"Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the capture of Brill was April 1st, and Alva, who was then at Brussels, suffered tortures from the Belgian wits. The word Brill, by a happy chance, signifies spectacles, and a couplet was ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... ladies had gone the Doctor lingered, and presently, in some strange way, he found himself in the dining-room with the doors carefully closed, saying "Ha! H'm!" and wiping his lips gratefully. He made Wade promise to come and see him, quoted a couplet anent hospitality—neglecting to give the author's name—and took his departure. After supper Wade lighted his pipe and started in the direction of the Doctor's house, but he never got there that evening. For an hour or more he wandered along the quiet, almost deserted street, and smoked ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... know the couplet, Mr. Rady. Why shouldn't I quote Sandoe? You know you like him, Rady. But, if you've missed me, I'm sorry. Rip and I have had a beautiful day. We've made new acquaintances. We've seen the world. I'm the monkey that has seen the world, and I'm going to tell you all about it. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... written by Lucius Commodus Hercules, and upon it was inscribed the well known couplet, viz.: "Hercules I, Jove's son, Lord of Fair Fame, Not ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... fantastic manner, the only woman devotee whom we chanced to see in Japan. She held out a lacquered salver for money, presumedly for religious purposes, and on receiving the same she commenced a series of gyrations worthy of the whirling dervishes of Cairo. It was impossible not to recall De Foe's couplet as applied ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... above the storm, while the head has been connected up to the heart, and they are doing team-work that is good for me and good for all who meet me. At church I like to have them sing the hymn whose closing couplet is: ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... published in the "Cambro-Briton" is somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... about the year 1564, and still in existence, I believe) she is represented, by way of derision, as herself in the pulpit, and preaching to a congregation of eight Huguenots seated. Underneath is the bitter couplet, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... of all. Granted;—for private enjoyment; and for private enjoyment keep them. They are not at all the less written you know, because you divide them. The couplet does not cease to be, nor does its meaning change. But take it away, and all appropriation ceases, and a very pretty gallant charade remains, fit for any collection. Depend upon it, he would not like to have his charade ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... another song. Those in the cabin paid little heed until the sailor's voice roared out the couplet: ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... consummation; her second, the Infante of Spain, died immediately after their union; and her third, the duke of Savoy, left her again a widow after three years of wedded life. She was a woman of talent and courage; both proved by the couplet she composed for her own epitaph, at the very moment of a dangerous accident which happened during her journey into Spain to join her second ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... in the midst of the reaction and those who had fought at the barricades on the 18th of March applauded when the couplet was sung, of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rhyming couplet with a quaint musical intonation, as though it was the refrain of a song, and after her voice and laughter had died away she went on nodding her head in time to the brushing as if she were singing ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... nothing but a catalogue of the specialties of May; but how the dickens to wind the thing up is what puzzles me. It's too beautiful and truly poetic to be spoiled by a completing couplet like: ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... of contemporary evidence must be added the information derivable from the posthumous publications enumerated in the former part of this article. The publication of 1723 was made by direction of the duchess of Buckingham. The couplet, "Tho' prais'd," &c., and the appended note, were omitted. In 1726 Mr. alderman Barber republished the volumes "with several additions, and without any castrations," restoring the couplet and note as they were printed in 1717. In the Original poems of Dryden, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... of four times in the first part. The pause is in them, as in the rest, variously placed through the course of the verses; and thus they bear no more resemblance than their associates, to those minute Elegies of twelve alternate rhimes, closing with a couplet, which assume the name of Sonnet, without any other resemblance to that order of Verse, except their limitation to fourteen lines. I never found the quadruple rhimes injurious to the general expression of the sense, but in the excepted instances. When it is considered ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... school. We called him "Bunty Lord." One evening after school four boys, of whom I was one, while playing on the commons, found a dead sheep. It was suggested that we carry the sheep into the schoolroom and place it on Lord's seat. This was promptly done and I wrote a Latin couplet, purporting that this was a very worthy sacrifice to a very poor Lord, and placed it on the head of the sheep. The next morning Lord found the sheep and made a great outcry against the indignity. Efforts were made at once to ascertain the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... intelligence which besets those who are known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them anonymously to magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of "How we Beat the Favourite" that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a versemaker. The success of his republished "collected" poems gave him courage, and the unreserved praise which greeted "Bush Ballads" ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... as is rarely found in any Englishman, he was destined to be a great social as well as a great artistic success. He loved the society of men of birth and fashion; he seems to have had a more passionate desire to please in private even than in public, and almost to have justified the often quoted couplet ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... you! Here's a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. "Here's a stanza On Braganza— Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup Of warm water—" "What's the matter?" "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this brutal ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... your sign?" said the dean. "Oh, the pole and bason; and if your worship would just write me a few lines to put upon it, by way of motto, I have no doubt but it would draw me plenty of customers." The dean took out his pencil, and wrote the following couplet, which long graced ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... on no other mission than that referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans. Swarms of turkeys are driven ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... A couplet of verse, a period of prose, may cling to the rock of ages as a shell that survives ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to the easily-remembered couplet: ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... theory common in this and the last century is that it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes, one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense, to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have imagination ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... instead of universal peace and good-will towards men,—that the Rights of Man included murder, confiscation, and atheism,—that the Sovereignty of the People meant the rule of King Mob, who seemed determined to carry out to the letter Diderot's famous couplet,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... replied, in the same light tone. 'I am going to Germany sometime—going to Wiesbaden, and I mean to find that house and the picture which Miss Raymond says I am so much like; then I shall know how I look to others. You remember the couplet: ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... There were not words strong enough for the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the People par excellence, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... grace of this charming last couplet, but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight perceptible to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... two lines as they stood in some obscure edition anterior to 1801, and the withers of poor G. are again wrung. His letter is a gem—with his poor blind eyes it has been laboured out at six sittings. The history of the couplet is in page 3 of this irregular production, in which every variety of shape and size that Letters can be twisted into, is to be found. Do shew his part of it to Mr. R. some day. If he has bowels, they must melt at the contrition so queerly character'd of a contrite sinner. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... hand in hand with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called "poetic diction." Indeed he was hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a lifelong adherence to a metre—the heroic couplet—with which this same poetic diction was most closely bound up. He did not always escape the effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature. ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... by to tell her that she must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him: ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe" with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet occurred: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... preference of the two favourite odes, which he estimates, in his raptures, at the value of a kingdom. I will, however, venture to recommend Cowley's first piece, which ought to be inscribed, To my Muse, for want of which the second couplet is without reference. When the title is added, there will still remain a defect; for every piece ought to contain, in itself, whatever is necessary to make it intelligible. Pope has some epitaphs without names; which are, therefore, epitaphs to be let, occupied, indeed, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... at the end of the acts. It began with 'The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs,' and was transformed into 'The Three Wishes'; this passed into 'Red Riding Hood' (with the wolf changed into a cannibal who sang a very comical little couplet), and finished as 'Cinderella,' varied with other ingredients. These pieces were in every respect excellently mounted and played, and I gained a very good notion there of the imaginative fare in which the English people can find amusement. I found the performances at the Olympic Theatre ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... rhymes; Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line, it "whispers through the trees":{13} If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep," The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep": Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song,{14} That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.{15} Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... stated intervals, as is done in 'Tears, idle tears' and elsewhere: but clearly none of these would be available to a translator. Where therefore he has to express stanzas, it is easy to see that rhyme may be admissible and even necessary. Pope's couplet may (or may not) stand for elegiacs, and the In Memoriam stanza for some one of Horace's metres. Where the heroes of Virgil's Eclogues sing alternately four lines each, Gray's quatrain seems to suggest itself: and where a similar case occurs in these Idylls (as for instance in the ninth) I ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... each couplet of the Angelus, is recited that short hymn of praise, beginning with the words which the angel of the annunciation addressed to Mary,[1] "Ave Maria." This is why the hour after sunset is so often called ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... chant these lines he ended his recitation of the chapter, and began also to sing and repeated the following couplet, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... opened, disclosed two sea biscuits—the square, thin kind, like a soda cracker—and upon each was painted a tiny marine view in water-colors, while beneath was a couplet done in ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... from Dane-shire, the shire of the Danes, though it is known to have had its name before ever the first Dane landed in England, and there seems to be little likelihood, therefore, but only "a sympathie in letters." He concludes his discussion by the couplet: ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... poems, whether the experiment of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement; it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... it—still, his sympathies are indubitably subordinated to the effort, the successful effort, to bring off a neat point, to make a pun in the right place, to be striking, antithetical, epigrammatic. His verses have the finish, in their way, of Pope's couplet and Ovid's pentameter. His best known and most praised work appeals, primarily, to the taste and the ear: always, perhaps, to the head rather than to the heart. There is something of "hard brilliance" in Praed: he writes ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... contribucion f. tax. convencer to convince. conveniente useful, fitting, proper. convenir to agree, fit, suit. convento convent. convertir to convert. convicto convicted. convidar to invite. convoy m. convoy, escort, train. copa cup. copla couplet, ballad, song. corazon m. heart. cordillera chain of mountains. corneta cornet; —— de llaves cornet-a-pistons. corona crown. coronar to crown. coronel colonel. coronilla crown of the head. corral m. yard. correo mail, post-office. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... and I took the pen and wrote the six sorts of writing in use among the Arabs, and each sort contained an original verse or couplet, in praise of the Sultan. And not only did my handwriting completely eclipse that of the merchants, but it is hardly too much to say that none so beautiful had ever before been seen in that country. When I had ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... (1685-1732) whose best known piece "The Beggar's Opera" was said to have made "The Rich gay and Gay rich"? He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph was by Alexander Pope, followed by Gay's own mocking couplet, "Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once and now ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... couplet de la chanson de Klein-Zach! Quand il avait but de genivre et de rack If fallait voir flotter les pans de son frac Comme des herbes dans un lac Le monstre faisait flic ...
— The Tales of Hoffmann - Les contes d'Hoffmann • Book By Jules Barbier; Music By J. Offenbach
... gentil Troubadour, Si tu reviens fidele, Chant un couplet pour celle Qui benit ton retour." "Pardonnez mon refus, Pelerine jolie, Sans avoir vu m'amie, Je ne ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... followed her graceful course to the side of her parents, he groaned, half humorously, and then went wandering about the upper hallway, a prey to conflicting emotions, engendered by the new point of view which the girl had unconsciously presented. A couplet of Browning's was running through his mind and more than once he ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like "the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice," which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be called the worst couplet in the world's literature. In his real poetry (even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Russian, I forget which, her sleep seemed to her the happy life; her waking hours a bad dream. She had just had her only pleasurable waking in three years. The memories of her childhood had sung their melodious ditties in her soul. The first couplet was heard in a dream; the second made her spring out of bed; at the third, she doubted her ears,—the sorrowful are all disciples of Saint Thomas; but when the fourth was sung, standing in her night-gown with bare feet by the window, she recognized Brigaut, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so, and found ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... A Persian couplet said by a lover to his mistress is, 'Gold has no scent and in the scent of flowers there is no gold; but thou both ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... and on each there was a lovely group of mountain foliage, flowers, or ferns, all beautifully executed in pen and ink, while underneath the design, or cunningly woven around it, was written, in a dainty hand, some appropriate verse or couplet, quotations from various authors, with now and then a bit of real heart rhyme that had been the outgrowth ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... but in the days when these terms meant something in real life there was a distinction. The talisman was probably at first an astronomical figure, but later the term became more comprehensive. Pope portrays this astrological import in his couplet, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Tacitus.—Although Byron is, by our school rules, a forbidden author, I sometimes contrive to indulge myself in reading his works by stealth. Among the passages that have struck my (boyish) fancy is the couplet in "The ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... unassailable by reason of their ramparts of wealth, that they lived in comfort, if not in luxury, while those whom they dominated were struggling hard for a bare subsistence. I can imagine the youth reciting the couplet which sets out ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... the Semitic goddess Ishtar and by the Sumerian goddess Nintu or Ninkharsagga. In the passage in the Babylonian Version, "the Lady of the Gods" has always been treated as a synonym of Ishtar, the second half of the couplet being regarded as a restatement of the first, according to a recognized law of Babylonian poetry. We may probably assume that this interpretation is correct, and we may conclude by analogy that "the holy Innanna" in the second half of the Sumerian couplet is there merely employed ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... statements are greatly exaggerated, The Traveller is interesting because it contains beautiful descriptions and apt expressions of thought. The verse employed is the heroic couplet, the favorite verse of the eighteenth-century poets. The lines rhyme in pairs, and often a couplet expresses a complete thought. Each line contains ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... Uhland in his lyrics but rarely gives us directly his own emotional life, preferring to let the shepherd, the soldier, the mountain lad speak. The type of the simple folksong predominates, and from the VOLKSLIED Uhland introduced into modern verse the modified Nibelungen stanza and the rhymed couplet. In his ballads Uhland prefers older historical subjects, as in Taillefer, that rarest jewel among his ballads; or at least uses an historic setting, as in the more popular ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... of medical Science on the subject—Science which however, adds nothing to our knowledge and leaves us still in darkness and uncertainty, while memory brings a well known couplet to the mind: ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... luxuriant; he is tempted to say many things which might be better omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words. But when the difficulty of artificial rhyming is interposed; where the poet commonly confines his verse to his couplet, and must continue that verse in such words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme, the fancy then gives leisure to the judgment to come in; which, seeing so heavy a task imposed, is ready to cut off ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... degree practically acquainted with those very different kinds of versification. I will venture to assert that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme, is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he is at invention ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... mistress, fleeting through the shades of night, awoke me, behold! my chamber was deserted, and far off was the place of our meeting. He says also,' continued the eunuch, 'that he cannot complete the piece, and will give a rich present to anyone who adds to it a second couplet to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... of the first order took any direct part in it, did much to embitter the relations of their respective parties.[16] Not less irritating were the jeux d'esprit with which Canning continued to assail the ministry in the newspaper press.[17] The most famous of these is the couplet:— ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... necessarily acetic. The presence of vinegar in a dressing, like that of onions and its relatives, on most occasions should be suspected only. Wyvern and other true epicures consider the advice of Sydney Smith, as expressed in the following couplet, "most pernicious":— ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we find ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... sang, and the audience, tittering curiously before, remained spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness of the ending of comedies, of the regret which lingers in the remembrance of past laughter. In a couplet of passionate melancholy she asked, where are the roses of yesterday? whither ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... first couplet, "Stay, adder," &c., makes the burden of the song. Now I have conversed enough with poetry to judge thus much that not only there is nothing barbarous in this invention, but, moreover, that it is perfectly Anacreontic. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... can trace? Self-love, ambition, envy, pride, Their empire in our hearts divide. Give others riches, power, and station, 'Tis all on me an usurpation. I have no title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher. In Pope I cannot read a line, But, with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Pox take him and his wit!' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous, biting way. Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the aid of clippings, and by printing that poem by Lowell which was his mother's favorite, wherein was the couplet ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Occasions'] for the perusal of some friends, which, with many other pieces, is withheld from the present volume. To draw the attention of the public to insignificance would be deservedly reprobated; and another reason, though not of equal consequence, may be given in the following couplet:— ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... a "stone": mund, is hand, and by periphrasis "land of fist"; so that Hallmund is meant by this couplet, and that was the real name of "Air," who is not a mere man, but a ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... hand, may easily be made to confront its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the visible shame of refutation. Such shame would settle upon every page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. And the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor breathed an aspiration, which he would not willingly ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... confusion of that great occasion I recall two toasts. One was offered by John Fox. "Japan for the Japanese, and the Japanese for Japan." Even the Japanese wardroom boy did not catch its significance. The other was a paraphrase of a couplet in reference to our brown brothers of the Philippines first spoken in Manila. "To the Japanese: 'They may be brothers to Commodore Perry, but they ain't no brothers ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... custom of Shakespeare's age, to conclude acts and scenes with a couplet, a custom which was continued ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... son kept staring at Thorgerda Glum's daughter; his wife Thorhillda saw this, and she got wroth, and made a couplet upon him. ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... couplet Milton afterwards, on his Italian journey, entered in an album belonging to an Italian named Cerdogni, and underneath it the words, Coelum non animum muto dum trans mare curro, and his signature, Joannes Miltonius, Anglus. The juxtaposition ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... seem to have been written some time earlier than 1627. The Elegies comprise a great variety of styles and themes; some are really threnodies, some verse-letters, some laments over the evil times, and one a summary of Drayton's literary opinions. He employs the couplet in his Elegies with a masterly hand, often with a deliberately rugged effect, as in his broader Marstonic satire addressed to William Browne; while the line of greater smoothness but equal strength is to be seen in the letters to Sandys and Jeffreys. ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... of the most respectable of the governors, was found, at his death, with a copy of verses in his pocket, which included the following couplet: ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter of Mr. Hawes, a South Sea director, and died in 1788. Lord Vane died in 1789. Boswell distinctly states, that the lady mnentioned in Johnson's couplet "was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose Memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett, but Ann Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London." See Boswell's Johnson, vol. i. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of the Lady Chapel is divided by buttresses into three bays, and has crocketed gables to each. The aisles show a lancet in the lower story, with a blind couplet beneath a quatrefoil in the gable; the central compartment has a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... these finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... freezing, and she shivered not a little. The drawing-room, fourteen feet by ten, was fitted up as a ballroom, with two fiddlers and a fifer sitting in a corner and a country-dance was performing when we arrived. Over the mantle-piece was a square of laurel twigs, inclosing as a frame this couplet from the poetical brain of the master of the house, cut out in red paper, and bespangled with ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the boasted inspiration of the Apollo! I cannot help—pity me!—I cannot help preferring the Antinous. Was it not Socrates who said that the statuary found his statue in the block of marble? Then Michael Angelo was by no means original in his couplet— ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... written to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of London, 1701; for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as follows: ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Myself by his side holding a candle to him. Then he began to sing. It was an awful tune—I think he called it sevens—but he made common-sense of my doggerel by one alarming emendation. When he came to the couplet I have given you, what do you ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... very pretty couplet, 'Every leaf of the foliage of a green tree is, in the eye of a wise man, a library to teach him the wisdom of his Creator.'[6] I may remark that, where an Englishman would write his own name, a Hindoo would write that of his god, his ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... distinctive feature of the church is the very decorative 'Greenway' chapel. John Greenway was a rich wool-merchant of Tiverton, and on the walls of the chapel was inscribed this couplet: ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... anxious mother heard to her joy, a rhymed couplet and caught the sound of a name, several times repeated. It sounded ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... took it to the camp. This has resulted in my having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... long lines that conclude each stanza of this charming love-poem, instead of rhyming alternately as in the translation, chime somewhat to the tune of Byron's Don Juan—six lines rhyming with each other, and the two last forming a separate couplet. In other respects the translation, it is hoped, is sufficiently ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... couplet has set me to thinking, long and seriously, upon the duty of cheerfulness, a duty which we owe not only to our fellow-men, but to ourselves. It is such an uncomfortable thing to be miserable that I marvel that any sensible human being ever gives way to the inclination to look ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... these are fixed and conventional, and others are of his own contrivance. Spanish uses the terms estrofa and copla to designate an arrangement of verses in a stanza. Copla must not be confused with English "couplet." These are general terms; most verse-forms are designated by special names. The following verse-forms are found in the ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... exceeds that of the grape. He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a dram, without the ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... descriptions of the various visual experiments of this and the following chapters, the first word of the couplet which describes the condition of the experiment, for example, white-black, always designates the visual condition which the animal was to choose, the second that which it was to avoid on penalty of an electric shock. In the case of Tables 6 and 7, for example, white cardboard was placed in one ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... say—for, alas! there was no speculation in the other. His dexter daylight was utterly darkened, and, indeed, the orb that remained was as sanguinary a luminary as ever struggled through a London fog at noonday. To borrow a couplet or so from the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... with the apparent want of unity in many of the Odes. The Orientals compare each couplet to a single pearl and the entire "Ghazal," or Ode, to a string of pearls. It is the rhyme, not necessarily the sense, which links them together. Hence the single pearls or couplets may often be arranged in various ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... grew older his handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet: ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... modern English literature by the Romance school of the fourteenth century. Our original English versification, on the other hand, was neither rimed nor rhythmic. What answered to metre was a certain irregular swing, produced by a roughly recurrent number of accents in each couplet, without restriction as to the number of feet or syllables. What answered to rime was a regular and marked alliteration, each couplet having a certain key-letter, with which three principal words in the couplet began. In addition to these two poetical devices, Anglo-Saxon verse shows traces of ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... the poet brings the whole scene before us at once, as it were by enchantment; and in this single couplet we feel all the effect that arises from the terrible wildness of a region unenlivened by the habitations of men. The verses that describe so minutely the camel-driver's little provisions have a touching influence on the imagination, and prepare the reader to enter more feelingly into his ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Perhaps the couplet in which Boileau depreciates Tasso may serve as well as any other specimen to justify the opinion given of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:— ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... several ballads of ten, twenty, or thirty couplets to be sung through, feigning by his silence to admit his defeat. Then the bridegroom's camp rejoiced and sang aloud in chorus, and thought that this time the foe was worsted; but at the first line of the last couplet, they heard the hoarse croaking of the old hemp-dresser bellow forth the ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... to the cupboard, 'in the name of Politics, take this and meditate upon him.' The shops being all shut on Sunday, he certainly bought it, anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and, as soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his repeating a couplet, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... charming couplet Mr. Lagg started toward the rear of his store, where the aromatic odor of ground coffee indicated that ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... presents more difficulties than this, in which M.A. has availed himself of a passage in the Cratylus of Plato. The divine hammer spoken of in the second couplet is the ideal pattern after which the souls of men are fashioned; and this in the first terzet seems to be identified with Vittoria Colonna. In the second terzet he regards his own soul as imperfect, lacking the final touches which it might have ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... couplet I remember learning long ago, when I was a child, and how applicable it is to this problem of deception. Truly, it is a tangled web, and the only way to get it untangled is to break off the thread and go back to the beginning where we can truly say, I am created free and perfect and whole in His ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... those in Cataline. On what provocation Marsten thus censured his friend is unknown, but the practice has been too frequently pursued, so true is it, as Mr. Gay observes of the wits, that they are oft game cocks to one another, and sometimes verify the couplet. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... we find that our religious poetry has gone down into the deeps. There are indications of such a tendency in the older times, but neither then were the questions so articulate, nor were the questioners so troubled for an answer. The alternative expressed in the middle couplet seems to me the most imperative of all questions—both for the individual and for the church: Is man fashioned by the hands of God, as a potter fashioneth his vessel; or do we indeed come forth from his heart? Is power or love the making might of the universe? He who answers this question ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... be seen in many places is the solving of historical enigmas. Some ancient celebrity is represented by an animal in a rhyming couplet; and the man who detects the hero under this disguise wins a considerable sum. Such is the native passion for gambling that bets are even made on the result of the metropolitan examinations, particularly on the province to which will fall the honour ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Benevolence and Taste, have ease and vigour enough to shew that he could, with a little practice, have written as well in the couplet measure as he did in blank verse. If Armstrong cannot be styled a man of genius, he is at least one of the most ingenious ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... holding in hand the wand which she again thrust into the frying pan, saying, "O fish! O fish! be ye constant to your olden covenant?" And behold, the fish lifted their heads, and repeated "Yes! Yes!" and recited this couplet: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone of the well-bred causeur, as free from classical mannerism as it ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Addresses' should still carry weight. In the burlesque couplet, ascribed in the first edition to the younger Colman and afterwards transferred to Theodore Hook, ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... passage already quoted under Pope's version from Odyssey, xiv. 29, what is the meaning of that singular couplet— ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... poet, has a doggerel narrative entitled "A New Discovery by Sea with a Wherry from London to Salisbury," 1623, wherein he mentions a woful night with fleas at Goring, and pens a couplet worthy to take a place with the famous description of a similar visitation ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... this time I recognized that the song was in the Greek language. I remained looking intently in that direction, until the form faded into a mere shadow; and then, as darkness increased, seemed to multiply before my aching eyes, and assume all sorts of fantastical shapes. Every now and then, a couplet, or a stanza, came sweeping up. It was evident the lady, whoever she might be, was not singing merely to amuse the child. The notes were sometimes lively, but, in general, sad and plaintive. I listened long ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... had a faithful personal ally in the person of the Procureur-Syndic, the most important national functionary in the city. This man, Couplet, called Beaucourt, was a disreputable and apostate ex-monk who had married an ex-nun. His position, of course, gave him a great influence over the least respectable part of the population, and with Marat and Danton at his back in Paris he cared ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... is pronounced Hie; doire, is trees or woods; luchd, people; and leigh, healing; and also a physician, whence the old English word for a doctor, a leech, so that the couplet means ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... [515] This ridiculous couplet pretends to imitate the redundancy and nonsensicality of Aeschylus' language; it can be seen how superficial and unfair the criticism of Euripides is; probably this is just what Aristophanes wanted to convey by this ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... more taxing of brains than most players care for. The ordinary rhyming game, without using paper, is for one player to make a remark in an easy metre, and for the next to add a line completing the couplet. Thus in one game that was played one ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... round hand on thin letter-paper) pleased me with the touching sentiment with which they seemed to be inspired. I learnt them by heart, and decided to take them as a model. The thing was much easier now. By the time the name-day had arrived I had completed a twelve-couplet congratulatory ode, and sat down to the table in our school-room to ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... calculations. It does not appear, indeed, that the Chinese were, at any time, able to predict an eclipse, notwithstanding all that has been said in their favour on this subject. The reputed Chinese tables, published by Father Couplet, have been detected to be those of Tycho Brahe; and Cassini found the chronology of their eclipses, published by Martinus, to be erroneous, and their returns impossible. It could not indeed be otherwise; the defectiveness of the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commended. "Madam," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... strange association of tragedy and romance: he was a patron of one of those poets who, approved by neither gods nor columns, are remembered by the accident of an accident, and was himself a poetaster, capable of the couplet,— ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... villages on the road between Norwich and Cromer. A third couplet alludes merely to the situation of a group of villages ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... so it became with me. Like most children, I had my own rather vivid idea of the day of judgment. The thought of death was familiar to me. (It is seldom, I think, a painful one in childhood.) I fully realized the couplet which concluded a certain quaint old rhyme in honour of the four Evangelists which Nurse Bundle had taught me ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Memory, or a New and Complete Treatise of Analogy between the French and English Languages," compiled by Charles Turrell, Professor of Languages, and published in 1828, contains the words which are the same in each language (alphabet, banquet, couplet, &c.), and those almost the same—"Letters necessary in English, and superfluous in French, are included in a parenthesis, thus Bag(g)age. Letters necessary in French, and superfluous in English are printed in ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... barefoot until they were ten, and who count the hard winters by their frozen toes." And he is fond of quoting in this connection—the only quotation, by the by, that the old gentleman ever makes—that couplet ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... I remarked, without any great show of emotion, feeling, I suppose, that without worldly goods we might consistently be without elegance. And in the back of my brain I was silently revising our old Kansas pioneer couplet into ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Here the satirist, leaving politics, applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard Steele in his couplet: ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... followed after an unusually good dinner, when the world and the Madigans were young together, had inspired Old Mother Gibson. The original couplet, with which all Madigans are familiar, is not strictly quotable; it was not invented, but adopted, by them. And it served merely to give a name to the game, which was half a war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the north, and Allahabad on the east, is said never to have been visited by a famine; and this exemption from so great a calamity must arise chiefly from its being so well studded with hills and groves. The natives have a couplet, which, like all good couplets on rural subjects, is attributed to Sahadeo, one of the five demigod brothers of the Mahabharata, to this effect: 'If it does not thunder on such a night, you, father, must go to ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... some intervals, until July, 1712, though Tutchin himself died in 1707. For his partisanship for Monmouth poor Tutchin came under the anger of Judge Jeffreys, who sentenced him to several floggings. Pope's couplet in the "Dunciad" ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... basis of marriage. The famous couplet of Rosalind still holds good. The sex instinct (or rather instincts, for coupled with sex-desire is love of beauty, admiration, joy of possession, triumph, etc.) has the unique place of being more regulated by law and custom than any other basic instinct. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... town was hardly at any time in a state of quietude. As described by an observant writer, "every man became a soldier and every house that was not a mere peasant's hut was a fortress." A local poet of the Seventeenth Century summed it up in a terse if not elegant couplet as his ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Lord Mallow were standing in the embrasure of a window, walled in by the crowd of aristocratic nobodies and intellectual eccentricities, talking earnestly of poor Erin and her chances of ultimate happiness, the lady, almost unawares, quoted a couplet of her own which seemed peculiarly applicable to ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... one couplet corresponds to the ten thousand feet in the other, while the bathing of the feet corresponds to the waving of the arms. Couplets of this kind are always attractive to the Chinese child as well as to the scholar, and poems and essays are replete ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... last, truly enough, our pathway led among the chickens and the geese. Indeed, one blustering gander "quite thought to bar our way." But, taking courage from the stirring old couplet, ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... In the masterly couplet closing the sestet of No. XVIII, Mr. Irwin's verbal enthusiasm reaches its highest mark in an ultra-Meredithian rendition of "I am an easy mark," an expression, by the way, which would itself have to be elaborately translated ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... was coaxed home and got upstairs, but then, in a gush of politeness, he insisted on seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking, Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet, which covered ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... looking into a camera obscura—you saw faces shining and speaking—the smoke curled, the lights dazzled, the oak wainscotting took a higher polish—there was old Sarratt, tall and gaunt, with his couplet from Pope and case at Nisi Prius, Mounsey eyeing the ventilator and lying perdu for a moral, and Hume and Ayrton taking another friendly finishing glass!—These and many more windfalls of character he gave us in thought, word, and action. I remember his once describing three different persons ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... both as to the Verse and the Sense; for it makes the thing described more immediately present than it would be otherwise. I cannot just now recollect an Example in Milton of this nature, but I remember one in Fairfax, in a Couplet already cited. ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... Britain is called English. These three languages are extremely like one another; but the Continental language that is likest the English is the Dutch or Hollandish dialect called Frisian. We even possess a couplet, every word of which is both English and Frisian. It ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... He wrote so many pages a day of so many lines each. He overtook an immense amount of work in the year. He published many books, and he made a great deal of money. The great English lawyer Sir Edward Coke divided his time according to the well-known couplet— ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... conspiracy of silence regarding the writers of the Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all adopted. Even Ovid, never ungenerous though not always discriminating in his praise, dismisses him in a list of Latin poets with a single couplet of vague eulogy. In the reactionary circles of the Empire, Lucretius found recognition; but the critics who, according to Tacitus, ranked him above Virgil may be reasonably suspected of doing so more from caprice ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... therefore unlike many which we have too frequently heard, and to which, but for the undeserved imputation which we should seem to cast upon our good friend Sir Henry Ellis, might be applied, with a slight alteration, that couplet of Mathias which tells— ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... that we arise, I and thou, and go forth this night from this land and seek us a town wherein we may wone and witness naught of the doings of yonder traitress; for whoso is absent from the eye is absent from the heart, and quoth one of the poets in the following couplet:[FN528]— ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the child in a tone of relief; and she repeated softly to herself the hymn which she had said to the old man. The last couplet was scarcely audible. ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... expresses the deepest personal emotion through the medium of a literary style that had been developed by long years of study. The Laments, to be sure, are not based on any classic model and they contain few direct imitations of the classical poets, though it may be noted that the concluding couplet of Lament XV is translated from the Greek Anthology. On the other hand they are interspersed with continual references to classic story; and, more important, are filled with the atmosphere of the Stoic philosophy, derived from Cicero and Seneca. And along with this austere teaching ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... him; plenty of both. Enough should be said to defeat the malice and stupidity of detractors. Those who want to know what he was in himself should read the poems. The poems are the man speaking. They are so like him that to read them is to hear him. The couplet— ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... gazing up at the tower. I soon found it, because it was the only one in that quarter from which I could see the top of the tower. It recorded the life and death of an aged pair who had been married fifty years, concluding with the couplet— ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... at Brieg, where he was sometime ducal councillor. In 1654 he published Salomon von Golaws deutscher Sinngetichte drei Tausend, the name Golaw being a disguise of Logau. They vary in length from a couplet to a hundred lines or more, and disclose in the aggregate a virile and interesting personality. The text follows Eitner's edition in Deutsche ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... simple topic as 'How to Retain a Husband's Love'—if your attention is being distracted by a conscientious rendering of Czerny's 101 Exercises in an adjoining room. I could get no further with my article than the opening lines (they like an introductory couplet ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... observed at once by reference to the text that in form the two poems are identical. They contain the same number of lines and feet as surely as all sonnets do. Each travels upon two rhymes with the members of a broken couplet in widely separated refrain. To the casual reader this much is obvious, but there are many subtleties in the verse which made the authorship inevitable. It was a form upon which he had worked for years, and made his own. When the moment arrived the medium was ready. ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... perturbed by the paucity of her native language. There appeared to be nothing to rhyme with "love" except "shove," "above," and "dove." Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated the final couplet doubtfully: ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Monsieur Dacier rather thinks that Horace refers here, as in the words Versibus impariter junctis, "Couplets unequal," to the use of pentameter, or short verse, consisting of five feet, and joined to the hexameter, or long verse, of six. This inequality of the couplet Monsieur Dacier justly prefers to the two long Alexandrines of his own country, which sets almost all the French poetry, Epick, Dramatick, Elegiack, or Satyrick, to the tune of Derry Down. In our language, the measures ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... usually begins at about three-quarters after six. I found also, that my good friend the Bencher had already spent three of his distichs; and only waiting an opportunity to hear a sermon spoken of that he might introduce the couplet where "a stick" rhymes to "ecclesiastic." At my entrance into the room, they were naming a red petticoat and a cloak, by which I found that the Bencher had been diverting them with a ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... The first couplet is general in character. It inculcates obedience to the precepts of the teacher, and gives as reason the assurance that thereby long life and peace will be secured. True to the Old Testament conception ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... shone upon my hand, reminding me always of her who gave it, and on this hand it shall go down into the grave. It is a plain circlet of thick gold, somewhat worn now, a posy-ring, and on its inner surface is cut this quaint couplet: ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that "he writes very well for a gentleman." His serious pieces are sometimes elevated; and his trifles are sometimes elegant. In his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained. In his Odes to Marlborough there are beautiful lines; but in the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... it has changed so often," and asked, "What is the origin of yours?" "Briant—brilliant, of course." He told the butler to close the door behind me lest I catch cold from a draught, quoting this couplet: ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the ant's passionate outburst to the thistle, and the thistle's reply, instead of a Sir Walter and Queen Elizabeth couplet. Long, lance-shaped, deeply cleft, sharply pointed, and prickly dark green leaves make the ascent almost unendurable; nevertheless, the ant bravely mounts to where the bristle-pointed, overlapping ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... place, and had a few dollars to the good. During one of the two years a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day. It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on the tombstones they ordered. They themselves, in most cases, knew none, and they asked Francois to supply them—as though he kept them in stock like marble and sand-paper. He had no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was an imaginary poem from which Turner professed to quote whenever he wanted a line or a couplet to explain his pictures, the avowed quotation being really of his own composition. Sir David Wilkie, the distinguished painter, died at sea on his way home from the Orient, June 1, 1841. His body was consigned to the sea at midnight of that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... title-page informs us of what all bibliomaniacs will be disposed to admit the truth, that the collection contained "a very great variety of uncommon books, and scarce ever to be met withal," &c. There is, at bottom, a small wretched portrait of Hearne, with this well known couplet subjoined: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... maiden, though, by the way, it would read extremely similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman—not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so—and the pursuit is much the same in one case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet— ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome |
