"Prosody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very fond of the Colonel, who liked pretty faces about him, and had been kind to her; but she could not resist a slight feeling of repulsion at what she considered an abject maneuver of Miss Prosody's. His ball, by an unskilful miss, was left in her power; her duty to her side required her to crack it to the other end of the ground, but a glance at the irritable gloom of his countenance induced her to discover ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... thoughts appear the effect of chance, sometimes adverse, and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgment.... His verses are formed by no certain model; he is no more like himself in his different productions than he is like others. He seems never to have studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from his own ear. But with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a poet.' Johnson's Works, viii. 458, 462. Mrs. Piozzi (Synonymy, ii. 371) tells why 'Dr. Johnson despised Young's quantity of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... evenly, clearly, articulately, to pronounce correctly and without affectation, to understand and use the accent demanded by grammar and prosody. Train him to avoid a common fault acquired in colleges, of speaking louder than is necessary; have him speak loud enough to be understood; let there be no exaggeration ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... preceptor, George Buchanan. The office of whipping-boy doomed its unfortunate occupant to undergo all the corporeal punishment which the Lord's Anointed, whose proper person was of course sacred, might chance to incur, in the course of travelling through his grammar and prosody. Under the stern rule, indeed, of George Buchanan, who did not approve of the vicarious mode of punishment, James bore the penance of his own faults, and Mungo Malagrowther enjoyed a sinecure; but ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... of Garcillaso de la Vega, that the Inca bards formed a separate and highly respected class, and that in their hands the supple Qquichua tongue had been brought under well recognized rules of prosody. He mentions the different classes and subjects of their poems, compares them to similar compositions in Spanish, and even gives specimens of two short ones, of undoubted antiquity, and adds that, when a boy, he knew many others. "What would not one now give," ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... supposed to approve. In the hurly-burly of wind and dust that was blown up under that passing cloud, it is not to be wondered that Dickens and copyright were as completely forgotten as orthography, etymology, syntax and prosody, and whatever else goes to the art of using language correctly. A strip of land that would not purchase the copyright of an almanac, became the subject of the fiercest congressional interest; and the rights of authors, and with them the noblest relations of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... purely literary kind, reflection on which is to me, at least, pleasurable (though many persons of literary taste may, perhaps, regard it as a bore), is the relation of modern prosody to ancient, and more particularly to Latin. It has always seemed to me that the lengthening and shortening of syllables according to their position, as happens in classical Latin, with regard to ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... whole art. If you look back across the sands of time and find out that it is that ridiculous old "Thirty days hath September," which comes to you when you are trying to think of the length of October—if you can quote your old prosody, ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... — N. poetry, poetics, poesy, Muse, Calliope, tuneful Nine, Parnassus, Helicon^, Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry^. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee^, epopoea, ode, epode^, idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, anacreontic^, sonnet, roundelay, rondeau [Fr.], rondo, madrigal, canzonet^, cento^, monody [Slang], elegy; amoebaeum, ghazal^, palinode. dramatic poetry, lyric ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... from this manner of learning is, that I never understood prosody, much less the rules of versification; yet, anxious to understand the harmony of the language, both in prose and verse, I have made many efforts to obtain it, but am convinced, that without a master it is ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Thais would soon develop into a most beautiful woman, she taught her—with the help of a whip—music and prosody, and she flogged with leather thongs those beautiful legs, when they did not move in time to the strains of the cithara. Her son—a decrepit abortion, of no age and no sex—ill-treated the child, on whom he vented the hate he had for all ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... to the present Translation. The original Rubaiyat (as, missing an Arabic Guttural, these Tetrastichs are more musically called) are independent Stanzas, consisting each of four Lines of equal, though varied, Prosody; sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here imitated) the third line a blank. Somewhat as in the Greek Alcaic, where the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the Wave that falls over in the last. As usual with such kind of Oriental Verse, the Rubaiyat follow one another according to ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... saint.[10] We learn from him that even in those days of blood there was a literary society at the Frankish courts, and the savage king Chilperich made pretence to be a writer, a theologian, and even a poet, though Gregory of Tours assures us that he had not the least notion of prosody. ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... did not check his teasing for a car of his own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit. Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon, with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... make a little bow to Watts-Dunton—'is himself a scholar, will bear me out when I say'—or 'I hardly know,' he would flute to his old friend, 'whether Mr. Beerbohm'—here a bow to me—'will agree with me in my opinion of' some delicate point in Greek prosody or some incident in an old French romance I had never ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... could spare; Some that were made to bear Blunders unnumbered. Plunging in metaphor, Not a bit better for— Pardon the Cockney rhyme!— Similies plunder'd. Praising Tobacco smoke, Heeding not grammar's yoke, Prosody's rules they broke. Many a rhyming moke, Sense from rhyme sundered: Many wrote well, but not— Not the Six Hundred. Honour Tobacco! roll'd, Cut, press'd, however sold. Alpha and Beta, bold, Ye shall be tipp'd with gold. Omega shall be sold, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the Curators." "Ugh!" groaned the Westminster Oxford law-lord, softening his reproof by an allusion to his Scotch nationality, "Curators, Mr. Crosby, Curators: I wish our countrymen would pay a little more attention to prosody." "My Lord," replied Mr. Crosby, with delightful readiness and composure, "I can assure you that our countrymen are very proud of your lordship as the greatest senator and orator of the present age." The barrister who made Baron Alderson shudder under his robes by applying ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... amphibolies, of metre and music—a list which seems at first sight a little mixed, but in which we can recognise the general features of grammar, with its departments of phonology, accidence, and prosody. The treatment of solecism and barbarism in grammar corresponded to that of fallacies in logic. With regard to the alphabet it is worth noting that the Stoics recognised seven vowels and six mutes. This is more correct than our way of ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and, with all his contempt for the "asinine" vulgar, was not fastidious. His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to [243] the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... perpetual sunshine and the weird radiance of the Northern Lights; but prosody is not taught in your "Normal" school. The thing is a vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas, notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes, and sentiments upon a race to which, in great ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... that the classics were not taught as literature at all, but as exercises in grammar and prosody. They were dissected by teachers who were simply lecturers on the science of language, and who had not large views even about that. Our whole attention being directed to the technicalities of the pedagogue, we did not perceive that the classic authors had produced poems which, as literature, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... of the Categories, finds also its minor representative in this domain in the Numbers, Singular, Dual, and Plural, incorporated into the Conjugation of the Verb. This leads us to the consideration of Grammatical Agreement and Government; carries us over into Syntax, Prosody, Logic, and Rhetoric; back to Lexicology, the domain of the Dictionary or mere Vocabulary in Language; and thence upward to Music, and finally again to Song, the culmination ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of 15th cent.). The chief work of Choeroboscus, which we have in its complete form, is the commentary on the canons of Theodosius on Declension and Conjugation. Mention may also be made of a treatise on orthography, of which a fragment (on Quantity) has been preserved; a tract on prosody; commentaries on Hephaestion and Dionysius Thrax; and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and elaborate, but admirably adapted to the genius of the Chinese language. Moreover, in the hands of the great poets this artificiality disappears altogether. Each word seems to slip naturally into its place; and so far from having been introduced by violence for the ends of prosody, it appears to be the very best word that could have been chosen, even had there been no trammels of any kind, so effectually is the art of the poet concealed by art. From the long string of names which have shed lustre upon this glorious age of Chinese ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... also that were followers of Moksha-Dharma; those again that were well-skilled in establishing propositions; rejecting superfluous causes, and drawing right conclusions. There were those having a knowledge of the science of words (grammar), of prosody, of Nirukta; those again that were conversant with astrology and learned in the properties of matter and the fruits of sacrificial rites, possessing a knowledge of causes and effects, capable of understanding the cries of birds and monkeys, well-read ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the learned, "I passed once by a school, wherein a schoolmaster was teaching children; so I entered, finding him a good-looking man and a well-dressed; when he rose to me and made me sit with him. Then I examined him in the Koran and in syntax and prosody and lexicography; and behold, he was perfect in all required of him, so I said to him, Allah strengthen thy purpose! Thou art indeed versed in all that is requisite,' thereafter I frequented him a while, discovering daily some new excellence in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... domains of art and of nature are entirely distinct. Nature and art are two things—were it not so, one or the other would not exist. Art, in addition to its idealistic side, has a terrestrial, material side. Let it do what it will, it is shut in between grammar and prosody, between Vaugelas and Richelet. For its most capricious creations, it has formulas, methods of execution, a complete apparatus to set in motion. For genius there are delicate instruments, for ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... distempered imagination? I do not mean the culture of a prize poet, or a poet on a newspaper staff, or a gentleman who writes verses for society, or a professor of poetry, or an authority who knows the history and laws of prosody in every tongue, and can play the bard or the critic with equal facility. Alan Walcott had never ceased to work in distemper, because his nature was distempered to begin with, and his taste had not been modified to suit the conventional canons of his critics. Therefore it was not ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... unutterable things; he threw Himself at length within the leafy nooks Where the wild branch of the cork forest grew; There poets find materials for their books, And every now and then we read them through, So that their plan and prosody are eligible, Unless, like Wordsworth, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the sixteen "Bahr" (metres) in Arabic prosody; the easiest because allowing the most license and, consequently, a favourite for didactic, homiletic and gnomic themes. It means literally "agitated" and was originally applied to the rude song of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... is directed to the word vowel. The longness or shortness of a vowel is one thing. The longness or shortness of a syllable another. This difference is important in prosody; especially in comparing the English ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... to them, and, generally, must understand those portions of the subject usually taught in the higher academies and schools throughout the country, comprehended under the heads of Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... on the versification of Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree with him. He seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to what he calls variations, he talks of the "substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." This is always misleading. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... are any more likely to furnish us with good prayers than "experts" in prosody are likely to give us the best poetry is a tempting question, but one that must be left, for the present, on one side. Perhaps, if the inquiry were to be pushed, we might find ourselves shut up to the curious conclusion that the framers ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... translation of a Supplementary Digest. He also prepared, as far as this was possible in the midst of diplomatic avocations, some of his most important contributions to the "Asiatic Researches," one on Sanskrit prosody, which did not appear till 1808, and was then styled an essay on Sanskrit and Prakrit poetry; one on the Vedas, another on Indian Theogonies (not published), and a critical treatise on Indian plants. At last, in May, 1801, he ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... full of sensibility and emotion, giving, effect to the Italian language, so pompous and so sonorous, produced upon Oswald an impression entirely novel. The English prosody is uniform and veiled, its natural beauties are all of a sombre cast; its colouring has been formed by clouds, and its modulation by the roaring of the sea; but when Italian words, brilliant as an Italian festival, resonant like those instruments of victory, which have been compared to scarlet ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... volume at this moment (I would not give it for an illuminated missal) I find, in its article on Prosody, some things extremely useful to me, which I have been hunting for in vain through Zumpt and Matthiae. In all rational respects I believe it to be the best Latin Grammar that has ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... years from my first attempt, that is by the time I was about fourteen and a half, I had experimented not only in most of the chief measures, but in almost all the chief stanzas used by the English poets. To these, indeed, I added some of my own devising. In this way Prosody early became for me what it has always been, a source of pleasure and delight in itself. I liked discovering metrical devices in the poets, analysing them, i.e. discovering the way the trick worked, and ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... generalized linguistic plane or may be inseparable from specific linguistic conditions. Language as a collective art. Necessary esthetic advantages or limitations in any language. Style as conditioned by inherent features of the language. Prosody as conditioned by the phonetic dynamics of ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... Several of the numerous poems inserted in the "Arcadia" are written in classical metres; for Sidney took part with several of his contemporaries in the futile effort made in England as in France to apply to modern languages the rules of ancient prosody. The pages referred to in the following notes are those of the edition of 1633, "now the eighth time published with some ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Anthology. There is clear evidence[1] that Campion wrote not only the music but the words for his songs—that he was at once an eminent composer and a lyric poet of the first rank. He published a volume of Latin verse, which displays ease and fluency (though the prosody is occasionally erratic); as a masque-writer he was inferior only to Ben Jonson; he was the author of treatises on the arts of music and poetry; and he practised as a physician. It would be interesting ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... comprises the department of Grammar, under which are included Etymology, Syntax, Analysis, Word Formation, and History, with a brief outline of Composition and of Prosody. The two may be had separately or bound together. Each constitutes a good one year's course of English study. The first part is suited for high schools; the second, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... write true church music, look through the old monkish chorals, etc., also the most correct translations of the periods, and perfect prosody in the Catholic ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... things to do. This is by the way. Tennyson is always an artist, and the finish of his work is one of the principal notes of his versification. How this finish comports with the excessive ease of his prosody remains his own peculiar secret. Ease, in him, does not mean that he has any unhandsome slovenly ways. On the contrary, he resembles rather the warrior with the pouncet box. It is the man of "neath cliffs" who will not be at the trouble of making a place for so ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... him through her mother. She also encloses some Latin verse for his criticism. She says, "This too, I ask, that you will correct the mistakes of this letter, and send me a few words as a proof of your goodwill. I have composed the little verses written below, according to the rules of prosody, not from pride, but from a desire to cultivate the beginnings of a slender genius, and because I wanted your help. I learnt the art from Eadburga, my mistress, who devotes herself unceasingly ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... Solinus; he quotes and names many other writers, including fourteen Greek; and generally impresses us with his earnest studentship. An Irish monk named Donatus wandered to Italy and became bishop of Fiesole (c. 829); he, too, was a scholar acquainted with Virgil, a teacher of grammar and prosody, and a lecturer on the saints.[1] Sedulius, the commentator, an Irish monk of Liege, copied Greek psalters, wrote Latin verses, knew Cicero's letters, the works of Valerius Maximus, Vegetius, Origen, and ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... various erudition, but to have surpassed him in an accurate knowledge of the Greek and poetical criticism. In the former, indeed, he seems to have obtained a greater repute than any Spanish scholar of the time. He composed some valuable works, especially on ancient prosody. The unwearied assiduity and complete success of his academic labors have secured to him a high reputation among the restorers of ancient learning, and especially that of reviving a livelier relish for the study of ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... which he must literally have worn out with reading, since no fragment of it seems to have survived his boyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it; his father bought it with a number of other books at an auction, and the boy, who had about that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the back part of his grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in many transfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero upon imagined occasions in the Boy's Town, to the fancied admiration of all the other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to his grandmother ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... having given special study to the hexameter, he was much interested to find that the measure now in vogue amongst bishops was that of six feet and over. He hoped to treat the subject exhaustively in his forthcoming treatise on Ecclesiastical Prosody. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... though formaliter very bad, is none the less materialiter excellent. The prosody, which is the most important ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... the most singular of its curiosities. His will is an awful jest; his declaration of his religious opinions a tissue of contradictions and absurdities: he bequeathes to a clergyman his humility; to Mr. Burgum his prosody and grammar, with half his modesty—the other half to any young lady that needs it; his abstinence—a fearful legacy—to the aldermen of Bristol at their annual feast! to a friend, a mourning ring—"provided ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... principle involved. For if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle the law is based, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... language; he must avoid errors in grammar and orthography; and steer clear of the cant of particular professions, and of every impropriety that is ludicrous or disgusting: nay, he must speak in good verse, and observe all the graces in prosody and collocation. After all this, it may not be very easy to say how we are to find him out to be a low man, or what marks can remain of the ordinary language of conversation in the inferior orders of society. If there be any phrases that are not used in good society, they will ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... some of her poems, on the Martyrdom of St. Denys, the Blessed Virgin, St. Ann, &c. were printed at Nuremburgh. Her verses in praise of Otto II. would be tolerable, if they were not Leonines: there are in them some errors of prosody." Bib. Univers. et Histor. Vol. ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... five great European tongues I was certain, for all these I either spoke or read; and there were particular sounds and inflections that induced me to think that it savored of the most ancient of the two classics. It is true that the prosody of these dialects, at the same time that it is a shibboleth of learning, is a disputed point, the very sounds of the vowels even being a matter of national convention; the Latin word dux, for instance, being ducks in England, docks in Italy, and dukes in France: yet ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from which ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of the discoverer, offering sympathy and asking for it in a single gesture. In attending a University Extension Lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for. It is well to remind ourselves that literature is first and ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... up his English reading. He is much amused with the German professors, and describes them with no little humor. There is Michaelis, who asks one of his scholars for some silver shoe-buckles, in lieu of a fee. There is Schultze, who "looks as if he had fasted six months on Greek prosody and the Pindaric meters." There is Blumenbach, who has a sharp discussion at a dinner-table, and next day sends down three huge quartos all marked to show his authorities and ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... satisfactorily impressing their subtle distinctions on certain, shall we say athletic, imaginations. It seems I was wrong. I had not enough faith. I am sorry. It is evident that these Scylla and Charybdis of prosody have no longer any terrors for ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... fifteen—had for some two years been studying his humanities in an atmosphere of Latinity at the Sapienza of Perugia. There, if we are to believe the praises of him uttered by Pompilio, he was already revealing his unusual talents and a precocious wit. In the preface of the Syllabica on the art of Prosody dedicated to him by Pompilio, the latter hails him as the hope and ornament of the Hous of Borgia—"Borgiae ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Nature and Elements of Poetry (Houghton, Mifflin); Johnson's The Forms of English Poetry (American Book Company); Alden's Specimens of English Verse (Holt); Gummere's The Beginnings of Poetry (Macmillan); Saintsbury's History of English Prosody (Macmillan). ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... up the sands than these, a swift traveller, unspent, of longer impulse, of more impetuous foot, of fuller and of hastier breath, more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to have done. Cowley left the line with all this lyrical promise within it, and if his example had been followed, English prosody would have had in ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... the museum at Alexandria a number of very learned men, who lived within its walls and were provided with salaries, the whole system closely resembling a university. Grammar, prosody, mythology, astronomy and philosophy were studied, and great attention was given to the study of medicine. Euclid was the teacher of Mathematics, and Hipparchus of Alexandria was the father of Astronomy. The teaching of medicine and of astronomy ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... demanded an abstract compliance with rules which were based on absolute truths, and where a swerving from them was evidence of impotence. His unconventional forms, the rhymeless rhythm of his verses, which, in appearance, resembled more a careless prosody than a delicately attuned poesy,—this alone was enough to provoke, at first, an incredulous smile, even among those whose tastes were endowed with more penetration. But Walt Whitman stood forth, besides, as the representative of a principle ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... a value on expression, never for its own sake, but solely for the sake of the dramatic purpose to be accomplished in the scene. Verse such as this would permit of every rhythmical variation known in English prosody, and through the appeal of its rhythm would offer the dramatist opportunities for emotional effect that prose would not allow him; but at the same time it could be spoken with entire naturalness by actors as ultra-modern ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... excessive use of archaic forms and expressions. Even that excess had its value as a protest against the pedantic precision of the Latinists, who were already indulging in a grotesque attempt to displace natural English metres by Ovidian and Horatian prosody. Spenser himself made some futile efforts in this direction; so did Sidney—sundry more or less ingenious examples are scattered about the Arcadia; but Sidney realised his error in time to write the Astrophel ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... way," said Deacon Reyner, addressing the future historian on this head, "I have secured a correct copy of poor Prosody's epitaph, as you asked me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... clever clerkly fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers 695 In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax, 700 And did it, not with hobnails but tin-tacks! But to return from this excursion— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap— 705 And the charm vanished! ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... that land lay they knew not. They sang many songs both in the Russian and Rommany languages; the former were modern popular pieces which are in vogue on the stage, but the latter were evidently very ancient, being composed in a metre or cadence to which there is nothing analogous in Russian prosody, and exhibiting an internal character which was anything but European or modern. I visited this place several times during my sojourn at Moscow, and spoke to them upon their sinful manner of living, upon the advent and suffering of Christ Jesus, and expressed, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... heard before. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical volume, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, that, when he began to write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact, was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the first draft of Innisfree will remember how it gives one the impression ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... great power and sweetness: but they have no metrical canons; and the minstrel whose numbers, regulated solely by his ear, are the delight of his audience, would himself be unable to say of how many dactyls and trochees each of his lines consists. As eloquence exists before syntax, and song before prosody, so government may exist in a high degree of excellence long before the limits of legislative, executive, and judicial power ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, of writing the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-odd years to do it in. I taught myself the language, or began to do so, when I knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of the book. My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himself written a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let me plunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and adverbs, nouns and pronouns, and all the rest, when ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Editor often my best things rejects), That the verses signed so,[symbol: hand], which you now and then see In our County Gazette (vide last) are by me. But 'tis dreadful to think what provoking mistakes The vile country Press in one's prosody makes. For you know, dear—I may, without vanity, hint— Tho' an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print; And you can't think what havoc these demons sometimes Choose to make of one's sense, and what's worse, of one's rhymes. But a week ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... absorb the attention of the learned,—a civilization in which the parts of speech, and their relations, have been deeply considered, but one in which the social elements, the parts of life, and their unions, and their prosody, have been left to spontaneity, and empiricism, and all kinds of rude, arbitrary, idiomatical conjunctions, and fortuitous rules; a civilization in which the learning of 'WORDS' is put down by the reporter—invented— and ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... that most of us have forgotten the greater part of what we learned at school. The dates which made up so large a part of our historical lessons, the rules we slavishly committed as we struggled to master the difficulties of syntax and prosody, our latinity, our grounding in the tongue of ancient Greece so hardly won—who amongst us, having grey hairs in abundance, could face to-day the examination room where once we triumphed in these ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... music. It was at once received with ridicule in all parts of the country. The leading critical journal of America exclaimed: "It reads like a communication from the spirit of Nat Lee, rendered through a bedlamite medium, failing in all the ordinary laws of sense and sound, melody and prosody." It urged the commissioners to "save American letters from the humiliation of presenting to the assembled world such a farrago as this." For several weeks Lanier could not pick up a newspaper without seeing his name held up to ridicule, the Southern papers alone, out of purely ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the year 1760, published, by the house of B. Mecom in Boston, a 72 page brochure entitled "The Rudiments of Latin Prosody with a Dissertation on Letters and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic and Prosaic Composition, collected from some of the ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... perfection, which, in the golden age of Polish literature, was one of its characteristic features. It is therefore surprising, that the Polish language in poetry, although in other respects highly cultivated, does not admit the introduction of the classical prosody. We mean, the Polish language in its present state; for it is very probable, that in its original character it possessed, in common with all the other Slavic languages, the elements of a regular system of long and short syllables. So long, however, as there have existed ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... stocking feet, trying to ease the chilblains which every boy used to have from his snow-soaked boots, before the days of india-rubbers, he found something in the back of his grammar which made him forget all about the pain. This was a part called Prosody, and it told how to make verses; explained the feet, the accents, the stanzas—everything that had puzzled him in his attempts to imitate the poems he had heard his father read aloud. He was amazed; he had never imagined that such a science existed, and yet here ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... work of so musical an artist as Espronceda, the student must be able to read his verse in the original. This cannot be done without some knowledge of the rules which govern the writing of Spanish poetry. It therefore becomes necessary to give some account of the elementary principles of Spanish prosody. This is not the place for a complete treatment of the subject: only so much will be attempted as is necessary for the intelligent comprehension of our author's writings. A knowledge of English prosody will hinder rather than help the student; for the ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... the rhythm of sentences, by the imperious rule of the ballad, of the pantoum or the chant royal, Maupassant also desired to write in metrical lines. However, he never liked this collection that he often regretted having published. His encounters with prosody had left him with that monotonous weariness that the horseman and the fencer feel after a period in the riding school, or a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... all. I hope the Frenchman will attend to my desire; and I dare say he will, as he will then have all credit to himself. He says he can't make out the metre of the rubayat at all—never could—though 'I am enough skilful in scanning the Persian verses as you have seen' (Qy?) 'in my Prosody of the languages of Musulman Countries, etc.' So much for De Tassy. No; but something more yet: and better, for he tells me his Print of the Mantic is finisht, 'in proofs,' and will be out in about a Month: and he will send me one. Now, my dear Cowell, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... only apparent, as in 68, 7. Platen followed the rules of Graeco-Roman prosody, where a long syllable could be ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Alexandrian grammarians of this reign was Apollonius Dyscolus, so called perhaps from a moroseness of manner, who wrote largely on rhetoric, on the Greek dialects, on accents, prosody, and on other branches of grammar. In the few pages that remain of his numerous writings, we trace the love of the marvellous which was then growing among some of the philosophers. He tells us many remarkable ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... appear before your lordships as counsel for the Cur[)a]tors."—"Ugh," groaned the Westminster-Oxford law lord, softening his reproof by an allusion to his Scottish nationality, "Cur[a]tors, Mr. Crosbie, Cur[a]tors: I wish our countrymen would pay a little more attention to prosody."—"My lord," replied Mr. Crosbie, with delightful readiness and composure, "I can assure you that our countrymen are very proud of your lordship as the greatest sen[a]tor and or[a]tor ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... written verse professionally can realize the extent to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that prodigious composition, the Overture to ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of English versification labored under two difficulties: an undue adherence to the traditions of Greek and Latin prosody more or less perfectly understood, and an exaggerated formalism. But recently the interest and excitement (now happily abated) over free-verse have reopened the old questions and let in upon them not a little light. Even today, however, a great deal of ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Irish monk from Peronne, was one of his correspondents. Aldhelm was the first Englishman, so far as we know, to write in Latin verse, and his letter to Acircius (Aldfrith or Eadfrith, king of Northumbria) is a treatise on Latin prosody for the use of his countrymen. In this work he included his most famous productions, 101 riddles in Latin hexameters. Each of them is a complete picture, and one of them runs to 83 lines. That his merits as a scholar were early recognized in his own country is shown by the encomium of Bede (Eccl. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sung on the boards of the theatre; but the latter were evidently of great antiquity, exhibiting the strongest marks of originality, the metaphors bold and sublime, and the metre differing from anything of the kind which it has been my fortune to observe in Oriental or European prosody. ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... do justice to the sumptuous phraseology of the work, to its opulence of carefully selected adjective, or to the involved rhetoric which seemed to defeat and set at naught all your petty rules of syntax and prosody. Still less can I impart a notion of the exhaustive raking up of ancient examples and modern instances, mostly worn bright by familiarity with the popular mind, but all converging toward the conclusion ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... tearing away, or cutting off; a term used sometimes in prosody for the elision of a vowel before another, and in surgery especially for abscission of the cornea, or the removal of that portion of the eyeball situated in front of the attachments of the recti muscles; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... poetry, poetics, poesy, Muse, Calliope, tuneful Nine, Parnassus, Helicon[obs3], Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry[obs3]. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee[obs3], epopoea, ode, epode[obs3], idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, anacreontic[obs3], sonnet, roundelay, rondeau[Fr], rondo, madrigal, canzonet[obs3], cento[obs3], *monody, elegy; amoebaeum, ghazal[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Prosody.[12]—Plautine prosody, which reflected the variation of quantity found in the popular speech, was not properly understood ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... is not missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present day, however, there is a tendency to run into excessive elaboration, largely due to superficial imitation of such masters of the poetic art as Tennyson, and especially ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in short, ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because he confided it to me ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt |
