"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... awaited a prose work from the pen of this gifted writer that should deal with the sentiments and emotions as forcibly as she has done in verse. "Sweet Danger," represents that effort in the fullest sense. It is creating a sensation even among readers of ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... The observation of that day, We know it was not free; For if it had, such acts as those Had ne'er been seen in verse or prose, You may ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... to in certain chapters because of their especial value when obtainable. Among these are two collections of patriotic selections valuable because of their emphasis upon national ideals—Long's American Patriotic Prose (D.C. Heath & Company), and Foerster and Pierson's American Ideals (Houghton Mifflin Company). Other similar ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... fire travelled far and wide. I was reported to have done prodigies, and to have saved the greater part of our household goods before help arrived. Reduced to plain prose, these prodigies shrink into the simple, and by no means marvellous fact, that during the excitement I dragged out chests which, under ordinary circumstances, I could not have moved; and that I was unconscious, both of the cold and the danger to which ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the influence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. As yet indeed even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his intellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay before him which revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... and good and noble, I am minded now and again to leave all and translate thee—I, who have never a word of Greek—so empty and so dismal are the versions men make of thee, in verse or in prose." ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... how the insertion of a single prosaic expression turns a fine verse into something worse than the vilest prose. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... is wont to do. If a whole neighborhood of farmers seeks such profits, or if real estate men get into the act, or big development corporations that may be operating from almost anywhere in the country, the scale enlarges and purple prose may appear in the metropolitan newspapers to lure nostalgic suburbans out to examine an assortment of lots sliced fine for maximum yield and priced most often according to their proximity to water. Water is usually involved, for it is the fundamental ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... beautiful romance of the idyllic. A charming picture of life in a Welsh seaside village. It is something of a prose-poem, true, ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... a favorite Christmas hymn in Germany, is ancient, and appears to be a versification of a Latin prose "Sequence" variously ascribed to a 9th century author, and to Gregory the Great in the 6th century. Its German form is still credited to Luther in most hymnals. Julian gives an earlier German form ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... art, and brought a new and gentler influence to bear on the society of her husband's court. There, too, she found a congenial spirit in the duke's accomplished sister, Bianca, that Virgin of Este, who was the subject of Tito Strozzi's impassioned eulogy, and whose Latin and Greek prose excited the admiration of all her contemporaries. This cultivated princess had been originally betrothed to the eldest son of Federigo, Duke of Urbino, but his early death put an end to these hopes, and in 1468 she married Galeotto della Mirandola, a prince ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... child, until we've had it. At your age I wanted it, too, for I had my dreams, though I was not a poet. But there are precious few of us who are willing in youth to accept the world on its own terms—we want to add our little poem to the universal prose of things." ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... if Raynal turns myth into history, he constantly resorts to the opposite method, and turns the hard prose of real life into doubtful poetry. If he reduces the demi-gods to men, he delights also in surrounding savage men with the joyous conditions of the pastoral demi-gods. He can never resist an opportunity of introducing an idyll. It was the fashion of the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... "This is the prose of camp-life," said Catherine, picking the gravy-strainer out of a puddle and rinsing it in the lake. "I hope we shall get ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... compositions in prose, all having the same moral—namely, that the reader must make haste to Jarley's, and that children and servants were admitted at half price, Mrs. Jarley then rolled these testimonials up, and having put them carefully away, sat down and looked at ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... where intuitively the hungry listener follows him into his Temple of Mirth, all should rejoice, for those who knew him not, can while away the moments imbibing the genius of his imagination in the poetry and prose here presented. ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... he is at the moment, but does not show the possibilities of his existence. Even thus seen, the head of Mr. Everett brings back all the age of Pericles, so refined and classic is its beauty. The two busts of Mr. Webster, by Clevenger and Powers, are the difference between prose,—healthy and energetic prose, indeed, but still prose,—and poetry. Clevenger's is such as we see Mr. Webster on any public occasion, when his genius is not called forth. No child could fail to recognize it in a moment. Powers' is not so good as a likeness, but has the higher ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Job has a prose prologue and epilogue, the intermediate portions being poetic dialogue. The characters are discriminated and well supported. It does not preserve the unities of Aristotle, which, indeed, are found neither in the Bible nor in Nature,—which Shakspeare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... are music in prose—they are like pearls on a chain of gold—each word seems exactly the right word in the right place; the stories sing themselves out, they are so ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the end of the story have been so often favourably received at the Circuit Mess, that I thought an amplified version of them in prose would not be unacceptable to the general reader, and might ultimately awaken in the public mind a desire for the long-needed reform ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... not go on in this manner," interrupted Fanny, sternly. "You found my husband here, and that, of course, dissolves the whole poetry of your words into plain prose, for she, whom in your enthusiastic strain you styled your cherub, is simply the wife of this noble and excellent man, whom you were free to compare with ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious authorship of the latter gave to this classicism—what it had hitherto lacked—extensive prose texts. Thus Cicero became the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist; it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less to the statesman, that the panegyrics—extravagant yet not made ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... been descending upon his spirit, like a pall. He had avoided music, pictures, the opera—which he never regarded as an art; even his favourite poets he could not read. Nor did he degustate, as was his daily wont, the supreme prose of the French masters. The pleasures of robust stomachs, gourmandizing and drinking, were denied him by nature. He could not sip a glass of wine, and for meat he entertained distaste. His physique proved him to be of the neurotic temperament—he ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... spiritualized and applied in a higher sense. Looking to the imagery alone, one may well call this book a grand anthology of the old Hebrew poets. But the poetic diction of one and the same writer may differ widely from his prose style, as we see in the case of Moses, Isaiah, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... winds whistle to-night! Heaven grant no poor woman or children are out in this sleety blight. I cannot read this eve; what ails me? "Chronicle," "Tribune" and "Times," Lie looking coaxingly at me, I heed not their prose or rhymes, Is it thinking so much of Arthur, brings Aimee before me here, Aimee, my idol, my darling, my pet, who always spoke words of cheer, Did I say what brings her near me to-night, she is with me every day. God help me, for Aimee's another ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... no libraries near him, and it was hard for him to get books. But he was anxious to learn. Whenever he could buy or borrow a volume of prose or verse he carried it with him until he had read it through. While watching his flocks, he spent much of his time in reading. He loved poetry and soon began to write poems of his own. These poems were read and ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... asked why verse has been employed at all. Why not have listened to Carlyle's rough demand, 'Tell us what they thought; none of your silly poetry'? The present translator can only reply that he began with prose, but soon found that, for tragic dialogue in English, blank verse appeared a more natural and effective vehicle than any prose style which he could hope to frame. And with the dialogue in verse, it was impossible to have the lyric parts in any sort of prose, simply because ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... world's evil and adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in accordance with it. He came ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... same year Thomas de Quincey published his "Confessions of an Opium Eater," a masterpiece of balanced prose. In other parts of the world, likewise, it was a golden period for literature. In France, Victor Hugo published his "Odes et Poesies Diverses," a collection of early poems which contained some of his most charming pieces. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... I should think not,' says the serjeant. '"Ion" is very different.' The Talfourd household, as it is described by Mr. Lestrange, is a droll mixture of poetry and prose, of hospitality, of untidiness, of petulance, of most genuine kindness and ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... literary merit, but as eminently characteristic of her habits of thought and feeling. In fact they are transcripts of her own heart, and she seems often to have preferred this method of expressing her fervid emotions to the use of cooler prose. ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... independence were to be preserved for his countrymen through all time, was not yet written. It was soon afterwards, however, to form not only a chief source of accurate information as to the great events themselves, but a model of style never since surpassed by any prose writer in either branch of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... two volumes of poetry were followed by many works in prose, which we shall notice. France's critical writings are collected in four volumes, under the title, 'La Vie Litteraire' (1888-1892); his political articles in 'Opinions Sociales' (2 vols., 1902). He combines in his style traces ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... spirit—from the exuberance of a comedy of Aristophanes and the caprice of an Elizabethan mask to the serenity of "Comus" and Tasso, and the terror of "Agamemnon" and "Macbeth;" at its range of expression—from, the full-toned Greek and English Iambic to the plain but sparkling prose of Moliere, and from that again to the intricate harmonies of Calderon, Goethe, and Shelley; with its use of all voices, from vociferous mob to melodious daughters of Ocean, and its command of all colour, from the gloom of Medea to the splendour of Marlowe's Helen,—it is a small ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... a languid, caressing voice (the musical laugh translated into prose, it seemed), "that he has never been able to educate me to a proper appreciation of art. He'll pay thousands of pounds for a child in rags or a badly dressed Madonna. Such a waste of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... America would be unintelligible. It will therefore be well to quote them here verbatim, and I do so the more readily because, apart from their historic importance, it is a pity that more Englishmen are not acquainted with this masterpiece of English prose. ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... better man, if he had got drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... from whom he receives in turn an account of the simple happiness and peace of Arcadia, the virtues and felicity of whose inhabitants are beautifully exemplified in the lives and conversation of the shepherd and his daughter. This pleasant little prose poem closes somewhat abruptly. Although inferior in artistic skill to "Paul and Virginia" or the "Indian Cottage", there is not a little to admire in the simple beauty of its pastoral descriptions. The closing paragraph ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... knowledge, he declared, that he could offer her, which the lassie from Corbyknowe would not take in like her porridge. Best thing of all for her was that, following his own predilections, he paid far more attention, in his class for English, to poetry than to prose. Colin Craig was himself no indifferent poet, and was even a master of the more recondite forms of verse. If, in some measure led astray by the merit of the form, he was capable of admiring verse essentially inferior, he yet certainly admired the better poetry more. He had, besides, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... and moral polemics, had so powerfully moved and subdued me, that, soon after my arrival at Paris in 1806, one of my first literary fantasies was to address an epistle, in very indifferent verse, to M. de Chateaubriand, who immediately thanked me in prose, artistically polished and unassuming. His letter flattered my youth, and 'The Martyrs' redoubled my zeal. Seeing them so violently attacked, I resolved to defend them in the 'Publicist,' in which I occasionally wrote. M. Suard, who conducted that journal, although far from coinciding with ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... way of looking at life, more clearly and completely than any other writer. He has at bottom the intense melancholy, the looking forward to the end of all, which is the ground-note of the poetry of Villon, and of Ronsard, as of the prose of Chateaubriand. The panelled library in Montaigne's chateau was carven with mottoes, which were to be charms against too great fear of death. "For my part," he says, "if a man could by any means avoid death, were it by hanging a calf-skin on his ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... possible use was made of the actual words of the great authors who had described these combats and these dances, the descriptions being condensed sometimes and sometimes their rhythm being a little modified so that they should not be out of keeping with the more pedestrian prose by which they were accompanied. Thus, as it happens, the dances of little Pearl and of Topsy could be set forth, fortunately, almost in the very phrases of Hawthorne and of Mrs. Stowe, while I was ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... Coleridge, thus: "While history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was laid in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation, which no Christian can ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... a cool-headed man,—not a light or superficial thinker, but thought on deep subjects. He was a brain worker; it makes my brain tired. I think he published books—poems. I think he was more a poet than a prose writer. He was not like Tom Moore—there was nothing light or superficial—his poetry was grand, solid, deep, stirring. He could write upon warlike scenes, vividly and descriptively, but was not in favor of war. He would deplore any appearance of war, but he had a patriotic ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... somewhere," laughed Anne, "that the first child is a poem but the tenth is very prosy prose. Perhaps Mrs. MacNab thought that the twelfth was ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a much keener edge, both of frost and fire, and touches nothing so gently or creatively; yet time would, no doubt, do much for our architecture, if we would give it a chance,—for that apotheosis of prose, the National Capitol at Washington, upon which, I notice, a returned traveler bases our claim to be considered "ahead" of the Old World, even in architecture; but the reigning gods interfere, and each spring or fall give the building a clean shirt in the shape of a coat of white paint. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... relates that it was divided into several parts. 'Some of the books are kept within, some without the Harem. {170} Each part of the library is subdivided, according to the value of the books and the estimation in which the sciences are held of which the books treat. Prose books, poetical works, Hindi, Persian, Greek, Kashmirian, Arabic, are all separately placed. In this order they are also inspected. Experienced people bring them daily, and read them before his Majesty, who hears every book from the beginning to the ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... in verse and partly in prose, and was entitled, "The Rules and Regulations of the Henpecked Club." This club was connected with the Agricultural Society's Show, and made its existence felt on the Show Day only. At the time of which I write, the Keighley Agricultural Show was about one ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... great proficient in music; and their solitary habitation is filled with embroidery by them both, of wonderful execution. Miss Ponsonby, who writes the finest hand I ever saw, has copied a number of select pieces in verse and prose, which she has ornamented with vignettes and arabesques, in the best taste, and which form a most valuable collection. Thus the arts are cultivated there with equal modesty and success, and their productions are admired with a feeling that is not experienced elsewhere; the spectator observes with ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... might fetch to knock his father in the head, as effoete, & of no more use."[103] That Aubrey preserved a true tradition is proved by what we learn of similar practices elsewhere. Thus, in fifteenth-century MSS. of prose romances found in English and also in Welsh, Sir Perceval, in his adventures in quest of the Holy Grail, being at one time ill at ease, congratulates himself that he is not like those men of Wales, where sons pull their ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the unknown; and it is the feelings and the struggles of these that he tells us, with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead set at our sensibilities. The sub-title Mrs. Stowe gave to Uncle Tom's Cabin would serve to cover most of M. Coppee's contes either in prose or verse; they are nearly all pictures of life among the lowly. But there is no forcing of the note in his painting of poverty and labor; there is no harsh juxtaposition of the blacks and the whites. The tone is always ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... subject of this essay. It is rugged and massive; but so is his mind. It were impossible to imagine the author of "Sartor Resartus" and "The French Revolution" expressing himself in the carefully rounded periods of Macaulay, whose prose is half poetry, and whose poetry is all prose. Carlyle seems to care precious little what kind of vehicle he uses for the conveyance of ideas so long as it does not break down. All his labor "smells of the lamp"; but "the midnight oil"—of which our modern "ready writers" ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 1839. Its publication, which was undertaken by John Owen, the University publisher in Cambridge, marked an era in American literature. Every body read the book, and every body talked of it. It was a poem in prose, and none the less the work of a poet because professedly "a romance of travel." The young read it with enthusiasm, and it sent hundreds to follow Paul Flemming's footsteps in the distant Fatherland, where the "romance of travel" became their guidebook. The merchant and the lawyer, the journalist ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side with this vulgar prose; more than this, it must distort its natural style and limits, put songs, poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera, as Middleton says, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tales rarely exceeding some sixty or seventy pages in length, but perfect in proportion, full of invention and originality, and saturated with the purest and pleasantest essence of the spirit which for six centuries in tableaux, farces, tales in prose and verse, comedies and correspondence, made French literature the delight and recreation of Europe. 'Gerfaut' is considered De Bernard's greatest work. The plot turns on an attachment between a married woman and the hero of the story. The book ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... might have been printed in the Complete Letter-Writer, as a specimen of the manner in which young ladies should address such correspondents. Fanny had a volume of French poetry in her hand, but had it been Greek prose it would have given her equal occupation and amusement. It had been in her hands half-an-hour, and she had ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... News. In 1865 he moved to Boston and was editor for ten years for Ticknor and Fields—then at the height of their prestige—of the eclectic weekly Every Saturday, discontinued in 1875. From 1881 to 1890 he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Meanwhile Aldrich had written much, both in prose and verse. His genius was many-sided, and it is surprising that so busy an editor and so prolific a writer should have attained the perfection of form for which he was remarkable. His successive volumes of verse, chiefly The Ballad of Babie Bell (1856), Pampinea, and Other ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... gathered from reading his highest single achievement, yet needs to be ranged with his other writings, early and late, to have its last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began "The House of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it— defrauded of art and the joy of life, "starving for symbols" as Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, on ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nearest saloon with all their disreputable friends who had gathered to meet them, it was trying to one whose regard for the truth was at first unshaken, and whose imagination at the last became exhausted. So, when Bronson heard he had to release another prisoner in pathetic descriptive prose, he lost ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... day, Cobden, is a great man in his way, the type of an honest manufacturer, but for the moment all-powerful. I am domiciled with your brother and sister, [27] under the same roof, dine daily at their hospitable table, sit over the fire and cose and prose with them, sometimes alone with your sister, who thinks and talks very like you, that is, not only well but ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... sixtieth potato. At any rate, the fact remains that, as that fateful vegetable changed hands across the fence, something resembling a proposal of marriage did actually proceed from him. As a sustained piece of emotional prose it fell short of the highest standard. Most of it was lost at the back of his throat, and what did emerge was mainly inaudible. However, as she distinctly caught the word 'love' twice, and as Tom ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... construction of both these lines is difficult to understand. The prose order of the line is 'yogatah yuktesu (madhye) yasya yatha, etc., vikrama (tatha vakshyami); atmani pasyatah (janasya) yuktasya yogasya (yatha) siddhi (tatha vakshyami).' Yogatah means upayatah, i.e., according to rules and ordinances. Vikrama ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... hesitate not to say that there is now sounding upon these shores a deeper, subtler, and more universal note than is heard in any other land touched by the Atlantic Sea. We have now writings in several departments of literature, and in both prose and verse, which are characterized by a breadth and largeness of suggestion, by a spirituality and a prophetic adherence to the moral sentiment, which justify all that has here been affirmed or reasoned. And our deepest thought finds a popular reception ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Robin himself, of a brown complexion and a high look in his face, but a little pale, too, with study, for he was learned beyond his years and read all the books that he could lay hand to. It was said even that his own verses, and a prose-lament he had written upon the Death of a Hound, were read with pleasure in London by the lords and gentlemen. It was as long ago as '71, that his verses had first become known, when he was still serving ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... been successful in my undertakings. Stood at the head of my class at school, and in my professional work graduated with highest honors. I have a memory for prose or verse that is the cause of envy to many of my friends. The facts here set down are recorded in the interest of advancing study along this most important but neglected and ignored line. That they have been truthfully recorded without favor to the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stretching out her fan, and touching him with it at arm's length, 'what I was going to say to you when you began as usual to prose and worry, is, that I shall guard against our being alone any more, and that when circumstances prevent my going out to my own satisfaction, I must arrange to have some people or other always here; for I really cannot, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... passed in that sadness most of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless in some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more intelligible nearness of the time—it had brought me to the end of my twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not only myself but my instructors—which I infer I did from their so intensely letting me alone—I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth mainly the remembrance of being consistently either ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... words hover like enchanted bees. Death is one of them. Mediaevally it was represented by a skeleton to which prose had given a rictus, poetry a scythe, and philosophy wings. From its eyries it swooped spectral and sinister. Previously it was more gracious. In Greece it resembled Eros. Among its attributes was beauty. It did not alarm. It beckoned and consoled. The child ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... each other at first so intent upon expressing ourselves to each other, and getting at each other, that we troubled very little about the appearance of our relationship. We met almost openly.... We talked of ten thousand things, and of ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no prose of mine that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing. Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How can I render bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession? I sit here at my ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Northwestern University said of her, at this time: "Dr. Kahn is one of the most accurate and effective students in a class of eighty-four members, most of them sophomores, although the class includes many seniors. The subject is the study of the style and diction of prominent prose authors, with some theme work. Last year Miss Kahn attained a very high rank in the study of the principles of good English style during the first semester, and in that of synonyms during the second semester. In the ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... the air is quickly compressed, enough heat is evolved to produce combustion. 2. Unless your thought packs easily and neatly in verse, always use prose. (Unless if not.) 3. If ever you saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you have an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. 4. Were it not for the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the harbors and the rivers of Britain ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... interesting. Any good textile must impress itself upon the mind by its suggestiveness and beauty of color. There is a difference between what may be called artistic and decorative embellishment of textiles. Each has its place in the world of beauty, but one is the poetry, the other the prose of ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... which kept him in a fevered and irritable condition. "He had a small writing-table," Mr. Phillips says, "with a shallow drawer; I have often seen it half full of sketches, unfinished poems, soliloquies, a scene or two of a play, prose portraits of some pet character, etc. These he would read to me, though he never volunteered to do so, and every now and then he burnt the whole and began to fill the ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... up the bundles. We may freely admit that the fire is part of the parable, but yet let us not forget that it occurs not only in the parable, but in the interpretation; and let us learn that the prose reality of 'everlasting destruction,' which Christ here solemnly announces, is awful and complete. For a moment He passes beyond the limits of that parable, to add that terrible clause about 'weeping and gnashing of teeth,' the tokens of despair and rage. So spoke the most ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... only get to the attitude of simple acceptance of this as a literal truth, and believe that, in prose reality, Christ comes to every heart that loves Him, would not all the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... now make the acquaintance of the dramas, we would say briefly that the Balzac Theatre comprises five plays —Vautrin, Les Ressources de Quinola, Pamela Giraud, La Maratre, and Mercadet. These plays are in prose. They do not belong to the apprenticeship period of the Works of Youth, but were produced in the heyday of his powers, revealing the mature man and the subtle analyst of character, not at his best, but at a point far above his worst. True, their production aroused condemnation on the part ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... a Letter as a variety of prose? A written communication addressed by the writer to ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... deeds of Highlanders, both in these islands and elsewhere, have been told in verse and prose, and not more often, nor more loudly, than they deserve. But we must remember, now and then, that there have been heroes likewise in the lowland and in the fen. Why, however, poets have so seldom sung of them; why no historian, save Mr. Motley in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," has ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... wittiest and shrewdest of the prose critics of Holland was Owen Feltham, from whom I quote later. His little book on the Low Countries is as packed with pointed phrase as a satire by Pope: the first half of it whimsically destructive, the second half eulogistic. It is he who charges the Dutch convivial ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Jonathan Swift in prose and verse so mutually illustrate each other, that it was deemed indispensable, as a complement to the standard edition of the Prose Works, to issue a revised edition of the Poems, freed from the errors which had ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... the Sleeping Beauty is well known; we have excellent accounts of it, both in prose and in verse. I shall not undertake to relate-it again; but, having become acquainted with several memoirs of the time which have remained unpublished, I discovered some anecdotes relating to King Cloche and Queen Satine, whose daughter it was that slept a hundred years, and also to several members ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France
... that there was neither he nor she amongst them but could read, write, sing, play upon several musical instruments, speak five or six several languages, and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose. Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so dexterous and skilful both on foot and a-horse-back, more brisk and lively, more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of weapons than were there. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of prose fiction, excepting only the first half-volume of Waverley, were all written in twelve years, 1814-26 (of his own age forty-three to fifty-five), the actual time employed in their composition being not more than a couple of months out of each year; and during that time only the morning ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... unfrequently testify—oftentimes assiduously wooed, won, and lightly discarded, to furnish an artistic study of the female capacity for suffering, as well as to supply renewed inspiration for further poetic bemoanings. In the prose narrations of Edgar Poe, the same skilful handling of mystery, and the turning to account of any incident susceptible of dramatic effect, are always apparent as in his poems. But the want of extended sympathy with mankind, the artist egotism, which looks ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to the village, Miss Dover lagged behind, and then Severne infused into his voice those tender tones, which give amorous significance to the poorest prose. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... battle." He was promoted to the Intelligence Department of the service where the personal risk was the greatest, and was killed in action at the battle of the Ourcq, July 30, 1918. He was buried within sound of the river. Since his death two volumes containing his complete work in prose and verse, his letters from abroad, and an excellent memoir written by his friend, Robert Holliday, have been published and will do much to perpetuate the ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... translation of Terence was published by Harper & Brothers as the second part of an omnibus volume also containing the 1853 Riley translation (prose, with notes and commentary). The Riley portion has been released as a ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... the words had been lost sight of and forgotten{173}. The same may be affirmed of such other of these feminine forms as are now applied to men, such as 'gamester', 'youngster', 'oldster', 'drugster' (South), 'huckster', 'hackster', (swordsman, Milton, prose), 'teamster', 'throwster', 'rhymester', 'punster' (Spectator), 'tapster', 'whipster' (Shakespeare), 'trickster'. Either, like 'teamster', and 'punster', the words first came into being, when the true significance of this form was altogether lost{174}; or like 'tapster', which ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... brother Charles, I gave them the fragments on Homer, Shakespeare, Burke: and my brother Edward wrote the little Farewell, when last he left his home. The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know. I am daily expecting an account for you from Little and Brown. They promised it at this time. It will speedily follow this sheet, if it do not accompany ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve Apostles" ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that it should not be burnt, but that all that part should be expunged which treats of the sage Felicia, and of the enchanted fountain, and also most of the longer poems; leaving him, in God's name, the prose and also the honor of being the first in that kind ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... cold unpoetical virtue. Mere historical truth is better written in prose. And, therefore, I think you did judiciously when you threw into the fire your history of Louis le Grand, and trusted ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... the skill with which they are grouped bring the California of 1849 before us with unmatched vividness. We have been getting knowledge and learning a deep moral without suspecting it, as if by our own observation and experience. In the same way "Asirvadam the Brahmin" is a prose poem that lets us into the secret of the Indian revolt. It is seldom that we meet with volumes of more real power than these, or whose force is so artistically masked under ease and playfulness. We prefer the "Old" part of the book to the "New." It seems to us to show a better style of handling. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... in 1721, and soon became pastor of the First Church in Boston. He was an equally active opponent of Whitefield and of Episcopacy. He was an ardent and romantic patriot, yet so plain in his ways and views that he wished Paradise Lost might be turned into prose that he might ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... the most ancient and mythic of these legends have been taken down from the trembling memories of old squaws who never understood their inner meaning, or from ordinary senaps who had not thought of them since boyhood, it will be seen that the preservation of a mass of prose poems, equal in bulk to the Kalevala or Heldenbuch, is ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... no," he said with a smile, half of relief and half of naive superiority, "I'm a prose writer—on a ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... ye!" cried the apparition, as though illustrating a point. Leaning his white sleeves on the rail, cigar in one fist, Tauchnitz volume in the other, he roared down over the side a passage of prose, from which his visitors caught only the words "Ginger Dick" and "Peter Russet," before ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Therefore, instead of fancying that any of his fair acquaintances were angels, he had deliberately and, as some may think, in a very cold-blooded fashion, endeavored to discover what they actually were. He had observed that a good deal of prose followed the poetry of wooing and the lunacy of the honeymoon; and he thought it might be well to criticise a little before marriage as ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the interpreters of the comet's message content with simple prose. At the appearance of the comet of 1618, Grasser and Gross, pastors and doctors of theology at Basle, put forth a collection of doggerel rhymes to fasten the orthodox theory into the minds of school-children and peasants. One ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... it left its impress on French literature. Following in the footsteps of Francis I and the two Marguerites nobles vied with each other in their efforts to produce some epoch-making work of poesy or prose, and while they did not often publish for profit they were glad enough to see themselves in print. Then there were also the professional men of letters, as distinct from the courtiers with literary ambitions, the churchmen and courtly attaches of all ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... would have treasured all those cards that she had despatched during the early years of her exile. She responded as well as she could to his eagerness for personal details concerning the siege and the commune. He might have been disappointed at the prose of her answers, had he not been ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Boulogne, or perhaps wandering often along the ramparts of the old town, introspective even then, with something of that rare and insatiable curiosity which we all now recognise as so distinctive of Sainte-Beuve. Again, the greatest creative literary artist of the century, in prose at any rate, was leading an apparently somewhat indolent schoolboy life at Tours, undreamful yet of enormous debts, colossal undertakings, gigantic failures, and the Comedie Humaine. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... toast. He lifted his glass of beer—the best Philip's cellar afforded. "Here's to the greatest nation on earth, one drop of whose blood is worth more to Art than all the stolid corpuscles that clog the veins of lesser races. Without it what man can hope to write great prose, or paint great pictures, or mix a great salad? Vive la France!—Benoix, who ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... overflowing with emotion, sometimes mild and sad, sometimes harsh and bitter, the poor workgirl, finding a melancholy charm in these dumb and solitary outpourings of the soul, now clothed in the form of simple and touching poetry, and now in unaffected prose, had accustomed herself by degrees not to confine her confidences to what immediately related to Agricola, for though he might be mixed up with all her thoughts, for reflections, which the sight of beauty, of happy love, of maternity, of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... valuable, though nameless; I paid rather less than one shilling. The poor thing tells me that some cruel person bought it five years ago—an imported piece, with two pseudo-bulbs. They still remain, towering like columns of old-world glory above an area of shapeless ruin. To speak in mere prose—though really the conceit is not extravagant—these fine bulbs, grown in their native land, of course, measure eight inches high by three-quarters of an inch diameter. In the first season, that malheureux reduced their progeny to a stature of three and a half inches by the foot-rule; next season, ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... liberal arts, and disputed according to the rules of dialectics.[275] Jacques d'Arc's daughter had heard nothing of all that; she knew Saint Catherine from stories out of some history written in the vulgar tongue, in verse or in prose, so many of which were in circulation ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... present sense of moral attraction. What he did in his best writing was, to use the English as if it were a spoken, and not merely an inkhorn language; as if it were his own to do what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed of itself. In this respect, his service to our prose was greater than any other man has ever rendered. He says he formed his style upon Tillotson's (Bossuet on the other hand, formed his upon Corneille's); but I rather think he got it at Will's, for its greatest charm is, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Church of Saint Eustace, it commemorates a vision which tradition attributes alike to Saint Julian the Hospitaller, to Saint Felix, and to Saint Hubert. The genius of Flaubert, who was certainly one of the greatest prose writers of this century, has told the story of the first of these in very beautiful language, and the legend of Saint Hubert is familiar to every one. Saint Eustace is perhaps less known, for he was a Roman saint of early days, a soldier and ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the classes may fleece them. In short the ethics of Christ would enter into the industrial and social systems. Usury would be abolished. Instead of having Christ so much in prayer and song, in poetry and prose, in marble and on canvas, we would have him in the halls of legislation, in railroad operations, in manufactories, in stores, on farms and in the home. In short he would enter into all the walks of life, and men's actions would be governed by his teachings, ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... columns of platoons appear Close to the leader following. Ah, here The poetry of war is fully seen, Its prose forgotten; as against the green Of Mother Nature, uniformed in blue, The soldiers pass for Sheridan's review. The motion-music of the moving throng, Is like a silent tune, set to ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... become fashionable (through Macaulay chiefly) to abuse the Poems of Ossian; but, admitting their forgery as well as faultiness, they seem to us in their better passages to approach more nearly than any English prose to the force, vividness, and patriarchial simplicity and tenderness of the Old Testament style. Lifting up, like a curtain, the mist of the past, they show us a world, unique and intensely poetical, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... of herself. As, however, her painters have not flattered her, it may not uncharitably be concluded that they were no great deacons in their craft. It is a much easier thing to assure a homely female, in prose or rhyme, that she is beautiful, than to represent her so upon canvass. Her effigies are, I believe, pretty numerous, varying in ugliness, but none that I have seen even handsome—prettiness, of course, is out of the question. She was fond of finery, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... continent, of which he enumerates sixteen different occasions, as if they disdained those peaceful incursions by which they gained no conquest, and established no permanent footing on the Byzantine territory. Of the romantic account of Soliman's first expedition, he says, "As yet the prose of history had not asserted its right over the poetry of tradition." This defence would scarcely be accepted as satisfactory by the historian of the Decline and Fall.—M. (in Quarterly Review, vol. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... prospered in this world, and good men have been afflicted;" and it is the most probably, because from the beginning, to the third verse of the third chapter, where the complaint of Job beginneth, the Hebrew is (as St. Jerome testifies) in prose; and from thence to the sixt verse of the last chapter in Hexameter Verses; and the rest of that chapter again in prose. So that the dispute is all in verse; and the prose is added, but as a Preface in the beginning, and an Epilogue ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... publishers have caused to be prepared for the festive season a handsome volume, of the Souvenir family, called the Ruby. A portion, indeed most of its pictorial embellishments are of the first class of engraving, and the letter-press contains poetry and prose worthy of perusal. The work is a beautiful addition to the centre-table, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... six months of palpitating negotiations with the adorable Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment of dejection, penned the prose apophthegm, "It is of no use trying ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... existence of early biographies of the early propagators of Irish Christianity is unnecessary. These had an undoubted existence; sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse; and it is these that the annalists themselves chiefly refer to; the character of whose notices may be collected from the following extracts relating to the first ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... on my knowledge of human nature, which, in regard to children, conformed to comparatively simple laws. I knew that the change would involve plenty of hard work, self-denial and careful managing, which nothing could redeem from prose; but I aimed to add to our exodus, so far as possible, the elements of adventure and mystery so dear to the hearts of children. The question where we should go was the cause of much discussion, the studying of maps, and the learning of ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... to overrate the influence such an atmosphere, breathed in youth, must have on the taste and character. The absence of a sordid spirit, the curse of our material day and generation, the contact with intellects trained to incase their thoughts in serried verse or crisp and lucid prose, cannot but form the hearer’s mind into a higher and better mould. It is both a satisfaction and a hope for the future to know that these influences are being felt all over the capital and throughout the length and breadth of France. There are at this moment in Paris ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... cease," cried Media. "What have you to do with cogitations not in verse, minstrel? Leave prose to Babbalanja, who is ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... he pronounced "d——d drum-and-trumpet verses." Gray used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the Elegy "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and the public would have received it as well had it been written entirely in prose." Had it been written in prose or in the inventory style of poetry, it would have been forgotten long ago, like so much else ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... dominion belong only to man, and it is right they should. He it was whom God created first, let him take pre-eminence. But among those stars of lesser glory, which are given to lighten the nations, among sweet-voiced poets, earnest prose writers, who, by lofty truth that lies hid beneath legend and parable, purify the world, graceful painters and beautiful musicians, each brightening their generation with serene and holy lustre—among these, let woman shine! But her ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... have all its faults and none of its beauties; in France, whatever it lost in method or in majesty, it gained in fantasy: literally Flamboyant, it breathed away its strength into the air; but there is not more difference between the commonest doggrel that ever broke prose into unintelligibility, and the burning mystery of Coleridge, or spirituality of Elizabeth Barrett, than there is between the dissolute dulness of English Flamboyant, and the flaming undulations of the wreathed lines ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... aim, Alfred changed the whole front of our literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the translations of Alfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign. It seems likely that the King's rendering of Bede's history gave the first impulse toward the compilation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... great Romany Rye, who discovered the most interesting people in Europe, and as a brother vagabond lived with them—lived with them “on the accont of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life,” to quote the “testimonial” of the prose-poet Sylvester Boswell. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... face relaxes with relief; A heart beloved of the wiser gods Grown weary of solemnity prolonged— That snatches scraps of gladness while Fate nods, Varying life's prose with stories many-songed: One who has faced the dark and naught denied— Yet lives persistent on the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... is it, Master Osborne? I thought there was some mental cause for this depression of health. I wouldn't trouble my head about it, if I were you, though that's always very easily said, I know. Try your hand at prose, if you can't manage to please the publishers with poetry; but, at any rate, don't go on fretting over spilt milk. But I mustn't lose my time here. Come over to us to-morrow, as I said; and what with the wisdom of two doctors, and the wit and folly of three ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... union of pastoral with heroic romance, out of which came presently, in France, a distinct school of fiction. But the genius of its author was at play, it followed designedly the fashions of the hour in verse and prose, which tended to extravagance of ingenuity. The "Defence of Poesy" has higher interest as the first important piece of literary criticism in our literature. Here Sidney was in earnest. His style is wholly free from the euphuistic extravagance in which readers of his time delighted: it ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... finish with a couple of samples of "literature," one from America, the other from India. The first is a Brooklyn public-school boy's attempt to turn a few verses of the "Lady of the Lake" into prose. You will have to concede ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... This, rendered into common prose, meant that Harry, after a prolonged consultation with Pawson and Gadgem, would shed his outer coat, the spring being now far advanced, blossoms out and the weather warm—and that Kate would tuck her petticoats clear of her dear little feet and go pattering ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was over, I had a constant source of amusement in endeavouring to impart such knowledge as I possessed to Harry. I fortunately remembered portions of the Bible, and numerous pieces of poetry and prose; and by repeating them to him, he also was able to get them by heart. I used to tell him all about England, and how various articles in common use were manufactured. I taught him a good deal of history and geography; and even arithmetic, by making use ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... I am almost sorry that Mrs. Eden, or Cobb, Jr., is not the author of this story. Either of them could make a chapter which would bear the title of "A Thrilling Incident." But with an unconquerable aversion to anything and everything "thrilling," the present writer can only say in plainest prose that this incident made the young marquis the grateful friend of his deliverer, Henry Stevens, who happened to be a zealous Methodist, and ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... to express their thanks to Mr. Riley for the poetry and to Mr. Nye for the prose which have been used ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... the chase, had its appropriate magical and mimetic dance and song, as in Finland, among Red Indians, and among Australian blacks. "The deeds of men" were chanted by heroes, as by Achilles; stories were told in alternate verse and prose; girls, like Homer's Nausicaa, accompanied dance and ball play, priests and medicine-men accompanied rites ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... be at breaking-point, there is no shutting out the impertinent details of life. And on this particular morning Honor found herself plunged neck-deep in prose. Domestic trifles thrust themselves aggressively to the fore. Parbutti assailed her after breakfast with a voluble diatribe against the dhobi's wife, whose eldest son was going to and fro in the compound unashamed, wearing a shirt made from the Memsahib's newest jharrons. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... find only in remoter authors, were, in his time, accessible and familiar. The fable of As You Like It, which is supposed to be copied from Chaucer's Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of those times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain English prose, which the criticks have now to seek in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... the material in the early American magazines which gave readers information about Germany and other Teutonic countries. While the primary aim has been to discuss the translations of poetry and the original poems bearing on the subject, all relevant prose articles have also been listed. Since many of the magazines used are extremely rare and almost unique, the texts from them are here reprinted in order to make such information accessible. As some of the translations ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... The first letter contained two notes of a hundred francs each, with Victor Gaillard's card, who congratulated Amedee anew and asked him to write something for his journal in the way of prose; a story, or anything he liked. The young poet gave a cry of joyful surprise when he recognized the handwriting of Maurice Roger upon ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... the founder of Latin prose, and the chief opponent of the exaggerated Hellenism that was finding its way into Roman life and literature (cf. his own words quoted by Pliny, N.H. xxix. 14, 'Quandoque ista gens suas litteras dabit, omnia corrumpet'); but even he shows traces of ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... if you like. They won't fit, though. They'll stick out like a sore thumb. The only editor I showed them to said they weren't prose, and they weren't poetry, and, besides, he didn't ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... Hermione. 'She says she's sure he thinks of himself as a prose Shelley; and for some reason that ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... such a work as Uncle Tom's Cabin, should have become so popular in England and America. As an American, we can but view it with shame and regret. Where is the Bible? Where are Shakespeare and Milton, and Addison and Johnson? And where are our own immortal poets and prose writers? Who reads the chaste and beautiful writings of Washington Irvin? What has become of our well written and instructive histories and biographies? Why is it that a filthy negro novel is found in every body's hand? Uncle Tom's Cabin! What is it? What can ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... The tree has no picturesqueness, no variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest, and its poorest and most meagre prose.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... written, the remainder would be a query, the produce of which would be a negative quantity, which would probably prevent both Sir and Madam from reading either the nonsense or the good sense, the poetry or the prose, the simple or the sublime, of the rhapsodical, metaphorical, allegorical genius, Hugh Trevor: for in that case I suspect Hugh Trevor would find a more pleasant and profitable employment than the honourable trade of authorship. I have read books much, but ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... will continue so to do as long as it endures. The voice of the teacher and the friend still survives, which had this extraordinary power of giving in the very different tongue of England all the glories of the poetry and the prose of Greece; and other youths, doubtless like me, look out under the spell of its music to that same green garden in far-off Galway, by the side of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... represented in the present series by his Preface to the "Fables" and his Dedication to the translation of Virgil. In these he shows himself not only a critic of sound and penetrating judgment, but the first master of modern English prose style. ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... there was the possibility to be regarded. To influence this larger public, therefore, men who could write came little by little into a larger demand. And as writers were comparatively scarce, all kinds—whether they wrote poems or prose—were pressed into service. It is significant, too, that it was in the decades subjected to the first influence of the French Revolution that the English daily paper took its start as an ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Waterloo debacle. She took a prominent part in Nelson's great battles at the Nile and Trafalgar. But her end was pitifully ignoble. After a glorious and proud career, she was converted into a convict hulk and re-named the Captivity. A great prose master has reminded us, in words that glow upon his impassioned page, of the slight thought given by the practical English to the fate of another line-of-battle ship that had flown their colours in the stress of war. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... yet with a good appetite, and she did not refuse the wine. Then, when the meal was over and Simpson had removed the dishes, I asked for the new manuscripts. She gave me an old green copybook filled with short poems, and a prose sketch by itself; I lit a cigar and sat down at my desk ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... few words. With the three writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the references to them in his books and in his letters. With Andrew Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of "The Religio Medici" and of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," in diverse ways in his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression. As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the literature of the ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... child is usually a letter of thanks; somebody has sent him a box of chocolates. The thanks tend to stiffen a child's style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know. They speak prose and know it. But a young child possesses his words by a different tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things he says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them. He is so little taken ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... slight literary advantages; yet the simple pathos, beauty, and eloquence of their dying messages moved every heart. Poor Larkin was, of all three, the least endowed with education, yet his letter has been aptly described as "a perfect poem in prose." here append ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... time. But they certainly seem to me to fail in redeeming their dose of rancor and misrepresentation by any sufficient evidence of genius such as, to my taste, saves not only the party journalism in verse and prose of Swift and Canning and Praed on one side, but that of Wolcot and Moore and Sydney Smith on the other. Even the often-quoted journal of events in London under the Chevalier is overwrought and tedious. The best thing in the True Patriot seems ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... fearful adventures in the swollen gulches between Laupahoehoe and Onomea. It is difficult to begin my letter with the plain prose of our departure from Waipio, which we accomplished on the morning after I last wrote. On rising after a sound sleep, I found that my potted beef, which I had carefully hung from a nail the night before, had been almost carried away by small ants. These ants swarm in every house on low ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... he edited the "London Journal," and in trying to improve its tone and quality of literature by the republication in its pages of the Waverley novels he well-nigh ruined it. These and other matters he embarked upon, together with a number of small works, such as his volume of "Prose and Verse" (which Jerrold said ought to have been called "Prose and Worse"), and his "Jest Book," on the strength of which, it is said, Hans Christian Andersen, when in England, sought an introduction to him and paid him the compliment ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Tell is the last of Schiller's five great dramas, a series beginning with Wallenstein, written within nine years, constituting, along with his ballads and many other poems, the work of what is called his "third period." This period was preceded by Schiller's chief prose works and the historical and philosophical studies preparatory thereto, together with considerable reading of Greek and English classics, notably Homer and Shakespeare. The influence of his historical and critical studies and of this reading is evident in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... in," she continued. She held the pencil suspended in the air. Her brow was puckered with thought. "Of course, it isn't supposed to read as sensibly as prose. That is one of the greatest differences between them. In poetry one must use imagination and poetic license." Then she fell to work upon the paper and wrote steadily and laboriously for some minutes. Her eye flashed with ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... the poet gets his chance, When even wingless Pegasi will prance; Yet We, whose pinions oft outsoared the crow's, Have hitherto confined Ourself to prose. But who shall doubt that We could sing as well as That Warrior-bard TYRTAEUS, late of Hellas, Who woke the Spartans up with words and chorus Twenty-six centuries B.U. (Before Us)? Also, since Truth is near allied to Beauty, We are convinced that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... burns with a fire of righteous indignation, reminding you of Juvenal. The finest display of his imaginative power is in "Gotham," which is throughout a glorious rhapsody, resembling some of the best prose effusions of Christopher North, and abounding ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... was won in 1833, when he was the successful competitor for a prize of $100 offered by a Baltimore periodical for the best prose story. "A MSS. Found in a Bottle" was the winning tale. Poe had submitted six stories in a volume. "Our only difficulty," says Mr. Latrobe, one of the judges, "was in selecting from the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... which falls in with our plan of recording Scotch reminiscences, as Allan Ramsay there states the great value set upon proverbs in his day, and the great importance which he attaches to them as teachers of moral wisdom, and as combining amusement with instruction. The prose of Allan Ramsay has, too, a spice of his poetry in its composition. His dedication is, To the tenantry of Scotland, farmers of the dales, and ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... better adapted to tragedy than rhymed alexandrines, but then the French language does not admit of blank verse, and to write tragedies in prose, unless they be tragedies in modern life, would deprive them of all charm; but after all I find the harmonious pomp and to use a phrase of Pope's "The long majestic march and energy divine" of the French alexandrine, very pleasing to the ear. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye |
