idyls

Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways.

Robert Browning 1892

And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last decade -- the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it.

Robert Browning 1892

It is a bit like the difference between the way 18th century aristocrats would play at being shepherds and shepherdesses in the summer such pastoral idyls being idyls of peace and contentment to an even greater universal extent than the ocean and what it actually is like to be a shepherd in autumn, winter and spring.

Dork of the Sea Michael May 2008

There are very few good tragedies; some are idyls, in very well-written and harmonious dialogue; and others a chain of political reasonings that set one asleep, or else pompous and high-flown amplifications, that disgust rather than please.

Candide 2007

This style belongs to productions of mere amusement; to idyls, eclogues, and descriptions of the seasons, or of gardens.

A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.

The Titan 2004

But I think the marriage of Gen and the singer is a sign that although idyls can't be sustained int he real world, they still exist and are meaningful.

readersguide Diary Entry readersguide 2003

And although he quotes Virgil in Latin, his speaking of the eclogues of "the overrated Virgil" as "stale imitations of the idyls of Theocritus" would seem to demonstrate that he cannot have had any very close acquaintance with this poet in the original, since Virgil, unlike Theocritus, is particularly accomplished in those qualities — tight verbal pattern and subtle effects of sound — which Nabokov particularly admires.

The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov Wilson, Edmund 1965

His patriotic verse is fervid, his idyls are graceful and his humorous verse delightful.

A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country Thomas Dykes Beasley

In summary catalogue may be named: lyrics, both delicate and stirring; ballads; romantic dreams and fancies; descriptive poems; sentimental reveries, and idyls; long narratives, in which he displays perfect narrative skill; delightfully realistic character-sketches, some of them in dialect; dramas; and meditative poems, long and short, on religious, ethical, and social questions.

A History of English Literature Robert Huntington Fletcher