Origin of The Term
The phrase stately home is a quotation from the poem The Homes of England, which was originally published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827. The poem is by Felicia Hemans, and it begins as follows:
- The stately Homes of England,
- How beautiful they stand,
- Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
- O’er all the pleasant land!
Noël Coward, English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, wrote and performed a parody of the above:
- The stately homes of England,
- How beautiful they stand,
- To prove the upper classes
- Have still the upper hand.
In the later, Las Vegas phase of his career, Coward revised his lyrics:
- The stately homes of England,
- We proudly represent;
- We only keep them up
- For Americans to rent....
Read more about this topic: Stately Home
Famous quotes containing the words origin of, origin and/or term:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.”
—Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)