"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tenth centuries arose a new form of hymnody, the Prose or Sequence sung after the Gradual (the anthem between the Epistle and Gospel at Mass). The earliest writer of sequences was Notker, a monk of the abbey of St. Gall, near |33| the Lake of Constance. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... your reader peruse these 'Poems in Prose' at one sitting; he will probably be bored, and the book will fall from his hands. But let him read them separately,—to-day one, to-morrow another,—and then perchance some one of them may leave some ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... good fortune, and eloquence that never yet failed. Headlong Controller-General! Eloquence can do much, but not all. Orpheus, with eloquence grown rhythmic, musical (what we call Poetry), drew iron tears from the cheek of Pluto: but by what witchery of rhyme or prose wilt thou from the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and, perhaps, reckon him a careless workman. He had yet to learn how much, or how little, the public recks of either grammar or punctuation, how it prefers semi-truths tempered by split infinitives to facts stated in balanced prose. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... the mischiefe in poetry: a man might have told 200 lies in prose upon his owne name, and never miscaried.—But, leaving these rude rymes, Ladie, how do you like the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... composers of this literature flourished chiefly at the commencement of the present century: Father Manso is said to have been one of the last. Many of their compositions, which are both in poetry and prose, exist in manuscript in a compilation made by one Luis Lobo. It has never been our fortune to see this compilation, which, indeed, we scarcely regret, as a rather curious circumstance has afforded us a perfect knowledge of ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... longed to linger, to wander among the older children of men, where intuitively the hungry listener follows him into his Temple of Mirth, all should rejoice, for those who knew him not, can while away the moments imbibing the genius of his imagination in the poetry and prose here presented. ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... when once his lines were finished, caught the infectious spirit of patriotism, and, like the rest, appended his signature to the following prose composition from the laborious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his Liddesdale "raids"—begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years—was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Contributions may take the form of prose, poetry or drawing. Contributors whose writings will lend themselves to illustration are asked to consult with the ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... entitled "Prison Thoughts," by Thomas Browning, citizen and cook of London, a prisoner in Lud Gate, "where poor citizens are confined and starve amidst copies of their freedom," was published in that prison, by the author, in 1682. It is written both in prose and verse, and probably gave origin to Dr. Dodd's more elaborate work on the same subject. The following is a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... dinner was characterized by some unfortunate incidents. D'Argenton was particularly fond of repeating the replies he had made to the various editors and theatrical managers who had declined his articles, and refused to print his prose or his verse. His mots on these occasions had been clever and caustic; but with Madame de Barancy he was never able to reach that point, preceded as it must necessarily be with lengthy explanations. At the critical moment Ida would invariably interrupt him,—always, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... may cock their nose, And say, 'How can you e'er propose, You wha ken hardly verse frae prose, To mak a sang?' But, by your leaves, my ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the material it took out of this chasm! But it could not—poetry at one end of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains—material for a new series of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Canons may be carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... face could be read a certain contemptuous scorn, when she looked at Lorand, as if she would say: "Well, after all, prose has conquered the poetry of honor, a man may live after the day of his death, if he has only the phlegm necessary thereto. Flight is shameful but useful,—yet you are as good as killed for ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... by many scruples which afflict the contemporary charity visitor. She says sometimes, "Why must I talk always of getting work and saving money, the things I know nothing about? If it were anything else I had to urge, I could do it; anything like Latin prose, which I had worried through myself, it would not be so hard." But she finds it difficult to connect the experiences of her youth with the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... realise it was not altogether wandering at one's sweet will, unless one had a garden of unfailing bloom in which to gather the flowers of poetry, or even prose. There were greater heights than even girlhood's visions. But there must be training and study to reach them, and she had been lilting along in a desultory way, like ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the musical measure of poetic prose as rendered by Mr. Artman, one of the most renowned blind authors—"There is a world to which night brings no gloom, no sadness, no impediments; fills no yawning chasm and hides from the traveler no pitfall. It is the world of sound. Silence is its night, the only darkness ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... however doubtless in some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more intelligible nearness of the time—it had brought me to the end of my twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not only myself but my instructors—which I infer I did from their so intensely letting me alone—I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth mainly the remembrance of being consistently either ignored or ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... myself to such works as encroach not on the anti-social passions—in poetry, to elevate the imagination and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life—in prose to the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimus,'—what our faculties are and what they are capable of becoming." This last sentence is a sort of half-prophetic summary of his life's work; but the poetry soon gave way to the prose, and ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English Prose. He read forward steadily, occasionally ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... faith is quiet in possession. Hope leaps out towards what will be; faith holds on to what is. Hope idealizes; faith realizes. Faith sees; hope foresees." [1] In other words, faith is apt to be content with what it has; hope ventures out to annex the wider provinces of the imagination. Faith is the prose of our religious life, hope is ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... for one at least who had perished in his sins. The light-hearted lawyer took one look at the remains of him, whom, within the past few days, he had seen so often in the full enjoyment of life and health, and resolved that never again, in prose or verse, would he speak of the person, whose crimes and cunning had returned so avengingly upon his own head, as the Grinstun man. Mr. Pawkins joked no more, for, with all his playful untruthfulness, he had a feeling heart. The most unconcerned man outwardly was ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... sentence in written prose is difficult. In spoken discourse, as well, it is so easy to fall into the First Primer style that while the advantages of the use of the simple sentence are great, the ability to produce good sentences in succession must ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... No. 1927., will be found "A paper Book in 8vo., wherein are contained, Poems, Impreses, and other Collections in Prose and Verse; written by Thomas Chaloner and Randle Holme, senior, both Armes-Painters in Chester, with other Notes of ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... were all there. Mrs. Ewing's "Jackanapes" and Charles Kingsley's "Water-Babies" jostled the "Seven Little Sisters" series; Hawthorne's "Wonder-Book" lay close to Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare;" and Whittier's "Child-Life in Prose and Poetry" stood between Mary Howitt's "Children's Year" and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Child's Garden ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... graphic prose picture of the hopeless Jewish resistance to Roman sway adds another leaf to his record of the famous wars of the world. The book is one ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... son, "let me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude, or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That is why I am now able to express myself so well: these periods ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... dazzle a rather juvenile pilgrim from over the sea; but it matters little, for it was very easy for him to shine. He was almost better as a talker than as a writer; that is, if the extraordinary finish of his written prose be really, as some people have maintained, a fault. There was such a kindness in him, however, that I have no doubt it gave him ideas to see me sit open-mouthed, as I suppose I did. Not so the two ladies, who not only were ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... would not be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of respectability. If respectability was your 'bete noire', then you were a Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose, then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who thought that it gave a quality ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... these nine worthies are written in prose and verse by Richard Johnson (1592), author of The Seven ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... in associations of storm and splendour,—of the grand Cardinal; the iron-clad Protector; Dutch William of the immortal memory, whom we tried so hard to like, and in spite of the great Whig historian, that Titian of English prose, can only frigidly respect. Hard task for us Britons to like a Dutchman who dethrones his father-in-law, and drinks schnaps! Prejudice certainly; but so it is. Harder still to like Dutch William's unfilial Fran! Like Queen Mary! I could as soon like Queen Goneril! Romance flies from ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of greater dreams. Elizabethan literature, take it for all in all, has never been surpassed; myriad-minded Shakespeare remains unequalled still. Elizabethan England was indeed 'a nest of singing birds.' Prose was often far too pedestrian for the exultant life of such a mighty generation. As new worlds came into their expectant ken, the glowing Elizabethans wished to fly there on the soaring wings of verse. To them the tide of fortune was no ordinary stream but the 'white-maned, proud, neck-arching ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... attempt things which had hitherto been unattempted yet in prose or rhyme, because among all the extravagant intellects with which the world has teemed none were ever before so utterly extravagant as to choose for themselves themes of such ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... are two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... great that a large and characteristic choice is still possible among her literary material, and this third volume of her verses is put forth in response to the repeated wish of the admirers of her peculiar genius. Much of Emily Dickinson's prose was rhythmic, —even rhymed, though frequently not set ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... controversialist, was born in Dijon, capital of the then Burgundy, on September 27th, 1627. There is no question but he is the greatest Catholic divine whom France ever knew, and one of the greatest, some say the greatest, of prose writers and orators of that country. His importance in the literary history of France is due, moreover, not simply to the high excellence of his productions, but fully as much to their representative character. The power that was wielded with absolute authority by Louis XIV. found ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... heated, that it's own proper Strength and Violence is able to support it. If this could want a Proof, I might say in short, That we can bear with Epick-Poetry, even without any kind of Verse, and Cambray has succeeded in such; but every one will judge that should a Pastoral appear in Prose, nay even without the Feminine Ornament of Jangle, 'twould not be born with; which show's that Epick Poetry can support it self with fewer foreign Assistances ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... he displayed as a poet. Like Rapoport's, his maiden effort was a translation of the Biblical dramas of Racine. His workmanship was exact and beautiful. He was a productive writer, and his activity expressed itself in every sort of literary form. He left upward of thirty volumes in prose and verse. [Footnote: His poetry was collected in one volume, and published at Vienna, under the title Tofes Kinnor we-'Ugab ("Master of the Lyre and the Cithern").] His Hebrew version of Faust, published at Vienna, is a masterpiece in point of style, and ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... exhibits less affectation in the matter of style than does the subject of this essay. It is rugged and massive; but so is his mind. It were impossible to imagine the author of "Sartor Resartus" and "The French Revolution" expressing himself in the carefully rounded periods of Macaulay, whose prose is half poetry, and whose poetry is all prose. Carlyle seems to care precious little what kind of vehicle he uses for the conveyance of ideas so long as it does not break down. All his labor "smells of the lamp"; but ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Melancholy, and was cried up to the skies by the whole circle. The Pleasures of Imagination, the Pleasures of Hope, and the Pleasures of Memory, though each had placed its author in the first rank of poets, were blank prose in comparison. Our Mrs. Montagu would cry over it from beginning to end. It was pronounced by all the members of the Literary, Scientific, and Philosophical Society the greatest poem of the age, and all anticipated ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... interesting poem of "The Shipwreck" had been a great favourite with Alfred and me, lost his life. The ship in which he sailed as purser foundered, and he, and I believe everybody on board, perished. No work, either in prose or poetry, so admirably, so graphically, and so truly describes a shipwreck as does his. It is curious that after its publication he should have lost his life amid the scene which he has so perfectly described. In the same way no writer has ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... condemn man to choose between irreflective ignorance and irreligion, or to lock the intellect and the highest emotions of our nature and principles of our life, in a mortal struggle. Poetry and religion may, after all, be truer then prose, and have something to tell the world that science, which is often ignorant of its own ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Laun, "was a force and concision of language never before heard in France.... The influence of Calvin's writings upon the style of his successors, and upon the literary development of his country, cannot easily be over-estimated. With him French prose may be said to have attained its manhood; the best of his contemporaries, and of those who had preceded him, did but use as a staff or as a toy that which he employed as a burning sword." History of French Literature (New York, 1876), ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... A, I;—This simulation is not as the former:—and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name. Soft; here follows prose.— 'If this fall into thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Thy fates open their hands; let thy blood and spirit embrace them. And, to inure thyself to what thou art like ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... I replied, "they won't go up the chimney. At least, I'll answer for the prose. I'm not so sure about the poetry. Now, good day! I'll keep ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the first word of the Introit, "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine." Its musical divisions are as follows: (1) Introit; (2) the Kyrie; (3) the Gradual and Tract,—"Requiem aeternam" and "Absolve Domine;" (4) the Sequence or Prose,—"Dies Irae;" (5) Offertorium; (6) Sanctus; (7) Benedictus; (8) Agnus Dei; (9) Communio,—"Lux aeterna." The most famous requiems are Palestrina's, written for five voices, but left incomplete (1595); Vittoria's, for six voices, written for the funeral of the ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... think the bush is purer and that life is better there, But it doesn't seem to pay you like the 'squalid street and square'. Pray inform us, City Bushman, where you read, in prose or verse, Of the awful 'city urchin who would greet you with a curse'. There are golden hearts in gutters, though their owners lack the fat, And we'll back a teamster's offspring to outswear a city brat. Do you think we're never jolly where the trams and buses ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... wont to do. If a whole neighborhood of farmers seeks such profits, or if real estate men get into the act, or big development corporations that may be operating from almost anywhere in the country, the scale enlarges and purple prose may appear in the metropolitan newspapers to lure nostalgic suburbans out to examine an assortment of lots sliced fine for maximum yield and priced most often according to their proximity to water. Water is usually involved, for it is the fundamental outdoor attraction, ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... then made a determined descent into the practical. The woods, most probably, were full of eyes. In plain prose, we were almost certainly being watched. Unless—unless, indeed, my bogus departure for Nassau had fooled Tobias as we had hoped. But, even so, with that lure of Calypso's doubloon ever before him, it was too probable ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... in the lake country of England, near the residence of Wordsworth, who has embalmed him in verse, and described him in prose. Robert Walker, the youngest of twelve children, the son of a yeoman of small estate, was bred a scholar because he was of a frame too delicate, as his father thought, to earn his livelihood by bodily labor. He struggled into a competent knowledge of the classics ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... Inquisitive the public always will be, but it is a mistake to indulge rather than to pique its curiosity. Tennyson respected the wishes of his public in this matter, and, not only in his dress and his dramatic seclusion, but surely in his obstinate avoidance of prose-work of any kind we have a subtler expression of his carefulness for fame. It is a mistake for a poet to write prose, however good, for it is a charming illusion of the public that, comparatively speaking, any one can write prose. It is an earthly accomplishment, it is as walking is to flying—is ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... Scandinavia. This ancestor of the modern Scandinavian tongues has been preserved in Iceland so little changed that every Icelander still understands, without the aid of explanatory commentaries, the oldest preserved prose written in their country 850 years ago. The principal reasons for this were probably limited communications between Iceland and other countries, frequent migrations inside the island, and, not least important, a long and uninterrupted literary tradition. As a consequence, Icelandic ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... some things—rhapsodic prose-poems, weak in syntax but strong in the quality miscalled imagination. Her pen name was George Bishop: following the example of the three Georges so dear to the believer in sexless literature—George Sand, George ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Faint and imperfect images they must be called, because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... way. And, since we begin with the 'Diana' of Montemayor, my opinion is that it should not be burnt, but that all that part should be expunged which treats of the sage Felicia, and of the enchanted fountain, and also most of the longer poems; leaving him, in God's name, the prose and also the honor of being the first in ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... culture. The schools of philosophy are not more visibly affected than the literature of the period. Proof that a reconsideration of the problem of the Ego is everywhere forcing itself upon Occidental minds, may be found not only in the thoughtful prose of the time, but even in its poetry and its romance. Ideas impossible a generation ago are changing current thought, destroying old tastes, and developing higher feelings. Creative art, working under larger inspiration, is telling what absolutely novel and exquisite ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... pieces of literature, either prose or poetry, for recitation before a friendly audience, acting charades or plays, and reading aloud with vivacity and sympathetic emotion, are good means of instruction at home or at school This collection contains numerous admirable pieces of literature for such use. In teaching ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... every-day people really behave in absurd situations and under comically trying circumstances is quite funny enough for him; and if he exaggerates a little and goes beyond the absolute prose of life in the direction of caricature, he never deviates a hair's-breadth from the groove human nature has laid down. There is exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... these minor beauties a knowledge of the Latin text is necessary, the more abounding charm of both Satires and Epistles is accessible to the Latinless reader. For the bursts of poetry are brief and rare, issuing from amid what Horace often reminds us are essentially plain prose essays in conversational form, their hexametral garb an unpoetical accident. Two versions present themselves to the unclassical student. The first is Conington's scholarly rendering, hampered sometimes rather than adorned by its metrical ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... rhythmical and varied, the right admixture of words and syllables, and even of letters, should be carefully attended to; above all, it should be equable in style. There must also be quantity, which is necessary in prose as well as in verse: clauses, sentences, paragraphs, must be in due proportion. Metre and even rhyme may be rarely admitted; though neither is a legitimate element of prose writing, they may help to lighten a cumbrous expression (Symp.). The translation should retain ...
— Charmides • Plato
... John Bale's history of English literature, written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was {579} Joachim du Bellay's Defence et Illustration de la langue francaise published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the classics. This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the characteristic words of the sixteenth century, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and power today of the arts of expression seem to assure us. When we come to look into the subject, we find that modern life, which finds its expression freely in prose and in verse, and to a slight extent in music, finds some expression also in those arts which deal with expression. It is perhaps not a great artistic epoch that we are living in, although, if some one were to rise by and ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... than all other influences together to consolidate the scattered forces of the Reformation and give them an enduring strength. As a religious teacher, as a social legislator, and as a writer, especially of the French language, whose modern prose style was then in process of formation, his fame is second to none in his age, and must always conspicuously adorn the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... be in sad want of money, my poor friend, to think of such things as these—you, too, who held M. de Mazarin's prose ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... one, from the boy of twelve upwards, who aspires to know anything of the inner history of Ireland; to understand, that is to say, that curiously recurrent note of poetry and pathos which breaks continually through all the dull hard prose of the surface. A note often lost in unmitigated din and discord, yet none the less re-emerging, age after age, and century after century, and always when it does so lending its own charm to a record, which, without some such alleviations, would ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... of Pope Leo, when a Firework, that had been prepared upon the Castle of St. Angelo, begun to play before its Time, being kindled by a Flash of Lightning. The Author hath written his Poem [1] in the same kind of Style, as that I have already exemplified in Prose. Every Line in it is a Riddle, and the Reader must be forced to consider it twice or thrice, before he will know that the Cynick's Tenement is a Tub, and Bacchus ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... author may draw characters distinct and clear, and entertaining, and even real; but they want atmosphere, and with them we are never intimate. Mr. Alfred Austin says that "we know the hero or the heroine in prose romance far more familiarly than we know the hero or heroine in the poem or the drama." "Which of the serious characters in Shakspeare's plays are not indefinite and shadowy compared with Harry Esmond or Maggie Tulliver?" The SERIOUS characters—they are seldom ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... work to the last, as boys save Latin prose, and, worn though they were, Mr. Wardrop did not dare to give them rest. The piston-rod and connecting-rod were to be straightened, and this was a job for a regular dockyard with every appliance. They fell to it, cheered by a little chalk showing of work done and time ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... followed the Court in its progress from city to city; but nowhere in his correspondence, teeming with facts and commentaries on the most varied subjects, is anything definite to be gleaned. Latin poetry and prose, the discourses of Cicero, rhetoric, and church history were important subjects in his curriculum. Though he frequently mentions Aristotle in terms of high admiration, it may be doubted whether he ever taught Greek. ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... office, in 1835, he counselled her majesty to bestow a pension on the poet of L300 a-year. Moore had found it difficult to realize this sum by his writings, as his prose works did not meet the expectations raised by his poetry. When he became a pensioner he seldom wrote, verifying the predictions of his friends. He exchanged too early in life the department of literature ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... will—entirely disconnected and quite destructive to the continuity that must be the essence of every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose! Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the situation was summed up in Wagner's famous ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... assigned to them in it: the rubric of the divine office, to be performed on that day, is mentioned; the particulars of the office follow; an account of the life and actions of the saint is inserted; and sometimes an engraving of him is added. If it happen that the saint has not his peculiar office, a prose or hymn in his praise in generally introduced. The greater solemnities have an appropriate office. From this the intelligent reader will observe that the Menaeon of the Greeks is {024} nearly the same as a work would be, which should unite in itself the Missal ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... sure you would never drift. You don't know how interested I am, Miss Campion, in the development of the human mind, or you would not try to evade the question. Now, which interests you most, poetry or prose?" ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... heart, she said, was far indeed from cheerful; but she had done her best; and, as she was afraid of not sustaining well a part which was uncongenial to her feelings, she had overacted it. Her deportment was the subject of reams of scurrility in prose and verse: it lowered her in the opinion of some whose esteem she valued; nor did the world know, till she was beyond the reach of praise and censure, that the conduct which had brought on her the reproach of levity and insensibility ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a-walking in the fields, He noticed all at once that plants could speak, Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him. That day the daisy had an eye indeed— Colloquized with the cowslips on such themes! We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose. ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... dimensions, filled me with too much diffidence and respect to admit of any freedom of approach. One listened to him, as he held forth of an evening when surrounded by his family, with reverential silence. He had a strong Scotch accent; and, if a wee bit prosy at times, it was sententious and polished prose that he talked; he talked invariably like a book. His family were devoted to him; and I felt that no one who knew ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the essence and spirit of an author's thought. I think the learned gentlemen, if they could peruse these doggerel rhymes, would acknowledge that their meaning has been expressed even more plainly and forcibly than in their own prose. The reader will observe that of the whole twenty-three only two appear to have any knowledge on the subject, the famous A. R. Wallace and the brilliant Dr. Coues. The following is the essence or rather quintessence ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... pretty tale you told me Once upon a time —Said you found it somewhere (scold me!) Was it prose or was it rhyme, Greek or Latin? Greek, you said, While your shoulder propped ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... Guinigi. Charity! charity! Who would not shower down oceans of charity to possess such a treasure?" He leaned his back against the parapet, and bent his eyes with fervent admiration on her. "It is only in verse that I can celebrate her," he muttered, "prose is too cold for her warm coloring. The Madonna—the uninstructed Madonna—before the ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... a syllable varies in quantity, viz. when its vowel is short and is followed by a mute with l or r, i.e. by pl, cl, tl; pr, cr, tr, etc.; as, agri, volucris.[8] Such syllables are called common. In prose they were regularly short, but in verse they might be treated as long at the ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... of the country weekly is a prose poem written by Professor Bristow Adams, editor of the New York State College of Agriculture, and presented at the first country newspaper conference held at that institution during Farmers Week 1920, entitled "I am the Country Weekly,"[46] and which vividly depicts its ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... was more than jealousy how slight was my hold upon her. It was not in her race, in her blood as in mine, to love me and my type. She had lived all her life in the middle of Romance, and the very fire and passion of her South must make me dim prose to her. I remember the flicker of Salazar's returning candle, cast in lines like an advancing scythe across the two walls ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... some cruel person bought it five years ago—an imported piece, with two pseudo-bulbs. They still remain, towering like columns of old-world glory above an area of shapeless ruin. To speak in mere prose—though really the conceit is not extravagant—these fine bulbs, grown in their native land, of course, measure eight inches high by three-quarters of an inch diameter. In the first season, that malheureux reduced their progeny to a stature of three and a half inches by the foot-rule; ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... before the strength of the house of Austria should outgrow his power to repress it. Voltaire negotiated for France on this occasion, and represented the danger with rather more than diplomatic ability. On both sides the protocols were as often written in verse as in prose; and Frederick, who hated George II., having told the poet, "Let France declare war against England, and I march," the latter instantly set out for Versailles, and thus gave the signal for the second Silesian ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... Virgil of prose! far distant is the day When at the mention of your heartfelt name Shall shake the head, and men, oblivious, say: 'We know him not, this master, nor his fame.' Not for so swift forgetfulness you wrought, Day upon day, with rapt fastidious pen, Turning, like precious stones, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... things. And, since the style in itself is pleasant enough, I don't know that any one need complain. What put me upon this reflection was Vagabonds in Perigord (CONSTABLE), which, for the modulation of its prose, might almost have been an unacknowledged work of the Master, but is actually written by Mr. H. H. BASHFORD. It concerns the wanderings on foot of certain pleasure pilgrims along the course of the river Dordogne; and is, for those that like such things, one of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... continuous stream, All can expatiate, and all be dull: Bane of the mind and topic of debate That drugs the reader to a restless doze, Thou that with soul-annihilating weight Crushest the Bard, and hypnotisest those Who plod the placid path of plain pedestrian Prose: ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... were always hasty and he rarely took the time to polish them, while Bruil's style was more smooth and uniform. Ollier's style, however, was easy and original. He replied effectively to the invective of his enemies in prose and in verse. He seems to have had no difficulty in the composition of his sentences nor did he take the pains which would seem to be necessary for the average man to acquire the finished journalistic style. His motto was as he wrote a page ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... into English, and then back into Latin; and when he went up for his degree, he took, besides his Latin and Greek books, the whole Hebrew Bible, but was only examined in the Psalms. He gained a triumphant first-class, and the next year, 1803, he carried off the English prose essay prize. The theme was "Common Sense." He had not in the least expected to gain the prize, and had not even mentioned the competition to his friends, so that their delight and surprise were equal. That same ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... not locked, and Leonard went to it with out ceremony or scruple. In rummaging for the instrument his eye fell upon a bundle of manuscripts; and he suddenly recollected that when he was a mere child, and before he much knew the difference between verse and prose, his mother had pointed to these manuscripts, and said, "One day or other, when you can read nicely, I'll let you look at these, Lenny. My poor Mark wrote such verses—ah, he was a schollard!" Leonard, reasonably ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... victory was won in 1833, when he was the successful competitor for a prize of $100 offered by a Baltimore periodical for the best prose story. "A MSS. Found in a Bottle" was the winning tale. Poe had submitted six stories in a volume. "Our only difficulty," says Mr. Latrobe, one of the judges, "was in selecting from the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Books of the Bible," which has become a classical authority on that somewhat recondite subject. It was he who originated and planned the new edition of the Festival Prayer Book in six volumes, and he wrote most of the prose translations. When he died, though only two volumes out of the six had been published, he left the whole of the text complete. To Mr. Herbert M. Adler, who had been his collaborator from the beginning, fell the finishing of the great ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... means, know all the grammar you can. Read the best of poets and prose authors to see how they have mastered the language, but don't allow your life to become a burden to you and others because of your worry lest you "slip a grammatical cog" here and there, when you know you have something worth ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... is surely the same as Montaigne's, to reveal himself to us, and it would be hasty to decide that his skill is inferior. For while Montaigne had nothing but prose at his command, and not too rich a prose, as he himself complains, Shakespeare in magic of expression has had no equal in recorded time, and he used the lyric as well as the dramatic form, poetry as well as prose, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Mrs. Stanton's imagination, fired by her sympathetic understanding of women's problems, had turned Susan's cold hard facts into moving prose, while Susan, the best of critics, detected every weak argument or faltering phrase. They both felt they ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... we shall do so by means of a criterion. Otherwise, we should only be acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose superior ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... near the terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the hateful. Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an amiable or attractive figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities. This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have delivered the world. But Milton has ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... who admire Isocrates above all things, place this among his very highest panegyrics, that he was the first person who added rhythm to prose writing. For they say that, as he perceived that orators were listened to with seriousness, but poets with pleasure, he then aimed at rhythm so as to use it in his orations both for the sake of giving pleasure, and also that variety of sound ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... Traditional Rhymes and Stories for Children, and of Masterpieces of Poetry and Prose for Use at Home and at School, chosen with special reference to the cultivation of the imagination and the development of a ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... then, that we find the Maori character actively alive to such impressions. The oldest men absolutely revel in the abundance of the tales, both prose and poetry, that they are able to relate about the scenes around them. But Young Maori is more civilized, and does not trouble his head so much with these old narratives. It is well, then, that some should be ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... lyrical powers fill him with enthusiasm. >From this ancient tongue, which was early as familiar to him as the French, he borrowed certain mannerisms, certain tricks of style, certain neologisms, and also, to some extent, his simplicity of manner and the cadence of his prose. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... Lunch, my dear young friends, has now been exhausted. We have done, for the time, with poetry, and descend again to the ordinary prose of every-day shooting. Yet stay—before we proceed further, there is one matter apart from the mere details of sport, which may be profitably considered in this treatise. It is the divine, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... and produces its anti-scorbutic foliage on a bit of flannel moistened with water, without any contact with soil or sunlight, in the long Arctic night of the ice-bound ship. With the ravings of madmen ringing in his ears, he composed some of the most beautiful of his writings, both in prose and verse. Among the manuscripts of the British Museum are preserved some of these writings, whose withered vellum pages we turn over with profound pity, as we think of the sad circumstances in which they were composed. The most valuable of these is the manuscript of the Torrismondo, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... sometimes creates ambiguity in poetry, e.g. "The son the father slew," and must be sparingly used in prose. ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... hill, and looked into a deep glen, through the steep descent of which ran a clear and copious rivulet rolling over a stony bed; the rocks were covered with mountain flowers, and wild shrubs—But nothing is more tiresome than a picture in prose: we shall, therefore, beg our readers to recall to their imagination some of the views they may have seen in Wales, and they will probably have a better idea of this place than any that we could give by the most laboured description, amplified with ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the Vision. He had read whatever came within his reach, good, bad, or indifferent, and his conscious thoughts were always a patchwork of phrases. When he was put to mind the shop he read the penny weeklies. He was fresh from one of the works of J. F. Smith, the un-remembered prose laureate of the London Journal, who would have been reckoned a giant of invention if he had lived in these days, and a sentence from his latest chapter got into Paul's head and went round and round: 'There lay the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl.' In Mr. Smith's moving page the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... visitations of pirates, who were wont to appear suddenly upon the coasts, to pillage a settlement or attack trading vessels and as suddenly to take flight to their strongholds. Captain Kidd was long celebrated in prose and verse, and only within a few years have credulous people ceased to seek his buried treasures. The arch-villain, Blackbeard, was a terror to Virginians and Carolinians until Spotswood, of "Horseshoe" fame, took the matter in hand, and sent after him lieutenant Maynard, who, slaying the pirate ...
— Captain Richard Ingle - The Maryland • Edward Ingle
... except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... as he greatly delighted in the conversation of the learned, so he took pleasure in the study of the writers of both prose and poetry. He had a special admiration for Dante, delighting in the admirable genius of that man, almost all of whose works he knew by heart; he held Petrarca in no less esteem. He not only delighted in reading, ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... must now turn to Nature. On every hand, the future was with students of the laws of matter. Often, it was true, he had been tempted by the thought of a literary career; he had written in verse and prose, but with small success. An attempt to compose the Prize Poem was soon abandoned in discouragement; the essay he sent in had not been mentioned. These honours had fallen to Earwaker, with whom it was not easy ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the old Washington Square stock, as antique—and as honourable—as Methuselah. Undine soon tires of him; above all, tires of his family and their old-fashioned social code. For her the rowdy joys of Peter Van Degen and his set. The Odyssey of Undine is set forth for us by an accomplished artist in prose. We see her in Italy, blind to its natural beauties, blind to its art, unhappy till she gets into the "hurrah" of St. Moritz. We follow her hence, note her trailing her petty misery—boredom because she can't spend extravagantly—through ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... during the evenings, when our work was over, I had a constant source of amusement in endeavouring to impart such knowledge as I possessed to Harry. I fortunately remembered portions of the Bible, and numerous pieces of poetry and prose; and by repeating them to him, he also was able to get them by heart. I used to tell him all about England, and how various articles in common use were manufactured. I taught him a good deal of history and geography; and even arithmetic, by making use of pebbles. ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... communication of Greek thought and literature to the western world. This was what occupied the best days of Cicero and Sulpicius Rufus and many others; and they succeeded at the same time in creating for its expression one of the most perfect prose languages that the world has ever known or will know. They did it too, helping each other by kindly and cheering intercourse,—the humanitas of daily life. It is exactly this humanitas that the northern mind of Mommsen, in spite of its vein of passionate romance, could not understand; all ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away from view and cherish ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... poetry of the English was so rude and imperfect during that age, we may reasonably expect that their prose would be liable to still greater objections. Though the latter appears the more easy, as it is the more natural method of composition, it has ever in practice been found the more rare and difficult; and there scarcely is an ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... has done; for, though a prose heading runs before every page, with a knowing wink to the reader, the mystery is not cleared up. As the view dissolves with every turn of a leaf, the showman says, confidentially,—"Now you shall see how a poet's soul comes into play,—how he succeeds a little, but fails more,—tries ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... worst kind of cynicism to make a mock in a realistic vein of any personality that has set in motion the idealising thaumaturgy of the affections. Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet. Only an energetic and beautiful imagination, together with a mastery of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... Song of Slaughter; Verse and prose, the Laureat Otter, Floats along, diluting song In milk and water. Next (who'll buy?) here's Love in Little, Smooth as glass and eke as brittle; Here are posies, lilies, roses, Cupid's slumbers—out ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... jolly Dean Who, in "Augustan" times, Made merriment for fat and lean In jocund prose and rhymes! Ah, but he drove a pranksome quill! With quips he wove a spell; His creed—he cried it with a ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... this thing will end? Vers libre is within the reach of all. A sleeping nation has wakened to the realization that there is money to be made out of chopping its prose into bits. Something must be done shortly if the nation is to be saved from this menace. But what? It is no good shooting Edgar Lee Masters, for the mischief has been done, and even making an example of him could not undo it. Probably the only hope lies in the fact that poets never ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... adoption of Arabian medicines, however, that has made the school at Salerno famous both in rhyme and prose, but rather the fact that women there practised the healing art. Greatest among them was Trotula, who lived in the eleventh century, and whose learning is reputed to have equalled that of the greatest physicians of the day. She ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... minds, the publishing of some such Work of Art, in one or the other dialect, becomes almost a necessity. For what is it properly but an Altercation with the Devil, before you begin honestly Fighting him? Your Byron publishes his Sorrows of Lord George, in verse and in prose, and copiously otherwise: your Bonaparte represents his Sorrows of Napoleon Opera, in an all-too stupendous style; with music of cannon-volleys, and murder-shrieks of a world; his stage-lights are the fires of Conflagration; his rhyme and recitative are the tramp of ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... passage in Richard Jefferies' imperishably beautiful book The Story of my Heart—a passage well known to all lovers of that prose-poet—in which he figures himself standing "in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory," and pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery of life. "Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed," he says, "is there any system ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty and an unfamiliar charm. It is written in blended prose and verse, like the mediaeval 'cante-fable,' and tells the tale of the House of the Wolfings in its struggles against the legionaries of Rome then advancing into Northern Germany. It is a kind of Saga, and the language in which the folk-epic, as we may call ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... incidents. We can pardon in a portrait-gallery of such extent here and there an ill-drawn figure or a face wanting in expression. With the exception of Scott, and perhaps of Dickens, what writer of prose fiction has created a greater number of characters such as stamp themselves upon the memory so that an allusion to them is well understood in cultivated society? Fielding has drawn country squires, and Smollett has drawn sailors; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... came in with a muslin gown on her arm, and some camellias in her hand, and there was again a flutter at my heart, as if dressing and going down-stairs and dining, had been as different things yesterday from what they were to-day, as the tamest prose is ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... of open and declared Socialists among the great writers, artists, playwrights, critics, of the Victorian period was out of all proportion to the number of Socialists in the general population. Wilde in his Soul of Man under Socialism, Ruskin in many volumes of imperishable prose, Morris in all his later life, have witnessed to the unending protest of the artistic spirit against the rule of gain. Some of these writers are not, perhaps, to be regarded as orthodox Socialists in the modern sense, but their disgust with and contempt ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... details do you learn the state of the country? How did the war affect even the people remote from the battlefields? How are the terror and suffering of the people indicated? Notice the effectiveness of the author's use of details. Have you read any prose or poetry in which war is made to seem glorious? How does it seem here? Does the author make the scene of the arrival of the Prussians vivid? How is this done? Note the dramatic contrast between the arrival of the Prussians and the actions of the peasants. How has the author drawn the ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... suspicion on account of the boldness of some of its statements. By this means I was drawn irresistibly to the northern sagas; and I now tried, as far as was possible without a fluent knowledge of the Scandinavian languages, to acquaint myself with the Edda, as well as with the prose version which existed of a ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the reading public will be, for the first time, made acquainted with the rich stores of intellectual wealth long garnered in the literature and beautiful romance of Northern Europe. From the famous Edda, whose origin is lost in antiquity, down to the novels of Miss Bremer and Baroness Knorring, the prose and poetic writings of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland are here introduced to us in a manner at once singularly comprehensive and concise. It is no dry enumeration of names, but the very marrow and spirit of the various works displayed before us. We have old ballads and fairy tales, always ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... of Strathearn have often been pictured by writers of poetry and prose, but without reaching the head of Strathearn these beauties can be only partially seen. The drive from Crieff to Lochearnhead in a summer day is universally regarded as one of the finest in all Scotland. To within a mile or so ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... the scanty leisure of the illustrious warrior was employed in producing odes and epistles, a little better than Cibber's, and a little worse than Hayley's. Here and there a manly sentiment which deserves to be in prose makes its appearance in company with Prometheus and Orpheus, Elysium and Acheron, the Plaintive Philomel, the poppies of Morpheus, and all the other frippery which, like a robe tossed by a proud beauty to her waiting woman, has long been contemptuously abandoned ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the earlier periods, free from conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it is natural and normal art, such as grew spontaneously when mankind first tried in freedom to express beauty. For example, the language of Greek poetry is markedly different from that of prose, and there are even clear differences of language between different styles of poetry. And further, the poetry is very seldom about the present. It is about the past, and that an ideal past. What we have to notice ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town—to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sights. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... he is attacking some lofty enterprise. He would persuade you that he is a knight-errant of purity. "Tremendous issues" are always at stake. The heroes of Wall Street are engaged in never-ending "battles." They are "fighting" for causes, the splendour of which is not dimmed in Mr Lawson's lurid prose. They have Americanised the language of ancient chivalry, until it fits the operations of the modern market. They talk of honour and of "taking each other's word," as though they had never stooped to dollars in their lives. But of one thing you may be sure—they are always ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... common ignorance of Prosodie, no School-master be admitted to teach a Grammar School, in Burghs, or other considerable Paroches, but such as after examination, shall be found skilfull in the Latine Tongue, not only for Prose, but also for Verse; And that after other trials to be made by the Ministers, and others depute by the Session, Town, and Paroch for this effect, that he be also approven ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... to be within sight and sound of Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist—the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... Saint Eustace, it commemorates a vision which tradition attributes alike to Saint Julian the Hospitaller, to Saint Felix, and to Saint Hubert. The genius of Flaubert, who was certainly one of the greatest prose writers of this century, has told the story of the first of these in very beautiful language, and the legend of Saint Hubert is familiar to every one. Saint Eustace is perhaps less known, for he was a Roman saint of early days, a soldier and a ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the calls of animals in the spring nights, are valuable chiefly inasmuch as they reveal the creature of instinct, the fawn escaped from his native forests, that Maupassant was in his early youth. But they add nothing to his glory. They are the "rhymes of a prose writer" as Jules Lemaitre said. To mould the expression of his thought according to the strictest laws, and to "narrow it down" to some extent, such was his aim. Following the example of one of his comrades of Medan, being readily carried ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... it is impossible to take from a man that which he never possessed. Burton was a very great man, Mr. Payne is a very great man, but they differ as two stars differ in glory. Burton is the magnificent man of action and the anthropologist, Mr. Payne the brilliant poet and prose writer. Mr. Payne did not go to Mecca or Tanganyika, Burton did not translate The Arabian Nights, [10] or write The Rime of Redemption and Vigil and Vision. He did, however, produce the annotations of The Arabian Nights, and a remarkable enough and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... said Mrs. Tretherick excitedly. In her deepest emotions, in either verse or prose, she rose above ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... and devoted care of parents, or of those who stand in the place of parents. If, when it grows up, it becomes indifferent; if its heart grows cold, and it becomes ungrateful, it arouses universal indignation. Poets and writers of prose have exhausted all the epithets in their effort to describe an ungrateful child. Shakespeare's words are probably ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... the exception of the well-known prefaces to his minor poems, they are little known. A paper or two in Coleridge's Friend, and a political tract occasioned by the convention of Cintra, form important and valuable contributions to the prose literature of the country. We would especially call attention to the introductory part of the third volume of the Friend, as containing a very beautiful development of Mr. Wordsworth's opinions on the moral worth and intellectual character of the age in which it was his destiny to live. The ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various |
