"Rhyme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the 'rise and fall of seasons' suits the rise and fall of rhyme, But we know that western seasons do not run on schedule time; For the drought will go on drying while there's anything to dry, Then it rains until you'd fancy it would bleach the sunny sky — Then it pelters out of reason, for the downpour day and night Nearly sweeps ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... think it was only their kindness. I have that twist in my brain, which is the curse of my countrymen—a sort of devilish quickness at doing well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... plains are wont to curse their camels, and the shout wherewith the whalers of the north lure the whales shoreward to be killed, and a word that causes elephants to trumpet; and every one of the forty lines closed with a rhyme ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... Democratic meeting. Well, I turned in, Dr. Greatrex, and there I heard a German refugee fellow from London—a white-haired man of the name of Schurts, or something of the sort'—Mr. Blenkinsopp pronounced it to rhyme with 'hurts'—'who was declaiming away in a fashion to make your hair stand on end, and frighten you half out of your wits with his dreadful communistic notions. I assure you, he positively took my breath away. I ran out of the hall at last, while he was still speaking, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... thought I'd mention a few facts to you, and you can just throw them together and make them rhyme, and I'll call 'round and pay you for them. What day? Tuesday? Very well; I'll run in on Tuesday and see how ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... Putnam immediately rose to their feet and made the best of their way out into the darkness amid a shower of bullets, and pursued by the awakened enemy. Unable "to see his hand before his face," Putnam soon fell into a clay-pit, and Durkee, like the immortal "Jill" in the nursery rhyme, came tumbling after. Knowing that the enemy were in swift and close pursuit, Putnam raised his tomahawk to give the supposed hostile a deadly stroke, when Durkee fortunately spoke. Thankful that ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... makes wing she gets power; Yet the higher she doth soar, She's affronted still the more, Till she to the highest hath past; Then she rests with Fame at last. Let nought, therefore, thee affright; But make forward in thy flight. For if I could match thy rhyme, To the very stars I'd climb; There begin again, and fly Till I reached eternity. But, alas, my Muse is slow, For thy place she flags too low; Yea, the more's her hapless fate, Her short wings were clipt of late; And poor I, ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... Dramas, Piccolomini, or the first part of Wallenstein, and Wallenstein, are introduced in the original manuscript by a prelude in one act, entitled Wallenstein's camp. This is written in rhyme, and in nine syllable verse, in the same lilting metre (if that expression may be permitted) with the second eclogue of Spencer's Shepherd's Calendar. This prelude possesses a sort of broad humour, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... to the 109th Hymn, I hope the reader will forgive the neglect of the rhyme in the first and third ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... not the politeness to stop and make answer, but just went on with his string of haivers, without either rhyme or reason, which we could make neither top, tail, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... one of the elements of which was the repetition of words or sounds at regular intervals, was transformed about the eighth century into a more learned system. Thenceforward alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and a fixed number of syllables constituted the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... traditions. He gathers together a group of lyrics, delicate in workmanship, fragrant with sentiment, and phrased in pure and unexceptionable English. Then he has another group of dialect verses, racy of the soil, pungent in flavor, swinging in rhythm and adroit in rhyme. But where he shows himself a pioneer is the half-dozen larger and bolder poems, of a loftier strain, in which he has been nobly successful in expressing the higher aspirations of his own people. It is in uttering this cry for recognition, ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... Johnson want poetic ear, Fancy, or judgment?—no! his splendid strain, In prose, or rhyme, confutes that plea.—The pain Which writh'd o'er Garrick's fortunes, shows us clear Whence all his spleen to GENIUS.—Ill to bear A Friend's renown, that to his own must reign, Compar'd, a Meteor's evanescent train, To Jupiter's fix'd orb, proves that each ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... on a time To have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... tidings upward climb, Struggling against the wind? Oh, how sublime! For not in vain from its portentous source, Thy heart, wild stream, hath yearned for its full force, But from thine ice-toothed caverns dark as time At last thou issuest, dancing to the rhyme Of thy outvolleying freedom! Lo, thy course Lies straight before thee as the arrow flies, Right to the ocean-plains. Away, away! Thy parent waits thee, and her sunset dyes Are ruffled for thy coming, and the gray Of all her glittering borders ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... itinerant preachers, who mixed poetry, anecdote, and devotion together—and those works still retain the air and style of poetry, though in translation. [NOTE: As there are many readers who do not see that a composition is poetry, unless it be in rhyme, it is for their information that ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... were wise, my Robert, wise in time; And I, who set you far above humanity, High-pedestalled upon my lofty rhyme, Rejoice with you in your recovered sanity; To me I feel it would have mattered Enormously to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... will certainly be struck by the command of language and metre they display. It was shown both in rhyme and in blank verse. Many fine odes are scattered through them, and in the octo-syllabic verse Milman always appears to us peculiarly happy. But his poetry, like most of the poetry that was written under the Byronic influence, was rather the poetry of rhetoric than of imagination, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... upon the vices of Paris, which inaugurated his great success. Seven satires appeared in 1666, and he afterward added five others. Their malicious wit, their novel form, the harmonious swing of the couplet rhyme, forced immediate attention. They held up contemporary literary weaknesses to scorn, and indulged in the most merciless personalities, sparing not even his own brother, the poet Gilles Boileau. All retorts upon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... what solemnities attended his burial, nor with what fervour the people flocked to pray at his tomb; but it is worth knowing that the poet of that place, who was rival to the chief poet in Auxerre itself, gathered up the story of his death into a rhyme, written in the dialect of that valley, of which rhyme this is an ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... as pitifully as they liked, the mothers never stirred. Sometimes this state of affairs would last a whole month, and the stock-keeper would be driven to his wits' end by his bleating, bellowing, neighing army. Then all of a sudden, one fine day, without rhyme or reason, a detachment would take it into their heads to make a start across, and the only difficulty now was to keep the whole herd from rushing helter-skelter after them. The wildest confusion set in among the ranks, and numbers of the animals ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... dwelling, but would furnish a more effectual remedy for the evils of life than any Reform Bill that ever passed the Houses of Parliament." Socrates said, "Let him that would move the world move first himself. " Or as the old rhyme ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... station at her patroness's well, where we were wedded, and pray for her soul and her blessed mother's. So there we journeyed for our summer roaming; and all had been well, had you not come down on us with all the idle danglers of the court to gaze and rhyme and tilt about the first fair face they saw. Even then so discreet was the girl that no more had befallen, but as ill-luck would have it, my old Evesham keepsake," touching his side, "burst forth again one evening, and left me so spent, that Bessee sent the boy to ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... following event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come. Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty—O Heaven! one ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... monument of his ignorance of spelling, compromised the matter by conforming to the current orthography, and inserted the superfluous consonant for nothing. And my second annotation shall consist of an inquiry: What is there in corrupt and diseased human nature which makes persons prefer such execrable rhyme as that quoted above, and that which I find upon two-thirds of the tombstones here, to decent English prose, which one would suppose might have been produced at a much less expenditure of intellectual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... in Dante's time, Before his cheek was furrowed by deep rhyme; When Europe, fed afresh from Eastern story, Was like a garden tangled with the glory Of flowers hand-planted and of flowers air-sown, Climbing and trailing, budding and full-blown, Where purple bells are tossed amid pink stars, And springing blades, green troops in innocent wars, ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... a' that I can; and by the gatherin' again, he'll be up wi' the lave o' the fleet. Faith! I'll sit like Deith i' the spectre-bark, and blaw intil his sails a' that I can blaw. Maybe ye dinna ken that verse i' The Rhyme o' the Ancient Mariner? It was left oot o' ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... lyrics. So that the most rapt and imaginative of men, if artists, utilize the whole realm of knowledge, and diffuse it, and perpetuate it in artistic forms. But real poets are rare, even if there are many who glory in the jingle of language and the structure of rhyme. Poetry, to live, must have a soul, and it must combine rare things,—art, music, genius, original thought, wisdom made still richer by learning, and, above all, a power of appealing to inner sentiments, which all feel, yet are reluctant to express. So choice are the gifts, so grand are the qualities, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... is that they are written by song-writers who have had no education. Mr. MacKaye's college training shows itself in every line of the opera. There is a subtlety of rhyme-scheme, a delicacy of meter, and, above all, an originality of thought and expression which promises much for the school of university-bred lyricists. Here, for instance, is a lyric which Joe McCarthy could ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... are not literally translated, for, in the author's opinion, poetry translated into literal prose is very unattractive reading. Neither are they in verse, as well for other reasons as from a conviction that to translate faithfully under all the embarrassments of rhyme and measure is impossible. The attempt has been made to tell the stories in prose, preserving so much of the poetry as resides in the thoughts and is separable from the language itself, and omitting those amplifications which are not ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... sought these upland fields and walked apart, Musing on Nature, till my thought did seem To read the very secrets of her heart; In mooded moments earnest and sublime I stored the themes of many a future song, Whose substance should be Nature's, clear and strong, Bound in a casket of majestic rhyme. ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... inspiration. Latin and Greek verse is quantitative and rhymeless; Italian verse, built up on the metres of the troubadours and the degeneration of Latin which gave the world the Romance languages, used many elaborate forms of rhyme. Blank verse took from Latin its rhymelessness, but it retained accent instead of quantity as the basis of its line. The line Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syllable line of what is called "heroic verse"—the line used by Chaucer in his Prologue ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... and ever forget the lines giving the gay Italian rhyme, with the boy's picturesquely childish prose-accompaniment? Strafford is seated, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... rhyme with Kimiya (alchemy proper). It is a subordinate branch of the Ilm al-Ruhani which I would translate "Spiritualism," and which is divided into two great branches, "Ilwi or Rahmani" (the high or related to the Deity) and Sifli or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... did not believe in Cap'n Jack's words, but afterward I found that all his gang were afraid to do that which was considered unlucky. All Cornish people, I suppose, have heard the rhyme about killing an eldest son who is the third in succession to bear the same christened name. I know, too, that Cap'n Jack believed implicitly in the legend, and I have heard him repeat it very solemnly, as though he were repeating a prayer at a funeral, while his gang became as solemn as judges. ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... composition of poetry commenced in the earliest ages and was developed independently of foreign influences. From the sovereign down to the lowest subject, everyone composed verses. These were not rhymed; the structure of the Japanese language does not lend itself to rhyme. Their differentiation from prose consisted solely in the numerical regularity of the syllables in consecutive lines; the alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables each. A tanka (short song) ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... methods he had applied to the painting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque. Which one of us in his ambitious days has not dreamed of a miracle of poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, and to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading station. All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with "The Heart of the Trail" open on his knee, knitting in his head a poem so full of feeling that it would not rhyme. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and seclusion ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... the Last Minstrel" placed Scott among the three great poets of Scotland, for originality and beauty of rhyme. It is not marked by pathos or by philosophical reflections. It is a purely descriptive poem of great vivacity and vividness, easy to read, and true to nature. It is a tale of chivalry, and is to poetry ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the album quilt until I knew almost every line by heart; while the curious medley which these different scraps of poetry presented reminded me very much of a play, in which one person repeats a line, to which another must find a rhyme. When Aunt Henshaw died, which was just about the time that I was grown up, she left the quilt to me in her will; because, as she said. I had always been so fond of it. I still have it carefully packed away, and regard ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... the puzzle of the ages. This is followed in turn by a chapter on Counting-out Rhymes, with numerous examples, home and foreign; which is succeeded, appropriately, by a section of the work embracing description of all the well-known out-door and in-door Rhyme-Games—in each case the Rhyme being given, the action being portrayed. The remaining contents the title may be left to suggest. I may only add that the Stories—including "Blue Beard," and "Jack the Giant Killer," and their fellow-narratives—ten in all—are printed verbatim from the old ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... was presently driven out of the place by Tarn Roberton, the baillie, and the village dogs. But the thing stuck in my memory, and together with the fact that I was a Thursday's bairn, and so, according to the old rhyme, "had far to go," convinced me long ere I had come to man's estate that wanderings and ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... wood near the town, and how he caught them by the tails and photographed them; and also that Ringandknock, a mountain near, was mentioned by EMERSON in a verse, which I remembered, because he made "co-eval" rhyme with "extended." Only a truly great Philosopher could have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... Most commonly, the narratives took the form of long 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 ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... love laughed at tinsmiths. She who had lived on equal terms with the Master and myself (I bowed my acknowledgment of the tribute) to marry a person without education? Ah! mais non! Au grand nom! Merci! She was as scornful as you please, and without rhyme or reason plucked a bunch of Christmas roses from a jug on the table and threw them into the stove. Poor quincaillier! There was nothing for it but to se fich' a l'eau—to chuck herself into the river. That was the end of most ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... was fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that I there listen to his word, say prayers to him, and sing his praises? Shall I be such a dull mule in the presence of the living Truth? Or, to use a homely simile, shall I be as the good boy of the nursery rhyme, who, seated in his corner of selfish complacency, regards the eating of his pie as a virtuous action, enjoys the contemplation of it, and thinks what a pleasant object he thus makes of himself to his parents? Shall I, to take a step farther, degrade the sanctity of the closet, hallowed ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... for this chapter I will copy out a little song which I extemporised for Sylvia on our way home to Yellowsands—too artlessly happy, it will be observed, to rhyme correctly:— ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... Rose Day Red and White Roses The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond Kenmure Culloden The Last of the Leal Jeanne d'Arc Cricket Rhymes To Helen Ballade of Dead Cricketers Brahma Critical of Life, Art, and Literature Gainsborough Ghosts A Remonstrance with the Fair Rhyme of Rhymes Rhyme of Oxford Cockney Rhymes Rococo The Food of Fiction "A Highly Valuable Chain of Thoughts" Matrimony Piscatori Piscator The Contented Angler Off my Game The Property of a Gentleman who has Given up Collecting The Ballade of the Subconscious Self Ballade ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... we have yet only the volume prepared by a lover of the poet some years ago for the Langleys, in this city. In the "Memoirs of Eminent Etonians," just printed by Mr. Edward Creasy, we have several waifs of Praed's that we believe will be new to all our readers. Here is a characteristic political rhyme: ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... "although the office is in some confusion owing to your recent Municipal Order Number 20,367 making Alabazam rhyme with Mulligatawney, and extending the number of lines in the municipal quatrains from four to twenty-three. The employees are finding considerable difficulty in making twenty-three-line quatrains and at least half the force have gone ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... you madly, senselessly—and when I think now that you, in your right senses, without rhyme or reason, are leaving me like this, and going to wander over the face of the earth—well, it strikes me that if I weren't a poor penniless devil, you wouldn't ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... powerless to make or to unmake the marks that showed the cliffs to have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, heat (supposing frost to be the root-conception) was obviously used merely as a balancing phrase, and thunder simply as the inevitable rhyme to asunder. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it may have been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make any serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in other respects so rich in beauty as to ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the 55th Sonnet that Shakespeare gives to this idea its fullest expression. To imagine that the 'powerful rhyme' of the second line refers to the sonnet itself, is to mistake Shakespeare's meaning entirely. It seemed to me that it was extremely likely, from the general character of the sonnet, that a particular play was meant, and that the play was none other but ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... there sounds above the roar Of the wide world's deafening din, An echo of song from a far-off time, Deeper and sweeter than poet's rhyme, Whose tidings of joy and whose message sublime, "Heaven's peace on earth, and good-will to mankind," Fill me with force; I yet will find ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... it over and returned it, smiling, and remarking that, as he had no taste for Italian poetry, she must give herself the pleasure of translating it into French rhyme if she wished ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... alone behaving exactly as others would behave in company, talking to themselves and laughing at their own expense, standing still and then again capering about, wherever they might chance to be, without rhyme or reason, as if their sole business were to show off to the ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... last edition, he came back to ask more questions about Hal's experiences. Before long he drew out the story of the young man's first effort in the publicity game; at which he sank back in his chair, and laughed until he shook, as the nursery-rhyme describes it, "like a ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... you ask! Perhaps you know that they make that of some account in the horse bazaars of the East. The Turks say "two white fore feet are lucky; one white fore and hind foot are unlucky;" and they have a rhyme that runs— ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... Pardon for soe unmannerly a Rhyme, which indeede, methoughte, needed an Excuse, but exprest a Feare that I knew not (what she called) my high Destiny, and prayed me not to trifle with Mr. Milton's Feelings nor in his Sighte, as I had done the Daye she dined at Forest Hill. I laught, and sayd, he must take me as he ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... The odd rhyme amused him. Thenceforth we were friends—'two 'Varsity men,' he said. And indeed it does make a queer sort of link—a freemasonry to which even ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... going to say before they begin. This is superfluous effort, tending to cramp the style. It is permissible, if not essential, to select a subject—say, MUD—but any detailed argument or plan which may restrict the free development of metre and rhyme (if any) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... "the revival of industries and peace and happiness was a shrewd political trick of the Republicans to carry" the United States. Following their practice for three campaigns, the old line speakers dwelt upon the conditions in the South. An Indiana rhyme "for young Democrats" ran:— ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... "A neat rhyme, I fancy, Monsieur, and one which will, if rightly translated, greatly please your friend and ruler, Citizen Robespierre.... Your colleague Citizen Collot is well on his way to Paris with it by now. ... No, no, Monsieur... as you rightly said just now... I really ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... said in a hearty voice, "sit you all down in your places. Kitty, my girl, say your grace. That's right," as the child folded her hands, closed her eyes, raised her piping voice, and pronounced a grace in rhyme in ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... cisterns, often sufficiently large to accommodate some thirty washerwomen at once. Here the common people resort to wash their clothes, and with great laughter and merriment amuse themselves while at their work by improvising verses, sometimes with rhyme, sometimes without, at the expense of each other, or perhaps of the passerby,—particularly if he happen to be a gaping forestiere, to whom their language is unintelligible. They stand on an elevated stone step, so as to bring the cistern about mid-height of their body, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... like the negro obeah or mandinga. One of these was, to make a hash of the flesh of an unbaptised child, with that of dogs and sheep, and to put this goodly dish in the house of the victim, reciting the following rhyme: ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... astonished by the sudden appearance of that sprite-like being, and by the sardonic bitterness of the speech, that he was unable to disentangle the significant fact from what seemed but a piece of family history fired out at him without rhyme or reason. Not at first. He was confounded and at the same time he was impressed by the rapid forcible delivery, quite different from the frothy excited loquacity of an Italian. So he stared while the homunculus letting his cloak fall about him, aspired an immense ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... elevate themselves so far above their circumstances, as to look at any science or art in the light of its independent value. Poetry, at least, with a few exceptions, was only regarded as the handmaid of religion. We find many books of legends, biographies of the fathers and saints, both prose and rhyme, written partly by Romish, partly by Hussite writers. The doctrines of Huss did not, like those of Luther a century later, shake the belief in saints. Dobrovsky mentions a very ancient printed work of 1480, in which the letters of Huss, his life by Mladionowicz, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... of fate Building on the walls of time; Some with massive deeds and great, Others with the ornaments of rhyme. For the structures that we raise God's Word is with materials filled; And our todays and yesterdays Reveal the materials ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... do can make you mine, For enterprise with equal charity In duty as in love elect will shine, The constant slave of mutability. Nor can your words for all their honey breath Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme, And though my ear deliver them from death One day or two, it is so little time. Nor does your beauty in its excellence Excel a thousand in the daily sun, Yet must I put a period to pretence, And with my logic's catalogue have done, For ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... whitit is the mere mechanical department. A man may be a poet without measuring spondees and dactyls like the ancients, or clashing the ends of lines into rhyme like the moderns, as one may be an architect though unable to labour like a stone-masonDost think Palladio or Vitruvius ever carried ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... yet there speaketh the Good Town, beseeching That ye tell us of your kindness if ye be contented With this breath of old tales, and shadowy seemings Of old times departed.—Overwise for our pleasure May the rhyme be perchance; but rightly we knew not How to change it and fashion it fresh into fairness. And once more, your Graces, we pray your forgiveness For the boldness Love gave us to set forth this story; And again, that I say, all that Pharamond sought for, Through sick dreams and ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... shadowings of awfulness,— Some wild, old tale of goblin's ghastly spite, Or antique strain of passionate distress;— And one, which has been wept o'er many a time I seek, to mar, perchance, with feeble rhyme ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... pity," said Kitty softly. "I think they are beautiful. I am glad my mother thought so too, But it need not be a nursery rhyme, ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... streak, But herbs, for use and physic, not a few Of gray renown, within those borders grew,— The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme, Fresh balm, and marigold of cheerful hue, The lowly gill, that never dares to climb, And more I fain would sing, disdaining here to rhyme. SHENSTONE. ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... usual aspect was glad with a soft mysterious smile. She would murmur snatches of songs, that were partly borrowed from English poets, and partly glided away into what seemed spontaneous additions of her own,—wanting intelligible meaning, but never melody nor rhyme. Strange, that memory and imitation—the two earliest parents of all inventive knowledge—should still be so active, and judgment—the after faculty, that combines the rest into ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of verses that do not rhyme. These are called blank verse. Here is an example of ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose words seem naturally to bourgeon into assonant terminations. But Japanese poetry is original in every sense of the term. Imitative as the Japanese are, and borrowers from other nations in every ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... an early swarm, hence valuable. Gram repeated to us a proverb in rhyme which set forth the ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... to the child: "You know what a rhyme is, of course. A rhyme is a word that sounds like another word. Two words rhyme if they end in the same sound. Understand?" Whether the child says he understands or not, we proceed to illustrate what a rhyme is, as follows: "Take the two words 'hat' and 'cat.' They sound alike ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... Pass of Pease, baffled the Earl of Argyle's attempts to enter the Merse, as lieutenant of his sovereign. On this occasion, the borderers regarded with wonder and contempt the barbarous array, and rude equipage, of their northern countrymen Godscroft has preserved the beginning of a scoffing rhyme, made ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... quarters, who entertained the ladies with their lampoons and gallantries, their madrigals and gossip, their sonnets and their repartees. "Little by little the poets had the better of the cavaliers: a felicitous rhyme was valued more than an elaborately constructed compliment." And this easy form of literature became the highest fashion. People hastened to call themselves by the sentimental pastoral names of the Arcadians, and almost ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... be more important than what we have done or said in prose or rhyme, or what folks that we never saw or heard of think ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... princes, its supreme rulers. Its founder never really divested himself of the character of a professor, and the Church has never emancipated itself from the lecture-room: it teaches, and then disappears. Its hymns are not real hymns, but versified theological dissertations, or sermons in rhyme. Born of the union of princes with professors, it retains the distinct likeness of both its parents, not altogether harmoniously blended; and when it is accused of worldliness, of paleness of thought, of being a police institution rather than a Church, that is no more than to say that ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... human species were made to be nailed to a chair, and to pore over books. He would have them exchange those robust exercises which make us joyous in the performance, and vigorous in the consequences, for the wise labour of scratching our heads for a rhyme and counting our fingers for a verse. Monkeys were as good men as these. A nation of such animals would have no chance with a single regiment of the old English votaries of beef and pudding. He never saw any thing come of learning but to make people foppish and impertinent; and a sensible ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... her why Pythagoras didn't say 'runned' and make a consistent rhyme, and she evaded the point by answering that Pythagoras ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... similitudes, new and forcible expressions, and possesses the power of exciting sensibility. It is every where animated and metaphorical, and allegory is its very soul and essence. Their verses are mostly composed in stanzas of eight or eleven syllables, and are for the most part blank, yet rhyme is occasionally introduced, according to the taste or caprice ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... "rememberable thing" to children. The Story-Teller, unlike the poet, is made as well as born, but he is not made of all stuffs nor in the twinkling of an eye. In this respect he is very like the Ichneumon in the nonsense rhyme:— ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... there were. I am going to write, and ask Harry to get a furlough for a few weeks. I want to talk sensibly to some one. I am tired of being on the heights or in the depths all the time; and as for poetry, I wish I might never hear words that rhyme again. I've got to feel that way about it, that if I open a book, and see the lines begin with capitals, my first impulse is to tear it to pieces. There, now, you have ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... luncheon at their villa in The Parks. The conversation turned on a new book of Limericks (or "Nonsense Rhymes," as we called them then) about the various Colleges. The Professor had not seen it, and wanted to know if it was amusing. In my virginal innocence I replied that one rhyme had amused me. "Let's have it," quoth the Professor, so off ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... down on the hosts of each clime, While the warriors hand to hand were— Gaul—Austrian and Muscovite heroes sublime, And—(Muse of Fitzgerald arise with a rhyme!) A quantity of Landwehr![37] Gladness was there, For the men of all might and the monarchs of earth, 50 There met for the wolf and the worm to make mirth, And a feast for the fowls ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... hours before he returned, and, if anything, he was more solemn than ever. He made no reply to their questions, but paced the room, and then he began to sing, and his tune had more reason than rhyme. ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... grows pale: With a blush as of opening flowers Dimly the east shines red. Can it be that the morn shall fulfil My dream, and refashion our clay As the poet may fashion his rhyme? Hark to that mingled scream Rising from workshop and mill— Hailing some marvelous sight; Mighty breath of the hours, Poured through the trumpets of steam; Awful tornado of time, ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... killed at Bosworth, along with King Richard, and hated Henry VII. as an enemy of their noble race. So all the parties were pretty well agreed. Lady Anne wrote rather a pretty little poem about welcoming the white Fawn to the Newcome bowers, and "Clara" was made to rhyme with "fairer," and "timid does and antlered deer to dot the glades of Chanticlere," quite in a picturesque way. Lady Kew pronounced that the poem ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "champeen pole vault of Alaska; height ten feet; depth, twelve inches," "veteran oarsman of the Gold," "Rocked into the Cradle of the Deep," but the last comment which brought out the old Pepperian red through the tan and the yellow of the mosquito "dope" was a quotation from an old boyhood rhyme made by ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... great danger it seems to me to arise from the constant habit which prevails where anything is opposed or objected to, of referring without rhyme or reason to the Constitution as a means of preventing its accomplishment, thus creating the general impression that the Constitution is but a barrier to progress instead of being the broad highway through which alone true progress may ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... out their hands, and alternately struck their feet against the ground with frantic contortions. The last words they repeated in chorus, and we easily distinguished a sort of metre, but I am not sure that there was any rhyme; the music was wild ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Boasted such might and main no King of old: Seeing his gifts, Bin Za'idah's[FN315] largesse * Forget we, and Mu'awiyah mildest-soul'd:[FN316] Were verse not feeble and o'er short the time * I had in laud of him used all of rhyme." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... fashion, expressed his views of this new development of the wild streak, producing all sorts of opinions from Mr. Gordon, who memorized the pretty verses and hummed them over at his work and to Jean, who, while confessing that the little rhyme had no literary value, declared herself exceedingly glad that Lizzie was ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... ask about dinner; then Mrs. Fundy slipped over from No. 27 (they are opposite neighbors, and made an acquaintance through Mrs. Fundy's macaw); and a thousand things happened. Finally, there was no rhyme to babe except Tippoo Saib (against whom Major Gashleigh, Rosa's grandfather, had distinguished himself), and so she gave up the little poem about her ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dinner-hour was established at nine o'clock in the morning, and the supper-hour at five in the evening. It is true that the hour of rising was also most unreasonably early according to modern ideas. There was a popular rhyme: ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... magazines, and was the author of many well-known fugitive pieces, both in prose and verse. He also published several books, of which "January and June," "Pictures in Camp and Field," "The World on Wheels," "Old-time Pictures and Sheaves of Rhyme," "Between the Gates," and "Songs of Yesterday," are the best known. In his later years, Mr. Taylor achieved some reputation as a lecturer. His writings are marked by ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... from such sweet intercourse. For I knew from the first as I have said that I loved her, and I knew, too, that it would be about as reasonable to fall in love with a star or a dream. Those gentry who write verses, find, as I believe, a kind of bitter satisfaction in recording their pains in rhyme, but for me there was no such solace. Yet on that driving night, in that high wind, I would have rejoiced to be apprenticed to the poets' guild and skilled to make some use that might please her ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a juvenile crudity. What does this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it most needs contact with true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, the wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with poetry's ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... greatness of the Creator? What do we know of the stars, after all? How much has the most profound science discovered? Next to nothing! Not but that I read all that has been written by the late astronomers, for the subject is very fascinating; it is the fairy tale of science. But still, the nursery rhyme expresses ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... something may remain, perchance, to chime With reason, and what's stranger still, with rhyme; Even this thy genius, CANNING! may permit, Who, bred a statesman, still was born a wit, And never, even in that dull house, could'st tame To unleaven'd prose thine own poetic flame; Our last, our best, our only Orator, Ev'n I can ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... she makes wing, she gets power, Yet the higher she doth soar, She's affronted still the more; Till she to the highest hath past, Then she rests with Fame at last. Let nought therefore thee affright, But make forward in thy flight; For if I could match thy rhyme To the very stars I'd climb, There begin again, and fly Till ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... with a reason, a lady's reason. "Such lines," says he, "are not, it must be allowed, unpleasing to the ear; but the redundant syllable ought to be confined to the drama, and not admitted into epic poetry." As to the redundant syllable in heroic rhyme on serious subjects, it has been, from the time of Pope downward, proscribed by the general consent of all the correct school. No magazine would have admitted so incorrect a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of my prose, or rhyme. Tell how thy pleasing Stowe employs thy time. Say, Cobham, what amuses thy retreat? Or stratagems of war, or schemes of state? Dost thou recall to mind, with joy or grief, Great Marlbro's actions? that immortal chief, Whose highest trophy, rais'd in each campaign, More than suffic'd ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... mustn't think it's cheek, you know, if I call your mother by her Christian name in the poetry. It's only for the rhyme." ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... a feller hates to see; One of these chaps forever fixin' things cute and clever; Makin' the world in gen'ral step 'long to tune an' time, An' cuttin' the earth into slices an' saltin' it down into rhyme. ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... dead-drunk, and in this condition the butcher tars and feathers her. When she awakes, she fancies that she must be some strange bird, and cries out, "Is this me, or is it not me? I'll go home, and if our dog barks, then it is not me." Thus far we have a variant of our favourite nursery rhyme: ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... Denver, Colorado. My little girl, here—she's all I've got in the world since Mr. Kidder died—is Beatrice, but we call her Beechy for short. We used to spell it B-i-c-e, which Mr. Kidder said was Italian; but people would pronounce it to rhyme with mice, so now we make it just like the tree, and then there can't be any mistake. Miss Madeleine Destrey is the daughter of my dead sister, who was ever so much older than I am of course; and the way she happened to come over with Beechy and me is quite a romance; ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... what tales the ladies about the queen told her, or other bad offices that they did, they would put it upon him." The poems of Fulke Greville, celebrated and fashionable in his own time, but now known only to the more curious students of our early literature, consist of two tragedies in interwoven rhyme, with choruses on the Greek model; a hundred love sonnets, in one of which he styles his mistress "Fair dog:" and "Treaties" "on Human learning," "on Fame and Honor," and "of Wars." Of these pieces the last three, as well as the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... tailor Karsch. When he scolded, I answered in verse, and tried to turn my thoughts to other things, and to make the most difficult rhymes. As he was always scolding and quarrelling, I always spoke in rhyme." ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... of his verse, and in this way developed a rhythm that never wearies the ear with monotonous recurrence. He employed for this same purpose the hemistich or half-verse, the triplet or three consecutive verses with the same rhyme, and the Alexandrine with its six accents and ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... start, you show me the rule as you have promised." "I am willing to do this," said Tartaglia, "but I must tell you that, in order to be able to recall at any time my system of working, I have expressed it in rhyme; because, without this precaution, I must often have forgotten it. I care naught that my rhymes are clumsy, it has been enough for me that they have served to remind me of my rules. These I will write down with my own hand, so ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Kate thoughtfully. "Now, just where does it begin? Oh, I know. There's a longish rhyme about it, but I can't remember that. The story ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... later still, they will be found in the deep holes, lying under rocky ledges, or where gravel has fallen from the banks and been washed away by the spring freshets. At this period the best bait is small minnows, crayfish, molluscs, etc. Yet without rhyme and reason, I find they may at any time be found in deep water one day and in the shallows ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... droplets will soon be evaporated by the rising sun. The red morning sky declares that the dust particles have been protected from radiation by a blanket of overlying moisture, the air, therefore, is saturated to great heights and rain is probable. So you see, Anton, Mammy's rhyme is right." ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumb over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half washed and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a rhyme to mugs; The Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept its painted promise of providing good entertainment for Man and Beast. However, Man, in the present case, was not critical, but took what entertainment he could get, and went ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... younger knights, Down the slope city rode, and sharply turn'd North by the gate. In her high bower the Queen, Working a tapestry, lifted up her head, Watch'd her lord pass, and knew not that she sigh'd. Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme Of bygone Merlin, "Where is he who knows? From the great deep to ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... simply the aberration of a rather remarkable lunatic. It is no good; it is not worth the price of a cheese sandwich. I understand that its one feat has been to break your leg; if it ever goes off again, persuade it to break your neck. And now I want you to take this nursery rhyme of yours and get out. And don't ever come here again. Do You understand ? You understand, do you ?" He arose and bowed ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... highly wrought episodes, like the Cupid and Psyche, the new Latin of Apuleius often approximates nearly to assonant or rhymed verse. Both rhyme and assonance were to be found in the early Latin which he had studied deeply, and may be judged from incidental fragments of the popular language never to have wholly disappeared from common use during the classical period. Virgil, in his latest work, as has been ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... connection between geographical place-names and poetical inspiration than is generally recognized; one of the chief reasons why there are so few really great poems about Russia in our language is that you can't possibly get a rhyme to names like Smolensk and Tobolsk ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... too, in her wide skirts and poke bonnet, covered with roses. Quite in contrast to the long and lanky figure Mr. Bunn, who in a nondescript suit, rode the mule that drew the cart, after the fashion of an English postillion. The play was a comic one without much rhyme or reason, but it was found that audiences occasionally liked things of that sort, ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... fields in some far clime Where Heroes, Sages, Bards sublime, 50 And all that fetched the flowing rhyme From genuine springs, Shall dwell together till old Time Folds up ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the best of the argument,' said La Fontaine, to the great scandal of the peace-lovers. The exigencies of verse, rhyme and rhythm, carried the worthy fabulist further than he intended: he meant to say that, in a fight between mastiffs and in other brute conflicts, the stronger is left master of the bone. He well knew that, as things go, success ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... other Friends), and here it is. You will see by the notice that AEschylus is left 'nowhere,' and why; a modest proviso. Still I think the Story is well compacted: the Dialogue good, (with one single little originality; of riding into Rhyme as Passion grows) and the Choruses (mostly 'rot' quoad Poetry) still serving to carry on the subject of the Story in the way of Inter-act. Try one or two Women with a dose of it one day; not Lady Pollock, who knows better. . . . When I look over the little Prose Dialogue, I see lots that ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... extent the elaboration of alliteration, but the end-rhymes and the vowel-assonances cannot be imitated without sacrificing the sense. The metre resembles that known as mibhasc (four-syllable and six-syllable lines alternating, but with trisyllabic rhyme in the ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... they were! to rhyme with far A kind star did not tarry; The metre, too, was regular As schoolboy's dot and carry; And full they were of pious plums, So extra-super-moral,— For sucking Virtue's tender gums Most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... sympathy and joyful pride of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself so naturally to such work as to the wild wood-notes of passion and fancy and pathos which in his happiest ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... kind-hearted aunts, and even fathers, who are summoned to become unwilling vocalists at break of day by young gentlemen and ladies of two years old; and to all having the charge of children, who are alive to the importance of cultivating their natural keenness for rhyme, rhythm, melody, and instinctive love for fun, that I offer this first part of a collection of Traditional Nursery Songs. This Collection has been in progress for more than ten years, and it is now published, after ...
— Traditional Nursery Songs of England - With Pictures by Eminent Modern Artists • Various
... is scarcely equal to Dr. Isaac Watts' version of the ninetieth of David's psalms. The rhyme of "rebel" with "able" is defective, and "discover" and "other" jar rather badly; but poets of high reputation have done worse in times of patriotic excitement, and the thing expressed the feelings of the Belfast people ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... words or syllables which rhyme, arranged in a particular order, and are given to a poet with a subject, on which he must write verses ending in the same rhymes, disposed in the same order. Menage gives the following account of the origin of this ridiculous ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... 'Rhyme of the Three Sealers'? 'There's never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three'! Well, the age of twenty-seven is a woman's fifty-three, north latitude—at least, it is if she's unmarried—time to jettison scruples, morals, regard for ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... lo! creation's self is one great choir, And what is Nature's order but the rhyme Whereto the worlds keep time, And all things move with all things from their prime? Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre? In far retreats of elemental mind Obscurely comes and goes The imperative breath of song, that as the wind Is trackless, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... about Le Cateau is that the soldiers pronounce it to rhyme with Waterloo—Leacatoo—and all firmly believe that if the French cavalry had come up to help us, as the Prussians came up at Waterloo, there would have been no Germans to ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... for thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservative ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... and did not often require to be cleaned. So the morning calm of my mind was lashed into an unwonted tempest of excitement when my jolly skipper, Sheikh Abdul Rehman, came in and told me briefly that a "bag" (which word does not rhyme with rag, but must be pronounced like barg without the r and signifies a tiger or panther) had killed a cow in the village the night ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... been indicated, children's literature is of two kinds: first, the traditional kind that grew up among the folk of long ago in the forms of rhyme, myth, fairy tale, fable, legend, and romantic hero story; and, second, the kind that has been produced in modern times by individual authors. The first, the traditional kind, was produced by early civilization and by the childlike peasantry of long ago. The best of the stories produced ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... disdainful smile You greet this comment from a stranger, Your pleasure-paths pursuing while A siren voice discounts the danger, Until, some day, in sadder rhyme You rue ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... tendency, having never been clearly apprehended, is not remembered at all."—Murray's Gram., i, p. 126. "The soil and sovereignty was not purchased of the natives."—Knapp's Lect. on Amer. Lit., p. 55. "The boldness, freedom, and variety of our blank verse, is infinitely more favourable than rhyme, to all kinds of sublime poetry."—Blair's Rhet., p. 40. "The vivacity and sensibility of the Greeks seems to have been much greater than ours."—Ib., p. 253. "For sometimes the Mood and Tense is signified by the Verb, sometimes they are signified of the Verb by ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... across,— Beneath the gnarled boughs, on the moss, The air around him golden-ripe With daybreak,—there, with oaten pipe, His eyes beheld the wood-god, Pan, Goat-bearded, horned; half brute, half man; Who, shaggy-haunched, a savage rhyme Blew in his reed to rudest time; And swollen-jowled, with rolling eye— Beneath the slowly silvering sky, Whose rose streaked through the forest's roof— Danced, while beneath his boisterous hoof The branch was snapped, and, interfused ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... Lud's men stomped withal, claim identity with our 'stamping.' The a and o used to 'change about,' you know, in the old English writers—see Chaucer for it. Still the 'stomp' with the peculiar significance, is better of course than the 'stamp' even with a rhyme ready for it, and I dare say you are justified in daring to put this old wine into the new bottle; and we will drink to the health of the poem in it. It is 'Italy in England'—isn't it? But I understand and understood perfectly, through ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... All the old clothes, fur rugs, and such things, were carefully carried up on to the deck, and kept there the whole winter. This was more than even these animals could stand; 53 deg. C. of cold proved to be too much for them, and we saw no more of them. As the bug is made to say in the popular rhyme: ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... consul at Madagascar, and formerly consul at Lamu, for many details furnished by him of the mode of life and war of those engaging people the Masai; also to my sister-in-law, Mrs John Haggard, who kindly put the lines of p. 183 into rhyme for me; also to an extract in a review from some book of travel of which I cannot recollect the name, to which I owe the idea of the great crabs in the valley of the subterranean river. {Endnote 23} But if I remember right, the crabs in the ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... we'll sharpen keen. Revenge shall fill the goblet to the brim, And "Pleasure saturnine" shall be our hymn. Francos, applauding: 'Twere well, sweet Quezox! Thou in happy tone Hast voiced a noble sentiment in rhyme. But lurking in my mem'ry it doth seem That I recall in part those words so apt. (Francos ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... England and the hot old plain from Needles to Berdoo. We kept a-rambling all the time. I rustled grub, he rustled rhyme— Blind-baggage, hoof it, ride or ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... distribution, so it doesn't matter, but I do hope they will ask me to go in," said Sylvia to herself. "I hated Esmeralda last night, but I rather love her this morning. She is like the little girl in the rhyme—when she is nice she is very, very nice; but when she is bad ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... he said. "Yesterday the world was grey, and I was happy; to-day the world is all gold, and I'm finding life harder and heavier than usual. Read it out slowly to me. It was meant to be read to the song of the river, and never a prettier voice read a rhyme than yours." ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... humblest sort. There are now living there an old woman, formerly a servant in respectable families, who has a room to herself; a half-mad fellow, who will not speak when spoken to unless he can hit on some way of answering in rhyme. He, of course, has a room to himself. There is, besides, a large room with sleeping-places for two persons. One of these places is occupied by an old man who has been a hard drinker; you would have to share the ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... face as he lay in her arms, until at last she, too, caught the child-feature and the child-smile. Rehoboth said old Deborah was renewing her youth; for she had been known to laugh and croon, and more than once purse up her old lips to sing a snatch of nursery rhyme—a thing which in the past she had denounced as tending to 'mak' childer hush't wi' th' songs o' sin.' The hard look died away from her eyes, and her mouth ceased to wear its sealed and drawn expression. The voice, too, became low and mellow, and her religion, instead of being ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... the reader is referred to the introduction to Bunyan's work on Justification, and to that to the Pilgrim's Progress.[266] The impression it made upon the public mind is well expressed in a rude rhyme, made by an anonymous author, in his Assembly ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... those who could neither make verses themselves nor remember the verses that other people made for them; while those who were never afraid were those who could make verses for themselves; for although there were certain old rhymes which were very effectual, yet it was well known that a new rhyme, if of the right sort, was even more distasteful to them, and therefore more effectual in putting ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... literature continued to be languidly studied in the cloisters and the schools of grammar. The metres of the ancients were practised with uncouth and patient assiduity, strenuous efforts being made to keep alive an art which was no longer rightly understood. Rhyme invaded the hexameter, and the best verses of the medieval period in ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... copiously otherwise: your Bonaparte represents his Sorrows of Napoleon Opera, in an all-too stupendous style; with music of cannon-volleys, and murder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lights are the fires of Conflagration; his rhyme and recitative are the tramp of embattled Hosts and the sound of falling Cities.—Happier is he who, like our Clothes-Philosopher, can write such matter, since it must be written, on the insensible Earth, with his shoe-soles only; and ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... ink, I gravely sat me down to think: I bit my nails, and scratched my head, But found my wit and fancy fled; Or, if with more than usual pain, A thought came slowly from my brain, It cost me Lord knows how much time To shape it into sense and rhyme; And, what was yet a greater curse, ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... the things to be combined. Thus, this very child (in the nineteenth month), when her favorite song, "Who will go for a Soldier?" ("Wer will unter die Soldaten?") was sung to her, could not only join in the rhyme at the end of the verse, but, no matter where a stop was made, she would go on, in a manner imperfect, indeed, but easily ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... flower-seeds with gay pictures on the outside, and only a penny each; the pitchers were only a penny and twopence; there were the dearest little watering-cans too, and fancy handkerchiefs with a nursery rhyme round the border, and funny little books, with roughly done pictures in the brightest of colours, and money-boxes, some like little houses, others ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Rev. J. East told her about a little Mary who loved the Lord Jesus. We were all taught to read early and to repeat by our dear mother, but as I had now left school I undertook the charming little pupil, teaching her reading, spelling, and a rhyme (generally one of Jane Taylor's), for half an hour every morning, and in the afternoon twenty or thirty stitches of patchwork, with a very short text to repeat next morning at breakfast. When three years old she could read easy books, and ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... all the more noteworthy that Chaucer reproduces only about one-half of the part contributed by Jean de Meung, and again condenses this half to one-third of its length. In general, he has preserved the French names of localities, and even occasionally helps himself to a rhyme by retaining a French word. Occasionally he shows a certain timidity as a translator, speaking of "the tree which in France men call a pine," and pointing out, so that there may be no mistake, that mermaidens are called it "sereyns" ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward |
