"Prosaical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fallacy that the Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic, so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only fields. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the commencement of last century, landscape-painting also degenerated and became mere ornamental flower-painting, of which the Dutch were so passionately fond that they honored and paid the most skilful artists in this style like princes. The dull prosaic existence of the merchant called for relief. Huysum was the mosrt celebrated of the flower-painters, with Rachel Ruysch, William von Arless, and others of lesser note. Fruit and kitchen pieces were also greatly admired. Hondekotter was celebrated ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... out of a beautiful dream, plump upon a prosaic boy who says, "Hullo!" It is apt to jolt one. It ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... is the point: The world might be prosaic without sin, but it is right positive that women would suffer less. And if it could be pounded into every woman's head that she was a fool to think twice about any man she could not marry, and that she threatened the whole ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... make myself believe that it was real when a brilliant group of horsemen in pointed, yellow hats and streaming, peacock feathers dashed down the street. It seemed too impossible that I, a wandering naturalist of the drab, prosaic twentieth century, and my American wife were really a living, breathing part of this strange ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... impossible to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, the sanctimonious tutor, or the naughty Tommy, as Mr. Sambourne has realised them. The "Anecdotes of the Crocodile" and "The Presumptuous Dentist" are no less good. The way he has turned a prosaic hat-rack into an instrument of torture would alone mark Mr. Sambourne as a comic draughtsman of the highest type. Nothing he has done in political cartoons seems so likely to live as these burlesques. A little known book, "The Royal Umbrella" (1888), which contains the delightful "Cat Gardeners" ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... to that sculpture the spectator is usually brought in a tranquil or prosaic state of mind; he sees it associated rather with what is sumptuous than sublime, and under circumstances which address themselves more to his comfort than his curiosity. The statue which is to be pathetic, seen between the flashes of footmen's livery round ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the collection from its oldest to its newest examples. As the results of his intelligent energy and research the following catalogue has been prepared which gives us the skeleton figure of the armed Pennsylvania mountain man, from the frontier days until later and more prosaic times ensued. While many of the arms listed are in imperfect condition and some of the more important ones are lacking, they give the idea of his times. Other pieces of later periods, and a few of foreign use, are included for purposes of comparison. To these are added ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... renown'd does not present the idea of a visible object to the mind, and is thence prosaic. But change this ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... Hollander taught, of not refusing to do the small things because the day of large things had not yet come or was in the past; of not waiting until the chance may come to distinguish ourselves in arms, and meanwhile neglecting the plain, prosaic duties of citizenship which call upon us every hour, every day ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... lethargic one to a fireside on a winter evening. She drops the book in her lap, the yells of the savages are fainter. She shakes the salt spray from her chair and tries to adjust herself once more to the prosaic of a land-lubber. ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... throughout his career the national, or, at any rate, the racial standpoint. The other is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen presently became, the one indifferent to artistic expression, and the other baldly prosaic where he was once deeply poetical, Bjoernson preserved the poetic impulse of his youth, and continued to give it play even in his envisagement of the most practical modern problems. Let us enlarge a little upon these two themes. Ernest Renan, speaking ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... Philippines," describes (Chapter V.) a feast, at which he had, while on a visit to the Tinguianes, to drink human brains mixed with basi. Whatever De La Gironiere says must be received with considerable caution; but Pickering, a prosaic and matter-of-fact Britisher, speaking of the Formosan savages, says that "they mixed the brains of their enemies with wine." ("Pioneering in ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... which, after all, is much more rational than the more recent contention of sundry modern Orators of the Human Race that 'the mines belong to the miners'! But after it had talked itself hoarse, the Assembly had to descend to the prosaic business of legislation, and in dealing with the mines, as in dealing with other matters, it made a muddle of the laws which existed before it met, and left this muddle to be resolved into a new order of things legal, under the presiding genius ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... one of the most recent on these matters, is astonished why the Histories of Friedrich should be such dreary reading, and Friedrich himself so prosaic, barren an object; and lays the blame upon the Age, insensible to real greatness; led away by clap-trap Napoleonisms, regardless of expense. Upon which Smelfungus takes him up, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... It is but a prosaic consideration, but the bracing air of the mountain-ride from Berkeley Springs down to the railway station, and the rapid career thence to Cumberland, have given us the appetites of ogres. We carry our pilgrim scrip into the town of Cumberland without much ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... Miss"— I have not caught your name— "you really are too deliciously prosaic. Stay here for a month, and then tell me if you think Dorothea— I mean Miss Heath— plain. No, I won't say any more. You must find out for yourself. But now, about the rules. I don't mean the printed rules. We have, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantage I could be sure my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, and that my first "Cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the National prosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with the desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the other, had here less of the audible ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... desperate because the Chafis were professional freighters with little experience of emergency. Hauling a Zid from Canthorian jungles to a Ciriimian zoo was a prosaic enough assignment so long as the cage held, but with the raging brute swiftly smelling them out, they were helpless to catch ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... rather prosaic life and would like to brighten it up with a little poetry. What you would really like would be a modest James Whitcomb Riley's worth of poetry. But the moment you express the desire the University Extension lecturer insists that what you should ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... SEELY read studiously prosaic statement of events leading up to resignations on the Curragh. Someone had blundered, or, as the SECRETARY FOR WAR, anxious above all things to avoid irritation, preferred to put it, "there had been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... city; or of the alternating stretches on a long railway journey of forest and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert; or of many other classes and conditions which are by no means void of material for the artist in pen or brush. All these lend hues that are anything but prosaic to my kaleidoscopic recollections of the United States; but more than all these, the characteristically picturesque feature of American life, stands out the omnipresent negro. It was a thrill to have one's boots blackened by a coloured "professor" in an alley-way ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Leavenworth is clearly a pot-companion of the first (whiskey and) water. He declines to address his fellow-citizens in the commonplace terms usually recognised in more prosaic communities. To adopt his own style of phraseology, ROBERTSON is clearly a "gay and festive cuss." He is a specimen brick from Kansas, and doubtless always carries one in his hat. The expression "ordinary gait," as applied to driving in Kansas, where everybody owns ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... lady. Shakespeare has given us his Ophelia and Desdemona, creations of this false theory, and I have heard men declare them to be perfect types of womanhood. In Ruffini's charming story of Doctor Antonio, we have the same lovely heroine in our prosaic modern life. But mark how all these women utterly fail in the great hours of trial. All untrue to the demands of their love, all incapable of mating the men who have sought them. But in Portia, in Miranda, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... the poet's poet, which Shelley no doubt meant to be, or the philosopher's poet, which Wordsworth, in spite of himself, is. He is the poet of homely human nature, not half so homely or prosaic as it seems. His genius, in a manner all its own, associates itself with the fortunes, experiences, memorable moments, of human beings whose humanity is their sole patrimony; to whom 'liberty and whatever, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... the ghastly shortcoming of his letter as regards distinctness, and the prosaic misinterpretation it was open to, Wilfrid called his inventive wits to aid, and ran swiftly to the end of the street. He had become—as like unto a lunatic as resemblance can approach identity. Commanding the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... regular martinet, who sent me for several long and dreary years to Dr. Tregear's well-known Grammar-school at Eastbourne, and had given me to understand that I should eventually enter his office in London. Briefly, I was, when old enough, to follow the prosaic and ill-paid avocation of clerk. But for a combination of circumstances, I should have, by this time, budded into one of those silk-hatted, patent-booted, milk-and-bun lunchers who sit on their high perches and drive a pen from ten till four at a salary of sixteen shillings ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... love each other in such a distracted way that somebody's feelings are always getting hurt, and somebody always crying. By a sort of magnetic influence she heals these wounds immediately, and finds some prosaic occupation as an antidote to these poetical moods. I confess that I am instructed and reproved whenever I go to see her, and wish ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... Nickleville is the prosaic name of that little hamlet in western Pennsylvania. Any gentle reader with a cynic strain there may verify this chronicle and find fresh confirmation for the ancient adage that "Fact is ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... distinctly material; yet the young man confronting her white grace, the strange look in her blue eyes, had a dreamlike feeling, almost as though he had met a dryad or an Undine between two of the prosaic, substantial doors of Ipswich House. And as in a dream the most extraordinary things seem familiar and expected, so the apparition of the Undine and her confidence in him seemed familiar, in fact just what he had been expecting ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... out of the jog-trot of my prosaic life. And being of a stolid and incurious nature, I left Seaton and his marriage, and even his aunt, to themselves in my memory, and scarcely gave a thought to them until one day I was walking up ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... have none of it. She haled him away to the brookside. There she showed him how to wash dishes by filling them half full of water in which fine gravel has been mixed, and then whirling the whole rapidly until the tin is rubbed quite clean. Never was prosaic task more delightful. They knelt side by side on the bank, under the dense leaves, and dabbled in the water happily. The ferns were fresh and cool. Once a redbird shot confidently down from above on half-closed wing, caught sight of these intruders, brought up with a ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Arabian Nights, was a great step forward, but unfortunately, Lane, who afterwards became an excellent Arabic scholar, was but a poor writer, and having no gift of verse, he rendered the poetical portions, that is to say, some ten thousand lines "in the baldest and most prosaic of English." [148] ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... doubtfully revolving what he ought to do. A deliberate sound of wheels arose in the distance, and then a cart was seen approaching, well filled with parcels, driven by a good-natured looking man on a double bench, and displaying on a board the legend, "I. Chandler, carrier." In the infamously prosaic mind of Mr. Finsbury, certain streaks of poetry survived and were still efficient; they had carried him to Asia Minor as a giddy youth of forty, and now, in the first hours of his recovered freedom, they suggested ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tempted—to make love to this actress,—as it is called,—to make love to her after the fashion, not so much of those poetical descriptions which have been referred to, as after the fashion of those prosaic settings-forth of the passion, which were familiar enough to his ears, was clearly recognizable by him. He knew very ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... up in that, and lament that there is so little poetry in French; quote foreign criticisms on the unimaginative precision of our style, and then extol M. de Canalis and Nathan for the services they have done France by infusing a less prosaic spirit into the language. Knock your previous argument to pieces by calling attention to the fact that we have made progress since the eighteenth century. (Discover the 'progress,' a beautiful word to mystify the bourgeois public.) Say that the new methods in literature concentrate ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... directed their labors. As silently as they came, the rope of sand has sifted away. Their influence is absolutely nothing upon the future social life of California. Even later Californian society owes nothing of its feverish strangeness to these gold hunters. They toiled in their historic quest. The prosaic results of the polyglot settlement of the new State ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the other day, and the things that happened in that story on these lines were most remarkable. They do not happen here. Practical missionary life is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident. It is very prosaic at times. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... any prosaic reader imagine that this little story is too melodramatic to be true, I refer him to the monograph, "Garibaldi the Patriot," by Alexandre Dumas, who got his data from the record written by Garibaldi, himself. Moreover, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... that destructive isolation of those who drag themselves up to maturity by themselves, and it gave them a glimpse of that order and beauty into which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore the bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic young people bear testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration of this came to us during our second year's residence on Halsted Street through an incident in the Italian colony, where the men have always boasted that they were able to guard their daughters ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... was not, and after a few days Martie realized with a sort of shame that she did not wish it to be over. She could not keep her memory away from the enchanted hours when John's presence had lent a glory to the dark old house and the prosaic village. She said with a pang: "It was only yesterday—it was only two—only three—days ago, that he was here, that all the warmth and ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... soon subsides with the hired laborer, and the delight of seeing one's self in print only extends to the first two or three appearances in the magazine or newspaper page. Pegasus put into harness, and obliged to run a stage every day, is as prosaic as any other hack, and won't work without his whip or his feed of corn. So, indeed Mr. Arthur performed his work at the Pall Mall Gazette (and since his success as a novelist with an increased salary), ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rising tide of those multitudinous forces, moral, intellectual, and social, which are bearing mankind onward to a new and unknown goal. We may feel some natural regret at the disappearance of quaint customs and picturesque ceremonies, which have preserved to an age often deemed dull and prosaic something of the flavour and freshness of the olden time, some breath of the springtime of the world; yet our regret will be lessened when we remember that these pretty pageants, these now innocent diversions, had their origin in ignorance and superstition; that if they are a record ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... pathetic; and it is told with art, though its lapses of taste are woful, and its faults those of the whole class of Italian poetry to which it belongs. The agony is tedious, as Italian agony is apt to be, the passion is outrageously violent or excessively tender, the description too often prosaic; the effects are sometimes produced by very "rough magic". The more than occasional infelicity and awkwardness of diction which offend in Byron's poetic tales are not felt so much in those of Grossi; but in "Ildegonda" there is horror more material even than in "Parisina". ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... eulogy awarded to Shakespeare, alike in his lifetime and immediately after his death. But the spirit and custom of the age confided to future generations the duty of first offering him the more formal honour of prosaic and critical biography. The biographic memoir, which consists of precise and duly authenticated dates and records of domestic and professional experiences and achievements, was in England a comparatively late growth. It had no existence when Shakespeare died. It began to blossom in the eighteenth ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... drinks which followed the ceremony of initiation had all been disposed of, the business of the lodge proceeded. McMurdo, accustomed only to the prosaic performances of Chicago, listened with open ears and more surprise than he ventured to show ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... one's door, The streets are choked with messy mist; I'm the proverbial Bachelor, An old, prosaic Pessimist. Yet somehow—who can tell me why?— Urged by the Past's dim Phantom, I'm Disposed my cosy Club to fly, And prank it ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... with Katenka (who during those two years had been wearing long dresses, and was growing prettier every day), the possibility of his falling in love with her never seemed to enter his head. Whether this proceeded from the fact that the prosaic recollections of childhood were still too fresh in his memory, or whether from the aversion which very young people feel for everything domestic, or whether from the common human weakness which, at a first encounter ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... sunny goddesses of classical days? He concluded, lamely, that there was an element of the child in every Southerner; that men, refusing to believe what is improbable, reserve their credulity for what is utterly impossible; in brief, that the prosaic sea-folk of Nepenthe were like everybody else in possessing a grain of stupidity in their composition—"which does not bring us much further," he ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of myself, lest I should unwittingly lose all I had gained. But then the question presented itself—What had I gained? Could I explain it, even to myself? There was nothing in any way tangible of which to say—"I possess this," or "I have secured that,"—for, reducing all circumstances to a prosaic level, all that I knew was that I had met in my present companion a man who had a singular, almost compelling attractiveness, and with whose personality I seemed to be familiar; also, that under some power which he might possibly have exerted, I had in an unexpected place and at an unexpected time ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Pisa in January, 1822, and published in November, there is no merit either of plan or execution; for the plot is taken, with little change, from "The German's Tale," written by Harriet Lee, and the treatment is throughout prosaic. Byron was never a master of blank verse; but Werner, his solo success on the modern British stage, is written in a style fairly parodied by Campbell, when he cut part of the author's preface into lines, and pronounced them as good as ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... architecture, you can fall back on the traditional home of love and poetry, the recollections of idyls and pastorals daily acted out by unconscious illustrators of the poets from one generation to another. Modern life engrafted on these old towns and villages seems prosaic and unattractive, though practically it is that which first strikes the eye. New fronts mask old buildings, as new manners do old virtues; and if we come to the frame and adjuncts of daily life, we must confess that nineteenth-century ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... stitches and the maker's name and date. The sampler is in superb preservation, the colours are particularly rich and well chosen. This sampler is also from the South Kensington Collection. Often the worker's name is followed by a verse or rhyme having a delightfully prosaic tendency. One can imagine the poor girls, in the early days we are writing of, writhing under the infliction of having slowly and painstakingly to ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... being made an instrument for their purpose by those who were. It appears that rumours of Henry's assassination were rife in Spain and Italy before the event occurred. Such vaticinators as George Withers will always rise in those disturbed times which his own prosaic metre ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... men in the cave through a couple of small pocket-telescopes, which brought the expression of Jones's and Billy's countenances clearly into view. At first Mr Queeker, with poetic fervour, started up, intent on rushing to the rescue of the oppressed; but Mr Larks, with prosaic hardness of heart, held him forcibly back, and told him to make his mind easy, adding that Mr Jones had no intention of doing the boy any further harm. Whereupon Queeker submitted with a sigh. The two friends then issued from the cave, shook hands, and bade each other goodbye ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... pass suddenly from the extreme of dejection to the extreme of elation. Luck comes in a great variety of ways: sometimes as the result of prolonged and deliberate scientific search in a region which is known to be fossiliferous; sometimes in such a prosaic manner as the digging of a well. Among discoveries of a highly suggestive, almost romantic kind, perhaps none is more remarkable than the ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... correct in all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at least familiar, conditions of the modern world. The offspring of the modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly legitimate, though not an original, form of art. It may even have a novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... conjure up from the magic cellars boot-cream and metal-polish and all those vulgar groceries which make life possible. That is the secret of Bond Street. Beneath that glittering display of luxurious trivialities there are vast reserves of solid prosaic necessaries, only waiting to be asked for. A man could live exclusively on Bond Street. I don't know where you would buy your butchers' meat, but I have a proud fancy that, if you went in and said something to one of those sleek ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... merely a Romish army making ready for their future temporal kingdom, with a mitred emperor—a Roman high priest at their head. That is their ideal and object, without any mystery or elevated suffering. The most prosaic thirsting for power, for the sake of the mean and earthly pleasures of life, a desire to enslave their fellow-men, something like our late system of serfs, with themselves at the head as landed proprietors—that ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Peter's lead from the depths to the heights, 'tis only to feed the inner-man, therefore as we grow prosaic we had best descend to the level ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... heart-broken look than before. While they gazed sadly at the emptiness left by Dione, Cortlandt saw Ayrault's expression change, and, not clearly perceiving its cause, said, wishing to cheer him: "Never mind, Dick; to-morrow night we shall see it again." "Ah, prosaic reasoner," retorted Bearwarden, who saw that this, like so many other things, had reminded Ayrault of Sylvia, "that is but small consolation for having lost it now, though I suppose our lot is not so hard as if we were never to see it again. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... spurious unity, one loses all tendency to idealize the Metropolis and System of the Hierarchy into anything higher than a piece of showy stage-declamation, at bottom, in our day, thoroughly mean and prosaic. My other remark is, that Rome, seen from the tower of the Capitol, from the Pincian or the Janiculum, is at this day one of the most beautiful spectacles which eyes ever beheld. The company of great domes rising from a mass of large and solid ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... was done and the boys were once more outside they were quite satisfied with sight-seeing among savages and were quite contented to spend the remaining days of the week among the more prosaic and poetical scenes ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... and it was far into the night before he finished, while the faces of his auditors grew grave again. The security of this well ordered office, with the familiar tokens of distant peaceful England all about them, made a prosaic background for the visions which were flashing through the minds of these three Englishmen. Even now, to Renwick, as he related his experience again, the whole thing seemed incredible, and the reiterated ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... heart exaggerates everything; the heart weighs the fall of a fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of a woman's glove in the same scales, and the glove is nearly always the heavier of the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic simplicity. The facts ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... I am far too prosaic a mortal to allow dreams to worry me. So far I have discovered sufficient trouble in real life to keep my brain active. Even now I cannot forget ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... scenes, persons, and habits of London in the dead season. I even did rational things at the instigation of others. For, though I should have liked total isolation best, I, of course, found that there was a sediment of unfortunates like myself, who, unlike me, viewed the situation in a most prosaic light. There were river excursions, and so on, after office-hours; but I dislike the river at any time for its noisy vulgarity, and most of all at this season. So I dropped out of the fresh air brigade and declined ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... of brick, and looks very like a Dissenting place of worship. It is a tame, moderately tall, quadrangular edifice, flanked with stone buttresses, heavy enough to crush in its sides, fronted with a plain gable, pierced with a few prosaic windows, and surmounted with collateral turrets and a small bell fit for a school-house, and calculated to swivel whilst being worked quite as much as any other piece of sacred bell-metal in the Hundred of Amounderness. There is a small graveyard in front of the church containing a few flat tombstones ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... music,—analogies often hinted at, but never, that we are aware, fully followed out. Color bears the same relation to form that sound does to language. If a painter sit down before Nature and accurately match all her tints, we have an absolute but prosaic rendering of her; and the analogy to this in music would be found in a passage of ordinary conversational language written down, with its inflections and pauses recorded in musical signs. Both are transcripts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... safe to suppose that a subject is never illumined by the rays of heaven-descended genius without being as thoroughly exhausted. Nevertheless, with our tame domestic lantern, let us endeavour to throw a little prosaic light over the details of a scene that has been irradiated by ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... quite as much in the spirit of revolt against a prosaic life of society at home as for gain. It had appealed strongly to Asta. She had insisted that nothing so much as a treasure hunt would be appropriate for their wedding- trip and they had agreed on the unconventional. Accordingly, she and her sister ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... nonsense, you silly child," said Patty, who was of a prosaic and literal turn of mind. "You wouldn't believe, Miss Campbell," she went on, turning to her elder sister, "would you, that Maggie last Christmas went and told Flop that Santa Claus was a real old man, and that he really came down the chimney, ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... year!" My reader can imagine that this was no great fortune. I had little or nothing to spend in kid gloves or cigars; indeed, to speak plain, prosaic English, I went without a good dinner far oftener than I had one. Yet, withal, I was passing rich on ...
— Coralie • Charlotte M. Braeme
... of England in the eighteenth century has upon our interest has been much more generally acknowledged of late years than was the case heretofore. There had been, for the most part, a disposition to pass it over somewhat slightly, as though the whole period were a prosaic and uninteresting one. Every generation is apt to depreciate the age which has so long preceded it as to have no direct bearing on present modes of life, but is yet not sufficiently distant as to have emerged into the full dignity of history. Besides, it cannot be denied that the records ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... flash and glare and brilliancy of Canal Street have palled upon the tired eye, and it is yet too soon to go home, and to such a prosaic thing as dinner, and one still wishes for novelty, then it is wise to go in the lower districts. Fantasy and fancy and grotesqueness in the costuming and behavior of the maskers run wild. Such dances and whoops and leaps as these hideous Indians and devils do indulge in; such wild curvetings ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... glance of sympathy. In her woman's heart she guessed the cause of his trouble, and while she had been afraid of him when he appeared suddenly as the Indian warrior yet she liked him better in that part than as she now saw him. Then he was majestic, now he was prosaic, and it seemed to her that ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... for his new interpretations, not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from another and a more prosaic, because a ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... westward than Cumberland, yet it served to carry one well toward the Ohio River at Pittsburg; whence, down the Ohio and up the Missouri to Leavenworth, my journey was to be made by steamboats. In this prosaic travel, the days passed monotonously; but at length I found myself upon that frontier which then marked the western edge of our accepted domain, and the eastern extremity ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... he might have been guided by a judicious parent through all the perils of his calf-love for Fanny French; thrown upon his own feeble resources, he regarded himself as a victim of the traditional struggle between prosaic age and nobly passionate youth, and resolved at all hazards to follow the heroic course—which meant, first of all, a cold taciturnity towards his father, and, as to his future conduct, a total disregard ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Jerry to set me to squiring middle-aged dames while he spooned with his Freudian miracle in the conservatory. Strindberg indeed! Schnitzler, too, in all probability! While I invented mid-Victorian platitudes for the prosaic, "not very ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... Thornton, St. Clair County, Michigan—manufactured a small effigy in cement, and in due time brought about the discovery of it. But, though several country clergymen used it to strengthen their arguments as to the literal, prosaic correctness of Genesis, it proved a failure. Finally, in 1889, twenty years after "the Cardiff Giant" was devised, a "petrified man" was found near Bathurst in Australia, brought to Sydney, and exhibited. The result was, in some measure, the same as in the case of the American ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... and were not disgraced thereby. The service, specially the body-service of the lord and lady, honoured and raised them up. Nevertheless, it often placed the highborn page in situations sorrowful enough, prosaic, not to say ridiculous. The lord never distresses himself about that. And the lady must indeed be charmed by the Devil, not to see what every day she saw, her well-beloved employed in ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... and Alfred reddened; he did not want the Deed read. But while he hesitated, Sarah came in with Julia's note, asking him to come to her for a minute. This sweet summons made him indifferent to prosaic things. "Well, read away," said he: "one comfort, you will ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... it be upon a trout brook or in the stock market. Against fish or men, one should play the game fairly. Yet for that matter some of the most skillful fly-fishermen I have known were pot-hunters at heart, and some of the most prosaic-looking merchants were idealists compared to whom Shelley was but a dreaming boy. All depends upon the spirit with which one makes his venture. I recall a boy of five who gravely watched his father tramp off after rabbits,—gun on shoulder and beagle in leash. Thereupon he shouldered ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... heir was his brother, the count of Provence, a cynical, prosaic, and very stout old gentleman who had been quietly residing in an English country-house, and who now made a solemn, if somewhat unimpressive, state entry into Paris. The new king kept what forms of the old regime he could: ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... language is laid bare shockingly by the process. Perhaps not really worse than in prose translation, but every metre (or almost every) deprives you at once of a sensible fraction of the already scanty vocabulary. One learns also how essentially clumsy and prosaic the language is in its vocabulary, though so ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... falling," replied the young lady, "if you only would some pretty story tell; but you are very prosaic, Mr. Morris. Do you ever read anything ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... the African continent has offered a particular attraction, and we should have fared badly in the East African campaign, if we could not have relied upon the services of many of them. They are for the most part men who have abandoned at an early age the prosaic existence previously mapped out for them, and plunging into the wilds of Africa have found a more attractive livelihood in big game shooting and prospecting. By far the most exhilarating calling is that of the elephant hunter, who finds in the profits he derives from it all ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... things as they ought to have been, rather than as they were. This is true even of subjects in which we have no personal interest, and not only do no two men describe the same street-scene in the same way, but the same man, unless prosaic to a degree below the freezing-point of Tupper, will never do it twice in the same way. Few men, looking into their old diaries, but are astonished at the contrast, sometimes even the absolute unlikeness, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the desire which characterizes some children for too many fairy stories. The fairy story and the nature story should be alternated, so that the child's interests may be imaginative without becoming visionary, and practical without becoming prosaic. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... thyself, wert thou not born, wilt thou not die? "Explain" me all this, or do one of two things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done, and God's world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... as a fundamental principle that, no matter how prosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon this planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the most hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thing in his life, the thing that reveals the ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... landmarks are associated in the minds of blacks with legends, generally of the simplest and most prosaic nature. About this rough rock Pee-rahm-ah is a story which in the minds of the natives satisfactorily ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... training; he dared not tell her the real state of affairs on the day after their wedding, nor for some time afterwards. His father's avarice condemned him to the most grinding poverty, but he could not bring himself to spoil the honeymoon by beginning his wife's commercial education and prosaic apprenticeship to his laborious craft. So it came to pass that housekeeping, no less than working expenses, ate up the thousand francs, his whole fortune. For four months David gave no thought to the future, and his wife remained in ignorance. The awakening ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... for its more prosaic return journey by train, they left the boat on the shore and following a beaten path came presently into the very heart of the thriving metropolis ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... thus, Michel made his prosaic companions shrug their shoulders. Barbicane and Nicholl looked upon the lunar map from a very different point of view to that of their fantastic friend. Nevertheless, their fantastic friend was a little in the right. ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... countenances of our companions, who fled from their Spanish venta to take refuge at the club the morning after our arrival, they may surely be thankful for being directed to the best house of accommodation in one of the most unromantic, uncomfortable, and prosaic of towns. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thought, "if in prosaic Europe in our days the inhabitants of our villages believe these flames to be some wild sorcery, then surely in the land of mystery they must be at least the evidences of war between the demons of ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... into his heart in A Window in Thrums and in that beautiful tribute to his mother, Margaret Ogilvie. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... was the laying of the foundation of a museum of science and art; it sounds prosaic, but it was a pageant of pageantry and pucca tomasha too; the greater part, I daresay, just the ordinary gorgeousness of this country, fevered with stirring loyalty. The ceremony was in the centre of an open space of grass, surrounded by town ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... called Father Montoya from baptizing Indians and recovering their souls to the more prosaic, if as useful, task of saving their bodies, which he did at the immediate peril of his own. The Mamelucos had appeared (1628) before the Reduction of Encarnacion, and many of the Indians had already taken refuge in the woods. Those who remained were ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... was, foremost in the throng, a tall, brown, handsome fellow, with a nice, strong face, and such a look of love and expectation in his eyes that prosaic Imogen suddenly felt that it might be worth while, after all, to cross half the world to meet a look and a husband like that,—a fact which she had disbelieved till now, demurring also in her private mind as to the propriety of such a thing. ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... of the nobility into which Maurus Jokay was born in 1825 had no attractions for a strongly intellectual boy, fired with zeal and energy that carried him easily to the head of each class in school and college; nor did he feel any attraction for the prosaic practice of law, his father's profession, to which Austria's despotism drove many a nobleman in those wretched days for Hungary. It was Petofi, the poet, who was his dearest friend during the student-life at Papa; idealism ever ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... visions than the rest of us. The actual life of to-day is to the dreams of that day as the wheat plant to the lily. It starts to be a lily, but the finger and thumb of destiny—mainly in the form of heredity—turn it into the wheat, and then into the prosaic flour and ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... talked, he often paused in his work to imitate the gesticulatory enthusiasms of the saints at the camp-meeting. He was a thickset fellow of only medium height, and was called, somewhat invidiously, "a chunky man." His face was broad, prosaic, good-natured, incapable of any fine gradations of expression. It indicated an elementary rage or a sluggish placidity. He had a ragged beard of a reddish hue, and hair a shade lighter. He wore blue jeans trousers and ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... be owned that the sentiment is not only obvious but prosaic. The moral maxims are delivered like advice offered by one sensible man to another, not with the impassioned fervour of a prophet. Nor can Pope often rise to that level at which alone satire is transmuted ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... was to get quit of his unpleasant neighbourhood. She would go for a long walk by the coast-guard path across the sand-hills, right out to Stone Horse Head. Would stay out till sundown, in the hope that by then Jennifer might have seen fit to exchange the manly joys of ratting for his more prosaic duties at the ferry, and so save her from further association ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... moment's thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else's disease. A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane. To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the least renowned of his pictures. He gave to his own rich but prosaic Flanders, all the breadth and breeziness and matchless aerial effects of a master of painting, and a true lover of nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a lover and a man of genius ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... and warm clothing and money,—and perhaps a recommendation to the Archbishop in order that he might get a chance of free education and employment in Rouen, while proper enquiries were being made about him. That was the soberly prosaic and commonplace view to take of the matter. The personality of the little fellow was intensely winning,—but after all, that had nothing to do with the facts of the case. He was a waif and stray, as he himself had said; his name, so far as he seemed to know it, was Manuel,—an ordinary ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... I perceive your objection then: you think me fairer without than within. I dare not contend you are altogether wrong in such conjecture. Faith, why not, senor? It would be strange otherwise. All lives do not flow gently amid prosaic routine, and my ship has been often enough upon the rocks. I have learned reasons of deceit and cruelty in the hard school of experience. If, in years of trial, I have grown hard of judgment, reckless of action, it is because ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... began—"The enclosed will have been a long time of reaching its real destination, for it is, as you will see, really intended for your sister. No doubt it will interest you too, as it has done me, though I am too matter-of-fact and prosaic to enter into such things much. Still it is curious. Please keep the letter; I am sure my friend intends you to do so. "Yours very ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it. Perhaps since the day of Mr. Tupper's "Philosophy" there has been no more difficult reading of the poetic sort. It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry. Like hundreds of other good patriots, Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our soldiers, and ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank verse will therefore, I fear, be too often found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome. His diction is certainly poetical, as it is not prosaic; and elegant, as it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either recalls old phrases, or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense, however, of his words is strained when ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... Indian men. Others might cross to the hustle and welter of New York, young giant of cities, but Campbell was content to sail to Asia Minor. He brought them what they needed and they sent color and rime to prosaic Britain, hashish to the apothecaries, and pistachios from Aleppo, cambric from Nablus and linen from Bagdad, and occasionally for an antiquary a Damascene sword that rang like a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... from the waking to the dreaming state is in general to exchange a prosaic and matter-of-fact world for one of fantastic improbabilities; but it is safe to assume that the three persons who fell asleep beneath Miss Ludington's roof that morning, just as the birds began to twitter, encountered in ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... Not the prosaic commonplace shells usually found on a New England shore nor even the brighter colored, more intricately formed shells of tropic seas. These were shells he had never seen before, even in library collections. ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... answers, that went "through and through," beyond hope. The work, by its own force and fortune, sometimes outstrips the workman. And then, in [101] defiance of the proprieties, whereas poets sometimes "flag, and languish in a prosaic manner," prose will shine with the lustre, vigour and boldness, with ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... tiger; the spring air was fresh and fragrant, the country charming, with here a forest, there a valley, farther off the tiled, colored roofs of some little town. Our road, like a white ribbon, wound itself out endlessly between stone walls or brown fields. In my content I forgot food and such prosaic details till I noticed that the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... rebellious individuals, the mass of men have lived according to the dictates of the church, the legal requirements of the state, and the surveillance of the community, if only because they feared social ostracism. It is easy, however, to forget these men and their prosaic virtues because history has so long busied herself in recording court amours and the ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... Cherubina," which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had ever seen it. I have not the slightest recollection of the book or the passage. I think its liveliness and "local color" will make it please the reader, as it pleases me, more than my own more prosaic extravagances: ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the distance, and then a cart was seen approaching, well filled with parcels, driven by a good-natured looking man on a double bench, and displaying on a board the legend, 'I Chandler, carrier'. In the infamously prosaic mind of Mr Finsbury, certain streaks of poetry survived and were still efficient; they had carried him to Asia Minor as a giddy youth of forty, and now, in the first hours of his recovered freedom, they suggested to him the idea of continuing his flight in Mr Chandler's cart. It would be ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... to recover in this prosaic world my long-lost paradise of the drop-curtain, but morning revealed it to me here on Leeward Island. Here was the feathery foliage, the gushing springs, the gorgeous flowers of that enchanted land. And here were the soft and intoxicating perfumes that I had ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... the actual grave and its ashes, or the more symbolical one of the end of love. But on the whole, for art's sake, this somewhat prosaic Versoehnung is better left behind the scenes. Yet this may be a private—it may be an erroneous—criticism. The positive part of what has been said in favour of Dominique is, I think, something ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... pride, feeling that at length she must have made an impression on this prosaic English girl, and was much disconcerted when Barbara broke into laughter, crying, "Oh, you goose; how can ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century? It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact that a Londoner in the country, or a countryman ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Joel Chandler Harris, who had done so much to portray the negro's inner kindliness, as well as his singularly poetic outlook. Harris was one of the editors of the Atlanta Constitution, and there I found him in a bare, prosaic office, a short, shy, red-haired man whom I liked at once. Two nights later I was dining with James A. Herne and William Dean Howells in New York City, and the day following I read some of my verses for the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... view what noxious Nonsense reigns, While yet I loiter on Prosaic Plains; If Pens impartial active Annals trace, Others, with secret Histr'y, Truth deface: Views and Reviews, and wild Memoirs appear, And ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... clement spirit of Alfonso. He is particularly anxious about the charge of heresy. Nothing indicates that any guilt of greater moment weighed upon his conscience.[31] After scrutinizing all accessible sources of information, we are thus driven to accept the prosaic hypothesis that Tasso was deranged, and that his Court-rivals had availed themselves of a favorable opportunity for making the duke sensible of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... me of my namesake's coming. For the other years I pleased myself prodigiously by remembering that she must speak my name openly to her first-born. And I lusted for battle, then. I was an early Norseman, and I would escape the prosaic bed-death, since, for those dying thus, Held waited in her chill prison-house below, with hunger her dish, starvation her knife, care her bed, and anguish her curtains. To survive for easy death, ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... bracken under the trees, they began their return to the house, Bettina felt that her sense of adventure had altered its character. She was still in the midst of a remarkable sort of exploit, which might end anywhere or in anything, but it had become at once more prosaic in detail and more intense in its significance. What its significance might prove likely to be when she faced it, she had not known, it is true. But this was different from—from anything. As they walked up the sun-dappled ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in fancy, and touching in feeling. Drayton (d. 1631) was the author of the "Poly-Olbion," a topographical description of England, and a signal instance of fine fancy and great command of language, almost thrown away from its prosaic design. Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke), the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, exhibits great powers of philosophical thought, in pointed and energetic diction, in his poem on "Human Learning." Among the religious ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... obtain a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true destiny was the glorious career of a poet. It was a most pleasing circumstance, that his mother, while she fully recognized the propriety of his being diligent in the prosaic line of business to which circumstances had called him, was yet as much convinced as he himself that he was destined to achieve literary fame. She had read Watts and Select Hymns all through, she said, and she did n't see but ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... biographer, "remarkable as they have been pronounced for the wit and humor which they display, their distinguishing attractions lies in the almost unparalleled flow and felicity of the versification. Popular phrases, sentences the most prosaic, even the cramped technicalities of legal diction, and snatches from well-nigh every language, are wrought in with an apparent absence of all art and effort that surprises, pleases, and convulses the reader at every turn. The author triumphs with a master hand over every variety ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... insight, nor do we care to deal at all with vexed questions, but are content to abide by existing authorities, doing our utmost to make our rendering close and accurate, and, if it might be so, at the same time, not over prosaic: it is to the lover of poetry and nature, rather than to the student, that we appeal to enjoy and wonder at this great work, now for the first time, strange to say, translated into English: this must be our excuse for speaking here, as briefly as ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... sought his advice upon a work of imagination, intended to depict the effects of enthusiasm upon different modifications of character. He listened to my conception, which was sufficiently trite and prosaic, with his usual patience; and then, thoughtfully turning to his bookshelves, took down an old volume, and read to me, first, in Greek, and secondly, in English, some extracts to ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... all embellishment is out of the question. The hero puts on his clothes, or refreshes himself with food and wine, or he yokes his steed, takes a journey, and in the evening preparation is made for his repose. To give relief to subjects prosaic as these without seeming unreasonably tumid is extremely difficult. Mr. Pope much abridges some of them, and others he omits; but neither of these liberties was compatible with the nature of my undertaking. These, therefore, and many similar ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer |
