"Verse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made by Achilles to the heralds whom Agamemnon despatches to the hero's hut in pursuance of the threat previously uttered that he (Agamemnon) will take Briseis, favorite of Achilles, in lieu of Chryseis, surrendered to her father. (From Homer's Iliad, Book I, verse 335.)] ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... of chaos followed, during which all the boys and girls, considered capable of reading the Bible, were arranging themselves in one great crescent across the room in front of the master's desk. Each read a verse—neither more nor less—often leaving the half of a sentence to be taken up as a new subject in a new key; thus perverting what was intended as an assistance to find the truth into a means of hiding it—a process constantly ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... of small volumes of English verse, extensively annotated by his own hand, which Stoddard had brought to her early in their acquaintance, leaving it with her more as a gift than as a loan. She kept these little books after all the others had gone back. She had read and reread them—cullings from Chaucer, ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... practice of melodies is useful, if one has musical taste. Simple, familiar melodies are best—such as "The Last Rose of Summer," "Annie Laurie," "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton," etc., etc. The importance of rhythm is well expressed by Emerson, who said that the rhythm of Shakespeare's verse was always ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... pulses, the oppression of the morning, had given way to a restlessness and a strange exaltation of spirit. Fancy was quickened, imagination heightened; to himself he seemed to see the heart of all things. Across his mind flitted fragments of verse,—now a broken line just hinting beauty, now the pure passion of a lovely stanza. His thoughts went to and fro, mobile as the waves of the sea; but firm as the reefs beneath them stood his knowledge that presently he was going back to Fair ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... my boy, I've been too deeply imbued with that in my babyhood to shake it off now, even if I wished to do so; but I don't, Bob, I don't. I'm proud of my mother, and, moreover, I remember her teachings. There's one little verse I used to repeat to her every Sunday night, along with the rest of the ten commandments, 'Honour thy father and thy mother,' etcetera. It seems to me that running away is rather flying in the face of that. Doesn't it strike you in ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... significant fact that a certain number of educated—or rather the so-called educated—Negroes were not at first disposed to accept at their full value either Dunbar's dialect verse or the familiar pictures of Negro life which are the symbols in which his poetry usually found expression. The explanation sometimes offered for the dialect poems was that "they were made to please white folk." The assumption seems to have been that if they had been written for Negroes ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... were parodies on familiar ballads. One of the best compositions, the authorship of which was ascribed to George P. Morris, the editor of the New York Mirror, was a parody on the Old Oaken Bucket. The first verse ran: ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... too, in a voice that needed cultivatin' worse'n a sandy front yard. And with every verse the congregation whooped and laughed and cheered. When the anthem was concluded, all hands set up a yell and looked at us to see how ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... for Arden!" she thought bitterly. She fancied how the record of her life would stand by-and-by, like a verse in those Chronicles which Sophia was so fond of: "And Clarissa reigned a year and a half, and did that which was evil"—and so on. Very brief had been her glory; very deep was ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... leave Gilbert to be "a jolly journalist." The periodicals in which her poems appeared were The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily Chronicle, the Westminster Gazette and The New Witness. Personally I have never much admired Frances's verse, but a professional journalist might have been quite pleased at "making" all these papers. Not one poem ever appeared in a Parish Magazine so far as either Dorothy or I have been able to ascertain. The point is not a very important one but ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... half aloud!—"MY Florian!" And she recalled certain lines of verse he had written to her,—for most Italians write verse as easily as they eat maccaroni;—and there are countless rhymes to "amor" in the dulcet Dante-tongue, whereas our rough English can only supply for the word "love" some ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Pliny,(469) of whom I never read but scraps before; because, in the poetical manner in which we learn Latin at Eton, we never become acquainted with the names of the commonest things, too undignified to be admitted into verse; and, therefore, I never had patience to search in a dictionary for the meaning of every substantive. I find I shall not have a great deal less trouble with the translation, as I am not more familiar with their common drogues than with the Latin. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... had come there his elastic tongue explained in tropes and puns and lines of dramatic verse. His patrimony spent, he at once believed himself an actor, and he was hissed off the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... descended into Nello's shop, had found the barber stretched on the bench with his cap over his eyes; one leg was drawn up, and the other had slipped towards the ground, having apparently carried with it a manuscript volume of verse, which lay with its leaves crushed. In a corner sat Sandro, playing a game at mora by himself, and watching the slow reply of his left fingers to the arithmetical demands of his right with ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... servants and companions of ladies of that date were themselves gentlewomen of good breeding. Waller writes verses to Mrs. Braughton, servant to Sacharissa, commencing his lines, "Fair fellow-servant." Temple, had he written verse to his mistress, would probably have left us some "Lines ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... fables, and one of my delights was to make a bet with my godfather or with M. Meydieu, our learned and tiresome friend. I used to bet that they would not recognise all the fables if I began with the last verse and went backwards to the first one, and I ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Roux de Lincy points out that this statement is exaggerated, for Margaret, instead of turning the whole of the New Testament into verse, merely wrote four Mysteries which mainly dealt with the childhood ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... and long; Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, With praise enough for Envy to look wan; To after age thou shalt be writ the man, That with smooth air could'st humour best our tongue. Thou honour'st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire, That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn, or story. Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher Than his Casella, who he woo'd to sing, Met in the milder ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... of particular instances are too uncertain and individual to permit any general identifications or differentiations. There are certain approximating propositions— e. g., that it is easier to keep in mind rhymed verse than prose, and definite rows and forms than block masses. But, on the one hand, what is here involved is only the ease of memory, not the content of memory, and on the other hand there are too many exceptions —e. g., there ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of our English poets about the close of the sixteenth century, was Donne. Unlike many of those trivial writers of verse who succeeded him after an interval of forty or fifty years, and who won for themselves a brilliant reputation by the smoothness of their numbers, the elegance of their conceptions, and the politeness of their style, Donne was full of originality, energy and vigour. No man can read him ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... he himself confessed that if the Church was "thrown open," meaning to competition, he would not despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being "thrown open," he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the Amens tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,—always giving the whole verse,—he looked all round the congregation first, as much as to say, "You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with your opinion ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... from amorous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things, I sing—This verse to Caryl, Muse! is due: This, even Belinda may vouchsafe to view: Slight is the subject, but not so the praise, If she inspire, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... specimens below, we feel that we reveal to our readers a genius of the first order. Unlike one of the most recently discovered English poets who is a Bengalee, and another who is a full-blooded Yak, Mr. Spudd is, we believe, a Navajo Indian. We believe this from the character of his verse. Mr. Spudd himself we have not seen. But when he forwarded his poems to our office and offered with characteristic modesty to sell us his entire works for seventy-five cents, we felt in closing with his offer that we were dealing ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... than the five-and-thirty years to which his wife confessed—but he had fancied himself already in the temperate zone; yet here he was listening for her step with a tender sense of all it symbolized, with some old trail of verse about the garlanded nuptial door-posts floating through his enjoyment of the pleasant room and the ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... of Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing, with bands of music, and with banners, "In God we trust" and "One is our Master, even Christ"—thousands of men who had never been inside a church, thousands of men who could never have looked up a verse in the Bible, still found themselves marching in a procession, snatching up these old and pious mottoes and joining in hymns they did not know, all to contradict, and to contradict thirty thousand strong, the idea ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... from beautiful lines like this, and from many noble passages of high reflection set to sonorous verse, this remarkable poem is in its whole effect unique in impressive power, as a picture of the advance of an elect and serious spirit from childhood and school-time, through the ordeal of adolescence, through close contact with stirring and enormous events, to that decisive stage ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... of K. Charles II (1689), and the third is here reproduced for the first time. After the perusal of these three tracts, the student may well turn to Absalom and Achitophel, and find instruction in comparing the prose and the verse. He may reach the conclusion that while both were written to win converts to the royal cause, the first was designed to weaken the Whig party and the second to take advantage of a tide that had turned ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... grotto, where I was waiting for her. This was a new surprise for the good mother. She could not sufficiently express her astonishment and delight, when Jack and Francis, taking their flageolets, accompanied their brothers, who sung the following verse, which Ernest had ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... into my hands, but it fascinated me so "weirdly" that I am conscious of its having been one of the stepping-stones of my thinking ever since. It gives the essence of Blood's philosophy, and shows most of the features of his talent—albeit one finds in it little humor and no verse. It is full of verbal felicity, felicity sometimes of precision, sometimes of metaphoric reach; it begins with dialectic reasoning, of an extremely Fichtean and Hegelian type, but it ends in a trumpet-blast of oracular mysticism, straight from the insight wrought by anaesthetics—of ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycee in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the amusements of his companions. On leaving school with but slender means of support, he devoted himself to letters, and in 1842 published his first volume of verse (Les Cariatides), which was followed by Les Stalactites in 1846. The poems encountered some adverse criticism, but secured for their author the approbation and friendship of Alfred de Vigny and Jules Janin. Henceforward Banville's life was steadily devoted to literary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... this impossible, gave it up, and fell to watching the play of the sunshine as it came twinkling through the branches of oak and pine. Green and gold!—those were the colors the fairy princes always wore, she thought. It was the most perfect combination in the world; and she hummed a verse of ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... pricked her was peeled off. They wondered if Hermann had come in yet. Then, by some vague process of locomotion, they found themselves at the piano, and with her arm around his neck Sylvia has whispered half a verse of the song ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... ox, plodding slowly down the trail, did not swerve when the bushes parted suddenly at one side, as she finished this verse of her song, but Madge Brierly looked about with a quick alertness. The sound of the rustling leaves and crackling twigs might mean a friend's approach, they might mean the coming of one of the very enemies whom the song ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... to live on the applause of others. And so—for she would not accept alms from Glyndon—so, by the commonest arts, the humblest industry which the sex knows, alone and unseen, she who had slept on the breast of Zanoni found a shelter for their child. As when, in the noble verse prefixed to this chapter, Armida herself has destroyed her enchanted palace,—not a vestige of that bower, raised of old by Poetry and Love, remained to say, "It ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... She was not like Marjorie Fleming, that immortal little girl, who was wont to be angry when offensively condescending grown-ups addressed her as a babe in intellect. For Marjorie had no real sense of humour; all the humour of her literary composition, verse and prose, was of the unconscious variety. This child was only amused at being taken for ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... Edges his satire, and improves his rage. Thy copy casts a fairer light on all, And still outshines the bright original. 20 Now Ovid boasts the advantage of thy song, And tells his story in the British tongue; Thy charming verse and fair translations show How thy own laurel first began to grow; How wild Lycaon, changed by angry gods, And frighted at himself, ran howling through the woods. Oh, mayst thou still the noble task prolong, Nor age nor sickness interrupt thy song! Then may we ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... clear and untrembling as to be almost metallic,—the restraint she had put upon herself making it unnatural. At the commencement she had estimated her strength, and said, "It is sufficient!" but she had overtaxed it, as she found in singing the last verse:— ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... BLANK VERSE consists in poetical thoughts expressed in regular numbers, but without the correspondence of sound at the end of ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... had made an end of her verse, the Commander of the Faithful said to her, "O damsel, thou art in love." She replied, "Yes;" and he asked, "With whom?" Answered she, "With my lord and sovran of my tenderness, for whom my love is as the love of the earth for rain, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... am a worm, and not man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people" (verse 6). This is His own complaint. No longer a man but writhing on the ground like a worm, the substitute of sinners, thus the Holy One felt when He was numbered among the transgressors. The Hebrew word "worm", means the ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... water is of unknown depth. This rock, which is always dark and bare, is, as you will remember, of conical shape, sharp pointed at the top, and stands up about the size of a small hay-stack, in the midst of the waters. Do you remember the account that somebody gives in a ragged but terse kind of verse, of the 'gentleman in black,' who, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... urged the first person, and to suggest gracefully that the incident had reached its furthest extremity, he began to set out the melody of an unspoken verse. ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... Moliere took a comedy of Plautus, and applied it in writing a drama for the modern French stage. "The Sorrows of Han" belongs to the famous collection entitled "The Hundred Plays of the Yuen Dynasty." It is divided into acts and is made up of alternate prose and verse. The movement of the drama is good, and the denouement ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... recurrence of this minor chord, in the savage sweep of Burton's protest against the irony of existence, is a fascination that the "Kasidah" has in common with every great poem of the world. The materialism of the book is peculiar in that it is Oriental, and Orientalism is peculiarly mystical. The verse is blunt, and almost coarse in places, but here and there are gentler touches, softer tones, that search out the sorrow at the heart of things. It is worthy, in its power, of the praise of Browning, Swinburne, Theodore Watts, Gerald Massey. It is Edward Fitz Gerald minus ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of the Anglican chant, it should be noted that there are two parts to each verse: one, a reciting portion in which there is no measured rhythm; the other, a rhythmic portion in which the pulses occur as in measured music. In the reciting portion of the chant, the rhythm is that of ordinary prose speech, punctuation marks being observed as in conventional language reading. ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... age, passion has not yet an oral language; it is in the heart, in the head especially, but not on the lips; one comprehends, experiences, dreams, writes of love in prose and verse, but does not talk of it. Selkirk had twenty times attempted to confess his affection to Catherine; he had as yet succeeded only in a few simple and hasty meteorological sentences, on the rain and fine ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... libelli," as Terentianus Maurus says, in a frequently quoted verse. If Cromwell's Commissioners were hard on Duns, the Visitors of Edward VI. were ruthless in their condemnation of everything that smacked of Popery or of magic. Evangelical religion in England has never been very favourable ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... verse I introduced, and neatly chiselled wit; To look, to scan: to plot, to plan: to twist, to turn, to woo: On all to spy; in ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... pairs of rhymes and required to write a verse of four lines ending with the prescribed rhymes. This same forfeit may be imposed on several different players at once, an added interest arising from comparison of the ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... the little round stand before her, upon which lay the old family Bible, over which she was intently bending, reading and commenting to herself, as was her custom, in half-audible tones. He had often stood behind her, and listened, unobserved, as she read verse after verse, and paused after each, to testify of its truth, or piously apply it to herself and others. And now he thought that, in all probability, he would never see her again, and he half repented his determination. But his preparations ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... iniquities of men, their rapes, adulteries, robberies, their pride, idolatry, and fearful blasphemies: so that things have come to such a pass that no one can be found acting righteously. Many times a day have I repeated with tears the verse: ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which may ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... appeared R. Smyth's Stravnge and Tragicall histories Translated out of French. In 1576 was also published the first of George Whetstone's collections of tales, the four parts of The Rocke of Regard, in which he told over again in verse several stories already better told by Painter. In the same year, 1576, appeared G. Turberville's Tragical Tales, translated out of sundrie Italians—ten tales in verse, chiefly from Boccaccio. Whetstone's Heptameron of Ciuill Discourses in 1582 was however a more important ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... verse—Gudrid's Wardlock chant is adapted from the Lay of Swipday and Merglad in Corpus Poeticum Boreale, I, 92 seq., and Thorstan's Song of Helgi and Sigrun is a partial version of that epic ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... thought it right to change the subject, feeling it to be wrong that an old lady on her death-bed should be taking joy in the disappointment of her young neighbour. Martha changed the subject, first to jelly, and then to the psalms of the day. Miss Stanbury was too weak to resist; but the last verse of the last psalm of the evening had hardly been finished before she remarked that she would never believe it till she saw it. "It's all in the hands of Him as is on high, mum," said Martha, turning her eyes up to the ceiling, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... London, I forsook the murky town, And left you to quaint ways and crowded places, While I went on to Putney just to see Old Swinburne and to look into his face's Changeable lights and shadows and to seize on A finer thing than any verse he wrote? (Oh beautiful illusions of our youth!) He did not see me gladly. Talked of treason To England's greatness. What was Camden like? Did old Walt Whitman smoke or did he drink? And Longfellow was sweet, but couldn't think. His mood was crusty. Lowell ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... the modern name, the tune still continues to speak its true original. * * *. Some of both sexes have a quick vein of poetry, and in their language—which is very emphatic—they compose rhyme and verse, both which powerfully affect the fancy. And in my judgment (which is not singular in this matter) with as great force as that of any ancient or modern poet I ever read. They have generally very retentive memories; they see things at a great distance. The ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... occupations, and labored in the night-time like the heroes one reads about. He taught himself to read five languages, and at the time when I saw him last he knew more great poetry by heart than any man of letters that I have ever met. He was the author of one book, a tragedy in blank verse, called The Captive; that drama forms the chief theme of this journal. For the rest, it seems to me enough to quote this notice, which appeared in the New York Times for June ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... after verse without pause. There was no modulation, no phrasing, no interpretation; it was merely a steady fortissimo outpouring of a remarkable volume of tone for so small an instrument. And the full power of it was, to all appearance, ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... to an Episcopal clergyman, who was frequently too late in reaching his church, and whose curate on such occasions began to read the morning service instead of him, and had reached in one of the lessons the well-known verse, St John xiv. 6, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," when his ecclesiastical superior, panting with exertion, reaches the reading-desk, pushes his curate from his place, and intones, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour. It took away all the life from the verse. It made ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... one could bring into society with impunity. This gentleman belonged to a German family of decidedly bourgeois origin, but he had a knack of acquiring the patronage of "big-wigs," and of retaining their favour. He had translated some great German poem into Russian verse, and claimed to have been a friend of a famous Russian poet, since dead. (It is strange how great a multitude of literary people there are who have had the advantages of friendship with some great man of their own profession who is, unfortunately, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... grandiose scheme. It is no mere fanciful picture, but based on the writings of great German publicists, professors, and high colonial authorities, and chapter and verse could be quoted in full detail for every feature of the scheme. The civilization of the African natives and the economic development of the dark continent must be subordinate to the most far-reaching schemes of German world power and world conquest; the world must be brought into ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... chap. xxi., verse 33, of Genesis is correctly translated, Abraham is represented as having invoked ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... of that? From time to time I feel the need of breathing the atmosphere of such a life as this. My madcap existence is like a song; each of my love-episodes forms a verse of it, but ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... who was a lover of verse, "how true it is that poetry lends an illusive charm to conceptions ordinary in themselves, like a lovely screen which bestows a grace on the scantiness it only half conceals. Poetry ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... said Philip. "But surely Walt Whitman must have understood for he said it all in verse. 'I am to wait, I do not doubt, I am to meet you again,'" quoted Philip under his breath; "'I am to see to it that I do not ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... of Marzavan excited the prince's curiosity; he opened his eyes and looked at him. Marzavan, who had a ready wit, seized that opportunity, and made his compliment in extempore verse; but in such a disguised manner, that neither the king nor the grand vizier under stood his meaning. He represented so exactly what had happened to him with the princess of China, that the prince had no reason to doubt he knew her, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... By reason of my vows, my services, Done to the Gurus, and my faultless love, Grant but thy grace, I shall unhindered go. The sages teach that to walk seven steps One with another, maketh good men friends; Beseech thee, let me say a verse ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Man's Granado Discharged upon the Maiden's Complaint Against Coffee, a dialogue in verse, also appeared in 1663. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... gestures, symbols, and signs. Associations result, and, upon a repetition of the signal, the act is repeated, whether the will assents or not. Association and habit account for the phenomena. Ritual gains further strength when it is rhythmical, and is connected with music, verse, or other rhythmical arts. Acts are ritually repeated at the recurrence of the rhythmical points. The alternation of night and day produces rhythms of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest, for great numbers at the same ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... preserve the form and savor of the originals, and at the same time to keep as close to the exact sense as the constraints of rime and meter would allow. In Nos. XI to XVII a somewhat perplexing problem was presented. The originals frequently have assonance instead of rime and the verse is sometimes crude in other ways. An attempt to imitate the assonances and crudities in modern German would simply have given the effect of bad verse-making. On the other hand, to translate into ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... 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 ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... find us very callous. The language has none of that exquisite grace and flexibility which makes a good French comedy of own day, a piece by Augier, Sandeau, Feuillet, Sardou, so delightful. Diderot was right in urging that there is no reason why a play should be in verse; but then the prose of a play ought to have a point, elegance, and highly-wrought perfection, which shall fill us with a sense of art, though not the art of the poet. Diderot not only did not write comedy in such a style; but he does not even ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... vale of Good; And they, as bettered beings, felt New virtue—as they should. And thus a shining, golden chain, Of many links of love, Knit Frankie to the peopled plain, And to the good above. Affection's wreathed rings of beauty, Bound round a globe of gold; It is my verse's pleasing duty, To say to all, behold, Sweet Frank that central globe of worth; That gems, with pride, this spot of earth, This flower-engirdled, blissful ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... "mythological nurse-maid,"[5] to whom, though in her proper name as well as to her first-born son, successive editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales had been dedicated; the youthful friend of Beethoven, from whom she had received treasured confidences as to the influence exerted by Goethe's verse upon his mind and art; at times the haunting Muse of Germany's greatest poet and, since 1811, the wife of the most chivalrous of German poets, Achim von Arnim. If we add to these characteristics the circumstance that, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... sung the first line before the people in the tent were all turned toward her, hushed and reverent. Before she had finished the verse the Rectangle was subdued and tamed. It lay like some wild beast at her feet, and she sang it into harmlessness. Ah! What were the flippant, perfumed, critical audiences in concert halls compared with this dirty, drunken, impure, besotted ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... a half had passed since Charles's great affliction, and the time had not been unprofitably spent either by himself or his friend. Both had read very regularly, and Sheffield had gained the Latin verse into the bargain. Charles had put all religious perplexities aside; that is, he knew of course many more persons of all parties than he did before, and became better acquainted with their tenets and their characters, but he did not dwell upon anything which he met ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... repeat a verse or two of poetry right here where we stand, uncle?" asked Margery. "It keeps saying itself in my mind. I think you all know it and who wrote it, but that ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... live in my memory. Know, my son of Neptune, fledgeling of the Nymphs, and half- brother to the Tritons, that he whom thou knewest once in Parnassus' grove (whither he himself led thy halting feet), respireth still in sighs for beauty and exhalations of sweet verse. Know, too, that he hath of late composed a notable and admirable epic in praise of the Sun, which, if it please Heaven to bring him, ere the year fall, to London, thou mayest have the high honour of setting in print, thereby assisting at the birth ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... Marius,[851] "that it were the period of all philosophy, if we could so continue sound, or perform but a part of that which we promised to do, being sick. Whoso is wise then, will consider these things," as David did (Psal. cxliv., verse last); and whatsoever fortune befall him, make use of it. If he be in sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity, seriously to recount with himself, why this or that malady, misery, this or that incurable disease is inflicted upon him; it may be for his good, [852]sic expedit ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... madly vicious, can it be! A mother sunk in infamy, To sell her child is seen. Let Bow-street annals, and Tom B-t,{48} Who paid the mill'ner, tell the rest, It suits not with our page; Just satire while she censures,—feels,— Verse spreads the vice when it reveals The foulness of the age. 'Tis half-past five, and fashion's train No longer in Hyde Park remain, Bon ton cries hence, away; The low-bred, vulgar, Sunday throng, Who dine at two, are ranged along On both sides of the way; With various ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... poetry, shewed the blending of heathenism and Christianity, of Germanism and Romanism, and it is only now and then among the Roman elegists and later epic poets that we meet a feeling for Nature which can be compared to his. Like all the poets of this late period, his verse lacks form, is rugged and pompous, moving upon the stilts of classic reminiscences, and coining monstrous new expressions for itself; but its feeling is always sincere. It was the last gleam of a setting sun of literature that fell upon ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... of note in connection with this—although no one noted it particularly at the time, namely, that the portion of Scripture undesignedly selected contained that oft-quoted verse, "Ye know not what ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... verse, the brother and sister had published a second in prose, called 'Miscellaneous Pieces,' about which there is an amusing little anecdote in Rogers's 'Memoirs.' Fox met ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... The only monument in the cemetery attracted his attention, and presently he found himself standing at the foot of Mr. Hennage's grave, reading the epitaph. It impressed him so greatly that he copied the verse in a little morocco- covered ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... verse!" he would say, and actually once or twice he would pick up one or two of their cheap little archaic mannerisms and proudly use them as his own, and be quite angry to find that Leah had carefully expunged them in ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Ovide. "And one evening it happened she had to remain enthroned until matins, saying, 'I am here by the will of God.' But at the first verse, she was delivered, in order that she should not miss the office. Nevertheless, the late abbess would not allow that this was an especial favour, granted from on high, and said that God did not look so low. Here are the facts of the case. Our defunct sister, whose canonisation the order ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... he awoke and said, "Nurse, I have been called home. Shall I hear her sing before I go?" "Yes, I think so." While he spoke the sign was given and I sang Nearer, My God, to Thee, with the other voices softly following each verse. "Oh, the angel has come at last." "Listen, she is singing to you," said the nurse. "Hark, is it not the angel voices? Is it real? Then I have heard the heavenly song before I go. Oh, how beautiful it all is and how kind of all these friends to come to me and make ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the phrase, yet apt the verse, More ponderous than nimble; For since grimed War here laid aside His Orient pomp, 'twould ill befit Overmuch to ply The Rhyme's ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... begin by asking, "Who can tell us what is the first verse of the Bible?" When hands are raised, call on three or four children to repeat the verse in turn; then let all the class repeat it in concert. Explain what the verse means, that God made the world, and all the ...
— Hurlbut's Bible Lessons - For Boys and Girls • Rev. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
... comparatively large, but we are here only concerned with two—an Algorism in prose attributed to Sacrobosco (John of Holywood) in the colophon of a Paris manuscript, though this attribution is no longer regarded as conclusive, and another in verse, most probably by Alexander de Villedieu (Villa Dei). Alexander, who died in 1240, was teaching in Paris in 1209. His verse treatise on the Calendar is dated 1200, and it is to that period that his Algorism may be attributed; Sacrobosco died ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... allusion to this doctrine that R. W. Emerson, paraphrasing the Katha-Upanishad, wrote that immortal verse of his:— ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... translation of verse into verse, but actually verse-into-prose also falls within Dryden's "third way." When the author of the Preface to The Lover's Assistant speaks of it as an "undertaking" in translation, he means prose imitation, or paraphrase ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... you do want cheering up, Sam," said I, waiting till he had finished the verse. "The skipper's in a regular tantrum about you, and says you're to come ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... absence of what we hold to be soul—that is, of superior emancipated intelligence. They come for little or no object—they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above that of an ordinary person on earth. These American spirit-seers have published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious dead—Shakespeare, Bacon—heaven knows whom. Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair talent and education; they are wondrously inferior ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... while Edith retired. She lighted the third branch which crackled and threw up numberless red sparks, after which she chanted the last verse: ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... as much as to say, 'A rare bird upon the earth, and very like a black swan.' The verse is in Juvenal. But to return to what I was relating. I was saying such garments are rare sights in the country; and perchance, too, it was thought the more rare, respect being had to the person who wore it, who, they tell me, is the daughter of Black George, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... this time the Jacobins had not been forewarned so as to pack the house, and Madame du Gazon's duet was received with enthusiasm. Again, as she sung "Ah, que j'aime ma maitresse!" she bowed to the royal box, and the audience cheered. As if in reply to one verse, "Il faut les rendre heureux," "Oui, oui!" with lively unanimity, came from all parts of the house, and the singers were compelled to repeat the duet four times. "It is a queer nation this of ours," says the Princess Elizabeth, in relating ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Donaldson, after handing his cup to be replenished, sang, Ye banks and braes with much feeling and in fine manly tenor. We all joined in each second verse, while the guitars gave excellent accompaniment. One song suggested another, and from singing to conversational story-telling the transition was easy. To be sure, neither my brothers nor I nor Archie had much to tell, but some of the experiences of the ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... of the gains you have earned, and pay honours to him out of the plunder, the booty, and the spoils. Banish licentiousness from among you." Having read aloud these words, translated from the Greek verse, he added, that immediately on his departure from the oracle, he had paid divine honours to all these deities with wine and frankincense; and that he was ordered by the chief priest of the temple, that, as he had approached the oracle ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... became an intimate friend of her husband's, writing a sincere elegy on his death.[5] About February, 1591, Drayton paid a visit to London, and published his first work, the Harmony of the Church, a series of paraphrases from the Old Testament, in fourteen-syllabled verse of no particular vigour or grace. This book was immediately suppressed by order of Archbishop Whitgift, possibly because it was supposed to savour of Puritanism.[6] The author, however, published another edition in 1610; indeed, he seems to have had a fondness ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... confound my stammering verse, If I can a passage see In this word-perplexity, Or a fit expression find, Or a language to my mind, (Still the phrase is wide or scant) To take leave of thee, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... his seed among growing thorn-bushes, and we must necessarily understand that the description in this verse is not meant to give us the picture of a field in which these were actually growing, but rather of one in which they had been grubbed up, and so preparation been made for the sowing of the seed. They had been grubbed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the mountain walls close in, forming a most magnificent canon from 1,000 to 2,500 feet deep. Other canons of nearly equal beauty descend to swell the Hanapepe with their clear, cool, tributaries, and there are "meetings of the waters" worthier of verse than those of Avoca. The walls are broken and highly fantastic, narrowing here, receding there, their strangely-arched recesses festooned with the feathery trichomanes, their clustering columns and broken buttresses suggesting some old-world ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... this play, "I have a silent sorrow here," was avowedly written by Sheridan, as the music of it was by the Duchess of Devonshire—two such names, so brilliant in their respective spheres, as the Muses of Song and Verse have seldom had the luck to bring together. The originality of these lines has been disputed; and that expedient of borrowing which their author ought to have been independent of in every way, is supposed to have been resorted to by his indolence on this occasion. Some verses ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... lettuhs at Marse Sam Allens school, I learned a Bible verse ebry day an if I want bixxy I'd learn ah half uh chaptuh. I read some newspapers, and some story books de Miss Mary Timberlikk give us chillun to read an look ovuh. I learned to write in a copy book, an I'd ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... perhaps generally known that the prose of Burns exceeds in quantity his verse. The world remembers him as a poet, and forgets or overlooks his letters. His place among the poets has never been denied—it is in the first rank; nor is he lowest, though little remembered, among letter-writers. His letters gave Jeffrey a higher opinion of him ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... by man only so often as it was necessary for the flotilla boat to call for paddy, a visiting commissioner anxious to get away, or a family homeward-bound. Somewhere in the northeast was Mandalay, but lately known in romance, verse and song; somewhere in the southeast lay Prome, known only in guide-books and time-tables; and farther south, Rangoon, sister to Singapore, the half-way house of the derelicts of the world. On the east side of the river, ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... of his senses should agitate and enrage him. At present he had no wish to draw away. He entered the churchyard, and found the leafy nook with a tombstone where he had often rested. And as he listened to the rude chanting of verse after verse, tears fell ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... renderings of Homer, Sophocles, and Dante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one can ever be adequately turned into the other? Schiller no doubt wrote his dramas in prose and then turned them into rhetorical verse; but then there are those who affirm that Schiller’s rhetorical verse is scarcely poetry. The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mind that if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations of poetry ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... which prove that the old Conquerors were much more expert with the sword than with the pen. Hist. del Peru, Parte 1, lib. 2, cap. 93.] [Footnote 27: "Fue recibimiento mui solemne, con universal alegria del Pueblo, por verse libre de Tiranos; i toda la Gente, a voces, bendecia al Presidente, i le llamaban: Padre, Restaurador, i Pacificador, dando gracias a Dios, por haver vengado las injurias hechas a su Divina Magestad." Herrera, Hist General, dec. 8, lib. 4, cap. 17.] But, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... make or mend. "For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove," is a charming song; but "Logan Burn and Logan Braes" are sweetly susceptible of rural imagery; I'll try that likewise, and if I succeed, the other song may class among the English ones. I remember the two last lines of a verse in some of the old songs of "Logan Water" (for I know a good many different ones), ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... heir, out. This, Clement succeeded in doing, and the repulsive and squalid-minded Alessandro—known as the Mule—was installed. Ippolito, in whom this proceeding caused deep grief, settled in Bologna and took to scholarship, among other tasks translating part of the Aeneid into Italian blank verse; but when Clement died and thus liberated Rome from a vile tyranny, he was with him and protected his corpse from the angry mob. That was in 1534, when Ippolito was twenty-seven. In the following year a ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... could both write and speak the Quichi language well, and they went to work to compose in verse an account of the creation, the fall of man, the birth, life, and miracles of our Lord, and His death upon the cross. These verses they set to music, for the ...
— Las Casas - 'The Apostle of the Indies' • Alice J. Knight |
