"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech, And the ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... it grow where it will, and I guess we raise about the best kind, which is common sense, and I warn't to be put down with short metre, arter that fashion. So I tried the old man; sais I, 'Uncle,' sais I, 'if you will divorce the eatables from the drinkables that way, why not let the servants come and tend. It's monstrous onconvenient and ridikilous ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... not perhaps inform the reader, that I had before written a Canto on the subject of this poem; but I was dissatisfied with the metre, and felt the necessity of some connecting idea that might give it a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the way, when he visited Vallombrosa with Crabb Robinson in 1837, wrote an inferior poem there, in a rather common metre, in honour of Milton's ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the cave, took from his pocket a ball of string and a tape-measure, tied the string to the flint corner, fastened a pebble at the nineteenth metre and flung it toward the land side. The pebble at most reached the end of ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... (says Puttenham,) none example in English metre so well mayntayning this figure (Exargasia, or the Gorgeous) as that dittie of her Majestie Queen Elizabeth's own making, passing sweete and harmonical; which figure being, as his very original name purporteth, the most beautiful and gorgeous of all others, it asketh in reason to be reserved ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... a song without metre; And, here again, nothing is wrong; (For nothing on earth could be neater) ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... that I have been more successful with the metre than usual," she added, "having been guided by a little poem, a favourite of mine, which, as it also inculcates kindness to the brute creation, you will do well, Harry, to commit to memory. ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... studies, making fresh inventions, taking up the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation; reading, writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations, interested in technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting, directing private theatricals, going a long way to see an actor - a long way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway of contemporary interests. And all the while he was busied about his father and mother, his wife, and in particular his sons; anxiously ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may cost his readers some trouble to convince themselves that the greater part of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "One advantage," says Mr. Southey, "this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. Southey ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... modulated by the will of the other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express by the contradictory phrase of innate experience. We copy one of the shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... period at which the English and Saxon people existed as separate tribes at all, we may be sure that they possessed battle-songs, like those common to the whole Aryan stock. But among the Teutonic races poetry was not distinguished by either of the peculiarities—rime or metre—which mark off modern verse from prose, so far as its external form is concerned. Our existing English system of versification is not derived from our old native poetry at all; it is a development of the ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... style, equally characteristic, but less obvious, are forgotten. It is almost impossible for a translator to do justice to this sententious brevity unless the stanza in which he writes is in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace. If he chooses a longer and more diffuse measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverb by expansion; not to mention that much will often depend on the very position of the sentence in the stanza. Perhaps, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... LITERATURE AND ITS DIVISIONS.—A greater part of the Sanskrit literature, which counts its works by thousands, still remains in manuscript. It was nearly all composed in metre, even works of law, morality, and science. Every department of knowledge and every branch of inquiry is represented, with the single exception of history, and this forms the most striking general characteristic of the literature, and one which robs it of a great share of worth and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... three proverbial examples of righteousness, shows that Ezekiel had the Deluge in his mind, and increases the significance of the underlying parallel between his argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may be added that Ezekiel has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and the metre of the two passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr. Daiches points ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... of the metre is essential to the full sense of the meaning and of the beauty of all poetry. Even the rhymeless flow of blank verse is absolutely necessary to an accurate and entire perception of the effect the author intends to produce: it is in both cases ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... of a metre, or 1/23400 of an English inch. The term has been formally adopted by the International Commission of Weights and Measures, representing the civilized nations of the world, and is adopted by ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... perfumed As the sweet roadside honeysuckle. That's why, Difficult though its metre was to tackle, I'm ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... intrinsic impulse towards modulation of sound already explained, speech first issued from the human breast in harmonious accents and rhythmic form, and these became in their turn the causes and genesis of versification and metre. The classic experiments of Helmholtz show that each note may be regarded as a harmonic whole, owing to the complementary sounds which accompany it in its complete development. With reference to our own race, the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... And justly Caesar scorns the poet's lays: It is to history he trusts for praise. F. Better be Cibber, I'll maintain it still, Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme quadrille, Abuse the city's best good men in metre, And laugh at peers that put their trust in Peter. Even those you touch not, hate you. P. What should ail 'em? F. A hundred smart in Timon and in Balaam: The fewer still you name, you wound the more; Bond is but one, but Harpax is a score. P. ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... Scotch Reviewers./ A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. 24, Cockspur ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... later autograph in B. Taken by Dean Beeching into 'A Book of Christmas Verse' 1895 and thence, incorrectly, by Orby Shipley in 'Carmina Mariana'. Stated in a letter to R. W. D. June 25, '83, to have been written to 'hang up among the verse com- positions in the tongues. ... I did a piece in the same metre as Blue in the mists all day.' Note Chaucer's account of the physical properties of the air, 'House of Fame', ii. ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... described the dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and other foes. In those days the difficulties of the road excluded all interest in mountain beauty. There is a tender and expressive poem in Sapphic metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his longing for beautiful Reichenau. But even he, like most of his predecessors and all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, expression often failing ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... bubbling over with excitement, "I've discovered the measurements in the document. Why Old Barbe Rouge was a Frenchman, and of course used French measure,—the metre! Hurrah!" and I made the rocks echo with my excited hurrahs ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... translator in the way of duty. And the son of Philip himself, though he bade 'spare the house of Pindarus,' we vehemently suspect, never read the works of Pindarus; that labour he left to some future Hercules. So much for his subjects: but a second objection is—his metre: The hexameter, or heroic metre of the ancient Greeks, is delightful to our modern ears; so is the Iambic metre fortunately of the stage: but the Lyric metres generally, and those of Pindar without one ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose—Origin and elements of metre —Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the stanzas written by him in this metre at the time of the Union, (beginning "Zooks, Harry! zooks, Harry!") he entitled them, "An admirable new ballad, which goes excellently well to the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... have written the numerals in letters, else the metre would not have come clear: they were really in figures thus, "II C. et XX," "XIII C. moins XII". I quote the inscription from M. l'Abbe Roze's admirable little book, "Visite a la Cathedrale d'Amiens,"—Sup. Lib. de ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... "What proof? Metre and rhyme, I grant you—long and short—but show me the afflatus! They make verse with a penknife, like their wooden nutmegs. They are perfect Chinese for ingenuity and imitation, and the resemblance to the real Simon-pure is very perfect—externally. But when it comes to grating the ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... at Rochester, a gentleman of very considerable learning, whom Dr. Johnson met there, he said, "My heart warms towards him. I was surprised to find in him such a nice acquaintance with the metre in the learned languages; though I was somewhat mortified that I had it not so much to myself, as ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... brown stones and float the sight up away through the fissure of the rocks. The rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that 'Duchess' does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ... the difficult rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the general measure. Then 'The Ride'—with that touch of natural feeling at the end, to prove that it was not in brutal carelessness that the poor horse was driven through ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... life! Besides this, a chorus for a concert! I have no longer any feeling for that kind of thing, and could not produce it at any price. I should not know where to take my inspiration. One other thing: my musical position towards verse and metre has undergone an enormous change. I could not at any price write a melody to Schiller's verses, which are entirely intended for reading. These verses must be treated musically in a certain arbitrary manner, and that arbitrary manner, as ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... to the prayers in Cato's book, to which I referred just now when discussing the word macte. Attempts have been made to prove that these were originally written in metre;[395] and this is quite possible. If so, it only means that they retained the outward form of the primitive spell; it must not lead us on to fancy that the sacrifice which accompanied the prayer was a magical act, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... expression of our authority, and the metre-gauge of our importance. By them the untutored mind of the poor Indian is enabled to estimate the amount of reverence due to each of us. This is the first purpose for which we are provided with Chupprassees. The second is that they may ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... as you can all your present notions about the nature of verse and poetry. Take a sponge and wipe the slate of your mind. In particular, do not harass yourself by thoughts of metre and verse forms. Second: Read William Hazlitt's essay "On Poetry in General." This essay is the first in the book entitled Lectures on the English Poets. It can be bought in various forms. I think ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... for, laying more stress upon their own duties of fasting and devotion than upon the obedience, satisfaction and righteousness of Christ, they soon came to deny part of the scripture, and to reject the psalms of David in metre; which began first to be discovered at Lochgoin in Fenwick parish. But returning eastwards towards Darmead, faithful Mr. Cargil had a meeting with them, and used all means with this mad-cap and his hair-brained followers to convict or reclaim them; ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... Job? There is not much poetry in the name, Job. But Rome and its vulgate vulgarized this hallowed name, and Britain followed Rome. His name in Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic, is Jobab. There is more poetry in this. There is no metre, no poetry in a monotone or monosyllable. Born among rocks and mountains, the proper theatre of a heaven-inspired Muse—not in Arabia the Happy, but in Arabia the Rocky—he was a heart-touching, a soul-stirring, emotional Bard. In such a case the clouds that overshadow the era of the man ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... metre he afterwards refrained, and taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has, perhaps, been with rather too ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... Daughter, Hymns of a Hermit, and I know not what other extensive stock of pieces; concerning which he was now somewhat at a loss as to his true course. He could write verses with astonishing facility, in any given form of metre; and to various readers they seemed excellent, and high judges had freely called them so, but he himself had grave misgivings on that latter essential point. In fact here once more was a parting of the ways, "Write in ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ancient civilised men, and cannot stand ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to whose ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... thou,' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our service—Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled. That flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... stirring strain, always admired, has attracted additional notice in the present day as the metrical prototype of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," which, in our estimation, fails to rival its model. The lapses of both poets may well be excused on the ground of the difficulty of the metre, but Drayton has the additional apology of the "brave neglect" which so correct a writer as Pope accounted a virtue in Homer, but which Tennyson never had the nerve ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... author calls them, nothing more—pure and simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the simple Spanish asonante, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the vowel rhyme called asonante.[2] They are pervaded by a tender spirit of melancholy, very different from the Weltschmerz of Heine, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas something beautiful. He's not lost a cubic metre a week."... ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Liszt, and though extremely brilliant, is full of meaning. It has an interlude of tender romance. "Coy Maiden" is a graceful thing, but hardly deserves the punishment of so horrible a name. "A Gypsy Dance" is too long, but it is of good material. It has an interesting metre, three-quarter time with the first note dotted. There is a good effect gained by sustaining certain notes over several measures, though few pianists get a real sostenuto. An "Allegro Patetico" (op. 12), "Medea" (op. 13), and a set of small pieces (one of them a burlesque called "A Caudle ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... translated other articles on ballooning from the French. It is also interesting that she retained in her translation the original units which Verne used (metre, feet, leagues), a practice forgotten until recently. This may be the first appearance of a work by Jules Verne in ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... translation is both spirited and faithful—faithful in following even the irregularities of metre which mark the original. It won the praise and admiration of some of the most accomplished judges in the country. The following extract from a letter of the late Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D., ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose words seem naturally to bourgeon ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... they borrow their phrases from a different and a scantier gradus ad Parnassum. If they were, indeed, to discard all imitation and set phraseology, and to bring in no words merely for show or for metre,—as much, perhaps, might be gained in freedom and originality, as would infallibly be lost in allusion and authority; but, in point of fact, the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old; only that, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... own edition of "The City Shower," has "old ACHES throb." Aches is two syllables, but modern printers, who had lost the right pronunciation, have aches as one syllable; and then, to complete the metre, have foisted in "aches will throb." Thus what the poet and the linguist wish to preserve is altered, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a poem of 188 lines, in heroic metre, and is followed by a shorter poem, entitled "A Comfortable Exhortation to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... of but one kind—but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... Anderson and Dave Mead, followed by every other boy and girl. O'mie rode beside me, and not one of us thought of himself. It was all done in a flash, and I marvel that I tell its mental processes as if they were a song sung in long-metre time. But it is all so clear to me. I can see the fiery radiance of that sky blotted by the two riders before me. I can hear the crash of the ponies' feet, and I can even feel the sweep of wind out of that storm-cloud turning ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... text: Italicized stanzas will be indented 5 spaces. Italicized stanzas that are ALREADY indented will be indented 10 spaces. Italicized words and phrases have been capitalized. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some obvious errors, after being confirmed against other sources, have been corrected. This etext was prepared ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... from not knowing If 'twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing; Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection, While, borne with the rush of the metre along, The poet may chance to go right or go wrong, Content with the whirl and delirium of song; Then his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes, And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes, Not his best, though, for those are struck off ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... advantage in an assault; across that narrow interval we should only get into trenches that might be costly or impossible to hold, and so it would be for the Germans on our side. But there is a kind of etiquette observed; loud vulgar talking on either side of the four-metre gap leads at once to bomb throwing. And meanwhile on both sides guns of various calibre keep up an intermittent fire, the German guns register—I think that is the right term—on the cross of Arras cathedral, the British guns search lovingly for the German batteries. As one ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... An automobile had come in last night from Madrid, a sixty horse-power Merlin, and the chauffeur had reported snow half a metre deep on the mountains. The Merlin had stuck, he said, and had to be pulled out with oxen. Supposing the Duke intended going to Madrid instead of turning off by way of Salamanca, he—and incidentally we—seemed likely to ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and style." The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the rough but vivacious doggrel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... for I bought them in print. Cribbed? of course they were cribbed. Yet I wouldn't say, cribbed from the French—Lady Bathsheba thought it was vulgar— But picked up on the banks of the Don, from the lips of a highly intelligent Bulgar. I'm aware, Bill, that's out of all metre—I can't help it—I'm none of your sort Who set metres, by Jove, above morals—not exactly. They don't go to Court— As I mentioned one night to that cowslip-faced pet, Lady Rahab Redrabbit (Whom the Marquis calls Drabby for short). Well, I say, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... point south-east of the north-west rock; when she cleared this rock, which is at this spot thirteen feet below the surface, leaving a large white furrow, she ran a hundred and sixty feet further, and struck on the south-east rock, which is only about four feet (one metre twenty centimetres) below the surface. She again marked the rock very distinctly. The sea, which is often very rough on this spot, has left nothing remaining but the massive part of the engine, where it can be perceived between the two rocks, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... reference to metre and its various forms in verse, as an element in the general treatment of style or manner (lexis) as opposed to the matter (logoi) in the imaginative literature, with which as in time past the [270] education of the citizens of the Perfect City will begin. It is however at his own ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Berdenich has reported a case of a parcel of carbide which yielded on the average 5.1 cubic foot of acetylene per lb., producing gas which contained only 0.398 gramme of phosphorus in the form of phosphine per cubic metre (or 0.028 per cent. of phosphine) and was spontaneously inflammable. But on examination the carbide in question was found to be very irregular in composition, and some lumps produced acetylene containing ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... Biblical writers would have been superseded by the learned professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later times! Is there to-day a popular poet, using the English language, who does not, in technical acquirements and in the artificial adjuncts of poetry,—rhyme, metre, melody, and especially sweet, dainty fancies,—surpass Europe's and Asia's loftiest and oldest? Indeed, so marked is the success of the latter-day poets in this respect, that any ordinary reader may well be puzzled, and ask, if the shaggy ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... tempests which arise, rage, destroy, and carry everything away without premonitory warning or possibility of arresting their course. All at once it was rumoured that land bought at five francs the metre had been sold again for a hundred francs the metre; and thereupon the fever arose—the fever of a nation which is passionately fond of gambling. A flight of speculators descending from North Italy swooped down upon Rome, the noblest and easiest of preys. Those needy, famished ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in 1863 in a peat bog of Schleswig; that is in the very country of the Angles; judging by the coins found at the same time, it must belong to the third century. It measures 22 metres 67 centimetres in length, 3 metres, 33 centim. in breadth, and 1 metre 19 centim. in height. Specimens of Scandinavian ships have also been discovered. When a chief died his ship was buried with him, as his chariot or horse was in other countries. A description of a Scandinavian funeral (the chief placed on ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in homely Spanish metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom, stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, and passed beneath ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... pre-eminent and eclipsed the brightness of the rest: the latter were the compositions of a school of bards in the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, among whom in like manner Hesiod enjoyed the greatest celebrity. The poems of both schools were composed in the hexameter metre and in a similar dialect; but they differed widely in almost every ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... "Should we be silent and not speak," is nearly word for word from Plutarch, with some additional graces of expression, and the charm of metre superadded. I shall give the last lines of this address, as illustrating that noble and irresistible eloquence which was the crowning ornament of the character. One exquisite touch of nature, which is distinguished by italics, was beyond the rhetorician and historian, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... were! to rhyme with far A kind star did not tarry; The metre, too, was regular As schoolboy's dot and carry; And full they were of pious plums, So extra-super-moral,— For sucking Virtue's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... deal of investigating the composition and geological formation of the ground surrounding Port Arthur. I found most of the ground consisting of loose layers of lava scoriæ. The comparative easy capture of the otherwise immensely strong 203 Metre Hill did not surprise me. The texture of the ground, besides having a deadening effect on shell fire, made the approach to the forts by means of parallels surprisingly easy. The Japanese, by the ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... idea in the whole poem (appalling in its length), but to no purpose. The transcendental literature of Germany absorbs all that, at first glance, arrests the attention. Without learning, imagination, or the attraction of a beautiful metre (like that of Tennyson's 'Princess'), I am at a loss to know what has given this poem its notoriety. Not its daring speculation, surely, for it is but a timid compromise ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... castings from a field near my house averaged 16 cubic centimeters. Several species of earth-worms are common in St. Catharina in South Brazil, and Fritz Muller informs me "that in most parts of the forests and pasture-lands, the whole soil, to a depth of a quarter of a metre, looks as if it had passed repeatedly through the intestines of earth-worms, even where hardly any castings are to be seen on the surface." A gigantic but very rare species is found there, the burrows of which are sometimes ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... his friend Frank Remand, surnamed Franko, to suit the requirements of metre, in which they habitually conversed, were walking arm-in-arm along the drive in Society's Park on a fine frosty Sunday afternoon of midwinter. The quips and jokes of Franko were lively, and he looked into the carriages passing, as if he knew that a cheerful countenance is not without charms for their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... point from a hundred and thirty-five to two hundred and fifteen metres, with a depth of five metres on the quays at lowest tide. These tides are felt as far as twenty miles above the town. They vary in height from one metre to as much as three, and a tidal wave is formed that is one of the greatest dangers of the downstream navigation. Coming up from the sea is fairly easy in almost any kind of stout and steady craft, but it is difficult for all ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... Every metre they trod was historic ground—ground which had been contested against the legions of the Crown ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... for himself by comparing the passage from the manuscript given in the appendix with the corresponding place in the text. Milton's own spelling revels in redundant e's, while the printer of the 1645 book is very sparing of them. But in cases where the spelling affects the metre, we find that the printed text and Milton's manuscript closely correspond; and it is upon its value in determining the metre, quite as much as its antiquarian interest, that I should base a justification of this reprint. Take, for instance, such a line as the eleventh ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... is intended for a convent of Ursuline nuns, must be in white marble. Height: one metre seven hundred and six millimetres; in other words, five feet three inches. As it will not be placed in a niche, you must carefully finish all sides of it. The costs of the work are to be taken out of the two hundred and ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... and unexceptionable doggerel and no one would admit such fact more quickly than Mistress Anne herself, who laid it away in after days in her drawer, with a smile at the metre and a sigh for the miserable time it chronicled. There were many of them, for among the same papers is a ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... tempted by the alluring offers of a richer suitor, forbade the nuptials. Archilochus thereupon composed so bitter a lampoon upon the family that the daughters of the nobleman are said to have hanged themselves. Says SYMONDS, "He made Iambic metre his own, and sharpened it into a terrible weapon of attack. Each verse he wrote was polished, and pointed like an arrow-head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges against his sweetheart, her sisters, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... subtle and penetrating than any other; and the licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense. The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers:—that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the Soul and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger and wiser Humanity,—hitherto ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... what it is they are going to say before they begin. This is superfluous effort, tending to cramp the style. It is permissible, if not essential, to select a subject—say, MUD—but any detailed argument or plan which may restrict the free development of metre and rhyme (if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... of disgust with his profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly abandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these inspired ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the real Scott first shows, and the better of the two is the second. It is not merely that, though Scott had a great liking for and much proficiency in 'eights,' that metre is never so effective for ballad purposes as eights and sixes; nor that, as Lockhart admits, Glenfinlas exhibits a Germanisation which is at the same time an adulteration; nor even that, well as Scott knew the Perthshire Highlands, they could not appeal to him with the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... retained, depend alike on physiological conditions; and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle grows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium's ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient and popular, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle of transforming ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his impulse ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... him in good stead one day, and helped to carry others through a trouble as well. He was in one of the country pulpits, and had just announced the second hymn, which was a long metre. The choir commenced to sing a common metre tune to the hymn, but before they had got through the second line they found out the mistake, and one after another dropped their voices and ceased to ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... letter than s, form the possessive by the addition of the apostrophe and the letter s. The only exceptions to this rule are, that, by poetical license the additional s may be elided in poetry for sake of the metre, and in the scriptural phrases "For goodness' sake." "For conscience' sake," "For Jesus' sake," etc. Custom has done away with the s and these phrases are now idioms of the language. All plural nouns ending in s form ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... beef, some delicate slices of boiled tongue, an open box of sardines, a plate heaped with cold red cabbage, a lemon, olives, etc.,—all fresh from the rotisserie and charcuterie below,—were flanked by a metre of bread and a litre of Bordeaux. The spread looked quite ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... sardonic, stern; the harrying sound Lashes them like a flail the long hours round, Till to strained nerves 'twere sweeter To silence it with one fierce passionate grip, Than into some bland Lotos Land to slip, And moon out life to metre. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... believe that Sidney Lanier was much more than a clever artisan in rhyme and metre; because he will, I think, take his final rank with the first princes of American song, I am glad to provide this slight memorial. There is sufficient material in his letters for an extremely interesting biography, which could be properly prepared only by his wife. These ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... more time than Tom's; as much indeed as his sister's, after they parted. But they were conducted by means of that marvel of marvels, the telegraph,—the chief of whose marvels is that it compels even a long- winded generation like ours to speak in very short metre. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... grace was chanted and then the Zemiroth was sung—songs summing up in light and jingling metre the very essence of holy joyousness—neither riotous nor ascetic—the note of spiritualized common sense which has been the key-note of historical Judaism. For to feel "the delight of Sabbath" is a duty and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves ...
— Ion • Plato
... frequently rallied by his family on his inconstancy of purpose, but he pleaded in extenuation that versatility had very marked charms of its own. He produced one day a copy of verses, written in the Gilbertian metre, to illustrate his mental attitude, and they strike me as so neatly worded, that I ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... that the tunes of the world were one; And the metre that guided the rhythmic sun Was at one, like the ebb and the flow of the sea, With the tunes that we learned at our mother's knee; The beat of the horse-hoofs that carried us down To see the fine Lady of Banbury Town; And so, by the rhymes that we knew, we could tell Without ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... root of that matter. In the first place, I must entirely differ with those persons who have sought to create an independent prosody for English verse under the head of "beats" or "accents" or something of that sort. Every English metre since Chaucer at least can be scanned, within the proper limits, according to the strictest rules of classical prosody: and while all good English metre comes out scatheless from the application of those rules, nothing ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... instantly sees and strikes at the weak point of his adversary's argument. "You appeal to scholars," he says in substance; "you admit that I am one; now you don't like my choice of words or metre; I do; who, then, shall decide? Why, the public, of course, which is the court of last appeal in such cases." It appears to us, that, on most of the points at issue, the truth lies somewhere between the two disputants. We do not think that Mr. Newman has made out his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... permanent of all the poetry of this age. Though written by both Troubadours and Trouveres, the latter were far superior in style and invention, and it is mostly their work which has survived. These romances were sometimes in prose, but more often in poetry of extremely smooth and flowing metre. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the 'Faery Queene' is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in doubling the impression ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the official clock dropped into its slot somebody called the Naval Observatory. The call was so faint as to be barely audible, in spite of the fact that Hood's instrument was tuned for a three-thousand-metre wave. Supposing quite naturally that the person calling had a shorter wave, he gradually cut out the inductance of his receiver; but the sound faded out entirely, and he returned to his original inductance and shunted in his condenser, upon which the ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... yttself moste bee ytts owne defense; Som metre maie notte please a womannes ear. 50 Canynge lookes notte for poesie, botte sense; And dygne, & wordie thoughtes, ys all hys care. Canynge, adieu! I do you greete from hence; Full soone I hope to taste of your good cheere; Goode Byshoppe ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... all we do, of the great laws of Divine government and human polity, that composition in the arts should strongly affect every order of mind, however unlearned or thoughtless. Hence the popular delight in rhythm and metre, and in simple musical melodies. But it is also appointed that power of composition in the fine arts should be an exclusive attribute of great intellect All men can more or less copy what they see, and, more or less, remember it: powers ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the special questions which a translator of the Satires and Epistles has to encounter, and the way in which, as it appears to me, he may best deal with them. These questions, I need hardly say, mainly resolve themselves into the metre and the style. With regard to the metre, I have myself but little doubt that the measure in which Horace may best be represented is the heroic as I suppose we must call it, of ten syllables. The one competing measure of course is the Hudibrastic octosyllabic. This latter ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... especially cultivated; there is sufficient to supply all the province of Cathay, and so fertile is the soil that according to a French traveller, M. E. Simon, an acre is now worth 15,000 francs, or three francs the metre. In the thirteenth century this plain was covered with towns and country-houses, and the inhabitants lived upon the fruits of the ground, and the produce of their flocks and herds, while the large quantity of game furnished hunters with ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... surely find something there which, for good or ill, is unique. You can name—or at least I can name—nothing to compare it with. Goldsmith and Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied, so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused such a man to pass away, and to leave a total output of about ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... decayed entirely. After the Deserted Village (1770) no striking work appeared till Crabbe published his first volume (1781), and was followed by his senior Cowper in 1782. Both of them employed the metre of Pope, though Cowper took to blank verse; and Crabbe, though he had read and admired Spenser, was to the end of his career a thorough disciple of Pope. Johnson read and revised his Village, which was thoroughly in harmony ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen |
