Word: speranza
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...overlooked influence on Wilde's career was his mother, from whom Oscar apparently inherited more than his big, undulant frame. Massive-headed Lady Wilde, who claimed descent from Dante, wrote poetry under the name Speranza, hot-headed Irish patriot propaganda under the name John Fenshawe Ellis. When her hard-drinking, ugly doctor-husband got mixed up in sex scandals, she either denounced the girl or paid no attention. (Dr. Wilde, knighted nine months before his worse scandal, left a family in every farmhouse, said G. B. Shaw.) Grieved that Oscar was not a girl (he looked, said a visitor...
...devotional silence. Then Representative Guyer, onetime high-school principal, onetime judge, onetime mayor of Kansas City, Kans., presented the Republican tribute to the dead. He quoted Felicia Hemans, Tennyson, Shakespeare (twice), Joseph Addison, William Cullen Bryant, William Winter. He drew on three foreign tongues: from Dante, Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate; from Bishop Jean Baptiste Massillon's funeral oration over Louis Quatorze, Dieu seul est grand; from a "lucid saying" of the Romans, Sic transit gloria mundi. Two he translated for the benefit of his less cultured colleagues...