"Alexandrine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of language is his Hymn of Heavenly Love. The Faerie Queene is written in a nine-lined stanza, which has since been called the Spenserian Stanza. The first eight lines are of the usual length of five iambic feet; the last line contains six feet, and is therefore an Alexandrine. Each stanza contains only three rhymes, which are disposed in this order: a b a b b c b c c. —The music of the stanza is long-drawn out, beautiful, involved, and even luxuriant. —The story of the poem is an allegory, like the 'Pilgrim's Progress'; ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... a large and costly slab of Alexandrine mosaic, is the grave of Bishop Allen (1836-1845), to whose memory a monument in white marble has been erected in the south aisle of the Choir. A little further southward is a monument erected over the grave of Dr. Mill, Canon of Ely, and Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... ex-officer of marine, Francois Robert d'Ache, who rarely occupied it, being an ardent sportsman and preferring his estates near Neufchatel-en-Bray, where there was more game. Saint-Clair was occupied by Mme. d'Ache, an invalid who rarely left her room, and her two daughters, Louise and Alexandrine, as well as d'Ache's mother, a bedridden octogenarian, and a young man named Caqueray, who was also called the Chevalier de Lorme, who farmed the lands of M. and Mme. d'Ache, whose property had recently been separated by law. Caqueray looked upon himself as one of the family, and Louise, the eldest ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... before it abstractions and generalisations which have no counterpart, no existence, out of it.'[88] Parenthetically, we may remark that passages like this show how wide of the truth Mr. Barry is when he speaks of Newman as a 'thorough Alexandrine.' To deny the existence of universals, to regard them as mere creations of the mind, is rank blasphemy to a Platonist; and the Alexandrines were Christian Platonists. No more misleading statement could be ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... presently; "in these lines Virgil, or rather the poet of the Alexandrine age who was his model, has anticipated Laplace's great hypothesis and Charles Lyell's theories. He shows cosmic matter, that negative something from which everything must come, condensing to make worlds, the ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... formerly cultivated through their agents.[6] It would be easy to increase this list of examples. The absolute monarchy, theocratic and bureaucratic at the same time, that was the form of government of Egypt, Syria and even Asia Minor during the Alexandrine period was the ideal on which the deified Caesars gradually fashioned ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... My aunt Pauline was married to a Serbian banker settled in Odessa, a very rich man called Jean Riznitsch, but he was neither a General nor a Baron. Her second daughter, Alexandrine, married Mr. Ciechanowiecki who also never could boast of a title, and whose father had never been Minister ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... district of Etampes the best houses are as yet the inns. There is certainly a royal castle, in the which lives the queen, the wife of the deceased king; nevertheless his Majesty was pleased to give audience in this hostelry, all covered expressly with cloth of Alexandrine velvet, with lilies of gold at the spot where the king was placed. As soon as the speech was ended, his Majesty rose up and gave quite a brotherly welcome to the brilliant ambassadors. The king has a very good countenance, a smiling countenance; he is forty years of age, and appears ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... said Alexandrine one day, 'and what grieves you so sorely. You know that you can trust me, for I have served you truly, and perhaps I may be able to help you in ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... a sister or cousin who plays a sort of superior confidante's part, is by no means uncommon in Romance. Alexandrine, for instance, who plays this in William of Palerne, is a very nice girl. But Urraque or Urraca,[61] the sister of Melior—whether full and legitimate, or "half" illegitimate, versions differ—is much more elaborately dealt with, and is, in fact, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of nine lines: the first eight are iambic pentameters, and the last line is an iambic hexameter or Alexandrine. Burns makes use of this stanza in The Cotter's Saturday Night. The following stanza from that poem shows ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... verse meandering, Bob went without a hitch or fall, Through Epic, Sapphic, Alexandrine, To verse that ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... would have envied him. He had done his worst; he had deified not a lad, but a lust. And not for the moment alone. A half century later Tertullian noted that the worship still endured, and subsequently the Alexandrine Clement discovered ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... French literature—a poetical instrument which, in its strength, its freedom, its variety of metrical resources, and its artistic finish, was really adequate to fulfil the highest demands of genius. In this direction their most important single achievement was their elevation of the 'Alexandrine' verse—the great twelve-syllabled rhyming couplet—to that place of undisputed superiority over all other metres which it has ever since held in ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Greece—good for nothing; written by some one who has never been there, and not being able to manage the Spenser stanza, has invented a thing of his own, consisting of two elegiac stanzas, an heroic line, and an Alexandrine, twisted on a string. Besides, why 'modern?' You may say modern Greeks, but surely Greece itself is rather more ancient than ever it ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... breast of milk! Her complexion is fresh, her color is pure pink and white. In her forty-second year, she affects the young woman, buys little baby stockings, walks about followed by a nurse, embroiders caps and tries on the cunningest headdresses. Alexandrine has resolved to instruct her daughter by her example; she is delightful and happy. And yet this is a trouble, a petty one for you, a serious one for your son-in-law. This annoyance is of the two sexes, it is common to ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... consist of ten syllables, with an occasional Alexandrine to accommodate a refractory epithet, and should ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... now repeated the verses, he laid a sharp accent upon every word and every imperfect rhyme; scanned every line with stern precision. Sometimes when he came to a false Alexandrine, he gave himself the appearance of being absolutely unable to force his lips to utter such barbarisms; and then his eyes glowed with malicious fire, and a contemptuous smile ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... least substantially, the one which has come down to us. Thucydides quotes the Delian "Hymn to Apollo", and it is possible that the Homeric corpus of his day also contained other of the more important hymns. Conceivably the collection was arranged in the Alexandrine period. ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the meantime, that I may arrogate nothing to myself, I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin and Spenser in English have been my masters. Spenser has also given me the boldness to make use sometimes of his Alexandrine line, which we call, though improperly, the Pindaric, because Mr. Cowley has often employed it in his odes. It adds a certain majesty to the verse when it is used with judgment, and stops the sense from overflowing into another line. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Nicaea, which forcibly crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only disrespectful attention at the present time. There you have a chief possibility of offence. He is quite unable to pretend any awe for what he considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that undignified ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... mischief was done, and Rome had accepted the Alexandrine model of education and literary culture, Juvenal reinvoked the old spirit in his denunciation of the hundred and more trivialities which the new spirit engendered. It was a belated, despairing echo. You cannot ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Poly-Olbion?" Twenty thousand long Alexandrines are filled with admirable descriptions of scenery, natural productions, and historical events, but how many of us in these days have time to read and inwardly digest twenty thousand Alexandrine verses? I fear that the specialist is apt to hold his intelligent reader or hearer too cheap. So far as I have observed in medical specialties, what he knows in addition to the knowledge of the well-taught general practitioner is very largely curious rather than ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Philip V. Eight of them may still be seen in the Museum of Madrid, but the ninth muse, Urania, from which the d'Estes could not then be induced to part, is now in the Sala delle Muse of the Vatican. This is the Urania which Ebers imagines to have been carved by the young Alexandrine sculptor, Pollux, from the Selene whom we are told Antinous ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... hearts were gladdened this spring by the news of the approaching marriage of his brother, Prince Ernest, to Princess Alexandrine of Baden. In a family so united such intelligence awoke the liveliest sympathy. The Queen wrote eagerly on the subject to her uncle, and the uncle of the bridegroom, King Leopold. "My heart is full, very full of this marriage; it brings back so many recollections of our dear betrothal—as Ernest ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... great satirical genius Lucian. Of his writings we now possess only a collection of imaginary letters, one hundred and eighteen in number, arranged in three books. Their value depends partly upon the curious and interesting pictures given in them of the life of the post-Alexandrine period, especially of the low life, and partly upon the fact that they are the first successful attempts at character-drawing to be found in the history of Greek prose fiction. They form a connecting link between the novel of pure incident and adventure, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... variety to the extreme. The poem consists of thirty-five stanzas, not one of which repeats both the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of any other. The stanzas range from six to eighteen lines in length, and the lines themselves from four short syllables to the long Alexandrine. At times one has the feeling that this love of changing rhythms and rhymes has improperly warped the ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... was not the first inventor of this stanza; for excepting the alexandrine close, it is to be found in Churchyard's Worthies of Wales. See ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... had their share in that downward career of pedantry which we have seen characterise the whole past Alexandrine age. They, like Zenodotus and Aristarchus, were commentators, grammarians, sectarian disputers: they were not thinkers or actors. Their inspired books were to them no more the words of living human beings who had sought ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Petersburgh, and converses with the Empress— Persuades the Russians and Turks to cease cutting one another's throats, and in concert cut a canal across the Isthmus of Suez—The Baron discovers the Alexandrine Library, and meets with Hermes Trismegistus—Besieges Seringapatam, and challenges Tippoo Sahib to single combat—They fight—The Baron receives some wounds to his face, but at last vanquishes the tyrant—The Baron returns to Europe, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... lived some years in France and England, where he became familiar with the literary forms and fashions of the Renascence. These he imitated in German, writing odes, songs (for the reader), anacreontics, sonnets, epigrams, elegies in alexandrine verse, and occasional poems of elaborate metrical structure. For the most part his substance is very thin, consisting in extravagant and affected praise, with much infusion of Roman mythology, of the high-born personages by whose favor he prospered or hoped ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... were written in assonating lines of variable length. There were also numerous monkish narrative poems (mester de clerecia) in stanzas of four Alexandrine lines each, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... Whig Pindarics rambling, Then in low Tory doggrel scrambling; Now love his theme, now Church his glory (At once both Tory and ama-tory), Now in the Old Bailey-lay meandering, Now in soft couplet style philandering; And, lastly, in lame Alexandrine, Dragging his wounded length along, When scourged by ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Exactly like you, Philip, to come strolling in from the antipodes—dear fellow!" recovering from the fraternal embrace and holding both lapels of his coat in her gloved hands. "Six years!" she said again and again, tenderly reproachful; "Alexandrine was a baby of six—Drina, child, do you remember my brother—do you remember your Uncle Philip? She doesn't remember; you can't expect her to recollect; ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... assigning the primary model to the incantations of the Druids.[25] The lyrical measures of the Gael are various, but the scansion is regular, and there is no description of verse familiar to English usage, from the Iambic of four syllables, to the slow-paced Anapaestic, or the prolonged Alexandrine, which is not exactly measured by these sons and daughters of song.[26] Every poetical composition in the language, however lengthy, is intended to be sung or chanted. Gaelic music is regulated by no positive rules; it varies from the wild chant of the battle-song ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... agony. I had also yesterday evening details of their flight (my father flying!!!) by Madame de Murat, Victoire's lady, who has gone to England, which quite distracted me. Thank God that Nemours and Clem at least are safe!I am quite unable to say more, and I hope the Duchess and Alexandrine will excuse me if I don't write to them. Truly, I can't. I thank you only once more, my beloved Victoria, for all your kindness and interest for my unfortunate family, and trust all the anxiety you feel for us won't hurt ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... is very marked. The influence of Dryden's narrative-poems (his translations from Boccaccio and Chaucer) is clearly traceable in the metre, style, and construction of the later poem. Like Dryden, Keats now makes frequent use of the Alexandrine, or 6-foot line, and of the triplet. He has also restrained the exuberance of his language and gained force, whilst in imaginative power and felicity of diction he surpasses anything of which Dryden was capable. The flaws in his style are mainly due to carelessness in the rimes ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... tales. They sang in a more warlike and virile strain than the poets of the South. Their first romances were written late in the twelfth century. About that time Villehardouin wrote in French a history of the conquest of Constantinople. From the poem entitled "Alexander," the name of Alexandrine verse came to be applied to the measure in which it was written. A favorite theme of the romances of chivalry was the mythical exploits of Arthur, the last Celtic king of Britain, and of the knights of the Round Table. Another class of romances of chivalry related ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... a history of Europe for the use of Alexandrine Greeks, had adopted, on some unknown authority, a division of thirty-one dynasties from Menes to the Macedonian Conquest, and his system has prevailed—not, indeed, on account of its excellence, but because it is the only complete ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... translator has not ventured to reproduce Shakespeare's blank verse, nor, indeed, could that be expected. The Alexandrine had long held sway in Danish poetry. In Rolf Krage (1770), Ewald had broken with the tradition and written an heroic tragedy in prose. Unquestionably he had been moved to take this step by the example ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl. His Birdofredom could, we doubt not, sail majestically in the clouds of a stately hexameter, make the aristocratic Alexandrine cry for quarter, and excel the old Trouveurs in the Rime equivoquee. From the quiet esteem which his early poems and essays had won for him, he leaped at once into the high tide of popularity, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various |
