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More "Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over this couplet, for it was indelibly stamped upon my memory, and is as fresh to-day as when the lines were penned. This my first literary effort was carried to somewhere about the middle of the first canto. It stuck there—I ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... few dollars to the good. During one of the two years a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day. It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on the tombstones they ordered. They themselves, in most cases, knew none, and they asked Francois to supply them—as though he kept them in stock like marble and sand-paper. He had no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... couplets to be sung through, feigning by his silence to admit his defeat. Then the bridegroom's camp rejoiced and sang aloud in chorus, and thought that this time the foe was worsted; but at the first line of the last couplet, they heard the hoarse croaking of the old hemp-dresser bellow forth the second rhyme. Then ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... adorns for her. Landscapes thereon he would design, A tombstone, Aphrodite's shrine, Or, with a pen and colours fit, A dove which on a lyre doth sit; The "in memoriam" pages sought, Where many another hand had signed A tender couplet he combined, A register of fleeting thought, A flimsy trace of musings past Which might for many ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... said solemnly, in order to save the situation: "That last couplet is not at all necessary;" and Daddy Taille, who had got red up to the ears, looked round ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement; it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy heroes, instead of letting them ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the kind of fool you're going to make of yourself," cried Septimus, a ray of wonderful lucidity flashing across his mind. "There's a couplet of Tennyson's—I don't read poetry, you know," he broke off apologetically, "except a little Persian. I'm a hard, scientific person, all machinery. My father used to throw poetry books into the fire if he caught me with one, but ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe three score years and ten ago, bore on its foaming crest Victor Hugo, prince of romanticists. Near by was Henri Heine,—he left Heinrich across the Rhine,—Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet. The star of classicism had seemingly set. In the rich conflict of genius were Gautier, Schumann, and the rest. All was romance, fantasy, and passion, and the young men heard the moon sing silvery—you remember De ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... to be supposed that the smaller Procellariae are only visible before a storm is not very apparent. In point of fact, there is no more reason for associating the petrel specially with storms than there is for the belief expressed in the old Scotch couplet quoted in ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... is a remarkable specimen of the affected style of compliment prevalent in the time of Elizabeth. The third couplet, at first sight, appears to have a signification exactly opposed to that which the context requires. We should expect, instead of "the tongue all impatient to speak," to find "the ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... band of inhabitants, ordered his general, Michi, to construct a spacious hut (muro) and invite the eighty doubtful characters to a banquet. An equal number of Jimmu's soldiers acted as hosts, and, at a given signal, when the guests were all drunk, they were slaughtered. Jimmu composed a couplet expressing his troops' delight at having disposed of a formidable foe so easily, and in this verselet he spoke of one Yemishi being reputed to be a match for ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... around a bend in the road by this time. When Tom returned to the scene of the encounter, Mr. Wood was not in sight. Mr. Chripp laughed, and paraphrased an old couplet. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... f. tax. convencer to convince. conveniente useful, fitting, proper. convenir to agree, fit, suit. convento convent. convertir to convert. convicto convicted. convidar to invite. convoy m. convoy, escort, train. copa cup. copla couplet, ballad, song. corazon m. heart. cordillera chain of mountains. corneta cornet; —— de llaves cornet-a-pistons. corona crown. coronar to crown. coronel colonel. coronilla crown of the head. corral m. yard. correo mail, post-office. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene, beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by Shakespeare in the Rape of Lucrece, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes, and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a third rhyme comes forward in the last ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is a broad stone plinth panelled in front. The stalls stand on the plinth west of the screen, and the backs are painted with scenes from the monkish legends of St. Anthony the Hermit, St. Cuthbert, and, in the south choir aisle, St. Augustine. A rhymed couplet explains each picture; and the paintings, though rudely executed, give good examples of late fifteenth-century dress and ornament. Prior Gondibour caused the work to be done, and as Richard Bell was bishop at the time he may have ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... And yet, 'tis true, There are as mad, abandoned critics, too!" This couplet, penned by Pope, is ever new— But then, dear friends, the second line ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... Besides this, after each couplet of the Angelus, is recited that short hymn of praise, beginning with the words which the angel of the annunciation addressed to Mary,[1] "Ave Maria." This is why the hour after sunset is so often called the hour ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... furze blossoms which Eleanor was very fond of. Then the scorpion grass, of both kinds, proclaimed that it was summer; and borage was bright in the sitting-room. Eleanor could hardly look at it without an inward smile and sigh, remembering the cheering little couplet which attached to it by old usage; and Julia from whose lips she had first heard it; and the other lips that had given it to Julia. Corn-marigold was gay again in July, and the white blackberry blossoms came with crane's bill and flax, campion and willow-herb, speedwell and vetchling. ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... keen sympathy with his kind, his fine common-sense and his genial humour. The same qualities, tempered by a certain grace and tenderness, also enter into the best of his poems. Avoiding the epigram of Pope and the austere couplet of Johnson, he yet borrowed something from each, which he combined with a delicacy and an amenity that he had learned from neither. He himself, in all probability, would have rested his fame on his three chief metrical efforts, 'The Traveller', 'The Hermit', and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... farmer's life is composed merely of coursing, hunting, shooting, and fishing. These alone, said he, are very well, when occasionally and moderately used as a recreation; but a farmer must learn his business before he is capable of conducting and managing a farm—for, remember the old couplet, "he that by the plough would thrive, must either hold himself or drive." I would, therefore, have you think this matter over, before you finally make your choice. If you should like to be a clergyman, I have now an opportunity of purchasing the next presentation ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... prayed a 'respite,' it was not that he was scared at the approach of death. His mind was never brighter and happier. To this moment may well be attributed, as it has been by popular tradition, his composition of the couplet: ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... intently in that direction, until the form faded into a mere shadow; and then, as darkness increased, seemed to multiply before my aching eyes, and assume all sorts of fantastical shapes. Every now and then, a couplet, or a stanza, came sweeping up. It was evident the lady, whoever she might be, was not singing merely to amuse the child. The notes were sometimes lively, but, in general, sad and plaintive. I listened long after the last quaver had died away; and was rather sulky when Ali came with the persevering ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... also be done; in a corner of the house must he stand and repeat that couplet, till some tender-hearted lass relieves him. Now for the questions which are most deeply laid, or so touching to him, that he finds much difficulty to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... Lord Mallow were standing in the embrasure of a window, walled in by the crowd of aristocratic nobodies and intellectual eccentricities, talking earnestly of poor Erin and her chances of ultimate happiness, the lady, almost unawares, quoted a couplet of her own which seemed peculiarly applicable ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... That couplet was not his first one, by a good deal. The habit, it would seem, had taken a pretty strong hold of him, when the whipping ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... (except, of course, those that are written in stanzas), or influence the structure of the Latin, it must be considered as a happy circumstance for those who wish to render Horace into English. In respect of restraint, indeed, the English couplet may sometimes be less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is, on the whole, easier to run couplet into couplet than to run quatrain into quatrain; but the couplet seems hardly suitable for an English lyrical poem of any length, the very notion of lyrical poetry apparently ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... it! And the changing Taste Of changing Time leaves half your Work a Waste! My Childhood fled your Couplet's clarion tone, And sought for Homer in the Prose of Bohn. Still through the Dust of that dim Prose appears The Flight of Arrows and the Sheen of Spears; Still we may trace what Hearts heroic feel, And hear the Bronze that hurtles on the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... blocks of calico and white cotton intermingled, and on every white block was written a verse from the Bible or a couplet from one of our best hymns. On the central block, in letters so large as to catch the careless eye, was that faithful saying, in which is our hope and strength—'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.' And below it the prayer ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... says to us?"—"Yes, I hear," said the King, and continued his game. Monsieur, who was in the habit of introducing passages from plays into his conversation, said to my father-in-law, "M. Campan, that pretty little couplet again, if you please;" and pressed the King to reply. At length the Queen said, "But something must be said to Campan." The King then spoke to my father-in-law in these words: "Tell M. d'Inisdal that I cannot consent to be carried ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and said to him, "O damned one, O dog of the Nazarenes, art thou come to such power that thou durst assail me with the King of the Franks?" Then quoth he to his guards, "Take this accursed and do him die"; and he repeated this couplet,[FN26] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... is too apt to connect itself with self-love, and the disquieting passions which follow in the train of that our natural infirmity. Fix your eye upon acquiring independence by honourable business, and let the Muses come after rather than go before. Such lines as the latter of this couplet, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... (Memory of Husein) still ringing in their ears. The new party is composed of Bombay Musulman youths, the tallest of whom carries an umbrella made out of pink, green and white paper, under which the rest crowd and sing the following couplet relating to the wife and ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... evidence must be added the information derivable from the posthumous publications enumerated in the former part of this article. The publication of 1723 was made by direction of the duchess of Buckingham. The couplet, "Tho' prais'd," &c., and the appended note, were omitted. In 1726 Mr. alderman Barber republished the volumes "with several additions, and without any castrations," restoring the couplet and note as they ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... Michael Malcolm, of Loch Ore, an eccentric baronet, pronounced this oracular couplet in his old age, when troubled with the talk of the French Revolution. As a picture of meditative serenity and neutrality, it seems ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like "the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice," which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be called the worst couplet in the world's literature. In his real poetry (even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always crests the ridge triumphantly and ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the church is the very decorative 'Greenway' chapel. John Greenway was a rich wool-merchant of Tiverton, and on the walls of the chapel was inscribed this couplet: ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... great theory of idealism in which he affirmed that there is no proof of the existence of matter anywhere save in our own perceptions. Byron, in his light-hearted way, more than two generations later, dismissed Bishop Berkeley and his theory in the famous couplet— ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... truth there was the moon between the legs of the cow! She did not remain there long however, but was soon on the cow's back, as she crept up and up in the face of the sun. He bethought him of a couplet that Grizzie had taught him ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... fashion of the present day? How far the judgment of that is worth a poet's pain I can't pretend to say. But of one thing I am sure, that while I could as easily square the circle as compose a simple couplet addressed to the heart of a simple audience with sufficient felicity to decoy their praises into Max's begging-tray, I could spin out by the yard the sort of verse-making which characterizes the fashion ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has done in the following couplet, which, most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the power ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... a man of much ability and considerable culture for the times in which he lived. At the same time he was a man of strong personality though of evil repute in the Gaelic-speaking districts, as the following couplet still current among ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... which had been expected of the venerable commander of the army of the Shenandoah. He had spent three months of time, and ten millions of money, and had only emulated the acts of that Gallic sovereign whose great deeds are immortalized in the brief couplet, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... earliest playthings were French alphabet-blocks, and the set which served as toys and tasks for each of the elder brothers came at last to him as his legacy. The letters were formed by the human figure in different attitudes, and each block had a little couplet below the picture, beginning with the letter on the block. The Y represented a gymnast hanging by his hands to a trapeze, and being a letter which does not occur in the Hungarian language except in combinations, excited most the interest ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... (line 10) answering to desolate and state (lines 4 and 5), instead of to the halfway rhymes aforesaid. As to Antistrophe 2b, that follows Antistrophe 2a, so far as it goes; but after line 9 it breaks off suddenly, and closes with two lines corresponding in length and rhyme to the closing couplet of Antistrophe 1b, the section immediately preceding, which, however, belongs not to this group, but to the other. Mr. Locock speaks of line 124 as 'a rhymeless line.' Rhymeless it is not, for shore, its rhyme-termination, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... spoke Mr. Lagg, being now too interested to quote a couplet. "Matters were going on well, and I expected to close the deal, and make a pretty penny, when the doctors said they couldn't take the property, as it was haunted, and of course a haunted house, with queer noises in the night, would never ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... have lost my wits very finally when I forget the first time that I pleased my father with a couplet of English verse (after many a year of trials); and the radiant joy on his face as he declared, reading it aloud to my mother with emphasis half choked by tears,—that "it was as fine as anything that Pope or ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... one of the most respectable of the governors, was found, at his death, with a copy of verses in his pocket, which included the following couplet: ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... couplet with full lung power through all the repetitions, till the inevitable "glory, glory hallelujah" had the voice of every soldier in the fort. The song "took," and the marching chorus of the Federal armies of the Civil War was started on its way. Mrs. Howe gave it a poem that made its rusticity sublime, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... some title. Until the year 1792, there existed at Paris no theatre specially appropriated to this style of performance, which was given at the Comedie Italienne. It attracted crowds; and Sedaine, the composer, vexed to see it preferred to his comic operas, wrote a couplet against it, exhibiting more spleen than poetical merit. The attack, however, together with the refusal of a small pension which he had claimed from the Italian Comedy, to whose treasury he had brought millions of francs, irritated Piis, the vaudevilliste then in vogue, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the Layards. This Stella had died at the age of twenty-five in the year 1741, and her tombstone recorded that in mind she was clean and sweet, and in body beautiful. Also at the foot of it was a doggerel couplet, written probably by her ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... about a sixteenth part of the sum he had promised. The indignant author would accept no remuneration at all, but wrote a satire upon Mahmood instead; but he was merciful in his revenge, for he reached no more than the seven-thousandth couplet. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Colliers: on reading in a Comic Paper absurd comparisons between the wages of Curates and Colliers Wanted—a Wife: a Voice from the Ladies Sympathy A Fragment Law versus Theology: on an Eminent County Court Judge The Broken Model Impromptu: on an Inveterate Spouter A Character Couplet Pause: on the hesitation of the Czar to Force a Passage of the Danube, June, 1877 The Test of the Stick Note: concerning Iuan Wyllt, an Eisteddfod at Neath, and a First ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... mingled and interwove itself with the drone of the music from the table. He was reciting verses; from his favourite poem, no doubt. But though the sound of them ran in my ears like a brook, I can remember one couplet only,— ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to do with poetry," comments Montaigne on this couplet, "to say about this that not only is there nothing barbarous in this fancy, but that it is altogether worthy of Anacreon." Such is his enthusiasm, indeed, that he finds in this simple and faithful expression of sentiment ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... possessed numerous rings in ancient times. In the romance of "Sir Degrevant" a couplet ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... country and their king." This concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:— ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to thee, while I, alas! who have been blessed by thy pure heart and love for thee for sixteen years, lo! now I have lost thee." Still greater sticklers for the truth at the expense of convention are two fond husbands who borrowed a pretty couplet composed in memory of some woman "of tender age," and then substituted upon the monuments of their wives the more truthful phrase "of middle age,"[33] and another man warns women, from the fate of his wife, to shun ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... the Persians are of several kinds; the gazel or ode usually treats of love, beauty, or friendship. The poet generally introduces his name in the last couplet. The idyl resembles the gazel, except that it is longer. Poetry enters as a universal element into all compositions; physics, mathematics, medicine, ethics, natural history, astronomy, grammar—all lend ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... exercise of the higher intelligence which besets those who are known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them anonymously to magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of "How we Beat the Favourite" that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a versemaker. The success of his republished "collected" poems gave him courage, and the unreserved praise which greeted "Bush Ballads" ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... been used by Koenig,[284] and I will first give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less than two; but I ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... all. Granted;—for private enjoyment; and for private enjoyment keep them. They are not at all the less written you know, because you divide them. The couplet does not cease to be, nor does its meaning change. But take it away, and all appropriation ceases, and a very pretty gallant charade remains, fit for any collection. Depend upon it, he would not like to have his ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... published in the "Cambro-Briton" is somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... expert in all manly exercises, but not equally graceful; and the same defect attended his otherwise striking eloquence in public assemblies. His putting to flight the assassins in Ferrara gave him such a reputation for courage, that there went about in his honour a popular couplet ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... {epigramma} almost in the sense of sepulchural epigrams; {epigegrammai grammata legonta tade}, and a little further on, {epixosmesantes epigrammasi xai stelesi}, "epitaphs and monuments". Among these epitaphs is the celebrated couplet of Simonides[3] which has found a place in all ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... jealousy in matters literary; and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of the eighteenth-century couplet. Erskine offered, and Lewis gladly accepted, contributions from Scott, and though Tales of Wonder were much delayed, and did not appear till 1801, the project directly caused the production of Scott's first original work in ballad, Glenfinlas and The ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... out "the ambiguity of this couplet, which indeed gives a sense exactly contrary to that intended; to avoid which one must break the grammatical construction." The poet's meaning ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... therefore seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may easily be made to confront its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the visible shame of refutation. Such shame would settle upon every page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. And the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... question whether the children are amused. Occasionally there is a line with the old ring to it, a couplet seasoned with Attic salt, but for the rest there is the body without the spirit,—there is the well of English undefiled, but it is pumped dry! Probably the desire to publish was never so great as during Landor's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... expressive. Even now, when I think of the expression which a great painter should give to genius, I always have before me that magnificent head. I had a moment of enthusiasm." And further, he adds that one day he saw him listening to Monti while the latter was singing his first couplet in the "Mascheroniana." "I shall never forget," said he, "the divine expression of his look; it was the serene look of genius ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... ear, and seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the Poem. It admits both of simplicity and magnificence of sound and of language, beyond any other stanza that I am acquainted with. It allows the sententiousness of the couplet, as well as the more complex modulation of blank verse. What some critics have remarked, of its uniformity growing at last tiresome to the ear, will be found to hold true, only when the poetry is ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... it to the camp. This has resulted in my having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... giving more time to the word "great" in the first line, and to the word "world" in the last line. The idea may be indicated by supposing that the word "O" has been omitted from the beginning of the first and last line. The first line of the last couplet is peculiar in that every one of the four feet contains three syllables with the accent on the last. All the other lines consist each of four feet of either two or three syllables. Technically the poem is anapestic tetrameter much varied by the introduction ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... immediate successors. Of the higher poetic qualities, imagination, sympathy, insight, and pathos, he had no great share; but for the work which in his original writings, as distinguished from translations, he set himself to do, his equipment was supreme, and the medium which he used—the heroic couplet—he brought to the highest technical perfection of which it is capable. He wrote for his own age, and in temper and intellectual and spiritual outlook, such as it was, he exactly reflected and interpreted it. In the forging ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... performed his obsequies. It appears that the abbey of S. Maximin was about 120 paces from the cell of the saint at Treves, and it is therefore most probable that the writer was a monk of the Benedictine order then belonging to that foundation; but he puts his name out of doubt by the following couplet, inscribed at the end of ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... great Duke of Marlborough, whose two chief qualities of mind were very happily hit off in the couplet 'On a High Bridge over a Small ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... come over from Nonsuch Palace by Epsom to fish in the Mole. Perhaps he did, and drank Elinour's "noppy ale"; in any case, a portrait of the Leatherhead ale-wife found its way into one of his books, with a rhymed couplet beneath it:— ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... came to reside in the district, a firm believer in the wisdom of the couplet: "A woman, a spaniel and a walnut tree, The more you beat them the better they be." The spaniel and the walnut tree he did not possess, so his wife had the benefit of his undivided energies. Whether his treatment had improved her ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the custom of Shakespeare's age, to conclude acts and scenes with a couplet, a custom which was continued for nearly ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... various Government works, if the five stanzas concerning Castlereagh should risk your ears or the Navy List, you may omit them in the publication—in that case the two last lines of stanza 10 [i.e. 11] must end with the couplet (lines 7, 8) inscribed in the margin. The stanzas on Castlerighi (as the Italians call him) are 11, 12, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... when filled up, shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... are many superstitions as to the fitness or unfitness of days, times, and seasons; but in England May appears to be the only month supposed to be unlucky for weddings. The reason for this does not seem clear. The couplet ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... consists of thirty-seven stanzas; the second of seventy-two; the third of forty-eight; each stanza of eight ten-syllable verses, of which the first six rhyme alternately; the last two are a couplet. There is a short argument, in verse, prefixed to each poem. That of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... in general use domestically so late as in 1687; for in the diary of Henry, Earl of Clarendon, he registers that "Pere Couplet supped with me, and after supper we had tea, which he said was really as good as any he had drank in China." Had his lordship been in the general habit of drinking tea, he had not probably made it a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... are on record of the encounter of this fish with other fishes, or of their attacks upon ships. What can be the inducement for it to attack objects so much larger than itself is hard to surmise. We are all familiar with the couplet from Oppian: ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... up with them. From a distance I saw in a pool of moonlight on the yellow road the black irregular mass of the convoy. Then I heard a weary dirge; the wretches were singing. One, in a sad and gutteral voice, gave the couplet, which trailed dismally through the depths of ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... of vinegar in a dressing, like that of onions and its relatives, on most occasions should be suspected only. Wyvern and other true epicures consider the advice of Sydney Smith, as expressed in the following couplet, "most pernicious":— ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... two poets eyed each other like two cocks seeking an opportunity to engage. Then through the crowd a stalwart carpenter, a constant attendant of Gigi's, elbowed his way. He leaned over the table with a hand on each shoulder, and in a neatly turned couplet he then addressed the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... New York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe" with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet occurred: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal and wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town at these hours must be ghostly enough on its neighbouring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... know not where the truth may be; I tell the tale as 'twas told to me." (Probable misquotation of old couplet.) ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... latter somewhat bowed, making him appear even shorter than he was. It was these legs of his, together with his big round head and shock of reddish hair, that inspired some genius of the school with a couplet which was often chanted by the boys when they caught sight of Joe in the street. ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... divide. Give others riches, power, and station, 'Tis all on me an usurpation. I have no title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher. In Pope I cannot read a line, But, with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Pox take him and his wit!' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous, biting way. Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 'eternal lines' clearly alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song. That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Essay on Criticism, Part II. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... give an affirmative meaning to the words "angkynnull agkymandull agkysgoget," the couplet might be ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... said the great poet Saxe. "Oh, how many a slip 'twixt the couplet and the cup! Abdomen dominates. When Homer had no ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... with Lady Mary and with Hervey was discontinued, merely because they had too much wit for him. Towards the latter end of 1732, 'The Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace,' appeared, and in it Pope attacked Lady Mary with the grossest and most indecent couplet ever printed: she was called Sappho, and Hervey, Lord Fanny; and all the world knew the characters ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... confounding incomprehensibility and power. She has some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian model, and generally end with a couplet. Her blank verse is the worst of all. The most ambitious poem in the book is that called "A Day in the Life of Mary Stuart," a dramatic poem in three scenes, dated the last of January, 1567. It contains a scene between the queen and her maidens, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... cause of a metamorphosis so singular and so absolute, Wayland only answered by singing a stave from a comedy, which was then new, and was supposed, among the more favourable judges, to augur some genius on the part of the author. We are happy to preserve the couplet, which ran ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... will be disposed to admit the truth, that the collection contained "a very great variety of uncommon books, and scarce ever to be met withal," &c. There is, at bottom, a small wretched portrait of Hearne, with this well known couplet subjoined: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... fantastic manner, the only woman devotee whom we chanced to see in Japan. She held out a lacquered salver for money, presumedly for religious purposes, and on receiving the same she commenced a series of gyrations worthy of the whirling dervishes of Cairo. It was impossible not to recall De Foe's couplet as applied to this ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... They were insecure! The city rested upon three columns, one of them intact, another quite decayed away, the third partially corroded and soon to crumble into ruin. He peered up from, his blue depths, and in a fateful couplet of verses warned the townsmen of their impending doom. In this prophetic utterance ascribed to the fabulous Cola Pesce is echoed a popular apprehension that was ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Walter, Rupert and Foch succeeded. Stephanie just missed. Walter and Rupert and Foch had jolly soft roes, a fact which is recorded in a cynical little poem by the precocious Foch, believed to be the only literary work of a whitebait now extant. We have only space here to quote the opening couplet:— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... this putting all the strength and beauty of a Shakespearean couplet? Shakespeare uses such figures as this often, and in them he is his greater self. His is the splendor of imagination and clearness of vision of a prince of poets. Time hastes. This task is decoying. To cease is a hardship; for "Job" lends itself with such wealth ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... invited. It was in the Rue des France-Bourgeois, close to La Force. As I expected, my officer was there. I went up to him as he was singing a love ditty and looking tenderly at a lady, and interrupted him exactly in the middle of the second couplet. 'Monsieur,' said I, 'does it still displease you that I should frequent a certain house of La Rue Payenne? And would you still cane me if I took it into my head to disobey you? The officer looked at me with astonishment, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, "from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history." Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... tittering curiously before, remained spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness of the ending of comedies, of the regret which lingers in the remembrance of past laughter. In a couplet of passionate melancholy she asked, where are the roses of yesterday? whither vanish ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... with Aurat, Beza, de L'Hopital, Montdore and Turnebus, as one of the foremost Latin poets of his time. Here also Buchanan formed a lasting friendship with Julius Caesar Scaliger; in later life he won the admiration of Joseph Scaliger, who wrote an epigram on Buchanan which contains the couplet, famous in its day:— ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... mund, is hand, and by periphrasis "land of fist"; so that Hallmund is meant by this couplet, and that was the real name of "Air," who is not a mere man, but a ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... am all at sea," returned Hollis. He laughed. "I suppose you've read Ace's poem in the Kicker?" He caught Norton's nod and continued. "Well, Ace succeeded in crowding a whole lot of truth into that effort. Of course you remember the first couplet: ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... never heard Horace's famous couplet, Segnius irritant, etc., she was Horatian by the plain, hard, positive intelligence, which, strange to say, characterizes the judgment of her sex, when feeling happens not to blind it altogether. She gauged ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... through the shades of night, awoke me, behold! my chamber was deserted, and far off was the place of our meeting. He says also,' continued the eunuch, 'that he cannot complete the piece, and will give a rich present to anyone who adds to it a second couplet to his satisfaction.' ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... ways, by Johnson, in his ,Vanity of Human Wishes," and by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter of Mr. Hawes, a South Sea director, and died in 1788. Lord Vane died in 1789. Boswell distinctly states, that the lady mnentioned in Johnson's couplet "was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose Memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett, but Ann Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London." See Boswell's Johnson, vol. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... it should be ascribed to him who appeared the most calculated to have written it, and who indeed claimed it for his own—the chevalier de Boufflers. I do not know whether you recollect the lines in question. I will transcribe them from memory, adding another couplet, which was only known amongst our own particular circle, but which proves most incontestably the spirit of kindness with which the stanzas were composed. Lise, ta beaute seduit, Et charme tout le monde. En vain la duchesse en rougit, Et la princesse en gronde, Chacun sait que ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... acting of Mrs. Siddons; had conversed with Napoleon in his seclusion at Elba, and had ridden with the Duke of Wellington along the lines of Torres Vedras. It was not without reason that Lord Russell, when reviewing his career, epitomized it in Dryden couplet: ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... variety of metrical resources, and its artistic finish, was really adequate to fulfil the highest demands of genius. In this direction their most important single achievement was their elevation of the 'Alexandrine' verse—the great twelve-syllabled rhyming couplet—to that place of undisputed superiority over all other metres which it has ever since held in ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... a garret—let him know't who will— There was my bed—full hard it was and small; My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun; For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days when ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... weather, were better for a free man than the court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich to give to the poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and not the will of another man commanding him for the commandment's sake. The men all listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a couplet at the end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not unmusical voices. As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by me, as they were indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and tangled thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn under the morning sun, and dreary with ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... the republication by the National Assembly of this spell of healing potency and virtue. The enlightened Dr. Ball, when he wished to rekindle the lights and fires of his audience on this point, chose for the test the following couplet:— ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... through every successive interval of space. Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves; and the act of composition fills and delights the mind with change of language and succession of images. Every couplet, when produced, is new, and novelty is the great source of pleasure. Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he first wrote it, or contracted his work till his ebullitions of invention had subsided. And even if he should control his desire of immediate renown, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... shall have lost my wits very finally when I forget the first time that I pleased my father with a couplet of English verse (after many a year of trials); and the radiant joy on his face as he declared, reading it aloud to my mother with emphasis half choked by tears,—that "it was as fine as anything that Pope or Byron ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... need for our day. We want to quell the exaggerated decision of monosyllables. We want the poise and the pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong movement expresses it. And not the phrase only but the form of verse might render us timely service. The controlling couplet might stay with a touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for his son. But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention of submission on the part of the writer. The couplet transgressed against, trespassed ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... say—for, alas! there was no speculation in the other. His dexter daylight was utterly darkened, and, indeed, the orb that remained was as sanguinary a luminary as ever struggled through a London fog at noonday. To borrow a couplet or so from the laureate ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of the Persians are of several kinds; the gazel or ode usually treats of love, beauty, or friendship. The poet generally introduces his name in the last couplet. The idyl resembles the gazel, except that it is longer. Poetry enters as a universal element into all compositions; physics, mathematics, medicine, ethics, natural history, astronomy, grammar—all lend themselves to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... drawback to the benefits which Surrey, Wyatt, and the other contributors of the Miscellany conferred on English literature by their exercises, here and elsewhere, in the blank verse decasyllable, the couplet, the stanza, and, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... to purl, in default of a stream to perform the part, and I can truly say of it that it arrived with us in a mood so pastoral that I still cannot understand why we did not ask for a fly at the station in a couplet out of Pope. We got the fly easily enough in our prose vernacular, and the driver hid his surprise at our taking it for the little distance to the palace, which it would have been so much ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... many modes of poetry; and though perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that "he writes very well for a gentleman." His serious pieces are sometimes elevated; and his trifles are sometimes elegant. In his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained. In his Odes to Marlborough there are beautiful lines; but in the second Ode he shows that he knew little of his hero, when he talks of his ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... Verstegan's couplet, even if it be not strictly true, makes a very good text for a discourse on our local names. The ham, or home, and the ton, or town, originally an enclosure (cf. Ger. Zaun, hedge), were, at any rate in a great part of England, the regular nucleus of the village, which in some cases ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... and legs, the latter somewhat bowed, making him appear even shorter than he was. It was these legs of his, together with his big round head and shock of reddish hair, that inspired some genius of the school with a couplet which was often chanted by the boys when they caught sight of Joe in the ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... study its construction. In his leisure hours, he took it to pieces and put it together again several times, in order to understand it. So of William Hutton, whose name is mentioned in another place. Encouraged by a couplet which he ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... met with a very wide and warm acceptance. I remember one extremely happy, the refrain of which still runs in my head. It is written on the newly-adopted Italian tricolour flag. After characterising each colour separately in a couplet, he ends:— ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... properly as they should; and he thought there ought to be a certain correspondence between all things that were in juxtaposition to each other, just as there ought to be between the last two words of a couplet of poetry. But he found, very often, there was no correspondence at all, just as words in poetry do not always rhyme when they should. However, he did his best to remedy it. He saw that every one of his children's ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... the purpose to be, to do, and to suffer all God's will. Its essence, already given in the words of Paul, is given also in the words of the Saviour. "Not My will but Thine be, done," which is beautifully versified by Frances Ridley Havergal, in the couplet, ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... expression which a great painter should give to genius, I always have before me that magnificent head. I had a moment of enthusiasm." And further, he adds that one day he saw him listening to Monti while the latter was singing his first couplet in the "Mascheroniana." "I shall never forget," said he, "the divine expression of his look; it was the serene look ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... that," spoke Mr. Lagg, being now too interested to quote a couplet. "Matters were going on well, and I expected to close the deal, and make a pretty penny, when the doctors said they couldn't take the property, as it was haunted, and of course a haunted house, with queer noises in the night, would never do as a home for nervous ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... first order took any direct part in it, did much to embitter the relations of their respective parties.[16] Not less irritating were the jeux d'esprit with which Canning continued to assail the ministry in the newspaper press.[17] The most famous of these is the couplet:— ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... called his Muse "young" in 1613. I cannot call to mind any precedent for the form of stanza adopted by him, consisting, as it does, of six ten-syllable lines, rhyming alternately, followed by a twelve-syllable couplet. None of the other stanzas contain personal matter; the grief of the author of Great Britain's Sun's-set seems as artificial as might be expected; and his tears were probably brought to the surface by the ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... before, he thinks; but, if not, it will be good fun for you to find out what it means. He adds that there is but one letter of the alphabet wanting, to make sense; this is used over and over, and, if you put it into the right places, the text will turn into a rhymed couplet. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... long straw in its beak flew right across Maxine's garden, a little winged poem, a couplet enclosing the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... like Charles, nor friendly to the ministry, but temperately and sensibly. There was no division. You know my opinion of Charles Townshend is neither new nor singular. When Charles Yorke left us,(739) I hoped for this event, and my wish then slid into this couplet: ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... character of any of the Horatian metres (except, of course, those that are written in stanzas), or influence the structure of the Latin, it must be considered as a happy circumstance for those who wish to render Horace into English. In respect of restraint, indeed, the English couplet may sometimes be less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is, on the whole, easier to run couplet into couplet than to run quatrain into quatrain; but the couplet seems hardly suitable for an English lyrical poem of any length, the very notion ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... so it became with me. Like most children, I had my own rather vivid idea of the day of judgment. The thought of death was familiar to me. (It is seldom, I think, a painful one in childhood.) I fully realized the couplet which concluded a certain quaint old rhyme in honour of the four Evangelists which Nurse Bundle had taught me to repeat ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... some bad end," said Aaron, with a reminiscence of an old couplet in his mind, and so it proved, for it did not get beyond a sprinkle, and the sun ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... garret—let him know't who will— There was my bed—full hard it was and small; My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun; For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days when I ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... said, and I took the pen and wrote the six sorts of writing in use among the Arabs, and each sort contained an original verse or couplet, in praise of the Sultan. And not only did my handwriting completely eclipse that of the merchants, but it is hardly too much to say that none so beautiful had ever before been seen in that country. When I had ended the officials took the roll and returned ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... Perhaps the couplet in which Boileau depreciates Tasso may serve as well as any other specimen to justify the opinion given of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... saying, "I want this," and apparently took it to the camp. This has resulted in my having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... face became night and he was wroth at his speech with exceeding wrath and said to him, "O damned one, O dog of the Nazarenes, art thou come to such power that thou durst assail me with the King of the Franks?" Then quoth he to his guards, "Take this accursed and do him die"; and he repeated this couplet,[FN26] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... read a line, But with a sigh I wish it mine; When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous biting way; Arbuthnot is no more my friend Who dares to irony ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second couplet." ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... line in that incomparable poem brings at least one distinct picture vividly before the mind's eye. The picture the first line of the couplet I have quoted suggests to ray mind is not of crowing Chanticleer at all, but of a stalwart, bare-armed, blowsy-faced woman, vigorously beating on a tin pan with a stick; but for what purpose—whether to call down a passing swarm ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him: ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... these old farms can again be made to yield bountiful crops," she said, "as ours did for so many years under the management of our ancestors. 'Hope springs eternal in the human breast.' I stop with that for I do not like the rest of the couplet. We can see that some marked progress has been made under my husband's management, although he feels that it is very slow work building up a run-down farm. But he has raised some fine crops on the fields under cultivation,—as much as ten barrels of corn to the acre, have you not, ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... them: his gravest have more than one light passage. To draw a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more of deep and sustained gravity than is to be found ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... 1547. No sonnet presents more difficulties than this, in which M.A. has availed himself of a passage in the Cratylus of Plato. The divine hammer spoken of in the second couplet is the ideal pattern after which the souls of men are fashioned; and this in the first terzet seems to be identified with Vittoria Colonna. In the second terzet he regards his own soul as imperfect, lacking the final touches ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... the same light tone. 'I am going to Germany sometime—going to Wiesbaden, and I mean to find that house and the picture which Miss Raymond says I am so much like; then I shall know how I look to others. You remember the couplet: ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... Choiseul, after replacing him in the good graces of Madame de Pompadour, succeeded also to his portfolio as minister. As some compensation, however, they gave him the cardinal's hat; a circumstance which elicited from some wit of the day the following couplet:— ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of the eighteenth-century couplet. Erskine offered, and Lewis gladly accepted, contributions from Scott, and though Tales of Wonder were much delayed, and did not appear till 1801, the project directly caused the production of Scott's first original work in ballad, Glenfinlas and The Eve of St. John, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... (a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have penned), should never have permitted himself to sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I first read this singularly vapid poem years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever laid ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... day and night. I used to sit up late, writing; and one fine moonlight night, I went out of my alcove to walk in the gallery, while I composed some lines on our great queen Elizabeth. I could not finish the last couplet to my fancy: I sat down upon an artificial rock, which was in the middle of the court, leaned my head upon my hand, and as I was searching for an appropriate rhyme to glory, fell fast asleep. A noise like that of a most violent clap of thunder awakened me; I was thrown with ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Nay, shudder not! I should bestow it So brimming full she couldn't blow it. Wishes aren't horses: true, but still There are worse roadsters than goodwill. And so I wish my darling health, And just to round my couplet, wealth, With faith enough to bridge the chasm 'Twixt Genesis and Protoplasm, And bear her o'er life's current vext From this world to a better next, Where the full glow of God puts out Poor reason's farthing candle, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a New and Complete Treatise of Analogy between the French and English Languages," compiled by Charles Turrell, Professor of Languages, and published in 1828, contains the words which are the same in each language (alphabet, banquet, couplet, &c.), and those almost the same—"Letters necessary in English, and superfluous in French, are included in a parenthesis, thus Bag(g)age. Letters necessary in French, and superfluous in English are printed in Italics, thus Hommage." At first ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... began Christmas at All Hallowtide, and continued it till Candlemas, during which time any man was permitted to stay three days without being asked who he was, or from whence he came." This generous knight had many guests who rejoiced in the couplet:— ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... and turning back, when a sound behind one of the hedges close to him startled him and sent his heart to his mouth. He stood still to listen, and heard a gruff voice say—or rather intone—the following mysterious couplet: ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... doggerel that I remember to have read; viz., that upon divers, to wit, three thousand papers, the rioters had wickedly and maliciously written and printed, besides, observe, causing to be written and printed, 'No Popery,' as also the following traitorous couplet— ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman—not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so—and the pursuit is much the same in one case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet— ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... the Lady Chapel is divided by buttresses into three bays, and has crocketed gables to each. The aisles show a lancet in the lower story, with a blind couplet beneath a quatrefoil in the gable; the central compartment has ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... in one couplet corresponds to the ten thousand feet in the other, while the bathing of the feet corresponds to the waving of the arms. Couplets of this kind are always attractive to the Chinese child as well as to the scholar, and poems and essays ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... older his handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet: ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... piece, but as it had been chosen for him he would read it. And this he did, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution of emphasis which made the charm of his delivery as a lyceum lecturer. When he came to the couplet, ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... rudimental forms that have been already sweeping the sea and creeping in the mud. The brother of his hand is even now cleaving the arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innumerable ages since was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurian." A view afterwards condensed into his memorable couplet: ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fitting, proper. convenir to agree, fit, suit. convento convent. convertir to convert. convicto convicted. convidar to invite. convoy m. convoy, escort, train. copa cup. copla couplet, ballad, song. corazon m. heart. cordillera chain of mountains. corneta cornet; —— de llaves cornet-a-pistons. corona crown. coronar to crown. coronel colonel. coronilla crown of the head. corral m. yard. correo ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... by ten, was fitted up as a ballroom, with two fiddlers and a fifer sitting in a corner and a country-dance was performing when we arrived. Over the mantle-piece was a square of laurel twigs, inclosing as a frame this couplet from the poetical brain of the master of the house, cut out in red paper, and bespangled with blue and ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... great recommendation), but I never think of making verses till I have a sufficient stock of poetical ideas to supply them."[373] "If I ever write another poem, I am determined to make every single couplet of it as perfect as my uttermost care and attention can possibly effect."[374] In spite of this momentary resolution to take more pains with his next poem, he was unable to do so when the time came; ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... should still carry weight. In the burlesque couplet, ascribed in the first edition to the younger Colman and afterwards transferred to Theodore Hook, ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... now well known that French verse is not seventy years old. If it was Hugo who invented French rhyme it was Banville who broke up the couplet. Hugo had perhaps ventured to place the pause between the adjective and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the line, "Elle filait pensivement la blanche laine" that the cæsura received its final coup ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... injustice. There began to be a new sentiment in the air. Men were asking why the few should dress in velvet and the many in rags. It was the first revolt against the tyranny of wealth, when people were heard on the streets singing the couplet ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... Bold granted armorial ensigns (1382) to Dijon, with the motto moult me tarde (I wish for ardently). The merchants of Sinapi copied this on their wares, the middle word of the motto being accidentally effaced. A well-known couplet of lines supposed to occur in Hudibras (but not to be found there), has long baffled the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... to the bottom of the social evil, down to its economic causes, and blames the state for "The Trap," and this striking couplet rings in one's heart long after ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... prophecy was quite common among the Lowland Covenanters; and I believe Peden's Prophecies may still be found among the lumber of the book-shops. An old lady, in Irvine, once repeated to me the following couplet, as ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... reapers have finished their task, which is just as awe-inspiring as that of the sowers. A cart, drawn by oxen, enters the yard, bringing a sheaf all adorned with ribbons and flowers. The oldest of the labourers, Pere Remy, addresses a fine couplet to the sheaf of corn which has cost so much labour, but which is destined to keep life in them all. Claudie is one of those young peasant girls, whom we met with in the novel entitled Jeanne. She had been unfortunate, but Jeanne, although virtuous and pure herself, ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... but in vain. His fertile head however soon furnished him with an opportunity to second his arguments by proof.—They soon after undertook an impression of a primer that had been lately published in New-England.—Franklin overlooked the piece; and when his master had set the following couplet— ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... write during the next half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the complicated rime scheme of its Italian original has become very much simplified, being reduced to the following form: a, b, a, b; c, d, c, d; e, f, e, f; g, g. This is merely three four-line stanzas with alternate rimes, plus a final couplet. Such a simplified form had already been used by other English authors, from whom ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... but you know the couplet, (49) which says, "I do not wish to be a lord - I am by birth a Gypsy - I do not wish to be a gentleman - I am content ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... warfare is with the lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to the easily-remembered couplet: ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... Thus ran a couplet of the "Roman de Thebes"; and of the hundred or more tales of chivalry in verse, which are recognized as classic, nearly all make mention ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... provoking punster and poet that ever turned the serious and sentimental into broad humour. Every quaint remark affords a pun or an epigram, and every serious sentence gives birth to some merry couplet. Such is the facility with which he strings together puns and rhyme, that in the course of half an hour he has been known to wager, and win it—that he made a couplet and a pun on every one present, to the number of fifty. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Russian, I forget which, her sleep seemed to her the happy life; her waking hours a bad dream. She had just had her only pleasurable waking in three years. The memories of her childhood had sung their melodious ditties in her soul. The first couplet was heard in a dream; the second made her spring out of bed; at the third, she doubted her ears,—the sorrowful are all disciples of Saint Thomas; but when the fourth was sung, standing in her night-gown with ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... in the midst of the reaction and those who had fought at the barricades on the 18th of March applauded when the couplet was sung, of which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... highest excellence in poetry. The art of composing short poems in which a thought, emotion or spiritual experience is expressed with a few simple but pregnant words in the compass of a single couplet or short hymn, was carried by the early Buddhists to a perfection which has never been excelled. The Dhammapada[645] is the best known specimen of this literature. Being an anthology it is naturally more suited for quotation or recitation in sections ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... 'Tears, idle tears' and elsewhere: but clearly none of these would be available to a translator. Where therefore he has to express stanzas, it is easy to see that rhyme may be admissible and even necessary. Pope's couplet may (or may not) stand for elegiacs, and the In Memoriam stanza for some one of Horace's metres. Where the heroes of Virgil's Eclogues sing alternately four lines each, Gray's quatrain seems to suggest itself: and where a similar case occurs in these Idylls (as for ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most licentious transpositions and the harshest constructions, vainly imagining that the more their writings are unlike prose, the more they resemble poetry.' Collins and Warton might have quoted by way of defence the couplet ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and degrees of feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem on the Characters ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... repose ourselves on the dazzling white mats, and listen to the singular duet sung by those two mousmes: a strange musical medley, slow and mournful, beginning with two or three high notes, and descending at each couplet, in an almost imperceptible manner, into actual solemnity. The song keeps its dragging slowness; but the accompaniment, becoming more and more accentuated, is like the impetuous sound of a far-off hurricane. At the end, when these girlish voices, usually so soft, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... have got so far, look into the water, and at the same moment you will see the Brownie, and think of a word that will fill up the couplet, and rhyme with the first line. If either you do not see the Brownie, or fail to think of the word, it will ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... thus generously awarded, did not long remain where it had been placed. In the interval between the inditing of this couplet and the delivery of the manuscript to the press, Lord Byron, under the impression that it was customary for a young peer, on first taking his seat, to have some friend to introduce him, wrote to remind Lord ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... its variety of metrical resources, and its artistic finish, was really adequate to fulfil the highest demands of genius. In this direction their most important single achievement was their elevation of the 'Alexandrine' verse—the great twelve-syllabled rhyming couplet—to that place of undisputed superiority over all other metres which it has ever since held in ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the usual voluntary at the opening of service. Then the old minister said, "Let us continue the worship of God by singing the hymn on page 554." He "lined" the hymn—that is, he read each couplet before it was sung. With the coming in of hymn books and other newfangled things the good old custom of "lining the hymn" has disappeared. But on that Sunday morning the Marquis d'Entremont thought he had never heard anything more delightful ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... Among much that is excellent in this vast production there are also dreary stretches of rambling loquacity, hollow rhetoric and unintelligible jumbles of words and phrases. He could be insupportably dull and again express more in a single stanza, couplet or phrase than many have said in a whole book. A study of his poetry is, therefore, not unlike a journey through a vast country, alternating in fertile valleys, barren plains and lofty heights with entrancing views into far, ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... although at the end of September, had induced the occupants of the room to leave open. The sound of laughter and merriment issued from it; but this was presently hushed, and two voices, accompanied by guitars, began to sing a lively seguidilla, of which, at the end of each piquant couplet, the listeners testified their approbation by a hum of mirthful applause. Before the song was over, Luis had sought and found a means of observing what was passing within doors. Grasping the lower branch of a tree which grew within a few feet of the corner of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... us?"—"Yes, I hear," said the King, and continued his game. Monsieur, who was in the habit of introducing passages from plays into his conversation, said to my father-in-law, "M. Campan, that pretty little couplet again, if you please;" and pressed the King to reply. At length the Queen said, "But something must be said to Campan." The King then spoke to my father-in-law in these words: "Tell M. d'Inisdal that I cannot consent to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... on this occasion it was easier than usual to crown the heir apparent. At least twenty girls were making love to Jim, and he was quite unconscious of it all, except that he thought them a little free, and at length he recited an appropriate couplet from "The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk": "They are so unaccustomed to man, their tameness is shocking to me." He joked and laughed with all; but ever he drifted over toward Belle, to ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... is now to be taken in; and as the method of performing this evolution has long been a subject of hot controversy at sea, I take the opportunity of saying, that Falconer's couplet,— ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... them off; they spoke of singing, and each of them sang, or repeated a couplet, which the others repeated enthusiastically. Then they got up with some difficulty, and while the two women, who were rather dizzy, were getting some fresh air, the two males, who were altogether drunk, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... and I loved each other more than ever since we worked together for a great cause." She carried out the old couplet:— ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... orthography is indeed deplorable. In one of his letters wright is put for write, woed for would. He challenged Tenison to dispute with him in Latin, that they might be on equal terms. In a contemporary satire, entitled The Advice, is the following couplet ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... name of Hessian as a term of reproach forever, just because a few poor miserable fellows once came over here to fight you. Was it not enough to have treated them as you say you did in the Jerseys? For the benefit of you and those less prejudiced, I will translate the couplet:— ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... devotee whom we chanced to see in Japan. She held out a lacquered salver for money, presumedly for religious purposes, and on receiving the same she commenced a series of gyrations worthy of the whirling dervishes of Cairo. It was impossible not to recall De Foe's couplet as ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... and foot, is inscribed with the name of the dead, the time and place of his birth, and the time when, to use their own language, he "departed," and this is the sole epitaph. But innovations have been recently made on this simplicity; a rhyming couplet or quatrain is now sometimes added, or a word in praise of the dead One recent grave was loaded with a thick tablet of white marble, which covered it entirely, and bore an inscription as voluminous as those in the burial places of other denominations. The graves, as in all Moravian ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... metrical effects, the seventeenth century shows some advance,—an advance, however, which must be laid chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms. Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing classical metres. Creech says of Horace, "'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the poet,"[418] ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... it and cast the burden of taxation upon the poor, Marie Antoinette had requested her husband's leave to relinquish her right to it. Like wildfire the news of the young queen's generosity spread throughout Paris; and in all the streets, cafe, and cabarets the people were singing this couplet ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... pornography. There were not words strong enough for the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... referring to Oglethorpe, says, "I had the pleasure of knowing him well;" and, in a note upon the couplet quoted from Pope, says, "Here are lines that will justly confer immortality on a man who well deserved so magnificent an eulogium. He was, at once, a great hero, and a great legislator. The vigor of his mind and ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... comes in Spain on no other mission than that referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans. Swarms ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. "Here's a stanza[6] On Braganza— Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup Of warm water—" "What's the matter?" "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... bought and paid for the place, and had a few dollars to the good. During one of the two years a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day. It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on the tombstones they ordered. They themselves, in most cases, knew none, and they asked Francois to supply them—as though he kept them in stock like marble and sand-paper. He had no collection of suitable epitaphs, and, besides, he did not know whether it was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... This couplet is not in the ballad, which is the complaint, not of a woman forsaken, but of a man rejected. These lines were probably added when it was ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... element dominates over the mystical, and corrupts it. The common mass of mankind employs devotion as an instrument favourable to worldly views and to the material interests of life. In Andalucia, enamoured girls confide to the Virgin their ardent sorrows and desires, as the following couplet will show, and which is sung with frequency and is very popular in that ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... of the various visual experiments of this and the following chapters, the first word of the couplet which describes the condition of the experiment, for example, white-black, always designates the visual condition which the animal was to choose, the second that which it was to avoid on penalty of an electric shock. In the case of Tables 6 and 7, for example, white cardboard was ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... hither, knight; come hither, Fabian; we'll whisper o'er a couplet or two of most ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... seldom used it, until shortly before his death, when increasing infirmities caused him occasionally to take a drive. It was of this carriage, plain and neat in its design, with nothing on its panel but the initials 'J. G.' that the witty Henry Erskine proposed the couplet— ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter of Mr. Hawes, a South Sea director, and died in 1788. Lord Vane died in 1789. Boswell distinctly states, that the lady mnentioned in Johnson's couplet "was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose Memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett, but Ann Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London." See Boswell's Johnson, vol. i. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... compare it? 'Tis like, what I have oft heard spoke on, The famous statue of Laocoon. 'Tis like,—O yes, 'tis very like it, The long, long string, with which you fly kite. 'Tis like what you, and one or two more, Roar to your Echo[7] in good humour; And every couplet thou ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... real, effective management, there's nothing like the old stock of men, who ran barefoot until they were ten, and who count the hard winters by their frozen toes." And he is fond of quoting in this connection—the only quotation, by the by, that the old gentleman ever makes—that couplet of "Poor Richard,"— ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... written for a rarity at the seat of business: it is but little time I can generally command from secular calligraphy—the pen seems to know as much and makes letters like figures—an obstinate clerkish thing. It shall make a couplet in spite of its nib before I ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... as soon as coming of age qualified him to be a reader there, he plunged deep into all the works on ideal commonwealths to complete his survey of 'forms of government'—the subject indicated by Pope's couplet, which had appealed so strongly both to his grandfather and himself. This was a side issue. Beading for his Tripos went on with unremitting energy, and he had in use ninety-four notebooks crammed with analyses. In June, 1865, he was announced Senior Legalist, easily at the head ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... matter or style are those derived from changes in versification, though here too there is often a subjective element in the reckoning. The more important metrical tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially at the end ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... bend in the road by this time. When Tom returned to the scene of the encounter, Mr. Wood was not in sight. Mr. Chripp laughed, and paraphrased an old couplet. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... is persistent even amid the triumph of the drama. Take away from Shakespeare all his bits of natural description, all his casual allusions to the life and aspects of the country, and what a loss were there! The reign of the iambic couplet confined, but could not suppress, this native music; Pope notwithstanding, there came the "Ode to Evening" and that "Elegy" which, unsurpassed for beauty of thought and nobility of utterance in all the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... of the Secretary of War the social recognition to which he considered her justly entitled, but it would not avail; the purpose of the most resolute man on earth was powerless against a determination equal to his own. Never was more forcibly exemplified the truth of the old couplet: ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... of this district is the only one, so far as we know, in the Empire who is relieved of the duty of welcoming and escorting transient officers. It was the multiplicity of such duties, so harassing, that persuaded Fang Kuan-ch'eng to write the couplet on one of the city gateways: Jih pien ch'ung yao, wu shuang ti: T'ien hsia fan nan, ti yi Chou. 'In all the world, there is no place so public as this: for multiplied cares and trials, this is the first Chou.' The people of Cho-Chou, of old celebrated for their religious spirit, are now ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Nancy was such a pile—but what an odious figure! He thought of her face as he had first seen it on the night of the Vernal, when, slightly flushed and smilingly expectant, she had peered into the costume closet. A couplet floated out of Freshman English into his mind—something about a countenance which had in it sweet records and promises as sweet. He jumped out of bed to verify ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... plane was habitual with Blake. Now because of his immense powers we are accustomed to think of Shakespeare as almost superhuman: we pay that tribute to his genius, his strength, and the enormous impression they produce on us. But a single couplet of Blake's will carry more of this uncanny superhuman imagination than the whole five acts of Hamlet. So great is Shakespeare, that he tempts us to think him capable of any flight of wing; but set down a line or two ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lost every female friend she ever had, with the exception of four. In a subsequent extract she names six women whose friendship has remained loving and true to her since girlhood. She speaks of a four-line stanza as a couplet. She imputes a "blasphemous tirade" to a great man of science who certainly never uttered one. She says that she had a conversation with Lord Salisbury about the fiscal controversy, in which he took no part, the year after his death. But why make a fuss about ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... seven couplets, except A^{13-16}, which, on account of the greater difficulty of three-figure numbers, contained five. Each couplet was composed of a number and a ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... there came up the fore-hatch a yell, as if from the throat of a North American savage. It terminated in the couplet, tunefully sung— ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... liked by the aristocracy; and although a very good lawyer, he was believed by the country to be narrow-minded and prejudiced. Lord John Manners was extremely unpopular, in consequence of his well-known couplet, expressive of the desire that learning and commerce should perish rather than that the power of the aristocracy should be diminished. The Duke of Northumberland was considered utterly unfit for the important duties imposed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of Waterloo. It promised to remain so, and I wished I had had better sense than to enter upon such a forlorn enterprise. But just then I had a saving thought—at least a thought that offered a chance. While the storm was still raging, I made up a Scotch couplet, and then ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bloody war between Russia and Turkey. It soon became evident that unless saved by English intervention, Constantinople must fall into the hands of the Czar. Beaconsfield's spirited language at this crisis was paraphrased in the London music-halls in the famous couplet: ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... early to attract public attention. Before he was twenty-five years old he had established his reputation as a wit, had spent nearly a year in the Bastille on a charge of writing satirical verses, and had produced a successful tragedy. In this play a couplet sneering at priests might possibly have become a familiar quotation even had it been written by another pen.[Footnote: Oedipe, written in 1718. "Nos pretres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense; ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... to look in a pier-glass," I retorted. "And, besides, that is not sufficient. You will want some rhyming couplet out of a mythology before you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... influence cannot be compared with those of her predecessor, Mme. de Pompadour. Modes were followed, but never invented by her. "With her taste for the pleasures of a grisette, her patronage falls from the opera to the couplet, from paintings and statuaries to bronzes and sculptures in wood; her clientele are no longer artists, philosophers, poets—they are the gods of lower domains, mimics, buffoons, dancers, comedians." She was the lowest and most common type of ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... zat," said innocent Flo, with a look of grave surprise at the peals of laughter which her couplet drew from ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... communicated this to Francis, who said that the same thing had been communicated to him; and then, filled with joy, not only on account of the eternal felicity again promised him, but because the time was fixed when his soul was to be released from the prison of his body, he added this further couplet to his canticle: "Be Thou praised, my Lord, for death our sister, from which no living man can escape," etc. "Blessed are they who, at the hour of death, are found conformed to Thy holy will, for they will ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... of the idol, by reason of my ignorance, and my solicitude respecting the affair of Solomon, and recited this couplet: ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... elegancy, into elegiac verse, whereof the learned W. Benson, esq. has lately published a new edition; and I hear that these Psalms are honoured with an increasing use in the schools of Holland and Scotland. A stanza, or a couplet of those writers would now and then stick upon the minds of youth, and would furnish them infinitely better with pious and moral thoughts, and do something towards making ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... arrangements which change in every scene, beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by Shakespeare in the Rape of Lucrece, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes, and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a third rhyme comes forward ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... rhyming couplet with a quaint musical intonation, as though it was the refrain of a song, and after her voice and laughter had died away she went on nodding her head in time to the brushing as if she were singing it over softly to herself. This distressed ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... quite understand her. Once I wrote a few verses and gave them to her—compared her to an ice-covered stream, quiet on the surface, but all motion and tumult below. Well, she never even thanked me for them, though she said she liked that simile, it was so new. There was another couplet about her name—Blanche and snow and cold: when she read it she laughed and said, "Though my name means white, it does not mean cold. You know there are some white things that are very warm, Mr. Highrank—my ermine muff, for instance." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... acetic. The presence of vinegar in a dressing, like that of onions and its relatives, on most occasions should be suspected only. Wyvern and other true epicures consider the advice of Sydney Smith, as expressed in the following couplet, "most pernicious":— ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... Englishman, he was destined to be a great social as well as a great artistic success. He loved the society of men of birth and fashion; he seems to have had a more passionate desire to please in private even than in public, and almost to have justified the often quoted couplet in ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... When the vision of my mistress, fleeting through the shades of night, awoke me, behold! my chamber was deserted, and far off was the place of our meeting. He says also,' continued the eunuch, 'that he cannot complete the piece, and will give a rich present to anyone who adds to it a second couplet to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... William Langland, in "Piers Plowman," dwelt on the social wrongs of the time; Ball was fond of quoting from Langland, and of harping on a familiar couplet: ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... eight. The second part contains six lines, and is therefore called the sextet, from the Latin word sex, meaning six. The sextet may have either two or three rimes, and these may be arranged in almost any order. But a correct sonnet ought not to end with a couplet, that is two riming lines. However, very many good writers in English ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... took the paper, and raising one hand, and with a strange solemnity on his war-scarred visage, he pronounced aloud the lines of the two halves, reading first a couplet from the left hand side of the dividing commas, then a couplet from the right, and so down the double column, revealing the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet with terror, for I knew beforehand that it ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... sorrowfully; "and I am deeply thankful that my little girlie wants to make the old world happier. But after all, dear, the greatest need of this world of ours is love. It is not the money we give away which counts; it is the love we have for other people. I remember well a little couplet your great-grandmother was fond of quoting—and she practiced it every day of ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
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