"Quatrain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the "que diable allait il faire dans cette galere?" expression, it was necessary to be one of the Mr. Lutes or Miss Nedra Jennings Nuncheons, of Stephen French Whitman's "Predestined," who were regular habitues of "Benedetto's," under which name Gonfarone's was thinly disguised. Mr. Lute wrote a quatrain once every three months for the "Mauve Monthly," and Miss Nuncheon, tall and thin, with a mop of orange-coloured hair, contributed somewhere stories about the "smart set," "a society existing far off amid the glamour of opera-boxes, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed furniture comported itself as though it had but three legs—the whitewashed walls had for their only ornament the following quatrain in honor ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... gazal Platen has also attempted the ruba'i or quatrain, in which form he wrote twelve poems (Werke, ii. pp. 62-64), and the qasidah. Of this there is only one specimen, a panegyric (for such in most cases is the Persian qasidah) on Napoleon, and, as may therefore be ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... ingenious, and so quick of apprehension, I declare that I will adopt him as my son." Perceiving that no one opposed my design, I took the pen, and wrote six sorts of hands used among the Arabians, and each specimen contained an extemporary distich or quatrain in praise of the sultan. My writing not only excelled that of the merchants, but was such as they had not before seen in that country. When I had done, the officers took the roll, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... 138) gives an elegiac quatrain poem on "The Ruins of Netley Abbey," by a poet with the suggestive name of George Keate; and "The Alps," in heavy Thomsonian blank verse (VII. 107) by the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of personal friendship with this "Father Poet," he will write for you somewhere, some time, some place, these four favorite lines, with a twinkle in his eyes that is half boy and half sage, but all love, which quatrain he calls "Outwitted": ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... position, her prospects; nay, even the circumstances and surroundings of her friends and few intimates came to be regarded in the same unsatisfactory light. She was unacquainted with the healthy tone of wisdom contained in the old quatrain,— ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Katrina's Sun-Dial For Katrina's Window For the Friends at Hurstmont The Sun-Dial at Morven The Sun-Dial at Wells College To Mark Twain Stars and the Soul To Julia Marlowe To Joseph Jefferson The Mocking-Bird The Empty Quatrain Pan Learns Music The Shepherd of Nymphs Echoes from the Greek Anthology One World Joy and Duty The Prison and the Angel The Way Love and Light Facta non Verba Four Things The Great River Inscription ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... curious features of the Nights is the promptitude with which everyone—porters, fishermen, ladies, caliphs—recites poetry. It is as if a cabman when you have paid him your fare were to give you a quatrain from FitzGerald's rendering of Omar Khayyam, or a cripple when soliciting your charity should quote Swinburne's Atalanta. Then in the midst of all this culture, kindliness, generosity, kingliness, honest mirth,—just as ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... fully discussed in Poet-Lore, Volume VII, April, May, June-July. The poems are noteworthy for the fusion of human emotion and natural scenery and for the startlingly specific phrasing of the first quatrain. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... con; and no such lopsided union either, as times go, for pro is not more unlike con than man is unlike woman— yet men and women marry every day with none to say, "Oh, the pity of it!" but I and fools like me! Now wherewithal shall we please you? We can rhyme you couplet, triolet, quatrain, sonnet,rondolet, ballade, what you will. Or we can dance you saraband, gondolet, carole, pimpernel, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... decasyllabic quatrain for the triple rhyme of the Italian, we suppose Dr. Parsons desired rather to please the reader's ear with a familiar stanza, than to avoid the difficulties (exaggerated, we think, by critics) of the terza rima, and he could certainly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... to whom the king had appointed her a maid of honor. It is a question whether she did not even then exercise over Charles VII. that influence, serviceable alike to the honor of the king and of France, which was to inspire Francis I., a century later, with this gallant quatrain: ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... it, but not wear it. You have said truly, the house of Rookwood is a fated house; and it hath been said likewise, that if he wed not one of his own kindred—that if Rook mate not with Rook, his possessions shall pass away from his hands. Listen to this prophetic quatrain: ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... distinguished, like the philosopher in Andersen's Drop of Ditchwater, by having no name; but a quotation is appended to each of the numbers in the catalogue, and is to be supposed to indicate, the subject. No. 9, in the Great Room, has this quatrain from Tennyson— ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... characters of the metres of the 'Angel' and 'Eros.' The meats and wines of the two are, in very great part, almost identical in character; but, in one case, they are served on the deal table of the octo-syllabic quatrain, and, in the other, they are spread on the fine, irregular rock ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... elaborated, and presented as it were under another aspect. As Mr. Mark Pattison has admirably expressed it: "This thought or mood should be led up to, and opened in the early lines of the sonnet; strictly, in the first quatrain; in the second quatrain the hearer should be placed in full possession of it. After the second quatrain there should be a pause—not full, nor producing the effect of a break—as of one who had finished what he had got ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... d'impos. This was enough to make the farrier popular and to cause those unhappy sufferers to centre in this poor windbag their hopes for a better future. His portrait was engraved in copper-plate, and below it was written the quatrain of Nostradamus. M. d'Argenson,[2764] who was at the head of the police department, had these portraits seized. They were suppressed, so says the Gazette d'Amsterdam, on account of the last line of the quatrain written beneath the portrait, the line which runs: En delivrant ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... profile—and big beaver head-covering, recalls Walt Whitman's "I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out." A giant egoist, and as human, all too human, a fellow as Spain ever begot, Goya is only hinted at in Baudelaire's searching quatrain beginning: "Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues." Fleurs du Mal would be a happy title for the work of Francisco Goya if to "The Flowers of Evil" were added "and Wisdom." Goya is often cruel and lascivious ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... music is widely diffused, and some of them not only sing but improvise. In the province of the Minho it is not uncommon at these gatherings for a match of improvisation to be held between two rustic bards. One takes his guitar, and in a slow, drawling recitative sings a simple quatrain, which the other at once caps with a second in rhyme and rhythm matching the first. Verse follows verse in steady succession, and the singer who hesitates is lost: his rival rushes in with a tide of rhyme which carries all before it. In such primitive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Biarritz, where I had a conference with the Duke de La Union de Cuba, a warm Carlist partisan, to whom I had an introduction, and thence I went to St. Jean de Luz, a drowsy, quaint, world-forgotten nook. A petit Paris it was called in a vaunting quatrain by some minstrel of yore. But Brussels may be comforted. It is nothing of the kind, but something infinitely better. The breezes from the main and the mountains, from the Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees, conspire to supply it with ozone. There is music in the ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... last quatrain is also very effective. The poem on the whole, however, is chiefly to be admired for the graceful insouciance of its metre, so well in accordance with the character of the sentiments, and especially for the ease of the general manner. This "ease" ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... a quatrain in which the last lines excuse the first. According to Mr. Cobbett's already-quoted Memorials of Twickenham, he left that place upon his appointment as a Middlesex magistrate, when he moved to Bow Street. His house in Bow Street belonged to John, Duke ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... for my own lucidity when I read what you say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse, and may probably alter the opening ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... (Conversations, p. 176), Byron maintained that the image of the broken mirror had in some mysterious way been suggested by the following quatrain which Curran ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... be completed in one couplet and not run on to a second; and, as the parts cohere very loosely, separate quotation can generally be made without injuring their proper effect. A favourite form is the Ruba'i or quatrain, made familiar to English ears by Mr. Fitzgerald's masterly adaptation of Omar-i-Khayyam: the movement is generally aa ba, but it also appears as ab cb, in which case it is a Kit'ah or fragment. The Murabba, tetrastichs ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... to execute a commission entrusted to him. The First Consul, upon finding he did not leave Brest after he had been ordered to the Mediterranean, repeatedly said to me, "What the devil is Gantheaume about?" With one of the daily reports sent to the First Consul he received the following quatrain, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... which displays itself in smaller subscriptions to public or private objects than the donor's means will justify has naturally met with keen reproach. Herrick has a quatrain directed against the failing; and everyone remembers the lines about the man who declared that at the sound of woe ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the Angels at the Tomb of Christ, a souvenir of the Venetians; Lola de Valence, commented upon by Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the Fleurs du Mal; the Episode d'un combat de taureaux (dissatisfied with this picture, he cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The Acteur tragique (portrait of ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... spring of love resembleth] At the end of this verse there is wanting a syllable, for the speech apparently ends in a quatrain. I find nothing that will rhyme to sun, and therefore shall leave it to some happier critic. But I suspect that the ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... enough, that to Allison, "Treasure Island" is the ne plus ultra and composite of all pirate stories, and this marvel of delight he called to Waller's attention while they were incubating "The Ogallallas." No sooner had Waller read it than the quatrain of Old Billy Bones took possession of him and converted itself into music. The two of them, as so many other thousands had done, bewailed the parsimony of Stevenson in the use and development of the grisly suggestion and Waller ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... I, "I can't sing its praises in a Welsh englyn, but I think I can contrive to do so in an English quatrain, with the help of what you have told me. What do ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... That quatrain may suffice to decorate our page. And in connection with his college days I may mention his first novel, a short romance entitled Fanshawe, which was published in Boston in 1828, three years after he graduated. It was probably also written after that event, but the scene of the ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... acquired in the field of Venus may readily be imagined from a quatrain that was affixed in a conspicuous part of the Church of St. Hyacinthe, and which ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... fitness. Similar in cadence, though different in arrangement, is the measure of Too Late, with its singularly constructed stanza of two quatrains, followed respectively by two couplets, which together made another quatrain. It is worth noticing how admirably and uniformly Browning contrives to connect, in sound, the two halves of the broken quatrains, placing them so as to complete each other, and relieve our ear of the sense of distance. The poem is spoken by a lover who was neither rejected nor accepted: ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... 1900 or 1901. In the first quatrain "spoken" does not rhyme with "open"; Butler knew this and would not alter it because there are similar assonances in Shakespeare, e.g. "open" and "broken" in ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... In this quatrain Greek reads your soul, and Hebrew my eye and precedes this line by shall weep indeed which Greek omits. The last line is one of those longer ones with which verses or strophes often conclude ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... short account of this is in the story of King Dathi (O'Curry Lectures, p. 286). The tale seems to be alluded to in the quatrain on p. ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... young adorer back, in return for her quatrain, Millevoye's lines on the withered leaf—a far more appropriate image of my peregrinations. These, no doubt, you know, ending with four ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... naturalized in English, and it still remains the best instrument for the terse expression of a single poetic thought. Wyatt, it should be observed, generally departs from the Petrarchan rime-scheme, on the whole unfortunately, by substituting a third quatrain for the first four lines of the sestet. That is, while Petrarch's rime-arrangement is either a b b a a b b a c d c d c d, or a b b a a b b a c d e c d e, Wyatt's is usually a b b a a b b a c d ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... twelfth canto of the Paradiso. Yet in his time poetry was recitatived to music. So it was in Petrarch's, who was a lutenist, and who "tried" his verses, to see how they would go to the instrument. Yet Petrarch could allow himself to write such a quatrain as ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... astonishing versatility of mood. They live through all their sense at the same time; and, being philosophers without knowing it, keep the measure of their desires in accordance with the brevity of life. I approach a much-patronised tavern, and see inscribed above the entrance this quatrain in ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... answer, or attempt to answer, the manifold questions of their tender offspring. From time immemorial the communication between parent (and nurse) and child, between the old of both sexes and little children, far from being yea and nay, has been cast in the mould of the advice given in the German quatrain:— ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... have so little of his very best! for that very best was the finest of our time. Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive lines more noble and more strong than those which begin with the well-known quatrain— ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle |
