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More "Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... relations of their respective parties.[16] Not less irritating were the jeux d'esprit with which Canning continued to assail the ministry in the newspaper press.[17] The most famous of these is the couplet:— ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... which Dr Johnson highly commends, saying "They are written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; they exhibit one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained."—Here is this bepraised couplet:— ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... said the child in a tone of relief; and she repeated softly to herself the hymn which she had said to the old man. The last couplet was scarcely audible. ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... repeated the couplet, and was plainly vastly pleased with it. "Faith, and I wonder is that my own, or something I read somewhere. Something of the lilt of a Scotch strathspey to 't, shouldn't you say? You know more of such things. What d'y' say—shall I claim that for ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... noted down whenever they happened, and not predictions or the result of calculations. It does not appear, indeed, that the Chinese were, at any time, able to predict an eclipse, notwithstanding all that has been said in their favour on this subject. The reputed Chinese tables, published by Father Couplet, have been detected to be those of Tycho Brahe; and Cassini found the chronology of their eclipses, published by Martinus, to be erroneous, and their returns impossible. It could not indeed be otherwise; the defectiveness of the calendar must necessarily falsify all their ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... where blank verse meant freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming."[26] Pope, among his many thousand rhymed couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed to Thomson's "Seasons." Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier poets was felt to have been too loose in structure. "The excellence and dignity of it," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us how to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... existence had no power to disturb his happy serenity. All day long, in the back-shop where the penetrating smell of paste mingled with the fumes of the cabbage-soup, he lived a life of his own, a life of incomparable splendours. His little Corneille, scored thickly with thumb-nail marks at every couplet of Emilie's, was all he needed to foster the fairest of illusions. A face and the tones of a ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... to be sung through, feigning by his silence to admit his defeat. Then the bridegroom's camp rejoiced and sang aloud in chorus, and thought that this time the foe was worsted; but at the first line of the last couplet, they heard the hoarse croaking of the old hemp-dresser bellow forth the second ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... grew older his handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet: ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... came to him, radiant, her hands full of the lilies, a couplet from a favourite poem ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... read, The Arraignment of Paris and David and Bethsabe. Of the first it may be said boldly, without fear of contradiction, that, considered metrically, the verse is unsuited to ordinary drama. The arbitrary and constantly changing use of heroic couplet, blank verse (pentameters), rhyming heptameters, alternate heptameters and hexameters rhyming together, and the swift transition from one form to another in the same speech, possibly help towards the lyrical effect aimed at; the nature of the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... armed, determined; will His Majesty, before midnight, consent to go? Profound silence; Campan waiting with upturned ear. "Did your Majesty hear what Campan said?" asks the Queen. "Yes, I heard," answers Majesty, and plays on. "'Twas a pretty couplet, that of Campan's," hints Monsieur, who at times showed a pleasant wit: Majesty, still unresponsive, plays wisk. "After all, one must say something to Campan," remarks the Queen. "Tell M. d'Inisdal," said the King, and the Queen puts an emphasis on it, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... with her head on one side and a big bandage over one of her horns, looking exactly like an old peasant woman with a kerchief tied around her head for a headache; and then she thought she saw, written in the air, a couplet ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... solemnly, in order to save the situation: "That last couplet is not at all necessary;" and Daddy Taille, who had got red up to the ears, looked ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... persons commit a gross error by overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem on the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... cannot be compared with those of her predecessor, Mme. de Pompadour. Modes were followed, but never invented by her. "With her taste for the pleasures of a grisette, her patronage falls from the opera to the couplet, from paintings and statuaries to bronzes and sculptures in wood; her clientele are no longer artists, philosophers, poets—they are the gods of lower domains, mimics, buffoons, dancers, comedians." She was the lowest and most common type of woman ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... own," he jumped up and shouted out, "Well done, old fellow!" Then he took it to himself and read it all over again, introductions and all, and has raved ever since. I wish you could see Aubrey singing out some profane couplet of "midnight and not a nose," or some more horrible original parody, and then dodging apparently in the extremity of terror, just as ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Deserted Village have come into the common stock of our language, and that sometimes not so much on account of the ideas they convey, as through their singular precision of epithet and musical sound. It is enough to make the angels weep, to find such a couplet as this— ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... latter somewhat bowed, making him appear even shorter than he was. It was these legs of his, together with his big round head and shock of reddish hair, that inspired some genius of the school with a couplet which was often chanted by the boys when they caught sight of Joe in ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Mr. Bolus, of Newcastle, used to write his prescriptions in rhyme. A bottle bearing the couplet, "When taken to be well shaken," was sent to a patient, and when Bolus called next day to inquire about its effect, John told the apothecary his master was dead. The fact is, John had shaken the sick man instead of the bottle, and had shaken the life ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... armorial ensigns (1382) to Dijon, with the motto moult me tarde (I wish for ardently). The merchants of Sinapi copied this on their wares, the middle word of the motto being accidentally effaced. A well-known couplet of lines supposed to occur in Hudibras (but not to be found there), has long baffled the research ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... was lost at sea, and in the grave-yard of his native place a stone was erected with the following couplet inscribed thereon: ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... only one, so far as we know, in the Empire who is relieved of the duty of welcoming and escorting transient officers. It was the multiplicity of such duties, so harassing, that persuaded Fang Kuan-ch'eng to write the couplet on one of the city gateways: Jih pien ch'ung yao, wu shuang ti: T'ien hsia fan nan, ti yi Chou. 'In all the world, there is no place so public as this: for multiplied cares and trials, this is the first Chou.' The people of Cho-Chou, of old celebrated for ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... written a book on Natural History—wherein I hope no unkind humorist will try to find a reason for such fondness. He sent for me one day and asked: "So you write poetry, do you?" I did not conceal the fact. From that time on, he would now and then ask me to complete a quatrain by adding a couplet of my own to ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... whipping. Ten children she had brought up in a far Lincolnshire parsonage, and without sparing the rod; but none had been allowed to disturb their father in his study where he sat annotating the Scriptures or turning an heroic couplet or adding up his tangled ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... peninsula led to a bloody war between Russia and Turkey. It soon became evident that unless saved by English intervention, Constantinople must fall into the hands of the Czar. Beaconsfield's spirited language at this crisis was paraphrased in the London music-halls in the famous couplet: ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... said the great poet Saxe. "Oh, how many a slip 'twixt the couplet and the cup! Abdomen dominates. When Homer had no paunch, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... are many superstitions as to the fitness or unfitness of days, times, and seasons; but in England May appears to be the only month supposed to be unlucky for weddings. The reason for this does not seem clear. The couplet ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... had a faithful personal ally in the person of the Procureur-Syndic, the most important national functionary in the city. This man, Couplet, called Beaucourt, was a disreputable and apostate ex-monk who had married an ex-nun. His position, of course, gave him a great influence over the least respectable part of the population, and with Marat and Danton at his back in Paris he cared nothing for the mayor and the municipal authorities. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... prayed a 'respite,' it was not that he was scared at the approach of death. His mind was never brighter and happier. To this moment may well be attributed, as it has been by popular tradition, his composition of the couplet: ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... and was taken to France to serve in the kitchen of Mlle. de Montpensier, the chief princess of the French court. The impishness which characterised his whole career inspired him to turn a highly improper couplet on an accident that happened in public to Mademoiselle,—and worst of all, he set it to music. She did not see the fun of the joke, and dismissed him, but the king laughed so much at his wit, that he had him presented, and interested ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... to attract public attention. Before he was twenty-five years old he had established his reputation as a wit, had spent nearly a year in the Bastille on a charge of writing satirical verses, and had produced a successful tragedy. In this play a couplet sneering at priests might possibly have become a familiar quotation even had it been written by another pen.[Footnote: Oedipe, written in 1718. "Nos pretres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense; Notre credulite fait ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... which carried it forward with only technical modifications to the days of Spenser and the Virgin Queen. The House of Fame and other minor poems are written in the octosyllabic verse of the Trouveres, but the Canterbury Tales give us the first vigorous English handling of the decasyllabic couplet, or iambic pentameter, which was to become so polished an instrument afterward in the hands of Dryden and Pope. The English of all the poems is simple ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... been used by Koenig,[284] and I will first give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less than two; ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... bay, a schooner standing for us to take our pilot. I descended to the cabin to write a note or two, and found myself almost involuntarily scribbling verses. 'Tis an odd freak of my fancy, that although never addicted to poetizing, and ordinarily incapable of manufacturing a couplet that will jingle even, I am rarely agitated by any strong feeling, without having a sort of desire to rhyme; luckily the delusion is exceedingly short-lived, and unfrequent in its visitations. The reader shall, however, have all the benefit of my present ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... came; it was the character which the Dame Lebrun had reserved for herself; and her couplet would have been out of place in any person's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... only couplet in which beasts as well as birds are subjected to this searching analysis. I think you will admit that it is the most sagacious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... Thus ran a couplet of the "Roman de Thebes"; and of the hundred or more tales of chivalry in verse, which are recognized as classic, nearly all make ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... word has been found, whose last consonants represent the number required, the best plan is to put it as the last word of a rhymed couplet, so that, whatever other words in it are forgotten, the rhyme will secure the only ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... castle, and some table and other utensils, which are still in preservation at Pollock. Before its removal, many are the snuff-boxes, toddy ladles, &c. that have been made of it, and are still in preservation by the curious. The following couplet, composed by the late Mr. W. Craig, surgeon, is inscribed on one of these ladles, which has seen no ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... promised to remain so, and I wished I had had better sense than to enter upon such a forlorn enterprise. But just then I had a saving thought—at least a thought that offered a chance. While the storm was still raging, I made up a Scotch couplet, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a garret—let him know't who will—- There was my bed—full hard it was and small; My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun: For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 62. 7-9 there are some verses to P[u]shan, following which is the most holy couplet of the Rig Veda, to repeat which is essentially to repeat the Veda. It is the famous ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... words and his name at the end." He looked dismally perplexed, and turning to me said imploringly in a whisper, "For pity's sake, what shall I write? I can't think of a word to add to my name. Help me to something." Thinking him partly in fun, I said, "Write an original couplet,—this ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... —is the regular Eng. HEROIC; its quality and adaptation: —embraces the elegiac stanza: —trochaic, example of, said by MURR. et al. to be very uncommon; was unknown to DR. JOH. and other old prosodists: —the two examples of. in sundry grammars, whence came; a couplet of these scanned absurdly by HIL.; HART mistakes the metre of do.: —dactylic, example ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian model, and generally end with a couplet. Her blank verse is the worst of all. The most ambitious poem in the book is that called "A Day in the Life of Mary Stuart," a dramatic poem in three scenes, dated the last of January, 1567. It contains a scene between the queen and her maidens, a scene with the Presbyterian deputies, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... we passed inside of the Bermudas; and notwithstanding the old couplet, which was quoted again and again by those who thought we should have one more touch of a storm before our ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... A Persian couplet said by a lover to his mistress is, 'Gold has no scent and in the scent of flowers there is no gold; but thou both art gold ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... son kept staring at Thorgerda Glum's daughter; his wife Thorhillda saw this, and she got wroth, and made a couplet upon him. ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... this," and apparently took it to the camp. This has resulted in my having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... The last couplet Milton afterwards, on his Italian journey, entered in an album belonging to an Italian named Cerdogni, and underneath it the words, Coelum non animum muto dum trans mare curro, and his signature, Joannes Miltonius, Anglus. The juxtaposition of these verses is significant: ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... shall judge of this last couplet," exclaimed Straws quickly. "It has cost me much effort. The editor wanted it. It seemed almost too sad a subject for my halting muse. There are some things which should be sacred even from us, Phazma. But what is to be done when the editor-in-chief commands? 'Ours ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... who for so many years has edited the London Truth, once wrote a couplet, that is as true ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... one couplet after another, philosophy after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean, Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid," and finds "the gorgeous table spread with fair-seeming ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the kind of fool you're going to make of yourself," cried Septimus, a ray of wonderful lucidity flashing across his mind. "There's a couplet of Tennyson's—I don't read poetry, you know," he broke off apologetically, "except a little Persian. I'm a hard, scientific person, all machinery. My father used to throw poetry books into the fire if he caught ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... ridiculous couplet pretends to imitate the redundancy and nonsensicality of Aeschylus' language; it can be seen how superficial and unfair the criticism of Euripides is; probably this is just what Aristophanes wanted to convey by ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... of the Gods", is attested as a title borne both by the Semitic goddess Ishtar and by the Sumerian goddess Nintu or Ninkharsagga. In the passage in the Babylonian Version, "the Lady of the Gods" has always been treated as a synonym of Ishtar, the second half of the couplet being regarded as a restatement of the first, according to a recognized law of Babylonian poetry. We may probably assume that this interpretation is correct, and we may conclude by analogy that "the holy Innanna" in the ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... that no human effort is perfect, the fact remains that these institutions have lived up to the high purpose for which they were founded, and are still being liberally supported and endowed. What more could be required by rational beings? This couplet may be suggestive: ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... playthings were French alphabet-blocks, and the set which served as toys and tasks for each of the elder brothers came at last to him as his legacy. The letters were formed by the human figure in different attitudes, and each block had a little couplet below the picture, beginning with the letter on the block. The Y represented a gymnast hanging by his hands to a trapeze, and being a letter which does not occur in the Hungarian language except in combinations, excited most the interest and imagination ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... the Admiralty and of various Government works, if the five stanzas concerning Castlereagh should risk your ears or the Navy List, you may omit them in the publication—in that case the two last lines of stanza 10 [i.e. 11] must end with the couplet (lines 7, 8) inscribed in the margin. The stanzas on Castlerighi (as the Italians call him) are 11, 12, 13, 14, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of a band of inhabitants, ordered his general, Michi, to construct a spacious hut (muro) and invite the eighty doubtful characters to a banquet. An equal number of Jimmu's soldiers acted as hosts, and, at a given signal, when the guests were all drunk, they were slaughtered. Jimmu composed a couplet expressing his troops' delight at having disposed of a formidable foe so easily, and in this verselet he spoke of one Yemishi being reputed to be a match ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the road between Norwich and Cromer. A third couplet alludes merely to the situation of a group of villages ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... be done; in a corner of the house must he stand and repeat that couplet, till some tender-hearted lass relieves him. Now for the questions which are most deeply laid, or so touching to him, that he finds much difficulty to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... that French verse is not seventy years old. If it was Hugo who invented French rhyme it was Banville who broke up the couplet. Hugo had perhaps ventured to place the pause between the adjective and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the line, "Elle filait pensivement la blanche laine" that the cæsura received its final coup de grâce. This verse has been probably ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... destined to be a great social as well as a great artistic success. He loved the society of men of birth and fashion; he seems to have had a more passionate desire to please in private even than in public, and almost to have justified the often quoted couplet ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... stood by me in keeping me true to my ideas of duty and life. Rather than lose these I would have missed all the sermons I have ever heard." Many another can say substantially the same, can trace his best deeds very largely to the influence of some little stanza or couplet early stored away in his memory and coming ever freshly to mind in after years as ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... enough for the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the People par excellence, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... presentment there can be as little question as of its splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet— ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... up nor sitteth down without speaking of him. Now when Attaf heard these words from the buffoon he looked up to heaven and said, O Thou whose attributes are inscrutable, bestow thy benefits upon thy servant Attaf. Then he recited this couplet:— ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... I loved each other more than ever since we worked together for a great cause." She carried out the old couplet:— ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... It appears that the abbey of S. Maximin was about 120 paces from the cell of the saint at Treves, and it is therefore most probable that the writer was a monk of the Benedictine order then belonging to that foundation; but he puts his name out of doubt by the following couplet, inscribed at the ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... graceful course to the side of her parents, he groaned, half humorously, and then went wandering about the upper hallway, a prey to conflicting emotions, engendered by the new point of view which the girl had unconsciously presented. A couplet of Browning's was running through his mind and more than once he found himself ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... his keen sympathy with his kind, his fine common-sense and his genial humour. The same qualities, tempered by a certain grace and tenderness, also enter into the best of his poems. Avoiding the epigram of Pope and the austere couplet of Johnson, he yet borrowed something from each, which he combined with a delicacy and an amenity that he had learned from neither. He himself, in all probability, would have rested his fame on his three chief metrical efforts, 'The Traveller', 'The Hermit', and 'The Deserted Village'. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... yesterday at Mr. Miller's to dinner, for the first time. My reception was quite to my mind: from the lady of the house quite flattering. She sometimes hits on a couplet or two, impromptu. She repeated one or two to the admiration of all present. My suffrage as a professional man was expected: I for once went agonising over the belly of my conscience. Pardon me, ye, my adored household gods, independence of spirit, and integrity ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... around a bend in the road by this time. When Tom returned to the scene of the encounter, Mr. Wood was not in sight. Mr. Chripp laughed, and paraphrased an old couplet. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... were better for a free man than the court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich to give to the poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and not the will of another man commanding him for the commandment's sake. The men all listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a couplet at the end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not unmusical voices. As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by me, as they were indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... face became night and he was wroth at his speech with exceeding wrath and said to him, "O damned one, O dog of the Nazarenes, art thou come to such power that thou durst assail me with the King of the Franks?" Then quoth he to his guards, "Take this accursed and do him die"; and he repeated this couplet,[FN26] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Ossalois observe them on a fete-day, in some of their villages, when the young people are returning home. They separate in two bands: some holding each other by the waist, some round the neck. The foremost party go about thirty steps in silence, while those behind sing a couplet in chorus; the first then stop, sing the second verse, and wait till those behind have joined them; and the latter sing the third verse as they arrive at home. This chant is called, in the country, Passe-carrere. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the envelope containing the message and the fingerprints in his pocket, then moved to follow his friend, already on his way to the stairs. He paused at the door, however, and came back rather hesitatingly. "Say—just how did that couplet run?" ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the aid of clippings, and by printing that poem by Lowell which was his mother's favorite, wherein was the couplet already quoted, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... attempted demonstrations, or at least illustrations, of his theories. Now, to theorise about men is seldom very satisfactory; but to theorise about women is to weigh gossamer and measure moonbeams. The very wisest thing ever said about them is said in the old English couplet: ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... engagement, wished to compromise the matter for 60,000 rupees, about a sixteenth part of the sum he had promised. The indignant author would accept no remuneration at all, but wrote a satire upon Mahmood instead; but he was merciful in his revenge, for he reached no more than the seven-thousandth couplet. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... style that had been developed by long years of study. The Laments, to be sure, are not based on any classic model and they contain few direct imitations of the classical poets, though it may be noted that the concluding couplet of Lament XV is translated from the Greek Anthology. On the other hand they are interspersed with continual references to classic story; and, more important, are filled with the atmosphere of the Stoic philosophy, derived from Cicero and Seneca. And along with this austere teaching ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... the etymology of lampoon, see Todd's Johnson, and Richardson's Dictionary. Bailey derives it from Lampons, a drunken song. It imports Let us drink, from the old French lamper, and was repeated at the end of each couplet at carousals. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... brought about by the old black crow, could be counteracted by repeating the following words, (a translation of the second couplet), with a pause between each line, and thus the last line would assume the form ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... willingness, and the resolution and the purpose to be, to do, and to suffer all God's will. Its essence, already given in the words of Paul, is given also in the words of the Saviour. "Not My will but Thine be, done," which is beautifully versified by Frances Ridley Havergal, in the couplet, ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... clairvoyance and prophecy was quite common among the Lowland Covenanters; and I believe Peden's Prophecies may still be found among the lumber of the book-shops. An old lady, in Irvine, once repeated to me the following couplet, as having ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... compare it? 'Tis like, what I have oft heard spoke on, The famous statue of Laocoon. 'Tis like,—O yes, 'tis very like it, The long, long string, with which you fly kite. 'Tis like what you, and one or two more, Roar to your Echo[7] in good humour; And every couplet thou hast writ Concludes ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... be observed at once by reference to the text that in form the two poems are identical. They contain the same number of lines and feet as surely as all sonnets do. Each travels upon two rhymes with the members of a broken couplet in widely separated refrain. To the casual reader this much is obvious, but there are many subtleties in the verse which made the authorship inevitable. It was a form upon which he had worked for years, and made his own. When the moment arrived the medium was ready. ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... subtle difficulty in love, in tying a knot of silk or fastening a lock of hair to their bonnet. They will steal into a cabinet so softly that a lady who is seated there, in a reverie, will not perceive them; they are so adroit that they will seize a paper on which she has sketched a couplet, will complete it, pass away, and she not know whence the poetical miracle has come. In valour, in courtesy, in magnificence they have no rival, just as the ladies whom they court are unique in beauty, in purity, in passion, and in self-denial. Sometimes they correspond at ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... on account of the brilliant beauty of her complexion; the other day, however, our poets made a diversion from the personal to the moral qualities of their small mistress, and after the usual tribute to her roses and lilies came the following rather significant couplet:— ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... its highest excellence in poetry. The art of composing short poems in which a thought, emotion or spiritual experience is expressed with a few simple but pregnant words in the compass of a single couplet or short hymn, was carried by the early Buddhists to a perfection which has never been excelled. The Dhammapada[645] is the best known specimen of this literature. Being an anthology it is naturally more suited ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... a running accompaniment of sound, which are the main secret of modern verse. He is not satisfied, ample as it may seem, with his double-rhyme harmony. He confines himself to it, indeed, in the famous overture-couplet— ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is much more right than the very rational one; and there is far more truth to life as it is in Lover's couplet— ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... construction. In his leisure hours, he took it to pieces and put it together again several times, in order to understand it. So of William Hutton, whose name is mentioned in another place. Encouraged by a couplet which ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, "from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history." Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... his left he held a trumpet or wooden tube, to announce to the assembled throng the completion of the joyful event. This tube was long preserved with great care at Dunkeld. Some suppose that the fatality long assigned to the stone was fully believed in by Kenneth, by whose orders the following couplet was carved on ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... jolly tar, you! Here's a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. "Here's a stanza[6] On Braganza— Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup Of warm water—" "What's the matter?" "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... of words, strange magic of the pen, Whereby the dead still talk with living men; Whereby a sentence, in its trivial scope, May centre all we love and all we hope; And in a couplet, like a rosebud furled, Lie all the wistful wonder of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... and genial although at the end of September, had induced the occupants of the room to leave open. The sound of laughter and merriment issued from it; but this was presently hushed, and two voices, accompanied by guitars, began to sing a lively seguidilla, of which, at the end of each piquant couplet, the listeners testified their approbation by a hum of mirthful applause. Before the song was over, Luis had sought and found a means of observing what was passing within doors. Grasping the lower branch of a tree which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... they spoke of singing, and each of them sang, or repeated a couplet, which the others repeated enthusiastically. Then they got up with some difficulty, and while the two women, who were rather dizzy, were getting some fresh air, the two males, who were altogether drunk, were performing gymnastic tricks. Heavy, limp, and with scarlet faces, they ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Philip The Handsome presented it to Joanna on her wedding day. Columbus took it to America, but fortunately brought it back again; Peter The Great threw it at an indifferent musician; on one of its later visits to England Pope wrote a couplet to it. And the most astonishing thing in its whole history was that now for more than a hundred years it had vanished completely. To turn up again in a little Devonshire cottage! Verily truth ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... stated intervals, as is done in 'Tears, idle tears' and elsewhere: but clearly none of these would be available to a translator. Where therefore he has to express stanzas, it is easy to see that rhyme may be admissible and even necessary. Pope's couplet may (or may not) stand for elegiacs, and the In Memoriam stanza for some one of Horace's metres. Where the heroes of Virgil's Eclogues sing alternately four lines each, Gray's quatrain seems to suggest itself: and where a similar case occurs in these Idylls (as for instance ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... and I have long puzzled over these enigmatical and possibly corrupt lines: he wrote to me in 1884, "This is the first piece that has beaten me." In the couplet above (vol. xii. 230) "Rayhani" may mean "my basil-plant" or "my food" (the latter Koranic), "my compassion," etc.; and Susani is equally ancipitous "My lilies" or "my sleep": see Bard al-Susan les douceurs du sommeil in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... except A^{13-16}, which, on account of the greater difficulty of three-figure numbers, contained five. Each couplet was composed of a number and a noun, object, ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... thinks that Horace refers here, as in the words Versibus impariter junctis, "Couplets unequal," to the use of pentameter, or short verse, consisting of five feet, and joined to the hexameter, or long verse, of six. This inequality of the couplet Monsieur Dacier justly prefers to the two long Alexandrines of his own country, which sets almost all the French poetry, Epick, Dramatick, Elegiack, or Satyrick, to the tune of Derry Down. In our language, the measures ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... La Bruyere, with his gallery of characters, not one of which was moulded among the people; De la Rochefoucauld's maxims, drawn from the arcana of fashionable life; Racine, whose heroes die with an immaculate couplet and speak the faint echoes of Grecian or Roman sentiment! When politics became common property, and the walls of a prescriptive and conventional system fell, how wild ran speculation and sentiment in the copious and superficial Voltaire and the vague ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... gayly, and the old classical couplet sent his thoughts off to the Aegean sea and the Greek fishermen, and the superstitions which are the soul alphabet ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... sort of Pax Germanica, which would satisfy all the needs of order and of freedom forever; leaving no need for revolutions or reactions. I am myself of a different opinion. When I was a child, when the toy-trade of Germany had begun to flood this country, there was a priggish British couplet, engraven on the minds of governesses, ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... Charles Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter of Mr. Hawes, a South Sea director, and died in 1788. Lord Vane died in 1789. Boswell distinctly states, that the lady mnentioned in Johnson's couplet "was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose Memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett, but Ann Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London." See Boswell's Johnson, vol. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... principles about which no doubt exists. First, its dominant feature is Parallelism, Parallelism of meaning, which, though found in all human song, is carried through this poetry with a constancy unmatched in any other save the Babylonian. The lines of a couplet or a triplet of Hebrew verse may be Synonymous, that is identical in meaning, or Supplementary and Progressive, or Antithetic. But at least their meanings respond or correspond to each other in a way, for which no better ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... various visual experiments of this and the following chapters, the first word of the couplet which describes the condition of the experiment, for example, white-black, always designates the visual condition which the animal was to choose, the second that which it was to avoid on penalty of an electric shock. In the case of Tables 6 and 7, for example, white cardboard was placed ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... Such a thunder of applause as followed was never heard before within the shell of that old theatre. With each succeeding couplet and refrain the uproar was renewed, until presently, when the performer, gathering courage from the favorable temper of his audience, ventured to improvise matter for his distiches from familiarly known local incidents, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... which had been expected of the venerable commander of the army of the Shenandoah. He had spent three months of time, and ten millions of money, and had only emulated the acts of that Gallic sovereign whose great deeds are immortalized in the brief couplet, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... taken a public-house. "And what's your sign?" said the dean. "Oh, the pole and bason; and if your worship would just write me a few lines to put upon it, by way of motto, I have no doubt but it would draw me plenty of customers." The dean took out his pencil, and wrote the following couplet, which long ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... supposed that the smaller Procellariae are only visible before a storm is not very apparent. In point of fact, there is no more reason for associating the petrel specially with storms than there is for the belief expressed in the old Scotch couplet quoted in the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... audience, tittering curiously before, remained spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness of the ending of comedies, of the regret which lingers in the remembrance of past laughter. In a couplet of passionate melancholy she asked, where are the roses of yesterday? whither ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... mystical, and corrupts it. The common mass of mankind employs devotion as an instrument favourable to worldly views and to the material interests of life. In Andalucia, enamoured girls confide to the Virgin their ardent sorrows and desires, as the following couplet will show, and which is sung with frequency and is very popular in that province ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... Government not keeping faith with its subjects, and not making them keep faith with each other. I one day asked Rajah Hunmunt Sing how it was that men guilty of such crimes were tolerated in society, and he answered by quoting the following Hindee couplet:—"Men reverence the man whose heart is wicked, as they adore and make offerings to the evil planet, while they let the good pass unnoticed, or with a ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... of thirty-seven stanzas; the second of seventy-two; the third of forty-eight; each stanza of eight ten-syllable verses, of which the first six rhyme alternately; the last two are a couplet. There is a short argument, in verse, prefixed to each poem. That ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... 41/2 per cents. Burke, on taking his seat beside Pitt in the great Paine Parliament (December, 1792), had protested that he had not abandoned his party through expectation of a pension, but the general belief of those with whom he had formerly acted was that he had been promised a pension. A couplet ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... is the basis of marriage. The famous couplet of Rosalind still holds good. The sex instinct (or rather instincts, for coupled with sex-desire is love of beauty, admiration, joy of possession, triumph, etc.) has the unique place of being more regulated by law and custom than any other basic instinct. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... He added, to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems, until he came to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full, because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his voice again ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the so called copy of great antiquity alluded to by Alpha before it came to the Museum. Well, in all of these, with, I believe, only one exception, the account of the moves does occur exactly (!) as I have given them, always excepting or rather excluding a couplet about two camels (die namliche nicht in die Bude des Tachenspielers passten es weiter unten) Und nun geht es echt fesuitisch weiter, Alpha denies the existence (!) (A hat in Gegentheil Hyde I, p. 63 Citirt) of the account of the moves in every copy of the Shahnama. I, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... I, and I translated into English the two lines which were a couplet by Edmund Price, an old archdeacon of Merion, celebrated in his day ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... succeeded. It is worthy of note, however, that none of these translators had the good taste to imitate the authors of Ferrex and Porrex in the adoption of blank verse, and that one only amongst them made use of the heroic rhymed couplet; the others employing the old alexandrine measure, excepting in the choruses, which were given in various kinds of stanza. Her majesty alone seems to have perceived the superior advantages, or to have been tempted by the greater facility ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... up between the "sleigh" in the carriage-house, and the act of pussy in mauling the poor little mouse, unmentioned, but of importance, in the couplet: ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... be publicly flogged in the hall of his college, and to receive one lash for each line in his satire. Never, surely, was a poet so sharply taught the merit of brevity. How Edward Anne must have regretted that he had not knocked off an epigram, a biting couplet, or a smart quatrain with the sting of the wit in ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... the English poet, John Gay, (1685-1732) whose best known piece "The Beggar's Opera" was said to have made "The Rich gay and Gay rich"? He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph was by Alexander Pope, followed by Gay's own mocking couplet, "Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... punster and poet that ever turned the serious and sentimental into broad humour. Every quaint remark affords a pun or an epigram, and every serious sentence gives birth to some merry couplet. Such is the facility with which he strings together puns and rhyme, that in the course of half an hour he has been known to wager, and win it—that he made a couplet and a pun on every one present, to the number of fifty. Nothing annoys the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... me zat," said innocent Flo, with a look of grave surprise at the peals of laughter which her couplet drew from her brothers. ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... that the New Era was to end in bloodshed, instead of universal peace and good-will towards men,—that the Rights of Man included murder, confiscation, and atheism,—that the Sovereignty of the People meant the rule of King Mob, who seemed determined to carry out to the letter Diderot's famous couplet,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... them: his gravest have more than one light passage. To draw a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more of deep and sustained ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... actually chance to meet her; the unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... and Rupert and Foch had jolly soft roes, a fact which is recorded in a cynical little poem by the precocious Foch, believed to be the only literary work of a whitebait now extant. We have only space here to quote the opening couplet:— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... production of crowing hens was discouraged (the wise old hens laid no eggs with a crow in them, according to the well-known principle of heredity), and the man who had in his youth exterminated the hen of progress actually went about quoting that false couplet as an argument against the higher ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and fall of her voice and now and then stopped his work to look at her with bright, eager, old eyes. He knew some of the places by heart evidently, for once in a while his voice would join the little girl's for a couplet or ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... an thou prank or adorn thyself: I have translated literally, but the couplet strongly suggests ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... wilderness, that ring has shone upon my hand, reminding me always of her who gave it, and on this hand it shall go down into the grave. It is a plain circlet of thick gold, somewhat worn now, a posy-ring, and on its inner surface is cut this quaint couplet: ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... amusement, and his acquaintances always depended just upon the category of each of these places. In the expensive and elegant restaurants certain sharpers of the better class of society surrounded him—gamblers, couplet singers, jugglers, actors, and property-holders who were ruined by leading depraved lives. At first these people treated him with a patronizing air, and boasted before him of their refined tastes, of their knowledge ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... taxing of brains than most players care for. The ordinary rhyming game, without using paper, is for one player to make a remark in an easy metre, and for the next to add a line completing the couplet. Thus in one game that was played one ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... is a couplet of reproach now applied to this once famous city; whose inhabitants seem little worthy of the inspiring call which was addressed to them within these twenty years, by ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... alike, and the encouragement of them must be counted as a certain drawback to the benefits which Surrey, Wyatt, and the other contributors of the Miscellany conferred on English literature by their exercises, here and elsewhere, in the blank verse decasyllable, the couplet, the stanza, and, above ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 1547. No sonnet presents more difficulties than this, in which M.A. has availed himself of a passage in the Cratylus of Plato. The divine hammer spoken of in the second couplet is the ideal pattern after which the souls of men are fashioned; and this in the first terzet seems to be identified with Vittoria Colonna. In the second terzet he regards his own soul as imperfect, lacking the final touches which it ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... such a simple topic as 'How to Retain a Husband's Love'—if your attention is being distracted by a conscientious rendering of Czerny's 101 Exercises in an adjoining room. I could get no further with my article than the opening lines (they like an introductory couplet on the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... sympathy with his kind, his fine common-sense and his genial humour. The same qualities, tempered by a certain grace and tenderness, also enter into the best of his poems. Avoiding the epigram of Pope and the austere couplet of Johnson, he yet borrowed something from each, which he combined with a delicacy and an amenity that he had learned from neither. He himself, in all probability, would have rested his fame on his three chief metrical efforts, 'The Traveller', 'The Hermit', ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... was the son of a gentleman of Florence, he was not gifted with wealth, and was taken to France to serve in the kitchen of Mlle. de Montpensier, the chief princess of the French court. The impishness which characterised his whole career inspired him to turn a highly improper couplet on an accident that happened in public to Mademoiselle,—and worst of all, he set it to music. She did not see the fun of the joke, and dismissed him, but the king laughed so much at his wit, that he had him presented, and interested himself ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... a young Strogonoff, were, it is said, perfect actors. Armand de Polignac had a little part. Tragedy was not my forte. But in the second piece I achieved a little success, which the Chevalier de Boufflers was kind enough to celebrate in a very bright couplet, sung at the close. He gave me the name of the Little White Mouse. After that the Queen called me her little white mouse, and showed me a thousand kindnesses. After the play there was a children's supper; the princes waited on, us and were much diverted ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of London, 1701; for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... town. The ancient character of Musselburg seemed to have been as congenial to his temperament as Nuremberg was to that of Hans Sachs. Indeed, in antiquity it can glory over 'Auld Reekie,' according to the quaint couplet,— ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Verstegan's couplet, even if it be not strictly true, makes a very good text for a discourse on our local names. The ham, or home, and the ton, or town, originally an enclosure (cf. Ger. Zaun, hedge), were, at any rate ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... New York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe" with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet occurred: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... and nights with them in different places of amusement, and his acquaintances always depended just upon the category of each of these places. In the expensive and elegant restaurants certain sharpers of the better class of society surrounded him—gamblers, couplet singers, jugglers, actors, and property-holders who were ruined by leading depraved lives. At first these people treated him with a patronizing air, and boasted before him of their refined tastes, of their knowledge of the merits of wine ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... way of throwing off injustice. There began to be a new sentiment in the air. Men were asking why the few should dress in velvet and the many in rags. It was the first revolt against the tyranny of wealth, when people were heard on the streets singing the couplet ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... to Memory, or a New and Complete Treatise of Analogy between the French and English Languages," compiled by Charles Turrell, Professor of Languages, and published in 1828, contains the words which are the same in each language (alphabet, banquet, couplet, &c.), and those almost the same—"Letters necessary in English, and superfluous in French, are included in a parenthesis, thus Bag(g)age. Letters necessary in French, and superfluous in English are printed in Italics, thus Hommage." At first sight it seems as if this plan were a good ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... even to deriving the word Devonshire from Dane-shire, the shire of the Danes, though it is known to have had its name before ever the first Dane landed in England, and there seems to be little likelihood, therefore, but only "a sympathie in letters." He concludes his discussion by the couplet: ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... says to us?"—"Yes, I hear," said the King, and continued his game. Monsieur, who was in the habit of introducing passages from plays into his conversation, said to my father-in-law, "M. Campan, that pretty little couplet again, if you please;" and pressed the King to reply. At length the Queen said, "But something must be said to Campan." The King then spoke to my father-in-law in these words: "Tell M. d'Inisdal that I cannot consent to be carried off!" The Queen enjoined M. ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... is a neat, witty, and pointed utterance briefly couched in verse form, usually satiric, and reserving its sting to the last line; sometimes made the vehicle of a quaintly-turned compliment, as, for example, in Pope's couplet to Chesterfield, when asked to write ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the Persians are of several kinds; the gazel or ode usually treats of love, beauty, or friendship. The poet generally introduces his name in the last couplet. The idyl resembles the gazel, except that it is longer. Poetry enters as a universal element into all compositions; physics, mathematics, medicine, ethics, natural history, astronomy, grammar—all lend themselves to verse ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... outburst to the thistle, and the thistle's reply, instead of a Sir Walter and Queen Elizabeth couplet. Long, lance-shaped, deeply cleft, sharply pointed, and prickly dark green leaves make the ascent almost unendurable; nevertheless, the ant bravely mounts to where the bristle-pointed, overlapping scales of the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... was the usual voluntary at the opening of service. Then the old minister said, "Let us continue the worship of God by singing the hymn on page 554." He "lined" the hymn—that is, he read each couplet before it was sung. With the coming in of hymn books and other newfangled things the good old custom of "lining the hymn" has disappeared. But on that Sunday morning the Marquis d'Entremont thought he had never heard anything more delightful ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... Stretched along the deck like logs— Bear a hand, you jolly tar, you! Here's a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. "Here's a stanza[6] On Braganza— Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup Of warm water—" "What's the matter?" "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... expresses the deepest personal emotion through the medium of a literary style that had been developed by long years of study. The Laments, to be sure, are not based on any classic model and they contain few direct imitations of the classical poets, though it may be noted that the concluding couplet of Lament XV is translated from the Greek Anthology. On the other hand they are interspersed with continual references to classic story; and, more important, are filled with the atmosphere of the ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... not merely anagrammatical, scorns the couplet for the mere sake of the couplet, and has little time for the smiting ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... footnote. Another friend of Vincent Novello's uses the same couplet (from Watt's Divine Songs for Children, Song XXVIII., "For the Lord's Day, Evening") in the description of glees by the old cricketers at the Bat and Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, near Hambledon—I refer to John Nyren, author of The Young Cricketer's ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... kind of fool you're going to make of yourself," cried Septimus, a ray of wonderful lucidity flashing across his mind. "There's a couplet of Tennyson's—I don't read poetry, you know," he broke off apologetically, "except a little Persian. I'm a hard, scientific person, all machinery. My father used to throw poetry books into the fire if he caught me with one, but my mother used to read to me now and ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... and the old classical couplet sent his thoughts off to the Aegean sea and the Greek fishermen, and the superstitions which are the soul alphabet ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not be accused of plagiarism, we acknowledge ourselves indebted for the hyperbole contained in the last two lines of these introductory stanzas, to an original recommendation for a proper display of rapture, as contained in the following couplet by one Peter Ker, wherein he very humanely invites all the vessels belonging to Great Britain to strand themselves out of joy for the accession of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... garret—let him know't who will— There was my bed—full hard it was and small; My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun; For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days when ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... presented to view, prior to entering the wild waste, underneath a rude painting of a weary traveller in a storm, had the following rude couplet: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... faith with its subjects, and not making them keep faith with each other. I one day asked Rajah Hunmunt Sing how it was that men guilty of such crimes were tolerated in society, and he answered by quoting the following Hindee couplet:—"Men reverence the man whose heart is wicked, as they adore and make offerings to the evil planet, while they let the good pass unnoticed, or with a ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... A version published in the "Cambro-Briton" is somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... beyond the industry of the most persevering of Dryasdusts. Nay, he even succeeded by some mysterious means in getting one of his poems published separately. It was called 'Inebriety,' and was an unblushing imitation of Pope. Here is a couplet by ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... which ever seemed to lie gazing up at the tower. I soon found it, because it was the only one in that quarter from which I could see the top of the tower. It recorded the life and death of an aged pair who had been married fifty years, concluding with the couplet— ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... rhymes, Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line it "whispers through the trees" If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep" The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep" Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song [356] That, like a wounded snake drags ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... to their estate, Hang their old trophies o'er the garden gate." Pope, in this couplet, is said to have alluded to the entrance of Lord Peterborough's ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... his shoulder. A low guttural sound appeared to come from this ill-omened bird. The augur bent his ear. Sounds shaped themselves into something like articulation, and the following couplet was distinctly heard:— ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian model, and generally end with a couplet. Her blank verse is the worst of all. The most ambitious poem in the book is that called "A Day in the Life of Mary Stuart," a dramatic poem in three scenes, dated the last of January, 1567. It contains a scene between the queen and her maidens, a scene ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... title. Until the year 1792, there existed at Paris no theatre specially appropriated to this style of performance, which was given at the Comedie Italienne. It attracted crowds; and Sedaine, the composer, vexed to see it preferred to his comic operas, wrote a couplet against it, exhibiting more spleen than poetical merit. The attack, however, together with the refusal of a small pension which he had claimed from the Italian Comedy, to whose treasury he had brought millions of francs, irritated Piis, the vaudevilliste ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the fancy. The great easiness of blank verse renders the poet too luxuriant; he is tempted to say many things which might be better omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words. But when the difficulty of artificial rhyming is interposed; where the poet commonly confines his verse to his couplet, and must continue that verse in such words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme, the fancy then gives leisure to the judgment to come in; which, seeing so heavy a task imposed, is ready ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... afraid. My father was a man who hid a great deal of tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet with terror, for I knew beforehand that it would ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... done; in a corner of the house must he stand and repeat that couplet, till some tender-hearted lass relieves him. Now for the questions which are most deeply laid, or so touching to him, that he finds much difficulty to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... I translated into English the two lines which were a couplet by Edmund Price, an old archdeacon of Merion, celebrated in his day ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... chamber was deserted, and far off was the place of our meeting. He says also,' continued the eunuch, 'that he cannot complete the piece, and will give a rich present to anyone who adds to it a second couplet to his satisfaction.' ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... of the army of the Shenandoah. He had spent three months of time, and ten millions of money, and had only emulated the acts of that Gallic sovereign whose great deeds are immortalized in the brief couplet, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... attract public attention. Before he was twenty-five years old he had established his reputation as a wit, had spent nearly a year in the Bastille on a charge of writing satirical verses, and had produced a successful tragedy. In this play a couplet sneering at priests might possibly have become a familiar quotation even had it been written by another pen.[Footnote: Oedipe, written in 1718. "Nos pretres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense; Notre credulite fait toute leur science." ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... he could not imagine how they could be moved by any such nonsense. He used to laugh in a very hearty jolly way, but a little late, and some time after the joke was over. Pray, why should all gentlemen have a literary turn? And do we like some of our friends the worse because they never turned a couplet in their lives? Ruined, perforce idle, dependent on his brother for supplies, if he read a book falling asleep over it, with no fitting work for his great strong hands to do—how lucky it is that ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... British seas, is generally attended with a hazy atmosphere, and is so ungenial as to countenance the couplet— ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... free man than the court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich to give to the poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and not the will of another man commanding him for the commandment's sake. The men all listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a couplet at the end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not unmusical voices. As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by me, as they were indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and tangled thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... the encouragement of them must be counted as a certain drawback to the benefits which Surrey, Wyatt, and the other contributors of the Miscellany conferred on English literature by their exercises, here and elsewhere, in the blank verse decasyllable, the couplet, the stanza, and, above all, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... test has been used by Koenig,[284] and I will first give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less than two; but I ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... his work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is "good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than in the case of the Alaric, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... poetry; and though perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that "he writes very well for a gentleman." His serious pieces are sometimes elevated; and his trifles are sometimes elegant. In his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained. In his Odes to Marlborough there are beautiful lines; but in the second ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... shudder not! I should bestow it So brimming full she couldn't blow it. Wishes aren't horses: true, but still There are worse roadsters than goodwill. And so I wish my darling health, And just to round my couplet, wealth, With faith enough to bridge the chasm 'Twixt Genesis and Protoplasm, And bear her o'er life's current vext From this world to a better next, Where the full glow of God puts out Poor reason's farthing candle, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet: ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... kept staring at Thorgerda Glum's daughter; his wife Thorhillda saw this, and she got wroth, and made a couplet upon him. ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... as of its splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet— ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... premature end!) The sonorous mourner could hardly have recognized himself in the impersonations in which he was presented, nor his progeny in the concrete objects to which they were reduced. The well-known couplet, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... understanding, that they were practically unassailable by reason of their ramparts of wealth, that they lived in comfort, if not in luxury, while those whom they dominated were struggling hard for a bare subsistence. I can imagine the youth reciting the couplet which ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... of the most respectable of the governors, was found, at his death, with a copy of verses in his pocket, which included the following couplet: ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... answer of the tryst-folk: "Yadi Husein" (Memory of Husein) still ringing in their ears. The new party is composed of Bombay Musulman youths, the tallest of whom carries an umbrella made out of pink, green and white paper, under which the rest crowd and sing the following couplet relating to the wife and daughter ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... lonely wilderness, that ring has shone upon my hand, reminding me always of her who gave it, and on this hand it shall go down into the grave. It is a plain circlet of thick gold, somewhat worn now, a posy-ring, and on its inner surface is cut this quaint couplet: ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... that she must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him: ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... wished I had had better sense than to enter upon such a forlorn enterprise. But just then I had a saving thought—at least a thought that offered a chance. While the storm was still raging, I made up a Scotch couplet, and then ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The second couplet was sung by Panshin with special power and expression, the sound of waves was heard in the stormy accompaniment. After the words "and longing vain," he sighed softly, dropped his eyes and let his voice gradually die away, morendo. When he had finished, Lisa praised the ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... texts, 41 is made a triplet, and 42 is made to consist of a single line; 42 is represented as Vaisampayana's speech. This is evidently an error; 41 a couplet. 42 also is so. Rajna etc., refer to Bhima. K.P. Singha avoids the error; the Burdwan translator, as usual, makes a mess of 41 by taking ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... objects for exhibition, and papers for reading, worthy of the body—and therefore unlike many which we have too frequently heard, and to which, but for the undeserved imputation which we should seem to cast upon our good friend Sir Henry Ellis, might be applied, with a slight alteration, that couplet ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... This, not to be confounded with Cottle's "Monody on Henderson," was Coleridge's "Monody on Chatterton." Lamb's emendations were not accepted. As regards "The Man of Ross," the couplet beginning "Friend to the friendless" ultimately had a place both in that poem and in the Monody, but the couplet "and o'er the dowried virgin" was never replaced in either. The lines on spring, page ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... habit of writing imitations of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he wrote the couplet— ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... accompaniment of sound, which are the main secret of modern verse. He is not satisfied, ample as it may seem, with his double-rhyme harmony. He confines himself to it, indeed, in the famous overture-couplet— ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... direct part in it, did much to embitter the relations of their respective parties.[16] Not less irritating were the jeux d'esprit with which Canning continued to assail the ministry in the newspaper press.[17] The most famous of these is the couplet:— ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... influence cannot be compared with those of her predecessor, Mme. de Pompadour. Modes were followed, but never invented by her. "With her taste for the pleasures of a grisette, her patronage falls from the opera to the couplet, from paintings and statuaries to bronzes and sculptures in wood; her clientele are no longer artists, philosophers, poets—they are the gods of lower domains, mimics, buffoons, dancers, comedians." She was the lowest and most common type of ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... is not allowed in comic poetry. When I opened my well-known military epic, "Riddles of the King," with the couplet, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... the first part. The pause is in them, as in the rest, variously placed through the course of the verses; and thus they bear no more resemblance than their associates, to those minute Elegies of twelve alternate rhimes, closing with a couplet, which assume the name of Sonnet, without any other resemblance to that order of Verse, except their limitation to fourteen lines. I never found the quadruple rhimes injurious to the general expression of the sense, but in the excepted instances. When it is considered how few they are in so ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more of deep and sustained gravity than is to be found ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... ourselves on the dazzling white mats, and listen to the singular duet sung by those two mousmes: a strange musical medley, slow and mournful, beginning with two or three high notes, and descending at each couplet, in an almost imperceptible manner, into actual solemnity. The song keeps its dragging slowness; but the accompaniment, becoming more and more accentuated, is like the impetuous sound of a far-off hurricane. At the end, when these girlish voices, usually so soft, give out their hoarse ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fine south-west wind, we passed inside of the Bermudas; and notwithstanding the old couplet, which was quoted again and again by those who thought we should have one more touch of a storm before our ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... envy, pride, Their empire in our hearts divide. Give others riches, power, and station, 'Tis all on me an usurpation. I have no title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher. In Pope I cannot read a line, But, with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Pox take him and his wit!' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous, biting way. Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce, Refined ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of my sister Louise and the King of the Belgians. But lo! at the climax of the piece, the principal performer came forward, before the newly married couple, the Royalties, and all the great personages forming the audience, and burst forth with a gag couplet, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... increased amount of colour and quality which the received forms can bear, and which are consequently likely to be acceptable to people of artistic perceptions. If a Tennyson had lived in the time of Pope, he would doubtless have used the heroic couplet faithfully, and put into it just a small increase of melody, a slightly more graceful play of thought, a finer observation of natural things—but he probably would not have strayed beyond the accepted forms ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... me; and now that my heart yearns to set them in verse for her reading, I cannot frame a line that doth not limp and stumble. What a thing it is that I can sing the tears into mine eyes with another fellow's verses and cannot build a couplet of mine own." Johnnie closed his eyes, puckered ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... condolence, but of good cheer. He has no theory upon the subject, probably; he is no Shepherd of Salisbury Plain; but he knows better than to waste the exhilarating air of this wild and frosty day in reminiscences of summer time. It is a pretty-sounding couplet,— ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... article in the "Dictionary of National Biography" lays stress on the freedom from conceits in Earle's few poems at a time when conceits were universal. The lines on Sir John Burroughs contain a couplet which is wonderfully close to Wordsworth's ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... the most simple forms are the couplet and the triplet. They often form a part of a continuous poem, but they are ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... enough to do with poetry," comments Montaigne on this couplet, "to say about this that not only is there nothing barbarous in this fancy, but that it is altogether worthy of Anacreon." Such is his enthusiasm, indeed, that he finds in this simple and faithful expression of sentiment the highest form of poesy; "the true, the supreme, the divine; ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commended. "Madam," I said, "you can pour three ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... society.' The concluding paper of his Rambler is at once dignified and pathetick. I cannot, however, but wish that he had not ended it with an unnecessary Greek verse, translated also into an English couplet[666]. It is too much like the conceit of those dramatick poets, who used to conclude each act with a rhyme; and the expression in the first line of his couplet, 'Celestial powers', though proper in Pagan poetry, is ill suited to Christianity, with 'a conformity[667]' to which he consoles ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Russia and Turkey. It soon became evident that unless saved by English intervention, Constantinople must fall into the hands of the Czar. Beaconsfield's spirited language at this crisis was paraphrased in the London music-halls in the famous couplet: ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... not spare the vulnerable points of his own countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... and versification of the Monody, the heroic couplet in which it is written has long been a sort of Ulysses' bow, at which Poetry tries her suitors, and at which they almost all fail. Redundancy of epithet and monotony of cadence are the inseparable companions of this metre ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... specimen of the affected style of compliment prevalent in the time of Elizabeth. The third couplet, at first sight, appears to have a signification exactly opposed to that which the context requires. We should expect, instead of "the tongue all impatient to speak," to find "the ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the street, I said to myself, 'Except this Umm Amru were without equal in the world, the poets had not celebrated her in ode and canzon.' So I fell in love with her; but two days after, the same man passed, singing the following couplet: ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene, beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by Shakespeare in the Rape of Lucrece, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes, and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a third rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the only couplet in which beasts as well as birds are subjected to this searching analysis. I think you will admit that it is the most sagacious and impressive of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... rhymes aforesaid. As to Antistrophe 2b, that follows Antistrophe 2a, so far as it goes; but after line 9 it breaks off suddenly, and closes with two lines corresponding in length and rhyme to the closing couplet of Antistrophe 1b, the section immediately preceding, which, however, belongs not to this group, but to the other. Mr. Locock speaks of line 124 as 'a rhymeless line.' Rhymeless it is not, for shore, its rhyme-termination, answers to bower ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... And yet, 'tis true, There are as mad, abandoned critics, too!" This couplet, penned by Pope, is ever new— But then, dear friends, the second ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... a gossiper, writing merely for the entertainment of a private circle." He regarded Swift, however, as a pattern of correctness both in style and sentiment, and he read to his young friend some of the short poetical addresses to Stella. Amicus says Smith expressed particular pleasure with one couplet— ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Semitic goddess Ishtar and by the Sumerian goddess Nintu or Ninkharsagga. In the passage in the Babylonian Version, "the Lady of the Gods" has always been treated as a synonym of Ishtar, the second half of the couplet being regarded as a restatement of the first, according to a recognized law of Babylonian poetry. We may probably assume that this interpretation is correct, and we may conclude by analogy that "the holy Innanna" in the second half of the Sumerian couplet is there merely employed as a synonym ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the highest cast was called Venus and the lowest canis. (Cf. a well-known couplet of Propertius, lib. iv. el. viii. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... authority upon the imagination. But the suggestion of two portrait busts of the period of classical decadence, one in marble representing a boy, and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to Protus, one of the few flawless poems of Browning. His mastery over the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in a few passages of Sordello. The poem is, however, more a page from history than a study in the fine arts; and Browning's imagination has made it a page which lives in our memory through ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... friends in this country makes me think of England with pleasure and respect; and I shall conclude with a very homely couplet, which, after all the fashionable liberality of modern travellers, contains ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Cambridge, the author of Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satires[9] and the author of Skialethea". This contemporary opinion regarding the fact that The Vision of Piers Plowman was esteemed a satire of outstanding merit in those days, is a curious commentary on Hall's boastful couplet describing himself ...
— English Satires • Various
... sublime, in their truth. "Their chief and enduring charm is their fathomless depth, their unassuming loveliness." Poems constructed with great artistic skill do not occur. Here and there a modest bud of lyric poesy shyly raises its head, like the following couplet, describing a ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... do very little, and they do absolutely nothing. All of us in our younger days, I am quite sure, were taught by those who had the care of us a verse which was intended to inculcate the virtue of industry. One couplet was to this effect— ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... as to the Verse and the Sense; for it makes the thing described more immediately present than it would be otherwise. I cannot just now recollect an Example in Milton of this nature, but I remember one in Fairfax, in a Couplet ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... gives us directly his own emotional life, preferring to let the shepherd, the soldier, the mountain lad speak. The type of the simple folksong predominates, and from the VOLKSLIED Uhland introduced into modern verse the modified Nibelungen stanza and the rhymed couplet. In his ballads Uhland prefers older historical subjects, as in Taillefer, that rarest jewel among his ballads; or at least uses an historic setting, as in the more ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, complete outer walls and complete inner (these, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... this night." When he heard this, he planned to enter the house amongst the mob of women and saw the twain seated on the bridal couch.[FN107] By and by, the bridegroom came up to her, whereupon she sighed heavily and weeping, recited this couplet, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... oft heard spoke on, The famous statue of Laocoon. 'Tis like,—O yes, 'tis very like it, The long, long string, with which you fly kite. 'Tis like what you, and one or two more, Roar to your Echo[7] in good humour; And every couplet thou ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... larger public, and make a profession out of what was before only a side issue in your life. It's a new field, and it 's a noble one, taken in its highest aspect, as you have always taken it. My motto for you, Polly, is Goethe's couplet:— ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... of his selfknowledge that, from the moment at which he began to distinguish himself in public life, he ceased to be a versifier. It does not appear that, after he became a Lord of the Treasury, he ever wrote a couplet, with the exception of a few well turned lines inscribed on a set of toasting glasses which were sacred to the most renowned Whig beauties of his time. He wisely determined to derive from the poetry of others a glory which he never would ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... older man, who walked less vigorously, echoed the couplet with slow emphasis, as if savouring every word. Then both together, bowing their ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... were. Nor was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like "the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice," which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be called the worst couplet in the world's literature. In his real poetry (even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... with the old jest, The deil take them wha have the least pint stoup.' ['The Scotch are liberal in computing their land and liquor; the Scottish pint corresponds to two English quarts. As for their coin, every one knows the couplet— ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... made desperate work now and then with rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with "Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make rhyme ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... to quote a stanza here, A couplet there. I'm very sure 'Twould aid my suit could I appear Au fait in books and literature. I'll do it! This jingle I can quickly learn; Then, hid in roses, ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... You know the couplet, Mr. Rady. Why shouldn't I quote Sandoe? You know you like him, Rady. But, if you've missed me, I'm sorry. Rip and I have had a beautiful day. We've made new acquaintances. We've seen the world. I'm the monkey that has seen the world, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of calculations. It does not appear, indeed, that the Chinese were, at any time, able to predict an eclipse, notwithstanding all that has been said in their favour on this subject. The reputed Chinese tables, published by Father Couplet, have been detected to be those of Tycho Brahe; and Cassini found the chronology of their eclipses, published by Martinus, to be erroneous, and their returns impossible. It could not indeed be otherwise; the defectiveness of the calendar must necessarily falsify all ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and Clearchus, was, with his work, introduced to the public in 1683 by Izaak Walton, who styles him "an acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser." If so, he must have been one of the first of English poets to adopt the very loose enjambed decasyllabic couplet in which his work, like that of Marmion and still more Chamberlayne, is written. His poem is unfinished, and the construction and working-up of the story are looser even than the metre; but it contains a great deal of charming description and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... but to look in a pier-glass," I retorted. "And, besides, that is not sufficient. You will want some rhyming couplet out of a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
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