"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now all the rage. At these elegant and up-to-date entertainments China tea is absolutely proscribed, the refreshments, solid and liquid, being exclusively of Indian origin. After tea the guests cantillate passages from the prose and poetry of the Great Indian Master to the accompaniment of gongs (the Sanskrit tum-tum) and one-stringed Afghan jamboons, for the space of two or three hours, when their engagements permit. Sometimes the reading is varied by mystical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... deities, in place of adopting the Latin forms; and in this matter he has little doubt that every scholar will approve his choice. Mr Archdeacon Williams has commonly followed the same plan in those very spirited prose translations that adorn his learned ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... of poetry into prose, we find the following countries mentioned as carrying on an active trade with the Phoenician metropolis:—Northern Syria, Syria of Damascus, Judah and the land of Israel, Egypt, Arabia, Babylonia, Assyria, Upper Mesopotamia,[924] Armenia,[925] Central Asia Minor, Ionia, Cyprus, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... another with a large photograph-album containing the portraits of old Boston friends and parishioners. But the most valuable gift was a large portfolio filled with autograph letters of congratulation in poetry and prose from Sumner, Wilson, Mr. Sigourney, Whittier, Wood, Dana, Holmes, Whipple, and other prominent authors, with other letters signed Moses Williams, Gardner Brewer, William W. Clapp, and other "solid men of Boston." All old differences of opinion were forgotten and due honor was ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... like an imitation with a small i. Then we both laughed—and quit our exercises. To-day she's a moving picture actress, Using her big eyes in a financially-effective way, While I write things in prose or jingle Or verse that is free-on-bail. Sometimes I get by with it; and Sometimes she doesn't spoil a film— Isn't the public lucky that we ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... 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 ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... took some of the tales in the Spectator and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... measure as herein is expressed, must surely have been happiness to him who wrote Green Mansions. In form and spirit the book is unique, a simple romantic narrative transmuted by sheer glow of beauty into a prose poem. Without ever departing from its quality of a tale, it symbolizes the yearning of the human soul for the attainment of perfect love and beauty in this life—that impossible perfection which we ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... stubborn lines lack power to move. O sweet Maria, empress of my love! These numbers will I tear, and write in prose. ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... from the results of the two excellent scientific journeys which he led in the Western Mountains, to this work during the latter half of September. He was a most valued contributor to The South Polar Times, and his prose and poetry both had a bite which was never equalled by any other of our amateur journalists. When his pen was still, his tongue wagged, and the arguments he led were legion. The hut was a merrier place for his presence. When the weather ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... the Infinite God. Nature is His prose, and man His Poetry. There is no Chance, no Fate; but God's Great Providence, enfolding the whole Universe in its bosom, and feeding it with everlasting life. In times past there has been evil which we cannot understand; now there are evils which we cannot solve, nor make square with ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... them in mosaics that glitter with an almost fabulous light. He knows where a red noun should go, and where a peacock-blue verb, and where an adjective as darkly purple as a grape. He is an imagist in prose. You may like his story and you may not like it, but if you don't like the way he tells it then there is something the matter with your ears. As for me, his experiments with words caress me as I am caressed by the tunes of old Johannes Brahms. How simple it seems to manage ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... think of it. I'm going to put some literary flavor into the Gas-bag even if it does explode it. Look—see. I've taken a boost for the Kells Karburetor—rotten lying boost it is, too—and turned it into this running verse, read it like prose, pleasant and easy to digest, especially beneficial to children and S. Herbert Souse, Sherbert Souse, I mean." He rapidly read an amazing lyric beginning, "Motorists, you hadn't better monkey with the carburetor, all the racers, all the swells, have equipped their ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... pauperism as something very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... admired and entertained. He is a lawyer and couldn't be better born, though he might be better educated; still, one mustn't expect all things in one man, and his eyes are so wonderful, and he uses such poetic prose, that the lack of money and a few other lacks shouldn't count. He lives in a beautiful old house which has proud traditions and no bathrooms, and his family is one of the oldest and most disagreeable in America; ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... teeming will render them a precious legacy to the world, when the time shall have arrived for their publication. Of late, Italy has claimed the lion's share in these unrhymed sketches of Mrs. Browning in the negligee of home. Prose has recorded all that poetry threw aside; and thus much political thought, many an anecdote, many a reflection, and much womanly enthusiasm have been stored up for the benefit of more than the persons to whom these letters were addressed. And while we wait patiently for this great pleasure, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... so many other intriguing and turbulent adventurers, who make a great deal of fuss themselves, and try to bring everything about them into a fuss as long as they live, and who die without leaving any trace of their career. But D'Aubigne wrote a great deal both in prose and in verse; he wrote the Histoire universelle of his times, personal Memoires, tales, tragedies, and theological and satirical essays; and he wrote with sagacious, penetrating, unpremeditated wit, rare vigor, and original and almost profound talent for discerning ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... peculiarly to my fish stories. He writes me a satiric, doubting letter—then shuts up his office and rushes for some river or lake. Will Dilg, the famous fly-caster, upon receipt of my communication, wrote me a nine-page prose-poem epic about the only fish in the world—black-bass. Professor Kellogg always falls ill and takes a vacation, during which he writes me that I have not mental ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... madrigal in prose, and sent it by Joseph, who handed it to Marguerite herself; she replied that she would ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... repetition of his own name induced a kind of trance, is used by the poet in his beautiful mystical poem, "The Ancient Sage." It would, indeed, have been equally easy to illustrate this topic from Wordsworth's prose and Tennyson's poetry.] ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... persons upon the stage to break jest, and to bob one another, which they call repartie." The original edition of The Sullen Lovers is partly in blank verse; but, in the first collected edition of Shadwell's works, published by his son in 1720, it is printed in prose. Stanford, "a morose, melancholy man, tormented beyond measure with the impertinence of people, and resolved to leave the world to be quit of them" is a combination of Alceste in The Misanthrope, and Eraste in The Bores; ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... prose reading selections (pages 99-121), page numbers and line breaks have been retained for use with the linenotes and Glossary. Page numbers are shown in [[double brackets]]. In the verse selections, line numbers in the notes have been replaced with line numbers from ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... for the dialogue is strong in my recollection, "it is a sign that I ought never to have succeeded, and I will write prose for life: you shall see no change in my temper, nor will I eat a single meal the worse. But if ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... no words which appear as editorial. The political articles were decidedly favorable to the Federal party, but moderate in tone. During the first three years of the existence of this paper, Daniel Webster, then a student, was a frequent contributor; he wrote both prose and poetry, more frequently the latter. The topics were trite, but the thoughts were always serious and elevated. In the issue of December 9, 1799, Mr. Webster published a poem on winter; he was then a Junior in college. The European wars commanded his attention ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... morning Damaris elected to explore to the Near East, in the vehicle of Eoethen's virile and luminous prose. She sat in one of the solid wide seated arm-chairs at the fire-place end of a long room, near a rounded window, the lower sash, of which she raised to its full height. Outside the row of geranium beds glowed scarlet and crimson in the calm light. Beyond them the turf of the lawn was overspread by ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Town. Very likely they sympathized with him more than they let him know; they encouraged his reading, and the father directed his taste as far as might be, especially in poetry. The boy liked to make poetry, but he preferred to read prose, though he listened to the poems his father read aloud, so as to learn how they were made. He learned certain pieces by heart, like "The Turk lay dreaming of the hour," and "Pity the sorrows of a poor old ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... St. John's to Trinity Hall, to study law and curtail his expenses. He took his Bachelor's degree from there in January, 1617, and his Master's in 1620. The fourteen letters show that he had prepared himself for University life by cultivating a very florid prose style which frequently runs into decasyllabics, perhaps a result of a study of the dramatists. Sir William Herrick is sometimes addressed in them as his most "careful" uncle, but at the time of ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... against the best book that ever was or will be written, the remainder would be a query, the produce of which would be a negative quantity, which would probably prevent both Sir and Madam from reading either the nonsense or the good sense, the poetry or the prose, the simple or the sublime, of the rhapsodical, metaphorical, allegorical genius, Hugh Trevor: for in that case I suspect Hugh Trevor would find a more pleasant and profitable employment than the honourable ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... became a contributor to the columns of the "Anti-Slavery Standard" and "Atlantic Monthly." She wrote both prose and poetry, and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Mr. Lavender, whose eyes were almost starting from his head, "your words are the knell of poetry, philosophy, and prose—especially of prose. They are the grave of history, which, as you know, is made up of the wars and intrigues which have originated in the brains of public men. If your sordid views were true, how do you suppose for one minute that in this great epic ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the beauty of the groves of Magdalen and of St. John's. When Kubla Khan "a stately pleasure-dome decreed," he did not mean to settle students there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays, and for Greek and Latin prose compositions. Kubla Khan would have found a palace to his desire in the gardens of Laud, or where Cherwell, "meandering with a mazy motion," stirs the green weeds, and flashes from the mill-wheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows white and ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... silence. On some such seas, I thought, must the Paladin Ogier, have sailed when about to discover that during that sleep at the enchantress's knees centuries had elapsed and the heroic world had set, and the kingdom of prose had come. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... and for the 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a prophet, rose In recent days, and called for power. I love him; but his mountain prose - His Alp and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... shown during the campaign by the official organ of the State Retail Liquor Dealers' Protective Association, called "Progress." For months preceding the election it was filled with objections, innuendo and abuse in prose, verse and pictures, all designed to impress the reader with the absurdity and danger of giving the vote to women. It appealed to the farmers and to every class of people connected in any way with the manufacture and sale of beer, saying in headlines: ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, "the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley, the darkness ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... writes in prose how sweet all virgins be; But there's not one, doth praise the smell ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... not once again, did Browning stoop; and that something removes, for me, all difficulty in understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of this work. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose note at the end. This is in French, and feigns to be written by Pauline herself. She is there made to speak of "mon pauvre ami." Let any woman ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a lover—"my poor dear friend"! We cannot of course be sure ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... expressed much better than I could express it the feeling with which I tried to write this book, and I once intended to ask your permission to prefix the sonnet to my book, but my friends persuaded me that I ought to tell my story in my own prose, however much ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... independently of foreign influences. From the sovereign down to the lowest subject, everyone composed verses. These were not rhymed; the structure of the Japanese language does not lend itself to rhyme. Their differentiation from prose consisted solely in the numerical regularity of the syllables in consecutive lines; the alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables each. A tanka (short song) consisted of thirty-one syllables arranged thus, 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7; ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... that a literal translation of as famous an epic as the "Nibelungenlied" would be acceptable to the general reading public whose interest in the story of Siegfried has been stimulated by Wagner's operas and by the reading of such poems as William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung". Prose has been selected as the medium of translation, since it is hardly possible to give an accurate rendering and at the same time to meet the demands imposed by rhyme and metre; at least, none of the verse translations ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... of James Whitcomb Riley IN TEN VOLUMES Including Poems and Prose Sketches, many of which have not heretofore been published; an authentic Biography, an elaborate Index and numerous ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... Vaughan's, and D'Aubigne's Life of Cromwell. Neal's History of the Puritans. Macaulay's History of England. Godwin's Commonwealth. The common histories of England. Milton's prose writings may be profitably read in this connection, and the various reviews and essays which have of late been written, on the character ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... of specific natural phenomena, the exposition demands proof and illustration. In certain chapters, therefore, quotations from the prose and poetry of those ancients and moderns who, avowedly or unavowedly, rank as nature-mystics, are freely introduced. These extracts form an integral part of the study, because they afford direct evidence of the reality, and of the continuity, of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Florence. He wrote three books on painting, now translated into the Tuscan tongue by Messer Lodovico Domenichi; he composed a treatise on traction and on the rules for measuring heights, as well as the books on the "Vita Civile," and some erotic works in prose and verse; and he was the first who tried to reduce Italian verse to the measure of the Latin, as is seen in the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... beginning of that fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio, produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last development, the novel - that prose-epic of modern Europe. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... and finished my poem. It was the Pleasures of Melancholy, and was cried up to the skies by the whole circle. The Pleasures of Imagination, the Pleasures of Hope, and the Pleasures of Memory, though each had placed its author in the first rank of poets, were blank prose in comparison. Our Mrs. Montagu would cry over it from beginning to end. It was pronounced by all the members of the Literary, Scientific, and Philosophical Society the greatest poem of the age, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Lectures Faciles. Capus's Pour Charmer nos Petits. Chapuzet and Daniels' Mes Premiers Pas en Franais. Clarke's Subjunctive Mood. An inductive treatise, with exercises. Comfort's Exercises in French Prose Composition. Davies's Elementary Scientific French Reader. Edgren's Compendious French Grammar. Fontaine's En France. Fontaine's Lectures Courantes. Fontaine's Livre de Lecture et de Conversation. Fraser and Squair's ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... and vices, find their representatives. The language which they employ is always natural to them, and is neither too gross nor over-refined. His verse has none of the stiffness of the ordinary French rhyme, and becomes in his hands, as well as his prose, a delightful medium for sparkling sallies, bitter sarcasms, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... of Burke was the best prose. I augurd great things from the 1st number. There is some exquisite poetry interspersed. I have re-read the extract from the Religious musings and retract whatever invidious there was in my censure of it as elaborate. There are times when one is not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... father, Germanicus; that comes to me from Agrippa; this vase is Egyptian, it was Antony's, Augustus took it at the battle of Actium." The imperial sales were succeeded by literary games, at which the losers had to pay the expenses of the prizes, and celebrate, in verse or prose, the praises of the winners; and if their compositions were pronounced bad, they were bound to wipe them out with a sponge or even with their tongues, unless they preferred to be beaten with a rod or soused in the Rhone. One day, when Caligula, in the character ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... moved he could rise and soar like that with ease. And not only in the prose form, but in the poetical as well. He had written many pieces of poetry in his time, and these manuscripts he lent around among the passengers, and was willing to let them be copied. It seemed to me that the least technical one in the series, and the one which reached ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ever after that he was wont to boast that his first and last day of fox-hunting, which was an unusually exciting one, had been got though charmingly without any fox at all. It is even said that Queeker, descending from poetry,—his proper sphere,— to prose, wrote an elaborate and interesting paper on that subject, which was refused by all the sporting papers and journals to which he sent it;—but, this not being certified, we do not ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... Stillingfleet cited it in the Origines? If so, where is its corpus? And in what form, MS. or printed? Of metrical Latin versions there are several beside those of the Jesuit Carlo d'Aquino and Piazza. The Query is as to the prose? ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... distinction is mere sickliness. I have the misfortune to admire all beautiful things without setting myself up for a wit by caustic and envious criticism of whatever shines from poesy and beauty. I don't seek to make Canalis and Nathan say of me in verse and prose that my intellect is superior. I'm only a poor little artless child; I care only for Calyste. Ah! if I had scoured the world like her, if I had said as she has said, 'I love,' in every language of Europe, I should be consoled, I should be pitied, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... enemies in every way that good women can have. If there were any virtue in vice, if black were white or even speckled, doubtless the supreme book of morals, the guide of the race, would have some word in praise of moral rottenness—some few lines in prose or verse in laudation of lewd women. But the whole Bible keeps the distinction sharp and clear between black and white, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... that?" She had been far from satisfied; the phrase had burnt in her memory from then till now. But she knew Arthur had not meant to hurt her, and she bore him no grudge. And, by now, she was too well acquainted with the rubs and prose of life, too much occupied with house-books, and rough servants, and the terror of an overdrawn account, to have any time or thought to spare to her own looks. Fortunately she had an instinctive love ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... before was such a flood of calumny and invective poured on a single head. All history, all fiction were ransacked by the old friends of the right honourable Baronet, for nicknames and allusions. One right honourable gentleman, who I am sorry not to see in his place opposite, found English prose too weak to express his indignation, and pursued his perfidious chief with reproaches borrowed from the ravings of the deserted Dido. Another Tory explored Holy Writ for parallels, and could find no parallel but Judas Iscariot. The great university ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my hand at turning into literal Italian prose (only marking the lines) a lyric on Rome sent lately to America; and I may show it to you ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... or Protestantism and freedom, were the law which God had appointed for the half of Europe, and the whole of future America. It is a twelve days' epic, worthy, as I said in the beginning of this book, not of dull prose, but of the thunder-roll of Homer's verse: but having to tell it, I must do my best, rather using, where I can, the words of contemporary ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his early notions about England, political and theological at least, gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old kindness for it, by looking at it only from a distance. ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the Queen of the Adriatic, in which Marco Polo was captured and cast into prison at Genoa. There he found as a fellow-prisoner one Rusticano of Pisa, a man of some learning and a sort of predecessor of Sir Thomas Malory, since he had devoted much time to re-writing, in prose, abstracts of the many romances relating to the Round Table. These he wrote, not in Italian (which can scarcely be said to have existed for literary purposes in those days), but in French, the common ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... no feminine termination, either for the verbs or nouns. This greatly facilitates to me my composition of songs and hymns for them, especially as their prose itself naturally runs into poetry, from the frequency of their tropes and metaphors; and into rhime, from their nouns being susceptible of the same termination, as that of the words in the verbs which express the different persons. In speaking of persons absent, the words change their termination, ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... "The art of prose translation does not perhaps enjoy a very high literary status in England, but we have no hesitation in numbering the present version of Ibsen, so far as it has gone (Vols. I. and II.), among the very best achievements, in that kind, ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... fortunes in the same way, and tried it, to their sorrow. A sort of inflation can be traced in English sailors' minds as their work expanded. Even Hawkins—the clear, practical Hawkins—was infected. This was not in Drake's line. He kept to prose and fact. He studied the globe. He examined all the charts that he could get. He became known to the Privy Council and the Queen, and prepared for an enterprise which would make his name and frighten ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... upon former years, and, taken altogether, plates, prose, and poetry, is the best book of the present season. The Editor, Mr. Hall, has judiciously maintained the original feature of his plan—that of "considering attractive tales and beautiful poems, however, essential to the interest and variety of the volume, as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... composition as there are nations and poets. For that reason, instead of selecting only such works as in the writer's opinion can justly claim the title of epic, each nation's verdict has been accepted, without question, in regard to its national work of this class, be it in verse or prose. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... by Chatto & Windus, of London; Scribner, Armstrong & Co., New York. A beautiful book, illustrated with several fine colored plates, and relating in simple prose the chief incidents ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... certainly uttered a false prophecy. The curious only look over her romances. They contain doubtless many beautiful inventions; the misfortune is, that time and patience are rare requisites for the enjoyment of these Iliads in prose. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... boyhood to youth his mental development took its characteristics from the popular demand of the neighborhood. He scribbled verses and satirical prose, wherein the coarse wit was adapted to the taste of the comrades whom it was designed to please; and it must be admitted that, after giving due weight to all ameliorating considerations, it is impossible to avoid disappointment at the grossness ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... of poetry,—for it traces out those things in our history which we are most interested in knowing. The poetic beauty of the Scriptures entranced him. Had each chapter of our canon been written in stately prose, Herder would have been one of its coldest admirers. He ransacked the myths and legends of various nations, and dwelt upon the stories of giants and demi-gods with scarcely less enthusiasm than if discoursing on the building of Babel or on the gift of the law on Sinai. Herder disliked the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... ceasing to be so Stuartist as they had been, it was natural that there should be express celebrations of the Protectorate in their name. There had been dedications of books to Cromwell, and applauses of him in prose and verse, from the time of his first great successes as a Parliamentary General; and such things had been increasing since, till they defied enumeration. In the Protectorate they swarmed. Matchless still among ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... devilish intensity. He deserted the Federal party in their greatest need, and meanly betrayed them to Mr. Jefferson, whom, from his boyhood, he had hated and reviled in doggerel rhymes and the bitterest prose his ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... comme je ne les aime pas, says Mallarme characteristically (ceux epars et prives d'architecture) of this long expected first volume of collected prose, Divagations, in which we find the prose poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the theatrical ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... friends 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 patience, ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... satisfaction to us to be allowed to remain together; and during the evenings, when our work was over, I had a constant source of amusement in endeavouring to impart such knowledge as I possessed to Harry. I fortunately remembered portions of the Bible, and numerous pieces of poetry and prose; and by repeating them to him, he also was able to get them by heart. I used to tell him all about England, and how various articles in common use were manufactured. I taught him a good deal of history and geography; and even ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... movement of an extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps been ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... species peculiar to each. The narrative contains those that either reprove with a smile or a frown, by pourtraying the characteristics of an individual, or the general manners of a society, people, or nation; and are either described in verse or prose. The dramatic contains perfect resemblance, which is described by comedy; or caricature, which is described by farce. And the picturesque is what exercises the painter, engraver, and sculptor. In all these species the satirist may either divert by his humour, entertain by his wit, or ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... ever been displayed. Nature has done wonderful things for him; but alas! he has thus far done but little for himself. The great pieces he has sometimes given us have cost him but little effort, and he has thrown out his productions, in prose as well as poetry, with a profusion and a variety that seem miraculous; and yet, of all our bards, he has met with the most severe and merciless censures. In some measure he has deserved the treatment. In College he would not condescend to study, and charity only for his high ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... word, and of compressing his speeches into a small space of time, speaks with equal success whether from a prepared manuscript or wholly extempore. His unsurpassed English style is the result of many years reading and study of prose masterpieces. "He produces, wherever and whenever he wants them, an endless succession of perfectly coined sentences, conceived with unmatched felicity and delivered without hesitation in a parliamentary style which is at once the envy and ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... which it lives. But I don't think young love gets born then. I only speak for myself, and from a very limited experience. As to the story, I don't the least object to it on The Spectator's ground. I think it could not have been done in prose. Verse was wanted to give it dignity. But if we find it trivial, the fault is in our own varnished selves. We have been polished up so bright that we forget the stuff we are ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... respect of the common ignorance of Prosodie, no School-master be admitted to teach a Grammar School, in Burghs, or other considerable Paroches, but such as after examination, shall be found skilfull in the Latine Tongue, not only for Prose, but also for Verse; And that after other trials to be made by the Ministers, and others depute by the Session, Town, and Paroch for this effect, that he be also approven ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... got up, containing apparently the names of a collection of pictures or sculptures, each object duly numbered and with the name of the artist appended. In some instances the name of a (supposed) picture is followed by an appropriate quotation in poetry or prose, after the orthodox fashion of art galleries. We append, by way of illustration, a selection from the catalogue of a collection which has met with great success: EXHIBITION OF THE WORKS ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... on, blubbering like a good Syrian his complaint and joy, gushing now in verse, now in what is worse, in rhymed prose, until he reaches the point which is to us of import. Khalid, in the winter of the first year of the Dastur (Constitution) writes to him many letters from Beirut, of which he gives us not less than ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... on the anti-social passions—in poetry, to elevate the imagination and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life—in prose to the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimus,'—what our faculties are and what they are capable of becoming." This last sentence is a sort of half-prophetic ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively no other name for it. There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... National Bible Society of Scotland is the best. It is the most attractive, in its bright red binding—one gets so tired of khaki—and it contains the Psalms, so priceless and unfailing in time of war. I think it a pity that they are in the metrical rather than the prose form. On the other hand, an officer once told me he found it impossible to settle to read the Bible. His experience was that a booklet of familiar hymns was of most spiritual value to him. He would pull it out in his dug-out and read ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale—But when will it do so? Never—When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... hear Dash by the hour blunder forth his vile prose, Job himself scarcely patience could keep; He's so dull that each moment we're ready to doze, Yet so noisy we ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... writer of prose, by intelligence taught, Says the thing that will please, in the way that ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... notice only of his errors; and that no one has translated any of those strong, those forcible passages which atone for all his faults. But to this I will answer, that nothing is easier than to exhibit in prose all the silly impertinences which a poet may have thrown out; but that it is a very difficult task to translate his fine verses. All your junior academical sophs, who set up for censors of the eminent writers, compile whole volumes; but methinks two pages ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has remained for the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in Java Head to seize most artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist—the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... "let me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude, or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... which was peculiarly agreeable to Eleanor after the great dose of clerical arrogance which she had lately been constrained to take. She played chess with them, walked with them, and drank tea with them; studied or pretended to study astronomy; assisted them in writing stories in rhyme, in turning prose tragedy into comic verse, or comic stories into would-be tragic poetry. She had no idea before that she had any such talents. She had not conceived the possibility of her doing such things as she now did. She found with the Stanhopes new amusements and ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional passage of the Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to verse, after the manner of some other bards or rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in mind that what appear as metrical irregularities on the printed page would not be felt to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... metrical impromptu.” Another person “evinced an elevated mind,” while a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an “attic warbler.” It is true, however, he was writing poetry, not prose. Though a Bluestocking, her praise was usually generously bestowed; she knew well how to flatter. She, though unacquainted with Latin, paraphrased Horace; and she admitted her ignorance of French. She loved all animals, notably cats and dogs, and, believing in a future existence ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... sun boat of Ra encloses similarly a human figure, which was apparently regarded as the soul of the sun: the life of the god was in the "sun egg". In an Indian prose treatise it is set forth: "Now that man in yonder orb (the sun) and that man in the right eye truly are no other than Death (the soul). His feet have stuck fast in the heart, and having pulled them out he comes forth; and when he comes forth then that man dies; whence they say of him who ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... HUNT, a noted American writer of prose and poetry, and known for years by her pen name of "H.H." (the initials of her name), was born in Massachusetts in the year 1831. She is the author of many charming poems, short stories, and novels. Read her "Bits of Talk" and "Bits of Travel." She lived some years in Colorado, where her life ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir of them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to make music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger. The essayist is a kind of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as to his uses, he might be unable to render a better apology for his existence than a flower might. The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature. The essayist wears a lance, but he cares more for the sharpness of its point than for ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... learning, and above all in humanity, illustrates this conflict in an interesting way. To literature, an art which can explain itself, the great public world lent on the whole a reverent and intelligent ear. Its great prose writers were at peace with their audience and were inspired by great public interests. Some of the greatest, for example Tolstoy, produced their finest work on widely human subjects, and numbered their readers and admirers ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... simple sentence in written prose is difficult. In spoken discourse, as well, it is so easy to fall into the First Primer style that while the advantages of the use of the simple sentence are great, the ability to produce good sentences in succession ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... these things will be specified in time, With strict regard to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I've got new mythological machinery, And very ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she received from ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... half prose as it is, is beautiful ... all through there is the spirit of the Magic Flute and at ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... of external civilization, Vilna surpassed the capital of the South by her store of mental energy. The circle of the Vilna Maskilim, which came into being during the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, gave rise to the two founders of the Neo-Hebraic literary style: the prose writer Mordecai Aaron Ginzburg (1796-1846) and the poet Abraham ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... mountain we can write "Heavens, what a piece of Nature's handiwork! how majestic! how sublime! how awe-inspiring in its colossal impressiveness!" This figure rather belongs to poetry and animated oratory than to the cold prose of ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... A Little Scrip for Travellers. In Prose and Verse. With end papers in colour, and gilt top. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. nett; on thin paper, leather, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... the fine gold of art—who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose; and—in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false—a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, moreover, a suffering ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... will work in prose and rhyme, And praise thee more in both Than bard has honored beech or lime, Or that Thessalian growth In which the swarthy ring-dove ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... human experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into her eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her great and energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century, that French prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of it may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free play of human affection, of the claims ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... made by this phenomenon, even before she left the country for London, that the presses teemed with tributes to her extraordinary merit, in verse and prose. Learning poured forth it praise in deep and erudite criticism—Poetry lavished its sparkling encomium in sonnets, songs, odes, and congratulatory addresses, while the light retainers to literature filled ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to her young imagination. She was passing through ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... earlier the last of the minstrels might 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 Apostles" ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... force of the subject opens his own vein of prose, we discover valuable sense and brilliant expression. Such is his account of the first feelings of melancholy persons, written, probably, from his own experience." [See p. 154, of the present edition.]—Ibid. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... comic spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without improving upon it, which was impossible. There is indeed in Boccaccio's serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be met with in any other prose writer whatever. Justice has not been done him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in his obnoxious attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... remembered as the great master of the historical novel, Jane Austen as the skillful realistic interpreter of everyday life, De Quincey for the brilliancy of his style and the vigor of his imagination in presenting his opium dreams, and Lamb for his exquisite humor. In philosophical prose, Mill, Bentham, and Malthus made important contributions to moral, social, and political philosophy, while Coleridge opposed their utilitarian and materialistic tendencies, and codified the principles of criticism from a ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... her late mother, it became a bridge, as it were, between mother and daughter, which enabled the now grown-up daughter to make the acquaintance of the dead mother. These pencil notes were the story of a soul. Displeasure with the prose of life and the brutality of nature, had inflamed the writer's imagination and inspired it to construct a dreamworld in which the souls dwelled, disincarnate. It was essentially an aristocratic ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... now from a survey of its poetry, both non-dramatic and dramatic, to the work done in the fifteenth century for the development of English prose. Until quite towards the close of the fourteenth century England can hardly be said to have possessed any prose literature not avowedly or practically of a didactic character. To save some one's soul or to improve some one's morals ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various |
