"Quatrain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of them not only sing but improvise. In the province of the Minho it is not uncommon at these gatherings for a match of improvisation to be held between two rustic bards. One takes his guitar, and in a slow, drawling recitative sings a simple quatrain, which the other at once caps with a second in rhyme and rhythm matching the first. Verse follows verse in steady succession, and the singer who hesitates is lost: his rival rushes in with a tide of rhyme which carries all before it. In such primitive pleasures the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... short account of this is in the story of King Dathi (O'Curry Lectures, p. 286). The tale seems to be alluded to in the quatrain on p. 10 of ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... everything around her—her past, her future, her position, her prospects; nay, even the circumstances and surroundings of her friends and few intimates came to be regarded in the same unsatisfactory light. She was unacquainted with the healthy tone of wisdom contained in the old quatrain,— ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... be worse than that? Then read this which I really told Hunt and got his praise for. Poor dear wonderful persecuted Pietro d'Abano wrote this quatrain on the people's plaguing him about his mathematical studies and wanting to burn him—he helped to build Padua Cathedral, wrote a Treatise on Magic still extant, and passes for a conjuror in his country to this day—when there is a storm the mothers tell the ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... unattainable. Perhaps that was the ideal kind of love, the hopeless kind—the quiet, theoretical kind of love. In this sad mood of repletion he could well believe it. He began to write. One elegant quatrain had flowed from beneath ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... delight, this pleasure in the lingering line, in the haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. By sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious, something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel. It will not suffice for the new poets to deny that they are minstrels, to assert that they write for ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... bizarre anomaly was probably observed first in 1650 by Riolanus, but the most celebrated case was that of Morand in 1660, and Mery described the instance later which was the subject of the following quatrain:— ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Batignolles cafe, the cafe Guerbois (still existing), public derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the Angels at the Tomb of Christ, a souvenir of the Venetians; Lola de Valence, commented upon by Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the Fleurs du Mal; the Episode d'un combat de taureaux (dissatisfied with this picture, he cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The Acteur tragique (portrait of Rouviere in Hamlet) and the Jesus insulte followed, and ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... History—wherein I hope no unkind humorist will try to find a reason for such fondness. He sent for me one day and asked: "So you write poetry, do you?" I did not conceal the fact. From that time on, he would now and then ask me to complete a quatrain by adding a couplet of my own to one ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Hoppner (1786-1872), second son of John Hoppner, R.A., was appointed English Consul at Venice, October, 1814. (See Letters, 1900, iv. 83, note I.) The quatrain was translated (see the following poem) into eleven different languages—Greek, Latin, Italian (also the Venetian dialect), German, French, Spanish, Illyrian, Hebrew, Armenian, and Samaritan, and printed "in a small neat volume ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... also not best to give too much weight to the opinion that Shakespeare has been over-influenced by Daniel in the adoption of the quatrain and couplet structure. The whole period from Wyatt to Shakespeare shows a slow and steady mastery of the native over the foreign tendency. The change was not a sudden leap on the part of Daniel and Shakespeare, but a gradual growth occupying ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... day of his ruin, but that was no reason why he should not sip his iced sherbet and laugh with a pretty French actress to-night. His epicurean formulary was the same as old Herrick's, and he would have paraphrased this poet's famous quatrain into ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... acquired in the field of Venus may readily be imagined from a quatrain that was affixed in a conspicuous part of the Church of St. Hyacinthe, and which ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... like that erudite body, it takes pleasure in trying to better what is done. On the occasion of the meeting of which the following gems of poesy are the result, the several members of the club engaged to write up the well-known tradition of the Purple Cow in more elaborate form than the quatrain made famous ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... never saw an ape so clever and ingenious, and so quick of apprehension, I declare that I will adopt him as my son." Perceiving that no one opposed my design, I took the pen, and wrote six sorts of hands used among the Arabians, and each specimen contained an extemporary distich or quatrain in praise of the sultan. My writing not only excelled that of the merchants, but was such as they had not before seen in that country. When I had done, the officers took the roll, and carried it to ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... transmigration to our satellite—the bleakness of whose scenery she had not realized—having given him some cause of offence, he stormed out to his nurse that he "could not bear the sight of the witch," and vented his wrath in the quatrain.— ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... a few lines in the album and departed in haste, while Mademoiselle Jacquemart was reading the following quatrain, improvised in her honour ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... sought the advice of the celebrated Metastasio, who had been for some time established at Vienna as the favorite poet of the court, and the Italian, with the ready wit of his country, at once supplied him with a quatrain, which, in her disappointment itself, could ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... line did not scan, but that was a trifle, since the quatrain at least conformed to the mode then prevalent. Neither signature nor date were appended to the document, but only a postscript expressing a conjecture that Chichikov's own heart would tell him who ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... metrical peculiarity of this song is that the rhymes of the even lines of the first quatrain (or set of four lines) are taken up as those of the odd lines in the second, and that they are the same ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Countess of Chesterfield, was a brunette; the younger, who married Colonel Anson, the most renowned lady-killer of his day, was a blonde; and they were both of them exquisitely pretty, and used to remind me of the French quatrain— ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... His vehement abundance refused those narrow banks, first running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, rising to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I have little doubt that it was the roominess, rather than the dignity, of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says of octosyllabic verse: "The thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... is the ne plus ultra and composite of all pirate stories, and this marvel of delight he called to Waller's attention while they were incubating "The Ogallallas." No sooner had Waller read it than the quatrain of Old Billy Bones took possession of him and converted itself into music. The two of them, as so many other thousands had done, bewailed the parsimony of Stevenson in the use and development of the grisly suggestion and Waller ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... twinkling eyes glancing evasively toward me, as he leaned whispering some further instructions to Tommy, who again took up his desultory ballad, while I turned and fled for the street, catching, however, as I went, and high above the laughter of the crowd, the satire of this quatrain to ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... towards the Beni 'Amr. The Muslimah, therefore, became exiles, and took refuge in Egypt. And in the flow of days it so happened that the Shaykh of the Beni' Amr awoke suddenly at midnight, and heard his wife, as she sat grinding at the quern, sing this quatrain:— ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Anjou, to whom the king had appointed her a maid of honor. It is a question whether she did not even then exercise over Charles VII. that influence, serviceable alike to the honor of the king and of France, which was to inspire Francis I., a century later, with this gallant quatrain: ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... go, for pro is not more unlike con than man is unlike woman— yet men and women marry every day with none to say, "Oh, the pity of it!" but I and fools like me! Now wherewithal shall we please you? We can rhyme you couplet, triolet, quatrain, sonnet,rondolet, ballade, what you will. Or we can dance you saraband, gondolet, carole, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... am not indorsing recipes of 250 odd years ago. The above is from the knowledge box of a Chinese priest, or a priest from China, called Pere Couplet (don't print it Quatrain), in 1667. He gave it to the Earl of Clarendon, and I extend it to you, if you wish to ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... four lines is called a quatrain. The lines of quatrains show a variety in the arrangement of their rhymes. The first two lines may rhyme with each other and the last two with each other; the first and fourth may rhyme and the second and third; or the rhymes may alternate. Notice the example on page 208, and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... see vol. iv. 196. The old English version says, "He learned the art of writing with pens cut in seven different ways." To give an idea of the style it renders the quatrain:—"Father," said the youth, "you must apply to my master, to give you the information you desire. As for me, I must long be all eye and all ear. I must learn to use my hand, before I begin to exercise my ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... pair of lovers true, And, whitened schemers twain, The scholar hears in each of you A note of that quatrain; The dim Renaissance seems to spin Around your satin shoon, Fair Columbine, feat Harlequin, Sly Clown ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one side, a desire to use a rejuvenated heroic, either in couplets or in various combined forms, the simplest of which is the elegiac quatrain of alternately rhyming lines, and the most complicated the sonnet; while between them various stanzas more or less suggested by Italian are to be ranked. Of this thing there has been and will be no end as long as English poetry lasts. The attempt to arrange the old and apparently ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Lips and Heart./ A Prayer in sonnet form. The metrical scheme is an illustration of 'duplication' applied to antistrophic structure: a quatrain question (strophe 1) has a couplet answer (strophe 2); then the quatrain is duplicated into an octet (antistrophe 1), and the answer is duplicated into a quatrain (antistrophe 2). [The lines of invocation are not counted ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... composed upon Vatel. La Fontaine had, for an hour, been scanning this verse in all corners, seeking some one to pour it out upon advantageously. He thought he had caught Pellisson, but the latter escaped him; he turned towards Sorel, who had, himself, just composed a quatrain in honor of the supper, and the Amphytrion. La Fontaine in vain endeavored to gain attention to his verses; Sorel wanted to obtain a hearing for his quatrain. He was obliged to retreat before M. le Comte de Chanost whose arm Fouquet had just taken. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... thoughts into the innermost labyrinth of the mind. It seemed to Ernest, under the spell of this passing fancy, as though each vase, each picture, each curio in the room, was reflected in Clarke's work. In a long-queued, porcelain Chinese mandarin he distinctly recognised a quaint quatrain in one of Clarke's most marvellous poems. And he could have sworn that the grin of the Hindu monkey-god on the writing-table reappeared in the weird rhythm of two stanzas whose grotesque cadence ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... of writing. The first quatrain lays down the principle that ill-doing brings its own inevitable punishment. The second distinguishes between the unblessed suffering which plagues the soul, and that which we welcome as a process of purgation. The first terzet makes heaven and hell respectively consist of a clean and a burdened ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... has poetical defects fatal for its popularity; the theme was not happily chosen; the quatrain has been discovered by capricious ears to be unpleasing, though its solemnity was felt by Dryden.[323] The style is sometimes harsh and abrupt, though often exquisite; and the fable is deficient in that rapid interest which the story-loving readers of all times seem ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... and most convincing tribute to the overwhelming genius of the great Finnish romancer is the quatrain recently written in his honour by Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... at Pen-y-gwryd, Tom Hughes, Tom Taylor, and he left alternate quatrains of doggerel to celebrate their stay, written currente calamo, as the spirit prompted them. This is Charles Kingsley's first quatrain: ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore |
