"Verse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enough! My publishers must have guessed you were here and my mind at the same time. Now, if you would like it, you shall carry home one of these little sets, and I'll just write a piece from one of my poems and your name on the fly-leaf of each volume. You say you like that little verse: ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... shell fire, week-days and Sundays, and all with a fine unconsciousness that anything unusual was singing and breaking around the path of their performance. He carried a pocket edition of the Oxford Book of Verse, and in the lulls of slaughter turned to the Wordsworth sonnets ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... This world and the next; having largely invested Not only where treasure is never molested By thieves, moth, or rust; but on this earthly ball Where interest was high, and security small. Of mankind there was never a theory yet Not by some individual instance upset: And so to that sorrowful verse of the Psalm Which declares that the wicked expand like the palm In a world where the righteous are stunted and pent, A cheering exception did Ridley present. Like the worthy of Uz, Heaven prosper'd his piety. The leader of every religious society, Christian knowledge ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... the preceding voyage to Guinea in 1563, of which this section is an abstract, was written in verse by Robert Baker, who appears to have been one of the factors employed by the adventurers. It is said to have been written in prison in France, where he had been carried on his subsequent voyage, which forms the subject of the next section, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... shoulders—is seated astride the ladder, with his back where his face should be—they hoist him upon men's shoulders—and in his hands he carries a long brush, tongs, and poker. A sort of mock proclamation is then made in doggerel verse at the door of all the alehouses in the parish, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... broad bosom thrown Rushes the loud impetuous Rhone, And bears his waves with mazy sweep In rapid torrents to the deep— Oh for a Muse less weak of wing, High on yon Alpine steeps to spring, And tell in verse what they disclose As well as you have told in prose; How wrapt in snows and icy showers, Eternal winter, horrid lowers Upon the mountain's awful brow, While purple summer blooms below; How icy structures rear their forms Pale products of ten thousand storms; ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... strain, but singing for all that? What of Bishops Heber and Ken, from All Souls and from New? Of Robert Browning of Balliol, and Landor Trinity's chief poet? And lastly what of Shelley, recognized at last as singer of immortal verse? These and a host of lesser songsters, each with his several songs, joining with the glorious harmonies that have for so long been sent up from Magdalen, New College, and from that ancient fane where once St. Frideswide ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... the cream of a people's thought, some true indications of the history of its religious feeling must be found in its religious verse, and I hope I have not altogether failed in setting ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... well-being by and by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely selfish; and if we are offended with that form of egotism, it is no more than ten of the twelve Apostles were, as the reader may see by turning to the Gospel of St. Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the twenty-fourth verse. ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... natural language. It was at first separated from the dialect of the people, and afterwards carefully preserved from all contamination by it. Only a restricted number of words were admitted into its select vocabulary. We learn from Servius that Virgil was censured for admitting avunculus into epic verse; and Quintilian says that the prestige of ancient use alone permits the appearance in literature of words like balare, hinnire, and all imitative sounds. [1] Spontaneity, therefore, became impossible, and soon invention also ceased; and ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... charitable Icarus. A very good simile, my dear Dunsford, but rather of the Latin-verse order. I almost see it worked into an hexameter and pentameter, and delighting the heart ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... name the verse feels loath, Fill the place with a monstrous undergrowth, Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue, Livid, and starred with a ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... books, I doubt if he ever opened a volume, if he could avoid it, after he wore out three horn-books and our mother's patience in learning his letters—not even the mottle-backed prayer-books which were handed round for family prayers, and out of which we said the psalms for the day, verse about with my father. I generally found the place, and Jem put his arm over my shoulder and ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... live and believe in a woman, who must one day grow aged and fat? You must see it's preposterous, Bill, sir. And yet, how the thought of it clings! I have lived out my time—I have prigged lots of verse—I have kissed (ah, that stings!) Lips that swore I had cribbed every line that I wrote on them—cribbed— honour bright! Then I loathed her; but now I forgive her; perhaps after all she was right. Yet I swear it was shameful—unwomanly, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Albinia had ever met, and she listened earnestly to her artless history, and pretty enthusiasms, and the story which she could not tell without tears, of her father's care, when the reward of her good behaviour had been the reading one verse in the quaint black letter ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... protest of such men as Alfieri and Coleridge. Simplicity and earnestness are the normal traits of efficient character, whether developed in action or Art, in sentiment or reflection; and manufactured verse, vegetation, and complexions indicate a faith in appearances and a divorce from reality, which, in political interests, tend to compromise, to theory, and to acquiescence in a military regime ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rift in the sky an early star stole out, and she made a wish on it. That was one of the things Belle had taught her. She started to wish that Barby might be happy. But before the whispered verse had entirely passed her lips she stopped to amend it, adding Uncle Darcy's name and Belle's. Then she stopped again, overcome by the knowledge of all the woe in the world, and gathering all the universe into her generous little heart ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... verse quoted by Royston, "pikemen's" is an apparent misquotation for "pikeman's", and "scatheless" may ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... delicate one. Well, I have never set up for a man of the world, though sometimes when I have heard the Lovelaces of the day hinting mysteriously at their secret sins or boasting of their florid gallantries, I have remembered the last verse of Suckling's "Ballad of a Wedding," which, no doubt, the reader knows as well as I, and if not, it will increase his acquaintance with our brave old poetry ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... the song the wood nymph performed the grotesque evolutions designed for the scene. At the middle of the second verse she stood still, with a strange look on her face, seeming to gaze dreamily into the depths of the scenic forest. The gorilla's last leap had brought him to her feet, and there he knelt, holding her hand, until he had finished the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... execution he gave legal status as his wife to the woman, a rather remarkable Eurasian adventuress, who had lived with him in Dapitan, and the religious ceremony was the only one then recognized in the islands. [14] The greater part of his last night on earth was spent in composing a chain of verse; no very majestic flight of poesy, but a pathetic monody throbbing with patient resignation and inextinguishable hope, one of the sweetest, saddest swan-songs ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... when Dante was living at Ravenna he would spend whole days alone among the forest glades, thinking of Florence and her civil wars, and meditating cantos of his poem. Nor have the influences of the pine-wood failed to leave their trace upon his verse. The charm of its summer solitude seems to have sunk into his soul; for when he describes the whispering of winds and singing birds among the boughs of his terrestrial ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Louis Frechette, Poet Laureate, has as a French-Canadian, kindly written an "Introductory" in his own graceful language, and I have to thank him above all for his recognition of the spirit which has actuated me in writing "dialect" verse. ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... ever becoming a famous author. The regret that I felt for this, while I lingered alone to dream for a little by myself, made me suffer so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind of its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the instant of pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on which my want of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite apart from all those literary preoccupations, and without definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Demperanceler, Temperenzler - Temperance man. Dessauerinn - A woman from Dessau. Deutschland - Germany. Die Hexe - The witch. Die wile as möhte leben - During all its life. Daz wolde er immer dienen Die wile es möhte leben. - Kutrun. XV. Aventiure, 756th verse. Dink - he, they think; my dinks - my thoughts. Dinked - he, they thought. Dishtriputet - Instead of attributed. Dissembulatin' - Dissembling. Dissolfed - Instead of resolved. D'lusion - Instead of allusion. ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... Pretoria, Mr. Conyngham Greene, and felt confident that the modus vivendi would lead finally to a complete cessation of British interference and to best relations and prosperous conditions for all instead. He also cautioned the Government at Pretoria, giving chapter and verse, against counting upon "the arm of man." They would find they had trusted on reeds—it would be so in regard to any foreign help, and even in regard to men of their own ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... but the elder had courage, wit, and penetration, infinitely above her sex; she had read abundance, and had such a prodigious memory that she never forgot any thing. She had successfully applied herself to philosophy, physic, history, and the liberal arts, and for verse exceeded, the best poets of her times; besides this, she was a perfect beauty, and all her fine qualifications were ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... such a height that as we passed under the Lovers' Rock, still haunted by the Moorish maiden and her Christian lover, I quoted Southey, verse after verse of the old-fashioned poetry coming back to my mind. The Pena de los Enamorados stood up like a small model of Gibraltar, rising out of the plain; and as we wound on among other pinnacles almost as majestic, we could see the bleached skeleton ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was possible for a Master of the English Language to deliver 'em. Some Latin without question he did know, and one may see up and down in his Plays how far his Reading that way went: In Love's Labour lost, the Pedant comes out with a Verse of Mantuan; and in Titus Andronicus, one of ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... interested, in attentive immobility. The many noises of the great courtyard were hushed up gradually by the sleep that stilled all voices and closed all eyes. Then somebody droned out a song with a nasal drawl at the end of every verse. He stirred. She put her hand suddenly on his lips and sat upright. There was a feeble coughing, a rustle of leaves, and then a complete silence took possession of the land; a silence cold, mournful, profound; more like death than peace; more hard to bear than ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... at which we now arrive, shows us the intention of Dr. Percy, and the object at which he had all along aimed: it runs thus:—"Poems in Bland Verse (not Dramatique) prior to Milton's Paradise Lost. Subsequent to Lord Surrey's in this Volume, and to N.G.'s in the preceding." In truth, Dr. Percy was making a collection in the two volumes of all the English undramatic blank verse he could discover, prior to the publication ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... very actors saw and were interested at once. They directed all their attention to that one box, and at the end of the act the stage manager got the writer of the topical song on the wire and had a brand new and very apropos verse added ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... to work or paint proverbs, moral sentences, or scraps of verse, on old tapestry hangings, which were called painted cloths. Several allusions to this practice may be found in the works of our early English dramatists. See ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... acquaint you with some who never enjoyed any, and were the happier for it; and of those who have preferred a private retired life to public employment, mentioning their names with respect; they tell you of the verse(89) of that most powerful king, who praises an old man, and pronounces him happy, because he was unknown to fame, and seemed likely to arrive at the hour of death in obscurity and without notice. Thus too they have examples for those who are deprived ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... begin by asking, "Who can tell us what is the first verse of the Bible?" When hands are raised, call on three or four children to repeat the verse in turn; then let all the class repeat it in concert. Explain what the verse means, that God made the world, and all the things in it. Tell the story of the creation of the world; of the first man and ...
— Hurlbut's Bible Lessons - For Boys and Girls • Rev. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
... church, at vesper service; his courtiers were about him, in their bright garments, and he himself was dressed in his royal robes. The choir was chanting the Latin service, and as the beautiful voices swelled louder, the king noticed one particular verse which seemed to be repeated again and again. He turned to a learned clerk at his side and asked what those words meant, ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... a great part. And so did alliteration and repetition—of a word—of a line—of a whole phrase. He interpolated words of every language. He wanted—(no one has ever known why)—to render the Cezanne into verse. In truth, he was poetic enough and had a distinguished taste for stale things. He was sentimental and dry, naive and foppish: his labored verses affected a cavalier carelessness. He would have been a good poet for men of the world. But there are too many of the kind in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... lived in Savernake Forest, an extraordinarily absent-minded man with a beard of such colossal dimensions that several of the feathered denizens of the forest took up their abode in its recesses. This curious phenomenon was, I believe, commemorated in verse by an early-Victorian poet, but I have not been able after considerable research to trace the reference. I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... studies, and condemn'd the new: Once he the names of saints and patriarchs old, Judges and kings, and chiefs and prophets, told; Then he in winter-nights the Bible took, To count how often in the sacred book The sacred name appear'd, and could rehearse Which were the middle chapter, word, and verse, The very letter in the middle placed, And so employ'd the hours that others waste. "Such wert thou once; and now, my child, they say Thy faith like water runneth fast away, The prince of devils hath, I fear, beguiled The ready wit of my backsliding child." On this, ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... Deulin inclines to the view that the stories as first published by Perrault were not really written by him, but by his little son of ten or eleven, to whom Perrault told the stories as he had gathered them up with the intention of rendering them in verse after the manner of La Fontaine. The lad had an excellent memory, much natural wit, and a great gift of expression. He loved the stories his father told him and thoroughly enjoyed the task his father set him of rewriting them from memory, as ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... editors say: "In chapter v., verse 23, Adam proclaims the eternal oneness of the happy pair, 'This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;' no hint of her subordination. How could men, admitting these words to be divine revelation, ever have ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous "Rosa," as Sarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse-Rouviere. The first three would make a very good group for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, who was tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who anticipated, and perhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the name "Waverley"; and whose Old Manor House (1793) is a solid but not heavy work of its kind—is something of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... reached the cottage, they had to put away their Sunday things; and when Amy came down her mother desired her to keep the baby while she got the tea ready. Amy thought it hard to be hindered in her plans; but she remembered the verse, "By love serve one another," and it came into her mind that Christ might be as pleased at her cheerfully giving up her own way to help her mother, as if she had been praying to him, and the thought made her happy, and she danced the baby, and played with it till it crowed with delight. ...
— Amy Harrison - or Heavenly Seed and Heavenly Dew • Amy Harrison
... dear fellow, you need not be so surprised. I have just been in Euripides's and Homer's company; I suppose I am full to the throat with verse, and the numbers come as soon as I open my mouth. But how are things going up here? what ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... absolutely. Poetry has taken possession of this social theme, "the man condemned to death"—a subject truly apt to strike the imagination! And poetry has been sublime on it. Prose has no resource but fact; still, the fact is appalling enough to hold its own against verse. The existence of a condemned man who has not confessed his crime, or betrayed his accomplices, is one of fearful torment. This is no case of iron boots, of water poured into the stomach, or of limbs racked ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... following (verse 54). Fear had driven Peter but a little way. Love soon drew him and John back. Sudden and often opposite impulses moved Ms conduct and ruffled the surface of his character, but, deep down, the core was loyal love. He followed, but afar off; though 'afar off,' he did follow. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... letter of introduction to a Venetian Ambassador abroad, often proved to be worth more than the gold he abstained from giving. He spoke Latin, he could read Greek, and his taste in poetry was so highly cultivated that he called Dante's verse rough, uncouth, and vulgar—precisely as Horace Walpole, seventy or eighty years later, could not conceive how any one could prefer Shakespeare's rude lines to the elegant verses of Mr. Pope. For the ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... her sire, wearied by a long spell at the bow oar, resigned his seat to Kenneth, and sat down beside her, "that glorious light brings to my remembrance a very sweet verse, 'Weeping may endure for a night, but ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... complement, which is here printed within square brackets, is for the most part fairly obvious, the more so as portions of the lost letters often remain. The whole MS. is in the same large square hand, but the pieces in verse, which are written continuously, like prose, are less carefully executed. The handwriting is of the second half of the twelfth century, perhaps about 1180 A.D. The Latin headings are ...
— Selections from early Middle English, 1130-1250 - Part I: Texts • Various
... of sin. Up Venus flew, and scarce durst up for fear Of Phoebe's laughter, when she pass'd her sphere: And so most ugly-clouded was the light, That day was hid in day; night came ere night; And Venus could not through the thick air pierce, Till the day's king, god of undaunted verse, Because she was so plentiful a theme To such as wore his laurel anademe, Like to a fiery bullet made descent, And from her passage those fat vapours rent, That, being not thoroughly rarified to rain, Melted like pitch, as blue as any vein; And scalding tempests ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... shy to the rest received me, The gray-brown bird I know received us comrades three, And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the song, and soon many thousands were singing it; those who did not know the words following the others. Dick felt his heart beat and his courage mount high, as he sang with Warner and Pennington the last verse: ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... love for their country and take an equal pride in their country's honourable achievements, it seems necessary to define the word before one applies it to oneself or puts one's name to what may be called patriotic verse. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... were rife. The people were ignorant and poor, and the chief posts about the cathedral, including even the deanery, were held by Italian absentees appointed by the Pope. The ecclesiastical discipline was naturally very lax. Thoresby drew up his famous Catechism, which was translated into English verse, in 1357, and set to work to abolish the abuses caused by pluralism and immorality among the clergy. The question of precedence was settled by Innocent VI., who determined that the Archbishop of Canterbury ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... names belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's, 1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787) under the title "Sean Dana," Smith ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... for Philoxenus, and bade him give his candid opinion of the verse. Now, Philoxenus was far too noble a man to tell a lie: and whenever he was consulted by Dionysius, he always boldly told the truth, whether ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... is of fairy life. And so the joy is not unmixed with just a touch of awe. Amidst the whole tintinnabulation is a soft resonant echo of horns below, like an image in a lake. The air hangs heavy with dim romance until the sudden return to first fairy verse in sounds almost human. Once more come the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... 28th chap, and 18th verse, that Jacob, after his dream, rose up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. Whether it has happened from this circumstance or not, that the heathen universally pour ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... contented Heligolander's wife (Dii tofreden Hjelgeluennerin), a pretty little song in Hettema's collection of Frisian poems; with which, however, the native literature ends. There is plenty of Frisian verse in general; but little enough of the particular ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... night, and which happened to be the fifth of the Gospel of St. Mark. His voice trembled, his face was ghastly pale, and his hands shook perceptibly as he began; but he read on, in low, broken tones, and with evident pain and difficulty, until he came to the verse containing these words: 'My little daughter lieth at the point of death.' Here he stopped suddenly, endeavoured vainly for a few minutes to proceed, and then, covering his face with his hands, sank down in the pulpit and sobbed aloud. His sorrowing ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... passions—surely we can really not be expected to become like Christ, or, if it is expected of us, we know that it is impossible. On the contrary, Paul says, "We all," "we all." Every Christian has that for a destiny: to be changed into the image of his Lord. And he not only says so, but in this one verse he reveals to us the mode of becoming like Christ, and a mode, as we shall find, so simple and so infallible in its working that a man cannot understand it without renewing his hope that even he may one day ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... inquired, "of the passage on Social Systems?" I have forgotten to say that the poem was in blank verse, and divided into parts, each with ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... of that quotation so often now that she was beginning to feel it was her favorite verse. But she touched the big parcel with a small, appreciative foot, and remembered that the blue frock, at least, would be saved out of the wreck, and that ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... in dramatic production are not like usual memorized selections. Usually a memorized selection does not express the feelings or opinions of a certain character, but is likely to be descriptive or narrative. Both prose and verse passages contain more than the uttered words ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... could be cited by any one who has lived the last year in France. On the bodies of young soldiers have been found letters of farewell to their parents that made one think of some heroic Elizabethan verse; and the mothers robbed of these sons have sent them an ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... was suggested by seeing the design of Crawford's Orpheus, and connecting with the circumstance of the American, in his garret at Rome, making choice of this subject, that of Americans here at home showing such ambition to represent the character, by calling their prose and verse "Orphic sayings"—"Orphics." We wish we could add that they have shown that musical apprehension of the progress of Nature through her ascending gradations which entitled them so to do, but their attempts are frigid, though sometimes grand; in their strain we are not warmed by the fire ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... choose a partner instead of being content with the first comer, must have coincided historically with the outward, and later on with the inward differentiation of the race. I cannot prove my theory by quoting chapter and verse from ancient writers, but obviously a feeling of preference could not have arisen until individuals had begun to show very noticeable traces of difference. Therefore with growing differentiation a new factor—modest at first ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... that Emerson 'moves more constantly than any recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since Milton and Spenser no man—not even Goethe—has equalled Emerson in this trait.' The Problem, according to another, 'is wholly unique, and transcends all contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry, they say, is like Westminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey is inferior in boldness.' Yet, strangely enough, while Emerson's poetic form is symbolised by the flowing lines of Gothic architecture, it is also 'akin to Doric severity.' ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... Borrow alone. Two more interesting men it would be impossible to meet. The remarkable thing was that there was between them no sort of intellectual sympathy. In style, in education, in experience, whatever Hake was, Borrow was not. Borrow knew almost nothing of Hake's writings, either in prose or in verse. His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into, Hake's World's Epitaph, he thought he did Hake the greatest honour by saying, 'there are lines here and there that are nigh as ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... clogging his lines with consonants, and of mistaking inversion of language for poetry. Not one of these faults belongs to Collins. In almost all his poems the words follow their natural order, and are mellifluous beyond those of almost any other verse writer. If the Passions are not described with splendour, there is no such thing as splendour. If the beauties which he sought and attained are unnatural and extravagant, then the tests of correctness and good taste which have been hitherto ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... shall this be given to rhyme, By rhymesters of a knowing time? Ah! for the age when verse was clad, Being godlike, to be bad ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... [Footnote: 4: Here one verse at least has been lost. The conjecture of Bothe seems to be verified, as far as substance is concerned, by the next line, and has consequently ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... of Walter Harte's An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad,[1] it has reappeared more than once: the unsold sheets of the first edition were included in A Collection of Pieces in Verse and Prose, Which Have Been Publish'd on Occasion of the Dunciad (1732), and the Essay is also found in at least three late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century collections of poetry.[2] For several reasons, however, it makes sense to reprint the Essay again. The three collections are ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... first, I came by and told him that it was blowing a hurricane if he cared to see what it looked like. 'Oh, yes,' he said, 'I could guess it was blowing, for the galley fire has never drawn so well; the bits of coal are flying up the chimney'; and then he whistled through the second verse. All the same, he could not resist going up to see. It was not long before he came down again, with a 'My word, it is blowing, and waves up to the sky!' No; it was warmer and more cosy below among his pots ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... received too little of the consecration of antiquity, and according to 2Samuel vii. was too insignificant and provisional to be thought worthy of preservation in the temple. But if the Ohel Moed is here (what it everywhere else is) the tabernacle, as is indicated also by the sacred vessels, then the verse is, as has been said, an interpolation. The motive for such a thing is easily understood; the same difficulty as that with which we set out must have made it natural for any Jew who started from the ideas of the Pentateuch ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... century, took also in Bohemia the same course as in Germany, and degenerated into loose works of fiction between prose and verse, mostly allegorical compositions, and the basis of the modern novel. Such are Tristram, in 9000 verses, a translation from the German; the life of Alexander and the History of Troy from the Latin, both of them more novel than history; and a great number ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... rooms in company with the works of certain well-meaning but inexpressibly dreary authors, and it is to be inferred they read them with profit. The children sat around the big room with Bibles, their task being to learn by heart one of the eight-verse articulations of the 119th Psalm, while the old lady meditated in her armchair and maintained discipline. Those were stern times for the young students: to fidget in one's seat was to court calamity; even to scratch oneself was a risky experiment. ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... I think of the beautiful town That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town, And my youth comes back to me. And a verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still: 'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... was a favourite pursuit in that age. Such, indeed, was the case. The taste developed almost into a mania. Guests bidden to a banquet were furnished with writing materials and invited to spend hours composing versicles on themes set by their hosts. But skill in writing verse was not merely a social gift; it came near to being a ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... one of the most distinguished of New England preachers, Horace Bushnell, preached a very famous sermon on the subject of "Unconscious Influence," taking for his text this verse: "Then went in also that other disciple." The two disciples had come together, as the passage says, to the sepulchre, but that other disciple, though he came first, hesitated to go in, until the impetuous Peter led the way, and "then went ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... mountain and the glen, the forest and the grove, the lake and the waterfall, the fruits and the flowers, the beasts and the birds, and all that is beautiful and good for us! And when I think of these, I repeat my favorite verse, and say— ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... end of her verse, the Commander of the Faithful said to her, "O damsel, thou art in love." She replied, "Yes;" and he asked, "With whom?" Answered she, "With my lord and sovran of my tenderness, for whom my love is as the love of the earth for rain, or as the desire ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... insincere. I see the Saturday Review says the passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose is free from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer will not go hunting over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose. This, however, is a trifle, and might pass if the tone of the writer ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... justify it by the result. Miss Lowell is the sister of President Lowell of Harvard. Her art, however, needs no reflection from such distinguished influence to make apparent its distinction. Such verse as this is delightful, has a sort of personal flavour, a loyalty to the fundamentals of life and nationality. . . . The child poems are particularly graceful." — 'Boston ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... one's trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower. Mowing well and mowing badly—or rather not mowing at all—are separated by very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle, and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing. For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all these things: He leaves great crescents ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... if my verse can give Immortal life, your fame shall ever live, Fix'd as the Capitol's foundation lies, And spread, where'er the ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... In winter, you'd be sitting near a casement; the panes are small, with gratings, there isn't much light, it smells of lamp oil, incense, cypress; you mustn't talk—the mother superior was strict. Some one from weariness would begin droning a pre-Lenten first verse of a hymn ... 'When I consider thy heavens ...' We sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow out the windows—well, now, just like ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... door, before which there was no need of a lamp to assure a man of the room he was seeking. Through the door burst that most sorrowful of all human sounds, the sound of a child audibly wrestling with some unintelligible verse, twenty, fifty, a thousand times repeated anew, and anew, without becoming intelligible, while the verse had not yet taken its place in the child's head. Through the boards sounded ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... tragedy has not the smooth flowing verse of Otway, Thomson, or Rowe, it possesses, in energy and fire, charms more theatrical; nor does the heroic so wholly engross every scene, but that it yields, ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... wasteful, useless habit, and therefore I have never practised it. Nothing useless is worth while, that's my motto—nothing that does not bring the reward. Oh, now I recall the text, 'Verily I say unto you they have their reward.' I shall ask Doctor Snodgrass to preach a sermon on that verse ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... a long letter from me, and have said in verse all that I intended to have said in far inferior prose. I intended filling three or four sides with exclamations against a University life; but you have showed me how strongly they may be expressed in three or four lines. I can't build without straw; nor have I the ingenuity ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... memorable sermon of F. W. Robertson, on this text, rightly grasps the spirit of the first clause, when it dwells with such power on the thought of 'the irrevocable past' of wasted opportunities and neglected duty. But the sudden transition to the sharp, short command and broken sentences of the last verse is to be accounted for by the sudden appearance of the flashing lights of the band led by Judas, somewhere near at hand, in the valley. The mood of pensive reflection gives place to rapid decision. He summons them to arise, not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a-ploughin', and couldn't have done it worse; He sat down on the handles, an' went to spinnin' verse. He wrote it nice and pretty—an agricultural ditty; But all o' his pesky measures didn't measure an acre more, Nor his p'ints didn't turn a furrow that ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... everything was now settled. He saw Henry sitting by the fire, gave him an ironical look, and, as he passed, sang clearly enough for the captive to hear a song of his own composition. He called it "The Drill Sergeant," written to the tune of "The Happy Beggars," and the first verse ran: ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... kept his royal state in the Tower, receiving his ambassadors, counting his angels, making presents to his bride, Elizabeth of York. Among other gifts to that lady on her nuptial day was a Royal Book of verse, composed by ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... more orderly of the spectators, the little man rose, closed his book, after methodically marking with a lead pencil the exact spot at which he stopped, and descended from his perch. "To-morrow night, boys," he remarked in his quiet voice, "the reading will commence at the 9th verse of the 15th chapter of the Apocalypse," with which piece of information, disregarding our congratulations, he walked away with the air of a man who has performed an ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that high, clear voice, the bacchanalian shoutings and roarings fell silent, and the wild weird song, throbbing with passion, rose and fell upon the still evening air. After each verse, the whole chorus of deep, harsh voices swelled high over the wailing ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... a verse," said Bones airily, waving his hand toward Throgmorton Street. "A 'bus, a fuss, a tram, a lamb, a hat, a cat, a sunset, a little flower growing on the river's brim, and all that sort of thing—any old subject, dear old miss, that strikes me in the ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... place in the General Evening Post, in Lloyd's Evening Post, in the Norwich, Bath, York, Bristol, Sherborne, Liverpool, Newcastle, and other provincial papers, for such articles as they chose to send to them. These consisted principally of extracts from such authors, both in prose and verse, as they thought would most enlighten and interest the mind upon ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Mehetabel, "just like two turtle doves,—never heard in the Punch-Bowl of such a tender couple. Since that little visit to the Moor you've been doin' nothin' but billin and cooin'." Then she burst into a verse of an old folks song, singing in ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... without some signs of scorn. We can never forget his merciless characterization of a malicious feeble-mind, who in a book entitled A Monograph of Moral Sense, declared that Calvin never had enough humanity in his nature to select even one verse by the Evangelists for pulpit illustration,—though the Reformer really preached some folio volumes of commentaries upon the Gospels, preached from them as much as he did from any other portion of the Bible. This person—his name was Smith—was not more reckless of truth ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... published in 1865 in a thin book of verse, containing, besides the titular poem, "The Lost Galleon," various patriotic contributions to the lyrics of the Civil War, then raging, and certain better known humorous pieces, which have been hitherto interspersed with his later poems in separate volumes, but are now restored ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... letters, and I could easily add others by going outside the group of Histories included in this study. They especially cultivate those regions of belles-lettres which lie on the borderland between prose and verse. Though they do not usually attain much eminence in poetry, they are often very accomplished writers of verse. They may be attracted to history, but rarely attempt tasks of great magnitude, involving much patient labor, though to this rule ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... written for the illegitimate stage, and therefore PUNCH in particular, knows very well that the necessity for the introduction of music into a piece played at one of the smaller theatres is only nominal—that four pieces of verse are interspersed in the copy sent to the licenser, but these are such matters of utter course, that their invention or selection is generally left to the prompter's genius. The piece is, unless essentially ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... beat faster as she read the verse. Later in the day, to test him, she asked him what he had been reading. She half expected him to tell her a lie, but, strangely enough, it was the truth that he ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... their sakes, as well as his own, honours himself? Or to speak from what many would regard as the mother's side of the question—will the girl be more likely, because of such a culture of her imagination, to refuse the wise, true-hearted, generous rich man, and fall in love with the talking, verse-making fool, because he is poor, as if that were a virtue for which he had striven? The highest imagination and the lowliest common sense are always on ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... similitude of the Lord.' If there be, as is most probable, an allusion to that ancient vision in these words, then the 'likeness' is not that conformity to the divine character which it is the goal of our hopes to possess, but the beholding of His self-manifestation. The parallelism of the verse also points to such ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... ill, he hurried around to make inquiry. What he heard was disquieting enough, but he could not, would not believe it, until he had gone to Cerito to see for himself. In the gown of a monk he gained access to the grounds, and walked slowly by, singing the verse of a song that Miralda liked, meanwhile scanning the windows closely. His heart gave a leap, and then sank miserably low, for his love appeared behind the bars of an upper window. She stretched her hands to him appealingly, told him in a few half-whispered ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... verse of rough doggerel which the children in these parts still repeat, and which embodies the story of ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... p. 168.).—If SELEUCUS will refer to Mr. Chamber's Collection of Scottish Ballads, he will find there the whole story under the name of Lammilsin, of which Lonkin appears to me to be a corruption. In the 6th verse ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... song for your quarter-deck," retorted the mate, contemptuously. "No; on second thoughts, just tell me how you have served your employers, you old humbug. Give me chapter and verse to choose from. Come now, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... met—what young lady even, though but in her teens, has not encountered some such charming triplet as this, which looks so like verse at a distance, but, like some other compositions, approximates nothing the more on this account to poetry? Who has not learnt from such examples what is a major, what a middle term, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... captured the Alum-Bagh, which we shall visit this morning. It was a terrible summer that the beleaguered people and their brave handful of soldiers passed; and Tennyson has commemorated Lucknow in his immortal verse. ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... this play, "I have a silent sorrow here," was avowedly written by Sheridan, as the music of it was by the Duchess of Devonshire—two such names, so brilliant in their respective spheres, as the Muses of Song and Verse have seldom had the luck to bring together. The originality of these lines has been disputed; and that expedient of borrowing which their author ought to have been independent of in every way, is supposed to have been resorted to by his indolence on this occasion. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... there, whose verse Was tender, musical, and terse; The inspiration, the delight, The gleam, the glory, the swift flight, Of thoughts so sudden, that they seem The revelations of a dream, All these were his; but with them came No envy of another's fame; He did not find his sleep less sweet For music in ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... been very severe on the practice of verse-writing. It was, they asserted, what all young beginners tried to do, and it was the one thing editors would never look at. In the first ardour of my revolt I determined to do a set ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... preached to me a silent sermon as often as I looked at it. Under the name and date of birth and death of the person it commemorated were the words, "Prepare to meet thy God." I spent a long time looking for them in my Bible, and thought a great deal about the verse when I had found it; wondering whether the young midshipman, son of one of the rectors, upon whose monument it had been engraved, had thought about them too, or whether it was a sort of warning because he had not prepared. It was upon this latter train of thought, with ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... even had a play in hand which treated of the fate of the troubadour Bernard de Ventadours in rhymeless, irregular verse. ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... parts of the United States even to this day. Michael Sadler, a member of the House of Commons and a fearless champion of the rights of the poor and oppressed, described this aspect of the evil in touching verse.[18] ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... we'll take care of thatthrow it all on the publishers. I do long to see your labours commenced. You will choose blank verse, doubtless?it is more grand and magnificent for an historical subject; and, what concerneth you, my friend, it is, I have an idea, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... confessed almost to a proverb, that the art of dissembling is a very necessary accomplishment; and therefore it is a common verse among school-boys:— ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... Sol, who knew the tongue of the Iroquois, and so it went on, verse after verse, and at the end of each verse came the refrain, in which the ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 'Virgil' when I came to the school. I began the study of Latin alone, and at the end of the first year made a translation of 'Ovid' in verse, which was read at the final exhibition of the school, and regarded, I believe, as a very creditable performance. I was very much interested in poetry, and it was my dream to be a poet. I began a drama called 'Cleon.' The scene was laid in the court and time of ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... The earliest example is that of Richard Grafton, whose pretty device represents a tun with a grafted tree growing through it, the motto, "Suscipite insertum verbum," being taken from the Epistle to St. James (i.,verse21). John Day's device, with the motto "Arise! for it is day," is generally supposed to be an allusion to the Reformation as well as a pun on his name; tradition has it, however, that Day was accustomed to awake his apprentices, when they had prolonged their slumbers beyond the ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... counter-opinion, counter pain, or counter-pleasure. To be defiant alike of the mob's thought, of the adversary's threat, and the harlot's temptation,—this is in the meaning of every great nation to be free; and the one condition upon which that freedom can be obtained is pronounced to you in a single verse of the 119th Psalm, "I will walk at liberty, for I ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Ovid, when he was banished to the frozen wilds of Tomi, Seneca vented his anguish in plaintive wailing and bitter verse. In his handful of epigrams he finds nothing too severe for the place of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... that we have seen, Morellet adds that for the intellectual side Turgot as a boy had a prodigious memory. He could retain as many as a hundred and eighty lines of verse, after hearing them twice, or sometimes even once. He knew by heart most of Voltaire's fugitive pieces, and long passages in his poems and tragedies. His predominant characteristics are described as penetration, and that other ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... modestly that there may be a similar hole in the bottom of that sea, only a little one, the tide being very little. After which, 'his praelibatis,' he will return, he says, to his story. And so he goes back to the famous Langbard Saga, the old story, which he has turned out of living Teutonic verse into dead Latin prose, and calls De Woden et Frea quaedam ridicula fabula; but can't help for the life of him telling it, apologizing all the time. How the Winils (his own folk) went out to fight the Wendels, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... and trite director for us: no dictator of the banquet; no rex convivii. Have not the Romans sworn never to obey a king? Shall we be less free than your ancestors? Ho! musicians, let us have the song I composed the other night: it has a verse on this subject, "The ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... of the house which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them—and did. When Dr. Westlake ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... own tears thy song must tears beget, O Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own Anguish or ardour, else no amulet. Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh, That song o'er which ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do rainy days," though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... precious and all the more true because it is not a unity like the vulgar unities that express themselves in external associations. You know, of course or if you do not know it will be a good thing that you should know, that that verse in John's Gospel which I have quoted has been terribly mangled by a little slip of our translators. Christ said, 'Other sheep I must bring which are not of this fold,' the fold being the external unity of the Jewish church—an enclosure made of hurdles that you can stick in the ground. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... he was court-martialed, but acquitted. The defenders, after exhausting every resource, finally surrendered the place on honourable terms, and marched out covered with glory. These stirring events, chronicled in prose and verse at home, rekindled the martial ardour which had slumbered since the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee |
