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More "Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... above the storm, while the head has been connected up to the heart, and they are doing team-work that is good for me and good for all who meet me. At church I like to have them sing the hymn whose closing couplet is: ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... published in the "Cambro-Briton" is somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... about the year 1564, and still in existence, I believe) she is represented, by way of derision, as herself in the pulpit, and preaching to a congregation of eight Huguenots seated. Underneath is the bitter couplet, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... of all. Granted;—for private enjoyment; and for private enjoyment keep them. They are not at all the less written you know, because you divide them. The couplet does not cease to be, nor does its meaning change. But take it away, and all appropriation ceases, and a very pretty gallant charade remains, fit for any collection. Depend upon it, he would not like to have his charade ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... another song. Those in the cabin paid little heed until the sailor's voice roared out the couplet: ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... consummation; her second, the Infante of Spain, died immediately after their union; and her third, the duke of Savoy, left her again a widow after three years of wedded life. She was a woman of talent and courage; both proved by the couplet she composed for her own epitaph, at the very moment of a dangerous accident which happened during her journey into Spain to join her second ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... in the midst of the reaction and those who had fought at the barricades on the 18th of March applauded when the couplet was sung, of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rhyming couplet with a quaint musical intonation, as though it was the refrain of a song, and after her voice and laughter had died away she went on nodding her head in time to the brushing as if she were singing ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... nothing but a catalogue of the specialties of May; but how the dickens to wind the thing up is what puzzles me. It's too beautiful and truly poetic to be spoiled by a completing couplet like: ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... of contemporary evidence must be added the information derivable from the posthumous publications enumerated in the former part of this article. The publication of 1723 was made by direction of the duchess of Buckingham. The couplet, "Tho' prais'd," &c., and the appended note, were omitted. In 1726 Mr. alderman Barber republished the volumes "with several additions, and without any castrations," restoring the couplet and note as they were printed in 1717. In the Original poems of Dryden, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... of four times in the first part. The pause is in them, as in the rest, variously placed through the course of the verses; and thus they bear no more resemblance than their associates, to those minute Elegies of twelve alternate rhimes, closing with a couplet, which assume the name of Sonnet, without any other resemblance to that order of Verse, except their limitation to fourteen lines. I never found the quadruple rhimes injurious to the general expression of the sense, but in the excepted instances. When it is considered ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... school. We called him "Bunty Lord." One evening after school four boys, of whom I was one, while playing on the commons, found a dead sheep. It was suggested that we carry the sheep into the schoolroom and place it on Lord's seat. This was promptly done and I wrote a Latin couplet, purporting that this was a very worthy sacrifice to a very poor Lord, and placed it on the head of the sheep. The next morning Lord found the sheep and made a great outcry against the indignity. Efforts were made at once to ascertain the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... intelligence which besets those who are known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them anonymously to magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of "How we Beat the Favourite" that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a versemaker. The success of his republished "collected" poems gave him courage, and the unreserved praise which greeted "Bush Ballads" ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... as is rarely found in any Englishman, he was destined to be a great social as well as a great artistic success. He loved the society of men of birth and fashion; he seems to have had a more passionate desire to please in private even than in public, and almost to have justified the often quoted couplet ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... you! Here's a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. "Here's a stanza On Braganza— Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup Of warm water—" "What's the matter?" "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this brutal ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... your sign?" said the dean. "Oh, the pole and bason; and if your worship would just write me a few lines to put upon it, by way of motto, I have no doubt but it would draw me plenty of customers." The dean took out his pencil, and wrote the following couplet, which long graced ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... on no other mission than that referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans. Swarms of turkeys are driven ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... A couplet of verse, a period of prose, may cling to the rock of ages as a shell that survives ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to the easily-remembered couplet: ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... theory common in this and the last century is that it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes, one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense, to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have imagination ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... instead of universal peace and good-will towards men,—that the Rights of Man included murder, confiscation, and atheism,—that the Sovereignty of the People meant the rule of King Mob, who seemed determined to carry out to the letter Diderot's famous couplet,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... replied, in the same light tone. 'I am going to Germany sometime—going to Wiesbaden, and I mean to find that house and the picture which Miss Raymond says I am so much like; then I shall know how I look to others. You remember the couplet: ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... There were not words strong enough for the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the People par excellence, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... grace of this charming last couplet, but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight perceptible to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... two lines as they stood in some obscure edition anterior to 1801, and the withers of poor G. are again wrung. His letter is a gem—with his poor blind eyes it has been laboured out at six sittings. The history of the couplet is in page 3 of this irregular production, in which every variety of shape and size that Letters can be twisted into, is to be found. Do shew his part of it to Mr. R. some day. If he has bowels, they must melt at the contrition so queerly character'd of a contrite sinner. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... hand in hand with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called "poetic diction." Indeed he was hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a lifelong adherence to a metre—the heroic couplet—with which this same poetic diction was most closely bound up. He did not always escape the effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature. ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... by to tell her that she must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him: ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe" with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet occurred: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... preference of the two favourite odes, which he estimates, in his raptures, at the value of a kingdom. I will, however, venture to recommend Cowley's first piece, which ought to be inscribed, To my Muse, for want of which the second couplet is without reference. When the title is added, there will still remain a defect; for every piece ought to contain, in itself, whatever is necessary to make it intelligible. Pope has some epitaphs without names; which are, therefore, epitaphs to be let, occupied, indeed, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... at the end of the acts. It began with 'The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs,' and was transformed into 'The Three Wishes'; this passed into 'Red Riding Hood' (with the wolf changed into a cannibal who sang a very comical little couplet), and finished as 'Cinderella,' varied with other ingredients. These pieces were in every respect excellently mounted and played, and I gained a very good notion there of the imaginative fare in which the English people can find amusement. I found the performances at the Olympic Theatre ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... rhymes; Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line, it "whispers through the trees":{13} If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep," The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep": Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song,{14} That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.{15} Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... stated intervals, as is done in 'Tears, idle tears' and elsewhere: but clearly none of these would be available to a translator. Where therefore he has to express stanzas, it is easy to see that rhyme may be admissible and even necessary. Pope's couplet may (or may not) stand for elegiacs, and the In Memoriam stanza for some one of Horace's metres. Where the heroes of Virgil's Eclogues sing alternately four lines each, Gray's quatrain seems to suggest itself: and where a similar case occurs in these Idylls (as for instance in the ninth) I ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... each couplet of the Angelus, is recited that short hymn of praise, beginning with the words which the angel of the annunciation addressed to Mary,[1] "Ave Maria." This is why the hour after sunset is so often called ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... chant these lines he ended his recitation of the chapter, and began also to sing and repeated the following couplet, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... opened, disclosed two sea biscuits—the square, thin kind, like a soda cracker—and upon each was painted a tiny marine view in water-colors, while beneath was a couplet done in ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... from Dane-shire, the shire of the Danes, though it is known to have had its name before ever the first Dane landed in England, and there seems to be little likelihood, therefore, but only "a sympathie in letters." He concludes his discussion by the couplet: ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... poems, whether the experiment of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement; it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... it—still, his sympathies are indubitably subordinated to the effort, the successful effort, to bring off a neat point, to make a pun in the right place, to be striking, antithetical, epigrammatic. His verses have the finish, in their way, of Pope's couplet and Ovid's pentameter. His best known and most praised work appeals, primarily, to the taste and the ear: always, perhaps, to the head rather than to the heart. There is something of "hard brilliance" in Praed: he writes ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... contribucion f. tax. convencer to convince. conveniente useful, fitting, proper. convenir to agree, fit, suit. convento convent. convertir to convert. convicto convicted. convidar to invite. convoy m. convoy, escort, train. copa cup. copla couplet, ballad, song. corazon m. heart. cordillera chain of mountains. corneta cornet; —— de llaves cornet-a-pistons. corona crown. coronar to crown. coronel colonel. coronilla crown of the head. corral m. yard. correo mail, post-office. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... and I took the pen and wrote the six sorts of writing in use among the Arabs, and each sort contained an original verse or couplet, in praise of the Sultan. And not only did my handwriting completely eclipse that of the merchants, but it is hardly too much to say that none so beautiful had ever before been seen in that country. When I had ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... (1685-1732) whose best known piece "The Beggar's Opera" was said to have made "The Rich gay and Gay rich"? He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph was by Alexander Pope, followed by Gay's own mocking couplet, "Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once and now ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... couplet de la chanson de Klein-Zach! Quand il avait but de genivre et de rack If fallait voir flotter les pans de son frac Comme des herbes dans un lac Le monstre faisait flic ...
— The Tales of Hoffmann - Les contes d'Hoffmann • Book By Jules Barbier; Music By J. Offenbach
... gentil Troubadour, Si tu reviens fidele, Chant un couplet pour celle Qui benit ton retour." "Pardonnez mon refus, Pelerine jolie, Sans avoir vu m'amie, Je ne ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... followed her graceful course to the side of her parents, he groaned, half humorously, and then went wandering about the upper hallway, a prey to conflicting emotions, engendered by the new point of view which the girl had unconsciously presented. A couplet of Browning's was running through his mind and more than once he ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like "the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice," which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be called the worst couplet in the world's literature. In his real poetry (even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Russian, I forget which, her sleep seemed to her the happy life; her waking hours a bad dream. She had just had her only pleasurable waking in three years. The memories of her childhood had sung their melodious ditties in her soul. The first couplet was heard in a dream; the second made her spring out of bed; at the third, she doubted her ears,—the sorrowful are all disciples of Saint Thomas; but when the fourth was sung, standing in her night-gown with bare feet by the window, she recognized Brigaut, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so, and found ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... A Persian couplet said by a lover to his mistress is, 'Gold has no scent and in the scent of flowers there is no gold; but thou both ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... and on each there was a lovely group of mountain foliage, flowers, or ferns, all beautifully executed in pen and ink, while underneath the design, or cunningly woven around it, was written, in a dainty hand, some appropriate verse or couplet, quotations from various authors, with now and then a bit of real heart rhyme that had been the outgrowth ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... but in the days when these terms meant something in real life there was a distinction. The talisman was probably at first an astronomical figure, but later the term became more comprehensive. Pope portrays this astrological import in his couplet, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Tacitus.—Although Byron is, by our school rules, a forbidden author, I sometimes contrive to indulge myself in reading his works by stealth. Among the passages that have struck my (boyish) fancy is the couplet in "The ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... unassailable by reason of their ramparts of wealth, that they lived in comfort, if not in luxury, while those whom they dominated were struggling hard for a bare subsistence. I can imagine the youth reciting the couplet which sets out ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... the Semitic goddess Ishtar and by the Sumerian goddess Nintu or Ninkharsagga. In the passage in the Babylonian Version, "the Lady of the Gods" has always been treated as a synonym of Ishtar, the second half of the couplet being regarded as a restatement of the first, according to a recognized law of Babylonian poetry. We may probably assume that this interpretation is correct, and we may conclude by analogy that "the holy Innanna" in the second half of the Sumerian couplet is there merely employed ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... statements are greatly exaggerated, The Traveller is interesting because it contains beautiful descriptions and apt expressions of thought. The verse employed is the heroic couplet, the favorite verse of the eighteenth-century poets. The lines rhyme in pairs, and often a couplet expresses a complete thought. Each line contains ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... Uhland in his lyrics but rarely gives us directly his own emotional life, preferring to let the shepherd, the soldier, the mountain lad speak. The type of the simple folksong predominates, and from the VOLKSLIED Uhland introduced into modern verse the modified Nibelungen stanza and the rhymed couplet. In his ballads Uhland prefers older historical subjects, as in Taillefer, that rarest jewel among his ballads; or at least uses an historic setting, as in the more popular ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... of medical Science on the subject—Science which however, adds nothing to our knowledge and leaves us still in darkness and uncertainty, while memory brings a well known couplet to the mind: ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... luxuriant; he is tempted to say many things which might be better omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words. But when the difficulty of artificial rhyming is interposed; where the poet commonly confines his verse to his couplet, and must continue that verse in such words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme, the fancy then gives leisure to the judgment to come in; which, seeing so heavy a task imposed, is ready to cut off ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... degree practically acquainted with those very different kinds of versification. I will venture to assert that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme, is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he is at invention ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... mistress, fleeting through the shades of night, awoke me, behold! my chamber was deserted, and far off was the place of our meeting. He says also,' continued the eunuch, 'that he cannot complete the piece, and will give a rich present to anyone who adds to it a second couplet to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... of the first order took any direct part in it, did much to embitter the relations of their respective parties.[16] Not less irritating were the jeux d'esprit with which Canning continued to assail the ministry in the newspaper press.[17] The most famous of these is the couplet:— ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... necessarily acetic. The presence of vinegar in a dressing, like that of onions and its relatives, on most occasions should be suspected only. Wyvern and other true epicures consider the advice of Sydney Smith, as expressed in the following couplet, "most pernicious":— ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we find ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... sang, and the audience, tittering curiously before, remained spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness of the ending of comedies, of the regret which lingers in the remembrance of past laughter. In a couplet of passionate melancholy she asked, where are the roses of yesterday? whither ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... first couplet, "Stay, adder," &c., makes the burden of the song. Now I have conversed enough with poetry to judge thus much that not only there is nothing barbarous in this invention, but, moreover, that it is perfectly Anacreontic. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... can trace? Self-love, ambition, envy, pride, Their empire in our hearts divide. Give others riches, power, and station, 'Tis all on me an usurpation. I have no title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher. In Pope I cannot read a line, But, with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Pox take him and his wit!' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous, biting way. Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the aid of clippings, and by printing that poem by Lowell which was his mother's favorite, wherein was the couplet ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Occasions'] for the perusal of some friends, which, with many other pieces, is withheld from the present volume. To draw the attention of the public to insignificance would be deservedly reprobated; and another reason, though not of equal consequence, may be given in the following couplet:— ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... a "stone": mund, is hand, and by periphrasis "land of fist"; so that Hallmund is meant by this couplet, and that was the real name of "Air," who is not a mere man, but a ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... hand, may easily be made to confront its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the visible shame of refutation. Such shame would settle upon every page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. And the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor breathed an aspiration, which he would not willingly ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... confusion of that great occasion I recall two toasts. One was offered by John Fox. "Japan for the Japanese, and the Japanese for Japan." Even the Japanese wardroom boy did not catch its significance. The other was a paraphrase of a couplet in reference to our brown brothers of the Philippines first spoken in Manila. "To the Japanese: 'They may be brothers to Commodore Perry, but they ain't no brothers ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... custom of Shakespeare's age, to conclude acts and scenes with a couplet, a custom which was continued ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... son kept staring at Thorgerda Glum's daughter; his wife Thorhillda saw this, and she got wroth, and made a couplet upon him. ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... seem to have been written some time earlier than 1627. The Elegies comprise a great variety of styles and themes; some are really threnodies, some verse-letters, some laments over the evil times, and one a summary of Drayton's literary opinions. He employs the couplet in his Elegies with a masterly hand, often with a deliberately rugged effect, as in his broader Marstonic satire addressed to William Browne; while the line of greater smoothness but equal strength is to be seen in the letters to Sandys and Jeffreys. ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... of the most respectable of the governors, was found, at his death, with a copy of verses in his pocket, which included the following couplet: ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter of Mr. Hawes, a South Sea director, and died in 1788. Lord Vane died in 1789. Boswell distinctly states, that the lady mnentioned in Johnson's couplet "was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose Memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett, but Ann Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London." See Boswell's Johnson, vol. i. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of the Lady Chapel is divided by buttresses into three bays, and has crocketed gables to each. The aisles show a lancet in the lower story, with a blind couplet beneath a quatrefoil in the gable; the central compartment has a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... these finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... freezing, and she shivered not a little. The drawing-room, fourteen feet by ten, was fitted up as a ballroom, with two fiddlers and a fifer sitting in a corner and a country-dance was performing when we arrived. Over the mantle-piece was a square of laurel twigs, inclosing as a frame this couplet from the poetical brain of the master of the house, cut out in red paper, and bespangled with ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the boasted inspiration of the Apollo! I cannot help—pity me!—I cannot help preferring the Antinous. Was it not Socrates who said that the statuary found his statue in the block of marble? Then Michael Angelo was by no means original in his couplet— ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... written to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of London, 1701; for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as follows: ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Myself by his side holding a candle to him. Then he began to sing. It was an awful tune—I think he called it sevens—but he made common-sense of my doggerel by one alarming emendation. When he came to the couplet I have given you, what do you ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... very pretty couplet, 'Every leaf of the foliage of a green tree is, in the eye of a wise man, a library to teach him the wisdom of his Creator.'[6] I may remark that, where an Englishman would write his own name, a Hindoo would write that of his god, his ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... distinctive feature of the church is the very decorative 'Greenway' chapel. John Greenway was a rich wool-merchant of Tiverton, and on the walls of the chapel was inscribed this couplet: ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... anxious mother heard to her joy, a rhymed couplet and caught the sound of a name, several times repeated. It sounded ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... took it to the camp. This has resulted in my having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... long lines that conclude each stanza of this charming love-poem, instead of rhyming alternately as in the translation, chime somewhat to the tune of Byron's Don Juan—six lines rhyming with each other, and the two last forming a separate couplet. In other respects the translation, it is hoped, is sufficiently ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... these are fixed and conventional, and others are of his own contrivance. Spanish uses the terms estrofa and copla to designate an arrangement of verses in a stanza. Copla must not be confused with English "couplet." These are general terms; most verse-forms are designated by special names. The following verse-forms are found in the ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... exceeds that of the grape. He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a dram, without the ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... descriptions of the various visual experiments of this and the following chapters, the first word of the couplet which describes the condition of the experiment, for example, white-black, always designates the visual condition which the animal was to choose, the second that which it was to avoid on penalty of an electric shock. In the case of Tables 6 and 7, for example, white cardboard was placed in one ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... say—for, alas! there was no speculation in the other. His dexter daylight was utterly darkened, and, indeed, the orb that remained was as sanguinary a luminary as ever struggled through a London fog at noonday. To borrow a couplet or so from the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... with the apparent want of unity in many of the Odes. The Orientals compare each couplet to a single pearl and the entire "Ghazal," or Ode, to a string of pearls. It is the rhyme, not necessarily the sense, which links them together. Hence the single pearls or couplets may often be arranged in various ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... grew older his handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet: ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... modern English literature by the Romance school of the fourteenth century. Our original English versification, on the other hand, was neither rimed nor rhythmic. What answered to metre was a certain irregular swing, produced by a roughly recurrent number of accents in each couplet, without restriction as to the number of feet or syllables. What answered to rime was a regular and marked alliteration, each couplet having a certain key-letter, with which three principal words in the couplet began. In addition to these two poetical devices, Anglo-Saxon verse shows traces of ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... the poet brings the whole scene before us at once, as it were by enchantment; and in this single couplet we feel all the effect that arises from the terrible wildness of a region unenlivened by the habitations of men. The verses that describe so minutely the camel-driver's little provisions have a touching influence on the imagination, and prepare the reader to enter more feelingly into his ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Perhaps the couplet in which Boileau depreciates Tasso may serve as well as any other specimen to justify the opinion given of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:— ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... several ballads of ten, twenty, or thirty couplets to be sung through, feigning by his silence to admit his defeat. Then the bridegroom's camp rejoiced and sang aloud in chorus, and thought that this time the foe was worsted; but at the first line of the last couplet, they heard the hoarse croaking of the old hemp-dresser bellow forth the ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... to the cupboard, 'in the name of Politics, take this and meditate upon him.' The shops being all shut on Sunday, he certainly bought it, anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and, as soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his repeating a couplet, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... charming couplet Mr. Lagg started toward the rear of his store, where the aromatic odor of ground coffee indicated that ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... presents more difficulties than this, in which M.A. has availed himself of a passage in the Cratylus of Plato. The divine hammer spoken of in the second couplet is the ideal pattern after which the souls of men are fashioned; and this in the first terzet seems to be identified with Vittoria Colonna. In the second terzet he regards his own soul as imperfect, lacking the final touches which it might have ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... those in Cataline. On what provocation Marsten thus censured his friend is unknown, but the practice has been too frequently pursued, so true is it, as Mr. Gay observes of the wits, that they are oft game cocks to one another, and sometimes verify the couplet. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... we find that our religious poetry has gone down into the deeps. There are indications of such a tendency in the older times, but neither then were the questions so articulate, nor were the questioners so troubled for an answer. The alternative expressed in the middle couplet seems to me the most imperative of all questions—both for the individual and for the church: Is man fashioned by the hands of God, as a potter fashioneth his vessel; or do we indeed come forth from his heart? Is power or love the making might of the universe? He who answers this question ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... be seen in many places is the solving of historical enigmas. Some ancient celebrity is represented by an animal in a rhyming couplet; and the man who detects the hero under this disguise wins a considerable sum. Such is the native passion for gambling that bets are even made on the result of the metropolitan examinations, particularly on the province to which will fall the honour ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Benevolence and Taste, have ease and vigour enough to shew that he could, with a little practice, have written as well in the couplet measure as he did in blank verse. If Armstrong cannot be styled a man of genius, he is at least one of the most ingenious ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... holding in hand the wand which she again thrust into the frying pan, saying, "O fish! O fish! be ye constant to your olden covenant?" And behold, the fish lifted their heads, and repeated "Yes! Yes!" and recited this couplet: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone of the well-bred causeur, as free from classical mannerism as it ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Addresses' should still carry weight. In the burlesque couplet, ascribed in the first edition to the younger Colman and afterwards transferred to Theodore Hook, ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... passage already quoted under Pope's version from Odyssey, xiv. 29, what is the meaning of that singular couplet— ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... poet, has a doggerel narrative entitled "A New Discovery by Sea with a Wherry from London to Salisbury," 1623, wherein he mentions a woful night with fleas at Goring, and pens a couplet worthy to take a place with the famous description of a similar visitation ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... this time I recognized that the song was in the Greek language. I remained looking intently in that direction, until the form faded into a mere shadow; and then, as darkness increased, seemed to multiply before my aching eyes, and assume all sorts of fantastical shapes. Every now and then, a couplet, or a stanza, came sweeping up. It was evident the lady, whoever she might be, was not singing merely to amuse the child. The notes were sometimes lively, but, in general, sad and plaintive. I listened long ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... had a faithful personal ally in the person of the Procureur-Syndic, the most important national functionary in the city. This man, Couplet, called Beaucourt, was a disreputable and apostate ex-monk who had married an ex-nun. His position, of course, gave him a great influence over the least respectable part of the population, and with Marat and Danton at his back in Paris he cared ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... is pronounced Hie; doire, is trees or woods; luchd, people; and leigh, healing; and also a physician, whence the old English word for a doctor, a leech, so that the couplet means ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... [515] This ridiculous couplet pretends to imitate the redundancy and nonsensicality of Aeschylus' language; it can be seen how superficial and unfair the criticism of Euripides is; probably this is just what Aristophanes wanted to convey by this ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... more taxing of brains than most players care for. The ordinary rhyming game, without using paper, is for one player to make a remark in an easy metre, and for the next to add a line completing the couplet. Thus in one game that was played one ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... round hand on thin letter-paper) pleased me with the touching sentiment with which they seemed to be inspired. I learnt them by heart, and decided to take them as a model. The thing was much easier now. By the time the name-day had arrived I had completed a twelve-couplet congratulatory ode, and sat down to the table in our school-room to ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... calculations. It does not appear, indeed, that the Chinese were, at any time, able to predict an eclipse, notwithstanding all that has been said in their favour on this subject. The reputed Chinese tables, published by Father Couplet, have been detected to be those of Tycho Brahe; and Cassini found the chronology of their eclipses, published by Martinus, to be erroneous, and their returns impossible. It could not indeed be otherwise; the defectiveness of the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commended. "Madam," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... strange association of tragedy and romance: he was a patron of one of those poets who, approved by neither gods nor columns, are remembered by the accident of an accident, and was himself a poetaster, capable of the couplet,— ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... villages on the road between Norwich and Cromer. A third couplet alludes merely to the situation of a group of villages ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... so it became with me. Like most children, I had my own rather vivid idea of the day of judgment. The thought of death was familiar to me. (It is seldom, I think, a painful one in childhood.) I fully realized the couplet which concluded a certain quaint old rhyme in honour of the four Evangelists which Nurse Bundle had taught me ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Memory, or a New and Complete Treatise of Analogy between the French and English Languages," compiled by Charles Turrell, Professor of Languages, and published in 1828, contains the words which are the same in each language (alphabet, banquet, couplet, &c.), and those almost the same—"Letters necessary in English, and superfluous in French, are included in a parenthesis, thus Bag(g)age. Letters necessary in French, and superfluous in English are printed in ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... barefoot until they were ten, and who count the hard winters by their frozen toes." And he is fond of quoting in this connection—the only quotation, by the by, that the old gentleman ever makes—that couplet ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... I remarked, without any great show of emotion, feeling, I suppose, that without worldly goods we might consistently be without elegance. And in the back of my brain I was silently revising our old Kansas pioneer couplet into ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Here the satirist, leaving politics, applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard Steele in his couplet: ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... followed after an unusually good dinner, when the world and the Madigans were young together, had inspired Old Mother Gibson. The original couplet, with which all Madigans are familiar, is not strictly quotable; it was not invented, but adopted, by them. And it served merely to give a name to the game, which was half a war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the north, and Allahabad on the east, is said never to have been visited by a famine; and this exemption from so great a calamity must arise chiefly from its being so well studded with hills and groves. The natives have a couplet, which, like all good couplets on rural subjects, is attributed to Sahadeo, one of the five demigod brothers of the Mahabharata, to this effect: 'If it does not thunder on such a night, you, father, must go to ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... some intervals, until July, 1712, though Tutchin himself died in 1707. For his partisanship for Monmouth poor Tutchin came under the anger of Judge Jeffreys, who sentenced him to several floggings. Pope's couplet in the "Dunciad" ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... basis of marriage. The famous couplet of Rosalind still holds good. The sex instinct (or rather instincts, for coupled with sex-desire is love of beauty, admiration, joy of possession, triumph, etc.) has the unique place of being more regulated by law and custom than any other basic instinct. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... town was hardly at any time in a state of quietude. As described by an observant writer, "every man became a soldier and every house that was not a mere peasant's hut was a fortress." A local poet of the Seventeenth Century summed it up in a terse if not elegant couplet as his ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Lord Mallow were standing in the embrasure of a window, walled in by the crowd of aristocratic nobodies and intellectual eccentricities, talking earnestly of poor Erin and her chances of ultimate happiness, the lady, almost unawares, quoted a couplet of her own which seemed peculiarly applicable to ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... one couplet corresponds to the ten thousand feet in the other, while the bathing of the feet corresponds to the waving of the arms. Couplets of this kind are always attractive to the Chinese child as well as to the scholar, and poems and essays are replete ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... last, truly enough, our pathway led among the chickens and the geese. Indeed, one blustering gander "quite thought to bar our way." But, taking courage from the stirring old couplet, ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... In the masterly couplet closing the sestet of No. XVIII, Mr. Irwin's verbal enthusiasm reaches its highest mark in an ultra-Meredithian rendition of "I am an easy mark," an expression, by the way, which would itself have to be elaborately translated ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... was coaxed home and got upstairs, but then, in a gush of politeness, he insisted on seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking, Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet, which covered ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... looking into a camera obscura—you saw faces shining and speaking—the smoke curled, the lights dazzled, the oak wainscotting took a higher polish—there was old Sarratt, tall and gaunt, with his couplet from Pope and case at Nisi Prius, Mounsey eyeing the ventilator and lying perdu for a moral, and Hume and Ayrton taking another friendly finishing glass!—These and many more windfalls of character he gave us in thought, word, and action. I remember his once describing three different persons ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... both as to the Verse and the Sense; for it makes the thing described more immediately present than it would be otherwise. I cannot just now recollect an Example in Milton of this nature, but I remember one in Fairfax, in a Couplet already cited. ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... Britain is called English. These three languages are extremely like one another; but the Continental language that is likest the English is the Dutch or Hollandish dialect called Frisian. We even possess a couplet, every word of which is both English and Frisian. It ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... He wrote so many pages a day of so many lines each. He overtook an immense amount of work in the year. He published many books, and he made a great deal of money. The great English lawyer Sir Edward Coke divided his time according to the well-known couplet— ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... conspiracy of silence regarding the writers of the Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all adopted. Even Ovid, never ungenerous though not always discriminating in his praise, dismisses him in a list of Latin poets with a single couplet of vague eulogy. In the reactionary circles of the Empire, Lucretius found recognition; but the critics who, according to Tacitus, ranked him above Virgil may be reasonably suspected of doing so more from caprice ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... therefore unlike many which we have too frequently heard, and to which, but for the undeserved imputation which we should seem to cast upon our good friend Sir Henry Ellis, might be applied, with a slight alteration, that couplet of Mathias which tells— ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... that we arise, I and thou, and go forth this night from this land and seek us a town wherein we may wone and witness naught of the doings of yonder traitress; for whoso is absent from the eye is absent from the heart, and quoth one of the poets in the following couplet:[FN528]— ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the child in a tone of relief; and she repeated softly to herself the hymn which she had said to the old man. The last couplet was scarcely audible. ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... expresses the deepest personal emotion through the medium of a literary style that had been developed by long years of study. The Laments, to be sure, are not based on any classic model and they contain few direct imitations of the classical poets, though it may be noted that the concluding couplet of Lament XV is translated from the Greek Anthology. On the other hand they are interspersed with continual references to classic story; and, more important, are filled with the atmosphere of the Stoic philosophy, derived from Cicero and Seneca. And along with this austere teaching ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... him; plenty of both. Enough should be said to defeat the malice and stupidity of detractors. Those who want to know what he was in himself should read the poems. The poems are the man speaking. They are so like him that to read them is to hear him. The couplet— ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... gazing up at the tower. I soon found it, because it was the only one in that quarter from which I could see the top of the tower. It recorded the life and death of an aged pair who had been married fifty years, concluding with the couplet— ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... at Brieg, where he was sometime ducal councillor. In 1654 he published Salomon von Golaws deutscher Sinngetichte drei Tausend, the name Golaw being a disguise of Logau. They vary in length from a couplet to a hundred lines or more, and disclose in the aggregate a virile and interesting personality. The text follows Eitner's edition in Deutsche ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... simple topic as 'How to Retain a Husband's Love'—if your attention is being distracted by a conscientious rendering of Czerny's 101 Exercises in an adjoining room. I could get no further with my article than the opening lines (they like an introductory couplet ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... observed at once by reference to the text that in form the two poems are identical. They contain the same number of lines and feet as surely as all sonnets do. Each travels upon two rhymes with the members of a broken couplet in widely separated refrain. To the casual reader this much is obvious, but there are many subtleties in the verse which made the authorship inevitable. It was a form upon which he had worked for years, and made his own. When the moment arrived the medium was ready. ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... perturbed by the paucity of her native language. There appeared to be nothing to rhyme with "love" except "shove," "above," and "dove." Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated the final couplet doubtfully: ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Monsieur Dacier rather thinks that Horace refers here, as in the words Versibus impariter junctis, "Couplets unequal," to the use of pentameter, or short verse, consisting of five feet, and joined to the hexameter, or long verse, of six. This inequality of the couplet Monsieur Dacier justly prefers to the two long Alexandrines of his own country, which sets almost all the French poetry, Epick, Dramatick, Elegiack, or Satyrick, to the tune of Derry Down. In our language, the measures ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... usually begins at about three-quarters after six. I found also, that my good friend the Bencher had already spent three of his distichs; and only waiting an opportunity to hear a sermon spoken of that he might introduce the couplet where "a stick" rhymes to "ecclesiastic." At my entrance into the room, they were naming a red petticoat and a cloak, by which I found that the Bencher had been diverting them with a ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... The first couplet is general in character. It inculcates obedience to the precepts of the teacher, and gives as reason the assurance that thereby long life and peace will be secured. True to the Old Testament conception ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... shone upon my hand, reminding me always of her who gave it, and on this hand it shall go down into the grave. It is a plain circlet of thick gold, somewhat worn now, a posy-ring, and on its inner surface is cut this quaint couplet: ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that "he writes very well for a gentleman." His serious pieces are sometimes elevated; and his trifles are sometimes elegant. In his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained. In his Odes to Marlborough there are beautiful lines; but in the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... it has changed so often," and asked, "What is the origin of yours?" "Briant—brilliant, of course." He told the butler to close the door behind me lest I catch cold from a draught, quoting this couplet: ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the ant's passionate outburst to the thistle, and the thistle's reply, instead of a Sir Walter and Queen Elizabeth couplet. Long, lance-shaped, deeply cleft, sharply pointed, and prickly dark green leaves make the ascent almost unendurable; nevertheless, the ant bravely mounts to where the bristle-pointed, overlapping ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... place, and had a few dollars to the good. During one of the two years a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day. It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on the tombstones they ordered. They themselves, in most cases, knew none, and they asked Francois to supply them—as though he kept them in stock like marble and sand-paper. He had no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was an imaginary poem from which Turner professed to quote whenever he wanted a line or a couplet to explain his pictures, the avowed quotation being really of his own composition. Sir David Wilkie, the distinguished painter, died at sea on his way home from the Orient, June 1, 1841. His body was consigned to the sea at midnight of that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... title-page informs us of what all bibliomaniacs will be disposed to admit the truth, that the collection contained "a very great variety of uncommon books, and scarce ever to be met withal," &c. There is, at bottom, a small wretched portrait of Hearne, with this well known couplet subjoined: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... maiden, though, by the way, it would read extremely similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman—not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so—and the pursuit is much the same in one case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet— ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by Shakespeare's contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. {95b} A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Bossuet, with his rhetorical graces; La Bruyre, with his gallery of characters, not one of which was moulded among the people; De la Rochefoucauld's maxims, drawn from the arcana of fashionable life; Racine, whose heroes die with an immaculate couplet and speak the faint echoes of Grecian or Roman sentiment! When politics became common property, and the walls of a prescriptive and conventional system fell, how wild ran speculation and sentiment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... acquaintance with each of these tongues. Their earliest playthings were French alphabet-blocks, and the set which served as toys and tasks for each of the elder brothers came at last to him as his legacy. The letters were formed by the human figure in different attitudes, and each block had a little couplet below the picture, beginning with the letter on the block. The Y represented a gymnast hanging by his hands to a trapeze, and being a letter which does not occur in the Hungarian language except in combinations, excited most the interest and imagination of the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... thing is not allowed in comic poetry. When I opened my well-known military epic, "Riddles of the King," with the couplet, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... of his acquisition. Yet even the worthy Corporation of his native city will, we doubt not, be willing to allow that the Blue-Coat Charity boy might be entitled to the praise he gives Canning in the next couplet: that he— ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... rehearsals; and many of his friends are of opinion, that our present poets are indebted to him for their happiest thoughts; by his contrivance the bell was rung twice in Barbarossa, and by his persuasion the author of Cleone concluded his play without a couplet; for what can be more absurd, said Minim, than that part of a play should be rhymed, and part written in blank verse? and by what acquisition of faculties is the speaker, who never could find rhymes before, enabled to rhyme at the conclusion ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... pen-combat was really lamentable; they displayed such an equality of excellence that the umpires refused to decide, till one of them espied that Mr. German had omitted the tittle of an i! But Mr. More was evidently a man of genius, not only by his couplet, but in his "Essay on the Invention of Writing," where occurs this noble passage: "Art with me is of no party. A noble emulation I would cherish, while it proceeded neither from, nor to malevolence. Bales had his Johnson, Norman his Mason, Ayres his Matlock and his Shelley; yet Art the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that," spoke Mr. Lagg, being now too interested to quote a couplet. "Matters were going on well, and I expected to close the deal, and make a pretty penny, when the doctors said they couldn't take the property, as it was haunted, and of course a haunted house, with queer noises in the night, would never do as a home for nervous ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... orthography." His orthography is indeed deplorable. In one of his letters wright is put for write, woed for would. He challenged Tenison to dispute with him in Latin, that they might be on equal terms. In a contemporary satire, entitled The Advice, is the following couplet ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... may not be accused of plagiarism, we acknowledge ourselves indebted for the hyperbole contained in the last two lines of these introductory stanzas, to an original recommendation for a proper display of rapture, as contained in the following couplet by one Peter Ker, wherein he very humanely invites all the vessels belonging to Great Britain to strand themselves out of joy for the accession ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... rubbish-heap of old-world verses, now decayed beyond the industry of the most persevering of Dryasdusts. Nay, he even succeeded by some mysterious means in getting one of his poems published separately. It was called 'Inebriety,' and was an unblushing imitation of Pope. Here is a couplet by way ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Ferrier's favourite of the whole. Here I shall think it's you who are wrong. You see, I did not try to make good verse, but to say what I wanted as well as verse would let me. I don't like the rhyme "ear" and "hear." But the couplet, "My undissuaded heart I hear Whisper courage in my ear," is exactly what I want for the thought, and to me seems very energetic as speech, if not as verse. Would "daring" be better than "courage"? Je me le ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the only couplet in which beasts as well as birds are subjected to this searching analysis. I think you will admit that it is the most sagacious and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... of the poetical, or rhyming ability, is found in the following couplet, written by him for his ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... bees; and butterflies were there, thick as motes in the midday sun. Roberta's observant, nature-loving eyes roved delightedly from one point to another of the sunny landscape, while she repeated gaily to Mam' Sarah a little couplet. The child's memory was ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... not wash out; in the Saxon Garden at Warsaw there broods the memory of long-dead things, coeval with the stately trees that shade its walks, and with the carp that swim to-day in its ponds as they doubtless swam there when "Lieber Augustin" was a living person and not as yet an immortal couplet. And St. James's Park, with its lawns and walks and waterfowl, harbours still its associations with a bygone order of men and women, whose happiness and sadness are woven into its history, dim and grey as they were once bright ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... but broad meadows, arable land, and woodlands, and his only warfare is with the lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to the easily-remembered couplet: ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... crams into one couplet after another, philosophy after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean, Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid," and finds "the gorgeous table spread with fair-seeming ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... happy confusion of that great occasion I recall two toasts. One was offered by John Fox. "Japan for the Japanese, and the Japanese for Japan." Even the Japanese wardroom boy did not catch its significance. The other was a paraphrase of a couplet in reference to our brown brothers of the Philippines first spoken in Manila. "To the Japanese: 'They may be brothers to Commodore Perry, but they ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... devoted Whig, at a time when Whiggism meant friendship for the American Colonists; and the open expression of this friendship cost him his place as a Royal Chaplain. I will remember this longer than I remember his "English Garden,"—longer than I remember his best couplet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... not predictions or the result of calculations. It does not appear, indeed, that the Chinese were, at any time, able to predict an eclipse, notwithstanding all that has been said in their favour on this subject. The reputed Chinese tables, published by Father Couplet, have been detected to be those of Tycho Brahe; and Cassini found the chronology of their eclipses, published by Martinus, to be erroneous, and their returns impossible. It could not indeed be otherwise; the defectiveness of the calendar must necessarily falsify all their ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... misfortune, mischance. contribucion f. tax. convencer to convince. conveniente useful, fitting, proper. convenir to agree, fit, suit. convento convent. convertir to convert. convicto convicted. convidar to invite. convoy m. convoy, escort, train. copa cup. copla couplet, ballad, song. corazon m. heart. cordillera chain of mountains. corneta cornet; —— de llaves cornet-a-pistons. corona crown. coronar to crown. coronel colonel. coronilla crown of the head. corral m. yard. correo mail, post-office. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... upon a stanza or two, which have floated to us with their precious freight, over the sea of centuries, and will float on unsubmergible by all the waves of Time. The soul of Simonides lives to us in a single couplet; but that is the very stuff of Eternity, which neither fire will assoil, nor tempest peril, nor the wrath of years impair. The Infinite has no degrees; wherever the world sees in any human being the fire of the Everlasting, it bows with equal awe, whether that ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... pretty couplet, 'Every leaf of the foliage of a green tree is, in the eye of a wise man, a library to teach him the wisdom of his Creator.'[6] I may remark that, where an Englishman would write his own name, a Hindoo would write that of his god, his parent, or ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... acquainted with those very different kinds of versification. I will venture to assert that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme, is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... is, by our school rules, a forbidden author, I sometimes contrive to indulge myself in reading his works by stealth. Among the passages that have struck my (boyish) fancy is the couplet in "The Bride of Abydos" ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... deriving the word Devonshire from Dane-shire, the shire of the Danes, though it is known to have had its name before ever the first Dane landed in England, and there seems to be little likelihood, therefore, but only "a sympathie in letters." He concludes his discussion by the couplet: ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... hear, Sire, what Campan says to us?"—"Yes, I hear," said the King, and continued his game. Monsieur, who was in the habit of introducing passages from plays into his conversation, said to my father-in-law, "M. Campan, that pretty little couplet again, if you please;" and pressed the King to reply. At length the Queen said, "But something must be said to Campan." The King then spoke to my father-in-law in these words: "Tell M. d'Inisdal that I cannot consent to be carried off!" The Queen enjoined M. Campan to take ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... a couplet so apropos, and so well delivered, as to have the immediate effect of restoring order and making the farmer look foolish. Encouraged by the voice of his great patron, Green once more essayed to finish his speech, which he did by a fresh assurance of the surprise by which he had been taken by ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet— ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... white) of Auvergne, the rouveau, and the paradis of Provence, are of oldest repute. This reminds us of the couplet by the author of the "Street ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... among them was one long quiver-shaped basket of birch bark, with something heavy under the green leaves that lay at the top. Lifting these, a slender bas-relief of a calla lily in plaster appeared, with this couplet slipped into the blue cord by which ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... and songs. The last incident which I recollect, was my LEARNED AND WORTHY patron falling from his chair, just as he concluded a long lecture upon temperance, by reciting, from the "Gentle Shepherd," a couplet, which he RIGHT HAPPILY transferred from the vice of avarice ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... construct a spacious hut (muro) and invite the eighty doubtful characters to a banquet. An equal number of Jimmu's soldiers acted as hosts, and, at a given signal, when the guests were all drunk, they were slaughtered. Jimmu composed a couplet expressing his troops' delight at having disposed of a formidable foe so easily, and in this verselet he spoke of one Yemishi being reputed to be a match ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... or a New and Complete Treatise of Analogy between the French and English Languages," compiled by Charles Turrell, Professor of Languages, and published in 1828, contains the words which are the same in each language (alphabet, banquet, couplet, &c.), and those almost the same—"Letters necessary in English, and superfluous in French, are included in a parenthesis, thus Bag(g)age. Letters necessary in French, and superfluous in English are printed in Italics, thus Hommage." At first sight it seems as ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... forest. I heard him indulging in memories and anecdotes of date sittings after long hunts; but I was myself always on a hunt for my beginning, and none of his words clearly reached my intelligence until I was aware of his reciting an excellently pertinent couplet:— ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... of any flesh-and-blood maiden, though, by the way, it would read extremely similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman—not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so—and the pursuit is much the same in one case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet— ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... terms meant something in real life there was a distinction. The talisman was probably at first an astronomical figure, but later the term became more comprehensive. Pope portrays this astrological import in his couplet, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... merely for the entertainment of a private circle." He regarded Swift, however, as a pattern of correctness both in style and sentiment, and he read to his young friend some of the short poetical addresses to Stella. Amicus says Smith expressed particular pleasure with one couplet— ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... during the next half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" resembled such a typical eighteenth century figure as Voltaire. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Blake. Now because of his immense powers we are accustomed to think of Shakespeare as almost superhuman: we pay that tribute to his genius, his strength, and the enormous impression they produce on us. But a single couplet of Blake's will carry more of this uncanny superhuman imagination than the whole five acts of Hamlet. So great is Shakespeare, that he tempts us to think him capable of any flight of wing; but set down a ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... will be good fun for you to find out what it means. He adds that there is but one letter of the alphabet wanting, to make sense; this is used over and over, and, if you put it into the right places, the text will turn into a rhymed couplet. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with "Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more of deep and sustained gravity than is ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... then repose ourselves on the dazzling white mats, and listen to the singular duet sung by those two mousmes: a strange musical medley, slow and mournful, beginning with two or three high notes, and descending at each couplet, in an almost imperceptible manner, into actual solemnity. The song keeps its dragging slowness; but the accompaniment, becoming more and more accentuated, is like the impetuous sound of a far-off hurricane. At the end, when these ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... long straw in its beak flew right across Maxine's garden, a little winged poem, a couplet enclosing the whole ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... much nettled by the insulting jests passed upon them by the despots. Mamercus, who plumed himself on his poems and tragedies, gave himself great airs after conquering the mercenaries, and when he hung up their shields as offerings to the gods, he inscribed this insolent elegiac couplet upon them. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... iron gratings of the upper Claverias, giving on the roofs, there was generally a voice singing the ancient couplet, no doubt inspired ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... arms and legs, the latter somewhat bowed, making him appear even shorter than he was. It was these legs of his, together with his big round head and shock of reddish hair, that inspired some genius of the school with a couplet which was often chanted by the boys when they caught sight of Joe ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... original Hebrew, each clause consists of three words. In such an antithetic parallelism the words of one couplet, at least, must correspond in meaning, as here memory and name; while the others are in contrast—just and wicked, is blessed and shall rot. Sometimes the two clauses are to be mutually ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the Gods", is attested as a title borne both by the Semitic goddess Ishtar and by the Sumerian goddess Nintu or Ninkharsagga. In the passage in the Babylonian Version, "the Lady of the Gods" has always been treated as a synonym of Ishtar, the second half of the couplet being regarded as a restatement of the first, according to a recognized law of Babylonian poetry. We may probably assume that this interpretation is correct, and we may conclude by analogy that "the holy Innanna" in the second half of the Sumerian couplet is there merely employed as a synonym ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... Ronald's awkward couplet gave him employment for the rest of the morning, and lunch-time found him still dissatisfied. An adjective avoided his quest—the right adjective; the one and only word which expressed the precise shade of meaning desired. From ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was acknowledged by us all, and we never thought of a rivalry with him. No man ever cantered a hack through the Champs Elysees with such elegant assurance; no man ever made such a massacre of dolls at the shooting-gallery; or won you a rubber at billiards with more easy grace; or thundered out a couplet out of Beranger with such a roaring melodious bass. He was the monarch of the Prado in winter: in summer of the Chaumiere and Mont Parnasse. Not a frequenter of those fashionable places of entertainment showed a more ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... incomprehensibility and power. She has some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian model, and generally end with a couplet. Her blank verse is the worst of all. The most ambitious poem in the book is that called "A Day in the Life of Mary Stuart," a dramatic poem in three scenes, dated the last of January, 1567. It contains a scene between the queen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... cents. Burke, on taking his seat beside Pitt in the great Paine Parliament (December, 1792), had protested that he had not abandoned his party through expectation of a pension, but the general belief of those with whom he had formerly acted was that he had been promised a pension. A couplet of the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... kept staring at Thorgerda Glum's daughter; his wife Thorhillda saw this, and she got wroth, and made a couplet upon him. ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... and live; animals grow, live, and feel;" this is the well-worn, not to say out-worn, diagnosis of the three kingdoms by Linnaeus. It must be said of it that the agreement indicated in the first couplet is unreal, and that the distinction declared in the second is evanescent. Crystals do not grow at all in the sense that plants and animals grow. On the other hand, if a response to external impressions by special movements is evidence of feeling, vegetables share this endowment ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... of the castle, which they found undefended. As they entered they beheld a shield suspended from a pilaster of gold. The device was a white eagle on an azure field, in memory of the bird of Jove, which bore away Ganymede, the flower of the Phrygian race. Beneath was engraved the following couplet: ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... thirty-seven stanzas; the second of seventy-two; the third of forty-eight; each stanza of eight ten-syllable verses, of which the first six rhyme alternately; the last two are a couplet. There is a short argument, in verse, prefixed to each poem. That of the first ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... arrangements which change in every scene, beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by Shakespeare in the Rape of Lucrece, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes, and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a third rhyme comes forward in the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... in order to save the situation: "That last couplet is not at all necessary;" and Daddy Taille, who had got red up to the ears, looked round ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... with a note of tenderness in his voice, and took her hand to lead her away, humming in an undertone the last couplet ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... met with a very wide and warm acceptance. I remember one extremely happy, the refrain of which still runs in my head. It is written on the newly-adopted Italian tricolour flag. After characterising each colour separately in a couplet, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... admirably upon her lute, being informed beforehand upon what subject she was to sing. The words were so agreeable to the prince of Persia's sentiments, that he could not forbear applauding her at the end of the couplet. "Is it possible," cried he, "that you have the gift of knowing people's hearts, and that the knowledge of what is passing in my mind has occasioned you to give us a taste of your charming voice by those words? I should ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... to have written it, and who indeed claimed it for his own—the chevalier de Boufflers. I do not know whether you recollect the lines in question. I will transcribe them from memory, adding another couplet, which was only known amongst our own particular circle, but which proves most incontestably the spirit of kindness with which the stanzas were composed. Lise, ta beaute seduit, Et charme tout le monde. En vain la duchesse ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... without family cares, he could give himself unreservedly to authorship. In 1660 he published a satire upon the vices of Paris, which inaugurated his great success. Seven satires appeared in 1666, and he afterward added five others. Their malicious wit, their novel form, the harmonious swing of the couplet rhyme, forced immediate attention. They held up contemporary literary weaknesses to scorn, and indulged in the most merciless personalities, sparing not even his own brother, the poet Gilles Boileau. All retorts upon himself the author bore with complacent superiority which ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Gascoigne, to prove that such a stanza was known to our old English poets. "The greatest part of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (says the latter gentleman, p.30), and his Legend of Good Women, are in the decasyllabick couplet; but in general Lidgate's, Occleve's, Rowley's, Spenser's, and a great part of Chaucer's poetry, is written in stanzas of seven, eight, or nine decasyllabick lines; to which Rowley generally adds a tenth, and closes it with an Alexandrine. All these may be ranked under ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... walls too, when I was a boy—and in refuge at Canonbury Tower, near the village of Islington, these are the places where Goldsmith wrote for children. Sir Joshua Reynolds tells how, when he called on the poet at Green Arbour Court, he found the couplet:— ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... expected rhymes, Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line it "whispers through the trees" If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep" The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep" Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song [356] That, like a wounded snake ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... Pope crippled meaning and weakened force to procure a rhyme—nay, since he actually planned the rhymes to make his couplets before he penned his poetry, to him not infrequently it was far more to rhyme than realise. In Goldsmith's couplet, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... young Priest, who was about to say his first Mass that day in the Chapel of the Carmel, bore the Blessed Sacrament to the dying Sister; and at her desire, Sister Mary of the Eucharist—whose voice was exceptionally sweet—sang the following couplet: ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... time when Croesus sent his present to the inhabitants of Delphi, he took the opportunity to address another inquiry to the oracle, which was, whether his power would ever decline. The oracle replied in a couplet of Greek verse, similar in its style to the one recorded on the ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... giving more time to the word "great" in the first line, and to the word "world" in the last line. The idea may be indicated by supposing that the word "O" has been omitted from the beginning of the first and last line. The first line of the last couplet is peculiar in that every one of the four feet contains three syllables with the accent on the last. All the other lines consist each of four feet of either two or three syllables. Technically the poem is anapestic tetrameter much varied by the introduction of iambic ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... Oglethorpe, says, "I had the pleasure of knowing him well;" and, in a note upon the couplet quoted from Pope, says, "Here are lines that will justly confer immortality on a man who well deserved so magnificent an eulogium. He was, at once, a great hero, and a great legislator. The vigor of his mind and body have ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... think of the expression which a great painter should give to genius, I always have before me that magnificent head. I had a moment of enthusiasm." And further, he adds that one day he saw him listening to Monti while the latter was singing his first couplet in the "Mascheroniana." "I shall never forget," said he, "the divine expression of his look; it was the serene look ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the first act opens with a vivacious chorus of the guests at Violetta's supper, leading to a drinking-song ("Libiamo, libiamo") in waltz time, sung first by Alfred and then by Violetta, the chorus echoing each couplet with very pretty effect. After a long dialogue between the two, closing with chorus, Violetta has a grand scena which is always a favorite show-piece with concert artists. It begins with an andante movement ("Ah! ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... succeeded. Stephanie just missed. Walter and Rupert and Foch had jolly soft roes, a fact which is recorded in a cynical little poem by the precocious Foch, believed to be the only literary work of a whitebait now extant. We have only space here to quote the opening couplet:— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... the first words which come to hand, rhymed richly and not at all, as destitute of sense as the gesture of the tree and the sound of the wind, which have their birth in the vapor of pipes, and are dissipated and take their flight with them. This is the couplet by which the group replied to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... which had been expected of the venerable commander of the army of the Shenandoah. He had spent three months of time, and ten millions of money, and had only emulated the acts of that Gallic sovereign whose great deeds are immortalized in the brief couplet, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... hearty jolly way, but a little late, and some time after the joke was over. Pray, why should all gentlemen have a literary turn? And do we like some of our friends the worse because they never turned a couplet in their lives? Ruined, perforce idle, dependent on his brother for supplies, if he read a book falling asleep over it, with no fitting work for his great strong hands to do—how lucky it is that he did not get into more trouble! Why, in the case of Achilles himself, when he was sent by his mamma ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which so much was inspired by personal regret. On this account it has a special literary interest as the most modern thing of the Renaissance. It would be far less surprising to find this written by one of the young republicans under the Second Empire (for instance) than to find a couplet of Malherbe's straying ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... were practically unassailable by reason of their ramparts of wealth, that they lived in comfort, if not in luxury, while those whom they dominated were struggling hard for a bare subsistence. I can imagine the youth reciting the couplet which ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, complete outer ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... well expressed by a couplet which was very popular with the eight-hour speakers of that period: "Whether you work by the piece or work by the day, decreasing the hours increases the pay." Steward believed that the amount of wages is determined by no other factor ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... enough for the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... While Mr. Cross was at dinner John wrote in a large hand the fine couplet. The teacher returned and called the school to order. He looked at the blackboard, then, searchingly, at John Briggs. ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... curry and harness the horses before breakfast. We then kept "humping" until sunset, except during the hour we took for dinner. On rainy days we were supposed to work in the barn, greasing harness, shelling seed-corn and "sifting" grass-seed. That old farmer seemed to realize the verity of the old couplet:— ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... the so called copy of great antiquity alluded to by Alpha before it came to the Museum. Well, in all of these, with, I believe, only one exception, the account of the moves does occur exactly (!) as I have given them, always excepting or rather excluding a couplet about two camels (die namliche nicht in die Bude des Tachenspielers passten es weiter unten) Und nun geht es echt fesuitisch weiter, Alpha denies the existence (!) (A hat in Gegentheil Hyde I, p. 63 Citirt) of the account of the moves in every copy of the Shahnama. I, on the other hand pledge ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... of the rope from before and behind stopped him short in the middle of his couplet. "Hush... Hush..." said Inebnit, pointing with his ice-axe to the threatening line of gigantic seracs on their tottering foundations which the slightest jar might send thundering down the steep. But Tartarin knew what that meant; he ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... looked at him and said, "I did according to my mother's milk, do thou according to thine."[FN78] Upon this Nur al-Din cast the sword from his hand and said to the Caliph, "O Commander of the Faithful, he hath beguiled me with his words;" and he repeated this couplet, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... general use domestically so late as in 1687; for in the diary of Henry, Earl of Clarendon, he registers that "Pere Couplet supped with me, and after supper we had tea, which he said was really as good as any he had drank in China." Had his lordship been in the general habit of drinking tea, he had not probably made it a subject for ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the usual voluntary at the opening of service. Then the old minister said, "Let us continue the worship of God by singing the hymn on page 554." He "lined" the hymn—that is, he read each couplet before it was sung. With the coming in of hymn books and other newfangled things the good old custom of "lining the hymn" has disappeared. But on that Sunday morning the Marquis d'Entremont thought he had never heard anything more delightful ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... 'respite,' it was not that he was scared at the approach of death. His mind was never brighter and happier. To this moment may well be attributed, as it has been by popular tradition, his composition of the couplet: ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Dudley, one of the most respectable of the governors, was found, at his death, with a copy of verses in his pocket, which included the following couplet: ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... pieces, is withheld from the present volume. To draw the attention of the public to insignificance would be deservedly reprobated; and another reason, though not of equal consequence, may be given in the following couplet:— ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... This couplet is not in the ballad, which is the complaint, not of a woman forsaken, but of a man rejected. These lines were probably added when it was ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... as the pulpit. The popular press rivalled the priests in anathemas against all who were not willing "to vote for Ireland against the Saxon." Public placards might be seen in town and country, headed, like the address of the Repeal Committee to the electors, with inflammatory poetry: a favourite couplet on these occasions was— ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the selections contained in this volume. Some of these are fixed and conventional, and others are of his own contrivance. Spanish uses the terms estrofa and copla to designate an arrangement of verses in a stanza. Copla must not be confused with English "couplet." These are general terms; most verse-forms are designated by special names. The following verse-forms are found in the ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem on ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of the various visual experiments of this and the following chapters, the first word of the couplet which describes the condition of the experiment, for example, white-black, always designates the visual condition which the animal was to choose, the second that which it was to avoid on penalty of ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... is a remarkable specimen of the affected style of compliment prevalent in the time of Elizabeth. The third couplet, at first sight, appears to have a signification exactly opposed to that which the context requires. We should expect, instead of "the tongue all impatient to speak," to find "the ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... compared to his! It was like looking into a camera obscura—you saw faces shining and speaking—the smoke curled, the lights dazzled, the oak wainscotting took a higher polish—there was old Sarratt, tall and gaunt, with his couplet from Pope and case at Nisi Prius, Mounsey eyeing the ventilator and lying perdu for a moral, and Hume and Ayrton taking another friendly finishing glass!—These and many more windfalls of character he gave us in ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... seventeenth century shows some advance,—an advance, however, which must be laid chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms. Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing classical metres. Creech says of Horace, "'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the poet,"[418] and leaves the matter there. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... realise his agony. The captain looked up into the hot sky, but no blessed cloud appeared there to raise the shadow of a hope. He looked down at the sea, and it seemed to mock him with its clear blue depths, which looked so sweet and pleasant. He realised the full significance of that couplet in ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness of the ending of comedies, of the regret which lingers in the remembrance of past laughter. In a couplet of passionate melancholy she asked, where are the roses of yesterday? whither vanish the ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... shudder not! I should bestow it So brimming full she couldn't blow it. Wishes aren't horses: true, but still There are worse roadsters than goodwill. And so I wish my darling health, And just to round my couplet, wealth, With faith enough to bridge the chasm 'Twixt Genesis and Protoplasm, And bear her o'er life's current vext From this world to a better next, Where the full glow of God puts out Poor reason's farthing candle, Doubt. I've wished her healthy, wealthy, wise, What more can ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... translations into modern English, that of Dryden may still be said to stand first, in spite of its lack of fidelity. It owes its place to its sustained vigour, and the fact that the heroic couplet is in the hands of a master. In its way nothing could ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they, with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several tombstones. ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... of Dryden were largely influential in establishing the heroic couplet, [Footnote: The heroic couplet consists of two iambic pentameter lines that rime. By "pentameter" is meant that the line has five feet or measures; by "iambic," that each foot contains two syllables, the first short ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... about which no doubt exists. First, its dominant feature is Parallelism, Parallelism of meaning, which, though found in all human song, is carried through this poetry with a constancy unmatched in any other save the Babylonian. The lines of a couplet or a triplet of Hebrew verse may be Synonymous, that is identical in meaning, or Supplementary and Progressive, or Antithetic. But at least their meanings respond or correspond to each other in a way, for which no better name ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... the family of Meek on several boards at the head of the graves. Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five. A female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life. Ezra Meek gave up the ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one. A healthy spot, Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected, and had a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an acknowledgement of a desire for the warm ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Now, to theorise about men is seldom very satisfactory; but to theorise about women is to weigh gossamer and measure moonbeams. The very wisest thing ever said about them is said in the old English couplet: ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... motley assemblage of most respectable men. Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, in their ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in all the tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' the heroic couplet and similar devices can inflict. For all these men had loved Virgil, though not wisely: and now their penance was to hear each other read ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... is on a plate in his left hand; and, with his right hand, about to put a pinch of it upon the tongue of each Becanus or Freshman. A glass, probably holding wine, is standing near him. Underneath is the following couplet:— ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... Copa, the Dirae, and the eighth Eclogue, practiced the craft of the miniaturist whenever he found the minutiae aesthetically significant. To realize the precision of his strokes even then one has but to recall the couplet of the Copa which in an instant sets one upon the dusty road ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... is somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... hopped down upon his shoulder. A low guttural sound appeared to come from this ill-omened bird. The augur bent his ear. Sounds shaped themselves into something like articulation, and the following couplet ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... a many-pointed symbol and the words, "See our combination symbol? It's a starfish!" Underneath was a couplet ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... I, and I translated into English the two lines which were a couplet by Edmund Price, an old archdeacon of Merion, celebrated in his day for ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... few simple words of deep meaning sprang to his lips they seemed like a gift deserving of thanks. It was the same with the little songs which he sang ever and anon: they were ended almost as soon as begun; but in each short couplet there dwelt a deep and winning spirit, whether it called forth a kindly sigh or a peaceful smile. It seemed to the noble Froda as if a younger brother rode beside him, or even a tender, blooming son. They travelled thus many days together; and it appeared as if ...
— Aslauga's Knight • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... poetry," said the King, who had himself written a rhymed couplet which could be said either forwards or backwards, and in the latter position was useful for removing enchantments. According to the eminent historian, Roger Scurvilegs, it had some vogue in Euralia and ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... wish, and, as you must see, wishes in one form or another, disguised or distorted, lie at the basis of dreams. Take the coal fire. That, too, is susceptible of interpretation. I think you must have heard the couplet: ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
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