"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grand seclusion! But soon there came a thought of Wordsworth's sonnet, addressed to just such a mood, "Yes, there is holy pleasure in thine eye," and I felt at once the truth of his admonition. What if the cottage really were mine,—mine to spend a lifetime in? How quickly the poetry would turn to prose! ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Otherwise, we should only be acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose superior ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... One would say that the inspiration of such a theme could have had no great force, and such doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem puddles, nevertheless, springs, flower-like, a charming and natural piece of prose. ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... grip on English tragedy till they choked it. His regard for Shakespeare did not give him courage for the addition of a comic element or an underplot. He must obey the "hampering critics," though his avowed model had ignored them. Accordingly, in his more deliberate prose criticism we find, amid his veneration of Shakespeare, his regard for the rules of the classical drama. The faults of Shakespeare, we read, were not so much his own as those of his time, for "tragi-comedy was the common mistake of that age," ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... literature and writers should be indicated at the outset. 1. The period has the great variety of almost unlimited creative force; it includes works of many kinds in both verse and prose, and ranges in spirit from the loftiest Platonic idealism or the most delightful romance to the level of very repulsive realism. 2. It was mainly dominated, however, by the spirit of romance (above, pp. 95-96). 3. It was full also of the spirit ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... natural current of human speech, and make their characters talk under all the restraints of rhyme and rhythm. But we pronounce this departure from literal truth a merit and not a defect. We consider Goethe's second "Iphigenie," written in verse, far preferable to the first one written in prose; nay, it is the rhythm or metre itself which communicates to the work its incomparable beauty. In a review of Longfellow's "Dante," published last year, we argued this very point in one of its special applications; the artist must copy his original, but he must ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... in 480 and of the Greek recoil on Asia in 479. It is thus a "triple wave of woes" familiar to Greek thought. His dialect is Ionic, which he adopted because it was the language of narrative poetry and prose. ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... about a wife's relatives: "They may even in course of time win such a place in one's affection that if they are taken away by Death they will leave a great void and an enduring sorrow. I write these lines from a sweet and sad experience. Only a poet can write of these sorrows. In prose one cannot sing,— ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... have mentioned the one poet for whom I have any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense. He never cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the bargain. But common sense would be just as good in prose as in verse." ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... conversation. In almost every house—I mean, of course, among the educated classes—words were spoken which a few months before would have seemed treasonable, if not blasphemous. Philippics and satires in prose and verse were written by the dozen, and circulated in hundreds of copies. A pasquil on the Commander in Chief, or a tirade against the Government, was sure to be eagerly read and warmly approved of. As a specimen of this kind of literature, and an illustration ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... (Dr. Chambers tells) differs a little, and represents Janet as "at the Well," instead of upstairs, and afterwards "at the Mill," and so on. A Glasgow edition gives the whole in good west-country prose, and the lover begins: "I'm come to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... smallpox inoculation when she was twenty-nine, held salons in London, Constantinople, Brescia, Rome, and Venice, and died when she was seventy-three, bequeathing a fortune and twenty large manuscript volumes of prose and verse to her daughter, one guinea to her son, and two volumes of correspondence to a gentleman in Holland, with the request that the letters be published ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... in the descriptive passages, and there is a melodious rhythm to his prose style that is pleasurable in a high degree. Mr. Warman has a field of his own, and ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... published an excellent translation of the Uttarakanda, in Italian prose, from the recension current in Bengal;(1030) and Mr. Muir has epitomized a portion of the book in the Appendix to the Fourth Part of his Sanskrit Texts (1862). From these scholars I borrow freely in the following pages, and give ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... graphic prose picture of the hopeless Jewish resistance to Roman sway adds another leaf to his record of the famous wars of the world. The book is one of Mr. Henty's ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... prose fiction, like prose of all kinds, was considerably later in production than verse, and short tales of the kind before us were especially postponed by the number, excellence, and popularity of the verse fabliaux. Of these, large numbers have come down to us, and they exactly correspond ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... a little confusing that he does not state more definitely what he means by poetry. Let us take another interesting and suggestive definition. It was Coleridge who said, "The opposite of poetry is not prose but science; the opposite of prose is not poetry but verse." That seems to me an even more fertile statement. It means that poetry is a certain sort of emotion, which may be gentle or vehement, but can be found ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with taste; though it yield a nod now, and then a smile, it hath always a deeper delight for the singer's finding. I have the gay and serious—history, traditions—the heroics of men and nations, their heart-throbs in verse and prose—all or any for the Lord of Constantinople and his kinswoman, my hostess,—may her life never end until the song of the dove ceases to be ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... always reflects their character. You may discover in the prose and poetry of a nation its social condition, and in their different phases its political progress. The age of Homer was the heroic, in which the Greeks excelled in martial exploits; that of Virgil found the Romans an intellectual and gallant race; ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... the bush is purer and that life is better there, But it doesn't seem to pay you like the 'squalid street and square'. Pray inform us, City Bushman, where you read, in prose or verse, Of the awful 'city urchin who would greet you with a curse'. There are golden hearts in gutters, though their owners lack the fat, And we'll back a teamster's offspring to outswear a city brat. Do you think we're never jolly where the trams and ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... discipline must be observed, she wrote on the slip the assistant carried around: "Please submit night reports in prose." ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Harleian Collection, No. 1927., will be found "A paper Book in 8vo., wherein are contained, Poems, Impreses, and other Collections in Prose and Verse; written by Thomas Chaloner and Randle Holme, senior, both Armes-Painters in Chester, with other Notes of ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... it! What Edmund's specific duties were; above all, what his method of discharging them with such results was, would surely be interesting to know; but are not very discoverable now. His Life has become a poetic, nay a religious Mythus; though, undeniably enough, it was once a prose Fact, as our poor lives are; and even a very rugged unmanageable one. This landlord Edmund did go about in leather shoes, with femoralia and bodycoat of some sort on him; and daily had his breakfast to procure; and daily ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... (for, after all, a man on whom you draw a cheque a bout portant will be angry). What a delicious thrill of triumph, if you can bring him down! If I have money at the banker's and draw for a portion of it over the counter, that is mere prose—any dolt can do that. But, having no balance, say I drive up in a cab, present a cheque at Coutts's, and, receiving the amount, drive off? What a glorious morning's sport that has been! How superior in excitement to the common transactions of every-day life! ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a tender and beautiful romance of the idyllic. A charming picture of life in a Welsh seaside village. It is something of a prose-poem, true, tender ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... to; which was the basis also of lines 461-475 of Milton's 'Comus'. The last of our own Platonists was Henry More, one of whose books Addison quoted four essays back (in No. 86), and who died only four and twenty years before these essays were written, after a long contest in prose and verse, against besotting or obnubilating the soul with 'the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the work does not merely treat of the provisioning of a great city. That provisioning is its scenario; but it also embraces a powerful allegory, the prose song of "the eternal battle between the lean of this world and the fat—a battle in which, as the author shows, the latter always come off successful. It is, too, in its way an allegory of the triumph of ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Preston, England, but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894. Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk, and became famous for his poems about this region, which are mostly in his first two books of poetry. He wrote quite a bit of prose as well, and worked as a reporter for some time, but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems. He travelled around the world quite a bit, and died 11 September 1958 ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... of wonderful women—edited it for two years, and contributed many a vivid, dashing, exuberant, ebullient page. Her criticism of Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word, but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose contributor, again saving the one great name, has anything to say that is so readable. Nearly all the rest is extinct, and the Dial now finds itself far away from the sunshine ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest, and its poorest and most meagre prose.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... explains all the Hawaiian words used in the prose text, is appended. Let no one imagine, however, that by the use of this little crutch alone he will be enabled to walk or stumble through the foreign ways of the simplest Hawaiian mele. Notes, often copious, have been appended to many of the mele, designed to exhaust neither ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... that, although he often had seen the gigantic ridges of Arran looming through the purple evening air, or with the "morning suddenly spread" upon their summer summits, or with premature snow tinging their autumnal tops, he never once alludes to them, so far as we remember, either in his poetry or prose; and that although he spent a part of his youth on the wild smuggling coast of Carrick, he has borrowed little of his imagery from the sea—none, we think, except the two lines in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... land with. I don't see why that should make me a poet. My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so are other young men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical genius. But wherever I got it, it comes as easy to me to write in verse as to write in prose, almost. Don't you ever feel a longing to send your thoughts forth in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism, our sense of exile, can never find that identity which he found between beauty and reality. "This benign nature so provides that all over the world you find something to imitate." To us imitation means prose, to him it meant poetry; science itself meant poetry, and illusion was the only ugliness. "Nature never breaks her own law." It is we who try to find freedom in lawlessness, which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion. "Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it should ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Cleopatra! And how she acts! She and Rachel—both Jewesses! Think of it! Ah, we are a great people. If I could tell you the secrets of her eyes as she looks at me—but no, you are dry as dust, a creature of prose! And there will be an orchestra, too, for Pesach Weingott has promised to play the overture on his fiddle. How he stirs the soul! It is like David ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to hammer home that idea the first book I got from the Institute happened to be an American edition of the collected works of Shelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was soon ripe for blatant unbelief. And at the Young Men's Christian Association I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told me, under promises of the most sinister secrecy, that he ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... from the prescribed Latin authors, making the acquaintance of Ovid, Vergil and Horace, and in time won praise for his facility in writing Latin verses. Some of his school exercises have chanced to be preserved. The earliest, dated Jan. 1, 1769, is a Latin translation in prose of some verses which seem to have been supplied by his teacher for the purpose. The handwriting and the Latin tell of faithful juvenile toil and moderate success—nothing more. Nor can we extract much biographic ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... at this work long. He became in turn a salesman in a large New York book store, an assistant editor, and then an editor. When the war broke out, he was a member of the staff of the New York Times. He had written several poems, and prose articles for popular magazines and periodicals. At the age of twenty-five he was widely known, enough of a celebrity, in fact, to have his name appear in "Who's Who ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... a lot of the unknown gentleman's compositions in prose and verse, something like his private history, James Batter informs me, can be made out, provided we are allowed to eke a little here and there. That he was an Englisher we both think amounts to a probability; and, from having an old "Taffy was a Welshman" for a flunkie, it ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... read Orlando Inamorato. I am now in a course of reading the Italian historians, and am confirmed in my former opinion that that language has not produced one author who knew how to write elegant correct prose though it contains several excellent poets. You say nothing to me of ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the fare which fourteen of the London publishers provide in their colonial editions is of interest. Excellent value, of its kind, is usually offered in these issues, but here again we find proclaimed an excessive preference for light prose literature. Of 264 volumes in one 'colonial library,' 238 are of fiction. Sketches, memoirs, reminiscences and a few essays make up most of the balance. The taste of the working classes, so far as it can be ascertained from the records of the principal free libraries, is, curious as it may seem, ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable barriers ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... in possession. Hope leaps out towards what will be; faith holds on to what is. Hope idealizes; faith realizes. Faith sees; hope foresees." [1] In other words, faith is apt to be content with what it has; hope ventures out to annex the wider provinces of the imagination. Faith is the prose of our religious life, ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... this means I was drawn irresistibly to the northern sagas; and I now tried, as far as was possible without a fluent knowledge of the Scandinavian languages, to acquaint myself with the Edda, as well as with the prose version which existed of a ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... literary execution of his work, it is, perhaps, scarcely possible to judge fairly from a translation. It is said to be the oldest prose composition among the Arabs, by whom Mohammed's boast of the unapproachable excellence of his work is almost universally sustained; but it must not be concealed that there have been among them very learned men who have held it in light esteem. Its most celebrated passages, as ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... something may remain, perchance, to chime With reason, and what's stranger still, with rhyme; Even this thy genius, CANNING! may permit, Who, bred a statesman, still was born a wit, And never, even in that dull house, could'st tame To unleaven'd prose thine own poetic flame; Our last, our best, our only Orator, Ev'n ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... COMEDY. Best edition the "Temple Classics," in three small volumes, with the Italian original and English prose translation on ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... story in the C. Mery Talys is defective in consequence of the mutilation of the only known copy, the foregoing extract becomes valuable, as it exhibits what was probably the sequel in the prose version, from which the author of the Scholehouse of Women was no ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... feelings, purposes, and human propensities to flowers. Because a conception might be interesting, and perhaps edifying, in a poem, M. Comte would have it imprinted on the inmost texture of every human mind in ordinary prose. If the imagination were not taught its prescribed lesson equally with the reason, where would be Unity? "It is important that the domain of fiction should become as systematic as that of demonstration, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... weave into brilliant fans that flutter and snap in many a gay assembly, and whose myriad eyes of blue and purple smile with irresistible mirthfulness into the most hostile countenances. Still Holmes apparently likes best the unrestrained freedom of prose. His genius delights in periods finished after its own heart,—pyramidal, trapezoidian, isoscelesian, rhomboidical. But Lowell's genius is infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... compression. The book, in design, subject, and general execution, is well worth the extra trouble. And even if I were wrong in thinking it specially wanted, it will not be lost; for do we not know, in Flaubert's dread confession, that "prose is never done"? What a medium to work in, for a man tired, perplexed among different aims and subjects, and spurred by the immediate need of "siller"! However, it's mine for what it's worth; and it's one ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Well, I must say, on the part of Her Majesty's Government, that we are perfectly satisfied with matters as they were left. We had a lively debate, a majority much larger than we had dared to hope for, and, as far as we are concerned, I think we'll leave matters alone. As one of our great prose-writers observed, it is, on the whole, more conducive to comfort to endure any inconveniences that may press upon one at the current moment, than to hasten to encounter others with the precise nature of which we do ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... little expected that he should so speedily and strangely emancipate himself. It was in a beautiful villa on the lake of Geneva that he finally established himself, and there for many years he employed himself in the publication of a series of works which, whether they were poetry or prose, imaginative or investigative, all tended to the same consistent purpose, namely, the fearless and unqualified promulgation of those opinions, on the adoption of which he sincerely believed the happiness of mankind ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... practice of authorship has run in my family to a quite extraordinary degree. In four generations, I believe that some twenty of my blood-relations have written and published books, from my cousin Adelaide Anne Procter to my uncle Henry Sidgwick. When we were children we produced little magazines of prose and poetry, and read them in the family circle. I wrote poetry as a boy at Eton, and at Cambridge as an undergraduate; and at the end of my time at Cambridge I produced a novel, which I sent to Macmillan's Magazine, of which Lord Morley was then editor, who ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one ballad at least to give, that shows, even in my prose translation, how near that day may be, if the language that holds the soul of our West Irish people can be saved from the 'West Briton' destroyer. There are some verses in it that attain to the intensity of great poetry, though I think less by the creation of one than by the selection of many ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... thought her so fair, so good; he spoke so lovingly of her charms, her sweetness, her innocence, that, in spite of my plain prose knowledge of the reality, a kind of reflected glow began to settle on her idea, even for me. Still, reader, I am free to confess, that he often talked nonsense; but I strove to be unfailingly patient with him. I had had my lesson: I had learned how severe ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Eustache Deschamps le Rutebeuf du XIVe siecle.—Ses oeuvres comprennent des epitres, des discours en prose, des jeux dramatiques, des ouvrages latins, des apologues, un grand poeme moral, et un infinite de ballades et rondeaux pieux, bouffons, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... a service of prayer, which is at the same time a family meal. Gathered round the table, on which are spread unleavened cakes, bitter herbs, and other emblems of joy and sorrow, the family recounts in prose and song the narrative of the Exodus. The service is in two parts, between which comes the evening meal. The hallowing of the home here attains ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... this man; and indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings: thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as well as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gypsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit: were it never so honorable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... left school. There seemed to be so many live authors worth reading. I gave precedence to them, and, not being much of a reader, never had time to grapple with the old masters. Meanwhile, I was already writing a little on my own account. I had had some sort of aptitude for Latin prose and Latin verse. I wondered often whether those two things, essential though they were (and are) to the making of a decent style in English prose, sufficed for the making of a style more than decent. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... inward or an outward nature. Of all her heroines, Rosalind was the one she liked the best, because from the first moment of her passion she knew herself and what she was about, and loved her lover right heartily. Of all girls in prose or poetry she declared that Rosalind was the least of a flirt. She meant to have the man, and never had a doubt about it. But with such a one as Flora MacIvor she had no patience;—a girl who did and who didn't, who would and who wouldn't, who could and who couldn't, and who of ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... this state of things. And, since the style in itself is pleasant enough, I don't know that any one need complain. What put me upon this reflection was Vagabonds in Perigord (CONSTABLE), which, for the modulation of its prose, might almost have been an unacknowledged work of the Master, but is actually written by Mr. H. H. BASHFORD. It concerns the wanderings on foot of certain pleasure pilgrims along the course of the river Dordogne; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... violent, and antitheses when just, and happily opposed. By a diligent attention to these particulars, her ears became so practised and so nice, that there was nothing in Greek, Latin, or English, prose or verse, which, according to its merits or defects, she did not either reject with disgust, or receive with the highest delight.... Had I more leisure, I would speak to you at greater length of the king, of the lady Elizabeth, and of the daughters of the duke of Somerset, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and power today of the arts of expression seem to assure us. When we come to look into the subject, we find that modern life, which finds its expression freely in prose and in verse, and to a slight extent in music, finds some expression also in those arts which deal with expression. It is perhaps not a great artistic epoch that we are living in, although, if some one were to rise by and by, and maintain that it was, I would ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... seats; let me now pass on to the show itself. Would yon like to have a hunt or a gladiatorial combat? Here I invent nothing. I have data, found at Pompeii (the paintings in the amphitheatre and the bas-reliefs on the tomb of Scaurus), that reproduce scenes which I have but to transfer to prose. Let us, then, suppose the twenty thousand spectators to be in their places on thirty-four ranges of seats, one above the other, around the arena; then, let us take our seats among them and ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... from those hoary teachers, and must now turn to Nature. On every hand, the future was with students of the laws of matter. Often, it was true, he had been tempted by the thought of a literary career; he had written in verse and prose, but with small success. An attempt to compose the Prize Poem was soon abandoned in discouragement; the essay he sent in had not been mentioned. These honours had fallen to Earwaker, with whom it was ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... that stately palace, rich in associations of storm and splendour,—of the grand Cardinal; the iron-clad Protector; Dutch William of the immortal memory, whom we tried so hard to like, and in spite of the great Whig historian, that Titian of English prose, can only frigidly respect. Hard task for us Britons to like a Dutchman who dethrones his father-in-law, and drinks schnaps! Prejudice certainly; but so it is. Harder still to like Dutch William's ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Heart of Midlothian, previously written, as well as Kenilworth and Quentin Durward, published later, must also be given first rank. In the intervals of his work on these novels, Scott also wrote reviews and essays and miscellaneous articles. He became recognized as the most gifted prose writer of his age, and his works, it is said, became "the daily food, not only of his countrymen, but of all educated Europe." He was sought after with eager homage by the wealthy and notable, and was given the title of baronet, yet remained as simple and sincere at ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... not belong to the metrical text of the Mahawanso, but are taken from the explanatory notes appended to it. I have stated elsewhere, that it was the practice of authors who wrote in Pali verse, to attach to the text a commentary in prose, in order to illustrate the obscurities incident to the obligations of rhythm. In this instance, the historian, who was the kinsman and intimate friend of the king, by whose order the glass pinnacle was raised in the fifth century, probably felt that the stanza ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... ago there went forth from our homes hundreds of thousands of men to do battle for their country. All the poetry of war soon vanished, and left them nothing but the terrible prose. They waded knee-deep in mud. They slept in snow-banks. They marched till their cut feet tracked the earth. They were swindled out of their honest rations, and lived on meat not fit for a dog. They had jaws all fractured, and eyes extinguished, and limbs shot away. Thousands ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... prose of the master-writer who overthrew the empire, violently declaimed, recited in the accent of the south, rang through the peaceful drawing-room, shook the old curtains with their rigid folds, seemed to splash ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... "Traulus" was published at this price, and gives in rhyme much the same matter as is here given in prose. See ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... good walk, which is the best thing I can do at present for my health. Some bookseller has raked up everything I writ, and published it t'other day in one volume; but I know nothing of it, 'twas without my knowledge or consent: it makes a four-shilling book, and is called Miscellanies in Prose and Verse.(4) Tooke pretends he knows nothing of it; but I doubt he is at the bottom. One must have patience with these things; the best of it is, I shall be plagued no more. However, I will bring a couple of them over with me for MD; perhaps you may ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... that took away The observation of that day, We know it was not free; For if it had, such acts as those Had ne'er been seen in verse or prose, You may ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... to-day as they ever were. I heard it said only this afternoon that those letters were our only hope of peace. They were compared with the letters of Junius, whoever he was. Lord Cardington told me himself that they were the most splendid political prose he had ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... figure of the etcher's art or of the process of the mint that we can fully represent Bergson's resources of style. These suggest staccato effects, hard outlines, and that does not at all represent the prose of this writer. It is a fine, delicately interwoven, tissue-like fabric, pliant and supple. If one were in the secret of M. Bergson's private thoughts, it might be discovered that he does not admire his style so much as others do, for his whole manner of thought must, one suspects, have ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... this feast was, in fact, in its own way, more romantically wonderful than that of the celebrated wedding of Camacho the Rich, and one of the many hundred proofs I've met with in the course of my long pilgrimage that the honest prose of everyday life is often ten times more surprising than the unsubstantial fictions of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... obtained for me by Mrs. W. Wallace Brown. It is from the Micmac, and is in the original from beginning to end a song, or poem. For this reason I have given it a plain metrical form, neither prose nor poetry, such being quite the character of the original. But I, have not introduced anything not ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... master answered. "She shuns all the other girls. She is getting a strange influence over my fellow-teacher, a young lady,—you know Miss Helen Darley, perhaps? I am afraid this girl will kill her. I never saw or heard of anything like it, in prose at least;—do you remember much of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... live? But if on the battle-field woman must prove her right to justice and equality, history abundantly sets forth her claims; the records of her brave deeds mark every page of fact and fiction, of poetry and prose. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... always be in harmony with one's surroundings; and so, intending to pass his morning in the garden, he had chosen 'The Garden of Cyrus' as an appropriate study. He opened it reverently, for it was compact of jewelled thoughts that had been set to words by one of the princes of prose. He, the young garden-lover, sat at the feet of the great garden-mystic, and began to pore wonderingly over the inscrutable secrets of the quincunx. His fine ear was charmed by the rhythm of the sumptuous and stately sentences, and his pulses throbbed ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... in a snow-storm while you stumble through a woodland behind a girl who shows no interest in either your prose or your rhymes has its embarrassments, particularly when you are breathing a trifle hard from the swift pace your auditor ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... how long the two men were going to prose about mines and shares, in those subdued half-mysterious voices, telling each other occult facts in half-expressed phrases, utterly dark to the outside world; but, while she was languidly wondering, a change in her lover's manner ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... York, Poe brought out another little volume of poems showing great improvement; then he went to Baltimore, and after a precarious struggle of a year or two, turned to prose, and, while in great poverty, won a prize of one hundred dollars from the Baltimore Saturday Visitor for his story, "The Manuscript Found in a Bottle." Through John P. Kennedy[1], one of the judges ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in accordance with it. He ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... was his life, it is amazing what an immense amount of literary work he accomplished. Since the publication of his Rinaldo, in his seventeenth year, he never ceased writing, even in the most unfavourable circumstances. Of his prose and poetical works no less than twenty-five volumes remain to us. These works are all rich in biographical materials. They show an ideal tenderness of feeling, an intense love for everything beautiful, and a deep piety, not only of sentiment but of duty. They are specially interesting to us as ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of those who do not read the originals will be increased by the dropping of Greek from the academical course. To give them something like an equivalent for the original in English is the object of a translation. As prose can never be an equivalent for poetry, and as the thoughts and diction of poetry are alien to prose, it is necessary to run the risks of a translation in verse. To translate as far as possible line for line, is requisite in the case of the Greek ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... his nostrils. ... The princess was at best a dream. It was not likely that he ever would speak to her again. The princess was a poem, unlettered and unrhymed. But here, close to him, was a bit of beautiful material prose. The hair again blew out toward him and he moved his lips. She heard the vague sound and lifted ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... I have kept to my old ways, and that is the way of beginning at the beginning. I disagree utterly with any Balbus who would build an absolute wall between romance and novel, or a wall hardly less absolute between verse- and prose-fiction. I think the French have (what is not common in their language) an advantage over us in possessing the general term Roman, and I have perhaps taken a certain liberty with my own title in order to keep the noun-part of it to a single word. I shall extend the meaning of "novel"—that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... songs; which being added to a rich vein of poetry, makes them more captivating to my heart and imagination, than any thing I ever read. You will consider how great disadvantages any poem must sustain from being rendered literally into prose, and then imagine how beautiful these must be in the original.—May you be enabled by reading them frequently, to transfuse into your own breast that holy flame which inspired the writer!—To delight in ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... for it, which you will either give or not as you think proper.... If Mr. Eustace was to have two thousand for a poem on Education; if Mr. Moore is to have three thousand for Lalla; if Mr. Campbell is to have three thousand for his prose or poetry.—I don't mean to disparage these gentlemen or their labours.—but I ask the aforesaid price for mine."—Lord Byron to Mr. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... "Then I prefer prose. Hello!"—pausing and raising his lantern, as they drew near the officer who had fallen under the observation of the fille a la cassette. "Colonel Saint-Prosper, or set me down for an ass—or Plato, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... youth learned nothing but to dance and to spin like weathercocks with their heads as well as their heels." Certainly Sainte Aldegonde had learned other lessons than these. He was one of the many-sided men who recalled the symmetry of antique patriots. He was a poet of much vigor and imagination; a prose writer whose style was surpassed by that of none of his contemporaries, a diplomatist in whose tact and delicacy William of Orange afterwards reposed in the most difficult and important negotiations, an orator whose discourses on many great public occasions attracted the attention of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... which (as skilful physicians assure me) is difficultly cured. But doctors differ, and I don't despair of a cure." Fortunately, he at last accomplished that cure, for his early poetry gives no indications of future excellence. His prose is much more poetic, even in those early letters, than his verse. A great poet unquestionably is a great man; but Burke's greatness was to be achieved in another sphere. It is only in the visions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... to put this poetry into common prose to obtain this argument, namely,—The presence of evil in the world is not compatible with the idea of the goodness of God. Here is the objection in all its force. And what is the answer? Simply this, that ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... not have been possible in the following pages to reproduce the elegant and incisive style of a master of French prose, not even the inadequacies of a translation can obscure the force of his argument. The only introduction, therefore, that seems possible must take the form of a request to the reader to study M. Faguet's criticism ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... justice which does not fail to be done in the prose narrative of life, while men hastened, the moment a cry was raised against Don Alessandro, to echo it back with all kinds of imputations both on himself and his employees, every man held his breath, and many wept, when the mortal remains of Don Carlo passed; ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... will in the perusal. And this is probably the case with most reading matter, except when it is of that highly beneficial kind (for Posterity) which is "thrown off in a few moments of leisure" by the superior poetic geniuses who scorn to take prose pains. ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... to express his meaning, when his meaning is not well known to himself, with a certain degree of obscurity, as it is one source of the sublime. But when, in plain prose, we gravely talk of courting the muse in shady bowers, waiting the call and inspiration of genius, finding out where he inhabits, and where he is to be invoked with the greatest success; of attending to times and seasons when the imagination shoots with the greatest vigour, whether at the summer ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... by John Nichols in his edition of The Works in Verse and Prose of Leonard Welsted (London, 1787). Nichols normalizes the text, spells out several names in full, and adds several unimportant notes. It is here reproduced from the copy in the Sterling Library, Yale University. The Blatant Beast has never been reprinted ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... drawn of Poe by his various biographers and critics may with safety be pronounced an excess of exaggeration, but this is not to be much wondered at when it is considered that these men were his rivals, either as poets or prose-writers, and it is well known that such are generally as jealous of each other as are the ladies who are handsome of those who desire to be considered so. It is an old truism, and as true as it is old, that in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... full storehouse of his poetry the golden phrases with which he characterizes the trees, meadows, brooks, flowers, birds, and human companions that were so near to him in his youth and so vivid in his recollection. In his prose works also a lively paper, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, contains many reminiscences of ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... is The Paladins of France; it was written by Manzanares in Italian prose and is in three volumes. It does not always agree with the other versions of the same story; but that is only as it should be, for romances have always been re-written to suit the audience they are intended ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... answer these inquiries, we are obliged, in part, to take our evidence at second-hand; but, fortunately, some fragments of writings of Anaxagoras have come down to us. We are told that he wrote only a single book. It was said even (by Diogenes) that he was the first man that ever wrote a work in prose. The latter statement would not bear too close an examination, yet it is true that no extensive prose compositions of an earlier day than this have been preserved, though numerous others are known by their fragments. Herodotus, "the father of prose," was a slightly younger ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... every clime, By all men, high and low; It is praised in prose and rhyme, So let the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... school were elaborately wasted. My time was mainly taken up with grammar, endless Latin proses, and verses that were not poetry; none of which exercises did me the slightest good. I forgot the grammar as soon as I conveniently could; I could never do Latin prose till I had read great chunks of Latin authors, or verses till I had studied the poets; and these accomplishments came to me by imitation and not by rules. Mean-while my imagination was simply starved. ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... allowed to land with impunity a considerable quantity of dynamite, with which on Saturday night they decamped. Their disappearance remained unsuspected up to a late hour on Sunday morning, when 'The Bower' was visited, and (to borrow the words of the great master of prose) non sunt inventi. The neatness with which the escape was executed points to the disquieting conclusion that they did not ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... little circle of the "great unwashed," is very oracular, and his infallibility a dogma with his followers and readers. How much he himself and his vulgar trash of prose run mad, stand in need of that wholesome reform which some of his English brother-firebrands have been taught in Coldbathfields and Newgate, let my reader judge from the following extract. The Times newspaper did good service in gibbeting this precious morceau, supplied by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various |
