"Verse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Europe. This is preserved in the Cotton MSS. in the British Museum. His fourth translation was the 'Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,' by Bede. To this last may be added the 'Blossom Gatherings from St. Augustine,' and many minor compositions in prose and verse, translations from the Latin fables and poems, and his own note-book, in which he jots, with what may be termed a journalistic instinct, scenes that he had witnessed, such as Aldhelm standing on the bridge instructing ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... deal before all others. These form as it were a kind of palaestra of folly, a very short training in which will suffice to break down that stiffness and self-respect in the soul, which is so incompatible with modern poetry. Taking, therefore, the silliest and commonest of all kinds of verse, and the one whose sentiments come most readily to hand in vulgar ...
— Every Man His Own Poet - Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book • Newdigate Prizeman
... thou plead, when, like a love-verse printed On the smooth polish of an emerald, I see the marks she stamped, the kisses dinted Large-lettered, by her lips? thy speech withheld Speaks all too plainly; go,—abide thy choice! If thou dost stay, I shall more greatly grieve thee; Not records ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... charge was read, and those against him showed their hand, it was easy to see that the game was up. No one saw this any sooner than Carew himself; yet he carried himself like a man, and confessed the indictment without a quiver. They brought him the book, to read a verse and save his neck, perhaps, by pleading benefit of clergy. But he knew the temper of those against him, and that nothing might avail; so he refused the plea quietly, saying, 'I am no clerk, sirs. All I wish to read ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... old letters, bits of verse, locks of hair, pressed flowers, inscribed books, photographs, etc., all make acceptable wedding gifts. By telling you whether they should be presented to the Bride or to the Groom PERFECT BEHAVIOR has, we feel, settled the ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... which I borrowed from a neighbor, I thought I might venture to read in the open, trusting that the word "Christian" would be proof against its cautious condemnation. But father balked at the word "Philosopher," and quoted from the Bible a verse which spoke of "philosophy falsely so-called." I then ventured to speak in defense of the book, arguing that we could not do without at least a little of the most useful kinds ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... thing in the book is 'Semael,' though the plot is neither very apparent nor very novel, the imagery as trite as need be, the blank verse heavy and monotonous, without breaks, grouping, or relief, and the accents as often as ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... newspapers are very largely the same. To a certain extent many of them are exactly the same, for the vastness of the country makes it possible to syndicalise various features, so that you find Walt Mason's sagacious and merry and punctual verse, printed to look like prose but never disappointing the ear, in one of the journals that you buy wherever you are, in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Chicago or New York; and Mr. Montagu's topical rhymes in another; ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... of the first circuit all the mathematical figures are conspicuously painted—figures more in number than Archimedes or Euclid discovered, marked symmetrically, and with the explanation of them neatly written and contained each in a little verse. There are definitions and propositions, etc. On the exterior convex wall is first an immense drawing of the whole earth, given at one view. Following upon this, there are tablets setting forth for every separate country the customs both public and private, the laws, the ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... by the sheep-market or by the sheep-gate, nor whereabouts in Jerusalem Bethesda might happen to be. It may be of importance for us to notice that the mention of the angel who appears in the fourth verse is not a part of the original narrative. The true text only tells us of an intermittent pool which possessed, or was supposed to possess, curative energy; and round which the kindness of some forgotten benefactor had built five rude porches. There lay a crowd of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... music and religion; the slim, fair comtesse had read much verse and romance. So she was his teacher in that literature which would most interest a brace of young lovers. There was no one at home to note how late he stayed of evenings, and one night he returned to his own house to find ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... while they adopt this position, do not mistake results for causes. They know from actual experience that Solomon was right when he attributed intemperance to ill conditions. Hunt out your Bible and turn to the Book of Proverbs, chapter 31, verse 7. There you will read: "Let him drink and forget his poverty, and remember ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... down in the thicket, listened to this little song with great delight; but she was extremely sentimental where poetry was concerned, and it happened that when she heard this last verse she clasped her hands in a burst of rapture and exclaimed in quite a loud voice, "Oh, delicious!" This was very unfortunate, for the song stopped short the instant she spoke, and for a moment everything was perfectly silent; then the little voice spoke up again, and ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... who were evidently much pleased, took up the chorus moderately at the second verse, came out strong at the third, and sang with such genuine fervour at the last that it was quite evident, as Moses remarked, there was not a lazy man amongst them—at least, ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... really is a mystery. But I am not at all more fortunate in the reception of my poetry. I have tried it every way—ballades by the bale, sonnets by the dozen, loyal odes, seditious songs, drawing-room poetry, an Epic on the history of Labducuo, erotic verse, all fire, foam, and fangs, reflective ditto, humble natural ballads about signal-men and newspaper-boys, Life-boat rescues, Idyls, Nocturnes in rhyme, tragedies in blank verse. Nobody will print them, or, if anybody ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... tone. The master of the mansion leaped from his restful chair. Where his feet had ornamented the coping his face now appeared. Far out he leaned, and roared at the musician below. The brass throat blared back at him, while the soloist, his eyes closed in the ecstasy of art, brought the "verse" part of his selection to an excruciating conclusion, half a tone below pitch. Before the chorus there was a brief pause for effect. In this pause, from Mr. Linder's open face a voice fell like a falling star. Although it did not cry "Excelsior," its output of vocables might have been mistaken, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... air and glorious sunshine,—when I felt the soft, rich, green grass beneath, and the blue illimitable heavens smiling above. I had come out of darkness into marvellous light. I was drenched with light as I had previously been by the cold, gray mist. I remembered another verse of the immortal poem I had learned from the lips ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... alike my songs and praises be To one, of one, still such, and ever so. Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence; Therefore my verse to constancy confined, One thing expressing, leaves out difference. 'Fair, kind, and true' is all my argument, 'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words; And in this ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... the book the general had been reading. It was the Bible, and open at the twenty-second chapter of the Book of Joshua. His eye fell full upon the twenty-second verse, which was marked. "The Lord God of gods, the Lord God of gods, he knoweth, and Israel he shall know; if; it be in rebellion, or if in transgression against the Lord, (save ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... language as he found it settled in any one part of Greece, but searched through its different dialects with this particular view, to beautify and perfect his numbers he considered these as they had a greater mixture of vowels or consonants, and accordingly employed them as the verse required either a greater smoothness or strength. What he most affected was the Ionic, which has a peculiar sweetness, from its never using contractions, and from its custom of resolving the diphthongs into two syllables, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... and idle ways, for Christ's sake, and then ask Him to give you strength henceforth to obey this word of His. And then listen to the little chime, "Do it heartily! do it heartily!" And then the last word of the verse about Hezekiah will be true of ...
— Morning Bells • Frances Ridley Havergal
... into English verse is in some respects specially difficult. In the first place, the translator has to deal with a language remarkable for its unity and fluency, qualities which, according to Curtius (History of Greece, i. 18), are the result of the "delicately ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Freedom, whose heart is a perpetual bleeding fountain of philanthropy.'" The friends of the government carried Paine in effigy, with a pair of stays under his arms, and burned the figure in the streets. The friends of humanity added a new verse to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... creature is limited within its own nature." But to be limited belongs to bodies. Therefore, every creature is corporeal. Now angels are God's creatures, as appears from Ps. 148:2: "Praise ye" the Lord, "all His angels"; and, farther on (verse 4), "For He spoke, and they were made; He commanded, and they were created." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt House—that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old Gardens"—and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his youth. I remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing round his little retreat ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... so beautifully: his voice was so deep and flexible; and his countenance answered so well to every modulation of his voice. Constance was touched by the reader, but not by the verse. Godolphin had great penetration; he perceived it, and turned to the speeches of Satan in Paradise Lost. The noble countenance before him grew luminous at once: the lip quivered, the eye sparkled; the enthusiasm of Godolphin ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we have referred. We had long known her as a writer of picturesque and vigorous prose, as one of the most successful sketchers of New England character, abounding in humor and pathos; but we had never conceived her as a writer of verse. The readers of the "Atlantic" remember too well her "Maya, the Princess," "Metempsychosis," and "The Sphinx's Children," to need reminding that she has qualities of fancy as remarkable as her faculty for observing real life. Miss Terry seems in this volume to have sought refuge from the real ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... other time, and would surely have missed its most peculiar and cherished qualities if reared in any other place. The Ionian intellect of Athens culminates in Plato; Florence runs into the mould of Dante's verse, like fluid bronze; Paris secures remembrance of her wide curiosity in Voltaire's settled expression; and Samuel Johnson holds fast for us that London of the eighteenth century which has passed out of sight, in giving place to the capital of the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his fellow- clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must, he told me of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make himself an undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above sending stories of love and death to the drop-a-penny-in-the-slot journals. It was my fate to sit still while Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and bulky fragments of plays that would surely shake the world. My reward was his unreserved confidence, and the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Sprudell, stimulated by the presence of the moneyed men of Bartlesville and his private knowledge of the importance of the occasion, was keyed up to his best. Genial, beaming, he quoted freely from his French and Latin phrase-book and at every turn of the conversation was ready with appropriate verse—his own, mostly. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... strange thing is that no one in the world has a nicer sense of the beauty of SHAKSPEARE'S verse than Mr. BARKER. Indeed he protests in his preface: "They (the fairies) must be not too startling.... They mustn't warp your imagination—stepping too boldly between SHAKSPEARE'S spirit and yours." (The italics ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... the following books in handy volume size:—Montaigne's Essays, Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Verse, Lockhart's Life of Napoleon, Autobiography of Cellini, Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, Lorna Doone, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, Les Miserables, Vanity Fair, Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Pepys' Diary, Carlyle's French Revolution, The Last of ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... that E mute can in no instance be assimilated to the accented E; but to suppress it entirely, is to break the symmetry of the verse, to put the measure out of time. It is unmistakable that the weakness of the vowel, or mute syllable, concerns the sound, not the duration. Let it die away gently; but for Heaven's sake, do not murder it! Voltaire wrote: "You reproach us with our E mute, as a ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... when I first made his acquaintance, in writing a play, with which he had already filled a whole quire of foolscap, without, however, having quite entered upon the plot; and he read to me some of the scenes in tones of such energy that the whole village heard. Though written in the kind of verse which Dr. Young believed to be the language of angels, his play was sad stuff; and when he paused for my approbation, I ventured to suggest an alteration in one of the speeches. "There, Sir," said Davie, in the vein of Cambyses, "take the pen; ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... beginning of things. Water was the primaeval element. 'Apsu' is the personified great 'ocean'—the 'Deep' that covers everything. With Apsu there is associated Tiamat. Tiamat is the equivalent of the Hebrew T'hom,[693] which occurs in the second verse of the opening chapter of Genesis, and which is, like Apsu, the personification of the 'watery deep.' Apsu and Tiamat are, accordingly, synonymous. The combination of the two may be regarded as due to the introduction of the theological ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... hurried to collect everything they had out of which they could make a house. Though she was not yet strong enough to talk, they thought perhaps she might sing the kind of house she would like to have, so Wendy sang softly this little verse: ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... among mountains, and so often driven from their dens, so wasted by wars civil and foreign! alas one man ever got all by heart? I doubt it; were parts preserved by some, other parts by others? Mighty lucky, that the tradition was never interrupted, nor any part lost-not a verse, not a measure, not the sense! luckier and luckier. I have been extremely qualified myself lately for this Scotch memory; we have had nothing but a coagulation of rains, fogs, and frosts, and though they ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... stay-at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring, mysterious pine go; the birch has humble every-day uses. In Maine, the paper or canoe birch is turned to more account than any other tree. I read in Gibbon that the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebrate in verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to which the various parts and products of the palm-tree were applied. The Maine birch is turned to so many accounts that it may well be called the palm of this region. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made especially ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... begins with profane, and ends with holy innovations—scratching out old readings which every commentator had sanctioned; abolishing ecclesiastical dignities which every reformer had spared; thrusting an anapaeest into a verse, which will not bear it; and intruding a Canon into a Cathedral, which does not want it; and this is the Prelate by whom the proposed reform of the Church has been principally planned, and to whose practical wisdom the Legislature is called upon to defer. The Bishop of London ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... was endeavouring to explain this passage also, according to the views of the Roman Catholic church, with no other object than the praise of men, and other worldly motives, I chanced to read the 29th chapter of Isaiah, from the 15th verse to the end. I read, and was afraid. I meditated upon the chapter a long while, and feared that I was doing what I did, with a motive far different from the only proper one, viz. the glory and the pleasure of God. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... silent; no doubt the last verse was finished. Amelie, who would not interrupt the last meditations of the doomed men, and who had recognized Gilbert's beautiful ode written on a hospital bed the night before his death, now signed ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the President, closed the exercises with some translations of his own, which he called "Stories in Verse." We give two of them here; each relates an incident of Eberhard, the good count, whom German poets have often remembered ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Rose has burned itself into one's silly Soul in spite of all. Do you know that one of Burns' few almost perfect stanzas was perfect till he added two Syllables to each alternate Line to fit it to the lovely Music which almost excuses such a dilution of the Verse? ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... not to pause and first devise How he should tell the king; for in nowise Were such love-message worthily bested Save in fine verse by music rendered. He sought a poet-friend, a Siennese, And "Mico, mine," he said, "full oft to please Thy whim of sadness I have sung thee strains To make thee weep in verse: now pay my pains, And write me a canzon divinely sad, Sinlessly ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... euphemistically referred to was scarcely more than a three-legged stool, which he occupied four mornings in the week, the rest of his time being spent at home in the arduous task of writing tragedies in blank verse. ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... from Mr. Philip Yorke's Parliamentary Journal, that the letter-writer took a part in the debate-"Young Mr. Walpole's speech," he says, "met with deserved applause from every body: it was judicious and elegant: he applied the verse which Lucan puts in Curia's mouth to Caesar, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... digressions ought to return upon the main subject. The art consists in preserving real unity in the midst of the superficial deviations rendered easy by this form of composition. The facility of digression is really a temptation, not a privilege. Anybody can write blank verse of a kind, because it so easily slips into prose; and that is why good blank verse is so rare. And so anybody can write a decent dialogue if you allow him to ramble as we all do in actual talk. The finest philosophical dialogues are those in which a complete logical framework underlies ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... thoroughly insulated as that of his hero—but the "dream is one," it is consistent with itself, and is painted with trembling truth of touch and delicate tenderness of feeling. We feel it to be destitute of profound suggestiveness and massive thought, but its verse is solemnly dignified, its imagery is chastely grand, and a rich chiaroscuro rests like a tropical night upon the whole. Besides the stanzas we have already alluded to, it has some of those brief touches which show the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... to his brothers and sisters, or even to his friend the bookseller, equally secret also were the sources of his happiness. No eye but his own ever beheld those scraps of paper which he begged from the bookseller, and covered with childish efforts at verse-making. No one shared the happiness of those hours, of which perhaps a quarter was spent in working at the poem, and three-fourths were given to the day-dreams of the poet; or knew that the wild fancies of his brain made Friedrich's nights more happy ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... during the campaign by the official organ of the State Retail Liquor Dealers' Protective Association, called "Progress." For months preceding the election it was filled with objections, innuendo and abuse in prose, verse and pictures, all designed to impress the reader with the absurdity and danger of giving the vote to women. It appealed to the farmers and to every class of people connected in any way with the manufacture and sale of beer, saying in headlines: "Give the Ballot to Woman and Industry goes ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... goin' out of the room, she called me back to hear a verse or two she particularly liked, about the ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... live (though why, yourselves alone can guess) In hope deferred, ambitious still to shine By hating me at half a cent a line— Like drones among the bees of brighter wing, Sunless to shine and impotent to sting. To estimate in easy verse I'll try The controversial value of a lie. So lend your ears—God knows you have enough!— I mean to teach, and if I ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other.... The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of many of the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose—not because it was erotic.... It was a passing mood which gave the poetry of the hour a hothouse fragrance; a perfume faint ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... before the eyes of all the people, he thought of his own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more than king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential of men. The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John's Gospel: "A branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine." The centre circle containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of English soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... fata libelli," as Terentianus Maurus says, in a frequently quoted verse. If Cromwell's Commissioners were hard on Duns, the Visitors of Edward VI. were ruthless in their condemnation of everything that smacked of Popery or of magic. Evangelical religion in England has never been very favourable to learning. Thus, in 1550 "the ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... answered Sue. "Don't you know the little verse: 'Once a trap was baited, with a piece of cheese. It tickled so a little mouse it almost made him sneeze.' And when your mices sneeze, when they smell the cheese, you could hear them, ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Playing Circus • Laura Lee Hope
... pacified him; and, with a misty sense of his importance in a convivial point of view, on account of the manner in which he had acquitted himself in the chorus, he now essayed a higher flight, and treated the party to a new version of "The Pope," oddly condensed into one verse, as follows:— ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... Gesenius translate verse 4 in a way wonderfully in accord with my theory: "The flood breaketh out from the inhabitants," they render, "a shaft, (or gulley-like pit,) is broken open far from the inhabitant, the dweller on the surface of the earth."[1] This is doubtless the ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... as you suppose, miss. To begin with, the original is in verse; a late Latin poem in a queer metre, and by whom written nobody knows. But you are quite right about my wasting my time. . . . What troubles me is that I have been wasting yours, when you ought to have been out at play in ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ripe and rare; no holiday trifler in the gardens of learning. He spoke and wrote Latin like his native tongue. He could compose poignant Greek epigrams. He was so familiar with Hebrew, that he had rendered the Psalms of David out of the original into flowing Flemish verse, for the use of the reformed churches. That he possessed the modern tongues of civilized Europe, Spanish, Italian, French, and German, was a matter of course. He was a profound jurisconsult, capable of holding debate against all competitors ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... falling to sleep, with a sense of the incalculable; and the songs themselves are old. Le Bon Roi Dagobert has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh. The nurse knows nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that she herself slept to when a child. The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in Le Pont a' Avignon, is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the tete a tete of child and nurse, in a thousand little sequestered rooms at night. Malbrook would be comparatively modern, were not all things that ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... Society Co. has published an American edition of this book. It contains pieces in prose and verse by all the leading Irish writers and speakers. It is bound in Irish linen, gilt edges, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... anything. To Helen Adams it had meant, ever since the day of the sophomore-freshman basket-ball game, the ability to write something that would interest her classmates. It might be a song that they would care to sing, or a little verse or a story that Miss Raymond would read in her theme class, as she had Mary Brooks's version of the Chapin house freshmen's letters home, and that the girls would listen to and laugh over, and later discuss and compliment her upon. It was not that she wanted the compliments, but they would measure ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... himself, 'I have ever passed through the forest unharmed, why should I fear that evil will befall me here?' and he began to repeat aloud a verse of the Bible. ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... having outlived the requirements of human passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and the freshness of girlhood expand, is seized with a pang which nothing but the spasm of verse will relieve. Each youth imagines that spring-tide and love are wonders which he is the first of human beings to appreciate, and he burns to alleviate his emotion in rhyme. Historians exaggerate, perhaps, the function of music in awakening and guiding ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... man, is hidden in that mist which overhangs the morning of history. Yet the indications are that this art of arts had its origin, as far back as the days of savagery, in the ideal element of life rather than the utilitarian. There came a time, undoubtedly, when the mnemonic value of verse was recognized in the transmission of laws and records and the hard-won wealth of experience. Our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, whose rhyme, it will be remembered, was initial rhyme, or alliteration, have bequeathed to our modern speech many such devices for "the knitting ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... raised in the attitude of a suppliant who implores, the cloud of her dark hair flaming into bronze against a sunset sky. Ted was rather too fond of that trick; but the study was not a mere vulgar success—he had achieved expression in it. It was marked "Sold." There were some lines of verse on the square panel at the base of the frame. Ted could not have afforded such a setting for his picture, but the frame was contributed by Mr. Percival Knowles, the purchaser of the canvas. The same gentleman was also the author of the verse, specially written for the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse by thousands in many lands for many centuries, exciting doubtless many a noble deed of self-denial, and spurring to the forefront many a popular act of patriotic daring. In Switzerland certainly this picturesque representative ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Within your bounds a large-limbed race of men; A long-lived race, and brimming o’er with song, From lays of ancient Greece, and Roman eld, To songs of Arthur’s knights, and England’s prime, And modern verse, in graceful sonnet sung. Each of the brood was clothed upon with song; Yet some had stronger pinions than the rest; And one there was, who for thy fame will long Send pilgrims to thy cross ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... their deeds in songs that have come down to us; but with the exception of the Eskimo, descendants of North American races have never been credited with a taste for harmony. Once I asked Pierre how he acquired his art of verse-making. With a laugh of scorn, he demanded if the wind and the waterfalls and the birds learned music from beardless boys and draggle-coated dominies with armfuls of books. However, it may have been with his Pegasus, his mount for the hunt was no laggard. He rode a knob-jointed, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... tributes that have been offered, in prose and verse, and in almost every language of Europe, to his memory, I shall select two which appear to me worthy of peculiar notice, as being, one of them,—so far as my limited scholarship will allow me to judge,—a simple and happy imitation of those laudatory inscriptions with which ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the memory of William Shenstone, Esquire, In whose verse Were all the natural graces. And in whose manners Was all the amiable simplicity Of pastoral poetry, With the sweet ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... often wondered how it has come about that Job has become proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or else a case where both adjectives have shifted their ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... delightful intercourse through the details of a bouquet, just as you would comprehend Saadi from a fragment of his verse. Have you ever smelt in the fields in the month of May the perfume that communicates to all created beings the intoxicating sense of a new creation; the sense that makes you trail your hand in the water from a boat, and loosen your hair to the breeze while your mind ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the songs were natural, and the love seductive. And now, my young friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star,—all that love too will ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... extravagant, imperial for the good—the employer of labour, the builder of stores, the spender of money; there is abuse, savage and outrageous, for the bad, the man who 'buys out of the town,' the man who intends to go, the sitter on the fence; with persuasion and invitation in prose, verse, and zincograph for all that outside world which prefers to live in cities other ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... spiritualism are reliable, and happen over and over again, under test conditions, in the presence of witnesses; and that similar phenomena are recorded in the Bible, which is written for our learning. It is not an opinion, not a theory, but a fact. There is chapter and verse for it, and this is what has rehabilitated the Bible. The clergy ought to be very grateful to spiritualism for this, for they could not have done it themselves. ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... produced in 1828 a metrical tale, entitled "Drouthy Tam," which, passing through numerous editions, brought a local reputation to the writer. In 1830 he published a small volume of poems, and in 1832 a little work in prose and verse, entitled "Recreations of Leisure Hours." In 1848 appeared from his pen a "History of Kilmarnock," in a well-written octavo volume. A collection of his best songs was published in 1855, under the title of "Ingleside Lilts." Mackay has contributed extensively ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... innocent child herself is in such deadly earnest. The two long narrative poems, "Bertha" and "Elfrida," are tragic in the extreme. Both are dashed off apparently at white heat: "Elfrida," over fifteen hundred lines of blank verse, in two weeks; "Bertha," in three and a half. We have said that Emma Lazarus was a born singer, but she did not sing, like a bird, for joy of being alive; and of being young, alas! there is no hint in these youthful effusions, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... sedan-chair. They took care to bring her straight to the grotto, where I was waiting for her. This was a new surprise for the good mother. She could not sufficiently express her astonishment and delight, when Jack and Francis, taking their flageolets, accompanied their brothers, who sung the following verse, which Ernest had added to ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... that night, and which happened to be the fifth of the Gospel of St. Mark. His voice trembled, his face was ghastly pale, and his hands shook perceptibly as he began; but he read on, in low, broken tones, and with evident pain and difficulty, until he came to the verse containing these words: 'My little daughter lieth at the point of death.' Here he stopped suddenly, endeavoured vainly for a few minutes to proceed, and then, covering his face with his hands, sank down in the pulpit ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... judgment brief and mild; when he judges the Gentiles, he will sit, and make it long and severe!" They affirm that the resurrection will be effected by means of a dew; and they quote to that effect this verse from Canticles: "I sleep, but my heart waketh; my head is filled with dew, and my locks with drops of the night." Some assert that "the resurrection will be immediately caused by God, who never gives ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Words with just note and accent, not to scan With Midas' ears, committing short and long; Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, With praise enough for Envy to look wan; To after age thou shalt be writ the man, That with smooth air could'st humour best our tongue. Thou honour'st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire, That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn, or story. Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher Than his Casella, who he woo'd to sing, Met in the milder shades ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... every verse is the same. When you ask a Russian to translate it for you he shrugs ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... Lucy, and made her listen with more than ordinary attention to her father's sermon, though, to do her justice, she was not usually either sleepy or inattentive. Mr. Raymond began by alluding to the "race set before us," which the apostle had spoken of in the previous verse,—the race which all who will follow Christ must know, but only in the strength He will supply. The young and strong might think themselves sufficient for it, but the stern experience of life would soon teach them that it must be often run with a heavy heart and weary feet; that ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... been urged by a particular circumstance to make various trials of translation into Latin (lyrical, etc.) verse—an exercise I always used to dislike, and have never much practised. I now find my dislike was largely caused by the unsuitable and over-stiff metres which used to be imposed on me when I was under orders.... In English and Greek versification I have ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... their little ones who were at work—a condition which sometimes obtains in some parts of the United States even to this day. Michael Sadler, a member of the House of Commons and a fearless champion of the rights of the poor and oppressed, described this aspect of the evil in touching verse.[18] ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... well attended. The second chapter of Peter's first letter was read. Much good instruction for self-examination was given, both in German and English, from the general scope of the chapter. I made a few remarks on the middle clause in the seventeenth verse: 'Love the brotherhood.' ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... not know, by Jupiter! that these feed very many sophists, Thurian soothsayers, practisers of medicine, lazy-long-haired-onyx-ring-wearers, song-twisters for the cyclic dances, and meteorological quacks. They feed idle people who do nothing, because such men celebrate them in verse. ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... called "THE BAB BALLADS," the other "MORE BAB BALLADS." The period during which they were written extended over some three or four years; many, however, were composed hastily, and under the discomforting necessity of having to turn out a quantity of lively verse by a certain day in every week. As it seemed to me (and to others) that the volumes were disfigured by the presence of these hastily written impostors, I thought it better to withdraw from both volumes such ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... persons shall have it, and the rest have none; or whether the Earth shall be made a Common Treasury to all, without respect of persons?" As it traverses much the same ground as the pamphlet from which we have just quoted at such length, it really calls for no further notice from us. The following verse on its title-page, however, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... took the sword from the tree against which she had propped it when Theron arrived, and entered the dwelling, murmuring as she went another verse of the sword-song: ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 1822), his first volume, entitled simply Poems; he wrote newspaper articles on Berlin and on Poland, which he visited in the summer of 1822; and in the spring of 1823 he published Tragedies together with a Lyrical Intermezzo—two very romantic and undramatic plays in verse, separated in the volume by a short ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... later than Hooker, in 1564, and his share in founding English prose as we know it is, of course, not comparable with that of Hooker, for of Shakespeare's prose there remains for us but little. Whenever he rose to eloquence he clothed himself in verse as with an inevitable attribute, but on the rare occasions when he condescended to step down from the great line to "the other harmony of prose" he is as splendid as in all else. In Hamlet we have this ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... twinkled out through the gloaming, and, looking up beyond them through the infinite stretches of space, Joyce thought of a verse that she and Jack had once learned together, one rainy Sunday at her Grandmother Ware's, sitting on a little stool ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... which has been called the "Psalm of Creation," because it speaks of the greatness and glory of God, and of how the Lord shall rejoice in His works, we find a description of what happened at this time. There is a beautiful verse which speaks of God covering the earth "with the deep as with a garment"; and of a time when it was so covered and hidden that "the ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... and renown by the same valorous exploits. Augustina is the most to be envied, for her praises have been sung by a great poet; Mary Ambree has a noble ballad to perpetuate her fame; Molly Pitcher is still without the tribute of a verse to remind her countrymen occasionally of her splendid courage ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... the condition of the Israelites was better under the Egyptians than ours is under the whites. I call upon the professing christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... exhorted them to have no fear of the infidels, against whom he was about to launch an irresistible force of troops and Ghazis, and wound up as follows: 'By the favour of God, and in accordance with the verse "Verily God has destroyed the powerful ones," the whole of them will go to the fire of hell for evermore. Therefore kill them to the extent of your ability.' A curious commentary this on the Amir's ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Anglo-Saxon verse was intended to be sung, and hence rhythm and accent or stress are important. Stress and the length of the line are varied; but we usually find that the four most important words, two in each half of the line, are stressed on their most ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... says that in his extemporaneous harangues he often spoke as from a supernatural impulse; and Demetrius tells us that in an address to the people, like a man inspired, he once uttered this oath in verse: ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... genius that has hitherto existed;" "For the creation of tragedy, comedy, history, idyll, idyllistic comedy, esthetic idyll, for the profoundest presentation, or for any casually thrown off, passing piece of verse, he is the only man. He not only wields an unlimited power over our mirth and our tears, over all the workings of passion, humor, thought, and observation, but he possesses also an infinite region full of the phantasy of fiction, of a horrifying and an amusing character. He possesses penetration ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... drink it or wear it on the lassies? And, anyway, my kingdom is no of this world. Either I'm a poet or else I'm nothing." Clem would remind him of old age. "I'll die young, like Robbie Burns," he would say stoutly. No question but he had a certain accomplishment in minor verse. His "Hermiston Burn," with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... poesy, which prove that the old Conquerors were much more expert with the sword than with the pen. Hist. del Peru, Parte 1, lib. 2, cap. 93.] [Footnote 27: "Fue recibimiento mui solemne, con universal alegria del Pueblo, por verse libre de Tiranos; i toda la Gente, a voces, bendecia al Presidente, i le llamaban: Padre, Restaurador, i Pacificador, dando gracias a Dios, por haver vengado las injurias hechas a su Divina Magestad." Herrera, Hist General, dec. 8, lib. 4, cap. ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... whether I was prepossessed from the first moment I saw you, but I admire all your prose and verse whenever ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... as the Hermits of the New Parnassus. He and his school had talked outside cafes and elsewhere more than solitaries do as a rule; but, then, rules were what they had vowed themselves to destroy. They proclaimed that verse, in particular, was free. The Hermit of the New Parnassus was now in the Ministry of the Interior, and already decorated: he expressed to Trent the opinion that what France needed most was a hand of iron. He was able to quote the ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... and fear long years have passed And glorious tidings come at last. True, true is now the ancient verse Which men in time of bliss rehearse: "Once only in a hundred years Great joy to mortal men appears." But now his woes and triumph tell, And loss and gain as each befell." He ceased: Hanuman mighty-souled ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... splendour without attaining it—of clogging his lines with consonants, and of mistaking inversion of language for poetry. Not one of these faults belongs to Collins. In almost all his poems the words follow their natural order, and are mellifluous beyond those of almost any other verse writer. If the Passions are not described with splendour, there is no such thing as splendour. If the beauties which he sought and attained are unnatural and extravagant, then the tests of correctness and good taste which have been hitherto ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Stratford until his death in 1616. Besides the two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece," which first won popularity for him, he has written thirty-seven plays, ranging from the lightest comedy, through romance and historical narrative, to the darkest tragedy. Whatever form his verse takes,—sonnet, song, or dramatic poetry,—it shows the touch of the master hand, the inspiration of the master mind. Of his plays those which are still most frequently acted are the tragedies "Hamlet," "Macbeth," ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... 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 Magazine.] Lady Ruthven ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... under the 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 ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... wholly given up. He could write in one style, but not in another, and the Greek language had not as yet been fashioned by any poet or philosopher to describe physical phenomena. The early physiologists had generally written in verse; the prose writers, like Democritus and Anaxagoras, as far as we can judge from their fragments, never attained to a periodic style. And hence we find the same sort of clumsiness in the Timaeus of Plato which characterizes the ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... artistic eye for picture-writing than any Indian race north of Mexico. They enliven their long winter nights with imaginative tales, music, and song. Their poets are held in high honor, and it is said they get their notion of the music of verse by sleeping by the sound of running water, that they ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... this sable hearse Lies, the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. Death! ere thou hast slain another Learned and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... discussed many things—the problems of life and of those beyond life, philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. He recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations—certain phrases and lines of verse—as, for instance, the wild, free breath of the open that one feels in "the days when we went gipsying a long time ago" and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested by the simple words, "departed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the earth, as dim old "genteel" Wordsworth, whom we are assured that nobody reads. But why were "the best judges" scornful in 1800 and again in 1919 of what gave the noblest and the most inspiriting pleasure to "the best judges" in 1870? The execution of the verse has not altered, the conditions of imagination seem the same, why then is the estimate always changing? Is every form of poetic taste, is all trained enjoyment of poetry, merely a graduated illusion which goes up and down like a wave of the sea and carries "the best ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Before the last verse was sung he reminded the audience of the congregational meeting immediately following, and without further comment the service was brought to ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... Musick; Now good morow frends. Now good Cesario, but that peece of song, That old and Anticke song we heard last night; Me thought it did releeue my passion much, More then light ayres, and recollected termes Of these most briske and giddy-paced times. Come, but one verse ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... defend us! They play'd the very devil with their rhymes. They hope'd Apollo a new set would send us; And then, invidiously enough, Place'd modish verse, which they call'd stuff, Against the writing of the ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... Came the dread Apocalypse! It has a very awful look, As it stands there at the end of the book, Like the sun in an eclipse. Ah me! when I think of that vision divine, Think of writing it, line by line, I stand in awe of the terrible curse, Like the trump of doom, in the closing verse! God forgive me! if ever I Take aught from the book of that Prophecy, Lest my part too should be taken away From the Book of Life ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... immediately began. An old man, sitting at the head of the ring, beat time upon the drum, while several of the elder warriors shook their rattles, and "ever and anon" made the woods re-echo with their yells. Each warrior chanted alternately the verse of a song, of which the words generally embraced ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... go through another verse—he felt himself all a-quiver, every nerve shattered. He jumped up. Yes, his conjecture had been right. Mary Ann was crying. He laughed spasmodically again. The thought had occurred to him how vain Peter would be if he could know the effect ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... started at the attempt: he smiled at my fears: his courage was justified by success; and a master of both languages will applaud the curious felicity with which he has transfused into French prose the spirit, and even the humour, of the English verse. It is not my wish to deny how deeply I was interested in these Memoirs, of which I need not surely be ashamed; but at the distance of more than twenty years, it would be impossible for me to ascertain the respective shares of the two associates. A long and intimate ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... close this chapter than by quoting the magnificent verse of Lucretius, which brings before us, better than could a long description, the condition of these men, and the humble starting-point from which humanity has advanced to achieve ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... third great romance, "The Toilers of the Sea" ("Les Travailleurs de la Mer"), published in 1866, was written during his exile in Guernsey. Of all Hugo's romances, both in prose and in verse, none surpasses this for sheer splendour of imagination and diction, for eloquence and sublimity of truth. It is, in short, an idyll of passion, adventure, and self-sacrifice. The description of the moods and mysteries ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... change which that hour wrought in his character; and some weeks after the event, Job received that statue of his little adversary, which had so often struck me, executed by a native artist, with a long letter in verse, a beautiful specimen of doggrel; indeed, gifts both equally creditable to the sculptor and the writer, and most honourable to the animal in whose favour ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... sentiment or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the spirit of the nation. The authors of these productions have frequently won the recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of prose and verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical standards. Neither Longfellow's "Excelsior" nor Poe's "Bells" nor Whittier's "Maud Muller" is among the best poems of the three writers in question, yet there was something in each of these productions which caught ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... effect his humiliation, the earl at once bestowed his favour on Elkanah Settle, a playwright and poet of mean abilities. He had originally been master of a puppet-show, had written verses to order for city pageants, and produced a tragedy in heroic verse, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... will of their gentleness take pain, The rather to correct and mend the same, Than rashly to condemn it with disdain, For well I wot it is not without blame, Because I know the verse therein is wrong As being some too short, and some ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... friends of Lord and Lady John Russell were Sydney Smith, Thomas Moore, and Macaulay. There is a note in verse written by Lady John to Samuel Rogers, which will serve at least to suggest how readily her fancy and good spirits might run into rhyme on the occasion of some family rejoicing or for a ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... capable of being abused. Alcohol not one of these; alcohol always pernicious. Fiction, on the other hand, a good thing. Antiquity of fiction. In early days couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... his own sober inartistic life. A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so old—thirty-two. His temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... office boys, who alone remained to listen to him, demanded that increase of salary justly attached to increased nervous strain. Swinburne, Harrington promptly decided, he did not like. There was an earthiness in his verse, he explained to Maxwell, a material side, wholly lacking in the love of the right man for the right woman—in other words, in his own love for Miss Evans. He wrote a column about this kind of love in his Mars department, and a hundred thousand men read it with gurgles of warm appreciation ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... liberty I have taken; but my opinion is, if it can be of any importance, that if a roe's egg were hung up in the middle of the dome, this hall would have no parallel in the four quarters of the world, and your palace would be the wonder of the unit verse." ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... Bjoernson went abroad and devoted three years to foreign travel, spending the greater part of his time in Italy. From Rome he sent home the historical drama "King Sverre" (1861), which is one of his weakest productions. It is written in blank verse, with occasional rhymes in the more impressive passages. Of dramatic interest in the ordinary sense, there is but little. It is a series of more or less animated scenes, from the period of the great civil war (1130-1240), connected by the personality ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... she showed her uncle the portfolio, directing his attention to the copied verses. Contrary to all her expectations, he only laughed at them, and made no remark about the dark-haired maiden. It was not that he did not notice that particular verse, but he did not wish Marjory to think that there was any reason why she should apply it to herself, and he did not wish her head to be filled with romantic nonsense. So he took away the portfolio, much to Marjory's disgust, ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... myriad-minded dramatist, but in the restricted role of adapter for English readers of familiar Ovidian fables, that he first impressed a wide circle of his contemporaries with the fact of his mighty genius. The perfect sweetness of the verse, and the poetical imagery in 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' practically silenced censure of the licentious treatment of the themes on the part of the seriously minded. Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of the eulogies ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... of her restlessness in the dark days in the unheeding city; she knew whose voice had called, whose arms had held her, though he was unaware. He needed her, though he did not know it. And she had come to him, without understanding. Somewhere she had read a fugitive bit of verse that had meant nothing then, and had been forgotten until now, when it suddenly sang across the years and the spaces like ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... to write ballads descriptive of the bushland of Australia as on light consideration would appear. Reasonably good verse on the subject has been supplied in sufficient quantity. But the maker of folksongs for our newborn nation requires a somewhat rare combination of gifts and experiences. Dowered with the poet's heart, he must yet have passed his 'wander-jaehre' ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... in a deep, blood curdling voice, Captain Benson started in on the first verse of "Down ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... the Origines of Cato the Censor, and other writers, which were then extant, but which have since perished. And these writers, whence did they obtain their historical narratives? If we may credit the theory of Niebuhr,[69] they were transmitted simply by bardic legends, composed in verse. Even Sir G.C. Lewis admits that "commemorative festivals and other periodical observances, may, in certain cases, have served to perpetuate a true tradition of some national event."[70] And how much more ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... into an undergraduate's room, one finds him reading the text with the help of a translation, two editions with notes, and a lecture note-book. No faculty is being used except the memory, which Bishop Creighton calls "the most worthless of our mental powers." The practice of prose and verse composition, often ignorantly decried, has far more educational value; but it belongs to the linguistic art which, if we are right, is not to be demanded of all students. Are we then to restrict the study ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... it was written upon the tables of stone. It is, by its facts, limited to the Jews, for they are the only people who were ever delivered from bondage in Egypt. The abrogation of this covenant is clearly presented in the following language, found in Zechariah, the eleventh chapter and tenth verse: "And I took my staff, even Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I might break my covenant which I had made with all the people. And it was broken in that day; and so the poor of the flock that waited upon me knew that it was the ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... piece in my reading-book at school, I came into the world a little too late on the one hand—and I daresay a little too early on the other—to think much of Byron; and the sonorous verse, prodigiously well delivered, struck me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... am now about to prove I cannot write a verse, but can write love. On such a subject as thy booke I coo'd Write books much greater, but not half so good. But as the humble tenant, that does bring A chicke or egges for's offering, Is tane into the ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... refused to understand it, and assisted by two days of hard walking he reduced Carinthia to an abstract enthusiasm, no very serious burden. His note-book sustained it easily. He wrote her name in simple fondness of the name; a verse, and hints for more, and some sentences, which he thought profound. They were composed as he sat by the roadway, on the top of hills, and in a boat crossing a dark green lake deep under wooded mountain walls: things of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... my feet on the platform, and then I stood straight up in front of the whole school and fairly shouted out this verse: ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope
... wealth doubled. They, again, that will, in expectation of good, reside constantly here, will never have to visit the region of Yama. Those kings that will perform great sacrifices here will reside as long in heaven as Earth herself will last. The chief of the celestials, Shakra, himself composed a verse here and sang it. Listen to it, O Baladeva! "The very dust of Kurukshetra, borne away by the wind, shall cleanse persons of wicked acts and bear them to heaven!" The foremost ones amongst the gods, as also those amongst the Brahmanas, and many foremost ones among the kings of the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... beyond the reach of prose. Nay, he has been wronged also by that other want of true appreciation, which deals in panegyric, and would put asunder those two things which God has joined,—the poet and the man,—as if it were not the same rash improvidence that was the happiness of the verse and the misfortune of the gauger. But his death-bed was at least not haunted by the unappeasable apprehension of a German for his biographer; and that the fame of Lessing should have four times survived this cunningest assault ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... quarrel," said the King, "and it is the way Bilbil and I often amuse ourselves. Listen, now, to the last verse of all: ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Vauxhall. Needless to say, she flew in the face of Dr. James's authority, and went everywhere. She was at Lady Bunbury's drum, whither I had gone in another fruitless chase after Mr. Marmaduke. Dr. Warner's verse was the laughter of the company. And, greatly to my annoyance,—in the circumstances,—I was made a hero of, and showered with three times as many invitations as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... apparitions come for little or no object,—they seldom speak when they do come; if they speak, they utter no ideas above those of an ordinary person on earth. American spirit seers have published volumes of communications, in prose and verse, which they assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious dead: Shakespeare, Bacon,—Heaven knows whom. Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of higher order than would be communications from living ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Sir Henry Taylor of Samuel Rogers that when he wrote that very indifferent poem, Italy, he said, "I will make people buy. Turner shall illustrate my verse." It is of no importance that the biographer of Rogers tells us that the poet first made the artist known to the world by these illustrations. Taylor's story is a good one, and the moral worth taking to heart. The late Lord Acton, most ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... left, right, left," until perfect uniformity was attained, and the disciplined force marched steadily on to College Green, following the triumphal chariot with alternate verses of "God Save the Queen" and "Rule Britannia," each verse interpolated with great bursts of applause. At Trinity College the glare of torches appeared, and simultaneously an organised attempt at groaning boomed in under the cheering. Heedless of the rabble the column marched merrily on, not with the broken rush of an English ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... was, he was disconcerted only for a moment. Lifting his heart to God for guidance, the thought came into his mind to take a text suggested by the rude remarks of the Boer. So he opened the Bible to the fifteenth chapter of Matthew and read the twenty-seventh verse: "Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table." Pausing a moment, he slowly repeated these words, with his eyes steadily fixed on the face of the Boer. Again pausing, a third time he quoted these appropriate words. Angrily the Boer cried out, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... outrageous sensibility, which disgraces most German poetry."[32] His special interest in the Germans was an early mood which seems not to have returned. After the process of translation had discovered to him his verse-making faculty, he naturally passed on to the writing of original poems, and circumstances of a half accidental sort determined that the Scottish ballads which he had always loved should absorb his attention for the next two or ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... precipices; a thunderstorm coming on at the time, the headman invited us to take shelter in a hut until it had passed. Our guide having informed him of what he knew and conceived to be our object, was favoured in return with a long reply in well-sounding blank verse; at the end of every line the guide, who listened with deep attention, responded with a grunt, which soon became so ludicrous that our men burst into a loud laugh. Neither the poet nor the responsive guide took ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone |
