"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you think the bush is purer and that life is better there, But it doesn't seem to pay you like the 'squalid street and square'. Pray inform us, City Bushman, where you read, in prose or verse, Of the awful 'city urchin who would greet you with a curse'. There are golden hearts in gutters, though their owners lack the fat, And we'll back a teamster's offspring to outswear a city brat. Do you think we're never jolly where the trams ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... xlii. 7-17, in prose, describes how Jehovah severely condemned the friends for the words they had spoken, commended His servant Job for speaking rightly of Him, and restored him to double ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... describing the superlative ease and speed of Tom Faggus's mare, when John Ridd as a boy was allowed to ride her—after a rough experience at the beginning of the venture—is, though printed as prose, perhaps better poetry than most similar efforts. To emphasize its full force it may be allowable to divide the phrases ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... days after our arrival in Liverpool, I see J. and myself on an absurd, old-fashioned, long-superannuated Rotary tandem tricycle riding along winding roads and lanes, between the hedgerows and under the elms English prose and verse had long since made familiar, in and out of little grey or red villages clustered round the old church tower, passing through great towns of many factories and high smoke-belching chimneys, halting for months under the shadow ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... aim, Alfred changed the whole front of our literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the translations of Alfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign. It seems likely that the King's rendering of Bede's history gave the first impulse toward the compilation of what is known as the English ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... construction of both these lines is difficult to understand. The prose order of the line is 'yogatah yuktesu (madhye) yasya yatha, etc., vikrama (tatha vakshyami); atmani pasyatah (janasya) yuktasya yogasya (yatha) siddhi (tatha vakshyami).' Yogatah means upayatah, i.e., according to rules and ordinances. Vikrama is used in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Christianity both in matter and in sentiment. The older Edda, written in verse, is said to have been collected by Saemund Sigfusson the learned, one of the early Christian priests of Iceland, who lived about the eleventh century. The other Edda is in prose; it is a collection made about two centuries later. The form given to the myths in these collections is due to the Skalds, who flourished in Iceland in the early Middle Ages; but the legends themselves are older. Nothing is known precisely about ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... of the world, seen from their lowest level, seem to shatter it to atoms. Talk about 'the stars in their courses fighting' for or against anybody! In one aspect it is superstition, in another aspect it is a dream and an illusion. The prose truth is that they shine down silent, pitiless, cold, indifferent, on battlefields or on peaceful homes; and the moonlight is as pure when it falls upon broken hearts as when it falls upon glad ones. Nature is utterly indifferent ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... by change of manner and variety of incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labor as of relish, are for the most part scarcely more than transcripts, thrown into the form of dialogue, from a popular prose History of Dr. Faustus, and therefore should be set down as little to the discredit as to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language can stand beside this tragic poem—it has hardly ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... however imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional passage of the Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to verse, after the manner of some other bards or rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in mind that what appear as metrical irregularities on the printed page would not be felt to be so when sung or chanted; just as ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Museum, where they still remain. Many persons, however, censured Lord Elgin for what they called his Vandalism in removing the relics from their native land. Among those who assailed him on this score was Lord Byron, who hurled anathemas at him both in prose and verse. "The Curse of Minerva" may fairly be said to have made Lord Elgin's name immortal. The case made against him in that fierce philippic, however, is grossly one-sided, as the author himself subsequently acknowledged; and ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... would assuredly be a terrible blow for the nobility in general, and for the Count de Toumeville in particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that such a thing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... infested the back of Ann Veronica's mind urged various facetious interrogations upon her, as, for example, where the witness had acquired his prose style. She controlled ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... journal "Sinn Fein," contributing to it his first poems and his mordant or extravagant essays and stories. At once he made a public for himself. His first poems were published in a volume called "Insurrections" and his public became a wide one. "Mary, Mary" brought out in 1912 was his first prose book. His next, the unclassifiable "Crock of Gold," was given the De Polignac Prize in 1914. Since then he has published two other prose books—"Here Are Ladies" and "The Demi-Gods," with three books of verse, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... "Our Emigrant" and signed "Cellarius." By comparing these articles with the book as published by Butler's father it is possible to arrive at some conclusion as to the amount of editing to which Butler's prose was submitted. Some passages in the articles do not appear in the book at all; others appear unaltered; others again have been slightly doctored, apparently with the object of robbing them of a certain youthful "cocksureness," which probably grated upon the paternal nerves, but seems to me ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... people; and the insecurity of the times was unfavorable to literary pursuits. Williram's German had lost the classical correctness of Notker's language, and the "Merigarto," and similar works, are written in a hybrid style, which is neither prose nor poetry. The Old High-German had become a literary language chiefly through the efforts of the clergy, and the character of the whole Old High-German literature is preeminently clerical. The Crusades put an end to the preponderance of the clerical element ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... considerable sale—a fact not likely to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought occurred, 'Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.' His communications with his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would, and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer's ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Canon of St. Augustine's Abbey, also in Bristol); together with plays or portions of plays which they wrote—a Saxon epic translated—accounts of Architecture—songs and eclogues—and friendly letters in rhyme or prose. In short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before he was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter of one kind or another that his fictitious circle of men of taste and ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... great affection for him I could not but smile pityingly over his poetic effusions. And I think that it is partly because of them that I have never, at any epoch in my life, had the least inclination to write a single line of verse. My notes were always written in a wild and free prose ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... imagination is not less fruitful in the higher races; and, passing through forms sometimes more, sometimes less, serious, the art of story-telling unites with the kindred arts of dance and song to form the epic or the drama, or develops under the complex influences of modern life into the prose romance and the novel. These in their various ways are its ultimate expression; and the loftiest genius has found no fitter vehicle to convey its ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less like the beginning of Macbeth than that of King Lear. The tone is pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds to his ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... to take to withdraw into France, Spain or England. On the advice of Lord Herries, which accorded with her own feeling, she decided upon the last; and that same night she wrote this double missive in verse and in prose to Elizabeth: ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the desperate lover by the armed domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat), "then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love may settle as sediment You have been fearfully scolded, my dear young friend, this was the bitter prose that had to be surmounted; ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... reporters were long since gone—that there had not been a man killed amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one had been killed two should have been; and, amid roars of laughter which gave me time to frame some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... city, and was there buried, "ibique jacens in miraculis vivit." He speaks of him likewise as an elegant scholar, and the author of a work, de contemptu hujus vitae, written partly in verse, and partly in prose. ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... rarely a very bright flame. Here and there we see it just blaze, and then sink into mediocrity. He is too redundant and tiresome.... 'Tis a great disadvantage to read them in MS., as one cannot readily turn to passages; but life is too short to be peeping into other peoples' MSS. I prefer your prose to your verse. Let me know if you receive it safely, and pray give no notion to any one that ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... me) is difficultly cured. But doctors differ, and I don't despair of a cure." Fortunately, he at last accomplished that cure, for his early poetry gives no indications of future excellence. His prose is much more poetic, even in those early letters, than his verse. A great poet unquestionably is a great man; but Burke's greatness was to be achieved in another sphere. It is only in the visions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Tom Touchy; [Footnote: Spectator 122.] but they are surrounded by circumstances peculiar to themselves, and so are much more highly individualized. The Tatler and the Spectator very greatly extended the range of essay-writing, and with it the flexibility of prose style; it is this extension that gives to them their modern quality. Nothing came amiss: fable, description, vision, gossip, literary criticism or moral essays, discussion of large questions such as marriage and education, or of the smaller social amenities—any subject which ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... poetic of her books, although it is written in prose, is the delicate interpretation of St. Francis, written for ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... could not be content. He would like to have Masson's Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to consider the great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. While ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... books under the above title, containing some of the famous works in English and other literatures, in the domains of fiction, poetry, and belles lettres. The series also contains volumes of selections in prose ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... always observe to pronounce a verse as you do prose, giving each word and syllable its natural accent, with these two restrictions: First, If there is no point at the end of the line, make a short pause before you begin the next. Secondly, If any word in a line has two sounds, give it that which agrees best with the rhyme and metre; ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... husband's home by her simple domestic virtues. A wife does not need to be a moral whetstone to sharpen her husband's wits by the fireside, neither would it enhance his happiness to find her filling reams of foolscap paper with choice specimens of prose and poetry; intelligent sympathy with his work is all he demands, and a loving, restful companion, who will soothe his hours of depression, who is never too weary or self-absorbed to listen to the story of his successes ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken Carlyle, brother ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... judge of one kind by another, and generally to judge the higher by the lower, to remonstrate with Hamlet for not having the speech and manner of Mr. Jones, to wish that Fra Angelico could have seen with the eyes of the Carracci, to wish verse had been prose, and that ideal tragedy were acted with the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Even in his most splendid passages his verses thrill us with a strange pathos, and his sensitiveness to unseen things—things beautiful and sad—has caused a great writer, himself a master of English prose, to speak of 'his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, giving utterance as the voice of Nature herself to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... nothing that poets, novelists, historians, antiquarians have been born in England for so many ages; and not a palm's breadth of her sky, not a foot of her earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wallspaces but has been fondly noted, studied, and described in prose, or celebrated in verse. English books are full of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the American, come he never so numerously, will find outnumbering him in the pursuit of any specific charm of hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in their islands ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... arrangements) and so will not trouble your brother's agent in London. When I left England I was not fully aware how essential a kindness you offered me when you undertook to receive my boxes. I do not know what I should do without such head-quarters. And now for an apologetical prose about my collection: I am afraid you will say it is very small, but I have not been idle, and you must recollect what a very small show hundreds of species make. The box contains a good many geological specimens; I am well ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... feelings. But do not in the least imagine that you are going by any means to be presented with a fatiguing copy of my passionate numbers; in the first place I am very diffident, and in the next—but never mind the next, I will tell you in plain prose that I felt convinced in my heart, I felt a rapturous presentiment that the unutterably lovely being I had that day beheld would ere long be my own dear little wife, forever and forever. An indistinct dream of having somewhere, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... for the adoring of his art." Whether this strong expression should be only adorning does not appear in any errata; but the feeling of admiration was fervent among the spectators of that day, who were at least as much astonished as they were delighted. Ben Jonson's prose descriptions of scenes in his own exquisite Masques, as Gifford observes, "are singularly bold and beautiful." In a letter which I discovered, the writer of which had been present at one of these Masques, and which Gifford has preserved,[11] the reader may see the great poet anxiously united with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... pastoral with heroic romance, out of which came presently, in France, a distinct school of fiction. But the genius of its author was at play, it followed designedly the fashions of the hour in verse and prose, which tended to extravagance of ingenuity. The "Defence of Poesy" has higher interest as the first important piece of literary criticism in our literature. Here Sidney was in earnest. His style is wholly free from the euphuistic extravagance in which readers of ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... rhyming poems; not because the people in those days were so poetical—indeed, some of these poems would be thought, in present times, very dreary doggerel—but because rhyme is easier to remember than prose. Story-tellers had generally much the same stock-in-trade—stories of Arthur, Charlemagne, Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of Southampton, and so on. If a minstrel had skill of his own, he would invent some new episode, ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... naturally—and something more than this. In short—." The rest of this amour, and one strange scene to which it led, very like an incident in an Italian comedy, is no concern of this book. For those who wish to know more, it is to be found, in prose, in the Letters, and, in ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... the two men were going to prose about mines and shares, in those subdued half-mysterious voices, telling each other occult facts in half-expressed phrases, utterly dark to the outside world; but, while she was languidly wondering, a change in her lover's manner startled ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... pretended "compositions" quoted in this chapter are taken without alteration from a volume entitled "Prose and Poetry, by a Western Lady"—but they are exactly and precisely after the schoolgirl pattern, and hence are much happier than any ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... blasting thunderbolts. His novels, even when translated, are read and reread by people of every degree of education. There is something vast, something almost Titanic, about the grandeur and gorgeousness of his fancy. His prose resembles the sonorous blare of an immense military band. Readers of English care less for his poetry; yet in his verse one can find another phase of his intellect. He could write charmingly, in exquisite cadences, poems for lovers and for little children. His gifts were varied, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... their wealth and luxury, and the currents of social, amorous, and political intrigue which are supposed to course through them have in all countries and in all ages strongly appealed to writers, fanciful and serious. Perhaps one-third of the prose and poetic literature of every country deals, directly or indirectly, with the subject, and determines in no small degree the character of its rising generations. The great architects of romance, depicting for us life in high places, and often ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... appropriate character. We do not find here music of strongly marked rhythm and clearly defined measure, suitable to the utterance of worldly emotions, but a melody resembling the chant, written in the tonalities used in the church, but containing a certain kind of prose rhythm and accentuation, such as exists in the ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... Boccaccio to the same modesty as Virgil, would assuredly produce nothing worth having, and would sin against the laws of propriety by setting himself the task to observe them. For in order that one may not make a mistake in matters of verse and prose, extreme modesty and propriety are two very different things. Cicero makes the latter consist in saying what is appropriate one should say, considering the place, the time, and the persons to whom one is speaking. This principle once admitted, it is ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... that stately palace, rich in associations of storm and splendour,—of the grand Cardinal; the iron-clad Protector; Dutch William of the immortal memory, whom we tried so hard to like, and in spite of the great Whig historian, that Titian of English prose, can only frigidly respect. Hard task for us Britons to like a Dutchman who dethrones his father-in-law, and drinks schnaps! Prejudice certainly; but so it is. Harder still to like Dutch William's unfilial Fran! Like Queen Mary! I could as soon like Queen Goneril! Romance flies from the prosperous ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not be said, Stevenson has told us in verse and prose, that in childhood "his whole vocation was endless imitation." He was the hunter and the pirate and the king—throwing his fancy very seriously into each of his roles, though visualizing never passed with him, as with some children it does, into actual hallucination. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... kind, Hook contributed various jingles—there is no other name for them—arranged to popular tunes, and intended to become favourites with the country people. These like the prose effusions, served the purpose of an hour, and have no interest now. Whether they were ever really popular remains to be proved. Certes, they are forgotten now, and long since even in the most Conservative corners of the country. Many of these have the appearance of ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... England saw the destruction of nearly all traces of the heathen system. The so-called Elder Edda is a collection of some thirty poems, mythic and heroic in substance, interspersed with short pieces of prose, which survives in a thirteenth-century MS., known as the Codex Regius, discovered in Iceland in 1642; to these are added other poems of similar character from other sources. The Younger Edda is a prose paraphrase of, and commentary on, these poems and others which are lost, together with ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... together; and during the evenings, when our work was over, I had a constant source of amusement in endeavouring to impart such knowledge as I possessed to Harry. I fortunately remembered portions of the Bible, and numerous pieces of poetry and prose; and by repeating them to him, he also was able to get them by heart. I used to tell him all about England, and how various articles in common use were manufactured. I taught him a good deal of history and geography; and even arithmetic, by making use of pebbles. By this exercise of ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... also wrote several works of prose, chief amongst which is that entitled, "A Crown for Our Queen". Like his poem, "Last of May", this book was intended as a loving tribute to Mary, the Mother of God, whom he wished to honor as the highest type and grandest embodiment of womanhood. ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... January 1874 in Preston, England, but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894. Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk, and became famous for his poems about this region, which are mostly in his first two books of poetry. He wrote quite a bit of prose as well, and worked as a reporter for some time, but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems. He travelled around the world quite a bit, and died ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... in spite of perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse. It is not in verse alone that poetry is written. Sweetness and light and truth can be crystallized into prose, and prose well worthy to ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... living author whose name is likely to descend to posterity is that of Chateaubriand, who, although he has never been a writer of poetry, may be considered the greatest poet in France, as there is so much of imagination and of soul in his prose, so much of sublimity in his ideas, that the works in verse of his contemporaries appear insipid when compared to the wild flights of genius which ever emerge from his pen, yet when they are closely studied, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... cabinets as neglected curiosities. Cleveland could not become the fashion with the public as an author, though the coteries cried him up and the reviewers adored him—and the ladies of quality and the amateur dilettanti bought and bound his volumes of careful poetry and cadenced prose. But Cleveland had high birth and a handsome competence—his manners were delightful, his conversation fluent—and his disposition was as amiable as his mind was cultured. He became, therefore, a man greatly sought after in society ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... painting in watercolors. No matter: what I have never seen practiced I will invent, managing badly at first, then a little better, at last well. The paintbrush will make a change from the strain of my daily output of prose. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the first excitement that followed the fall of the Bastille, and the publication of Shelley's Hellas there stretched a period of thirty-two years. It covered the dawn, the clouding and the unearthly sunset of a hope. It begins with the grave but enthusiastic prose of a divine justly respected by earnest men, who with a limited horizon fulfilled their daily duties in the city. It ends in the rapt vision, the magical music of a singer, who seemed as he sang to soar beyond the range of human ears. The hope passes from the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... perhaps, reckon him a careless workman. He had yet to learn how much, or how little, the public recks of either grammar or punctuation, how it prefers semi-truths tempered by split infinitives to facts stated in balanced prose. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... possesses the rare gift of summoning the one inevitable word, and of compressing his speeches into a small space of time, speaks with equal success whether from a prepared manuscript or wholly extempore. His unsurpassed English style is the result of many years reading and study of prose masterpieces. "He produces, wherever and whenever he wants them, an endless succession of perfectly coined sentences, conceived with unmatched felicity and delivered without hesitation in a parliamentary style which is at once the envy and the ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... heard him applauded, and waited for Dante to begin. Indeed, it was a common thing then, in places where friend met friend, for one that had a voice to read somewhat aloud for the delectation of the others, whether a pleasant tale in prose or a poetic canzonet. But Dante, while he took the parchment from Guido's fingers, looked about him quietly and spoke, and his voice and words were very ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... are music in prose—they are like pearls on a chain of gold—each word seems exactly the right word in the right place; the stories sing themselves out, they are so ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... fair play, and his ever present courtesy to women, form a picture that has no counterpart in the folk-lore of any other people. The simple ballad English has been most successfully preserved in Mr. Pyle's easy prose, and, as regards the text, this edition is in all respects the most complete and in every way the most desirable that has ever ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... all, a man on whom you draw a cheque a bout portant will be angry). What a delicious thrill of triumph, if you can bring him down! If I have money at the banker's and draw for a portion of it over the counter, that is mere prose—any dolt can do that. But, having no balance, say I drive up in a cab, present a cheque at Coutts's, and, receiving the amount, drive off? What a glorious morning's sport that has been! How superior in excitement to the common ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... aroused, and the tears came readily to his eyes. Like his contemporaries, he too was passionately eager to admire grandeur and to give himself up to tender feelings in a poetical mood. He played adagios softly on his flute. Like his worthy contemporaries, he did not easily find, in prose or poetry, the full expression of his feelings; pathetic oratory stirred him to tearful emotion. In spite of all his French aphorisms, the essence of his nature was very German in this ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... he never possessed. Burton was a very great man, Mr. Payne is a very great man, but they differ as two stars differ in glory. Burton is the magnificent man of action and the anthropologist, Mr. Payne the brilliant poet and prose writer. Mr. Payne did not go to Mecca or Tanganyika, Burton did not translate The Arabian Nights, [10] or write The Rime of Redemption and Vigil and Vision. He did, however, produce the annotations of The Arabian Nights, and a remarkable enough and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the little home under the sycamores was still no less honest in its labours or bright in its rest. It was one among a million of such homes in France, where a sunny temper made mirth with a meal of herbs, and filial love touched to poetry the prose of daily household tasks. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... mysticism which has no particular plan of reform to propose, but is nevertheless thoroughly dissatisfied with the world as it is. Lastly, a series of vague appeals to revolt, written in the vernacular, partly in prose, partly in doggerel rhyme, have been preserved and seem to testify to a deliberate propaganda of lawlessness. Some of the general causes of this rising tide of discontent are quite apparent. The efforts to enforce ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... Augustus!' said Miss Pecksniff, in a low voice. 'I verily believe you have said that fifty thousand times, in my hearing. What a Prose you are!' ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... theme for an old water-drinker who had never tasted wine! But Litton toiled over the Greek text, added copious notes as to minute variants, appallingly learned prolegomena, an index, and finally an English version in prose. He had begun to translate it into hexameters, but he feared that he would never live to finish it. It was hard enough for a man like Litton to express at all the florid spirit of an author whose theme was "the voluptuous phalanxes" of Bacchus' army—"the heroic race of such unusual ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... considered that Sam Patch Shall never be forgot in prose or rhyme; His name shall be a portion in the batch Of the heroic dough, which baking Time Kneads for consuming ages—and the chime Of Fame's old bells, long as they truly ring, Shall tell of him; he dived for the sublime, And ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... not only published INDIANA, VALENTINE, and JACQUES, but also LELIA, that prose poem of which she afterwards said: "If I regret having written it, it is because I could not now write it. Were I in the same state of mind now as when it was written, it would indeed be a great consolation to me to be able to commence it." The mere painting of romances in cold water colors ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... reduced the price to half-a-crown. The reduction brought on a sale of about three hundred copies, and there it stopped. I then disposed of the entire remainder to a wholesale buyer of "remainders" for the modest sum of sixpence per copy. Since I have become known as a writer of prose, many people have sought out this book of verse, with the wonderful and unforeseen result that it has resumed its original price. I myself have purchased copies for five shillings each that I had sold for sixpence (not a profitable species of commerce), and I have been ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Eustache Deschamps le Rutebeuf du XIVe siecle.—Ses oeuvres comprennent des epitres, des discours en prose, des jeux dramatiques, des ouvrages latins, des apologues, un grand poeme moral, et un infinite de ballades et ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence. This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the saint's magic gift to mankind.[215] Not only does his vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness; but even when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted, he makes some converts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... to dazzle a rather juvenile pilgrim from over the sea; but that matters little—it seemed so natural to him to shine. His spoken wit or wisdom, or whatever, had thus a charm almost beyond his written; that is if the high finish of his printed prose be really, as some people have maintained, a fault. There was such a kindness in him, however, that I've no doubt it gave him ideas for me, or about me, to see me sit as open-mouthed as I now figure myself. ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... violent, and antitheses when just, and happily opposed. By a diligent attention to these particulars, her ears became so practised and so nice, that there was nothing in Greek, Latin, or English, prose or verse, which, according to its merits or defects, she did not either reject with disgust, or receive with the highest delight.... Had I more leisure, I would speak to you at greater length of the king, of the lady ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... "Alide," a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she received ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... toilet- cover, embroidered curtains, plates fastened against the wall, and table all over knick-knacks, which Miss Constance called her little den, where she could study beauty after her own bent, while her sister Mary was wholly engrossed with the useful, and could endure nothing but the prose of the last century. ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dear Lady of Dunmoe, tell when I can be with you; go I will before autumn runs away with all your leaves, but I am afraid I must let autumn turn them of a sober hue, though I will not let it go to the sear and yellow. In plain prose I am tied down now ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... not like this. He has given play to all the noble qualities of his nature. I envy him. I admire his disinterestedness, his broad views of life, his faith in good in spite of evil, his belief in poetry in spite of prose, his unspoiled capacity for receiving new impressions and illusions—a capacity which, amid the crowds that grow old in mind before they are old in body, keeps him still young and boyish. I think I might have been devoted to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... possible martyrdom about his head—the Church of the Revolution Settlement lost in her established safety, if not as much as she gained, yet something which it was not well to lose. And the kingdom in general dropped in something like the same way into a sort of prose of existence, with most of the picturesque and dramatic elements gone. Romance died out along with the actual or possible tragedies of public life, and Humour came in, in the development most opposed ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... he was at this time engaged in building for his father a Highland barn, and, to vary the work, fabricating for him a Highland plough. The younger, George, who had wrought for a few years at his trade in the south of Scotland, was a great reader, wrote very tolerable prose, and verse which, if not poetry, to which he made no pretensions, was at least quaintly-turned rhyme. He had, besides, a competent knowledge of geometry, and was skilled in architectural drawing; and—strange accomplishment for a Celt—he ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... previous translations of Indian plays to require a word of explanation. The difference consists chiefly in the manner in which I have endeavored to preserve the form of the original. The Indian plays are written in mingled prose and verse; and the verse portion forms so large a part of the whole that the manner in which it is rendered is of much importance. Now this verse is not analogous to the iambic trimeter of Sophocles or the blank verse of Shakspere, but roughly corresponds to the Greek choruses or the occasional ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein - for it was not Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the BOOK OF SNOBS. So I might go on for ever, through ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been possible in the following pages to reproduce the elegant and incisive style of a master of French prose, not even the inadequacies of a translation can obscure the force of his argument. The only introduction, therefore, that seems possible must take the form of a request to the reader to study M. Faguet's criticism of modern democracy ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... minds of men;—which, as my readers and I may feel too well, is yet by no means satisfied. As to his speech, indeed, though it had the worth just ascribed to it and more, and though masses of it were deliberately put on paper by himself, in prose and verse, and continue to be printed and kept legible, what he spoke has pretty much vanished into the inane; and except as record or document of what he did, hardly now concerns mankind. But the things he did were extremely remarkable; and cannot be forgotten by ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again, the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the Comedie Humaine. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Otherwise, we should only be acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose superior to poetry." ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... he wishes, may discover without undue delay, the little volume of modern prose selections that he has before him is the result of no ambitious or pretentious design. It is not a collection of the best things that have lately been known and thought in the American world; it is not an anthology in which "all our best authors" ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... upside-down, but wasn't above being spoken to"; "the Mayor of Calenick, who walked two miles to ride one"; "the Mayor of East Looe, who called the King of England 'Brother.'" Everyone remembers the stately prose in which Gibbon records when and how he determined on his great masterpiece, when and how he completed it. "It was at Rome: on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was no knowledge, he declared, that he could offer her, which the lassie from Corbyknowe would not take in like her porridge. Best thing of all for her was that, following his own predilections, he paid far more attention, in his class for English, to poetry than to prose. Colin Craig was himself no indifferent poet, and was even a master of the more recondite forms of verse. If, in some measure led astray by the merit of the form, he was capable of admiring verse essentially inferior, he yet certainly admired the better poetry more. ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... Cranch, has left one immortal stanza, and Bryant, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier, and Emerson have written enough of poetic melody, the direct inspiration of the feathered inhabitants of the woods, to fill a good-sized volume. In prose, no one has said finer things than Thoreau, who probed nature with a deeper ken than any of his contemporaries. He is to be read, and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... cruelty, and the horror of it for all time within the shuddering comprehension of English-speaking people. One is a history that is more than a history; the other a tale that is more than a tale. Dickens, no doubt, owed much of his inspiration to Carlyle's tremendous prose epic. But the genius that depicted a moving and tragic story upon the red background of the Terror was Dickens's own, and the "Tale of Two Cities" was final proof that its author could handle a great theme in a manner that was worthy of its greatness. The work ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in "the great style," against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of an age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer's poetry? Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer, the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader and the actual matter of his experience; ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... "Mr. Henty's graphic prose picture of the hopeless Jewish resistance to Roman sway adds another leaf to his record of the famous wars of the world. The book is one of Mr. Henty's ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... reasons fail, Have one sure refuge left—and that's to rail. Fop, coxcomb, fool, are thundered through the pit; And this is all their equipage of wit. We wonder how the devil this difference grows, Betwixt our fools in verse, and yours in prose: For, 'faith, the quarrel rightly understood, 'Tis civil war with their own flesh and blood. The thread-bare author hates the gaudy coat; And swears at the gilt coach, but swears a-foot; For 'tis observed of every scribbling man, He ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... to me last night. Prose read aloud always frets me, because one's mind travels so much faster than the spoken words and arrives at the conclusion, even if not always the right one, long before the printed climax is reached; but with good poetry it is different—the ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... this scene is printed as verse in the 4to. I have printed the early part as prose, that the reader's eye may not be vexed ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... hundred years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his Songs and Sonnets and Elegies rather than in his Divine Poems. We find, in some of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the temptations ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... burst out Jean in baffled irritation. "He won't write anything else! Easily seeing the approaching catastrophe, I wrote long persuading essays to him. It was pathetically useless. Proudly he continued to write his Rise and Fall of the Western Plainsman in a lucid, passionate prose which would evoke an imperishable picture—but in three ...
— Droozle • Frank Banta
... Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist—the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... and with his usual instant response to suggestion, he got it at once and began reading it. But I could not persuade him to share my enthusiasm, and, what was not like him, he did not read Marius to the end. The richness and complication of Pater's style annoyed him. He liked prose to be clear and stately; he liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. Even Gibbon-though he read The Decline and Fall over again, very carefully, so late as 1913—was not entirely to his taste. He enjoyed the limpidity and the irony, but the sustained roll ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... vastly pleased the Queen. Not a day passed but she received seven or eight thousand sonnets, and as many elegies, madrigals, and songs, which were sent her by all the poets in the world. All the prose and the poetry that was written just then was about Bellissima—for that was the Princess's name—and all the bonfires that they had were made of these verses, which crackled and sparkled better than any ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... will be rendered nugatory, and with his own hand he will crush to powder his life's work. That wonderful short dialogue which broke the stern silence of the journey seems to throw light on his mood. There is nothing in literature sacred or secular, fact or fiction, poetry or prose, more touching than the innocent curiosity of Isaac's boyish question, and the yearning self-restraint of the father's desperate and yet calm answer. But its value is not only in its pathos. It seems to show that, though he knew not how, still he held by the hope that somehow ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... somewhere," laughed Anne, "that the first child is a poem but the tenth is very prosy prose. Perhaps Mrs. MacNab thought that the twelfth was merely ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the reader an account of the origin and history of Hallowe'en, how it absorbed some customs belonging to other days in the year,—such as May Day, Midsummer, and Christmas. The context is illustrated by selections from ancient and modern poetry and prose, related to ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... writers seem to have desired little more than to be understood, and, perhaps, seldom aspired to the praise of pleasing. Their verses were considered chiefly as memorial, and, therefore, did not differ from prose but by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... is a genius," he said. "He is an artist, he is a poet, he is also a writer of subtile prose. His sonnets to Euphrasie—in the day of Euphrasie—awakened the admiration of the sternest critics: they were so tender, so full of purest fire! Some of the same critics also could scarcely choose between these ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... added nothing to his reputation, if, indeed they sustained it. But, "as the old mine gave symptoms of exhaustion," says Bulwer, the new mine, ten times more affluent at least in the precious metals, was discovered. In 1814 he commenced that long and magnificent series of prose fictions which for seventeen years were poured out with an unprecedented prodigality, and which can onlv be compared with the dramas of Shakspeare, as presenting an endless variety of original characters scenes historical situations and adventures. In 1826, he became bankrupt, in consequence ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... mind. The great poet who wrote those beautiful verses could not do that every day. A good deal more of what he writes is poor enough; and many days he could not write at all. By long habit the mind may be made capable of being put in harness daily for the humbler task of producing prose; but you cannot say, when you harness it in the morning, how far or at what rate it will run ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... feeling interpreted by loveliness of face. By his own choice he had cut himself off from all possibility of such communion; had accepted complete abstinence for that part of his nature which might have offered a refuge from the stern prose of his daily task. But his personal indifference to his surroundings—deliberately encouraged as a defiance to the attractions of the life he had renounced—proved no defence against this appeal; rather, the meanness ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... that possibility is now removed. I'm not going to study law. The law is very forcible and very logical, but it is too dry for me. I don't believe that I am practical enough for a lawyer. I would rather read poetry and luminous prose than to study rules of civil conduct. I am going to bejewel my house with books and then I am going to live. I heard you say that the poet was the only man who really lives, but he is not—those who worship with him live with him. Yes, I am going to buy old books—I don't like ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... The tributes—in poetry and prose—are just, examine the works of this great painter-teacher as closely and suspiciously as we may, we can discover nothing that will induce a momentary doubt of his integrity of purpose in all he ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... On ne badine pas avec l'amour; I did not want to recite verse, because I was to perform in a play in prose. I believe I was perfectly charming, and Lambert Thiboust thought so too, but when I had finished poor Faille got up in a clumsy, pretentious way, said something in a low voice to the author, and took me ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... reading expected from the young Sybarite, a great contest arose between him and other poets and prose writers of the time. They spoke to each other with great volubility and animation a language incomprehensible to any one who should suddenly have come among them without being initiated, eagerly pressing each other's hands with affectionate ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... went out with her without a book—now one of the poets, now some prose classic. He was surprised by her quick appreciation of and sympathy with the finest passages. Gradually, too, she forgot her shyness and began to talk. She knew nothing of his world, but her own world she knew and knew well. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... plays, especially the blank verse of his tragedies, exhibits the same general characteristics. It is strong, compact, and sometimes powerful, but it entirely lacks imaginative poetic beauty—it is really only rhythmical prose, though sometimes ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... held its place long among the lower orders, and specimens of it, both in prose and verse, are found a century after the Conquest. Gradually the Norman tongue began to amalgamate with it, and the result was, the English. At what precise year our language might be said to begin, it is impossible to determine. Throughout the whole of the twelfth century, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... legs with a sudden flounce. "You put too serious an estimate upon love," he said. "You expect it to be the grand, over-mastering passion we read about. That was all well enough for the age of poetry, but this is the age of prose. You can go to that man ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... in the shrubberies with various entangled curates, with young Sam Worthington from Oxford and friends of his. Mr. Worthington himself, master of the difficult art of declining verse as if it were bad prose, rehearsed the Prologue and Epilogue in a master's gown and mortarboard, which he would retain for the rest of the afternoon. It was in that guise that, his caution deserting him, he allowed himself ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... of the poems in his personal anthology were picked from the poets' corner of newspapers, and it was in this way that he became acquainted with Longfellow. Lincoln was especially fond of humorous writings, both in prose and verse, a taste that is closely connected with his lifelong fondness for funny stories. His favorite humorous writer during the presidential period was Petroleum V. Nasby (David P. Locke), from whose letters he frequently read to more or less sympathetic listeners. It was eminently characteristic ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... His hereditary instincts lead him to approve of autocrats as against republics, Spartan discipline as against Attic freedom. Yet in himself he has shown a striking example how the latter could appreciate and embrace the former. As the simplest specimen of pure Attic prose he will ever be paramount in schools, neglected in universities—the recreation rather than the occupation of mature scholars. He is a great worthy, a man of renown; "nevertheless, he did not attain unto the first three"—the two masters of his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... Livy to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall. The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was necessary, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... people let him," said Polly, carelessly, "because he puts it into poetry. It would never do in prose; ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... his fifteenth year, [9] in verse as well as prose, marked him as a boy of great talent, but of talent only according to his own definition of it (vide "Friend," vol. iii. edit. 1818). His verse was good, his prose powerful, and language correct, and beyond his years in depth ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... though highly engrossing hour. In place of the children's story she anticipated, she had found herself, on opening the book, confronted by the queerest stuff she had ever seen in print. From the opening sentence on. To begin with, it was a play—and Laura had never had a modern prose play in her hand before—and then it was all about the oddest, yet the most commonplace people. It seemed to her amazingly unreal—how these people spoke and behaved—she had never known anyone like them; and yet again so true, in the way ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... DISCOVERED.—Charles Lamb, who, in the early part of this century, delighted the reading public by his quaint prose sketches, written under the title of "Essays of Elia," has, in his own quiet humorous way, devoted one paper to the subject of Roast Pig, and more especially to that luxurious and toothsome dainty known as "CRACKLING;" and shows, in a manner ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... point which serves to give prestige to French: its literary supremacy in the modern world. While some would claim for the English the supreme poetic literature, there can be no doubt that the French own the supreme prose literature of modern Europe. It was felt by those who advocated the adoption of English or French that it would surely be a gain for human progress if the auxiliary international languages of the future should be one, if not ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Writing.—It is to be borne in mind that the foregoing classifications are by no means absolute. Gardiner in his "Forms of Prose Literature" says very truly that the "essential elements, not only of literature, but of all the fine arts, are: first, an organic unity of conception; and second, the pervasive personality of the artist." It is true that much of our writing does not aspire to literary ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... immediately the deplorable deficiency of his education struck him. What preparation had he for his life's vocation? Of mathematics he knew absolutely nothing! The priceless years had been squandered on mere Latin, English prose, French verbs and ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... which I speak in detail later. The work of Dr. Hyde is the most important work of this sort, however, and it is not too much to say, as I intimated at the outset, that, without his translation of "The Love Songs of Connacht" (1894) and "The Religious Songs of Connacht" (1906), the prose of the movement would never have attained that distinction of rhythm which reveals English almost as a new language. I would gladly have written at length of Dr. Hyde, but he has chosen to write his plays in Irish as well as most of his verses. Yet so winning are the plays as translated by Lady ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... departments as nature study and field work in geography. Thus is laid the basis of future potentialities of imagery, and through it appreciation of literature. On account of the acuteness of sense activity at this period, this is also the time for memorization of fine passages of prose and poetry. The child's thinking is still of the pictorial rather than of the abstract order, though the powers of generalization and language are considerably extended. The social interests are not yet strong, and hence co-operation for a common purpose is largely absent. ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education |
