"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so fast," interrupted Miss Maxwell. "Though they don't amount to anything as poetry, they show a good deal of promise in certain directions. You almost never make a mistake in rhyme or metre, and this shows you have a natural sense of what is right; a 'sense of form,' poets would call it. When you grow older, have a little more experience,—in fact, when you have something to say, I think you may write ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Geographer, M. Arago, the eminent Astronomer, F.R.S., and Commander Garnier, of the French Brig of War, "Le Laurier," have proved that if there be any inequality of height, the average difference of level cannot exceed one metre (about one yard English). ...
— A Succinct View of the Importance and Practicability of Forming a Ship Canal across the Isthmus of Panama • H. R. Hill
... into 'A Book of Christmas Verse' 1895 and thence, incorrectly, by Orby Shipley in 'Carmina Mariana'. Stated in a letter to R. W. D. June 25, '83, to have been written to 'hang up among the verse com- positions in the tongues. ... I did a piece in the same metre as Blue in the mists all day.' Note Chaucer's account of the physical properties of the air, 'House of Fame', ii. ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... is no knowledge (but vanity) in any other works than those in which their own education has consisted, so Henry Vavasour became at once the victor and victim of Bentleys and Scaligers, word-weighers and metre-scanners, till, utterly ignorant of everything which could have softened his temper, dignified his misfortunes, and reconciled him to his lot, he was sinking fast into the grave, soured by incessant pain into moroseness, envy, and bitterness; exhausted ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual—coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other." "Man is the metre ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... form of the letters, nothing can be more unfortunate than the correction of "princely;" Mr. Collier, on the other hand, follows Steevens and Malone, and reads "princely," observing the Tieck's reading ("precise") "sounds ill as regards the metre, the accent falling on the wrong syllable. Mr. Collier's choice is determined by the authority of the second folio, which he considers ought to have considerable weight, whilst Mr. Knight regards the authority ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... of course, not at all the same thing as the real religion of those who subscribe to it. The rules of metre are not the same thing as poetry; the rules of cricket, if the analogy may be excused, are not the same thing as good play. Nay, more. A man states in his creed only the articles which he thinks it right to assert positively against those who think otherwise. His deepest and most ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... libel is all bad matter, beautified (which is all that can be said of it) with good metre.[462] Mr Dryden's genius did not appear in any thing more than his versification, and whether he is to be ennobled for ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... Professor of Moral Philosophy would be too degrading. I could have demolished every paragraph of the defence. Croker defended his thuetoi philoi by quoting a passage of Euripides which, as every scholar knows, is corrupt; which is nonsense and false metre if read as he reads it; and which Markland and Matthiae have set right by a most obvious correction. But, as nobody seems to have read his vindication, we can gain nothing by refuting it. ["Mr. Croker has favoured us with some Greek of his own. 'At the altar,' say Dr. Johnson. 'I recommended ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... moment he has fallen into this confusion: "The mere matter of all poetry—to wit, the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men—being unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become here of the substance of Paradise Lost—the story, scenery, characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have vanished ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... in reproducing them in their throats, and moreover in adding the text, they exercise at the same time the hand, ear, and eye, and attain orthography and calligraphy quicker than you would believe; and, finally, since all this must be practised and copied according to pure metre and accurately fixed time, they learn to understand much sooner than in other ways the high value of measure and computation. On this account, of all imaginable means, we have chosen music as the first element ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year—besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... performed," says an old author, "divine service in the chancel, others in the body of the church; some in a seat made in the church; some in a pulpit, with their faces to the people; some keeping precisely to the order of the book; some intermix psalms in metre; some say with a surplice, and others without one. The table stands in the body of the church in some places, in others it stands in the chancel; in some places the table stands altarwise, distant ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Sheridan's copy of the stanzas written by him in this metre at the time of the Union, (beginning "Zooks, Harry! zooks, Harry!") he entitled them, "An admirable new ballad, which goes excellently well ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... visiting expedition, she had translated the Erl King, which she knew by heart, into English, far more literal than Sir Walter Scott's, and with no fault, except that not above half the couplets professed to rhyme, and most of those that did were deficient in metre. Another time she had composed three quarters of a story of a Saxon hero, oppressed by a Norman baron, and going to the Crusades; and at another time she had sent back the whole party to the times of Queen Elizabeth, and fancied what they might be saying about the Spanish Armada. But now, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is a constant metre of the orator. There are many audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn. If anything comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence of the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious, that you might think the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... gleefully to Leonora and Patricia. "Nobody'll ever hear that song again! I was sure of it when I saw the word in the dictionary, for Vance Alden is so sensitive about a mistake. It is funny! Ilga—why, she'd never know whether it was good rhyme or metre or anything! But Vance didn't think of that. Now promise, both of you, that ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it written—rapidity and antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... spectator of others?[105] The Bacchic and Corybantic dances one can also modulate and quell, by changing the metre from the trochaic and the measure from the Phrygian. Similarly, too, the Pythian priestess, when she descends from her tripod, possesses her soul in peace. Whereas the love-fury, when once it has really seized on a man and inflamed him, can be laid by no Muse, no charm or incantation, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... cough comes from chewing tobacco, and I know it's a very bad habit. Nine-and-ninepence is what I have to say to you, for I'm the officer of the gas company, and they have a claim against you for that on the metre." ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... writing, it had ceased to be pronounced, and therefore never found a place in any of the manuscripts,—insomuch that the Alexandrian critics, though they knew of its existence in the much later poems of Alkaios and Sappho, never recognized it in Homer. The hiatus, and the various perplexities of metre, occasioned by the loss of the digamma, were corrected by different grammatical stratagems. But the whole history of this lost letter is very curious, and is rendered intelligible only by the supposition that the Iliad and Odyssey belonged for a wide space of time to the memory, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... to the reader. The influence of Browning and of Swinburne upon the writer's taste is plain. There is plainly visible also, however, a keen sense for natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living. If in "Ashtaroth" and "Bellona" we recognise the swing of a familiar metre, in such poems as "The Sick Stockrider" we perceive the genuine poetic instinct united to a very clear perception of the loveliness of ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... different forms of flowers. The species known as Catasetum tridentatum has pollinia with very large viscid discs; on touching one of the two filaments (antennae) which occur on the gynostemium of the flower the pollinia are shot out to a fairly long distance (as far as 1 metre) and in such manner that they alight on the back of the insect, where they are held. The antennae have, moreover, acquired an importance, from the point of view of the physiology of stimulation, as stimulus-perceiving organs. Darwin had shown that it is only a touch on the antennae that causes ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... stanzas will be indented 5 spaces. Italicized stanzas that are ALREADY indented will be indented 10 spaces. Italicized words and phrases have been capitalized. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some obvious errors, after being confirmed against other sources, have been corrected. This etext was prepared ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... As philosophy, as history, as rhetoric, as metre, as rhythm, as politics, it is positively enormous. The whole poem is a wonderful poem, and I wish I had space for it here. It is patriotic and it is written about as badly as a poem could conceivably be written. It is a mournful pleasure to think that my dear friend ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the fields. Thus we have made a purgation of music, and will now make a purgation of metres. These should be like the harmonies, simple and suitable to the occasion. There are four notes of the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre, 3/2, 2/2, 2/1, which have all their characteristics, and the feet have different characteristics as well as the rhythms. But about this you and I must ask Damon, the great musician, who speaks, if I remember rightly, of a martial measure as well as of dactylic, trochaic, and iambic ...
— The Republic • Plato
... corresponds to chapter XI. in Gorresio's edition. That scholar justly observes: "The eleventh chapter, Description of Evening, is certainly the work of the Rhapsodists and an interpolation of later date. The chapter might be omitted without any injury to the action of the poem, and besides the metre, style, conceits and images differ from the general tenour of the poem; and that continual repetition of the same sounds at the end of each hemistich which is not exactly rime, but assonance, reveals the artificial ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... At worship little Charless seated himself opposite his grandpa, and observed him attentively as he read the Bible and one of the metre Psalms. We knelt in prayer, the only words of which, that I remember, are, "We thank thee, O God, that thy mercies are new to us every morning, and fresh every evening." After worship he stood erect before us, his countenance full of his usual look of benevolence and love, as he asked, "What's ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... did not move him or interest him, and fixing jealously on all that fed his fancy. Such books as Grimm's Fairy Tales and Masterman Ready were wells of delight, enacted as they were in a strange and exciting world; and he was sensitive, too, to the beauty of metre and sonorous phrases, learning poetry so easily that it was supposed to be a species of wilfulness in him that the Collects and texts, and the very Psalms—that seemed to him so unreal and husk-like then, and that later became to him like fruits full ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... formulas and generalisations useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature, and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious "product-of-the-circumstances" ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... righteousness, shows that Ezekiel had the Deluge in his mind, and increases the significance of the underlying parallel between his argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may be added that Ezekiel has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and the metre of the two passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr. ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... not until September 13th, 1906, that Ellehammer, a Danish engineer, made the first free flight in Europe, his machine flying 42 metres at a height of a metre and a half. About the same time reports of the Wrights' successes began to reach Europe and were quickly ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... course, a steady refrain of Greek iambics, Greek anapaests, 'an easy and nice metre,' 'a hodge-podge lot of hendecasyllables,' and thirty alcaic stanzas for a holiday task. Mention is made of many sermons on 'Redeeming the time,' 'Weighed in the balance and found wanting,' 'Cease to do evil, learn to do well,' and the other ever unexhausted texts. One ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... being a free country, I have taken the liberty, for the sake of the metre, to alter ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... they began to worship in outward observances, which is not the worship of God, but superstitious and idolatrous." "When singing in the spirit and with the understanding ceased, then people began to introduce the form of singing David's experiences, in rhyme and metre; and thus, in the apostacy, the form grew as a substitute for that which the saints had enjoyed in power; shadows were set up instead of the substance, and ...
— On Singing and Music • Society of Friends
... like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially of the opening, largo, vivacissimo, and, as the general expression signature, tempo rubato. I know no other verse in which the effects of music are so precisely copied in metre. Shelley, you feel, sings like a bird; Blake, like a child or an angel; ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... "relish to his song," {0f} by adopting "a diversity of structure in the metre;" for the lyric comes in occasionally to relieve the solemnity of the heroic, whilst at the same time the latter is frequently capable of being divided into a shorter verse, a plan which has been observed in one ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... which there are several, hardly deserve to be dignified with so high a title. At no part of his life had Bunyan much title to be called a poet. He did not aspire beyond the rank of a versifier, who clothed his thoughts in rhyme or metre instead of the more congenial prose, partly for the pleasure of the exercise, partly because he knew by experience that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that form. Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse than is commonly held, remarks that ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Mr. Lambkin, who was raised in Tioga, and keeps a grocery store in the lower part of Washington street. I found Mr. Lambkin in, and he told me as how, accordin' to last accounts, Gusty was stayin' with her uncle Van Quintem. I knowed your address, and come up here short metre. I was goin' to pretend that I was a man in search of work, and trust to luck to get a sight of Gusty. I found your front door open, and walked through the entry to the back parlor, where you fust see ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... (16), why cannot you conform to a form of worship which, though it does not profess to be prescribed in all particulars, contains nothing actually forbidden in the Scriptures? What authority have Dissenters for singing psalms in metre? "Where has our Saviour or his Apostles enjoined a directory for public worship? What Scripture command is there for the three significant ceremonies of the Solemn League and Covenant, viz. that the whole congregation should take it ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... moral progress. And to a large extent she succeeded. As a vehicle of her opinions, the scheme and style of the poem proved completely adequate. She moves easily through the story; she handles her metre with freedom and command; she can say her say without exaggeration or unnatural strain. Further, the opinions themselves, as those who have learnt to know her through her letters will feel sure, are lofty and honourable, and full of a genuine enthusiasm for humanity. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... these badgers! with a long leg on one quarter and a short leg on the other. The wench herself might well and truly have said all that matter without the poet, bating the rhymes and metre. Among the girls in the country there are many such SHILLY-SHALLYS, who give themselves sore eyes and sharp eye- water; I would cure them rod ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... by eye," this was a test put to her accidentally. About the beginning of June, 1917, for lack of any better idea at the moment, I determined to teach her the use of the yard measure (the metre), and without having any definite object in view. So I fetched the yard-stick and told her the names and the meaning of the divisions three times; but she seemed unable to work up any enthusiasm for the subject, and I therefore did not attempt to question her. Many duties intervened, and ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... to handle metre, he had sought to rejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnet into the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome clay which rest on stands, their heads straight down, their tails on top. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... on some of the special questions which a translator of the Satires and Epistles has to encounter, and the way in which, as it appears to me, he may best deal with them. These questions, I need hardly say, mainly resolve themselves into the metre and the style. With regard to the metre, I have myself but little doubt that the measure in which Horace may best be represented is the heroic as I suppose we must call it, of ten syllables. The one competing measure of course is the Hudibrastic ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... him, he receives, also, a portion of the same creative power. Mr. Lewes reaches this conclusion: "If, therefore, we reflect what a poem Faust is, and that it contains almost every variety of style and metre, it will be tolerably evident that no one unacquainted with the original can form an adequate idea of it from translation,"[E] which is certainly correct of any translation wherein something of the rhythmical variety and beauty ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... Greek Prose, The source of my woes! (This metre's too tough, I must draw to a close.) May Sargent be drowned In the ocean profound, And Sidgwick be ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... letters, not that of the specialist in the eighteenth century, or indeed, that of any specialist at all. Well, then, first of all Johnson wrote verses which though not great poetry have some fine qualities. They are, like so much of the verse of that century, chiefly "good sense put into good metre." That is what Twining, the Aristotelian critic, said of them when Johnson died. He had a much {181} finer sense of poetry than Johnson, and he was perfectly right in this criticism. But it is a loss and not a gain that, since Wordsworth ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... churlish ungraciousness, their greed of money and authority, their fast and loose morality, their inordinate pride. The extraordinary felicity of the means taken to place all these things in the most ridiculous light has never been questioned. The doggerel metre, never heavy or coarse, but framed as to be the very voice of mocking laughter, the astounding similes and disparates, the rhymes which seem to chuckle and to sneer of themselves, the wonderful learning with which the abuse of learning is rebuked, the subtlety with which subtle casuistry ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... domestic tragedy La Chaussee wrote in verse, which is not against French rules, and which has been done by dramatists a hundred and twenty years later; but it is probably an error, being even more unlikely that citizens would express themselves in metre than that kings and heroes should give utterance with a certain solemnity which entails rhythm. Thus he wrote The Fashionable Prejudice, The School of Friends, Melanide, very pathetic, The School of Mothers, etc. It must be stated that he wrote his plays in verse somewhat ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... prepare such ground for the cactus. The earth must be taken from below the surface-rock, as at Malta; spread in terraced beds, and cleared of loose stones, which are built up in walls or in molleras, cubes or pyramids. Such ground sold for $150 per acre; $600 were paid for metre-deep soil unencumbered by stone. Where the chalk predominates, it must be mixed with the volcanic sand locally called zahorra. In all cases the nopals are set at distances of half a yard, in trenches at least three feet ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... and then sink back ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... Paros; but the father, probably tempted by the alluring offers of a richer suitor, forbade the nuptials. Archilochus thereupon composed so bitter a lampoon upon the family that the daughters of the nobleman are said to have hanged themselves. Says SYMONDS, "He made Iambic metre his own, and sharpened it into a terrible weapon of attack. Each verse he wrote was polished, and pointed like an arrow-head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges against his sweetheart, her sisters, and her father." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets;" ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... 1700 and 1785—eighty-five years. Next comes a paper on passages from selected English verse and prose writings —the Statute discreetly avoids calling them literature—between 1200 and 1500, exclusive of Chaucer; with questions on language, metre, literary history and literary criticism: then a paper on Chaucer with questions on language, metre, literary history and literary criticism: lastly a paper on writing in the Wessex dialect of Old English, with questions on the cornet, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... wonder and disgust. In his moments of inspiration when he was evoking the stormy chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, Bisesa he never dreamed that his landlady was craning her head up from her pillows in a vain effort to discover the tune, or to reduce it to the known terms of short metre rhythm. His broken, irregular measures troubled her, as did also his broken, irregular hours of work. There were days when he rode far afield, or was seen lying on his back under the pines by the brookside, listening to the ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... wander. Once there was sea everywhere, and all continents are born from the sea. One day land arose out of the sea. The birth was of a revolutionary nature, there were earthquakes, volcanic craters, falling cities and dying men—but new land was there. Or else it moves slowly, invisibly, a metre or two in a century, and returns to the land it used to possess. Thus it restores the soil it stole from it, but cleaner, refined and full of vitality to live and to create. Such is ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... the latter were the compositions of a school of bards in the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, among whom in like manner Hesiod enjoyed the greatest celebrity. The poems of both schools were composed in the hexameter metre and in a similar dialect; but they differed widely in almost every ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... that hexameter verse, in which Moses's triumphant song is here said to be written, distinctly means, our present ignorance of the old Hebrew metre or measure will not let us determine. Nor does it appear to me certain that even Josephus himself had a distinct notion of it, though he speaks of several sort of that metre or measure, both here and elsewhere. Antiq. B. IV. ch. 8. sect. 44; and B. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... beatific vision, in the style of Moses. The barbarous Cossacks and Tartars, infamous to look at on any side, have burnt and ravaged countries, and committed atrocious inhumanities. This is all I saw of THEM. Such melancholy spectacles don't tend to raise one's spirits. [Breaks off into metre:] LA FORTUNE INCONSTANTE ET FIERE, Fortune inconstant and proud. Does not treat her suitors Always in an equal manner. Those fools called heroes, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in Metre known, With Strains has grac'd thee, humble as thy own; Who (b) G—l—n's Dullness did for thine discard, A better Critick, for as bad a Bard! Not unregarded let this Tribute be, Tho' humble, just; well-bred, tho' ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... sweete and Godlie Verse, I will recite the very wordes of Homere and also turne them into rude English metre. ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... when she cleared this rock, which is at this spot thirteen feet below the surface, leaving a large white furrow, she ran a hundred and sixty feet further, and struck on the south-east rock, which is only about four feet (one metre twenty centimetres) below the surface. She again marked the rock very distinctly. The sea, which is often very rough on this spot, has left nothing remaining but the massive part of the engine, where it can be perceived between the two rocks, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him. Others who pursue a different track will interest him likewise; I do not interfere ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... l. 5. —in Nishadha lord of earth. I have accented this word not quite correctly Nishadha, in order to harmonise with the trochaic flow of my metre. It appears to be the same as Nishadha-rashtra and Nishadha-desa. See Wilford's list of mountains, rivers, countries; from the Puranas and other books. Asiatic Researches, vol. ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... from the limitations imposed by realistic scenery has not been sufficiently insisted upon as an element in their art. Theirs was a true drame libre, having its analogies with the present attempts of the vers-librists to free poetry from its restrictions of rhyme and metre. But while the tendency of poetry has always been away from its restrictions, the mise-en-scene in the drama has continually, with the attempts to make it conform to nature, tightened its throttling bands on the real ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... mythology. The poem is divided into cantos, written not in blank verse but in stanzas. Several stanza-forms are commonly employed in the same poem, though not in the same canto, except that the concluding verses of a canto are not infrequently written in a metre of more compass ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... extant, for example, the German Shakespeare, Homer, Calderon, they may still be called better than indifferent. One great merit Mr. Taylor has: rigorous adherence to his original; he endeavours at least to copy with all possible fidelity the term of praise, the tone, the very metre, whatever stands written ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... and the jagati metre are described, the last two, however, not by name. Narada's speech, p. 236, is in sloka, 16 syllables to the line; the first distich, p. 233, is in tristubh, 22 syllables to the line. Quantity of ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... ff.]—Entrance of Agamemnon. The metre of the Chorus indicates marching; so that apparently the procession takes some time to move across the orchestra and get into position. Cassandra would be dressed, as a prophetess, in a robe of white reaching to the feet, covered by an agrenon, or net of wool with large meshes; ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... way, when he visited Vallombrosa with Crabb Robinson in 1837, wrote an inferior poem there, in a rather common metre, in honour of Milton's ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... does not occur in Aulus Gellius, but is a fragment in iambic metre from the Papia papae [Greek: peri e)nkomi/on] of M. Terentius Varro, cited by the grammarian Nonius Marcellus (De Comp. Doct., ii. 135, lines 19-23). Sigilla is a variant of the word in the text, laculla, a diminutive of lacuna, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... seemed apparently conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice announcing my name first awoke him; he started, and for a moment seemed at a loss to understand my purpose, or his own situation, for he repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to either of us; very likely trying a metre, or making verse, a frequent practice of his, and of Mr. Wordsworth's. There was no mauvaise haute in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst daylight realities. ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Blackwood, a large assortment of verses, Sexton's Daughter, Hymns of a Hermit, and I know not what other extensive stock of pieces; concerning which he was now somewhat at a loss as to his true course. He could write verses with astonishing facility, in any given form of metre; and to various readers they seemed excellent, and high judges had freely called them so, but he himself had grave misgivings on that latter essential point. In fact here once more was a parting of the ways, "Write in Poetry; write in Prose?" upon which, before all else, it much concerned him ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Persepolitan Verses {5} come from. I wonder you were not startled with the metre, though ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... the eastern feature. The knifeback is covered with the foundations of what appears to be a fortified Laura or Palace; a straight street running north-south, with 5 degrees west (mag.). It serves as base for walls one metre and a half thick, opening upon it like rooms: of these we counted twenty on either side. At the northern end of the "horse," which, like the southern, has been weathered to a mere spur, is a work composed of two semicircles fronting to the north and east. A bastion of well-built ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... nodding and swaying their bodies sympathetically. He works himself into a frenzy, in which the fiddlers vainly try to keep up with him. He turns and digs the laggard angrily in the side without losing the metre. The climax comes. The bride bursts into hysterical sobs, while the women wipe their eyes. A plate, heretofore concealed under his coat, is whisked out. He has conquered; the inevitable ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... to the measures most approved in French poetry, especially to Alexandrines and Iambic tetrameters, and to their irregular association in a sort of ballad metre, which in England has been best handled by Robert Browning in his fine ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... thought, feeling, and emotion, and clothed them all, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the slightest to the most intense and concentrated, in the dress of exactly appropriate style and language. His metre also is a perfect vehicle of the language. If we think the range of his knowledge limited, yet it was all that his country and his age possessed, and it was very greatly more than has been supposed by readers that dwelt only on the surface. So long ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... latter is of high antiquity. Latin poetry began in the lyrical form. Dancing was a common trade, and this was accompanied with pipers, and religious litanies were sung from the remotest antiquity. Comic songs were sung in Saturnian metre, accompanied by the pipe. The art of dancing was a public care, and a powerful impulse was early given by Hellenic games. But in all the arts of music and poetry there was not the easy development as in Greece. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... rhythms, but of words. The preponderance of the five-foot blank-verse line in the work of, say, Shakespeare and Milton, is so great that we can safely say that their rank as poets would not be lower than it is if they had written nothing else. Clearly their constancy to this metre was not the result of any technical deficiency. Even if Milton had not written the choruses of Samson Agonistes and Shakespeare his songs, nobody would be so absurd as to suggest that they adopted ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... There is also a regular service between Cape Town, Lobito and Lisbon and Southampton. The Portuguese line is subsidized by the government. The railway from Loanda to Ambaca and Malanje is known as the Royal Trans-African railway. It is of metre gauge, was begun in 1887 and is some 300 m. long. It was intended to carry the line across the continent to Mozambique, but when the line reached Ambaca (225 m.) in 1894 that scheme was abandoned. The railway had created a record in being the most expensive built in tropical Africa—L8942 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... the name in this poem beginning with H, which Goldsmith makes to rhyme with "beef?" The metre requires it to be a monosyllable, but there is no name that I have ever heard of that would answer in this place. Is the H a mistake for K, which would give a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... her schooldays, what had been inclination before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I studied ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... smiths at their forges Worked the red St. George's Cannoneers; And the "villainous saltpetre" Rung a fierce, discordant metre Round their ears; As the swift Storm-drift, With hot sweeping anger, came the horse-guards' clangor On our flanks. Then higher, higher, higher burned the old-fashioned ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... kind of agricultural industry. The character of the gradients will be best understood by a reference to the map, with the aid of the following few figures. The towns of Galatz and Braila or Ibrail, situated on the Danube, are fifteen metres above the sea-level, a metre being, as the reader doubtless knows, equal to 1.095, or as nearly as possible 1-1/10 yard. At Bucarest, the capital, which is thirty or forty miles inland, the land rises to a height of seventy-seven metres;[6] still further inland, where the elevation from the plain to ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... inclose a space to dwell in, in comfort and security. The windows show us outward real life and nature. The walls should not compete with the windows. Nature must be translated into the terms of line and form and colour, and invention and fancy may be pleasantly suggestive in the harmonious metre and ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... Banville, like Gerard de Nerval in earlier times, RONSARDISED. The poem 'A la Font Georges,' full of the memories of childhood, sweet and rich with the air and the hour of sunset, is written in a favourite metre of Ronsard's. Thus Ronsard says in his lyrical version of five ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... sovereign court of justice outdoes our prisons in all that is most hideous. The writer describing our manners and customs would shrink from the necessity of depicting the squalid corridor of about a metre in width, in which the witnesses wait in the Superior Criminal Court. As to the stove which warms the court itself, it would disgrace a cafe on the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... metre as these dedications is the Song of the Arval Brothers, which was found engraved on a stone in the grove of the goddess Dea Dia, a few miles outside of Rome. This hymn the priests sang at the May festival ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... are the outward expression of our authority, and the metre-gauge of our importance. By them the untutored mind of the poor Indian is enabled to estimate the amount of reverence due to each of us. This is the first purpose for which we are provided with Chupprassees. The second is that they may deliver ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... sense, let it grow where it will, and I guess we raise about the best kind, which is common sense, and I warn't to be put down with short metre, arter that fashion. So I tried the old man; sais I, 'Uncle,' sais I, 'if you will divorce the eatables from the drinkables that way, why not let the servants come and tend. It's monstrous onconvenient and ridikilous to be a jumpin' up for ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... succeeded in obtaining a free-and-easy translation of the lyric; but in my anxiety to preserve the metre and something of the spirit of the original, I have made several blunders and many anachronisms. Mr. Free, however, pronounces my version a good one, and the world must take his word till some more worthy translator shall have consigned it ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... twang, and it is particularly in the Psalms—which we have now been reading, and which might be ranked with the finest hymns—that I miss the number and rhythm of the syllables, the observance of a fixed metre—in short, severity of form. David, the royal poet, was no less possessed by the divinity when he sang to his lyre than other poets have been, but he does not seem to have known that delight felt by our poets in overcoming the difficulties they have raised ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... present occasion are the same as those followed in the translation of Schiller's complete Poems that was published by me in 1851, namely, as literal a rendering of the original as is consistent with good English, and also a very strict adherence to the metre of the original. Although translators usually allow themselves great license in both these points, it appears to me that by so doing they of necessity destroy the very soul of the work they profess to translate. ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... An automobile had come in last night from Madrid, a sixty horse-power Merlin, and the chauffeur had reported snow half a metre deep on the mountains. The Merlin had stuck, he said, and had to be pulled out with oxen. Supposing the Duke intended going to Madrid instead of turning off by way of Salamanca, he—and incidentally we—seemed likely to come in ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... striking reality and directness of this lyric, its immense emotional undercurrent, and its abrupt, almost gasping metre, admirably suited to the impassioned mood of the speaker,—these are a few of the qualities that combine to make "A Woman's Thought" one of the most ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... consarned old coot you. I tell ye there's your hat, and there's the door—be off with yerself, quick metre, or I'll give ye ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... Drew. I felt ashamed of the lightness of my own thoughts, but I had to tell him of my speculations upon after-the-war developments in aviation: nurses flying Voisins, with the cars filled with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties taking comfortable outings in gigantic biplanes of the R-6 type; mothers, as of old, gazing apprehensively at speed-dials, cautioning fathers about "driving too fast," and all of ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... vanguard against the hosts of the heathen, and, smiling, falls with his king on the field of Stiklestad. One song from this cycle, "The Cloister in the South" is here reproduced in an exact copy of the original metre, in the hope that even this imperfect representation of the poem may be ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... and be modulated by the will of the other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express by the contradictory phrase of innate experience. We copy one of the shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a little dimness in the filling up, but the grace ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... there existed in Leipzig a sort of literary centre, where Gottsched was regarded as a dictator in matters of taste. This literary autocrat praised Bodmer's translation of 'Paradise Lost' more than the original poem, in which he condemned the rhymeless metre. A sharp controversy soon divided the literary world into two hostile parties, known in German literature as the "conflict between Leipzig and Zuerich." Gottsched followed Voltaire in considering the English style rude and barbarous; whereas Bodmer, with keener artistic perception and deeper ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... metre and sense, owing to the loss of a hemistich, but the sense is complete. Grein's suggestion, feoll on foldan, adds nothing ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... my time away,— I 'm sure to rue it. The day is rather bright, I know The Muse will pardon My half-defection, if I go Into the garden. It must be better working there,— I 'm sure it's sweeter: And something in the balmy air May clear my metre. ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of repetitions in the tune, and has a chorus that is sung at the end of each verse. I have not presumed to arrange it in metre; but the following is the substance: "We are assembled in the habiliments of war, and will go in quest of our enemies. We will march to their land and spoil their possessions. We will take their women and children, and lead them into captivity. The warriors shall fall ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... make by a desire to conciliate, if possible, some, who, rather unreasonably partial to rhyme, demand it on all occasions, and seem persuaded that poetry in our language is a vain attempt without it. Verse, that claims to be verse in right of its metre only, they judge to be such rather by courtesy than by kind, on an apprehension that it costs the writer little trouble, that he has only to give his lines their prescribed number of syllables, and so far as the mechanical part is concerned, all ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... 80 per cent of phosphine to render it spontaneously inflammable. Berdenich has reported a case of a parcel of carbide which yielded on the average 5.1 cubic foot of acetylene per lb., producing gas which contained only 0.398 gramme of phosphorus in the form of phosphine per cubic metre (or 0.028 per cent. of phosphine) and was spontaneously inflammable. But on examination the carbide in question was found to be very irregular in composition, and some lumps produced acetylene containing a very high proportion of phosphorus and silicon compounds. No doubt the spontaneous inflammability ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... Mr. Urijah Hopps appeared in person among the fathers—who looked at each other over his head—and enlightened them on supply and demand, the Game Laws, the production of cabbages for towns, the iniquity of an Established Church, and the bad metre of the ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... together geometers, astronomers, chemists, mechanicians, engineers. There were also poets, who ministered to the literary wants of the dissipated city—authors who could write verse, not only in correct metre, but in all kinds of fantastic forms—trees, hearts, and eggs. Here met together the literary dandy and the grim theologian. At their repasts occasionally the king himself would preside, enlivening the moment with the condescensions of royal relaxation. Thus, of Philadelphus ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... welcome; but we yawned in the midst of their tale. At last they came crying that he was coming to the king's house, and fell to their dispute, but we would listen to neither party, for we were busy with a dispute about the merits of the Great and of the Little Metre; nor were we disturbed when they passed our door with sticks of enchantment under their arms, travelling towards the forest to contend against his coming, nor when they returned after nightfall with torn robes and despairing cries; for the ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... has! What a revolutionary personality!" they used to say in Valencia, and once the janitor at the Club added: "To think I knew that man when he was only this high!" And he held out his hand about a metre ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... to hint at its own hideous nature with every convulsive tick of the metre. It hiccuped nickels, and as Win's terrified eyes, instead of taking in New York, watched the spendthrift contrivance yelping for her dollars, she remembered that she owned but two hundred. She had had to be "decent" ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical strain of the English ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... But he was followed by Hanmer, who, as his chief interest was to rival Pope, was content with Pope's methods. It is easy to underestimate the value of Hanmer's edition; his happy conjectures have been prejudiced by his neglect of the older copies and his unfortunate attempt to regularise the metre; but what alone concerns us here is that he reverts to the methods which Theobald had discarded. Warburton, confident in his intellectual gifts, was satisfied with Theobald's examination of the early copies, and trusted to his own insight ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... was pursuing the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking up the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation; reading, writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations, interested in technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting, directing private theatricals, going a long way to see an actor—a long way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway of contemporary interests. And all the while he was busied about ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mrs. Jerrold, "I will be lenient. You children may throw all the stones. It is not poetry to my taste. There's no metre to it, and I should certainly be sorry to think ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... in prose and verse, on a strange diversity of curious and abstruse subjects; a double panegyric of Justinian and the life of the philosopher Theodotus; the nature of happiness and the duties of government; Homer's catalogue and the four-and-twenty sorts of metre; the astronomical canon of Ptolemy; the changes of the months; the houses of the planets; and the harmonic system of the world. To the literature of Greece he added the use of the Latin tongue; the Roman civilians ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... said that, tired of repeating the words of the songs which Jackson had taught me, I had taken those of Psalms in metre, at the end of the Prayer-book, by way of variety; and, as far as metre went, they answered very well, although people would have been surprised to have heard Psalms sung to such quick and varied measure. The Psalm I chose this time was the first—"How ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of the class or club should bring in a short paper giving his favorite passage in the play and why he likes it, including his criticism of the metre, of the metaphors and ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... glad of it with all my heart: I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers; I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd, Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree; And that would set my teeth nothing on edge, Nothing so much as mincing poetry: 'Tis like the forced ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... of ludicrous interludes. A jig was not in Shakespeare's time only a dance, but a ludicrous dialogue in metre; many historical ballads were also ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... to the mastery of the problems of metre is for each student to tread alone. The best plan is to read aloud a considerable quantity. Then the technical language of the books will lose its terrors and the simplicity of construction of good poetry will become apparent. If the student will read so much ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances which very ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sitting at a pantomime (Forbidden treat to those who stood in fear of him), Roaring at jokes, sans metre, sense, or rhyme, He turned, and saw immediately in rear of him, His peace of mind upsetting, and annoying it, A ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... my hand to the work," said Tom, laughing, "down they must come, in short metre, if they're bigger than Goliah. Me and my axe are old friends, and we've got the hang of one another pretty well. All I have to do, is to say, 'go it,' and every ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... ear; They scarce can bear their laureate twice a year; And justly Caesar scorns the poet's lays: It is to history he trusts for praise. F. Better be Cibber, I'll maintain it still, Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme quadrille, Abuse the city's best good men in metre, And laugh at peers that put their trust in Peter. Even those you touch not, hate you. P. What should ail 'em? F. A hundred smart in Timon and in Balaam: The fewer still you name, you wound the more; Bond is but one, but Harpax is a score. P. ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... to the "Canterbury Tales" we know that the observations could not have been recorded except at complete hours, because the construction of the metre will not admit the supposition of any parts of hours ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... a song without metre; And, here again, nothing is wrong; (For nothing on earth could be neater) Except ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... not dwell, except to note that he avoids that metronomic beat of rhythm which Edgar Poe introduced into modern lyric measures, as Pope introduced it into the rhyming heroics of his day. Our varied metres are becoming as painfully over-polished as Pope's one metre. Shelley could at need sacrifice smoothness to fitness. He could write an anapaest that would send Mr. Swinburne into strong shudders (e.g., "stream did glide") when he instinctively felt that by so forgoing the more obvious music of melody he would better secure the higher music ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... very coolest Poet; and the fullest of this common earth and its affairs, of any sage that has ever showed his head upon it, in prose or metre. The sturdiness with which he makes good his position, as an inhabitant, for the time being, of this terrestrial ball, and, by the ordinance of God, subject to its laws, and liable to its pains and penalties, is a thing which appears, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... quite irrelevant. What were his views on literature, and on the literary controversies which have been agitated from his day to our own? He tells us very little. He must have heard discussions and arguments on metre, on classical precedent, on the ancient and modern drama; but he makes no mention of these questions. He does not seem to have attached any prophetic importance to poetry. The poets who exalt their ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... of years dim the ruddy glow of that hearth-fire, nor the charm of the poem. The simplicity of metre, the purity of wording, the gentle sadness of some of its expressions, make us read between the lines the deep and affectionate reminiscence with ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... hippogriff at once, as it is in the wrong metre. Hieroglyph is attractive, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... gusto. Why he should have taken it into his head to get a child, as I was, to write poetry I cannot tell. One afternoon he sent for me to his room, and asked me to try and make up a verse; after which he explained to me the construction of the payar metre of fourteen syllables. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... terror-stricken, as he had been on his first day in the cavalry, at hearing behind him the thunder of many hoofs. Having once become used to the noise, he was even thrilled by the swinging metre of it. A kind of wild harmony was in it, something which made one forget everything else. At such times Pasha longed to break into his long, wind-splitting lope, but he learned that he must leave the ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... wish of friends. A few extracts appeared in a magazine several years ago, and it was afterwards completed without any view to publication. It follows the present Irish text[8] as closely as the laws of metre will allow. Since these pages were in the printer's hands Mr. Aubrey de Vere has given to the world his treatment of the same theme,[9] adorning as usual all that he touches. As he well says: "It is not in the form of translation that an ancient Irish tale of ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... optimism permeates his poems. By temperament a singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is capable here and there of the true miracle of transforming fact and thought into true beauty. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... pronounce this departure from literal truth a merit and not a defect. We consider Goethe's second "Iphigenie," written in verse, far preferable to the first one written in prose; nay, it is the rhythm or metre itself which communicates to the work its incomparable beauty. In a review of Longfellow's "Dante," published last year, we argued this very point in one of its special applications; the artist must copy his original, but he must not copy ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... ceremonies. And as this ring touched and bounded off from the different letters which still preserved their distances distinct, he made with these letters, by the order in which he touched them, verses in the heroic metre, corresponding to the questions which we had asked; the verses being also perfect in metre and rhythm; like the answers of the Pythia which are so celebrated, or those given by the oracles ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... decent and right and morally correct in our relations to one another. All that is involved in the fact of redemption just as fragrance is involved and included in the rose, as harmony is expected to be a part of music and rhythm as well as metre a part of verse ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... the reader may see for himself by comparing the passage from the manuscript given in the appendix with the corresponding place in the text. Milton's own spelling revels in redundant e's, while the printer of the 1645 book is very sparing of them. But in cases where the spelling affects the metre, we find that the printed text and Milton's manuscript closely correspond; and it is upon its value in determining the metre, quite as much as its antiquarian interest, that I should base a justification of this reprint. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... literature it would seem as though we might get closer still to the expression of mere personality, by the medium of 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... truth of poor mortality; When lo! as one who, in a mirror, spies The shining of a flambeau at his back, Lit sudden ore he deem of its approach, And turneth to resolve him, if the glass Have told him true, and sees the record faithful As note is to its metre; even thus, I well remember, did befall to me, Looking upon the beauteous eyes, whence love Had made the leash to take me. As I turn'd; And that, which, in their circles, none who spies, Can miss of, in itself apparent, struck On mine; a point I saw, that darted light So sharp, no lid, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and style." The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the rough but vivacious doggrel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, and rondels of Italy and France. With the Italian conceits came an Italian refinement whether ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... of the great laws of Divine government and human polity, that composition in the arts should strongly affect every order of mind, however unlearned or thoughtless. Hence the popular delight in rhythm and metre, and in simple musical melodies. But it is also appointed that power of composition in the fine arts should be an exclusive attribute of great intellect All men can more or less copy what they see, and, more or less, remember it: powers of reflection and investigation are also ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... an expansion of Wace's "Brut" with insertions from Baeda. Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the same ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... as you can all your present notions about the nature of verse and poetry. Take a sponge and wipe the slate of your mind. In particular, do not harass yourself by thoughts of metre and verse forms. Second: Read William Hazlitt's essay "On Poetry in General." This essay is the first in the book entitled *Lectures on the English Poets*. It can be bought in various forms. I think the cheapest satisfactory edition is in Routledge's "New Universal Library" (price ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... separates the waters above the firmament from those below. It is the walking and clinging together that gives power to the winds, weight to the waves, heat to the sunbeams, and stability to the mountains. It is the 'clinging together' which throws our syllables into words, gives metre to poetry, and melody and harmony to sound. Indeed, the clinging together of sounds, as seized by the ear in time, with the ever forming and living ebb and flow of widely different rhythms, exerting the most mysterious influences upon the soul, is not less remarkable than ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... were modern popular pieces, such as are accustomed to be sung on the boards of the theatre; but the latter were evidently of great antiquity, exhibiting the strongest marks of originality, the metaphors bold and sublime, and the metre differing from anything of the kind which it has been my fortune to observe in ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow |
