"Verse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... using for fuel the trees past which the gay procession had defiled, with fluttering banners, on Corpus Christi Day. In others the children collected the firewood from door to door on the eve of the festival, singing their request for fuel at every house in doggerel verse. Cattle were driven through the fire to cure the sick animals and to guard such as were sound against plague and harm of every kind throughout the year. Many a householder on that day put out the fire on the domestic hearth and rekindled it by means of a brand taken from the midsummer bonfire. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... at myself. I went home and got into bed shaken with anger. There are certain books of verse and some prose writings that have always moved me deeply, and so I put several books on a table ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's Prelude, Browning's Sordello, and the like, could scarcely give more than a re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the main body of such verse written in the last one hundred and fifty years. We are concerned, to be sure, with pointing out idiosyncratic conceptions of individual writers, and with tracing the vogue of passing theories. The chief interest, however, should lie in the discovery of an essential unity in many poets' views ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... wait till you hear the second verse. That's only part of the chorus. You see, he's supposed to be talking to a French ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... was considered at the time, at the hands of Alfred Bunn. Bunn was the theatrical and operatic manager and man of letters—or, rather, as the letters were so insignificant, the "man of notes." As early as 1816 he had produced a volume of verse. Such verse!—sentimental, washy, and "woolly" to a degree. Three years later he put his name to 'Tancred: a Tale,' by the author of 'Conrad: a Tragedy,' lately performed at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham—of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... verse of the seventh chapter of his wondrous Epistle to the Romans says: 'O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' You alone, gentlemen, can deliver this wretched man from the body of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... ordinarily too good sense for this, too deep a reverence for that world of poetry, at the threshold of which one should bow the knee, and loose the shoe from his foot, and tread softly. She didn't care for this to-day. She plunged boldly in, wrote her verse, copied it, sent it to a Roman English paper, and heard from it again two days later, ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... disappointed, and like our own Chaucer, but more frequently, he pours forth lamentations to his empty purse. He was evidently a friend of most of the prominent men of letters of his time, and he entered freely into the debauchery of the period. Thus his verse gives a representation of the debased manners of the day in gay society. His style was remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Menander, preserved in a manuscript once at Beauvais, but now lost (Baehrens, Poet. Lat. Min. 4, p. 104), he mentions a hymn to Aesculapius, written both in Latin and Greek (Florida 18), and a panegyric in verse on the virtues of Scipio Orfitus (Florida 17). He wrote also another novel entitled Hermagoras, a collection of famous love-stories of the past, sundry 'histories', a translation of the Phaedo, and numerous scientific works, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... of verse I introduced, and neatly chiselled wit; To look, to scan: to plot, to plan: to twist, to turn, to woo: On all to spy; ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... to its firm position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations. 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse—and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow way, and he that passeth ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... on his arm, and her eyes shone upon him. 'It will not be your gospel, Walter, that I know. Some day you will be a rich man, perhaps, and then you will show the world what a rich man can do. Isn't there a verse in the Bible which says, "Blessed is he that considereth the poor"? You will consider the poor then, Walter, and I will help you. We shall be able to do it all the better because we have been ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... church found a chink in the inner wall just back of the pulpit. He found this crevice a convenient pigeon hole for his carefully written and always excellent sermon during the preliminary parts of the service. While the congregation sang the last verse of the hymn preceding the sermon he would draw it from its hiding place and lay it on the pulpit. One fatal Sunday he pushed it too far in and it fell between the two walls hopelessly beyond immediate recovery. His anguish during the last ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... Finally the lights went up, once more she stepped to the front of the stage, nodded to the orchestra leader, who waved his baton, and began "Loch Lomond." Sweet and clear the voice rose and fell; they cheered after the first verse; they cheered again at the close of the second; and then—she saw Tommy Watson, who was staring straight at her, his face brighter now, his eyes aflame, his lips slightly parted. What was it that brought the tears to her eyes; that made her falter and sway a little, and then stand silent ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... prescription; not to be made up by an apothecary, as such dangerous people do not exist, but the prescription itself is to be SWALLOWED! Upon a smooth board, like a slate, he rubs sufficient lime to produce a perfectly white surface; upon this he writes in large characters, with thick glutinous ink, a verse or verses from the Koran that he considers applicable to the case; this completed, he washes off the holy quotation, and converts it into a potation by the addition of a little water; this is swallowed in perfect faith by the patient, who in return pays a fee ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... have an aunt called Rachel, who put the life of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic—the result of the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a soul. Have ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... little boy, "what does this verse mean? It's in my Sunday school lesson. 'Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... here," she said, "that the Bible is to be our food, and that it is intended to make us grow. Now one can't grow without the right kind of food. The verse makes me think of my dear little grandson Neddie. His mother was taken away, and he was left a wee baby for us to bring up. We had such a hard time to find anything to agree with him. We tried milk and water, and arrowroot, ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... the door, and the latter stood looking in for a moment, amused at Battersleigh and his attitude and his song. When quite happy Battersleigh always sang, and very often his song was the one he was singing now, done in a low nasal, each verse ending, after the vocal fashion of his race, with a sudden uplift of a sheer ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... solicitor and banker. Both were of high repute, both begat famous sons. From Robert sprang the eminent Parliamentary lawyer, Serjeant John Kinglake, at one time a contemporary with Cockburn and Crowder on the Western Circuit, and William Chapman Kinglake, who while at Trinity, Cambridge, won the Latin verse prize, "Salix Babylonica," the English verse prizes on "Byzantium" and the "Taking of Jerusalem," in 1830 and 1832. Of William's sons the eldest was Alexander William, author of "Eothen," the youngest Hamilton, for many years one of the most distinguished physicians in the West ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... up her Bible and found the verse she had marked as a "promise" before leaving: "But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by the spirit that dwelleth in you." She saw now that this meant ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... 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 Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... possibly after the restoration of the Temple by Judas Maccabaeus [Endnote 19]. (2) For in chap. ix. of the first book we find a reckoning of the families who were the first to live in Jerusalem, and in verse 17 the names of the porters, of which two recur in Nehemiah. (3) This shows that the books were certainly compiled after the rebuilding of the city. (4) As to their actual writer, their authority, utility, and doctrine, ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... misgivings, fearing that the fine would be annually renewed, and even the wealth of Chelebi exhausted. Elsewhere, the Jewries were divided into factions, that fought each other with texts, and set the Word against the Word. This verse clearly proved the Messiah had come, and that verse that the signs were not yet fulfilled; and had not Solomon, the wise king, said that the fool gave belief at once to all indifferently, while the wise man weighed and considered before believing? Fiercely waged the battle of texts, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... twelfth of Romans, and he read the verses quietly to himself until he came to the last but one: "Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." As he finished the verse he cast a troubled look at his stepdaughter, who was quietly sewing on the other side of the fire. "Coals o' fire," he muttered under his breath, and the old look of terror came back into his eyes. Mary had never learnt to read, but she saw that the Bible, which ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... their marble garments clapping; St. Michael, descending upon the Fiend, has been caught and bronzified just as he lighted on the Castle of St. Angelo: his enemy doubtless fell crushing through the roof and so downwards. He is as natural as blank verse—that bronze angel-set, rhythmic, grandiose. You'll see, some day or other, he's a great sonnet, sir, I'm sure of that. Milton wrote in bronze; I am sure Virgil polished off his Georgics in marble—sweet calm shapes! exquisite ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... should think it was fine!' burst out Atlee. 'It was so fine that, had the deed been done on the other side of this narrow sea, the nation would not have been satisfied till your Poet Laureate had commemorated it in verse.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... read verse about, so that Mr. Milburn can hear both our voices and his favorite minister's, too. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... asserted by any one. He saw that the Pythagoreans really implied it, though they were quite unconscious of the fact. He is interesting to us as the first philosopher who thought of expounding his system in verse. It was not a very happy thought, as the arguments in which he deals do not readily lend themselves to this mode of expression, and we may be thankful that none of his successors except Empedocles followed his example. It has the very great inconvenience ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... chill and presentiment at his heart returned. There is a feeling which perhaps all have in a momentary hypochondria felt at times: it is a strong and shuddering impression which Coleridge has embodied in his own dark and supernatural verse, that something not of earth is behind us; that if we turned our gaze backward we should behold that which would make the heart as a bolt of ice, and the eye shrivel and parch within its socket. And so intense is the fancy that when we turn, and all is void, from that very ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hatfield. We are not told that she affected any great concern for the loss of her sister, much less did any unbecoming sign of exultation escape her; but, "falling on her knees, after a good time of respiration she uttered this verse of the Psalms; A Domino factum est istud, et est mirabile oculis nostris[33]: which to this day we find on the stamp of her gold; with this on her silver, Posui ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... seem to be a very fascinating and very curious fact if the influence of the moon upon men should be such as to regulate the spontaneous discharges of their sexual system. Certainly the lovers of all ages would then have "builded better than they knew," when they reared altars of devotional verse to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... thought of his brutal awkwardness, and Polly burst into a ringing peal of laughter and confessed that the pin had n't touched her, and Edgar called her a deceitful little wretch. This naturally occupied some time, and then there was the second verse:— ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... think it is part of an old-fashioned missionary hymn. I once heard a boy repeat the whole of it, but this is the only verse I can remember.—Yours truly, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... the beginning of the anti-slavery agitation, no lack of women sympathizers with it. Some of the best and brightest of the land had poured forth their words of grief, of courage, and of hope through magazines and newspapers, in prose and in verse, and had proved their willingness to suffer for the slave, by enduring unshrinkingly ridicule and wrath, pecuniary loss and social ostracism. All over the country, in almost every town and village, women labored untiringly to raise funds for the printing of pamphlets, sending forth lecturers ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... him feel melancholy. He ventured to cast one glance at his fishing-rod, and at the garden, then looking straight at his great-grandmother, he began in a sweet and serious tone of voice to repeat his lesson from the twenty-seventh chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, the third to the tenth verse. ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... single one. But what are these?' She looked at some lines written in pencil in a music-book. 'Oh! here is something; too slight, but it will do. You see,' she continued, reading it to the Duke, 'by the introduction of the same line in every verse, describing the same action, a back-scene is, as it were, created, and the story, if you can call it such, proceeds in front. Really, I think, we might ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... a very sin For one so weak to venture his poor verse In such a place as this. O do not curse, High Muses! let him hurry ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... my country this edition of one of its favourite poets, without stating that I have deliberately omitted several pieces of verse ascribed to Burns by other editors, who too hastily, and I think on insufficient testimony, admitted them among his works. If I am unable to share in the hesitation expressed by one of them on the authorship of the stanzas on "Pastoral Poetry," ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the little song, he joined in, and they finished the last verse triumphantly; then they looked at each other ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... the limelight and blank verse. He had the "gift of the gab" all right. Old Cassius referred to it later on in one of those "words-before-blows" barneys they had on the battlefield where they hurt each other a damned sight more with their tongues than they did with ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... come from the moon? I think you do." Then, stopping abruptly, she broke into a verse of a nursery-song, which she chaunted with a low, listless tone, as if she were not conscious of the sense. As she thus sang, Morton, looking at her, felt a strange and painful doubt seize him. The child's eyes, though soft, were so ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... says, will so discipline the memory for names, as to partially or even permanently remove all embarrassment from that source. I may add that a long table of names or dates, or any prolonged extract in verse or prose, if learned by repeating it over and over as a whole, will be less tenaciously retained in memory, than if committed ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Marget, but jist Maggie. She was aye Maggie at home. Maggie Jamieson, frae her father. It's the last thing I can gie her. Maybe ye micht put a verse ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... has never been considered out of the ordinary. On the contrary, a person unable to make up a verse or two would almost be considered exceptional. Yet, this requires considerable skill as the Icelanders are the only nation that has preserved the ancient common Germanic alliteration (found in all Germanic poetry ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... Among the ancient Arabians the power of poetic declamation, either in verse or prose, was held in the highest honour and esteem, and he who excelled in it was known as "Khateb," or Orator. Every year a general assembly was held at which the rival poets repeated their compositions, when those poems ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... to strike up an appropriate hymn, in which the congregation joins. On this occasion, all was silent. After the lapse of a few minutes, Mr. Odell arose, and turning, in the Bible, to the chapter where the text, from which he was to preach, was recorded, read the verse that was to form the groundwork of his remarks. Before opening the subject, he stated, briefly, that he was the preacher who was to labour among them during the ensuing year, and hoped, in the Divine Providence, that good, both to ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... bed is still pointed out. No peasant woman who wishes to be a mother will ever enter this hallowed spot. The legend of Saint Senanus is similar to that of Saint Kevin. He was haunted by the love of a woman from whom he flew. Thomas Moore in verse tells us the hard-heartedness ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... raised up in any nation. He is sometimes called the "Great Unknown," because we to-day know nothing about his personal life, not even his name. His great messages to his fellow Jews are found in the latter part of the book of Isaiah, beginning with chapter 40. The first verse of this chapter strikes the keynote of comfort which runs through all the ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... of Johnson, on the pleasures of rural life, have ever weakened my capability for enjoying it at convenient intervals. His antipathy to the country resembled his contempt for blank-verse—he could not enjoy it. I have now moped away a considerable number of months in this city of all things—this—this London. "Well?" Pray restrain yourself, reader; I am coming to the point in due season. During my metropolitan existence—although I am neither a tailor, nor any trade, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... garden, where, summer and winter through, there brooded a heavenly quiet, a perfect peace. It was strange and sad, said Tanqueray, that a quiet and peace like that should be given to Nicky—to write poems in. Jane said it was sadder and stranger that verse so vile should flow from anything so charming, so perfect in ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... attended service, one of those strangely appropriate verses came up in the course of the Psalms, which make troubled spirits feel that the Psalter does indeed utter a message to faithful individual hearts. "I have desired that they, even my enemies," ran the verse, "should not triumph over me; for when my foot slipped, they rejoiced greatly against me." In the course of the verse the unhappy performer executed a perfect fandango on the pedals. I looked guiltily at the senior churchwarden, and saw ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to like Bridges," he told me, "for the sake of one verse. Have you ever thought why I like you, Father De Rance? Because you amuse me. I see in you one of life's subtlest ironies: A Greek beauty-worshiper posing as a Catholic priest—in Appleboro!" He laughed. And then, with real feeling, he read in ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... allowed that a vast improvement has taken place in translations, whether prose or verse. From quarter to quarter the Dictionary of National Biography continues its stately progress. But the noblest monument of English scholarship is The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society, edited by Dr. James Murray, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... true my legends I rehearse, And string the pearls of wisdom in my verse, That in the glimmering days of life's decline, Its fruits, in wealth and honor, may be mine. My verse, a structure pointing to the skies; Whose solid strength destroying time defies. All praise the noble work, save only those Of impious life, or base malignant foes; ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... verse, and the last," he said at length. "And all Poland was shouting them when this man dreamed his dreams. They are forbidden now, and if that waiter's a liar, I'll end my days in Siberia. They sang it in the churches, and ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... twenty-one large volumes in prose and verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety to have them published. Her family are in terrors lest they should be, and have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... with Saul. So we have it upon record in the 22d chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that "they saw the light and were afraid, but they heard not," that is, understood not, the voice. That the voice was in the Hebrew is asserted in the twenty-sixth chapter and the fourteenth verse. We often hear a man's voice, and fail at the same time—say we did not hear because we did not understand the words uttered. Such is the latitude of the original term translated by the word hear. So there is no contradiction here. The term hear in one passage is used with ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... to Rosa, before he leaves for his business, and he paused on the words, "then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, and full of years, and was gathered to his people;" and he remarked that in this verse there was a most striking affirmation of a future existence; for that Abraham being gathered to "his people," must imply that these people yet lived, or why should mention be made of that fact? And now, in this beautiful ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... quieted herself, and read on till she came to the eleventh verse: "'Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; but afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness to them ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... began with prayer, were attended by all the children of the town and neighbourhood, with their mothers, and a great many old women, who came to be edified. They were an acute race, and could quote chapter and verse of Scripture as accurately as the minister himself. I remember he said to one of them—"Peggie, what lightened the world before the sun was made?" After thinking for a minute, she said—"'Deed, sir, the question ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... you, Whose eyes on this simple verse fall, Remember good angels will hear you, And help you, so sure ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... form is 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 philosophical ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... friendship has long been one of the delights of my life, and I have long entertained the greatest respect and admiration for his ability and quality. As a writer of hymns he has won the first place in the world's esteem, and probably his noble verse is (after the Psalms) the most universally used expression of the religious feeling of mankind. More worshipers unite in singing his hymns, Unitarian though he be, than those of any other man, living or dead. It is a great distinction, and in meriting ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... which the various kinds of fish are introduced in mock heroic verse. It dates from ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... irritated, and one or two whose sense of dignity is outraged. The twenty-first critic will probably be one who knows and admires some of the poems, but who either says: "Pound is primarily a scholar, a translator," or "Pound's early verse was beautiful; his later work shows nothing better than the itch for advertisement, a mischievous desire to be annoying, or a childish desire to be original." There is a third type of reader, rare enough, who has perceived Mr. Pound for some years, ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... round, I saw laid on a shelf a thin board prepared for painting, and a box of paints and brushes. With these I made a hasty sketch of the princess as she lay, and of myself kneeling at her feet, and underneath it I wrote this verse:— ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... Blank verse, yes, so far as it went; but delivered without the slightest regard for rhythm, and composed in stark defiance of those laws which should regulate the breaking of bad news. You, please remember, were carefully ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... offers of a richer suitor, forbade the nuptials. Archilochus thereupon composed so bitter a lampoon upon the family that the daughters of the nobleman are said to have hanged themselves. Says SYMONDS, "He made Iambic metre his own, and sharpened it into a terrible weapon of attack. Each verse he wrote was polished, and pointed like an arrow-head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges against his sweetheart, her sisters, and her father." [Footnote: "The Greek ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing—no man formed as he was can be anything by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse monger, or poetical Restaurateur, but of a true poet and singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had been given him: and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... days, and then having reconstructed the essay from his notes to compare his version with the original. Sometimes he jumbled the collection of hints into confusion and thus made a study of construction as well as of style; or again he turned an essay into verse and after a while converted it back into prose. And this we believe to be the true method of acquiring a good style, more efficacious than any English ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... took the ziggurat at Nineveh to be the burial-place of Sardanapalus. They declared that Cyrus had pulled it down in order to strengthen his camp during the siege of the town, and that formerly it had borne an epitaph afterwards put into verse by the poet Choerilus of Iassus: "I reigned, and so long as I beheld the light of the sun, I ate, I drank, I loved, well knowing how brief is the life of man, and to how many vicissitudes it is liable." Many writers, remembering the Assyrian monument at Anchiale in Cilicia, were inclined to place ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... strength and originality; his choice of a sacred subject; earlier attempts in England and France; Boileau's opinion; Milton's choice of metre an innovation; the little influence on Milton of Spenser, and of Donne; Milton a pupil of the dramatists; the history of dramatic blank verse; Milton's handling of the measure; the "elements of musical delight"; Tennyson's blank verse; Milton's metrical licenses; the Choruses of Samson Agonistes; Milton's diction a close-wrought mosaic; compared with the diffuser diction of Spenser; conciseness ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the road and fell into line with the other loaded carts. The peasant women, with their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the hay cart. One wild untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a verse, and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half a hundred strong healthy voices, of all sorts, coarse and fine, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... This verse, which closes this psalm, occurs twice in the previous one. It is a kind of refrain. Obviously this little psalm, of which my text is a part, was originally united with the preceding one. That the two made one is clear to anybody that will read them, by reason of structure, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an erratic creature who puts horrid sentiments into indifferent verse. I repeat, I ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... Essay on Murder, the English Mail-Coach, The Spanish Nun, The Csars, and half a score other things at the age of about fifteen or sixteen is, or ought to be, to fall in love with them."—Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, p.307.] Few boys read poetry, whether in verse or prose, and fewer still criticism or philosophy; to every normal boy the gate of good literature is the good story. It is the narrative skill of De Quincey that has secured for him, in preference to other writers of his class, the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... kindness to her child, and she is prepared at once to second your efforts on its behalf. She must be debased, indeed, who will not listen to her child repeating its text from the Bible, or singing a verse of its infant hymn; and by this means the first seeds of a new life may be, and have been, planted in ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... borne its own bright bees And slain them since thy honey-bees were hived, John Day, in cells of flower-sweet verse contrived So well with craft of moulding melodies, Thy soul perchance in amaranth fields at ease Thought not to hear the sound on earth revived Of summer music from the spring derived When thy song sucked the flower of flowering trees. ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I have here literally translated the botanical name of the Virginia creeper,—an appellation too cumbrous for verse. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... (Vol. vii., p. 336.) describes the Palindrome as being universally sotadic. Now, this term was only intended to apply to the early samples of this fanciful species of verse in Latin, the production Sotades, a Roman poet, 250 B.C. The lines given by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... for it. As for me, what I value particularly is, that by means of these ingenious visits, we learn a hundred things which we ought necessarily to know, and which are the quintessence of wit. Through them we hear the scandal of the day, or whatever niceties are going on in prose or verse. We know, at the right time, that Mr. So-and-so has written the finest piece in the world on such a subject; that Mrs. So-and-so has adapted words to such a tune; that a certain gentleman has written a madrigal upon a ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... period the official residence of the governors—the "lords presidents" they were called—of the Marches of Wales, and it was in the days of its presidential splendor that Milton's Comus was acted in the great hall. Wandering about in shady corners of the ruin, it is the echo of that enchanting verse that we should try to catch, and not the faint groans of some encaverned malefactor. Other verse was also produced at Ludlow—verse, however, of a less sonorous quality. A portion of Samuel Butler's Hudibras was composed there. Let me add that the traveller who spends a morning at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the like; while all that belongs to Him in relation to outward bodies, can be attributed to Him as He exists in His proper species, but not as He is in this sacrament; such as to be mocked, to be spat upon, to be crucified, to be scourged, and the rest. Hence some have composed this verse: ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... old physician for him who had in his possession a leaden box, which, according to his account, had been discovered among the crumbling foundations of an ancient hermitage that was being rebuilt; in which box were found certain parchment manuscripts in Gothic character, but in Castilian verse, containing many of his achievements, and setting forth the beauty of Dulcinea, the form of Rocinante, the fidelity of Sancho Panza, and the burial of Don Quixote himself, together with sundry epitaphs and eulogies on his life and character; but all that could be read and deciphered ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... carriage stopped before the grand entrance of one of the most magnificent mansions in England. Ulverston Priory—whose beauty has been described, in prose and in verse, by pens ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... Protestants of other tongues. S. Andrew's was at one time a centre for Protestant learning: Poles and Danes, Germans and French visited this university in order to study under Melville. Even Latin verse was written with a certain elegance. A fit monument of these studies and their direction is to be found in Buchanan's History of Scotland, a work without value for the earlier period, and full of party spirit in describing his own, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Greyfriars School state that, as a boy, he was in no ways remarkable either as a dunce or as a scholar. He did, in fact, just as much as was required of him, and no more. If he was distinguished for anything it was for verse-writing: but was his enthusiasm ever so great, it stopped when he had composed the number of lines demanded by the regulations (unlike young Swettenham, for instance, who, with no more of poetry in his composition than Mr. Wakley, yet would bring up a hundred dreary hexameters to the ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tendency of figurative verse seems to be due to the aristocratic patronage of composition, whose tendency was to exalt language above the comprehension of the common people, either by obscurity, through ellipsis and allusion, or by saying one thing and meaning another. ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... yours and mine shall stand linked as friends to posterity, both in verse and prose, and (as Tully calls it) in consuetudine studiorum. Would to God our persons could but as well and as surely be inseparable! I find my other ties dropping from me; some worn off, some torn off, some relaxing daily: ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Thomas Otway (1652-1685), English playwright who wrote a number of important tragedies in verse, but who died destitute at the age of 33. The Coopers were familiar with his work; James Fenimore Cooper used quotations from Otway's "The Orphan" for three chapter heading epigraphs in his 1850 novel, "The Ways ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... arresting fate, in the person of Don Ruy, breaks in upon the rapture of the lovers. She absolutely forgot the Grosville drawing-room, the staring Grosville girls, the other faces, astonished or severe, neutral or friendly. Out rolled the tide of tragic verse, fine poetry, and high passion; and though it be not very much to say, it must at least be said that never had such recitation, in such French, been heard before within the walls of Grosville Park. Nor had the lips of any English girl ever dealt there with a poetic diction so unchastened ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... character, most of which have been reprinted in other lands, all testify to a mind of no common stamp; and here, in reply to numerous questions relative to her literary remains, I may state that Grace Aguilar has left many excellent works in manuscript, both in prose and verse; some of which may, at a future day, be presented to ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... publications, some of which have already been referred to, consisted mostly in translations from the French, Latin, and Greek, that of the first book of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura being in verse. Their authorship was usually veiled either under Greek pseudonyms or else more thinly under the initials 'J.E.' That on A Character of England (1659), a tract purporting to have been written ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Martial de Limoges contains this passage (Paris, Bibl. Nat., No. 2400.) "Adrian II., after the example of his predecessor of the same name, completed the Gregorian Antiphoner in several places. He also arranged a second prologue in hexameter verse to be chanted at High Mass on the first day of Advent. This prologue begins in the same way as another very short one composed by the first Adrian to be sung at all the Masses of this first Sunday in Advent, ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... of pity swept over Jimmy. He did not blame her now. She had been a mere child five years ago, scarcely old enough to distinguish right from wrong. You couldn't blame her for writing sentimental verse at that age. Why, at a similar stage in his own career he had wanted to be a vaudeville singer. Everything must be excused to Youth. It was with a tender glow of affectionate forgiveness that ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... nothing has been born to you,—that I call very much. And there are women, and pretty women too, Mr. Finn, who have spirit enough to understand this, and to think that the man, after all, is more important than the lord." Then she sang the old well-worn verse of the Scotch song with wonderful spirit, and with a clearness of voice and knowledge of music for which he had hitherto ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... coming in. As each appeared, he or she was met by a group of ushers and escorted ceremoniously across the floor, amid vigorous hand-clapping from the side whose colors were in evidence, and the singing of a verse of "Balm of Gilead" adapted to the occasion. Most of these had been written beforehand and were now hastily "passed along" from a paper in the hands of the leader. The rhymes were execrable, but that did not matter since almost nobody could understand them; and the ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and give expression to the contentment that was in me, and I kept ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about metaphysics. He had never read Victor Cousin, or any of the great German lights; and a feeling of despair took possession of him when his sweetheart's poetry degenerated into diluted Hegelism, or rose to a feeble imitation of Browning's obscurest verse. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... is exact in every respect: You have in it the Suspence and Majesty of Virgil. The second is a good Translation, though not at all like Virgil, but exactly like Homer: There is no Hesitation, but the Verse and the Matter hurry on together as fast ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... syllable and one short one, two short syllables and one long one, or whatever else it may be, are frequently disregarded. You know, too, that some lines are cut off short at the end, and others are made a little too long. Why is this permitted? In his "Rationale of Verse," Poe explained all these things, and showed how the learned of past ages had made mistakes. In a subsequent chapter we shall see just what the relation between music and poetry is, and what Poe taught about the ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... world to expect. 'Cain' was perhaps the culmination of his power. The lyrics and occasional poems of this time add to his fame because they exhibit his infinite variety. Critics point out the carelessness of his verse,—and there is an air of haste in much of it; they deny his originality and give the sources of his inspiration,—but he had Shakespeare's faculty of transforming all things to his own will; and they deny him the contribution ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... followers of beauty, but the august masters of beauty." And Whitman's own verse is a notable example of a new technique forged in response to a new need of expression. Dealing as he did with the big basic impulses of common experience accessible to all men, Whitman needed a largeness ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... had to be content. She retired to her own room, mixed a powder in a cup of root-tea and gave it to the girl, who was quiet now, though wide-awake and bright-eyed. Kavanagh went home, invented a ballad about his fever in Port-o'-Spain, and wrote it upon his memory, verse by verse—for he did not possess the art of writing upon paper. After supper Cormick retired to the loft and his bed; but the skipper did not touch a blanket that night. He spent most of the time ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... fainting fits at Tunbridge, at least twice every day, for love of him." Upon this discourse, Talbot thought it right to begin the recital of his sufferings and fidelity, when Miss Temple, with a paper in her hand, entered the room. This was a letter in verse, which Lord Rochester had written some time before, upon the intrigues of the two courts; wherein, upon the subject of Miss Jennings, he said: "that Talbot had struck terror among the people of God, by his gigantic ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of English works is very complete. I possess, however, an unpublished manuscript translation of Alciato into English verse. It is of the time of James I., and possesses much merit; but it has unfortunately ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... had been brought up by his sisters;—there were three more Misses Bibby scattered about the State, teaching, or in similar positions of trust to the "Greenways" Miss Bibby. And they were all inclined to be literary. Clara Bibby wrote verse; if you happened to be a reader of obscure country newspapers you would frequently come across a poem entitled Australia—my Country, or Wattle Blossom, with the signature "Clara L. C. Bibby" beneath it. Alice, the quietest, gentlest little person in the world, wrote vehement articles ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... Cabin, Ben-Hur, Trilby, She, Little Lord Fauntleroy; and of a later decade, there were novels about those delicately tangled emotions experienced by the supreme few; and stories of adventurous royalty; tales of "clean-limbed young American manhood;" and some thin volumes of rather precious verse. ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... him the less fluent, omnipresent, persuasive, at Niagara. It was diverting to see them seated side by side on Goat Island, he waving his hand toward the blue sky, apostrophizing the water, the foliage, the clouds, and what not, in prose and verse, quite content if he but got a quiet glance and assenting word now and then, she listening demurely in a state of protestant satisfaction, her fair hair very dazzling in the sunshine, an unvarying apple-blossom tint in her calm face, her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are problematical, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... above the head, toward the left shoulder, and allow the weight of the body to rest on the left leg, the right foot being carried slightly outward. Allow the body to bang down as far as possible on the left side, without straining too much. Then verse the movement. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... paused, his eyes fixed anxiously upon our Indian allies, De Croix began to hum a popular tune of the day, riding meanwhile, hat in hand, with one foot out of the stirrup to beat the time. Then Jordan caught up the refrain, and sang a verse. I saw one or two of the older Indians glance around at him in ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... merchants solution for the eyes. This evening Haj Ibrahim's slaves sung and played together in the court-yard. They consist of girls and boys, and young women. They sung in choruses, one first repeating a line or a verse in the style of the ancient Greeks. Their voices are not very melodious, and they remind me of the responses of a charity school at church. Still it is grateful to one's feelings to witness how pitying is God to these poor things, in giving them such happy hearts in the early days ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the first verse. Yes, yes, they would sing songs! Everyone in turn. It was more amusing than anything else. And they all put their elbows on the table or leant back in their chairs, nodding their heads at the best parts and sipping their wine when they came to the choruses. That rogue Boche had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... thinkers has not been entirely silent. The utter failure of her reign to present a single noble thought or impulse, a single evidence of sympathy with the immense mass of suffering, has been sharply commented on, not only in prose, but in the vigorous verse of Robert Buchanan. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... allusion to the all-ness of God is in line with all who have attained to cosmic consciousness. Nothing more impresses the illumined mind, than the fact that the universe is One—uni—(one)—verse—(song)—one glorious harmony when taken in its entirety, but when broken up and segregated, and set at variance, we find discord, even as the score of a grand operatic composition when played in unison makes perfect harmony but when incomplete, ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... in the fields of Thrasymene, Where Mars did mate the warlike Carthagens; [1] Nor sporting in the dalliance of love, In courts of kings where state is overturn'd; Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds, Intends our Muse to vaunt her [2] heavenly verse: Only this, gentles,—we must now perform The form of Faustus' fortunes, good or bad: And now to patient judgments we appeal, And speak for Faustus in his infancy. Now is he born of parents base of stock, In Germany, within a town call'd Rhodes: ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... The Mullah sprang to his feet, glaring with withered eyeballs at the drawn death he could not see, and calling down the curses of God and Mahomed on the tribe. Then began a game of blind man's buff round and between the fires, whereof Khuruk Shah, the tribal poet, has sung in verse that ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... deserted, but from the distance, right, comes the sound of singing. The sound swells louder and louder in the rhythm of one of the oldest of African songs, "Mary and Martha just gone 'long to ring those charming bells." The first verse is sung before the singers appear. With the second verse those who have been at work in the fields come into view, their gay and colorful costumes bright against the ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... text of Scripture which turned Augustine from his evil life. It was the single word Eternity printed in the tract which a man had torn scoffingly in two, and which lay in a scrap of paper on his arm, that led him to repent. Sometimes it is a word in a sermon, or a verse in a hymn; sometimes it is the question of a little child, or the sight of a dead face in a coffin; but whatever it is which brings us back to Jesus, that must be the first step to finding pardon ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton |
