Edmund Gosse Quotes (1849-1928)

“The measure, as used by the early Greeks, is essentially lyrical and impassioned. Mingled with other metres, it was constantly serviceable in choral writing, to which it was believed to give a stormy and mysterious character.”

“When brutes were deified, And Memnon in the sunrise sprang and cried, And love-winds smote Bubastis, and the bare Black breasts of carven Pasht received the prayer Of suppliants bearing gifts from far and wide!”

“Pope was not a classic of prose; he wrote almost exclusively in a highly finished artistic verse, which may evade the romantic formulas, but is either poetry or nothing.”

“If I were asked to point to a passage which combined all that prose fiction should not be—lurid sentimentality, preposterous morals, turgid and sickly style—I do not think I could point to anything worse than the closing chapters of Howard's End. I meant to say how good, in the earlier part of the book, is much of the character-painting. The real talent of the author is for delicate, ironic painting of straightforward natures. How excellent is Aunt Juley! The quiet lives of people of that type, to whom nothing happens, who do not meet with manslaughterers and bastards and Jane-Eyre-borrowed lunatics in their walks abroad—that is what your author was born to depict. And I am now going to read a few chapters of Mrs. Gaskell to take the taste of Howard's End out of my mouth.”

“Vogüé was a stoic, but beneath his moral austerity there glowed humanity none the less attractive because it was veiled by reserve.”

“Fresh with all airs of woodland brooks   And scents of showers, Take to your haunt of holy books   This saint of flowers.”

“He had imperfections, prejudices, limitations, but when we have recognised them all, he remains the greatest literary critic that the world has seen.”