"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Samuel Butler, "thus," as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me, "honouring a great man's memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation." Besides showing that the Odyssey was written by a woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also translated the Iliad, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... subject-matter of his editorials could be rarely attacked. Ollier's writings 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 "une feuille lue aujourd'hui, oubliee demain." Therefore, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... essays, collected from here and there, on this and that, on everything and on nothing, we may see Mr. Belloc reflected in the clear stream of his own writing: and in proportion as the reflection is vivid or blurred we may rank him as a stylist and writer of English prose. ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... and a certain Mr. Thomas Butts, who bought incessantly, anything and everything,—seized upon all he drew and painted. In his literary undertakings he was for the most part his own editor and printer and publisher. His career in verse and prose began early. In 1783 came forth the charming collection 'Poetical Sketches,' juvenile as the fancies of his boyish days, but full of a sensitive appreciation of nature worthy of a mature heart, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... is Willis, all natty, and jaunty, and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em; Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,— Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... on the stage" has done duty again and again. I might quote a hundred such examples to show Johnson, whatever his qualities as a poet, is very much alive indeed in his verse. It is, however, as a great prose writer, that I prefer to consider him. Here he is certainly one of the most permanent forces in our literature. Rasselas, for example, while never ranking with us moderns quite so high as it did with the excellent Miss Jenkins in Cranford, is a never failing delight. So far from being ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... at the same time we respect her philosophers and literary men, who appear to us to compose the first rank of writers. Without mentioning their Ossian, Thompson and Burns, we may enumerate their prose writers, such as Hume, and the present association of truly learned and acute men, who write the Edinburgh Review. A Scotchman may be allowed to show pride at the mention of this celebrated work. As it regards America, this northern constellation ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... With thoughts and hopes, anxieties and aims, Born of thine own peculiar self, and fed Upon a certain round of circumstance, A soul as different and distinct from thine As love of goodness is from love of glory, Or noble poesy from noble prose. I could forgive thee, if thou wast of them Who do their fated parts in this world's business, Scarce knowing how or why—for common minds See not the difference 'twixt themselves and others— But thou, thou, with the visions which thy youth did cherish Substantialized ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... like Mrs. Turner (some of whose Cautionary Stories have already been published in this series), lived and wrote at the beginning of this century. Mrs. Turner practised verse, Mrs. Fenwick prose. I can tell nothing of Mrs. Fenwick's life, except that among her books were Infantine Stories, the Life of Carlo, Mary and her Cat, Presents for Good Boys and Girls, Rays from the Rainbow (an easy system of teaching grammar), and Lessons for Children; or, Rudiments of Good Manners, ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... the Ideal which was sure to spring out of it. Fancy and Imagination, Grace and Beauty, all those qualities which are to the work of Art what scent and colour are to the flower, can only grow towards heaven by taking root in earth. Is not the noblest poetry of prose fiction the poetry of ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... "The Fool's Paradise, or Love and Life," "A Lost Illusion," "Vers Nonsensiques," "L'Onglay a Parry," "Two Thrones," "A Love-Agony," "A Simple Story," "A Ballad of Blunders" (after Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens"), and then a story in prose, "The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts: A tale of Modern Art and Fashion." All the poetry is in the ballad strain, and by its monotony the reader is put into the right condition to receive a shock from ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... lived, felt, and believed what he wrote, and though his dramas and poems do not rise above fair mediocrity, and the great number of his prose stories are injured by a certain monotony, the charm of them is in their elevation of sentiment and the earnest faith pervading all. His knights ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... prophecy, "But I shall see it reanimated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his Songs and Sonnets and Elegies rather than in his Divine Poems. We find, in some of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on. I had left the chamber of the—shall I say de jure King of England?—a sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes touched the comic. To harry an old valet out of bed and set ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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
... mother-tongue because they know so little of it that they do not even suspect their own ignorance of its burthen and its powers. They speak a little set of ready-made phrases, they write it scarcely at all, and all they read is the weak and shallow prose of popular fiction and the daily press. That is knowing a language within the meaning of their minds, and such a knowledge a child may very well be left to "pick up" as it may. Side by side with this they will presently set themselves to erect a similar ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... drifted away. How could it be otherwise, while a famous painter was describing some scene, or a noted philosopher illustrating some theory, or an acute statesman drawing some historical parallel, than that the egotist should drop himself, and the proser forget to prose?" The late Clarence King was in his day a leader in the Century talk, and his comment on the club was that it contained "the rag-tag and bob-tail of all that was best in the country." Many times has it been introduced under thin disguises in the fiction dealing with New York. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... have, we may say, words in their best order—Coleridge's equally admirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from great nobility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the best order announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with the highest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and its people ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... 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 ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... thought but also the spirit of the age and the ideals of the nation's history. The third aim is to show, by a study of each successive period, how our literature has steadily developed from its first simple songs and stories to its present complexity in prose ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the little guard thereof, as he whirled onward into the eye of the west. It was the hour before afternoon school, and already I could hear my father's voice within declaiming as to unnecessary datives and the lack of all feeling for style in the Latin prose ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... Indeed if Empathy is so recent a discovery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our thinking; so that we are surprised to learn its existence, as Moliere's good man was to hear that be talked prose. ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... whose fustian's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad." (POPE, Prologue to the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... my knowledge of human nature, which, in regard to children, conformed to comparatively simple laws. I knew that the change would involve plenty of hard work, self-denial and careful managing, which nothing could redeem from prose; but I aimed to add to our exodus, so far as possible, the elements of adventure and mystery so dear to the hearts of children. The question where we should go was the cause of much discussion, the studying of maps, and the learning of not ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... a child when I began to write down the things I was thinking about, but at first I always made rhymes and found prose so difficult that a school composition was a terror to me, and I do not remember ever writing one that was worth anything. But in course of time rhymes themselves became difficult and prose more and more enticing, and I began my work in life, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and, in the course of his exordium, takes care to throw out all the sarcasm he can against his rival, who rouses himself, and the battle of tongues begins, and is carried on in a sort of rhyming prose, in which nothing is spared to give force to jest or argument against the reigning vices or follies of the day. As the orators proceed and become more and more animated on the subject, they are frequently interrupted ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... decidedly. "Do as you please, M. Clergeot, but have done with your advice. I prefer the lawyer's plain prose. If I have committed follies, I can repair them, and in a way that would surprise you. Yes, M. Clergeot, I can procure twenty-two thousand francs; I could have a hundred thousand to-morrow morning, if I saw fit. They would only cost me the trouble of asking ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... as became a bride, and he pointed out that as Keith Rickman was a poet his greatness was incommensurable with that of her husband, it left him undisturbed upon his eminence as the supreme master of prose. So that Mrs. Rankin smiled dimly and deferentially as an elegant hostess must smile upon a poet who has kept her waiting. There were two other ladies there (Rankin's mother and sister from the provinces); their greeting conveyed a rustling and excited consciousness ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... does! It says the Vandals martyred her. Phoebe, you can't criticise poetry as if it were prose." ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... and y will vanish, When that Bonnet I recall; And a vision fair will banish, Newton, Euclid, and Snowball. And a gleam of tresses golden, And of eyes divinely blue, Will interfere with Holden, And my Verse and Prose imbue. ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... 'Senilia;' in which he shews so little learning or taste in writing, as to make Carteret a dactyl[4]. In matters of genealogy it is necessary to give the bare names as they are; but in poetry, and in prose of any elegance in the writing, they require to have inflection given to them. His book of the Dialects[5] is a sad heap of confusion; the only way to write on them is to tabulate them with Notes, added at the bottom of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... an article often mentioned by Arabs in verse and prose; the bright coloured little gourd attracts every eye by its golden glance when travelling through the brown-yellow waste of sand and clay. A favourite purgative (enough for a horse) is made by filling the inside with sour milk which is drunks after ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... in life, and we should cultivate them while we are young enough to be able to learn to enjoy them. The loftiest spirits of the ages have left their inspirations and their aspirations with us in poetry, prose, music, painting, statuary and in other forms. We should try to cultivate understanding of these subjects, not necessarily all of them, but of one or more, for with understanding come the elevation and broadening of mind that are always present when there is ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... in a little town which looked a place of fairy enchantment under the moon. And as the song of the motor changed into jogging prose with the putting on of the brakes, open flew the door of an inn. Nothing could ever have looked half so attractive as the rosy glow of the picture suddenly revealed. There was a miniature hall and a quaint stairway—just an impressionist ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day after day, columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether he wrote in longhand, dictated, or used ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... not only published INDIANA, VALENTINE, and JACQUES, but also LELIA, that prose poem of which she afterwards said: "If I regret having written it, it is because I could not now write it. Were I in the same state of mind now as when it was written, it would indeed be a great consolation to me to be able to commence it." The mere painting ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... spirit in a feeble body—and out of the furnace came forth Herbert the priest and saint. All that knowledge can inspire, all that tenderness can endear, centres about that picture of the beauty of holiness, his brief pastoral career—as we read it in his prose writings and his poems, and the pages of Walton—at the little village of Bemerton. He died at the age of thirty-nine—his gentle spirit spared the approaching conflicts of his country, which pressed so heavily upon ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... possessed a larger fund of such thrilling incident or greater enthusiasm for his calling than he who recently paid that last penalty which ever hovers over its followers—the venerable John Wise. His autobiography, Through the Air, is a prose poem on the glories of Cloudland. The following extract from a private letter written by him in 1876, after an aeronautical career of forty years, comprising nearly five hundred ascensions, illustrates this enthusiasm and his views ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the desires of men, whether considered in their persons or their states, that they will grasp at all, and can form no scheme of perfect happiness with less."[1] So writes the most powerful of English prose-writers. And this hope and desire, which is reason, once thrown down, the most powerful among poets has brought from human lips this ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... before they begin to write. I will not assert that it is a proof of madness, but it is a proof that a very little more would make them mad. Shakespeare says 'the lover, the lunatic, and the poet, are of an imagination all compact.' It matters little whether it is prose or poetry; there is often more imagination and more poetry in prose than in rhyme. But ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... Here the interview ended; I withdrew, and went with my mind disquieted to the tavern, where I met some of the Yankee captains, who would have drawn me into a conversation on what had happened, but I was determined to be silent, and retired to prose ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... of it for all time within the shuddering comprehension of English-speaking people. One is a history that is more than a history; the other a tale that is more than a tale. Dickens, no doubt, owed much of his inspiration to Carlyle's tremendous prose epic. But the genius that depicted a moving and tragic story upon the red background of the Terror was Dickens's own, and the "Tale of Two Cities" was final proof that its author could handle a great theme in a manner that was worthy of its greatness. The work ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... pittance, when the exploited worker of to-day will be educated, and will have his own ideas to put down in black and white and to communicate to others, then the authors and scientific men will be compelled to combine among themselves and with the printers, in order to bring out their prose and their poetry. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... say," remarked the Mistress of the House, "that although his action was natural enough, he was in great danger of becoming a prose-fool." ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... each other in passing. I have certainly earned a little holiday. I have worked like a beast of burden. I need too to see some blue, but the blue of the sea will do, and you would like the blue of the artistic and literary firmament over our heads. Bah! that doesn't exist. Everything is prose, flat prose in the environment in which mankind has settled itself. It is only in isolating oneself a little that one can find in oneself ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... jathondek, sewarihwisaanonghkwe Kayanerenghkowa,—"now listen, ye who completed the work, the Great League." This section, though written continuously as prose, was probably always sung, like the list of chiefs which follows. It is, in fact, the commencement of a great historical chant, similar in character to the 78th Psalm, or to some passages of the Prophets, which in style it greatly resembles. In ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... I have kept to my old ways, and that is the way of beginning at the beginning. I disagree utterly with any Balbus who would build an absolute wall between romance and novel, or a wall hardly less absolute between verse- and prose-fiction. I think the French have (what is not common in their language) an advantage over us in possessing the general term Roman, and I have perhaps taken a certain liberty with my own title in order to keep the noun-part of it to a single word. I shall extend ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... She was perpetually at work, although often—nay, generally—with little of physical strength, and sometimes utterly prostrated by illness. Yet the work must be done, as her poems and prose were usually for periodical publications, and a given day of the month it was impossible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... prose and rhymed exaggeration, this ought to reproduce the sense of what Sir A— told the nation sometime ago, when the Government struck from our incomes two ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... never let die—require a devotion as unceasing, as patient, as inexhaustible, as the devotion that is required for the works that adorn your walls; and we have luckily in our age—tho it may not be a literary age—masters of prose and masters of verse. No prose more winning has ever been written than that of Cardinal Newman; no verse finer, more polished, more melodious has ever been written than that of Lord Tennyson ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... the favorite historian of this expedition. His Lives of Celebrated Spaniards is regarded as one of the classics of Spanish prose literature. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... the mountains, The dew shall flee the rose, The nymphs forsake the fountains, Ere I forsake my prose!" ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... edified and often very much instructed. Subjects relating to a more rational life and education for the poor and unlearned interest me and arouse my enthusiasm. There are some fine lady as well as gentlemen readers, who show their ability in poetry and prose, and, for the amusement of the young people, some devote their talents on occasions to tableaux, which are delightful and display ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... wishes, may discover without undue delay, the little volume of modern prose selections that he has before him is the result of no ambitious or pretentious design. It is not a collection of the best things that have lately been known and thought in the American world; it ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... he in the same strain. "Prose and verse shall woo her for my lady-love; and she shall blush and hang her head in modest joy, even as the rose when listening to the music of her beloved bulbul beneath ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... do it." But when he was only thirty-three—a boy, as authors go—he had already tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may be that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained Song.... The worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and life, one's affections are divided.... And in truth, being a servant of the public, I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously to singing." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... capture of the three robbers who stole the boats on the Missouri River, which belonged to the Roosevelt ranch. This last would be a capital addition to school readers and books of selected standard prose. ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... a part of that national gladness Gard was observing in Germany and could not gage, could not yet give an explicit and sufficient reason for? Those old-time Teuton liberals, masters of prose and verse—how would they feel at home in this modern Rhineland of hysterical spleen and arms provocative? Was it possible he had really come on ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... moments before. At least, he sprang to her side with an agility which suggested that his eyes had been following her every movement, thereby prompting Harrington, who was ever on the alert for a touch of romance amid the prose of every-day business, to ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... head, designed by Hogarth after the Lion of Venice, "a proper emblem of knowledge and action, being all head and paws," was set up to receive letters and papers for the Guardian.[82] The Tatler and the Spectator were born in the coffee house, and probably English prose would never have received the impetus given it by the essays of Addison and Steele had it not been ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... also cursorily at home, having to give a weekly account of what we had thus read by ourselves. I liked my classics, and yet I could not help feeling that there was a certain exaggeration in the way in which every one of them was spoken of by our teachers, nay, that as compared to German poets and prose writers they were somewhat overpraised. Still, it would have been very conceited not to admire what our masters admired, and as in duty bound we went into the usual raptures about Homer and Sophocles, about Horace and Cicero. ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... language, the moderns can only attain by the combination of their rhymes. It is a bad substitute perhaps, but better than the total absence of form, favoured by the atomic character of our words, and the flat juxtaposition of our clauses. The art which was capable of making a gem of every prose sentence, — the art which, carried, perhaps, to, a pitch at which it became too conscious, made the phrases of Tacitus a series of cameos, — that art is inapplicable to our looser medium; we cannot give clay the finish and nicety of marble. Our poetry and speech in general, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... complexion and a high look in his face, but a little pale, too, with study, for he was learned beyond his years and read all the books that he could lay hand to. It was said even that his own verses, and a prose-lament he had written upon the Death of a Hound, were read with pleasure in London by the lords and gentlemen. It was as long ago as '71, that his verses had first become known, when he was still serving in the school of good manners as page in my Lord ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... the rush of pulsing days, These days whose poetry was lost in prose So long ago, left desolate on those Far childhood paths—yet, sometimes from the haze Of half-forgotten years, fall on our ways Now drear, a strain of song, a June-blown rose. Ah, sweet, so sweet unto a heart that knows The memory of ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... Latin kingdom of Constantinople. In European literature these historic events are represented by the class of romances represented in this volume, which all trace back to versions in verse of the twelfth century, though they were done into prose somewhere in Picardy during the course of the next century. Daphnis and Chloe, one might say, had revived after a sleep of 700 years, and donned the garb and spoke the ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... to speak in few or measured words. He may have been a Philistine, as Mr. Symonds calls him, but he was surely a Philistine of genius. He has the supreme virtue of style. In fact, it may be roughly said that in Europe for nearly two centuries there is no such thing as a prose style but Boccaccio's. Even when dealing with his grosser topics—and these he derived from others—he half disarms disgust by the lightness of his touch. And he could tell a tale, one of the most difficult of literary tasks. When he deals with graver ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... make that month a memorable one. It is not strange that while the young man most admired "Heroism" and "Self-Reliance," the girl preferred "Love" and "Friendship," reading them over and over like prose poems, as they are, to the fitting accompaniment of sunshine, solitude, and sympathy, for letters went to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... his work in Europe; he could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home, he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at such ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... 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 experiences of ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... He is too redundant and tiresome.... 'Tis a great disadvantage to read them in MS., as one cannot readily turn to passages; but life is too short to be peeping into other peoples' MSS. I prefer your prose to your verse. Let me know if you receive it safely, and pray give no notion to any one that I have ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... to devote his life to literature. The father said, speaking of his two sons, Armand and Francois: "I have a pair of fools for sons, one in verse and the other in prose." In 1713 Voltaire, in a small way, became a diplomat. He went to The Hague attached to the French minister, and there he fell in love. The girl's mother objected. Voltaire sent his clothes to the young lady that she might ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Intelligence Department of the service where the personal risk was the greatest, and was killed in action at the battle of the Ourcq, July 30, 1918. He was buried within sound of the river. Since his death two volumes containing his complete work in prose and verse, his letters from abroad, and an excellent memoir written by his friend, Robert Holliday, have been published and will do much to perpetuate the memory ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... schoolman; plot to send him on embassy to China; Fujiwara plot against, (ill.); one of authors of the fifth of "National Histories"; Chinese prose; shrine, (ill.); descendants ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... manner of Books and Pamphlets, in Verse or Prose, at Reasonable Rates: And furnisheth, at a Minute's Warning, any Customer with Elegies, Pastorals, Epithalamium's and Congratulatory Verses adapted to all manner of Persons and Professions, Ready Written, with Blanks to insert the Names of ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... fraud and deception were rife in the system and its results were tragic. Mrs. Browning's famous poem, 'The Cry of the Children,' gives a more vivid picture of the children's sufferings than many pages of prose. At the same time we have plenty of first-hand evidence from the great towns of the misery which went along with the wonderful development of national wealth. Speaking in 1873 Lord Shaftesbury said, 'Well can I recollect in the earlier periods of the Factory ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country, that nimble English which ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Jourdain talked prose all his life without knowing it. Well- I prefer the unconscious method. I have as little faith as Mr. Carlyle would have in saying: 'Go to, let us make'-an induction about words, or anything else. It seems to me no very hopeful ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... books of the Old Testament now invite our attention,—"The Lamentations," "Proverbs," "Ecclesiastes," "The Song of Solomon," "Job," and "The Psalms." Ecclesiastes is not in poetical form, but it is a prose poem; the movement of the language is often lyrical, and the thought is all expressed in poetic phrases. The other books are all poetical in form as well as ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... been most appropriately styled, "the poetry of rural economy;" and that, without being made too familiar with a sharp little weapon, which can most speedily and effectually convert all the poetry into very sorry prose. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... upon former years, and, taken altogether, plates, prose, and poetry, is the best book of the present season. The Editor, Mr. Hall, has judiciously maintained the original feature of his plan—that of "considering attractive tales and beautiful poems, however, essential to the interest and variety of the volume, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... those who can understand neither and can read but one, who will object to any comparison being drawn between the Dramatist and the Novelist; but I confess that I—if the inherent superiority of verse over prose, which I admit unhesitatingly, be waived—that I fail, utterly fail to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet's thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be greater than the novelist's. On these points we will cry ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... still be a seat of world Empire, one of several seats, if you will—where the ruling council of the world assembles. Then the arts will cluster round this city, as gold gathers about wisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and beautiful rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate, austere and courageous imagination of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... now return to an earlier period in order to follow the development of the pastoral romance. When dealing with Daphnis and Chloe I pointed out that the Greek work could claim no part in the formation of the later prose pastoral. Between it and the work of Boccaccio and Sannazzaro there exists no such continuity of tradition as between the bucolics of the classical Mantuan and those of his renaissance follower. The Italian pastoral romance, in spite of its almost pedantic ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Falsehood do but decease, being ripe, decompose itself, and return to the Father of it?' To whom, alas! I fear, under this inexorable law must in due time revert too many of the fuliginous word-pictures of Mr. Carlyle's own dithyrambic prose concerning the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... have caused to be prepared for the festive season a handsome volume, of the Souvenir family, called the Ruby. A portion, indeed most of its pictorial embellishments are of the first class of engraving, and the letter-press contains poetry and prose worthy of perusal. The work is a beautiful addition to the centre-table, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... first published in 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution, "the Russian novel," not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... autumn he journeyed with his wife to Rome, the vellum-bound quarto was with him, but the persons from whom he sought further light about the murder and the trial could give little information or none. Smithcraft did not soon begin. He offered the story, "for prose treatment" to Miss Ogle, so we are informed by Mrs Orr, and, she adds, but with less assurance of statement, offered it "for poetic use to one of his leading contemporaries." We have seen that in a letter of 1862 from ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... heralds rake from coffin'd clay, Nor florid prose, nor horrid lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... his arms when her long vanished son, whom she had never given up for lost, however, suddenly stood before her and said: "Here am I." How fondly she kissed and caressed her dear, cruel, restored fugitive. The singer too loudly expressed his joy alike in verse and in prose, and fetched his best theatrical dress out of the chest to put it on his son in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... like to know of two books by the use of which teaching may be made a pleasure instead of a task to children, they cannot do better than order "The Easy Book" and "The Beautiful Book;" the former containing pieces in prose, and the latter, pieces in verse, and both of them richly and copiously illustrated with appropriate pictures. These books are published at "The Nursery" ...
— The Nursery, No. 103, July, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... difficulty in understanding his rejection, despite its exquisite verbal beauties, of this work. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the queer sub-conscious sense of the lover's inferiority betrayed in the prose note at the end. This is in French, and feigns to be written by Pauline herself. She is there made to speak of "mon pauvre ami." Let any woman ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in speaking of a lover—"my poor dear friend"! ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... harassing them—notwithstanding the ill-success of their poems—the three sisters were trying that other literary venture, to which Charlotte made allusion in one of her letters to the Messrs. Aylott. Each of them had written a prose tale, hoping that the three might be published together. "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" are before the world. The third—Charlotte's contribution—is yet in manuscript, but will be published shortly after the ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... was in an extraordinary state; his acts were normal enough, but his speech betrayed him shamefully; they had to warn him more than once about it. He seemed unable to talk ordinary prose, saying that "Everything ought to rhyme, At such a time," and, instead of walking like other people, his feet tried to keep in time with his language. "But you don't understand," he replied to Tim's grave ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... journalism naturally care for writing, but in an art to "care" is little and most have never had the personal environment, the training, or the personal command of English to enable them to do more than write a stiff prose with a narrow vocabulary and no sense of style. Even those who have some such capacity are hampered by the family heritage already outlined. College writing is in the same condition; but the average college man is not expecting to earn his living by his typewriter. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... characters—for a political purpose. Their veiled and bitter satire was to make Europe think—to sting reason into action—to ridicule out of existence a humbugging System of special privileges. It did, via the French Revolution and the resulting upheavals. His prose romances are the most perfect of Voltaire's manifold expressions to this end, which mark him the most powerful literary ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... material aspect has a sensuous value, as the wealth of color of Venetian painting, the sumptuousness of Renaissance architecture, the melody of Mr. Swinburne's verse, the gem-like brilliance of Stevenson's prose, the all-inclusive sensuousness, touched with sensuality, of Wagner's music-dramas. Because of the charm of beautiful language there are many art-lovers who regard the sensuous qualities of the work itself as making up the entire experience. Apart from any consideration of intention ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... than mortal beauty ever really be his—his in the common prose of possession that can never be disassociated with marriage—the prose that is to the delicate subtle beauty of love, what the rough touch is to the wings of the butterfly, the ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... exhilaration, and I greatly feared a posthumous breaking of the spell. Poet in feeling as I thought him, I could hardly imagine a poem written by my friend, and while I had little doubt that I could live through the reading of a novel or short prose sketch from his pen, I was apprehensive as to the effect of a possible bit ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... Guide or Fifth Reader is the book that by its careful selection of specimens of the best English literature in prose and verse contributed most to the training of its readers toward the appreciation of true beauty in literature. It contained many pieces of solid and continuous worth,—many that relate closely to the great historical ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... eighteenth-century English literature needs to be reminded of the interest of writers of the period in the condition—"disease" is too confining a term—hypochondriasis.[2] Their concern is apparent in both the poetry and prose of two centuries. From Robert Burton's Brobdingnagian exposition in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) to Tobias Smollett's depiction of the misanthropic and ailing Matthew Bramble in Humphry Clinker (1771), ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... this little book will be apt to notice very soon that though its title is Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading, the verse occupies nine tenths, the prose being confined to about two hundred proverbs and familiar sayings—some of them, indeed, in rhyme—scattered in groups throughout the book. The reason for this will be apparent as soon as one considers the end in view in the ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... from my Pegasus, which has prevented me from descending to plain prose in an epistle of greater length to your fair self. You regretted, in a former letter, that my poems were not more extensive; I now for your satisfaction announce that I have nearly doubled them, partly by the discovery of some ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... lover; and in the short notices of new ones, which are transferred from "The Tribune" to these pages, there is hardly one that has not some thought of value to author as well as reader. Indeed, all her prose writings are suggestive, and thus are capable of opening vistas in the quickened mind which were unknown before. Authors of this class often dart a ray into the recesses of our souls, so that we see what they never saw, gain what they never gave. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... Toumeville in particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that such a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when Burns confessed excess he did not defend ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... short, simple 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
... Philippine collection arranged in chronological order, the sketch we have given of the literature accessible to Filipinos who could not read Spanish in the eighteenth century would serve not unfairly for much of the nineteenth. The first example of secular prose fiction I have noted in his lists is Friar Bustamente's pastoral novel depicting the quiet charms of country life as compared with the anxieties and tribulations of life in Manila. [140] His collection did not contain so far as I ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... 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 ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... longing for home, as a vague yet deepening sense that, in some vital way—not yet fully understood—he was different from his fellows But once he reached the haven of Desmond's study, the good days began in earnest. He could read and dream along his own lines. He could scribble verse or prose, when he ought to have been preparing quite other things; and the results, good or bad, went straight to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... she waited in the afterglow, Star-eyed and golden 'mid the poppy and rose, I do not know; I do not care to know,— It is enough I keep her picture so, Hung up, like poetry, in my life's dull prose. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... scientist he must know the trend of scientific thought and its relation to the Bible. The best poetry of nations should be at his command on account of the refining influence which it has always exercised on mankind in all ages. The masterpieces of the world's best prose writers, the history of art, the study of the philosophy of history, and the too neglected study of the history of ethnic religions must be in his possession, not simply in the library of his home but in the library of his mind. Most if not all of these studies ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... writing in America at the time they were written; and if there had been, it would hardly have commended itself to the old-fashioned taste of Dr. Bryant, to whom Pope was still a power in poetry, as Addison, no doubt, was in prose. It was natural, therefore, that he should offer his boy to the strait-laced Muses of Queen Anne's time; that the precocious boy should lisp in heroic couplets, and that he should endeavor to be satirical. Politics were running high in the first decade of the present ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... dearly love the poets, and always long to enrich my plain prose with gems from their verse, it is sometimes a little embarrassing, because one is obliged to disagree with them. If they would only look a little into the ways of birds, and not assert, in language so musical that one can ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... night watches. On the contrary, its wings had grown to an amazing span and iridescence. It was so impatient for flight, that its feet had to be chained to the ground—the wise Calypso's doing—with a little plain prose, a detail or two of preliminary ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... mine shall stand linked as friends to posterity, both in verse and prose, and (as Tully calls it) in consuetudine studiorum. Would to God our persons could but as well and as surely be inseparable! I find my other ties dropping from me; some worn off, some torn off, some relaxing daily: my greatest, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... remoter authors, were, in his time, accessible and familiar. The fable of As You Like It, which is supposed to be copied from Chaucer's Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of those times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain English prose, which the criticks have now to seek in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... Cortegiano was first published by the Aldine Press at Venice, in 1528. Before the close of the century more than one hundred editions saw the light; French, Spanish, English, and German versions followed each other in rapid succession, and the Cortegiano was universally acclaimed as the most popular prose work of the Italian Renaissance. "Have you read Castiglione's Cortegiano?" asks the courtier Malpiglio, in Tasso's dialog. "The beauty of the book is such that it deserves to be read in all ages; as long as courts endure, as long as princes reign and knights and ladies ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... Milton's English one could stand Night, docile to the orders of Satan, condescending to deflect a hatchet which is whistling unpleasantly close to Rene's ear, not that he may be benefited, but preserved for more sufferings. In comparatively plain French prose—the qualification is intentional, as will be seen a little later—with a scene and time barely two hundred years off now and not a hundred then, though in a way unfamiliar—the thing won't do. "Time," at the orders of the Prince of Darkness, cutting down trees to make a stockade ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... necessarily has an appropriate character. We do not find here music of strongly marked rhythm and clearly defined measure, suitable to the utterance of worldly emotions, but a melody resembling the chant, written in the tonalities used in the church, but containing a certain kind of prose rhythm and accentuation, such as exists in the ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... Westminster Assembly: Its History and Standards'; in 1886 he published 'The Catechisms of the Second Reformation'; in 1888 he edited, for the Scottish Text Society, 'The Richt Vay to the Kingdome of Heuine,' by John Gau, the earliest known prose-treatise in the Scottish dialect setting forth the doctrines of the Reformers; and in 1897, for the same Society, 'The Gude and Godlie Ballads,' reprinted from the edition of 1567, with a full and most interesting Introduction. For the Scottish History Society ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... said such harsh things about our present-day makers of books that I am going to send you, by way of palliative, a couple of volumes by living writers who really have some notion of literature. One is Brownell's Victorian Prose Masters, and the other is Santayana's Poetry and Religion. If they give you as much pleasure as they have given me, I know I shall win your gratitude, which I much desire. It is a little disheartening and a justification of my pessimism ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... its place. Tacitus, who died about A.D.120, is perhaps the latest of the Latin authors whose works may be ranked among the classics. No more great men of letters arose. Few of those who understand and enjoy Latin literature to-day would think of reading any of the poetry or prose written after the beginning of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Sahara, or the sites of high civilization on the earth; but the whole world of novels seemed to them a chaos undisciplined by art and unformed to beauty. The gates of the halls where the classics live in immortal youth were beginning to close against the voluminous prose romances that have sprung from modern thought, when the deliberations of the Muses were suddenly interrupted. They had disturbed the divine elements of modern society. Forth from all the recesses of the air came troops ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... it, is it, Master Osborne? I thought there was some mental cause for this depression of health. I wouldn't trouble my head about it, if I were you, though that's always very easily said, I know. Try your hand at prose, if you can't manage to please the publishers with poetry; but, at any rate, don't go on fretting over spilt milk. But I mustn't lose my time here. Come over to us to-morrow, as I said; and what with the wisdom of two doctors, and the wit and folly of three women, I think we shall ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... 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 in which he had ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not live to see that fine unity of the west which lent the latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their classical repose. No common rule of verse or prose will satisfy men's permanent desire for harmony: no common rule of manners, of honour, of international ethics, of war. We shall not live to see, though we are young now, a Paris reading some new Locke or Hume, a London moved to attentive ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... will, nevertheless, adorn her husband's home by her simple domestic virtues. A wife does not need to be a moral whetstone to sharpen her husband's wits by the fireside, neither would it enhance his happiness to find her filling reams of foolscap paper with choice specimens of prose and poetry; intelligent sympathy with his work is all he demands, and a loving, restful companion, who will soothe his hours of depression, who is never too weary or self-absorbed to listen to the story of ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey |
