"Acrostical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time the pantomime for a Birmingham theatre; and there constantly fluttered from his desk and circulated through the office, little scraps of paper containing quips and puns and jokes in prose or verse, or acrostics from his prolific pen. One clever acrostic upon the office boy, which has always remained in my memory, I should like for its delicate irony (worthy of Swift himself) to reproduce; but as that promising youth may still be in the service I feel I had better ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... when I used to call at the manor house. One of the girls was understood to be engaged to be married to a far distant lieutenant, of whom Penrith knew nothing, which circumstance gave rise to sundry ingenious conceits in the acrostic line, based on allusions to "his story" and "mystery!" I wonder whether Charlotte is alive! If she is, and should see this page, she will remember! It was for her sake that I deserted, or tried to desert, Sir George's ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... ACROSTIC (Gr. akros, at the end, and stichos, line or verse), a short verse composition, so constructed that the initial letters of the lines, taken consecutively, form words. The fancy for writing acrostics is of great antiquity, having been common among ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... artless simplicity of a nursery jingle, would have been sure of an appreciative audience. However, the text seems to indicate something much more elaborate, and probably the original composition was an acrostic, like Colum Cille's great Altus Prosator.[30] The two authentic stanzas of the Liber Hymnorum are incorporated in the metrical patchwork at ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... that he wrote many letters about him. Nearly every ship that sailed for Boston brought a letter from him to the Franklin family, and almost every letter contained a piece of poetry from his pen. One of his letters about that time contained the following acrostic on ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes[192] and Himmaleh[193] are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;[194]—read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... logomachist, verbarium, apocope, kyriology, metonomy, autonomasia, multiloquence, perissology, purism, purist, elision, polysynthesis, coin, coinage, apheresis, aphetic, aphetism, aphesis, onomatopoiesis, metaphrase, acrostic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... will be dead in an hour," he said, "the fact of your being a dyspeptic need not trouble you any more than if you were an acrostic. Let me therefore suggest that you try a sausage or a knuckle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various |
