"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Historical English Grammar," Lounsbury's "English Language," Champney's "History of English," Emerson's "History of the English Language," Kellner's "Historical Outlines of English Syntax," Earle's "English Prose," and Matzner's "Englische Grammatik." Allen's "Subjunctive Mood in English," Battler's articles on "Prepositions" in the "Anglia," and many other valuable papers, have ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... the Best Authors, in Prose and Verse. Richly illuminated in gold and colours from ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... reascending the throne of Scotland. There remained but three courses for the queen to take to withdraw into France, Spain or England. On the advice of Lord Herries, which accorded with her own feeling, she decided upon the last; and that same night she wrote this double missive in verse and in prose to Elizabeth: ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... if he wishes, may discover without undue delay, the little volume of modern prose selections that he has before him is the result of no ambitious or pretentious design. It is not a collection of the best things that have lately been known and thought in the American world; it is not an anthology in which "all our best authors" are represented ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... not till long after the Jacobite Atterbury's exile, that a Dean (Wilcocks) was broad-minded enough to acknowledge Milton's genius, and allow an admirer of his, one Benson, to put up a monument. The lyric muse above Gray's medallion {51} close by, points to the bust of that master of poetry and prose, to whom he and all the poets ever since Milton's time owe so much. Gray himself must always be remembered in the Abbey, for who can stand amongst the kings and look upon the "mighty conquerors, mighty lords," who made this island kingdom, without recalling ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... downstairs, so I must drop into plain prose, and tell you what already you have guessed, that the Prince I mean is their father, John Frisbie,—Prince John, if you like,—and the Princess's name was Mary Jones before she was married, but now, of course, it is Mary Frisbie. There were five of the princelings,—Jack ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... 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 that Browning, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... failed, but it started a movement in the world of thought deeper and more enduring than State transactions. For his ideas were adopted by the greatest writer then living, and were expounded by him in the most eloquent and gracious prose that had been heard for a thousand years. Petrarca called the appearance of the patriotic tribune and rhetorician the dawn of a new world and a golden age. Like him, he desired to purge the soil of Italy from the barbaric taint. It became ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the intelligent mind of Edwin. The monarch called a council of his wise men, to talk with them about the new doctrine which had been taught in his realm. Of what passed at that council we have but one short speech, but it is one that illuminates it as no other words could have done, a lesson in prose which is full of the finest spirit of poetry, perhaps the most picturesque image of human life that has ever ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... is that deep down in the hearts of the majority of the human race there exists a profound attachment to the ideals of gallantry and chivalry which were nourished by the stories we loved in childhood, and by the tales of Scottish prowess, in prose and poetry, selected for the school-books in use by the children ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater—Dreamed Dreams and Saw Visions and Pictured Them in Poetic Prose. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Crummell, Prof. E. Blyden, Dr. Tanner, and others, it is gratifying to be able to chronicle the Ethiopic women of North America as moving shoulder to shoulder with the men in the highest spheres of literary activity. Among a brilliant band of these our sisters, conspicuous no less in poetry than in prose, we single out but a solitary name for the double purpose of preserving brevity and of giving in one embodiment the ideal Afro-American woman of letters. The allusion here can scarcely fail to point to Mrs. S. Harper. This ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and William ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the bush is purer and that life is better there, But it doesn't seem to pay you like the 'squalid street and square'. Pray inform us, City Bushman, where you read, in prose or verse, Of the awful 'city urchin who would greet you with a curse'. There are golden hearts in gutters, though their owners lack the fat, And we'll back a teamster's offspring to outswear a city brat. Do you think we're ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... purposes of melodious verse, and if it seem to fail, on whatsoever occasion, in energy, the blame is due, not to itself, but to the unskilful manager of it. For so long as Milton's works, whether his prose or his verse, shall exist, so long there will be abundant proof that no subject, however important, however sublime, can demand greater force of expression than is within the compass of ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... affection, for it is the element in 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
... that sadness most of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless in some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more intelligible nearness of the time—it had brought me to the end of my twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not only myself but my instructors—which I infer I did from their so intensely letting me alone—I am quite at a loss ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... a solid slab of purple prose, scissor it into a jig-saw puzzle, serve it with a dazzle dressing and call it the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... and pray that the same power will crown it with a blessing answerable to our wish. The way you take with my other friend shows you to be none of the Bishop of Exeter's converts; [Hall, Bishop of Exeter, had written strongly, both in verse and in prose, against the fashion of sending young men of quality to travel.] of whose mind neither am I superstitiously. But had my opinion been asked, I should, as vulgar conceits use me to do, have showed my power rather to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation. O Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller! No wonder that European fiction sounds cold and meagre, after the wonderful effects which I have seen the romances of the ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... of the early prose testimonies to the genius of Shakspere has been more admired than that which bears the signature of John Dryden. I must transcribe it, accessible as it is elsewhere, for the sake of its juxtaposition with a less-known metrical specimen of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... series of sketches on the delights, adventures, and misadventures connected with bibliomania did not come impulsively to my brother. For many years, in short during the greater part of nearly a quarter of a century of journalistic work, he had celebrated in prose and verse, and always in his happiest and most delightful vein, the pleasures of book-hunting. Himself an indefatigable collector of books, the possessor of a library as valuable as it was interesting, a library containing volumes obtained only at the cost of great personal sacrifice, he was in ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of narrative; for to give a just idea of ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... did not pine, but to show that he took no offence and was still hopeful, he sent Rose on the following Sunday with two bottles of champagne and a large bunch of flowers. She gave them into the handsome fish-girl's own hands, repeating, as she did so, the wine dealer's prose madrigal: ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... which the Odes funambulesques (Alencon, 1857) received unstinted praise from Victor Hugo, to whom they were dedicated. Later, several of his comedies in verse were produced at the Theatre Francais and on other stages; and from 1853 onwards a stream of prose flowed from his industrious pen, including studies of Parisian manners, sketches of well-known persons (Camees parisiennes, &c.), and a series of tales (Contes bourgeois, Contes heroiques, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Deschamps le Rutebeuf du XIVe siecle.—Ses oeuvres comprennent des epitres, des discours en prose, des jeux dramatiques, des ouvrages latins, des apologues, un grand poeme moral, et un infinite de ballades et ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... success. We have a fragment of Cornelius Nepos, the biographer of the Augustan age, declaring that at Cicero's death men had to doubt whether literature or the Republic had lost the most.[9] Livy declared of him only, that he would be the best writer of Latin prose who was most like to Cicero.[10] Velleius Paterculus, who wrote in the time of Tiberius, speaks of Cicero's achievements with the highest honor. "At this period," he says, "lived Marcus Cicero, who owed everything to himself; a man of altogether a new family, as distinguished for ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Prose-writing. St Bede the Venerable. His love of truth. His industry and carefulness. Cuthbert's account of his last days. "Bede whom ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... to come, is a giant compared with the past, and full of mighty materials for any great pen in prose or verse. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... a dramatic poem, which I propose to analyse, making extensive quotations. The work consists of nine scenes. It is written in prose mingled with verse, sometimes free, sometimes rhymed, the transition from prose to verse occurring when emotion breaks from control. The form is ample and rhetorical. There is a majestic balance in the exposition of the thought; but the poem would perhaps have been better ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... Dr. Holmes enjoys, as one of the most popular poets and prose-writers of the day, has made the public overlook the fact that literature has been the recreation of a life of which medical science has been the business. By far the larger portion of his time, for the last thirty years, has been devoted to his profession. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Sleeping Beauty is well known; we have excellent accounts of it, both in prose and in verse. I shall not undertake to relate-it again; but, having become acquainted with several memoirs of the time which have remained unpublished, I discovered some anecdotes relating to King Cloche and ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France
... Drama, and in Characteristic-Writings are the same,' goes on to praise the Tatler and the Spectator for the 'excellent Specimens in the Characteristic-Way' that they offered their readers.[26] Such acknowledgments of the dramatic potentialities in prose fiction were, however, unusual. The romances were modelled on the epic (Fielding, in fact, describes Joseph Andrews in his Preface as a 'comic Romance'); and the picaresque mode in which Smollett wrote had no obviously dramatic qualities. Richardson's advocacy ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... carried away by my own prose, and with the natural vanity of the author, I resented ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... delicate perfumes and colours exquisite. The bard of the future ... h'm! Will he ever appear? As an atavism, perhaps. Take away from modern poetry what appeals to primitive man—the jingle and pathetic fallacy—and the residue, if any, would be better expressed in prose. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... 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 as in verse. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Beharistan, 'The Garden of Spring.' A book on ethics and education, illustrated by interesting anecdotes and narratives, written both in verse and prose, in imitation of the Gulistan, or 'Rose garden' of Saadi, and like it divided into eight chapters, composed by Nuruddin, Abdurrahman Jami, ben Ahmed of the village of Jam, near Herat. He was born A. H. 817 ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... into vernacular verse of the prose versions of specimens of the literature of the great apes of Africa, collected by Professor GARNER. It is not too much to say that those touching cris de coeur redolent of the jungle, the lagoon and the hinterland, will appeal with ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... I; this simulation is not as the former; and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name. Soft! here follows prose. — [Reads] 'If this fall into thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em. Thy Fates ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... Massulam, nor perhaps the challenge of Lady Massulam; she was very much more prosaic to him. But still he admitted that she had an effect on him, that he reacted to her presence, that she was at any rate at least as incalculable as Lady Massulam, and that there might be bits of poetry gleaming in her prose, and that after a quarter of a century he had not arrived at a final judgment about her. Withal Lady Massulam had a quality which she lacked,—he did not know what the quality was, but he knew that it excited him in an unprecedented manner and that he wanted it and would ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... paraphrasing Horace, but each of them with their knowledge of the world, cross-questioned in prose, could have told us how the stings of fortune really are felt. The truth is, that fortune is not exactly a distinct isolated thing which can be taken away—"and there an end." But much has to be severed, with undoubted pain in the operation. A man mostly feels that his reputation for sagacity, ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... have been possible in the following pages to reproduce the elegant and incisive style of a master of French prose, not even the inadequacies of a translation can obscure the force of his argument. The only introduction, therefore, that seems possible must take the form of a request to the reader to study M. Faguet's criticism of modern democracy with the daily paper ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... could show you the fact that our question is two thousand years old. [Cheers.] In the truest sense, it did not begin in 1848, as my friend Dr. Hunt stated; it began centuries ago. Did you ever hear of the old man who went to the doctor, and asked him to teach him to speak prose? "Why, my dear fellow," was the reply, "you have been speaking prose all your life." But he did not know it. So with some people in regard to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... present to his friend—and he judged rightly. His manner is quaint and affected; his order is confused: but he displays some wit, more reading, and still more enthusiasm: and if an enthusiast be often absurd, he is never languid. An English text is perpetually interspersed with Latin sentences in prose and verse; but in his own poetry he claims an exemption from the laws of prosody. Amidst a profusion of genealogical knowledge, my kinsman could not be forgetful of his own name; and to him I am indebted for almost the whole of my information concerning the Gibbon ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... sixty to a hundred pages . . . the amount of the whole seems very great, if we remember that it was all written in about fifteen months. So much for the quantity; the quality strikes me as of singular merit for a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Both as a specimen of her prose style at this time, and also as revealing something of the quiet domestic life led by these children, I take an extract from the introduction to "Tales of the Islanders," the title of one ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... country which had not been equalled since Buckingham fell before the assassin Felton's knife, and was employing all his influence to patronise the Scotch, Wilkes commenced the North Briton. In this, from the first, he was assisted by Churchill, who, however, did not write prose so vigorously as verse. He had sent to the North Briton a biting paper against the Scotch. On reflection, he recalled and recast it in rhyme. It was "The Prophecy of Famine;" and became so popular as to make a whole nation his enemies, and all their enemies ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... the fare which fourteen of the London publishers provide in their colonial editions is of interest. Excellent value, of its kind, is usually offered in these issues, but here again we find proclaimed an excessive preference for light prose literature. Of 264 volumes in one 'colonial library,' 238 are of fiction. Sketches, memoirs, reminiscences and a few essays make up most of the balance. The taste of the working classes, so far as it can ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... anything be an appearance only? Here arises a difficulty which has always beset the subject of appearances. For the argument is asserting the existence of not-being. And this is what the great Parmenides was all his life denying in prose and also in verse. 'You will never find,' he says, 'that not-being is.' And the words prove themselves! Not-being cannot be attributed to any being; for how can any being be wholly abstracted from being? Again, in every predication there is an attribution of singular ...
— Sophist • Plato
... chamber, and repelled the attempted storming on the part of the desperate lover by the armed domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat), "then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love may settle as sediment You have been fearfully scolded, my dear young friend, this was the bitter prose that had ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... play in hand, and have left it a monument to their piety and good taste. Everything grotesque, or barbarous, or ridiculous has been eliminated. All else is subordinated to a faithful and artistic representation of the life and acts of Christ. Stately prose and the language of the Gospel narratives have been substituted for doggerel verse. As a work of art, the Passion Play deserves a high place in the literature ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Brentano's prose tales vary in quality from the over-allegorized latter part of The Fairy Tale of the Rhine and the Miller Radlauf (1816) to the simple and homely Kasper and Annie (1817), with its elemental clash of soldiers and citizens. Through many of the tales there runs a note of satire and of symbolism, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... these lines is difficult to understand. The prose order of the line is 'yogatah yuktesu (madhye) yasya yatha, etc., vikrama (tatha vakshyami); atmani pasyatah (janasya) yuktasya yogasya (yatha) siddhi (tatha vakshyami).' Yogatah means upayatah, i.e., according to rules and ordinances. Vikrama is used in a peculiar sense, viz., ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... shape in which we now have them. But it is said, that, about the year 1100, an Icelandic scholar called Saemund the Wise collected a number of songs and poems into a book which is now known as the "Elder Edda;" and that, about a century later, Snorre Sturleson, another Icelander, wrote a prose-work of a similar character, which is called the "Younger Edda." And it is to these two books that we owe the preservation of almost all that is now known of the myths and the strange religion of our Saxon and Norman forefathers. But, besides these, there are a number of semi-mythological stories ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... throughout the whole of Scandinavia. This ancestor of the modern Scandinavian tongues has been preserved in Iceland so little changed that every Icelander still understands, without the aid of explanatory commentaries, the oldest preserved prose written in their country 850 years ago. The principal reasons for this were probably limited communications between Iceland and other countries, frequent migrations inside the island, and, not least important, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... they now sing the Kyrie, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Credo, &c, even the Te Deum, on the Roman or Parisian tone, (for this worthy priest came from Paris). They know many hymns of the Blessed Virgin, which they sing equally well, also the prose Dies Irae. They sing mass fairly well, especially the tone Royal, and the mass for the dead. Some persons may be surprised at this, and perhaps harbor a doubt of it, but I can testify as a witness to its truth. More than a hundred times they have sung ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... of the story have been so often favourably received at the Circuit Mess, that I thought an amplified version of them in prose would not be unacceptable to the general reader, and might ultimately awaken in the public mind a desire for the long-needed reform of ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... your poetry as if it were just as good as prose. But you don't consider, my dear fellow, that if we make our visit when I go down to preach for Bellows, that I can't preach for your Orthodox friend. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... taken of alternative readings, and to which the variants, chronologically arranged from the earliest to the latest Quartos, can easily be referred. Some of the early Quartos no doubt offer better texts of some of the plays, especially in the matter of verse and prose arrangement, and had it been intended to print one text, and one text only, unaccompanied by a full apparatus of variorum readings, something might be said in favour of a choice among the Quartos and Folios, selecting here and there, in the case of each play, the particular text ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... Savill was asked by my lord of Essex his opinion touching poets; who answered my lord, "He thought them the best writers, next to those that write prose." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... a young Russian girl, Marie Bashkirtzeff. She wrote some prose and poetry and did some painting. She lived and died very young from TB on the French Riviera in Nice. Not particularly pretty, nor particularly striking, she had nevertheless a tremendous personality. In fact so ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... writers, in many instances, seem to have been entirely ignorant. From what we can learn, the composers of this literature flourished chiefly at the commencement of the present century: Father Manso is said to have been one of the last. Many of their compositions, which are both in poetry and prose, exist in manuscript in a compilation made by one Luis Lobo. It has never been our fortune to see this compilation, which, indeed, we scarcely regret, as a rather curious circumstance has afforded us a perfect ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... 122.] and of Tom Touchy; [Footnote: Spectator 122.] but they are surrounded by circumstances peculiar to themselves, and so are much more highly individualized. The Tatler and the Spectator very greatly extended the range of essay-writing, and with it the flexibility of prose style; it is this extension that gives to them their modern quality. Nothing came amiss: fable, description, vision, gossip, literary criticism or moral essays, discussion of large questions such as marriage and education, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... they said such things in a fashion that suggested no violent effort nor any demand for resistance: it was the peculiar virtue of Froude that he touched nothing without the virile note of a challenge sounding throughout his prose. On this account, though he will convince our posterity even less than he does ourselves, the words of persuasion, the writings themselves will remain: for he chose the hardest wood in which to chisel, knowing ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... confidences of roadside vagrants, and the acquaintanceship serves as an introduction to the scene of the gipsy encampment, where the young Sapengro or serpent charmer was first claimed as brother by Jasper Petulengro. The picture of the encampment may serve as an example of Borrovian prose, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... cheerfully declared that she was bored to death, and wasn't Ward just dying for a game of "rob casino"? Sometimes she simply teased him into retaliation. Frequently she insisted that he repeat the things he had learned by heart, of poetry or humorous prose, for his memory was almost uncanny in its tenacity. She discovered quite early, and by accident, that she had only to shake her head in a certain way and declaim: "Ah, Tam, noo, Tam, thou'lt get thy faring—In hell they'll roast thee like a herring,"—she ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... He actually carried out this resolve, and enrolled himself as a member of Boswell's crew for a few days; but at the end of this period left them with much internal disgust. The poetry of gypsy life utterly vanished on close examination, giving way to the most disagreeable prose. Accustomed as John Clare was to humble fare under a poor roof, his nerves could not stand the cookery at King Boswell's court. To fish odds and ends of bones, bits of cabbage, and stray potatoes from a large iron pot, in partnership with a number ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... vastly pleased the Queen. Not a day passed but she received seven or eight thousand sonnets, and as many elegies, madrigals, and songs, which were sent her by all the poets in the world. All the prose and the poetry that was written just then was about Bellissima—for that was the Princess's name—and all the bonfires that they had were made of these verses, which crackled and sparkled better than any ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... existence of early biographies of the early propagators of Irish Christianity is unnecessary. These had an undoubted existence; sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse; and it is these that the annalists themselves chiefly refer to; the character of whose notices may be collected from the following extracts relating to the first arrival ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... feudalism and make the people submit to a centralized government. Even down to the present day, the Chinese are proud to describe themselves as "sons of Han." The house of Tang, A.D. 618-908, is noted above all for the literary style of its prose-writers and the genius of its poets. In South China the people are fond of calling themselves "sons of Tang." The house of Sung, A.D. 970-1127, shows a galaxy of philosophers and scholars, whose expositions and speculations ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... TRALESTRIS, And she that wou'd have been the mistress Of GUNDIBERT; but he had grace, 395 And rather took a country lass; They say, 'tis false, without all sense, But of pernicious consequence To government, which they suppose Can never be upheld in prose; 400 Strip nature naked to the skin, You'll find about her no such thing. It may be so; yet what we tell Of TRULLA that's improbable, Shall be depos'd by those who've seen't, 405 Or, what's as good, produc'd ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... philosopher, was such a lover of flowers that he was never satisfied unless he saw them in almost every room of his house, and when he came to discourse of them in his Essays, his thoughts involuntarily moved harmonious numbers. How naturally the following prose sentence in Bacon's Essay on Gardens ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... succeeded admirably in keeping much of the spirit of the originals in her prose versions of the best ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... only to man, and it is right they should. He it was whom God created first, let him take the preeminence. But among those stars of lesser glory, which are given to lighten the nations, among sweet-voiced poets, earnest prose writers, who, by the lofty truth that lies hid beneath legend and parable, purify the world, graceful painters and beautiful musicians, each brightening their generation—among these, let ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... notwithstanding it is my Opinion, that several of the Scenes might have been altered by our Author for the better; but as they all stand, it is, as I said, quite impossible to separate them, without a visible Prejudice to the Whole. I must add, that I am much in Doubt, whether Scenes of Prose are allowable, according to Nature and Reason, in Tragedies which are composed chiefly of Blank Verse; the Objection to them seems to be this, that as all Verse is not really in Nature, but yet Blank Verse is necessary ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... recited heroic legends and other tales to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. These were followed by the minstrels and other tellers of tales written for the people. They frequented fairs and merrymakings, spreading the knowledge not only of tales in prose or ballad form, but of appeals also to public sympathy ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... work is in philosophy, he belongs to literature by the beauty of his poems, especially his sonnets, and by the quality of his prose. ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... and George Sand's "Correspondance," which supplement and correct the two publications of the novelist. Remembering the latter's tendency to idealise everything, and her disinclination to descend to the prose of her subject, I shall make the letters the backbone of my narrative, and for the rest ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... would be palpably absurd. It might even be doubted whether for the themes which he was afterwards likely to choose, and actually did choose, for poetic treatment the materials at his command in French (and English) poetry and prose would not have sufficed him. As it was, it seems probable that he took many things from Italian literature; it is certain that he learnt much from it. There seems every reason to conclude that the influence of Italian study ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... us feed the things we ought to starve and serve the things we ought to rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: 'We will give her champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only sweet—as we well know—but also helpful to society and the life of man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I take it, if this can be proved.' Aristotle certainly knew the ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... with its heavy, monotonous noise, and the brisk, lively tinkle of the muffin-bell, have something in them, but not much. They will bear dilating upon with the utmost license of inventive prose. All things are not alike conductors to the imagination. A learned Scotch professor found fault with an ingenious friend and arch-critic for cultivating a rookery on his grounds: the professor declared "he would as soon think of encouraging ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... Hook contributed various jingles—there is no other name for them—arranged to popular tunes, and intended to become favourites with the country people. These like the prose effusions, served the purpose of an hour, and have no interest now. Whether they were ever really popular remains to be proved. Certes, they are forgotten now, and long since even in the most Conservative corners of the country. Many of these have the appearance ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... come back to plain prose and consider your desperate financial situation. You cannot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... the same conclusion, but a different moral, in an hour—since you allow me twice the time I named—if I may be permitted to write it in blank verse, that is, and of course, with the understanding that what I write is not intended to be anything but mere versified prose." ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal. Rasselas, as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his Vanity of Human Wishes he had ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the Kalevipoeg an Esthonian variant of the Kalevala; but I found it so dissimilar, and at the same time so interesting, when divested of the tedious and irrelevant matter that has been added to the main story, that I finally decided to publish a full account of it in prose, especially as nothing of the kind has yet been attempted in English, beyond ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... for children, combining a series of progressive spelling lessons, commencing with the alphabet, and interspersed with simple rhymes and easy sentences in prose, accompanied with many pictures. The Primer contains Dr. Watts' celebrated Cradle Hymn, the verses entitled "Mary and her Lamb," the "Busy Bee," &c. Those who wish to change from the heavy and badly printed "Spelling Books" ...
— A Narrative of The Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man. - Written by Himself, At The Age of Fifty-Four • Noah Davis
... By William J. Thoms, F.S.A., Secretary of the Camden Society, Editor of "Early Prose Romances," "Lays and Legends of all Nations." &c. One object of the present work is to furnish new contributions to the History of our National Folk-Lore; and especially some of the more striking Illustrations of the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... known from her earliest infancy: they had been piled around that bedroom over the roof. Books and book lore and the command of the English tongue were William Wetherell's only legacies to his daughter, and many an evening that spring she had read him to sleep from classic volumes of prose and poetry I hesitate to name, for fear you will think her precocious. They went across the green to Cousin Ephraim Prescott's harness shop, where Jethro had tied his horse, and it was settled that Cynthia ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... could throw myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was a constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming that presented itself as daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of the schoolroom. I don't mean by this, of course, that we studied only fiction and verse; ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... 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
... Custom House officials, they were allowed to land with impunity a considerable quantity of dynamite, with which on Saturday night they decamped. Their disappearance remained unsuspected up to a late hour on Sunday morning, when 'The Bower' was visited, and (to borrow the words of the great master of prose) non sunt inventi. The neatness with which the escape was executed points to the disquieting conclusion that they did not want ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... text of the Mahawanso, but are taken from the explanatory notes appended to it. I have stated elsewhere, that it was the practice of authors who wrote in Pali verse, to attach to the text a commentary in prose, in order to illustrate the obscurities incident to the obligations of rhythm. In this instance, the historian, who was the kinsman and intimate friend of the king, by whose order the glass pinnacle was raised in the fifth century, probably felt that the stanza descriptive ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... questions under consideration, his usual qualities are present - precision, clearness, soberness of judgment. But the preambles - sometimes a bit prolix - are written after the fashion prevailing among the rabbis of the time, in a complicated, pretentious style, often affecting the form of rhymed prose and always in a poetic jargon. With this exception, the Responsa do not betray the least straining after effect, the least literary refinement. The very fact that Rashi did not himself take the precaution to collect his Responsa, proves how little he cared to make a show with them, though, it is ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... medium of verse. In this novel, the theme of which occasionally touches upon the same problems—problems involving love, freedom of expression, the right to live one's life in one's own way—he is revealed to be no less a master of the prose form than of the poetical. While the book is one for mature minds, the skill with which delicate situations are handled and the reserve everywhere exhibited remove it from possible criticism even by the most exacting. The title, it should be explained, refers to a spirited ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... and inimitable, which is as much a part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, how his abrupt, crabbed, but withal sinewy and picturesque, prose compares with the pure crystalline sentences of Cardinal Newman, and how these again compare with the quaintly and pathetically humorous chat, the idealized talk of Charles Lamb. Think how easy it is ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... gone, and Lady Rose, And Janice Meredith, where no one knows; But still the Author gushes overtime, And many a Poet babbles on in Prose. ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... me join my voice to the universal chorus of praise to Shakspeare, "si quid loquar audiendum." It is merely a testimony of gratitude; nor presumes to add to that fame which has been celebrated, not to mention a thousand others, by the nervous prose of Johnson and the rapturous poetry of Gray. O ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... Your pre-Reformation lark sang from "a full stomach," and thanked God it had a constitution to carry it off without affectation: and your nineteenth century lark applying the same code of life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, and not poetry at all as we try to ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... planted vine and the lover's godship.—Ludicrous! There is no getting farther than the cup of milk with Marko. They curvet and caper to be forward unavailingly. It should be Alvan to bring her through the forest to the planted vine in sunland. Her splendid prose Alvan could do what the sprig of poetry can but suggest. Never would malicious fairy in old woman's form have offered Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride's imagination of him confronting perils. Yet, O shameful contrariety of the fates! he who could, will not; he who ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... race perishing beyond recovery. Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself. With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious authorship of the latter gave to this classicism—what it had hitherto lacked—extensive prose texts. Thus Cicero became the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist; it was to the stylist Cicero, not ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... got out of the carriage, being impulsive, and began almost involuntarily to climb the hill, half expecting to see the glories of the New Jerusalem all spread out before me when I should reach the top; and it came with quite a shock of disappointment to find there was nothing there but the prose of potato-fields, and a sandy road with home-going calves kicking up its dust, and in the distance our neighbour's Schloss, and the New Jerusalem just as far off ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... fellowship with one another, which had been the costliest gem in the days of their fathers; and therefore, in future, they honoured the day as the true spiritual birthday of the Renewed Church of the Brethren. It is useless trying to express their feelings in prose. Let us listen to the moving words of the Moravian ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... had heard that Juno never uttered; but we were forced to go astray in the footsteps of these poetic fictions, and to say in prose much what he expressed in verse. And his speaking was most applauded, in whom the passions of rage and grief were most preeminent, and clothed in the most fitting language, maintaining the dignity of ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... 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 determined ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... seventeenth-century book, which had belonged to Carlyle, and whose margins were sometimes filled with Carlyle's notes. He imparted freely from his own vast information and it was pleasant indeed to hold a chair for an hour or two in his hospitable home. In our last interview the prose and the solemn romance of life were strangely blended. We had just heard the burial service in Appleton Chapel read by Phillips Brooks over the coffin of James Russell Lowell; then we rode together on the crowded platform of a street-car to the grave at Mount Auburn; a rough and jostling ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... of Dante's, the dead poetry arose, and a burst of song came almost simultaneously from all Western Europe. To this period belong the Minnesingers of Germany, the Troubadours of Provence, the unknown authors of the lovely romance—poetical in feeling, though cast chiefly in a prose form—Aucassin et Nicolete, and of several not less lovely English ballads and lyrics. Even the heavy rhymed chronicles begin to be replaced by romances in which the true poetic fire breaks out, such as the Nibelungen Lied (in its definitive form) and ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... use was made of the actual words of the great authors who had described these combats and these dances, the descriptions being condensed sometimes and sometimes their rhythm being a little modified so that they should not be out of keeping with the more pedestrian prose by which they were accompanied. Thus, as it happens, the dances of little Pearl and of Topsy could be set forth, fortunately, almost in the very phrases of Hawthorne and of Mrs. Stowe, while I was forced to describe as best I could myself the gyrations of the wife who lived in 'A Doll's House' ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... heredity, the important thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors. He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to find himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid salesman without a relative in the world, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... purposely avoiding the use of any literary materials. Many similar tales might be added to this chapter, but the most important and best known have been given. To give those tales which cannot be described as fairy tales and which are usually found in the shape of chap-books in prose and poetry would fall without the scope of the present volume, and would belong more appropriately to a ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... is an exquisite prose poem—words strung on thought-threads of gold—in which a musician tells his love for one whom he has found to be his ideal. The idea is not new, but the opinion is ventured that nowhere has it been one-half so well carried ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... still a child when I began to write down the things I was thinking about, but at first I always made rhymes and found prose so difficult that a school composition was a terror to me, and I do not remember ever writing one that was worth anything. But in course of time rhymes themselves became difficult and prose more and more enticing, and I began my work in life, most happy in finding that ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... The Siamese Twins. His My Novel, or Varieties of English Life, is nearly finished, and he will give to the world a new three volume novel in the course of the spring. He is also bringing out, with final revisions, notes, &c., all his prose writings, in a neat and cheap edition. In the new preface to Alice, or the Mysteries, he says: "So far as an author may presume to judge of his own writings, no narrative fiction by the same hand (with the exception of the poem of King Arthur) ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... "deigned to choose for our best virtue our sweetest pleasure."[2318]—The idyll which is imagined to take place in heaven corresponds with the idyll practiced on earth. From the public up to the princes, and from the princes down to the public, in prose, in verse, in compliments at festivities, in official replies, in the style of royal edicts down to the songs of the market-women, there is a constant interchange of graces and of sympathies. Applause bursts out in the theater at any verse containing an allusion to princes, and, a moment ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... for achievements. Mr. Meeker in his youth taught school, went into journalism, was connected with the New York "Mirror," and later was associated with George D. Prentice on the Louisville "Journal," now the "Courier-Journal," edited by the brilliant Henry Watterson. A versatile writer in both prose and verse, he wrote two or three books, one of which he dedicated to President Pierce. He married a woman of great force and exaltation of character, a native of Connecticut, and a descendant of Elder Brewster. She shared his aims ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... "I am a prose labourer," Warrington said; "you, my boy, are a poet in a small way, and so, I suppose, consider you are authorised to be flighty. What is it you want? Do you want a body of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of all authors, who may present themselves, manuscript ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... surroundings; and so, intending to pass his morning in the garden, he had chosen 'The Garden of Cyrus' as an appropriate study. He opened it reverently, for it was compact of jewelled thoughts that had been set to words by one of the princes of prose. He, the young garden-lover, sat at the feet of the great garden-mystic, and began to pore wonderingly over the inscrutable secrets of the quincunx. His fine ear was charmed by the rhythm of the sumptuous and stately sentences, and his pulses throbbed ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Doctrine" is by far the most remarkable of all Milton's later prose publications, and would have exerted a great influence on opinion if it had appeared when the author designed. Milton's name would have been a tower of strength to the liberal eighteenth-century clergy inside and ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... valley, and ten years' residence is proof of my affection for the place. I have shown my love of it by the house which I built there. There I began my article "Africa," there I wrote the greater part of my epistles in prose and verse. At Vaucluse I conceived the first idea of giving an epitome of the Lives of Illustrious Men, and there I wrote my treatise on a Solitary Life, as well as that on religious retirement. It was there, also, that I sought to moderate my passion for Laura, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... utmost gratification ever earned by either of these in the prosecution of his special calling—in acquiring knowledge, in solving knotty problems, or in scaling the heights of abstract contemplation—is probably as inferior in keenness of zest to that which the poet knows, as the best prose is inferior in charm to the best poetry. It may even be that both poet and philosopher owe, on the whole, more unhappiness than happiness—the one to his superior sensibility, the other to his superior enlightenment, and yet neither would exchange his own lesser happiness ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... endeavoured, however 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 be so when sung or chanted; just as is the case with the folk-songs of Palestine ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... formerly used before a vowel, as mine amiable lady: which though now disused in prose, might be still properly continued in poetry: they are used as ours and yours, when they are referred to a substantive preceding, as thy house is larger than mine, but my garden is ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... he 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
... subject under consideration. Cardinal Newman, some may believe, possessed this supreme rhetoric in perhaps even a higher degree than Brownson, but so much can be said of few other writers of English prose. George Ripley, whom Father Hecker deemed the best judge of literature in our country or elsewhere, assured him that there were passages in Dr. Brownson which could not be surpassed in the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... himself this characteristic is comparatively natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... LANG!—who the classics is pat in, Suggests to our writers, as test of their "style," Just to turn their equivocal prose into Latin, As DRYDEN did. Truly the plan makes one smile! Reviewers find Novelists' nonsense much weary 'em. Writers of twaddle Take DRYDEN a model— Turn your books into some great "dead language"—and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the prose of Boethius—and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints—together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... already as a writer in 'Blackwood's Magazine' when I made his acquaintance in 1841. For some years I had been writing in Tait's and Fraser's Magazines, and elsewhere, articles and verses, chiefly humorous, both in prose and verse, under the nom de guerre of Bon Gaultier. This name, which seemed a good one for the author of playful and occasionally satirical papers, had caught my fancy in Rabelais, {vii} where he says of himself, "A ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... pair together, and thus provide 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
... a man of marked personality, Lord Lytton. The only son of the celebrated novelist, he inherited decided literary gifts, especially an unusual facility of expression both in speech and writing, in prose and verse. Any tendency to redundance in speech is generally counted unfavourable to advancement in diplomatic circles, where Talleyrand's mot as to language being a means of concealing thought still finds favour. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... inclined to think that he must have had Fox's readiness without Fox's redundancy and repetition; and that he must have had the stately diction and the commanding style of the younger Pitt, with a certain freshness and force which {28} the younger Pitt did not always exhibit. Bolingbroke's English prose style is hardly surpassed by that of any other author, either before his time or since. It is supple, strong, and luminous; not redundant, but not bare; ornamented where ornament is suitable and even useful, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... bookman; but at bottom Thyrsis knew that all these men were gilding a corpse. Wordsworth and Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne —he followed each one as far as their revolutionary impulse lasted; and after that there was no more in them for him. Even Ruskin, who taught him the possibilities of English prose, and opened his eyes to the form and color of the world of nature—even Ruskin he gave up, because he was a philanthropist and not ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... used to measure land with. I don't see why that should make me a poet. My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so are other young men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical genius. But wherever I got it, it comes as easy to me to write in verse as to write in prose, almost. Don't you ever feel a longing to send your thoughts forth in ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... surprising to be told, by a man of Hume's literary power, that the first polite prose in the English language was written by Swift. Locke and Temple (with whom Sprat is astoundingly conjoined) "knew too little of the rules of art to be esteemed elegant writers," and the prose of Bacon, Harrington, and Milton ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... not of Molire's invention, but is to be found in Les Oeuvres galantes en prose et en vers de M. Cotin, Paris, 1663. It is called, Sonnet Mademoiselle de Longueville, prsent Duchesse de Nemours, sur sa fivre quarte. As, of necessity, the translation given above is not very literal, I append ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... the Italy of sublime dreams, which, owing her deliverance to her sons alone, should arise immaculate from the grave a Messiah among the nations, but the actual Italy which has been accomplished; imperfect and peccable as human things mostly are, belonging rather to prose than to poetry, to matter than to spirit, but, for all that, an Italy which is ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... reading, and brooding Lafcadio Hearn's prose ripened and mellowed consistently to the end. In mere workmanship the present volume is one of his most admirable, while in its heightened passages, like the final paragraph of "The Romance of the Milky Way," the rich, melancholy music, the profound suggestion, are not easily ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... should know. McMurry. Classic myths. Norton. Heart of oak books, v. 3. (Adapted.) Perkins. Twenty best fairy tales. Scudder. Children's book. Tappan. Folk stories and fables. Whittier. Child life in prose. ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... The most illustrious prose writer of this or any other age is M. Tullius Cicero; and as his life is copiously related in biographical works, it will be sufficient to mention his writings. From his earliest years, he applied himself ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... final "-e" of an adverb is very rarely elided (except in the expression "dank' al", which occurs in prose as ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... as O.C. Split Infinitives. His duties are to see that the standard of literary excellence, which makes the correspondence of the Corps a pleasure to receive, is maintained at the high level set by the Corps Commander himself. Indeed the velvety quality of our prose is the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is explicable partly by the supposition ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Museum and Public Library, the Protestant church, several orphanages and hospitals, lastly, incredible as it may seem, the beautiful octagonal tower of the Cathedral. The incidents of this vandalism have just been graphically described in the new volume of the brothers' Margueritte prose epic, dealing with the Franco-Prussian War, ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... occasion. A sister, a mother, a promised lover, all false,—all so damnably, cruelly false! It was impossible. No history, no novel of most sensational interest, no wonderful villany that had ever been wrought into prose or poetry, would have been equal to this. It was impossible. She told herself so a score of times a day. And yet the circumstances were so terribly suspicious! Mr. Gibson's conduct as a lover was simply disgraceful to him as a man and a clergyman. He was full ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... book being personally censorious, and in that part the names of real persons being used without their assent, it seems fit that a few words be said of the matter in sober prose. What it seems well to say I have already said with sufficient clarity in the preface of another book, somewhat allied to this by that feature of its character. I quote from "Black Beetles ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... and table all over knick-knacks, which Miss Constance called her little den, where she could study beauty after her own bent, while her sister Mary was wholly engrossed with the useful, and could endure nothing but the prose of ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... no occasion whatever for a fox. And 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 record it as ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 following epistle by ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... severely criticized by French and English writers, but while his verdicts have been shaken, they have not been reversed. The world still fails to doubt their substantial reality. Tacitus, adds Cruttwell, has probably exercised upon readers a greater power than any other writer of prose whom Rome produced.] ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... of friendship. But if, as it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, why may not any one acquiesce in the privation of his sight, when God has so amply furnished his mind and his conscience with eyes?—Milton's Prose Works. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... friendship, in the matter of "The Symphony", as indeed in all others, has been wonderful, a thing too fine to speak of in prose. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Story touched the highest note of his life,—as poet, sculptor, painter, or writer of prose; in no other form of expression has he equalled the sublimity of sentiment ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... could only get to the attitude of simple acceptance of this as a literal truth, and believe that, in prose reality, Christ comes to every heart that loves Him, would not all the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... don't mean their published verse, but their absurdly romantic view of unromantic objects—is terribly hard to translate. It seldom escapes being turned into prose. It must have happened to you now and again to have had the photograph of your friend's beloved produced for your inspection and opinion. It is a terrible moment. If she does happen to be a really pretty girl—heavens! what a relief. You praise her with almost hysterical ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... the village, Miss Dover lagged behind, and then Severne infused into his voice those tender tones, which give amorous significance to the poorest prose. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... 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
... has done this for us in his famous drama; Jordan has done it in his Sigfrid's saga; Morris has done it in the work mentioned above; but will not Auber Forestier gather up all the scattered fragments relating to Sigurd and Brynhild, and weave them together into a prose narrative, that shall delight the young and the old of this ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... of the drive from Naples to the Bay of Salerno has been set forth, by many writers, in prose and song and poem, and remembering this, Barbara's and Bettina's faces were radiant with expectation as they started upon it. Malcom and Margery were in the carriage with them; the atmosphere was perfection; the ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt |
