"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a syllable varies in quantity, viz. when its vowel is short and is followed by a mute with l or r, i.e. by pl, cl, tl; pr, cr, tr, etc.; as, agri, volucris.[8] Such syllables are called common. In prose they were regularly short, but in verse they might be treated as long at the option ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... of various celebrated mystical writings, especially the Prem-Sagar, or "Ocean of Love" (translated by Eastwick and by others); and the sensuous Gita-Govinda of the Bengalese lyric poet Jayadeva (translated into French prose by Hippolyte Fauche, and chastely rendered into English verse by Edwin Arnold in the "Indian Song of Songs"). See also Burnouf's partial translation of the Bhagavata Parana, and Theodore Pavie's "Krichna et sa doctrine." ... The same theme has inspired some of the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... of the Clitumnus, which we did not view under the best of auspices, because it was overcast, and the wind as chill as if it had the cast in it. The valley, though fertile, and smilingly picturesque, perhaps, is not such as I should wish to celebrate, either in prose or poetry. It is of such breadth and extent, that its frame of mountains and ridgy hills hardly serve to shut it in sufficiently, and the spectator thinks of a boundless plain, rather than of a secluded vale. After passing Le Vene, we came to the little temple which Byron describes, and which ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... contribute to the amazing skill of the battek girls, but the elaboration of native Art is doomed to decay, for Time, hitherto a negligeable quantity in this "summer isle of Eden," begins to reveal a value unknown to the Javanese past, and as the poetry of illumination vanished before the prose of the printing press, so the painting of battek must inevitably give way to the wholesale methods of Manchester in the near future of Java, just awakening from her spellbound sleep to the changed conditions of life and labour. An exquisite plain, described by ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dental reach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that they will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is so unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to improve my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper in a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost invariably pleaded justification, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... apparent that R. L. S. and Modestine are the models responsible for this state of things. And, since the style in itself is pleasant enough, I don't know that any one need complain. What put me upon this reflection was Vagabonds in Perigord (CONSTABLE), which, for the modulation of its prose, might almost have been an unacknowledged work of the Master, but is actually written by Mr. H. H. BASHFORD. It concerns the wanderings on foot of certain pleasure pilgrims along the course of the river Dordogne; and is, for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... of Cuchullin" is a rendering in verse of an Irish prose translation of a fragment of the Cuchullin Cycle, which moves in the Bronze Age period. Cuchullin, with "the light of heroes" on his forehead, is also reminiscent of Achilles. One of the few Cuchullin tales ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... ridges of Arran looming through the purple evening air, or with the "morning suddenly spread" upon their summer summits, or with premature snow tinging their autumnal tops, he never once alludes to them, so far as we remember, either in his poetry or prose; and that although he spent a part of his youth on the wild smuggling coast of Carrick, he has borrowed little of his imagery from the sea—none, we think, except the two lines in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... only to put this poetry into common prose to obtain this argument, namely,—The presence of evil in the world is not compatible with the idea of the goodness of God. Here is the objection in all its force. And what is the answer? Simply this, that God did not create evil. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... his analysis, the result is the essence of clear, logical reasoning; and if the reasoning is a little dry and simplifies the thing almost too much, it is still very illuminating and from the hand of a master of French prose. And in this I find him exercising the same consistent instinct of good sense and sincerity, the same art of development, the same seventeenth and eighteenth century principles of classic rhetoric that he applies to his music. In truth, M. d'Indy ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... letters, and wrote a deal of prose and verse at this time of leisure. When displeased with the conduct of Miss Beatrix, he would compose a satire, in which he relieved his mind. When smarting under the faithlessness of women, he ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Bane of the mind and topic of debate That drugs the reader to a restless doze, Thou that with soul-annihilating weight Crushest the Bard, and hypnotisest those Who plod the placid path of plain pedestrian Prose: ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... why the Jordan, which plays such an important part in the history of the Hebrews, receives so little honour and praise in their literature. Sentimental travellers and poets of other races have woven a good deal of florid prose and verse about the name of this river. There is no doubt that it is the chief stream of Palestine, the only one, in fact, that deserves to be called a river. Yet the Bible has no song of loving pride for the Jordan; no tender and beautiful words to describe ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... prepare that French prose?" she wailed when the crew of the "Jolly Susan" foregathered after luncheon in her room. "I begged Madame to let me make it up any other time, but of ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... for its own sake I came into it. But what particular group of people is worth pinning one's faith upon? I confess it sometimes seems to me men and women are very poor creatures. I suppose I'm too romantic and always was. I've an unfortunate taste for poetic fitness. Life's hard prose, and one must learn to read prose contentedly. I believe I once supposed all the prose to be in America, which was very foolish. What I thought, what I believed, what I expected, when I was an ignorant girl fatally addicted ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... elect-ladies who have produced great uplifting hymns that "were not born to die" was Mrs. Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, the daughter of the saintly Dr. Edward Payson, of Portland, Maine. Her prose works were very popular, and "Stepping Heavenward" had found its way into thousands of hearts. But one day she—in a few hours—won her immortality by writing a hymn, ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... works, four are poetry throughout; the three dramas, like all Sanskrit dramas, are written in prose, with a generous mingling of lyric and descriptive stanzas. The poetry, even in the epics, is stanzaic; no part of it can fairly be compared to English blank verse. Classical Sanskrit verse, so far ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... word that has the poetic aroma about it, and is an example (of which we might adduce additional cases from the domain of 'poetic diction') of a word set aside from a prose use and devoted exclusively to poetry. It is, as we know, Saxon, signifying old or old age, and was formerly in constant use in this sense; as, for instance, in Chaucer's translation of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiae, we ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... exclusively, and on my return here I had, first of all, to complete a little piece of literary work which has only just been finished. M. Frederic Villot, about whom H. has probably spoken to you, asked me to publish an edition of my operatic poems in a prose-translation, and to add a preface explaining my ideas. This I have done, and I hope that the opus will appear about the beginning of October at the latest. The rehearsals are in full swing, but unfortunately I had to object to the baritone at the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Review of Burke was the best prose. I augurd great things from the 1st number. There is some exquisite poetry interspersed. I have re-read the extract from the Religious musings and retract whatever invidious there was in my censure of it as elaborate. There are times when one ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... verse as much as you like. It does not sound nice in prose. Don't let us make fools of ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... a cold unpoetical virtue. Mere historical truth is better written in prose. And, therefore, I think you did judiciously when you threw into the fire your history of Louis le Grand, and trusted his fame ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... until he feels the need of observation. Then he observes, and intensely. He does not analyse, he does not amass his facts; he concentrates. He wrings out quintessences; and when he has distilled his drops of pure spirit he brews his potion. Something of the kind happens to me now, whether verse or prose be the Muse of my devotion. A stray thought, a chance vision, moves me; presently the flame is hissing hot. Everything then at any time observed and stored in the memory which has relation to the fact is fused and in a swimming flux. Anon, as the Children of Israel said to Moses, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... better than I could express it the feeling with which I tried to write this book, and I once intended to ask your permission to prefix the sonnet to my book, but my friends persuaded me that I ought to tell my story in my own prose, however much better your ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... a tragedy. Thus an epic might be a bad epic, but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We call any long fictitious narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. Both these forms are really quite formless, and both of them are really quite new. The difference between a good epic by Mr. John Milton and a bad epic by Mr. John Smith was simply the difference between the ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... and written by a Magus for popular use; what it contains, therefore, cannot be attributed to Zoroaster. It is remarkable that Gibbon should fall into this error, for Hyde himself does not ascribe the Sadder to Zoroaster; he remarks that it is written inverse, while Zoroaster always wrote in prose. Hyde, i. p. 27. Whatever may be the case as to the latter assertion, for which there appears little foundation, it is unquestionable that the Sadder is of much later date. The Abbe Foucher does not even believe it to be an extract from the works of Zoroaster. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... she slipped down the room before him to place him at table he saw that she was, as it were, involuntarily, unwillingly graceful. She made him think of a wild sweetbrier, of a hermit-thrush; but, if there were this sort of poetic suggestion in Cynthia's looks, her acts were of plain and honest prose, such as giving Westover the pleasantest place and the most intelligent waitress ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... much "swot" that evening. He couldn't get the ghost out of his head, nor the slovenly Latin prose of ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... is amplified and ripened, while purified, in the calm warmth of emotion. From being emotive, poetry draws in more of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has, must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in its naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving, flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learn osteology, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... above all things, place this among his very highest panegyrics, that he was the first person who added rhythm to prose writing. For they say that, as he perceived that orators were listened to with seriousness, but poets with pleasure, he then aimed at rhythm so as to use it in his orations both for the sake of giving pleasure, and also that variety of sound might prevent weariness. And this is ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... bright flame. Here and there we see it just blaze, and then sink into mediocrity. He is too redundant and tiresome.... 'Tis a great disadvantage to read them in MS., as one cannot readily turn to passages; but life is too short to be peeping into other peoples' MSS. I prefer your prose to your verse. Let me know if you receive it safely, and pray give no notion to any one that I ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... felt, and believed what he wrote, and though his dramas and poems do not rise above fair mediocrity, and the great number of his prose stories are injured by a certain monotony, the charm of them is in their elevation of sentiment and the earnest faith pervading all. His ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... into a large pit in St. Margaret's churchyard adjoining.—Besides the works above noticed, May also wrote The Description of Henry II., in verse, with A Short Survey of the Changes of his Reign, and The Single and Comparative Character of Henry and Richard his Sons, in prose. Nor was that of Lucan his only translation, for he rendered into English verse Virgil's Georgics and Selected Epigrams of Martial. He was also the author of five dramas, two of which are given in Dodsley's Old Plays. A now forgotten ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... And the consummate prose of this our chapter moves us with the like rhythmical power upon the spirit, while from Abel and Enoch onwards we hear recited, name by name, the ancestors of the undying family of faith. No wonder that the chapter should have inspired ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... write in prose the praise of the picture story-books when Stevenson thinks he cannot do it in his pretty rhymes? Moreover, we have just found out that the poet's chimney corner is filled with the little ones who can read only the simplest things, and need big, fine pictures and easy words. He was not ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation. O Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller! No wonder that European fiction sounds cold and meagre, after the wonderful effects which I have seen the romances of the East produce ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... story is a product of undergraduate days at Princeton. Considerably revised, it was published in the "Smart Set" in 1921. At the time of its conception I had but one idea—to be a poet—and the fact that I was interested in the ring of every phrase, that I dreaded the obvious in prose if not in plot, shows throughout. Probably the peculiar affection I feel for it depends more upon its age than ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... into prose again, and have done with this iliad of odds and ends. Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first recorded pauper workhouse—though not in connection with her poets, as might naturally be supposed. The building was ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... "But I've not found it yit," he continued, breaking into prose, "and there don't seem much prospect o' findin' it here anyhow. Wot an 'orrible cold place ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... number of the prizes has been increased, as now five different flowers of gold and five of silver are bestowed each for poetry of a certain kind, and in addition there is a gold jasmine which is awarded to the most excellent prose article, and a silver pink which is a sort of prize at large, and which may be given for ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... chiefly inasmuch as they reveal the creature of instinct, the fawn escaped from his native forests, that Maupassant was in his early youth. But they add nothing to his glory. They are the "rhymes of a prose writer" as Jules Lemaitre said. To mould the expression of his thought according to the strictest laws, and to "narrow it down" to some extent, such was his aim. Following the example of one of his comrades of Medan, being ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... existing translations of Aristophanes. These, the English ones at any rate, leave much to be desired; indeed it is not too much to say that there is no version of our Author in the language which gives the general reader anything like an adequate notion of these Plays. We speak of prose renderings. Aristophanes has been far more fortunate in his verse translators—Mitchell, who published four Comedies in this form in 1822, old-fashioned, but still helpful, Hookham Frere, five plays (1871), both scholarly and spirited, and last but not least, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... was partly in verse and partly in prose, and was entitled, "The Rules and Regulations of the Henpecked Club." This club was connected with the Agricultural Society's Show, and made its existence felt on the Show Day only. At the time of which I write, ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... not the adoption of Arabian medicines, however, that has made the school at Salerno famous both in rhyme and prose, but rather the fact that women there practised the healing art. Greatest among them was Trotula, who lived in the eleventh century, and whose learning is reputed to have equalled that of the greatest physicians of the day. She is accredited with a work on Diseases of Women, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... read Tolstoi, and Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... victory; and as the king 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 a ridicule upon a character which was otherwise ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... O, A, I; this simulation is not as the former; and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name. Soft! here follows prose. — [Reads] 'If this fall into thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em. Thy Fates open their hands; let thy blood and spirit embrace them; and, to inure thyself to ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... him with its palsy touch, he continued to think of nothing but Sara's conversion, and assailed her in prose and verse. One of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... hand luggage and stood in readiness. In the presence of that improbability, that Titan of venturesomeness, that floating fairy palace, it was impossible to cling to the conviction that modern civilisation is all prose. The most prosaic of mortals here had forced upon him a piece of foolhardy romance compared with which the dreams of the poets lose colour and ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... enough in prose, but the fame of Marion and his men has been fitly enshrined in poetry, and it will not be amiss to quote a verse or two, in conclusion, from Bryant's stirring poem entitled "Song ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... into poetry. The operator at Simpson's Crossing telegraphed to "The Sacramento Universe" "All day the low clouds have shook their garnered fulness down." A San Francisco journal lapsed into noble verse, thinly disguised as editorial prose: "Rejoice: the gentle rain has come, the bright and pearly rain, which scatters blessings on the hills, and sifts them o'er the plain. Rejoice," &c. Indeed, there was only one to whom the rain had not brought ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Night, docile to the orders of Satan, condescending to deflect a hatchet which is whistling unpleasantly close to Rene's ear, not that he may be benefited, but preserved for more sufferings. In comparatively plain French prose—the qualification is intentional, as will be seen a little later—with a scene and time barely two hundred years off now and not a hundred then, though in a way unfamiliar—the thing won't do. "Time," at the orders of the Prince of Darkness, cutting down trees to make a stockade for the Natchez ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... dry, hard facts are not interesting. They may make themselves names in the financial world, may become railway magnates and coal kings, may control the money market; but they are not interesting. They are the prose of life. They who see the clouds forming into fantastic shapes, the glories of a sunset, the shadows in pools, the colour on a bird's wing, the rose tint on the cheek of a child,—they and such as they ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... make shirts, and Dr. H. reads Tennyson's poems, or we speak tenderly of that world of culture and noble deeds which seems here "the land very far off," or Mrs. H. lays aside her work for a few minutes and reads some favorite passage of prose or poetry, as I have seldom heard either read before, with a voice of large compass and exquisite tone, quick to interpret every shade of the author's meaning, and soft, speaking eyes, moist with feeling and sympathy. These ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... suffrage for the women of the country. Neither party, therefore, it seems to me, can justify hesitation as to the method of obtaining it, can rightfully hesitate to substitute federal initiative for state initiative, if the early adoption, of the measure is necessary to the successful prose- ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... Hilda, enjoying a childlike pleasure in her own idea. "The theme is better suited for verse than prose; and when I go home to America, I will suggest it to one of our poets. Or seven poets might write the poem together, each lighting a separate ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... species peculiar to each. The narrative contains those that either reprove with a smile or a frown, by pourtraying the characteristics of an individual, or the general manners of a society, people, or nation; and are either described in verse or prose. The dramatic contains perfect resemblance, which is described by comedy; or caricature, which is described by farce. And the picturesque is what exercises the painter, engraver, and sculptor. In all these species the satirist may either divert by his humour, entertain by his wit, ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... is a frende in courte than a peny in purse"—(I. 70.) "Whan the stede is stolyn to shyt the stable dore"—(I. 76.) "It goeth through as water through a syue."—(I. 245.) "And he that alway thretenyth for to fyght Oft at the prose is skantly worth a hen For greattest crakers ar nat ay boldest men."—(I. 198.) "I fynde foure thynges whiche by no meanes can Be kept close, in secrete, or longe in preuetee The firste is the counsell of a wytles ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... eighteenth-century English literature needs to be reminded of the interest of writers of the period in the condition—"disease" is too confining a term—hypochondriasis.[2] Their concern is apparent in both the poetry and prose of two centuries. From Robert Burton's Brobdingnagian exposition in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) to Tobias Smollett's depiction of the misanthropic and ailing Matthew Bramble in Humphry Clinker (1771), and, of course, well into the nineteenth century, afflicted ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... silent, Julia thought that she had never found her host so charming before. His rambling discourse amused her, touched her; she loved his occasional shy introduction of a line of poetry, his eager snatching of a book now and then to illuminate some point with half a page of prose. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... be acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose superior ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... prophecies, and which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional passage of the Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to verse, after the manner of some other bards or rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in mind that what appear as metrical irregularities on the printed page would not be felt to be so when sung or chanted; just as is the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... 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 ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... own reports. He continued to subject me to the indignity of being "ghosted," a thoroughly expressive term, which by a combination of bad conjugation and the suggestion of insubstantiality defines the sort of prose produced, by Jacson Gootes. This arrangement, instead of giving me some freedom, shackled me to the reporter, who dashed from celebrity to celebrity, grass to nuclei, office to point of momentary interest, with unflagging energy and infuriating ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... of antiquity, or of the modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in Greek; but if you don't happen to know Greek, the next best thing we can do is to read as good a translation of it as we have recently been furnished with in prose.[83] You won't get all you would get from the original, but you may get a great deal; and to refuse to know this great deal because you cannot get all, seems to be as sensible as for a hungry man to refuse bread because he cannot get partridge. Finally, ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... supererogatory to assume that Shakespeare had Chapman's phrases in his mind when alluding to superstitions which were universally acknowledged. It could be as easily argued on like grounds that Shakespeare was drawing on other authors. Nash in his prose tract called independently The Terrors of the Night, which was also printed in 1594, described the nocturnal habits of 'familiars' more explicitly than Chapman. The publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe's translation of Lucan (bk. i.) to his ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... pretended "compositions" quoted in this chapter are taken without alteration from a volume entitled "Prose and Poetry, by a Western Lady"—but they are exactly and precisely after the schoolgirl pattern, and hence are much happier than ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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
... the occasion. A sister, a mother, a promised lover, all false,—all so damnably, cruelly false! It was impossible. No history, no novel of most sensational interest, no wonderful villany that had ever been wrought into prose or poetry, would have been equal to this. It was impossible. She told herself so a score of times a day. And yet the circumstances were so terribly suspicious! Mr. Gibson's conduct as a lover was simply disgraceful to him as a man and ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... too complicated to be discussed here. We may say briefly, that we attach the term to all that increasing amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently nor so obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." We refer those interested in the question to the Greek Melic poets, and to the many excellent French studies on the subject ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... the Greek masters. Chapman published his Iliad in 1611, his Odyssey in 1616; Pope's version appeared between 1715 and 1726; Cowper issued his translation in 1791. In the next century the Earl Derby retranslated the Iliad, while an excellent prose version of the Odyssey by Butcher and Lang was followed by a prose version of the Iliad by Lang Myers and Leaf. At a time when Europe had succeeded in persuading itself that the whole story of a siege of Troy was an obvious ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... hardly survived as a standard author, though he wrote a pure and lucid prose. Those who leave the bulk of their literary work behind them in the form of sermons are inviting ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... 1st.—Twenty years ago there used to be a not infrequent headline in The Times, "The Duke of Devonshire on Technical Education," which always struck on my frivolous spirit with a touch of infinite prose. It is the same nowadays, I regret to say, with a Lords' debate on the national resources. The Upper House is filled with eminent financiers—men who think in millions and who under our glorious Constitution may not propose an expenditure of sixpence without the consent ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... creation. Anyhow he kept it, and I think he was wise to keep it. One cannot keep everything of that kind that is printed, so it is well to keep a specimen. Capricorn had, moreover, intended to perpetuate that specimen for ever in his immortal prose—pray Heaven he may return ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... settled in London, where he did writing, lecturing, and some more poetry, in particular "The Last Man"; after settling in London a pension of L200 was awarded him through the influence of Fox; he wrote in prose as well as verse; he was elected Rector of Glasgow University in 1827, and again in the following year: ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... went a-courtin';—she liked him, I suppose; But certain parts of courtin' a feller must do in prose. He rhymed her each day a letter, but that didn't serve to get her; He waited so long, she married another man from spite, An' sent him word she'd done it, an' not to forget ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... is The Paladins of France; it was written by Manzanares in Italian prose and is in three volumes. It does not always agree with the other versions of the same story; but that is only as it should be, for romances have always been re-written to suit the audience they are intended for. It has been going on about four months, that is, since last October, when ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... 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 way it dragged in everyday happenings, so petty ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... people really behave in absurd situations and under comically trying circumstances is quite funny enough for him; and if he exaggerates a little and goes beyond the absolute prose of life in the direction of caricature, he never deviates a hair's-breadth from the groove human nature has laid down. There is exaggeration, but no distortion. The most wildly funny people are low comedians of the highest order, whose fun is never forced and never fails; they ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... certainly neither are nor can be, for that while he himself certainly holds them, he as certainly is not himself a materialist. Professor Huxley is among the last to be suspected of talking anything, as Monsieur Jourdain did prose, without knowing it. He knows perfectly well that he has here been talking materialism, but he insists that his materialism is only another form of idealism. He seeks to evade the seemingly inevitable deduction ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... become the greatest song-writer that Scotland—perhaps the world—has known. In other respects the mental training of the lads was of the most thorough kind. Murdoch taught them not only to read, but to parse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn verse into the prose order, to supply ellipses, and to substitute plain for poetic words and phrases. How many of our modern village schools even attempt as much? When Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook the education of his children, and carried it on at night after work-hours were over. Of that ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... While it works with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist would care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except what the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and expressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a translation of physical evolution into mythical language, which presents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in that of a romantic drama. In either case ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the former, none excel; in the mock heroic and the ethical, none equal him; and in my mind, the latter is the highest of all poetry, because it does that in verse, which the greatest of men have wished to accomplish in prose. If the essence of poetry must be a lie, throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your republic, as Plato would have done. He who can reconcile poetry with truth and wisdom, is the only true "poet" in its real sense, "the maker" "the creator,"—why must this mean ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... hungry child, already standing outside the cave, reciting the beautiful verses about the joys of paradise which St. Augustine wrote and I had taught her. [Footnote: This is an error. The following verses are written by the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, Peter Damianus (d. 23d Feb. 1072), after Augustine's prose.] She sobbed for grief ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... or summaries. In this e-text, they are always collected into full sentences. In some verse selections, sidenotes appear immediately before their original location, with no further marking. In other selections— including all prose passages— sidenotes are collected into longer paragraphs and placed after the text they refer to. These will be identified either by line number or by lower-case letters [a] showing ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... Prostitute. The rising Sun this Poets God did seem, Which made him tune's old Harp to praise Eliakim. Bibbai, whose name won't in Oblivion rot, For his great pains to hide the Baalites Plot, Must be remembred here: A Scribe was he, Who daily damn'd in Prose the Pharisee. With the Sectarian Jews he kept great stir; Did almost all, but his dear self, abhor. What his Religion was, no one could tell; And it was thought he knew himself not well: Yet Conscience did pretend, and did abuse, Under the notion of Sectarian Jews, All that he ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... in which he held literary men. When he spoke to me respecting them he called them mere manufacturers of phrases. He could not pardon them for excelling him in a pursuit in which he had no claim to distinction. I never knew a man more insensible than Bonaparte to the beauties of poetry or prose. A certain degree of vagueness, which was combined with his energy of mind, led him to admire the dreams of Ossian, and his decided character found itself, as it were, represented in the elevated thoughts of Corneille. Hence his almost exclusive predilection for these two authors With this exception, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... And covered over with most curious lawn. Thus if thy careles draughts are cal'd the best, What would thy lines have beene, had'st thou profest That faculty (infus'd) of poetry, Which adds such honour unto thy chivalry? Doubtles thy verse had all as far transcended As Sydneyes Prose, who Poets once defended. For when I read thy much renowned pen, My fancy there finds out another Ben In thy brave language, judgement, wit, and art, Of every piece of thine, in every part: Where thy seraphique ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... hesitation, and without a grammatical error, entered into the most subtle metaphysical reasoning (rather too much of it indeed!), and had preached with impassioned (perhaps too impassioned) eloquence, quoting poets and prose writers, ancient and modern, with the facility of good scholars—while they urged men and women to repent and flee to Christ, with all the fervour of men thoroughly in earnest. On the other hand, he knew that their opportunities for self-education were ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... to fulfil my promise about Mr. Sheridan. There was little in his boyhood worth communication. He was inferior to many of his school-fellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I do not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself by Latin or English composition, in prose or verse. [Footnote: It will be seen, however, though Dr. Parr was not aware of the circumstance, that Sheridan did try his talent at English verse before he left Harrow.] Nathaniel Halhed, one of his school-fellows, wrote well in Latin and Greek. Richard Archdall, another school-fellow, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... or prayers,— Of Southey's prose, or Wordsworth's sonnets, Of danglers or of dancing bears, Of battles, or the last new bonnets; By candle-light, at twelve o'clock, To me it mattered not a tittle, If those bright lips had quoted Locke, I might have thought ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... highest and indeed only science and the ancient prayers and poems of the race were arranged in three collections to suit the ritual. These were the Rig Veda, containing metrical prayers: the Yajur Veda (in an old and new recension known as the Black and the White) containing formulae mainly in prose to be muttered during the course of the sacrifice: and the Sama Veda, a book of chants, consisting almost entirely of verses taken from the Rig Veda and arranged for singing. The Rig Veda is clearly older ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... less vaguely to another great dreamer—and worker—of Germany, Immanuel Kant, and to several great Frenchmen, including De Maillet, Maupertuis, Robinet, and the famous naturalist Buffon—a man who had the imagination of a poet, though his message was couched in most artistic prose. Not long after the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon had put forward the idea of transmutation of species, and he reiterated it from time to time from then on till his death in 1788. But the time was not yet ripe for ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... have been born in England for so many ages; and not a palm's breadth of her sky, not a foot of her earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wallspaces but has been fondly noted, studied, and described in prose, or celebrated in verse. English books are full of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the American, come he never so numerously, will find outnumbering him in the pursuit of any specific charm of hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in their islands I had ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... items and productions. Roscius, Citizen, and Alma, Ida, Claude, and Regulator, Many signatures unnoted, Many noms de plume forgotten, Filled the sheet with spicy reading, With discussion, fact, and fancy, Prose and poetry and fiction, Rhyme and riddle and acrostic, All the sorrows and the blessings, All misfortunes and successes, ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have a look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly on ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... to repeat in prose, what has already been said in verse, that Grass of Parnassus, the pretty Autumn flower, grows in the marshes at the foot of the Muses' Hill, and other hills, not at the top ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... on the sun boat of Ra encloses similarly a human figure, which was apparently regarded as the soul of the sun: the life of the god was in the "sun egg". In an Indian prose treatise it is set forth: "Now that man in yonder orb (the sun) and that man in the right eye truly are no other than Death (the soul). His feet have stuck fast in the heart, and having pulled them out he comes forth; and when he comes forth then that man dies; whence they say of him who has passed ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... the following lines from this noble poet, though a prose translation can do but little justice to the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me only with thine eyes," says the great Ben Jonson, or sings it rather. The words, that he versified out of the Greek prose of Philostratus, cannot be thought of without the tune. It is the same with Carew's "He that loves a rosy cheek," or with "Roses, their sharp spines being gone." The lighter poetry of Carew's day is all powdered with gold dust, like the court ladies' hair, and is crowned and diapered ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Pussy's Nightmare," "The Fool's Paradise, or Love and Life," "A Lost Illusion," "Vers Nonsensiques," "L'Onglay a Parry," "Two Thrones," "A Love-Agony," "A Simple Story," "A Ballad of Blunders" (after Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens"), and then a story in prose, "The Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts: A tale of Modern Art and Fashion." All the poetry is in the ballad strain, and by its monotony the reader is put into the right condition to receive a shock from some felicitous twist at the end of a line. Thus it ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve Apostles" or the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... usual, the truth (if it be a truth) for which they contend is, as with other parts of their system, a plagiarism from the abjured Bible. Now, if I must believe prophecy, I prefer the magnificent strains of Isaiah to the sentimental prose either of Mr. Parker or of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... and her friend, and was received with cordial familiarity. He entered into conversation with Arthur, drawing a little further from Miss Brandon at each step, till having brought him close to old Mr. Randall, and placed him under the infliction of a long prose about the hounds, he retreated, and was soon again in conversation with the two friends, Emma's face raised ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and even less dangerous combats, have been described in good heroic verse; but that of Gurth and the Miller must remain unsung, for want of a sacred poet to do justice to its eventful progress. Yet, though quarter-staff play be out of date, what we can in prose we will do ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... poetic-prose may appear hardly suitable to the philosophic dignity of history, relating the fate of two knights accused with a monk of having 'sinned' with the king's daughter-in-law 'even on the holiest days,' and who were castrated and flayed alive, truly enough infers that ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... learn the state of the country? How did the war affect even the people remote from the battlefields? How are the terror and suffering of the people indicated? Notice the effectiveness of the author's use of details. Have you read any prose or poetry in which war is made to seem glorious? How does it seem here? Does the author make the scene of the arrival of the Prussians vivid? How is this done? Note the dramatic contrast between the arrival of the Prussians and the actions of the peasants. How has ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken Carlyle, brother of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... being absorbed in the furor poeticus, which (as skilful physicians assure me) is difficultly cured. But doctors differ, and I don't despair of a cure." Fortunately, he at last accomplished that cure, for his early poetry gives no indications of future excellence. His prose is much more poetic, even in those early letters, than his verse. A great poet unquestionably is a great man; but Burke's greatness was to be achieved in another sphere. It is only in the visions of prophecy that we see the Lion with wings. Burke entered his name at the Middle ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... prose what a Thomas Dunn English or a Roy Lee Harmon could peel off in crisp, singing lines. Surely we have gifted souls who can illumine our story in song—the story of Mountaineers Always Free, of West Virginians always Mountaineers—for ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... his beautiful language would be tortured into a shape which would convict him of talking nonsense?—But this is poetry. Then take Hooker's prose:— ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... sought more than once for the soul in living and in dead matter; yet, like providence, it has remained invisible to my eyes, although present to my heart. A hundred writers since Socrates, Seneca, St. Augustine, and Gall, have made, in verse and prose, the comparison you have made, and yet I can well understand that a father's sufferings may effect great changes in the mind of a son. I will call on you, sir, since you bid me contemplate, for the advantage of my pride, this terrible ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in the afterglow, Star-eyed and golden 'mid the poppy and rose, I do not know; I do not care to know,— It is enough I keep her picture so, Hung up, like poetry, in my life's dull prose. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... to a hitherto unattained perfection of form and style, and in his best work, Endymion, he displayed a lovely delicacy of thought and expression which has kept his reputation secure. He is best known, however, for his prose romance, Euphues, which gave its name to the style of which it was the climax. Euphuism is a manner of writing marked by elaborate antithesis and alliteration, and ornamented by fantastic similes drawn from a mass of legendary lore concerning plants and animals.[3] This ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... who writes in a Latin Style in Prose and Verse, as polite and accurate as can be boasted of by any of our modern Wits. Jocelin, Spelman, both Father and Son, Cambden, Whelock, Gibson, and many more of all Ranks and Qualities, whose Names deserve well ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... unnecessary, and might possibly be impertinent, to renew here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and reviewers as authors—the debate whether the reissue of work contributed to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved from the objection, at once sum ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... means, know all the grammar you can. Read the best of poets and prose authors to see how they have mastered the language, but don't allow your life to become a burden to you and others because of your worry lest you "slip a grammatical cog" here and there, when you know you have something worth saying. And if you haven't anything worth saying, please, ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... important thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors. He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to find himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid salesman without a relative in the world, except a married sister in Bordentown, and he awoke ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... Switzerland, with his father and mother. He had already become familiar with the French language, and a year later he read Latin with some facility. Although the father judiciously studied to repress his son's marked precocity of talent, Arthur wrote about this time several plays in prose and in rhyme,—compositions which were never exhibited, however, beyond ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... something of the halo of possible martyrdom about his head—the Church of the Revolution 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, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... O'Brien,' and even in 'Phaudrig Croohore,' of a power over the mysterious, the grotesque, and the horrible, which so singularly distinguish him as a writer of prose fiction. ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... influence the infant early finds himself, often leads him precociously into the realm of song. Emerson has said, "Every word was once a poem," and Andrew Lang, in his facetious Ballade of Primitive Man, credits our Aryan ancestors with speaking not in prose, but "in a strain that would scan." In the statement of the philosopher there is a good nugget of truth, and just a few grains of it in the words of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... no wonder men's eminence appears but in their own way. Virgil's felicity left him in prose, as Tully's forsook him in verse. Sallust's orations are read in the honour of story, yet the most eloquent. Plato's speech, which he made for Socrates, is neither worthy of the patron nor the person defended. Nay, ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... the house; they were struck by lightning, and found lying dead in each other's arms. Here was an admirable chance for Pope, who was staying in the house with his friend Gay. He wrote off a beautiful letter to Lady Mary,[9] descriptive of the event—a true prose pastoral in the Strephon and Chloe style. He got Lord Harcourt to erect a monument over the common grave of the lovers, and composed a couple of epitaphs, which he submitted to Lady Mary's opinion. She replied by a cruel dose of common sense, and a doggrel epitaph, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... to be attended to, is, The Inversion of the Phrase. This flings the Stile out of Prose, and occasions that Suspense which is the Life of Poetry. This builds the lofty Rhyme (as Milton expresses it) in such manner as to cause that Majesty in Verse of which I have said so much before, that there is no need of ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come. Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty—O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... fables, apart from their satire, are often mere essays. Plato, Sir Thomas More, William Morris, and Mr. H. G. Wells have not disdained to transmit their philosophy under the domino of romance or myth. Some of the greatest poets—Ruskin and Pater for example—have chosen prose for their instrument of expression. If that theory is true of literature—and I ask you to accept it as true—how much truer is it of journalism, at least such journalism as mine; though I see a great gulf between literature and journalism far greater than that between fiction and essay- ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... understand that men find it a weary task to read in sight of the beauty of the groves of Magdalen and of St. John's. When Kubla Khan "a stately pleasure-dome decreed," he did not mean to settle students there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays, and for Greek and Latin prose compositions. Kubla Khan would have found a palace to his desire in the gardens of Laud, or where Cherwell, "meandering with a mazy motion," stirs the green weeds, and flashes from the mill-wheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows white and purple ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... in particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that such ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Bess's patronage was of the national breed: she loved no pictures so well as portraits of herself. As, however, her painters have not flattered her, it may not uncharitably be concluded that they were no great deacons in their craft. It is a much easier thing to assure a homely female, in prose or rhyme, that she is beautiful, than to represent her so upon canvass. Her effigies are, I believe, pretty numerous, varying in ugliness, but none that I have seen even handsome—prettiness, of course, is out of the question. She was fond of finery, but had no taste in dress. Her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... come from Miss Ingelow's pen since 1863. The following year, Studies for Stories was published, of which the Athenaeum said, "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy and sorrow." The five stories are told in simple and clear language, and without slang, to which ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... style in American fiction dates from the appearance, in 1915, of Spoon River Anthology, though it required five years for the influence of that book to pass thoroughly over from poetry to prose. For nearly half a century native literature had been faithful to the cult of the village, celebrating its delicate merits with sentimental affection and with unwearied interest digging into odd corners of the country for persons ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... professions of supernatural virtue, who know of what stuff such professions are made, for what purposes they are designed, and in what they are sure constantly to end. Many innocent gentlemen, who had been talking prose all their lives without knowing anything of the matter, began at last to open their eyes upon their own merits, and to attribute their not having been lords of the treasury and lords of trade many years before, merely to the prevalence of party, and to ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... England what it is, under God, to its own people and to half the human race. These are Chaucer, the Father of English Verse; Wyclif the Father of the Evangelical Reformation in all lands; Hooker, the Father of English Prose; Shakspere, the Father of English Literature; Milton, the Father of the English Epic; Bunyan, the Father of English Allegory; Newton, the father of English Science; Carey, the Father of the Second Reformation through ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... 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
... Latin, but from his own Stock: and so, rather by bringing in the Phrases, than the Words: And This was natural; and will, I believe, always be the Case in the same Circumstances. His Language, especially his Prose, is full of Latin Words indeed, but much fuller of Latin Phrases: and his Mastery in the Tongue made this unavoidable. On the contrary, Shakespeare, who, perhaps, was not so intimately vers'd in the ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... by example.' Said the Khalif, 'Wilt thou not tell us thy story and acquaint us with thy case? Peradventure it may bring thee relief, for the help of God is near at hand.' 'O fisher man,' said Noureddin, 'wilt thou hear our story in prose or verse?' 'Prose is but words,' replied the Khalif, 'but verse is strung pearls.' Then Noureddin bowed his head and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... documents from Norse sources that may be classed as "Original Narratives of Early American History" are the Icelandic sagas (prose narratives) that tell of the voyages of Northmen to Vinland. There are two sagas that deal mainly with these voyages, while in other Icelandic sagas and annals there are a number of references ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... will work in prose and rhyme, And praise thee more in both Than bard has honored beech or lime, Or that Thessalian growth In which the swarthy ring-dove sat ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... are foes, stand up now, stand up now, The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now; The Cavaliers are foes, themselves they do disclose By verses, not in prose, to please the singing boys. ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... Scotland. Walton had his information from Dr. Morley. On Nov. 25, 1645, Walton probably wrote, though John Marriott signed, an Address to the Reader, printed, in 1646, with Quarles's Shepherd's Eclogues. The piece is a little idyll in prose, and 'angle, lines, and flies' are not omitted in the description of 'the fruitful month of May,' while Pan is implored to restore Arcadian peace to Britannia, 'and grant that each honest shepherd may again sit under his own vine and fig-tree, and feed his own flock,' when ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... sight of her own bad writing, her broken-backed illuminated capitals, her lumpy campanulas, crooked-winged fairies, queer perspective, and dabs of blue paint, she saw her performance not as it was, but as it was meant to be, heard her own lines without their awkward rhymes and bits like prose, and thought of the wonder and admiration of all the Wardour family, and of the charms of having it secretly lent about as a dear simple sweet effusion of the talented young countess, who longed for rural retirement. And down came a great tear into the red trimming of British ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge |
