"Alliterative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is called The Times, remains a mystery. To-day would have been better; that is, if by The Times is only meant "The Present Day." And if it doesn't mean this, what meaning has it? For alliterative advertisement it may be useful; e.g., "Times at TERRY's." The dialogue generally is easy, natural ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... Andre were covered with original sketches by the artists who furnished much of the color and sound of the place. Fair woman furnished the theme for the bulk of the drawings. When you say "sirens and siphons" you come near to estimating the alliterative atmosphere of Andre's. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... the gerund from helian heal, and means the Healer or Saviour. It is the name of an old Saxon poem, in alliterative metre, of the tenth or eleventh century, in the dialect supposed to have belonged to the parts about Essen, Cleves, and Munster in Westphalia. It is a sort of Gospel Harmony, or Life of Christ, taken from the Gospels. It has been ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... crowd. Properly reinforced by brass bands and bunting, graced by some sufficiently august presence, and enlivened by plenty of cheering and hat-flourishing, it presents a strong appeal. A political party is, moreover, a solid and self-sustaining affair. All sound and alliterative generalities about virile and vigorous manhood, honest and honourable labour, great and glorious causes, are understood, in this country at least, to refer to the virile and vigorous manhood of Republicans or Democrats, as the case may ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Banneker's introductory editorial appeared, the paper would have eclipsed all former records. In less than two years it had climbed to third place, and already Banneker's salary, under the percentage agreement, was, in the words of the alliterative Gardner, whose article describing The House With Three Eyes and its owner had gone forth on the wings of a far-spreading syndicate, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... so entirely into epithets and adjectives, as to render recitation breathless, and translation hopeless. Here, while we have retained the imagery, we have been unable to find room, or rather rhyme, for one half of the epithets in the original. The power of alliterative harmony in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... maintains a much truer tragic detachment, the effect being heightened by its opening picture of virtuous happiness destined to abrupt and tyrannous ruin. But it expresses itself so ill, shatters our hearing so unmercifully with its alliterative mouthing, and hurls us down so steeply with its low comedy, that we refuse to give its characters the grandeur or excellence claimed for them by the author. Gorboduc alone presents tragedy unspoiled by extraneous additions. In its ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... am satisfied that this poor Decade be irrevocably lost; but, for dear recollection's sake of days gone by, intend it at least to be spared from malicious incremation. Records of roamings in romantic youth, witnesses of wayward way-side wanderings, gayly with alliterative titles might your contents, a la Roscoe, be set forth. But—what conceivable news can be told at this time of day about the trampled Continent, and the crowded British isles? Had my luck led me to Lapland or Formosa, to Mexico or Timbuctoo, to the top of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Agenbite of Inwit, by Dan Michel of Northgate in Kent; and a few others. But to the second half belong the rich and varied productions of Geoffrey Chaucer, our first great poet and always one of our greatest writers; the alliterative poems of William Langley or Langlande; the more learned poems of John Gower; and the translation of the Bible and theological works ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... written in part in alliterative lines on the Anglo-Saxon system, in part in rhymed couplets of ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... The alliterative titles at once attracted the paragraphers; they fell upon them like hungry trout, and a perfect fusillade of paragraphs began. This is exactly what the editor wanted; and he followed these two series ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... The Early English alliterative romance, entitled the Morte Arthure, published from a manuscript in Lincoln Cathedral by Mr. Halliwell,[3] is considered by Sir F. Madden to be the veritable gest of Arthure composed by Huchowne. An examination of this romance does not ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... Not only does this add powerfully to the archaic impressiveness and awe, but it also seems to bring the form and figure of the Sisters of Fate more closely within the circle of the Teutonic idea. I have pointed out this striking use of the alliterative system in Macbeth in an article on "An old German Poem and a Vedic Hymn," which appeared in Fraser in June, 1877, and in which the derivation of the Weird Sisters from the Germanic Norns ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... tiptoed softly over to the table, and examined the other books thereon. There were volumes of the early English poets, an album, and A Souvenir of Friendship, in red and gold, like the Hemans. She opened the souvenir, and looked idly at the small, exquisitely fine steel engravings, the alliterative verses, the tales of sentiment beginning with long preambles couched in choicest English. She shut the book with a little weary sigh, and looked irresolutely at her sleeping aunt, then at the chair by ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Franklin was accused of being the author, and he neither denied nor admitted it. But when a lady reproached him for having used the fine alliterative phrase, applied to the king, "The Royal British Brute," he smiled and said blandly, "Madame, I would never have been so disrespectful to the brute creation ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... one of your blanked spiritual creatures—with no flesh on her bones." On the other hand, however, she enjoyed later much complimentary disparagement from her own sex. Miss Celestina Howard, second leader in the ballet at the Varieties, had, with great alliterative directness, in after-years, denominated her as an "aquiline asp." Mlle. Brimborion remembered that she had always warned "Mr. Jack" that this woman would "empoison" him. But Mr. Oakhurst, whose impressions are perhaps the most important, only ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... you, Brice," she said, the first thing, "you must have it that they have been engaged, and you can call the play 'The Second Chapter,' or something more alliterative. Don't you think that would ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Jones, like some wiser people, was the more pleased with his formula that it had an alliterative sound. Nevertheless, Ralph was master from this time until the spelling-school came. If only it had not been for that spelling-school! Many and many a time after the night of the fatal spelling-school Ralph used to say, "If only it had ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... from this, though belonging to the same group, those of which the characteristic feature is not this internal likeness with initial unlikeness, but initial likeness with internal unlikeness; not rhyming, but strongly alliterative, and in every case with a change of the interior vowel from a weak into a strong, generally from i into a or o; as 'shilly-shally', 'mingle-mangle', 'tittle-tattle', 'prittle-prattle', 'riff-raff', 'see-saw', 'slip-slop'. No one who ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... to Faithfulness (for no Translator is at liberty to misrepresent his Author and make an old Saxon Bard speak the Language of a modern Petit Matre) or from uniting English Words to express important Anglo-Saxon compounds.... Some may ask why I have not preserved the Anglo-Saxon alliterative Metre. My Reason is that I do not think the Taste of the English People would at present bear it. Iwish to get my book read, that my Countrymen may become generally acquainted with the Epic of our Ancestors wherewith ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... William Skipwith Burwell. Somebody had dubbed him "Rosebud," in the first moon of his sublunary existence, and the abbreviation was inevitable. He would probably remain "Bud" until he entered Hampton Sidney. The chances were even that the alliterative temptation of "Bud Burwell" would tack the label upon him for life. Changes were troublesome, and Powhatan County people were opposed to taking trouble. The name of their own county usually lost the second syllable in ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... "How alliterative you are!" she said, trying to be flippant. "You are not to say anything until I have had my supper. Look how the things are ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... J. Courthope (History of English Poetry, ii. p. 253). Herford, on the other hand, while having recourse to Chancer's influence to explain Spenser's anomalies, regards the metre in question as derived from the old alliterative line. From this view I am reluctantly forced to dissent. The alliterative line may be readily traced in the mystery cycles, and later influenced the verse of the interludes and such comedies as Royster Doyster; and this tradition may have affected the verse of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... some American gentleman, tiring of storing up his treasures only in heaven, would send a can or a case or a shipload of baked beans to the Belgians. This is alliterative, but earnest. They can heat them in the trenches in the cans; they can thrive on them and fight on them. And when the cans are empty they can build fires in them or hang them, filled with stones, on the barbed-wire entanglements in front of the trenches, ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... thought it prudent to avoid Montreal and Quebec and to board his ship at Rimouski. This circumstance afforded material to the editor of the Mail, Mr Edward Farrer, for an amusing article, bearing the alliterative title, 'The Murderer's Midnight Mizzle, or ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... had at that time been a twelvemonth or more in charge of what he himself described playfully as his "oceanic see"; but his long neglect of Mulfera was due less to its remoteness than to the notorious fact that they wanted no adjectival and alliterative bishops there. An obvious way of repulse happened to be open to the blaspheming squatter, though there is no other instance of its employment. On these up-country visitations the Bishop was dependent ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... nature. In Germany nature has got to behave herself, and not set a bad example to the children. A German poet, noticing waters coming down as Southey describes, somewhat inexactly, the waters coming down at Lodore, would be too shocked to stop and write alliterative verse about them. He would hurry away, and at once report them to the police. Then their foaming and their shrieking would ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... The Dale stood, and lived only a few hundred yards from the Gordons. Mr. Teeter was an Irishman, with a fine gift for speech-making. He was much sought after, for tea-meetings and during political campaigns, and had won the proud alliterative name of Oro's Orator. Tom was now holding forth hotly upon the "onparalleled rascality and treachersome villainousness" of the Opposition ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... do not fully sympathize with the late Mr. Lamb's statement, as quoted above; which statement I always have believed partially owed its origin to its very tempting alliterative robe. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in which he makes the spider, "from the silent ambush of his den," "feel far off the trembling of his thread," show that he was beginning to study the niceties of verse, instead of trusting wholly to what he would have called his natural fougue. On the whole, this part of the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Sensibility the sense of Elinor, and the sensibility (or rather sensiblerie) of Marianne, are markedly emphasised in the opening pages of the book But Miss Austen subsequently, and, as we think, wisely, discarded in her remaining efforts the cheap attraction of an alliterative title. Emma and Persuasion, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, are names far more in consonance with the quiet tone of her easy ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... evil fame his name conveyed to the citizens in his native state. As "Harry Excell, alias Black Mose," he had figured in the great newspapers of Chicago, and Denver, and Omaha. Imaginative and secretly admiring young reporters had heaped alliterative words together to characterize his daring, his skill as a marksman and horseman, and had also darkly hinted of his part in desperate stage and railway robbery in the Farther West. To all this—up to the time of his return—Harold ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... perished on the field." Three hundred and sixty chieftains were slain; only three escaped by flight, among whom was Aneurin, who afterwards commemorated the slaughter in the 'Gododin,' a lament for the dead. Ninety-seven of the stanzas remain. In various measures of alliterative and assonant verse they sing the praises of ninety of the fallen chiefs, usually giving one stanza to each hero. One of these stanzas is known to readers of Gray, who translated it under the name of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Exhortation addressed to the Christian Laity. Literal Translations of the Hymns of the Old Church:— 1. Deus qui cordi lumen es. 2. Aurora lucis rutilat. 3. Te Deum laudamus. The Song of Hildebrand and his son Hadubrand,—in alliterative metre. The Prayer from the Monastery of Wessobrun,—in alliterative metre. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... moment he was swinging aloft with his two fellow-performers, in "death-defying dives," and other alliterative acts set down on the ...
— Joe Strong on the Trapeze - or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer • Vance Barnum
... materials to his edition of 'The Canterbury Tales,' accidentally found out who the real writer was; and Ritson afterwards published Minot's ballads, which are ten in number, written in the northern dialect, and in an alliterative style, and with considerable spirit and liveliness. He has been called the Tyrtaeus of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... looked it. But I admit my thoughts verged on the profane. And I have such a cold in the head—I can do nothing but sniffle, sigh and sneeze. Isn't that alliterative agony for you? Queen Anne, do say something to ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... they show promise. I am not an editor, but I know the standard of some editors. You must not expect to "leap with a single bound" into the society of those whom it is not flattery to call your betters. When "The Pactolian" has paid you for a copy of verses,—(I can furnish you a list of alliterative signatures, beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe Zenith,)—when "The Rag-bag" has stolen your piece, after carefully scratching your name out,—when "The Nut-cracker" has thought you worth shelling, and strung the kernel ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to the mockery in Shakespeare's burlesques of Euphuism, or to Scott's later parody of it in the character of Sir Piercie Shafton. The everlasting antitheses, the perpetual playing with words, the alliterative trickery, the accumulation of far-fetched similes, the endless and often most inappropriate classical, mythological, and quasi-zoological allusions and parallels, are indeed sufficiently absurd and wearisome; and when "Euphuism" became ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... as Ludlum's Dog (No. 24. p. 382.).—This proverb is repeated somewhat differently in The Doctor, &c., "As lazy as Ludlum's dog, as leaned his head against a wall to bark." I venture to suggest that this is simply one of the large class of alliterative proverbs so common in every language, and often without meaning. In Devonshire they say as "Busy as Batty," but no one knows who "Batty" was. As I have mentioned The Doctor, &c., I may was well jot down two more odd sayings from the same old curiosity-shop:—"As ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... Francaises) sang in Court and Camp. The poorer, less regular brethren of the art, harped and played conjuring tricks, in farm and grange, or at street corners. The foreign newer metres took the place of the old alliterative English verse. But unprofessional men and women did not cease to make ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... has been employed instead of verse, for two reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which, in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in the second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet should attempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations would be few and far between, ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... developed point of view; he is more formidable and disconcerting; in short, much more mature. That he abandons nothing of his technical skill is evident from the translation from the Anglo-Saxon, the "Seafarer." It is not a slight achievement to have brought to life alliterative verse: perhaps the "Seafarer" is the only successful piece of alliterative verse ever written in modern English; alliterative verse which is not merely a clever tour de force, but which suggests the possibility of a new development of this form. Mr. Richard Aldington (whose own accomplishments as ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... name for the moment we are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has been well caught. Perhaps it should be added that the effect is greatly increased if Owen's verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indistinctly in a ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... have alliteration in plenty; you even have what some hold to be the pattern of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (though in practice disregarded, may be, as often as not), the chosen initial used twice in the first line and once ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Lord NORTHCLIFFE, who began his brilliant career as simple Mr. HARMSWORTH. Now the Latin for "harm" is damnum (loss or sacrifice in the primal sense), and for "worth" dignus. So, with a fine loyalty to his antecedents, Lord NORTHCLIFFE has adopted the heroic and pleasantly alliterative motto: "Per damna ad dignitatem" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... are these the 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 come ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... work, in rude alliterative verse (for rhyme was introduced in England only after the Norman Conquest), is the most valuable old English manuscript in the British Museum. Although much damaged by fire, it has been carefully studied by learned men. They have patiently restored the poem, the story ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... we read it now is in two distinct parts, the first containing the vision of Piers, the second a series of visions called "The Search for Dowel, Dobet, Dobest" (do well, better, best). The entire poem is in strongly accented, alliterative lines, something like Beowulf, and its immense popularity shows that the common people still cherished this easily memorized form of Saxon poetry. Its tremendous appeal to justice and common honesty, its clarion call to every man, whether king, priest, noble, or laborer, to do ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... equally annoying to the eye. Nor is it important or superfluous to note that this oral literature had, in the Teutonic countries and in England more especially, an immense influence (hitherto not nearly enough allowed for by literary historians) in the great change from a stressed and alliterative to a quantitative and rhymed prosody, which took place, with us, from about 1200 A.D. Accustomed as were the ears of all to quantitative (though very licentiously quantitative) and rhymed measures in the hymns and services of the Church—the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... SWINBURNE'S conduct of The British Weekly, it is enough to point to such alliterative and melodious combinations as "Rambling Remarks" and "Claudius Clear." The theological attitude of the paper presents difficulties which are not so easy to overcome, but Mr. Pullar Leggatt has promised ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... two metaphorical expressions there lies one simple condition. I put it into three words, which, for the sake of being easily remembered, I cast into an alliterative form: approach Christ, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... strain of alliterative classification, Mrs. Schum's boarding house might have been indexed as Middle West, middle class, medium price, and ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst |
