"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... principal means of transportation up Mount Lowe. Why has the donkey never found a eulogist? The horse is universally admired. The Arab poet sings of the beauties of his camel. The bull, the cow, the dog, and even the cat have all been praised in prose or verse; but the poor donkey still remains an ass, the butt of ridicule, the symbol of stupidity, the object of abuse. Yet if there be another and a better world for animals, and if in that sphere patience ranks as a cardinal virtue, the ass will have a better pasture-ground ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... prose. Hello!"—pausing and raising his lantern, as they drew near the officer who had fallen under the observation of the fille a la cassette. "Colonel Saint-Prosper, or set me down for an ass—or Plato, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... is! Will you have hash or fishballs for breakfast?" asked Hannah, who wisely mingled poetry and prose. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Northwestern University said of her, at this time: "Dr. Kahn is one of the most accurate and effective students in a class of eighty-four members, most of them sophomores, although the class includes many seniors. The subject is the study of the style and diction of prominent prose authors, with some theme work. Last year Miss Kahn attained a very high rank in the study of the principles of good English style during the first semester, and in that of synonyms during the second semester. In the latter difficult subject she ranked among ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... burst of poetry into prose, we find the following countries mentioned as carrying on an active trade with the Phoenician metropolis:—Northern Syria, Syria of Damascus, Judah and the land of Israel, Egypt, Arabia, Babylonia, Assyria, Upper ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... would suggest in passing that a considerable part of the K.C. is in rhythmic prose—some of it declamatory. I have endeavoured throughout this work to represent, or reproduce to the mind and heart of the reader the spoken word and intonation—not written language. It really should be read aloud, especially the descriptive and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... mixed up in the woman there was a mental quality very rare and sympathetic, a strange fitful brilliance, extremely pleasing. Once or twice on their journey she had expressed the peculiar quality of the scenery in words which were not far off prose poems. It had puzzled him to know how her intellectual refinement could dwell in the same temple as ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... appropriately shingled with golden shields. Guzzlers of ale and drinkers of lagerbier will be pleased to learn that this Northern Valhalla was a sort of celestial beer-saloon, thus showing that it was a genuine Teutonic paradise; for ale would surely be found in such a region. In the "Prose Edda," Hor replies to Gangler—who is asking him about the board and lodgings of the heroes who had gone to Odin in Valhalla, and whether they had anything but water to drink—in huge disdain, inquiring of Gangler whether he supposed that the Allfather ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... congresses—scientific, ecclesiastical, archaeological—but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... equally excellent in verse and in prose. His prose had all the clearness imaginable, together with all the nobleness of expression; all the graces and ornaments proper and peculiar to it, without deviating into the language or diction of poetry. I make this observation, only to distinguish his style from that of many poetical ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... effectively and of "thinking on his feet." The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and of history were accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered about the technique of declamatory prose. Not that the rhetorical study was itself made absolutely practical. The teachers unfortunately would spin the technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over several years. But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed on the parents, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... always the poem or the song that is hidden in it. A work of art by a man of talent is generally ranked by the fact that it is the work of a man who analyses a song before he sings it. He puts down the words of the song first—writes it, that is—in prose. Then he lumbers it over into poetry. Then he looks around for some music for it. Then he practises at singing it, and then he sings it. The man of genius, on the other hand, whether he be a great one or a very little one, is known by the fact that he has a song ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... by an enchanted wand, have its scenes been changed, since Chateaubriand wrote his prose-poetic description of it,* as a river of mighty, unbroken solitudes, rolling amid undreamed wonders of vegetable ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... has been held in peculiar esteem. George Saintsbury remarks that those chronicles "are by universal consent among the most attractive works of the Middle Ages." They comprize one of the oldest extant examples of French prose. The passage here given was translated for this collection from the old French by Eric Arthur Bell. A translation by T. Smith was published ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... long vanished son, whom she had never given up for lost, however, suddenly stood before her and said: "Here am I." How fondly she kissed and caressed her dear, cruel, restored fugitive. The singer too loudly expressed his joy alike in verse and in prose, and fetched his best theatrical dress out of the chest to put it on his son in the place of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sublime is very near the terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the hateful. Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an amiable or attractive figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities. This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have delivered the world. But Milton has at least ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... 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 ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... imaginative art, as is to be gathered from reading his 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 Hampshire, on ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... One cannot read the "New English Canaan" without regretting a little that this happy-natured fellow was so unceremoniously bustled out of the country. Whatever Morton's discrepancies may have been, his response to beauty was lively and true: whatever his morals, his prose is delightful. All the town records and memorial addresses of all the good folk subsequent contain no such tribute to Weymouth, and paint no picture so true of that which is still best in her, as these loving words of the erstwhile ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his Liddesdale "raids"—begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years—was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of medicine, 'I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.' It seemed ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... It was first published in the so-called Amsterdam Edition of Milton's Prose Works (1698); and Toland, who gave it to the publishers of that edition, informs us that it had been communicated to him "by a worthy friend, who, a little after the author's death, had it ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... the evening on, I think of our doings—their doings—with a sort of unchanging homesickness. Nothing like them can ever happen again, I know; for it's all gone—settled, sobered, and gone. And whatever wholesomer prose of good fortune waits in our cup, how I thank my luck for this swallow of frontier poetry which I ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... in studying Shakespeare. Richardson's Dictionary embodies all the good points of Johnson's Dictionary, and is very excellent for quotations. Poetical Concordances and Dictionaries of Quotations, both prose and poetry, are useful, though very rarely does one find the quotation required in any professed book of quotations. A good Biographical Dictionary is a joy; such is Lippincott's, an American work. A good Classical Dictionary ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... is quickly compressed, enough heat is evolved to produce combustion. 2. Unless your thought packs easily and neatly in verse, always use prose. (Unless if not.) 3. If ever you saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you have an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. 4. Were it not for the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the harbors and the rivers of Britain would be blocked up with ice for a great ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... moral and literary training in school, urges that the custom, so successfully begun, shall be kept up, and that children in all grades of schools shall be required to learn every week a few lines of good poetry, instead of choosing for themselves either verse or prose for declamation. Mr. Merrill asks in his last report for coooperation between the school and the library, and says in a letter: "I read a paper some time ago which was published in a teachers' magazine, and ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... the Most Catholic, covering with the mantle of his Catholicity, a greater multitude of enormities on this very continent, than even charity itself could conceal; and our own gracious Sovereign, whose virtues and whose mildness are celebrated in verse and prose, causing rivers of blood to run, in order that the little island over which she rules may swell out, like the frog in the fable, to dimensions that nature has denied, and which will one day inflict the unfortunate death that befell the ambitious inhabitant ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... spoken of prose writing above. But in poetry (and in Poetry well fitted to the tales), this work had already been done nobly, and with a fine Celtic splendour of feeling and expression, ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... and then sink back ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... rejoined, "I shall be like the king's daughter in the Psalms. Never you fear for my appearance. As our dear French prose book would remark: 'The grandmother of the young man so attractive has a maid French, of the heart excellent, and of the habits ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... said, for the dialogue is strong in my recollection, "it is a sign that I ought never to have succeeded, and I will write prose for life: you shall see no change in my temper, nor will I eat a single meal the ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... READ AND DECLAIM A course of instruction in reading and declamation which will develop graceful carriage, correct standing, and accurate enunciation; and will furnish abundant exercise in the use of the best examples of prose and poetry. Cloth, $1.50, net; by ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... himself with measuring it to his inner ear, and let his fingers, like horses which he knew he had safe in hand, play what pranks they pleased? A reader may, I think, be measuring verse correctly to himself, and yet make of it nothing but rugged prose to his hearers. Perhaps this may be how severe masters of quantity in the abstract are so careless of it in the concrete—in the audible, namely, where alone it is of value. Shall I analogize yet a little further, and suggest the many who admire righteousness and work iniquity; ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... of fortifying your strength. The instructor of children who cares for his work only so far as it brings him profit, is a sad teacher; for his pay is indifferent, and his teaching more indifferent still. Of what value is the mercenary journalist? The day you write for the dollar, your prose is not worth the dollar you write for. The more elevated in kind is the object of human labor, the more the mercenary spirit, if it be present, makes this labor void and corrupts it. There are a thousand reasons to say that all toil ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... who was to (p. 006) become the greatest song-writer that Scotland—perhaps the world—has known. In other respects the mental training of the lads was of the most thorough kind. Murdoch taught them not only to read, but to parse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn verse into the prose order, to supply ellipses, and to substitute plain for poetic words and phrases. How many of our modern village schools even attempt as much? When Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook the education of his children, and ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... this poetry into common prose to obtain this argument, namely,—The presence of evil in the world is not compatible with the idea of the goodness of God. Here is the objection in all its force. And what is the answer? Simply this, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... had described these combats and these dances, the descriptions being condensed sometimes and sometimes their rhythm being a little modified so that they should not be out of keeping with the more pedestrian prose by which they were accompanied. Thus, as it happens, the dances of little Pearl and of Topsy could be set forth, fortunately, almost in the very phrases of Hawthorne and of Mrs. Stowe, while I was forced to describe as best I could myself the gyrations of the wife ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... convention on the part of the author demands a corresponding change in the actor. Clearly, he must speak verse differently from prose, though there are foes to poetry who beg him to break up the lines and defeat the efforts of the poet; and he must adopt a manner in a blank-verse tragedy unsuitable to a play by Mr Barrie. Moreover, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... that sympathizing passengers, turning to commiserate the reptile's woes, are seized and destroyed by the treacherous creatures. That quaint and credulous old author—the earliest writer of English prose—Sir John Mandeville, in his "Voiage," or account of his "Travile," published about 1356—in which, by the way, there are to be found accounts of not a few wonderful things in the way of zooelogical curiosities—tells us that in a certain "contre ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... Latin prose and English verse) C.T. nigro. In civitate Londoniarum, per Wilhelmum de Machlinia. Supposed to be the first book printed in London, and about 1480, 4to. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... catalogue of his Philippine collection arranged in chronological order, the sketch we have given of the literature accessible to Filipinos who could not read Spanish in the eighteenth century would serve not unfairly for much of the nineteenth. The first example of secular prose fiction I have noted in his lists is Friar Bustamente's pastoral novel depicting the quiet charms of country life as compared with the anxieties and tribulations of life in Manila. [140] His collection did not contain so far as I noticed a single secular historical ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... end of the story have been so often favourably received at the Circuit Mess, that I thought an amplified version of them in prose would not be unacceptable to the general reader, and might ultimately awaken in the public mind a desire for the long-needed reform of ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... mesmerism alone covers all sorts of odd and suspicious doings. The case, for instance, of—— But that is beside the point. The point is, that with half of Brassfield's skill, Amidon will win handsomely. Some scenes ought not to be painted—in this plain and flippant prose. Let us wait, therefore, until the arrival of the voices of Florian and Elizabeth at the pitch of ordinary conversation admonishes us that the prose writer's psychological moment has arrived. Then we may take and ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... very distinctly. I do not think that the fact argues a good memory, for I have never been clever at learning words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that I believe my remembrance of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... laughing, "that exceeds any eagle adventure that I have heard of in this region. In the car business you certainly brought his majesty down to the prose of common life, and I don't wonder the regal bird refused ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... see how, out of this vile piece of prose, the higher nature of Alfieri and of the Countess of Albany, and (what a satire upon poetic and platonic affection!) most of all, the monomaniac jealousy of Charles Edward, contrived to ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... edition of the Farmer's Letters, Livingston, described on his title-page as a "young gentleman educated at Yale College," brought out his Philosophic Solitude at Trenton, in his native state. It is worth quoting Philosophic Solitude for the sake of the comparison to be drawn between Crevecoeur's prose and contemporary American verse:- ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... affectation in the matter of style than does the subject of this essay. It is rugged and massive; but so is his mind. It were impossible to imagine the author of "Sartor Resartus" and "The French Revolution" expressing himself in the carefully rounded periods of Macaulay, whose prose is half poetry, and whose poetry is all prose. Carlyle seems to care precious little what kind of vehicle he uses for the conveyance of ideas so long as it does not break down. All his labor "smells of the lamp"; but "the midnight oil"—of which our modern "ready writers" evidently use ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... strange that a man who loved literature passionately, and rewarded literary merit munificently, should have been more savagely reviled both in prose and verse than almost any other politician in our history. But there is really no cause for wonder. A powerful, liberal and discerning protector of genius is very likely to be mentioned with honour long after his death, but is very likely also to be most brutally libelled during his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... first experienced an agony which has since recurred so often that by dint of mere repetition it has worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... fresh air. Quicker, however, than the breeze, the withered, sallow arms of the beggars were thrust in, accompanied by the eternal whine of "Miserabili, miserabili, excellenza!" On the walls were displayed innumerable inscriptions, written in nearly every language of Europe, some in verse, some in prose, most of them not very ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... burns up the bundles. We may freely admit that the fire is part of the parable, but yet let us not forget that it occurs not only in the parable, but in the interpretation; and let us learn that the prose reality of 'everlasting destruction,' which Christ here solemnly announces, is awful and complete. For a moment He passes beyond the limits of that parable, to add that terrible clause about 'weeping and gnashing of teeth,' the tokens of despair ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... behind; and as the drama necessarily took that up, it was for more reasons than one encouraged, as we may say, in its lagging. But meanwhile Amyot and Calvin[120] and Montaigne were getting the language more fully ready for the prose-writer's use, and the constant "sophistication" of literature with religion, politics, knowledge of the physical world in all ways, commerce, familiarity with foreign nations—everything almost that touched on life—helped to bring ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... unlimited area. The elements of the story remain, wholly or in part, while the literary clothing is altered according to the 'taste and fancy' of the reciter. The lore is now traditional, whether it be in prose, as Maerchen, or in verse, as ballad. And so it remains in oral circulation—and therefore still liable to variation—until it is written down or printed. It is left 'masterless,' unsigned; for of the original author's composition, may be, ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Good prose versions of some of the famous old ballads sung by the minstrels of England and Scotland. "The Story ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... not less significant than his prose works, are Luther's poems, those stirring songs which, as it were, escaped from him in the very midst of his combats and his necessities like a flower making its way from between rough stones, or a moonbeam gleaming amid dark clouds. Luther loved ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... does according to his ability." But simple as was his aim, AElfred changed the whole front of our literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the translations of AElfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign. It seems likely that the King's rendering of Baeda's history gave the ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... theme of which occasionally touches upon the same problems—problems involving love, freedom of expression, the right to live one's life in one's own way—he is revealed to be no less a master of the prose form than of the poetical. While the book is one for mature minds, the skill with which delicate situations are handled and the reserve everywhere exhibited remove it from possible criticism even by the most exacting. The title, it should ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... poetic insight and motives which are ignored by other authors, who have grown up in the University, the Bureau, or the Coffee-houses of large towns. His life of poverty has made him rich. He has evolved some significant prose-poems from the life of Nature, and the contest of her forces. While the sketch, "Spring Voices," is a satire, bristling with tangible darts and stings, "The Bursting of the Dam" expresses the full force that rages and battles in a stormy sea. The unemancipated workers construct ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... believe that as irons support the rickety child, whilst they impede the healthy one, so rules, for the most part, are but useful to the weaker among us. Our greatest masters in language, whether prose or verse, in painting, music, architecture, or the like, have been those who preceded the rule and whose excellence gave rise thereto; men who preceded, I should rather say, not the rule, but the discovery ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... is certainly better adapted to tragedy than rhymed alexandrines, but then the French language does not admit of blank verse, and to write tragedies in prose, unless they be tragedies in modern life, would deprive them of all charm; but after all I find the harmonious pomp and to use a phrase of Pope's "The long majestic march and energy divine" of the French alexandrine, very pleasing to the ear. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... could show you the fact that our question is two thousand years old. [Cheers.] In the truest sense, it did not begin in 1848, as my friend Dr. Hunt stated; it began centuries ago. Did you ever hear of the old man who went to the doctor, and asked him to teach him to speak prose? "Why, my dear fellow," was the reply, "you have been speaking prose all your life." But he did not know it. So with some people in regard to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was greatly increased in volume." Similar sounds have been heard elsewhere in the Indian seas, and doubtless the ancients connected this mysterious music of the ocean with the animals round which they had thrown such a halo of romance. But to return to the prose of the subject. The Sirenia consists of the Manatees (Manatus), the Dugongs (Halicore), and the Stellerines (Rhytina); the latter is almost extinct; it used to be found in numbers in Behring Straits, but was exterminated by sailors and others, who found it very good ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... academy, since he and his aristocratic pupils always followed the Court in its progress from city to city; but nowhere in his correspondence, teeming with facts and commentaries on the most varied subjects, is anything definite to be gleaned. Latin poetry and prose, the discourses of Cicero, rhetoric, and church history were important subjects in his curriculum. Though he frequently mentions Aristotle in terms of high admiration, it may be doubted whether he ever taught Greek. There is no evidence that he even ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... so, intending to pass his 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 sentences, ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... inner space and inner time of the ideas and feelings. But just in this, its highest phase, art oversteps the bounds of its own sphere by abandoning the harmoniously sensuous mode of portraying the spirit and by passing from the poetry of imagination into the prose of thought. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... opened with the loss of New York in September. He remained in the field until the army went into winter-quarters after the battles of Trenton and Princeton. It was not as a combatant that Paine did the States good service. He played the part of Tyraetus in prose,—an adaptation of the old Greek lyrist to the eighteenth century and to British America,—and cheered the soldiers, not with songs, but with essays, continuations of "Common Sense." The first one was written on the retreat from Fort Lee, and published under the name of "The Crisis," on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... romances, and fairy tales, among which is "Cinderella and the Glass Slipper"; autobiographies, letters, fables, and epics; treatises on medicine, astronomy, and various other scientific subjects; and books on history—in prose and verse—which fully justify the declaration of the Egyptian priests to Solon: "You Greeks are mere children, talkative and vain; you know nothing at all of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... he calls merely rhythmical prose, Horace disclaims for himself the title of poet; and at this time it would appear as if he had not even conceived the idea of "modulating Aeolic song to the Italian lyre," on which he subsequently rested his hopes of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... halting below. The apple which was rosy is become green, and the Dutchman who of late flew is now become ship's ballast. Nay, my poor ruin, thank me not for coming; 'tis the common debt the high oweth to the low, the sound to the broken, the poem to the prose; nay, 'tis the duty a knight oweth to ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... easy to tell what satire is, or where it originated. "In Eden," says Dryden, "the husband and wife excused themselves by laying the blame on each other, and gave a beginning to those conjugal dialogues in prose which poets have perfected in verse." Whatever it may be, we know it when it cuts us, and Sherwood Bonner's hit on the Radical Club of Boston ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... home under the sycamores was still no less honest in its labours or bright in its rest. It was one among a million of such homes in France, where a sunny temper made mirth with a meal of herbs, and filial love touched to poetry the prose of daily household tasks. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... quickened by ever fresh delight in the beauty and strangeness of such things, how they responded to the magic of romance and dreamed of a day when they should themselves help in the creation of such work, how they started a magazine of their own and essayed short flights in prose or verse, can best be read in the volumes which Lady Burne-Jones[50] has dedicated to the memory of her husband. This period is of capital importance in the life of William Morris, and the year 1855 especially was fraught ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... this volume to trace the gradual progress of English Prose Fiction from the early romance to the novel of the present day, in such connection with the social characteristics of the epochs to which these works respectively belong, as may conduce to a better comprehension of their ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... work 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 edition of the ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... such old chronicles, has drawn his authority for the last fine scene in King John. But he probably had it from Caxton, who uses nearly the words of the prose chronicle. Hemingford tells the same tale with the metrical historian. It is certain, that John increased the flux, of which he died, by the intemperate use of peaches and of ale, which may have given rise to the story of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... also his brother, and obtained his M.D. in 1885. During the next two years he was attached to the resident staff of one of the big hospitals. It was also the period that saw the beginning of his authorship. While contributing medical reviews to his father's journal, he was also publishing poems and prose sketches in various literary periodicals. Most of his contributions from this time appeared in a publication named "An der schoenen blauen Donau" (By the Beautiful ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... that old Ocean he loved so dearly, but, we think, in the kirkyard of Douglas, in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire,—a light early quenched,—but whose memory this notice and these lines may, perhaps, for a season, preserve! The SEA still lies over, after all written in prose or rhyme regarding it, as the subject for a great poem; and it will task all the energies of even ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... he really knows of him. In the drama he inclines to the "unities;" and of the English Theatre "Sheridan's School for Scandal," and Otway's "Venice Preserved," or Rowe's "Fair Penitent," are what he best likes in his heart. John Kemble is his favourite actor—Kean he thinks somewhat vulgar. In prose he thinks Dr. Johnson the greatest man that ever existed, and next to him he places Addison and Burke. His historian is Hume; and for morals and metaphysics he goes to Paley and Dr. Reid, or Dugald Stewart, and is well content. For the satires of Swift he has no relish. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... Requisite in Writing.—It is to be borne in mind that the foregoing classifications are by no means absolute. Gardiner in his "Forms of Prose Literature" says very truly that the "essential elements, not only of literature, but of all the fine arts, are: first, an organic unity of conception; and second, the pervasive personality of the artist." It is true that much of our writing does not aspire to literary character, but in very little ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... narrated in the words of his own narrative. We may follow here as elsewhere the translation of Hakluyt, which is itself three hundred years old, and seems in its quaint and picturesque form more fitting than the commoner garb of modern prose. ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... of the original both in substance and in sound. But experience has convinced me that it is not so, and that great fidelity is even the most essential element of success, whether in translating poetry or prose. It was therefore very satisfactory to me to find that the principle laid down by me to myself in translating Schiller met with the very general, if not universal, approval of the reader. At the same time, I have endeavoured to profit ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... they moved across the swelling land. Hour after hour, while the yellow sun rolled up the slope, putting to flight the morning shapes on the horizon—striking the plain into level prose again, and warming the air into genial March. Hour after hour the horses toiled on till the last cabin fell away to the east, like a sail at sea, till the road faded into a trail almost imperceptible ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... a circus, now exhibiting in a neighboring town, had been advertised in glowing prose and lurid pictures on big billboards ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... decidedly. "Do as you please, M. Clergeot, but have done with your advice. I prefer the lawyer's plain prose. If I have committed follies, I can repair them, and in a way that would surprise you. Yes, M. Clergeot, I can procure twenty-two thousand francs; I could have a hundred thousand to-morrow morning, if I saw fit. They would only cost me the trouble of ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... out in English Fairy Tales (Note to "Childe Rowland") that in most folk-tales of a romantic type the mode of telling is by prose narrative interspersed with rhyming formulae analogous to the cante-fable as in "Aucassin and Nicolete." The Cinderella formula shows clear traces of such rhymes, especially at the stages of the narrative where incidents are repeated—the appeal for aid at ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... instincts') The Haunch of Venison Epitaph on Thomas Parnell The Clown's Reply Epitaph on Edward Purdon Epilogue for Lee Lewes Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (1) Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (2) The Captivity. An Oratorio Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... into vernacular verse of the prose versions of specimens of the literature of the great apes of Africa, collected by Professor GARNER. It is not too much to say that those touching cris de coeur redolent of the jungle, the lagoon and the hinterland, will appeal with irresistible force to all lovers of sincere ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... me expressed much 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 your verse ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... of the early prose testimonies to the genius of Shakspere has been more admired than that which bears the signature of John Dryden. I must transcribe it, accessible as it is elsewhere, for the sake of its juxtaposition with a less-known metrical specimen of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... in historical writings. Poetry looked back to Chaucer as its 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 ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... and made me a present of his prose panegyric on the Marechal de Saxe. We went out together and took a walk in the Tuileries, where he introduced me to Madame du Boccage, who made a good jest in speaking of the Marechal ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... energies on some definite problem. The man who sets out with the whole world before him is unlikely to get anywhere. In that fact lies the explanation of the absolute necessity for artistic conventions. That is why it is easier to write good verse than good prose, why it is more difficult to write good blank verse than good rhyming couplets. That is the explanation of the sonnet, the ballade, and the rondeau; severe limitations concentrate and ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," but, in forming images, it is not always possible to hold our minds to such exactness. We are prone to picture more or less than the words convey. In fact, in some forms of prose, and often in poetry, the author purposely takes advantage of this habit of the mind and wishes us to enlarge with creations of our own imagination the bare image that his words convey. Such writing, however, aims to give pleasure ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... exploitation is wont to do. If a whole neighborhood of farmers seeks such profits, or if real estate men get into the act, or big development corporations that may be operating from almost anywhere in the country, the scale enlarges and purple prose may appear in the metropolitan newspapers to lure nostalgic suburbans out to examine an assortment of lots sliced fine for maximum yield and priced most often according to their proximity to water. Water is usually involved, for it is the fundamental ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... are two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... of languages. It was a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond the material of other languages; it was an instrument for a larger compass of modulations; and it happens that the peculiar theme of an orator imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose diction. One step further in passion, and the orator would become a poet. An orator can exhaust the capacities of a language—an historian, never. Moreover, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age of highest development for arts dependent upon social refinement. That generation ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... irritably giving orders for the removal of the tarpaulin from the skylight, a substitution of the ingenious cook's for the drawn blinds ashore, sat down to a solitary breakfast and the composition of a telegram to Captain Barber. The first, a beautiful piece of prose, of which the key-note was resignation, contained two shillings' worth of sympathy and fourpence-halfpenny worth of religion. It was too expensive as it stood, and boiled down, he was surprised to find that it became unfeeling to the verge ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... time marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war, love, and religion would be without it. The ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... tree of our life, the volume of our knowledge, or, in plain prose, our hearts, are not here, and scenic beauty is a poor substitute for that. Duty, I am convinced, is the key of the best life. There are hearts here, noble ones—duties here, inspiring ones. But they do not ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... could be constructed. They had heard Him say, "I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands." It was a sentence of His early ministry, obviously of high poetic meaning, which they were reproducing as the vulgarest prose; although, even thus interpreted, it is difficult to see what they could have made of it; because, if the first half of it meant that He was to destroy the temple, the second promised to restore it again. The high priest saw too well that they were making ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... means unusual in the case of forward boys; and we have seen that at Sion House he greedily devoured the sentimental novels of the day. His favourite poets at the time of which I am now writing, were Monk Lewis and Southey; his favourite books in prose were romances by Mrs. Radcliffe and Godwin. He now began to yearn for fame and publicity. Miss Shelley speaks of a play written by her brother and her sister Elizabeth, which was sent to Matthews the comedian, and courteously returned as unfit for acting. She also mentions a little volume of ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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 thing, we ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... boyhood worth communication. He was inferior to many of his school-fellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I do not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself by Latin or English composition, in prose or verse. [Footnote: It will be seen, however, though Dr. Parr was not aware of the circumstance, that Sheridan did try his talent at English verse before he left Harrow.] Nathaniel Halhed, one of his school-fellows, wrote well in Latin and Greek. Richard Archdall, another ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... again, not once again, did Browning stoop; and that something removes, for me, all difficulty in understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of this work. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose note at the end. This is in French, and feigns to be written by Pauline herself. She is there made to speak of "mon pauvre ami." Let any woman ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a lover—"my poor dear friend"! We cannot of ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... before setting off for one of the law courts to conduct a prosecution which the Government had thought it well to institute against a man who held a most prominent position in England at that time, and whose name, it is safe to say, will be remembered as long as good {155} English prose is studied. This man was William Cobbett, and he had just aroused the anger of the Government by a published article in which he vindicated the conduct of those who had set fire to hayricks and destroyed farm buildings in various parts of the country. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... desire to express their thanks to Mr. Riley for the poetry and to Mr. Nye for the prose which have been used ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... write more beautiful or sparkling prose than Mrs. Spofford and never has she been so absolutely charming as ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... ARMIDA, bold TRALESTRIS, And she that wou'd have been 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 not take our word, We'll ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Margaret, "I don't think I ever have, Hugh; but what a pleasant thing it must be! I have never slept in the open, but even if I should, I fear my waking would be plain prose, like myself." ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... wearisome, insignificant. As with pebbles in some clear brook with the sunshine on it, the water in which they are sunk glorifies and magnifies them. If you lift them out, they are but bits of dull stone; lying beneath the sunlit ripples they are jewels. Plunge the prose of your life, and all its trivialities, into that great stream, and it will magnify and glorify the smallest and the homeliest. Absolute submission to the divine will, and the ever-present thrilling consciousness of doing it, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... Sidonius, l. i. epist. 7, p. 15-20, with Sirmond's notes. This letter does honor to his heart, as well as to his understanding. The prose of Sidonius, however vitiated by a false and affected taste, is much superior ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... impromptu charade party, bringing out something of that taste in arrangement of costume, and capacity for dramatic effect, of which there is more latent in society than we think. It might be the reading of articles in prose and poetry furnished to a common paper or portfolio, which would awaken an abundance of interest and speculation on the authorship, or it might be dramatic readings and recitations. Any or all of these pastimes ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was an England of great deeds, but of greater dreams. Elizabethan literature, take it for all in all, has never been surpassed; myriad-minded Shakespeare remains unequalled still. Elizabethan England was indeed 'a nest of singing birds.' Prose was often far too pedestrian for the exultant life of such a mighty generation. As new worlds came into their expectant ken, the glowing Elizabethans wished to fly there on the soaring wings of verse. To them the tide of fortune was no ordinary stream ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... Major of old Age, a Poem: It is taken from the Latin of Tully, though much alter'd from the original, not only by the change of the stile, but by addition and subtraction. Our author tells us, that intending to translate this piece into prose (where translation ought to be strict) finding the matter very proper for verse, he took the liberty to leave out what was only necessary, to that age and place, and to take or add what was proper to this preset age and occasion, by laying the scene clearer and in fewer words, according to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... method—must be as truly a man of science—as the veriest bookworm of us all; though I have no doubt that the man of business will find himself out to be a philosopher with as much surprise as M. Jourdain exhibited vhen he discovered that he had been all his life talking prose. If, however, there be no real difference between the methods of science and those of common life, it would seem, on the face of the matter, highly improbable that there should be any difference between the methods of the different ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... Richard, viz.: 1. An Ode upon occasion of his Majesty's Proclamation in 1630, commanding the gentry to reside upon their estates in the country. 2. A summary Discourse on the Civil Wars of Rome, extracted from the best Latin writers in verse and prose. 3. An English translation of the fourth book of the AEneid of Virgil or the Loves of Dido and AEneas. 4. Two Odes out of Horace, relating to the civil wars of Rome, against covetous rich men. 5. He translated, from Portuguese, into English, "The ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... not always easy to pronounce upon these heroes, whether they belong to history or mythology, their nation's poetry or its prose. In arriving at a conclusion we must remember that a fiction built on an idea is infinitely more tenacious of life than a story founded on fact. Further, that if a striking similarity in the legends of two such heroes be discovered ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Chapters one and two and parts of chapter forty-two are prose. All the rest is poetry. The different speakers may have been real speakers, or characters created by one writer to make the story. There is, however, little doubt that the story is founded on ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... in Excelsis, the Credo, &c, even the Te Deum, on the Roman or Parisian tone, (for this worthy priest came from Paris). They know many hymns of the Blessed Virgin, which they sing equally well, also the prose Dies Irae. They sing mass fairly well, especially the tone Royal, and the mass for the dead. Some persons may be surprised at this, and perhaps harbor a doubt of it, but I can testify as a witness to its truth. More than a hundred times they have sung it for me. So recently ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... the century which followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely confined to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very seldom was he, during that time, mentioned with respect by any writer of great literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the wretched D'Urfey. In the "Spiritual Quixote," the adventures of Christian are ranked with those of Jack the Giant-killer and John Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist, but did not venture to name him. It is a significant circumstance ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... anybody but himself, and that whatever goes wrong here is the consequence of Julius's faith in Dr. Easterby. So, when poor Cecil, uneasy in her mind, began asking about the illness at Wil'sbro', he enlivened her with a prose about misjudging, through well-intentioned efforts of clerical philanthropy to interfere with the sanitary condition of the town— so that wells grew tainted, &c., all from ignorant interference. Poor man he heard a little sob, and looked round, and there was Cecil in a dead ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Brook, one very eminent both for Arts and Arms; to which the genius of that time did mightily invite active Spirits. This Noble Person, for the great love he bore to Sir Philip Sidney, wrote his Life. He wrote several other Works both in Prose and Verse, some of which were Dramatick, as his Tragedies of Alaham, Mustapha, and Marcus Tallius Cicero, and others, commonly of a Political Subject; amongst which, a Posthume Work, not publish'd till within a few years, ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... creatures,—I but twenty-four and seven months (for it was written on the 14th of May), and she well-nigh upon a twelve- month younger. My own verses, the first, are neither here nor there; indeed, they were imbedded in solid prose, like lampreys and ram's-horns {181a} in our limestone, and would be hard to get out whole. What they are may be seen by her answer, ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... word (as nearly as the change from prose to blank verse would allow) from the old record in Hall. It would have been easy for Shakspeare to have exalted his own skill, by throwing a coloring of poetry and eloquence into this speech, without ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... was music and dancing, tea-drinking and card-playing, gossip and silence at varied and irregular intervals. Some of the officers read selections from Russian authors, and others recited pieces of prose and poetry. There were dialogues, evidently humorous to judge by the mirth they produced, and there was a paper containing original contributions. The association appeared prosperous, and I was told that its literary features were ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... make no technical distinctions between tragedy and comedy in their stage pieces;—the dialogue of which is composed in ordinary prose, while the principal performer now and then chants forth, in unison with music, a species of song or vaudeville, and the name of the tune or air is always inserted at the top of the passage to be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... heathendom as it developed during the four centuries which in England saw the destruction of nearly all traces of the heathen system. The so-called Elder Edda is a collection of some thirty poems, mythic and heroic in substance, interspersed with short pieces of prose, which survives in a thirteenth-century MS., known as the Codex Regius, discovered in Iceland in 1642; to these are added other poems of similar character from other sources. The Younger Edda is a prose paraphrase of, and commentary on, these poems and others ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, but there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and therefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his great pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... In this e-text, they are always collected into full sentences. In some verse selections, sidenotes appear immediately before their original location, with no further marking. In other selections— including all prose passages— sidenotes are collected into longer paragraphs and placed after the text they refer to. These will be identified either by line number or by lower-case letters [a] showing their ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... is to give an accurate and readable modern English prose rendering of the Old English poetry. The translation of Richard Francis Weymouth, entitled A Literal Translation of Cynewulf's Elene, has been at hand, but I owe it practically nothing in this work. While I trust that my rendering has not departed so far from the text that it ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... I dread; dare I to leave Of humble prose the shore, And put to sea? a dangerous sea? ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... and sweet, and always in harmony with the sentiment he would express, or the subject he would discuss. Chenier might well arm himself with "Paul and Virginia," and the "Chaumiere Indienne," in opposition to those writers, who, as he said, made prose unnatural, by seeking to ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... because she was a woman. James Russell Lowell, editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," declined a poem from Julia Ward Howe on the theory that no woman could write a poem; but he added on second thought that he might consider an article in prose. Nathaniel Hawthorne, another editor, even objected to something in prose because to him "all ink-stained women were equally detestable." To the natural resentment against their intrusion into new fields ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... the Latin poem—not its prose translation—were printed as headnotes on each page. For this e-text, only the line numbers of each complete "Fable" are given. Line numbers used in footnotes are retained from the original text; ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... fraud and deception were rife in the system and its results were tragic. Mrs. Browning's famous poem, 'The Cry of the Children,' gives a more vivid picture of the children's sufferings than many pages of prose. At the same time we have plenty of first-hand evidence from the great towns of the misery which went along with the wonderful development of national wealth. Speaking in 1873 Lord Shaftesbury said, 'Well can I recollect in the earlier periods of the Factory movement ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... to learn of the books that helped to make him the man he became, it is necessary to delay further to see how he practised writing composition, both prose and poetry, in his early life, thus laying the foundation for the excellence of his ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... them now and then, not understanding, and having a greater fondness for the versifying part than the prose. But she did pore over "Rasselas," and an odd collection of adventures in Eastern lands, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... shudder: "This can't be he?" This simpering dandy, so sleek and spruce; This languorous lily in garments loose; They sought to brace from the awful shock: Taking a seat, they tried to talk. She spoke of Bergson and Pater's prose, He prattled of dances and ragtime shows; She purred of pictures, Matisse, Cezanne, His tastes to the girls of Kirchner ran; She raved of Tchaikovsky and Caesar Franck, He owned that he was a jazz-band ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... 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
... author had been unsuccessful, but that it should be the voice of Fate, which said, "She shall marry the watchman." If, on the contrary, the piece was successful, it indicated that she should have the tailor; and this last, remarked the father, must be said in prose, in order that the public may understand it. Now every one of the characters thought himself on the stage, where in the epilogue the lovers besought the public for their applause, whilst the watchman begged them either to whistle, or at ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... of the Megaliths, to rise again a daughter of the Brythons, or of a Norse Viking . . . west into Anglia to appear once more as a Priestess of the Druids chaunting in a sacred grove . . . or as Boadicea—who knows! But no prose can regenerate that shadowy time. I see it—prehistory—as a swaying mass of ghostly multitudes, but always pressing on—on . . . as we shall appear, no doubt, ten thousand years hence if all histories are destroyed—as no doubt they will be. If I were an epic poet ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... courtly picture-dealer, eager to make his market of the gratitude with which his fellow-citizens greeted the reforms with which the reigning sovereign had already inaugurated his reign, contrived to extract a compliment to him even out of the severe prose of the multiplication-table; publishing a joint portrait of the three kings, Louis XII., Henry IV., and Louis XVI., with an inscription beneath to testify that 12 ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge |
