Word: gem
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...with this full life, she wrote poetry, but write it she did-reams of it, in relentless iambic pentameter. It was dourly didactic, endlessly hortatory: "Come, come, I'll show unto thy sense,/ Industry hath its recompense." Some of it was inadvertently funny: "Was ever gem so rich found in thy trunk/ As Egypt's wanton Cleopatra drunk?" Yet when her work was published in London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up In America, it became one of the "most vendible books in England," and when its author died in 1672 her eulogist said: "Time...
...amazing piece of music. Subtitled "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," its four movements are labelled, respectively, "Emerson," "Hawthrone." "The Alcotts," and "Thoreau." In "Hawthorne" Ives unleashes all his powers of satire as he incorporates Debussy-like ragtime, fragments of Protestant hymns, and purposely misharmonized American bombast -- "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," for example--into an acid brew that recalls the "This Scherzo Is a Joke" movement of the Piano Trio. Mendelssohn and the Beethoven Fifth make their appearance in "The Alcotts," a merciless parody of all the cliches of nineteenth-century musical sentimentality. Of the four, the "Thoreau" movement...
...biggest cheers were rightly saved for the last curtain calls, when out stepped the dapper figure of Balanchine himself-a gem of a choreographer...
HAYDN: THREE QUARTETS, OPUS 54 (Epic). The Juilliard String Quartet once again displays its unsurpassed exactness of intonation and joint attack as it makes each quartet a finely chiseled gem-all without sacrificing warmth or passion, as in the C Major Adagio, with its deep-voiced Hungarian lament under the dancing arabesques of the violin...
What attacks Generals fatally and finally is neither its cliché-ridden script nor its miscast stars, but the gemütlich approach of Director Anatole Litvak. The slick editing and the bright, bold colors seem less to polish the picture than to varnish it, and they cannot cover the film's faults. The waifs of German-occupied Warsaw are too plump and well padded, the armies seem too clean and well mannered. And the officers are too self-consciously symbolic of Germany's decadence and decency, grossness and grace. Somewhere beneath it all is a plausible plot...