"Metrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the whole of our MS. Anglo-Saxon in type, and accessible to students, will edit for the Society all the unprinted and other Anglo-Saxon Homilies which are not included in Thorpe's edition of lfric's prose,[11] Dr. Morris's of the Blickling Homilies, and Prof. Skeat's of lfric's Metrical Homilies. The late Prof. Klbing left complete his text, for the Society, of the Ancren Riwle, from the best MS., with collations of the other four, and this will be edited for the Society by Dr. Thmmler. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... sort of metre which, in the hands of Collins, became flexible and exquisitely poetic, and which in those of Kirke White is at least pleasing, but of which we find poor enough specimens in the "Anthologies" of Southey, and which perhaps no one so limited in his metrical vocabulary, and so defective in his musical ear, as the writer of these chapters, should ever ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... torture me into attention. It is a rich language, however, and would amply repay any one the trouble of learning it. I try, and shall go on; but I answer for nothing, least of all for my intentions or my success." He made a few metrical translations into Armenian, but his principal task was to help with an English and Armenian grammar, for which, when it was ready, he wrote a preface. Byron usually came to the monastery only for the day, but ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... present very much in the public eye. We subjoin a specimen which has been rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has been well caught. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the potency of written or spoken words, for the production of good or evil, has been characteristic of all historic epochs and nations. The exorcist of ancient Egypt relied on amulets and mysterious phrases for the cure of disease; and a metrical petition traced on a papyrus-leaf, or a formula of prayer opportunely repeated, "put to flight the serpents, who were the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... kind of monotonous chant, the clapping of hands, the striking of rude instruments: there are measured movements, measured words, and measured tones. The early records of historic races similarly show these three forms of metrical action united in religious festivals. In the Hebrew writings we read that the triumphal ode composed by Moses on the defeat of the Egyptians, was sung to an accompaniment of dancing and timbrels. The Israelites danced and sung ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... success. And, as Lockhart has sufficiently shown, it was impossible for Scott to get to it except through the years of exploration and editing, the collection of the Border ballads, the study of the old metrical romance of Sir Tristrem. The story of the Goblin Page was at first reckoned enough simply for one of the additions to the Border Minstrelsy on the scale of a ballad. Scott had tried another sort of imitation in the stanzas composed in old English and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... city a circular was sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal—not metrical—translation and had issued them ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... of the nature jocularly imputed to them by the Baron, were really laid to the charge of the Highland insurgents; for which many traditions, and particularly one respecting the Knight of the Mirror, may be quoted as good evidence. [Footnote: A homely metrical narrative of the events of the period, which contains some striking particulars, and is still a great favourite with the lower classes, gives a very correct statement of the behaviour of the mountaineers respecting this same military license; and, as ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... means a screw of five feet in length and two inches in diameter was cut with fifty threads to the inch; the Nut to fit on to it being twelve inches long, and containing six hundred threads! This screw was principally used for dividing scales for astronomical and other metrical purposes of the highest class. By its means divisions were produced with such minuteness that they could only be made visual ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... temporal proportion. Those groups which are identical in figure must also be uniform in duration if they are to enter as substitutionary groups into a rhythmical sequence.[5] When the acatalectic type is alternately departed from and returned to in the course of the rhythmical sequence, the metrical equivalents must present total time-values which, while differing from that of the full measure in direction and degree, in dependence on the whole form of their structure, maintain similar fixed relations to the primary type. The changes which these flexible quantities undergo will here ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... even remotely concerned with metrical analysis. For that phase, with a discussion as to the effect of the various metrical systems, see Klotz, Grundzuge der altromischen Metrik, esp. p. 370 ff. Cf. Duff, A Lit. Hist. of Rome, p. 196. Note Donat, de Com. VIII. 9 ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... The cardinal of St. George, in his poetical, or rather metrical history of the election and coronation of Boniface VIII., (Muratori Script. Ital. tom. iii. P. i. p. 641, &c.,) describes the state and families of Rome at the coronation of Boniface VIII., (A.D. 1295.) Interea titulis redimiti ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... pastoral duties, a diligence and faithfulness such as to put him for the most part above censure, the young husband toiled hard in literary work for the support of his household, and by various publications of a theological character in verse and prose—at one time a metrical Life of Christ, at another a treatise on The Hebrew Points, and chiefly by articles in Dunton's Athenian Oracle—he earned the means of keeping his ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art—unfailing ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... and the only things about which he was enthusiastic in Italy, except the fragments of antiquity which he loved for their associations, were the paintings of Raphael and Guido Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metrical effects, those sublime inventions in prosody, with which the great masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this respect, and Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless. Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of complicated wholes, were never his. He is supreme, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... greater importance, however, are the works which constitute Anglo-Norman historiography. The first Anglo-Norman historiographer is Geoffrey Gaimar, who wrote his Estorie des Angles (between 1147 and 1151) for Dame Constance, wife of Robert Fitz-Gislebert (The Anglo-Norman Metrical Chronicle, Hardy and Martin, i. ii., London, 1888). This history comprised a first part (now lost), which was merely a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, preceded by a history of the Trojan War, and a second part which carries us as far as the death ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... by your unions. The social and recreative side of life you have now taken over into your keeping, you order recreation which shall be as music or as poetry in your associated lives, harmonious, melodious, rhythmic, metrical. All that I have said to-night leads up to this, that the Associated Life is necessary for the enjoyment and the attainment of the best and the highest things that the world can give, as the Guild and the Company formerly, and the Trade Union is now, for the safeguarding ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... feels hurt when a rhythm is maimed or curtailed as if it had been defrauded of due payment. It dislikes even more whatever is prolonged and runs on beyond the proper bounds, since too much is more offensive than too little. Not that everyone knows the metrical feet, or understands anything about rhythm, or is aware of what offends him, or where, or why; it is rather that nature has set in our ears a power of judging the length and brevity of sound, as also the acute and grave ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... or not on the part of the writer, the concluding words, in which the intention of the Laws is conveyed, assume a metrical form: ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... instructed both in sacred and in secular letters, they gathered a crowd of disciples, and rivers of wholesome knowledge daily flowed from them to water the hearts of their hearers; and, together with the books of Holy Scripture, they also taught them the metrical art, astronomy, and ecclesiastical arithmetic. A testimony whereof is, that there are still living at this day some of their scholars, who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... may be noticed here:—the rigmarole, snatches of which probably most of us have heard, which contains an immense number of mere truisms having no connexion with each others, and no bond of union but the metrical form in which their juxtaposition is effected, and the rhyme, which is kept up very well throughout, though sometimes by the introduction of a nonsense line. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... Mr. Kinosling. "No tobacco for me. No cigar, no pipe, no cigarette, no cheroot. For me, a book—a volume of poems, perhaps. Verses, rhymes, lines metrical and cadenced—those are my dissipation. Tennyson by preference: 'Maud,' or 'Idylls of the King'—poetry of the sound Victorian days; there is none later. Or Longfellow will rest me in a tired hour. Yes; for me, a book, a volume in the hand, held ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... imitation it would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose of daily life. Does a beautiful arch or dome or tower of a building imitate any part of reality? Is its architectural value dependent upon the similarity ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle him to a high place ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the period after the Norman Conquest, the remains which furnish us with direct or indirect evidence concerning them hardly enable us to form an opinion. But we know that (the cavilling spirit of Chaucer's burlesque "Rhyme of Sir Thopas" notwithstanding) the efforts of English metrical romance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were neither few nor feeble, although these romances were chiefly translations, sometimes abridgments to boot—even the Arthurian cycle having been only imported across the Channel, though it may have thus ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... from Sir John Bowring's "Specimens of the Russian Poets," rather than attempt a metrical translation myself. It is reasonably close to the original—as close as most metrical translations are—and gives the spirit extremely well. Sir John Bowring adds the following footnote: "This is the poem of which Golovnin says in his narrative, that it has been rendered into Japanese, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... wandering Esquimaux, their ditties, which, however insignificant in comparison with the compositions of the former nations, still are entitled in every essential point to the name of poetry; if poetry mean metrical compositions intended to soothe and recreate the mind fatigued by the cares, distresses, and anxieties to which mortality ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... me each metrical puppy Might make of such parodies two pair a day; Mocking birds think they obtain for each copy Paradise plumes for the parodied lay:— Ladder of fame! if man can't reach thy top, he Is right to sing just as high up as he may; I'd be a Parody, made by a puppy, Who makes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... are of varied metrical structure; but their intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... him at Nunappleton are now in the Bodleian, the treasures of which he had protected in troubled times. He loved to handle medals and coins, and knew the points of old engravings. He wrote a history of the Christian Church down to our own ill-conducted Reformation, and composed a complete metrical version of the Psalms of David and of the Song of Solomon. These and many other productions, which he characterised as "The Employment of my Solitude," still remain in his own handwriting. Amongst them, Yorkshire men will hear with pleasure, is a "Treatise ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... for the most part derived. The same violent Lancastrian sympathy runs through Walsingham and the fifth book of Knyghton's Chronicle. The French authorities on the other hand are vehemently on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at this time, is supplemented by the metrical history of Creton ("Archaeologia," vol. xx.), and by the "Chronique de la Traison et Mort de Richart" (English Historical Society), both works of French authors and published in France in the time of Henry the Fourth, probably with the aim of arousing French feeling against the House of ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... alone is a tether, and not a very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Rouse, a member of the English Parliament, had recently produced his Metrical Version of the Psalms. It was fresh and fragrant and greatly admired. The Assembly after a careful revision adopted it. Five years later, having passed through the purifying furnace of revision at the hands of the General Assembly of Scotland, it was authorized as "The only paraphrase ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... metrical renderings of Benedicite exist, one of the 18th and two of the 19th century, by J. Merrick, J.S. Blackie, and Richard Wilton respectively. The first of these writers, who expands freely, concludes with a stanza designed to put the Song unmistakeably into the ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... alluded to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors of his "Dernier Jour d'un Condamne" by ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... physicists of the whole world will spread more and more. It is right to remark that a few errors still occur with regard to this unit, and that these errors have been facilitated by incoherent legislation. France herself, though she was the admirable initiator of the metrical system, has for too long allowed a very regrettable confusion to exist; and it cannot be noted without a certain sadness that it was not until the 11th July 1903 that a law was promulgated re-establishing the agreement between the legal ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... to Stocktaking, Table of Relative Values of Potter's Materials, Hourly Wages Table, Workman's Settling Table, Comparative Guide for Earthenware and China Manufacturers in the use of Slop Flint and Slop Stone, Foreign Terms applied to Earthenware and China Goods, Table for the Conversion of Metrical Weights and Measures on the Continent and South America ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... with the pupil surpassing the master, for while it has the subject and characters of a medieval European romance, the spirit and settings are entirely Malay. It is written in the peculiar Tagalog verse, in the form of a corrido or metrical romance, and has been declared by Fray Toribio Menguella, Rizal himself, and others familiar with Tagalog, to be a work of no mean order, by far the finest and most characteristic composition in that, the richest of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... metrical evidence is found in the proportion of 'masculine' and 'feminine' endings in the verse. A line has a masculine ending when its last syllable is stressed; when it ends, for example, on words or phrases like behold', ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... which play so memorable a part in the "Tale of King Edward and the Shepherd" {516} (Hartshorne's Ancient Metrical Tales) been explained? The shepherd's instructions (pp. 48, 49.) seem more zealous than luminous; but it has occurred to me that perhaps "passelodion," "passilodyon," or "passilodion" may have some reference to the ancient custom of drinking from a peg-tankard, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... Norwich, in an edition of five hundred copies, of which two hundred were reserved for Norwich and sold at half a guinea each copy; the rest went to London. Allan Cunningham wrote a very eulogistic metrical dedication. The subscription list reveals a very varied list of subscribers, including Bishop Bathurst, Benjamin Haydon, Thomas Campbell, and John Thurtell, who was hanged before the book appeared. Borrow's biographers generally ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... person had strongly encouraged my own researches into this species of legendary lore; but I had never dreamed of an attempt to imitate what gave me so much pleasure." He then speaks of some successful metrical translations which he made at the High School; but in original rhyme he was less fortunate. "In short," says Sir Walter, "except the usual tribute to a mistress' eyebrow, which is the language of passion rather than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at our first meeting without political ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... business, he must so train his ear that he shall be able to weigh the rhythm of every word as it falls from his pen. This, when it has been done for a time, even for a short time, will become so habitual to him that he will have appreciated the metrical duration of every syllable before it shall have dared to show itself upon paper. The art of the orator is the same. He knows beforehand how each sound which he is about to utter will affect the force ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... any tongue is more informed with rhythmic life than the Divine Comedy. And yet, such is its extraordinary distinction, no poem has an intellectual and emotional substance more independent of its metrical form. Its complex structure, its elaborate measure and rhyme, highly artificial as they are, are so mastered by the genius of the poet as to become the most natural expression of the spirit by which the poem is inspired; while ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... natural for a mind suddenly disgusted with mechanic toil to seek relief from its opposite, it can easily be imagined that my next resource was Poetry. Every one rhymes now-a-days, and so can I. Shall I write an Epic, or a Tragedy, or a Metrical Romance? Epics are out of fashion; even Homer and Virgil would hardly be read in our time, but that people are unwilling to admit their schooling to have been thrown away. As to Tragedy, I am a modern, and it is a settled thing that no modern can write a tragedy; ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 1835 included two poems, signed "J. R.," and entitled "Saltzburg" and "Fragments from a Metrical Journal; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... "Short Story" are the only poems in the book which seem to follow a clearly rhymed pattern. If any misguided schoolmistress had ever suggested that a poem should have rhyme and metre, this book would never have been "told." In "Moon Doves," however, there is a distinctly metrical effect without rhyme. But the great majority of the poems are built upon cadence, and the subtlety of this little girl's cadences are a delight to those who can hear them. Doubtless her musical inheritance has all to do with this, for in poem after poem the instinct ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... it ought always to do or not to act at all, but excludes it. In a far greater degree are Pope's epitaphs debased by faults into which he could not I think have fallen if he had written in prose as a plain man and not as a metrical Wit. I will transcribe from Pope's Epitaphs the one upon Mrs. Corbet (who died of a cancer), Dr. Johnson having extolled it highly and pronounced it ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... verse, they are only too plenty For ringing the changes on metrical chimes; A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty, Have filled that great ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the house. The tick-tick of the clock, very even, slow, dryly metrical, increased the silence and solitude. I put my ear to the door of the room, in hope of hearing a groan, a word, an insult, anything that would be a sign of life, that might bring back peace to my conscience; I was ready to let myself be struck ten, twenty, a hundred ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... utterly savage long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible. Metrical composition, therefore, which, in a highly civilised nation, is a mere luxury, is in nations imperfectly civilised almost a necessity of life, and is valued less on account of the pleasure which it gives to the ear than on account of the help which it gives to the memory. A man who can invent or ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... mind's eye into its different parts. He would never mistake the calyx for a petal, and he would be able to determine at once the peculiarities of each part. In addition to the melodic phrases the pupil should be able to see the metrical divisions which underlie the form of the piece. He should be able to tell whether the composition is one of eight-measure sections or four-measure sections, or whether ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... this scene is printed as verse in the 4to. I have printed the early part as prose, that the reader's eye may not be vexed by metrical monstrosities. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... solemn moments he believed that his poetry would live, live beyond his own lifetime and his age, even, perhaps, as long as the Pontifex Maximus and the Vestal Virgin should ascend to the Capitol in public processional. He had said laughingly of his published metrical letters that they might please Rome for a day, travel on to the provinces, and finally become exercise-books for school-boys in remote villages. But his odes were different. They were not prosaic facts and comments put into metre: they were poetry. If he were only a laborious bee compared with ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... Enius is despatched even with more succinctness, but in Montalvan's 'Vida y Purgatorio de San Patricio', all his early crimes are detailed nearly in the order and almost in the very words that Calderon has used. Sir Walter Scott mentions, in his Border Minstrelsy, that there is a curious MS. Metrical Romance, in the Advocates' Library of Edinburgh, called, "The Legend of Sir Owain," relating his adventures in St. Patrick's Purgatory; he gives some stanzas from it, descriptive of the knight's passage of "The Brig O'Dread;" which in the legend, is placed between Purgatory ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... that metre is a species of verbal gymnastics, or legerdemain, of which the object is to win the admiration of the crowd. That is not so. Metre is born as all beauty is born the universe through. The current set up within well-defined bounds gives metrical verse power to move the minds of men as ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... his Gaelic collection. It soon became popular in the Highlands, and the authorship came to be assigned to different individuals. Fletcher afterwards announced himself as the author, and completely established his claim. He was the author of various metrical compositions both ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sexagesimal numeration, the metrical system of Babylon and Nineveh was "the most scientific of all those known and practised by the ancients: until the elaboration of the French metrical system, it was the only one whose every part ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... shows, Lydgate, in his Minor Poems at least, uses ye only, as do Lord Berners in his Arthur of Lytil Brytayne, ab. 1530, the Ormulum, Ancren Riwle, Genesis and Exodus, William of Palerne, Alliterative Poems, Early Metrical Homilies, &c.[2] ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... this somewhat unlettered Indian we catch faint glimpses of the poetic beauty with which the tradition glowed when actually related at the wigwam door. An attempt has been made to retain and crystallize this poetic beauty in the preceding metrical version of ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... interesting journal, edited by a committee of the junior class—with a capital "N" and a superfluous "t" in the monosyllable referred to, as it appears in the present memoir. The conceit was Nott thought a bad one, and those who were not in the secret gave my hero more credit for his metrical skill, than ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... might be made the starting-point of the fast either by the choice of the votary or by the cast of the die. A third method is instanced in the "Popish Kingdom" of Barnabe Googe (1570), actually an English metrical version of a truculent German satire by one Thomas Kirchmeyer, who was scholar enough to Latinize, or Graecize, his homely patronymic into the more imposing correlative "Naogeorgus." ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... against the Government, was sure to be eagerly read and warmly approved of. As a specimen of this kind of literature, and an illustration of the public opinion of the time, I may translate here one of those metrical tirades. Though it was never printed, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... "jingles," and he also rightly points out that "all genuine nursery rhymes . . . have never become nursery rhymes until the historical fact has been practically forgotten by those who used them, and nothing but the metrical ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... line will be seen in the context, which, for plainness as well as curiosity, I quote from a metrical version of the first book of the poem,[51] entitled, "The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem, by Edward Sherburne," which was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... other pastoral, is apparently of Roman origin. Milton, employing the noble freedom of a great artist, has here united ancient mythology, with what may be called the modern mythology of Camus and Saint Peter,—to direct Christian images.—The metrical structure of this glorious poem is partly ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Wiwert in Vrieslant," i.e., "The 150 Psalms of David, translated afresh into Dutch verse in accordance with the Dutch text, by J.D., lover of poetry, at Wieuwerd in Friesland." Explaining the deficiencies of the metrical version by Petrus Dathenus, the writer sets forth his wish to make a better translation (from French into Dutch), and narrates how the opportunity at last arrived "when I found myself called upon for the second time to make a journey to New ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Italy, we eventually find him in St. Petersburg, where he undertook the translation of the Bible into the Mandschu-Tartar language, and issued in 1835, through Schulz and Beneze, his "Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects." While in Russia, he made many friends amongst the nobility there, who frequently invited him to their country homes. In the same year that saw the publication of "Targum," he returned home. His stay in England, however, was a very short one. The ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... resist the opportunity of giving the late Sir Walter Scott's metrical translation of this sublime ode, a translation which, as a hymn, is ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... France, Italy, Austria, and Russia. Of his adventures in these countries there is unhappily no record. In St. Petersburg he must have made a long stay, for there he superintended the translation of the Bible into Mandschu- Tartar, and published in 1835 his Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects. In 1835 Borrow returned to London, and being already known to the Bible Society for his biblical labours in Russia, was offered, and accepted, the task of circulating the Scriptures ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... render possible that ideal representation of the great passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... of King Richard is an ancient romance, translated originally from the Norman; and at first certainly having a pretence to be termed a work of chivalry, but latterly becoming stuffed with the most astonishing and monstrous fables. There is perhaps no metrical romance upon record where, along with curious and genuine history, are mingled more absurd and exaggerated incidents. We have placed in the Appendix to this Introduction the passage of the romance in which Richard figures as an ogre, or ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... published "Sir Tristrem, a Metrical Romance of the Thirteenth Century, by Thomas of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... bookseller's in Holborn. Already ambition devoured him, and the genuine love of knowledge goaded his brain. He allowed himself but three or four hours of sleep; he wrought doggedly at languages, ancient and modern; he tried his hand at metrical translations; he planned tragedies. Practically he was living in a past age; his literary ideals were formed on ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... and drilled into us well. The unfortunate part of it was that there was hardly more than one boy in the class who enjoyed learning anything about just that particular thing. Instruction in Danish was, for Holst, instruction in the metrical art. He explained every metre and taught the boys to pick out the feet of which the verses were composed. When we made fun of him in our playtime, it was for remarks which we had invented and placed in his mouth ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Luther, about the year 1517, first introduced metrical psalmody into the service of the church, which not only kept alive the enthusiasm of the reformers, but formed a rallying point for his followers. This practice spread in all directions; and it was not long ere six thousand persons were heard singing together at St. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this moment compelled by the market to put their reflections into the form of novels, just as Marlowe and Chapman were forced to write plays. With one exception, the law of supply and demand determines the metrical shape of the poet's frenzy, and the prose mould of the ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... educational addresses, and metrical discourses on memorable occasions filled the years from 1829 to 1840. He felt the demon of insanity lurking behind him, now close at his heels, now farther away; and it was a desperate race, in which life and death, nay, worse than death, was at stake. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... certain expressions, gentle reader, which occur in the notes to the life of Robin Hood, prefixed to the ballads which go under his name: 1795. 2 vols. 8vo.—also a Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy in the first vol. of Ancient Metrical Romances, 1802, 3 vols. 8vo. A very common degree of shrewdness and of acquaintance with English literature will shew that, in Menander and Sycorax, are described honest TOM WARTON and snarling ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... has come down in a very corrupt state. A sadly tattered appearance is presented by the metrical passages. I have ventured to patch only a few of the many rents in ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... which is of great importance to the duration of a language, because the first change will naturally begin by corruptions in the living speech. The want of certain rules for the pronunciation of former ages, has made us wholly ignorant of the metrical art of our ancient poets; and since those who study their sentiments regret the loss of their numbers, it is surely time to provide that the harmony of the moderns may ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... "regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the present version is the appearance, for the first time, in English metrical shape, preserving the external form and rhyme movement of the originals, of the whole of the poetry with which the Arabic text is so freely interspersed. This great body of verse, equivalent to at least ten thousand twelve-syllable English lines, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... and varied drama, the richness and ripeness of dramatic imagination, of character portrayal, representation as distinct from analysis, of vigorous scenes that sweep through the excited brain of the reader with the rush of the hurricane, and owe nothing to metrical sweetness, to lyrical melody—that has never come ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... the metrical version. No that I would preen my faith to that clink neither; but it's bonny, and easier to mind. "Who go to sea in ships," they ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... And yet it is not on account of want of metrical harmony in respect to the lyre, to borrow the words of Plato, that cities quarrel with cities and friends with friends, and do and suffer the worst woes, but on account of deviations[670] from law and justice. And ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... translation, prose has been employed instead of verse, for two reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which, in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in the second place, to the writer's thinking, ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... have always wished for a more happy metrical version than they have yet obtained of the Book of Psalms. This wish the piety of Blackmore led him to gratify, and he produced (1721) "A New Version of the Psalms of David fitted to the Tunes used in Churches," which being recommended by the archbishops and ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... the editors hope, be found more accurate and useful than either of the preceding editions. Further corrections in text and glossary have been made, and some additional new readings and suggestions will be found in two brief appendices at the back of the book. Students of the metrical system of Bewulf will find ample material for their studies in Sievers' exhaustive essay on ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... been ashamed of his present. The Italians carried this taste to excess. The manners of our country were more rarely tainted with this deplorable licentiousness, although I have observed an innocent tendency towards it, by examining the illuminated manuscripts of our ancient metrical romances: while we admire the vivid colouring of these splendid manuscripts, the curious observer will perceive that almost every heroine is represented in a state which appears incompatible with her reputation. Most of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... comes to its defence with a tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical. To hint this once, is sufficient. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... the language and the metrical form of which exclamation afford no ground for disputing its authenticity, when the habits and education of those times are fairly considered.' It is quite likely that, having already abdicated the throne, Charles regarded the comet ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... selections from the Amyntas quoted in this article have been selected from the admirable metrical translation of Mr. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... should employ the dash; and, lastly, the dash itself becomes a point of all work, replacing indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention—for, in Shelley's hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to indicate the structure or elucidate ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... an increasingly large section of the reading public who while they may not be expert in Latin composition, nevertheless do not think that a Latin word in itself is a cause for laughter. A French phrase thrown in now and then for metrical effect does not strike them as essentially an affectation, and they are willing to have references made to characters whose native language may not have been that noblest of all ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... fyve of the secunde Kyng Richard after the conquest, in al the gramer scoles of Engelond children leveth Freynsch, and construeth and turneth an Englysch." To the first half of this period belong a Metrical Chronicle, attributed to Robert of Gloucester; Langtoft's Metrical Chronicle, translated by Robert de Brunne; the Agenbite of Inwit, by Dan Michel of Northgate in Kent; and a few others. But to the second ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... defeat in the Pyrenees in 777-778, and adds that Hroudlandus was slain. From this bald statement arose the mediaeval "Chanson de Roland," which was still sung at the battle of Hastings. The probable author of the French metrical version is Turoldus; but the poem, numbering originally four thousand lines, has gradually been lengthened, until now it includes more than forty thousand. There are early French, Latin, German, Italian, English, and Icelandic versions of the adventures of Roland, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... help, I might not have found my way for many a year to come. My reading, till now, had been almost wholly English or classical; she sent me to the old French literature—to the Chansons de Geste; to the metrical romances of the Trouveres; to the Chronicles of Froissart, Monstrelet, and Philip de Comines, and to the poets and dramatists ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... 1645 text and Milton's manuscript read self-consum'd; after which word there is to be understood a metrical pause to mark the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... villages are frequently the substance of the chants of these bards. More than this, the line between singing and narration is so faintly drawn, that the bards themselves often interpose great patches of prose between the metrical portions of their recitations. Fairs, festivals, and marriages all over India are attended by the bards, who are always ready to perform for pay and drink. Mr. Leland believes the stories he obtained from the Christian Algonkins of New England, concerning the ancient heroes of the race and ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Style, the Musical accent must be carefully distinguished from the Metrical accent which is determined by Time, or Measure, as well as from the Verbal accent whereby the import of a word is rendered clear to the listener. Here is an example of Musical accent, from Act III of ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... born in London; did much to promote the study of early English literature; contributed to the Anti-Jacobin, and was joint-author of the "Rolliad," a satire on Pitt, and of "Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances"; Scott declared him to be the best conversationalist he had ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... parts; but in airs I find no use they have, unless it be to make a vulgar and trivial modulation seem to the ignorant strange, and to the judicial tedious." It is among the curiosities of literature that this true poet, who had so exquisite a sense of form, and whose lyrics are frequently triumphs of metrical skill, should have published a work (entitled "Observations in the Art of English Poesy") to prove that the use of rhyme ought to be discontinued, and that English metres should be fashioned after classical models. "Poesy," he writes, "in all kind of speaking ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... carried me over the whole ground of the Rowley controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familiarized me with the "Black Letter," that I had begun to find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances; and in Chaucer, though acquainted as yet only with part of his works, I had perceived and had felt profoundly those divine qualities, which, even at this day, are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen. With this knowledge, and this enthusiastic ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Tennyson, and Browning sweep the soul upward to spiritual heights, and answer some of the deepest questionings of the soul of man. And hence literature is no longer merely a thing of vocabulary, of phrase, of rhythm, of assonance, of alliteration, or of metrical and philosophical form. It is a revelation of the progress of the soul, of its standards, of its triumphs, its defeats, and its desires. It is the unfolding of one's intellectual helplessness before the unmoved, calm ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between "the literature of power and the literature ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... 366. 1. The metrical unit in versification is a short syllable, technically called a mora ( v ). A long syllable ( ) is regarded as ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... increasing since, till they defied enumeration. In the Protectorate they swarmed. Matchless still among the tributes in verse was Milton's single Sonnet of May 1652, "Cromwell, our chief of men," and Milton had written no more to or about Cromwell in the metrical form since the Protectorate had begun, but had contented himself with adding to his former prose tributes in various pamphlets that most splendid and subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his Defensio Secunda. It ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... far as I can give the Reader any satisfaction, he is to. know that Island was first inhabited (in the year 874) by a Colony of Norwegians; who brought hither the Traditions of their Forefathers, in certain metrical Composures, which (as is usual with Men transplanted into a Foreign Land) were here more zealously and carefully preserv'd and kept in memory than by the Men of Norway themselves. About 240 years after this (A. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy to compete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine; and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed his heirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his later work his mannerisms in prose ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of this volume are set forth in the beginning of Lecture I. Lecture II. explains the various metrical forms in which I understand Jeremiah to have delivered the most of his prophecies, and which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... in finding and putting together the inscriptions of four of these early popes, and, with Cuvier-like sagacity, he reconstructed, out of a hundred and twelve separate, minute, and scattered pieces, the metrical inscription in which Damasus expressed his desire to be buried with them, but his fear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... taken to be a cubit, but seems at this time to have been nine hundred and ninety millimetres, which is sometimes called "a double cubit." On these suppositions the SAR would be a square, each side measuring about twenty-two yards, about one-tenth of an acre, or four ares on the metrical system. But it is certain that both in early times and during the First Dynasty of Babylon the GAR was only 12 U, and the U, if a cubit, would not be much over eighteen inches. This would make the SAR a square of about ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... A verse of twelve syllables, with the stress on the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh syllables, makes a dodecasyllable of amphibrachs. This dodecasyllable has a short metrical pause after the sixth syllable, and a longer ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer |
