"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a life of freedom in a corner by ourselves," she continued with a disconcerting change of metre into which I could not hope to follow her. But her words gave ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... Prose, The source of my woes! (This metre's too tough, I must draw to a close.) May Sargent be drowned In the ocean profound, And Sidgwick be food for the ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... and has twelve men and a donkey to carry the ice he quarries to the village of Chaux, a mile from the glaciere, where it is loaded for conveyance to Besancon. He uses gunpowder for the flooring of ice, and expects the eighth part of a pound to blow out a cubic metre; and if, by ill luck, the ice thus procured has stones on the lower side, he has to saw off the bottom layer. Madame Briot said I was right in supposing March to be the great time for the formation of ice, as she had heard her husband say that the columns were higher then than at any ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... also that his work is in rhyme and as far as I know it is not had in prose in our tongue, and also, peradventure, he translated after some other author than this is; and yet for as much as divers men be of divers desires, some to read in rhyme and metre and some in prose; and also because that I have now good leisure, being in Cologne, and have none other thing to do at this time; in eschewing of idleness, mother of all vices, I have delibered in myself for the contemplation of my said redoubted lady to take this labour in hand, by the sufferance ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... beginning the height should be moderate, and the wings not too large, or the wind will soon show that it is not to be trifled with." The inventor commenced with all due caution, making his first attempt over a grass plot from a spring board one metre high, and subsequently increasing this height to two and a half metres, from which elevation he could safely cross the entire grass plot. Later he launched himself from the lower ridges of a hill 250 feet high, when he sailed to a distance of over ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding pas de quatre. He may arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who called a section of his poems "anacreontiques,'' because they were paraphrased out of the so-called writings of Anacreon into a familiar measure which was supposed to represent the metre of the Greek. Half a century later, when the form had been much cultivated, John Phillips (1631-1706) laid down the arbitrary rule that an anacreontic line "consists of seven syllables, without being tied to any certain ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cleverness of speech, slenderness of shape and seemliness of all attributes. But the acme of beauty is in the hair and, indeed, al-Shihab the Hijazi hath brought together all these items in his doggrel verse of the metre Rajaz, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... new text of Chaucer, founded solely on the manuscripts and the earliest printed editions that are accessible. Where Chaucer has translated, the originals have been carefully studied: "the requirements of metre and grammar have been carefully considered throughout": and "the phonology and spelling of every word have received particular attention." We may add that all the materials for a Life of Chaucer have been sought out, examined, and pieced ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... character. In view of these common features, we might be tempted at first sight to suppose the difference between the three kinds to be merely one of form, merely the difference between the vehicle of prose and the vehicle of metre. We shall find, however, on deeper inquiry, that to the true artist, who does not find his materials in the world, but creates them according to the inner laws by which the world and himself are governed, the vehicle ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... duty of the Churches to sing Psalms, they must necessarily be turned into such a sort of Verse and Metre as will best fit them for the whole Church to join in the Worship: Now this will be very different from a Translation of the original Language word for word; for the Lines must be confined to a certain number of Syllables, and the Stanza or Verse to a certain number of Lines, ...
— A Short Essay Toward the Improvement of Psalmody • Isaac Watts
... a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... poet's. He is a paragon of deceit and quackery, a jingling knave. 'T is a game of bouts rimes, and he calls it "inspiration." No wonder Plato would have none of him in his Republic, even though Plato's poets were guiltless of rhyme and slaves only to metre. But the metre of verse, too, is a friend to thought, and its enemy. It is like wheels to a cart; not unsagaciously is Pegasus figured with wings. He flies away with you, and you are lulled by the regular flap, flap of his pinions, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... of the metre is essential to the full sense of the meaning and of the beauty of all poetry. Even the rhymeless flow of blank verse is absolutely necessary to an accurate and entire perception of the effect the author intends to produce: it is in both cases as the colouring ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... usually thin and is what might be termed pot-bellied, owing to the sort of food he eats and the cold he suffers during the night, but he is much more robust and taller (the average height of an adult is a little past one metre and a half)[7] than the other tribes and races around him who are in close reports with civilization. This fact would almost make one believe that civilization is detrimental to the physical ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... part of a metre, or 1/23400 of an English inch. The term has been formally adopted by the International Commission of Weights and Measures, representing the civilized nations of the world, and is adopted by ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... me," said James; looking, however, rather proudishly at what I had said, and replacing his glasses on the brig of his nose, he then read us a screed of metre to the following effect; part of which, I am free to confess, is rather above my ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... England. We have here to choose between three,—Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne; and for many reasons, particularly as the two last were married, we are inclined to give the preference to the first, the word new having, for the sake of the metre, been substituted for virgin. Certain it is that a married woman cannot be considered as new, although she may not be old. We therefore adhere to our supposition that this rhyme was composed at the accession of the great Elizabeth. And here we may observe, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... that a grave error had been committed in selecting the narrow metre gauge; it was all very well for phosphate transport, but once the line over Feriana and the branch to Tozeur are completed, they would have to deal with other material, such as ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... long syllables. The metrical character of English poetry depends upon the recurrence of similarly accented syllables at short and more or less regular intervals. Let us take this as the definition of what I mean by metre in the few sentences in which I shall ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... cover the brown stones and float the sight up away through the fissure of the rocks. The rhythm (to touch one of the various things) the rhythm of that 'Duchess' does more and more strike me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ... the difficult rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the general measure. Then 'The Ride'—with that touch of natural feeling at the end, to prove that it was not ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... now printing at Copenhagen three Anglo-Saxon poems of the eleventh century, namely: The Old Testament Story, On the Sixth Day's Work, and The New Testament Story, by Aelfric, Archbishop of York, now just translated into the metre and alliteration of the original. The three poems will make a quarto volume of about thirty sheets, and copies may be ordered (price three dollars), through the Hon. H. W. Ellsworth, late United States ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... disagreements there cannot be. Music too is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. In the abstract, all is simple, and we are not troubled with the twofold love; but when they are applied in education with their accompaniments of song and metre, then the discord begins. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair Urania and the coarse Polyhymnia, who must be indulged sparingly, just as in my own art of medicine care must be taken that the taste of the epicure be gratified without inflicting upon him the ...
— Symposium • Plato
... they translated, or added of themselves; the rest is made up of what are probably original phrases but omitted from the Hebrew by the carelessness of copyists; yet none of these differences is of importance save where the Greek corrects an irregularity in the Hebrew metre, or yields sense when the Hebrew fails to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... noise and tumult, the office and the weighing-stand. In the interior, the arrangements are those usually adopted,—the wooden benches are ranged around the parc, or pit, a large wire cage nearly five metres long and two and a quarter high, elevated on a platform about a metre from the floor. It has no top, but the upper portions of the walls present a smooth band of metal up which the rats cannot climb. The dog is introduced through a sliding door on the floor, and his antagonists are emptied from a box over the top. They are of three kinds, water-rats, sewer-rats, and ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... Italian Airs into the hundredth Psalm, and whilst we begin All People in the old solemn Tune of our Forefathers, she in a quite different Key runs Divisions on the Vowels, and adorns them with the Graces of Nicolini; if she meets with Eke or Aye, which are frequent in the Metre of Hopkins and Sternhold,[4] we are certain to hear her quavering them half a Minute after us to some ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of the document is 1340, but the Cornish writing on the back is somewhat later, perhaps about 1400. The language and spelling agree with those of the Poem of the Passion and the Ordinalia, and the exact metre is not found anywhere else. The speaker (it may be a part in some play) offers a lady to some other person as a wife, praises her virtues, and then gives the lady some rather amusing advice as to her behaviour to her future husband, and how to acquire ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... this quotation, merely showing the metre, would have no appeal to us; with all its perfection and its proportion, rhyme and cadence, it would only be a construction. But when it is the outer body of an inner idea it assumes a personality. The idea flows through the rhythm, permeates the words and throbs in their rise ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... down to the piano again, after a hasty dinner snatched in the neighbourhood; but as he was only playing scales, he propped open before him a little volume of Goethe's poems, which Johanna had lent him, and suiting his scales to the metre of the lines, read through one after another of the poems he liked best. At a particular favourite, he stopped playing and held the book ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... lines entirely explain the meaning of the picture; another piece is described by lines from the same poem, in a metre ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... orthodox university calibre, who imagine that there is no knowledge (but vanity) in any other works than those in which their own education has consisted, so Henry Vavasour became at once the victor and victim of Bentleys and Scaligers, word-weighers and metre-scanners, till, utterly ignorant of everything which could have softened his temper, dignified his misfortunes, and reconciled him to his lot, he was sinking fast into the grave, soured by incessant pain into ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of my own thoughts, but I had to tell him of my speculations upon after-the-war developments in aviation: nurses flying Voisins, with the cars filled with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties taking comfortable outings in gigantic biplanes of the R-6 type; mothers, as of old, gazing apprehensively at speed-dials, cautioning fathers about "driving too fast," ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... and Tartars, infamous to look at on any side, have burnt and ravaged countries, and committed atrocious inhumanities. This is all I saw of THEM. Such melancholy spectacles don't tend to raise one's spirits. [Breaks off into metre:] LA FORTUNE INCONSTANTE ET FIERE, Fortune inconstant and proud. Does not treat her suitors Always in an equal manner. Those fools called ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and on which she seemed to set her all and then sink back ununderstood. It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain bonnie ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... the very couplet she had seen pencilled on the wallpaper by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared to be recent. Ella could resist no longer, but seizing a pen impulsively, wrote to him as a brother-poet, using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him in her letter on his triumphant executions in metre and rhythm of thoughts that moved his soul, as compared with her own brow-beaten efforts in ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... verses display a rare and versatile gift of parody, great command of metre, and a ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... correct, that once with rapture writ, And are, besides, too moral for a wit. Decay of parts, alas! we all must feel— Why now, this moment, don't I see you steal? 'Tis all from Horace; Horace long before ye Said, "Tories called him Whig, and Whigs a Tory"; And taught his Romans, in much better metre, "To laugh at fools who put their trust in Peter". But Horace, sir, was delicate, was nice; Bubo observes, he lashed no sort of vice: Horace would say, Sir Billy served the crown, Blunt could do business, Huggins knew the town; In Sappho touch ...
— English Satires • Various
... of which there are several, hardly deserve to be dignified with so high a title. At no part of his life had Bunyan much title to be called a poet. He did not aspire beyond the rank of a versifier, who clothed his thoughts in rhyme or metre instead of the more congenial prose, partly for the pleasure of the exercise, partly because he knew by experience that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that form. Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse than is commonly held, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the term gallant mast. If gallant mean brave, there are two words. If the words be two, there is a stronger accent on mast. If the accent on mast be stronger, the rhyme with fast is more complete; in other words, the metre favours the notion of the words being considered as two. Gallant-mast, however, is a compound word, with an especial nautical meaning. In this case the accent is stronger on gal- and weaker on ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... will write it as a song and put it in italics, so that even you will know that it is a song; So listen, listen, Camerados! for I am about to spout and my song shall be masculine and virile. A bas your metre, a la lanterne your rhyme, conspuez ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... life or sweeter Time, that lights and quenches men, Now may quench or light again, Mingling with the mystic metre Woven of all men's lives with his Not a clearer note than this, Not a kindlier life ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... racer had made another false start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another. Such a subject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame, besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, if ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Hermit, and I know not what other extensive stock of pieces; concerning which he was now somewhat at a loss as to his true course. He could write verses with astonishing facility, in any given form of metre; and to various readers they seemed excellent, and high judges had freely called them so, but he himself had grave misgivings on that latter essential point. In fact here once more was a parting of the ways, "Write in Poetry; write in Prose?" upon which, before all else, it much concerned ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... change of a single syllable is sufficient to make good English, good sense, and good metre of a passage which is otherwise defective in these three particulars. It retains the s in "labours," keeps the comma in its place, and provides that antecedent for "it," which was justly considered ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... gives "relish to his song," {0f} by adopting "a diversity of structure in the metre;" for the lyric comes in occasionally to relieve the solemnity of the heroic, whilst at the same time the latter is frequently capable of being divided into a shorter verse, a plan which has been observed in one ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature, and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism of literature must always be a contradiction in terms. You may to some considerable extent ascertain the general laws of language, of metre, of music, as applied to verbal rhythm and cadence; you may classify the subjects which appeal to the general, and further classify their particular manners of appeal; you may arrange the most ingenious "product-of-the-circumstances" theories about ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... travellers return." Thomas M. Blasdell, step this way, And tell me how you feel to-day? You thought I'd pass and let you go, Old twisted groove! but 'tis not so, Like charcoal, brimstone and salpetre. I'll touch you off now in short metre. 'Tis long since first your eye, my man, Along the rifle barrel ran; The "crotch" or "globe" was all the same, If you could only see the game. Or the "bulls-eye," the missile flew Into its centre straight and true, In the old days when ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... forms of literature and of inference from the two great epics which have come down to us. So reconstructed, the earliest period appears to us as a time of slow development in which the characteristic epic metre, diction, and structure grew up slowly from crude elements and were improved until the verge of maturity ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... interrupted Miss Maxwell. "Though they don't amount to anything as poetry, they show a good deal of promise in certain directions. You almost never make a mistake in rhyme or metre, and this shows you have a natural sense of what is right; a 'sense of form,' poets would call it. When you grow older, have a little more experience,—in fact, when you have something to say, I think you may write very good verses. Poetry needs knowledge and vision, experience ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... song, the others accompanying him with gestures. They stretched out their hands, and alternately struck their feet against the ground with frantic contortions. The last words they repeated in chorus, and we easily distinguished a sort of metre, but I am not sure that there was any rhyme; the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... 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
... (of reproducing the Saj'a) may be carried to any length (how?), and we do not see why Captain Burton neglects the metre of the poetry, or divides his translation into sentences by stops, or permits any break in the continuity of the narrative, since none such exists in the Arabic" (p. 182). My reply is that I neglect the original metres first and chiefly because I do not care to "caper ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... white gloves, drinking, rushing, screaming with laughter, screaming with anger, Billy was one of that large class of women that the big city breeds, and that cannot live elsewhere than in the big city. She would ride in a thousand taxicabs, worrying as she watched the metre; she would drink a thousand glasses of champagne, wondering anxiously if Joe were to pay for it; she would gossip of a dozen successful actresses without the self-control to work for one-tenth of their success, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... were no significant italics in this text. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. This etext was transcribed from a 1917 ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... time before my story opens, he found, in his wanderings from shelf to shelf, some nicely-bound volumes, one of which he opened, and straightway verses of the most attractive-looking metre met his eye, not, however, in German, but in a fair round Roman text, and, alas! in a language which he did not understand. There were customers in the shop, so he stood still in the corner with his nose almost resting on the bookshelf, ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a poem of 188 lines, in heroic metre, and is followed by a shorter poem, entitled "A Comfortable Exhortation to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott's genius did not reach its highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises of his loved Border-land. The very quality in his verse which makes it seize so powerfully on the imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous men, often makes ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... Ambassador's verses I have ventured to omit, as alike destitute of elegance, point, or metre.] ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... reproachful hint to the poor old England he is leaving. What a glorious metre! warming one's whole heart into life and energy! If I could but write in such a metre one true people's song, that should embody all my sorrow, indignation, hope—fitting last words for a poet of the people—for they will be my last words—Well—thank God! at least I shall not be buried ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... bounced over the cobble-stones in a taxi-metre on the way to the Place Vendome, he devoted the whole of his conversation to the delicious breakfast they were to have, expatiating glibly on the wonderful berries that would come first in that always-to-be-remembered meal. She was ravenously ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... preludes give an interesting insight into the author's moods and views. The opinions of literary men of course differ as to the relative excellence of the different poems. "Marmion" certainly had great merit, and added to the fame of the author. There is here more variety of metre than in his other poems, and also some passages of such beauty as to make the poem immortal,—like the death of Marmion, and those familiar lines in reference to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... reading aloud, or pacing to and fro to the measure of her own recitations. Listen as I would, I could only make out that these recitations were poetical fragments—I could only distinguish a certain chanted metre, the chiming of an occasional rhyme, the rising and falling of a voice ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's Songs and Sonnets with Matthew Arnold's Obermann; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with The Light of Asia. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but no one denies that the French Revolution and Hero-Worship, at least in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splendid ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... remember also that pretty impromptu verse of the author when acting the part of King in another man's play, two years ago at Greenwich? Did she not twice drop her glove near his feet in crossing the stage? And how happily had he responded to the challenge! True to the character as well as to the metre of his part, he had picked up the glove, presenting it to its owner ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ill success are thus severely and distinctly stated, "The strange license ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... to the Alexandrine line later so predominant in French poetry.) The volume of this quasi-epical verse, existing in its three groups, or cycles, is immense. So is that of the satire and the allegory in metre that followed. From this latter store of stock and example, Chaucer drew to supply his muse with material. The fabliaux, so called,—fables, that is, or stories,—were still another form of early French literature in verse. It is only now, within the current decade ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of grammar, I needed no teacher except my mother. When I had conquered the first difficulties I took up Tennyson's Idyls of the King, and at last succeeded in translating two of these beautiful poems in the metre of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were numerous. One day we dug a two-metre hole, and next day found eight live ones. They have teeth ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... one single literary effect, it appears to me that the poetry of the future will probably not develop very much further in the direction of metre and rhyme. Indeed, it is possible to see, not to travel far for instances, in the work of such writers as Mr. Robert Bridges or Mr. Stephen Phillips, a tendency to write lines which shall conceal ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... poems. By temperament a singer as well as a seer and sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the singing voice. He composed no one great poem, his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. He ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is capable here and there ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... which are really poetical. To begin with the more gross and external ones, he had no instinct for, no pleasure in, metrical arrangements for their own sake; he did not think nor invent in verse, ideas did not come to him on the wave of metre; he thought out, he elaborately finished, every sentence in prose, and then translated that prose into verse, as he might have translated (and in some instances actually did translate) from a French version into an Italian one. Moreover he was, to a degree which would have been surprising ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... had been arranged between Australasians and Canadians in France to decide which could fell trees in the quickest time. It began really with the French forest authorities, who insisted on the well-known forest rule that no young trees under one metre twenty in girth must be felled after the middle of May, because if you cut the young tree after the sap begins to rise it will not grow again. The British officer in control of the forest had obtained an extension until ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... that while the laconic George Crabbe, "Nature's sternest painter," was writing his rough couplets in the metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy oysters for his cat, William Blake—in mind and imagination a contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman—should have been asserting the artist's right (why should we ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 13th century, did not deem it necessary to insert—I have hoped at least partially to liberate the lurking devil of humor from his fetters, letting him caper, not, certainly, as he does in the Latin, but as he probably would have done had his creator written in English. In preserving the metre and double rhymes of the original, I have acted from the same reverent regard for the music with which, in the liturgy of the Church, the verses have become inseparably wedded that inspired Gen. Dix; seeking rather to surmount the obstacles ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... rarely indicates the date of composition. Only sixteen of the thirty-seven plays commonly assigned to Shakespeare were published in his lifetime, and it is questionable whether any were published under his supervision. {48} But subject-matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period in his career to which each play may be referred. In his early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy appears in its simplicity; as his powers gradually matured he depicted life in its most complex involutions, and portrayed with masterly ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... is to walk in prose, without the friction of the wings of metre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the spirit and ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... with his new friend, but the gentleman who travels in Europe needs to carry an assortment of dialects for use on opposite sides of the same rivulet or the same hill. However, as the French franc has been adopted by four other nations, and the French litre and metre by a greater number, one and the same mail and postage made to serve Europe and America, and passports been abolished, we may venture to picture to ourselves the time when the German shall consent to clear his throat, the Frenchman his nose, the Spaniard his tonsils and the Englishman ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... missing, but I know that this is the edition printed, as was Priscilla's, in Amsterdam in 1612 (not "in England in 1600" as a note written in the last blank page states). The full title was "The Book of Psalms. Englished both in Prose and Metre. With annotations opening the words and sentences by conference with other Scriptures. Eph. v: 18,19. Bee yee filled with the Spirit speaking to yourselves in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual-Songs singing and making melodie in your hearts to the Lord." The book contains besides the Psalms and ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the benefit of the bookseller; and by the way, as probably for a play as a poem: but modern criticks may be surprised perhaps at the complaint of John Hall, that 'certayne chapters of the Proverbes, translated by him into English metre, 1550, had before been untruely entituled to be the doyngs of Mayster Thomas ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Murs, in Anjou, there is "a strip of nine hectares, subdivided into no fewer than thirty-one separate parcels." The limit, however, seems to be reached in Laon, where "it is not rare to find fields scarce a metre (3 ft. 3.37 in.) wide; here an apple-tree or a walnut-tree covers with its branches four or five lots, and the proprietor can only take in his crop in the presence of his neighbours, to whom he has also to leave one-half of the fruit fallen on their lots." ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Hungarian, There are only twenty-one letters in the alphabet; the letter J is pronounced like Y (as a consonant), and Y almost as a short I. The first syllable of every word is accented. This renders it difficult to accommodate such words as K[a]l[)e]v[)a]l[a] to the metre; but I have ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... or severally provide the requisite perfections. But, if history adopts such servile arts, it is nothing but poetry without the wings; the exalted tones are missing; and imposition of other kinds without the assistance of metre is only the more easily detected. It is surely a great, a superlative weakness, this inability to distinguish history from poetry; what, bedizen history, like her sister, with tale and eulogy and their attendant exaggerations? ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... I have succeeded in obtaining a free-and-easy translation of the lyric; but in my anxiety to preserve the metre and something of the spirit of the original, I have made several blunders and many anachronisms. Mr. Free, however, pronounces my version a good one, and the world must take his word till some more worthy translator shall have consigned ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... manuscript given in the appendix with the corresponding place in the text. Milton's own spelling revels in redundant e's, while the printer of the 1645 book is very sparing of them. But in cases where the spelling affects the metre, we find that the printed text and Milton's manuscript closely correspond; and it is upon its value in determining the metre, quite as much as its antiquarian interest, that I should base a justification of this reprint. Take, for instance, such a line as the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... expectations, was succeeded by a most abominable fog, thick and white like cotton-wool. These were hardly ideal conditions under which to close a rocky and unknown coast, but it had to be done. The trouble was that it was entirely useless taking soundings, as the twenty-metre depth-line on the chart went right up to the land. We crept slowly eastwards, till, when by dead reckoning we were ten miles inside the coast, the Navigator accidentally leant on the whistle lever; this action on his part probably saved the ship, as an ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it written—rapidity and antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are half-a-dozen ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... A year earlier he had built a powerful station for the purpose of making experiments in talking across the ocean. On that account the United States Government had granted him a special permit to use an 1,800 metre wave length. ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... understand why boats were not used. The horses had water up to their hams, and it would have been impossible even to get into a carriage if the pavements had not been a metre ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... that I was a good deal disturbed at one time," said Mr. Cabot frankly; "but never mind that now, you are through," and he heaved a sigh of relief, "and nicely established with Van Metre and Cartwright. It's the best law firm in the town, Pickering." Mr. Cabot brought his elbow off from the mantel enough to smite his palms together smartly in enthusiasm. ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... skill in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to the hymn-books as "common metre," was such as to convince the youth that, whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time to obtain a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true destiny was the glorious career of a poet. It was a most pleasing circumstance, that his mother, while she fully ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the modern reader should have become tired of academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... questions which a translator of the Satires and Epistles has to encounter, and the way in which, as it appears to me, he may best deal with them. These questions, I need hardly say, mainly resolve themselves into the metre and the style. With regard to the metre, I have myself but little doubt that the measure in which Horace may best be represented is the heroic as I suppose we must call it, of ten syllables. The one competing measure of course is the Hudibrastic ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... imitable, and to follow Prout, this time with careful outlines on the spot, than to idealize his notes in mimic Turnerism. He kept a prose journal, chiefly of geology and scenery, as well as a versified description, written in a metre imitated from "Don Juan," but more elaborate, and somewhat of a tour de force in rhyming. But that poetical journal was dropped after he had carried it through France, across the Jura, and to Chamouni. The ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... German growth. Neither the Romans, nor the lineal descendants of the Romans, the Italians, the Provencals, the Spaniards, can claim that poetry as their own. It is Teutonic, purely Teutonic in its heart and soul, though its utterance, its rhyme and metre, its grace and imagery, have been touched by the more genial rays of the brilliant sun of a more southern sky. The same applies to the great romantic poems of that period. The first impulse came from abroad. The subjects ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... beats out with a more or less regular proportion of stresses or heavy accents. It diverts into an order of words different from the order normal in prose. Sometimes it is elliptic, sometimes it contains particles unnecessary to the meaning—both signs of an attempt at metre. Though almost constantly unrhymed, it carries alliteration and assonance to a degree beyond what is usual in prose, and prefers forms of words more sonorous than the ordinary. But these many and distinct passages of poetry issue ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... requires a number of repetitions in the tune, and has a chorus that is sung at the end of each verse. I have not presumed to arrange it in metre; but the following is the substance: "We are assembled in the habiliments of war, and will go in quest of our enemies. We will march to their land and spoil their possessions. We will take their women and children, and lead them into captivity. The warriors ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... the greater part of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "One advantage," says Mr. Southey, "this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. Southey is ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... delay. You will surely find something there which, for good or ill, is unique. You can name—or at least I can name—nothing to compare it with. Goldsmith and Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied, so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused such a man to pass away, and to leave a total output of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stations of the cross, (places where our Saviour is supposed to have halted, or fainted under his load, on his way to Calvary.) Stanzas we were at first profane enough to attribute to Metastasio, but afterwards found that it was only the metastasis of his metre adapted to the use of the church. They are much better than most of our sacred poetry, as it is strangely miscalled, which is frequently neither ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants, knowing what is right and that he must and will ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... that the opening lines belong to another poem," observed the doctor, "both by the same author, it does not alter the fact that both fit the subject admirably, and might easily be a part of one production. The metre is the same, and the subject as well. The first serves excellently as an ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh |
