"Alexandrine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... might not at some time be clad with flesh and skin, and a decent Roman toga. I fear it will yet haunt me as a 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' destroying my quiet with involuntary shreds and patches of long-metred blank; the notion is still vivacious, albeit scotched: Alexandrine though the synopsis appear, it must not be thrown on the highroad as a dead snake; nay, let me cherish it yet on my hearth, and not hurl it away like a bonum waviatum; a little more boiling up of Roman messes in my brain, and my tragedy might flow forth ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and talked till bedtime, when the squires made up the beds in the hall, and brought in supper—dates, figs, nutmegs, spices, pomegranates, and at last lectuaries, suspiciously like what we call jams; and "alexandrine gingerbread"; after which they drank various drinks, with or without spice or honey or pepper; and old moret, which is thought to be mulberry wine, but which generally went with clairet, a colourless grape-juice, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only disrespectful attention at the present time. There you have a chief possibility of offence. He is quite unable to pretend any awe for what he considers the spiritual monstrosities ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... lines can be more legitimate,—none in which the substitution of equipollent feet, and the modifications by emphasis, are managed with such exquisite judgment. B. and F. are fond of the twelve syllable (not Alexandrine) line, as— ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... in the House of Commons corresponding to the verse named Alexandrine—"Which, like a wounded snake, drags its slow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... III. " 48. Caesar follows Pompeius into Illyria. The lines of Dyrrachium and the Battle of Pharsalus. The beginning of the Alexandrine War. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... goodly ambulatory over against the hall, and he entered a door therefrom, which was but on the latch, and went up a little stair into a chamber, which was the goodliest and the richest of all. Its roof was all done with gold and blue from over sea, and its pavement wrought delicately in Alexandrine work. On the dais was a throne of carven ivory, and above it a canopy of baudekin of the goodliest fashion, and there was a foot-carpet before it, wrought with beasts and the hunting of the deer. As for the walls of ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... [Footnote 3299: Alexandrine des Echerolles, "Une famile noble sous la Terreur," 209. At Lyons, Marin, the commissioner, "a tall, powerful, robust man with stentorian lungs," opens his court with a volley of "republican oaths... ".. The crowd of supplicants melts away. One lady alone dared present her petition. "Who ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... irregular as thy feet are;— First, into Whig Pindarics rambling, Then in low Tory doggrel scrambling; Now love his theme, now Church his glory (At once both Tory and ama-tory), Now in the Old Bailey-lay meandering, Now in soft couplet style philandering; And, lastly, in lame Alexandrine, Dragging his wounded length along, When scourged by Holland's ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... alliteration, paronomasia; figurativeness &c (metaphor) 521. flourish; flowers of speech, flowers of rhetoric; frills of style, euphuism^, euphemism. big-sounding words, high-sounding words; macrology^, sesquipedalia verba [Lat.], Alexandrine; inflation, pretension; rant, bombast, fustian, prose run mad; fine writing; sesquipedality^; Minerva press. phrasemonger; euphuist^, euphemist. V. ornament, overlay with ornament, overcharge; smell ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... permits, and I shall take as illustration of the finest achievement of poetry in this whole first phase the closing stanzas of his famous Boaz Endormi in the Legende, whose beauty even translation cannot wholly disguise. Our decasyllable is substituted for the Alexandrine.[11] ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... of stately gallantry. The first word of the seventeenth line should read "small" instead of "swell". As misprinted, this line conveys a rather incongruous impression. "Mountains in Purple Robes of Mist", a vivid and powerful poem of Nature by Rev. Eugene B. Kuntz, is cast in Alexandrine quatrains, a rather uncommon measure. The only possible defect is in line thirteen, where the accent of the word "sublime" seems to impede the flow of the metre. Line nineteen apparently lacks two syllables, but the deficiency is probably secretarial or typographical rather than literary. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... jamais chose plus belle." Here is an Alexandrine written three hundred years ago, as simple as bon jour. Professor Aytoun is more ornate. After elegantly complimenting the spring, and a description of her Royal Highness's well-known ancestors the "Berserkers," he ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... called Alexander."—Worcester's Dict. Such metre has sometimes been written, with little diversity, through an entire English poem, as in Drayton's Polyolbion; but, couplets of this length being generally esteemed too clumsy for our language, the Alexandrine has been little used by English versifiers, except to complete certain stanzas beginning with shorter iambics, or, occasionally, to close a period in heroic rhyme. French heroics are similar to this; and if, as some assert, we have obtained it thence, the original poem was doubtless a French ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Johnson] both charge Pope with error and inconsistency:—error in supposing that in English, of metrical lines unequal in the number of syllables and pronounced in equal times, the longer suggests celerity (this being the principle of the Alexandrine:)—inconsistency, in that Pope himself uses the same contrivance to convey the contrary idea of slowness. But why in English? It is not and cannot be disputed that, in the Hexameter verse of the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... in assigning the primary model to the incantations of the Druids.[25] The lyrical measures of the Gael are various, but the scansion is regular, and there is no description of verse familiar to English usage, from the Iambic of four syllables, to the slow-paced Anapaestic, or the prolonged Alexandrine, which is not exactly measured by these sons and daughters of song.[26] Every poetical composition in the language, however lengthy, is intended to be sung or chanted. Gaelic music is regulated by no positive ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... has come down to us. Thucydides quotes the Delian "Hymn to Apollo", and it is possible that the Homeric corpus of his day also contained other of the more important hymns. Conceivably the collection was arranged in the Alexandrine period. ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod |
