"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But I liked Scott's poems far better, and got from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity of fancy. I followed the "Lady of the Lake" throughout, and when I first began to contrive verses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a peaceful spectator of others?[105] The Bacchic and Corybantic dances one can also modulate and quell, by changing the metre from the trochaic and the measure from the Phrygian. Similarly, too, the Pythian priestess, when she descends from her tripod, possesses her soul in peace. Whereas the love-fury, when once it has really seized on a man and inflamed him, can be laid by no Muse, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... amount of rhyme that comes to a printing office. The fact is that at some period in every one's life he writes "poetry." His existence depends upon it. We wrote ten or fifteen verses ourselves once. Had we not written them just then and there, we might not be here. They were in long metre, and "Old Hundred" would have fitted ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... trifles with a long preface? Still there is one thing of which I think I should advise you, and it is that I am thinking of calling these trifles "Hendecasyllables," a title which simply refers to the single metre employed. So, whether you prefer to call them epigrams, or idylls, or eclogues, or little poems, as many do, or any other name, remember that I only offer you "Hendecasyllables." I appeal to your candour to speak to me frankly about my tiny volume as you would to a ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... works as a living organism, each a member of one created unity, the whole a tree of healing and of comfort to the nations, a growth from small beginnings to mighty ends." And again: "As the growth is more and more closely watched and discerned, we shall more and more clearly see that his metre, his words, his grammar and syntax, move but with the deeper changes of mind and soul of which they are outward signs, and that all the faculties of the man went onward together. . . . This subject of the growth, the oneness of Shakespeare . . . is the special ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... of coal, however, was reckoned by Captain Palander at twelve cubic feet or 0.3 cubic metre an hour, with a speed of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the 'Pilgrim's Progress' had not existed. The 'Life of Mr. Badman,' though now scarcely read at all, contains a vivid picture of rough English life in the days of Charles II. Bunyan was a poet, too, in the technical sense of the word, and though he disclaimed the name, and though rhyme and metre were to him as Saul's armour to David, the fine quality of his mind still shows itself in the ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... called in other days the Parterre de Tiber, offered as remarkable an example of the terrace garden as was to be found in France, the terraces rising a metre or more above the actual garden plot and enclosing a ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... ambitiously frequent, that the writer evidently means rather to show his literature than his wit. It is surely sufficient for an author of sixteen, not only to be able to copy the poems of antiquity with judicious selection, but to have obtained sufficient power of language, and skill in metre, to exhibit a series of versification which had in English poetry no precedent, nor has ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... wish 'it' to be made? Deal, plain oak, or oak lead-lined? Oak with a lead lining is the best style. The body is a stock size,"—he felt for the feet, and proceeded to take the measure—"one metre seventy!" he added. "You will be thinking of ordering the funeral service at the church, sir, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... for herself by the suitor destined for her own hand. This is the main dramatic point; the thread is very slender, and is drawn out to its utmost limits through five acts of blank verse. The language and metre are scrupulously correct. But one cannot credit the play with any touch of poetry or imagination. It presents a trite theme tamely and prosaically. Congenital inability of the most inveterate toughness to appreciate dramatic poetry could alone account ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... think too lightly of the elation felt by one who, after learning this language out of the most absurd primers and according to the most ridiculous methods, nevertheless discovered it in its purity, and afterwards came to handle it in the charming rhythm of some artful metre, in the glorious precision of its structure and in all the melodiousness of ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Thought.—The striking reality and directness of this lyric, its immense emotional undercurrent, and its abrupt, almost gasping metre, admirably suited to the impassioned mood of the speaker,—these are a few of the qualities that combine to make "A Woman's Thought" one of the most remarkable poems in ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... even a brief summary of Day's career, and it must suffice us to mention that Archbishop Parker was among his patrons, and that the more important books which appeared from his press included Fox's "Acts and Monuments," 1563, and the "Psalmes in Metre with Music," 1571 (for the printing of which he received a patent dated June 2, 1568). His best known device, of which we give an example, has a double meaning; first it is a pun on his name, and secondly an allusion to ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... better than many things that are not called sad. James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms, prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way, showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and doting over her as his "ain Ailie." "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... begun. I tried the blank metre once, and it would not do, and so I had to begin again in lyrics. Something above an hundred lines is written, and now I am in two panics, just as if one were not enough. First, because it seems to me ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... translated other articles on ballooning from the French. It is also interesting that she retained in her translation the original units which Verne used (metre, feet, leagues), a practice forgotten until recently. This may be the first appearance of a work by Jules Verne in the ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... 6. The metre reverts here again to the asonante form, which is kept up for the remainder of this act. The vowels here used are e, e, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... contain a free translation, and the first English version in prose and metre, of the purest recension of the most celebrated drama of the ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... whether proper names or not, and all nouns in the plural ending with any other letter than s, form the possessive by the addition of the apostrophe and the letter s. The only exceptions to this rule are, that, by poetical license the additional s may be elided in poetry for sake of the metre, and in the scriptural phrases "For goodness' sake." "For conscience' sake," "For Jesus' sake," etc. Custom has done away with the s and these phrases are now idioms of the language. All plural nouns ending in s form the possessive by the addition of the apostrophe only ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... allegorical poems, James Russell Lowell depicted the antagonism of sentiment to which I am referring as existing between Christ and his conventional worshippers. The poem is a slight thing: although strict in metre and perfect in rhyme, it is too flowing and fantastic to be classed high in literature. But if we view it as a scientific essay in dynamic sociology, it is admirable beyond criticism. As its meaning is quite ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... de Boreuil, Arnaud de Marveil, Bertrand de Born, mischievous progenitors of jongleurs, troubadours, provencals, minnesingers, minstrels, and singers of cansos and love chants! Confusion overtake and confound your modern descendants, the "metre ballad-mongers," who carry the shamelessness of the Middle Ages into the nineteenth century, and awake a sleeping neighborhood to the brazen knowledge of their loves and wanton fancies! Destruction and demoralization pursue these pitiable imitators of a barbarous age, when ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... road, only a slight depression now in the expanse of weeds. The automobile that had brought Evan was standing there. It was a shabby little landaulet with the top up. It looked like a taxi-cab but carried no metre. Beyond the line of the road the view was shut off by second-growth woods, with a larger tree ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... ever hear that song again! I was sure of it when I saw the word in the dictionary, for Vance Alden is so sensitive about a mistake. It is funny! Ilga—why, she'd never know whether it was good rhyme or metre or anything! But Vance didn't think of that. Now promise, both of you, that you won't ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... not know the last line, and, as he was but a poor poet, he was unable to make a line to fill the sense, metre, and rhyme. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... opportunity to say that my translation of BEOWULF, of which the last reprint was issued in 1910, is not in prose, as some have misconceived it, but it is in the same metrical form as the translations in the present volume,—an accentual metre in rough imitation of the original. I agree with Professor Gummere and others that this is a better form for the translation of Old English poetry than plain prose. It was approved by the late Professor Child nearly ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... improvement; and as the tutors were all of the orthodox university calibre, who imagine that there is no knowledge (but vanity) in any other works than those in which their own education has consisted, so Henry Vavasour became at once the victor and victim of Bentleys and Scaligers, word-weighers and metre-scanners, till, utterly ignorant of everything which could have softened his temper, dignified his misfortunes, and reconciled him to his lot, he was sinking fast into the grave, soured by incessant pain into moroseness, envy, and bitterness; exhausted by an unwholesome ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was probably Lissoy, in Ireland, where he grew up; but the village of his imagination is lovelier than any actual spot, and there is no use in hunting for it on the map. See the first note on The Traveller for remarks on metre, etc. ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... presidentship of the society, it won't be enough, of course, for me alone to preside; it will be necessary to invite two others to serve as vice-presidents; you might then enlist Ling Chou and Ou Hsieh, both of whom are cultured persons. The one to choose the themes and assign the metre, the other to act as copyist and supervisor. We three cannot, however, definitely say that we won't write verses, for, if we come across any comparatively easy subject and metre, we too will indite a stanza if we feel so disposed. But you ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... sacrifices; four are the cardinal points; four is the number of letters; and four also, as is ever known, are the legs of a cow."[29] Vandin said, "Five is the number of fires; five are the feet of the metre called Punki; five are the sacrifices; five locks, it is said in the Vedas, are on the heads of the Apsaras; and five sacred rivers are known in the world."[30] Ashtavakra said. "Six cows, it is asserted by some, and paid as a gratuity on the occasion of establishing the sacred fire; six are ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... when he visited Vallombrosa with Crabb Robinson in 1837, wrote an inferior poem there, in a rather common metre, in honour of Milton's association ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... methods now govern the Muses, The modes of expression have changed with the times; That low is the rank of the poet who uses The old-fashioned verse with intentional rhymes. And quite out of date, too, is rhythmical metre; The critics declare it an insult to art. But oh! the sweet swing of it, oh! the clear ring of it, Oh the great pulse of it, right from the heart, Art or ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... been disused, but which retained its hold on the affections of the common people, who were of Anglo-Saxon stock. In the extracts we give from the poem, the measure is retained, but the words modernized, so far as can be done without injuring the sense or metre. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... of the State Studs did not credit the information sent from the Horde, so that in 1856 there was sent to the sitting committee a second metre, for the speed to be followed on it, the circumference of the circle having been previously measured. The president of the committee repotted that the measurement of the course was correct, except that in every 4 versts (2-2/3 miles) it was out 17-1/2 feet. The deficiency was then ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... equally characteristic, but less obvious, are forgotten. It is almost impossible for a translator to do justice to this sententious brevity unless the stanza in which he writes is in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace. If he chooses a longer and more diffuse measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverb by expansion; not to mention that much will often depend on the very position of the sentence in the stanza. Perhaps, in order to preserve these external peculiarities, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... Miss Maxwell. "Though they don't amount to anything as poetry, they show a good deal of promise in certain directions. You almost never make a mistake in rhyme or metre, and this shows you have a natural sense of what is right; a 'sense of form,' poets would call it. When you grow older, have a little more experience,—in fact, when you have something to say, I think you may write very good verses. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the ...
— Ion • Plato
... equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott's genius did not reach its highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises of his loved Border-land. The very quality in his verse which makes it seize so powerfully on the imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous men, often makes ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... busy, why, leisure Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: Faith, and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy. Here we've got peace; and aghast I'm Caught thinking war the true pastime. Is there a reason in metre? Give us your speech, master Peter!" 10 I who, if mortal dare say so, Ne'er am at loss with my Naso "Sire," I replied, "joys prove cloudlets: "Men are the merest Ixions"— Here the King whistled aloud, "Let's —Heigho—go look at our lions." Such are ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... metronome,—time to which our own souls furnish tune, sweet or sorrowful, inspiriting or saddening, as we will. It is a curious experiment to try repeating or chanting lines in time and cadence following the patter of raindrops on windows. It will sometimes be startling in its effect: no metre, no accent fails of its response in the low, liquid stroke of the tender drops,—there seems an uncanny rapport between ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... estate,—and that authors, no longer the disinterested and suffering apostles, of art, have chosen rather to bear the wand of power and luxury than to be inspired. We can imagine his horror at the sacrilegious vulgarization of print, that people without taste rush into angelic metre, that dunces and sages thrive together on the public indiscrimination. How would he marvel to see literary reputations born, grow old, and die within a season, the owners thereof content to be damned or forgotten eternally for a moment's incense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... there would in fact have been no end of it. With this turn, however, his time was not quite thrown away, nor his gravity. In conjunction with Dampier, Langley, and Serjeant, who were styled the learned Cons, he composed a very long English poem, in the same metre as the Bath Guide, and of which it was then held a favour to get a copy. He had so much of advanced life about him, that the masters always looked upon him as a man; and this serious manner followed him through his pastimes. He was fond ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Hubert," said the Minstrel, "but it is a wondrous tale, and fit to be put in metre to the ancient tune, 'Sorrow came to ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... below, who seemed rather flattered by her attention, and would swim about, singing their sweetest songs to her alone. Passers-by were equally curious as to her, but a broken lyre gives forth no music, and her heart responded not with any more long metre hymns. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... that "Bitter-Sweet" was not this and that and t'other, but, after all said and done, it would remain an obstinately charming little book. It is not free from faults of taste, nor from a certain commonplaceness of metre; but Mr. Holland always saves himself in some expression so simply poetical, some image so fresh and natural, the harvest of his own heart and eye, that we are ready to forgive him all faults, in our thankfulness at finding the soul of Theocritus transmigrated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... those followed in the translation of Schiller's complete Poems that was published by me in 1851, namely, as literal a rendering of the original as is consistent with good English, and also a very strict adherence to the metre of the original. Although translators usually allow themselves great license in both these points, it appears to me that by so doing they of necessity destroy the very soul of the work they profess to translate. In fact, it is not a translation, but ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... Actes of the Apostles translated into Englyshe metre, by Chrystofer Tye, Doctor in musyke, with notes to synge, and also to play upon the lute. Printed by Seres, 1553, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, Bisesa he never dreamed that his landlady was craning her head up from her pillows in a vain effort to discover the tune, or to reduce it to the known terms of short metre rhythm. His broken, irregular measures troubled her, as did also his broken, irregular hours of work. There were days when he rode far afield, or was seen lying on his back under the pines by the brookside, listening ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... river. Anxiously, anxiously have I sought one striking original idea in the whole poem (appalling in its length), but to no purpose. The transcendental literature of Germany absorbs all that, at first glance, arrests the attention. Without learning, imagination, or the attraction of a beautiful metre (like that of Tennyson's 'Princess'), I am at a loss to know what has given this poem its notoriety. Not its daring speculation, surely, for it is but a timid compromise ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... permanent. We set a thing down in ink—we print it in a book—because we feel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving. But to set this memorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose; and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be a record which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that it convey a certain pleasure ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... all the restraints of rhyme and rhythm. But we pronounce this departure from literal truth a merit and not a defect. We consider Goethe's second "Iphigenie," written in verse, far preferable to the first one written in prose; nay, it is the rhythm or metre itself which communicates to the work its incomparable beauty. In a review of Longfellow's "Dante," published last year, we argued this very point in one of its special applications; the artist must copy his original, but he must not copy it ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... ages of writing, it has been found difficult or impossible to keep linguistic novelties and novelties of metre out of old epics. We later refer (Archaeology of the Epic) to the Chancun de Willame, of which an unknown benefactor printed two hundred copies in 1903. Mr. Raymond Weeks, in Romania, describes Willame as taking a place beside the Chanson ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... earth, there are very few but can repeat a part or the whole of "Mother Hubbard," and I have seen it somewhat asserted that it is to be found in almost every home in the civilised world. Its rude style of poetry tells nothing against it. The child knows nothing of correct metre: as long as there is a jingling rhyme it is satisfied. The dog is the domestic animal in millions of families, and in numberless cases is actually a more loved companion then brothers and sisters. A simple rhyme, therefore, about this attached, playful, and constant companion is sure to fascinate ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... Landscape Garden. Our present theme, however, has regard only to its manifestation in words. And here let me speak briefly on the topic of rhythm. Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected—is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... used by our author to denote the head of the State (e.g. Raja, Protector of men, Lord of men, &c.) to suit the metre or fancifully. In translation we have thought ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... They evolved the hexameter; the laisse of the Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the mediaeval rhymed romance. The metre of improvised verse changed into the artistic lyric. These lyric forms were fixed, in many cases, by the art of writing. But poetry did not remain solely in professional and literary hands. The mediaeval ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... in a peat bog of Schleswig; that is in the very country of the Angles; judging by the coins found at the same time, it must belong to the third century. It measures 22 metres 67 centimetres in length, 3 metres, 33 centim. in breadth, and 1 metre 19 centim. in height. Specimens of Scandinavian ships have also been discovered. When a chief died his ship was buried with him, as his chariot or horse was in other countries. A description of a Scandinavian funeral (the chief placed ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... would be a true ballad all through, were it not that there is tacked on to it a long moral in an altered metre. I do not much value the moral, but the ballad is excellent, not only in much of its versification and in the turns of its language, but in the quaint and true picture it gives of the French nation. The drummer, either by himself or by some of his family, has drummed ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Denah, "I have done already almost half a metre of the piece I began at the same time. ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... Al-Aghlab al-Ajibi temp. Mohammed: the Alfiyah-grammar of Ibn Malik is in Rajaz Muzdawij, the hemistichs rhyming and the assonance being confined to the couplet. Al-Hariri also affects Rajaz in the third and fifth Assemblies. So far Arabic metre is true to Nature: in impassioned speech the movement of language is iambic: we say "I will, I will," not ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of this ministerial trio was printed in the year 1640, at Cambridge, and has the honor of being the first production of the North American press that rises to the dignity of a book. It was entitled, "The Psalms newly turned into Metre." A second edition was printed in 1647. "It was more to be commended, however," says Mr. Peirce, in his History of Harvard University, "for its fidelity to the text, than for the elegance of its versification, which, having been executed by persons of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... music again changing with the metre.] Give up the scene, give up, ye sordid rocks, The last of Arnold in his English home, Which in your bosom lives for evermore, A deathless picture; England cast it out Not being English, and it shivered on, Coiling about the world, till it was caught And locked into ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... contrary to all expectations, was succeeded by a most abominable fog, thick and white like cotton-wool. These were hardly ideal conditions under which to close a rocky and unknown coast, but it had to be done. The trouble was that it was entirely useless taking soundings, as the twenty-metre depth-line on the chart went right up to the land. We crept slowly eastwards, till, when by dead reckoning we were ten miles inside the coast, the Navigator accidentally leant on the whistle lever; this action on his part probably saved the ship, as an immediate echo ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... l. 5. —in Nishadha lord of earth. I have accented this word not quite correctly Nishadha, in order to harmonise with the trochaic flow of my metre. It appears to be the same as Nishadha-rashtra and Nishadha-desa. See Wilford's list of mountains, rivers, countries; from the Puranas and other books. Asiatic Researches, ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... several, hardly deserve to be dignified with so high a title. At no part of his life had Bunyan much title to be called a poet. He did not aspire beyond the rank of a versifier, who clothed his thoughts in rhyme or metre instead of the more congenial prose, partly for the pleasure of the exercise, partly because he knew by experience that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that form. Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse than is commonly held, remarks ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... comest thou,' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our service—Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled. That flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... for the later effort to discredit him in that respect. It is true that, like Browning and almost every other Victorian poet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that in his case (unlike Browning's) both the poets were good. The first is more or less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in the mere choice of words. "Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud"—"Flits by the sea-blue bird of March"—"Leafless ribs and iron horns"—"When the long dun wolds are ribbed with snow"—in all these cases one word is the keystone of an arch which ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... died here in the seventh century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed biographies will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in 1766, in the Cuomo Library at Naples.] treated in the heroic style and metre, as though he were a new Achilles. As a jeu d'esprit the book might pass; but it is deadly serious. Single men will always be found to perpetrate monstrosities of literature; the marvel is that an entire generation of writers should have worked themselves into a state of mind which ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... held on his way, deaf to all that did not move him or interest him, and fixing jealously on all that fed his fancy. Such books as Grimm's Fairy Tales and Masterman Ready were wells of delight, enacted as they were in a strange and exciting world; and he was sensitive, too, to the beauty of metre and sonorous phrases, learning poetry so easily that it was supposed to be a species of wilfulness in him that the Collects and texts, and the very Psalms—that seemed to him so unreal and husk-like then, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... chapter XI. in Gorresio's edition. That scholar justly observes: "The eleventh chapter, Description of Evening, is certainly the work of the Rhapsodists and an interpolation of later date. The chapter might be omitted without any injury to the action of the poem, and besides the metre, style, conceits and images differ from the general tenour of the poem; and that continual repetition of the same sounds at the end of each hemistich which is not exactly rime, but assonance, reveals the artificial ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... no longer read at all, and that there is only one familiar instance recorded of a nephew who read his uncle. The exception tends rather to support the rule, since it needed a Macaulay to produce, and two volumes to record it. Finally, the metre does not permit it. One may not say: "Who reads me, when I am ashes, is my ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... read them without delay. You will surely find something there which, for good or ill, is unique. You can name—or at least I can name—nothing to compare it with. Goldsmith and Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied, so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused such a man to pass away, and to leave a total output of about five ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ready, and lacked nothing except some furniture, which was daily expected. The barracks, 25 metres (81 feet) long and 8 metres (20 feet) wide, consisted of a solid wooden framework, with partitions either of timber or cement, constructed in the camp by native workmen. A corridor about 1 metre 75 (6 feet) wide runs all along the front of the building, and gives access to the chambers. These measure about 3 metres 50 (14 feet) by 4 metres (17 feet), and 4 metres (17 feet) from the wooden floor to the ceiling. All the interior walls ...
— Turkish Prisoners in Egypt - A Report By The Delegates Of The International Committee - Of The Red Cross • Various
... A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... ballads is partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed. The Spanish ballad, or romance, was a stanza (redondilla, roundel) of four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement—just the metre, in short, of "Locksley Hall." Only the second and fourth lines rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... whence no travellers return." Thomas M. Blasdell, step this way, And tell me how you feel to-day? You thought I'd pass and let you go, Old twisted groove! but 'tis not so, Like charcoal, brimstone and salpetre. I'll touch you off now in short metre. 'Tis long since first your eye, my man, Along the rifle barrel ran; The "crotch" or "globe" was all the same, If you could only see the game. Or the "bulls-eye," the missile flew Into its centre straight and true, In the old days when practiced eye Was ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... it grow where it will, and I guess we raise about the best kind, which is common sense, and I warn't to be put down with short metre, arter that fashion. So I tried the old man; sais I, 'Uncle,' sais I, 'if you will divorce the eatables from the drinkables that way, why not let the servants come and tend. It's monstrous onconvenient and ridikilous to be a ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... this confusion: "The mere matter of all poetry—to wit, the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men—being unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme, cadence, and what not, to this invariable material." What has become here of the substance of Paradise Lost—the story, scenery, characters, sentiments as they are in the poem? They have vanished clean ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... "What does the young gentleman want now?" and I blubberingly answered, "I—want—to—go—go—home." I recovered from that attack with the aid of counter irritation by the application of birch, and emollients in the shape of scribbling verses to the metre of "dulce—dulce domum." The effects of the second are now before the reader, from which I opine he is the greatest sufferer, and this is dispersed by music, for the "retreat" has just been beaten, and I shall ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... containing moral maxims. (e) Hedyphagetica, 'On Gastronomy,' modelled on a hexameter poem by Archestratus (about B.C. 310). (f) Sota, so called from Sotades, after whom the Sotadean metre has been named. The book was probably of a lascivious nature. (g) Epigrams; the chief of which are ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... mastery of the problems of metre is for each student to tread alone. The best plan is to read aloud a considerable quantity. Then the technical language of the books will lose its terrors and the simplicity of construction of good poetry will become apparent. If the student will read so much of this poetry that his senses ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... of twelve compositions, with no other internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre, character, and excellence. They are called AEglogues, according to the whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the classical writers called Eclogues: "AEglogai, as it were aigon or aigonomon logoi, that is, Goatherd's Tales." ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... stood pre-eminent and eclipsed the brightness of the rest: the latter were the compositions of a school of bards in the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, among whom in like manner Hesiod enjoyed the greatest celebrity. The poems of both schools were composed in the hexameter metre and in a similar dialect; but they differed widely in almost every ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... weights was earlier than the art of writing, although the latter is of high antiquity. Latin poetry began in the lyrical form. Dancing was a common trade, and this was accompanied with pipers, and religious litanies were sung from the remotest antiquity. Comic songs were sung in Saturnian metre, accompanied by the pipe. The art of dancing was a public care, and a powerful impulse was early given by Hellenic games. But in all the arts of music and poetry there was not the easy development as in Greece. Architecture owed its first impulse to the Etruscans, who borrowed from the Greeks, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... pet detestation which Landor nursed with great volubility. In 1860 all Anglo-Saxon Florence was reading with no little interest a poem in this metre, which had recently appeared, and which of course passed under the critical eye of the old Grecian. "Well, Mr. Landor, what do you think of the new poem?" I asked during its nine days' reign. "Think of it? I don't think of it. I don't want to be bothered with it. The book ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... checks which Aristotle's rules impose upon profligacy? The idea is more poetical, {452} and the line runs more smoothly; while the altered line is prosaic in comparison, and the metre is not correct. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... will be best understood by a reference to the map, with the aid of the following few figures. The towns of Galatz and Braila or Ibrail, situated on the Danube, are fifteen metres above the sea-level, a metre being, as the reader doubtless knows, equal to 1.095, or as nearly as possible 1-1/10 yard. At Bucarest, the capital, which is thirty or forty miles inland, the land rises to a height of seventy-seven metres;[6] still further ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... in "Ajax" are long. Here, the "j" is to be pronounced as a "double letter" (technically an affricate) as in English.] alter{i}us has always a short i and alIus a long i [The "i" in "alterius" is conventionally shortened in poetry to accommodate the metre.] ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... not good for metre. Even when an actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the wing without a certain measure in the movement of the pinion. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... the father, probably tempted by the alluring offers of a richer suitor, forbade the nuptials. Archilochus thereupon composed so bitter a lampoon upon the family that the daughters of the nobleman are said to have hanged themselves. Says SYMONDS, "He made Iambic metre his own, and sharpened it into a terrible weapon of attack. Each verse he wrote was polished, and pointed like an arrow-head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges against his sweetheart, her sisters, and her ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Clytaemnestra advances to the front. At the same moment the Choral Ode is finished and the Chorus take up their usual position during the Episodes, drawn up in two lilies in front of the Altar facing the Stage. They speak only by their Foreman (or Corypliceus), and use the ordinary Iambic Metre (equivalent ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... writer with very fair foreshadowing; but it does not fore-shadow his poetry in the very least. It is quite free from the usual formal faults of a boy's verse, except some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for rhyme ("full" and "beautiful," "palaces" and "days"). It manages a rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed ababcc and ending with an Alexandrine) without too much of the monotony which is its special danger. And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught are interesting and abode with him, such as ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... some trouble to convince themselves that the greater part of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "One advantage," says Mr. Southey, "this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. Southey ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... do not shed a tear, because You've heard my story told in metre, For I'm a Carpet, and he ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... ranges holding hands about an immensity of space. It was one of our giant days to his emotions, and particularly memorable to him through the circumstance that it insisted on a record in verse, and he was unused to the fetters of metre: and although the verse was never seen by man, his attempt at it confused his ideas of his expressive powers. Oddly too, while scourging the lines with criticism, he had a fondness for them: they stamped a radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... unrivalled ability to handle metre, he had sought to rejuvenate the fixed poetic forms. He turned the tail of the sonnet into the air, like those Japanese fish of polychrome clay which rest on stands, their heads straight down, their tails on top. Sometimes he corrupted it by using only masculine rhymes to which he seemed ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... uneasily; sundry persons coughed and cleared their throats, but all remained silent. Odell was not much of a singer, but had practised on "Old Hundred" so much, that he could lead that air very well; and the hymn happening, by good luck, to be set to a long-metre tune, he was able to start it. This done, the congregation joined in, and the singing went off pretty well. After praying and reading a chapter in the Bible, Odell sat down to collect his thoughts for the sermon, which was, of course, to ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... taste is plain. There is plainly visible also, however, a keen sense for natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living. If in "Ashtaroth" and "Bellona" we recognise the swing of a familiar metre, in such poems as "The Sick Stockrider" we perceive the genuine poetic instinct united to a very clear perception of the loveliness of duty and ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Metre and rhyme, I grant you—long and short—but show me the afflatus! They make verse with a penknife, like their wooden nutmegs. They are perfect Chinese for ingenuity and imitation, and the resemblance to the real Simon-pure is very perfect—externally. But ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... every seed had its way every year for five years, produce from a single plant ten thousand billions—enough to cover the whole area of the dry land of the world, allowing seventy-three plants to the square metre.[footnote*: "Natural History of Plants"—Kerner and Oliver] Perhaps God permits the seeming waste of such an overwhelming proportion of the seed formed, to show us the Fountain of Life that there is in Him; and to teach ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... of an ampere: A current in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length and negligible cross-section, 1 metre apart in vacuum, would produce a force equal to 2E-7 newton ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... told his father what he had done: "I have learned Welsh, and have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand lines, into English rhyme. I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered the old book of Ballads into English metre. I have learned many other tongues, and have acquired some knowledge even of Hebrew and Arabic." He read and conversed with William Taylor; he read alone in the Guildhall of Norwich, where the Corporation ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... and with his soul stirred by the events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the song that made him famous. They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre worse. But once his heart took fire and burned for a day sheer white, and in that day he wrote words that a nation sang, and now all the world is singing. And they are proud of him, and when people come to Sycamore Ridge on pilgrimages to see the author of the song, men do not smile in wonder; ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... inform the reader, that I had before written a Canto on the subject of this poem; but I was dissatisfied with the metre, and felt the necessity of some connecting idea that might give it a degree of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... one after another, slowly, solemnly, in a sort of inexorable metre, like the blows of ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... very neat quarto, to which the title "Miscellaneous Poems" might be given. I was pleased with this, as it gave me an opportunity of quietly imitating well-known and celebrated authors. I had composed a good number of so- called Anacreontic poems, which, on account of the convenience of the metre, and the lightness of the subject, flowed forth readily enough. But these I could not well take, as they were not in rhyme; and my desire before all things was to show my father something that would please him. So much the more, therefore, did the spiritual odes seem suitable, which ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Notwithstanding the Shower, he continued in the Garden, and never quitted it, till he had found one Moiety of the Tablet, which was unfortunately broke in such a Manner, that even the half Lines were good sense, and good Metre, tho' very short. But what was still more remarkably unfortunate, they appear'd at first View, to be a severe satyr upon the King: The ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... food for almost nothing, and people are starving here in St. Pierre; there is clothing for almost nothing, and poor girls cannot earn enough to buy a dress. The pretty printed calicoes (indiennes) that used to be two francs and a half the metre, now sell at twelve sous the metre; but nobody has any money. And if you read our papers,—Les Colonies, La Defense Coloniale,— you will find that there are sons wicked enough to beat their mothers: oui! yche ka batt manman! It is ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life. Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else. The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... his thought he substituted for Lalage the fair-haired Bertha, quite regardless of the requirements of the metre. ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... permanent of all the poetry of this age. Though written by both Troubadours and Trouveres, the latter were far superior in style and invention, and it is mostly their work which has survived. These romances were sometimes in prose, but more often in poetry of extremely smooth and flowing metre. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... indication of these signs, in reproducing them in their throats, and moreover in adding the text, they exercise at the same time the hand, ear, and eye, and attain orthography and calligraphy quicker than you would believe; and, finally, since all this must be practised and copied according to pure metre and accurately fixed time, they learn to understand much sooner than in other ways the high value of measure and computation. On this account, of all imaginable means, we have chosen music as the first element of our education, for from this equally easy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... worthless subjects, whose very flattery displays absence of taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year—besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former factions, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and we thought that a pretty smart thing for a beginning. "Oh, never mind—go farther on—any—long meter," uttered his interlocutor, and he forthwith made a sanguine dash into the centre of the book, and gave out a hymn. The company got into a "peculiar metre" tune at once, and the singing was about the most comically wretched we ever heard. The lad who came in with the elderly men tried every range of voice in every verse, and thought that he had a right to do just as he liked with the music; the elderly men near him hammed ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... that any poem, original or translated, by Pope or Dryden or any of their school, really resembles in any degree the bucolic poetry of the Greeks. Mr. Morris, whose poems appear to me to resemble it more almost than anything I have ever seen, of course writes what is technically Pope's metre, and equally of course is not of Pope's school. Whether or no Pope and Dryden intended to resemble the old bucolic poets in style is, to say the least, immaterial. If they did not, there is no ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... there comes an Englishman nourished on this poetry, taught his trade by this poetry, getting words, rhyme, metre from this poetry; for even of that stanza which the Italians used, and which Chaucer derived immediately from the Italians, the basis and suggestion was probably given in France. Chaucer (I have already named him) fascinated his contemporaries, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Aymon, 1504.—A fine copy is offered at 15s. in a catalogue about 1760. Of the Famous history of the vertuous and godly woman Judith, 1565, all that is so far discoverable is that it is a translation in English metre by Edward Jenynges. A title-page, preserved among Ames's collections at the British Museum, is copied by me in Bibl. ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... a single syllable is sufficient to make good English, good sense, and good metre of a passage which is otherwise defective in these three particulars. It retains the s in "labours," keeps the comma in its place, and provides that antecedent for "it," which was justly considered ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... it is worth while to follow his career. His literary fate was what might have been expected. After the Persian war, the reputation of his verses rapidly decayed. Wits arose in Athens, who laughed so furiously at his style and his metre, in the Delphic oracles, that at length some echoes of their scoffing began to reach Delphi; upon which the god and his inspired ministers became sulky, and finally took refuge in prose, as the only shelter they could think of from the caustic ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... essential of the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck by a certain attractiveness in the ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... Apple-Jelly-Fish-Tree," 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. ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... disgust with his profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly abandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these inspired works ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... thought that a grave error had been committed in selecting the narrow metre gauge; it was all very well for phosphate transport, but once the line over Feriana and the branch to Tozeur are completed, they would have to deal with other material, such as tourists, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... me see! What have I done already? I have learnt Welsh, and have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand lines, into English rhyme; I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered the old book of ballads cast by the tempest upon the beach into corresponding English metre. Good! have I done enough already to secure myself a reputation of a thousand years? No, no! certainly not; I have not the slightest ground for hoping that my translations from the Welsh and Danish will be read at the end of a thousand years. Well, but ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... speech, beginning "Should we be silent and not speak," is nearly word for word from Plutarch, with some additional graces of expression, and the charm of metre superadded. I shall give the last lines of this address, as illustrating that noble and irresistible eloquence which was the crowning ornament of the character. One exquisite touch of nature, which is distinguished by italics, was beyond the rhetorician ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... verse and music have added to their tragedy! And how much have we lost, toward a true appreciation of their dramatic art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of their melody and harmony, but even the true metric time of their odes! music and metre, which must have surely been as noble as their poetry, their sculpture, their architecture, possessed by the same exquisite sense of form and of proportion. One thing we can understand—how this musical form ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... the Hebrew MSS. from which they translated, or added of themselves; the rest is made up of what are probably original phrases but omitted from the Hebrew by the carelessness of copyists; yet none of these differences is of importance save where the Greek corrects an irregularity in the Hebrew metre, or yields sense when the Hebrew ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... been stimulated by Wagner's operas and by the reading of such poems as William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung". Prose has been selected as the medium of translation, since it is hardly possible to give an accurate rendering and at the same time to meet the demands imposed by rhyme and metre; at least, none of the verse translations made thus far have succeeded in doing this. The prose translations, on the other hand, mostly err in being too continuous and in condensing too much, so that they retell the story instead of ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Daughter, Hymns of a Hermit, and I know not what other extensive stock of pieces; concerning which he was now somewhat at a loss as to his true course. He could write verses with astonishing facility, in any given form of metre; and to various readers they seemed excellent, and high judges had freely called them so, but he himself had grave misgivings on that latter essential point. In fact here once more was a parting of the ways, "Write in Poetry; write in Prose?" upon ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... because in Q1 line 31 begins 'And,' not 'Nay'; the Duke might say 'Nay' if he were cutting the previous speaker short, but not 'And.' (d) is surely no addition. If the lines are cut out, not only is the metre spoilt, but the obvious reason for Iago's words, 'I see, Sir, you are eaten up with passion,' disappears, and so does the reference of his word 'satisfied' in 393 to Othello's 'satisfied' in 390. (e) is the famous passage about the Pontic Sea, and I reserve it for the present. (f) ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the well-known iambic trimeter, i.e. the metre of six feet (twelve syllables) used in all the speeches ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... the Iliad in hexameters, no man can tell; but having done so, he thereby constituted for ever the proper metre of Greek—and Latin—Epic poetry. But what a multitude of subjects, how different from one another does that, and every other Epic poem, comprehend! Glory to the hexameter! it suits them all. Now, in every Epic poem, and in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... At last they came crying that he was coming to the king's house, and fell to their dispute, but we would listen to neither party, for we were busy with a dispute about the merits of the Great and of the Little Metre; nor were we disturbed when they passed our door with sticks of enchantment under their arms, travelling towards the forest to contend against his coming, nor when they returned after nightfall with torn robes and despairing cries; for the click of our knives writing our thoughts in Ogham filled ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... will in this place give a few observations upon his Epitaphs,—the largest collection we have in our language, from the pen of any Writer of eminence. As the epitaphs of Pope and also those of Chiabrera, which occasioned this dissertation, are in metre, it may be proper here to enquire how far the notion of a perfect epitaph, as given in a former Paper, may be modified by the choice of metre for the vehicle, in preference to prose. If our opinions be just, it is manifest that the basis must remain the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... attainable, or ruins the work you have already done. It has taken us a long time to find out how to make a flat surface, and when we were called upon to make the twenty-eight plane and parallel surfaces for the investigation of the value of the metre of the international standard, every one of which required an accuracy of one-twentieth of a wave length, we had a difficult task to perform. However, it was found that every surface had the desired accuracy, and some of them went far ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... pencilled on the wallpaper by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared to be recent. Ella could resist no longer, but seizing a pen impulsively, wrote to him as a brother-poet, using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him in her letter on his triumphant executions in metre and rhythm of thoughts that moved his soul, as compared with her own brow-beaten efforts ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... as he had been on his first day in the cavalry, at hearing behind him the thunder of many hoofs. Having once become used to the noise, he was even thrilled by the swinging metre of it. A kind of wild harmony was in it, something which made one forget everything else. At such times Pasha longed to break into his long, wind-splitting lope, but he learned that he must leave the others no more than a pace or ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... metrical arrangement, Saxon poetry differed from our modern English as well as from the classical models, in that their poets followed no laws of metre, but arranged their vernacular verses without any distinct rules, but simply to please the ear. "To such a selection and arrangement of words as produced this effect, they added the habit of frequently omitting the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... father's wish that Tennyson competed for the English prize poem. The theme, Timbuctoo, was not inspiring. Thackeray wrote a good parody of the ordinary prize poem in Pope's metre:- ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of Brahman, while such marks are set forth in the passages (discussed above) which refer to pra/n/a and the ether. Nor, again, is Brahman indicated in the preceding section, 'the Gayatri is everything whatsoever exists,' &c. (III, 12); for that passage makes a statement about the Gayatri metre only. And even if that section did refer to Brahman, still Brahman would not be recognised in the passage at present under discussion; for there (in the section referred to) it is declared in the clause, 'Three feet of it are the Immortal in heaven'—that heaven constitutes the abode; while ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... then, may well be included its power as a metre of the intellectual advance of mankind. In these splendid symbols man writes the record of his advancing humanity. How all is interwoven with the All! A petrified national mind will certainly appear in a petrified ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... examples of righteousness, shows that Ezekiel had the Deluge in his mind, and increases the significance of the underlying parallel between his argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may be added that Ezekiel has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and the metre of the two passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr. Daiches points out, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... schooldays, what had been inclination before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates, I studied ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... resolution;—in brief Schiller to the life! Besides this, a chorus for a concert! I have no longer any feeling for that kind of thing, and could not produce it at any price. I should not know where to take my inspiration. One other thing: my musical position towards verse and metre has undergone an enormous change. I could not at any price write a melody to Schiller's verses, which are entirely intended for reading. These verses must be treated musically in a certain arbitrary ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... is a constant metre of the orator. There are many audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn. If anything comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence of the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... garments, and one of them sang a rough sort of song, the others accompanying him with gestures. They stretched out their hands, and alternately struck their feet against the ground with frantic contortions. The last words they repeated in chorus, and we easily distinguished a sort of metre, but I am not sure that there was any rhyme; the music ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... but sweeter Than ever a moondawn smiled, Moves, measured of no tune's metre, The song in ...
— A Dark Month - From Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works Vol. V • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... text: Italicized stanzas will be indented 5 spaces. Italicized words or phrases will be capitalized. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, some obvious errors, after being confirmed against other sources, have ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... I felt ashamed of the lightness of my own thoughts, but I had to tell him of my speculations upon after-the-war developments in aviation: nurses flying Voisins, with the cars filled with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties taking comfortable outings in gigantic biplanes of the R-6 type; mothers, as of old, gazing apprehensively at speed-dials, cautioning fathers about "driving too fast," and ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... roughly coincides with that of the road, until the equator is reached, after which it strikes by a more direct route across the Mau plateau to the lake, which it reaches at Port Florence on Kavirondo Gulf. The railway is 584 m. long and is of metre (3.28 ft.) gauge, the Sudan, and South and Central African lines being of 3 ft. 6 in. gauge. The Uganda railway is essentially a mountain line, with gradients of one in fifty and one in sixty. From Mombasa it crosses to the mainland by a bridge half a mile long, and ascends the plateau till it reaches ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Thomas," quoth Mr. Richardson, "it is not seemly to jest over the Word of God. The writers of our Book of Psalms in metre held rightly, that God's altar needs no polishing; and truly they have rendered the words of David into ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Spanish metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom, stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... without meaning, or with no significance in the connection where they occur are used. These may serve merely to fill out a line or to meet the demands of metre. Such often appear to be names of the style of "Humpty Dumpty;" these may be phonetically happy, as similar ones often are in European riddles, fitting well with the word or idea to be called up. Marabotania is probably meaningless, merely for euphony. ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... number of repetitions in the tune, and has a chorus that is sung at the end of each verse. I have not presumed to arrange it in metre; but the following is the substance: "We are assembled in the habiliments of war, and will go in quest of our enemies. We will march to their land and spoil their possessions. We will take their women and children, and lead them into ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... adores that Pilgrim flock, The same that split old Plymouth rock, Their "Bay Psalm" when they tried to sing. Devoid of metre, sense, and tune, Who but a Puritanic loon Could have devised ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... pooh!—Booh!" off he rode for the Tavern, where he and the landlord had a haze, the landlord was notified to leave, short metre; and being fully revenged for the insult paid his millions, old Stephen Girard, the great Philadelphia financier, rode back to where he was better used for his money, and evidently better satisfied than ever, that money is mighty when brought ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... loyalty! There is an anthem to celebrate the Union of Hearts! It should be sung round a table, Gladstonians and Irish Home Rulers hand in hand, as in "Auld Lang Syne," and given out by Pastor W.E. Gladstone, as short metre, two lines at a time. Why not? Stranger things are happening ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... my rhyming be at fault, If e'er I chance to scribble dope, If that my metre ever halt, I err ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the metre is essential to the full sense of the meaning and of the beauty of all poetry. Even the rhymeless flow of blank verse is absolutely necessary to an accurate and entire perception of the effect the author intends to produce: it is in both cases as the colouring to a picture. It may ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... as you can all your present notions about the nature of verse and poetry. Take a sponge and wipe the slate of your mind. In particular, do not harass yourself by thoughts of metre and verse forms. Second: Read William Hazlitt's essay "On Poetry in General." This essay is the first in the book entitled *Lectures on the English Poets*. It can be bought in various forms. I think the cheapest satisfactory edition is in Routledge's "New ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... by a succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... look at these badgers! with a long leg on one quarter and a short leg on the other. The wench herself might well and truly have said all that matter without the poet, bating the rhymes and metre. Among the girls in the country there are many such SHILLY-SHALLYS, who give themselves sore eyes and sharp eye- water; I would cure ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor |
