"Blank verse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... specimen conversations are here suggested as suitable for the conditions which we have lately experienced. The idea is to discourage the Hun by ignoring those conditions or explaining them away. For similar conversations in actual life blank verse would not of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... battle of Nature against Artificiality. However naturally he might write, the affected or monotonous delivery of his verse by the actors would neutralize all his efforts. The old rhyming ten-syllable lines could not but lead to a monotonous style of elocution, nor was the early blank verse much improvement in this respect; but Shakespeare fitted his blank verse to the natural expression of his ideas, and not his ideas to the trammels ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... desire and large-moulded lays of passionate freedom. His music is, to quote Thoreau, "a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our life." He had no feeling for the epic, his genius was too concentrated, and though he could be furiously dramatic the sustained majesty of blank verse was denied him. With musical ideas he was ever gravid but their intensity is parent to their brevity. And it must not be forgotten that with Chopin the form was conditioned by the idea. He took up the dancing patterns of Poland because they suited his vivid inner life; he transformed ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... does he? Well, I should say so! Serves him right for being an old bachelor, and having nothing but furniture and Ram Juna to illuminate existence. I should expect that combination to drive a man either to drink or to blank verse." ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... eleven of which are easily recognisable amongst the Visions of Bellay, published along with the Visions of Petrarch. There is indeed as little difference between the two sets of poems as is compatible with the fact that the old series is written in blank verse, the latter in rhyme. The sonnets which appear for the first time in the Visions are those describing the Wolf, the River, the Vessel, the City. There are four pieces of the older series which are not reproduced ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... good deal of poetic feeling, although without any special indication of originality of thought. The verses entitled "Morning" ought to have rhymes, as it is not blank verse. You ought to study the rules of metrical composition before putting your thoughts into metre. This is as essential to the construction of verse, as to be acquainted with those of harmony or counterpoint, ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... Rumple, dodging round from the shady side of the wagon, where he had been walking and trying to compose blank verse about Australian roadside ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... was with him, and had not yet had time to study a speech, confessed his last words to have been, "Jai froid."—"I am cold." This, however, would nave made no figure on the banners of a funeral procession; and Le Pelletier was made to die, like the hero of a tragedy, uttering blank verse. ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... more particular concerning this opera, after having begged his pardon for so long a preface to so short a work. It was originally intended only for a prologue to a play of the nature of "The Tempest;" which is a tragedy mixed with opera, or a drama, written in blank verse, adorned with scenes, machines, songs, and dances, so that the fable of it is all spoken and acted by the best of the comedians; the other part of the entertainment to be performed by the same singers and dancers who were introduced in this present opera. It cannot properly be called ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... peculiar rhyme of Tennyson's "In Memoriam," endeavour to realize the very different effect which would be produced if the verses were to be alternated or coupled in successive pairs, or if rhyme were to be abandoned for blank verse. The exquisite melody of the poem would be silenced. The rhyme-system of the "Divine Comedy" refuses equally to be tampered with or ignored. Its effect upon the ear and the mind is quite as remarkable as that of the rhyme-system of "In ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Marullus are in blank verse. Wherever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank, Shakespeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this line should ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... monarch went on to argue in his own mind (though we need not say that blank verse is not argument) that what he had got it was his duty to keep, and that, if at one time he had entertained ideas of a certain restitution, which shall be nameless, the prospect by a CERTAIN MARRIAGE ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drawing-room poetry, an Epic on the history of Labducuo, erotic verse, all fire, foam, and fangs, reflective ditto, humble natural ballads about signal-men and newspaper-boys, Life-boat rescues, Idyls, Nocturnes in rhyme, tragedies in blank verse. Nobody will print them, or, if anybody prints them, he regrets that he cannot pay for them. My moral and discursive essays are rejected, my descriptions of nature do not even get into the newspapers. I have not been elected by the Sydenham Club (a clique of humbugs); I have let my hair grow long; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... excellent in its kind. The smoothness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with which they bound, is, to our ears at least, very pleasing. We are inclined to think that if Addison had left heroic couplets to Pope, and blank verse to Rowe, and had employed himself in writing airy and spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher than it now does. Some years after his death, Rosamond was set to new music by Doctor Arne; and was performed with complete success. Several passages long retained ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... between 'Patience' and 'Iolanthe,'" said Clarence. "The 'Mikado' has been done to death, and so has 'Trial by Jury.' And 'Princess Ida' is too full of blank verse, and the ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully declares: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the productions of others includes some dramas which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... voice, even in the tempered drawing-room tones of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under the gallery, and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with them, movements which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown away upon two women and a little furniture. A consciousness stood in the room between them, and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazar rode on long absorbed regards, one reading, the other ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... reader is struck first of all with the novel versification. It is blank verse, the line being precisely that of Dante's Divina Commedia. Not only is there no rhyme, but assonance is very carefully avoided. The effect of this unbroken succession of feminine verses is slightly monotonous, though the poet shifts his pauses skilfully. The rhythm ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... The Voyage In the Valley of Cauteretz The Flower Requiescat The Sailor-Boy The Islet The Ringlet A Welcome to Alexandra Ode sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition A Dedication Experiments. Boadicea In Quantity Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... his diplomatic service he added almost nothing to his permanent literary product. In 1869 he had published Under the Willows, a collection that contains some of his finest poems. In the same year The Cathedral was published, a stately poem in blank verse, profound in thought, with many passages of great poetic beauty. In 1888 a final collection of poems was published, entitled Heartsease and Rue, which opened with the memorial poem, Agassiz, an elegy that would not be too highly honored by being bound in a ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... theme; meantime the juice of the juniper is in requisition, and it seems that those small hires cannot be performed without it. Returning from her wretched journey to her wretcheder home, the lady had to listen to a mild reproof from easy-going Diaper,—a reproof so mild that he couched it in blank verse: for, seldom writing metrically now, he took to talking it. With a fluent sympathetic tear, he explained to her that she was damaging her interests by these proceedings; nor did he shrink from undertaking to elucidate wherefore. Pluming ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Among the Gael, blank verse is unknown, and for rhyme they entertain a passion.[23] They rhyme to the same set of sounds or accents for a space of which the recitation is altogether tedious. Not satisfied with the final rhyme, their favourite measures ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of the present generation of playgoers. Yet, through two or three among the long list of plays of this type, there runs like a vein of gold amid the dross, a noble and true idea that preserves them from the common fate, and one of these few pieces is 'Ingomar.' Its blank verse may be stilted, its action often forced and unreal; but the pictures it presents of a daughter's devotion, a maiden's purity, a brave man's love and supreme self-sacrifice, are drawn with a breadth and a simplicity of outline that make them ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... carolled. "Out in the open, friend." He rattled off some lines of blank verse in praise of the liberal air that set Master Vallance staring before he resumed plain speech. "When a man has lived in such hissing hot places that he is fain to spend his life under cover, he is glad to keep abroad ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... this is fatal to popularity. As he himself said, "The life of the people is such that in literature they require joy." But not only his thought, his very style, is anti-popular. Much of his most elaborate work is in blank verse, and that in itself is a heavy draw-back. Much also is in exotic and unaccustomed metres, which to the great bulk of English readers must always be more of a discipline than of a delight. And, even when he wrote in our indigenous metres, his ear often played him false. His ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... merit either of plan or execution; for the plot is taken, with little change, from "The German's Tale," written by Harriet Lee, and the treatment is throughout prosaic. Byron was never a master of blank verse; but Werner, his solo success on the modern British stage, is written in a style fairly parodied by Campbell, when he cut part of the author's preface into lines, and pronounced them as good as any in ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... publicity of their position and shone physically with well-being and the expectation of pleasure; the grandiose marble corridors, the splendid version of a lift, and the number of storeys that flashed past them, all very much the same, but justifying their monotony by their stateliness, like modern blank verse, made her remember solemnly her inner conviction that she would some day find ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... own production. It had often happened to him, he went on to say, to be interrupted in his observations by clouds covering the objects he was examining for a longer or shorter time. In these idle moments he had put down many thoughts, unskilfully he feared, but just as they came into his mind. His blank verse he suspected was often faulty. His thoughts he knew must be crude, many of them. It would please him to have me amuse myself by putting them into shape. He was kind enough to say that I was an artist in words, but he held ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... war and love, of eating and drinking and dancing, of the virtues and vices of rulers, and of the misery and happiness of the people. They are in rhyme. Rhyme is essential to Chinese poetry; there is no such thing as blank verse. Further, the rhymes of the Odes have always been, and are still, the only recognized rhymes which can be used by a Chinese poet, anything else being regarded as mere jingle. Poetical licence, however, is tolerated; and great masters have availed themselves freely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... and fixing its standard. During the troubles of King James's reign he was about to leave the kingdom, when his departure was delayed by gout, of which he died in 1684. A foremost English representative of the chief literary movement of his time, he translated into blank verse Horace's Art of Poetry, and besides a few minor translations and some short pieces of original verse, which earned from ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... memories of them all! Dear old Pagan, wonderful in his death as in his life. When, shortly before he died, his house caught fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well, he flatly refused to listen, and cried roundly, in a line of vehement blank verse, "By the immortal gods, I will not ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Edith; it isn't true to life. Why, who ever heard of a case being conducted in any Court of Law as that is? Do you suppose all kinds of people are allowed to stand up and talk just when they like, and say just what they choose—in blank verse, too? Do you think now, if someone brought an action against me and you wanted me to win it, that you and Bennett could calmly walk off to the Law Courts disguised as a barrister and his clerk, and that you could get me off? Do you suppose, even, that you would be let in? People ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... made some experiments in tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy—the prose comedy of manners—and classical tragedy admitted no comic intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage, was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his "heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the ground that it would act as a check upon the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... excellent salary, no doubt; and, likely enough, had got two-thirds of all the brain there was in the palace. But not a wooden-headed man-at-arms but looked down upon him. Every gallery boy who pays a shilling to laugh at me regards himself as my intellectual superior; while to a fourth-rate spouter of blank verse he ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... Purcell's music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah, who prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well call rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a "defect" of blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as inseparable as sound from tone, as atoms from the element they constitute. But the question, why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven, brings me to the point at which I must show the precise relationship in which Purcell stood to ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... weel nee brussen—there be's Mister Wudsworth—Ho, ho, ho!" It was indeed the bard, benighted in the Excursion from Patterdale to Jobson's Cherry-Tree; and the Red Tarn Club, afraid of having their orgies put into blank verse, sailed away in floating fragments beneath ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... ungrammatical level of the Common Herd. But the fact is, his proud spirit was chafed and fretted at the spectacle of sordid self-seeking that everywhere met his gaze, and excess of sentiment made him forgetful of syntax. "Mark me, my friend, I am not to be bought," he continued in unconscious blank verse. "I shall take my pick, sir, and you will take this check." And he handed the amazed publisher a check for five hundred dollars. "I sicken, sir," he continued, "of this qualmish air of half-truth that I ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... Saemund translated into English Verse, by A.S. Cottle of Magdalen College, Cambridge. This work has an Introduction containing nothing worth discussing here, and an "Epistle" to A.S. Cottle from Robert Southey. The laureate, in good blank verse, discourses on the Old Norse heroes whom he happens to know about. They are the old favorites, Regner Lodbrog and his sons; in Southey's poem the foeman's skull is, as usual, the drinking cup. It was certainly time for ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... little Wiedemann, as his parents tried to call him—his full name was Robert Wiedemann Barrett—had developed a decided turn for blank verse. He would extemporize short poems, singing them to his mother, who wrote them down as he sang. There is no less proof of his having possessed a talent for music, though it first naturally showed itself in the love of a cheerful noise. His father had once ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Bjoernson went abroad and devoted three years to foreign travel, spending the greater part of his time in Italy. From Rome he sent home the historical drama "King Sverre" (1861), which is one of his weakest productions. It is written in blank verse, with occasional rhymes in the more impressive passages. Of dramatic interest in the ordinary sense, there is but little. It is a series of more or less animated scenes, from the period of the great civil war (1130-1240), ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... overrunning the latter country gave a new stimulus to the imitation of Italian meters and poets which we have seen existed in a premature state since the reign of John II. The man who first achieved real success in the hendecasyllable, combined in sonnets, octaves, terza rima and blank verse, was Juan BOSCAN ALMOGAVER (1490?-1542), a Catalan of wealth and culture. Boscan was handicapped by writing in a tongue not native to him and by the constant holding of foreign models before his eyes, and he was not a man of genius; yet his verse kept to a loftier ideal than ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... be a blank verse, Fairy? Keep it up, you haven't far to go!—There they are! Look at them, Aunt Grace. They cheated. They tried to get all my hard-earned ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... those poets at second-hand, the Romans. They observed that though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton did not, in their greatest works; and a good half of the time the first-rate moderns managed very well with blank verse. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... earlier, although it was not printed until three years afterwards. The versification of "The Wounds of Civil War" certainly affords evidence that it was penned even before Marlowe had improved the measure of dramatic blank verse, which Shakespeare perfected: it is heavy, monotonous, and without the pauses subsequently introduced; if therefore Lodge produced it after Marlowe's "Edward II." was brought out, he did not at least profit by the example. All the unities are ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... as well as the pair of lovers—are indicated with an appreciation of the value of dramatic contrast that might make the little story effective on the stage. One of the Tales in this collection, The Confidant, was actually turned into a little drama in blank verse by Charles Lamb, under the changed title of The Wife's Trial: or the Intruding Widow. The story of Crabbe's Confidant is not pleasant; and Lamb thought well to modify it, so as to diminish the gravity of the secret of which the ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... defies tradition to an eccentric degree. Originality is his sin. He strains after it in every line. I must confess I think much of the free verse he writes is really prose, and a good deal of it blank verse chopped up into odd lengths. He talks of assonance and color, of stress and pause and accent, and bewilders me with ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... und der Abt' (The Emperor and the Abbot), 'Der Wilde Jaeger' (The Wild Huntsman), all belong, like 'Lenore,' to the literary inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... and Homer, with Terence, Tacitus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid, were constantly pillaged for thoughts to piece out the theatrical robes and blank verse eloquence of playwrights who only received for their best accepted works from five to twenty pounds; proprietors and stage managers driving hard bargains with these brilliant, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... throw this fine picture into blank verse so well, as to convince the public, that the beauties of Klopstock can be naturalized without strangeness, and his peculiarities retained without affectation; that quaintness, the unavoidable companion of neologism, is as needless to genius, as hostile to grace; the hexameter, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... of two accents alternate, so that the poem is really written in blank verse; its character is, however, entirely changed, since the last word of each line stands out because of the necessary rhythmical pause. Notice the change ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... by Mr Reed was calculated to mislead. Some slight separate proofs of the age of this piece are pointed out in the new notes; but the general evidence is much more convincing. The versification is interlarded with rhymes like nearly all our earlier plays, and the blank verse is such as was written before Marlowe's improvements had generally been adopted. When the play was reprinted in 1662, some parts of it were perhaps a little modernised. The introduction of Malbecco and Paridell into it, from Spenser's "Faerie Queene," may be some guide as to ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... for food, and let me have it," says Orlando, and is welcomed by the Duke to his table. And what does Orlando do? Does he seize the boar's head, or something equally attractive, and rush back to his fainting servitor with the prize? Not a bit of it! He leisurely delivers fourteen lines of blank verse about the "shade of melancholy boughs," "the creeping hours of time," and "blushing, hides his sword!" In my neighbourhood happened to be one of the greatest advocates of our generation, and I heard ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... would be greatly mistaken. Not only is his knowledge of English— extending to the most subtle idiom, or the most recondite cant phrase—more extensive than that of many of us who have English for our mother-tongue, but his delivery of Shakespeare's blank verse is remarkably facile, musical, and intelligent. To be in a sort of pain for him, as one sometimes is for a foreigner speaking English, or to be in any doubt of his having twenty synonymes at his tongue's end if he should want one, is out of the question after ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... become for us as empty as a mirage. Our sole trouble was how to give this news to Nilkamal Babu with due decorum. We did it at last with considerable restraint, while the geometrical figures on the blackboard stared at us in wonder and the blank verse of the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... ready to do. But sister Amelia wouldn't fool him, if she got East with her emergency dressing bag and her perfectly equipped energy. She would clap him into the Psychopathic before he had time for even half as much blank verse as Hamlet had. They wouldn't allow him ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same, and are said to have been "formerly translated." In the Visions of Du Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in blank verse, and the later ones are rimed as sonnets; but the change does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of his genuine pieces for the volume, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... or purer order. He seems to have written down, to the model before him, and to have been inspired by nothing but an emulation of its faults. His style, accordingly, is kept hovering in the same sort of limbo, between blank verse and prose,—while his thoughts and images, however shining and effective on the stage, are like the diamonds of theatrical royalty, and will not bear inspection off it. The scene between Alonzo and Pizarro, in the third act, is one of those almost entirely rewritten by Sheridan; ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... we were poets, I suppose we should before now have as good as drank some of that Long Island champagne. Speaking of poets reminds me that I did n't tell you how charmed I was with those translations from the Odyssey; the blank verse is so simple, clear, and exquisite, so ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... some sort the Romantic Drama was an extraneous product in English literature. Even the magnificent medium in which it is composed, the decasyllabic blank verse which the genius of Marlowe adapted to the needs of the drama, is ultimately due to the Italian Trissino, and has never kept a firm hold on English poetry. Thus both the formal elements of the Drama, plot and verse, were importations from Italy. But style and characterisation were both ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces unnatural celibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first serious poem, 'Queen Mab' (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The spirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the confines of the universe, where the past, present, and future of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants writhing upon their thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is introduced; ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Go to, you shall come, and let your Muses go spin for once. If thou wilt not, 's hart, what's your god's name? Apollo? Ay, Apollo. If this melancholy rogue (Lorenzo here) do not come, grant, that he do turn Fool presently, and never hereafter be able to make a good jest, or a blank verse, but live in more penury of wit and invention, than either the Hall-Beadle, or Poet Nuntius." Well, it is the strangest letter that ever I read. Is this the man, my son so oft hath praised To be the happiest, and most precious wit That ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... verse was like Keats, how soon he came to that unmistakable style of his own—to the utterance of those pure lyrics, "most musical, most melancholy"—"to the perfection of his matchless songs," and again, to the mastery of blank verse, that noblest measure, in "The Fisher and Charon"—to the grace and limpid narrative verse of "The King's Bell," to the feeling, wisdom—above all, to the imagination—of his loftier odes, among which that on Lincoln remains unsurpassed. This is ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... "starred" over the head of W. C. Macready, and the real water tank in the Cataract of the Ganges helped to increase the attractions of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. But we ourselves are evidently in a parlous state at the present day, when actors vainly endeavor to struggle through twenty lines of blank verse—when we are told mechanical effects and vast armies of supers make up the production of historical plays—when pathological details, we are told, are always well received—when the "psychonosological" (whatever that may be)—[laughter], is invariably ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Poetry such as that of Blair is never the result of imitation: its verbal happinesses are at least as great as those of the Night Thoughts themselves, and its power and earnestness considerably greater. 'The eighteenth century,' says Thomas Campbell, 'has produced few specimens of blank verse of so powerful and simple a character as that of the Grave. It is a popular poem, not merely because it is religious, but because its language and imagery are free, natural, and picturesque. The latest editor of the poets has, with singularly bad taste, noted some of the author's most nervous ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... paper informed me that there were eleven musical comedies, three Shakespeare plays, a blank verse drama, and two comedies ("last weeks") for me to choose from. I bought a stall at the Briggs Theatre. Stanley Briggs, who afterwards came to bulk large in my small world, was playing there in a musical comedy which had had even more ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... rich language,' said he, 'but less prolific in rhymes than either the German or the English. That is why our best work has been done in blank verse, a form of composition which is capable of reaching great heights. But I fear that such subjects are somewhat outside the ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Surrey; but these two at least discovered the way which, once found, became comparatively easy to tread. They introduced the sonnet, learnt from Petrarch; Surrey (the same who was executed on the eve of Henry's death) wrote the first English blank verse. The moribund tradition of the successors of Chaucer continued to find better exponents in Scotland than in England, in the persons first of bishop Gawain Douglas—who perhaps should rather be connected with the previous reign—and later of Sir David Lyndsay. But doctrinal controversy does not ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... same moment the Choral Ode is finished and the Chorus take up their usual position during the Episodes, drawn up in two lilies in front of the Altar facing the Stage. They speak only by their Foreman (or Corypliceus), and use the ordinary Iambic Metre (equivalent to our Blank Verse). ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... from the return of this noble traveller that we are to date not only the introduction into our language of the Petrarchan sonnet, and with it of a tenderness and refinement of sentiment unknown to the barbarism of our preceding versifiers; but what is much more, that of heroic blank verse; a noble measure, of which the earliest example exists in Surry's spirited and faithful version of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... sank into the remaining low-seated wicker chair and gave herself up. Fraulein began to read, as she did at prayers, slowly, almost below her breath, but so clearly that Miriam could distinguish each word and her face shone as she bent over her book. It was a poem in blank verse with long undulating lines. Miriam paid no heed to the sense. She heard nothing but the even swing, the slight rising and falling of the clear low tones. She felt once more the opening of the schoolroom window—she saw the little brown ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... heard till then. 'Will you permit me to look at it?' said I. 'With pleasure,' he answered, politely handing me the book. {138b} I took the volume, and glanced over the contents. It was written in blank verse, and appeared to abound in descriptions of scenery; there was much mention of mountains, valleys, streams, and waterfalls, harebells and daffodils. These descriptions were interspersed with dialogues, which, though ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the first parson to record the manners of the Burwash parishioner. The Rev. James Hurdis, curate there towards the end of the preceding century, and afterwards Professor of Poetry at Oxford (we saw his grave at Bishopstone), had written a blank verse poem in the manner of Cowper, with some of the observation of Crabbe, entitled "The Village Curate," which is a record of his thoughts and impressions in his Burwash days. One could hardly say that "The Village Curate" ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... before a line from his pen appeared in type. He found employment in a machine-shop, and it was only very gradually—probably after much doubt and hesitation—that he came to the determination to subject his private creations to the ordeal of print. His first venture was a poem in blank verse, the title of which we have been unable to ascertain. A few copies were printed anonymously and distributed among personal friends. It was a premature birth, which never knew a moment's life, and the father of it would now be the last person to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... talent of the individual imitators of French interferes more with the process of insensible shaping and growth. German prosody, despite the charm of its lyric measures, has never acquired the perfect combination of freedom and order which we find in English, as may be seen by comparing the best blank verse of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... (1517-1547). These two eminent writers have been called the "twin-stars of the dawn," the "founders of English lyrical poetry"; and it is worthy of especial note, that it is to Wyatt that we owe the introduction of the Sonnet into our literature, and to Surrey that is due the introduction of Blank Verse. The most important prose-writers of the first half of the century were Sir Thomas More, the great lawyer and statesman, and William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament into English. In the latter half of the century, the great poets are Spenser and Shakespeare; the great ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... child and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. In another passage he says, "The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... possibility of the modern poetic drama by writing The Sunken Bell, his most far-reaching success both on the stage and in the study. In it appears for the first time the disciplinary effect of naturalism upon literature in its loftiest mood. The blank verse is the best in the German drama, the only German blank verse, in truth, that satisfies an ear trained on the graver and more flexible harmony of English; the lyrical portions are of sufficient if inferior ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... her high mission, she has received into her heart a human passion. Her peace is gone. Here the poet, in order to express the rapid alternations of feeling to which she is a prey, breaks from the even tenor of blank verse into a lyrical effusion of remarkable beauty and pathos. She is sought for to take her part in the ceremony of the coronation; it is now with a feeling of horror that she receives into her hands the sacred banner, which she had borne triumphantly to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... best of romances; "The Lady of the Lake" to stand high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice of a noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the same way, if not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the lightness of our hearts and the divine intoxication of our brains. I know that I felt as though all the varied genius of which the human intellect is capable had descended upon me. I could have spoken in blank verse of Shakesperian beauty, all sorts of great ideas flashed through my mind; it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened and left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its native power. The sensations that ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the colouring of human passion,—have been excluded. Humorous poetry, except in the very unfrequent instances where a truly poetical tone pervades the whole, with what is strictly personal, occasional, and religious, has been considered foreign to the idea of the book. Blank verse and the ten-syllable couplet, with all pieces markedly dramatic, have been rejected as alien from what is commonly understood by Song, and rarely conforming to Lyrical conditions in treatment. But it is not anticipated, nor is it possible, that all readers shall think ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... us, not one poem, but a large literature. Mr. Dutt compares it, both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy, Blackstone's Commentaries, Percy's Ballads, and the writings of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,—all done into blank verse and incorporated with Paradise Lost. You have a martial poem like the Iliad, full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and blazonry of war;—and you find the Bhagavad-Gita a chapter in it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions to it: Whosever fancy it struck ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... same pen on miscellaneous subjects, which have been collected and reprinted, seemed as a relaxation from his severe scientific studies. Like certain other great mathematicians Herschel was also a poet, and he published a translation of the Iliad into blank verse. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... proceeded to recite some twenty lines of blank verse, for in those days people had more patience and fewer books, and exercised their memories much more than their descendants do. Listening was ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... books he took to himself, and twelve he distributed between Broome and Fenton: the books allotted to Fenton were the first, the fourth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth. It is observable, that he did not take the eleventh, which he had before translated into blank verse; neither did Pope claim it, but committed it to Broome. How the two associates performed their parts is well known to the readers of poetry, who have never been able to distinguish their books ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... in prose, and part in blank verse, in about six weeks, and having shewn it to several of my literary acquaintance, the far greater part were of opinion, that it should be entirely one, or the other; but, as the scene was laid in private ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... drawing from that noble scenery his inspiration. It was printed with a few other poems in one volume the next year. Not only was "Alastor" the first serious poem published by Shelley; but it was also the first of his compositions which revealed the greatness of his genius. Rarely has blank verse been written with more majesty and music; and while the influence of Milton and Wordsworth may be traced in certain passages, the versification, tremulous with lyrical vibrations, is such as only ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... of his author—worshipping his meanest scraps and relics as divine—without one sceptical misgiving of their authenticity, and doubt which was the properest to expound Homer to their countrymen. Reverend Chapman! you have read his hymn to Pan (the Homeric)—why, it is Milton's blank verse clothed with rhyme. Paradise Lost could scarce lose, could it ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of his discourse," said Mr Gosport, "is not more singular than the manner, for without any seeming effort or consciousness, he runs into blank verse perpetually. I have made much enquiry about him, but all I am able to learn, is that he was certainly confined, at one part of his life, in a private mad-house: and though now, from not being mischievous, he is set at liberty, his looks, language, and whole ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... stirring, the ingredients did begin to simmer into something resembling a plot. Put it upon paper. Ah! there was my difficulty. I remembered suddenly that I had read "Cain," "Manfred," "The Cenci," as poems, without ever thinking of how the dialogue looked upon paper; besides, they were in blank verse. I hadn't a notion how prose dialogue would look upon paper. Shakespeare I had never opened; no instinctive want had urged me to read him. He had remained, therefore, unread, unlooked at. Should I buy a ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... English, which, by reason of its monosyllables, is far the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English heroic."[421] Yet though Dryden admits that Caro, the Italian translator, who used blank verse, made his task easier thereby, he does not think of abandoning the couplet for any of the verse forms which earlier translators had tried. He finds Chapman's Homer characterized by "harsh numbers ... and a monstrous length of verse," and thinks his own period "a much better age ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... expressed an optimistic philosophy which ignored the corruption of human nature. Young represents a partial revolt against the domination of the Pope circle. He had always been an outsider, and his life at Oxford had, you may perhaps hope, preserved his orthodoxy. He writes blank verse, though evidently the blank verse of a man accustomed to the 'heroic couplets'; he uses the conventional 'poetic diction'; he strains after epigrammatic point in the manner of Pope, and the greater part of his poem is an elaborate argumentation to prove ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... own lips that the perils of the way made him see the poetry of it all, and he said to himself that here was the theme for that great epic, which would be the chef d'oeuvre of his literary life. It is to be written in blank verse, with the hymns and secular songs he sang at each stop given in an appendix, and he confidently hopes that it will stand out as something conspicuous and distinct against the sombre background of prosaic ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Honourable John Ruffin, laying a finger on his lips, frowning portentously, and rolling his eyes. Then he added in blank verse, as being appropriate to the conspiratorial attitude: "I thought I heard a footstep ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... for Cowper is no poet, come into comparison in one great work, the translation of Homer. Now, with all the great, and manifest, and manifold, and reproved, and acknowledged, and uncontroverted faults of Pope's translation, and all the scholarship, and pains, and time, and trouble, and blank verse of the other, who can ever read Cowper? and who will ever lay down Pope, unless for the original? Pope's was "not Homer, it was Spondanus;" but Cowper's is not Homer either, it is not even Cowper. As a child I first read Pope's Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work could ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... care of thatthrow it all on the publishers. I do long to see your labours commenced. You will choose blank verse, doubtless?it is more grand and magnificent for an historical subject; and, what concerneth you, my friend, it is, I have an idea, more ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... death rather picturesque; many young people do. There is a certain kind of poetry that fosters this idea; that delights in imaginary youthful victims, and has, reciprocally, its youthful devotees. One of my blank verse poems in the "Offering" is entitled "The Early Doomed." ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... correspondent of Mrs. Brooks, during her residence in New York and in Cuba. Among the souvenirs of Mrs. Brooke's grateful recollection of his kindness, are two or three short poems commemorating her visits to Keswick, and the following song, put into a lyrical form by her, from the blank verse of "Madoc." ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank verse, leavings from his long coxcombical strain to be a poet; of his false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages, monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his braggart assertions of blood, played off against ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... full concessions to the demands of poetical treatment, we may assume pretty confidently that Mr. Davidson intended this "Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet" for a soul's autobiography, of a kind. If so, I trust he will forgive me for doubting if he is at all likely to fulfil the poet's office as he conceives it here, or even to approach within measurable distance ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... be putten i' print; it's striking. It's almost blank verse. Ye'll be jingling into poetry just e'now. If the afflatus comes, give way, Robert. Never heed me; I'll bear it ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... on the usual subjects of love and scenery, and in the form of odes, sonnets, elegies, &c.; all serious, none personal or satirical. And besides these slight things, there is a completed poem on Dreaming, in blank verse, about 1800 lines long. The first page is dated Edinburgh, May 4, 1791, the last Edinburgh, 25th June 1791; from which I presume that we are to hold it to have been all written in these fifty-three days—a fact which accounts for the absence of high poetry, though there ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... this time was of a decidedly gloomy cast. He brought his mother a tragedy, in which, though he killed sixteen people before the second act, it made her laugh so, that he thrust the masterpiece into the fire in a pet. He projected an epic poem in blank verse, 'Cortez, or the Conqueror of Mexico, and the Inca's Daughter.' He wrote part of 'Seneca, or the Fatal Bath,' and 'Ariadne in Naxos;' classical pieces, with choruses and strophes and antistrophes, which sadly puzzled ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... perfect satisfaction in the versification of the 'Essay on Man,' we can understand his saying of 'Lycidas,' that 'the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.' In one of the 'Ramblers' we are informed that the accent in blank verse ought properly to rest upon every second syllable throughout the whole line. A little variety must, he admits, be allowed to avoid satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of alternate ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:"—such passages as these, and the whole of the 'Fragment on Mummies,' one can scarcely recite without falling into something of that chant which the blank verse of Milton and Tennyson seems ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... his native originality. But, putting this aside, what majestic Pandemoniums of terrific Imagination he has the power to call up! The opening Books are as sublime as the book of Job, and more arresting than Aeschylus. The basic secrets of his blank verse can never be revealed, but one is struck dumb with wonder in the presence of this Eagle of Poetry as we attempt to follow him, flight beyond flight, hovering beyond hovering, as he gets nearer and nearer to ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... this poem is written in blank verse. In what respects does it differ from other forms of verse? Read it with great care, observing the marks of punctuation and giving to each passage the proper inflections and emphasis. Compare it with some other poems you ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... best, he is incomparable. But all authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is circumlocution in the crow ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... finest passage of his 'Zenobie et Rhadamiste', which I had translated into blank verse. Silvia was delighted to see the pleasure enjoyed by Crebillon in hearing, at the age of eighty, his own lines in a language which he knew thoroughly and loved as much as his own. He himself recited the same passage in French, and politely pointed out the parts in which he thought that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... subsequently entered the office of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad company as clerk in the record department. While in the office of the railroad company he wrote and published his first poem. It is called "Satana Victo" and is written in blank verse. Since that time he has been a prolific writer of both poetry and prose, much of ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... crossbones and ruffled cherubim on the gravestones in a country churchyard. The four—and in this order, as I never shall forget—were 'The Last Day' of Dr Young, Blair's 'Grave', 'Death' by Bishop Beilby Porteus, and 'The Deity' of Samuel Boyse. These lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic couplet, represented, in its most redundant form, the artistic theology of the middle of the eighteenth century. They were steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as passed for elegant piety in the ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... way captivated the suffrages both of the many and of the fit though few, notwithstanding the fact that their methods of dramatic approach in their plays are absolutely and fundamentally different. Even their very methods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennyson’s blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such a ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... certainly better adapted to tragedy than rhymed alexandrines, but then the French language does not admit of blank verse, and to write tragedies in prose, unless they be tragedies in modern life, would deprive them of all charm; but after all I find the harmonious pomp and to use a phrase of Pope's "The long majestic march and energy divine" of the French alexandrine, very pleasing to the ear. I am sure that the ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... the interest of the work. If the religious works of Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, the commentaries of Blackstone and the ballads of Percy, together with the tractarian writings of Newman, Keble, and Pusey, were all thrown into blank verse and incorporated with the Paradise Lost, the reader would scarcely be much to blame if he failed to appreciate that delectable compound. A complete translation of the Maha-bharata therefore into English verse is neither possible nor desirable, but portions of it have now and then been ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... Danish of Johannes Evald, he translated "The Death of Balder," a play, into blank verse with consistently feminine endings, as in this speech of Thor to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... be specific. Now, if he had wanted to hear me, why hadn't he asked? He would have needed only to second Mrs. Phillips herself; and there he was, just on the other side of me. In consequence of his reticence I was driven—or drove myself—to blank verse. And that other man, the one in the chair; he may have had his expectations too. Arthur, Arthur, try to grasp the situation! You must come down here, and you must bring your hands with you. Tell the bishop and the ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... to talk in high-flown, blank verse sort of a way. "Ere long!" that wus somethin' new ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... other Slavic languages, the elements of a regular system of long and short syllables. So long, however, as there have existed Polish poets, they have not measured, but, in imitation of the French, have counted the syllables. With the exception of a few recent poets, who have written in blank verse, and a few weak attempts to adapt the Greek principles of accent to the Polish language, all Polish poetry is, like the French, in rhyme; and the French Alexandrine is the favourite form ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... conceived in Milton's brain, could not utter itself in any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to our language a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserian stanza. What would the "Fairy Queen" be in blank verse? For his theme and mood Dante felt the need of the delicate bond of rhyme, which enlivens musical cadence with sweet reiteration. Rhyme was then a new element in verse, a modern aesthetic creation; and it is a help and an added beauty, if it ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... began to ask himself how much truth there was in Laura's resolve to go and attend upon his wife in what was no doubt a last agony. Seeing and hearing her put into his head remembrances of an actress, he could not remember which. Her demeanour was as lofty as any and her speech almost rose into blank verse at times; and he began to think that she had missed her vocation in life. It might have been that she was destined by nature for the stage. 'She's more mummer than myself or Kate,' he said to himself, and giving an ear to her outpourings, he recognized in them the rudiments of the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... separation scene—which affords a curious view of the marriage tie and on which Leigh Hunt has founded an argument for divorce. This play contains several examples of Farquhar's curious habit of breaking out into a kind of broken blank verse occasionally for a few lines in the more serious passages. Partaking as it does of the elements of both comedy and force, it is the prototype of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, which it resembles in many respects. It will be remembered that Miss Hardcastle compares ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... him as long as he lived. You know what Elia says of him. He and Lamb were joint authors of the Original Letters of Falstaff. Lamb, I believe, first appeared as an author in the second edition of Coleridge's Poems (Bristol, 1797), and, secondly, in the little volume of blank verse with Lloyd (1798). Lamb, Lloyd, and White were inseparable in 1798; the two latter at one time lodged together, though no two men could be imagined more unlike each other. Lloyd had no drollery in his nature; White seemed to have nothing else. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... there confronting him! Was this the face of Troy's Chief Magistrate? (forgive the blank verse). Were these the features—was this the aspect—from which virtue had so often derived its encouragement and wrongdoing its reproof? Was this the figure the ladies of Troy had been wont to follow with all but idolatrous gaze? Nay, who was this man—unshaven, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... writer is obviously insincere. I see the Saturday Review says the passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose is free from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer will not go hunting over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose. This, however, is a trifle, and might ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... he made a fresh adaptation of the story which he rechristened Werner, or the Inheritance. It was finished on the 20th of January and published on the 23rd of November 1822. Werner is in parts Kruitzner cut up into loose blank verse, but it contains lines and passages of great and original merit. Alone of Byron's plays it took hold of the stage. Macready's "Werner" was a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... versatility of faculty to mislead him. The "Night Thoughts" only differ from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same Young—the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... wont to write books of little distinction on semi-religious topics. Mr. H. G. Atkinson was a person interested in mesmerism. Kisch, Moss, and Quelch, with Dyte and Isaac Meyers, Bergheim and Geary, Hannah, Hillier, Reed (their names go naturally in blank verse), were, doubtless, all most estimable men, but scarcely boast of scientific fame. Serjeant Cox, a believer in the phenomena, if not in their spiritual cause, was of the company, as was Mr. Jencken, who ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... different Macbeth than our company usually does. Louder and faster, with shorter pauses between speeches, the blank verse at times approaching a chant. But it had a lot of real guts and everybody was just throwing themselves ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... work of revision remains to be done, and then we shall see it published. I promise both you and myself much pleasure from its perusal. You will most probably find it at first less pleasing than Pope's versification, owing to the difference subsisting between blank verse and rhyme—a difference which is not sufficiently attended to, and whereby people are led into injudicious comparisons. You will find Mr. Pope more refined: Mr. Cowper more simple, grand, and majestic; and, indeed, insomuch as Mr. Pope is more ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... Dramatique) prior to Milton's Paradise Lost. Subsequent to Lord Surrey's in this Volume, and to N.G.'s in the preceding." In truth, Dr. Percy was making a collection in the two volumes of all the English undramatic blank verse he could discover, prior to the publication of Milton's great poem. He was guilty of some important omissions, because bibliographical knowledge was not then as far advanced as at present, but he performed ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various |
