse a patent to a perfecter of boots, refuse also a privilege to a maker ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Byron as they please, but this is certain that they show no poet who is to be compared with him" was and is the keynote of continental European criticism. A survey of European literature is a testimony to the universality of his influence. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Delavigne, Alfred de Musset, in France; Boerne, Mueller and Heine in Germany; the Italian poets Leopardi and Giusti; Pushkin and Lermontov among the Russians; Michiewicz and Slowacki among the Poles—more ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... colossal-immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... and there at the other the pale padre, questioning his visitor about Rachel. The mere name of a street would bring memories crowding to his lips; and when his guest would tell him of a new play, he was ready with old quotations from the same author. Alfred de Vigny they had, and Victor Hugo, whom the padre disliked. Long after the dulce, or sweet dish, when it was the custom for the vaqueros and the rest of the retainers to rise and leave the gente fina to themselves, the host sat on in the empty ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... lengthening and shortening of the verses. The final verses also express Don Flix's waning strength. This device is an attempt to imitate the crescendo and diminuendo effect of music. This whole passage is an obvious imitation of Victor Hugo's "Les Djinns," a poem included in "Les Orientales." Nowhere has Espronceda shown greater virtuosity in ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... that is left, the common residuum, to all these literary masters; to Homer, Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus, Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and knowledge? When we have got behind all the varying and often contradictory criticism of their several epochs; when we have stripped away the characteristics ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... of winning a nod from a passing duke; but I would have seen the "good grey head," and thrilled at the memory of "Vanity Fair" and "Henry Esmond." Similarly, in the Paris of that time or of a little earlier period, I would have considered the day well spent if in the course of it I had seen Victor Hugo with his umbrella, riding on the Imperiale of an omnibus, or the good Dumas exhibiting his woolly pate conspicuously in a boulevard cafe, or the author of "The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" posing at a table in the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... That French demagogue whom Victor Hugo aptly called Napoleon the Little was a prime factor in the history of the Union and the Confederacy. The Confederate side of his intrigue will be told in its proper place. Here, let us observe him from the point ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... he were a fool who, with Lycidas, or Gray's "Elegy," or certain choruses of "Prometheus Unbound," or page after page of Victor Hugo in his mind, should assert it to be in itself inimical, or a hindrance, or even less than a help, to sublimity; or who, with Dante in his mind, should assert it to be, in itself, any bar to continuous and sustained sublimity. But languages differ vastly in ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... may be translated into a somewhat Sioux cognomen—the Yellow Cow). A figure in rags with an inimitable limp, and a fashion of closing one eye that reminds one of Victor Hugo's Quasimodo of Notre Dame. A more intimate acquaintance proved there was much instruction, and a good deal of amusement, to be ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... in other literatures. Thus, whilst French Romanticism—in spite of what it may or may not have owed to Chenier—became often distinctly, deliberately, wilfully anti- classical, whilst for example [Footnote: As pointed out by Brunetiere, Evolution de la Poesie lyrique, ii, p. 147.] Victor Hugo in that all-comprehending Legende des Siecles could find room for the Hegira and for Zim-Zizimi, but did not consecrate a single line to the departed glories of mythical Greece, the Romantic poets of England may claim to have restored in freshness ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... ambition of the producers was natural, to go forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the attention for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels on the screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new triumphs. In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the possibility of giving a photographic rendering of any thinkable theater performance ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... Blunderer too many incidents, which take place successively, without necessarily arising one from another. Some of the characters are not distinctly brought out, the style has often been found fault with, by Voltaire and other competent judges, [Footnote: Victor Hugo appears to be of another opinion. M. Paul Stapfer, in his les Artistes juges et parties (2nd Causerie, the Grammarian of Hauteville House, p. 55), states:—"the opinion of Victor Hugo about Moliere is very peculiar. According to him, the best written of all the ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... by a former wife a son and daughter, who rival in good looks the celebrated children of our friend Victor Hugo," returned Louis Blanc. ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... "Victor Hugo mounted the tribune. He failed to achieve success. He was listened to as Felix Pyat was listened to, but he did not obtain as much applause. 'I don't like his ideas,' Vaulabelle said to me, speaking of Felix Pyat,' but he is one of the greatest writers and the greatest orator of France.' ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... passage in one of Victor Hugo's novels in which the writer affectionately apostrophizes the Paris of his youth—those quaint old streets of the Quartier Latin so redolent of the happy associations which cling to the springtide of life. Were Thackeray ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... considers the traditions that have controlled English education for centuries, and recalls the conservatism that rules English life, one can only marvel at the tremendous strides taken by England during the last third of a century. Victor Hugo says: "The English patrician order is patrician in the absolute sense of the word. No feudal system was ever more illustrious, more terrible, and more tenacious of life." England has had to overcome her patrician ideas in regard to education, and her growth in ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Victor Hugo's description of the marine monster said to be found in the vicinity of the Channel islands, and known as the Devil Fish. It is apparently formed of an almost transparent jelly, colorless, almost indistinguishable from the water which surrounds it, armed with long ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... renown. The Hotel de la Rochefoucauld of Madame Ancelot became a second Hotel de Rambouillet, where the classical Parseval-Grandmaison, who spent twenty years over his poem Philippe-Auguste, held armistice with the young champion of the Romantic school, Victor Hugo. The Princess de Vaudemont received her guests in Paris during the winter, and at Suresnes during the summer; and her friend the Duchess de Duras' causeries were frequented by such men as Cuvier, Humboldt, Talleyrand, Mole, de Villele, Chateaubriand, and Villemain. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the First Empire seem to be more than a lifetime away from us; and yet it was in that day that Victor Hugo lived as a child in the old convent of the Feuillantines so graphically described in "Les Miserables." Here he and his two brothers lived with their mother in the strictest seclusion, while the father, General Hugo, a soldier ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Victor Hugo might have taken his character of Quasimodo from the wild figure who now enters the Greco, with a pair of horns for sale; each horn is nearly a yard in length, black and white in color; they have been polished by the hunchback until they shine like glass. Now he approaches ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... public, and it is true to the life. Some critics frankly called it melodramatic. I do not object to the term. I know nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare's plays. Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic; Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Sir Walter Scott. The charge of melodrama is not one that should disturb a writer of fiction. The question is, are the characters melodramatic. Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as we are on this subject at last, I want to ask you, do you believe mother is gone—absolutely blotted out of existence?" She waited in tense silence, and as they passed a street-lamp, and the light fell on his face, he seemed to have grown suddenly pale. "Do you believe Darwin and Spencer and Victor Hugo have gone to nothingness?" ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... allusion to Cuvillier-Fleury, my brother Aumale's tutor, and Victor Hugo thought he owed both the gentlemen a grudge. M. Trognon, a distinguished pupil of the Ecole Normale, had begun his teaching career as professor of rhetoric at the college at Langres, where, coming in one day to take his class, he found his desk occupied ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Day-dreams, but too often fulfilled—the old story of centralization doing its work; look at the map of Normandy, and see how the 'chemin de fer de l'Ouest' is putting forth its arms, which—like the devil-fish, in Victor Hugo's 'Travailleurs de la Mer'—will one day draw irresistibly to itself, our fair 'Toiler ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... funeral, the glorious yet bitter seal upon his destiny, Victor Hugo delivered a magnificent address, and in his capacity as poet and seer proclaimed with assurance ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... liquor in any other way. The grasp with which liquor holds a man when it turns on him, even after he has abused it for a lifetime, compared with the ascendency possessed by opium over the unfortunate habituated to it for but a single year, is as the clutch of an angry woman to the embrace of Victor Hugo's Pieuvre. A patient whom, after habitual use of opium for ten years, I met when he had spent eight years more in reducing his daily dose to half a grain of morphia, with a view to its eventual complete abandonment, once spoke to me in ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... so recently left Saxonland, where public opinion is opposed to everything that has the faintest shade of Magyarism, that I felt in the state of Victor Hugo's hero, of whom he said, "Son orientation etait changee, ce qui avait ete le couchant etait le levant. Il s'etait retourne." The transition was certainly curious, but I confess to getting rather tired of the mutual recriminations ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... Like a trip-hammer down on his bulbous knee, And he roared: "Her Nanny? By gum, we'll see If the public's time she dares devote To the educatin' of any dam goat!" "You do not entirely comprehend— Hernani's a play," said his learned friend, "By Victor Hugo—immoral and bad. What's worse, it's French!" "Well, well, my lad," Said Smith, "if he cuts a swath so wide I'll have him took re'glar up and tried!" And he smiled so sweetly the other chap Thought that himself was a Finn or Lapp Caught in a storm of his native snows, With a purple ear and ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce |
