"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stand ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to whose contact he ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... universally acknowledged to be, except perhaps Liszt's Feux Follets. The most important point would appear to lie not so much in the interchange of the groups of legato and staccato as in the exercise of rhythmic contrasts—the alternation of two and three part metre (that is, of four and six) in the same bar. To overcome this fundamental difficulty in the art of musical reproduction is the most important thing here, and with true zeal it may even be ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... in this quotation, merely showing the metre, would have no appeal to us; with all its perfection and its proportion, rhyme and cadence, it would only be a construction. But when it is the outer body of an inner idea it assumes a personality. The idea flows ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... ununderstood. It was very sad, but 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 doating over her as his "ain Ailie," "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... brilliant, is full of meaning. It has an interlude of tender romance. "Coy Maiden" is a graceful thing, but hardly deserves the punishment of so horrible a name. "A Gypsy Dance" is too long, but it is of good material. It has an interesting metre, three-quarter time with the first note dotted. There is a good effect gained by sustaining certain notes over several measures, though few pianists get a real sostenuto. An "Allegro Patetico" (op. 12), ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... but neatly set for two in Mlle. Fouchette's chamber. A cold cut of beef, some delicate slices of boiled tongue, an open box of sardines, a plate heaped with cold red cabbage, a lemon, olives, etc.,—all fresh from the rotisserie and charcuterie below,—were flanked by a metre of bread and a litre of Bordeaux. The spread looked quite ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... 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
... called "The Form of Prayers and Ministration of the Sacraments, etc., used in the English Church at Geneva approved and received by the Church of Scotland, whereunto besides that was in the former books are also added sundry other Prayers with the whole Psalms of David in English Metre." As the Psalms occupied by far the greater part of the book it came to be commonly known as "The Psalm Book," and as such, with frequent additions, among which were several hymns and doxologies, it continued to be the recognized Book of Common Order of the Scottish ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... guided me on the present occasion are the same as 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, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... smiths at their forges Worked the red Saint George's Cannoneers; And the "villainous saltpetre" Rung a fierce, discordant metre Round their ears; As the swift Storm-drift, With hot sweeping anger, came the horseguards' clangor On our flanks. Then higher, higher, higher, burned the old-fashioned ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... them, asking them to read the verse after you, word by word, and then sing it with you. I will gladly supply, at bare cost, Song Rolls in Chinese, containing familiar gospel hymns translated into Chinese and so conformed in metre to the English original that the time remains unchanged, and the teachers can sing the English words, if desirable, while the Chinese use their own. There is no more effective preaching of the gospel ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 6, June, 1889 • Various
... possession, and that he set to work busily to make use of them. One of the most interesting of the poems reclaimed for him by Professor Skeat is a fragmentary "Compleynt," part of which is written in terza rima. While he thus experimented with the metre of the Divina Commedia, he made his first attempt to use the material provided by Boccaccio's Teseide in another fragment of great interest, that of Quene Anelida and Fals Arcyte. More than a third of this is taken up with another, and quite successful, metrical experiment in Anelida's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's Songs and Sonnets with Matthew Arnold's Obermann; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with The Light of Asia. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but no one denies that the French Revolution and Hero-Worship, at least in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splendid as anything in our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also of Esmond, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Rhigas, see Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 199, note 2. Hobhouse (Travels in Albania, 1858, ii. 3) prints a version (Byron told Murray that it was "well enough," Letters, 1899, iii. 13) of [Greek: Deute paides,] of his own composition. He explains in a footnote that the metre is "a mixed trochaic, except the chorus." "This song," he adds, "the chorus particularly, is sung to a tune very nearly the same as the Marseillois Hymn. Strangely enough, Lord Byron, in his translation, has entirely mistaken the metre." The first stanza ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the scientific mind, in so far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations: and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... 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 harder after leaving school than ever before ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... a crown, I can truthfully state 'Tis a metre long, nor curly nor straight, And it is as yellow as plumbic chromate In a slightly ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... has been found that fresh basalt exposed to continually moving water will lose about 0.20 gramme per square metre of surface per year. The mineral orthoclase, which enters largely into the constitution of many granites, was found to lose under the same conditions 0.025 gramme. A glassy lava (obsidian) rich in silica and in the chemical constituents of an average granite, was ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.' The chief point in which Surrey imitated his 'master, Francis Petrarcha,' was in the use of the sonnet. He introduced this elaborate form of poetry into our literature; and how it has thriven ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... these lines, which were in that form of verse known to the hymn-books as "common metre," was such as to convince the youth that, whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time to obtain a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true destiny was the glorious career of a poet. It was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... The sound of 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 ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... text: Italicized stanzas will be indented 5 spaces. Italicized stanzas that are ALREADY indented will be indented 10 spaces. Italicized words and phrases have been 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 been corrected. This etext was ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... river has deserted its old bed, and the lagoon has been formed behind the bar, or littoral cord, wave and storm working upon this long line of mud and sand succeed in breaking through; then, as the inclination of the land is but 0'm, 01 in the metre—almost nothing, the sweet and salt water mingle in these lakes, they never run dry, though in many cases not three ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... any case, and even in the disasters of war, would be working out advantages which, after the war was done, would give England many friends and fewer enemies, give her treaties and new territory, and set her higher than she was now by a political metre. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of both metre and sense, and the words untalk'd of and unseen make it nearly indisputable. I had at first thought it might be "rumorous eyes;" but the personification would then be wanting. Shakspeare has personified ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... sitting at a pantomime (Forbidden treat to those who stood in fear of him), Roaring at jokes, sans metre, sense, or rhyme, He turned, and saw immediately in rear of him, His peace of mind upsetting, and annoying it, A ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again another time, ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... in a theatre overpowered by stage agony, but a truer sympathy is that which may require some effort, pity for common, dull, and deadly trouble that does not break out in shrieks and is not provided with metre and scenery. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... of 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 manner, and ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... pitiful Prior, for thy rude speech and curses canonical we do requite thee with song sweet-sung and of notable rhyme and metre. Curse, and Belsaye shall out-curse thee; laugh, and Belsaye ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... fragment the title of Epic Poem, though epic poems are growing out of fashion; because, in the structure, plan, and metre, the heroic model is followed. My authorities for facts, dates, and characters, are Vertot and Puffendorff. The latter I have only read in an English translation, dated 1702: the former I quote from a small Amsterdam edition, printed for Stephen Roger, ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... "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 and historian, and belongs ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... three, O'er the wide world wandering be.— First, the antenatal Peter, Wrapped in weeds of the same metre, The so-long-predestined raiment 5 Clothed in which to walk his way meant The second Peter; whose ambition Is to link the proposition, As the mean of two extremes— (This was learned from Aldric's themes) 10 Shielding from the guilt of schism The orthodoxal syllogism; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the phenomena in nine of them), and that they follow in all cases the same general laws. Those of the Lake of Geneva have received the most elaborate and prolonged investigation. In March, 1876, Forel established a self-registering tide-gauge (limni-metre enregistreur) on the northern shore of this lake, at Morges; and, with the cooeperation of P. Plantamour, another one was installed in June, 1877, at Secheron, near the city of Geneva, at the southern extremity. Since these ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... when he visited Vallombrosa with Crabb Robinson in 1837, wrote an inferior poem there, in a rather common metre, in honour of ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... him, said: "By Jupiter, Socrates, you have done well in reminding me. With respect to the poems which you made, by putting into metre those Fables of AEsop and the hymn to Apollo, several other persons asked me, and especially Evenus recently, with what design you made them after you came here, whereas before, you had never made any. If, therefore, you care at all that I should ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... and tumult, the office and the weighing-stand. In the interior, the arrangements are those usually adopted,—the wooden benches are ranged around the parc, or pit, a large wire cage nearly five metres long and two and a quarter high, elevated on a platform about a metre from the floor. It has no top, but the upper portions of the walls present a smooth band of metal up which the rats cannot climb. The dog is introduced through a sliding door on the floor, and his antagonists are emptied from a box over the top. They are of three ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... 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 ...
— Ion • Plato
... it be objected that (Brahman is) not (denoted) on account of the metre being denoted; (we reply) not so, because thus the direction of the mind (on Brahman) is declared; for thus ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Spanish metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom, stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, and passed beneath ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... text and sometimes regarded as merely a commentary. To this division of the Pitaka belong the Dhammapada, a justly celebrated anthology of devotional verses, and the Sutta-Nipata, a very ancient collection of suttas chiefly in metre. Other important works included in it are the Thera and Theri-gatha or poems written by monks and nuns respectively, and the Jataka or stories about the Buddha's previous births[607]. Some of the rather miscellaneous contents of this Nikaya ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... be pure literature; as much so as the poem. But poetry—now that the day of the broad Homeric epic is past, or temporarily eclipsed—appeals to a taste too exclusive and abstracted for the demands of modern readers. Its most accommodating metre fails to house our endless variety of mood and movement; it exacts from the student an exaltation above the customary level of thought and sentiment greater than he can readily afford. The poet of old used to clothe in the garb of verse his every observation on life ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... given in 'Botanische Zeitung' 1871 page 537. See also Hildebrand on Hordeum in 'Monatsbericht d. K. Akad Berlin' October 1872 page 760.) I hear from Fritz Muller that there is a grass in Southern Brazil, in which the sheath of the uppermost leaf, half a metre in length, envelopes the whole panicle; and this sheath never opens until the self-fertilised seeds are ripe. On the roadside some plants had been cut down, whilst the cleistogamic panicles were developing, and these plants afterwards produced free or unenclosed panicles ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... SI definition 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 per metre ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... everything. It was but the other day that he would have it that I was wrong when I said that one of the windows in the Trianon was smaller than any of the others. It was the same size, said he. I brought Le Metre with his measures, and of course the window was, as I had said, too small. But I see by your clock that it is four o'clock. ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 few more than in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... that were near the present cathedral. But it was converted into a baptistery and ornamented with mosaics by the archbishop Neon of Ravenna (c. 449-459) as its inscriptions tell us and is signed with his monogram. The original floor is three metres below that we see, and a second floor about a metre and a half above the original floor has been discovered; this it would seem is that made by Neon, while a third remains about half a metre under the pavement we use, and upon this are set the eight columns, with ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... seriously damaging the interior. A desperate resistance followed, but the Russians finally retreated, destroying a part of the fort before they left. We also saw other defences, but had no time to study them, as a long rough drive ensued, in order to reach 203-Metre Hill, the ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... badger) were numerous. One day we dug a two-metre hole, and next day found eight live ones. They have teeth one and ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... two metres.... three metres....Here is the door....Mon Dieu, how easy it is! Only a small, simple bolt now separates me from the chamber, and I know that the bolt is located exactly one metre, forty-three centimeters, from the floor. So that, thanks to a small incision I am about to make, I can soon get ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... 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 minstrels and jongleurs (who ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... with immediate reference to metre and its various forms in verse, as an element in the general treatment of style or manner (lexis) as opposed to the matter (logoi) in the imaginative literature, with which as in time past the [270] education of the citizens of the Perfect City will begin. It is however at his own express suggestion ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... we should only get into trenches that might be costly or impossible to hold, and so it would be for the Germans on our side. But there is a kind of etiquette observed; loud vulgar talking on either side of the four-metre gap leads at once to bomb throwing. And meanwhile on both sides guns of various calibre keep up an intermittent fire, the German guns register—I think that is the right term—on the cross of Arras cathedral, ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... 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 captivity. The warriors shall fall ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... of the subjoined productions of the MUSAE LONDINENSES have failed of selection, may he discovered in their being penned in a metre unusual upon occasions of this sort, and in their not being written with that attention to stage effect, the want of which, like want of manners in the concerns of life, is more prejudicial than a deficiency of talent. There is an art of writing for the ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... literary career was the happy discovery of the author, Richard Braithwait. I transcribe it from the MS. volume from which James Boswell first gave to the world Shakspeare's verses "On the King." Southey has somewhere said that "the best serious piece of Latin in modern metre is Sir Francis Kinaston's Amores Troili et Cressidae, a translation of the two first books of Chaucer's Poem[1]; but it was reserved for famous BARNABY to employ the barbarous ornament of rhyme, so as to give thereby point and character ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... 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 nephew ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... perfumed As the sweet roadside honeysuckle. That's why, Difficult though its metre was to tackle, I'm glad ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... measures and with diverse feet. The rhythm is easy and flows along trippingly from the tongue with such regular emphasis and cadence as to lead instinctively to a sort of sing-song in the recital of it. Ballads are more frequently written in common metre lines of eight and six syllables alternating. Such is the famous ballad of "Chevy Chace,"[5] which has been growing in popular esteem for more than three hundred years. Ben Jonson used to say he would rather have been the author of it than ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... a general collection, the "Orphan Ballads" would fill a whole chapter.[61] The simple ditty which we give here as another specimen of Polish popular poetry, exceedingly rude as it is in its form, and even defective in rhyme and metre, cannot but please and touch us by its ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... cent of phosphine to render it spontaneously inflammable. Berdenich has reported a case of a parcel of carbide which yielded on the average 5.1 cubic foot of acetylene per lb., producing gas which contained only 0.398 gramme of phosphorus in the form of phosphine per cubic metre (or 0.028 per cent. of phosphine) and was spontaneously inflammable. But on examination the carbide in question was found to be very irregular in composition, and some lumps produced acetylene containing ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... its position, consists the chief art of appropriate harmony. Accentuation of syllables, which seems, to answer the idea of long and short syllables in the dead languages, is the foundation of English, metre.—Tripple rhymes used with judgment have been admitted by the best English poets, and now and then the introduction of an Alexandrine, ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... them, which is not always the case?" This domestic tragedy La Chaussee wrote in verse, which is not against French rules, and which has been done by dramatists a hundred and twenty years later; but it is probably an error, being even more unlikely that citizens would express themselves in metre than that kings and heroes should give utterance with a certain solemnity which entails rhythm. Thus he wrote The Fashionable Prejudice, The School of Friends, Melanide, very pathetic, The School of Mothers, etc. It must ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... kind—but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... ans Taille d'un metre 62 centimetres Perruque brun Front large Yeux gris-sanguin Nez moyen Barbe grisatre ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... engineer. Thereafter, the story of the siege followed stereotyped lines except that the colossal nature of the fortifications entailed unprecedented sacrifice of life on the besiegers' part. The crucial point of the siege-operations was the capture of a position called 203-Metre Hill. This took place on November 30th after several days of the most terrible fighting ever witnessed, fighting which cost the Japanese ten thousand casualties. The importance of the hill was that ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Science, 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 national Science. And that sublime upsurging from the depths ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... 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 Universal ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... respect, if in no other, my poem is beyond dispute superior to the Iliad and Paradise Lost. However, tastes differ, I am aware; and you may possibly prefer those two epics to mine! They are longer, it is true; but then I think it will be conceded, even by the critics of the POH school, that my metre is sufficiently long, even though my story is short. While others measure their verse by the 'feet,' I measure mine by the yard.' . . . D.'S paper, (of Georgia,) so thickly interlarded with French, and Italian synonymes for far more expressive English words, reminds us of an old 'ignorant ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... hoped at least partially to liberate the lurking devil of humor from his fetters, letting him caper, not, certainly, as he does in the Latin, but as he probably would have done had his creator written in English. In preserving the metre and double rhymes of the original, I have acted from the same reverent regard for the music with which, in the liturgy of the Church, the verses have become inseparably wedded that inspired Gen. Dix; ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... incited by Mr. Cardew, for he was an enthusiast for Milton. Mrs. Cardew was a bad reader; she had no emphasis, no light and shade, and she missed altogether the rhythm of the verse. To Catharine, on the other hand, knowing nothing of metre, the proper cadence came easily. They finished the first six hundred ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... find anywhere a false quantity or a hiatus. The Ambrosian hymns remained the type of all the hymnic poetry of succeeding centuries. Even Prudentius, great poet as he was, was manifestly influenced in the choice of metre and the composition of the strophe by the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... of metre I would choose, this I think you will hardly guess: no other than ottave rime. All the rest, except iambic, are become insufferable to me. And how beautifully might the earnest and the lofty be made to ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... may see for himself by comparing the passage from the manuscript given in the appendix with the corresponding place in the text. Milton's own spelling revels in redundant e's, while the printer of the 1645 book is very sparing of them. But in cases where the spelling affects the metre, we find that the printed text and Milton's manuscript closely correspond; and it is upon its value in determining the metre, quite as much as its antiquarian interest, that I should base a justification of this reprint. Take, for instance, such a line ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... sister's, after they parted. But they were conducted by means of that marvel of marvels, the telegraph,—the chief of whose marvels is that it compels even a long- winded generation like ours to speak in very short metre. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... I will make one remark: in the fourth line of the third strophe the metre leaves something to ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Langland's metre 'is more uncouth than that of his predecessors' (Hallam, Mid. Ag. Ch. IX: ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... the Codex Regius, discovered in Iceland in 1642; to these are added other poems of similar character from other sources. The Younger Edda is a prose paraphrase of, and commentary on, these poems and others which are lost, together with a treatise on metre, written by the historian Snorri ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... are a more subtle experiment in metre by the musician and poet, Campion, than even the following, Laura, which he himself sweetly commended as "voluble, and fit to express any amorous conceit." In Kind are her Answers the long syllables and the ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... when the metre is carefully fitted to the tune (which is a work of time), and sung by a choir (with accent) of a thousand British Blue-jackets, will doubtless be ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... him repeated applause. Here, for instance, in Chap. X: "It has, all of it, the description (and we see clearly the fact itself had), a kind of pathetic grandeur, simplicity, and rude nobleness; something Epic or Homeric, without the metre or the singing of Homer, but with all the sincerity, rugged truth to nature, and much more of piety, devoutness, reverence for what is ever high in this universe, than meets us in those old ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... acclimatization of the hexameter upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel Harvey,—a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,—whose chief claim to remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... invariably I find myself in a flurried, not to say confused, state of mind upon being thrust physically into the crowded throng. However, affairs of a more pressing and a more personal nature as well soon claimed me. Upon reaching the appointed destination, my attention was directed to the fact that the metre-device attached to the taxicab registered no less a total than two ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... gambling frenzies, those tempests which arise, rage, destroy, and carry everything away without premonitory warning or possibility of arresting their course. All at once it was rumoured that land bought at five francs the metre had been sold again for a hundred francs the metre; and thereupon the fever arose—the fever of a nation which is passionately fond of gambling. A flight of speculators descending from North Italy swooped ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... 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 on his boat, with his arms, and burnt, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the equator to either pole. This is something that does not vary in extent. A commission of five learned men, especially in mathematics, was appointed by the French Academy, at the instance of the government, to adopt a standard, and they made it a metre, which is the ten millionth part of the quadrant of a meridian. The metre is 3.28 feet of our measure, with five more decimal ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... version by John Oxenford published in "The Monthly Magazine" for 1842, which being in blank verse does not represent the form of the original, no complete translation into English has been attempted. Some scenes translated with considerable elegance in the metre of the original were published by Archbishop Trench in 1856; but these comprised only a portion of the graver division of the drama. The present version of the entire play has been made with the advantages which ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... 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 ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... composition of the 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 ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... rhyme, some do not; Hilda evidently belongs to the second category. "Treasure," and "The 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. Doubtless her musical ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... thought of metre, he thought of rhyme. 'Twas a race between weary brains and time. He tried to write as he used to when His heart was as young as his ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... paying no attention, or little, to metre and versification. Except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous experiments as of carelessness and inattention. In one very important matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our language; in single ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Attention to metre and euphony will generally enable us to assign, amongst the forms in which we pick up and note any particular proverb, the original and legitimate one; especially when combined with brevity and "pith." As a case in point, our friend Ludlum will serve our purpose ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... was naturally frequently rallied by his family on his inconstancy of purpose, but he pleaded in extenuation that versatility had very marked charms of its own. He produced one day a copy of verses, written in the Gilbertian metre, to illustrate his mental attitude, and they strike me as so neatly worded, that I will reproduce ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... great gusto. Why he should have taken it into his head to get a child, as I was, to write poetry I cannot tell. One afternoon he sent for me to his room, and asked me to try and make up a verse; after which he explained to me the construction of the payar metre of fourteen syllables. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... burning aspirations strewn through this profound and massive work, are lasting lessons for all womankind. It seems to have been much easier for most of the critics of this great work to feel its artistic faults, its jarring metre, and cumbrous forms, than to appreciate the transcendent nobleness and wisdom wrought into it from the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... book may be considered as having been hitherto overlooked or rejected, while in the alternative case it is to be understood that the original cast of the melody has at some former time been altered (frequently to suit the English common metre to which it was not at first conformable), and ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... through the ranks of Austrian spears. It is written in the Middle-High-German, by Halbsuter, a native of Lucerne, who was in the fight. Here are specimens of it. There is a paraphrase by Sir Walter Scott, but it is done at the expense of the metre and nave ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... off before and after, so that there is no possibility of avoiding it in reading. I venture to say that no real parallel can be found to this in Cic., it stands in glaring contradiction to his own rules about admitting metre in prose, Orator 194 sq., De Or. III. 182 sq. Solam censebant ... tale quale esset: probably from Plato's Tim. 35 A thus translated by Cic., Tim. c. 7 ex ea materia quae individua est et unius modi ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... him. In vigorous imitation, he sat down to the piano again, after a hasty dinner snatched in the neighbourhood; but as he was only playing scales, he propped open before him a little volume of Goethe's poems, which Johanna had lent him, and suiting his scales to the metre of the lines, read through one after another of the poems he liked best. At a particular favourite, he stopped playing and held the book ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 labour of a more recent age." The following ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... 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 away. Nothing is left but the form on one side, and on the other not even the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... he was for, without an instant's hesitation and just like a hunted creature at bay, he turned sharply on his heel and then ran back down the street as hard as he could tear. He passed close to within half a metre of Tournefort, and as he flew past he hit out with his left fist so vigorously that the worthy agent of the Committee of Public Safety, caught on the nose by the blow, staggered and measured his length upon ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... mirror, spies The shining of a flambeau at his back, Lit sudden ore he deem of its approach, And turneth to resolve him, if the glass Have told him true, and sees the record faithful As note is to its metre; even thus, I well remember, did befall to me, Looking upon the beauteous eyes, whence love Had made the leash to take me. As I turn'd; And that, which, in their circles, none who spies, Can miss of, in itself apparent, struck On mine; a point I saw, that darted ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... reflection on the distinction between gentle birth and a gentle life. Chaucer's translation was not made at second-hand; if not always easy it is conscientious, and interpolated with numerous glosses and explanations thought necessary by the translator. The metre of "The Former Life" he at one time or another turned into verse ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... your industry, Meyer, but it is your discretion which is sometimes at fault. These plans of the forts of Liege—they might as well be published in a magazine. We had them when they were made. We have received copies of every alteration. We know to a metre how far the guns will carry, how many men are required to man them, what stocks of ammunition are close at hand. Understand, therefore, my friend, that the sight of these carefully traced plans, which you hint to have obtained at the risk of your life, ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they may still be called better than indifferent. One great merit Mr. Taylor has: rigorous adherence to his original; he endeavours at least to copy with all possible fidelity the term of praise, the tone, the very metre, whatever ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... given you tragedies, all sense defying, And singing men, in woful metre dying; This 'tis when heavy lubbers ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Beeching into 'A Book of Christmas Verse' 1895 and thence, incorrectly, by Orby Shipley in 'Carmina Mariana'. Stated in a letter to R. W. D. June 25, '83, to have been written to 'hang up among the verse com- positions in the tongues. ... I did a piece in the same metre as Blue in the mists all day.' Note Chaucer's account of the physical properties of the air, 'House of Fame', ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... dream my time away,— I 'm sure to rue it. The day is rather bright, I know The Muse will pardon My half-defection, if I go Into the garden. It must be better working there,— I 'm sure it's sweeter: And something in the balmy air May clear my metre. ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... was over, grace was chanted and then the Zemiroth was sung—songs summing up in light and jingling metre the very essence of holy joyousness—neither riotous nor ascetic—the note of spiritualized common sense which has been the key-note of historical Judaism. For to feel "the delight of Sabbath" is a duty and to take three meals thereon a religions obligation—the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... theme of the native lore reveals one of the true sources of our literary independence. Greece and Rome, England and Italy, have so long furnished, if they have not exhausted, the field of poetic culture, that it is, at least, refreshing to find both in theme and metre, ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... metre in common use, and appropriate to every occasion where God is worshipped and men are blessed. From the compositions of Billings, Holden, Maxim, Edson, Holyoke, Read, Kimball, Morgan, Wood, Swan, &c. &c., and eminent ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... have been superseded by the learned professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later times! Is there to-day a popular poet, using the English language, who does not, in technical acquirements and in the artificial adjuncts of poetry,—rhyme, metre, melody, and especially sweet, dainty fancies,—surpass Europe's and Asia's loftiest and oldest? Indeed, so marked is the success of the latter-day poets in this respect, that any ordinary reader may well be puzzled, and ask, if the shaggy antique masters ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... minds what it is they are going to say before they begin. This is superfluous effort, tending to cramp the style. It is permissible, if not essential, to select a subject—say, MUD—but any detailed argument or plan which may restrict the free development of metre and rhyme (if any) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... of lines besides, of the like brevity and metre. In them he was said to be greater even than the immortal gods themselves, seeing that they came to render their homage unto him, together with all things else over which they bare rule, even as the greater ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... one volume, Johnson, writing to Brocklesby, under date Sept. 2, 1784, calls Windham "inter stellas Luna minores." Boswell, in a note, says, "It is remarkable that so good a Latin scholar as Johnson should have been so inattentive to the metre, as by mistake to have written stellas instead of ignes." Now, with all due deference, a Captain of Native Infantry ventures to suggest that both stellas and ignes are wrong, and that Johnson was thinking of the noble opening of Horace's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... over with excitement, "I've discovered the measurements in the document. Why Old Barbe Rouge was a Frenchman, and of course used French measure,—the metre! Hurrah!" and I made the rocks echo with my excited ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... Your statue, which is intended for a convent of Ursuline nuns, must be in white marble. Height: one metre seven hundred and six millimetres; in other words, five feet three inches. As it will not be placed in a niche, you must carefully finish all sides of it. The costs of the work are to be taken out of the two hundred and fifty ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... flew into the House, but Arimazes. 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: ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... And/ Scotch Reviewers./ 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. 24, Cockspur ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... 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 ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to music, work to music, obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants, knowing what is right and that ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Napoleon, who endeavoured to apply philosophy to all the arts of life, decreed, that no public road in France should exceed an inclination of 4 deg. 46', or rise more than one metre in twelve. This proportion, it was estimated, would combine the maxima and minima of the powers; and, in spite of those malignant confederacies which he was so often called upon to overthrow, the labour of reducing many steep roads of France to this practicable ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... county. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her creed, that I am le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnete homme in the universe; although she scarcely ever in her life, except the Scriptures of the old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David in metre, spent five minutes together on either prose or verse. I must except also from this last a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has perused very devoutly; and all the ballads in the country, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... as has been seen, sundry stanzas, and I have changed the order of others. The text has nowhere been translated verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn has been given to many sentiments which were judged too Oriental. As the metre adopted by Haji Abdu was the Bahr Tawil (long verse), I thought it advisable to preserve that peculiarity, and to fringe it with the rough, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... monuments in Rome," says a modern writer, "were written in Saturnian verse, the oldest measure used by the Latin poets. It was probably derived from the Etruscans, and until Ennius introduced the heroic hexameter the strains of the Italian bards flowed in this metre. The structure of the Saturnian is very simple, and its rhythmical arrangement is found in the poetry of every age and country. Macaulay adduces as an example of this measure, the following line from the well-known ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... 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
... their literary aspect. One play in each volume, with Introduction, Notes, Essay on Metre, and Glossary. Based on the Globe text. From 144 to 224 pages. Cloth. ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... 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 ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... the station during the morning, trying in vain to damage his lost rolling stock. This booty was of immense value to us, and to a large extent it solved the transport problem which at this moment was a very anxious one indeed. The line was metre gauge and we had no stock to fit it, though later the Egyptian State Railways brought down some engines and trucks from the Luxor-Assouan section, but this welcome aid was not available till after the rains had begun and had made lorry ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... accept the old traditions, he is the ruthless denouncer of abuses, and is thoroughly filled with the spirit which, four years after the second recension of his book, found expression in the Peasants Revolt of 1381. With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than Chaucer, reflects ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... course, a steady refrain of Greek iambics, Greek anapaests, 'an easy and nice metre,' 'a hodge-podge lot of hendecasyllables,' and thirty alcaic stanzas for a holiday task. Mention is made of many sermons on 'Redeeming the time,' 'Weighed in the balance and found wanting,' 'Cease to do evil, learn to do well,' and the other ever unexhausted texts. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of old associations, or of especial adaptation, be always sung to the same melodies, while to others might be accorded greater facilities for variety. This only by way of suggestion. The common practice of selecting melodies for verses, hap-hazard, with regard only to the 'metre,' of course destroys all possibility of any especial characterization. If the original 'marriage' have been a congenial one, a divorce, with view to a second union, rarely proves advisable. The same verses may bear another musical ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the cave, took from his pocket a ball of string and a tape-measure, tied the string to the flint corner, fastened a pebble at the nineteenth metre and flung it toward the land side. The pebble at most reached the ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... the fourteenth century 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... leave both my metre and my stomach to the gods," Horace had retorted, "if you will turn over to them your worry about Rome, and pluck the blossom of the hour with me. Augustus is safe in Spain, you cannot be summoned to the Palatine, and to-morrow is early enough for the noise of the Forum. By the way," ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... of ludicrous interludes. A jig was not in Shakespeare's time only a dance, but a ludicrous dialogue in metre; many historical ballads were also ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... 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 ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... commend mere 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 ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... Schenectady. With several other students and two or three young ladies of the city we held services at the "poorhouse" every Sunday. Short exhortations with prayers and the singing of hymns composed the service, and I remember that one day, in giving out a hymn in long metre, I started it to a short metre tune, and had to go through it alone, the ladies whose business was the musical part of the service not being able to accommodate their measure to my leading. I made my solo as short as ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... "Charles I". But though not seldom successful in restoring the text, Mr. Rossetti pushed revision beyond the bounds of prudence, freely correcting grammatical errors, rectifying small inconsistencies in the sense, and too lightly adopting conjectural emendations on the grounds of rhyme or metre. In the course of an article published in the "Westminster Review" for July, 1870, Miss Mathilde Blind, with the aid of material furnished by Dr. Garnett, 'was enabled,' in the words of Mr. Buxton Forman, 'to supply omissions, make ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... I have been more successful with the metre than usual," she added, "having been guided by a little poem, a favourite of mine, which, as it also inculcates kindness to the brute creation, you will do well, Harry, to commit to memory. ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by words and expressions still more ardent and glowing. What separates and distinguishes poetry is more particularly the ornament of verse; it is this which gives it its character, and is an essential, without which it cannot exist. Custom has appropriated different metre to 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 ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... regulating it, so that the foliage should have grown again on the first stripped shrubs at the period when the leaves of the last plant were pulled off. About 12,000 tea shrubs are grown in this garden: they are regularly planted in quincunxes, and stand about one metre distant from each other; the greater number are stunted and shabby looking, probably owing to the aspect of the ground, which lies low, on the level of the sea, and exposed to the full rays of a burning sun; perhaps the quality of the soil ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... occupied his evenings his mornings were spent over a satirical fairy-poem, The Cap and Bells, in the metre of the Faerie Queene. This metre, however, was ill-suited to the subject; satire was not natural to him, and the ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... reason why the modern reader should have become tired of academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised Shakespeare ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... with insertions from Baeda. Historically it is worthless; but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price. In more than thirty thousand lines not more than fifty Norman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the same. The alliterative metre of the earlier verse is still only slightly affected by riming terminations; the similes are the few natural similes of Caedmon; the battle-scenes are painted with the same ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, where,—instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm,—here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... 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
... THE LITERATURE AND ITS DIVISIONS.—A greater part of the Sanskrit literature, which counts its works by thousands, still remains in manuscript. It was nearly all composed in metre, even works of law, morality, and science. Every department of knowledge and every branch of inquiry is represented, with the single exception of history, and this forms the most striking general characteristic of the literature, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another. Such a subject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame, besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, if only one could manage it well enough to be named in the same breath with ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to tally greatest bards, To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will, Homer with all his wars and warriors—Hector, Achilles, Ajax, Or Shakspere's woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—Tennyson's fair ladies, Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme, delight of singers; These, these, O sea, all these I'd gladly barter, Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer, Or breathe one breath ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... term gallant mast. If gallant mean brave, there are two words. If the words be two, there is a stronger accent on mast. If the accent on mast be stronger, the rhyme with fast is more complete; in other words, the metre favours the notion of the words being considered as two. Gallant-mast, however, is a compound word, with an especial nautical meaning. In this case the accent is stronger on gal- and weaker on -mast. This, however, is not the state of things that the ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... the poet had in mind any special place when writing of "Sweet Auburn," it 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
... two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. In view of these common features, we might be tempted at first sight to suppose the difference between the three kinds to be merely one of form, merely the difference between the vehicle of prose and the vehicle of metre. We shall find, however, on deeper inquiry, that to the true artist, who does not find his materials in the world, but creates them according to the inner laws by which the world and himself are governed, ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green |
