"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reckon him a careless workman. He had yet to learn how much, or how little, the public recks of either grammar or punctuation, how it prefers semi-truths tempered by split infinitives to facts stated in balanced prose. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... he admired rather the heroic patience of the blind author than the splendour of the verse. He was more impressed by the schoolmaster's learning than by that God-given genius which lifted that one Englishman above every other of his age and country. No, he was eminently prosaic, had sucked prose and plain-thinking from his mother's breast; but he was not the less an agreeable companion for a girl upon whose youth an unnatural solitude ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... of the subject opens his own vein of prose, we discover valuable sense and brilliant expression. Such is his account of the first feelings of melancholy persons, written, probably, from his own experience." [See p. 154, of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of persons who, like M. Jourdan, talked prose without knowing it, digest without knowing how; for them I make a popular history of digestion, being satisfied that M. Jourdan was much better satisfied when his master told him that he wrote prose. To he fully acquainted with digestion, one must know hoth its antecedents ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... the Mistress of the House, "that although his action was natural enough, he was in great danger of becoming a prose-fool." ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... some fashion that would not be inadequate to the occasion. A sister, a mother, a promised lover, all false,—all so damnably, cruelly false! It was impossible. No history, no novel of most sensational interest, no wonderful villany that had ever been wrought into prose or poetry, would have been equal to this. It was impossible. She told herself so a score of times a day. And yet the circumstances were so terribly suspicious! Mr. Gibson's conduct as a lover was simply disgraceful to him as a man and a clergyman. He was full of excuses, which ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... morning in the garden, he had chosen 'The Garden of Cyrus' as an appropriate study. He opened it reverently, for it was compact of jewelled thoughts that had been set to words by one of the princes of prose. He, the young garden-lover, sat at the feet of the great garden-mystic, and began to pore wonderingly over the inscrutable secrets of the quincunx. His fine ear was charmed by the rhythm of the sumptuous and stately ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... as a stage for the young actors. When all was arranged, the elder Indians seated themselves on the benches, while the boys and girls ranged themselves along the wall behind the table. Mr Evans then began by causing a little boy about four years old to recite a long comical piece of prose in English. Having been well drilled for weeks beforehand, he did it in the most laughable style. Then came forward four little girls, who kept up an animated philosophical discussion as to the difference of the days in the moon and on the earth. Then a bigger boy made a long speech in the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... contains those that either reprove with a smile or a frown, by pourtraying the characteristics of an individual, or the general manners of a society, people, or nation; and are either described in verse or prose. The dramatic contains perfect resemblance, which is described by comedy; or caricature, which is described by farce. And the picturesque is what exercises the painter, engraver, and sculptor. In all these species the satirist may either divert by his humour, entertain by his wit, or torture ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... lovely though it be, seems to be rather for a sermon than for singing, so cold it is, and yet full enough of his perfect feeling for construction, for architecture. It has a rhythm of its own, but it is the rhythm of prose, not of poetry. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... prose Edda,[3] "Iduna keeps in a box the apples which the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to become young again. It is in this manner that they will be kept in renovated youth until Ragnarok" (or the destruction of ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... Chambers tells) differs a little, and represents Janet as "at the Well," instead of upstairs, and afterwards "at the Mill," and so on. A Glasgow edition gives the whole in good west-country prose, and the lover begins: "I'm come to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... preparing for the invasion of England, this ancient trophy of the subjugation of the British nation was proudly exhibited to the gaze of the Parisians, who saw another Conqueror in Napoleon Bonaparte; and many well-sounding effusions, in prose and verse, appeared, in which the laurels of Duke William were transferred, by anticipation, to the brows of the child and champion of jacobinism. After this display, Bonaparte returned the tapestry to the municipality, accompanied ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... exquisite prose poem—words strung on thought-threads of gold—in which a musician tells his love for one whom he has found to be his ideal. The idea is not new, but the opinion is ventured that nowhere has it been one-half so well ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... highest single achievement, yet needs to be ranged with his other writings, early and late, to have its last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began "The House of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it— defrauded of art and the joy of life, "starving for symbols" as Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "The art of prose translation does not perhaps enjoy a very high literary status in England, but we have no hesitation in numbering the present version of Ibsen, so far as it has gone (Vols. I. and II.), among the very best achievements, in that kind, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... is simple; choose a spot, Then focus with decision Your thoughts upon it till you've got A clear-cut mental vision; And though from fact it widely errs, Remember in conclusion Only the man of prose prefers Eyewitness to illusion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... and rehearsed before battle, as incentives to deeds of glory. Thus tragedy and the epic muse were born, and, in the progress of taste, arrived at perfection. It is no wonder that the ancients could not relish a fable in prose, after they had seen so many remarkable events celebrated in verse by their best poets; we therefore find no romance among them during the era of their excellence, unless the Cyropaedia of Xenophon may be so called; and ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... several orphanages and hospitals, lastly, incredible as it may seem, the beautiful octagonal tower of the Cathedral. The incidents of this vandalism have just been graphically described in the new volume of the brothers' Margueritte prose epic, dealing with the Franco-Prussian War, entitled "Les ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... men. When he spoke to me respecting them he called them mere manufacturers of phrases. He could not pardon them for excelling him in a pursuit in which he had no claim to distinction. I never knew a man more insensible than Bonaparte to the beauties of poetry or prose. A certain degree of vagueness, which was combined with his energy of mind, led him to admire the dreams of Ossian, and his decided character found itself, as it were, represented in the elevated thoughts of Corneille. Hence his almost exclusive ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... name of "King's Brigade," and the recital closes with this phrase: "When night came on, with a prayer of thankfulness on our lips we fell asleep to await the coming day." Then adding, by way of postscript, a little phrase "Heimkehr vom Kampf." He carries the notebook—prose and verse together—to his Lieutenant, who countersigns it: "Certified as correct, De Niem, Lieutenant Commanding the Company," and then he sends his paper to his town of Jauer, where he is quite confident ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... great dose of clerical arrogance which she had lately been constrained to take. She played chess with them, walked with them, and drank tea with them; studied or pretended to study astronomy; assisted them in writing stories in rhyme, in turning prose tragedy into comic verse, or comic stories into would-be tragic poetry. She had no idea before that she had any such talents. She had not conceived the possibility of her doing such things as she now did. She found with the Stanhopes new amusements and employments, new pursuits, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... as to infect others with his own feelings; a Macaulay or a Froude will give what color he please to the story of a nation and compel all but the most wary readers to see as through his eyes. We are too much accustomed to reserve the title of literary artist for the creator of fiction, whether in prose or in verse. Mr. Wilson is no less truly an artist because the vision that fires his imagination, the vision he has spent his life in making clear to himself and others and is now striving to realize in action, is a political conception. He has ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... search for tangible relics: but love of classical art was founded on sentiment and tradition. As regards the sculptors themselves, their art was less influenced by antiquity than were the arts of poetry, oratory and prose. While Rossellino, Desiderio, Verrocchio and Benedetto da Maiano maintained their individuality, the indigenous literature of Tuscany waned. Sculpture retained its freedom longer than the literary arts, and when ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... "This is the prose of camp-life," said Catherine, picking the gravy-strainer out of a puddle and rinsing it in the lake. "I hope we shall ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... you wanted some one who had sense enough to put a thoroughly capable and accomplished housewife's notions of what a house should be into readable prose?" ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... for us with loving care by one of the most famous of the world's historians, who was fully able to appreciate the mingled force and cunning, the suaviter in modo and the fortiter in re, of this leader of a handful of Normans in a hostile and distant country. Let Gibbon's stately prose therefore present to us a word-painting of the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... preserved for his countrymen through all time, was not yet written. It was soon afterwards, however, to form not only a chief source of accurate information as to the great events themselves, but a model of style never since surpassed by any prose writer in either branch of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 544), was the Scottish writer, John Wilson (1785-1854), the author of numerous tales and criticisms, and of diverting papers written under the name of "Christopher North." Without the fancy and humor of Wilson, yet master of a style keeping within the limits of prose while verging on poetry, was Thomas De Quincey, the author of The Confessions of an Opium Eater, Essays on the Roman ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... d'abord Chapelain et Conrart. De meme nous voyons a l'Academie Grecque le vicomte invite, Corai repousse, lorsque Jormard y entre comme dans un moulin.' Thus speaks Paul-Louis Courier in his own brief inimitable prose. And a still greater writer—a real Frenchman, if ever there was one, and (what many critics would have denied to be possible) a great poet by reason of his most French characteristics—Beranger, tells ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude, or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That is why I am now able ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... the fashion of prose lullabies, Ruth Dyer has put together a little volume of twenty-five short stories. Each deals with the things of every-day child experiences, and aside from the standpoint of nap-time stories, forms a pleasant lesson for the child consciousness in making it aware ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... affords a generous harvest of beautiful and poetic thoughts, together with some keen observations of life, all of which are expressed in a graceful and supple prose.... It is a privilege to have stood for a time upon the veranda steps and to have caught a glimpse of that sane ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... perished in his sins. The light-hearted lawyer took one look at the remains of him, whom, within the past few days, he had seen so often in the full enjoyment of life and health, and resolved that never again, in prose or verse, would he speak of the person, whose crimes and cunning had returned so avengingly upon his own head, as the Grinstun man. Mr. Pawkins joked no more, for, with all his playful untruthfulness, he had a feeling heart. The ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... that Marguerite d'Angouleme was the first to write prose that can be read without the aid of a vocabulary; in verse, she excels all poets of her time in sympathy and compassion; her poetry is "a voice which complains—a heart which suffers and which tells us so." "It is not so much her own deep sentiment ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... 18: Let me join my voice to the universal chorus of praise to Shakspeare, "si quid loquar audiendum." It is merely a testimony of gratitude; nor presumes to add to that fame which has been celebrated, not to mention a thousand others, by the nervous prose of Johnson and the rapturous poetry of Gray. O "Magnum ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... is the best. It is the most attractive, in its bright red binding—one gets so tired of khaki—and it contains the Psalms, so priceless and unfailing in time of war. I think it a pity that they are in the metrical rather than the prose form. On the other hand, an officer once told me he found it impossible to settle to read the Bible. His experience was that a booklet of familiar hymns was of most spiritual value to him. He would pull it out in his dug-out and read a verse, and then ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... not found it yit," he continued, breaking into prose, "and there don't seem much prospect o' findin' it here anyhow. Wot an 'orrible cold ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... circumstance on which the Induction to the anonymous play, as well as to the present Comedy [Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew"], is founded, is related (as Langbaine has observed) by Heuterus, "Rerum Burgund." lib. iv. The earliest English original of this story in prose that I have met with is the following, which is found in Goulart's "Admirable and Memorable Histories", translated by E. Grimstone, quarto, 1607; but this tale (which Goulart translated from Heuterus) had undoubtedly appeared in English, in some other ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... of various celebrated mystical writings, especially the Prem-Sagar, or "Ocean of Love" (translated by Eastwick and by others); and the sensuous Gita-Govinda of the Bengalese lyric poet Jayadeva (translated into French prose by Hippolyte Fauche, and chastely rendered into English verse by Edwin Arnold in the "Indian Song of Songs"). See also Burnouf's partial translation of the Bhagavata Parana, and Theodore Pavie's ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... the young lady in her chamber, and repelled the attempted storming on the part of the desperate lover by the armed domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat), "then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love may settle as sediment You have been fearfully scolded, my dear young friend, this was the bitter prose that had to be surmounted; you have surmounted it, and so now give ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... has the form of poetry and the function of prose. Being thought, it distinguishes objects from the experience that reveals them and it aspires to know things as they are; but being poetical, it attributes to those objects all the qualities which the experience of them contains, and builds them out imaginatively in all directions, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... think of it. I'm going to put some literary flavor into the Gas-bag even if it does explode it. Look—see. I've taken a boost for the Kells Karburetor—rotten lying boost it is, too—and turned it into this running verse, read it like prose, pleasant and easy to digest, especially beneficial to children and S. Herbert Souse, Sherbert Souse, I mean." He rapidly read an amazing lyric beginning, "Motorists, you hadn't better monkey with the carburetor, all ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... risen, with burning heat, it scatters the beneficent clouds, and the 'sunbeams like swords' threaten to slay the tender green shoots. But this mist from God that comes down to water the earth is never dried up. It is not transient. It may be ours, and live in our hearts. Dear brethren, the prose of this sweet old promise is 'If I depart, I will send Him unto you.' If we are Christian people, we have the perpetual dew of that divine Spirit, which falls on our leaves and penetrates to our roots, and communicates life, freshness, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... least part of the interest of the Minstrelsy itself was the editor's appearance as a prose-writer. Percy had started, and others down to Ritson had continued, the practice of interspersing verse collections with dissertations in prose; and while the first volume of the Minstrelsy contained a long general ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... company she kept, for an introduction to so much that was wise, beautiful, and true could not but make that month a memorable one. It is not strange that while the young man most admired "Heroism" and "Self-Reliance," the girl preferred "Love" and "Friendship," reading them over and over like prose poems, as they are, to the fitting accompaniment of sunshine, solitude, and sympathy, for letters went to and fro ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... bad at not bein' invited, and made some poetry about 'em. When I feel poetic I talk prose, and give people as good as they send. ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... combination of the most delightful feminine disregard of facts with the highest feminine respect for titles. It was rich in a real and spiritual estate of tapestries, paintings, armor, legends, and ghosts. Everything the poet could wish for, and indeed some things that decent prose might have possibly wished out ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... own limitations exactly. Out of everyday experiences everyday thoughts had come to her, and when she began to embody such thoughts in words she did not suppose that their everyday character would be altered by the process. She had not met any of those perfect beings who inhabit the realms of ideal prose fiction, and make no mistakes but such as are necessary to keep the story going; nor any of the terrible demons, without a redeeming characteristic, who haunt the dim confines of the same territory for purposes invariably malign; and it never occurred to her to pretend that she had. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... critic has been mourning because good prose is not being written to-day. This surprised him, and he asked why it was that when poetry, which he pictured as "primroses and violets," found abundance of nourishment even in the unlikely compost these latter days provide, yet prose, ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... were being scattered broadcast in Italy and elsewhere—when, in short, all Europe was ringing with the doleful history of Adam and Eve—Milton could have ventured to speak of his work as 'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyma'—an amazing verse which, by the way, is literally transcribed out of Ariosto ('Cosa, non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima'). But even now the acquaintance of the British public with the productions of continental writers is superficial and spasmodic, and such ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Epicurean syndic, who had presented M. de Voltaire with my translation of his play, with an exceedingly polite letter from me, in which I begged his pardon for having taken the liberty of travestying his fine French prose in Italian. The syndic told me plainly that M. de Voltaire had pronounced my translation to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... PROSE WRITERS.—The fourteenth century forms a brilliant era in Italian literature, distinguished beyond any other period for the creative powers of genius which it exhibited. In this century, Dante gave to Europe his great epic poem, the lyric muse ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... creates ambiguity in poetry, e.g. "The son the father slew," and must be sparingly used in prose. ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... classing their author with the Shakspeares, Miltons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges of song; but we are nevertheless prepared, not only for the sake of these two satires, of his prologue, and of some other pieces in verse, but on account of the general spirit of much of his prose, to pronounce him potentially, if not actually, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... such print as could not brave this freedom; in France, to suppress such Young Persons as could! There is something to be said for both methods, and each has, perhaps, its defects; the one producing more stimulating Young Persons, the other enjoying more virile prose. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... closed unexpectedly well, one paper admitted, but it could never succeed. It was not dramatic of construction. Another admitted that it was a novel and pretty entertainment, a kind of prose poem, a fantasy of the present, but without wide appeal. Others called it a moonshine monologue—that a girl at once so naive and so powerful was impossible. All united in praise of Helen, however, and, as though by agreement, bewailed her desertion of the roles in which ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. He liked ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... whole of this scene is printed as verse in the 4to. I have printed the early part as prose, that the reader's eye may not ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... country. How was science encouraged there? One hour per week, exactly one-fifth of the time devoted weekly, not to Greek and Latin (that would have been almost sacrilegious), but to the writing of Greek and Latin prose and alleged Greek and Latin verse—that was the amount of time which was devoted to what was called science. I suppose I had an ingrained vocation for science, for it was the only subject, except English composition, in which I ever felt interest at school. If the vocation ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... had scratched verses upon his walls, and brief prose sentences—brief, but full of pathos. These spoke not of himself and his hard estate, but only of the shrine where his spirit fled the prison to worship—of home and the idols that were templed there. He never ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... languages, like so many others, is explained by the influence of the classical languages upon the English.—"Mundilfori had two children; a son, M[^a]ni (Moon), and a daughter, S[^o]l (Sun)."—Such is an extract out of an Icelandic mythological work, viz., the prose Edda. In the classical languages, however, Phoebus and Sol are masculine, and Luna and Diana feminine. Hence it is that, although in Anglo-Saxon and Old-Saxon the sun is feminine, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... may; it will only help you to write better prose. Now for the first composition. I am going to ask all the new students to write a letter giving some description of the town and a hint of the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... flow, and after came the thunder of its fall: it was a stream, but a solid one—an avalanche. Away up in the air the huge snow-summit glittered in the light of the Afternoon sun. I was gazing on the Maiden in one of her most savage moods—or to speak prose—I was regarding one of the wildest ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... that grips us very tight—and if there were a little more reality and prose brought into our sentimental talk about Christian love, and that love were more often shown in action, in all the self-suppression and taking a lift of a world's burdens, which its great Pattern demands, the world would be less ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... tradesmen, and each order might have been printed in the Complete Letter-Writer, as a specimen of the manner in which young ladies should address such correspondents. Fanny had a volume of French poetry in her hand, but had it been Greek prose it would have given her equal occupation and amusement. It had been in her hands half-an-hour, and she ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... Tacitus, who died about A.D.120, is perhaps the latest of the Latin authors whose works may be ranked among the classics. No more great men of letters arose. Few of those who understand and enjoy Latin literature to-day would think of reading any of the poetry or prose written after the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... come down to us. There is no romance either, and there is, we may say, no humour. Life is a very serious thing, so often lying close to the sword-edge; and the duties of life are simple. There is to be a great, very great enlargement of the borders of English literature later on. Prose and poetry are to have new developments. Romances are to show us heroic ideals. Lyrics of joy, of sorrow, of passion, of emotion natural and spiritual, are to be sung. The sense of beauty is to ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... natures like that of the countess; and the dinner was characterized by some unfortunate incidents. D'Argenton was particularly fond of repeating the replies he had made to the various editors and theatrical managers who had declined his articles, and refused to print his prose or his verse. His mots on these occasions had been clever and caustic; but with Madame de Barancy he was never able to reach that point, preceded as it must necessarily be with lengthy explanations. At the critical moment Ida would invariably interrupt him,—always, to be sure, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... prose of life, With its riches all sure and told: And scorning the beauties, that calmly in strife Truth fashions, it longs for the things all rife With ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... hod-bearing—namely, writing from Charles Verity's dictation, verifying names and dates, checking references and quotations. Still each arresting phrase, each felicitous expression, the dramatic ring of some virile word, the broad onward sweep of stately prose in narrative or sustained description, not only charmed her ear but challenged her creative faculty. She put herself to school in respect of it all, learning day by day a lesson.—This was the way it should be ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... were twelve Latin lines on his grave. His successor, Alexander Nowell, who died in 1601 at the age of ninety, was a zealous promoter of the Reformation. There was a fine monument to him, a bust in fur robe, and very long Latin inscriptions in prose and verse. ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... "Alide," a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she received ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... were adepts in the field of what might be called musical spectacle. M. du Locle had a hand in both of the operas written for Paris, "Les Vpres Sicilienne," and "Don Carlos." Under the eyes of Verdi at Sant' Agata he wrote the prose scenario of "Ada," which Ghislanzoni turned into Italian verse for the composer. If a prodigal and sumptuous heaping up of stage adornments could make the success of an opera, "Salammb" would have been one of the greatest triumphs of the French lyric stage; but ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... with great zest into the life of a Parisian art student, but somehow the experience did not equal his anticipations. What he had read in books—poetry and prose—had thrown a halo around the Latin Quarter, and he was therefore disappointed in finding the halo missing. The romance was sordid and mercenary, and after a few months of it he yearned for ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... forgotten them. The education which has been fostered in American schools and colleges keeps the whole nation in touch with the past. Some of their best authors write in a style that Milton and Burke would understand and approve. There is no more beautiful English prose than Nathaniel Hawthorne's. The best speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and, we may truly add, of President Wilson, are merely classic English. During my own lifetime I am sure I have seen the speech usages of the two peoples draw closer together. For one ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... instinct with his personality came into existence and made friends for itself. He called it Patchwork, and to have given it any other name would have severely taxed his inventiveness. It is a collection of stories, of ana, of quotations in verse and prose, of original matter, of character-sketches, of small adventures, of table-talk, and of other things besides, if other things, indeed, there be. If you know Patchwork by heart you are well equipped. It is intensely original throughout, and never more original than when ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... composed many poems, but on leaving the university he turned his attention to art and prose composition. His "Modern Painters" was justly hailed as one of the noblest works of the century, and instantly placed its author in the ranks of the foremost art ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... they ridiculed, but they were not without their use in the development of philosophy. [Footnote: Grote has a fine chapter on the Sophists (part ii. ch. 67).] The Sophists also rendered a service to literature by giving definiteness to language, and creating style in prose writing. Protagoras investigated the principles of accurate composition; Prodicus busied himself with inquiries into the significance of words; Gorgias proposed a captivating style. He gave symmetry to the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... any time at which Greece had not writers equal or superior to their Roman contemporaries. I am sure that no Latin writer of the age of Lucian is to be named with Lucian; that no Latin writer of the age of Longinus is to be named with Longinus; that no Latin prose of the age of Chrysostom can be named with Chrysostom's compositions. I have read Augustin's Confessions. The book is not without interest; but he expresses himself in the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Until it happed, a-walking in the fields, He noticed all at once that plants could speak, Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him. That day the daisy had an eye indeed— Colloquized with the cowslips on such themes! We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose. ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... god; he healed the sick, foretold the future, worked miracles, and delivered Sparta from a plague (Herod. iv. 36; Iamblichus, De Fit. Pythag. xix. 28). Suidas credits him with several works: Scythian oracles, the visit of Apollo to the Hyperboreans, expiatory formulas and a prose theogony. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... has a prose prologue and epilogue, the intermediate portions being poetic dialogue. The characters are discriminated and well supported. It does not preserve the unities of Aristotle, which, indeed, are found neither in the Bible nor in Nature,—which Shakspeare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Bibliographical Society's publications, from 1893 onwards, are of the greatest value, comprising lists of English printers, early editions of rare books, lists of early English plays, tales, and prose romances, with numerous bibliographies. For recourse to these, probably it will be necessary to visit the nearest important public library, though one may purchase individual numbers from time to time at the ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... And the consummate prose of this our chapter moves us with the like rhythmical power upon the spirit, while from Abel and Enoch onwards we hear recited, name by name, the ancestors of the undying family of faith. No wonder that the chapter should have inspired to utterances formed ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... to read First Year Ashmun's Prose Selections 9 Cricket on the Hearth 5 Sohrab and Rustum 3 Midsummer Night's Dream 6 ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... of Bolognese nobles and the widow of a knight of Picardy, well versed in the liberal arts, was the author of a number of lays, virelays,[1663] and ballads. Christine de Pisan, noble and high-minded, wrote with distinction in prose and verse. Loyal to France and a champion of her sex, there was nothing she more fervently desired than to see the French prosperous and their ladies honoured. In her old age she was cloistered in the Abbey of Poissy, where her daughter was a nun. There, on the 31st of July, 1429, she completed ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... periods, free from conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it is natural and normal art, such as grew spontaneously when mankind first tried in freedom to express beauty. For example, the language of Greek poetry is markedly different from that of prose, and there are even clear differences of language between different styles of poetry. And further, the poetry is very seldom about the present. It is about the past, and that an ideal past. What we have to notice there is that this kind of rule, which has been usual in all great ages of poetry, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of high antiquity and extended popularity. The prose is doubtless as old as our own era; but the intercalated verses and proverbs compose a selection from writings of an age extremely remote. The Mahabharata and the textual Veds are of those quoted; to the first of which Professor M. Williams (in his admirable ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... course, hold good in the case of such legends about national heroes as Mr. J. F. Campbell has found thriving in Ireland and the West Highlands of Scotland, and which he justly believes to be "bardic recitations, fast disappearing, and changing into prose." They belong to a different section of popular fiction from that to which reference is now made. It is often difficult to draw the line between these two classes of folk-tales. But there is a striking difference ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... "Greek Prose, Mansell 19th; Greek Translation, Mansell 19th; Combined Order, Mansell 19th." A roar of laughter. "Well, Mansell, I don't think that a titter from your companions is a sufficient reward ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Parmenides were carried out by Zeno the Eleatic, who is said to have been his adopted son. He brought into use the method of refuting error by the reductio ad absurdum. His compositions were in prose, and not in poetry, as were those of his predecessors. As it had been the object of Parmenides to establish the existence of "the One," it was the object of Zeno to establish the non-existence of "the Many." Agreeably to such ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... that deep down in the hearts of the majority of the human race there exists a profound attachment to the ideals of gallantry and chivalry which were nourished by the stories we loved in childhood, and by the tales of Scottish prowess, in prose and poetry, selected for the school-books in use by the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... novelists is individually, the interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly short of uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples of prose fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet in those grey volumes we have the production of one who made way ever by a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of language, above all, by the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the "Journal des Debats," by occasional concerts, revising proofs, in a word anything which a versatile and desperate Bohemian could turn his hand to. In fact, for many years the main subsistence of Berlioz was derived from feuilleton-writing and the labors of a critic. His prose is so witty, brilliant, fresh, and epigrammatic that he would have been known to posterity as a clever litterateur, had he not preferred to remain merely a great musician. Dramatic, picturesque, and subtile, with an admirable sense of art-form, he could have become a powerful dramatist, perhaps ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... the mountains, The dew shall flee the rose, The nymphs forsake the fountains, Ere I forsake my prose!" ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... must distinguish again between the original collection of the hymns or Mantras, called the Sanhita or the collection, being entirely metrical and poetical, and a number of prose works, called Brahmanas and Sutras, written in prose, and giving information on the proper use of the hymns at sacrifices, on their sacred meaning, on their supposed authors, and similar topics. These works, too, go by the name of Rig-veda: but though very curious in themselves, they are evidently ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... passed from boyhood to youth his mental development took its characteristics from the popular demand of the neighborhood. He scribbled verses and satirical prose, wherein the coarse wit was adapted to the taste of the comrades whom it was designed to please; and it must be admitted that, after giving due weight to all ameliorating considerations, it is impossible to avoid disappointment ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... story of Nala and Damayanti is still read and appreciated by a select circle of readers; and Sir Edwin Arnold's beautiful translation of the concluding books of the Epic is familiar to a larger circle of Englishmen. A complete translation of the Epic into English prose has also been published in India, and is useful to Sanscrit scholars for the ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... been. There was no original writing in America at the time they were written; and if there had been, it would hardly have commended itself to the old-fashioned taste of Dr. Bryant, to whom Pope was still a power in poetry, as Addison, no doubt, was in prose. It was natural, therefore, that he should offer his boy to the strait-laced Muses of Queen Anne's time; that the precocious boy should lisp in heroic couplets, and that he should endeavor to be satirical. Politics ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution, "the Russian novel," not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... upon trial, that they did not belong to sculpture. He had the ambition to make marble speak not its own language merely, but those of painting and of poetry likewise; and when this proved impossible he was unhappy and out of conceit with himself, On the other hand, he did good work in poetry and in prose; but neither did these content him. After all, my father's observation hit the mark; things came too easy to him. Goethe speaks ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... our table to vary the usual talk, by the reading of short papers, in prose or verse, by one or more of The Teacups, as we are in the habit of calling those who make up our company. Thirty years ago, one of our present circle—"Teacup Number Two," The Professor,—read a paper on Old Age, at a certain Breakfast-table, where he was in the habit of appearing. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... South Seas the censor has had his day. From New Guinea to Easter Island, he has made his rules and enforced them. Often he wrote glowing pages of prose and poetry about his accomplishments, for reading in Europe and America. He was usually sincere, and determined. He felt that it was up to him to make over the native races to suit his own ideas of what pleased God and himself. When he had the lower hand, he prayed and strove in agony ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... place long among the lower orders, and specimens of it, both in prose and verse, are found a century after the Conquest. Gradually the Norman tongue began to amalgamate with it, and the result was, the English. At what precise year our language might be said to begin, it is impossible to determine. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... once more the hard-worked doctor at everybody's command, with a fretful patient waiting for him a mile beyond St Roque's; and all these dazzling moments, which had rapt the unfortunate young fellow into another world, were so much time lost to the prose figure that had to help Nettie down and let her go, and betake himself soberly about his own business. Perhaps Nettie felt it a little disenchanting too, when she was dropped upon the bare street, and went into the common shop, and saw the doctor's drag flash off in the red frosty sunshine ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... religious prejudices, provocative of strife that amounted to revolution. Its social life ran the gamut from the severity of the Commonwealth Puritan to the unbridled debauchery of the Restoration Courtier. In literature it experienced a remarkable transformation in poetry, and developed modern prose, watched the production of the greatest English epics, smarted under the lash of the greatest English satires, blushed at the brilliant wit of unspeakable comedies, and applauded the beginnings ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... artist—that is, a great artist. The hierarchies of the soul's dominion belong only to man, and it is right they should. He it was whom God created first, let him take the preeminence. But among those stars of lesser glory, which are given to lighten the nations, among sweet-voiced poets, earnest prose writers, who, by the lofty truth that lies hid beneath legend and parable, purify the world, graceful painters and beautiful musicians, each brightening their generation—among ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... justice which does not fail to be done in the prose narrative of life, while men hastened, the moment a cry was raised against Don Alessandro, to echo it back with all kinds of imputations both on himself and his employees, every man held his breath, and many wept, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Come, STERNE!—whose prose, with all a Poet's art, Tickles the fancy, while it melts the heart!— Since at apologies I ne'er was handy,— Come, while fastidious Readers run me hard, And screen, sly playful wag! a hapless Bard, Behind one ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... we do not give; for indeed it was in strophes, sung viva voce, with all the parts;—Danton glooming considerably, in his place; and demanding that there be prose and decency in future. (See also Moniteur, Seance du 26 Novembre.) Nevertheless the captors of such spolia opima crave, not untouched with liquor, permission to dance the Carmagnole also on the spot: whereto an exhilarated Convention cannot but accede. Nay, 'several ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... prodigy; that he was precocious, like Cicero and Pascal; that he early made great attainments, giving utterance to living thoughts and feelings, like Bacon, among boyish companions; lisping in numbers, like Pope, before he could write prose; different from all other boys, since no time can be fixed when he did not think and feel like a person of maturer years. Born in Florence, of the noble family of the Alighieri, in the year 1265, his early education devolved upon his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... ye!" cried the apparition, as though illustrating a point. Leaning his white sleeves on the rail, cigar in one fist, Tauchnitz volume in the other, he roared down over the side a passage of prose, from which his visitors caught only the words "Ginger Dick" and "Peter Russet," before ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... the thanks I speak come short of that which is your due, Say for whom else my verse and prose I make except for you? You have indeed prevented me with many an unasked boon, Blest me, unhindered of excuse, with favours not a few. How then should I omit to give your praise its full desert And ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... temper, which is that of prudence. "I have not read the books," he says, and immediately he adds, "and if I have read them I have forgotten." This is excellent caution. And I like his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly sincerity. As a reported piece of prose this declaration is easy to read and not difficult to believe. Many books have not been read; still more have been forgotten. As a piece of civic oratory this declaration is strikingly effective. Calculated to fall in with the bent of the popular ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... the mistress Of GUNDIBERT; but he had grace, 395 And rather took a country lass; They say, 'tis false, without all sense, But of pernicious consequence To government, which they suppose Can never be upheld in prose; 400 Strip nature naked to the skin, You'll find about her no such thing. It may be so; yet what we tell Of TRULLA that's improbable, Shall be depos'd by those who've seen't, 405 Or, what's as good, produc'd in print: And if they will ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... philosophy in them in our sense of the term. It is here that we first find intensely interesting philosophical questions of a more or less cosmological character expressed in terms of poetry and imagination. In the later Vedic works called the Brahmaf@nas and the Ara@nyakas written mostly in prose, which followed the Vedic hymns, there are two tendencies, viz. one that sought to establish the magical forms of ritualistic worship, and the other which indulged in speculative thinking through crude generalizations. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Madame de Stael there is no place in this century for a Sappho, and that Ninon could not exist in Paris without grands seigneurs and a voluptuous court. She is the Ninon of the intellect; she adores Art and artists; she goes from the poet to the musician, from the sculptor to the prose-writer. Her heart is noble, endowed with a generosity that makes her a dupe; so filled is she with pity for sorrow,—filled also with contempt for the prosperous. She has lived since 1830, the centre of a choice circle, surrounded by tried ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an “attic warbler.” It is true, however, he was writing poetry, not prose. Though a Bluestocking, her praise was usually generously bestowed; she knew well how to flatter. She, though unacquainted with Latin, paraphrased Horace; and she admitted her ignorance of French. She loved all animals, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... sweetness still living in his blood—for these does that chase seem alone of worth, when the dusty entomological relic thereof is in limbo. And so that long and costly shelf, groaning beneath the weight of Grose and Dugdale, and many a mighty slab of topographical prose; those pilgrimages to remote parish churches, with all their attendant ardours of careful 'rubbings'; those notebooks, filled with patient data; those long letters to brother antiquaries—of sixteen; even that ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... among its more or less distinguished authors a goodly number of physicians. Sir Thomas Browne was, perhaps, the last of the great writers of English prose whose mind and style were impregnated with imagination. He wrote poetry without meaning it, as many of his brother doctors have meant to write poetry without doing it, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English Prose. He read forward steadily, occasionally making ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... came so early, was constructed according to realistic principles; and although we still distinguish romantic tints, it is a striking picture of Russian society at the beginning of the 19th century. We find the same tendency in Lermontov's prose novel, "A Hero of Our Times," in which the hero, Pechorin, has many traits in common with Evgeny Onyegin. This book immediately made a deep impression. It was really nothing more than a step taken in a new direction by ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... vagrant Scotch, the fortune-hunters of the Caledonian tribe; at the same time we respect her philosophers and literary men, who appear to us to compose the first rank of writers. Without mentioning their Ossian, Thompson and Burns, we may enumerate their prose writers, such as Hume, and the present association of truly learned and acute men, who write the Edinburgh Review. A Scotchman may be allowed to show pride at the mention of this celebrated work. As it regards America, this northern constellation of talent, shines brightly in our ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... man, where he shortly after died and was interred at Westminster, near to Chaucer, at the charge of the Earl of Essex, his hearse being attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems with the pens that wrote them thrown into his tomb.'{4} In 1633, Sir James Ware prefaced his edition of Spenser's prose work on the State of Ireland with these remarks:— 'How far these collections may conduce to the knowledge of the antiquities and state of this land, let the fit reader judge: yet something I may not passe by touching Mr. Edmund Spenser and the worke ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... construction of both these lines is difficult to understand. The prose order of the line is 'yogatah yuktesu (madhye) yasya yatha, etc., vikrama (tatha vakshyami); atmani pasyatah (janasya) yuktasya yogasya (yatha) siddhi (tatha vakshyami).' Yogatah means upayatah, i.e., according to rules and ordinances. Vikrama is used in a peculiar sense, viz., anubhavakramah, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the Works of Alexander the Great; the manners, habits, customs, usages, and the meditations of the Grecians; the Greek Digamma resolved, Prosody, Composition, both in prose and verse, and Oratory, in English, Latin and Greek; together with various other branches of learning and scholastic profundity—quoi enumerare longum est—along with Irish Radically, and a small taste of ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... desired plain, prose, Mr. Raikes tamed his imagination to deliver it. He pointed distinctly at the old gentleman who gave the supper as the writer of the letter. Evan, in return, confided to him his history and present position, and Mr. Raikes, without cooling to his fortunate friend, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... better than I could express it the feeling with which I tried to write this book, and I once intended to ask your permission to prefix the sonnet to my book, but my friends persuaded me that I ought to tell my story in my own prose, however much better ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... it would but ill become me to pretend to exchange verses with him who, for fifty years, has been the undisputed sovereign of European literature. You must therefore accept my most sincere acknowledgments in prose—and in hasty prose too; for I am at present on my voyage to Greece once more, and surrounded by hurry and bustle, which hardly allow a moment even to gratitude and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... saw, and that if one of his novels and the most fascinating work of ancient or modern times lay side by side, he would choose the former, even though he had already repeatedly perused it. He studies Lippard just as other folks do Shakespeare, and yet the man has read and admires the majestic prose of Chilton, and is quite familiar with the best English classics! He is a Quaker, and his merciless and unmitigated regard for truth is comically grand, and nothing amuses me more than to draw out that peculiar characteristic. For instance, after talking at him the most beautiful ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... leads Livy to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall. The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the traces. But to the limning of that sketch ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... remembered that in their sermons they had, without notes, without hesitation, and without a grammatical error, entered into the most subtle metaphysical reasoning (rather too much of it indeed!), and had preached with impassioned (perhaps too impassioned) eloquence, quoting poets and prose writers, ancient and modern, with the facility of good scholars—while they urged men and women to repent and flee to Christ, with all the fervour of men thoroughly in earnest. On the other hand, he knew that their opportunities for self-education were not great, and that they had to ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... observed a youngster, of the name of Prose, a cockney, who drawled out his words, which, "like a wounded snake, dragged their slow ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... himself, suddenly seized with haste, grasped his or her hand luggage and stood in readiness. In the presence of that improbability, that Titan of venturesomeness, that floating fairy palace, it was impossible to cling to the conviction that modern civilisation is all prose. The most prosaic of mortals here had forced upon him a piece of foolhardy romance compared with which the dreams of the poets ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist—the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey houses, looked for their familiar outline when ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... father, was proud of its long tradition, and had proved its right to sing the glories of Elizabeth's reign. The drama, in the full vigour of its youth, challenged comparison with the drama of Greece and Rome. Prose was conscious of its power in exposition and controversy. But in every review of our literature's great achievement and greater promise there was one cause of serious misgivings. England could not yet rank with other countries in its histories. Many large volumes had ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... had never sung for his royal patron a roundelay more pleasing than his prose of the moment. It caused to vibrate the very heart chords of the susceptible prince. There were subtle appeals to spite ungratified, to wounded pride, to ambition, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Scribe goes on, blubbering like a good Syrian his complaint and joy, gushing now in verse, now in what is worse, in rhymed prose, until he reaches the point which is to us of import. Khalid, in the winter of the first year of the Dastur (Constitution) writes to him many letters from Beirut, of which he gives us not less than fifty! And of these, the following, if not the most piquant and interesting, are the most indispensable ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... could not be content. He would like to have Masson's Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to consider the great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. While he counts Gibbon's Rome, I mean the ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... are foes, stand up now, stand up now, The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now; The Cavaliers are foes, themselves they do disclose By verses, not in prose, to please the singing boys. Stand up now, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... homely prose follows. The tradesmen and tinkers of Athens are planning to turn actors and to play "Pyramus and Thisbe" for the Duke's wedding feast. It is full of "local hits," which are not lost upon the audience. In the practical jokes, the melodrama, the ranting bombast, and Bottom's ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... with pleasure; the fantastic message was not devoid of reality in the days when young imaginative spirits tried to hide the prose of war and policy in a bright mist of romantic fancy; nor was he ashamed to bend his manly head in reverence to, and even press to his lips, his lady's first love-letter, in the very sight of the satirical though sympathizing Bedford, of whom he eagerly asked of the fair Joan's health and ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... interests to woman suffrage was unmistakably shown during the campaign by the official organ of the State Retail Liquor Dealers' Protective Association, called "Progress." For months preceding the election it was filled with objections, innuendo and abuse in prose, verse and pictures, all designed to impress the reader with the absurdity and danger of giving the vote to women. It appealed to the farmers and to every class of people connected in any way with the manufacture and sale of beer, saying in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... of James Whitcomb Riley IN TEN VOLUMES Including Poems and Prose Sketches, many of which have not heretofore been published; an authentic Biography, an elaborate Index and numerous Illustrations in ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... tried it, to their sorrow. A sort of inflation can be traced in English sailors' minds as their work expanded. Even Hawkins—the clear, practical Hawkins—was infected. This was not in Drake's line. He kept to prose and fact. He studied the globe. He examined all the charts that he could get. He became known to the Privy Council and the Queen, and prepared for an enterprise which would make his name ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... from Improvement's thorny way. Verse I abjure, nor will forgive that friend, Who, in my hearing, shall a rhyme commend. It cannot be—whether I will, or no, Such as they are, my thoughts in measure flow. Convinced, determined, I in prose begin, But ere I write one sentence, verse creeps in, And taints me through and through; by this good light, In verse I talk by day, I dream by night! 50 If now and then I curse, my curses chime, Nor can I pray, unless I pray in rhyme. E'en ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Teas are now all the rage. At these elegant and up-to-date entertainments China tea is absolutely proscribed, the refreshments, solid and liquid, being exclusively of Indian origin. After tea the guests cantillate passages from the prose and poetry of the Great Indian Master to the accompaniment of gongs (the Sanskrit tum-tum) and one-stringed Afghan jamboons, for the space of two or three hours, when their engagements permit. Sometimes the reading is varied by mystical dances of a slow and solemn character, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... them beside the sofa to hold her on. So she followed Mrs. Worretts advice, and "amused herself with a book." There were not many books in the best room. The one Elsie chose was a fat black volume called "The Complete Works of Mrs. Hannah More." Part of it was prose, and part was poetry. Elsie began with a chapter called "Hints on the Formation of the Character of a Youthful Princess." But there were a great many long words in it; so she turned to a story named ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... The Secular Drama. Pageants and Masques. Popular Comedies. Classical and English Drama. Predecessors of Shakespeare. Marlowe. Shakespeare. Elizabethan Dramatists after Shakespeare. Ben Jonson. The Prose Writers. The Fashion of Euphuism. The Authorized Version of the Scriptures. Francis Bacon. Summary of the Period. Selections for ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Ewing's "Jackanapes" and Charles Kingsley's "Water-Babies" jostled the "Seven Little Sisters" series; Hawthorne's "Wonder-Book" lay close to Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare;" and Whittier's "Child-Life in Prose and Poetry" stood between Mary Howitt's "Children's Year" and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Child's Garden ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale—But when will it do so? Never—When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... to pealing, and breathed into his organs. There was nothing down to poor poetry,—properly speaking, that which persisted in vegetating in manuscripts,—which was not forced, in order to make something of itself, to come and frame itself in the edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the same part, after all, which the tragedies of AEschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece; Genesis, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... finest writers of antiquity. According to Ammianus, Jupiter himself would not speak otherwise, if he were to converse in the Attic tongue. Aristotle considered his style as a medium between poetry and prose. Cicero no less praises him for the excellence of his diction than the profundity of his conceptions; and Longinus calls him with respect to his language, the rival of Homer. Hence he is considered by this prince of critics, as deriving ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... and brought a new and gentler influence to bear on the society of her husband's court. There, too, she found a congenial spirit in the duke's accomplished sister, Bianca, that Virgin of Este, who was the subject of Tito Strozzi's impassioned eulogy, and whose Latin and Greek prose excited the admiration of all her contemporaries. This cultivated princess had been originally betrothed to the eldest son of Federigo, Duke of Urbino, but his early death put an end to these hopes, and in 1468 she married Galeotto della Mirandola, a prince of the ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... small books under the above title, containing some of the famous works in English and other literatures, in the domains of fiction, poetry, and belles lettres. The series also contains volumes of selections in prose ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... interests of science; nor could any argument turn him. We wish we could say that it was chiefly for their beauties that he now set himself to translate Catullus, Ausonius, [540] and Apuleius. He did appreciate their beauties; the poets and the classic prose writers were to him as the milk of paradise; and some of his annotations would have illuminated the best passages, but the majority of them were avowedly to be consecrate to the worst. Having in The Arabian Nights given the world the fruits of his enquiries in ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... second parte is in speach as it were a faute, which though it be pardoned in Poetes, yet in prose it is not to be suffered. The kyndes bee these: obscure, ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry |
