"Verse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... state seal. These books, in fact, had been kept so long, that, like port wine superannuated, they had lost their flavor and body. [Footnote: 'Like port wine superannuated, the Sibylline books had lost their flavor and their body.'—There is an allegoric description in verse, by Mr. Rogers, of an ice-house, in which winter is described as a captive, &c., which is memorable on this account, that a brother poet, on reading the passage, mistook it, (from not understanding the allegorical expressions,) ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... There were twelve Latin lines on his grave. His successor, Alexander Nowell, who died in 1601 at the age of ninety, was a zealous promoter of the Reformation. There was a fine monument to him, a bust in fur robe, and very long Latin inscriptions in prose and verse. ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... isn't just the thing to put your name to a valentine, they tell me, but this is something deeper and more poetic than such things usually are. It means mischief, as Cousin Dempster says. It is a proposal, buried in roses and veiled in sweet and modest verse, such as a lady might almost send at any time with a few blushes. It will reach him out in that vast wilderness of dead grass, where he has been deluded off by Mr. Sheridan, and has risked his precious life in a terrific ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... Bench, which controls it absolutely. Poetry has taken possession of this social theme, "the man condemned to death"—a subject truly apt to strike the imagination! And poetry has been sublime on it. Prose has no resource but fact; still, the fact is appalling enough to hold its own against verse. The existence of a condemned man who has not confessed his crime, or betrayed his accomplices, is one of fearful torment. This is no case of iron boots, of water poured into the stomach, or of limbs racked by hideous machinery; it is hidden and, so to speak, negative torture. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... be expected, Persia very early had cottons and calicoes imported from India. In the sixth verse of the first chapter of Esther definite reference is made to the use to which cotton was put at the feasts which King Ahasuerus gave about 519 B.C. "White, green, and blue hangings" are said to have been used on this occasion, and from authorities who have specially investigated ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... into view. They turned into the cane yard and immediately the workhands surrounded them. Horatio felt better by this time, and they began a performance. First Bo sang and then Horatio gave a gymnastic exhibition. Then at last Bo sang a closing verse ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a noise," said Gerald, "but people read their verse of the psalm, and say Amen, and all that, quite loud. They don't leave it all to the clerk ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... write in verse, and Mademoiselle de la Valliere wished to repay your majesty in the same coin; that is to say, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sang, and their faces glowed and their eyes burned; and the tears came and flowed don their cheeks and their forms began to sway unconsciously to the swing of the song, and their bosoms to heave and pant; and moanings broke out, and deep ejaculations; and when the last verse was reached, and Roland lay dying, all alone, with his face to the field and to his slain, lying there in heaps and winrows, and took off and held up his gauntlet to God with his failing hand, and breathed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Tragicall histories Translated out of French. In 1576 was also published the first of George Whetstone's collections of tales, the four parts of The Rocke of Regard, in which he told over again in verse several stories already better told by Painter. In the same year, 1576, appeared G. Turberville's Tragical Tales, translated out of sundrie Italians—ten tales in verse, chiefly from Boccaccio. Whetstone's Heptameron of Ciuill Discourses in 1582 was however a ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... whether to undertake a campaign of municipal house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits home she suggested that her ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... In the 25th verse of the eleventh chapter of Numbers, it is said that "the Lord took of the spirit that was upon Moses, and gave it unto the seventy elders." Some conclude from this statement that, as a punishment for his intemperate prayer, the wisdom of Moses ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... in prose and in verse, in Germany fast is decaying; Far behind us, alas, lieth the golden age now! For by philosophers spoiled is our language—our logic by poets, And no more common sense governs our passage through ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a clever Man, Erasmus, and a very merry one too. Indeed I am apt to admire from whence it comes to pass that there is such a great Diversity in Mens Palates, for if I may make use of this Verse ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... It is not, however, as a dramatist that Lodge is remembered, but as a writer of pastoral romance. Here the discursive and idyllic quality of his genius, both in verse and prose, was to find complete and unhampered expression. Of the pastoral romances that Lodge produced during the next decade "Rosalynde" is by far the most important. The author wrote it, he tells us, while he was on a freebooting expedition ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... often wondered why the Jordan, which plays such an important part in the history of the Hebrews, receives so little honour and praise in their literature. Sentimental travellers and poets of other races have woven a good deal of florid prose and verse about the name of this river. There is no doubt that it is the chief stream of Palestine, the only one, in fact, that deserves to be called a river. Yet the Bible has no song of loving pride for the Jordan; no ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... a play which shall convey to the general public an impression of antiquity is to make the characters speak blank verse and abstain from reference to steam, telegraphy, or any of the material conditions of their existence. The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex which civilization ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... Aniline, Products chemical and gas-tarry Give the modern Muse new mastery. Mauve may chime with love, and mauver Form a decent rhyme to lover; While (and if not, why not?) mauvest Antiphonetic proves to lovest. (Verse erotic always sports Tricksily with longs and shorts. Verbal votaries of Venus Are an arbitrary genus, And as arrogant as HOWELLS In their dealings with the vowels. Love, move, rove, linked in a sonnet, Pass for rhymes; the best have done it!) Then again there ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... are many details of modern social well-being with which the New Testament does not deal, questions of present-day ethics and economics which cannot be decided by a direct reference to chapter and {247} verse, either of the Gospels or Epistles. The problems of life shift with the shifting years, but the nature of life remains unchanged, and responds to the life and the spirit of Him who was, and remains down the ages, the Light of men. The ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... prayer-book, rather than, like ours, a hymn-book, arises from the nature of the English service, which is composed very little of singing, and almost entirely of praying. The psalms of David, however, are here translated into English verse, and are generally printed at the end of ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... the most familiar—that of the destruction of the Mohawk war party at the Grand Falls—told by the Indians to the early settlers on the river soon after their arrival in the country and has since been rehearsed in verse by Roberts and Hannay and in prose by Lieut.-Governor Gordon in his "Wilderness Journeys," by Dr. Rand in his Indian legends ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... little later Geoffrey's Latin history was translated by Wace and others into Norman French, and here the Arthur material first appeared in verse form. Then, still later in the twelfth century, Walter Map worked the same stories over into French prose, and at the same time put so much of his own knowledge and imagination with them, that we may almost say that he was the maker of ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... of us together; and sometimes, when one begins to talk of 'Thekla,' the other will not know for a moment which of us is meant. They drink my health, too, on her birthday, which is the fourteenth of May; and you know King Solomon's verse for the fourteenth—'She is like the merchants' ships, she bringeth her food from afar.' This is what I have done while she was growing; for King Solomon wrote it for a wife, of course. But now I shall yield up my trust, for when I return she is to be married. She shall bind ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... which had a certain intoxicating power. The Pythia, or prophetess of Apollo, sat on a tripod over the steaming cleft and inhaled the gas. The words she uttered in delirium were supposed to come from the god. They were taken down by the attendant priests, written out in verse, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... thence to Edinburgh; Ormiston on the 21st; the John Stanleys there and Lord Neaves. [Footnote: A lord of justiciary, one of the foremost authorities on criminal law in Scotland, and for more than forty years a regular contributor of prose and verse to Blackwood's ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... rather, was waked up for the occasion; and of all that family group he has been, for a decade or more, the only survivor. The mother of the house was but lately dead; the eldest son, and his son, were going, the next day, to the other side of the world; and every voice broke before the familiar verse came ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... moon, or rather pretending to cry for it, for the writer is obviously insincere. I see the Saturday Review says the passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose is free from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer will not go hunting over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose. This, however, is a trifle, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... which is shortly to call one of you its lord. Name then, the flower, and he who first shall name it, let him be proclaimed the lawful king of Souffra. Take then, your instruments, noble rayahs, and to their sounds, in measured verse, pour out the name of the hidden flower, and the reason for my choice. Thus shall fate decide the question, and no one say that his merits ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... many do not understand the verse of Lichtenstein, do not correctly understand, do ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... nourishment' to the 'poor soul,' should be turned into 'rank poison!' But as Mr. Daniel de Foe (an ingenious man, though a 'dissenter') observeth (but indeed it is an old proverb; only I think he was the first that put it into verse) ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... joins. On this occasion, all was silent. After the lapse of a few minutes, Mr. Odell arose, and turning, in the Bible, to the chapter where the text, from which he was to preach, was recorded, read the verse that was to form the groundwork of his remarks. Before opening the subject, he stated, briefly, that he was the preacher who was to labour among them during the ensuing year, and hoped, in the Divine Providence, that good, both to them and to him, would ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... God they have no knowledge. Temptations surround me as mountains; they rise up about me like the waves of the sea. While Kamo lived, I was comforted, for he loved the truth. Every day he used to read the Scriptures with me, and ask the meaning of each verse. I had hoped he would have Paul's zeal in the work of the Lord. I had expected that we should have schools in our village after a year or two, and that the places of concourse for idle conversation would become places for reading the Scriptures, and for prayer. But it ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... special honour in paradise, set upon this belief his high authority. The lives of the saints, and the chronicles of the Middle Ages, were filled with it. Poetry and painting accepted the idea and developed it. Dante wedded it to verse, and at Venice this thought may still be seen embodied in one of the grand pictures of Bordone: a shipload of demons is seen approaching Venice in a storm, threatening destruction to the city, but St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicholas attack ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the word she left out because it did not fit in this case. "A brave and manlike form" would be better. She repeated the verse to herself ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of Aeneas' behavior toward Lausus. The robin red-breast covering the children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of Horace's odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so artificial, should have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song. He was severely ridiculed by his contemporaries for these concessions. "He descended now and then to lower disquisitions," wrote Dr. Johnson," and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as I hope, the reader has no objection to an occasional interlude of verse in all this prose, I will copy for him here the poem I wrote next morning—it being always easier to tell the strict truth in poetry rather ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... Ralph Lane's bold adventures in exploration of Albemarle Sound, Chowan River and Chesapeake Bay, of the return of his disappointed colony to England in Drake's vessels, and the tragic fate of little Virginia Dare and of John White's colony, have all been told in fiction, song and verse. ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... well. Here Nature's bounteous hand around shall fling, Scenes that thy Muse hath never dar'd to sing. When sickness weigh'd thee down, and strength declin'd; When dread eternity absorb'd thy mind, Flow'd the predicting verse, by gloom o'erspread, That 'Cambrian mountains' thou should'st never tread, That 'time-worn cliff, and classic stream to see,' Was wealth's prerogative, despair for thee. Come to the proof; with us the breeze inhale, Renounce despair, and come to Severn's vale; And where the COTSWOLD HILLS are ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... stopped our ears with the praises of Lysis; and if he is a little intoxicated, there is every likelihood that we may have our sleep murdered with a cry of Lysis. His performances in prose are bad enough, but nothing at all in comparison with his verse; and when he drenches us with his poems and other compositions, it is really too bad; and worse still is his manner of singing them to his love; he has a voice which is truly appalling, and we cannot help hearing him: and now having a question put to him by you, behold ...
— Lysis • Plato
... of his manhood will help us to appreciate the genius of his art. "It is needful to know Dante as man" wrote Charles Elliot Norton, "in order fully to appreciate him as poet." The thought is expressed in another way by James Russell Lowell: "The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself and Dante is not merely a great poet but an influence, part of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him the soul learns that 'married to the truth she is a mistress but otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty'" (The Banquet). But that knowledge ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... attainments won the regard of his teachers, while his amiable manners endeared him to his classmates. While his principal delight was in the study of the Classics, he devoted much attention to mathematics and other studies. Like many other writers, some of his earliest efforts were in verse. Indeed it may be said of him, as of Pope, that ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... by Parkes the gardener in the matter of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very earnest churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author of several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled (unless my memory ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... the Christian Year: being a Text of Scripture, with an Original Meditation and a Short Selection in Verse for Every Day, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... popular song 'Sung with great applause by the Original Female American Serenaders.' (c. 1845.) The first verse will ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... edition having lightened the translator's labours, they were speedily supplied. England, however, was all but last in the field but when she did appear, it was in force, with a version in each hand, the one in prose and the other in verse. ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... at the sight that presented itself. The whole verse was repeated, and the whole dance gone through again in the sight and hearing of that gentleman. Was the boy mad? Had the strain of business been too ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... hand and cried out. Life suddenly seemed quite different to her. These moving figures peopled gloriously the desert waste, these ringing voices filled with music the brooding silence of it. She murmured to herself a verse of scripture, "Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh with the morning," and she realized for the first time how absurdly sad and deserted she had been feeling, how unreasonably forlorn. By her present joy she measured her past—not sorrow exactly; she could ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... days must have been a stimulus to the boy, who from the first had ambitions far beyond anything that he was to achieve. Here was his first lesson. The second came from Lady Fenn—a more vivid impression for the child. Twenty years before Borrow was born Cowper had sung her merits in his verse. She and her golden-headed cane are commemorated in Lavengro. Dame Eleanor Fenn had made a reputation in her time. As 'Mrs. Teachwell' and 'Mrs. Lovechild' she had published books for the young of a most improving character, The Child's Grammar, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... father's death, Mike had sold the lease of the farm for three hundred pounds, and with that sum and a volume of verse he went to London. When he had published his poems he wrote two comedies. His efforts to get them produced led him into various society. He was naturally clever at cards, and one night he won three ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... portraits of his ancestors, for two years before he could resolve on parting with it to the church. The Prince likewise composed the epitaph which was carved on the stone which covers the grave of Swartz, the first instance of English verse ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... BYRHTNOTH, or Fight at Maldon, relates in vigorous verse the contest between the Saxons, led by the Ealdorman Byrhtnoth, and the Danes at the river Panta, near Maldon in Essex, in which the Danes were victorious and Byrhtnoth was slain. The incident is mentioned in four manuscripts of the "Anglo-Saxon ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... of the page," says Lynch, rather sarcastically (for I don't care to confess that I kissed the name of "Dorothea v. Klingenspohr, born v. Speck" written under an extremely feeble passage of verse). "Look at the other ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Hippolyta, Semiramis, Zenobia, and, finally, Mark Antony's Fulvia, who so often took up arms, as the historian Dion tells us, to defend her husband and herself. But in poetry, also, they have been truly marvellous, as Pausanias relates. Corinna was very celebrated as a writer of verse, and Eustathius makes mention in his "Catalogue of the Ships of Homer"—as does Eusebius in his book of "Chronicles"—of Sappho, a young woman of great renown, who, in truth, although she was a woman, was yet such that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... volume are translations by Major Frye of several Northern poems—in German, Italian and English verse—from the Danish and the Swedish; then come two sonnets in French verse, the one in honour of Lafayette, the other about the Duke of Orleans, whose premature death he compares with that of the Northern hero of the Edda, Balder. A part of Frye's translation of the Edda, before appearing in book ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... Agriculture join the train, Rear a sad altar, bend around his urn, And to their guardian, grateful incense burn! Let History calm, in thoughtful mood reclin'd, Record his actions to enrich mankind, And Poesy divine his deeds rehearse In all the energy of epic verse! ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... would give a free rein to these ecstatic moods, these wild emotions. When he had given a free rein to them they ambled round a little paddock, and brought him back to his own front door. It was delicious. He had thoughts of chronicling the expedition in verse. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... have been of little import in Elizabeth's eye's, except as they implied her yielding to dictation; the real sting lay in the last. And the last was the one which Philip would be most loth to yield. With a touch of grim humour, His Catholic Majesty sent his ultimatum in Latin verse. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... dullness, the throbbing pulses, the oppression of the morning, had given way to a restlessness and a strange exaltation of spirit. Fancy was quickened, imagination heightened; to himself he seemed to see the heart of all things. Across his mind flitted fragments of verse,—now a broken line just hinting beauty, now the pure passion of a lovely stanza. His thoughts went to and fro, mobile as the waves of the sea; but firm as the reefs beneath them stood his knowledge that presently he was going ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... are marked by genuine passion, in Lothar Schmidt's Frauenbriefe der Renaissance. The famous Imperia, called by a Pope in the early years of the sixteenth century "nobilissimum Romae scortum," knew Latin and could write Italian verse. Other courtesans knew Italian and Latin poetry by heart, while they were accomplished in music, dancing, and speech. We are reminded of ancient Greece, and Graf, discussing how far the Renaissance courtesans resembled the hetairae, finds a very considerable likeness, especially ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... on his arm, and her eyes shone upon him. 'It will not be your gospel, Walter, that I know. Some day you will be a rich man, perhaps, and then you will show the world what a rich man can do. Isn't there a verse in the Bible which says, "Blessed is he that considereth the poor"? You will consider the poor then, Walter, and I will help you. We shall be able to do it all the better because we have been ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... the Anglo-Saxon race, Whose words have won the hearts of young and old; So free from cant, and yet replete with grace, Or prose or verse it glows like burnished gold; Thy muse is ever loyal to the truth, And those who know thee best ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... still possess. "The Doctor" was no poet, though the best of his historical prose—the well-known passage in the Roman History, for instance, on the death of Marcellus—has some of the essential notes of poetry—passion, strength, music. But the gentle Wordsworthian quality of his few essays in verse will be perhaps interesting to those who are aware of him chiefly as the great Liberal fighter of eighty years ago. He ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... already prepared him well for the conflicts of life. His intelligent physiognomy breathed forth energy. It was not that of an audacious person, it was that of a darer. These three words from an unfinished verse of ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... The passages in verse from pp 137, 139, and the description of the Beggarman, pp. 136, 140, are instances of a curious characteristic of Gaelic folk-tales called "runs." Collections of conventional epithets are used over and over again to describe the same incident, the beaching ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... knew by heart scores of the sonnets, and were fond of repeating verses either in the original or in their own translations, and Esther soon picked up what they let fall, being quick at catching what was thrown to her. She caught verse after verse of Hazard's favorites, and sometimes he could hear her ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... as an odd caprice, for his health from that time hardly permitted him to move about. He persisted, and accomplished his project; he learned nearly everything thus by himself, making his own choice among authors, getting the grammar quite alone, and his pleasure was to translate into verse the finest passages he met with among the Latin and Greek poets. When he was about sixteen years old, he said, his taste was formed as much as it was later.... If such a thing as literary temperament exist, it never discovered itself in a ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... mine with the sacred Maro's art To wake to sympathy the feeling heart, Like him the smooth and mournful verse to dress In all the pomp of exquisite distress ... Then might ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... John Laverentzen, in 1715, and reissued in 1851. The present version has been much helped by the translation of Seier Schousbolle, published at Copenhagen in 1752. It is true that the verses, often the hardest part, are put into periphrastic verse (by Laurentius Thura, c. 1721), and Schousbolle often does not face a difficulty; but he gives the sense of Saxo simply and concisely. The lusty paraphrase by the enthusiastic Nik. Fred. Sev. Grundtvig, of which there have been ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... be an inclusive anthology. The ghostly poetry of the late war alone would have made a book as large as this; and an inclusive scheme would have ended as a six-volume Encyclopedia of Ghostly Verse. I hope that this may be called for some day. The present book has been held to the conventional limits of the type of small anthology which may be read without weariness (I hope) by the exclusion not only of many long and dreary ghost-poems, ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... shout of joy from the throng went forth; they built him a crystal throne, And there in his pride, with none beside, he rules and he reigns alone. And this is the tale which I here set down, as the story was told to me— In excellent Rudyard-Kipling verse—the tale of the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... we shall find on many a deserted down or lonely tor ample evidence of the causes which led the people of this ancient Etruscan town to build their citadel at so great a height above the neighbouring valley. Fiesole, says Dante, in a well-known verse, was the mother of Florence. Even so in England, Old Sarum was indeed the mother of Salisbury, and Caer Badon or Sulis was the mother of Bath. And when there was first a Faesulae on the hill here there could ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... things: fear of God and trust in Him. And especially the prophet David throughout the Psalms, as when he says [Ps. 147,11]: The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear Him, in those that hope in His mercy. As if the entire commandment were explained by one verse, as much as to say: The Lord taketh pleasure in those who have ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... human emotion, at a time when a selfish or thoughtless spirit would have leaped in exultation, touched the heart of England deeply, and was rightly held of happy omen. The nation's feeling is aptly expressed in the glowing verse of Mrs. Browning, praying Heaven's blessing on the "weeping Queen," and prophesying for her the love, happiness, and honour which have been hers in no stinted measure. "Thou shalt be well beloved," said the poetess; there are very few sovereigns of whom ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... heard his speech and the verse he made, she laughed and smilingly said, "O my lord Nur al-Din, abide in thy place and I will keep thee from their ill grace, though they be as the sea-sands in number. But mount and ride in rear of me, and if we be defeated and put to flight, beware of falling, for none can ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... one of the more gifted singers—of whom, perhaps, the most satisfactory was a young colored man in a black velvet coat and a brilliant red tie—came forward, stood before the pulpit, and began a long solo—as a rule, with scores of verses. One was on the creation, another on the flood, each verse paraphrasing the scriptural account; and the refrain, in which the whole congregation joined, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... of Georgian children! We know him well, that awfully massive and mysterious personage, who seemed ever to his offspring so remote when they were in his presence, so frighteningly near when they were out of it. In Mrs. Turner's Cautionary Stories in Verse he occurs again and again. Mr. Fairchild was a perfect type of him. Mr. Bennet, when the Misses Lizzie, Jane and Lydia were in pinafores, must have been another perfect type: we can reconstruct him as he was then from the many fragments of his awfulness which still ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... is near you, Whose eyes on this simple verse fall, Remember good angels will hear you, And help you, so ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... lines to Hill, with whom he had had a former misunderstanding. Hill replied to these assaults by a ponderous satire in verse upon "tuneful Alexis;" it had, however, some tolerable lines at the opening, imitated from Pope's own verses upon Addison, and attributing to him the same jealousy of merit in others. Hill soon afterwards wrote a civil note to Pope, complaining of the passage in the Dunciad. Pope ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... that would never have been a source of poems for the canon, and one mentioned by Lonsdale, was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous. James Bramston, in his The ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... pomposity of the Queen's jubilee, the voice of the thinkers has not been entirely silent. The utter failure of her reign to present a single noble thought or impulse, a single evidence of sympathy with the immense mass of suffering, has been sharply commented on, not only in prose, but in the vigorous verse ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... above the head, toward the left shoulder, and allow the weight of the body to rest on the left leg, the right foot being carried slightly outward. Allow the body to bang down as far as possible on the left side, without straining too much. Then verse ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... that his father never would deceive him, or bid him do anything but what was right; and he was sure, too, that the lady, from her love to him, and her teaching him to trust God and to pray, would not have bid him do anything that was wrong. And then an old verse his father taught ...
— The Gold Thread - A Story for the Young • Norman MacLeod
... been suffering from a delusion very similar to that of the subject of Mr. Lewis Carroll's nonsense-verse. Mr. Bartlett is a man of few words, though what he does say is both interesting and humorous. Without replying"—(the Westminster representative required him to tell him all he knew about my snake)—"he took up his pen and, on the back of a visiting-card ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... suppose that meant the stars, but it must have been written a long time ago, for there are a good many more than a thousand now; and there's a verse in our ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... which the Universe Beholds itself, and knows it is divine; All harmony of instrument or verse, All prophecy, all medicine, is mine, All light of art or nature;—to my song Victory and praise in ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... as I use in prayer the 16th verse of the 71st Psalm, (in our Prayer-book version), my thoughts especially revert to the subject of the right appreciation of the Scriptures, and in what sense the Bible may be called the word of God, and how and under what conditions the unity of the Spirit ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 is no certificate of excellence. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... Way. A Little Scrip for Travellers. In Prose and Verse. With end papers in colour, and gilt top. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. nett; on thin paper, leather, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... because we knew of no Irish ones, and our little troop of Irish amateurs—as they were at the time—could not have too many Plays, for they would come to nothing without continued playing. Besides, it was exciting to discover, after the unpopularity of blank verse, what one could do with three Plays written in prose and founded on three public interests deliberately chosen,—religion, humour, patriotism. I planned in those days to establish a dramatic movement upon the popular passions, as the ritual of religion is established in the ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... before the eyes of the world. But now let us hear what the prophet saith further: "The dead shall not live," saith he, "neither shall the tyrants, nor the dead arise, because thou hast visited and scattered them, and destroyed all their memory," verse 14. ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... agitation. He was not so old, to be sure—his glass gave him little more than the five-and-thirty years to which his wife confessed—but he had fancied himself already in the temperate zone; yet here he was listening for her step with a tender sense of all it symbolized, with some old trail of verse about the garlanded nuptial door-posts floating through his enjoyment of the pleasant room and the good dinner just ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... haynous Treasons of Ballard and Babington: with other their Adherents, latelie executed. Together with the horrible attempts and actions of the Q. of Scottes: and the Sentence pronounced against her at Fodderingay. Newlie compiled and set foorth, in English verse: For a Newyeares gifte to all loyall English subiects, by W. Kempe. Imprinted at London by Richard Jones, dwelling at the signe of the Rose and crowne, neere Holborne bridge, 1587. 4to. (four leaves) is assigned to our comedian ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... esdition;" but it probably means, according to the common interpretation, that this monarch was to govern the whole race of men, i. e. the children of Seth; for Noah, according to the Old Testament, was descended from him; and of the posterity of Noah, was the whole earth overspread. And in verse 19, it is added "out of Jacob shall come he that shall ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... Barbey d'Aurevilly, an appreciation of one of your comedies which bears a title very appropriate to yourself: 'Honor.' "And this play does him honor," said Barbey d'Aurevilly, "because it is charming, light, and supple, written in flowing verse, the correctness of which does not rob it of ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... laughed until the tears streamed down his cheeks at Blakeney's foolish yet funny repartees. His doggerel verse, "We seek him here, we seek him there," etc., was sung to the tune of "Ho! Merry Britons!" and to the accompaniment of glasses knocked loudly against the table. Lord Grenville, moreover, had a most perfect cook—some wags asserted that he was a scion ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... it was like what you ought to be, and what you should be if you ever reached heaven; and you repeated that verse in the Revelation about 'those that have not defiled their garments.' I always think of it. It seems ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... beating more and more violently, her breath coming quicker and quicker, and when she had reached the last verse, tears burst from her eyes, and she raised the book with both hands to hurl it from her and throw her arms around the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... does not, at least by hearsay, know the Cigale? Where in the entomological world shall we find a more famous reputation? Her fame as an impassioned singer, careless of the future, was the subject of our earliest lessons in repetition. In short, easily remembered lines of verse, we learned how she was destitute when the winter winds arrived, and how she went begging for food to the Ant, her neighbour. A poor welcome she received, the would-be borrower!—a welcome that has become proverbial, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... to which Goethe belonged? At a time when a common cause with Austria conjures up again the shade of the dear old Holy Roman Empire no other verse in Faust seems so inept as that concerning the ugly political song. Today we should rather say "An unpolitical song, an ugly song;" for to the people that but a few weeks ago was mindful of naught but works of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to the editors of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Delineator, Good Housekeeping, The Lyric, St. Nicholas, and Contemporary Verse for their courteous permission to reprint many ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... small. We leave the rest to the reader's imagination, but we are bound to say that it had a thrilling effect. And they were sorry, too, when the hymn was finished. This was obvious, for when one of the singers began the last verse over again the others joined him with alacrity and sang it straight through. Even Gunter and those like-minded men who had remained on deck were moved by the fervour ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... floor. It was a splendid night to sleep on deck; and so, protected from the stiff breeze by the flapping canvas, on an army cot which the muchacho had stretched out, I went to sleep, my thoughts instinctively running into verse: ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... to do. He made long voyages, copying manuscripts in Flanders and in the cloisters along the Rhine and in Paris and Liege and finally in Rome. Then he went to live in a lonely valley of the wild mountains of Vaucluse, and there he studied and wrote and soon he had become so famous for his verse and for his learning that both the University of Paris and the king of Naples invited him to come and teach their students and subjects. On the way to his new job, he was obliged to pass through Rome. The people had heard of his fame as an editor of half-forgotten Roman authors. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... EUR. Canons of verse I introduced, and neatly chiselled wit; To look, to scan: to plot, to plan: to twist, to turn, to woo: On all to ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... writing poetry in such a place? Everybody does write poetry that goes there. In the state archives, kept in the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of unpublished verse,—some by well-known hands, and others, quite as good, by the last people you would think of as versifiers,—men who could pension off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what they had left. Of course I had to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... helpful literal reading of a verse in Hebrews.[108] "Now the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, with the blood of an eternal covenant, put you in joint [with Himself] to do His will in every good work, working in you [or through you] that which is well-pleasing ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be to take the poem more seriously than Vergil intended it to be when he wrote currente calamo. Yet we may say that on the whole the modulation of the verse, the treatment of the caesural pauses[7] and the phrasing compare rather favorably with the Catullan hexameters which obviously served as its models, that in the best lines the poet shows himself sensitive to delicate effects, and that the pastoral ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... the almighty and enduring care of God. Then just before I went to my lecture I went to see her again: I asked her if she still remembered the hymn, 'Thou art mine, because I hold thee;' when she said, 'Oh yes,' and repeated the verse, 'O Lord my refuge, Fountain of my Joys.' 'Yes, eternal,' I added. I left her, thinking that she might last considerably longer. But I was suddenly called from my lecture, when I again committed her grand spirit to God who gave it, and closed ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... occurred to me the Hunting of the Boar, Cinyras and Myrrha, the good-natur'd story of Baucis and Philemon, with the rest, which I hope I have translated closely enough, and given them the same turn of verse which they had in the original; and this, I may say without vanity, is not the talent of every poet. He who has arriv'd the nearest to it, is the ingenious and learned Sandys, the best versifier of ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... a means of grace was known to the first man who wrote a verse or who sang a ballad. It was discovered back in the darkness before men invented words or devised letters. The only poetry you will ever know is that you learned by heart when you were young. Happy is he who has learned much, and much of that which ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... hearts break, lad, and then in verse. Shall I weep? No. Let me laugh; for, my faith, it is laughable. I brought it on myself. Fate led me to the precipice, and I myself jumped over. Yesterday I had pride, I was heir to splendid estates, ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... when she came down the stair: and read it in your face. We look when you don't fancy us looking, and see better than you think, dear Harry: and just now when they spoke about your poems—you writ pretty lines when you were but a boy—you thought Beatrix was a pretty subject for verse, did not you, Harry?" (The gentleman could only blush for a reply.) "And so she is—nor are you the first her pretty face has captivated. 'Tis quickly done. Such a pair of bright eyes as hers learn their power very soon, and use it very early." And, looking at him keenly with hers, the fair ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray |
