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More "Metrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Nennius (ninth century). 3. The Armoric collections of Walter [Cale'nius] or Gauliter, archdeacon of Oxford. 4. The Chronicon sive Historia Britonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth. 5. Floating traditions and metrical ballads ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... some interesting remarks on the metrical features of this complex ode. On the 10th line of Antistrophe 1a (line 86 of the ode)—Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk—which exceeds by one foot the 10th lines of the two corresponding divisions, Strophe 1 and Antistrophe ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... selections from the Amyntas quoted in this article have been selected from the admirable metrical translation ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... metrical psalm sounded strangely in unaccustomed ears. Of melody there seemed little or none. The notes ascended and fell, and quavered into odd, unexpected trills and shakes, but it was sung with an earnestness and an intensity which could not fail to be impressive. The women, clean and tidy in their ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... be met with in this volume, I may say that the reader will not find one which is not (as I believe) either native or imported with the early settlers, nor one which I have not, with my own ears, heard in familiar use. In the metrical portion of the book, I have endeavored to adapt the spelling as nearly as possible to the ordinary mode of pronunciation. Let the reader who deems me over-particular remember this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... A second form of metrical evidence is found in the proportion of 'masculine' and 'feminine' endings in the verse. A line has a masculine ending when its last syllable is stressed; when it ends, for example, on words or phrases like ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... wit than its devotion. While making these discoveries, Alec chanced to observe—he was quick-eyed—that some of the dusty papers on the table were scrawled over with the first amorphous appearance of metrical composition. These moved his curiosity; for what kind of poetry could the most unpoetic-looking Mr Cupples produce from that great head of his with the lanky colourless hair?—But meantime we must return to the commencement of ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the child's death. A collection of poems, entitled The Grave, entirely devoted to his memory, is overflowing with an unique intensity of feeling. The poems are composed in short quatrains of a slowly moving rhythm restrained by frequent pauses and occasional metrical irregularities, and thus they reflect with faithfulness the paternal agony with which they are filled. They belong to the earlier works of the poet, but they disclose great lyric power and are the first deep notes of the poet's genius. A few lines from ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of the metrical unit in Old English verse, the half-line, Professor Eduard Sievers,[4] of the University of Leipzig, has shown that there are only five types, or varieties, employed. These he classifies as follows, the perpendicular line serving to separate ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors of his "Dernier Jour d'un ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... language of this somewhat unlettered Indian we catch faint glimpses of the poetic beauty with which the tradition glowed when actually related at the wigwam door. An attempt has been made to retain and crystallize this poetic beauty in the preceding metrical version ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal—not metrical—translation and had issued them in ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... the Commander in Chief, or a tirade against the Government, was sure to be eagerly read and warmly approved of. As a specimen of this kind of literature, and an illustration of the public opinion of the time, I may translate here one of those metrical tirades. Though it was never printed, it obtained a ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... down which the relation of congruence between segments is to satisfy. It is supposed that we have a complete theory of points, straight lines, planes, and the order of points on planes—in fact, a complete theory of non-metrical geometry. We then enquire about congruence and lay down the set of conditions—or axioms as they are called—which this relation satisfies. It has then been proved that there are alternative relations which satisfy these conditions equally well and that there ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... languages; and English, German and French writers are all agreed in pronouncing it one of the most perfect expressions of the religion and philosophy of the Vedas. Sir Edwin Arnold popularized it by his metrical rendering under the name of "The Secret of Death," and Ralph Waldo Emerson gives its story in brief at the close ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... SPANISH WRITERS.—In Germany, in the age of the Hohenstaufens, the poets called Minnesingers abounded. They were conspicuous at the splendid tournaments and festivals. In the thirteenth century numerous lays of love, satirical fables, and metrical romances were composed or translated. Of the Round Table legends, that of the San Graal (the holy vessel) was the most popular. It treated of the search for the precious blood of Christ, which was said to have been brought in a cup or charger into Northern Europe by Joseph of Arimathea. During ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Iconium(258) gives a metrical catalogue of the Biblical books. The canon of the Old Testament is the usual one, except that he says of Esther at the end, "some judge that Esther should be added to the foregoing." He notices none of the apocryphal books. His New Testament canon agrees ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... At least three English metrical renderings of Benedicite exist, one of the 18th and two of the 19th century, by J. Merrick, J.S. Blackie, and Richard Wilton respectively. The first of these writers, who expands freely, concludes with a stanza designed to put the Song unmistakeably ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... you tell me each metrical puppy Might make of such parodies two pair a day; Mocking birds think they obtain for each copy Paradise plumes for the parodied lay:— Ladder of fame! if man can't reach thy top, he Is right to sing just as high up as he may; I'd be a Parody, made by a puppy, Who makes of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... not even remotely concerned with metrical analysis. For that phase, with a discussion as to the effect of the various metrical systems, see Klotz, Grundzuge der altromischen Metrik, esp. p. 370 ff. Cf. Duff, A Lit. Hist. of Rome, p. 196. Note Donat, de Com. VIII. 9 and ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... of all work, replacing indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention—for, in Shelley's hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to indicate the structure or elucidate the sense. For this reason ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Having sprung from that sinful form of marriage called Asura, the issue becomes wicked in conduct. Persons acquainted with the histories of olden times, conversant with duties, devoted to the scriptures and firm in maintaining the restraints therein laid down, recite in this connection some metrical lines sung in days of yore by Yama. Even this is what Yama had sung. That man who acquires wealth by selling his own son, or who bestows his daughter after accepting a dower for his own livelihood, has to sink in seven terrible hells one after another, known ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... musical devotion have always wished for a more happy metrical version than they have yet obtained of the Book of Psalms. This wish the piety of Blackmore led him to gratify, and he produced (1721) "A New Version of the Psalms of David fitted to the Tunes used in Churches," which ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... between the two ends was filled by younger creatures. It was spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony, free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the years of the great war and those persons over military age who had not been called upon to enter them, or about freedom; free love, free thought and a ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... beauty or quickness in writing, if nature has not stimulated them to acquire these accomplishments in the given number of years, they should let alone. And as to the learning of compositions committed to writing which are not set to the lyre, whether metrical or without rhythmical divisions, compositions in prose, as they are termed, having no rhythm or harmony—seeing how dangerous are the writings handed down to us by many writers of this class—what will you do ...
— Laws • Plato
... of the other sonnets in the collection, with the exception of the one from the Portuguese, is framed according to the legitimate Italian model, which, in the author's opinion, possesses no peculiar beauty for an ear accustomed only to the metrical forms of our own language. The sonnets in this collection are rather poems ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... these ballads, at least, should be published, and he set to work to prepare them for the press. Allan Cunningham, with whom Borrow was acquainted, contributed, at his request, a metrical dedication. The volume appeared on 10th May, in an edition of five hundred copies at ten shillings and sixpence each. It appears that some two hundred copies were subscribed for, thus ensuring the cost of production. The balance, or a large proportion of it, was ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... outcome of others of a still earlier period, and which give a contemporary history of the country in the Gaelic language of the fifth century. There is no other modern nation in Europe that can point to such a literary past. The Scotch Celts had early metrical verse, of which the Ossian, wherein is related the heroic deeds of Fingal, was supposed to have been sung by all the ancient Celtic bards. In the eighteenth century, Macpherson, a Scotchman, found some of these poems sung in the Highlands of Scotland; and, making a careful study of them, he translated ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... how Browning wished his metrical movement to be judged. This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of life—the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... these, however, it simply meant 'as old as the days of Saturn,' and, like the Greek Ogugios, was a kind of proverbial expression for something antiquated. Hence (1) the rude rhythmical effusions, which contained the early Roman story, might be called Saturnian, not with reference to their metrical law, but to their antiquity; and (2) the term Saturnius was also applied to a definite measure on the principles of Greek prosody, though rudely and loosely moulded—the measure employed by Naevius, which soon became ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... so also have the wild and barbarous tribes of Soudan, and the wandering Esquimaux, their ditties, which, however insignificant in comparison with the compositions of the former nations, still are entitled in every essential point to the name of poetry; if poetry mean metrical compositions intended to soothe and recreate the mind fatigued by the cares, distresses, and anxieties to which mortality ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken Carlyle, brother of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... verse, they are only too plenty For ringing the changes on metrical chimes; A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty, Have filled that great basket with ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the wars which the Albyn had waged with their enemies of Scandinavia. To the same period we are disposed to assign the "Song of the Owl," though it has been regarded by a respectable authority[10] as of modern origin. Of a portion of this celebrated composition we subjoin a metrical translation from the pen of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... 1876, which contains an interesting paper on "Wordsworth and Gray." After quoting Wordsworth's remark that "Gray was at the head of those poets who, by their reasonings, have attempted to widen the space of separation between prose and metrical composition, and was, more than any other man, curiously elaborate in the construction of his own poetic diction," ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... GUARINI.—Hannibal Caro, by his poems, his letters, his literary criticism, his comedy, The Beggars, and his metrical translation of the Aeneid, acquired high rank in the judgment ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... before the tradition arose that Gilbert Elliot WAS laird of Stobs before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Now that tradition was in full force on the Border before 1688. We know that (see chapter on Kinmont Willie, infra), for, in 1688, a man born in 1613, Captain Walter Scott of Satchells, in his Metrical History of the Honourable Families of the Names of Scott and Elliot, represents Gilbert Elliot of Stobs as riding with Buccleuch in the rescue of Kinmont Willie, in 1596. {95a} Now Satchells's own father rode in that fray, ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... Whittingham and his adherents, still resolute, as Bale wrote, "to erect a Church of the Purity" (we may perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later name of Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where the leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical translation of the Psalms which left its traces on English psalmody and in the production of what was afterwards known as ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... had protected in troubled times. He loved to handle medals and coins, and knew the points of old engravings. He wrote a history of the Christian Church down to our own ill-conducted Reformation, and composed a complete metrical version of the Psalms of David and of the Song of Solomon. These and many other productions, which he characterised as "The Employment of my Solitude," still remain in his own handwriting. Amongst them, Yorkshire ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... interspersed in the Eclogues that Drayton's best work at this time is to be found: already his metrical versatility is discernible; for though he doubtless remembered the many varieties of metre employed by Spenser in the Calendar, his verses already bear a stamp of their own. The long but impetuous lines, such as 'Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree', afford a striking ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... he had had much experience of life beyond college walls. His choice of models—the artificial pastorals in which the Renaissance had modelled itself on Virgil and Theocritus, rather than Virgil and Theocritus themselves—was not altogether happy. He showed, indeed, already his extraordinary metrical skill, experimenting with rhyme-royal and other stanzas, fourteeners or eights and sixes, anapaests more or less irregular, and an exceedingly important variety of octosyllable which, whatever may have been his own idea in practising it, looked back to early Middle English rhythms and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... may be here briefly noticed. First: a German metrical version of the Game of Chess, moralized, called Der Schachzabel. This is an extraordinary, and highly illuminated MS. upon paper; written in a sort of secretary gothic hand, in short rhyming verse, as I conceive about the year 1400, or 1450. The embellishments are large and droll, and in ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... As regards the metrical part Dr. Steingass writes to me, "The verses in Al-Hayfa and Yusuf, where not mere doggerel, are spoiled by the spelling. I was rarely able to make out even the metre and I think you have accomplished a feat by translating them as you ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... everywhere professional bards; and the stories told in Indian villages are frequently the substance of the chants of these bards. More than this, the line between singing and narration is so faintly drawn, that the bards themselves often interpose great patches of prose between the metrical portions of their recitations. Fairs, festivals, and marriages all over India are attended by the bards, who are always ready to perform for pay and drink. Mr. Leland believes the stories he obtained from the Christian ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... John Marston are of Oxford, also Watson and Warner. Henry Vaughan the Silurist, Sir John Davies, George Sandys, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Donne, Lovelace, and Wither belong to the sister University, so did Dr. Brady—but Oxford must not claim all the merit of the metrical version of the Psalms, for Brady's colleague, Dr. Nahum Tate, was a Dublin man. Otway and Collins, Young, Johnson, Charles Wesley, Southey, Landor, Hartley Coleridge, Beddoes, Keble, Isaac Williams, Faber, and Clough are names of which their University may well be proud. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Greek vases. But the most curious fact connected with their use in this country seems to be the knowledge our Saxon ancestors had of them; though the use, in accordance with the earliest custom, appears to have been as a shelter or mark of distinction for royalty. In Caedmon's "Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of Scripture," now in the British Museum (Harleian MS. No. 603), an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the tenth century, is the drawing of a king, who has an umbrella held over his head by an attendant, in the same way as it is borne over modern ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... filled the papal throne from 1623 to 1644, a man well versed in literature, especially in Latin poetry, and himself one of the distinguished poets of his time, took measures for the emendation of the hymns in the Roman Breviary. He was offended by the many defects in their metrical composition, and it is said that upwards of nine hundred and fifty faults in metre were corrected, which gave to Urban occasion to say that the Fathers had begun rather than completed the hymns. These, as corrected, he caused to be inserted in the Breviary. ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... the name of a metre, and talk of elegiac-poets and epic-poets, thinking that they call them poets not by reason of the imitative nature of their work, but indiscriminately by reason of the metre they write in. Even if a theory of medicine or physical philosophy be put forth in a metrical form, it is usual to describe the writer in this way; Homer and Empedocles, however, have really nothing in common apart from their metre; so that, if the one is to be called a poet, the other should be termed a physicist rather than a poet. We should ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Altertum, Bd. xxxiii. 262-4). Dr. Joyce has a somewhat florid version in, his Old Celtic Romances, from which I have borrowed a touch or two. I have neither extenuated nor added aught but the last sentence of the Fairy Maiden's last speech. Part of the original is in metrical form, so that the whole is of the cante-fable species which I believe to be the original form of the folk-tale (Cf. Eng. Fairy Tales, notes, p. 240, ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... leaving a Hindu ruler in charge of the third, and in Bactriana, a part of Ariana or ancient Persia, he left governors; and in these the western civilization was long in evidence. Some of the Greek and Roman metrical and astronomical terms {78} found their way, doubtless at this time, into the Sanskrit language.[305] Even as late as from the second to the fifth centuries A.D., Indian coins showed the Hellenic influence. The Hindu astronomical terminology reveals the same relationship to western thought, for ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... attempts at versifying, exhibited both his editorial and his creative powers. It led up to the publication of two important volumes which contained material originally intended to form part of the Minstrelsy, but which outgrew that work. These were the edition of the old metrical romance Sir Tristrem, which showed Scott as a scholar, and the Lay of the Last Minstrel, the first of Scott's own metrical romances. So far his literary achievement was all of one kind, or of two or three kinds closely ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... entranced, and the Prioress, seeing that books had an attraction for her younger guest, promised her on the morrow a sight of some of the metrical lives of the saints, especially of St. Katharine and of St. Cecilia. It must be owned that Jean was not fretted as she expected by chapel bells in the middle of the night, nor was even Lady Drummond summoned by ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And yet it is not on account of want of metrical harmony in respect to the lyre, to borrow the words of Plato, that cities quarrel with cities and friends with friends, and do and suffer the worst woes, but on account of deviations[670] from law and justice. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... accessible to students, will edit for the Society all the unprinted and other Anglo-Saxon Homilies which are not included in Thorpe's edition of lfric's prose,[11] Dr. Morris's of the Blickling Homilies, and Prof. Skeat's of lfric's Metrical Homilies. The late Prof. Klbing left complete his text, for the Society, of the Ancren Riwle, from the best MS., with collations of the other four, and this will be edited for the Society by Dr. Thmmler. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... before him the few Greek authors habitually in hand's reach, whether handled or not, and from a compartment of his desk took out several sheets of manuscript, metrical translations from favorite passages in the tragedists or the short poems of the Anthology. Like the rest of the Vaucluse professors—a mere handful they were,—he was straitened by the hard exactions of class-room work, and the book which he hoped sometime to publish grew slowly. How far he ...
— Different Girls • Various
... you must." I was thinking more especially of rhymed verse. Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sixteenth centuries. Its quaintness and the unintentional humor of its simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to escape. He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical versions of the almost undecipherable Saxon English to the polished and perfect measure of the late English laureate. For three years Mallory's "History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table" was the delight of his poetic soul and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... temporal proportion. Those groups which are identical in figure must also be uniform in duration if they are to enter as substitutionary groups into a rhythmical sequence.[5] When the acatalectic type is alternately departed from and returned to in the course of the rhythmical sequence, the metrical equivalents must present total time-values which, while differing from that of the full measure in direction and degree, in dependence on the whole form of their structure, maintain similar fixed relations ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... when he had somewhat recovered his horror and astonishment, "and give warning of this additional calamity. I wish she could have been brought to a confession. And, though of far less consequence, I could have wished to transcribe that metrical fragment. But Heaven's will ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the hexameter there is the greatest versative power. How different, for instance, are the first lines of the "Tale of Troy Divine," and the more familiar adventures of Ulysses. The ad libitum alternation of dactyl and spondee make the lively or the grave; and the whole metrical glow is all life and action, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... interest in the story of Chatterton had carried me over the whole ground of the Rowley controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familiarized me with the "Black Letter," that I had begun to find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances; and in Chaucer, though acquainted as yet only with part of his works, I had perceived and had felt profoundly those divine qualities, which, even at this day, are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen. With this knowledge, and this enthusiastic ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... he mentions the following authors as his poetic models—Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian, Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero, Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet been recognized. Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his Elegantiae passed with him for the pioneer of bonae literae; but Filelfo, Aeneas Sylvius, Guarino, Poggio, and others, were also not unknown to him. In ecclesiastical ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only remarkable when it displays an effort of reason, and the rudest verses in which we can trace some conception of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Johnson is right. We invite these people here to see our club-house, not to give them an exhibition of our metrical powers, and I think all exercises of a formal nature ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... so living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclopaedia of disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. It is the marvellous property of verse—one, if we rightly consider it, which would excuse any superstition on the origin of language—that the metrical and rhythmic arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and express back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions themselves, with all the feelings which inspire them; to call up human action, and all other outward things in which human hearts take interest—to ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... dissonances and by the variety of tone-color. A thoroughly novel feature was the flexibility of the rhythm, which breaks from the old "sing-song" metres and abounds in syncopations, in contrasted accents, and in subtle combinations of metrical groups; every effort being made to avoid the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... St. George, in his poetical, or rather metrical history of the election and coronation of Boniface VIII., (Muratori Script. Ital. tom. iii. P. i. p. 641, &c.,) describes the state and families of Rome at the coronation of Boniface VIII., (A.D. 1295.) Interea titulis redimiti sanguine et ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... his translation of II., 10, an ode beautifully rendered also by Mr. William Watson. Sir Theodore Martin and Connington are always readable, Francis is uniformly insipid, and Professor Newman, with his metrical capers, absolutely absurd. Pope's "Imitations of Horace" are so brilliant, that no student of English literature can afford to neglect them. Pope's method of replacing ancient allusions by modern ones, was employed by Johnson in some magnificent renderings of Juvenal, and no doubt suggested to our ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... those already given, a verse paraphrase of Cicero's Cato major, and a metrical version of the Psalms. As a writer of didactic verse, he was perhaps too highly praised by his immediate successors. Dryden called Cooper's Hill "the exact standard of good writing," and Pope in his Windsor Forest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... language since the date of its composition has rendered necessary some modernizing of the style both of the prayers and of the accompanying psalms. These modifications, much more radical in the case of the metrical psalms, took place in the eighteenth century, and commended themselves so fully to the good sense of all French-speaking Protestants as soon to be everywhere adopted. The MS. records of the French church ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... found recoverable to measure by that restitution of the Mute E which we since, too exclusively perhaps, connect with the name of Tyrwhitt. The confidence felt in his text, however—the only one upon which a metrical scholar dares work—in some sort justifies the honour. Meanwhile, this metrical theory, from his time, has been generally received; and the renown of the founder of our poetry settled on all the wider and firmer basis, when he appears as the earliest skilled artificer of the verse itself—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... famous Italian author of the sixteenth century, who wrote comedies, satires, and a metrical romance, Orlando Furioso.] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Addison possessed in still larger measure. The numerous fictions, generally original, often wild and grotesque, but always singularly graceful and happy, which are found in his essays, fully entitle him to the rank of a great poet, a rank to which his metrical compositions give him no claim. As an observer of life, of manners, of all the shades of human character, he stands in the first class. And what he observed he had the art of communicating in two widely different ways. He could describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as Clarendon. But he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Friederike, October 15, 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with a ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... black-letter, quaint sentence of Froissart or Monstrelet is like a knight in full armor, bristling with quaint, beautiful devices, golden dragons inlaid on Milan cuirasses, golden vines on broad Venetian blades, apes on the hilts of grooved-bladed, firm stilettoes, or the illuminated margins of old metrical romances. The pages of Strada are darkened by the stormy passions of a battling age, crossed with the lurid light of Moorish tragedies; an ay de mi Alhama moans under his pride and bigotry. Torquemadas grind each sentence into dullness and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... longer fragment is a characteristic specimen of the style and metrical treatment, the loose structure of which cannot possibly be reproduced in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in 1100. Late discovery of the chansons. Their age and history. Their distinguishing character. Mistakes about them. Their isolation and origin. Their metrical form. Their scheme of matter. The character of Charlemagne. Other characters and characteristics. Realist quality. Volume and age of the chansons. Twelfth century. Thirteenth century. Fourteenth, and later. Chansons in print. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Style, the Musical accent must be carefully distinguished from the Metrical accent which is determined by Time, or Measure, as well as from the Verbal accent whereby the import of a word is rendered clear to the listener. Here is an example of Musical accent, from Act III ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... transferred by Turner into his Gaelic collection. It soon became popular in the Highlands, and the authorship came to be assigned to different individuals. Fletcher afterwards announced himself as the author, and completely established his claim. He was the author of various metrical compositions both in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... absent from Lane. I also repeat that wherever the style and the subject are the most difficult to treat, Mr. Payne comes forth most successfully from the contest, thus giving the best proof of his genius and capacity for painstaking. Of the metrical part, which makes the Villon version as superior to Lane's as virgin gold to German silver, the critique offers only three inadequate specimens specially chosen and accompanied with a growl that "the verse ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... imitation implies persons acting, it necessarily follows, in the first place, that Spectacular equipment will be a part of Tragedy. Next, Song and Diction, for these are the medium of imitation. By 'Diction' I mean the mere metrical arrangement of the words: as for 'Song,' it is a term ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... richness of imagination and feeling displayed itself in early youth. In his eleventh year he would be a poet! A Saxon poet, Apel, imitated the Greek tragedies, why should he not do the same? He had already translated the first twelve books of Homer's "Odyssey," and had made a metrical version of Romeo's monologue, after having, simply to understand Shakspeare, thoroughly acquired a knowledge of English. Thus at an early age he mastered the language which "thinks and meditates for us," and Shakspeare became his favorite model. A grand tragedy based ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... sense, then, tragedy satisfies its definition as "the flight or elevation of life." The two indispensable supports which render this elevation possible, are metrical expression and great situations. "In the regeneration" the language of the market-place and the morning call may answer to the realised harmony of life; there may, indeed, be "the fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed;" there may be no distinction of great or little, high or low. But it ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... of Alcaeus were principally war and drinking songs of great beauty, and it is said that they furnished to the Latin poet Horace "not only a metrical model, but also the subject-matter of some of his most beautiful odes." The poet fought in the war between Athens and Mityle'ne (606 B.C.), and enjoyed the reputation of being a brave and skilful warrior, although on one occasion he is said to have fled from the field of battle ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... war ended, on Henry VII.'s accession, ballads took the place of war-songs in the heart affections of the people, and they sang songs of peace and contentment. Bard, scald, minstrel, gleeman, with their heroic rhymes and long metrical romances, gave way in the evolution of song and harmony to the ballad-monger with his licence. However, in turn they became an intolerable nuisance, and a wag ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... more may be noticed here:—the rigmarole, snatches of which probably most of us have heard, which contains an immense number of mere truisms having no connexion with each others, and no bond of union but the metrical form in which their juxtaposition is effected, and the rhyme, which is kept up very well throughout, though sometimes by the introduction of a nonsense line. Who ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... Works: Comprising Plays of the Passions, Miscellaneous Dramas, Metrical Legends, Fugitive Pieces, and Ahalya Baee; with the Life of Joanna Baille, Portrait and Vignette. Square crown 8vo. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... they have skirmished on the outskirts and have shown a disinclination to come to grips with the LAUREATE on the main question whether these hexameters are a success or a failure. Now I have no hesitation whatever in admitting my metrical ignorance and at the same time in denouncing as a fiasco the experiment of Dr. BRIDGES. I have spent some time in struggling with his hexameters; I have attempted to track his dactyls to their lair; I have followed up what I took to be his spondees, and I am thankful to say ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... one of the most active members of a Woodbridge Book Club, and had been in the habit of writing and sending to his friends occasional copies of verse. In 1812 he published his first volume, called 'Metrical Effusions,' and began a correspondence with Southey. A complimentary copy of verses which he had addressed to the author of the 'Queen's Wake,' just then come into notice, brought him long and vehement letters from the Ettrick—letters full of thanks ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Walsh and Pope forgot ever once to ask themselves what it was that they meant by 'correctness;' an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside afterwards sternly ridiculed. Neither of the two literati stopped to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which, by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning, or in any case inconsistent, as this talk about 'correctness' may be, we cannot allow Pope ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... specimens, Walter Scott's Border Minstrelsy, Percy's collection, Ellis's early English Metrical Romances, the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction; the history of the Troubadours, by Fauriel; even the far-back cumbrous ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 'olian Harp of 1795 with the Dejection of 1803, and no one who has thoroughly felt the spirit of both poems can make that comparison without emotion. The former piece is not, as has been said, in a literary sense remarkable. With the exception of the one point of metrical style, to be touched on presently, it has almost no note of poetic distinction save such as belongs of right to any simple record of a mood which itself forms the highest poetry of the average man's life; and one well knows whence came the criticism of that MS. ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... well as religious, and has been praised by historical writers of all ages, who turned to it for help with confidence. He wrote a number of other historical works. Besides, he wrote books on grammar, orthography, the metrical art, on rhetoric, on the nature of things, the seasons, and on the calculation of the seasons. These latter books are distinctly scientific. His contributions to Gregorian Music are ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... he was a true singer and an admired chevalier of his period. Gottfried von Strassburg, whose excellent poem of Tristan and Isolde inspires the writer with his least unhappy translation, leads the subject away from the mere love-carolers toward the authors of the metrical romances, the bards of Germany. It is at this point that he introduces some forcible criticisms on Tennyson's poetry of that character, and makes it evident that the Laureate might have improved his Idyls by extending his readings among the German chanters of Arthurian ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... imitation it would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose of daily life. Does a beautiful arch or dome or tower of a building imitate any part of reality? Is its architectural ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... Colin eclogues standing respectively at the beginning, in the middle, and at the close of the year. These are symmetrically arranged: the 'January' and 'December' are both alike monologues and agree in the stanza used, while the 'June' is a dialogue and likewise differs in metrical form. This latter is supported as it were by two subsidiary eclogues, those of April and August, in both of which another shepherd sings one of Colin's lays and refers incidentally to his passion for Rosalind. It is upon this ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... connections appear in the metrical romances of the twelfth or thirteenth century, as well as in those early Anglo-Norman chroniclers or fabulists, who have been at the pains to inform us of the pre-historic events of their country. The author of the romance-poem of the well-known Merlin—so famous in British prophecy—in ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... of Kelso, who had already begun to indicate that skill in typography for which he was afterwards so justly celebrated. In 1804 he published, from the Auchinleck Manuscript in the Advocates' Library, the ancient metrical tale of "Sir Tristrem;" and, in an elaborate introduction, he endeavoured to prove that it was the composition of Thomas of Ercildoune, better known as Thomas the Rhymer. He published in 1805 "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," an original ballad poem, which, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as to render possible that ideal representation of the great passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... France, to-day, poetry is so living and vigorous a thing, that so many metrical experiments come from there. Only a vigorous tree has the vitality to put forth new branches. The poet with originality and power is always seeking to give his readers the same poignant feeling which he has himself. To do this he must constantly find new and striking images, delightful and ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... Andromeda almost succeeds in that impossible feat—the revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the countrymen of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexameter is a metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of consonants over vowels, the want of inflected forms, and other peculiarities in our language—make the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... must recall to the reader the state of Greek literature in England during Coleridge's youth; and, in all equity, as a means of placing Coleridge in the balances, specifically we must recall the state of Greek metrical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... deal of the best prose is in style and sentiment of a true poetic character, lacking only the metrical form. To become familiar with Tennyson and Shakespeare, and the brilliant catalogue of British poets is in itself a liberal education. Rolfe's Shakespeare is in handy volumes, and so edited as to be of most service. Palgrave's "Golden Treasury" of the best songs ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... enthusiasm inspired him on one occasion to attempt a metrical description of a match between Bedford and Dulwich. The nature of this poetical effusion may be ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... seemed to have been composed in times of great national excitement. The misery of the present, the prospect still more gloomy beyond, impelled its authors to anxious inquiries into the future. The books were written, like the genuine Sibylline books, in the metrical form, which the old Greek tradition had consecrated to religious use; and their style so closely resembled that of the Apocalypse and the Old Testament prophecies, that some pagan writers who accepted them as genuine did not hesitate ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... mutus est," said Colonel Graeme, indicating the younger man, and added a sentence in sonorous metrical Greek. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... successive phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very well pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; but one following another will produce an instant impression ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of twelve syllables, with the stress on the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh syllables, makes a dodecasyllable of amphibrachs. This dodecasyllable has a short metrical pause after the sixth syllable, and a longer one ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... Rheinhart Kleiner contributes the single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle him to a high ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... moral law in their theme. Law puts a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a continual slight novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all chime together in praise of the truer order ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... and the Fight at Finnsburg. Boston, 1882. An accurate line-for-line translation, using alliteration occasionally, and sometimes assuming a metrical cadence. ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... unhallowed and unprofitable exercise of her understanding was so impressed upon her spirit, that, although the sacrifice was considerable, she caused all the unsold copies to be destroyed. It is interesting to observe how, in later years, this talent for metrical rhythm, which had been so misapplied, became consecrated, as were all her faculties, to the promotion ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... inconvenience of making it necessary to use different words for the same thing to suit the exigencies of metre. And if there ever was an argument that demanded precise statement, it was that of Parmenides. As it is, his poem has the faults we should look for in a metrical version of Euclid. On the other hand, Parmenides is the first philosopher of whom we have sufficient remains to enable us to follow a continuous argument; for we have nothing of Pythagoras at all, and only detached fragments of the rest. We can see that he was ready to follow the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... vital thing in life than this act. For it is something taking place in the subconscious self; it is a revolution, and a growth. It happened that after dinner, Conall wished to hear Ian sing again that loveliest of all metrical Collects, "Lord of All Power and Might," and Thora went with Ian to do her part as accompanist on the piano. As they sang Conall appeared to fall asleep, and no more music ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... a sort of little hall, where the graves of several popes had been found; among others that of Sixtus II, a holy martyr, in whose honour there was a superbly engraved metrical inscription set up by Pope Damasus. Then, in another hall, a family vault of much the same size, decorated at a later stage, with naive mural paintings, the spot where St. Cecilia's body had been discovered was shown. And the explanations continued. The Trappist dilated on the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... best love songs were written by the best hymn writers. Even Ibn Gabirol, who, so far as we know, wrote no love songs, composed other kinds of secular poetry. One of the favorite poetical forms of the Middle Ages consisted of metrical letters to friends—one may almost assert that the best Hebrew love poetry is of this type—epistles of affection between man and man, expressing a love passing the love of woman. Ibn Gabirol wrote such epistles, but the fact remains that we know of no love verses from his hand; ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... prima expeditione Attilae, Regis Hunnorum, in Gallias, was published in the year 1780, by Fischer at Leipsic. It contains, with the continuation, 1452 lines. It abounds in metrical faults, but is occasionally not without some rude spirit and some copiousness of fancy in the variation of the circumstances in the different combats of the hero Walther, prince of Aquitania. It contains little which can be supposed historical, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the Plot. The story existed in many forms, mostly Italian. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke's metrical version (Romeus and Juliet), and possibly consulted the prose version in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The tale had been dramatised and performed before Arthur Broke published his poem in 1562. The play (if it existed ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... As far as I can give the Reader any satisfaction, he is to. know that Island was first inhabited (in the year 874) by a Colony of Norwegians; who brought hither the Traditions of their Forefathers, in certain metrical Composures, which (as is usual with Men transplanted into a Foreign Land) were here more zealously and carefully preserv'd and kept in memory than by the Men of Norway themselves. About 240 years after this (A. D. 1114) their History began ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... letter to Cornelius he mentions the following authors as his poetic models—Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian, Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero, Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet been recognized. Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his Elegantiae passed with him for the pioneer of bonae literae; but Filelfo, Aeneas Sylvius, Guarino, Poggio, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... France, Austria and Italy, we eventually find him in St. Petersburg, where he undertook the translation of the Bible into the Mandschu-Tartar language, and issued in 1835, through Schulz and Beneze, his "Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects." While in Russia, he made many friends amongst the nobility there, who frequently invited him to their country homes. In the same year that saw the publication of "Targum," he returned home. His stay in England, however, was a very short one. ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... Kinosling. "No tobacco for me. No cigar, no pipe, no cigarette, no cheroot. For me, a book—a volume of poems, perhaps. Verses, rhymes, lines metrical and cadenced—those are my dissipation. Tennyson by preference: 'Maud,' or 'Idylls of the King'—poetry of the sound Victorian days; there is none later. Or Longfellow will rest me in a tired hour. Yes; for me, a book, a volume in the hand, held ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... 80: Mark certain expressions, gentle reader, which occur in the notes to the life of Robin Hood, prefixed to the ballads which go under his name: 1795. 2 vols. 8vo.—also a Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy in the first vol. of Ancient Metrical Romances, 1802, 3 vols. 8vo. A very common degree of shrewdness and of acquaintance with English literature will shew that, in Menander and Sycorax, are described honest TOM WARTON and snarling 'mister' ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the same period we are disposed to assign the "Song of the Owl," though it has been regarded by a respectable authority[10] as of modern origin. Of a portion of this celebrated composition we subjoin a metrical translation from the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a well-known metrical history, states distinctly, as you shall see in half a moment, that a tree upon one occasion discoursed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... this ballad. Mr. Train acknowledged his letter with gratitude, and the little book reached him just as he was about to embark in the lighthouse yacht. He took it with him on his voyage, and, on returning home again, wrote to Mr. Train, expressing the gratification he had received from several of his metrical pieces, but still more from his notes, and requesting him, as he seemed to be enthusiastic about traditions and legends, to communicate any matters of that order connected with Galloway which he might not himself think of turning to account; "for," said Scott, "nothing interests me so much as ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in The Princess, though often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If Browning had written the passage which opens The Princess, descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... followed them would have been lost had they succeeded in their object, and their verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly forms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the first and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily worn themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... best prose is in style and sentiment of a true poetic character, lacking only the metrical form. To become familiar with Tennyson and Shakespeare, and the brilliant catalogue of British poets is in itself a liberal education. Rolfe's Shakespeare is in handy volumes, and so edited as to be of most service. Palgrave's "Golden Treasury" of the best songs and lyrical poems ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... de prima expeditione Attilae, Regis Hunnorum, in Gallias, was published in the year 1780, by Fischer at Leipsic. It contains, with the continuation, 1452 lines. It abounds in metrical faults, but is occasionally not without some rude spirit and some copiousness of fancy in the variation of the circumstances in the different combats of the hero Walther, prince of Aquitania. It contains ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... power. How different, for instance, are the first lines of the "Tale of Troy Divine," and the more familiar adventures of Ulysses. The ad libitum alternation of dactyl and spondee make the lively or the grave; and the whole metrical glow is all life and action, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... The manners of our country were more rarely tainted with this deplorable licentiousness, although I have observed an innocent tendency towards it, by examining the illuminated manuscripts of our ancient metrical romances: while we admire the vivid colouring of these splendid manuscripts, the curious observer will perceive that almost every heroine is represented in a state which appears incompatible with her reputation. Most of these works are, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the rimes will show (a b b a a b b a: c d d e c e), there is a natural metrical division at the end of the eighth line. The first eight lines in technical language are called the "octave," the last six lines are called the "sestet." The octave is sometimes said to consist of two quatrains, and ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... The metrical structure of this song should be noted: the lines vary in length from two to six feet. The rhymes are few, and the effect is more striking owing to the consonance of shell, well with vale, nightingale; also of pair, where ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... by your unions. The social and recreative side of life you have now taken over into your keeping, you order recreation which shall be as music or as poetry in your associated lives, harmonious, melodious, rhythmic, metrical. All that I have said to-night leads up to this, that the Associated Life is necessary for the enjoyment and the attainment of the best and the highest things that the world can give, as the Guild and the Company formerly, and the Trade Union is ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... than a fair specimen of the average scholarship and culture given by the universities at that time. He was an extreme classicist; all his admiration was for classical models and works that savoured of them; he it was who headed the attempt made in England to force upon a modern language the metrical system of the Greeks and Latins. What baneful influence he exercised over Spenser in this last respect will be shown presently. Kirke was Spenser's other close friend; he was one year junior academically to the poet. He too, as we shall see, was a profound admirer of Harvey. After ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... other pastoral, is apparently of Roman origin. Milton, employing the noble freedom of a great artist, has here united ancient mythology, with what may be called the modern mythology of Camus and Saint Peter,—to direct Christian images.—The metrical structure of this glorious poem is partly derived ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... was one which proved singularly suited to the Latin genius. He speaks of his own works under the name of Sermones (talks)—a name which was retained by his great successor and imitator Horace; but the peculiar combination of metrical form with wide range of subject and the pedestrian style of ordinary prose received in popular usage the ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... he to be dethroned, to whom should the sceptre and the crown be given? Lord Bacon had a kingly soul, capacious great thoughts, and high designs, but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... greater ideal. An Englishman turns to poetry for the expression in beautiful words of his happier and better feelings, and he is not contented unless poetry tends to make him happier or better—happier because better than he would be otherwise. His favourite poems are psalms, or at least metrical paraphrases, of life. Men of other nations are less concerned about their feelings and their souls. They regard the poet as the creator, the inventor, the maker par excellence, and he who can imagine or make the greatest eidolon is the greatest poet. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... to thee, thou holy herb, That sprung on holy ground! All in the Mount Olivet First wert thou found: Thou art boot for many a bruise, And healest many a wound; In our Lady's blessed name, I take thee from the ground.' [This metrical spell, or something very like it, is preserved by Reginald Scott, in his ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... publish the Book hardly pretend to understand. As far as I can give the Reader any satisfaction, he is to. know that Island was first inhabited (in the year 874) by a Colony of Norwegians; who brought hither the Traditions of their Forefathers, in certain metrical Composures, which (as is usual with Men transplanted into a Foreign Land) were here more zealously and carefully preserv'd and kept in memory than by the Men of Norway themselves. About 240 years after this (A. D. 1114) their History began to be written ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... sexagesimal numeration, the metrical system of Babylon and Nineveh was "the most scientific of all those known and practised by the ancients: until the elaboration of the French metrical system, it was the only one whose every part was scientifically ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... potency of written or spoken words, for the production of good or evil, has been characteristic of all historic epochs and nations. The exorcist of ancient Egypt relied on amulets and mysterious phrases for the cure of disease; and a metrical petition traced on a papyrus-leaf, or a formula of prayer opportunely repeated, "put to flight the serpents, who ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... me. I had taken down all the books from a hitherto undisturbed corner, and had seated myself on a heap of them, no doubt a very impersonation of the genius of the place; for while I waited for the housekeeper, I was consuming a morsel of an ancient metrical romance. After waiting for some time, I glanced towards the door, for I had begun to get impatient for the entrance of my helper. To my surprise, there stood Lady Alice, her eyes fixed upon me with an expression I could not comprehend. ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... and seated himself at the table in the main cabin. Occasionally he would nod approvingly, or rumple the feathery end of the quill between his teeth, or drum with his fingers in the effort to prove a verse whose metrical evenness did not quite satisfy his ear. There were obstacles, however, which marred the sureness of his inspiration. First it was the face of madame as he had seen it, now here, now there, in sunshine, in cloud. Was hers a heart of ice which ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... sometimes very much more. The vestries early adopted the custom of appointing godly laymen as readers whose duty it was to assist the minister by leading the congregation in the responses in the Church service, and in raising tunes for the singing of metrical version of the Psalms. Later, when it was found desirable to erect chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went his ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... event Poe wrote a poem which is a sort of requiem for her death. It was not published during his life, but after his death it appeared in the New York Tribune. Immediately it took rank as one of the three greatest poems Poe ever wrote. It is long enough to be complete, it has none of those metrical imperfections found in his earlier poems, and it possesses in a wonderful degree that haunting thrill so characteristic of all the best things Poe wrote. Moreover, it has a musical flow surpassing any other of Poe's poems except "The Bells," and in some respects it is even more pleasing ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... expressive when a large number of boots join in the performance. He showed a remarkable talent for playing on one of the less complex musical instruments, too limited in compass to satisfy exacting ears, but affording excellent discipline to those who wish to write in the simpler metrical forms,—the same which summons the hero from his repose and stirs ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... three English metrical renderings of Benedicite exist, one of the 18th and two of the 19th century, by J. Merrick, J.S. Blackie, and Richard Wilton respectively. The first of these writers, who expands freely, concludes with a stanza designed to put the Song unmistakeably ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... the unintentional humor of its simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to escape. He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical versions of the almost undecipherable Saxon English to the polished and perfect measure of the late English laureate. For three years Mallory's "History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table" was the delight of his poetic soul and the text-book for his conversation ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... third in the list of English writers. I think he would even have been willing to say that Dryden was the third as a poet. For greatly as he admired Chaucer, Scott did not feel Chaucer's full power, and indeed it was only beginning to be possible to read Chaucer with any appreciation of his metrical excellence. Spenser, of whom he once wrote: "No author, perhaps, ever possessed and combined in so brilliant a degree the requisite qualities of a poet,"[167] was more of a favorite with Scott than Chaucer. But at another time he spoke of Drayton as possessing perhaps equal powers of poetry,[168] ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... tell me each metrical puppy Might make of such parodies two pair a day; Mocking birds think they obtain for each copy Paradise plumes for the parodied lay:— Ladder of fame! if man can't reach thy top, he Is right to sing just as high up as he may; I'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a poet.' Johnson's Works, viii. 458, 462. Mrs. Piozzi (Synonymy, ii. 371) tells why 'Dr. Johnson despised Young's quantity of common knowledge as comparatively small. 'Twas only because, speaking once upon the subject of metrical composition, he seemed totally ignorant of what are called rhopalick verses, from the Greek word, a club—verses in which each word must be a syllable longer than that ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... For metrical purposes Bret Harte has here taken the same kind of liberty with "Resanoff," and in another poem with Portola, as Byron took with Trafalgar, ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... modulation seem to the ignorant strange, and to the judicial tedious." It is among the curiosities of literature that this true poet, who had so exquisite a sense of form, and whose lyrics are frequently triumphs of metrical skill, should have published a work (entitled "Observations in the Art of English Poesy") to prove that the use of rhyme ought to be discontinued, and that English metres should be fashioned after classical models. "Poesy," he writes, "in all kind ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... pawnbroker's," explained the poet; "but I have a soiled collar in the left-hand corner drawer. However, I can offer you more valuable security for this trifling debt than you would dare to ask; the bureau is full of pearls —metrical, but beyond price. I beg your tenderest care of them, especially my tragedy in seven acts. Do not play jinks with the contents of that bureau, or Posterity will gibbet you and the name of 'Gouge' will one day be ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... be noted. Parts of the MS. have very much faded since it was written some ten or twenty years before 1450, so that a few of the words are queried in the print. The MS. contains a few metrical points and stops, which I have here printed between parentheses (). The expansions of the contractions are printed in italics, but the ordinary doubt whether the final lined n or u—for they are often undistinguishable—is to be printed ne, nne, ...
— Arthur, Copied And Edited From The Marquis of Bath's MS • Frederick J. Furnivall
... sense; secondly, emphatic or rhetorical pauses,—such as particularly call the hearer's attention to something which has been, or is about to be, uttered; and lastly, poetical or harmonic pauses,—such as are peculiar to the utterance of metrical compositions. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... that John Brown's favourite minister 'held the sacred and apostolical succession of the Scottish priesthood.' Little would he have thought of apologizing to the English reader for 'the antique and ballad verses' of our metrical version of the Psalms. Indeed, so devoid was he of learning, that he could scarce have valued at a sufficiently high rate the doctrines of Oxford; and so little gifted with taste, that he would have probably failed to appreciate the sublimities of Brady and ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Fairfax's Tasso (MR. SINGER's accurate reprint, 1817), has his in both lines. 2. MR. RYE, in understanding me to refer to any translation proper; unless Sternhold and Hopkins are to be considered as having produced one. 3. Myself, in supposing the old metrical version in the Book of Common Prayer originally had the word its. I copied from the Oxford edition in fol. of 1770; but a 4to. edition, "printed by Iohn Daye, dwelling over Aldersgate, anno 1574," ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... it may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between poetry and painting, and, accordingly, we call them sisters; but where shall we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to typify the affinity between metrical and prose composition? If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Some of the members, ashamed of the paltry nature of the volumes circulated in the name of the club, bethought themselves of uniting to produce a book of national value. They took Sir Frederick Madden into their counsels, and authorised him to print eighty copies of the old metrical romance of Havelok the Dane. This gave great dissatisfaction to the historian, who muttered how "a MS. not discovered by a member of the club was selected, and an excerpt obtained, not furnished by the industry or under the inspection ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Convention at various periods, might form a curious history of the progress of despotism. These effusions of zeal were not, however, all in the "sublime" style: the legislative dignity sometimes condescended to unbend itself, and listen to metrical compositions, enlivened by the accompaniment of fiddles; but the manly and ferocious Danton, to whom such sprightly interruptions were not congenial, proposed a decree, that the citizens should, in future, express their adorations in plain ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... guilt, penitence, and death of Starkather, a fabulous Scandinavian hero, famous throughout the North for his bodily strength and warlike achievements, as well as for his poetical genius, of which traces are still to be found in the metrical traditions and phraseology of his country. According to the old legend, the existence of Starkather was prolonged for three lifetimes, in each of which he was doomed to commit some act of infamy; but this fiction has not here been followed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... fledged madrigal dramas of Vecchi in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and at what may be called the golden era of the frottola was generally and successfully applied to that species of composition. Whatever the troubadours and minnesingers may have done toward establishing a metrical melodic form of monophonic character was soon obliterated by the swift popularity of part singing and the immense vogue of the secular songs of the polyphonic composers. When the desire for the vocal solo made itself felt in the exquisitely sensuous life of ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... its defence with a tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical. To hint this once, is sufficient. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... quite evident that this could never be done in the strict pattern of a metrical form, but the flowing, fluctuating rhythm of vers libre seemed to open the door to such an experiment. First, however, I considered the same method as applied to the more pronounced movements of natural objects. If the reader will turn ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... verdure,—will confess that the lowland, as well as the highland, can at times breed gallant men. [Footnote: The story of Hereward (often sung by minstrels and old-wives in succeeding generations) may be found in the "Metrical Chronicle of Geoffrey Gaimar," and in the prose "Life of Hereward" (paraphrased from that written by Leofric, his house- priest), and in the valuable fragment "Of the family of Hereward." These have all ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... should probably be erased before [Greek: kolpode], with the Cambridge editor. He remarks, "the sea-port, although separated from the island by the narrow strait of Euripus, is styled its wing." On the metrical difficulties and corruptions throughout this chorus, I must refer the reader to ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... at all translations. Like the Divan-poems they are original creations, inspired by the reading of Hafid, and, to use the poet's own words "dem Hafis nachgefuehlt und nachgedichtet."[137] They follow as closely as possible the Persian metrical rules, and make use throughout of Persian images and metaphors, so much so that we can adduce direct parallels from the poems of Hafid. Thus in 13[138] we read: "Schenke! Tulpen sind wie Kelche Weines," evidently a parallel to some such line as ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... school had effected in poetry;[H] but shall lay the grounds of our opposition, for this time, a little more broadly. The end of poetry, we take it, is to please—and the name, we think, is strictly applicable to every metrical composition from which we receive pleasure, without any laborious exercise of the understanding. This pleasure, may, in general, be analyzed into three parts—that which we receive from the excitement of Passion or emotion—that which is derived from the play of Imagination, or the easy exercise ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... corruptions of the text and by the various interpretations of commentators, who, though they all agree as to the moral pregnancy and sublimity of the passage, frequently differ as to its precise meaning. A metrical translation of these odes in English is apt to remind us of the metrical versions of the Hebrew Psalms. A part of one chorus in Aeschylus, which forms a distinct picture, has been given in rhythmical prose; three choruses ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... the prime of life, and interrupted in some literary undertakings and projects of great pith and moment. He had written a portion of a treatise on the "Evidences of Christianity," and was meditating some works, such as a "Metrical Version of the Psalms" and a tragedy on the history of Socrates, still more suitable to his cast ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... consideration of the well-known difficulty that most popular variety-artists experience in the metrical delivery of decasyllabic couplets, the lines which follow have been written as they will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... and write; but the acquisition of perfect beauty or quickness in writing, if nature has not stimulated them to acquire these accomplishments in the given number of years, they should let alone. And as to the learning of compositions committed to writing which are not set to the lyre, whether metrical or without rhythmical divisions, compositions in prose, as they are termed, having no rhythm or harmony—seeing how dangerous are the writings handed down to us by many writers of this class—what will you do with them, O most excellent guardians of the law? or how can the lawgiver ...
— Laws • Plato
... Amyntas quoted in this article have been selected from the admirable metrical translation ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... [2] Metrical paraphrases of passages of Scripture, always to be found at the end of the Bibles printed ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... by Dr. Richard James; an English Poem, written in 1636, containing a Metrical Account of some of the Principal Families and Mansions in Lancashire; from the unpublished MS. in the Bodleian ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... most of his life was spent as a schoolmaster in Dunfermline; his chief works, which are full of pathos, humour, and a fine descriptive power, include "Testament of Cresseid," a continuation of Chaucer's tale, "Robene and Makyne," the earliest Scottish pastoral, a metrical version of some of "AEsop's Fables," and the story of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... vii., p. 236.).—There is a passage in Warton's History of English Poetry (Vol. i. p. 194., Tegg's edition) which will in part answer the Query of your correspondent W. M. It is in the form of a note, appended to the following lines from the metrical ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... leonine hexameters, composed about 1030 at Tegernsee, Bavaria. It is imperfectly preserved, but more than 2000 verses are extant, and these give interesting pictures of contemporary German life. It is a metrical novel with a knight for hero. The selection is from M. Heyne's Rudlieb, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... and his successors gave repeated victories and far-extended authority. The presence of the name Cyrus seems without reasonable doubt to be due to a later scribe, who thus incorrectly identified the allusion. It is supported neither by the metrical structure nor the context of the passages in which it is found. Furthermore, the ideas in Isaiah 40-55 are almost without exception those which Zechariah had already voiced in germinal form, especially ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... the emotion of the human heart, mixes freely in verse and sentimental poetry, forms a considerable portion of the lays of every country. There is in this particular no distinction between the early and modern history of nations, for sentiment enters the metrical effusions of every period alike. Pathos and taste appear to be the foster mothers of this quality, which is a distinguishing trait of the poetry of Wales, as shown by the examples furnished in the ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... Babberly's first demonstration in Belfast, had become a kind of battle song. It is, I think, characteristic of the Irish Protestants that they should have a tune of their own for this hymn. Elsewhere, in England, in Scotland, in the United States and the Colonies this metrical version of the 90th Psalm is sung to a fine simple tune called St. Ann. But we are not and never have been as other men are. Without a quiver of our nerves we run atilt at the most universally accepted traditions. ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... is only a metrical expression of a great and practical truth. You do not need to be a "Christian Scientist" to know that ideas and emotions can affect the stoop of the shoulders or the lines of the mouth. Other people besides "Eugenists" have observed that ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... public worship in the fully reformed Church of Scotland, and whose simple rites Bishop Grindal was forced to own, in his controversy with the English Puritans, he could not reprove. There was nearly completed, after the model of the French version, the English Metrical Psalter. There was planned and executed a translation of the Scriptures into our mother tongue, which for nearly half a century continued to hold its place alongside of others executed at greater leisure ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... all has been said that an enemy could in justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... since the early sixteenth century. The number of English monosyllables was sometimes complained of, because to ears trained on the classical languages they sounded harsh, barking, unfitted for eloquence; sometimes because they were believed to impede the metrical flow in poetry; sometimes because, being particularly characteristic of colloquial speech, they were considered low; and often because they were associated with the languages of the Teutonic tribes which had escaped the full ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... Baltazar's Florante, with the pupil surpassing the master, for while it has the subject and characters of a medieval European romance, the spirit and settings are entirely Malay. It is written in the peculiar Tagalog verse, in the form of a corrido or metrical romance, and has been declared by Fray Toribio Menguella, Rizal himself, and others familiar with Tagalog, to be a work of no mean order, by far the finest and most characteristic composition in that, the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... author of the following lines fears that he has failed to do full justice to the metrical purity of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... sentiments and conceits of ancient authors as well as of those of other countries, and, all things considered, a literal version in prose appears to present the fewest disadvantages, for it disarms the translator of the temptation to poetical flights and metrical ingenuity, and brings us nearer to the man and the age to ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... fault with his German. "Lawine" (see Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, act iii. sc. 3) signifies an avalanche, not avalanches. In stanza xii. line 7 a similar mistake occurs. It may seem strange that, for the sake of local colouring, or for metrical purposes, he should substitute a foreign equivalent which required a note, for a fine word already in vogue. But in 1817 "avalanche" itself had not long been naturalized. Fifty years before, the Italian valanca and valanche ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... has seemed to me that a uniform translation of the Tain Bo Cualnge in prose would destroy one of its special characteristics, which is that in it both prose and verse are mingled. It was not in my power, however, to reproduce at once closely and clearly the metrical schemes and the rich musical quality of the Irish and at the same time compress within the compass of the Irish measure such an analytic language as English, which has to express by means of auxiliaries what is accomplished in Early Irish by inflection. But ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... man well versed in literature, especially in Latin poetry, and himself one of the distinguished poets of his time, took measures for the emendation of the hymns in the Roman Breviary. He was offended by the many defects in their metrical composition, and it is said that upwards of nine hundred and fifty faults in metre were corrected, which gave to Urban occasion to say that the Fathers had begun rather than completed the hymns. These, as corrected, he caused to be inserted ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... if we did not fear that all the other harassed and beset creatures in these parts would instantly rush to lay their troubles in his shrewd and friendly bosom we would mention his name right here and do a little metrical pirouette in his honour)—we had been sitting there, we say, watching the proceedings, without the slightest comprehension of what was happening. It is really quite surprising, let us add, to find how many people are suddenly interested in some quiet, innocent-looking ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... fireworks and oratory on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red flag of the socialists; every song from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the "International"; every metrical conclusion to a great speech—whether we stand at Armageddon, refuse to press upon the brow of labor another crown of thorns, or call upon the workers of the world to unite—every one of these slogans is an incitement of the will—an effort ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... most curious register of the history of King Richard is an ancient romance, translated originally from the Norman; and at first certainly having a pretence to be termed a work of chivalry, but latterly becoming stuffed with the most astonishing and monstrous fables. There is perhaps no metrical romance upon record where, along with curious and genuine history, are mingled more absurd and exaggerated incidents. We have placed in the Appendix to this Introduction the passage of the romance in which Richard figures as an ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... they are only too plenty For ringing the changes on metrical chimes; A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty, Have filled that great basket with bushels ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... and Measures also continues its work in Paris. I invite your attention to the necessity of an appropriation to be made in time to enable this Government to comply with its obligations under the metrical convention. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... word for them was carmen, viz. the Carmen Saliare, which is too obscure and fragmentary to be of use to us, and the Carmen of the Arval Brethren, which is preserved on stone and is quite intelligible.[388] The word carmen, let us notice, was used by the old Romans for any kind of metrical formula, whether hymn, prayer, or spell. Pliny, when writing of magic and incantations, plainly includes prayer among them;[389] and Dr. Jevons has recently pointed out that singing, and especially singing in a low voice or muttered tones, is a characteristic of magic not only in Greece and Rome, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... considered: we mean its rhythmical structure. This, improbable though it seems, will be found to come under the same generalization with the others. Like each of them, it is an idealization of the natural language of strong emotion, which is known to be more or less metrical if the emotion be not too violent; and like each of them it is an economy of the reader's or hearer's attention. In the peculiar tone and manner we adopt in uttering versified language, may be discerned its relationship to the feelings; and ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... "Metrical compliment is an ample reward for my strains; you are one of the few votaries of Apollo who unite the sciences over which that deity presides. I wish you to send my poems to my lodgings in London immediately, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... be made up of our Restoration hymns, by Jeremy Clark, Croft, and others who added to the succeeding editions of the metrical Psalms. If there are not many in this class, yet the few are good; and Clark must be regarded as the inventor of the modern English hymn-tune, regarded, that is, as a pure melody in the scale with harmonic interpretation ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... Prior of Lochlevin, the author of a Metrical Chronicle, written about the year 1420, when recording the appointment of Robert Duke of Albany as Governor of Scotland, in the year 1405, commends him for his ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... or, more properly, metrical romance, was originally published by the late Doctor Whitaker in his History of Craven, from an ancient MS., which was supposed to be unique. Whitaker's version was transferred to Evan's Old Ballads, the editor of which work introduced some judicious conjectural emendations. In ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... they have put it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a book, this volume would be indeed a chef-d'oeuvre. On the page usually devoted to the Dedication, we have no less than six more or less appropriate quotations: a Greek one from Julian, a Latin one from Quintilian, a dramatic one from Shakspeare, a metrical one from Young, a ponderous philosophical one from Dr. Johnson, and a commonplace one from Bryant. In consideration of the number and learnedness of these certificates of character, we approach the lucubrations of the Reverend Mr. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... then that Aunt Rhoda and Aunt Cinthia, matrons of portly frame and perilous foothold, engaged in a metrical dialogue concerning the robbing of a bird's nest, in which lively diversion they assumed to have participated. And Bachelor Lot rendered "My beautiful Annabel Lee" with unique effect; and Grandma Keeler spoke mysteriously ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... of them and leaving a Hindu ruler in charge of the third, and in Bactriana, a part of Ariana or ancient Persia, he left governors; and in these the western civilization was long in evidence. Some of the Greek and Roman metrical and astronomical terms {78} found their way, doubtless at this time, into the Sanskrit language.[305] Even as late as from the second to the fifth centuries A.D., Indian coins showed the Hellenic influence. The Hindu ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... ingenuity. In tracing out parallels between passages of the Roman poets and figures or scenes which appear in ancient sculptures, Addison opened the easy course of inquiry which was afterwards prosecuted by Spence; and this, with the apparatus of spirited metrical translations from the classics, gave the work a likeness to his account of his travels. This account, entitled Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, &c. (1705), he sent home for publication before his own return. It wants altogether the interest of personal narrative: ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... inflections of moral law in their theme. Law puts a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a continual slight novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all chime together in praise of the truer order ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... Luther, about the year 1517, first introduced metrical psalmody into the service of the church, which not only kept alive the enthusiasm of the reformers, but formed a rallying point for his followers. This practice spread in all directions; and it was not ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... idea represents accurately enough the use of the word rhapsodia in the latter periods of Greek literature. Suppose the word canto to be taken in its literal etymological sense, it would indicate a metrical composition meant to be sung or chanted. But what constitutes the complexity of the idea in the word rhapsodia is that both its separate elements, the poetry and the musical delivery, are equally essential; neither is a ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Russia. Of his adventures in these countries there is unhappily no record. In St. Petersburg he must have made a long stay, for there he superintended the translation of the Bible into Mandschu- Tartar, and published in 1835 his Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects. In 1835 Borrow returned to London, and being already known to the Bible Society for his biblical labours in Russia, was offered, and accepted, the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... verse" Inscription by the Rev. W. L. Bowles, in Nether Stowey Church Translation Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie Epilogue to the Rash Conjuror Psyche Complaint Reproof An Ode to the Rain Translation of a Passage in Ottfried's Metrical Paraphrase of the Gospel Israel's Lament on the Death of the Princess Charlotte of Wales Sentimental The Alternative The Exchange What is ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... particularize a few of the most striking papers. Among the metrical gems is Conradin, a fine battle-piece, by Mr. Charles Swain; an Every-day Tale, by Montgomery—one of "the short and simple annals of the poor," written in behalf of a Society for relieving distressed females in the first month of their widowhood, to save their little households from being ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... diabolic connections appear in the metrical romances of the twelfth or thirteenth century, as well as in those early Anglo-Norman chroniclers or fabulists, who have been at the pains to inform us of the pre-historic events of their country. The author of the romance-poem of the well-known Merlin—so famous in British prophecy—in ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... ordinary law. It is a piteous tale, and few things in Browning equal the horror of the mother's vain attempt to hide her crime while she confesses it. Nor does he often show greater imaginative skill in metrical movement than when he describes in galloping and pattering verse the grey pack emerging from the forest, their wild race for the sledge, and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... included two poems, signed "J. R.," and entitled "Saltzburg" and "Fragments from a Metrical Journal; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that day the same distinction (expressly in honour of Henry) upon ten others his companions in arms. The (p. 039) particulars of this transaction, and the details of the entire campaign against the Wild Irish, as they were called, are recorded in a metrical history by a Frenchman named Creton, who was an eye-witness of the whole affair. This gentleman had accepted the invitation of a countryman of his own, a knight, to accompany him to England. On their arrival in London ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... defied enumeration. In the Protectorate they swarmed. Matchless still among the tributes in verse was Milton's single Sonnet of May 1652, "Cromwell, our chief of men," and Milton had written no more to or about Cromwell in the metrical form since the Protectorate had begun, but had contented himself with adding to his former prose tributes in various pamphlets that most splendid and subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his Defensio ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
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