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Prose   Listen
noun
Prose  n.  
1.
The ordinary language of men in speaking or writing; language not cast in poetical measure or rhythm; contradistinguished from verse, or metrical composition. "I speak in prose, and let him rymes make." "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry, that is; prose words in their best order; poetry the best order."
2.
Hence, language which evinces little imagination or animation; dull and commonplace discourse.
3.
(R. C. Ch.) A hymn with no regular meter, sometimes introduced into the Mass. See Sequence.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books



... accomplishments Burke had no rival among Parliamentary speakers. His prose is, as we read it now, the most fascinating, the most musical, in the English language. It bears on every page the divine lineaments of genius. Yet an orator requires something more than mere force of words. He must feel, while he speaks, the pulse ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... The prose thrilled her even more intimately than the verse. She cried within herself: "Why have I never heard of Richard Crashaw? Why did Tom never tell me?" She became upon the instant a devotee of this Saint Teresa. She thought inconsequently, with a pang that ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... know for certain which words Chaucer introduced, we do know that this first great English poet must have introduced many, especially French words; while Wyclif, the first great English prose writer, who translated part of the Bible from Latin into English, must also have given us many new words, especially from the Latin. The English language never changed so much after the time of Chaucer and Wyclif as ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill

... I woo her? I will try The charms of olden time, And swear by earth, and sea, and sky, And rave in prose and rhyme— And I will tell her, when I bent My knee in other years, I was not half so eloquent; I could ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... Longfellow, Hood, and Lowell. Many of the poems in his personal anthology were picked from the poets' corner of newspapers, and it was in this way that he became acquainted with Longfellow. Lincoln was especially fond of humorous writings, both in prose and verse, a taste that is closely connected with his lifelong fondness for funny stories. His favorite humorous writer during the presidential period was Petroleum V. Nasby (David P. Locke), from whose letters he frequently ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln

... so little serious consideration that the average person, when he probes even slightly into the art, is as surprized as was Moliere's bourgeois gentilhomme upon discovering that he had spoken prose for forty years. Plato says: "Whosoever seeketh must know that which he seeketh for in a general notion, else how shall he know it when he hath found it?" And if what I write on this subject enables readers to know ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin

... pleasing and instructive Tales in poetry and prose, adapted to the Youthful mind. By the Author of Spring Flowers and Summer ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous

... this tract is based on that which appeared in a volume of "Miscellanies in Prose and Verse" in the year 1789. It has been collated with those given by Scott, Hawkesworth, and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... a slow, deliberating habit of work, and of some things was astonishingly ignorant, with the ignorance of those who, when at school, have worked at what they preferred and quietly disregarded the rest. If he let her compose a letter, its wording would be quaint. Her prose was, in fact, worse than her verse, and that was saying a good deal. But she was thorough, never slipshod. Her brain ground slowly, but it ground exceeding small; there were no blurred edges to her apprehension of facts; ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... Done with a delicate Dutch fidelity, these little prose pastorals of Miss Mitford's would live were they purely imaginary—so perfect is their finish, so tender and joyous their touch. But they have, in addition, the virtue of being entirely faithful pictures of English village life as it was at the time they were written. With ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton

... numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labours! The heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness, or heroism, to sympathise in their fate. Besides, there is much uncertainty even in the best authenticated ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth

... French prose and French poetry had interested me during so many years that when Mr. Gosse invited me to write this book I knew that I was qualified in one particular—the love of my subject. Qualified in knowledge I was not, and could not be. No one can pretend to know the whole of a vast literature. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... in fashion for the moment? I am sure, in spite of the success of 'Nourhalma,' that the era of poetry has passed; and, moreover, it certainly seems to have given place to the very baldest and most unbeauteous forms of prose! As, for instance, if a book is written which contains what is called 'poetic prose' the critics are all ready to denounce it as 'turgid,' 'overladen,' 'strained for effect,' and 'hysterical sublime.' Heine's Reisebilder, which is one of the most ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... independently of foreign influences. From the sovereign down to the lowest subject, everyone composed verses. These were not rhymed; the structure of the Japanese language does not lend itself to rhyme. Their differentiation from prose consisted solely in the numerical regularity of the syllables in consecutive lines; the alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables each. A tanka (short song) consisted of thirty-one syllables arranged thus, 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7; and a naga-uta (long song) consisted of an unlimited ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... meant those who have written most skilfully in prose and verse. Some of these have written in prose, because they wished to tell us something more fully and freely than they could do if they tied themselves to lines of an equal number of syllables, or ending with the same sound, as men do when they write ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... place in this century for a Sappho, and that Ninon could not exist in Paris without grands seigneurs and a voluptuous court. She is the Ninon of the intellect; she adores Art and artists; she goes from the poet to the musician, from the sculptor to the prose-writer. Her heart is noble, endowed with a generosity that makes her a dupe; so filled is she with pity for sorrow,—filled also with contempt for the prosperous. She has lived since 1830, the centre of a choice circle, surrounded by tried friends who love her tenderly and esteem each ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... of singers of the sea, from the days of the Elizabethans to the sublime Swinburne, belongs to another volume. It is the sincere hope of the compiler that the present collection offers undisputable evidence that the prose tradition has been fully sustained and the reader will find in these pages living testimony to the marvelous interest of the theme—its virility ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... the passion, the cruelty, and the horror of it for all time within the shuddering comprehension of English-speaking people. One is a history that is more than a history; the other a tale that is more than a tale. Dickens, no doubt, owed much of his inspiration to Carlyle's tremendous prose epic. But the genius that depicted a moving and tragic story upon the red background of the Terror was Dickens's own, and the "Tale of Two Cities" was final proof that its author could handle a great theme in a manner that was worthy ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... works such as John Bale's history of English literature, written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was {579} Joachim du Bellay's Defence et Illustration de la langue francaise published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the classics. This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the characteristic words of the sixteenth century, "patrie," ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... squire to Lintot goes, Inquires for Swift in verse and prose. Says Lintot, "I have heard the name, He died a year ago." "The same." He searches all the shops in vain: "Sir, you may find ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, wi thout the music, is prose, from ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... story. His literary style is at times very colloquial, and his sentences are often of great length, running on for ten, fifteen, or even twenty lines without a full stop. The difficulty of rendering such a mass of words into English prose without sacrificing the meaning, and of maintaining the easy familiarity of the conversation has been fairly overcome by the translator. The story is simple as compared with some of Lie's later productions, but it will always be interesting, not only in itself but as ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie

... apologetically infer, being the middle, the rallying feature, of Mr. J.H. Shorthouse's verbose apology. If fictionizing in prose, he writes with brief orange-hued flashes of liquid ether; each of short, all but, brief span. Characteristically, he belongs to the same school and unapproachable law as the French organist-composer, C.M. Widor: stringent, petulant observance of free ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater

... sad want of money, my poor friend, to think of such things as these—you, too, who held M. de Mazarin's prose ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... a prose pastoral love story in Greek, by Longos (a Byzantine), not unlike the tale of The Gentle Shepherd, by Allan Ramsay. Gessner has also imitated the Greek romance in his idyll called Daphnis. In ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... Settlement lost in her established safety, if not as much as she gained, yet something which it was not well to lose. And the kingdom in general dropped in something like the same way into a sort of prose of existence, with most of the picturesque and dramatic elements gone. Romance died out along with the actual or possible tragedies of public life, and Humour came in, in the development most opposed to romance, a humour full of mockery and jest, less tender than keen-sighted, picking out ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... I have often wondered whether anybody ever realised how much we may owe to metre acting on thought; for I do not believe that I ever penned any poetry in my life unless it was to a tune; and even in this prose which I now write there is ever and anon a cadence as of a brook running along, then rising, anon falling, perceptible to me though not to you, yet which has many a time been noted down by critics ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... the age and the ideals of the nation's history. The third aim is to show, by a study of each successive period, how our literature has steadily developed from its first simple songs and stories to its present complexity in prose and poetry. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... to the play; and a Lord in the country,[D] who gave him a place in the Excise—and a cover at his table. You do not know perhaps that this Gentleman is the greatest of all poets past—present and to come—besides which he has written an 'Opus Magnum' in prose—during the late election for Westmoreland.[E] His principal publication is entitled 'Peter Bell' which he had withheld from the public for 'one and twenty years'—to the irreparable loss of all those who died ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... after all, a man on whom you draw a cheque a bout portant will be angry). What a delicious thrill of triumph, if you can bring him down! If I have money at the banker's and draw for a portion of it over the counter, that is mere prose—any dolt can do that. But, having no balance, say I drive up in a cab, present a cheque at Coutts's, and, receiving the amount, drive off? What a glorious morning's sport that has been! How superior in excitement to the common transactions of every-day life! . . . ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... forgetting the dictates of prudence in our zeal for the dictates of poetry, we have no great cause to fear it. Hitherto, at least, there has always been enough of dull reality, on every side of us, to abate such fervours in good time, and bring us back to the most sober level of prose, if not to sink us below it. We should thank the poet who performs such a service; and forbear to inquire too rigidly whether there is any 'moral' in his piece or not. The writer of a work, which ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... Sapphic and Hexameter, were composed accentually. The services and music of the Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of medieval Latin—that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by Augustine in the prose of the Confessions, and gifted with poetic inspiration in such hymns as the Dies Irae or the Stabat Mater—rendered this new vehicle of literary utterance adequate to all the tasks imposed on it by piety and metaphysic. The language of the Confessions and the Dies Irae is not, ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... it with care, from the adorably finished prologue—it is the disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable of writing one page of lyric prose—to the eloquent, the joyful, the impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... Young Grandison: she began a translation from the French, of a book, called, the New Robinson; but in this undertaking, she was, I believe, anticipated by another translator: and she compiled a series of extracts in verse and prose, upon the model of Dr. Enfield's Speaker, which bears the title of the Female Reader; but which, from a cause not worth mentioning, has hitherto been printed with a different ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin

... only to man, and it is right they should. He it was whom God created first, let him take the preeminence. But among those stars of lesser glory, which are given to lighten the nations, among sweet-voiced poets, earnest prose writers, who, by the lofty truth that lies hid beneath legend and parable, purify the world, graceful painters and beautiful musicians, each brightening their generation—among these, let ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... longitude within the average western limit of the moon's visible hemisphere. 'Here the valley narrows to a mile in width, and displays scenery on both sides picturesque and romantic beyond the powers of a prose description. Imagination, borne on the wings of poetry, could alone gather similes to portray the wild sublimity of this landscape, where dark behemoth crags stood over the brows of lofty precipices, as if a rampart in the sky; and forests ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... aware that my prose is pedestrian, and that Europe—as it once was, to us—deserves a brighter and higher note. I will attempt, just here, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... fear, and made me a low bow. I asked her what she wanted, and she replied in Latin verse to the effect that her mother was in the next room, and that if I liked she would come in. I replied in Latin prose that I did not care about seeing her mother, telling her my reasons with great plainness. She replied with four Latin lines, but as they were not to the point I could see that she had learnt them by heart, and repeated them like a parrot. She went on-still in Latin verse—to tell ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... as I hope, the reader has no objection to an occasional interlude of verse in all this prose, I will copy for him here the poem I wrote next morning—it being always easier to tell the strict truth in poetry ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... from the Latin poem—not its prose translation—were printed as headnotes on each page. For this e-text, only the line numbers of each complete "Fable" are given. Line numbers used in footnotes are retained from the original text; these, too, refer to the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... as windsor soap can make them, could complain of their wrongs, what contaminations with dusty Ainsworth and Scapulas would they enumerate! if his brain were to reveal its labours, what labyrinths of prose and verse, in which it has been bewildered when it had no clue of a friendly translation, or Clavis to conduct it through the wanderings, would it disclose! what permutations and combinations of commas, what elisions and additions of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various

... happened to die in the midst of their transports, occasioned by the final conquest of Canada, their good humour garnished his character with a prodigality of encomiums. A thousand pens were drawn to paint the beauties and sublimity of his character, in poetry as well as prose. They extolled him above Alexander in courage and heroism, above Augustus in liberality, Titus in clemency, Antoninus in piety and benevolence, Solomon in wisdom, and Saint Edward in devotion. Such hyperbolical eulogiums served only to throw ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... that sermon! I never heard any thing like it, and I shall never forget it, or cease to be thankful that I heard it," said the Rev. Dr. Charles Wadsworth, of Philadelphia, the great Presbyterian preacher—a man of genius, and a true prose-poet, as any one will concede after reading his published sermons. As he spoke, the tears were in his eyes, the muscles of his face quivering, and his chest heaving with irrepressible emotion. Nobody who heard that discourse ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald

... reading his highest single achievement, yet needs to be ranged with his other writings, early and late, to have its last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began "The House of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it— defrauded of art and the joy of life, "starving for symbols" as Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, on ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... book of fairy tales. Lang. Orange fairy book. Mabie. Fairy tales every child should know. McMurry. Classic myths. Norton. Heart of oak books, v. 3. (Adapted.) Perkins. Twenty best fairy tales. Scudder. Children's book. Tappan. Folk stories and fables. Whittier. Child life in prose. ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various

... ready writer. The emotions which they arouse, the mass of pleasant anecdote they recall, the ghosts of far-off delights they summon, are either too obvious to be worth the trouble of description or too evanescent to be expressed in dull prose. Swift, we are told (perhaps a little too frequently), could write beautifully of a broomstick; which may strike a common person as a marvel of dexterity. After a while, the journalist is apt to find that it is the perfect theme which proves to be the hardest to treat adequately. Clothe a broomstick ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... reader, Miss Dawson," said the doctor, "will read verse with the proper accent, just as a musician would divide it into bars; but my friend Randal there, although he can tell a good story and hit off prose very well, has no more notion of rhythm or poetry than new beer ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... well founded, so far as concerned part of the field of foreign affairs, but it failed to recognize the striking advance made in other areas. We were like M. Jourdain of Moliere's comedy, who was surprised to find that he had been talking prose all his life without knowing it. We had been carrying on a steadily increasing part of our foreign affairs without consciously labelling them as such. For to-day foreign affairs are largely commercial affairs, questions of trade and tariff, of immigration and transportation, of fishery or power ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... Unitarians to accept his view of the universality of incarnation and the consubstantiality of man and God. He was wise as an interpreter, and by no means wanting in originality, a brilliant essayist, a philosophical historian, and a student of high themes. His Prose Writers of Germany, Hours with the German Classics, Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition, and Atheism in Philosophy show the range of his interests and his ability ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... glorious burst of poetry into prose, we find the following countries mentioned as carrying on an active trade with the Phoenician metropolis:—Northern Syria, Syria of Damascus, Judah and the land of Israel, Egypt, Arabia, Babylonia, Assyria, Upper Mesopotamia,[924] Armenia,[925] Central Asia Minor, Ionia, Cyprus, Hellas or Greece,[926] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... therefore, and told it in the house, and we showed the thing to our Lord. So He sent me out again to entreat him to come in; but I dare say I had hard work to do it." Greatheart's whole account of Mr. Fearing always brings the water to my eyes also. It is indeed a delicious piece of English prose. If I were a professor of belles lettres instead of what I am, I would compel all my students, under pain of rustication, to get those three or four classical pages by heart till they could neither perpetrate ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... his speech, a straightforward, manly speech in prose, and the gist of the matter was that he did what he did (killed Caesar), not because he loved Caesar less, but because he loved Rome more. And I believe he told the simple ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson

... little taste for poetry, because of his strong preference for prose as a vehicle of thought and expression. He, however, greatly admired Byron, Shelley, and Scott, and paid a passing compliment to Swinburne, except as to the too fiery amatory ardor of his first poems; but he considered Tennyson, with all his polish, little better than a versifier, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... "Hyperion," though written in prose, is scarcely anything more than a long drawn out lyric poem, so thoroughly is action subordinated to reflection, and so beautiful and rhythmic is the dignified flow of its periods. But having said that the locality is Greece and its hero ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... a work that has long been well known to scholars, and in the 16th and 17th centuries editions were common. The translation under consideration is entitled "Priapeia, or the Sportive Epigrams of divers Poets on Priapus: the Latin text now for the first time Englished in verse and prose (the metrical version by Outidanos) [Good for Nothing], with Introduction, Notes, Explanatory and Illustrative and Excursus, by Neaniskos [a young man]," whose name, we need hardly ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... with a love of letters to speak in few or measured words. He may have been a Philistine, as Mr. Symonds calls him, but he was surely a Philistine of genius. He has the supreme virtue of style. In fact, it may be roughly said that in Europe for nearly two centuries there is no such thing as a prose style but Boccaccio's. Even when dealing with his grosser topics—and these he derived from others—he half disarms disgust by the lightness of his touch. And he could tell a tale, one of the most difficult ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter

... whether in Verse or prose, the dramatic monologue seemed to me the aptest for the exposition of character and habits of mind. It is the creation—or recreation—of Robert Browning, the most illuminating interpreter of the workings of the ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman

... fortune-hunters of the Caledonian tribe; at the same time we respect her philosophers and literary men, who appear to us to compose the first rank of writers. Without mentioning their Ossian, Thompson and Burns, we may enumerate their prose writers, such as Hume, and the present association of truly learned and acute men, who write the Edinburgh Review. A Scotchman may be allowed to show pride at the mention of this celebrated work. As it regards America, this northern constellation of ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse

... may safely enjoy the pleasure and profit of a pursuit, which has been most appropriately styled, "the poetry of rural economy;" and that, without being made too familiar with a sharp little weapon, which can most speedily and effectually convert all the poetry into very sorry prose. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... ought to starve and serve the things we ought to rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: 'We will give her champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only sweet—as we well know—but also helpful to society and the life of man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I take it, if this can be proved.' Aristotle certainly knew the passage, ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle

... heart and you do not know the delightful naivete which is in every line. And because you love you write like a poet. Ah, dear boy, that is the real thing: I felt the glow of your young passion, and your prose was musical from the sincerity of your emotion. You must be happy! I wish I could have been present unseen in that enchanted garden while you wandered hand in hand, like Daphnis and Chloe, amid the flowers. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... sentiment he would express, or the subject he would discuss. Chenier might well arm himself with "Paul and Virginia," and the "Chaumiere Indienne," in opposition to those writers, who, as he said, made prose unnatural, by seeking to elevate ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... arts. She always held her head high among her Sisters. It was only on the sly that she was an omnivorous reader of dramatic and lyric poetry. She watched with keen interest the earliest developments of the prose romance in southern Europe; and after the publication of "Clarissa Harlowe" she spent practically all her time in reading novels. It was not until the Spring of the year 1863 that an entirely new element ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... the vagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics. The merciless wits, clerical and profane, of the court of Charles II. regarded Harrington's romance as a perfect godsend to their vocation of ridicule. The gay dames and carpet knights of Versailles made themselves merry with the prose pastoral of St. Pierre; and the poor old enthusiast went down to his grave without finding an auditory for his lectures upon ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... sea-shore, often carried a book in her hand, and at Adela's request she read aloud. In this way Adela first came to know what was meant by literature, as distinguished from works of learning. The verse of Shelley and the prose of Landor fell upon her ears; it was as though she had hitherto lived in deafness. Sometimes she had to beg the reader to pause for that day; her heart and mind seemed overfull; she could not even speak of these new things, but felt the need of lying ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... Sophocles, AEschylus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the Works of Alexander the Great; the manners, habits, customs, usages, and the meditations of the Grecians; the Greek Digamma resolved, Prosody, Composition, both in prose and verse, and Oratory, in English, Latin and Greek; together with various other branches of learning and scholastic profundity—quoi enumerare longum est—along with Irish Radically, and a small taste of Hebrew upon ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... pealing, and breathed into his organs. There was nothing down to poor poetry,—properly speaking, that which persisted in vegetating in manuscripts,—which was not forced, in order to make something of itself, to come and frame itself in the edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the same part, after all, which the tragedies of AEschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece; Genesis, in ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... prose sketch, a walk up Mt. Washington from the Glen House, appeared in the Independent, Sept. 13, 1866; and from this time she wrote for that able journal three hundred and seventy-one articles. She worked rapidly, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... did not enter the Senate, but indolently pursued his artistic studies, read a great deal, wrote poems and prose, danced, went into society and to the theatre, indulged in wild dissipation, and at the same time did some musical composition, and drew a portrait of a lady. He would spend one week in dissipation and the next in diligent study at the Academy. Life knocked at the door ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov

... Wortley[1] has left twenty-one large volumes in prose and verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole

... poetic of her books, although it is written in prose, is the delicate interpretation of St. Francis, written for children ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse

... verse is now with one consent allied To Tragedy, and rarely quits her side; Though mad Almanzor rhymed in Dryden's days, No sing-song hero rants in modern plays;— While modest Comedy her verse foregoes For jest and pun in very middling prose. Not that our Bens or Beaumonts show the worse, Or lose one point because they wrote in verse; But so Thalia pleases to appear,— Poor virgin!—damn'd some ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... would some day give it distinction. Heretofore, his instructors had held him rigidly to the limitations of black and white, but now they took off the bonds, and permitted him the colorful delight of attempting to express himself from the palette. It was like permitting a natural poet to leave prose, and play ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... in the words of his own narrative. We may follow here as elsewhere the translation of Hakluyt, which is itself three hundred years old, and seems in its quaint and picturesque form more fitting than the commoner garb of modern prose. ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock

... Homer once, and you can read no more; For all books else appear so mean, so poor, Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, And Homer will be all the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... interesting in the original, inasmuch as it is rhymed throughout, although printed as prose. A kind of lilt is perceptible in many of the Skazkas, and traces of rhyme are often to be detected in them, but "The Mizgir's" mould is different from theirs. Many stories also exist in an artificially versified ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... of her, at this time: "Dr. Kahn is one of the most accurate and effective students in a class of eighty-four members, most of them sophomores, although the class includes many seniors. The subject is the study of the style and diction of prominent prose authors, with some theme work. Last year Miss Kahn attained a very high rank in the study of the principles of good English style during the first semester, and in that of synonyms during the second semester. In the latter difficult subject she ranked among the very ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton

... from the divan, and would have hurried to the piano, but Marianne held him back. "Maestro," said she, "before we sacrifice to Apollo, let us give to life and mortality their rights. Prose awaits us in the dining-room, and we shall give her audience before we open the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... now make the acquaintance of the dramas, we would say briefly that the Balzac Theatre comprises five plays —Vautrin, Les Ressources de Quinola, Pamela Giraud, La Maratre, and Mercadet. These plays are in prose. They do not belong to the apprenticeship period of the Works of Youth, but were produced in the heyday of his powers, revealing the mature man and the subtle analyst of character, not at his best, but at a point far above his worst. True, their production ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden

... ourselves, we gravely taught How books by others should be wrought? Whom interrupting, then inquir'd A fifth, in squalid garb attir'd, Do now the world with much regard In mem'ry hold the dirty Bard, Who credit gain'd for genius rare By shabby coat and uncomb'd hair? Or do they, said a Shade of prose, With many a pimple's ghost on nose, Th' eccentric author still admire, Who wanting that same genius' fire, Diving in cellars underground, In pipe the spark ethereal found: Which, fann'd by many a ribbald joke, From brother tipplers puff'd in smoke, Such blaze diffused with ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston

... castle wherein his bride did dwell, he blew three blasts upon the horn that hung beside the gate, and in answer to his call a voice cried out to him. But what it said I shall sing thee, lest thou grow weary of my prose: ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson

... very distinctly. I do not think that the fact argues a good memory, for I have never been clever at learning words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that I believe my remembrance of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford

... great that a large and characteristic choice is still possible among her literary material, and this third volume of her verses is put forth in response to the repeated wish of the admirers of her peculiar genius. Much of Emily Dickinson's prose was rhythmic, —even rhymed, though frequently not ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... [8. Anglo-Saxon Prose and Historical English Syntax. Investigation of special questions and writing of essays. Professor Price. Not given in 1898-9. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... Mistress of the House, "that although his action was natural enough, he was in great danger of becoming a prose-fool." ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton

... minority. The greater number, when drawn outside the small circle of their delusions, often reason with greater acumen than normal persons; and their ideas, unhampered by stale prejudices which hinder freedom of thought, are remarkable for their originality. Fine fragments of prose and poetry and really beautiful snatches of melody, the work of inmates of lunatic asylums, were collected by my father and published, as special monographs, in The Man of Genius; and his museum at Turin contains specimens of embroidery of marvellously beautiful design and ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... months; an effect however doubtless in some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more intelligible nearness of the time—it had brought me to the end of my twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. How I gave to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not only myself but my instructors—which I infer I did from their so intensely letting me alone—I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth mainly the remembrance of being consistently either ignored or exquisitely ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... Mrs. Tretherick excitedly. In her deepest emotions, in either verse or prose, she rose above a ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... are a poet! Then I don't want your romance," and the old man handed back the manuscript. "The rhyming fellows come to grief when they try their hands at prose. In prose you can't use words that mean nothing; you absolutely must ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... engrossing hour. In place of the children's story she anticipated, she had found herself, on opening the book, confronted by the queerest stuff she had ever seen in print. From the opening sentence on. To begin with, it was a play—and Laura had never had a modern prose play in her hand before—and then it was all about the oddest, yet the most commonplace people. It seemed to her amazingly unreal—how these people spoke and behaved—she had never known anyone like them; and yet again so true, in ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... a model of literary perfection; yet our translators and compilers have somehow neglected him. His Fables are lyric poetry of a high order, and this alone has doubtless been a barrier to a better acquaintance with his work when transferred to our own tongue. Done into prose, the Fables are no longer La Fontaine, but take their place with the many respectable, dull translations which English readers try to admire because they are classics—though the soul that made them such has been separated from the ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine

... may take the form of prose, poetry or drawing. Contributors whose writings will lend themselves to illustration are asked to consult with the Editor as ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... to himself, "because she doesn't happen to see, or because she doesn't wish to see? How can I make her open her eyes? Shall I speak to her coldly or gently, with mirth or with melancholy, in poetry or in prose?" ...
— Adventures in Toyland - What the Marionette Told Molly • Edith King Hall

... Preface to Four New Plays, and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy—not only introduce us to one of the most interesting critical controversies of the seventeenth century, but present us, in the last work, with an epoch-marking masterpiece, both in English criticism and in English prose composition. Bishop Copleston's brochure brings us to the early days of the Edinburgh Review, and to the dawn of the criticism with which we are, unhappily, only too familiar in our own time. From criticism we pass, in the extract from Ellwood's life ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... heartily tired, that it would be absolutely barbarous to stun your ears any longer; only give me leave to tell you in one good round sentence, that your prose is admirable, and that I am just now (at three o'clock in the morning) sitting over the poor pale remnant of a once glorious blazing fire, and feasting upon it, till I am all ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... poet in our company to describe that charming little bay of Glaucus, into which we entered on the 26th of September, in the first steam-boat that ever disturbed its beautiful waters. You can't put down in prose that delicious episode of natural poetry; it ought to be done in a symphony, full of sweet melodies and swelling harmonies; or sung in a strain of clear crystal iambics, such as Milnes knows how to write. A mere map, drawn in words, gives the mind ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... restore the habit of thinking is to do away with the names. The word Romantic loses almost all its meaning and value when it is used to characterize whole periods of our literature. Landor and Crabbe belong to a Romantic era of poetry; Steele and Sterne wrote prose in an age which set before itself the Classic ideal. Yet there is hardly any distinctively Classical beauty in English verse which cannot be exemplified from the poetry of Landor and Crabbe; and there are ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh

... of writing was unknown among the Norsemen, and it was their custom to fix the history of their great achievements, as well as much of their more domestic doings, in their memories by means of song and story. Men gifted with powers of composition in prose and verse undertook to enshrine deeds and incidents in appropriate language at the time of their occurrence, and these scalds or poets, and saga-men or chroniclers, although they might perhaps have coloured their narratives ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne

... the background of late, by wars and generals, must be delighted to find their old friend, the "Eastern Question," cropping up. The settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein question was a heavy blow to them; but for many a year they will have an opportunity to prose and protocol over Turkey. An Austrian wit—indeed the only wit that Austria ever produced—used to say that Englishmen could only talk about the weather, and that if by some dispensation of Providence there ever should be no such thing as weather, the whole English nation would become dumb. What ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... Bishop of Hereford,(7) to the great grief of himself and his wife. And hat is MD doing now, I wonder? Playing at cards with the Dean and Mrs. Walls? I think it is not certain yet that Maccartney is escaped. I am plagued with bad authors, verse and prose, who send me their books and poems, the vilest trash I ever saw; but I have given their names to my man, never to let them see me. I have got new ink, and 'tis very white; and I don't see that it turns black at all. I'll go to ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... here a class of scalds, or bards, who, before the introduction of writing, preserved and transmitted orally the sagas, or legends, of the Northern races. About the twelfth century these poems and legends were gathered into collections known as the Elder, or poetic, Edda, and the Younger, or prose, Edda. These are among the most interesting and important of the literary memorials that we possess of the early Teutonic peoples. They reflect faithfully the beliefs, manners, and customs of the Norsemen, and the wild, adventurous spirit of their Sea-Kings.] ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... vague yet deepening sense that, in some vital way—not yet fully understood—he was different from his fellows But once he reached the haven of Desmond's study, the good days began in earnest. He could read and dream along his own lines. He could scribble verse or prose, when he ought to have been preparing quite other things; and the results, good or bad, went straight to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... well as by Charpentier. In a short time, however, the voices of scholarly skeptics began to be heard in the land, and accurate and unbiased criticism laid bare the fraud. The Latinity was attacked and exception taken to Silver Age prose in which was found a French police regulation which required newly arrived travellers to register their names in the book of a police officer of an Italian village of the first century. Although they are still retained ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... far-away times. We can learn from it something of what the people did and thought, and how they lived, and even of what they wore. Here is a description of a driver and his war chariot, translated, of course, into English prose. "It is then that the charioteer arose, and he put on his hero's dress of charioteering. This was the hero's dress of charioteering that he put on: his soft tunic of deer skin, so that it did not restrain the movement of his hands outside. He put on ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... locations are substantially correct. The location of Gall is the seat of Marvellousness, Imagination, and Spirituality; that of Spurzheim is well expressed by the term Ideality, and the description given, but the word Poetry is rather too limited as the definition of Gall's organ. It gives brilliance to prose and to oratory, or even conversation, as well ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various

... devote to this work, and realised the importance of vernacular literature, is one of the chief signs of his greatness. What he did had a lasting influence upon our literature. He tapped the wellspring of English prose. Mainly owing to his initiative, from his day till the Conquest all the literature of importance was in the vernacular, and the impulse so given to the language as a literary vehicle was strong ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... material aspect has a sensuous value, as the wealth of color of Venetian painting, the sumptuousness of Renaissance architecture, the melody of Mr. Swinburne's verse, the gem-like brilliance of Stevenson's prose, the all-inclusive sensuousness, touched with sensuality, of Wagner's music-dramas. Because of the charm of beautiful language there are many art-lovers who regard the sensuous qualities of the work itself as making up the entire experience. Apart ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... but to dance and to spin like weathercocks with their heads as well as their heels." Certainly Sainte Aldegonde had learned other lessons than these. He was one of the many-sided men who recalled the symmetry of antique patriots. He was a poet of much vigor and imagination; a prose writer whose style was surpassed by that of none of his contemporaries, a diplomatist in whose tact and delicacy William of Orange afterwards reposed in the most difficult and important negotiations, an orator whose discourses on many great public occasions attracted the attention ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... knew, somehow, and had printed the past in draggled prose, for Cecil to read and for ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... it very much. We are going to print, a few at a time, some of the pleasant praises our readers send. They are so cordial that we are moved to ask all those who do enjoy this little monthly service of sermon and story, fun and fiction, poetry and prose, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... M.D. in 1885. During the next two years he was attached to the resident staff of one of the big hospitals. It was also the period that saw the beginning of his authorship. While contributing medical reviews to his father's journal, he was also publishing poems and prose sketches in various literary periodicals. Most of his contributions from this time appeared in a publication named "An der schoenen blauen Donau" (By the Beautiful Blue Danube), ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler

... "Hanzal"coloquintida, an article often mentioned by Arabs in verse and prose; the bright coloured little gourd attracts every eye by its golden glance when travelling through the brown-yellow waste of sand and clay. A favourite purgative (enough for a horse) is made by filling the inside with sour milk which is drunks after a night's soaking: it is as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... His son expresses the opinion that part of Hood's success in comic writing arose from his early reading of Humphrey Clinker, Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, and other works of that period, and imbuing himself with their style: a remark, however, which applies to his prose rather than his poetical works. Certain it is that the appetite for all kinds of fun, verbal and other was a part of Hood's nature. We see it in the practical jokes he was continually playing on his good-humored ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... largely the same. To a certain extent many of them are exactly the same, for the vastness of the country makes it possible to syndicalise various features, so that you find Walt Mason's sagacious and merry and punctual verse, printed to look like prose but never disappointing the ear, in one of the journals that you buy wherever you are, in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Chicago or New York; and Mr. Montagu's topical rhymes in another; and the daily adventures of Mutt and Jeff, who are national heroes, in a third. Every day, for ever, ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... he did not think himself obliged to have no buttons to the collar of his doublet, if the King should command it,—a grave argument to convince the deputies of an important company of the obedience due to kings, for which he was severely lampooned both in prose ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled, Doth overflow his purpose with made heat, And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed What should have been an inner instinct's feat; Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned, Lacking the subtler music in his measure, With useless care labours but to be spurned, Courting in alien speech the Muse's pleasure; I study how to love or how to hate, Estranged by consciousness ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa

... all fiction were ransacked by the old friends of the right honourable Baronet, for nicknames and allusions. One right honourable gentleman, who I am sorry not to see in his place opposite, found English prose too weak to express his indignation, and pursued his perfidious chief with reproaches borrowed from the ravings of the deserted Dido. Another Tory explored Holy Writ for parallels, and could find no parallel but Judas Iscariot. The great university which had been proud to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... still be a seat of world Empire, one of several seats, if you will—where the ruling council of the world assembles. Then the arts will cluster round this city, as gold gathers about wisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and beautiful rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate, austere and courageous imagination of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his Liddesdale "raids"—begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years—was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... individual of any education may call another highly cultivated language in the fullest sense his own,—as is the case with the Bohemians and Slovenzi in respect to the German,—cannot be very extensive. There have, however, in modern times, been published several works of poetry and prose in the Vindish language; among the writers of which we can mention only the most distinguished. Such are, V. Vodnik, author of some collections of poems; Kavnikar, author of a biblical history of the Old and New Testament, and several works for religious ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson

... but a very hard person to deal with when roused. And I had some inkling by this time of the Professor's temperament. Moreover, I am afraid that some of my remarks had rather prejudiced him against Andrew, as a brother at any rate and apart from his excellent prose. ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... arena on the hill in the centre of the town—a place of narrow, tortuous ruelles where every stone cries out a message from the past. In the lanes, going about the business of the day, were women and girls moulded in the strange dark beauty of the district—the "belles Arlesiennes" famous in prose ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... 7, 1777, of a book supposed to have been written by Sion Brwynog about the year 1550. In these versions the stanzas are not divided. The third version appears in a book containing a variety of poems and articles in prose, of which, however, the writer or copyist is not known, though one "Davydd Thomas" is mentioned in a poor modern hand as being the owner. Our poem is therein headed "Y Gododin. Aneurin ae cant. Gyda nodau y Parchedig Evan Evans." These "nodau" are marginal notes, ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin

... "that bad eminence" awarded by fame to the execrated Catilinarians. Was it—was it not all a dream? Connected thought became impossible. Now he was in the dear old orchard at Praeneste playing micare[156] with Cornelia and AEmilia; now back in Athens, now in Rome. Poetry, prose, scraps of oratory, philosophy, and rules of rhetoric,—Latin and Greek inextricably intermixed,—ideas without the least possible connection, raced through his head. How long he thus drifted on in his reverie he might not say. Perhaps ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... civilization, Vilna surpassed the capital of the South by her store of mental energy. The circle of the Vilna Maskilim, which came into being during the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, gave rise to the two founders of the Neo-Hebraic literary style: the prose writer Mordecai Aaron Ginzburg (1796-1846) and the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... is said to have made on that occasion has been committed to memory and declaimed by several generations of American schoolboys, and is now perhaps familiarly known to a larger number of the American people than any other considerable bit of secular prose in our language. The old church at Richmond, in which he made this marvelous speech, is in our time visited every year, as a patriotic shrine, by thousands of pilgrims, who seek curiously the very spot upon the floor where the orator is ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler

... wonderfully, the event being recent, having made a great noise. This flattered my vanity; but my father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances, and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars. So I escaped being a poet, most probably a very bad one; but as prose writing bad been of great use to me in the course of my life, and was a principal means of my advancement, I shall tell you how, in such a situation, I acquired what little ability I have ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... as an artistic embodiment of harmony. He therefore restores the universal element which is apt to pass out of sight in Pope's rhymed arguments. He indulges his philosophical enthusiasm in what he calls The Moralists, a Rhapsody. It culminates in a prose hymn to a 'glorious Nature, supremely fair and sovereignly good; all-loving and all-lovely, all divine,' which ends by a survey of the different climates, where even in the moonbeams and the shades of the forests we find intimations of the mysterious ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... perchance, to chime With reason, and what's stranger still, with rhyme; Even this thy genius, CANNING! may permit, Who, bred a statesman, still was born a wit, And never, even in that dull house, could'st tame To unleaven'd prose thine own poetic flame; Our last, our best, our only Orator, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various

... child when I began to write down the things I was thinking about, but at first I always made rhymes and found prose so difficult that a school composition was a terror to me, and I do not remember ever writing one that was worth anything. But in course of time rhymes themselves became difficult and prose more ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... literature, became estranged from the German people; and the insecurity of the times was unfavorable to literary pursuits. Williram's German had lost the classical correctness of Notker's language, and the "Merigarto," and similar works, are written in a hybrid style, which is neither prose nor poetry. The Old High-German had become a literary language chiefly through the efforts of the clergy, and the character of the whole Old High-German literature is preeminently clerical. The Crusades put an end to the preponderance of the clerical element in the literature of Germany. They ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... fortifying your strength. The instructor of children who cares for his work only so far as it brings him profit, is a sad teacher; for his pay is indifferent, and his teaching more indifferent still. Of what value is the mercenary journalist? The day you write for the dollar, your prose is not worth the dollar you write for. The more elevated in kind is the object of human labor, the more the mercenary spirit, if it be present, makes this labor void and corrupts it. There are a thousand reasons to say that all toil merits its ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... quickly compressed, enough heat is evolved to produce combustion. 2. Unless your thought packs easily and neatly in verse, always use prose. (Unless if not.) 3. If ever you saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you have an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. 4. Were it not for the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, the harbors and the rivers of Britain would be blocked up with ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... no Laura, and forthwith returned his love in equal measure. Their liaison lasted several years, during which Boccaccio recorded the various phases of their passion with exemplary assiduity in verse and prose. Besides paying her due and discreet homage in sonnet and canzone, he associated her in one way or another, not only with the Filocopo (his prose romance of Florio and Biancofiore, which he professes to have written to pleasure ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... you have neither of you ever been in love, or you would prefer poetry to prose. But excuse [pulls out a paper] the haste in which it was written. I heard the news in the fields—always have paper and a pencil about me, and composed the whole forty lines crossing the meadows and the park ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald

... Stevenson has told us in verse and prose, that in childhood "his whole vocation was endless imitation." He was the hunter and the pirate and the king—throwing his fancy very seriously into each of his roles, though visualizing never passed with him, as with some children ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Northumbrian, Cornishman or Welshman, has lavished upon Rowley such cordial and such manfully sympathetic praise as would suffice to preserve and to immortalize the name of a far lesser man and a far feebler workman in tragedy or comedy, poetry or prose. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... should not unduly influence him. "I had to determine its logical value," he says, "and its bearing on my duty." "What are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as a duty," he wrote many years afterwards, "but unlearning the world's poetry and attaining to its prose? This is our education as boys and as men, in the action of life and in the closet or library; in our affections, in our aims, in our hopes, and in our memories. And in like manner it is the education of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... older than Robin himself, of a brown complexion and a high look in his face, but a little pale, too, with study, for he was learned beyond his years and read all the books that he could lay hand to. It was said even that his own verses, and a prose-lament he had written upon the Death of a Hound, were read with pleasure in London by the lords and gentlemen. It was as long ago as '71, that his verses had first become known, when he was still serving in the school of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... academic question of economic policy! No legal technicality. The paper fell from Isabelle's hand, and she sat staring at the floor. Her husband was called in plain prose a "grafter,"—one who participated in unearned and improper profits, due to granting favors in his official ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... already guessed by the number of prose writers you have been reading about, this age, the age of the last Stuarts and the first Georges, was not a poetic one. It was an age of art and posturing. It was an age of fierce and passionate party strife—strife between Whig and Tory which almost amounted to civil war, but instead of using ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... Indian tradition on which this somewhat extravagant tale is founded is both too wild and too beautiful to be adequately wrought up in prose. Sullivan, in his history of Maine, written since the Revolution, remarks that even then the existence of the Great Carbuncle was ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a writer of prose is nowhere seen to a better advantage than in Dr. Blyden's "Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race." Here we find the Negro in command of the best English style. Whatever may be said of his opinions, his mastery of a forcible, spirited, nervous expression reminds ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to 'Volpone' tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the average morality ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... which they must constantly raise in him that contemplates them, a more striking example cannot easily be found than two Greek epigrammatists will afford us in their accounts of human life, which I shall lay before the reader in English prose. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson



Words linked to "Prose" :   literary genre, nonfiction, nonfictional prose, genre, euphuism, prosaic, interior monologue, prose poem, polyphonic prose



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