"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... repast at the Piccadilly grill-room, he had brought with him an early edition of the Evening News. And one of the first items which met his eye was the following, embodied in a column on one of the inner pages devoted to humorous comments in prose and verse on the happenings of the day. This particular happening the writer had apparently considered worthy of being dignified ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... to, for it is a book that a man that knows it as well as I do just can't HELP talking about. It's a wonderful book. It is a book that has all the wisdom and knowledge of the world condensed into one volume, including five hundred ennobling thoughts form the world's great authors, inclusive of the prose and poetical gems of all ages, beginning on page 201, sixty-two solid pages of them, with vingetty portraits of the authors, this being but one of the many features that make the book helpful to all people of refinement and mind. Now, when you take a book like that and bind it in ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... one sole method, memorizing: and to memorize every word in a language is an appalling task. Our rhetoric we have inherited from the middle ages, from scholiasts, refiners, and theological logicians, a race of men who got their living by inventing distinctions and splitting hairs. The fact is, prose has had a very low place in the literature of the world until within a century; all that was worth saying was said in poetry, which the rhetoricians were forced to leave severely alone, or in oratory, from which all their rules were derived; and since written prose language became ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... as hearts go. And nothing would do at last but he must stay and live the same scenes for a little; and father told him 't wouldn't pay;—they weren't so much to go through with as to tell of,—there was too much prose in the daily life, and too much dirt, and 't wa'n't fit for gentlemen. Oh, he said, he'd been used to roughing it,—woodsing, camping and gunning and yachting, ever since he'd been a free man. He was Canadian, and had been cruising from the St. Lawrence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... work only so far as it brings him profit, is a sad teacher; for his pay is indifferent, and his teaching more indifferent still. Of what value is the mercenary journalist? The day you write for the dollar, your prose is not worth the dollar you write for. The more elevated in kind is the object of human labor, the more the mercenary spirit, if it be present, makes this labor void and corrupts it. There are a thousand ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... pathos, beauty, and eloquence of their dying messages moved every heart. Poor Larkin was, of all three, the least endowed with education, yet his letter has been aptly described as "a perfect poem in prose." here ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... definitely run dry. Impossible to make things rhyme, somehow. Perhaps his passion was too strong for technical restraints. He tried his hand at prose: ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Fifth Reader is the book that by its careful selection of specimens of the best English literature in prose and verse contributed most to the training of its readers toward the appreciation of true beauty in literature. It contained many pieces of solid and continuous worth,—many that relate closely to the great historical eras of the ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... that their peculiar qualities date back at least as far as 1813. His Rhyme and Revolution in Germany (CONSTABLE) is not so much a history of the scrambling undignified revolutionary movements culminating in the year 1848, as a collection of contemporary comment thereon, in prose and verse. The prose is generally bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with relief to the author's connecting links, wishing only at times that he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the likeness to "some poor nigh-related guest" with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought. ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... prove that a good, well-written history of a colony like New Zealand is not wanted, and may not succeed, but merely that I have not done the work well enough. That may easily be, inasmuch as until this year my encounters with English prose have almost all taken the form of political articles or official correspondence. Doubtless these do not afford the best possible training. But of the quality of the material awaiting a capable writer there can be no question. There, ready to his hand, are the beauty of those islands of ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... who had gathered to meet them, it was trying to one whose regard for the truth was at first unshaken, and whose imagination at the last became exhausted. So, when Bronson heard he had to release another prisoner in pathetic descriptive prose, he lost heart and ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... explained by the influence of the classical languages upon the English.—"Mundilfori had two children; a son, M[^a]ni (Moon), and a daughter, S[^o]l (Sun)."—Such is an extract out of an Icelandic mythological work, viz., the prose Edda. In the classical languages, however, Phoebus and Sol are masculine, and Luna and Diana feminine. Hence it is that, although in Anglo-Saxon and Old-Saxon the sun is feminine, it is ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... affected being greater poets than they really were. It was a good sign, and it left its impress on French literature. Following in the footsteps of Francis I and the two Marguerites nobles vied with each other in their efforts to produce some epoch-making work of poesy or prose, and while they did not often publish for profit they were glad enough to see themselves in print. Then there were also the professional men of letters, as distinct from the courtiers with literary ambitions, the churchmen and courtly attaches of all ranks with the literary ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... Roman and of Grecian lore Sure mortal brain can hold no more. These ancients, as Noll Bluff might say, "Were pretty fellows in their day;" But time and tide o'er all prevail - On Christmas eve a Christmas tale, Of wonder and of war—"Profane! What! leave the loftier Latian strain, Her stately prose, her verse's charms, To hear the clash of rusty arms: In Fairy Land or Limbo lost, To jostle conjuror and ghost, Goblin and witch!" Nay, Heber dear, Before you touch my charter, hear; Though Leyden aids, alas! no more, ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... absurd with the surroundings of Tennis Court to expect anything grand or beautiful [to] develop in its midst; but with Annette, poetry was a passion born in her soul, and it was as natural for her to speak in tropes and figures as it was for others to talk in plain, common prose. Mr. Thomas called her "our inveterate poet," and encouraged her, but the literary aspirants took scarcely any interest in the girl whom they left to struggle on as best she might. In her own home she was doomed to meet with lack ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... speech at Cambridge,— fine things from CARLYLE. Scarcely could we maintain a decorous gravity on the occasion. And then news of a friend, who is also Carlyle's friend. What has life better to offer than such tidings? You may suppose I went directly and got me Blackwood, and read the prose and the verse of John Sterling, and saw that my man had a head and a heart, and spent an hour or two very happily in spelling his biography out of his own hand;—a species of palmistry in which I have a perfect reliance. I found many incidents grave and gay and beautiful, and have ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... attempt to describe it. You can find descriptions by great pens in many books. Sir Edwin Arnold has done it up both in prose and poetry, and sprawled all over the dictionary without conveying the faintest idea of its glories and loveliness. It cannot be described. One might as well attempt to describe a Beethoven symphony, for, if architecture be frozen ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... AND DECLAIM A course of instruction in reading and declamation which will develop graceful carriage, correct standing, and accurate enunciation; and will furnish abundant exercise in the use of the best examples of prose and poetry. Cloth, ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... Family Legend." But we have neither at hand to consult at this moment, even if the steamer would pause to indulge us in literary pastime; so we must wait the leisure of some winter evening for poem and tragedy, and content ourselves with the prose account given by James Wilson, (the Professor's brother,) which is as much as we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... mother-in-law in place of the two sisters, it is the basis of a mediaeval European romance entitled "The Knight of the Swan," and of a similar tale which occurs in "Dolopathus," the oldest version of the "Seven Wise Masters," written in Latin prose about the year 1180: A king while hunting loses his way in a forest and coming to a fountain perceives a beautiful lady, whom he carries home and duly espouses much against the will of his mother, Matabrun. Some time after, having to lead his knights ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... quartets slapped all the pedants in the ears; yet I believe you will find astonishingly few rules broken by Mozart, one of the gods in the mythology of art music, and Berlioz, who broke all the rules, is more interesting to us today as a writer of prose than as ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... when his whole kingdom had risen against him, declared that he would never pardon Churchill, never, never. By all the Jacobites the name of Churchill was held in peculiar abhorrence; and, in the prose and verse which came forth daily from their secret presses, a precedence in infamy, among all the many traitors of the age, was assigned to him. In the order of things which had sprung from the Revolution, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... contained, under its glass frame, three works of Baudelaire copied on real vellum, with wonderful missal letters and splendid coloring: to the right and left, the sonnets bearing the titles of La Mort des Amants and L'Ennemi; in the center, the prose poem entitled, Anywhere Out of the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... he was probably very fond. Standing before us he felt more than at ease, but judging from the confused sideway glances he cast from time to time at his basket, only one thing was spoiling his satisfaction—the mushrooms, womanish, peasantish, prose, derogatory ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... right," said Chateaubriand. "Verses! make verses! 'Tis the highest department of literature. You are on higher ground than mine: the true writer is the poet. I have made verses, too, and am sorry I did not continue to do so, as my verses were worth more than my prose. Do you know that I have written a tragedy? I must read you a scene. Pilorge! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... religione, id est cultu."[512] This is in his work on the nature of the gods; in an oration he naturally puts it more strongly: "We have overcome all the nations of the world, because we have realised that the world is directed and governed by the will of the gods."[513] Sallust, Livy, and other Roman prose writers have said much the same thing[514]; the Aeneid as a whole might be adduced as evidence, and in a less degree all the poets of the Augustan age. Foreigners, too, were struck with the strange phenomenon, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... they had been. There was no original writing in America at the time they were written; and if there had been, it would hardly have commended itself to the old-fashioned taste of Dr. Bryant, to whom Pope was still a power in poetry, as Addison, no doubt, was in prose. It was natural, therefore, that he should offer his boy to the strait-laced Muses of Queen Anne's time; that the precocious boy should lisp in heroic couplets, and that he should endeavor to be satirical. Politics were running high in the first decade of the present century, and the favorite bug-bear ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... was won in 1833, when he was the successful competitor for a prize of $100 offered by a Baltimore periodical for the best prose story. "A MSS. Found in a Bottle" was the winning tale. Poe had submitted six stories in a volume. "Our only difficulty," says Mr. Latrobe, one of the judges, "was in selecting from the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensable Louis Veuillot called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout's toys. Mind you ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in the afterglow, Star-eyed and golden 'mid the poppy and rose, I do not know; I do not care to know,— It is enough I keep her picture so, Hung up, like poetry, in my life's dull prose. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... I prepare that French prose?" she wailed when the crew of the "Jolly Susan" foregathered after luncheon in her room. "I begged Madame to let me make it up any other time, but ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... thrust in, accompanied by the eternal whine of "Miserabili, miserabili, excellenza!" On the walls were displayed innumerable inscriptions, written in nearly every language of Europe, some in verse, some in prose, most of them not very laudatory ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... which had hitherto been unattempted yet in prose or rhyme, because among all the extravagant intellects with which the world has teemed none were ever before so utterly extravagant as to choose for themselves themes of such ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... accent and inflection, the largeness and prolongation of vowel sounds, and, above all, the Scotch tone of Malcolm, and the pure, clear articulation, and decided utterance of the perfect London speech of Lenorme. It was something like the difference between the blank verse of Young and the prose of Burke. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... enterprise. He would persuade you that he is a knight-errant of purity. "Tremendous issues" are always at stake. The heroes of Wall Street are engaged in never-ending "battles." They are "fighting" for causes, the splendour of which is not dimmed in Mr Lawson's lurid prose. They have Americanised the language of ancient chivalry, until it fits the operations of the modern market. They talk of honour and of "taking each other's word," as though they had never stooped to dollars in ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... debacle. She took a prominent part in Nelson's great battles at the Nile and Trafalgar. But her end was pitifully ignoble. After a glorious and proud career, she was converted into a convict hulk and re-named the Captivity. A great prose master has reminded us, in words that glow upon his impassioned page, of the slight thought given by the practical English to the fate of another line-of-battle ship that had flown their colours in the stress of war. "Those ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... story, the first written in English for three hundred years, and the only one we have in prose narrative. For this assertion not to seem ridiculous it must be remembered that a love story is not one in which love is used as an ingredient; if that were so nearly all novels would be love stories; even Scott's historical novels could not be excluded. ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... French construction, there is nothing known of the origin under French rule, of Bigot's little Chateau. History is replete with details about his peculations and final punishment in the Bastile of France; possibly the legends in prose and in verse, which mantle round the time-worn rein, have no other foundation than the fictions of the poet and the novelist. Thanks to Amedee Papineau, W. Kirby, Jos. Mannette, Beaumanoir, Bigot's Chateau, is now immortalized ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... without the other—that every man should realize that it is for the interests of mankind to have the higher supplant the lower life. Small indeed is my sympathy with those people who bemoan the fact, sometimes in prose, sometimes in even weaker verse, that the champions of civilization and of righteousness have overcome the champions of barbarism or of an outworn tyranny, whether the conflict be fought by the Russian heralds of civilization in Turkestan, by the English champion of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... fashion, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. "This bishop's prose shocks me; I want to eat eggs without being permitted. Your style is the hot and cold; I am amusing myself. Besides, I'm not wasting myself, I'm getting a start; and if I tore down that charge, Hercle! 'twas only to whet ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... autocrats as against republics, Spartan discipline as against Attic freedom. Yet in himself he has shown a striking example how the latter could appreciate and embrace the former. As the simplest specimen of pure Attic prose he will ever be paramount in schools, neglected in universities—the recreation rather than the occupation of mature scholars. He is a great worthy, a man of renown; "nevertheless, he did not attain unto the first three"—the two masters of his own day, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... simplicity, and therefore have held them of no value in the history of Rome. Such critics have not reflected that this conception is found, not only in the literature, but also in the politics and the legislation; that Roman history is full, not only of invectives in prose and verse, but of laws and administrative provisions against luxuria, ambitio, avaritia—a sign that these laments were not merely a foolishness of writers, or, as we say to-day, stuff for newspaper articles. Other critics, instead, taking account of these laws and administrative ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... instances, and not fail in any one? How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground, before they would fall into an exact poem! yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose! And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as the great volume of the world? How long might a man be in sprinkling colors upon canvass with a careless hand, before they would happen to make the exact picture ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... is the speech of feeling. Even the prose of emotion always wanders into the rhythmical. Hence, as well as for other reasons belonging to its nature, it is one chief mode in which men unite to praise God; for in thus praising they hold communion with each other, and ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... the tale with another than its clearly predestined end. Of course he doesn't succeed, but the attempt furnishes capital entertainment for everybody concerned, and proves that Mr. Punch's "C.F.S." can write prose too. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... had written only the preface to these sketches, we might well thank him for that one gem of poetic prose; and to say that the book is worthy of it is but a hearty tribute to ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... with pleasure; the fantastic message was not devoid of reality in the days when young imaginative spirits tried to hide the prose of war and policy in a bright mist of romantic fancy; nor was he ashamed to bend his manly head in reverence to, and even press to his lips, his lady's first love-letter, in the very sight of the satirical though sympathizing Bedford, of whom he eagerly ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... success and power today of the arts of expression seem to assure us. When we come to look into the subject, we find that modern life, which finds its expression freely in prose and in verse, and to a slight extent in music, finds some expression also in those arts which deal with expression. It is perhaps not a great artistic epoch that we are living in, although, if some one were to rise ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled, Doth overflow his purpose with made heat, And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed What should have been an inner instinct's feat; Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned, Lacking the subtler music in his measure, With useless care labours but to be spurned, Courting in alien speech the Muse's pleasure; I study how to love or how to hate, Estranged by consciousness from sentiment, ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... has been reading poetry and prose, and thus communicates the result of his studies:—There is genuine but unassuming poetry, which is, after all, only another way of saying fine feeling finely expressed, in Corn and Poppies, by COSMO MONKHOUSE (ELKIN MATHEWS). Much of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... and listen to metrical compositions, enlivened by the accompaniment of fiddles; but the manly and ferocious Danton, to whom such sprightly interruptions were not congenial, proposed a decree, that the citizens should, in future, express their adorations in plain prose, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... his hunger alive, Shargar being gifted with a great appetite, and Robert having no allowance of pocket-money from his grandmother. The threepence he had been able to spend on him were what remained of sixpence Mr. Innes had given him for an exercise which he wrote in blank verse instead of in prose—an achievement of which the school-master was proud, both from his reverence for Milton, and from his inability to compose a metrical line himself. And how and when he should ever possess another penny was even unimaginable. Shargar's shilling ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... that a man who loved literature passionately, and rewarded literary merit munificently, should have been more savagely reviled both in prose and verse than almost any other politician in our history. But there is really no cause for wonder. A powerful, liberal and discerning protector of genius is very likely to be mentioned with honour long after his death, but is very likely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is indigenous, and has at all times been peculiarly characteristic of our genius. Therefore it is not surprising that our life and literature and art have been foremost in developing the sentiment of which we are speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers gave the tone to European thought in this respect. Our travellers in search of the adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... work of high antiquity, and extended popularity. The prose is doubtless as old as our own era; but the intercalated verses and proverbs compose a selection from writings of an age extremely remote. The "Mahabharata" and the textual Veds are of those quoted; to the first of which Professor M. Williams (in his admirable ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... it wasn't over till supper-time. As I brought the young lady in, the baby waked out of a five-minutes' nap that had cost about an hour's rocking, and I thought the roof would come off. My wife looked cross and worried—well, it was prose, gentlemen, prose—not the poetry of life; and I said to myself, 'I suppose I have about made it certain that this young woman will live and die an old maid by giving her this glimpse behind the scenes. I thought the ladies could get on better without me ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... set her all, and then sink back ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and meter, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... words or matter. In the first sense, it is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present. In the latter, it is—as hath been said—one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... that he might have been perpetually a poet. It has been often remarked, that in his poetical pieces, which it is to be regretted are so few, because so excellent, his style is easier than in his prose. There is deception in this: it is not easier, but better suited to the dignity of verse; as one may dance with grace, whose motions, in ordinary walking, in the common step, are awkward. He had a constitutional ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... later, when the rush and heat of achievement relax, we can begin to expect the appearance of grand men to celebrate in glorious poetry and prose the deeds and triumphs of the last ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Shakespeare's matchless image. Faint and imperfect images they must be called, because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to the history of prose literature among the Romans. The earliest prose works were Annals, containing a meagre account of the principal events in Roman history, arranged under their respective years. The earliest Annalists who obtained reputation were Q. FABIUS PICTOR and L. CINCIUS ALIMENTUS, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... attain it. I met some one the other day who did not care for poetry at all; it gave her no pleasure, no satisfaction, and only caused her to reflect how much better the thought, so it seemed to her, could be expressed in prose. In the same way there are people who care nothing for music. I knew one Englishman of whom it was said that he knew only two tunes: one was the national anthem, "God Save the King," and the other wasn't. We cannot help these people ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... how could we do aught but welcome this spontaneous and ever-fresh fountain bubbling into the sunlight, albeit without geometrical restrictions, and bringing as it did such treasures from its secret sources? Yet, welcomed or not, there is no record of any female prose-writer's ever having lived who possessed more than a portion of that genius which permeated Elizabeth Sheppard's whole being. Genius,—the very word expresses her: in harmony with the great undertone of the universe, the soul suffused with light. Flower-warmth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... where he shortly after died and was interred at Westminster, near to Chaucer, at the charge of the Earl of Essex, his hearse being attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems with the pens that wrote them thrown into his tomb.'{4} In 1633, Sir James Ware prefaced his edition of Spenser's prose work on the State of Ireland with these remarks:— 'How far these collections may conduce to the knowledge of the antiquities and state of this land, let the fit reader judge: yet something I may not passe by ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... periphrase[obs3], periphrasis; roundabout phrases; episode; expletive; pennya-lining; richness &c. 577. V. be diffuse &c. adj.; run out on, descant, expatiate, enlarge, dilate, amplify, expand, inflate; launch out, branch out; rant. maunder, prose; harp upon &c. (repeat) 104; dwell on, insist upon. digress, ramble, battre la campagne[Fr][obs3], beat about the bush, perorate, spin a long yarn, protract; spin out, swell out, draw out; battologize[obs3]. Adj. diffuse, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... The Soul of Man it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring motifs make Salome so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... three articles entitled "Our Emigrant" and signed "Cellarius." By comparing these articles with the book as published by Butler's father it is possible to arrive at some conclusion as to the amount of editing to which Butler's prose was submitted. Some passages in the articles do not appear in the book at all; others appear unaltered; others again have been slightly doctored, apparently with the object of robbing them of a certain youthful "cocksureness," ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... shall do so by means of a criterion. Otherwise, we should only be acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose superior to poetry." ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... worse horrors still. They are furnished by almost every history of a campaign, in all quarters of the world. Circumstances so painful, in a first attempt to render them public for their own sakes, would, I thought, even meet with less attention in prose than in verse, however less fitted they may appear for it at first sight. Verse, if it has any enthusiasm, at once demands and conciliates attention; it proposes to say much in little; and it associates with ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... and prose—are just, examine the works of this great painter-teacher as closely and suspiciously as we may, we can discover nothing that will induce a momentary doubt of his integrity of purpose in all he did; his shafts ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... Rose And the Ring decked Giglio's finger Thackeray! 'twas sport to linger With thy wise, gay-hearted prose. Books were merry, goodness knows! When Betsinda ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as usual, the truth (if it be a truth) for which they contend is, as with other parts of their system, a plagiarism from the abjured Bible. Now, if I must believe prophecy, I prefer the magnificent strains of Isaiah to the sentimental prose either of Mr. Parker ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Hugo's third great romance, "The Toilers of the Sea" ("Les Travailleurs de la Mer"), published in 1866, was written during his exile in Guernsey. Of all Hugo's romances, both in prose and in verse, none surpasses this for sheer splendour of imagination and diction, for eloquence and sublimity of truth. It is, in short, an idyll of passion, adventure, and self-sacrifice. The description of the moods and mysteries of the sea ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... instructive Tales in poetry and prose, adapted to the Youthful mind. By the Author of Spring ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... tragedy on the lines of Greek drama, and the ending has been pronounced by great critics to be the most moving in prose literature. In the Master of Ravenswood, Scott has drawn perhaps his greatest tragic figure, and in Caleb Balderstone one of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... ever read some stately bit of prose, which caught in its glamour of splendid words the vital, throbbing world of affairs and passions, some crystallization of a rich experience, and then by chance turn to the "newsy" column of an American newspaper? (Forsooth, ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... Scotland—perhaps the world—has known. In other respects the mental training of the lads was of the most thorough kind. Murdoch taught them not only to read, but to parse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn verse into the prose order, to supply ellipses, and to substitute plain for poetic words and phrases. How many of our modern village schools even attempt as much? When Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook the ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... upside-down, but wasn't above being spoken to"; "the Mayor of Calenick, who walked two miles to ride one"; "the Mayor of East Looe, who called the King of England 'Brother.'" Everyone remembers the stately prose in which Gibbon records when and how he determined on his great masterpiece, when and how he completed it. "It was at Rome: on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... often been pictured by writers of poetry and prose, but without reaching the head of Strathearn these beauties can be only partially seen. The drive from Crieff to Lochearnhead in a summer day is universally regarded as one of the finest in all ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... began reading the contents of her hymnbook to herself. All the verses were printed as if in prose, which of course made it easier as ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... began her campaign for smallpox inoculation when she was twenty-nine, held salons in London, Constantinople, Brescia, Rome, and Venice, and died when she was seventy-three, bequeathing a fortune and twenty large manuscript volumes of prose and verse to her daughter, one guinea to her son, and two volumes of correspondence to a gentleman in Holland, with the request that the letters be ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... Count de Toumeville in particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that such a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... litterateurs busy themselves with the pretty things of the past, as if the present were not adequate to their genius! The first among them to venture on these infernal paths has created a scandal in the coterie! Cowardly parasites, vile venders of prose and verse, all worthy of the wages of Marsyas! Oh! if your punishment were to last as long as my contempt, you would be forced to believe in the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... was evidently as sincere in his philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable barriers of grammar ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Seas the censor has had his day. From New Guinea to Easter Island, he has made his rules and enforced them. Often he wrote glowing pages of prose and poetry about his accomplishments, for reading in Europe and America. He was usually sincere, and determined. He felt that it was up to him to make over the native races to suit his own ideas of what pleased God and himself. When he had the lower hand, he prayed and strove ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... in the coming time, With inky hand and polished sleeve, In lucid prose or honest rhyme Some worthy task ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... the sacred quest, the doughty deeds, the battery of low churls, the fearsome ride and grewsome perils of the Flower of Simpson's Bar! Alack! she is dainty, this Muse! She will have none of this bucking brute and swaggering, ragged rider, and I must fain follow him in prose, afoot! ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... may have to wait until you have made a name in the other direction. Why not try fiction? Your prose is excellent, almost ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in accordance with it. He came to wrest man from the slavery of the new gigantic body he ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and master of cadenced lyric prose, urged young writers to lead ascetic lives that in their art they might be violent. Chopin's violence was psychic, a travailing and groaning of the spirit; the bright roughness of adventure was missing ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Knowing that she was often writing, she said to her, "You are writing a novel, which will appear some day or other; or, perhaps, the age of Louis XV.: I beg you to treat me well." I have no reason to complain of her. It signifies very little to me that she can talk more learnedly than I can about prose and verse. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... great zest into the life of a Parisian art student, but somehow the experience did not equal his anticipations. What he had read in books—poetry and prose—had thrown a halo around the Latin Quarter, and he was therefore disappointed in finding the halo missing. The romance was sordid and mercenary, and after a few months of it he yearned for ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... writing," was the warning which the manager of the great syndicate was always flashing to its correspondents. "We do not pay you to send us pen-pictures or prose poems. We want the facts, all the facts, ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... pleased with As You Like It? Well, I have known worse, but I have seen better. It seemed a mixture of prose and verse, with several topical allusions that appeared, somehow or other, to have lost their point. For instance, a dull dog of a jester (played in a funereal fashion by Mr. SUGDEN) stopped the action of the piece, for what seemed to me (no doubt the time was actually ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... moreover, is not good for metre. Even when an actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the wing without a certain measure in the movement of the pinion. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... combinations of words which are called poetry, prose, poems, novels, romances, tragedies or comedies, but physical stimulants of reproduction (the e stage); what are those combinations of sound which are called operas, symphonies, sonatas; and what those of lines and of colours, which are ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... certainly better adapted to tragedy than rhymed alexandrines, but then the French language does not admit of blank verse, and to write tragedies in prose, unless they be tragedies in modern life, would deprive them of all charm; but after all I find the harmonious pomp and to use a phrase of Pope's "The long majestic march and energy divine" of the French alexandrine, very pleasing to the ear. I am sure ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... an atmosphere, breathed in youth, must have on the taste and character. The absence of a sordid spirit, the curse of our material day and generation, the contact with intellects trained to incase their thoughts in serried verse or crisp and lucid prose, cannot but form the hearer’s mind into a higher and better mould. It is both a satisfaction and a hope for the future to know that these influences are being felt all over the capital and throughout the length and breadth of France. There are at this moment in Paris alone ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Lodge's "Rosalynde" has grown out of a need felt by the editor for an example of Elizabethan prose suitable for use in a general survey course in English, designed for college freshmen. "Rosalynde," of all the books that were considered, seemed on the whole best to fulfill the desired conditions. As a pastoral romance it belongs to a class of books ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... of my trying at condensation, as the hieroglyphists put an animal for a paragraph. I am incorrigible, you see; but the lecture in prose must be for by-and-by, if you ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hiding-place for his literary work was above these sheets of paper, and one day when old Armstrong stood by his side, a tintack gave way beneath the superincumbent weight, and the whole bundle of scraps in verse and prose fell at the author's feet Armstrong stooped for it, and Paul went red and white, and his legs shook beneath him. There was an upturned box by the side of the cracked and blistered old stove which warmed the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... the higher and lower departments. The first class, which in those days consisted of the senior boys, passed a good Examination in Greek Testament, a play of Aeschylus, Homer, Thucydides, Horace, and Vergil, Geography and Ancient History. The Latin Prose Composition of two ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... fundamental elements of his system of belief; but they can be taken in detachment as the exposition of a view of the nature and value of culture by a man who was himself the fine flower of English university training and a master of English prose. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... From the stenographic report of the argument; reprinted in the author's Forms of Prose Literature, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... of his weakness. But he has opened a new avenue to the human heart, has explored another secret haunt and nook of nature, 'sacred to verse, and sure of everlasting fame.' Compared with his lines, Lord Byron's stanzas are but exaggerated common-place, and Walter Scott's poetry (not his prose) old wives' fables.(2) There is no one in whom I have been more disappointed than in the writer here spoken of, nor with whom I am more disposed on certain points to quarrel; but the love of truth and justice which obliges me to do this, will not suffer me to blench his merits. Do what he can, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... clothes in the marketplace. That made life not at all positively pleasant, yet decidedly thrilling, for the hour; and it was well enough till the thrill abated. When this occurred, as it inevitably would, the romance and the glow of the adventure were exchanged for the chill and the prose. It was to these latter elements he had waked up pretty wide on this particular morning; and the prospect was not appreciably fresher from the fact that he had warned himself in advance it would be dull. He had in fact known how dull it would be, but now he would ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... "bits" of prose by heart had not deserted him, and he found verse even easier to remember; in fact, sometimes certain stanzas would recur with irritating persistency when he didn't want them at all; and in thinking of this, to him, new type of girl, there ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... accustomed bearing, On the night he thus took ship Or started landward?—little caring 10 For us, it seems, who supped together (Friends of his too, I remember) And walked home thro' the merry weather, The snowiest in all December. I left his arm that night myself For what's-his-name's, the new prose-poet Who wrote the book there, on the shelf— How, forsooth, was I to know it If Waring meant to glide away Like a ghost at break of day? 20 Never looked he ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... translated all Cicero's letters into English, and then back into Latin; and when he went up for his degree, he took, besides his Latin and Greek books, the whole Hebrew Bible, but was only examined in the Psalms. He gained a triumphant first-class, and the next year, 1803, he carried off the English prose essay prize. The theme was "Common Sense." He had not in the least expected to gain the prize, and had not even mentioned the competition to his friends, so that their delight and surprise were equal. That ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... enchanting scenery; the music of its brooks; the sweet and refreshing repose of its recesses; the noble company that frequent it. I soon found that all the greater poets have been there, and that their lines had caught the magical radiance of the sky; and many of the prose writers showed the same familiarity with a country in which they evidently found whatever was sweetest and best in life. I came to know at last those whose knowledge of Arden was most complete, and I put them ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... independent institutions; the same ideas in religion, in ethics; the same respect for women, the same esteem of labor, the same mental culture; a striving after progress, yet side by side with this a high respect for traditions; the same poetry of agriculture, the same prose of industry; rapid progress of both, and in consequence thereof an ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... not found it yit," he continued, breaking into prose, "and there don't seem much prospect o' findin' it here anyhow. Wot an 'orrible ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... construing Latin, I think also an elementary knowledge of Greek; add ciphering to a small extent, Euclid perhaps in a rather imaginary condition; a swift but not very legible or handsome penmanship, and the copious prompt habit of employing it in all manner of unconscious English prose composition, or even occasionally in verse itself: this, or something like this, he had gained from his grammar-schools: this is the most of what they offer to the poor young soul in general, in these indigent times. The express schoolmaster is not equal to much at present,—while the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... word poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... nothing but news and politics will be regarded; but against the days of peace, which Heaven send soon, my little assistance may perhaps fill up an idle column of a newspaper. I have long had it in my head to try my hand in the way of little prose essays, which I propose sending into the world though the medium of some newspaper; and should these be worth his while, to these Mr. Perry shall be welcome; and all my reward shall be, his treating me with his paper, which, by the bye, to anybody who has the least relish for ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... when both were old.' Longfellow wondered that the legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and he said to him, 'If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you let me have it for a poem?' To this Hawthorne consented, and promised, moreover, not to treat the subject in prose till Longfellow had seen what he could do with it in verse. Longfellow seized his opportunity and gave to the world 'Evangeline, or the Exile of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... to himself, "because she doesn't happen to see, or because she doesn't wish to see? How can I make her open her eyes? Shall I speak to her coldly or gently, with mirth or with melancholy, in poetry or in prose?" ...
— Adventures in Toyland - What the Marionette Told Molly • Edith King Hall
... which was part of her strange wisdom, and was always awake and on the watch. In all her letters, written in exquisite English prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement sincerity of emotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost more directly, un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual, critical sense of humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as frankly ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... to-day delved in these vast fields of Lincolniana until he has brought together the most precious of the golden words written of and by the Man of the People. Howe has collected a few of the best poems on Lincoln; Rice, Oldroyd and others, the elder prose tributes and reminiscences. McClure has edited Lincoln's yarns and stories; Nicolay and Hay, his speeches and writings. But each successive twelfth of February has emphasized the growing need for a ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... the divan, and would have hurried to the piano, but Marianne held him back. "Maestro," said she, "before we sacrifice to Apollo, let us give to life and mortality their rights. Prose awaits us in the dining-room, and we shall give her audience before we open the pages of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach |
