"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a learned apology by Heath for a line in Macbeth which is defective in metre: 'This is one of the effects of literature in minds not naturally perspicacious'—a criticism which might be extended to ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... and were for giving him welcome; but we yawned in the midst of their tale. At last they came crying that he was coming to the king's house, and fell to their dispute, but we would listen to neither party, for we were busy with a dispute about the merits of the Great and of the Little Metre; nor were we disturbed when they passed our door with sticks of enchantment under their arms, travelling towards the forest to contend against his coming, nor when they returned after nightfall with torn robes and despairing cries; for the click ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... intensity of the streams. The outer circle could have been much larger than the present one; in fact, with this coil I have used much larger circles, and I have been able to produce a strongly luminous sheet, covering an area of more than one square metre, which is a remarkable effect with this very small coil. To avoid uncertainty, the circle has been taken smaller, and the area is now about 0.43 ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... steady refrain of Greek iambics, Greek anapaests, 'an easy and nice metre,' 'a hodge-podge lot of hendecasyllables,' and thirty alcaic stanzas for a holiday task. Mention is made of many sermons on 'Redeeming the time,' 'Weighed in the balance and found wanting,' 'Cease to do evil, learn to do well,' and the other ever unexhausted texts. One constant ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... is gone, etc. As Taylor remarks, the metre of this dirge seems to be amphibrachic; that is, made up of feet, or metrical divisions, of three syllables, the second of which is accented. Some of the lines appear to be anapestic (made up of trisyllabic feet, with the last syllable ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... semina legit equae. A more recent text (the 1898 Teubner) has "hippomanes fetae semina legit equae." Footnote u: Nubilaque iudico... Modern texts such as the 1907 Teubner give VII. 202 as "Nubilaque indico..." The word "iudico" does not fit the metre, and may be typographic error. ouranothen katagontes... The wording was reconstructed with the aid of the Loeb text, which ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... denouncer of abuses, and is thoroughly filled with the spirit which, four years after the second recension of his book, found expression in the Peasants Revolt of 1381. With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than Chaucer, reflects the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... ear is soon wearied by a succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rules 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
... (16), why cannot you conform to a form of worship which, though it does not profess to be prescribed in all particulars, contains nothing actually forbidden in the Scriptures? What authority have Dissenters for singing psalms in metre? "Where has our Saviour or his Apostles enjoined a directory for public worship? What Scripture command is there for the three significant ceremonies of the Solemn League and Covenant, viz. that the whole congregation should take it (1) uncovered, (2) standing, (3) with their right ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... all parts of the earth, there are very few but can repeat a part or the whole of "Mother Hubbard," and I have seen it somewhat asserted that it is to be found in almost every home in the civilised world. Its rude style of poetry tells nothing against it. The child knows nothing of correct metre: as long as there is a jingling rhyme it is satisfied. The dog is the domestic animal in millions of families, and in numberless cases is actually a more loved companion then brothers and sisters. A simple rhyme, therefore, about ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... sometimes there are groups of a larger number of lines in which occasional lines are found without any rhyme at all. A few stray pieces, as old as many of those found among the Odes, have been handed down and preserved, in which the metre consists of two lines of three words followed by one line of seven words. These three lines all rhyme, but the rhyme changes with each succeeding triplet. It would be difficult to persuade the English reader that this is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... nearly all, the faculties 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 ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... opportunity to say that my translation of BEOWULF, of which the last reprint was issued in 1910, is not in prose, as some have misconceived it, but it is in the same metrical form as the translations in the present volume,—an accentual metre in rough imitation of the original. I agree with Professor Gummere and others that this is a better form for the translation of Old English poetry than plain prose. It was approved by the late Professor Child nearly thirty years ago, as noted in the Preface ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... 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 octosyllabic. This latter metre is ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... metre as below, 6: A fine lilting lyric of the Captain's love for his lass; his farewell; ...
— A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs • Hubert G. Shearin
... me alone to preside; it will be necessary to invite two others to serve as vice-presidents; you might then enlist Ling Chou and Ou Hsieh, both of whom are cultured persons. The one to choose the themes and assign the metre, the other to act as copyist and supervisor. We three cannot, however, definitely say that we won't write verses, for, if we come across any comparatively easy subject and metre, we too will indite a stanza if we feel ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... he had, whose name was RALPH, That in th' adventure went his half: Though writers, for more stately tone, Do call him RALPHO; 'tis all one; 460 And when we can with metre safe, We'll call him so; if not, plain RALPH: (For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which like ships they steer their courses.) An equal stock of wit and valour 465 He had laid in; by birth a taylor. The mighty Tyrian Queen, that gain'd With subtle shreds ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... go! What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach: Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech. 'Tis like the harper's prelude on the strings, The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings; - Prologues in metre are to other pros As worsted stockings are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the subject. 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
... ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... Adonis,' and immediately afterwards John Marston's 'Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image.' [26] We do not know whether it has struck anyone as yet that this poem of Marston is a most evident satire, written even in the same metre as Shakspere's first, and at that time most popular, poem. [27] In his sixth satire of 'The Scourge of Villanie,' Marston explains why he had composed ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I studied harder after leaving ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... used for lowering the bottle into the water to the split ring on the rubber suspender. The best material for this purpose is cotton insulated electric wire knotted at every metre. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... 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 ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... that, tired of repeating the words of the songs which Jackson had taught me, I had taken those of Psalms in metre, at the end of the Prayer-book, by way of variety; and, as far as metre went, they answered very well, although people would have been surprised to have heard Psalms sung to such quick and varied measure. The Psalm I chose this time was the first—"How blest is he who ne'er ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... doubt a thoroughly barbarian twang, and it is particularly in the Psalms—which we have now been reading, and which might be ranked with the finest hymns—that I miss the number and rhythm of the syllables, the observance of a fixed metre—in short, severity of form. David, the royal poet, was no less possessed by the divinity when he sang to his lyre than other poets have been, but he does not seem to have known that delight felt by our ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... moreover, is not good for metre. Even when an actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the wing without a certain ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... of one created unity, the whole a tree of healing and of comfort to the nations, a growth from small beginnings to mighty ends." And again: "As the growth is more and more closely watched and discerned, we shall more and more clearly see that his metre, his words, his grammar and syntax, move but with the deeper changes of mind and soul of which they are outward signs, and that all the faculties of the man went onward together. . . . This subject of the growth, the oneness of Shakespeare . . . is the special ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... in Metre known, With Strains has grac'd thee, humble as thy own; Who (b) G—l—n's Dullness did for thine discard, A better Critick, for as bad a Bard! Not unregarded let this Tribute be, Tho' humble, just; well-bred, tho' ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... that it embraced every form and degree of human thought, feeling, and emotion, and clothed them all, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the slightest to the most intense and concentrated, in the dress of exactly appropriate style and language. His metre also is a perfect vehicle of the language. If we think the range of his knowledge limited, yet it was all that his country and his age possessed, and it was very greatly more than has been supposed by readers that dwelt only on the surface. So long as the lamp of civilization shall not have ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... at Rochester, a gentleman of very considerable learning, whom Dr. Johnson met there, he said, "My heart warms towards him. I was surprised to find in him such a nice acquaintance with the metre in the learned languages; though I was somewhat mortified that I had it not so much to myself, as ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... poem of "Ferdiah" I was influenced by its subject as well as by the wish of friends. A few extracts appeared in a magazine several years ago, and it was afterwards completed without any view to publication. It follows the present Irish text[8] as closely as the laws of metre will allow. Since these pages were in the printer's hands Mr. Aubrey de Vere has given to the world his treatment of the same theme,[9] adorning as usual all that he touches. As he well says: "It is not in the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... is ignorant of the Spanish language and people can never hope to understand, still less to expound, their literature. The Spanish drama is largely dependent upon subtleties of metre and diction which cannot be reproduced in translations, and it is inspired by motives very different from our own. Our watchwords are "self-interest," "freedom," "progress"; those natural to the Spaniard are "honour" and "Catholic Christianity." No great people has been so ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... divided into tenths (decimetres), hundredths (centimetres), and thousandths (millimetres), and it is multiplied by decimals in like way into hectometres, kilometres, and myriometres. The unit of weight is the gramme, divided as the metre into decigrammes, centigrammes, and milligrammes; multiplied into decagrammes, hectogrammes, and kilogrammes. The unit of capacity is the litre, divided and multiplied like ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... Parvis of the Cathedral. Even now the Seine varies in breadth at this point from a hundred and thirty-five to two hundred and fifteen metres, with a depth of five metres on the quays at lowest tide. These tides are felt as far as twenty miles above the town. They vary in height from one metre to as much as three, and a tidal wave is formed that is one of the greatest dangers of the downstream navigation. Coming up from the sea is fairly easy in almost any kind of stout and steady craft, but it is difficult for all but the best steamers to get down without being delayed, ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... yet such as, under modifications, I accede to. I have received testimonials from men not merely of genius according to my belief, but of the highest accredited reputation, that my translation of "Wallenstein" was in language and in metre superior to the original, and the parts most admired were substitutions of my own, on a principle of compensation. Yet the whole work went for waste-paper. I was abused—nay, my own remarks in the Preface were transferred to a Review, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... linguist, translated Dante into the metre of the original, with annotations, besides metrical versions of the "Iliad," the "Prometheus" of AEschylus, the "Canzoniere" of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... subject in a very different and perhaps a far superior style; but these I dare not try to imitate. I must write in my own way. It may be inferior to the way of others; but then it is much better to move around on your own limbs, even if they are rather "short metre," than to parade abroad on stilts ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... "Should we be silent and not speak," is nearly word for word from Plutarch, with some additional graces of expression, and the charm of metre superadded. I shall give the last lines of this address, as illustrating that noble and irresistible eloquence which was the crowning ornament of the character. One exquisite touch of nature, which is distinguished by ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... from steep to steep in roaring waterfalls. Some country men, high on the cliffs, howled directions, and the Master, his eye on his hounds struggling with the fierce stream, went on down the gorge until the howls changed their metre, thus indicating to the experienced that the moment had come to cross the river. The ford, such as it was, permitted some half dozen of the horses to cross it, splashing and floundering, wobbling perilously from the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... such fun up there!" Mary exclaimed. "I'd no idea that one bought land by the square yard, or metre; but it's the way here, apparently; and Vanno's going to give that handsome young man who's engaged to your maid twelve francs a metre for his terrain, although there's no road to it. But really that's a great advantage according to the father, a ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of Mr. Badman,' though now scarcely read at all, contains a vivid picture of rough English life in the days of Charles II. Bunyan was a poet, too, in the technical sense of the word, and though he disclaimed the name, and though rhyme and metre were to him as Saul's armour to David, the fine quality of his mind still shows itself in the ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... fast," 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 ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wanted, it is seldom forthcoming. The end of classical teaching at school should be to make our boys acquainted, not only with the language, but with the literature and history, the ancient thought of the ancient world. Rules of grammar, syntax, or metre, are but means towards that end; they must never be mistaken for the end itself. A young man of eighteen, who has probably spent on an average ten years in learning Greek and Latin, ought to be able to read any of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... three proverbial examples of righteousness, shows that Ezekiel had the Deluge in his mind, and increases the significance of the underlying parallel between his argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may be added that Ezekiel has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and the metre of the two passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr. ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... more curiously subtle and penetrating than any other; and the licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense. The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... trifling variations, except in those cases where there was nothing specially characteristic to make this desirable (as e.g., in the case of Islwyn, where I have thrown some of my translations into sonnet form) or where—as in the Song of the Fisherman's Wife—the metre, even if it could be reproduced, would not in English harmonise with the meaning. I ought perhaps to ask pardon beforehand for the audacity with which I have treated Ieuan Glan Geirionydd's famous ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... September 13th, 1906, that Ellehammer, a Danish engineer, made the first free flight in Europe, his machine flying 42 metres at a height of a metre and a half. About the same time reports of the Wrights' successes began to reach Europe and were quickly appreciated by ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... songs date from the Middle Ages, but they have suffered much corruption in the course of time. Words and music have been altered, but the version given here is from an old source, and, owing to the irregularity of the metre of the lines, as in all traditional songs, a considerable amount of ingenuity is called for on the part of the singer to fit the words of the second and subsequent verses—particularly of the Day Song—to the tune. ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... time by friends and colleagues. 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 as anything in our ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... of 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 music was wild ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... tridentatum has pollinia with very large viscid discs; on touching one of the two filaments (antennae) which occur on the gynostemium of the flower the pollinia are shot out to a fairly long distance (as far as 1 metre) and in such manner that they alight on the back of the insect, where they are held. The antennae have, moreover, acquired an importance, from the point of view of the physiology of stimulation, as stimulus-perceiving organs. Darwin had shown that it is only a touch on the antennae ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... what it proved, was right—so far as he went. And conversely (as he would have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origin of Species by casting them into blank verse; or Euclid's Elements by writing them out in ballad metre— ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... justly observes: "The eleventh chapter, Description of Evening, is certainly the work of the Rhapsodists and an interpolation of later date. The chapter might be omitted without any injury to the action of the poem, and besides the metre, style, conceits and images differ from the general tenour of the poem; and that continual repetition of the same sounds at the end of each hemistich which is not exactly rime, but assonance, reveals the artificial labour ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... that reading the human countenance is one of my accomplishments, I am diffidently mindful that in this company, I, myself, am read, perused; no other probably so well read—I mean so exhaustively perused. For there is one thing about me, gentlemen, if you'll allow me to say it, I'm short metre, large print, and open to the public seven days in the week. And yet you probably all make one mistake about me: you take me for the alumni of some university. Not so. I'm a self-made man. I made ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Langland's metre 'is more uncouth than that of his predecessors' (Hallam, Mid. Ag. Ch. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... our poet's style and the apparent facility, perhaps, of his metre have attracted, as I have already remarked, a crowd of imitators. Some of these have succeeded with wonderful felicity, as may be discerned in the few odes which are attributed to writers of a later period. But none of his emulators have been half so dangerous ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Principles Observations on Verse Section II. Of Accent and Quantity Section III. Of Poetic Feet Critical Observations on Theories Section IV. Of the Kinds of Verse Order I. Iambic Verse; its 8 Measures Order II. Trochaic Verse; its Nature Observations on Trochaic Metre Trochaics shown in their 8 Measures Order III. Anapestic Verse; its 4 Measures Observations on the Short Anapestics Order IV. Dactylic Verse; its 8 Measures Observations on Dactylics Order V. Composite Verse Observations on Composites Section ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... and expressions still more ardent and glowing. What separates and distinguishes poetry is more particularly the ornament of verse; it is this which gives it its character, and is an essential, without which it cannot exist. Custom has appropriated different metre to different kinds of composition, in which the world is not perfectly agreed. In England the dispute is not yet settled which is to be preferred, rhyme or blank verse. But however we disagree about what these metrical ornaments shall be, that some metre ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... all She's welcome fifty times, And comes consigned in hope and love— And common-metre rhymes. She has no manifest but this; No flag floats o'er the water; She's too new for the British Lloyds— My ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... expansion of Wace's "Brut" with insertions from Baeda. Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... a great quantity of warmth, and it is chiefly given off to the air, which is thus warmed over a great area. Water contains more than 3,000 times as much warmth as the same volume of air at the same temperature. For example, if 1 cubic metre of water is cooled 1deg., and the whole quantity of warmth thus taken from ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... 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; ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... 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 with ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... now to the consideration of what may be called, by contradistinction to the direct versions of the Indian epics, the native Kavi works. The character of these poems—for all the Kavi literature is alike written in metre—is in the main mythological and romantic; but there are also to be found among them certain ethical and religious works. Although the subjects, the heroes, and even the metre in many cases, are still Indian, these subjects and heroes have been so completely identified ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... of being made to harbor any symbolical meaning. He "never deviates into sense;" but those who appreciate him never feel the need of such deviation. He has a genius for coining absurd names and words, which, even when they are suggested by the exigencies of his metre, have a ludicrous appropriateness to the matter in hand. His verse is, with the exception of a certain number of cockney rhymes, wonderfully flowing and even melodious—or, as he would say, meloobious—while ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... only; he wrote too—verses, not very good, nor yet very bad, but well expressed, in fairly well chosen language, and with due regard to the nice laws of metre and of grammar, which is in itself a great point. Writing verse is an occupation at which only very few even among men of literary education ever really succeed; and nine-tenths of published verse is mere mediocre twaddle, quite ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... [Sings. The music again changing with the metre.] Give up the scene, give up, ye sordid rocks, The last of Arnold in his English home, Which in your bosom lives for evermore, A deathless picture; England cast it out Not being English, and it shivered on, Coiling ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... given up study and gone to bed, I heard her 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
... moste bee ytts owne defense; Som metre maie notte please a womannes ear. 50 Canynge lookes notte for poesie, botte sense; And dygne, & wordie thoughtes, ys all hys care. Canynge, adieu! I do you greete from hence; Full soone I hope to taste of your good cheere; Goode Byshoppe Carpynter ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... which had a smooth floor of inlaid silver and silken hangings, the windows looking forth on the gardens of the palace and its fountains and cool recesses of shade and temperate sweetness. While they sat there conversing in this metre and that, measuring quotations, lo! the old woman, the affianced of Shibli Bagarag—and she sumptuously arrayed, in perfect queenliness, her head bound in a circlet of gems and gold, her figure lustrous with a full robe of flowing crimson silk; and she wore slippers embroidered ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Jones, no poem in the strict metre is more read than Eben Farrd's "Dinistur Jerusalem" ("The Destruction of Jerusalem"), translated into kindred verse in this volume, unless indeed its popularity is rivalled by Hiraethog's ode on "Heddwch," ("Peace"). Two extracts from the former poem ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... 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 ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... Scotch Reviewers./ A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. 24, Cockspur ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... estimate—he told his father what he had done: "I have learned Welsh, and have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand lines, into English rhyme. I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered the old book of Ballads into English metre. I have learned many other tongues, and have acquired some knowledge even of Hebrew and Arabic." He read and conversed with William Taylor; he read alone in the Guildhall of Norwich, where the Corporation Library offered him the books from which he gained "his knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and early ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... exclaimed Billy, with ardor, "I wish I could do something to show you how much I think of you for being so good to me. I don't know how. Would it make you happy if I was to learn a hymn for you,—a smashing big hymn—six verses, long metre, and ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... more critical for the reason that the next obstacle was a brook, only two metres wide, but of which the passage was obstructed on the farther side of the track by heavy beams, laid one on top of another, solidly riveted and measuring one metre and ten millimetres from the base to the summit. The excited horse charged obliquely toward this obstruction with all his might. Paying no more attention to the pressure upon his bit, he rose in the air, but as he had not given himself sufficient time to take plenty of room for ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... wit, the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men—being unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become here of the substance of Paradise Lost—the story, scenery, characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have vanished ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the 'Faery Queene' is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in doubling the impression ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... and acclimatization of the hexameter upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel Harvey,—a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,—whose chief claim to remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure Letters," (1592,) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to face with him, in fact, and must have known who he was for, without an instant's hesitation and just like a hunted creature at bay, he turned sharply on his heel and then ran back down the street as hard as he could tear. He passed close to within half a metre of Tournefort, and as he flew past he hit out with his left fist so vigorously that the worthy agent of the Committee of Public Safety, caught on the nose by the blow, staggered and measured his length upon ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... to 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 as far as possible their rhythmical beat. It is indeed a very subtle ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it were, a hand in embryo. It had apparently become detached, or had detached itself, from the medium, and remained sufficiently solid to leave an impression of itself upon the plate, held about half a metre from it. It was, in fact, a form of materialization, but of so shadowy a texture that it remained often quite invisible to ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... Vedas, such as ka/nd/as and so on. Scripture also declares that the performance of the sacrificial action by means of the mantra is to be preceded by the knowledge of the /ri/shi and so on, 'He who makes another person sacrifice or read by means of a mantra of which he does not know the /ri/shi, the metre, the divinity, and the Brahma/n/a, runs against a post, falls into a pit[205], &c. &c., therefore one must know all those matters for each mantra' (Arsheya Brahma/n/a, first section).—Moreover, religious duty is enjoined and its opposite is forbidden, in order that the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... hand to the work," said Tom, laughing, "down they must come, in short metre, if they're bigger than Goliah. Me and my axe are old friends, and we've got the hang of one another pretty well. All I have to do, is to say, 'go it,' and every ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thou,' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our service—Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled. That flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... considerable. I have omitted, as has been seen, sundry stanzas, and I have changed the order of others. The text has nowhere been translated verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn has been given to many sentiments which were judged too Oriental. As the metre adopted by Hj Abd was the Bahr Tawl (long verse), I thought it advisable to preserve that peculiarity, and to fringe it with the rough, unobtrusive rhyme of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... and English ballads, and Lockhart's translations from the Spanish, are mostly composed in one metre, though written down in either of two ways. Macaulay's Roman Lays and "Ivry" are in this metre. Take an example from ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... nephews, as a social class, no longer read at all, and that there is only one familiar instance recorded of a nephew who read his uncle. The exception tends rather to support the rule, since it needed a Macaulay to produce, and two volumes to record it. Finally, the metre does not permit it. One may not say: "Who reads me, when I am ashes, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... elation felt by one who, after learning this language out of the most absurd primers and according to the most ridiculous methods, nevertheless discovered it in its purity, and afterwards came to handle it in the charming rhythm of some artful metre, in the glorious precision of its structure and in all the melodiousness ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... translators of Virgil, in particular, were a vast and motley assemblage of most respectable men. Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, in their ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in all the tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' the heroic couplet and similar devices can inflict. For all these men had loved Virgil, though not wisely: and now their penance was to hear each other ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... archaic words and unfamiliar metres; he often seems to be scorning the limitations of form and metre, breaking out into any sort of expression which ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... effort to discredit him in that respect. It is true that, like Browning and almost every other Victorian poet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that in his case (unlike Browning's) both the poets were good. The first is more or less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in the mere choice of words. "Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud"—"Flits by the sea-blue bird of March"—"Leafless ribs and iron horns"—"When the long dun wolds are ribbed ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... lines are more correct than the others, but they are less vigorous, and a poet should never sacrifice meaning to metre. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... of the stanzas written by him in this metre at the time of the Union, (beginning "Zooks, Harry! zooks, Harry!") he entitled them, "An admirable new ballad, which goes excellently well to the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... was, of course, a metre much harder to reproduce in Latin than the trochaic and iambic metres of the Greek drama, the former of which especially accommodated itself without difficulty to Italian speech. In his dramatic ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... surtout sur le plaisir que j'aurai de revoir et d'embrasser un ami tel que vous—Mardi prochain part d'ici pour Londres un commis de Mr. Parish un des premiers Banquiers d'ici qui vous remetra en mains propres, par un de vos associes, mes trois nouvelles Sonates,—je suis occupe a metre au net. Les trois Concertinos qui vous recevrez aussi dans une quinzaine au plus tard, dont j'espere qui vous serez assez content, etant le meilleur ouvrage que j'ai jamais fait in the Selling Way, adieu ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... gentle birth and a gentle life. Chaucer's translation was not made at second-hand; if not always easy it is conscientious, and interpolated with numerous glosses and explanations thought necessary by the translator. The metre of "The Former Life" he at one time or another turned into verse of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... ginger is especially cultivated; there is sufficient to supply all the province of Cathay, and so fertile is the soil that according to a French traveller, M. E. Simon, an acre is now worth 15,000 francs, or three francs the metre. In the thirteenth century this plain was covered with towns and country-houses, and the inhabitants lived upon the fruits of the ground, and the produce of their flocks and herds, while the large quantity of game furnished ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... the case so well, you'll forgive me, Sir, for 'popping down' in 'English metre,' as the 'translative impulse' (pardon a new word, and yet we 'scholars' are not fond of 'authenticating new' words) ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... Greater Plays in their literary aspect. One play in each volume, with Introduction, Notes, Essay on Metre, and Glossary. Based on the Globe text. From 144 to 224 pages. Cloth. ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... Italicized stanzas will be indented 5 spaces. Italicized words or phrases will be capitalized. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some obvious errors, after being confirmed against other sources, have ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... person in the taxi-cab might have been observed searching his pockets curiously, and to be counting what money he found therein as he cast anxious glances toward the dial of the taxi-metre. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... be more briefly told. They took more time than Tom's; as much indeed as his sister's, after they parted. But they were conducted by means of that marvel of marvels, the telegraph,—the chief of whose marvels is that it compels even a long- winded generation like ours to speak in very short metre. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... attention. But the clan poetry of the ancient Arabs and of the bard-clans, surviving in the Hebrew sons of Asaph or the Greek Homeridae, has not received that light from comparative inquiry which the closely connected problems of primitive music and metre would alone amply deserve."[144] ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... Greek and Armenian merchants. Many of these are large and stately houses, surrounded with handsome gardens. The streets are shaded with sycamores, and the number of coffee-houses shows that the place is much frequented on festal days. A company of drunken Greeks were singing in violation of all metre and harmony—a discord the more remarkable, since nothing could be more affectionate than their conduct towards each other. Nearly everybody was in Frank costume, and our Oriental habits, especially the red Tartar ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the root of that matter. In the first place, I must entirely differ with those persons who have sought to create an independent prosody for English verse under the head of "beats" or "accents" or something of that sort. Every English metre since Chaucer at least can be scanned, within the proper limits, according to the strictest rules of classical prosody: and while all good English metre comes out scatheless from the application of those rules, nothing exhibits the badness of bad English metre so well as that application. It is, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... it was Elizabethan poetry that Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,' said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet, if ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... mystic ceremonies. And as this ring touched and bounded off from the different letters which still preserved their distances distinct, he made with these letters, by the order in which he touched them, verses in the heroic metre, corresponding to the questions which we had asked; the verses being also perfect in metre and rhythm; like the answers of the Pythia which are so celebrated, or those given by the oracles of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... of both metre and sense, and the words untalk'd of and unseen make it nearly indisputable. I had at first thought it might be "rumorous eyes;" but the personification would then be wanting. Shakspeare has personified Rumour in the Introduction to the Second Part of King Henry IV.; ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... is written meall in the other Confession; and the metre (such as it is) requires this liberty. Mowld ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... fall a sacrifice to doctrine. The 'Divine Comedy' is indeed not less incomparable in its beauty than in its vast compass, the variety of its interest, and in the harmony of its form with its spirit. In his lectures 'On Translating Homer' Mr. Arnold, speaking of the metre of 'Paradise Lost,' says:—"To this metre, as used in the 'Paradise Lost,' our country owes the glory of having produced one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which are to be found in the modern languages; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... neatly set for two in Mlle. Fouchette's chamber. A cold cut of beef, some delicate slices of boiled tongue, an open box of sardines, a plate heaped with cold red cabbage, a lemon, olives, etc.,—all fresh from the rotisserie and charcuterie below,—were flanked by a metre of bread and a litre of Bordeaux. The spread looked ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... richly stored with poetry, some of it far above my own comprehension, but clinging irresistibly to my mind through the music of the metre. I had revelled in old ballads until I could recite nearly all of these precious relics of heroic times, or rather chant them forth monotonously enough in all probability, yet in a way that riveted his attention forcibly, and roused his ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Pilgrim flock, The same that split old Plymouth rock, Their "Bay Psalm" when they tried to sing. Devoid of metre, sense, and tune, Who but a Puritanic loon Could ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... fierce and sweeter Than joys we deem divine Their lives, by time untarnished, Are girt about and garnished, Who match the wave's full metre And drink the wind's wild wine With joy more fierce and sweeter Than ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Nature:—that, whilst maintaining on the whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers:—that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer passages of the Soul and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger and wiser Humanity,—hitherto hardly attained, and perhaps unattainable ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... They are however in fact selected from two poems addressed to daughters of Lord Carteret, and are put together arbitrarily, out of the order in which they stand in the original poems. There is a short poem by Philips in the same metre, addressed to Signora Cuzzoni, and dated May 25, 1724, beginning, "Little syren of the stage;" but none of the verses quoted in the Treatise on the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... them), and that they follow in all cases the same general laws. Those of the Lake of Geneva have received the most elaborate and prolonged investigation. In March, 1876, Forel established a self-registering tide-gauge (limni-metre enregistreur) on the northern shore of this lake, at Morges; and, with the cooeperation of P. Plantamour, another one was installed in June, 1877, at Secheron, near the city of Geneva, at the southern extremity. Since these dates, these ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... of the printers, it remains the only text we have with any claims whatever to authenticity. It should be deferred to as authority in all cases where it does not make Shakspeare write bad sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we believe him to have been more supremely incapable than any other man who ever wrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly even of the blunders of the Folio. They have put bread into the mouth of many an honest editor, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... apostles, of art, have chosen rather to bear the wand of power and luxury than to be inspired. We can imagine his horror at the sacrilegious vulgarization of print, that people without taste rush into angelic metre, that dunces and sages thrive together on the public indiscrimination. How would he marvel to see literary reputations born, grow old, and die within a season, the owners thereof content to be damned or forgotten eternally for a moment's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval minstrels and jongleurs (who may best ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... 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 doating over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... easy metre, was John Wesley's triumphant review of life in his middle age. The tune, although marked in the music-books C.P.M., and thus indicating some difficulty, was really as simple as it was lively, and carried the voice along like the ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... being a free country, I have taken the liberty, for the sake of the metre, to alter the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... he was an enthusiast for Milton. Mrs. Cardew was a bad reader; she had no emphasis, no light and shade, and she missed altogether the rhythm of the verse. To Catharine, on the other hand, knowing nothing of metre, the proper cadence came easily. They finished the first six hundred lines ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... singing regularly at the close of school. It was then proposed, that a number of Singing books be obtained, and one of the scholars, who was well acquainted with common tunes, be appointed as chorister. Her duty should be, to decide what particular tune may be sung each day, inform the Teacher of the metre of the hymn, and take the lead in the exercise. This plan being approved of by the scholars, was adopted, and put into immediate execution. Several brought copies of the Sabbath School Hymn Book which they had in their possession, and the plan succeeded beyond all expectation. The greatest ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... indeed from paying no attention, or little, to metre and versification. Except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous experiments as of carelessness and inattention. In one very important ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... International states that he is 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 Charge d'Affaires in Sweden, at New-York, or Dr. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Condoulis, and learnt that the Greeks were as anxious to fight the Bulgars as were the Serbs. "Death to Bulgaria" was their cry. Not a metre of land to be ceded to those "cochons de Bulgares." "We went," they said, "willingly to fight the Turk. We go with ten times more joy to fight the Bulgars; they are our worst enemies." And they would listen to no remonstrance. So strong were they on this that I could only think ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... youth, the anguish of his mother, and the sweet bride he had left upon the Severn. It is quite Homeric, professedly and successfully so, and therefore quite out of place. The Welsh knight speaks in a most unknightly strain. And the change of metre that is adopted assists in giving to the whole the air of a mere poetical exercise. The scene is not, however, without its purpose in the development of the character of the maid, because it shows how utterly she is at this time engrossed in her warlike mission; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... to Virginia" and "Cassandra Southwick" in my own book, where one of my pleasures will be trying to do justice to American poetry, and Dr. Holmes's fine "Astraea." We have nothing like that nowadays in England. Nobody writes now in the glorious resonant metre of Dryden, and very few ever did write as Dr. Holmes does. I see there is another volume of his poetry, but the name was new to me. How much I owe to you, my dear Mr. Fields! That great romance, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... because hister, in the Tuscan vocabulary, was the name of an actor, who did not, as formerly, throw out alternately artless and unpolished verses like the Fescennine at random, but represented medleys complete with metre, the music being regularly adjusted for the musician, and with appropriate gesticulation. Livius, who several years after, giving up medleys, was the first who ventured to digest a story with a regular ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... 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
... of English poetry, but relinquished the design to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The "Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among Gray's prose remains, are apparently ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... think M. Bayle repeated them from memory, for he put sacrata instead of afflata. But it is apparently the printer's fault that prudenter stands in place of pudenter (that is, modestly) which the metre requires. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... in the seventh century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed biographies will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in 1766, in the Cuomo Library at Naples.] treated in the heroic style and metre, as though he were a new Achilles. As a jeu d'esprit the book might pass; but it is deadly serious. Single men will always be found to perpetrate monstrosities of literature; the marvel is that an entire generation of writers ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Spanish metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom, stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, and ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... issue is known, that so they may be just. In this case, the ideas signified by judgment, waiting, result, known, and just were all to be expressed together, and the answering parts of language are disposed in the handiest order for metre and brevity; while the relations which those parts bear to each other in the speaker's thought are to be gathered from the subject and ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... large amount of vigour perhaps because he is 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 development of ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... and pitiful Prior, for thy rude speech and curses canonical we do requite thee with song sweet-sung and of notable rhyme and metre. Curse, and Belsaye shall out-curse thee; laugh, and Belsaye laugheth ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... the county. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her creed, that I am le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnete homme in the universe; although she scarcely ever in her life, except the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David in metre, spent five minutes together either on prose or verse. I must except also from this last a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has perused very devoutly; and all the ballads in the country, as she has (O the partial lover! you will cry) the finest "wood-note wild" I ever heard. I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a rare and versatile gift of parody, great command of metre, and a very pretty turn ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... Drew. I felt ashamed of the lightness 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," and all of ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... is the same word as the Sanscrit Gita (Cf. p. 61 Bhagavad-Gita). These five gathas include yasnas 28-34, 43-46, 47-50, and 51-53. In metre, vocabulary, and matter, the gathas prove themselves to be the oldest part of the Avesta. The doctrines taught are likewise purer and more rational. Note the following:—I. There is one supreme good deity, Ahura-Mazda, the conception of whom is so lofty ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... of Amara), a vocabulary of Sanskrit roots, in three books, and hence sometimes called Trikanda or the "Tripartite.'' It contains 10,000 words, and is arranged, like other works of its class, in metre, to aid the memory. The first chapter of the Kosha was printed at Rome in Tamil character in 1798. An edition of the entire work, with English notes and an index by H. T. Colebrooke, appeared at Serampore in 1808. The Sanskrit text was printed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... from all parts of Australia, and have been patched together by the compiler to the best of his ability, with the idea of presenting the song as nearly as possible as it was sung, rather than attempting to soften any roughness or irregularity of metre. Attempts to ascertain the names of the authors have produced contradictory statements, and no doubt some of the songs were begun by one man and finished or improved by another, or several others. Some few fairly recent ballads have been included, but for the most part no ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... Roman practice, took the gentilic name of his master. He acquired at Rome a perfect knowledge of the Latin language, and wrote both tragedies and comedies, which were borrowed, or, rather, translated from the Greek. He also wrote an Odyssey in the Saturnian metre, and some hymns. He may be regarded as the first Roman poet. His works were read in schools in the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... alike on physiological conditions; and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle grows as there is more or less native analogy ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... prayer in the metre of the Rig-veda].— Holy flames, that gleam around Every altar's hallowed ground; Holy flames, whose frequent food Is the consecrated wood, And for whose encircling bed, Sacred Kusa-grass is spread; Holy flames, that waft to heaven Sweet oblations daily given, Mortal guilt to purge away;— ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... 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 ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... sense of the passage and be similar in the number and form of the letters, nothing can be more unfortunate than the correction of "princely;" Mr. Collier, on the other hand, follows Steevens and Malone, and reads "princely," observing the Tieck's reading ("precise") "sounds ill as regards the metre, the accent falling on the wrong syllable. Mr. Collier's choice is determined by the authority of the second folio, which he considers ought to have considerable weight, whilst Mr. Knight regards the authority of that edition as very trifling; and the only point of agreement between ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... epic, and we are therefore thrown back upon the evidence of analogy from other 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 ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... added the last verse to the rest. Then I went into our bedroom and recited the whole poem aloud with much feeling and gesticulation. The verses were altogether guiltless of metre, but I did not stop to consider that. Yet the last one displeased me more than ever. As I sat ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... stormy chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, Bisesa he never dreamed that his landlady was craning her head up from her pillows in a vain effort to discover the tune, or to reduce it to the known terms of short metre rhythm. His broken, irregular measures troubled her, as did also his broken, irregular hours of work. There were days when he rode far afield, or was seen lying on his back under the pines by the brookside, listening ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... partly opened pomegranate; a heaving bosom, a full figure, pretty hands, the whitest teeth, and a mass of black hair; and the whole meagrely set off by a cotton frock at seventy-five centimes the metre, leather shoes without heels, and the cheapest gloves. The girl, all unconscious of her charms, had put on her best frock to wait ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... grace was chanted and then the Zemiroth was sung—songs summing up in light and jingling metre the very essence of holy joyousness—neither riotous nor ascetic—the note of spiritualized common sense which has been the key-note of historical Judaism. For to feel "the delight of Sabbath" is a duty and to take three meals ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of metre, he thought of rhyme. 'Twas a race between weary brains and time. He tried to write as he used to when His heart was as young as his ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... expression toward the world in which he lived; and it is this quality that gave them their strength and their celebrity. His metres were lively, and the care which he expended upon his strophes has led to the naming of one metre the 'Alcaic.' Horace testifies (Odes ii. 13, ii. 26, etc.), to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner |
