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More "Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon his Epitaphs,—the largest collection we have in our language, from the pen of any Writer of eminence. As the epitaphs of Pope and also those of Chiabrera, which occasioned this dissertation, are in metre, it may be proper here to enquire how far the notion of a perfect epitaph, as given in a former Paper, may be modified by the choice of metre for the vehicle, in preference to prose. If our opinions be just, it is manifest that the basis must remain the same in either case; and that the difference ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... what might be termed pot-bellied, owing to the sort of food he eats and the cold he suffers during the night, but he is much more robust and taller (the average height of an adult is a little past one metre and a half)[7] than the other tribes and races around him who are in close reports with civilization. This fact would almost make one believe that civilization is detrimental to the ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... a peaceful spectator of others?[105] The Bacchic and Corybantic dances one can also modulate and quell, by changing the metre from the trochaic and the measure from the Phrygian. Similarly, too, the Pythian priestess, when she descends from her tripod, possesses her soul in peace. Whereas the love-fury, when once it has really seized on a man and inflamed him, can be laid by no Muse, no charm or incantation, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... he went. And conversely (as he would have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origin of Species by casting them into blank verse; or Euclid's Elements by writing them out in ballad metre— ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... also translated other articles on ballooning from the French. It is also interesting that she retained in her translation the original units which Verne used (metre, feet, leagues), a practice forgotten until recently. This may be the first appearance of a work by Jules Verne ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... as this ring touched and bounded off from the different letters which still preserved their distances distinct, he made with these letters, by the order in which he touched them, verses in the heroic metre, corresponding to the questions which we had asked; the verses being also perfect in metre and rhythm; like the answers of the Pythia which are so celebrated, or those given by the oracles of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... and moral progress. And to a large extent she succeeded. As a vehicle of her opinions, the scheme and style of the poem proved completely adequate. She moves easily through the story; she handles her metre with freedom and command; she can say her say without exaggeration or unnatural strain. Further, the opinions themselves, as those who have learnt to know her through her letters will feel sure, are ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... special interests; but for any archaeological work the following things are desirable. Note- books of squared paper. Drawing-blocks of blue-squared paper. Paper for wet squeezes, and for dry squeezes. Brush for wet squeezes (spoke brush). One or two so-metre tapes. A few bamboo gardening canes for markers in planning. Divide one in inches or centimetres for measuring buildings. A steel rod, 3 ft. x 1 inch for probing. Field- glass, or low-power telescope. Prismatic compass with card partly black, to see at night. Large ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... merely showing the metre, would have no appeal to us; with all its perfection and its proportion, rhyme and cadence, it would only be a construction. But when it is the outer body of an inner idea it assumes a personality. The idea flows through the rhythm, permeates the words and ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... insertions from Baeda. Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... common features, we might be tempted at first sight to suppose the difference between the three kinds to be merely one of form, merely the difference between the vehicle of prose and the vehicle of metre. We shall find, however, on deeper inquiry, that to the true artist, who does not find his materials in the world, but creates them according to the inner laws by which the world and himself are governed, the vehicle is not more a part of his creation than ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... of its predecessors. It presents the same command of metre and diction, the same contrasts of mood, the same grace and sweetness. It cannot be denied that he has won a definite position among ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... and Trouveres, the latter were far superior in style and invention, and it is mostly their work which has survived. These romances were sometimes in prose, but more often in poetry of extremely smooth and flowing metre. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... would in fact have been no end of it. With this turn, however, his time was not quite thrown away, nor his gravity. In conjunction with Dampier, Langley, and Serjeant, who were styled the learned Cons, he composed a very long English poem, in the same metre as the Bath Guide, and of which it was then held a favour to get a copy. He had so much of advanced life about him, that the masters always looked upon him as a man; and this serious manner followed him through his pastimes. He was fond of billiards; but he was so long in making ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... MARX in metre or LASSALLE in verse, The vampire-horde of Capital he'll curse, And praise the Proletariat; But having thus delivered his bard-soul, He finds it, practically, nice to loll With DIVES ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... fertile country and produces all kinds of vegetation; ginger is especially cultivated; there is sufficient to supply all the province of Cathay, and so fertile is the soil that according to a French traveller, M. E. Simon, an acre is now worth 15,000 francs, or three francs the metre. In the thirteenth century this plain was covered with towns and country-houses, and the inhabitants lived upon the fruits of the ground, and the produce of their flocks and herds, while the large quantity of game ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... that in the Japanese investiture of Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese war, thousands of lives were expended upon the retention and assault of 203 Metre Hill. It was the most blood-stained spot upon the whole of the Eastern Asiatic battlefield. General Nogi threw thousands after thousands of his warriors against this rampart while the Russians defended it no less resolutely. It was captured and re-captured; in fact, the fighting ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... occasion in this place to commend the great care of our author to preserve the metre of blank verse, in which Shakspeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, were so notoriously negligent; and the moderns, in imitation of our author, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... pages of his lexicon. He had lived so closely with nature that he seemed to understand her gentlest whispers, and he had more genuine poetry in his soul than many a man who chains weak ideas in tangled metre. ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... with a padlock, and the key was in the lock. He lifted the platform, and to his great surprise and wonder found a low ladder made of diamond bars, leading down into a small apartment all shining bright as if it were day. Here he found two columns of diamond bars, each a foot in thickness and a metre in height, whose brightness shot through all the corners like sunbeams. This subterranean chamber immediately led to another in which there was a big safe about five feet in height and three feet wide. He opened the safe, and from out of it flowed gold coins like water in torrents ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... in the memory when other features of Horace's style, equally characteristic, but less obvious, are forgotten. It is almost impossible for a translator to do justice to this sententious brevity unless the stanza in which he writes is in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace. If he chooses a longer and more diffuse measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverb by expansion; not to mention that much will often depend on the very position of the sentence in the stanza. Perhaps, in order to preserve these external peculiarities, it may be necessary ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... for a concert! I have no longer any feeling for that kind of thing, and could not produce it at any price. I should not know where to take my inspiration. One other thing: my musical position towards verse and metre has undergone an enormous change. I could not at any price write a melody to Schiller's verses, which are entirely intended for reading. These verses must be treated musically in a certain arbitrary manner, and that arbitrary manner, as it does not bring about a real flow of melody, leads us to harmonic ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year—besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... the Pic de Bergons, with the Pic du Lac Grand rivalling it on the other side of the defile, we soon sighted the chasm and cascade of Rioumaou on our left, and reached the Pas de l'Echelle. At 1 metre 50 centimetres, or 43/4 feet, from the extremity of the ornamental facing which marks the place, we pulled up, to try the magnificent echo, and were in no way disappointed. Our voices came back particularly ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... conceding to me the presidentship of the society, it won't be enough, of course, for me alone to preside; it will be necessary to invite two others to serve as vice-presidents; you might then enlist Ling Chou and Ou Hsieh, both of whom are cultured persons. The one to choose the themes and assign the metre, the other to act as copyist and supervisor. We three cannot, however, definitely say that we won't write verses, for, if we come across any comparatively easy subject and metre, we too will indite a stanza if we feel so disposed. But you four will ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... reader by their clearness and beauty of statement, as well as by their freedom from prejudice. "Deutsche Liebe" is a poem in prose, whose setting is all the more beautiful and tender, in that it is freed from the bondage of metre, and has been the unacknowledged source of many ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... reality and directness of this lyric, its immense emotional undercurrent, and its abrupt, almost gasping metre, admirably suited to the impassioned mood of the speaker,—these are a few of the qualities that combine to make "A Woman's Thought" one of the most remarkable poems ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... coal, however, was reckoned by Captain Palander at twelve cubic feet or 0.3 cubic metre an hour, with a speed of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Makes prayers for the King, in sundry languages, Turns all his Proclamations into metre; Is really in love with the King, most dotingly, And swears Adonis was a Devil to him: A sweet King, a most comely King, ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (2 of 10) - The Humourous Lieutenant • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... And justly Caesar scorns the poet's lays: It is to history he trusts for praise. F. Better be Cibber, I'll maintain it still, Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme quadrille, Abuse the city's best good men in metre, And laugh at peers that put their trust in Peter. Even those you touch not, hate you. P. What should ail 'em? F. A hundred smart in Timon and in Balaam: The fewer still you name, you wound the more; Bond is but one, but Harpax is a score. P. Each mortal has his ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style[107]." ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Russian language is indeed more mellifluous, more lingering, more caressing, fuller of sighs than the Polish. Its cadencing is peculiarly fitted for song. The finer poems, such as those of Zukowski and Pouchkin, seem to contain a melody already designated in the metre of the verses; for example, it would appear quite possible to detach an ARIOSO or a sweet CANTIABLE from some of the stanzas of LE CHALE NOIR, or the TALISMAN. The ancient Sclavonic, which is the language of the Eastern Church, possesses great majesty. ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... into the house, the trail of Susy's long wrapper following after little Dotty Dimple like the closing feet in one of Polly's long-metre verses. Still the moon shone with the same white, ghostly light, and the sun ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... fun up there!" Mary exclaimed. "I'd no idea that one bought land by the square yard, or metre; but it's the way here, apparently; and Vanno's going to give that handsome young man who's engaged to your maid twelve francs a metre for his terrain, although there's no road to it. But really that's a great advantage according to the father, a large yellow old ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of the Apostles translated into Englyshe metre, by Chrystofer Tye, Doctor in musyke, with notes to synge, and also to play upon the lute. Printed by Seres, 1553, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... form and degree of human thought, feeling, and emotion, and clothed them all, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the slightest to the most intense and concentrated, in the dress of exactly appropriate style and language. His metre also is a perfect vehicle of the language. If we think the range of his knowledge limited, yet it was all that his country and his age possessed, and it was very greatly more than has been supposed by readers that dwelt only on the surface. So long as the lamp of civilization ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... it ended; and an "orator" in apparel of cloth of gold, spoke a kind of special epilogue in rhyming metre in praise of the Virgin ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... impression on him. In vigorous imitation, he sat down to the piano again, after a hasty dinner snatched in the neighbourhood; but as he was only playing scales, he propped open before him a little volume of Goethe's poems, which Johanna had lent him, and suiting his scales to the metre of the lines, read through one after another of the poems he liked best. At a particular favourite, he stopped playing and held the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain bonnie ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... look at these badgers! with a long leg on one quarter and a short leg on the other. The wench herself might well and truly have said all that matter without the poet, bating the rhymes and metre. Among the girls in the country there are many such SHILLY-SHALLYS, who give themselves sore eyes and sharp eye- water; I would cure ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... OF THE LITERATURE AND ITS DIVISIONS.—A greater part of the Sanskrit literature, which counts its works by thousands, still remains in manuscript. It was nearly all composed in metre, even works of law, morality, and science. Every department of knowledge and every branch of inquiry is represented, with the single exception of history, and this forms the most striking general characteristic of the literature, and one which robs it of a great share of worth and interest. Its ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... that the tunes of the world were one; And the metre that guided the rhythmic sun Was at one, like the ebb and the flow of the sea, With the tunes that we learned at our mother's knee; The beat of the horse-hoofs that carried us down To see the fine Lady of Banbury ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again another ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... eye," this was a test put to her accidentally. About the beginning of June, 1917, for lack of any better idea at the moment, I determined to teach her the use of the yard measure (the metre), and without having any definite object in view. So I fetched the yard-stick and told her the names and the meaning of the divisions three times; but she seemed unable to work up any enthusiasm for the subject, and I therefore ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... outward expression of our authority, and the metre-gauge of our importance. By them the untutored mind of the poor Indian is enabled to estimate the amount of reverence due to each of us. This is the first purpose for which we are provided with Chupprassees. The second ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... like that metre; let me try it,' and taking up a pencil, wrote those on the other side in an instant. I read them to Moore, and at his particular request I copied them for ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... "It's all right, doctor," said he. "That cough comes from chewing tobacco, and I know it's a very bad habit. Nine-and-ninepence is what I have to say to you, for I'm the officer of the gas company, and they have a claim against you for that on the metre." ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that even I had given up study and gone to bed, I heard her reading aloud, or pacing to and fro to the measure of her own recitations. Listen as I would, I could only make out that these recitations were poetical fragments—I could only distinguish a certain chanted metre, the chiming of an occasional rhyme, the rising and falling of a ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... "Oh dears", and such dismayed faces! The student proposes to procure the coffee mill to assist him in grinding out his "pome"; the tennis player wishes she had a hatchet to chop up a long word which has fallen to her lot, so that she can put it in proper metre; but Mr. Short (6 ft. 2 in.), with watch in hand, calls "Time", and then "Silence", as pencils race over papers as if on a wager. Ten minutes is the brief space allotted for the production of the wondrous effusions; and when Mr. S. announces, "Time's up", ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... then knew not, nor observed; they struck my sight on all sides, and I saw them not. I indited verses, in which I might not place every foot every where, but differently in different metres; nor even in any one metre the self-same foot in all places. Yet the art itself, by which I indited, had not different principles for these different cases, but comprised all in one. Still I saw not how that righteousness, which good and holy men ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... which is the principal unit of both fluid and dry measures, is the contents of 1 cubic decimetre (decimetre 1/10 metre).) ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... being freed from wars and dangers, and enjoying for the future a profound peace, [22] composed songs and hymns to God of several sorts of metre; some of those which he made were trimeters, and some were pentameters. He also made instruments of music, and taught the Levites to sing hymns to God, both on that called the sabbath day, and on other festivals. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Italicized stanzas have been indented 5 spaces. Italicized words or phrases have been capitalized. Lines longer than 77 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "One advantage," says Mr. Southey, "this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... in town, With other whores undone, tho' not in print, Clubs credit for Geneva in the mint? Ye bards! why will you sing, tho' uninspir'd? Ye bards! why will you starve, to be admir'd? Defunct by Phoebus' laws, beyond redress, Why will your spectres haunt the frighted press? Bad metre, that excrescence of the head, Like hair, will sprout, altho' the poet's dead. All other trades demand, verse makers beg; A dedication is a wooden leg; A barren Labeo, the true mumper's fashion, Exposes borrow'd brats to move compassion. Tho' such myself, vile bards ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... strung across the battlefield. As the Japanese said, it was this "flying telephone" that enabled Oyama to manipulate his forces as handily as though he were playing a game of chess. It was in this war, too, that the Mikado's soldiers strung the costliest of all telephone lines, at 203 Metre Hill. When the wire had been basted up this hill to the summit, the fortress of Port Arthur lay at their mercy. But the climb had cost them twenty-four ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... nice they were! to rhyme with far A kind star did not tarry; The metre, too, was regular As schoolboy's dot and carry; And full they were of pious plums, So extra-super-moral,— For sucking Virtue's tender ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... to handle metre, he had sought to rejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnet into the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome clay which rest on stands, their heads straight down, their tails on top. Sometimes he corrupted it by using only masculine rhymes ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of 'The Song of Hiawatha.' Having, then, distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... food for almost nothing, and people are starving here in St. Pierre; there is clothing for almost nothing, and poor girls cannot earn enough to buy a dress. The pretty printed calicoes (indiennes) that used to be two francs and a half the metre, now sell at twelve sous the metre; but nobody has any money. And if you read our papers,—Les Colonies, La Defense Coloniale,— you will find that there are sons wicked enough to beat their mothers: oui! yche ka batt manman! It is the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... matter,—here we go! What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach: Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech. 'Tis like the harper's prelude on the strings, The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings; - Prologues in metre are to other pros As worsted stockings ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... deserted its old bed, and the lagoon has been formed behind the bar, or littoral cord, wave and storm working upon this long line of mud and sand succeed in breaking through; then, as the inclination of the land is but 0'm, 01 in the metre—almost nothing, the sweet and salt water mingle in these lakes, they never run dry, though in many cases not three ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... hippomenes faetae semina legit equae. A more recent text (the 1898 Teubner) has "hippomanes fetae semina legit equae." Footnote u: Nubilaque iudico... Modern texts such as the 1907 Teubner give VII. 202 as "Nubilaque indico..." The word "iudico" does not fit the metre, and may be typographic error. ouranothen katagontes... The wording was reconstructed with the aid of the Loeb text, which ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... as firmly as her creed, that I am le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnete homme in the universe; although she scarcely ever in her life, except the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David in metre, spent five minutes together either on prose or verse. I must except also from this last a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has perused very devoutly; and all the ballads in the country, as she has (O the partial lover! you will cry) the finest "wood-note wild" I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... sandwiches,—thin slices of tinkling sentimentality between two covers looking like hard-baked gilt gingerbread. But what faces these young folks make up at my good advice! They get tipsy on their rhymes. Nothing intoxicates one like his—or her—own verses, and they hold on to their metre-ballad-mongering as the fellows that inhale nitrous oxide hold ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... work. It is dedicated to Liszt, and though extremely brilliant, is full of meaning. It has an interlude of tender romance. "Coy Maiden" is a graceful thing, but hardly deserves the punishment of so horrible a name. "A Gypsy Dance" is too long, but it is of good material. It has an interesting metre, three-quarter time with the first note dotted. There is a good effect gained by sustaining certain notes over several measures, though few pianists get a real sostenuto. An "Allegro Patetico" (op. 12), "Medea" ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... is a poem of 188 lines, in heroic metre, and is followed by a shorter poem, entitled "A Comfortable Exhortation to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... of that island where repose the bones of Columbus,) the song of Prince Hoel attached itself to my thoughts, and has been (involuntarily) put into rhyme. This song may be found in the first part of the poem mentioned. The lyric metre in which it now appears must rather injure than improve the belle nature of the original. Still I wish it to be published, as coming from my hand; because it gives me an opportunity of expressing, in some degree, my unqualified admiration of its composer. Well ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... of rapt contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when the sun's warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away, the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti's have a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem, almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers:—that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the Soul and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger and wiser Humanity,—hitherto hardly attained, and perhaps unattainable ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... really has been a difficulty of the poet in translating his own Alexandrines into French prose, not to produce verses; nor has he always avoided them. Here, for instance, is a distich which not only becomes French when translated word for word, but also reproduces exactly metre ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... and Gomarus. I think M. Bayle repeated them from memory, for he put sacrata instead of afflata. But it is apparently the printer's fault that prudenter stands in place of pudenter (that is, modestly) which the metre requires. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Shakespeare, Homer, Calderon, they may still be called better than indifferent. One great merit Mr. Taylor has: rigorous adherence to his original; he endeavours at least to copy with all possible fidelity the term of praise, the tone, the very metre, whatever ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... merely, but to the Spirit of Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our service—Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled. That flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his impulse towards the infinite ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... German critics remarks that the poem in which he celebrates his release embodies a nearer approach to passion than all his Oriental songs of love, sorrow, or wine. It is a joyous dithyrambic, which, despite its artful and semi-impossible metre, must have been the swiftly-worded expression of a genuine feeling. Let me attempt to translate the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... the real Scott first shows, and the better of the two is the second. It is not merely that, though Scott had a great liking for and much proficiency in 'eights,' that metre is never so effective for ballad purposes as eights and sixes; nor that, as Lockhart admits, Glenfinlas exhibits a Germanisation which is at the same time an adulteration; nor even that, well as Scott knew the Perthshire Highlands, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... well-known iambic trimeter, i.e. the metre of six feet (twelve syllables) used in all the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... cord used for lowering the bottle into the water to the split ring on the rubber suspender. The best material for this purpose is cotton insulated electric wire knotted at every metre. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... impromptu verse of the author when acting the part of King in another man's play, two years ago at Greenwich? Did she not twice drop her glove near his feet in crossing the stage? And how happily had he responded to the challenge! True to the character as well as to the metre of his part, he had picked up the glove, presenting it to its ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... stated on the title-page to have been "lately acted by the right Honorable the Earle of Darby his servants." It has not been reprinted, and copies of the old quarto are exceedingly rare. There is an air of old-fashionedness about the diction and the metre that would lead us to suppose the play was written several years before the date of publication. The wearisome practice, in which the characters so freely indulge, of speaking in the third person is very characteristic of the earlier dramatists, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... to be bribed to devil you. Until you've put ten centimes in the metre, you don't get any gas. It's ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... poem is unknown, nor can I, on the vague and rather doubtful allusion to Thule, as Iceland, venture to assign its date. It was, evidently, recited in a monastery, as appears by the first line; and no doubt composed there. The faults of metre would point out a late date; and it may have been formed upon some local tradition, as Walther, the hero, seems to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... her schooldays, what had been inclination before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I studied harder ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... maidens. All the while he was pursuing the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking up the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation; reading, writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations, interested in technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting, directing private theatricals, going a long way to see an actor—a long way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway of contemporary interests. And all the while he was busied about his father ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I've had to live alone, with no company but my own voice. Maybe you heard me singing as you came. It wasn't much of a song, I admit, for elegance of rhyme and metre don't seem to come easy, but a song like that is more comfort than you'd believe.' He ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. 24, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... express my obligations to Professor R. M. Alden, whose Introduction to Poetry and English Verse I have used in my own Harvard courses in poetry. His views of metre have probably influenced mine even more than I am aware. The last decade, which has witnessed such an extraordinary revival of interest in poetry, has produced many valuable contributions to poetic theory. I have found Professor Fairchild's Making of Poetry particularly suggestive. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... cave, and has twelve men and a donkey to carry the ice he quarries to the village of Chaux, a mile from the glaciere, where it is loaded for conveyance to Besancon. He uses gunpowder for the flooring of ice, and expects the eighth part of a pound to blow out a cubic metre; and if, by ill luck, the ice thus procured has stones on the lower side, he has to saw off the bottom layer. Madame Briot said I was right in supposing March to be the great time for the formation of ice, as she had heard her husband ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... just because, judging from their language and metre, they are older than everything else in India, or even in the entire Aryan world, and because they are mainly concerned with the ancient gods of nature, appeared to the Hindus themselves as apaurusheya, that is, not wrought by man. They were called Sruti, ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... interrupted Miss Maxwell. "Though they don't amount to anything as poetry, they show a good deal of promise in certain directions. You almost never make a mistake in rhyme or metre, and this shows you have a natural sense of what is right; a 'sense of form,' poets would call it. When you grow older, have a little more experience,—in fact, when you have something to say, I think you may write very good verses. Poetry needs knowledge and vision, experience ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... retained, depend alike on physiological conditions; and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle grows as there is more ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and that they follow in all cases the same general laws. Those of the Lake of Geneva have received the most elaborate and prolonged investigation. In March, 1876, Forel established a self-registering tide-gauge (limni-metre enregistreur) on the northern shore of this lake, at Morges; and, with the cooeperation of P. Plantamour, another one was installed in June, 1877, at Secheron, near the city of Geneva, at the southern extremity. Since these dates, these two instruments have, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Zoroaster or to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his Iranian heroes leads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so these fifty or more thousand verses, written in the Arabic heroic Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight of the Persians down to this very day—when the glories of the land have almost altogether departed and Mahmud himself is ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You could just as well hear Glueck as Keats; you could just as well see the world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch the smoke of old altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West become columns ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Longley, at Rochester, a gentleman of very considerable learning, whom Dr. Johnson met there, he said, "My heart warms towards him. I was surprised to find in him such a nice acquaintance with the metre in the learned languages; though I was somewhat mortified that I had it not so much to myself, as I should ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... charms of Latin, not think too lightly of the elation felt by one who, after learning this language out of the most absurd primers and according to the most ridiculous methods, nevertheless discovered it in its purity, and afterwards came to handle it in the charming rhythm of some artful metre, in the glorious precision of its structure and in all ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... was [Greek: elpidos leptes], which Euripides has changed to [Greek: asthenous rhomes], though the other had equally suited the metre. But Euripides is fond of slight alterations in ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... both my metre and my stomach to the gods," Horace had retorted, "if you will turn over to them your worry about Rome, and pluck the blossom of the hour with me. Augustus is safe in Spain, you cannot be summoned to the Palatine, and to-morrow is early enough for ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... still more ardent and glowing. What separates and distinguishes poetry is more particularly the ornament of verse; it is this which gives it its character, and is an essential, without which it cannot exist. Custom has appropriated different metre to different kinds of composition, in which the world is not perfectly agreed. In England the dispute is not yet settled which is to be preferred, rhyme or blank verse. But however we disagree about what these metrical ornaments shall ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... power over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ill success are thus severely and distinctly stated, "The strange license in which he appears to have indulged himself, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... is remarkable that so good a Latin scholar as Johnson, should have been so inattentive to the metre, as by mistake to have written ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the likeness suggested, and then it turns out to be purely superficial. The resemblance of such a writer to Pope obviously does not go deep. Crabbe imitates Pope because everybody imitated him at that day. He adopted Pope's metre because it had come to be almost the only recognised means of poetical expression. He stuck to it after his contemporaries had introduced new versification, partly because he was old-fashioned to the backbone and partly because he had none of those lofty inspirations which naturally ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... edition. That scholar justly observes: "The eleventh chapter, Description of Evening, is certainly the work of the Rhapsodists and an interpolation of later date. The chapter might be omitted without any injury to the action of the poem, and besides the metre, style, conceits and images differ from the general tenour of the poem; and that continual repetition of the same sounds at the end of each hemistich which is not exactly rime, but assonance, reveals the artificial labour of a more recent age." The following ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... on a greater wing, Nor twitter robin-like of love, nor sing A pretty dalliance with grief—but try Some metre like a sky, Wherein to set Stars that may linger yet When I, thy master, shall have come to die. Twitter and tweet Thy carollings Of little things, Of fair and sweet; For it is meet, O robin red! That little theme Hath little song, That little head Hath ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... verse, and one form of verse or many): this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name to cover mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in iambics, elegiacs, &c. Commonly people attach the 'making' to the metre and say 'elegiac-makers', 'hexameter-makers,' giving them a common class-name by their metre, as if it was not their imitation that ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... them any less, so their owners have them each in turn a year"; in the commune of Murs, in Anjou, there is "a strip of nine hectares, subdivided into no fewer than thirty-one separate parcels." The limit, however, seems to be reached in Laon, where "it is not rare to find fields scarce a metre (3 ft. 3.37 in.) wide; here an apple-tree or a walnut-tree covers with its branches four or five lots, and the proprietor can only take in his crop in the presence of his neighbours, to whom he has also to leave one-half of the fruit fallen on their lots." ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... he had built a powerful station for the purpose of making experiments in talking across the ocean. On that account the United States Government had granted him a special permit to use an 1,800 metre wave length. ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... made by her grace the Duchess of Northumberland;(189) receipts to make them by Corydon the venerable, alias George Pitt; others very pretty, by Lord Palmerston;(190) some by Lord Carlisle; many by Mrs. Miller herself, that have no fault but wanting metre; and immortality promised to her without end or measure. In short, since folly, which never ripens to madness but in this hot climate, ran distracted, there was never any thing so entertaining or so dull—for you cannot read so long as I ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... their formal pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations: and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better when ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Roccsberri, about an hour's ride from Boston, this Old Testament printed, and some sheets of the New. The printing-office was at Cambridge, three hours' ride from Boston, where also there was a college of students, whether of savages or of other nations. The Psalms of David are added in the same metre. ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... rarely indicates the date of composition. Only sixteen of the thirty-seven plays commonly assigned to Shakespeare were published in his lifetime, and it is questionable whether any were published under his supervision. {48} But subject-matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period in his career to which each play may be referred. In his early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy appears in its simplicity; as his powers gradually matured he depicted life in its most complex involutions, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Potter's Translation, in Routledge's Universal Library, freely altered in parts for the purpose of bringing out changes of metre, etc., in the original. The References are to the numbering of the ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... smiths at their forges Worked the red Saint George's Cannoneers; And the "villainous saltpetre" Rung a fierce, discordant metre Round their ears; As the swift Storm-drift, With hot sweeping anger, came the horseguards' clangor On our flanks. Then higher, higher, higher, burned the old-fashioned fire ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... verse is its relation of quantities; the modulation of its numbers; or, the kind of metre, measure, or movement, of which it consists, or by ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... wife of the preceding, commonly called Vermichel, as was the case with her husband; a mustached virago, a metre in width, and of two hundred and forty pounds weight, but active in spite of this; she ruled her husband absolutely. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... at the unconscious girl and made his decision. Over one shoulder he wore one of the green objects that Brion remembered from the solido. He pulled it off and the thing writhed slowly in his hands. It was alive—a green length a metre long, like a noduled section of a thick vine. One end flared out into a petal-like formation. The Disan took a hook-shaped object from his waist and thrust it into the petaled orifice. When he turned the hook in a quick motion the length ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... And yet you have been reading my poems all this while!—There is renunciation in our words, renunciation in the metre, renunciation in our music. That is why fortune always forsakes us; and we, in turn always forsake fortune. We go about, all day long, initiating the youths in the sacred ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... since, as Pohl points out, Michael Haydn failed in the very qualities which ensured his brother's success. As it was, he wrote a very large number of works, most of which remained in manuscript. A Mass in D is his best-known composition, though mention should be made of the popular common-metre tune "Salzburg," adapted from a mass composed for the use of country choirs. Michael Haydn was nominated the great composer's sole heir, but his ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... wit, the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men—being unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become here of the substance of Paradise Lost—the story, scenery, characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have vanished clean away. Nothing is left ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... followed by every other boy and girl. O'mie rode beside me, and not one of us thought of himself. It was all done in a flash, and I marvel that I tell its mental processes as if they were a song sung in long-metre time. But it is all so clear to me. I can see the fiery radiance of that sky blotted by the two riders before me. I can hear the crash of the ponies' feet, and I can even feel the sweep of wind out of that storm-cloud turning the white under-side ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... inspiration when he was evoking the stormy chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, Bisesa he never dreamed that his landlady was craning her head up from her pillows in a vain effort to discover the tune, or to reduce it to the known terms of short metre rhythm. His broken, irregular measures troubled her, as did also his broken, irregular hours of work. There were days when he rode far afield, or was seen lying on his back under the pines by the brookside, listening to the splash of the water, the hissing of ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... Napoleon, who endeavoured to apply philosophy to all the arts of life, decreed, that no public road in France should exceed an inclination of 4 deg. 46', or rise more than one metre in twelve. This proportion, it was estimated, would combine the maxima and minima of the powers; and, in spite of those malignant confederacies which he was so often called upon to overthrow, the labour of reducing many ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... from the Percy Folio MS., with the spelling modernised, except in two or three instances for the sake of the rhyme (13.4) or metre (102.2). Other alterations, as suggested by Child, are noted. Apart from the irregularities of metre, this ballad is remarkable for the large proportion of 'e' rhymes, which are found in 71 stanzas, or two-thirds of the whole. ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... thought of metre, he thought of rhyme. 'Twas a race between weary brains and time. He tried to write as he used to when His heart was as young as ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... cooling of the atmosphere seldom waited long, however, and when the river rose to within a metre of my tent, which I had pitched on the edge of the river bank, I had to abandon it temporarily for the house in which Mr. Demmini and Mr. Loing resided, a little back of the rest of the houses. Besides a kitchen, it contained a large room and a small one, which I appropriated. ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... will be to remove the cap and give the proper exposure when I am ready. The light is not too good, and I intend to use the orange screen, so I guess the exposure will be rather a lengthy one, but I will determine its correct duration by means of the exposure metre; so all that you will have to do will be to remove the cap and carefully ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... to think that while the laconic George Crabbe, "Nature's sternest painter," was writing his rough couplets in the metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy oysters for his cat, William Blake—in mind and imagination a contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman—should have been asserting the artist's right (why ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... considered as having been hitherto overlooked or rejected, while in the alternative case it is to be understood that the original cast of the melody has at some former time been altered (frequently to suit the English common metre to which it was not at first conformable), ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... the sweet bride he had left upon the Severn. It is quite Homeric, professedly and successfully so, and therefore quite out of place. The Welsh knight speaks in a most unknightly strain. And the change of metre that is adopted assists in giving to the whole the air of a mere poetical exercise. The scene is not, however, without its purpose in the development of the character of the maid, because it shows how utterly she is at this time engrossed in her warlike mission; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... northeast and seriously damaging the interior. A desperate resistance followed, but the Russians finally retreated, destroying a part of the fort before they left. We also saw other defences, but had no time to study them, as a long rough drive ensued, in order to reach 203-Metre Hill, the ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... this epoch, of which there are several, hardly deserve to be dignified with so high a title. At no part of his life had Bunyan much title to be called a poet. He did not aspire beyond the rank of a versifier, who clothed his thoughts in rhyme or metre instead of the more congenial prose, partly for the pleasure of the exercise, partly because he knew by experience that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... eight 30-metre contour lines in one centimetre works out roughly at 27 deg., which is a steeper slope than most people care to take straight, running over unknown country. Anything steeper than this is apt to avalanche in certain conditions, though a 30 ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... metre and sense, owing to the loss of a hemistich, but the sense is complete. Grein's suggestion, feoll on foldan, adds nothing to ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... completely as you can all your present notions about the nature of verse and poetry. Take a sponge and wipe the slate of your mind. In particular, do not harass yourself by thoughts of metre and verse forms. Second: Read William Hazlitt's essay "On Poetry in General." This essay is the first in the book entitled *Lectures on the English Poets*. It can be bought in various forms. I think the ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... there is only one familiar instance recorded of a nephew who read his uncle. The exception tends rather to support the rule, since it needed a Macaulay to produce, and two volumes to record it. Finally, the metre does not permit it. One may not say: "Who reads me, when I am ashes, is my ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... studied the phenomena in nine of them), and that they follow in all cases the same general laws. Those of the Lake of Geneva have received the most elaborate and prolonged investigation. In March, 1876, Forel established a self-registering tide-gauge (limni-metre enregistreur) on the northern shore of this lake, at Morges; and, with the cooeperation of P. Plantamour, another one was installed in June, 1877, at Secheron, near the city of Geneva, at the southern extremity. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... equae. A more recent text (the 1898 Teubner) has "hippomanes fetae semina legit equae." Footnote u: Nubilaque iudico... Modern texts such as the 1907 Teubner give VII. 202 as "Nubilaque indico..." The word "iudico" does not fit the metre, and may be typographic error. ouranothen katagontes... The wording was reconstructed with the aid of the Loeb text, which had no ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... and the kindest heart in the county. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her creed, that I am le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnete homme in the universe; although she scarcely ever in her life, except the Scriptures of the old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David in metre, spent five minutes together on either prose or verse. I must except also from this last a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has perused very devoutly; and all the ballads in the country, as she ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... All the while, he was pursuing the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking up the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation; reading, writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations, interested in technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting, directing private theatricals, going a long way to see an actor - a long way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway of contemporary interests. And all the while he was busied about his father and mother, his wife, and in particular his sons; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gives "relish to his song," {0f} by adopting "a diversity of structure in the metre;" for the lyric comes in occasionally to relieve the solemnity of the heroic, whilst at the same time the latter is frequently capable of being divided into a shorter verse, a plan which has been observed in one of the MSS. used on the present occasion; e. g. the ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... the spirit which shall speak through him, he receives, also, a portion of the same creative power. Mr. Lewes reaches this conclusion: "If, therefore, we reflect what a poem Faust is, and that it contains almost every variety of style and metre, it will be tolerably evident that no one unacquainted with the original can form an adequate idea of it from translation,"[E] which is certainly correct of any translation wherein something of the rhythmical variety and beauty of the original is not retained. That very ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... invariably fixed on the same syllable of the verse, as in French; in the choice and variety of its position, consists the chief art of appropriate harmony. Accentuation of syllables, which seems, to answer the idea of long and short syllables in the dead languages, is the foundation of English, metre.—Tripple rhymes used with judgment have been admitted by the best English poets, and now and then the introduction of an Alexandrine, or verse of ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... original there is a sudden change from prose to verse. "It is generally supposed that these stories were recited by the ancient Irish poets for the amusement of their chieftains at their public feasts, and that the portions given in metre were sung" ("Battle of Magh Rath," p. 12). The prose portions of this tale are represented in the translation by blank verse, and the lyrical portions by ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... catechism is, of course, not at all the same thing as the real religion of those who subscribe to it. The rules of metre are not the same thing as poetry; the rules of cricket, if the analogy may be excused, are not the same thing as good play. Nay, more. A man states in his creed only the articles which he thinks it right to assert positively against those ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... may be sweet, But Hymen's tenderness is sweeter; And though all virile love be meet, You'll find the poet's love is metre. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... years later, when The Vision of Piers the Ploughman was first printed, the printer in his preface explained alliterative verse very well. "Langland wrote altogether in metre," he says, "but not after the manner of our rimers that write nowadays (for his verses end not alike), but the nature of his metre is to have three words, at the least, in every verse which begin with some one letter. As for example the first two verses ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... half a metre wide—wound its way up to a great height above the foaming river. There were beautiful ferns of immense height, some of which had finely ribbed, gigantic leaves. Graceful yellow flowers, or sometimes beautiful red ones, were to be seen on tall trees with ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... substance was not more remarkable than the inequality in the mechanical expression of it. "The Forsaken Merman" is perhaps as beautifully finished as anything of the kind in the English language. The story is exquisitely told, and word and metre so carefully chosen that the harmony of sound and meaning is perfect. The legend itself we believe is Norwegan. It is of a King of the Sea who had married an earthly maiden; and was at last deserted by her from some scruples of conscience. The original ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... and make their characters talk under all the restraints of rhyme and rhythm. But we pronounce this departure from literal truth a merit and not a defect. We consider Goethe's second "Iphigenie," written in verse, far preferable to the first one written in prose; nay, it is the rhythm or metre itself which communicates to the work its incomparable beauty. In a review of Longfellow's "Dante," published last year, we argued this very point in one of its special applications; the artist must copy his original, but he must ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... as he had been on his first day in the cavalry, at hearing behind him the thunder of many hoofs. Having once become used to the noise, he was even thrilled by the swinging metre of it. A kind of wild harmony was in it, something which made one forget everything else. At such times Pasha longed to break into his long, wind-splitting lope, but he learned that he must leave the others no more than a pace or two behind, ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... of his time, took measures for the emendation of the hymns in the Roman Breviary. He was offended by the many defects in their metrical composition, and it is said that upwards of nine hundred and fifty faults in metre were corrected, which gave to Urban occasion to say that the Fathers had begun rather than completed the hymns. These, as corrected, he caused to be inserted in the Breviary. Grancolas proceeds to tell us that many complained of these changes, alleging that the primitive simplicity and piety ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... modulation is as perfect as the sentiment itself is weighty. It is uttered wholly in the dactylic measure, the noblest and most magnificent of all measures, and hence forming the chief constituent in the finest metre we know, the heroic. [And it is with great judgment that the words hosper nephos are reserved till the end.[2]] Supposing we transpose them from their proper place and read, say touto to psephisma hosper nephos epoiese ton tote kindunon ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... extreme fineness, and which had also been consecrated with mystic ceremonies. And as this ring touched and bounded off from the different letters which still preserved their distances distinct, he made with these letters, by the order in which he touched them, verses in the heroic metre, corresponding to the questions which we had asked; the verses being also perfect in metre and rhythm; like the answers of the Pythia which are so celebrated, or those given by ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... because "the power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." The invention of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights. The discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. The sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take messages and turn wheels marks another. But, after all, the vital stages of human progress are marked by steps toward personal, individual ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... something there which, for good or ill, is unique. You can name—or at least I can name—nothing to compare it with. Goldsmith and Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied, so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused such a man to pass away, and to leave a total output of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... scientific mind, in so far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations: and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them; much as if a composer found that the sailors ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... In Sheridan's copy of the stanzas written by him in this metre at the time of the Union, (beginning "Zooks, Harry! zooks, Harry!") he entitled them, "An admirable new ballad, which goes excellently well to the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... can be more unfortunate than the correction of "princely;" Mr. Collier, on the other hand, follows Steevens and Malone, and reads "princely," observing the Tieck's reading ("precise") "sounds ill as regards the metre, the accent falling on the wrong syllable. Mr. Collier's choice is determined by the authority of the second folio, which he considers ought to have considerable weight, whilst Mr. Knight regards the authority of that edition ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... continents are born from the sea. One day land arose out of the sea. The birth was of a revolutionary nature, there were earthquakes, volcanic craters, falling cities and dying men—but new land was there. Or else it moves slowly, invisibly, a metre or two in a century, and returns to the land it used to possess. Thus it restores the soil it stole from it, but cleaner, refined and full of vitality to live and to create. Such is the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... The music again changing with the metre.] Give up the scene, give up, ye sordid rocks, The last of Arnold in his English home, Which in your bosom lives for evermore, A deathless picture; England cast it out Not being English, and it shivered on, Coiling about the world, till it was caught And locked into your rocky fastnesses ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... carried off from the camp of Attila. The author of this poem is unknown, nor can I, on the vague and rather doubtful allusion to Thule, as Iceland, venture to assign its date. It was, evidently, recited in a monastery, as appears by the first line; and no doubt composed there. The faults of metre would point out a late date; and it may have been formed upon some local tradition, as Walther, the hero, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... delicious parody of Longfellow's "Hiawatha." "In an age of imitation," says Lewis Carroll, in a note at the head, "I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy." It is not every one who has read this note who has observed that it is really in the same metre ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... Nature:—that, whilst maintaining on the whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers:—that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the Soul and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger and wiser Humanity,—hitherto hardly attained, and perhaps unattainable even by predecessors of ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Italicized stanzas are indented 5 spaces. Italicized words or phrases are marked by tildes (). Lines longer than 78 characters are broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some obvious errors ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale
... nose, gentleness of eyes, sweetness of mouth, cleverness of speech, slenderness of shape and seemliness of all attributes. But the acme of beauty is in the hair and, indeed, al-Shihab the Hijazi hath brought together all these items in his doggrel verse of the metre Rajaz, [FN489] and it ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances which very little ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the translation of Schiller's complete Poems that was published by me in 1851, namely, as literal a rendering of the original as is consistent with good English, and also a very strict adherence to the metre of the original. Although translators usually allow themselves great license in both these points, it appears to me that by so doing they of necessity destroy the very soul of the work they profess to translate. In fact, it is not a translation, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... have grown again on the first stripped shrubs at the period when the leaves of the last plant were pulled off. About 12,000 tea shrubs are grown in this garden: they are regularly planted in quincunxes, and stand about one metre distant from each other; the greater number are stunted and shabby looking, probably owing to the aspect of the ground, which lies low, on the level of the sea, and exposed to the full rays of a burning sun; perhaps the quality of the soil may have ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek religion and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and partly relish that extravagance. Subject and audience alike stimulate the romantic temper, and the tragedy of the Bacchanals, with its innovations in metre and diction, expressly noted as foreign or barbarous—all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing of the chorus, notwithstanding—with its subtleties and sophistications, its grotesques, mingled with and heightening a real shudder at the horror of the theme, and a peculiarly fine ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... she reported gleefully to Leonora and Patricia. "Nobody'll ever hear that song again! I was sure of it when I saw the word in the dictionary, for Vance Alden is so sensitive about a mistake. It is funny! Ilga—why, she'd never know whether it was good rhyme or metre or anything! But Vance didn't think of that. Now promise, both of you, that you won't ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... than a slight pleasure; but it is possible that I am prejudiced by a dislike of English anapaests (I am aware that the classic terms are not really applicable to our English metres, but the reader will underhand that I mean the metre of the lines just quoted.) I do not find these anapaests in the Elizabethan or in the seventeenth-century poets, or most rarely. They were dear to the eighteenth century, and, much more than the ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... pooh!—Booh!" off he rode for the Tavern, where he and the landlord had a haze, the landlord was notified to leave, short metre; and being fully revenged for the insult paid his millions, old Stephen Girard, the great Philadelphia financier, rode back to where he was better used for his money, and evidently better satisfied than ever, that money is mighty ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... its subject as well as by the wish of friends. A few extracts appeared in a magazine several years ago, and it was afterwards completed without any view to publication. It follows the present Irish text[8] as closely as the laws of metre will allow. Since these pages were in the printer's hands Mr. Aubrey de Vere has given to the world his treatment of the same theme,[9] adorning as usual all that he touches. As he well says: "It is not in the form ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... plural ending with any other letter than s, form the possessive by the addition of the apostrophe and the letter s. The only exceptions to this rule are, that, by poetical license the additional s may be elided in poetry for sake of the metre, and in the scriptural phrases "For goodness' sake." "For conscience' sake," "For Jesus' sake," etc. Custom has done away with the s and these phrases are now idioms of the language. All plural nouns ending in s form the possessive ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Sexton's Daughter, Hymns of a Hermit, and I know not what other extensive stock of pieces; concerning which he was now somewhat at a loss as to his true course. He could write verses with astonishing facility, in any given form of metre; and to various readers they seemed excellent, and high judges had freely called them so, but he himself had grave misgivings on that latter essential point. In fact here once more was a parting of the ways, "Write in Poetry; write in Prose?" upon which, before all else, it much concerned ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Ireland, where he grew up; but the village of his imagination is lovelier than any actual spot, and there is no use in hunting for it on the map. See the first note on The Traveller for remarks on metre, etc. ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... and wine. The English word appears to have been first used in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who called a section of his poems "anacreontiques,'' because they were paraphrased out of the so-called writings of Anacreon into a familiar measure which was supposed to represent the metre of the Greek. Half a century later, when the form had been much cultivated, John Phillips (1631-1706) laid down the arbitrary rule that an anacreontic line "consists of seven syllables, without being tied to any certain law ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... volume, however, contains pieces which can be little gratifying to the public:—some are pretty; and all are besprinkled with "gems," and "roses," and "birds," and "diamonds," and such like cheap poetical adornments, as are always to be obtained at no great expense of thought or of metre.—It is happy for the author that these bijoux are presented to persons of high degree; countesses, foreign and domestic; "Maids of Honour to Louisa Landgravine of Hesse D'Armstadt;" Lady Blank, and Lady Asterisk, besides—-, and—-, and others anonymous; who are exactly ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... part of the whole. Its keynote was the keynote of the time and place, its message was their message, the thrill it bore to the listener the thrill of the whole. It was not a musical call, that steadily approaching sound. No human being has ever been able to locate it in pitch or metre; yet to such as the listening man upon the ground, to those who have heard it year by year, it is nevertheless the sweetest, most insistent of music. Beside it there is no other note which will compare, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... is certainly poetical as it is not prosaick, and elegant as it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either recalls old phrases, or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense, however, of his words is strained, when "he views the Ganges from Alpine heights;" that is, from mountains like the Alps: and the pedant surely intrudes, (but when was blank verse ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... immediate reference to metre and its various forms in verse, as an element in the general treatment of style or manner (lexis) as opposed to the matter (logoi) in the imaginative literature, with which as in time past the [270] education of ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... the very coolest Poet; and the fullest of this common earth and its affairs, of any sage that has ever showed his head upon it, in prose or metre. The sturdiness with which he makes good his position, as an inhabitant, for the time being, of this terrestrial ball, and, by the ordinance of God, subject to its laws, and liable to its pains and penalties, is a thing which appears, to the careful reviewer of it, on the whole, the most novel ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... opportunity to say that my translation of BEOWULF, of which the last reprint was issued in 1910, is not in prose, as some have misconceived it, but it is in the same metrical form as the translations in the present volume,—an accentual metre in rough imitation of the original. I agree with Professor Gummere and others that this is a better form for the translation of Old English poetry than plain prose. It was approved by the late Professor Child nearly thirty years ago, ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... hand of the official clock dropped into its slot somebody called the Naval Observatory. The call was so faint as to be barely audible, in spite of the fact that Hood's instrument was tuned for a three-thousand-metre wave. Supposing quite naturally that the person calling had a shorter wave, he gradually cut out the inductance of his receiver; but the sound faded out entirely, and he returned to his original inductance and ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.' The chief point in which Surrey imitated his 'master, Francis Petrarcha,' was in the use of the sonnet. He introduced this elaborate form of poetry into our literature; and how it has thriven with us, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... is marvellous, but I will make one remark: in the fourth line of the third strophe the metre leaves something to ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... strewn through this profound and massive work, are lasting lessons for all womankind. It seems to have been much easier for most of the critics of this great work to feel its artistic faults, its jarring metre, and cumbrous forms, than to appreciate the transcendent nobleness and wisdom wrought into it from the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... rules which they have learnt by heart is really wanted, it is seldom forthcoming. The end of classical teaching at school should be to make our boys acquainted, not only with the language, but with the literature and history, the ancient thought of the ancient world. Rules of grammar, syntax, or metre, are but means towards that end; they must never be mistaken for the end itself. A young man of eighteen, who has probably spent on an average ten years in learning Greek and Latin, ought to be able ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... trimeter, i.e. the metre of six feet (twelve syllables) used in all the speeches ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... a mirror, spies The shining of a flambeau at his back, Lit sudden ore he deem of its approach, And turneth to resolve him, if the glass Have told him true, and sees the record faithful As note is to its metre; even thus, I well remember, did befall to me, Looking upon the beauteous eyes, whence love Had made the leash to take me. As I turn'd; And that, which, in their circles, none who spies, Can miss of, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... it is alive with the true spirit of poetry. Her skill in mere technique is good, her handling of narrative is notable, and if there is no striking individuality—which might have been expected from her Indian origin—if she was often reminiscent in her manner, metre, form and expression, it only proves her a minor poet and not a Tennyson or a Browning. That she should have done what she did do, devotedly, with an astonishing charm and the delight of inspired labour, makes her life memorable, as it certainly made ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... a number of repetitions in the tune, and has a chorus that is sung at the end of each verse. I have not presumed to arrange it in metre; but the following is the substance: "We are assembled in the habiliments of war, and will go in quest of our enemies. We will march to their land and spoil their possessions. We will take their women and children, and lead them into captivity. The warriors ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... vocation in life was that of a historian. My brother was naturally frequently rallied by his family on his inconstancy of purpose, but he pleaded in extenuation that versatility had very marked charms of its own. He produced one day a copy of verses, written in the Gilbertian metre, to illustrate his mental attitude, and they strike me as so neatly worded, that I ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... requirements of both metre and sense, and the words untalk'd of and unseen make it nearly indisputable. I had at first thought it might be "rumorous eyes;" but the personification would then be wanting. Shakspeare has personified Rumour in the Introduction to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... expression of our authority, and the metre-gauge of our importance. By them the untutored mind of the poor Indian is enabled to estimate the amount of reverence due to each of us. This is the first purpose for which we are provided with Chupprassees. The second is that they may deliver our commands, post our letters, and ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... him with gestures. They stretched out their hands, and alternately struck their feet against the ground with frantic contortions. The last words they repeated in chorus, and we easily distinguished a sort of metre, but I am not sure that there was any rhyme; the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the rest is made up of what are probably original phrases but omitted from the Hebrew by the carelessness of copyists; yet none of these differences is of importance save where the Greek corrects an irregularity in the Hebrew metre, or yields sense when the Hebrew fails to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... 2439b. Defective metre and sense, owing to the loss of a hemistich, but the sense is complete. Grein's suggestion, feoll on foldan, adds nothing to the ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... peasants through the ranks of Austrian spears. It is written in the Middle-High-German, by Halbsuter, a native of Lucerne, who was in the fight. Here are specimens of it. There is a paraphrase by Sir Walter Scott, but it is done at the expense of the metre and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... point from a hundred and thirty-five to two hundred and fifteen metres, with a depth of five metres on the quays at lowest tide. These tides are felt as far as twenty miles above the town. They vary in height from one metre to as much as three, and a tidal wave is formed that is one of the greatest dangers of the downstream navigation. Coming up from the sea is fairly easy in almost any kind of stout and steady craft, but it is difficult for all but the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... stanzas, and I have changed the order of others. The text has nowhere been translated verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn has been given to many sentiments which were judged too Oriental. As the metre adopted by Hj Abd was the Bahr Tawl (long verse), I thought it advisable to preserve that peculiarity, and to fringe it with the rough, unobtrusive rhyme of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... rare passages does beauty fall a sacrifice to doctrine. The 'Divine Comedy' is indeed not less incomparable in its beauty than in its vast compass, the variety of its interest, and in the harmony of its form with its spirit. In his lectures 'On Translating Homer' Mr. Arnold, speaking of the metre of 'Paradise Lost,' says:—"To this metre, as used in the 'Paradise Lost,' our country owes the glory of having produced one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which are to be found ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... I hear the British tongue? Dear Heaven! what a rhyme! And yet 'tis all as good As some that I have fashioned in my time, Like bud and wood; And on the other hand you couldn't have a more precise or neater Metre. ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... favourably of it. [Footnote: Bouterwek's Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit.—Ersten Band, s. 334, &c.] According to his description, it resembles the older pieces of the Spanish stage before it had attained to maturity of form, and in common with them it employs the stanza for its metre. The attempts at romantic drama have always failed in Italy; whereas in Spain, on the contrary, all endeavours to model the theatre according to the rules of the ancients, and latterly of the French, have from the difference ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... rhymes is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre and syntax. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... we think, vainly endeavoured to elucidate. But we shall, on a future occasion, meet him on his own favourite ground. No less than 182 pages of the second volume are dedicated to the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth. He has endeavoured to define poetry—to explain the philosophy of metre—to settle the boundaries of poetic diction—and to show, finally, "What it is probable Mr. Wordsworth meant to say in his dissertation prefixed to his Lyrical Ballads." As Mr. Coleridge has not only studied the laws of poetical composition, but is a Poet of considerable ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Though Bloomfield's metre can be scarce held faultless, yet his power of detailed description has preserved us a living picture of Ranelagh in the height of its glory. Balls and fetes succeeded each other. Lysons tell us that "for some time previously to 1750 a kind of masquerade, ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... fore-shadow his poetry in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a boy's verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for rhyme ("full" and "beautiful," "palaces" and "days"). It manages a rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed ababcc and ending with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its special danger. And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught are interesting and abode with him, such ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... follow Paley. Dindorf, in his notes, agrees in reading [Greek: trophas], but the metre seems to require [Greek: epikotos]. Griffiths defends the common reading, but against the ancient authority of the schol. on ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... The British Ambassador, Punch, Has borrowed the lyre of the Opium-eater To praise your unparalleled feat! By his hunch 'Twould tax that great master of magic and metre To do it full justice. To paint such a vision The limner need call on the aid of the Poppy. It is a Big Blend of the Truly Elysian, And (you'll comprehend!) the Colossally Shoppy! Mix HAROUN ALRASCHID with Mr. MCKINLEY, And Yellowstone Park with a Persian Bazaar, And then the ensemble ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... went on: 'So I've had to live alone, with no company but my own voice. Maybe you heard me singing as you came. It wasn't much of a song, I admit, for elegance of rhyme and metre don't seem to come easy, but a song like that is more comfort than you'd ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... of Agamemnon. The metre of the Chorus indicates marching; so that apparently the procession takes some time to move across the orchestra and get into position. Cassandra would be dressed, as a prophetess, in a robe of white reaching to the feet, covered by an agrenon, or ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... he has fallen into this confusion: "The mere matter of all poetry—to wit, the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men—being unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become here of the substance of Paradise Lost—the story, scenery, characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have vanished clean away. Nothing ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Deluge in his mind, and increases the significance of the underlying parallel between his argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may be added that Ezekiel has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and the metre of the two passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr. ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... and directness of this lyric, its immense emotional undercurrent, and its abrupt, almost gasping metre, admirably suited to the impassioned mood of the speaker,—these are a few of the qualities that combine to make "A Woman's Thought" one of the most remarkable ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... in Metre known, With Strains has grac'd thee, humble as thy own; Who (b) G—l—n's Dullness did for thine discard, A better Critick, for as bad a Bard! Not unregarded let this Tribute be, Tho' humble, just; ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... is throughout symbolical. The sacrificial straw represents the world; the metre used represents all living creatures, etc.,—a symbolism frequently suggested by a mere pun, but often as ridiculously expounded without such aid. The altar's measure is the measure of metres. The cord of regeneration ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... death of Edward the Confessor will be found to correspond, both in metre and expression, with the poetical paraphrase ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... suppose that King Cormac designated his noble work by this name; and third, even could this be proven, the much maligned Keating removes any difficulty by the simple and obvious remark, that "it is because of its having been written in poetic metre, the chief book which was in the custody of the Ollamh of the King of Erinn, was called the Saltair of Temair; and the Chronicle of holy Cormac Mac Cullinan, Saltair of Cashel; and the Chronicle of Aengus Ceile De ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... the base of the Pic de Bergons, with the Pic du Lac Grand rivalling it on the other side of the defile, we soon sighted the chasm and cascade of Rioumaou on our left, and reached the Pas de l'Echelle. At 1 metre 50 centimetres, or 43/4 feet, from the extremity of the ornamental facing which marks the place, we pulled up, to try the magnificent echo, and were in no way disappointed. Our voices came back particularly clearly, but from the coach-box ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... advantages of music; order of different kinds of exercises according to; on intercourse between men and their wives; calls salt divine; epithets applied to liquids by; a moot point in third book of Iliad; essay on life and poetry of; biographical sketch of; the two works of; metre and dialects used by; epithets used by; tropes found in; figures of speech in; various styles used by; on constitution of the universe; natural philosophy of; on God and the gods; on the human soul; places emotions about the heart; ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... present, and the exercise made more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal agents. My Father read the verse admirably, with a full,—some people (but not I) might say with a too full—perception of the metre as well as of the rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and glorying in the proper names. He began, and it was a happy choice, with 'The Lady of the Lake'. It gave me singular pleasure to hear his large voice do ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 'cause she would, to part the sweeter, A portion have of Hopkins' metre, As people use at execution, For the decorum of conclusion, Being too ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... he is the ruthless denouncer of abuses, and is thoroughly filled with the spirit which, four years after the second recension of his book, found expression in the Peasants Revolt of 1381. With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than Chaucer, reflects the modernity of ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... He consecrated his muse to the service of religion, but, in so doing, imitated the Homeric hexameters of Milton; he sought to arouse the national pride of his countrymen by recalling the deeds of Hermann (Armin) and termed himself a bard, but, in the Horatian metre of his songs, imitated Ossian, the old Scottish bard, and was consequently labored and affected in his style. Others took the lesser English poets for their model, as, for instance, Kleist, who fell at Kunersdorf, copied Thomson in his "Spring"; ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... McMillan has told me the following story of one of his hunting experiences. While I can only tell it in simple prose, the deed described deserves perpetuity in the stately metre ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... tale!—but delicately perfumed As the sweet roadside honeysuckle. That's why, Difficult though its metre was to tackle, ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that it recalled (in single passages at least) Oehlenschlaeger's "The Golden Horns," does not seem to have weighed in the verdict. It is not in any sense an imitation; but there is an audible reminiscence which is unmistakable in the metre and cadence of the short-lined verses, descriptive of the vision. Never, I fancy, had the Swedish language been made to soar with so strong a wing-beat, never before had it been made to sing so bold a melody. To me, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Al-Aghlab al-Ajibi temp. Mohammed: the Alfiyah-grammar of Ibn Malik is in Rajaz Muzdawij, the hemistichs rhyming and the assonance being confined to the couplet. Al-Hariri also affects Rajaz in the third and fifth Assemblies. So far Arabic metre is true to Nature: in impassioned speech the movement of language is iambic: we say "I will, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... to Port Said, however, was a metre gauge one, laid down on the beach which runs as a narrow strip between the sea and the lagoons. The aforesaid R.T.O., sitting equably among a cloud of flies, would inform you on arrival (1) that the train which should have been the 8.30 from Mahamdiya had only just left Port Said, ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... Attention to metre and euphony will generally enable us to assign, amongst the forms in which we pick up and note any particular proverb, the original and legitimate one; especially when combined with brevity and "pith." As a case in point, our friend Ludlum will serve our purpose for comparison. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... representation of life; it is a symbol of life. In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has distinct and most evident form, in the musician's sense of the word. It is one of those plays that reach the artist's ideal condition of ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... native land, and to free her from continual warlike alarms, Determined that he would popularize the conception (and a very good one too) of a Nation in Arms! Now this is the way he proceeded to fan the flame of patriot ardour— (This metre looks at first as easy to write as blank verse, or Walt Whitman, but is in reality considerably harder),— He assured his crowded audience that, while everyone must deprecate a horrid, militant, Jingoist attitude, Not to serve one's country—at least on Saturday afternoons—was the very blackest ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... case, and even in the disasters of war, would be working out advantages which, after the war was done, would give England many friends and fewer enemies, give her treaties and new territory, and set her higher than she was now by a political metre. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... returned along the lurid circle On either hand unto the opposite point, Shouting their shameful metre evermore. ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... And/ Scotch Reviewers./ A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. 24, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Round Table, and Iseult of Brittany was a new figure of romance to him. In Tennyson, he had got no further than "Locksley Hall," which, he said, had a right tune and wrong words; and "Maud," which "was big in pathos." The story and the metre of "Tristram and Iseult" beat in his veins. He got to his feet, and, standing before the window, repeated a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... acknowledged master-piece of Latin poetry and the most sublime of all uninspired hymns. The secret of its irresistible power lies in the awful grandeur of the theme, the intense earnestness and pathos of the poet, the simple majesty and solemn music of its language, the stately metre, the triple rhyme, and the vocal assonances, chosen in striking adaptation—all combining to produce an overwhelming effect, as if we heard the final crash of the universe, the commotion of the opening graves, the trumpet of the archangel summoning the quick ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... will certainly be struck by the command of language and metre they display. It was shown both in rhyme and in blank verse. Many fine odes are scattered through them, and in the octo-syllabic verse Milman always appears to us peculiarly happy. But his poetry, like most of the poetry that ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle of transforming ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... as history, as rhetoric, as metre, as rhythm, as politics, it is positively enormous. The whole poem is a wonderful poem, and I wish I had space for it here. It is patriotic and it is written about as badly as a poem could conceivably be written. It is a mournful pleasure to think that my dear friend had his last ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... reflect. When one is full one is not very clear-headed, and he replied: 'I will sell her by the cubic metre.' ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... that our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to whose ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... a grave error had been committed in selecting the narrow metre gauge; it was all very well for phosphate transport, but once the line over Feriana and the branch to Tozeur are completed, they would have to deal with other material, such as ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain bonnie ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... Saxons of Sus-sex, Es-sex, and Middle-sex? Only so far as they were Angles; and, except in the parts near the Elbe, they were other than Angle. This we know from their language, in which a Gospel Harmony, in alliterative metre, a fragmentary translation of the Psalms, and a heroic rhapsody called Hildubrant and Hathubrant have ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... Poet, a poem by Sir H. Wotton—'How happy is he born or taught, that serveth not another's will'? It is very beautiful, and fit for a Paradise of any kind. Here are some lines from old Lily, which your ear will put in the proper metre. It gives a fine description of a fellow walking in Spring, and looking here and there, and pricking up his ears, as different birds sing. 'What bird so sings, but doth so wail? Oh! 'tis the ravished nightingale: "Jug, jug, jug, jug, terue," ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... which had also been consecrated with mystic ceremonies. And as this ring touched and bounded off from the different letters which still preserved their distances distinct, he made with these letters, by the order in which he touched them, verses in the heroic metre, corresponding to the questions which we had asked; the verses being also perfect in metre and rhythm; like the answers of the Pythia which are so celebrated, or those given by the oracles ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... Gomarus. I think M. Bayle repeated them from memory, for he put sacrata instead of afflata. But it is apparently the printer's fault that prudenter stands in place of pudenter (that is, modestly) which the metre requires. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... there comes an Englishman nourished on this poetry, taught his trade by this poetry, getting words, rhyme, metre from this poetry; for even of that stanza which the Italians used, and which Chaucer derived immediately from the Italians, the basis and suggestion was probably given in France. Chaucer (I have already named him) fascinated his contemporaries, but so ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the society, it won't be enough, of course, for me alone to preside; it will be necessary to invite two others to serve as vice-presidents; you might then enlist Ling Chou and Ou Hsieh, both of whom are cultured persons. The one to choose the themes and assign the metre, the other to act as copyist and supervisor. We three cannot, however, definitely say that we won't write verses, for, if we come across any comparatively easy subject and metre, we too will indite a stanza if we feel so disposed. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... There were no significant italics in this text. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. This etext was transcribed from a ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... disappointment of the reader, the terms proposed are humiliatingly low; yet such as, under modifications, I accede to. I have received testimonials from men not merely of genius according to my belief, but of the highest accredited reputation, that my translation of "Wallenstein" was in language and in metre superior to the original, and the parts most admired were substitutions of my own, on a principle of compensation. Yet the whole work went for waste-paper. I was abused—nay, my own remarks in the Preface were transferred ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... I whistled for Old Clay, and back he comes, and I mounted and off, jist as the crowd came up. The folks looked staggered, and wondered a little grain how it was done so cleverly in short metre. If I didn't quilt him in no time, you may depend; I went right slap into him, like a flash of lightning into a gooseberry bush. He found his suit ready made and fitted afore he thought he was half measured. ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideas were better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed." Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severe upon its Greek, but its main conception—an appeal to Death to come, a welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "they may tell ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... rare; and a rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... leaves a close friend, who is wooed in mistake for herself by the suitor destined for her own hand. This is the main dramatic point; the thread is very slender, and is drawn out to its utmost limits through five acts of blank verse. The language and metre are scrupulously correct. But one cannot credit the play with any touch of poetry or imagination. It presents a trite theme tamely and prosaically. Congenital inability of the most inveterate toughness to appreciate ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... degree of human thought, feeling, and emotion, and clothed them all, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the slightest to the most intense and concentrated, in the dress of exactly appropriate style and language. His metre also is a perfect vehicle of the language. If we think the range of his knowledge limited, yet it was all that his country and his age possessed, and it was very greatly more than has been supposed by readers that dwelt only on the surface. So long as the lamp of civilization ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... with this sweetness and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the 'Faery Queene' is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in doubling the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... succeeded by a most abominable fog, thick and white like cotton-wool. These were hardly ideal conditions under which to close a rocky and unknown coast, but it had to be done. The trouble was that it was entirely useless taking soundings, as the twenty-metre depth-line on the chart went right up to the land. We crept slowly eastwards, till, when by dead reckoning we were ten miles inside the coast, the Navigator accidentally leant on the whistle lever; this action on his part probably saved the ship, as an immediate echo answered the blast. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... of the reader. We can only promise him the utmost fidelity in the translation, having taken no other liberty than the substitution of common idiomatic phrases, peculiar to our language, for corresponding phrases in the other. The original metre, in every instance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... he visited Vallombrosa with Crabb Robinson in 1837, wrote an inferior poem there, in a rather common metre, in honour of Milton's association ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... cave, took from his pocket a ball of string and a tape-measure, tied the string to the flint corner, fastened a pebble at the nineteenth metre and flung it toward the land side. The pebble at most reached the end of ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... written, at college, the prize essay on Rendle's poetry (it chanced to be the moment of the great man's death); he had fashioned the fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on the forms which Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two years later the Life and Letters appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets took substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the woman who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful, tender, ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... remarks on the unaccountable alternation and connection between pleasure and pain, and adds that AEsop, had he observed it, would have made a fable from it. This remark reminds Cebes of Socrates's having put some of AEsop's fables into metre since his imprisonment, and he asks, for the satisfaction of the poet Evenus, what has induced him to do so. Socrates explains his reason, and concludes by bidding him tell Evenus to follow him as soon as ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... no news to other than professional critics that no means of study can be more precious or more necessary to a student of Shakespeare than this of tracing the course of his work by the growth and development, through various modes and changes, of his metre. But the faculty of using such means of study is not to be had for the asking; it is not to be earned by the most assiduous toil, it is not to be secured by the learning of years, it is not to be attained by the devotion of a life. No proficiency in grammar and arithmetic, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... not good for metre. Even when an actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... poet twice called himself the melancholy Cowley? He employed no poetical cheville[28] for the metre of a verse which his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... sweet, But Hymen's tenderness is sweeter; And though all virile love be meet, You'll find the poet's love is metre. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... almost entirely, the chief exception being in the case of the old poems, a great number of which appear in the Records and the Chronicles alike. The actual words of these poems had to be preserved as well as the metre, and therefore it was necessary to indite them phonetically. For the rest, the Nihon Shoki, which resulted from the labours of these annalists and literati, was so Chinese that its authors did not hesitate to draw largely upon the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... beings, and the whole is little better than [Greek: skias onar.] The plot was, as I believe, suggested by the "Twa Briggs" of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of the last century, as that found its prototype in the "Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey" by Fergusson, though the metre of this latter be different by a foot in each verse. I reminded my talented young parishioner and friend that Concord Bridge had long since yielded to the edacious tooth of Time. But he answered me to this effect: that there was no greater mistake of an authour than to suppose the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... (Ps, cxxxvii. 7). In the last poem the city, after piteously lamenting her manifold sorrows, v. 1-18, beseeches the everlasting God for deliverance therefrom, v. 19-22. [Footnote 1: In the Hebrew elegiac metre, as in the Greek and Latin, the second line is shorter than the first—usually three beats followed by two.] [Footnote 2: An unconvincing attempt has been made to refer the last two chapters to ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... S. C., in which there is a remarkable notice of Cleveland, Donne, and 'Bass Divine.' The latter name somebody has ignorantly altered, not knowing, probably, who 'Bass Divine' was. The poem is in imitation of Hudibras, both in style and metre." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... leisure, when it comes? I cannot bring myself to discard inkstone and brush; Now and then I make a new poem. When the poem is made, it is slight and flavourless, A thing of derision to almost every one. Superior people will be pained at the flatness of the metre; Common people will hate the plainness of the words. I sing it to myself, then stop and ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... stand for any of the large rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre are of course in this case very great, and it is they, doubtless, that drove the poet into this false picture of a bird of prey laden with his quarry. It is an ungracious task, however, to cross- question the gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... English. The second marks the passages that struck me as flat or mean. The third is a note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book language. The last mark implies bad metre.' ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... points of vantage commanding the broad fields of knowledge, upon which the poet may take his station to survey the world and all that it contains. But it has long ceased to be his function to set forth, in any kind of metre, systems of speculative thought or purely scientific truths. This was not the case in the old world. There was a period in the development of the intellect when the abstractions of logic appeared like intuitions, and guesses about the structure of the universe still ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... seem to have lost all sense of exactness," said Mrs. Gradinger, "for the lines you have just read would not pass muster as classic. In the penultimate line there are two syllables in excess of the true Alexandrine metre, and the last line seems too long by one. Neither Racine nor Voltaire would have taken such liberties with prosody. I remember a speech in Phaedre of more than a hundred lines which is an admirable example of what I mean. I dare say some of you ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... tendencies, and by the intrinsic impulse towards modulation of sound already explained, speech first issued from the human breast in harmonious accents and rhythmic form, and these became in their turn the causes and genesis of versification and metre. The classic experiments of Helmholtz show that each note may be regarded as a harmonic whole, owing to the complementary sounds which accompany it in its complete development. With reference to our own race, the genesis of the composition of verse and metre are ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... of it has no doubt a thoroughly barbarian twang, and it is particularly in the Psalms—which we have now been reading, and which might be ranked with the finest hymns—that I miss the number and rhythm of the syllables, the observance of a fixed metre—in short, severity of form. David, the royal poet, was no less possessed by the divinity when he sang to his lyre than other poets have been, but he does not seem to have known that delight felt by our poets in overcoming the difficulties they ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... supremest gifts of Shelley: namely, that his marvellous metrical invention of the anapaestic heptameter was almost exactly reproducible in a language to which all variations and combinations of anapaestic, iambic, or trochaic metre are as natural and pliable as all dactylic and spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent. As it happens, this highest central interlude of a most adorable masterpiece is as easy to detach from its dramatic setting, and even from ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I tried the blank metre once, and it would not do, and so I had to begin again in lyrics. Something above an hundred lines is written, and now I am in two panics, just as if one were not enough. First, because it seems to me a very daring subject—a subject almost beyond our sympathies, and therefore quite beyond the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... sights astonishes the gravity of an Englishman; whose astonishment is yet heightened by the extraordinary good humour which every where prevails. The laugh, the joke, the equivoque, and reply, were worth being recorded in pointed metre;—and what metre but that of Crabbe could possibly render it justice? By nine of the clock all is hushed. The sale is over: the goods are cleared; and both buyers and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... strikes at the weak point of his adversary's argument. "You appeal to scholars," he says in substance; "you admit that I am one; now you don't like my choice of words or metre; I do; who, then, shall decide? Why, the public, of course, which is the court of last appeal in such cases." It appears to us, that, on most of the points at issue, the truth lies somewhere between the two ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... "it has to be bribed to devil you. Until you've put ten centimes in the metre, you don't get any gas. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... too much for them; they seemed to enter heartily into the other portions of the service—but the psalms in metre are a great Shibboleth. My beadle, who always sat where he could command the congregation, has often assured me that when a psalm was announced he could soon tell the ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... have, we may reasonably hope, small need of the law any how, and we may be pretty sure that the verses which have touched the great popular heart are made in a spirit which is better than any law, even the law of metre. On reading attentively the poem in question we find a touching theme handled with simplicity, and in a certain sense earning its popular place, though no poem could possibly be so good as the simple fact—an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... will escape and live together, far away from men, in an Aegean island. The description of this visionary isle, and of the life to be led there by the fugitives from a dull and undiscerning world, is the most beautiful that has been written this century in the rhymed heroic metre. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... been superseded by the learned professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later times! Is there to-day a popular poet, using the English language, who does not, in technical acquirements and in the artificial adjuncts of poetry,—rhyme, metre, melody, and especially sweet, dainty fancies,—surpass Europe's and Asia's loftiest and oldest? Indeed, so marked is the success of the latter-day poets in this respect, that any ordinary reader may well be puzzled, and ask, if the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... "Well," until the end, has, with several alterations rendered necessary by change of metre, been treated by Molire in his Amphitryon, Act ii., Sc. ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... love of Nature:—that, whilst maintaining on the whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers:—that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the Soul and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger and wiser Humanity,—hitherto hardly attained, and perhaps unattainable even ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Shower, he continued in the Garden, and never quitted it, till he had found one Moiety of the Tablet, which was unfortunately broke in such a Manner, that even the half Lines were good sense, and good Metre, tho' very short. But what was still more remarkably unfortunate, they appear'd at first View, to be a severe satyr upon the King: ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... morning, trying in vain to damage his lost rolling stock. This booty was of immense value to us, and to a large extent it solved the transport problem which at this moment was a very anxious one indeed. The line was metre gauge and we had no stock to fit it, though later the Egyptian State Railways brought down some engines and trucks from the Luxor-Assouan section, but this welcome aid was not available till after the rains had begun and had made lorry traffic temporarily impossible between our standard ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... branches of art, but its productions are not likely to be of value outside the doting domestic circle. Even Pope who "lisped in numbers for the numbers came," did not add to our Anthology from his cradle, though he may therein have acquired his monotonous rocking-metre. Immaturity of mind and experience, so easily disguised on the stage or the music-stool—even by adults—is more obvious in the field of pure intellect. The contribution with which Mary Antin makes her debut in letters is, however, saved from the emptiness of embryonic ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin
... side, who did not interest him, he used to whisper to me, "Talk, that I may do my Catullus," and between the courses he wrote what I now give you. The public school-boy is taught that the Atys was unique in subject and metre, that it was the greatest and most remarkable poem in Latin literature, famous for the fiery vehemence of the Greek dithyramb, that it was the only specimen in Latin of the Galliambic measure, so called, because sung by the Gallae—and I suspect ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Spanish metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom, stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, and ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... a crown, I can truthfully state 'Tis a metre long, nor curly nor straight, And it is as yellow as plumbic chromate In a ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... his poems. By temperament a singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... intil lengths like the metre psalms, but it luikit gye an' daft like, sae I didna' read it," said the cuif hastily. "Here it's to ye, Meg. I was e'en gaun to licht my cutty wi't." Something shone gray-white in Saunders's hand as he held it out to Meg, ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to whose contact he ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... in a book—because we feel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving. But to set this memorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose; and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be a record which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that it convey a certain pleasure ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... pleased with this, as it gave me an opportunity of quietly imitating well-known and celebrated authors. I had composed a good number of so- called Anacreontic poems, which, on account of the convenience of the metre, and the lightness of the subject, flowed forth readily enough. But these I could not well take, as they were not in rhyme; and my desire before all things was to show my father something that would please ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Thought.—The striking reality and directness of this lyric, its immense emotional undercurrent, and its abrupt, almost gasping metre, admirably suited to the impassioned mood of the speaker,—these are a few of the qualities that combine to make "A Woman's Thought" one of the most remarkable poems in ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... speech, beginning "Should we be silent and not speak," is nearly word for word from Plutarch, with some additional graces of expression, and the charm of metre superadded. I shall give the last lines of this address, as illustrating that noble and irresistible eloquence which was the crowning ornament of the character. One exquisite touch of nature, which is distinguished by italics, was beyond the rhetorician and historian, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... difference between them is, that they borrow their phrases from a different and a scantier gradus ad Parnassum. If they were, indeed, to discard all imitation and set phraseology, and to bring in no words merely for show or for metre,—as much, perhaps, might be gained in freedom and originality, as would infallibly be lost in allusion and authority; but, in point of fact, the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old; only that, instead of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... contemplate my said Lady's good grace, and also that his work is in rhyme and as far as I know it is not had in prose in our tongue, and also, peradventure, he translated after some other author than this is; and yet for as much as divers men be of divers desires, some to read in rhyme and metre and some in prose; and also because that I have now good leisure, being in Cologne, and have none other thing to do at this time; in eschewing of idleness, mother of all vices, I have delibered in myself for the contemplation of my said ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... and float the sight up away through the fissure of the rocks. The rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that 'Duchess' does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ... the difficult rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the general measure. Then 'The Ride'—with that touch of natural feeling at the end, to prove that it was not in brutal carelessness that the poor horse was driven through all ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle grows as there is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... part of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "One advantage," says Mr. Southey, "this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. Southey ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's Songs and Sonnets with Matthew Arnold's Obermann; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with The Light of Asia. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but no one denies that the French Revolution and Hero-Worship, at least in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splendid as anything in our prose literature. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... have written the numerals in letters, else the metre would not have come clear: they were really in figures thus, "II C. et XX," "XIII C. moins XII". I quote the inscription from M. l'Abbe Roze's admirable little book, "Visite a la Cathedrale d'Amiens,"—Sup. ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... "The metre of these Odes is constructed on Greek models. It is not uniform but symmetrical. The nine stanzas of each ode form three groups. A slight examination will show that the 1st, 4th, and 7th stanzas are exactly inter-correspondent; so the 2d, 5th, and 8th; and so the remaining three. The technical ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... is especially cultivated; there is sufficient to supply all the province of Cathay, and so fertile is the soil that according to a French traveller, M. E. Simon, an acre is now worth 15,000 francs, or three francs the metre. In the thirteenth century this plain was covered with towns and country-houses, and the inhabitants lived upon the fruits of the ground, and the produce of their flocks and herds, while the large quantity of game furnished ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... stag at eve had drunk his fill. The metre of the poem proper is iambic, that is, with the accent on the even syllables, and octosyllabic, or eight syllables to ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... a pantomime (Forbidden treat to those who stood in fear of him), Roaring at jokes, sans metre, sense, or rhyme, He turned, and saw immediately in rear of him, His peace of mind upsetting, and annoying it, A curate, also heartily ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... dull, and it was during this visit that he gave me an inkling of his wish to go out to India as a cadet, but the transactions anent that fall within the scope of another year—as well as what relates to her headstone, and the epitaph in metre, which I indicated myself thereon; John Truel the mason carving the same, as may be seen in the kirkyard, where it wants a little reparation and setting upright, having settled the wrong way when the second ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... is the orthodox custom of translators to render the dialogue of the Greek plays in blank verse; but in this instance the whole animation and rapidity of the original would be utterly lost in the stiff construction and protracted rhythm of that metre. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this confusion: "The mere matter of all poetry—to wit, the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men—being unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become here of the substance of Paradise Lost—the story, scenery, characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... thou shalt stay?' Devastator of the day! Know, each substance and relation, Thorough nature's operation, Hath its unit, bound and metre; And every new compound Is some product and repeater,— Product of the earlier found. But the unit of the visit, The encounter of the wise,— Say, what other metre is it Than the meeting of the eyes? Nature poureth into nature Through the channels of that feature, Riding on the ray of sight, Fleeter ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fact selected from two poems addressed to daughters of Lord Carteret, and are put together arbitrarily, out of the order in which they stand in the original poems. There is a short poem by Philips in the same metre, addressed to Signora Cuzzoni, and dated May 25, 1724, beginning, "Little syren of the stage;" but none of the verses quoted in the Treatise on the Bathos ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... assortment of verses, Sexton's Daughter, Hymns of a Hermit, and I know not what other extensive stock of pieces; concerning which he was now somewhat at a loss as to his true course. He could write verses with astonishing facility, in any given form of metre; and to various readers they seemed excellent, and high judges had freely called them so, but he himself had grave misgivings on that latter essential point. In fact here once more was a parting of the ways, "Write in Poetry; write ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Chaucer's greatest work is the Canterbury Tales. It is a collection of stories written in heroic metre— that is, in the rhymed couplet of five iambic feet. The finest part of the Canterbury Tales is the Prologue; the noblest story is probably the Knightes Tale. It is worthy of note that, in 1362, when Chaucer was a very young man, the session of the House of Commons ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... their practical cogency, an attentive reader will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in English prose, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... itself from oratory by words and expressions still more ardent and glowing. What separates and distinguishes poetry is more particularly the ornament of verse; it is this which gives it its character, and is an essential, without which it cannot exist. Custom has appropriated different metre to different kinds of composition, in which the world is not perfectly agreed. In England the dispute is not yet settled which is to be preferred, rhyme or blank verse. But however we disagree about what these metrical ornaments shall be, that some ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... are not meant as a 'translation,' but as an humble attempt to give the literal sense in some sort of metre. It would be an act of arrogance even to aim at success where Pope and Chapman failed. It is simply, I believe, impossible to render Homer into English verse; because, for one reason among many, it is impossible ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kilmarnock volume contains poems descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming brethren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that which is known as Burns's peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditional forms of his country's poetry, and from earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these two he felt himself ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... French in less than two years, and as a mark of my gratitude I translated his Radamiste into Italian Alexandrines. I am the first Italian who has dared to use this metre in our language." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... got my apparatus finished now, and in the afternoon I climbed up to the roof of the main building and set it up there. I saw at once that the sight cut the hillside several metres below the top. Good. Even reckoning a whole metre down to the water-level, there would still be pressure enough and ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... you. We call it "Hunt the Shovels." You have been instructed to draw shovels from the Brigade. The term covers a space of some thousand square metres intersected with hedges, bridges, rivers, dugouts, horseponds (natural and adventitious), any square metre of which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... in the seventh century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed biographies will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in 1766, in the Cuomo Library at Naples.] treated in the heroic style and metre, as though he were a new Achilles. As a jeu d'esprit the book might pass; but it is deadly serious. Single men will always be found to perpetrate monstrosities of literature; the marvel is that an entire generation of writers should ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of short syllables of speech varied in different rotations by long syllables. The metrical character of English poetry depends upon the recurrence of similarly accented syllables at short and more or less regular intervals. Let us take this as the definition of what I mean by metre in the few sentences in which I shall use ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... to give me more than a slight pleasure; but it is possible that I am prejudiced by a dislike of English anapaests (I am aware that the classic terms are not really applicable to our English metres, but the reader will underhand that I mean the metre of the lines just quoted.) I do not find these anapaests in the Elizabethan or in the seventeenth-century poets, or most rarely. They were dear to the eighteenth century, and, much more than the heroic couplet, are the distinctive ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... is the poetry of naked thought. They have neither rhyme nor metre to adorn it," says Schoolcraft (Oneota, 14). The preceding poem has both; what guarantee is there that the translator has not embellished the substance of it as he did its form? Yet, granting he did not embroider ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... and perhaps the purest. They are at least as old as the time of Elizabeth, and can pass among the Zigany in the heart of Russia for Ziganskie. The other lines are not so ancient. The piece is composed in a metre something like that of the ancient Sclavonian songs, and contains the questions which two strange Gypsies, who suddenly meet, put to each other, and the answers which ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... a large selection from Paul Gerhardt's "Spiritual Songs." Every piece included is given in full, and is rendered into the metre of the original. A few of the following translations have appeared at various times during the last three years in different periodicals. They have been revised for this volume. Several of the hymns have been beautifully translated by others; and had the Translator been compiling ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... his thought he substituted for Lalage the fair-haired Bertha, quite regardless of the requirements of the metre. ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the song that made him famous. They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre worse. But once his heart took fire and burned for a day sheer white, and in that day he wrote words that a nation sang, and now all the world is singing. And they are proud of him, and when people come to ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... known as Catasetum tridentatum has pollinia with very large viscid discs; on touching one of the two filaments (antennae) which occur on the gynostemium of the flower the pollinia are shot out to a fairly long distance (as far as 1 metre) and in such manner that they alight on the back of the insect, where they are held. The antennae have, moreover, acquired an importance, from the point of view of the physiology of stimulation, as stimulus-perceiving organs. Darwin had shown that it is only ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... this Old Testament printed, and some sheets of the New. The printing-office was at Cambridge, three hours' ride from Boston, where also there was a college of students, whether of savages or of other nations. The Psalms of David are added in the same metre. ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... there existed in Leipzig a sort of literary centre, where Gottsched was regarded as a dictator in matters of taste. This literary autocrat praised Bodmer's translation of 'Paradise Lost' more than the original poem, in which he condemned the rhymeless metre. A sharp controversy soon divided the literary world into two hostile parties, known in German literature as the "conflict between Leipzig and Zuerich." Gottsched followed Voltaire in considering the English style rude and barbarous; whereas Bodmer, with keener artistic ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... first half of the twelfth century, which was the basis of the German "Pfaffe" Lamprecht's "Alexanderbuch," also of the twelfth century. The French poets Lambert li Court and Alexandre de Bernay composed, between 1180 and 1190, a romance of Alexander, the twelve-syllable metre of which gave rise to the name Alexandrines. The German poem of Rudolf of Ems was based on the Latin epic of Walter of Chatillon, about 1200, which became henceforward the prevailing form of the story. In contrast with it is the thirteenth century Old English epic of Alexander (in vol. i. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... German, (to those, at least, who do not know what sort of a thing Faust is in the original,) for offering another translation to the public, of a poem which has been already translated, not only in a literal prose form, but also, twenty or thirty times, in metre, and sometimes with great ...
— Faust • Goethe
... still to the expression of mere personality, by the medium of some sublimated form of reverie, the thought blended and tinged in the subtlest gradations, without the clumsy necessity of sacrificing the sequence of thought to the barbarous devices of metre and rhyme, or to the still more childish devices of incident and drama. Flaubert, it will be remembered, looked forward to a time when a writer would not require a subject at all, but would express emotion and thought directly rather than ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to their feet as one man. Then to Peter's and my own intense surprise that most impressive of all chants, the Doxology in long metre, surged out, gaining in volume and strength as its strains were caught up ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding pas de quatre. He may arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... An automobile had come in last night from Madrid, a sixty horse-power Merlin, and the chauffeur had reported snow half a metre deep on the mountains. The Merlin had stuck, he said, and had to be pulled out with oxen. Supposing the Duke intended going to Madrid instead of turning off by way of Salamanca, he—and incidentally we—seemed likely to come ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... thirty hymns. Some hymns were untouched—e.g., the three hymns of the Blessed Sacrament, the Ave Maris Stella, which is rhythmic prose, not verse, and the hymn of the Angels, which was sufficiently perfect. The metre of three hymns, Tibi Christe splendor Patris, and the Urbs Jerusalem and Angularis ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... him, said: "By Jupiter, Socrates, you have done well in reminding me. With respect to the poems which you made, by putting into metre those Fables of AEsop and the hymn to Apollo, several other persons asked me, and especially Evenus recently, with what design you made them after you came here, whereas before, you had never made any. If, therefore, you care at all that I should be able to answer ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... been said that the entire series is an exemplification of the Horatian maxim, "Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura"; and, except that we should be disposed to exchange the position of the words "quaedam" and "plura" (if the metre allowed it), with this sentiment ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... all the poetry of this age. Though written by both Troubadours and Trouveres, the latter were far superior in style and invention, and it is mostly their work which has survived. These romances were sometimes in prose, but more often in poetry of extremely smooth and flowing metre. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... It becomes an inviting treat to the populace, and gains an additional zest and burlesque by following the already established plan of tragedy; and the first man of genius who seizes the idea, and reduces it into form,—into a work of art,—by metre and music, is the Aristophanes ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... coolest Poet; and the fullest of this common earth and its affairs, of any sage that has ever showed his head upon it, in prose or metre. The sturdiness with which he makes good his position, as an inhabitant, for the time being, of this terrestrial ball, and, by the ordinance of God, subject to its laws, and liable to its pains and penalties, is a thing which appears, to the careful reviewer of it, on the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... without metre; And, here again, nothing is wrong; (For nothing on earth could be neater) Except ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... brain, Dreaming I hear the British tongue? Dear Heaven! what a rhyme! And yet 'tis all as good As some that I have fashioned in my time, Like bud and wood; And on the other hand you couldn't have a more precise or neater Metre. ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... felicitously, 'Cyrus the Great and Artaxerxes (Whose temper bloodier than a Turk's is) Were children both of the mild, pious, And happy monarch, King Darius,'—who fails to see that, although a correct 'Kuraush' may pass, yet 'Darayavush' disturbs the metre as well as the rhyme? It seems, however, that 'Themistokles' may be winked at: not so the 'harsh and subversive Kirke.' But let the objector ask somebody with no knowledge to subvert, how he supposes 'Circe' is spelt in Greek, and the answer will be 'with a soft c.' Inform him ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Sidney Lanier was much more than a clever artisan in rhyme and metre; because he will, I think, take his final rank with the first princes of American song, I am glad to provide this slight memorial. There is sufficient material in his letters for an extremely interesting biography, which could be properly prepared only by his wife. These pages can give ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of complexion, shapeliness of nose, gentleness of eyes, sweetness of mouth, cleverness of speech, slenderness of shape and seemliness of all attributes. But the acme of beauty is in the hair and, indeed, al-Shihab the Hijazi hath brought together all these items in his doggrel verse of the metre Rajaz, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... down a peaceful spectator of others?[105] The Bacchic and Corybantic dances one can also modulate and quell, by changing the metre from the trochaic and the measure from the Phrygian. Similarly, too, the Pythian priestess, when she descends from her tripod, possesses her soul in peace. Whereas the love-fury, when once it has really seized on a man and inflamed ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... articles on ballooning from the French. It is also interesting that she retained in her translation the original units which Verne used (metre, feet, leagues), a practice forgotten until recently. This may be the first appearance of a work by Jules Verne in ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... easy as you suppose, miss. To begin with, the original is in verse; a late Latin poem in a queer metre, and by whom written nobody knows. But you are quite right about my wasting my time. . . . What troubles me is that I have been wasting yours, when you ought to have been out at play ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that we should try to attribute the times of the year to children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... as an artist in verse, Tennyson is the greatest of modern poets. Other masters, old and new, have surpassed him in special instances; but he is the only one who rarely nods, and who always finishes his verse to the extreme. Here is the absolute sway of metre, compelling every rhyme and measure needful to the thought; here are sinuous alliterations, unique and varying breaks and pauses, winged flights and falls, the glory of sound and color everywhere present, or, if missing, absent of the poet's free will. The fullness of his art evades ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... which is new in this book may be considered as having been hitherto overlooked or rejected, while in the alternative case it is to be understood that the original cast of the melody has at some former time been altered (frequently to suit the English common metre to which it was not at first conformable), ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... the rest: the latter were the compositions of a school of bards in the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, among whom in like manner Hesiod enjoyed the greatest celebrity. The poems of both schools were composed in the hexameter metre and in a similar dialect; but they differed widely in ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... can book it by the coach. I warrant it, large as it looks, readable in two hours; and I very much want to know what you think of the first act, and especially the opening, which seems to me quite famous. The metre is very odd and rough, but now and then there's a wildness in it which helps the thing very much; and altogether it has left a something on my mind which I can't ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... of the hexameter upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel Harvey,—a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,—whose chief claim to remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... of English poetry, but relinquished the design to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The "Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among Gray's prose remains, are apparently ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Welsh, and have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand lines, into English rhyme; I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered the old book of ballads cast by the tempest upon the beach into corresponding English metre. Good! have I done enough already to secure myself a reputation of a thousand years? No, no! certainly not; I have not the slightest ground for hoping that my translations from the Welsh and Danish will be read at the end of a thousand years. Well, but I am only eighteen, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Percy Folio MS., with the spelling modernised, except in two or three instances for the sake of the rhyme (13.4) or metre (102.2). Other alterations, as suggested by Child, are noted. Apart from the irregularities of metre, this ballad is remarkable for the large proportion of 'e' rhymes, which are found in 71 stanzas, or two-thirds of the whole. The redundant 'that,' ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
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