rhapsodizev.

1745 D. Fordyce Dialogues conc. Educ. I. ix. 247 I am not, replied Hiero, so positive in my Opinion, from any mean Conception of our Friend's Abilities, but from a Sense of my own Incapacity of rhapsodizing so coherently.

1767 A. Campbell Lexiphanes (ed. 2) 28 Having thus reciprocally rhapsodized, we disparted. The bard retired behind the umbrageous hedge.

a1822 P. B. Shelley Ion in Prose Wks. (1888) II. 130 How is it..that..you continually go about Greece rhapsodising, and never lead our armies?

1846 G. Grote Hist. Greece II. i. xxi. 173 That the Thebaïs and the Epigoni were then rhapsodised at Sicyôn as Homeric productions.

1853 W. Mure Crit. Hist. Lang. & Lit. Antient Greece IV. iv. §5. 261 [He] would hardly have laid so much stress on the rhapsodising of the history of Herodotus by Hegesias..had he been aware that Herodotus himself had rhapsodised it at Olympia.

1886 F. B. Jevons in Jrnl. Hellenic Stud. 7 307 We do know on good external evidence that the Iliad was rhapsodised.

1964 Phoenix 18 11 The Chian Cynaethus..is said to have rhapsodized the Homeric epics at Syracuse during the sixty-ninth Olympiad.

1787 G. Grace Short Plea for Human Nature & Common Sense 19 If a Roman Catholic..wished to rhapsodise upon the present situation of things in this country, what a field has been opened to him!

1806 H. K. White Let. 22 Sept. in Remains (1807) I. 252 I..shall be happy to spend a few days with you at Clapham, and to rhapsodize on your common.

1862 G. W. Thornbury Life J. M. W. Turner I. 230 He never rhapsodized about scenery.

1923 Mod. Philol. 21 170 It is when rhapsodizing over the physical superiority of early man that Rousseau falls into the often-quoted language which probably has done most to give hasty readers the impression that he identifies the state of nature with the ideal state.

1962 Washington Daily News 25 July 44/1 I'm humiliated when he rhapsodizes over someone else's sensational figure and beautiful eyes.

1994 Times Lit. Suppl. 20 May 16/4 Dali himself rhapsodized over the stickiness and pliancy of the Art Nouveau architecture of his fellow Catalan Antoni Gaudi.

1819 Monthly Rev. Mar. 323 Not only were politics rhapsodized in the course of that tremendous occurrence [sc. the French Revolution], but rhapsodies became political.

1886 New Princeton Rev. Mar. 246 The noble poet, Wergeland, rhapsodized his nationality in prose and verse.

1922 F. L. Pattee Sidelights on Amer. Lit. 72 He translated Nietzsche and explained him and rhapsodized him to an America which..had never heard his name even.

1963 L. M. Packer Christina Rossetti 385 ‘Santa Christina shone like a light’..Miss Tynan rhapsodized.

1995 Philadelphia Inquirer 7 Aug. a1/5 ‘Kvas is very nourishing, like liquid bread,’ rhapsodized..the chief lab technician at the Moscow kvas factory.

2001 Kenyon Rev. & Stand Spring 137 The War for Thebes rhapsodizes her [sc. Egypt's] resistance to foreign invaders, substituting the Asian Hyksos tribes for the contemporary British colonials.