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More "Metrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scholarship and culture given by the universities at that time. He was an extreme classicist; all his admiration was for classical models and works that savoured of them; he it was who headed the attempt made in England to force upon a modern language the metrical system of the Greeks and Latins. What baneful influence he exercised over Spenser in this last respect will be shown presently. Kirke was Spenser's other close friend; he was one year junior academically to the poet. He too, as we shall see, was a profound admirer of Harvey. After ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... Spain shortly before her death, and whose prose story, "The Two Muleteers," he has also translated. To these must be added, besides several shorter ballads from Duran's Romancero General, "The Poem of the Cid," "The Romance of Gayferos," and "The Infanta of France." The last is a metrical tale of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, presenting analogies with the "Thousand and One Nights," and probably drawn from an Oriental source. His translations from the Latin, chiefly of ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... incidents of the wars which the Albyn had waged with their enemies of Scandinavia. To the same period we are disposed to assign the "Song of the Owl," though it has been regarded by a respectable authority[10] as of modern origin. Of a portion of this celebrated composition we subjoin a metrical translation from the pen of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... great, and hung aside; His eyen were hollow, his mouth was wide; Lothly he was to look on than, And liker a devil than a man. His staff was a young oak, Hard and heavy was his stroke." Specimens of Metrical Romances, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... Euripides, and also a great number of small and much less known poems. He held the professorship of poetry at Oxford from 1821 to 1831, and as his lectures, according to the custom which then prevailed, were delivered in Latin, he had the happy thought of diversifying them by English metrical translations of the different poems he treated. They range over a wide field of obscure Greek poets, as well as of epitaphs, votive inscriptions, and inscriptions relating to the fine arts, and in addition to ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Milton and Dante to Alfred Austin's yaller doggerel—to the raucous twitterings of grown men who aspire to play Persian bulbul instead of planting post-holes, who mistake some spavined mule for Bellerophon's Mount and go chasing metrical rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind adown the shining blade of a bucksaw; from the flame sighs of Sappho, that breed mutiny in the blood, to the green- sick maunderings of atrabilarious maids who are best qualified to build soft-soap or take a fall out of the corrugated ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... collected for many years past by Mr. William Archer, I have received important help. Indeed, of Mr. Archer it is difficult for an English student of Ibsen to speak with moderation. It is true that thirty-six years ago some of Ibsen's early metrical writings fell into the hands of the writer of this little volume, and that I had the privilege, in consequence, of being the first person to introduce Ibsen's name to the British public. Nor will I pretend for a moment that it is not ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Eve. The eighteenth century is farther off; the genuine mediaeval inspiration is nearer. And it is especially noticeable that, as in most of the early performances of the great poetical periods, an alteration of metrical etiquette (as we may call it) plays a great part. Scott had not yet heard that recitation of Christabel which had so great an effect on his work, and through it on the work of others. But he had mastered for himself, and by study of the originals, the secret of the Christabel metre, that is ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... Caesar wrote in youth several poems, of which Tacitus grimly says that they were not better than Cicero's. This list includes a tragedy, 'Oedipus,' 'Laudes Herculis' (the Praises of Hercules), and a metrical account of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... The number of English monosyllables was sometimes complained of, because to ears trained on the classical languages they sounded harsh, barking, unfitted for eloquence; sometimes because they were believed to impede the metrical flow in poetry; sometimes because, being particularly characteristic of colloquial speech, they were considered low; and often because they were associated with the languages of the Teutonic tribes which had escaped the full refining influence of Roman civilization. ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... heart of movement, for the lack of which no metrical science could atone. He goes far because ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... sight of movement. Dancing, music, and poetry were primitively so closely allied as to be almost identical; they were still inseparable among the early Greeks. The refrains in our English ballads indicate the dancer's part in them. The technical use of the word "foot" in metrical matters still persists to show that a poem is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... exception of Solomon ibn Gabirol—a big exception, I admit—the best love songs were written by the best hymn writers. Even Ibn Gabirol, who, so far as we know, wrote no love songs, composed other kinds of secular poetry. One of the favorite poetical forms of the Middle Ages consisted of metrical letters to friends—one may almost assert that the best Hebrew love poetry is of this type—epistles of affection between man and man, expressing a love passing the love of woman. Ibn Gabirol wrote such epistles, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... means of the actual, would be, at best, a paltry deception. All the externals of a theatrical representation are opposed to this notion; all is merely a symbol of the real. The day itself in a theatre is an artificial one; the metrical dialogue is itself ideal; yet the conduct of the play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a part. Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of time and place ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... has the following note here: "The ancient and powerful family of Graham (which, for metrical reasons, is here smelled after the Scottish pronunciation) held extensive possessions in the counties of Dumbarton and Stirling. Few families can boast of more historical renown, having claim to three of the most remarkable characters in the Scottish annals. Sir John the Graeme, the faithful ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... of Chinese Poetry, being the Collection of Ballads, Sagas, Hymns, etc., translated by C. E. R. Allen, 1891. (The best book available on the Odes of Confucius. It contains a complete metrical translation.) ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... your unions. The social and recreative side of life you have now taken over into your keeping, you order recreation which shall be as music or as poetry in your associated lives, harmonious, melodious, rhythmic, metrical. All that I have said to-night leads up to this, that the Associated Life is necessary for the enjoyment and the attainment of the best and the highest things that the world can give, as the Guild and the Company formerly, and the Trade Union is now, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... of the other sonnets in the collection, with the exception of the one from the Portuguese, is framed according to the legitimate Italian model, which, in the author's opinion, possesses no peculiar beauty for an ear accustomed only to the metrical forms of our own language. The sonnets in this collection are rather poems in fourteen lines ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... the laws he lays down for himself of his own free-will, and subordinate to them every word, and yet his matter and his song should seem to float on a free and soaring wing. Now, even the original Hebrew text of the Psalms has no metrical laws." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... subjects of verse, they are only too plenty For ringing the changes on metrical chimes; A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty, Have filled that great basket with ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... modulation seem to the ignorant strange, and to the judicial tedious." It is among the curiosities of literature that this true poet, who had so exquisite a sense of form, and whose lyrics are frequently triumphs of metrical skill, should have published a work (entitled "Observations in the Art of English Poesy") to prove that the use of rhyme ought to be discontinued, and that English metres should be fashioned after classical models. "Poesy," ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... which tells us how Browning wished his metrical movement to be judged. This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of life—the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... studied history and law; he heard Ernst Moritz Arndt interpret the Germania of Tacitus; but more especially did he profit by official and personal relations with A.W. Schlegel, who taught Heine what he himself knew best, namely, the secret of literary form and the art of metrical expression. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a metrical chronicle, written by one of the sons of Gustavus Vasa, and containing one or ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... still earlier period, and which give a contemporary history of the country in the Gaelic language of the fifth century. There is no other modern nation in Europe that can point to such a literary past. The Scotch Celts had early metrical verse, of which the Ossian, wherein is related the heroic deeds of Fingal, was supposed to have been sung by all the ancient Celtic bards. In the eighteenth century, Macpherson, a Scotchman, found some of these poems sung in the Highlands of Scotland; and, making a careful ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... figure must also be uniform in duration if they are to enter as substitutionary groups into a rhythmical sequence.[5] When the acatalectic type is alternately departed from and returned to in the course of the rhythmical sequence, the metrical equivalents must present total time-values which, while differing from that of the full measure in direction and degree, in dependence on the whole form of their structure, maintain similar fixed relations to the primary type. The changes which these flexible quantities ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... be met with in this volume, I may say that the reader will not find one which is not (as I believe) either native or imported with the early settlers, nor one which I have not, with my own ears, heard in familiar use. In the metrical portion of the book, I have endeavored to adapt the spelling as nearly as possible to the ordinary mode of pronunciation. Let the reader who deems me over-particular remember this caution ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... For metrical purposes Bret Harte has here taken the same kind of liberty with "Resanoff," and in another poem with Portola, as Byron took with ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet. The elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could find no counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative power, though twisting it too often into contortion and excess, appears to have been little known as a lyrist ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... it would be impossible for him to recall spring up in his mind like flowers and weeds in the soil. But to-night he was truly in a state of lyrical inspiration, his eyes flashing, his face glowing, and his whole composition chanted out in an almost metrical form. He began by mourning the death of a certain Harriet whom he had let go to foreign parts, and who had died at sea. He described her as having "blue, sparkling eyes, and a sweet smile," and lamented that ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... generations; the Atharvan represents different ages; each Br[a]hmana appears to belong in part to one era, in part to another; the earliest S[u]tras (manuals of law, etc.) have been interpolated; the earliest metrical code is a composite; the great epic is the work of centuries; and not only do the Upanishads and Pur[a]nas represent collectively many different periods, but exactly to which period each individually is to ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... and Italy, we eventually find him in St. Petersburg, where he undertook the translation of the Bible into the Mandschu-Tartar language, and issued in 1835, through Schulz and Beneze, his "Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects." While in Russia, he made many friends amongst the nobility there, who frequently invited him to their country homes. In the same year that saw the publication of "Targum," he returned home. His stay in England, however, was a very short one. ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... not even remotely concerned with metrical analysis. For that phase, with a discussion as to the effect of the various metrical systems, see Klotz, Grundzuge der altromischen Metrik, esp. p. 370 ff. Cf. Duff, A Lit. Hist. of Rome, p. 196. Note Donat, de Com. VIII. 9 and ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... It brings me happier dreams than the others, and takes no more time in bringing them. Preparation for my lectures made me remember a great deal of the poem. I did not request my auditors to admire the beauty of the metrical version: ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... 1826 they were issued by S. Wilkin, Upper Haymarket, Norwich, in an edition of five hundred copies, of which two hundred were reserved for Norwich and sold at half a guinea each copy; the rest went to London. Allan Cunningham wrote a very eulogistic metrical dedication. The subscription list reveals a very varied list of subscribers, including Bishop Bathurst, Benjamin Haydon, Thomas Campbell, and John Thurtell, who was hanged before the book appeared. Borrow's biographers ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... Andromeda almost succeeds in that impossible feat—the revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the countrymen of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexameter is a metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of consonants over vowels, the want of inflected forms, and other peculiarities in our language—make ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Richard James; an English Poem, written in 1636, containing a Metrical Account of some of the Principal Families and Mansions in Lancashire; from the unpublished MS. ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... long after, my interest in the story of Chatterton had carried me over the whole ground of the Rowley controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familiarized me with the "Black Letter," that I had begun to find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances; and in Chaucer, though acquainted as yet only with part of his works, I had perceived and had felt profoundly those divine qualities, which, even at this day, are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... improvements which this new school has effected in poetry: but shall lay the grounds of our opposition, for this time, a little more broadly. The end of poetry, we take it, is to please—and the same, we think, is strictly applicable to every metrical composition from which we receive pleasure, without any laborious exercise of the understanding. Their pleasure may, in general, be analysed into three parts—that which we receive from the excitement of Passion or emotion—that which is derived from the play of Imagination, or the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... prefixed to the Polychronicon desires a translation in prose, "for commonly prose is more clear than rhyme, more easy and more plain to understand";[48] but apparently the only one of Orm's successors to put into words his consciousness of the complications which accompany a metrical rendering is the author of The Romance ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... extant form of the story of the Holy Grail is the French metrical romance of "Perceval" or "Le Conte du Graal" of Chretien de Troies, written about 1175. Chretien died leaving the poem unfinished, and it was continued by three other authors till it reached the vast size of 63,000 lines. The religious signification of the Grail ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... eminently felicitous, with which the preceding ode commences; together with the bold image of freedom triumphing over power. If the merits of the Rowleian Controversy rented solely on this one piece, it would be decisive; for no man, in the least degree familiar with our earlier metrical compositions, and especially if he were a poet, could hesitate a moment in assigning this chorus to ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Politics in which you know I little meddle. . . . March 20. Why, see how the Time goes! And here has my Letter been lying in Sir W. Ouseley for the last ten days, I suppose. To-day I have been writing twenty pages of a metrical Sketch of the Mantic, for such uses as I told you of. It is an amusement to me to take what Liberties I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Honour and his Epistle on the Battle of the Boyne should be placed side by side with Comus and Alexander's Feast. Other eminent statesmen and orators, Walpole, Pulteney, Chatham, Fox, wrote poetry not better than his. But fortunately for them, their metrical compositions were never thought worthy to be admitted into any collection ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the reasonable confidence of the people of England.” In 1801 she wrote of “Pitt’s low and perfidious manœuvres,” and she never changed her opinion of him. She seemed unable to write what is called plain English. Archdeacon Vyse is described by her as “a man of prioric talents in a metrical impromptu.” Another person “evinced an elevated mind,” while a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an “attic warbler.” It ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... Kinosling. "No tobacco for me. No cigar, no pipe, no cigarette, no cheroot. For me, a book—a volume of poems, perhaps. Verses, rhymes, lines metrical and cadenced—those are my dissipation. Tennyson by preference: 'Maud,' or 'Idylls of the King'—poetry of the sound Victorian days; there is none later. Or Longfellow will rest me in a tired hour. Yes; for me, a book, a volume in the hand, held ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... metrical division, I have (unless a special note on any one particular line draws attention to the contrary) in this difficult matter followed the first quartos, as at this point 1724 proves not so satisfactory, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... contributes the single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle him to a high ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... in the songs interspersed in the Eclogues that Drayton's best work at this time is to be found: already his metrical versatility is discernible; for though he doubtless remembered the many varieties of metre employed by Spenser in the Calendar, his verses already bear a stamp of their own. The long but impetuous lines, such as 'Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree', afford ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... The first productions were handed down by memory. Poetry is easily memorized and naturally lends itself to singing and musical accompaniment. Under such circumstances, even prose would speedily fall into metrical form. Poetry is, furthermore, the most suitable vehicle of expression for the emotions. The ancients, unlike modern writers, seldom undertook to make literature unless they felt so deeply that silence ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... His verses to his brother, in the glyconic measure, written when he was seventeen, are remarkably easy and elegant. Some of his other odes are deformed by the Pindaric folly then prevailing, and are written with such neglect of all metrical rules as is without example among the ancients; but his diction, though perhaps not always exactly pure, has such copiousness and splendour, as shews that he was but at a very little ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... be found recoverable to measure by that restitution of the Mute E which we since, too exclusively perhaps, connect with the name of Tyrwhitt. The confidence felt in his text, however—the only one upon which a metrical scholar dares work—in some sort justifies the honour. Meanwhile, this metrical theory, from his time, has been generally received; and the renown of the founder of our poetry settled on all the wider ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... "falling in love"; and there is hardly a more vital thing in life than this act. For it is something taking place in the subconscious self; it is a revolution, and a growth. It happened that after dinner, Conall wished to hear Ian sing again that loveliest of all metrical Collects, "Lord of All Power and Might," and Thora went with Ian to do her part as accompanist on the piano. As they sang Conall appeared to fall asleep, and no more music ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... say in the metrical version. No that I would preen my faith to that clink neither; but it's bonny, and easier to mind. "Who go to sea ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... author's power of accurate imitation is, after all, the primary and indispensable test of his having even the capability of becoming a poet. He who cannot write in a style which he does know, will certainly not be able to invent a new style for himself. The first and simplest form in which any metrical ear, or fancy, or imagination, can show itself, must needs be in imitating existing models. Innate good taste—that is, true poetic genius—will of course choose the best models in the long run. But not necessarily at first. What shall be the student's earliest ideal must needs be ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... we must distinguish again between the original collection of the hymns or Mantras, called the Sanhita or the collection, being entirely metrical and poetical, and a number of prose works, called Brahmanas and Sutras, written in prose, and giving information on the proper use of the hymns at sacrifices, on their sacred meaning, on their supposed authors, and similar topics. These works, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... called forth this poem. (Compare Goethe's first letter to Friederike, October 15, 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Amyntas quoted in this article have been selected from the admirable metrical translation ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... 1853, to compile and publish an edition of the text of the '[S']akoontala' from various original MSS., with English translations of the metrical passages, and explanatory notes. A second edition of this work has since been published by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press. To the notes of that edition I must refer all students of Sanskrit literature who desire a close and literal ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... of monotonous chant, the clapping of hands, the striking of rude instruments: there are measured movements, measured words, and measured tones. The early records of historic races similarly show these three forms of metrical action united in religious festivals. In the Hebrew writings we read that the triumphal ode composed by Moses on the defeat of the Egyptians, was sung to an accompaniment of dancing and timbrels. The Israelites danced ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... their character The Mahawanso Scriptural coincidences in Pali books (note) Sanskrit works: Principally on science and medicine Elu and Singhalese works: Low tone of the popular literature Chiefly ballads and metrical essays Exempt from licentiousness Sacred poems in honour of Hindu gods General literature ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... work an artist's pains. He has made a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse the effect of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness, but of his art. He is one of the modern poets who have broken away from the metrical formalities of Swinburne and the older men, and who, of set purpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... this time to have been nine hundred and ninety millimetres, which is sometimes called "a double cubit." On these suppositions the SAR would be a square, each side measuring about twenty-two yards, about one-tenth of an acre, or four ares on the metrical system. But it is certain that both in early times and during the First Dynasty of Babylon the GAR was only 12 U, and the U, if a cubit, would not be much over eighteen inches. This would make the SAR a square of about eighteen feet on each side. The fact that a SAR ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... surprised that this romance did not strike the fancy of the novelist, asked if he himself might use it for a poem; and Hawthorne, readily assenting, promised not to attempt the subject in prose until the poet had tried what he could do with it in metrical form. No one rejoiced more heartily in the success of the world-renowned poem than the writer who generously gave up an opportunity to win fame from his working up ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... the eighteenth century that the three most popular of English Christmas hymns belong. Nahum Tate's "While shepherds watched their flocks by night"—one of the very few hymns (apart from metrical psalms) in common use in the Anglican Church before the nineteenth century—is a bald and apparently artless paraphrase of St. Luke which, by some accident, has attained dignity, and is aided greatly by the simple and noble tune now attached to it. Charles Wesley's "Hark, the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... regular worshippers from their own place of worship, and so we arranged for the extra service at 5.30. It was to be purely a soldiers' service. But a word or two about the Friday evening special Lenten service. Familiar hymns, a metrical litany, and part of the Commination Service were gladly joined in by a large number of men, the cathedral being more than half full, and the archdeacon gave us a very helpful address. After that service a good number of men stayed behind, at our invitation, to practise ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... this appointment were a series of lectures on metrical forms, which appeared, in 1880, in a volume entitled The Science of English Verse. It is an original and suggestive work, in which, however, the author's predilections for music carry him too far. He has done well to emphasize the time element in English ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... such a metrical disquisition it is not easy to separate the poetry, which in places is very good, from the intellectual content, which is not so good from a modern point of view. By the joint aid of several sciences laboriously piecing together bits of knowledge that have nothing to do ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... be noticed here:—the rigmarole, snatches of which probably most of us have heard, which contains an immense number of mere truisms having no connexion with each others, and no bond of union but the metrical form in which their juxtaposition is effected, and the rhyme, which is kept up very well throughout, though sometimes by the introduction of a nonsense ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... good deal of poetic feeling, although without any special indication of originality of thought. The verses entitled "Morning" ought to have rhymes, as it is not blank verse. You ought to study the rules of metrical composition before putting your thoughts into metre. This is as essential to the construction of verse, as to be acquainted with those of harmony or counterpoint, before attempting to ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... inscription is not Cretan, but may represent a script, perhaps Lycian, in use in the coast-lands of Asia Minor. No interpretation of the writing can yet be given, but Dr. Evans has pointed out evidences of a metrical arrangement among the signs, and has suggested that the inscription may conceivably be a hymn in honour of the Anatolian Great Mother, a goddess who corresponded to the Nature Goddess worshipped in Minoan Crete, whose traditions have survived under the titles of Rhea, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... all in lyrical form—if the word form may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical conventions. Her lines are rugged and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and the "thought-rhymes" which she ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the guilt, penitence, and death of Starkather, a fabulous Scandinavian hero, famous throughout the North for his bodily strength and warlike achievements, as well as for his poetical genius, of which traces are still to be found in the metrical traditions and phraseology of his country. According to the old legend, the existence of Starkather was prolonged for three lifetimes, in each of which he was doomed to commit some act of infamy; but this fiction has not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... addresses, presented to the Convention at various periods, might form a curious history of the progress of despotism. These effusions of zeal were not, however, all in the "sublime" style: the legislative dignity sometimes condescended to unbend itself, and listen to metrical compositions, enlivened by the accompaniment of fiddles; but the manly and ferocious Danton, to whom such sprightly interruptions were not congenial, proposed a decree, that the citizens should, in future, express their adorations in plain prose, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... avenger of oaths, compeller of clouds, utterer of thunder (and pray add any other epithets; those cracked poets have plenty ready, especially when they are in difficulties with their scansion; then it is that a string of your names saves the situation and fills up the metrical gaps), O Zeus, where is now your resplendent lightning, where your deep-toned thunder, where the glowing, white- hot, direful bolt? we know now 'tis all fudge and poetic moonshine— barring what ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... recension. It comes in awkwardly and may I think be considered as an interpolation, but I paraphrase a portion of it as a relief after so much fighting and carnage, and as an interesting glimpse of the monotheistic ideas which underlie the Hindu religion. The hymn does not readily lend itself to metrical translation, and I have not attempted here to give a faithful rendering of the whole. A literal version of the text and the commentary given in the Calcutta edition will be ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Highlands, and the authorship came to be assigned to different individuals. Fletcher afterwards announced himself as the author, and completely established his claim. He was the author of various metrical compositions both in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... for an Elizabethan establishment comprises the observance of decorum and duty at table, and is at least as valuable and curious as those metrical canons and precepts which form the volume (Babees' Book) edited for the Early English Text ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... vestries early adopted the custom of appointing godly laymen as readers whose duty it was to assist the minister by leading the congregation in the responses in the Church service, and in raising tunes for the singing of metrical version of the Psalms. Later, when it was found desirable to erect chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went his usual round ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... records a partial defeat in the Pyrenees in 777-778, and adds that Hroudlandus was slain. From this bald statement arose the mediaeval "Chanson de Roland," which was still sung at the battle of Hastings. The probable author of the French metrical version is Turoldus; but the poem, numbering originally four thousand lines, has gradually been lengthened, until now it includes more than forty thousand. There are early French, Latin, German, Italian, English, and Icelandic versions of the adventures of Roland, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... of musical devotion have always wished for a more happy metrical version than they have yet obtained of the Book of Psalms. This wish the piety of Blackmore led him to gratify, and he produced (1721) "A New Version of the Psalms of David fitted to the Tunes used in Churches," which being recommended by the ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... MacConglinne's hatred of the Church and clergy, for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well, or when the crowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing a metrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of Biblical adventure. He would stand at a street comer, and when a crowd had gathered would begin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one who knew him)—"Gather round me, boys, gather ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... as here by Gray. In the Elegy the quatrain has not the somewhat disjunctive and isolating effect that it has in some other works where there is continuous argument or narrative that should run on with as few metrical hindrances as possible. It is well adapted to convey a series of solemn reflections, and that is its ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... as modern Italian is from the language of St. Augustine or Cicero. Ancient Greek possessed a pitch-accent only, which allowed the quantitative values of syllables to be measured against one another, and even to form the basis of a metrical system. In Romaic the pitch-accent has transformed itself into a stress-accent almost as violent as the English, which has destroyed all quantitative relation between accented and unaccented syllables, often wearing away the latter altogether at the termination ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... will be seen in the context, which, for plainness as well as curiosity, I quote from a metrical version of the first book of the poem,[51] entitled, "The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem, by Edward Sherburne," which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... was about to embark in the lighthouse yacht. He took it with him on his voyage, and, on returning home again, wrote to Mr. Train, expressing the gratification he had received from several of his metrical pieces, but still more from his notes, and requesting him, as he seemed to be enthusiastic about traditions and legends, to communicate any matters of that order connected with Galloway which he might not himself think of turning ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... mean its rhythmical structure. This, improbable though it seems, will be found to come under the same generalization with the others. Like each of them, it is an idealization of the natural language of strong emotion, which is known to be more or less metrical if the emotion be not too violent; and like each of them it is an economy of the reader's or hearer's attention. In the peculiar tone and manner we adopt in uttering versified language, may be discerned its relationship to the feelings; and the pleasure which its measured ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... specimen which has been rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has been well caught. Perhaps it should be added that the effect is greatly increased ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in length and two inches in diameter was cut with fifty threads to the inch; the Nut to fit on to it being twelve inches long, and containing six hundred threads! This screw was principally used for dividing scales for astronomical and other metrical purposes of the highest class. By its means divisions were produced with such minuteness that they could only be made ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... published, and Christopher North, in Blackwood, saluted it as "by far the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event in literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society in 1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848, or Wendell Phillips's in ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... greatest versative power. How different, for instance, are the first lines of the "Tale of Troy Divine," and the more familiar adventures of Ulysses. The ad libitum alternation of dactyl and spondee make the lively or the grave; and the whole metrical glow is all life and action, without hitch ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... passage already quoted, Solomon is said to have discoursed of plants, "from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,"—from the great tree to the minute herb; and Cowley rose, in his metrical treatise, as has been shown, from descriptions of herbs and flowers to descriptions of fruit and forest trees. And as in every age in which there existed a terrestrial vegetation there seem to have been "trees" as certainly ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... instruction and discipline, he[FN38] bestowed on Sang Tsung the Kachaya handed down from Bodhidharma, and authorized him as the Third Patriarch. It is by Sang Tsung that the doctrine of Zen was first reduced to writing by his composition of Sin Sin[FN39] Ming (Sin zin-mei, On Faith and Mind), a metrical exposition of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... another, but in one poet it will be relatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but material upon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being a relatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changing metrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions," subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a corresponding alternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain that other subjects of its ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... comes to its defence with a tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical. To hint this once, is sufficient. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... books were chiefly devoted to a complete revisal and correction of all the translations, which my friend had finished, from the Latin and Italian poetry of Milton; and we generally amused ourselves after dinner in forming together a rapid metrical version of Andreini's Adamo. But the constant care which the delicate health of Mrs. Unwin required rendered it impossible for us to be very assiduous in study, and perhaps the best of all studies ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... have casually alluded to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors of his "Dernier ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... well-known difficulty that most popular variety-artists experience in the metrical delivery of decasyllabic couplets, the lines which follow have been written as they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... speak, and stimulated her to clothe her feelings and sentiments in a metrical form. It is not difficult to understand the effect which, on a warm imagination and sensitive temperament, that richly-coloured panorama of "the isles of Greece," and that exquisite prospect of Constantinople and the Golden Horn, would necessarily produce. For some time, as she herself tells ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... struggling, the hatchery boatman seized it by the tail with a strong grip, swung it clear out of the net and over his left arm, laying it immediately on the measuring platform. This consisted merely of a wide board with an upright at one end, a rule giving both metrical and standard measures being nailed to the side of the board. Instantly the measurer called out the length and the professor noted it down, the hatchery foreman—famous for his expertness in judging the weight ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of this somewhat unlettered Indian we catch faint glimpses of the poetic beauty with which the tradition glowed when actually related at the wigwam door. An attempt has been made to retain and crystallize this poetic beauty in the preceding metrical version of the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... duty of parents to make their children acquainted with La Fontaine? Well, then, no better opportunity of so doing could possibly be afforded them than is given by the new Bodley Head edition. It is a metrical version of the time-honoured favourites, and every fable has a picture filling the page opposite. The child would be hard to please who did not find hours of amusement in the artist's ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... all has been said that an enemy could in justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy to compete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine; and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed his heirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his later work his mannerisms in prose and in verse are ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... from the fabliau, in being interspersed with musical interludes; but I suspect they were generally translations from the British. The word is said to be derived from leudus; but laoi seems to be the general name of a class of Irish metrical compositions, as "Laoi na Seilge" and others, quoted by Mr. Walker (Hist. Mem. of Irish Bards), and it may be doubted whether the word was not formerly common to the ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... unhallowed and unprofitable exercise of her understanding was so impressed upon her spirit, that, although the sacrifice was considerable, she caused all the unsold copies to be destroyed. It is interesting to observe how, in later years, this talent for metrical rhythm, which had been so misapplied, became consecrated, as were all her faculties, to the promotion ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... in 1100. Late discovery of the chansons. Their age and history. Their distinguishing character. Mistakes about them. Their isolation and origin. Their metrical form. Their scheme of matter. The character of Charlemagne. Other characters and characteristics. Realist quality. Volume and age of the chansons. Twelfth century. Thirteenth century. Fourteenth, and later. Chansons in print. Language: oc and oil. Italian. Diffusion of the chansons. Their ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of this scene is printed as verse in the 4to. I have printed the early part as prose, that the reader's eye may not be vexed by metrical monstrosities. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... poured forth a series of ejaculations expressive of intense and rapturous delight, very strange to listen to in such a place and from an old man's lips. Then the language he spoke changed from English into Gaelic, and there came a kind of hymn of adoration. His sentences followed each other in metrical balance like the Latin of the old liturgies, and suited themselves naturally to a subdued melody, half chant, half cry, like the mourning of the keeners round a grave. At last, rising from his knees, he spoke, and his voice became wholly unemotional, ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... are both indescribably fine. (Is Marvell's Horatian Ode good enough? I half think so.) But my great point is a fear that you are one of those who are unjust to our old Tennyson's Duke of Wellington. I have just been talking it over with Symonds; and we agreed that whether for its metrical effects, for its brief, plain, stirring words of portraiture, as—he "that never lost an English gun," or—the soldier salute; or for the heroic apostrophe to Nelson; that ode has never been surpassed in any tongue or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the Iliad.[1] Of course there was a Homer, and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... whole pages of his are like so many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds his scriptural motto ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... remark that a few errors still occur with regard to this unit, and that these errors have been facilitated by incoherent legislation. France herself, though she was the admirable initiator of the metrical system, has for too long allowed a very regrettable confusion to exist; and it cannot be noted without a certain sadness that it was not until the 11th July 1903 that a law was promulgated re-establishing the agreement between the legal and the scientific ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... served as lists for the combatants, is said by Gervase to have been the work of the pagan invaders of Britain. In the metrical romance of Arthour and Merlin, we have also an account of Wandlesbury being occupied by the Sarasins, i.e. the Saxons; for all pagans were Saracens with the romancers. I presume the place to have been Wodnesbury, in Wiltshire, situated on ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... replacing indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention—for, in Shelley's hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to indicate the structure or elucidate the sense. For this reason the original pointing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and Hadrian were "fully instructed both in sacred and in secular letters, they gathered a crowd of disciples, and rivers of wholesome knowledge daily flowed from them to water the hearts of their hearers; and, together with the books of Holy Scripture, they also taught them the metrical art, astronomy, and ecclesiastical arithmetic. A testimony whereof is, that there are still living at this day some of their scholars, who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... that metre is a species of verbal gymnastics, or legerdemain, of which the object is to win the admiration of the crowd. That is not so. Metre is born as all beauty is born the universe through. The current set up within well-defined bounds gives metrical verse power to move the minds of men as vague and indefinite ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... these early heraldic Rolls records, in a metrical form, and in Norman-French, the siege and capture of the fortress of Carlaverock, on the Scottish border, by EDWARDI., in the year 1300. In addition to very curious descriptions of the muster of the Royal troops at Carlisle, their march ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... Wilson to come to me. I had taken down all the books from a hitherto undisturbed corner, and had seated myself on a heap of them, no doubt a very impersonation of the genius of the place; for while I waited for the housekeeper, I was consuming a morsel of an ancient metrical romance. After waiting for some time, I glanced towards the door, for I had begun to get impatient for the entrance of my helper. To my surprise, there stood Lady Alice, her eyes fixed upon me with an expression I could not comprehend. Her face instantly altered to its usual look of indifference, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... poem, de prima expeditione Attilae, Regis Hunnorum, in Gallias, was published in the year 1780, by Fischer at Leipsic. It contains, with the continuation, 1452 lines. It abounds in metrical faults, but is occasionally not without some rude spirit and some copiousness of fancy in the variation of the circumstances in the different combats of the hero Walther, prince of Aquitania. It contains little ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... death. It was not published during his life, but after his death it appeared in the New York Tribune. Immediately it took rank as one of the three greatest poems Poe ever wrote. It is long enough to be complete, it has none of those metrical imperfections found in his earlier poems, and it possesses in a wonderful degree that haunting thrill so characteristic of all the best things Poe wrote. Moreover, it has a musical flow surpassing any other of Poe's poems ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... most detailed account of Cuchulain told with great sympathy in dignified, often metrical prose. Contains: Cuchulain's youth, Strife for the dun cow, Cuchulain and Ferdia, Cuchulain's death, Fate of the sons ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... "regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen a ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... is a tether, and not a very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you have a beautiful line ending with the word stars. Were you ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Bale wrote, "to erect a Church of the Purity" (we may perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later name of Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where the leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical translation of the Psalms which left its traces on English psalmody and in the production of what was afterwards ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... the other edition have been occasionally preferred, and where obvious typographical errors have been rectified. Every minute particular in which the second 4to differs from the first, I have thought it unnecessary to note. The absurd punctuation and faulty metrical arrangement of the old copy have not been followed; and I must be allowed to add that I have retained the original spelling only in accordance to the decision of the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... are taken from a well known manuscript in the Cottonian collection, marked Nero A. x, which also contains, in the same handwriting and dialect, a metrical romance,[1] wherein the adventures of Sir Gawayne with the "Knight in Green," are most ably ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... 'numerous', 'penetrate', 'penetrable', 'indignity', 'savage', 'scientific', 'delineation', 'dimension'—all which he notes to have recently come up; so too 'idiom', 'significative', 'compendious', 'prolix', 'figurative', 'impression', 'inveigle', 'metrical'. All these he adduces with praise; others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their ground, as 'placation', 'numerosity', 'harmonical'. Of those neologies which he disallowed, he only anticipated ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... Walter Scott's Border Minstrelsy, Percy's collection, Ellis's early English Metrical Romances, the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction; the history of the Troubadours, by Fauriel; even the far-back cumbrous old Hindu epics, as indicating the Asian ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the year 1517, first introduced metrical psalmody into the service of the church, which not only kept alive the enthusiasm of the reformers, but formed a rallying point for his followers. This practice spread in all directions; and it was ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... brought to abandon the point of view whence things are seen in their immediate relation to the individual soul. This kind of research is the work of letters; here are facts of human life to be noted that are never like to be numerically tabulated, changes and developments that defy all metrical standards to be traced and described. The greater men of science have been cast in so generous a mould that they have recognised the partial nature of their task; they have known how to play with science as a pastime, and ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... perfectly possess. In some respects he was as childish (to use the word in no contemptuous sense) as in others he was precocious. And it is a thousand pities that the difficulties of Chatterton's language and the peculiar charm and invention of his metrical technique cannot be appreciated till the boyish love of adventure, delight in imagined bloodshed, and ignorance of sentimental love, have generally been left behind. Nothing—to give an example—could be more frigid ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... 1645 text and Milton's manuscript read self-consum'd; after which word there is to be understood a metrical pause to mark the violent ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... it is not on account of want of metrical harmony in respect to the lyre, to borrow the words of Plato, that cities quarrel with cities and friends with friends, and do and suffer the worst woes, but on account of deviations[670] from law and justice. And yet some, who ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... has, how he supposes time is measured on them? He seems to me to have forgotten the elementary fact that angles can be measured as well as straight lines. (I might add that he makes the further curious assumption that all geometry is metrical.) It may be that something would be left of the Bergsonian philosophy if one eliminated the consequences of these initial blunders, but I do not know what the remainder would be. At any rate, the anti-intellectualism which M. Bergson ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... hatchery boatman seized it by the tail with a strong grip, swung it clear out of the net and over his left arm, laying it immediately on the measuring platform. This consisted merely of a wide board with an upright at one end, a rule giving both metrical and standard measures being nailed to the side of the board. Instantly the measurer called out the length and the professor noted it down, the hatchery foreman—famous for his expertness in judging the weight of a fish—calling out the weight to be recorded. Laying down his pencil, the professor ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Lycidas than in any other pastoral, is apparently of Roman origin. Milton, employing the noble freedom of a great artist, has here united ancient mythology, with what may be called the modern mythology of Camus and Saint Peter,—to direct Christian images.—The metrical structure of this glorious poem is partly derived from ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken Carlyle, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the term 'metrical' is not applicable to Biblical verse, since this is constituted, not by any numbering of syllables, but by the parallelism ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... however, MacConglinne's hatred of the Church and clergy, for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well, or when the crowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing a metrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of Biblical adventure. He would stand at a street comer, and when a crowd had gathered would begin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one who knew him)—"Gather round me, boys, gather round ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... described in the metrical history of Rouen, composed by a minstrel ycleped Poirier, the limper. This little tract is a chap-book at Rouen: most towns, in the north of France and Belgium, possess such chronicle ballads in doggerel rhyme, which are much read, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... be found. Mr. Capell informs me (and he is in these matters the most able of all men to give information) that our Author appears to have been beholden to some Novels which he hath yet only seen in French or Italian: but he adds, "to say they are not in some English dress, prosaic or metrical, and perhaps with circumstances nearer to his stories, is what I will not take upon me to do: nor indeed is it what I believe; but rather the contrary, and that time and accident will bring some of them to light, if ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... frequently the substance of the chants of these bards. More than this, the line between singing and narration is so faintly drawn, that the bards themselves often interpose great patches of prose between the metrical portions of their recitations. Fairs, festivals, and marriages all over India are attended by the bards, who are always ready to perform for pay and drink. Mr. Leland believes the stories he obtained from the Christian Algonkins of New England, concerning the ancient heroes ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... state of intellectual and social development, and yet feels bound to reproduce the impressions made upon the ancient Greek. The translator has to be an accurate scholar and to give the right shade of meaning for every phrase, while he has also to approximate to the metrical effect. The conclusion seems to be that the only language into which Homer could be adequately translated would be Greek, and that you must then use the words of the original. The actual result is that the ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... politics, and had her patrons to be sung up and her patrons' enemies to be sung down, she very often screamed and called names, and cursed like an intoxicated fish-wife. Pope, Swift, Gay, Hervey, flung metrical abuse about in the coarsest fashion. There seemed to be hardly any pretence at accuracy of description or epithet. If the poet or the poet's patron did not like a man or woman, no word of abuse was ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... labors, educational addresses, and metrical discourses on memorable occasions filled the years from 1829 to 1840. He felt the demon of insanity lurking behind him, now close at his heels, now farther away; and it was a desperate race, in which life and death, nay, worse than death, was ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... letter with gratitude, and the little book reached him just as he was about to embark in the lighthouse yacht. He took it with him on his voyage, and, on returning home again, wrote to Mr. Train, expressing the gratification he had received from several of his metrical pieces, but still more from his notes, and requesting him, as he seemed to be enthusiastic about traditions and legends, to communicate any matters of that order connected with Galloway which he might not himself think of turning to account; "for," said Scott, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the 'Troubadour Songs,' which have become so afflictingly common of late years. Some of these we have already given; and we find them on the increase in England. We have before us, from the London press of TILT AND BOGUE, 'Sir WHYSTLETON MUGGES, a Metrical Romaunte, in three Fyttes,' with copious notes. A stanza or two will suffice as a specimen. The knightly hero, it needs only to premise, has been jilted by his fair 'ladye-love,' who retires to her boudoir, while the knight walks off ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... "verse" stands for any kind of metrical composition as distinguished from prose. It is not used as a synonym for "poetry." Though most poetry is in verse form, most verse is not poetry. The ability to write verse can be acquired; only a poet can write ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal—not metrical—translation and had issued them in book form ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... was so impressed upon her spirit, that, although the sacrifice was considerable, she caused all the unsold copies to be destroyed. It is interesting to observe how, in later years, this talent for metrical rhythm, which had been so misapplied, became consecrated, as were all her faculties, to the promotion ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... Dante to Alfred Austin's yaller doggerel—to the raucous twitterings of grown men who aspire to play Persian bulbul instead of planting post-holes, who mistake some spavined mule for Bellerophon's Mount and go chasing metrical rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind adown the shining blade of a bucksaw; from the flame sighs of Sappho, that breed mutiny in the blood, to the green- sick maunderings of atrabilarious maids who are best qualified to build soft-soap or take ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Fairfax's Tasso (MR. SINGER's accurate reprint, 1817), has his in both lines. 2. MR. RYE, in understanding me to refer to any translation proper; unless Sternhold and Hopkins are to be considered as having produced one. 3. Myself, in supposing the old metrical version in the Book of Common Prayer originally had the word its. I copied from the Oxford edition in fol. of 1770; but a 4to. edition, "printed by Iohn Daye, dwelling over Aldersgate, anno 1574," does not exhibit the word in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very well pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; but one following another will produce an instant impression of poverty, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... translation has naturally assumed from the Latin, is certainly noticeable. That Byron could have seen the piece before he wrote his own lines in question is almost impossible, for this portion of the Carmina Burana had not, so far as I am aware, been edited before the year 1847. The coincidence of metrical form, so far as it extends, only establishes the spontaneity of emotion which, in the case of the medieval and the modern poet, found a similar rhythm for the utterance ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... adopting—though the heart should disown—the enmities of one's own family, or country, or religious sect. In forms how afflicting must that necessity have sometimes occurred during the Parliamentary war! And, in after years, amongst our beautiful old English metrical romances, I found the same impassioned complaint uttered by a knight, Sir Ywain, as early as ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... accurate and useful than either of the preceding editions. Further corrections in text and glossary have been made, and some additional new readings and suggestions will be found in two brief appendices at the back of the book. Students of the metrical system of Bewulf will find ample material for their studies in Sievers' exhaustive essay on that ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine aspects of Mr. Manning's feelings, and as Ann Veronica's mind was still largely engaged with fundamentals and found no pleasure in metrical forms, she had not as yet cut its pages. So that as she saw him she remarked to herself very faintly but definitely, "Oh, golly!" and set up a campaign of avoidance that Mr. Manning at last broke down by coming directly at her as she talked with the vicar's aunt about some of the details of the alleged ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and "Short Story" are the only poems in the book which seem to follow a clearly rhymed pattern. If any misguided schoolmistress had ever suggested that a poem should have rhyme and metre, this book would never have been "told." In "Moon Doves," however, there is a distinctly metrical effect without rhyme. But the great majority of the poems are built upon cadence, and the subtlety of this little girl's cadences are a delight to those who can hear them. Doubtless her musical inheritance has ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... it is not in my power to accept the invitation of the committee to be present at the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow on the 27th instant, or to write anything worthy of the occasion in metrical form. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... had effected in poetry;[H] but shall lay the grounds of our opposition, for this time, a little more broadly. The end of poetry, we take it, is to please—and the name, we think, is strictly applicable to every metrical composition from which we receive pleasure, without any laborious exercise of the understanding. This pleasure, may, in general, be analyzed into three parts—that which we receive from the excitement of Passion ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... European affairs bring him to British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and mythology to the "Younger Edda" and the "Heimrskringla" of Snorro Sturleson, to Mallet's "Northern Antiquities," to Ellis's "Metrical Romances," to Asser's "Life of Alfred," and Venerable Bede, and to the researches of Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the English mind, with the chief men ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Journey" essay. Granted that it would never have been written but for Hazlitt and Stevenson and Belloc. Yet it is fresh distilled, it has its own sparkle. Beginning with an even pace, how it falls into a swinging stride, drugs you with hilltops and blue air! Crisp, metrical, with a steady drum of feet, it lifts, purges and sustains. "This is the religious side" of ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... The Odes and Epodes of Horace. A Metrical Translation into English. With Introduction and Commentaries. By LORD LYTTON. With Latin Text from the Editions of Orelli, Macleane, ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... brow; His lips were great, and hung aside; His eyen were hollow, his mouth was wide; Lothly he was to look on than, And liker a devil than a man. His staff was a young oak, Hard and heavy was his stroke." Specimens of Metrical Romances, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics— which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention—display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... text and Milton's manuscript read self-consum'd; after which word there is to be understood a metrical pause to mark the violent transition ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... learned from books. But, as respects his accuracy, again we must recall to the reader the state of Greek literature in England during Coleridge's youth; and, in all equity, as a means of placing Coleridge in the balances, specifically we must recall the state of Greek metrical composition at that period. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... of Mr.(afterwards Sir Charles) Elton, brother-in-law of Hallam, the historian, and uncle to the subject of "In Memoriam." Mr. Elton, who was a friend and patron of Rippingille, was much pleased with Clare, and while he was yet in London sent him from Clifton the following metrical epistle, which afterwards appeared in the "London Magazine." It contains several ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... and ninety millimetres, which is sometimes called "a double cubit." On these suppositions the SAR would be a square, each side measuring about twenty-two yards, about one-tenth of an acre, or four ares on the metrical system. But it is certain that both in early times and during the First Dynasty of Babylon the GAR was only 12 U, and the U, if a cubit, would not be much over eighteen inches. This would make the SAR a square of about eighteen feet on each side. The fact that a SAR ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... Prof. Feuling, the eminent philologist, of the University of Wisconsin, for his literal version of the extracts from the "Deutsche Theologie," which preserve the quaintness of the original, and to Mrs. F. M. Brown, for her metrical version of Goethe's almost untranslatable lines, "Ueber allen Gipfeln, ist Ruh," which form the keynote of the beautiful harmony in the character of ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... England, Surrey and Wyatt, heedful of things Italian, had already discovered that verse-making was at any rate a delectable pastime for a gentleman of wit, especially if he had a love-affair on hand; a pastime certainly pleasing to himself and probably agreeable to his mistress. They made metrical experiments, introducing both the sonnet and blank verse. The example they set was followed by others, and Tottel's Miscellany, published towards the end of Mary's reign, shows that a considerable skill in this minor art had already been acquired, and not only by the two principal contributors, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... is only a metrical expression of a great and practical truth. You do not need to be a "Christian Scientist" to know that ideas and emotions can affect the stoop of the shoulders or the lines of the mouth. Other people besides "Eugenists" have observed that ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... almost every English child, no general reader is aware of the valuables it contains, nor indeed will the door open to any but Arabists. Before parting we agreed to "collaborate" and produce a full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original, my friend taking the prose and I the metrical part; and we corresponded upon the subject for years. But whilst I was in the Brazil, Steinhaeuser died suddenly of apoplexy at Berne in Switzerland and, after the fashion of Anglo India, his valuable MSS. left at ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... provincialisms to be met with in this volume, I may say that the reader will not find one which is not (as I believe) either native or imported with the early settlers, nor one which I have not, with my own ears, heard in familiar use. In the metrical portion of the book, I have endeavoured to adapt the spelling as nearly as possible to the ordinary mode of pronunciation. Let the reader who deems me overparticular remember this ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... think that metre is a species of verbal gymnastics, or legerdemain, of which the object is to win the admiration of the crowd. That is not so. Metre is born as all beauty is born the universe through. The current set up within well-defined bounds gives metrical verse power to move the minds of men as ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... Old French from the Latin gesta, 'deeds' or 'exploits.' But as the word was particularly applied to 'exploits as narrated or recited,' there came into use a secondary meaning—that of 'a story or romantic tale in verse,' or 'a metrical chronicle.' The latter meaning is doubtless intended in the title of the Gest of Robyn Hode. A further corruption may be noticed even in the titles of the later texts as given above; Copland adds the word 'mery,' which ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... plan of an old song, of which David Laing has given an authentic version in his very curious volume of Metrical Tales.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... think we have been doing this evening? Still under the spell of Loches and its weird associations, we have been trying to turn the French verse, which Lydia copied for you, into metrical English. It seemed so strange that we four twentieth century Americans and one Franco-American should be translating the pathetic little verse of the ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... the figure represents the theoretical number of syllables in the line, and indicates the actual number only in the case of the verso llano. Furthermore, the figure has been determined by a comparison with adjacent lines in the same stanzas, verses which offer no metrical ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... 'the law-book of Manu,'[26] will give in epitome the popular religion as taught to the masses; withal even better than this is taught in the S[u]tras. For Father Manu's law-book, as the Hindus call it, is a popular C[a]stra or metrical[27] composite of law and religion, which reflects the opinion of Brahmanism in its geographical stronghold, whereas the S[u]tras emanate from various localities, north and south. To Manu there is but one Holy Land, the Kurus' plain and the region ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Hayward and some of his reviewers have instituted in advance against the possibility of a good and faithful metrical translation of a poem like Faust, they seem to the present translator full of paradox and sophistry. For instance, take this assertion of one of the reviewers: "The sacred and mysterious union of thought with verse, twin-born and immortally wedded from the moment of ...
— Faust • Goethe
... satrapies,[304] placing Greek governors over two of them and leaving a Hindu ruler in charge of the third, and in Bactriana, a part of Ariana or ancient Persia, he left governors; and in these the western civilization was long in evidence. Some of the Greek and Roman metrical and astronomical terms {78} found their way, doubtless at this time, into the Sanskrit language.[305] Even as late as from the second to the fifth centuries A.D., Indian coins showed the Hellenic influence. The Hindu astronomical terminology reveals the ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Keats's verses were monstrous pretty, but over-ornamented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry of Shelley might have been composed in the moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning person. If you wanted a sound mind in a sound metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's "Essay on Man." There was something winsome and by-gone in the general make-up of Tom Folio. No man living in the world ever seemed to me to live so much out of it, or to ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the 'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne, 'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or instinct ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to the French metrical system, which most people have come to believe is the best in the world. I suppose everybody here knows what a meridian is, for it was explained when we were talking about great circles and geographical or sea miles. A meridian is a great circle ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... certain expressions, gentle reader, which occur in the notes to the life of Robin Hood, prefixed to the ballads which go under his name: 1795. 2 vols. 8vo.—also a Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy in the first vol. of Ancient Metrical Romances, 1802, 3 vols. 8vo. A very common degree of shrewdness and of acquaintance with English literature will shew that, in Menander and Sycorax, are described honest TOM WARTON and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... taken from a well known manuscript in the Cottonian collection, marked Nero A. x, which also contains, in the same handwriting and dialect, a metrical romance,[1] wherein the adventures of Sir Gawayne with the "Knight in Green," are most ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... knowledge of the German language, Mr. Adams made a metrical translation of Wieland's Oberon into the English language. The publication of this work, which at one time was designed, was superseded by the appearance of a ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... expression of ideas in metrical form is seldom the one best suited to the conditions of modern life, it has not seemed desirable to continue the themes throughout this chapter. The study of this chapter, with suitable illustrations from the poems to which the pupils have access, may serve to aid them in ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... popular in the Highlands, and the authorship came to be assigned to different individuals. Fletcher afterwards announced himself as the author, and completely established his claim. He was the author of various metrical compositions both in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... college walls. His choice of models—the artificial pastorals in which the Renaissance had modelled itself on Virgil and Theocritus, rather than Virgil and Theocritus themselves—was not altogether happy. He showed, indeed, already his extraordinary metrical skill, experimenting with rhyme-royal and other stanzas, fourteeners or eights and sixes, anapaests more or less irregular, and an exceedingly important variety of octosyllable which, whatever may have been his own idea in practising it, looked back to early ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... head in triumph to Edinburgh, where Ker caused it to be exposed at the cross. The bastard Heron would have shared the same fate, had he not spread abroad a report of his having died of the plague, and caused his funeral obsequies to be performed.—Ridpath's History, p. 481.—See also Metrical Account of the Battle of Flodden, published by the Rev. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... pedant comes to its defence with a tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical. To hint this once, is sufficient. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... the language and the metrical form of which exclamation afford no ground for disputing its authenticity, when the habits and education of those times are fairly considered.' It is quite likely that, having already abdicated the throne, Charles regarded the comet as signalling his retirement ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the Faithful, when he desired to be incognito, was known by that of Il Bondocani. The French minstrels are not silent on so popular a theme. There must have been a Norman original of the Scottish metrical romance of Rauf Colziar, in which Charlemagne is introduced as the unknown guest of a ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... detailed account of Cuchulain told with great sympathy in dignified, often metrical prose. Contains: Cuchulain's youth, Strife for the dun cow, Cuchulain and Ferdia, Cuchulain's death, Fate of the sons ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... to ask themselves what it was that they meant by 'correctness;' an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside afterwards sternly ridiculed. Neither of the two literati stopped to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which, by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning, or in any case inconsistent, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... may be regarded as a harmonic whole, owing to the complementary sounds which accompany it in its complete development. With reference to our own race, the genesis of the composition of verse and metre are shown by the researches made by Westphal and others into the metrical system of the Vedic Aryans, the Turanians, and the Greeks, since the fact that their metres were the same implies a common origin. The demonstration is complete, if we compare the iambic metre of Archilochus ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... earliest plays. We find the same sort of thing which we find in their writings, only better done than they usually do it, rather than such work as Shakespeare's a little worse done than usual. And even in the final text of the tragic or metrical scenes the highest note struck is always, with one magnificent and unquestionable exception, rather in the key of Marlowe at his best than of Shakespeare while yet in great measure ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... verse of twelve syllables, with the stress on the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh syllables, makes a dodecasyllable of amphibrachs. This dodecasyllable has a short metrical pause after the sixth syllable, and a longer ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... "No tobacco for me. No cigar, no pipe, no cigarette, no cheroot. For me, a book—a volume of poems, perhaps. Verses, rhymes, lines metrical and cadenced—those are my dissipation. Tennyson by preference: 'Maud,' or 'Idylls of the King'—poetry of the sound Victorian days; there is none later. Or Longfellow will rest me in a tired hour. Yes; for me, a book, a volume in the hand, held ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... nor any of the other sonnets in the collection, with the exception of the one from the Portuguese, is framed according to the legitimate Italian model, which, in the author's opinion, possesses no peculiar beauty for an ear accustomed only to the metrical forms of our own language. The sonnets in this collection are rather poems in fourteen lines ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... four consecutive lines, that have undergone enough of the toilette of composition to be presentable in print. It was his usual practice, when he undertook any subject in verse, to write down his thoughts first in a sort of poetical prose,—with, here and there, a rhyme or a metrical line, as they might occur—and then, afterwards to reduce with much labor, this anomalous compound to regular poetry. The birth of his prose being, as we have already seen, so difficult, it may ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... form,—yet is its range wider, fuller, and far more comprehensive than any one of the sister arts. If any one should be inclined to doubt that it is indeed a resume of them all, let him consider that in its prosodial flow, measured pauses, metrical lines, varied cadences, stirring or soothing rhythms, sweet or rugged rhymes,—it is music: in its metaphorical diction, descriptive imagery, succession of shifting pictures, diversified illustration, and vivid coloring,—it is painting; while in its organic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... never so be-rhimed since Pythagoras's time, that I was an Irish rat] Rosalind is a very learned lady. She alludes to the Pythagorean doctrine, which teaches that souls transmigrate from one animal to another, and relates that in his time she was an Irish rat, and by some metrical charm was rhymed to death. The power of killing rats with rhymes Donne mentions in his Satires, and Temple in his Treatises. Dr. Gray has produced a similar passage ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... an increasingly large section of the reading public who while they may not be expert in Latin composition, nevertheless do not think that a Latin word in itself is a cause for laughter. A French phrase thrown in now and then for metrical effect does not strike them as essentially an affectation, and they are willing to have references made to characters whose native language may not have been that noblest of ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... the Brahmans, resumed its pre-eminence and took possession of the whole field of literature and art and science as well as of theology. Oral traditions were reduced to writing and poetry was adapted to both sacred and profane uses in the Puranas, in the metrical code of Manu, in treatises on sacrificial ritual, in Kalidasa's plays, and in many other works of which only fragments have survived. Astronomy, logic, philosophy were all cultivated with equal fervour and to the greater glory of Brahmanism. Local tradition is doubtless quite wrong in assigning ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... dramas of Vecchi in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and at what may be called the golden era of the frottola was generally and successfully applied to that species of composition. Whatever the troubadours and minnesingers may have done toward establishing a metrical melodic form of monophonic character was soon obliterated by the swift popularity of part singing and the immense vogue of the secular songs of the polyphonic composers. When the desire for the vocal solo made itself felt ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... my person and a shelf at the pawnbroker's," explained the poet; "but I have a soiled collar in the left-hand corner drawer. However, I can offer you more valuable security for this trifling debt than you would dare to ask; the bureau is full of pearls —metrical, but beyond price. I beg your tenderest care of them, especially my tragedy in seven acts. Do not play jinks with the contents of that bureau, or Posterity will gibbet you and the name of 'Gouge' will one day be execrated ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... WRITERS.—In Germany, in the age of the Hohenstaufens, the poets called Minnesingers abounded. They were conspicuous at the splendid tournaments and festivals. In the thirteenth century numerous lays of love, satirical fables, and metrical romances were composed or translated. Of the Round Table legends, that of the San Graal (the holy vessel) was the most popular. It treated of the search for the precious blood of Christ, which was said to have been brought in a cup ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Sulpicia, and Lucilius, literally translated into English Prose, with Notes, Chronological Tables, Arguments, etc. By the Rev. Lewis Evans, M. A., late Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. To which is added the Metrical Version of Juvenal and Persius by the late William Gifford, Esq. New York. Harper & Brothers. 16mo. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... possible, I have adhered to the rhyming structure of my originals, feeling that this is a point of no small moment in translation. Yet when the choice lay between a sacrifice of metrical exactitude and a sacrifice of sense, I have not hesitated to prefer the former, especially in dealing with ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... versed in literature, especially in Latin poetry, and himself one of the distinguished poets of his time, took measures for the emendation of the hymns in the Roman Breviary. He was offended by the many defects in their metrical composition, and it is said that upwards of nine hundred and fifty faults in metre were corrected, which gave to Urban occasion to say that the Fathers had begun rather than completed the hymns. These, as corrected, he caused to be inserted ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... Cornelius he mentions the following authors as his poetic models—Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian, Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero, Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet been recognized. Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his Elegantiae passed with him for the pioneer of bonae literae; but Filelfo, Aeneas ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... carry all my men and baggage, had I even at that moment decided to descend that river instead of proceeding west. I took observations for latitude and longitude at Porto Castanho, as well as boiling-point observations with the hypso-metrical apparatus, the latter in order to get the exact elevation, and also to keep a check on my several aneroids which I used on the journey ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... foot within this arena of controversy; and to address a letter to me; to which his model, M. Crapelet, was too happy to give circulation through the medium of his press.[3] To that letter the following metrical lines are prefixed; which the Reader would scarcely forgive me if I failed to amuse him by their introduction in this place. "Lesne, Relieur Francais, a Mons. T.F. Dibdin, Ministre de ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... received four Erse books, without any direction, and suspect that they are intended for the Oxford library. If that is the intention, I think it will be proper to add the metrical psalms, and whatever else is printed in Erse, that the present may be complete. The donor's name should ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... sober manhood. Some of the members, ashamed of the paltry nature of the volumes circulated in the name of the club, bethought themselves of uniting to produce a book of national value. They took Sir Frederick Madden into their counsels, and authorised him to print eighty copies of the old metrical romance of Havelok the Dane. This gave great dissatisfaction to the historian, who muttered how "a MS. not discovered by a member of the club was selected, and an excerpt obtained, not furnished by the industry or under the inspection of any ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... are all in lyrical form—if the word form may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical conventions. Her lines are rugged and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and the "thought-rhymes" which she often substitutes for the more regular assonances appeal "to an unrecognised ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... drilled into us well. The unfortunate part of it was that there was hardly more than one boy in the class who enjoyed learning anything about just that particular thing. Instruction in Danish was, for Holst, instruction in the metrical art. He explained every metre and taught the boys to pick out the feet of which the verses were composed. When we made fun of him in our playtime, it was for remarks which we had invented and placed in his mouth ourselves; for instance: "Scan my immortal poem, The Dying Gladiator." ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... essentials of his art. It is no less obvious that he saw matters in their actual perspective, that he attached no undue importance to technique, as such, and that he gave no less weight to the choice of matter than to the choice of form. Luis de Leon was not incapable of metrical audacities: as when he divides into two separate words adverbs in -mente occurring at the end of a line. This practice was audacious, but it was not an innovation. Juan de Almeida defended it by citing a host of precedents from other literatures and, had Almeida been a prophet, he might ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... different, for instance, are the first lines of the "Tale of Troy Divine," and the more familiar adventures of Ulysses. The ad libitum alternation of dactyl and spondee make the lively or the grave; and the whole metrical glow is all life and action, without ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... and lodes, the squares of rich corn and verdure,—will confess that the lowland, as well as the highland, can at times breed gallant men. [Footnote: The story of Hereward (often sung by minstrels and old-wives in succeeding generations) may be found in the "Metrical Chronicle of Geoffrey Gaimar," and in the prose "Life of Hereward" (paraphrased from that written by Leofric, his house- priest), and in the valuable fragment "Of the family of Hereward." These have all three been edited by Mr. T. Wright. The account of Hereward in ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... the Prose Style of Poets" in the "Plain Speaker": "What is a little extraordinary, there is a want of rhythmus and cadence in what they write without the help of metrical rules. Like persons who have been accustomed to sing to music, they are at a loss in the absence of the habitual accompaniment and guide to their judgment. Their style halts, totters, is loose, disjointed, and without expressive pauses or rapid movements. The ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... (1) Metrical, thermometer, barometer, pedometer, diametrically, geometry; (2) millimeter, chronometer, hydrometer, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... for themselves. The poet should slavishly obey the laws he lays down for himself of his own free-will, and subordinate to them every word, and yet his matter and his song should seem to float on a free and soaring wing. Now, even the original Hebrew text of the Psalms has no metrical laws." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... not at first hand, at least through the medium of Shelley's rendering. But apart from the "Greek choruses," which "Shelley made such a fuss about," Byron was acquainted with, and was not untouched by, the metrical peculiarities of the Curse of Kehama, and might have traced a kinship between his "angels" and Southey's "Glendoveers," to say nothing of their collaterals, the "glumms" and "gawreys" of Peter Wilkins (see notes to Southey's Curse ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... British Muse, such as she had come to be, was doing less, or had so nearly ceased to do anything, or to have any good opinion of herself, as precisely about the year 1764. Young was dying; Gray was recluse and indolent; Johnson had long given over his metrical experimentations on any except the most inconsiderable scale; Akenside, Armstrong, Smollett, and others less known, had pretty well revealed the amount of their worth in poetry; and Churchill, after his ferocious blaze of what was really rage and declamation in metre, though conventionally ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... various languages; and English, German and French writers are all agreed in pronouncing it one of the most perfect expressions of the religion and philosophy of the Vedas. Sir Edwin Arnold popularized it by his metrical rendering under the name of "The Secret of Death," and Ralph Waldo Emerson gives its story in brief at the close of his essay ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... the wars which the Albyn had waged with their enemies of Scandinavia. To the same period we are disposed to assign the "Song of the Owl," though it has been regarded by a respectable authority[10] as of modern origin. Of a portion of this celebrated composition we subjoin a metrical translation from the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... celebrity, he conferred on that day the same distinction (expressly in honour of Henry) upon ten others his companions in arms. The (p. 039) particulars of this transaction, and the details of the entire campaign against the Wild Irish, as they were called, are recorded in a metrical history by a Frenchman named Creton, who was an eye-witness of the whole affair. This gentleman had accepted the invitation of a countryman of his own, a knight, to accompany him to England. On their arrival in London they found the king himself in the very act of starting for ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... be made up of our Restoration hymns, by Jeremy Clark, Croft, and others who added to the succeeding editions of the metrical Psalms. If there are not many in this class, yet the few are good; and Clark must be regarded as the inventor of the modern English hymn-tune, regarded, that is, as a pure melody in the scale with harmonic interpretation of instrumental rather than true vocal suggestion. His tunes ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... it was so, that the Bible story became current in Anglo-Saxon speech. Bede himself certainly put the Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon. At the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, there is a manuscript of nearly twenty thousand lines, the metrical version of the Gospel and the Acts, done near 1250 by an Augustinian monk named Orm, and so called the Ormulum. There were other metrical versions of various parts of the Bible. Midway between Bede and Orm came Langland's poem, "The Vision ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... attractive, I urged him to invite these musical people to his house to practise; and in due course we had a clarionet, two fiddles, and his bass viol, with a few singers to form a choir. We tried over some metrical psalms (for there were no hymn-books in those days), and soon succeeded in learning them. This musical performance drew many people to church. The singers were undeniably the great attraction, and they knew it; consequently I was somewhat in their power, and had to submit ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... year 1150, five years before the death of Geoffrey, an Anglo-Norman, Geoffrey Gaimar, wrote the first French metrical chronicle. It consisted of two parts, the Estorie des Bretons and the Estorie des Engles, of which only the latter is extant, but the former is known to have been a rhymed translation of the Historia of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Gaimar's work might possibly ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... Their technical ability was very great; and it is hardly too much to say that the result of their efforts was the creation of something hitherto lacking in French literature—a poetical instrument which, in its strength, its freedom, 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 ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... most make a distinction, applying it to some and not to others. In point of fact, however, it does not seem that any such distinction can be made. Horace's lightest Satires or Epistles have generally something grave about 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 ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the Plot. The story existed in many forms, mostly Italian. Shakespeare took it from Arthur Broke's metrical version (Romeus and Juliet), and possibly consulted the prose version in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The tale had been dramatised and performed before Arthur Broke published his poem in 1562. The play (if it existed ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Dubliner by birth, and Nicholas Brady (1659-1726), a Bandon man, have secured a certain sort of twin immortality by their authorized metrical version of the Psalms (1696), which gradually took the place of the older rendering by Sternhold and Hopkins. Tate became poet-laureate in 1690 in succession to Shadwell and was appointed historiographer-royal in 1702. He wrote the bulk of the second part of Absalom ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... of Charlemagne, records a partial defeat in the Pyrenees in 777-778, and adds that Hroudlandus was slain. From this bald statement arose the mediaeval "Chanson de Roland," which was still sung at the battle of Hastings. The probable author of the French metrical version is Turoldus; but the poem, numbering originally four thousand lines, has gradually been lengthened, until now it includes more than forty thousand. There are early French, Latin, German, Italian, English, and Icelandic versions of the adventures of ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... recall spring up in his mind like flowers and weeds in the soil. But to-night he was truly in a state of lyrical inspiration, his eyes flashing, his face glowing, and his whole composition chanted out in an almost metrical form. He began by mourning the death of a certain Harriet whom he had let go to foreign parts, and who had died at sea. He described her as having "blue, sparkling eyes, and a sweet smile," and lamented that he could never kiss her ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Epigram, "Hoarse Maevius reads his hobbling verse" Inscription by the Rev. W. L. Bowles, in Nether Stowey Church Translation Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie Epilogue to the Rash Conjuror Psyche Complaint Reproof An Ode to the Rain Translation of a Passage in Ottfried's Metrical Paraphrase of the Gospel Israel's Lament on the Death of the Princess Charlotte of Wales Sentimental The Alternative The Exchange What is Life? Inscription ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... which were inscribed on clay tablets and treasured in libraries, do not throw much light on the progress of medical knowledge, for the genuine folk cures were regarded as of secondary importance, and were not as a rule recorded. But these metrical compositions are of special interest, in so far as they indicate how poetry originated and achieved widespread popularity among ancient peoples. Like the religious dance, the earliest poems were used for magical purposes. They were composed in the first place by men and women who were supposed ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... time with a metrical fluency, he scraped a little jig on the violin, while Dummer led off a procession which solemnly capered round the room in sundry stages of conscious awkwardness. Mr. Bultitude shuffled along somehow after the rest, with rebellion at his heart and a deep sense of degradation. "If ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... in the French language since the date of its composition has rendered necessary some modernizing of the style both of the prayers and of the accompanying psalms. These modifications, much more radical in the case of the metrical psalms, took place in the eighteenth century, and commended themselves so fully to the good sense of all French-speaking Protestants as soon to be everywhere adopted. The MS. records of the French church in New York (folio 45) ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... borrowed the form of the novella and transplanted it to their racier soil that it began to bear character, and to fruit in the richness of their picaresque fiction. When the English borrowed it they adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the genius of their nation, which was then both poetical and humorous. Here it was full of character, too, and more and more personality began to enlarge the bounds of the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones. But in so far as the novella was studied in the Italian ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... gems of Pope's collection, are the 'Essay on Criticism,' the 'Rape of the Lock,' and the 'Essay on Man.' On the first, which (with Dr. Johnson's leave) is the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication-table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps; since nothing is said worth answering, it is sufficient to answer nothing. The 'Rape of the Lock' is treated with the same delicate sensibility that ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... and unpublished sources, viz. (1) the successive editions issued by the author, (2) holograph MSS., or (3) contemporary transcriptions. Occasion has been taken to include in the Text and Appendices a considerable number of poems, fragments, metrical experiments and first drafts of poems now published for the first time from MSS. in the British Museum, from Coleridge's Notebooks, and from MSS. in the possession of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... “Pitt’s low and perfidious manœuvres,” and she never changed her opinion of him. She seemed unable to write what is called plain English. Archdeacon Vyse is described by her as “a man of prioric talents in a metrical impromptu.” Another person “evinced an elevated mind,” while a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an “attic warbler.” It is true, however, he was writing poetry, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... the best account and criticism of this piece is Mr. Barham's metrical report of it in the "Ingoldsby Legends." Lord Francis himself used to quote with delight, "She didn't mind death, but she ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... has ever befallen a man's domestic life. Longfellow was widowed for the second time, and five children were left without a mother. It seemed as if Providence had set a limit beyond which human happiness could not pass. It was after this calamity that Longfellow undertook his metrical translation of Dante's "Divina Commedia," a much more difficult and laborious work than writing original poetry. As his brother said, "He required an absorbing occupation to prevent him from thinking of ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... to be dethroned, to whom should the sceptre and the crown be given? Lord Bacon had a kingly soul, capacious great thoughts, and high designs, but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the 'Wreck of the Hesperus,' which was given at the examination of Oswell's school. Then all sung, 'There is a happy land, far, far away,' and it, with some of the Christian hymns, was beautiful. They speak English perfectly, but with a little foreign twang. All joined in a metrical prayer before retiring. They have been taught all by their father, and it was very pleasant to see that this teaching had brought out their natural cheerfulness. Native children don't look lively, but these were brimful ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... in examining a new flower would divide it in his mind's eye into its different parts. He would never mistake the calyx for a petal, and he would be able to determine at once the peculiarities of each part. In addition to the melodic phrases the pupil should be able to see the metrical divisions which underlie the form of the piece. He should be able to tell whether the composition is one of eight-measure sections or four-measure sections, or ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... different kinds of composition, in which the world is not perfectly agreed. In England the dispute is not yet settled which is to be preferred, rhyme or blank verse. But however we disagree about what these metrical ornaments shall be, that some metre is essentially necessary ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... love"; and there is hardly a more vital thing in life than this act. For it is something taking place in the subconscious self; it is a revolution, and a growth. It happened that after dinner, Conall wished to hear Ian sing again that loveliest of all metrical Collects, "Lord of All Power and Might," and Thora went with Ian to do her part as accompanist on the piano. As they sang Conall appeared to fall asleep, and no more music ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... expression of anguish, however, and only intimated the agony which he felt by a contortion and a muttered groan. The White Lady passed her cold hand over his arm, and, ere she had finished the following metrical chant, his pain had entirely gone, and no mark of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... poems of 1855; except in one instance, where Tennyson's method in Maud, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating themes of Men and Women, love, art, religion, are the predominating themes of Dramatis Personae. A slight metrical complication—the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of Dis aliter visum and in the third line of the quatrains of May and Death—may be noted as indicating Browning's love of new metrical experiments. In the former of these poems ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the metrical part Dr. Steingass writes to me, "The verses in Al-Hayfa and Yusuf, where not mere doggerel, are spoiled by the spelling. I was rarely able to make out even the metre and I think you have accomplished a feat by translating ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... a good deal of poetic feeling, although without any special indication of originality of thought. The verses entitled "Morning" ought to have rhymes, as it is not blank verse. You ought to study the rules of metrical composition before putting your thoughts into metre. This is as essential to the construction of verse, as to be acquainted with those of harmony or counterpoint, before ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... prevent the further expansion of the work. The contents of the Epic were described in some prefatory verses, and the number of couplets in each Book was stated. The total number of couplets, according to this metrical preface, is about eighty-five thousand. But the limit so fixed has been exceeded in still later centuries; further additions and interpolations have been made; and the Epic as printed and published in Calcutta in this century contains over ninety thousand couplets, excluding ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... thinking more especially of rhymed verse. Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you have a beautiful line ending with the word stars. Were ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... may be noticed here:—the rigmarole, snatches of which probably most of us have heard, which contains an immense number of mere truisms having no connexion with each others, and no bond of union but the metrical form in which their juxtaposition is effected, and the rhyme, which is kept up very well throughout, though sometimes by the introduction of a nonsense line. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... entered the service of he British and Foreign Bible Society, and being sent to Russia edited at Saint Petersburg the New Testament in the Manchu or Chinese Tartar. Whilst at Saint Petersburg he published a book called Targum, consisting of metrical translations from thirty languages. He was subsequently for some years agent of the Bible Society in Spain, where he was twice imprisoned for endeavouring to circulate the Gospel. In Spain he mingled much with the Calore or Zincali, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... branches: this writing seems to have originated at a very early period, and to be traceable rather to the old Greek than to the Phoenician alphabet. There is even a tradition that the Turdetani (round Seville) possessed lays from very ancient times, a metrical book of laws of 6000 verses, and even historical records; at any rate this tribe is described as the most civilized of all the Spanish tribes, and at the same time the least warlike; indeed, it regularly carried on its wars by means of foreign mercenaries. To the same region probably ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... practice of Hazlitt lies in this—that essentially it is at war with sincerity, the foundation of all good writing, to express one's own thoughts by another man's words. This dilemma arises. The thought is, or it is not, worthy of that emphasis which belongs to a metrical expression of it. If it is not, then we shall be guilty of a mere folly in pushing into strong relief that which confessedly cannot support it. If it is, then how incredible that a thought strongly conceived, and bearing about it the impress of one's ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... always remained awkward in company he now became the idol of the world of fashion. He followed up his first literary success by publishing during the next four years his brief and vigorous metrical romances, most of them Eastern in setting, 'The Giaour' (pronounced by Byron 'Jower'), 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Siege of Corinth,' and 'Parisina.' These were composed not only ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Caro, by his poems, his letters, his literary criticism, his comedy, The Beggars, and his metrical translation of the Aeneid, acquired high rank in the judgment ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... underground railways, beautiful theatres and parks, cars which ran without horses or steam, and millions of inhabitants produced no impression whatsoever, my most improbable tale being received with a diffident condescension, equalled only by the metrical repose that stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. Given a few months in New York or Paris, and Mindanao's future Sultana would bloom like a rose in manners and millinery, for, despite her reserve, she is adaptable and what ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... and the wandering Esquimaux, their ditties, which, however insignificant in comparison with the compositions of the former nations, still are entitled in every essential point to the name of poetry; if poetry mean metrical compositions intended to soothe and recreate the mind fatigued by the cares, distresses, and anxieties ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... Iroquois, in numbers and valor, had become quite supreme throughout all this region. All the adjacent tribes bowed before their supremacy. In Mr. Street's metrical romance, entitled "Frontenac" he speaks, in pleasing verse, of the prowess and achievements of these ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... improbable though it seems, will be found to come under the same generalization with the others. Like each of them, it is an idealization of the natural language of strong emotion, which is known to be more or less metrical if the emotion be not too violent; and like each of them it is an economy of the reader's or hearer's attention. In the peculiar tone and manner we adopt in uttering versified language, may be discerned its relationship ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... in the potency of written or spoken words, for the production of good or evil, has been characteristic of all historic epochs and nations. The exorcist of ancient Egypt relied on amulets and mysterious phrases for the cure of disease; and a metrical petition traced on a papyrus-leaf, or a formula of prayer opportunely repeated, "put to flight the serpents, who were ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... broke, according to the viewpoint of S. Yeager, is right and fitting after a jaunt to town when one has a good job back in the hills. But it happened he had no more job than a rabbit. Wherefore, to keep up his spirits he chanted the endless metrical version of the adventures ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... United States in France and in Belgium as delegates. The International Commission upon Weights and Measures also continues its work in Paris. I invite your attention to the necessity of an appropriation to be made in time to enable this Government to comply with its obligations under the metrical convention. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes
... A Metrical Address recited on the one hundredth anniversary of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, on invitation of the United States Congress, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the two ends was filled by younger creatures. It was spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony, free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the years of the great war and those persons over military age who had not been called upon to enter them, or about freedom; ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... educate the working classes to appreciate what is best in standard English poetry. I do not deny that much maybe done in this way, but let us not forget that something more will be needed than a course of instruction in poetic diction and metrical rhythm. Our great poets depict a world which is only to a very small extent that of the working man. It is a world of courts and drawingrooms and General Headquarters, a world of clubs and academies. The working man or woman ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... Rudolf of Ems was based on the Latin epic of Walter of Chatillon, about 1200, which became henceforward the prevailing form of the story. In contrast with it is the thirteenth century Old English epic of Alexander (in vol. i. of Weber's "Metrical Romances," 1810), based on the Callisthenes version. The story appears also in the East, worked up in conjunction with myths of other nationalities, especially the Persian. It appears in Firdusi, and among later writers, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... life which Daphnis and Ardelia spent in the recesses of Eastwell Park. They saw little company and paid few visits. There was a stately excursion now and then, to the hospitable Thynnes at Longleat, and Anne Finch seldom omitted to leave behind her a metrical tribute to the beauties of that mansion. They seem to have kept up little connection with the Court or with London. There is no trace of literary society in this volume. Nicholas Rowe twice sent down for their perusal translations ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... of metrical romance has dwelt in my memory as long {428} as I have been able to remember. I have never seen it in print, nor heard it, at least for some years, from any one else; and have not been able to discover ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... unions. The social and recreative side of life you have now taken over into your keeping, you order recreation which shall be as music or as poetry in your associated lives, harmonious, melodious, rhythmic, metrical. All that I have said to-night leads up to this, that the Associated Life is necessary for the enjoyment and the attainment of the best and the highest things that the world can give, as the Guild and the Company formerly, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
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