"Rhyme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hate to see thee go; but the best of friends must sever, and you'll soon come back, you know. Listen now to our advices. Kitty, dear, for pity's sake, do not tumble in the river,—do not tumble in the lake. Many more things I could tell you as I talk in lovely rhyme, but I think it is my duty to let others share ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... the quaintest experiences are when the eloquent baby, determined to express herself in English, falls back upon scraps of kindergarten rhyme and delivers it in all seriousness. On the evening before my birthday I was banished from my room, and the children decorated it exactly as they pleased. When I returned I was implored not to look at anything, ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... setting sun glared wildly from the summit of the hills, and sank like a burning ship at sea, wrecked in the tempest. Thus the evening set in; and winter stood at the gate wagging his white and shaggy beard, like an old harper, chanting an old rhyme:—"How cold it is! ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... simply by sticking to nature, making his personages speak so naturally; and the second, with the real dramatic [290] grandeur of his genius. I feel that I have never done justice to Corneille before, I have been so dissatisfied with the formal rhyme, the want of the natural dramatic play of language in his work, the stilted rhetoric. And when I heard Rachel in the Cid, I thought, by the rapid, undramatic way in which she hurried through his declamations, while, in a few exclamatory bursts, she swept ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... nest in a hollow, "with buds to follow," I think occurred next in his nimble strain; And clay that was "kneaden," of course in Eden,— A rhyme ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... character, in the English language. It contains about two hundred sonorous lines, some of which appear to be fine, even in the sense, as well as the sound. The remaining seven thousand three hundred are quite ineffectual. Then what labor the builder of that lofty rhyme must have undergone! It is, in its own way, a small Tower of Babel, and all built by a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... pie—and the ale! Hurrah for the peacock and his tail!" shouted the boys; and straightway, seeing that they had made a rhyme, they gave a cheer shriller and longer than all the others put together, and went clattering down the stairway, singing at the top of ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... conditions of oral delivery and listening. For all poetry, I think, makes its primary appeal to the ear; and the modern habit of reading it seems to me to have thrown this essential test of quality somewhat into the background. The arrangement of metre and rhyme may have been gradually invented to correspond with and satisfy that natural expectation of the recurrence of certain tones and measures which always delights primitive men, and of which one may possibly trace some symptoms even in animals, as when the snake sways slowly to ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... necessarily inadequate, as the poems depend very much on modulations of rhythm and on the expressive fitting together of words impossible to render in a foreign language. He uses rhyme comparatively little, often substituting assonance in accordance with the peculiar traditions of Spanish prosody. I have made no attempt ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... night grows pale: With a blush as of opening flowers Dimly the east shines red. Can it be that the morn shall fulfil My dream, and refashion our clay As the poet may fashion his rhyme? Hark to that mingled scream Rising from workshop and mill— Hailing some marvelous sight; Mighty breath of the hours, Poured through the trumpets of steam; Awful tornado of time, ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... Landor said about Louis Napoleon. You are aware that he loathed the first Napoleon and that he hates the French nation; also, he detests the present state of French affairs, and has foamed over in the 'Examiner' 'in prose and rhyme' on the subject of them. Nevertheless, he who calls 'the Emperor' 'an infernal fool' expresses himself to this effect about the President: 'I always knew him to be a man of wonderful genius. I knew him intimately, and I was persuaded of what was in him. When people have said to me, "How can ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the Tuscan land shall beat Her Sorrow, like a wounded bird; And if her suit at Mary's feet Avail, its moan shall yet be heard By some just poet, who shall shed, Whate'er the theme that leads his rhyme Bright words like tears above her, dead, Entreating ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... made use of last night for keeping on your masque, I endeavoured to defeat with reason, but that proving ineffectual, I'll try the force of rhyme, and send you the heads of our chat, in a poetical ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... of these Latin lines, changing, as I have said, the name of the river to Awyne, almost, apparently, for the purpose of getting a vernacular rhyme, and then himself ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... is to make up their minds what it is they are going to say before they begin. This is superfluous effort, tending to cramp the style. It is permissible, if not essential, to select a subject—say, MUD—but any detailed argument or plan which may restrict the free development of metre and rhyme (if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... Brotherhood The Tavern of Last Times The Two Ages If I Were Warned Forward In England Karma The Gossips Together Petition A Waft of Perfume The Plough Go Plant a Tree Pain's Purpose Memory's Mansion Old Rhythm and Rhyme All in a Coach and Four Songs of a Country Home Worthy the ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... translators of the Iliad, or of parts of it, the metres which have been selected have been almost as various: the ordinary couplet in rhyme, the Spenserian stanza, the Trochaic or Ballad metre, all have had their partisans, even to that "pestilent heresy" of the so-called English Hexameter; a metre wholly repugnant to the genius of our language; which can only be pressed into the service by a violation of every rule of prosody; and ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... wun winter's neet, Net far fra Kersmas time, When I met wee this Feffy Goast, The subject of mi rhyme. ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... accept such loans from the deanery. And there was at times a lightness of heart about the man. In the course of the last winter he had translated into Greek irregular verse the very noble ballad of Lord Bateman, maintaining the rhythm and the rhyme, and had repeated it with uncouth glee till his daughter knew it all by heart. And when there had come to him a five-pound note from some admiring magazine editor as the price of the same,—still through the dean's hands,—he ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... beside himself and bristled up like an angry little fighting-cock. "You're a mean old thing," he shrieked, breaking over all bounds of respect, and screaming out his words so loud that his father, passing through the hall, heard the impudent rhyme he had made ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... any difference in the degrees of danger to which both the hero and the poet are exposed, the courage, strength, arms, and address of the valiant knight, render it safer for him to venture into scenes of peril, than for the poor man of rhyme." ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... is described in the metrical history of Rouen, composed by a minstrel ycleped Poirier, the limper. This little tract is a chap-book at Rouen: most towns, in the north of France and Belgium, possess such chronicle ballads in doggerel rhyme, which are much read, and eke chaunted, by ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... sweet on sweeter altars laid. There were no heroes did not lovers ride, And pyramid high deeds upon new time; Nor tale for feast, or field, or chimney-side, And harps were dumb and song had ne'er a rhyme. Then live, proud heart, in happy fealty, Nor sigh thee more thy dear bonds to remove; Thou art not thrall to liege of mean degree, For all are kings who bear the lance of love; No wight so poor but may his tatters lose, And find his ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... The Tenth of June, 1715 White Rose Day Red and White Roses The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond Kenmure Culloden The Last of the Leal Jeanne d'Arc Cricket Rhymes To Helen Ballade of Dead Cricketers Brahma Critical of Life, Art, and Literature Gainsborough Ghosts A Remonstrance with the Fair Rhyme of Rhymes Rhyme of Oxford Cockney Rhymes Rococo The Food of Fiction "A Highly Valuable Chain of Thoughts" Matrimony Piscatori Piscator The Contented Angler Off my Game The Property of a Gentleman who has Given up Collecting The Ballade of the Subconscious Self Ballade of the Optimist Zimbabwe ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... escaped any one of less universal reading than myself. You should encourage your daughter to talk over with you what she reads; and, as you are very capable of distinguishing, take care she does not mistake pert folly for wit and humour, or rhyme for poetry, which are the common errors of young people, and have a train of ill consequences. The second caution to be given her (and which is most absolutely necessary) is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... solely the rhyme,' said Henry; 'but this has been a wakeful night, and not without misgivings whether I am one who ought to look for joy ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as does the avidity with which many intelligent people read in a cheap 'penny dreadful' magazine the incoherent, self-contradictory, and self-incriminating articles of a notorious frenzied fakir, who, like a crazed Malay, is wildly running amuck, and, without rhyme or reason, slashing at the reputations ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of his ignorance of spelling, compromised the matter by conforming to the current orthography, and inserted the superfluous consonant for nothing. And my second annotation shall consist of an inquiry: What is there in corrupt and diseased human nature which makes persons prefer such execrable rhyme as that quoted above, and that which I find upon two-thirds of the tombstones here, to decent English prose, which one would suppose might have been produced at a much less expenditure of intellectual effort? But since ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... have remained in the English language, not so much for the wisdom they contain as for the way in which they express it. Some are in the form of a rhyme—as, "Birds of a feather flock together," and "East and west, home is best." These are ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... life dance on. Dante may build up his great triple universe in his great triple rhyme, and encase it in walls of brass. But still they dance on. We may tremble at the supreme poet's pride and wonder at the passion of his humility—but "the damned grotesques make arabesques, like ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... give to music the highest place and honor. And we see how David and all the saints have wrought their godly thoughts into verse, rhyme, and song.—LUTHER. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... wretch, for instance, who had been a murderer—cutting the throat of a dozen fellow-creatures, for instance; or stabbing six little children for his own amusement (there have been such men!)—would perhaps, without rhyme or reason, suddenly give a sigh and say, "I wonder whether that old general is alive still!" Although perhaps he had not thought of mentioning him for a dozen years before! How can one say what seed of good may have been dropped into his soul, never ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... lyrical outburst. What I remember of it now are those two odious chevilles—marchait et respirait, and Astarte fille de l'onde amere; nor does the fact that amere rhymes with mere condone the offence, although it proves that even Musset felt that perhaps the richness of the rhyme might render tolerable the intolerable. And it is to my credit that the Spanish love songs moved me not at all; and it was not until I read that magnificently grotesque poem "La Ballade a la Lune," that I could be induced to bend the knee and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... It ain't neither the Thirteenth of June, nor the Fourth of July, nor Thanksgivin' nor Christmas, nor New Year's, on which dates a man's supposed to git drunk, the revels that comes in between bein' mostly accidental, as you might say. But here comes you, without neither rhyme nor reason, as the feller says in the Bible, just a-honin' to git drunk out of a clear sky as the sayin' goes. Of course they's one other occasion which it's every man's duty to git drunk, an' that's his birthday, so if this is yourn, have another on the house, an' here's hopin' you live till ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... learns us to rhyme an' write An' all be poets an' all recite: His little-est poet's his little-est niece, An' this is her ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... pillow, the sole confidant of timid dreams, that narrow couch, fitted like a tomb for but one alabaster form, inspired me with tender melancholy. No anacreontic thoughts came to me, I assure you, nor any disposition to rhyme in ette, herbette, filette, coudrette. The love I bear to noble poesy saved me from such ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... of fame, Untouched by prose or rhyme, The world has never heard that name,— The name ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... gilli-flowers to American blackberry vines. The truly representative poetry of colonial times is Michael Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom". This is the real heart of the Puritan, his conscience, in imperfect rhyme. It fulfills the first part of our definition, but shows by its lack of beautiful style that both elements are ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... and Ballantrae were a strong family in the south-west from the days of David First. A rhyme still ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Secretary's office, to seize his papers, he says, "I have buried the memoirs under the oak in my garden, where they are to be found a thousand years hence, and taken perhaps for a Runic history in rhyme." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day. —From ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... relevant locally. The accompaniment—an easy change of chords—was played on the piano colla voce. And no one minded in the least a foot, more or less, at the end of a verse. The joke was the thing with the Madigans, and the impromptu rhyme that brought down the house was the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... died, from being half-fed and frozen, mother thought; and he was always talking about meeting the "pore innocents" in Heaven, and singing that one song. Every time he made exactly the same speech in meeting. It began like reciting poetry, only it didn't rhyme, but it sort of cut off in lines, and Isaac waved back and forth on his feet, and half sung it, and the rags waved too, but you just couldn't feel any thrills of earnestness about what he said, because he needed washing, and to go to work and get him some clothes ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... hours before he returned, and, if anything, he was more solemn than ever. He made no reply to their questions, but paced the room, and then he began to sing, and his tune had more reason than rhyme. ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... advertised in catalogues; If tramps were not afraid of dogs; If servants never left; If comic songs would always scan; If Alfred Austin were sublime; If poetry would always rhyme; If ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... poetic genius than to the nature of his inspiration, even to the laws of poesy, and to the secret and irreducible antinomy that exists between art and thought. When, for example, Theophile Gautier reproached him with being too little impressed with the exigencies of rhyme, his criticism was not well grounded, for richness of rhyme, though indispensable in works of descriptive imagination, has no 'raison d'etre' in poems dominated by sentiment and thought. But, having said that, we must recognize in his poetry an element, serious, strong, and impressive, ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... the Gods there is none she acknowledges but Phoebus, him she frequently implores for assistance, to charm her Lovers with the Spirit of Poetry.... She pretends, however, to have an intimate acquaintance with the Muses— has judgment enough to know that ease and please make a Rhyme, and to count ten Syllables on her Fingers.—This is the Stock with which she sets up for a Wit, and among some ignorant Wretches passes for such; but with People of true Understanding, nothing affords ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... time saves nine—though it doesn't rhyme. And it's no good crying over spilt milk, and two heads are better than one. But, really, Bruce, I didn't ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... make, Like rockets druv by their own burnin', All leap an' light, to leave a wake Men's hearts an' faces skyward turnin'!— But, it strikes me, 't ain't jest the time Fer stringin' words with settisfaction: Wut's wanted now's the silent rhyme 'Twixt upright Will an' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... among his hardware. But Blanquette's love laughed at tinsmiths. She who had lived on equal terms with the Master and myself (I bowed my acknowledgment of the tribute) to marry a person without education? Ah! mais non! Au grand nom! Merci! She was as scornful as you please, and without rhyme or reason plucked a bunch of Christmas roses from a jug on the table and threw them into the stove. Poor quincaillier! There was nothing for it but to se fich' a l'eau—to chuck herself ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the carriage house for a week. I wrote the most of it. I can write poetry as slick as anything. Johnny helped me hunt out the rhymes. That is the hardest thing about writing poetry, it is so difficult to find rhymes. Johnny would find me a rhyme and then I would write a line to suit it, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... memory, being so set as one cannot be lost, but the whole work fails: which accusing itself, calleth the remembrance back to itself, and so most strongly confirmeth it. Besides, one word so, as it were, begetting another, as, be it in rhyme or measured verse, by the former a man shall have a near guess to the follower. Lastly, even they that have taught the art of memory, have showed nothing so apt for it as a certain room divided into many places, well and thoroughly known; now that hath the verse in effect perfectly, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... of all time, Great deeds extolled in prose and rhyme, Delve deep in Clio's treasured store, Exhaust encyclopedic lore— You will not find in one edition A hint of ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... beds some carol or chant of their own native province, which it always seemed she must know by magic; for, were it Basque or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-song of the Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules of Alsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri—Cigarette knew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but ever sung to every soldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother's cradle-song and of his first love's lips. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... it all behind, All the turmoil and the tears, All the mad vindictive blind Yelping of the heartless years! Ride—the ringing world's in chase, Yet we've slipped old Father Time, By the love-light in your face And the jingle of this rhyme. ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the Grenadiers' pet was, of all things in the world, a pet lamb; and of all persons in the world, the cook of the officers' mess was its kindly custodian. "Mary had a little lamb," says the nursery rhyme. So ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... word Achera is merely a jingle put in to make the rhyme complete. Kachera is a maker ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... disregard the pleasure of the heart in order to labour for the gratification of the ear. We must leave studied narrative for lofty subjects, and not compose an epic poem of the Adventures of Renaud d'Ast. Suppose the Author, who has put these tales into rhyme, had brought to bear on them all the care and preciseness required of him; not only would this care be observed, especially as it is unnecessary, but it would also transgress the precept lain down by Ouintilian, still the Author would not have attained the ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... and smiled somewhat; and said: "I rejoice in thy joy. But there be evil things in yonder city also, though they be not fays nor devils, or it is like to no city that I wot of. And in every city shall foes grow up to us without rhyme or reason, and life therein shall be ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... quite as much to felicitous phrases of hymns as to any words of sermon or catechism. Our most positive convictions of religious truth are apt to come to us in some line or stanza that tells the whole story. The rhythm and the rhyme have helped to fix it and hold it ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... to prattle before I came away. It will not do with Prior's lean carcass. I drink little, miss my glass often, put water in my wine, and go away before the rest, which I take to be a good receipt for sobriety. Let us put it into rhyme, and ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... In Emily Dickinson's exacting hands, the especial, intrinsic fitness of a particular order of words might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic; and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music. Lines are always daringly constructed, and the "thought-rhyme" appears frequently,—appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... gestures. They stretched out their hands, and alternately struck their feet against the ground with frantic contortions. The last words they repeated in chorus, and we easily distinguished a sort of metre, but I am not sure that there was any rhyme; the music was ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... time—bide your time! Patience is the true sublime. Heroes, bottle up your tears; Wait for ten, or ten score, years. Shrink from blows, but rage in rhyme: Bide your time—bide ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... was not originally written in verse. Mr. Biglow, thinking it peculiarly susceptible of metrical adornment, translated it, so to speak, into his own vernacular tongue. This is not the time to consider the question, whether rhyme be a mode of expression natural to the human race. If leisure from other and more important avocations be granted, I will handle the matter more at large in an appendix to the present volume. In this place I will barely remark, that I have sometimes noticed ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... when Mrs. Van Vechten was fast asleep, and Rosamond deep in the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," (the former having selected that poem as an opiate because of its musical jingle,) there was the sound of a bounding step upon the stairs, accompanied by the stirring notes of Yankee Doodle, which some one whistled at the top of his voice. Rosamond was about going ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God, I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sat'st ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... knights, Down the slope city rode, and sharply turn'd North by the gate. In her high bower the Queen, Working a tapestry, lifted up her head, Watch'd her lord pass, and knew not that she sigh'd. Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme Of bygone Merlin, "Where is he who knows? From the great deep to the ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... labour and when dulness, club in hand, Like the two figures at St. Dunstan stand, Beating alternately, in measured time, The clock-work tintinnabulum of rhyme." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... from the Percy Folio MS., with the spelling modernised, except in two or three instances for the sake of the rhyme (13.4) or metre (102.2). Other alterations, as suggested by Child, are noted. Apart from the irregularities of metre, this ballad is remarkable for the large proportion of 'e' rhymes, which are found in 71 stanzas, or two-thirds of ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Orange. Nothing for a faction fight could be neater. Moreover the two words rhyme in Netherlandish, which is the case in no other language, "Spanje-Oranje." The sword was drawn and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... and wife for Barabbas," replied Sancho, "why would you now, without rhyme or reason, hinder me from marrying my daughter with one who may bring me grandchildren that may be styled your lordships? Look you, Teresa, I have always heard my betters say, 'He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay'; and it would ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... instance, came to no result; they that sowed the hemp-seed forgot the magic rhyme that they were to pronounce—so the true lover never appeared; and as to the dumb-cake, what between the awful stillness they had to keep, and the awfulness of the midnight hour, their hearts failed them when they ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... since after having been forgotten for the best part of a century. The booklet, which was issued anonymously, consists of a number of rough pictures, each accompanied by half a dozen lines of Hudibrastic verse; the inspiration being of course the old nursery rhyme about the tarts made by the Queen of Hearts ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... a child's voice from the neighbouring house began repeating in a kind of chant: "Take and read, take and read." Augustin shuddered. What was this refrain? Was it a nursery-rhyme that the little children of the countryside used to sing? He could not recollect it; he had never heard it before.... Immediately, as upon a divine command, he rose to his feet and ran back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for he had ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... they were! to rhyme with far A kind star did not tarry; The metre, too, was regular As schoolboy's dot and carry; And full they were of pious plums, So extra-super-moral,— For sucking Virtue's tender gums ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Dante's time, Before his cheek was furrowed by deep rhyme; When Europe, fed afresh from Eastern story, Was like a garden tangled with the glory Of flowers hand-planted and of flowers air-sown, Climbing and trailing, budding and full-blown, Where purple bells are tossed amid pink stars, ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... "from grave to gay, from lively to severe," (for novelty in quotations we find to be contagious,) have recounted the wildly erratic history "of that false matron known in nursery rhyme, Insidious Morey," ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... some sublimated form of reverie, the thought blended and tinged in the subtlest gradations, without the clumsy necessity of sacrificing the sequence of thought to the barbarous devices of metre and rhyme, or to the still more childish devices of incident and drama. Flaubert, it will be remembered, looked forward to a time when a writer would not require a subject at all, but would express emotion and thought directly rather than pictorially. To utter the unuttered thought—that is really the problem ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... absurd question, when the baby woke. Then the cook came up to ask about dinner; then Mrs. Fundy slipped over from No. 27 (they are opposite neighbors, and made an acquaintance through Mrs. Fundy's macaw); and a thousand things happened. Finally, there was no rhyme to babe except Tippoo Saib (against whom Major Gashleigh, Rosa's grandfather, had distinguished himself), and so she gave up the little poem about her ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pronounce the words of it. Jane and Fanny Taylor, Rebekah Watts, and Mrs. Green's little boy, were the only ones who, by their own account, used morning and evening prayers, though, on further examination, it appeared that Polly and Jenny Hall, and some others, were accustomed to repeat the old rhyme about "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John," and Una M'Carthy and her little brother Fergus said something that nobody could make out, but which Mr. Wilmot thought had once ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... strano," says Volpi, "noi Lombardi in questo significato diciamo ladin." The "discreto latino" of Thomas Aquinas, elsewhere in Paradiso (xii. 144.), must mean "sage discourse." Chaucer, when he invokes the muse, in the proeme to the second book of "Troilus and Creseide," only asks her for rhyme, because, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... full of inspiration, must needs undergo to make it palpable, denotes an amount of conscious effort which detracts in a measure from its apparent spontaneity. But in spite of the quaint conceits, the frequent play upon words, the unworthy tricks of speech, the painful sacrifice to rhyme which occasionally mar his verse, I believe Petrarch was sincere. If he was only a pretence and a sham, then all the amatory poetry that has been written since his time, intellectual or analytic, passionate or sensuous, is a pretence and a sham. Petrarch's utterance must needs have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... of some pirates, which she had witnessed when a "gal," was popular. She had a rhyme which condensed the details. The ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... little silence he said not without hesitation: "And do you apply your theory to all artists, or only to us makers of rhyme?" ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... Lament in rhyme, lament in prose, Wi' saut tears tricklin' down your nose, [salt] Our bardie's fate is at a close, Past a' remead; [remedy] The last sad cape-stane of his woes— ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... that after Sparkley had that affair with Miss Millikens a singular change came over him. He grew abstracted and solitary,—holding dark seances with himself,—which was odd, as everybody knew he never cared a rap for the Millikens girl. It was even said that he was off his head—which is rhyme. But his reason was undoubtedly affected, for he had been heard to mutter incoherently at the Club, and, strangest of all, to answer questions THAT WERE NEVER ASKED! This was so awkward in that Branch of the Civil Department of which he was a high official—where the rule was exactly ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... were mediaeval monks, who spent our time chanting the rhyme of Bernard of Morlaix, there might seem to be a reason in our madness. To make a Hell of earth is doubtless a useful method of rendering more joyous the transition to Heaven, and less overwhelming the transition to Purgatory. Yet the mediaeval ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... rhymes, written on a frosty day in Glen Farg, just north of Loch Leven. It bears date 1st January, 1828. I was born on the 8th of February, 1819; and al that I ever could be, and all that I cannot be, the weak little rhyme already shows. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... I, then?—Well, there are several reasons against it. In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the luminous ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... nymph of beauty, I would woo thee in my rhyme, Wildest, brightest, loveliest river Of our sunny Southern clime. * * * Gone forever from the borders But immortal in thy name, Are the Red Men of the forest Be thou keeper of their fame! Paler races dwell beside thee, Celt and Saxon till thy lands Wedding use unto thy beauty ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... necessary by the character in which he was employed. There is no opposition between an HONEST COURTIER and a PATRIOT; for an HONEST, COURTIER cannot but be a PATRIOT. It was unsuitable to the nicety required in short compositions to close his verse with the word TOO; every rhyme should be a word of emphasis: nor can this rule be safely neglected, except where the length of the poem makes slight inaccuracies excusable, or allows room for beauties sufficient to overpower the ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... universe. My question was, What have we here?—not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly until he was asked which leg came after which, whereupon he became so rattled that he couldn't take a step. I know I have come on a thousand feet, on wings, winds and American machines,—I have leaped and run and climbed and crawled,—but to ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... of being a vulgar joke, it was deliberate calumny. The desire to punish this shameless liar became so strong that I waited impatiently the favorable moment. I had not long to wait. The next day, occupied composing an elegy, biting my pen in the expectation of a rhyme, Alexis knocked at my window. I put down my pen, took my sword, and ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... delineations. Looking it over, here, (amidst the woods and canes of that island where repose the bones of Columbus,) the song of Prince Hoel attached itself to my thoughts, and has been (involuntarily) put into rhyme. This song may be found in the first part of the poem mentioned. The lyric metre in which it now appears must rather injure than improve the belle nature of the original. Still I wish it to be published, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... read of the last Council Fire, and of the weekly meeting. Edna Whitely had really exerted herself and had written it in clever rhyme. ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... the church, and here are the people," as the old rhyme has it. What then of the services? That they are interminable we know. The tithing-man or clerk may turn the brass-bound hourglass by the side of the pulpit two and three times during the sermon, and once or twice during the prayer. Interminable, and, also, to the ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... Albani has thrown into the urn for me. I found it directly by the small pin which, according to his promise, he inserted in the paper. This cardinal is an agreeable imp, and I must give him a kiss for his complaisance. Besides, the Tasso rhyme will ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number; But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. 'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say, 'In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... device I persevered in. To all—old and young, innocent girls and sturdy men—I so taught the multiplication table that one fatal error was hidden in its array of facts. The nine line is the difficult one. I buried the error there. "Nine times six," I taught them, "is fifty-six." The rhyme made it easy. The gilded falsehood passed from lip to lip, from State to State,—one little speck in a chain of golden verity. I retired from teaching. Slowly I watched the growth of the rebellion. At last the aloe blossom ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... aweful Johnson want poetic ear, Fancy, or judgment?—no! his splendid strain, In prose, or rhyme, confutes that plea.—The pain Which writh'd o'er Garrick's fortunes, shows us clear Whence all his spleen to GENIUS.—Ill to bear A Friend's renown, that to his own must reign, Compar'd, a Meteor's evanescent train, To Jupiter's fix'd orb, proves that each sneer, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... twenty years later. They consist[4] of fifteen complete plays, which I believe to be the largest amount of translated verse by any one author, that has ever appeared in English. Most of it is in the difficult assonant or vowel rhyme, hardly ever previously attempted in our language. This may be a fitting place to cite a few testimonies as to the execution of the work. Longfellow, whom I have myself heard speak of the "Autos" in a way that showed how deeply he had studied them in the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... considered became him. Also, as he had still three-quarters of an hour to spare, he began to write a little poem about Isobel, which was a dismal failure, to tell the truth, since he could think of no satisfactory rhyme to her name, except "O well!" which, however ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... of God may be your besetting sin? If you will try to pull the poison fang up, you will find how deep its roots are. It is like the yellow charlock in a field, which seems only to spread in consequence of attempts to get rid of it—as the rough rhyme says; 'One year's seeding, seven years' weeding'—and more at the end of the time than at the beginning. Any honest attempt at mending character drives a man to this—'My iniquities are too strong ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... While considering the expediency of advancing, our attention was drawn to the antics of several cattle, which had been quietly grazing near by, now so thoroughly astonished at the strange proceedings that they were literally attempting to carry out the old Mother Goose rhyme of "jumping over the moon." With tails stiff as crowbars and hind legs higher than their heads, they were cavorting around the field, bellowing with fright, and making such an extremely ludicrous spectacle, that, in our excited condition, it was more than we could ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... into Alice's arms, still talking as fast as her tongue could vibrate, changing from subject to subject without rhyme or reason, her prattle making its way by skips and shies until what was really upper-most in her sweet little ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... could not help feeling, many were their absurd experiments to lower it to the standard of their own comprehension. One author, deeming the "Paradise Lost" deficient in harmony, was pleased painfully to turn it into rhyme; and more than one, conceiving the subject too serious to be treated in verse of any kind, employed their leisure in humbling it into prose. The names of these well-judging and considerate persons are preserved by Mr Todd in his ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... often be introduced with charm and effect. A few lines of verse, judiciously interspersed with the conversation; pearls of the thought of our great masters of the world of rhyme falling from the ruby lips of the young and fair daughters of Eve, have often caused a masculine heart to beat faster and to be thrown around the lovely borrower of words an atmosphere of gentle and refined erudition that nothing else could so ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... Hahmed? Please understand that I will not tolerate such continual fault-finding any longer! That is a tattoo mark of a pail of water—you may not know that we have a rhyme in ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... voice that was choked with tears, "do not die, master, but take my advice and live many years; for the foolishest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die without rhyme or reason, without anybody killing him, or any hands but melancholy's making an end of him. Come, do not be lazy, but get up from your bed and let us take to the fields in a shepherd's trim as we agreed! Perhaps behind some bush we shall find ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... for music, but rhyme is bad in its very nature.... It would be by far the best if a good composer, understanding the theatre and knowing how to produce a piece, and a clever poet, could ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... great poet and a philosophical thinker, in spite of his having here paid a tremendous compliment to a rhyme (for unquestionably the word "slaughter" provoked him into that imperative "Yea," and its subsequent venturous affiliation); but the judgment, to say no more of it, is rash. Whatever the Divine Being intends, by his permission or use ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... not believe in Cap'n Jack's words, but afterward I found that all his gang were afraid to do that which was considered unlucky. All Cornish people, I suppose, have heard the rhyme about killing an eldest son who is the third in succession to bear the same christened name. I know, too, that Cap'n Jack believed implicitly in the legend, and I have heard him repeat it very solemnly, as though he were repeating a prayer at ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... could give an instance in the Oedipus Tyrannus, which was the masterpiece of Sophocles; but I reserve it for a more fit occasion, which I hope to have hereafter. In my style, I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disencumbered myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose. I hope I need not to explain myself, that I have not copied my author servilely: Words and phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding ages; but it is almost ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... the position of the sun could be seen through it. He pulled his straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... convincingly upon the excellence of rhyme over blank verse in English poetry. I mentioned to him that Dr. Adam Smith, in his lectures upon composition, when I studied under him in the College of Glasgow, had maintained the same opinion strenuously, and I repeated some of his arguments. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell |
