"Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... although no politician of the first order took any direct part in it, did much to embitter the relations of their respective parties.[16] Not less irritating were the jeux d'esprit with which Canning continued to assail the ministry in the newspaper press.[17] The most famous of these is the couplet:— ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... had a few dollars to the good. During one of the two years a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day. It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on the tombstones they ordered. They themselves, in most cases, knew none, and they asked Francois to supply them—as though he kept them in stock like marble and sand-paper. He had no collection ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... predictions or the result of calculations. It does not appear, indeed, that the Chinese were, at any time, able to predict an eclipse, notwithstanding all that has been said in their favour on this subject. The reputed Chinese tables, published by Father Couplet, have been detected to be those of Tycho Brahe; and Cassini found the chronology of their eclipses, published by Martinus, to be erroneous, and their returns impossible. It could not indeed be otherwise; the defectiveness ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... hesitation, and made my salam [to the princess;] she never looked at me directly, but continued all along to give me furtive side glances. When I became elevated [with the effects of the wine,] I began to repeat some pieces of poetry; among others, I recited the following couplet: ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... vices of the natives, very artlessly revealing the fact in many places, however, that his observations were drawn principally from the conduct of the servants in the conventos and homes of Spaniards. To him in this letter is due the credit of giving its wide popularity to the specious couplet: ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... instances are on record of the encounter of this fish with other fishes, or of their attacks upon ships. What can be the inducement for it to attack objects so much larger than itself is hard to surmise. We are all familiar with the couplet from Oppian: ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... responsible for much of this. He has brought this House into nearly the same condition. We do very little, and they do absolutely nothing. All of us in our younger days, I am quite sure, were taught by those who had the care of us a verse which was intended to inculcate the virtue of industry. One couplet ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... paper pasted across its back. As he hoped, it gave both the name and address of the merchant from whom it had been bought. But that was not all. Running in diagonal lines across this label, he saw some faded lines in fine handwriting, which proved to be a couplet signed with five initials. The latter were not quite legible, but the couplet he could read without the least difficulty. It was highly sentimental, and might mean much and might mean nothing. If the handwriting should prove to be Mr. Roberts', the probabilities were in favor ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... Sonnet in that they rhime three, instead of four times in the first part. The pause is in them, as in the rest, variously placed through the course of the verses; and thus they bear no more resemblance than their associates, to those minute Elegies of twelve alternate rhimes, closing with a couplet, which assume the name of Sonnet, without any other resemblance to that order of Verse, except their limitation to fourteen lines. I never found the quadruple rhimes injurious to the general expression of the sense, but in the excepted instances. When it is considered ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... this pleasure in the lingering line, in the haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. By sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious, something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel. It will not suffice for the new ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... insulting jests passed upon them by the despots. Mamercus, who plumed himself on his poems and tragedies, gave himself great airs after conquering the mercenaries, and when he hung up their shields as offerings to the gods, he inscribed this insolent elegiac couplet upon them. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... granted armorial ensigns (1382) to Dijon, with the motto moult me tarde (I wish for ardently). The merchants of Sinapi copied this on their wares, the middle word of the motto being accidentally effaced. A well-known couplet of lines supposed to occur in Hudibras (but not to be found there), has long baffled the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone of the well-bred causeur, as free from classical mannerism as it was free ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... have more than one light passage. To draw a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more of deep and ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Buckler in 1602 (if it were the same man), he still called his Muse "young" in 1613. I cannot call to mind any precedent for the form of stanza adopted by him, consisting, as it does, of six ten-syllable lines, rhyming alternately, followed by a twelve-syllable couplet. None of the other stanzas contain personal matter; the grief of the author of Great Britain's Sun's-set seems as artificial as might be expected; and his tears were probably brought to the surface by the ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... They were insecure! The city rested upon three columns, one of them intact, another quite decayed away, the third partially corroded and soon to crumble into ruin. He peered up from, his blue depths, and in a fateful couplet of verses warned the townsmen of their impending doom. In this prophetic utterance ascribed to the fabulous Cola Pesce is echoed a popular apprehension that ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... should give to genius, I always have before me that magnificent head. I had a moment of enthusiasm." And further, he adds that one day he saw him listening to Monti while the latter was singing his first couplet in the "Mascheroniana." "I shall never forget," said he, "the divine expression of his look; it was the serene ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... a garret—let him know't who will—- There was my bed—full hard it was and small; My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun: For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days when ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... still carry weight. In the burlesque couplet, ascribed in the first edition to the younger Colman and afterwards transferred ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... apologise. Eventually he was coaxed home and got upstairs, but then, in a gush of politeness, he insisted on seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking, Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet, which covered a multitude of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... these are fixed and conventional, and others are of his own contrivance. Spanish uses the terms estrofa and copla to designate an arrangement of verses in a stanza. Copla must not be confused with English "couplet." These are general terms; most verse-forms are designated by special names. The following verse-forms are found in the ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... is called Frisian; and the Low German spoken in Great Britain is called English. These three languages are extremely like one another; but the Continental language that is likest the English is the Dutch or Hollandish dialect called Frisian. We even possess a couplet, every word of which is both English and ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Speech-ending test has been used by Koenig,[284] and I will first give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less than two; but I am ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Semitic goddess Ishtar and by the Sumerian goddess Nintu or Ninkharsagga. In the passage in the Babylonian Version, "the Lady of the Gods" has always been treated as a synonym of Ishtar, the second half of the couplet being regarded as a restatement of the first, according to a recognized law of Babylonian poetry. We may probably assume that this interpretation is correct, and we may conclude by analogy that "the holy Innanna" in the second ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... outburst to the thistle, and the thistle's reply, instead of a Sir Walter and Queen Elizabeth couplet. Long, lance-shaped, deeply cleft, sharply pointed, and prickly dark green leaves make the ascent almost unendurable; nevertheless, the ant bravely mounts to where the bristle-pointed, overlapping scales of the deep green cup hold the luscious ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... conducted her to Niddry Castle, his own seat. When, in gratitude for his fidelity, Mary would have created him an Earl, Lord Seaton declined the honour, and preferred his existing rank as Premier Baron of Scotland. Mary celebrated his determination in a couplet, written both in ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet: ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... with the quaint humor in the description of the old man who is the subject of the poem. There is a delicious Irish character in this, as in many other pieces of Holmes, reminding us of the familiar couplet ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... but you know the couplet, (49) which says, "I do not wish to be a lord - I am by birth a Gypsy - I do not wish to be a gentleman - I am content ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... Kilpeck, Herefordshire, I have seen a wayside public-house, exhibiting the sign of the "Oak," under which is the following couplet: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... statements are greatly exaggerated, The Traveller is interesting because it contains beautiful descriptions and apt expressions of thought. The verse employed is the heroic couplet, the favorite verse of the eighteenth-century poets. The lines rhyme in pairs, and often a couplet expresses a complete thought. Each line contains five feet, ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... any ill—such as toothache or moody meditation—so poignant as to prevent him losing himself in the interest of the moment, then he is not happy. Nor must he merely think himself absorbed, but actually be so, as are two lovers sitting under one umbrella, or he who is just making a couplet rhyme." ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... occupations, either as regards pleasantness or usefulness. Nor do I mean to say, that neither parents themselves nor their children, are ever to consult their own natural preferences—their own likes and dislikes. All I aim at is, to convince the young—especially the young woman—that the old couplet, ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... The second couplet was sung by Panshin with special power and expression, the sound of waves was heard in the stormy accompaniment. After the words "and longing vain," he sighed softly, dropped his eyes and let his voice gradually die away, morendo. When he had finished, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... after school four boys, of whom I was one, while playing on the commons, found a dead sheep. It was suggested that we carry the sheep into the schoolroom and place it on Lord's seat. This was promptly done and I wrote a Latin couplet, purporting that this was a very worthy sacrifice to a very poor Lord, and placed it on the head of the sheep. The next morning Lord found the sheep and made a great outcry against the indignity. Efforts were made at once to ascertain the actors in this farce, and ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... eight long lines that conclude each stanza of this charming love-poem, instead of rhyming alternately as in the translation, chime somewhat to the tune of Byron's Don Juan—six lines rhyming with each other, and the two last forming a separate couplet. In other respects the translation, it is hoped, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... excellent. The sentiment reminds me of the Earl of Roscommon's well-known couplet in his Essay on Translated Verse, a poem now ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... therefore sentenced to be publicly flogged in the hall of his college, and to receive one lash for each line in his satire. Never, surely, was a poet so sharply taught the merit of brevity. How Edward Anne must have regretted that he had not knocked off an epigram, a biting couplet, or a smart quatrain with the sting of ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... for herself; some pretended that she did not hold out long enough, and that she surrendered at discretion before she was vigorously attacked; and others said, that his majesty complained of certain other facilities still less pleasing. The Duke of Buckingham made a couplet upon this occasion, wherein the king, speaking to Progers, the confidant of his intrigues, puns upon the name of the fair one, to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... first my courage brave. He shall lose his ears, egad! Who shall howl his love and rave In a couplet good or bad. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... prank or adorn thyself: I have translated literally, but the couplet strongly suggests ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Cross was at dinner John wrote in a large hand the fine couplet. The teacher returned and called the school to order. He looked at the blackboard, then, searchingly, at John Briggs. ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town at these hours must be ghostly enough on its neighbouring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of landscape and garden owes at least half its glory to the long trance of winter, and wished that dwellers in Creole lands might see New England's First of June? For what says the brave old song-couplet of New ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... solemnly, in order to save the situation: "That last couplet is not at all necessary;" and Daddy Taille, who had got red up to the ears, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... well expressed by a couplet which was very popular with the eight-hour speakers of that period: "Whether you work by the piece or work by the day, decreasing the hours increases the pay." Steward believed that the amount of wages is determined by no other factor than the worker's standard of ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... "That is the best yet. But we might branch out a little, I think, Willy. This condensed couplet is forcible, but not very graceful. How do ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... principles about which no doubt exists. First, its dominant feature is Parallelism, Parallelism of meaning, which, though found in all human song, is carried through this poetry with a constancy unmatched in any other save the Babylonian. The lines of a couplet or a triplet of Hebrew verse may be Synonymous, that is identical in meaning, or Supplementary and Progressive, or Antithetic. But at least their meanings respond or correspond to each other in a way, for which no better ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... anagrammatical, scorns the couplet for the mere sake of the couplet, and has little time for the smiting ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... words strong enough for the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the People par excellence, as Fichte says—German ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him: ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... is a couplet of reproach now applied to this once famous city; whose inhabitants seem little worthy of the inspiring call which was addressed to them within these twenty ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sign?" said the dean. "Oh, the pole and bason; and if your worship would just write me a few lines to put upon it, by way of motto, I have no doubt but it would draw me plenty of customers." The dean took out his pencil, and wrote the following couplet, which ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... poet of my acquaintance, who in the midst of war's obsessions still finds time and taste for the exercise of his art (he is in a Government office), has allowed me to see the opening couplet of what I understand to be a very ambitious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... tryst-folk: "Yadi Husein" (Memory of Husein) still ringing in their ears. The new party is composed of Bombay Musulman youths, the tallest of whom carries an umbrella made out of pink, green and white paper, under which the rest crowd and sing the following couplet relating to the ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... who were not willing "to vote for Ireland against the Saxon." Public placards might be seen in town and country, headed, like the address of the Repeal Committee to the electors, with inflammatory poetry: a favourite couplet on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Besides this, after each couplet of the Angelus, is recited that short hymn of praise, beginning with the words which the angel of the annunciation addressed to Mary,[1] "Ave Maria." This is why the hour after sunset is so often called the hour of ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... Poetry," and has given us a charming volume of her own verses, which no one runs any "Risk" in buying, in spite of the title of the book, has done a good deal in this direction, and is fond of giving an epigrammatic turn to a bright thought, as in the following couplet: ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the Latin word octo, eight. The second part contains six lines, and is therefore called the sextet, from the Latin word sex, meaning six. The sextet may have either two or three rimes, and these may be arranged in almost any order. But a correct sonnet ought not to end with a couplet, that is two riming lines. However, very many good writers in English do so end ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... shows some advance,—an advance, however, which must be laid chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms. Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing classical metres. Creech says of Horace, "'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... the couplet with a subdued fervour which characterized the man and explained his worldly lot. Elkanah Madden should never have entered the medical profession; mere humanitarianism had prompted the choice in his dreamy ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Chateau of Compiegne, in honour of the marriage of my sister Louise and the King of the Belgians. But lo! at the climax of the piece, the principal performer came forward, before the newly married couple, the Royalties, and all the great personages forming the audience, and burst forth with a gag couplet, which nobody expected. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... in the bay, a schooner standing for us to take our pilot. I descended to the cabin to write a note or two, and found myself almost involuntarily scribbling verses. 'Tis an odd freak of my fancy, that although never addicted to poetizing, and ordinarily incapable of manufacturing a couplet that will jingle even, I am rarely agitated by any strong feeling, without having a sort of desire to rhyme; luckily the delusion is exceedingly short-lived, and unfrequent in its visitations. The reader shall, however, have all the benefit of my present attempt, as I feel bound to treat him, who ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... getteth up nor sitteth down without speaking of him. Now when Attaf heard these words from the buffoon he looked up to heaven and said, O Thou whose attributes are inscrutable, bestow thy benefits upon thy servant Attaf. Then he recited this couplet:— ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... edition with as near an approach to completeness as regard for the popular character of the volume permitted. The 17,385 verses, of which the poetical Tales consist, have been given without abridgement or purgation — save in a single couplet; but, the main purpose of the volume being to make the general reader acquainted with the "poems" of Chaucer and Spenser, the Editor has ventured to contract the two prose Tales — Chaucer's Tale of Meliboeus, and the Parson's Sermon or Treatise on ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... he continued, "I don't complain so much, though, personally, I consider 'Extract from Order made by the Secretary of State for the Home Department' a very poor paraphrase of the resounding couplet in which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... their country and their king." This concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:— ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... by the National Assembly of this spell of healing potency and virtue. The enlightened Dr. Ball, when he wished to rekindle the lights and fires of his audience on this point, chose for the test the following couplet:— ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rhymes, Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line it "whispers through the trees" If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep" The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep" Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song [356] That, like a wounded snake drags ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... your Hole."—In Surrey, and most probably in other counties where {133} shell-snails abound, children amuse themselves by charming them with a chant to put forth their horns, of which I have only heard the following couplet, which is repeated until it has the desired effect, to the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... abbey of S. Maximin was about 120 paces from the cell of the saint at Treves, and it is therefore most probable that the writer was a monk of the Benedictine order then belonging to that foundation; but he puts his name out of doubt by the following couplet, inscribed at the end of ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... one of the most respectable of the governors, was found, at his death, with a copy of verses in his pocket, which included the following couplet: ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... believed his almost superhuman labors would be all in vain. In these contests a spirit blazed out from his noble soul which electrified the nation with admiration. In his intrepid bearing amid these scenes he fully personified the couplet quoted ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... straightway be offset by that of her sister. And we have our Scribe's word for it, that the Dervish went as far and as deep with the huris, as the doctors eventually would permit him. That is why, we believe, in commenting upon his adventures there, he often quotes the couplet, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Kit. "Oh, Uncle Cassius, we girls back home made up a lovely little couplet about that when we were studying Egypt at ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... are some verses to P[u]shan, following which is the most holy couplet of the Rig Veda, to repeat which is essentially to repeat the Veda. It is the famous G[a]yatr[i] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... songs. Among much that is excellent in this vast production there are also dreary stretches of rambling loquacity, hollow rhetoric and unintelligible jumbles of words and phrases. He could be insupportably dull and again express more in a single stanza, couplet or phrase than many have said in a whole book. A study of his poetry is, therefore, not unlike a journey through a vast country, alternating in fertile valleys, barren plains and lofty heights with entrancing views into far, ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commended. "Madam," I said, "you can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... pointed out in his essay on Sir William Temple that these lines are a reminiscence of a couplet under the portrait of Sultan Mustapha the First in Knolles's Historie of the Turkes ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... got tangled up between the "sleigh" in the carriage-house, and the act of pussy in mauling the poor little mouse, unmentioned, but of importance, in the couplet: ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... fate (line 10) answering to desolate and state (lines 4 and 5), instead of to the halfway rhymes aforesaid. As to Antistrophe 2b, that follows Antistrophe 2a, so far as it goes; but after line 9 it breaks off suddenly, and closes with two lines corresponding in length and rhyme to the closing couplet of Antistrophe 1b, the section immediately preceding, which, however, belongs not to this group, but to the other. Mr. Locock speaks of line 124 as 'a rhymeless line.' Rhymeless it is not, for shore, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... or who is in any degree practically acquainted with those very different kinds of versification. I will venture to assert that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme, is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... I shall have lost my wits very finally when I forget the first time that I pleased my father with a couplet of English verse (after many a year of trials); and the radiant joy on his face as he declared, reading it aloud to my mother with emphasis half choked by tears,—that "it was as fine as anything that Pope or ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... my having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that "he writes very well for a gentleman." His serious pieces are sometimes elevated; and his trifles are sometimes elegant. In his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained. In his Odes to Marlborough there are beautiful lines; but in the second Ode he shows that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... the advice, and, in his housekeeping experience, afterward, confirmed the good qualities of the terrier, as related to him by the burglar. He also commemorated the conversation by the following not exceedingly poetical couplet: ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... couplet the language is distorted by inversions, clogged with superfluities, and clouded by a harsh metaphor; and in the second there are two words used in an uncommon sense, and two epithets inserted only to lengthen the line; all these practices may in a long work easily ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... with a long straw in its beak flew right across Maxine's garden, a little winged poem, a couplet enclosing ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... (a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have penned), should never have permitted himself to sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I first read this singularly vapid poem years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever laid eyes on any ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... grace of this charming last couplet, but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Pope, we believe, coined the contemptuous phrase, "I care not a pin." The pin has never been done justice in the world of poetry. As one might say, the pin has had no Pindar. Of course there is the old saw about see a pin and pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck. This couplet, barbarous as it is in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a profound truth. When you see a pin, you must pick it up. In other words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are. Their instinctive affinity for terra firma makes one wonder ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of the "Depositio." The last represents the giving of the salt, which a person is on a plate in his left hand; and, with his right hand, about to put a pinch of it upon the tongue of each Becanus or Freshman. A glass, probably holding wine, is standing near him. Underneath is the following couplet:— ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... uniform, steady use of the same signs."—Id. "A traveller remarks most of the objects which he sees."—Jamieson cor. "What is the name of the river on which London stands? Thames."—G. B. "We sometimes find the last line of a couplet or a triplet stretched out to twelve syllables."—Adam cor. "The nouns which follow active verbs, are not in the nominative case."—David Blair cor. "It is a solemn duty to speak plainly of the wrongs which good men perpetrate."—Channing ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... thankful that my little girlie wants to make the old world happier. But after all, dear, the greatest need of this world of ours is love. It is not the money we give away which counts; it is the love we have for other people. I remember well a little couplet your great-grandmother was fond of quoting—and she practiced it every ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... standing in the pew with my paper in his hand the wrong way up. Myself by his side holding a candle to him. Then he began to sing. It was an awful tune—I think he called it sevens—but he made common-sense of my doggerel by one alarming emendation. When he came to the couplet I have given you, what do you think ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... son kept staring at Thorgerda Glum's daughter; his wife Thorhillda saw this, and she got wroth, and made a couplet upon him. ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... was in the Rue des France-Bourgeois, close to La Force. As I expected, my officer was there. I went up to him as he was singing a love ditty and looking tenderly at a lady, and interrupted him exactly in the middle of the second couplet. 'Monsieur,' said I, 'does it still displease you that I should frequent a certain house of La Rue Payenne? And would you still cane me if I took it into my head to disobey you? The officer looked at me with astonishment, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... are liberal in computing their land and liquor; the Scottish pint corresponds to two English quarts. As for their coin, every one knows the couplet— ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a dram, without the evil ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... luxuriant; he is tempted to say many things which might be better omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words. But when the difficulty of artificial rhyming is interposed; where the poet commonly confines his verse to his couplet, and must continue that verse in such words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme, the fancy then gives leisure to the judgment to come in; which, seeing so heavy a task imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary expenses. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... yielded these precious things had all been mixed with the milk of these four cows. As regards Surabhi, the milk she yielded becometh Swaha unto those that live on Swaha, Swadha unto those that live on Swadha, and Amrita unto those that live on Amrita. The couplet that was sung by the dwellers of Rasatala in days of old, is still heard to be recited in the world by the persons of learning. That couplet is this,—Neither in the region of the Nagas, nor in Swarga, nor in Vimana, nor in Tripishtapa is residence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... volume. In yet another respect Crabbe was to work hand in hand with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called "poetic diction." Indeed he was hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a lifelong adherence to a metre—the heroic couplet—with which this same poetic diction was most closely bound up. He did not always escape the effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature. He was ever describing what he had seen ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... and Foch had jolly soft roes, a fact which is recorded in a cynical little poem by the precocious Foch, believed to be the only literary work of a whitebait now extant. We have only space here to quote the opening couplet:— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... Nature's forming- -honest, pure-minded, humble, yet dignified being! Art thou still wandering through the courts of beautiful Safacoro, or on the banks of the Len Baro, thine eyes fixed in vacancy, and thy mind striving to recall some half-forgotten couplet of Luis Lobo; or art thou gone to thy long rest, out beyond the Xeres gate within the wall of the Campo Santo, to which in times of pest and sickness thou wast wont to carry so many, Gypsy and Gentile, in thy ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even sang one catchy couplet of this ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... beautiful of English lyrics. One listens with delight to the musician working out his intricately beautiful theme; or is it nearer the impression we get to say that we watch the skilful dancer executing his elaborate figure? In either case we await with sure confidence the triumphant close. The final couplet, by the way, and particularly the great Alexandrine, is a curious anticipation of Dryden's finest manner. But the rest is a music Dryden's ear never heard. ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... as they answered were clearly shown. With "I would I had been there" the cloud of unseen witnesses with whom he had before been communing again descended. For a second or two Horatio and the rest did not exist for him.... So onward to the crowning couplet: ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... was said to have written on the slates in the yard a couplet about a classmate of his who often rode home from the college ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... he was. Lies and lives will be written of him; plenty of both. Enough should be said to defeat the malice and stupidity of detractors. Those who want to know what he was in himself should read the poems. The poems are the man speaking. They are so like him that to read them is to hear him. The couplet— ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... when these terms meant something in real life there was a distinction. The talisman was probably at first an astronomical figure, but later the term became more comprehensive. Pope portrays this astrological import in his couplet, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... what all bibliomaniacs will be disposed to admit the truth, that the collection contained "a very great variety of uncommon books, and scarce ever to be met withal," &c. There is, at bottom, a small wretched portrait of Hearne, with this well known couplet subjoined: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Barker, in his Parriana has quoted the identical two lines as they stood in some obscure edition anterior to 1801, and the withers of poor G. are again wrung. His letter is a gem—with his poor blind eyes it has been laboured out at six sittings. The history of the couplet is in page 3 of this irregular production, in which every variety of shape and size that Letters can be twisted into, is to be found. Do shew his part of it to Mr. R. some day. If he has bowels, they must melt at the contrition ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the moon between the legs of the cow! She did not remain there long however, but was soon on the cow's back, as she crept up and up in the face of the sun. He bethought him of a couplet that Grizzie had taught him when he ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... Personae. Couplet headed 'Lectori'. Prologue. Epilogue at the end. The third edition really, two having appeared in 1637. On the verso of the titlepage and of the next leaf are some verses inscribed in an ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... work of this painter that I have yet seen, and give a more favourable impression of him than is likely to be formed elsewhere. Behind the high altar there is an oil picture also by Macrino d'Alba, signed as by the following couplet, which they may ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... school-children. However the supper seemed to me to be most niggardly, and the sight of the dishes put before me disgusted me: but had I been offered ortolans, I would not have been tempted, my heart was so full. The meal finished as it had begun, with a patriotic song. We knelt down at the couplet of the Marseillaise which begins "Amour sacr de la patrie"...Then we filed out, as we had come in, to the sound of a drum, and ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... I was reminded of an old custom by an old friend who was staying with me. When some hot cross buns were offered, he took one and told me to hold it with him and, whilst we were holding it together to repeat with him this couplet:— ...
— Weather and Folk Lore of Peterborough and District • Charles Dack
... period had occurred just before my story opens. It was a whole month since the town boys had made our lives unhappy by calling, and howling, and yelling, and squeaking on every occasion they met us the following apparently inoffensive couplet:— ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... Forest" that many lines are found by which Pope is perhaps alone remembered by many sportsmen. The references to the well-breathed beagles and the circling hare are happy, and very characteristic of the poet's telling style in the couplet in brackets. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... presentment there can be as little question as of its splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet— ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... duty and life. Rather than lose these I would have missed all the sermons I have ever heard." Many another can say substantially the same, can trace his best deeds very largely to the influence of some little stanza or couplet early stored away in his memory and coming ever freshly to mind in after years as the embodiment of ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... primitive peoples of the present day do not seem to feel or "hear mentally" the half step. If musicians of early days had this same failing, it was only natural for them to avoid that interval by eliminating from their songs one or the other of each couplet of tones which if sung would form a half step, thus ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole |
