"Rhyme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their flocks Across the fields of thyme, Of sunlit fields above the rocks, Where the small waves lap in rhyme. Of glancing maids and youths their peers, For ever young and free, With faces fair, and in their ears Great music of ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... living in forgetfulness of God may be your besetting sin? If you will try to pull the poison fang up, you will find how deep its roots are. It is like the yellow charlock in a field, which seems only to spread in consequence of attempts to get rid of it—as the rough rhyme says; 'One year's seeding, seven years' weeding'—and more at the end of the time than at the beginning. Any honest attempt at mending character drives a man to this—'My iniquities are too strong ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... rise; Not even your Britain's groans can pierce The leaden silence of your hearse; Then, oh, how impotent and vain This grateful tributary strain! Though not unmarked, from northern clime, Ye heard the Border minstrel's rhyme His Gothic harp has o'er you rung; The bard you deigned to praise, your deathless names ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... I, then?—Well, there are several reasons against it. In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty shows herself under the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... to be, to write good poetry. It must be lots of fun, Mrs. March, to dash off a rhyme just to while away the time—ha, ha, ha! My wife often writes poetry when she feels tired and lazy. I know that whirling this way through this beautiful country is inspiring you right now to write half a dozen poems. I'd like to see you on one of those lovely hillsides in ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... department may be referred all educational books, the most of them written in rhyme, and according to a system ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... write it as a song and put it in italics, so that even you will know that it is a song; So listen, listen, Camerados! for I am about to spout and my song shall be masculine and virile. A bas your metre, a la lanterne your rhyme, conspuez your ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... prosessing the Art of Healing long before the 14th century [66], as implying such knowledge and skill in all kinds of natural substances, constituting the materia medica, as was necessiary for them in practice. At the end of the Editor's MS. is written this rhyme, ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... himself: Ah, Palomides, Palomides, why art thou defaded, thou that was wont to be called one of the fairest knights of the world? I will no more lead this life, for I love that I may never get nor recover. And therewithal he laid him down by the well. And then he began to make a rhyme of La Beale Isoud ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... and something of a poet"; for I do not believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies minus one in your life; and I shrewdly suspect, that, so far from knowing the difference between a male and a female rhyme, you are unfamiliar with the close family connection between "trees" and "breeze," or between "love" and "dove." My episodical remarks are for the benefit of young Dolce Pianissimo, who has taken, I am sorry to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... down on the hosts of each clime, While the warriors hand to hand were— Gaul—Austrian and Muscovite heroes sublime, And—(Muse of Fitzgerald arise with a rhyme!) A quantity of Landwehr![37] Gladness was there, For the men of all might and the monarchs of earth, 50 There met for the wolf and the worm to make mirth, And a feast for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day. —From "The ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... her name was connected with all this made my face twitch. I heard the people clapping and saw them waving in the carriages as we passed, and some stood forward before the rest in a haphazard way, without rhyme or reason. Mr. Walpole with Lady Di Beauclerk, and Mr. Storer and Mr. Price and Colonel St. John, and Lord and Lady Carlisle and Lady Ossory. These I recognized. Inside, the railing along the row was lined with people. And there ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... already grown hoarse from tears, and is shy of everybody—he, this same 'roundsman on the beat,' stretches out two of his black, calloused fingers, the index and the little, and begins to imitate a nanny goat for the girl and reciting an appropriate nursery rhyme! ... And so, when I looked upon this charming scene and thought that half an hour later at the station house this same patrolman will be beating with his feet the face and chest of a man whom he had not till that time seen once, and whose crime he is entirely ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... same period of the author's poetic career as the first two cantos of Childe Harold. They followed one another like brilliant fireworks. They all exhibit a command of words, a sense of melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which mastered Moore and even Scott on their own ground. None of them are wanting in passages, as "He who hath bent him o'er the dead," and the description of Alp leaning against a column, which strike deeper than any verse of either of those ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the measured falling of that rhyme Mingled the lovely sights and glorious time, Whereby, in spite of hope long past away, In spite of knowledge growing day by day Of lives so wasted, in despite of death, With sweet content that eve they drew their breath, And scarce their ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... other never again to be friendly with that stingy, stunted fellow! The following is a translated specimen of one of the old songs chanted for the diversion of children, or to lessen the tedium of a long canoe journey. I do not tamper with an exact translation by any attempt at rhythm or rhyme, but simply give the thoughts as they stand, and as a fair ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... Phaeacia A ballad of departure They hear the sirens for the second time Circe's Isle revisited The limit of lands Verses: Martial in town April on Tweed Tired of towns Scythe song Pen and ink A dream The singing rose A review in rhyme Colinette * A sunset of Watteau * Nightingale weather * Love and wisdom * Good-bye * An old prayer * A la belle Helene * Sylvie et Aurelie * A lost path * The shade of Helen * Sonnets: She Herodotus in Egypt Gerard de Nerval * Ronsard * Love's miracle * Dreams * Two sonnets of ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... Andover, if any reader who may have survived so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil, out of which I remember this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme of beginners: ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... leading men. This power may be abused, but ought not to be, if it were really looked upon as under divine direction and inspiration. Cannot a great leader be inspired to the choice of a man, as well as a great author to the choice of a word, a rhyme? Comparatively few men thoroughly understand how to rate other men, and to these few men, as in all other great enterprises, must be given the power and authority to select and adjust. By this I do not mean that a set of ecclesiastics will ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... gibberish which was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other, all classes were constantly singing this idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More than seventy years after the revolution, a great writer delineated, with exquisite skill, a veteran who had fought at the Boyne and at Namur. One of the characteristics of the ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... gestures. They stretched out their hands, and alternately struck their feet against the ground with frantic contortions. The last words they repeated in chorus, and we easily distinguished a sort of metre, but I am not sure that there was any rhyme; the music was wild ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... me without rhyme or reason—not even a word or a thought. I sorrowed for yer till I turned to 'ate yer! Now then, get out o' this. I don't want yer, niver no more. Go down them stairs, unless yer want me to push yer down. Go 'way—and ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... young, when you and I Talked of golden things together,— Of love and rhyme, of books and men: Ah! our hearts were buoyant then ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... and in the Monody, but the couplet "and o'er the dowried virgin" was never replaced in either. The lines on spring, page 28, are "Lines to a Beautiful Spring." Dr. Forster (Faustus) was the hero of the nursery rhyme, whose scholars danced out of England into France and Spain and back again. The epitaph on an infant was in The Watchman, No. IX. (see note on page 62). The poem "Edmund" is called "Lines on a Friend who died of a frenzy fever induced by calumnious reports." The lines in "Absence" ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the Rhyme of the Three Sealers came into MacRae's mind as befitting. But he was thinking of his father and not so much of himself as ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... King has assigned, like a sad 'fleering Jack,' A duck for a crest, with the motto, 'Quack, Quack' To the proud name of St. John (it should be St. Johng, Which would rhyme with the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... decide against the book without further consideration." As a rule, the said books are worthless. The number of versifiers makes it hard, indeed, for the poet to win recognition. One little new book of rhyme is so like another, and almost all are of ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... grinding upon the rocks. She seemed to be sinking, sinking—There was a knocking, knocking at the door of the cabin, and a voice calling to her—how far away it seemed! . . . Was she dying, was she drowning? The words of a nursery rhyme rang in her ears distinctly, keeping time to the knocking. She wondered who should be singing a nursery rhyme on a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... vister," he acknowledged. "I don't know as I can think of a word that will rhyme ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle the law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention; it may have no inherent beauty; all that we ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is neither a regular ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... simple and even the most ardent admirers of Mr. Longfellow must, when they try to make "forehead" and "horrid" rhyme, admit that it was very poor verse for ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at his highest moment of happiness. 'Il me faut des geants.' An essential aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party playing 'bouts ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... make his things rhyme?" he said impatiently as his sister returned the book. "I never knew such rotten stuff to learn as ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... Trevor is a young gentleman, my dear Quisque, that you will be proud to be acquainted with; a man of talents; a poet; an orator; an author; a great genius; an excellent scholar; a fine writer; turns a sentence or a rhyme with exquisite neatness; very prettily I assure you. I mention these circumstances, my dear Quisque, because I know you have a taste for such things: and so has Mrs. Quisque, and the two Miss Quisques, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... informed that in a convent of he-goats he certainly deserved to be abbot. The same story, re-made into a gross form, is current in this country, and attributed to an eminent Virginia politician. In the Antidotum Melancholiae (Frankfort, 1667), it is given in the form of an evidently very old Latin rhyme: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... or arch, meaning 'to be bright.' The stars are called riksha, that is, bright ones, in the Veda. 'The constellations here called the Rikshas, in the sense of the "bright ones," would be homonymous in Sanskrit with the Bears. Remember also that, apparently without rhyme or reason, the same constellation is called by Greeks and Romans the Bear. . . . There is not the shadow of a likeness with a bear. You will now perceive the influence of words on thought, or the spontaneous growth of mythology. The name Riksha was ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... door; yet he vanquished him With lofty prose and with undying rhyme; But fortune not, who laid ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... forbid that such a thought should cross Her brain, though in a dream! (and then she sigh'd) Never could she survive that common loss; But just suppose that moment should betide, I only say suppose it—inter nos. (This should be entre nous, for Julia thought In French, but then the rhyme would go ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... to the scholar's eye than mine, (Albeit unlearned in ancient classic lore,) The daintie Poesie of days of yore— The choice old English rhyme—and over thine, Oh! "glorious John," delightedly I pore— Keen, vigorous, chaste, and full of harmony, Deep in the soil of our humanity It taketh root, until the goodly tree Of Poesy puts forth green branch and bough, With bud and blossom sweet. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... his plays, and said—as Pope and Voltaire used also to say—that it was nothing but laziness that prevented our tragic poets from writing in rhyme like those of France. "Dryden," said he, "had he possessed but a tenth part of Shakespeare's dramatic genius, would have brought rhyming tragedies into fashion here as they were in France, and then the mob would have ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Ireland and Scotland, these three were united on the British royal shield, as we find them in the time of Queen Elizabeth. On a victory over France, the symbol of France, a unicorn, was also added, the unicorn wearing a chain, to denote the subjection of France to England. This explains the nursery rhyme which you have ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... the plain and the hazy blue sweep of the mountains, and had come suddenly into the poetic mood. She had even caught a phrase,—"The lazy line of the watchful hills," it was,—and she was trying to fit it into a verse, and to find something beside "rills" that would rhyme with "hills." ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... from the Percy Folio MS., with the spelling modernised, except in two or three instances for the sake of the rhyme (13.4) or metre (102.2). Other alterations, as suggested by Child, are noted. Apart from the irregularities of metre, this ballad is remarkable for the large proportion of 'e' rhymes, which are found in 71 stanzas, or two-thirds of the whole. The redundant 'that,' which ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... which, unless in the drama, no one except Milton ever wrote who could rhyme, became the order of the day,—or else such rhyme as looked still blanker than the verse without it. I am aware that Johnson has said, after some hesitation, that he could not 'prevail upon himself to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... down here with us all on the verandah," said my grandfather, coming up to him. My mother had to abandon the quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... greatness of the Creator? What do we know of the stars, after all? How much has the most profound science discovered? Next to nothing! Not but that I read all that has been written by the late astronomers, for the subject is very fascinating; it is the fairy tale of science. But still, the nursery rhyme ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... have More than pity? claim'st a stave? —Friends more near us than a bird We dismiss'd without a word. Rover, with the good brown head, Great Atossa, they are dead; Dead, and neither prose nor rhyme Tells the praises of their prime. Thou didst know them old and grey, Know them in their sad decay. Thou hast seen Atossa sage Sit for hours beside thy cage; Thou wouldst chirp, thou foolish bird, Flutter, chirp—she never stirr'd! What were now these toys to her? Down she sank ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... my trust all down the years, And love you always through the tears. O heart of mine, my feet do sing As down the aisle into the Spring Of bursting bud and lilac time, Of budding trees and robin rhyme, So tenderly, Dear, I love you. In happiness I go with you Now in sunshine to follow on And into dark when you are gone. Then back again from misty night And at the dawn in coming light. At sunup when the Japs are caught You will come when the battle's fought. And then glad shouts the whole day ...
— Clear Crystals • Clara M. Beede
... and the waves of ocean— Had they a merry chime? Didst thou hear, from those lofty chambers, The harp and the minstrel's rhyme? ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... tyrant may always be 'deposed by that people as by a superior authority.'[6] For even Fergus the First, he narrates, 'had no right' other than the nation's choice, and when Sir William Wallace was yet a boy, he was taught by his Scottish tutor to repeat continually the rude inspiring rhyme, 'Dico tibi verum Libertas optima rerum.'[7] These views as to the rights of man, and of Scottish men, may well have fanned, or even kindled, the strong feeling of independence in secular matters ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... "The Parallelogram of Forces": "And hence no force, however great, can draw a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which shall be absolutely straight." This is precisely the "four-stressed iambic" metre of In Memoriam, and it even preserves the peculiar rhyme order of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... song whose thunderous chime Eternal echoes render— The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme, And Milton's starry splendor!" ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... name (pronounce Aj- to rhyme with trudge) meaning both unborn and a goat, is a name of the sun (who was a goat in Assyria), the soul, Brahma, Wishnu, Shiwa, the God of Love, and others. It was also the ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... tedious waste of time To mingle song and reason; Folly calls for laughing rhyme, Sense is out of season. Let Apollo be forgot When Bacchus fills the drinking-cup; Any catch is good, I wot, If good fellows take it up. Let philosophers protest, Let us laugh, And quaff, And a fig ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... of a poet. When the great poet laureate, Tennyson, died, and I found that the place was open, I tried to get it—but I did not get it. Anybody can write the first line of a poem, but it is a very difficult task to make the second line rhyme with the first. When I was down in Australia there were two towns named Johnswood and Par-am. I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ancient times,—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette,—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no waking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourselves, to question you, and be answered after the fashion of the old nursery rhyme— ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... exercises his critical abilities. But there are not many of the Lives which reveal Johnson at work on particular passages, where the passage in question is quoted and critical comment is made on a particular line or a particular image, rhyme, word, etc. In short, as so often in Johnson, we are confronted with the large general statement in so much of the criticism in the Lives. The "diction" of Lycidas is "harsh." "Some philosophical notions [in ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... first of the great French heroic poems known as "chansons de geste." It is written in stanzas of various length, bound together by the vowel-rhyme known as assonance. It is not possible to reproduce effectively this device in English, and the author of the present translation has adopted what is perhaps the nearest equivalent—the romantic measure of Coleridge ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... yet apt the verse, More ponderous than nimble; For since grimed War here laid aside His Orient pomp, 'twould ill befit Overmuch to ply The rhyme's barbaric cymbal. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... very moment a child's voice from the neighbouring house began repeating in a kind of chant: "Take and read, take and read." Augustin shuddered. What was this refrain? Was it a nursery-rhyme that the little children of the countryside used to sing? He could not recollect it; he had never heard it before.... Immediately, as upon a divine command, he rose to his feet and ran back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for he had left St. Paul's Epistles lying there. He opened ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... they heard, and what I have now to tell, was perfectly incredible. When 'some' years (two apparently) had passed, Will Harrison, Gent., like the three silly ewes in the folk-rhyme, 'came hirpling hame.' Where had the old man been? He explained in a letter to Sir Thomas Overbury, but his tale is as hard to believe as that ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... do—yes, I own it— But, dear, I was young then, you know. I wrote that before we were married; Let's see—why, it's ten years ago! You remember that night, at Drake's party, When you flirted with Dick all the time? I left in a state quite pathetic, And went home to scribble that rhyme. ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... to endure it, or even to exist, was a puzzle to me; but possibly the vinchucas respected them, and only dined when, like the giant in the nursery rhyme, they "smelt the blood of ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... vituperation. At length, a slang rhyme of peculiar offensiveness was used to a Wadham gentleman, which so exasperated him that he immediately, by way of a forcible reply, sent his fist full into the speaker's face. On this, a collision took place between those who formed the outside of the crowd; and the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... for a poet to muse in! How he could roll his azure eyes and comb out his locks with his lily-white taper fingers, and gaze into space for a word to rhyme! How he would wrinkle his lofty brow, compress his cupidon upper lip, and unloose his neglige necktie, to give room for his bosom to swell with pride at the enchanting poem which would, at the picture before him, be sure to flow from the tip ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... nor thought. Shut him up in a room with plenty of stationery, and in twenty-four hours, he would write himself up to the chin in verse. His muse was singularly prolific and her progeny various. He roamed recklessly through the realm of poesy. Every style seemed his—blank verse and rhyme, ode and epic, lyrical and tragical, satiric and elegiac, sacred and profane, sublime and ridiculous, he was equally good at all. His poetry might not perhaps have stood a very strict classification, but ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Scald, your song sublime, Your ocean-rhyme," Cried King Olaf: "it will cheer me!" Said the Scald, with pallid cheeks, "The Skerry of Shrieks Sings too loud for you ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... provincialism and looked eagerly about the brilliant universe. My question was, What have we here?—not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly until he was asked which leg came after which, whereupon he became so rattled that he couldn't take a step. I know I have come on a thousand feet, on wings, winds and American machines,—I ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... of indulgence, there had arisen in his bosom the old love of verse. Stimulated by intercourse with Lloyd, Colman, B. Thornton, and other wits of the period, he had written a poem, in Hudibrastic rhyme, entitled "The Bard." This he offered to one Waller, a bookseller in Fleet Street, who rejected it with scorn. In this feeling Churchill seems afterwards to have shared, as he never would consent to its publication. Not at all discouraged, he ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... ends with a smooth consonant, the substitution of t for ed produces an irregularity in sound as well as in writing. In some such irregularities, the poets are indulged for the sake of rhyme; but the best speakers and writers of prose prefer the regular form, wherever good use has sanctioned it: thus learned is better than learnt; burned, than burnt; penned, than pent; absorbed, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... read poetry. She was perfectly frank about being utterly bored with it. When she had anything to say, she liked to say it straight out, she explained, without twisting it about to make it rhyme with something just shoved in to fill up the line; and she preferred other people to ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... in Dante's time, Before his cheek was furrowed by deep rhyme; When Europe, fed afresh from Eastern story, Was like a garden tangled with the glory Of flowers hand-planted and of flowers air-sown, Climbing and trailing, budding and full-blown, Where purple bells are tossed amid pink stars, And springing ...
— How Lisa Loved the King • George Eliot
... the following doggerel (the most acceptable poetry, by the way, of the city), in which the titles of the songs were dragged in, without any regard to order, to make up a rhyme: ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... that there was to be bad news today," said Susan, "for that cat-creature turned into Mr. Hyde this morning without rhyme or reason for it, and that was no ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... did so, and the old nurse repeated the following rhyme, very much in the tone of, "The goblins 'll git you if ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... have introduced a rhyme at the pivotal pause of the line, not because my Hexameter requires it, but because I think it increases the melody, and more emphatically ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... changes the body and the voice, and makes it far different from its usual constitution. Hence the very Bacchae use measure, and the inspired give their oracles in measure. And we shall see very few madmen but are frantic in rhyme and rave in verse. This being certain, if you will but anatomize love a little, and look narrowly into it, it will appear that no passion in the world is attended with more violent grief, more excessive ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... pride in showing his many references in prose and rhyme, and the members of our party were glad to contribute in prose to his collection. But at the end of the week we presented him with another testimonial of ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... the Summer time; It has lost its rhythm and lilting rhyme— For the grace goes out of the day so soon, And the tired head aches in the glare of noon, And the way seems long to the hills that lie Under the calm of the ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... edition, he came back to ask more questions about Hal's experiences. Before long he drew out the story of the young man's first effort in the publicity game; at which he sank back in his chair, and laughed until he shook, as the nursery-rhyme describes it, ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... say a little prayer each evening: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep"; but who the Lord was or what my soul was I had no idea. It was just a pretty little way of saying in rhyme that I was going to bed. My world was a purely material one, and a most wonderful world it was, but how I came to be in it I didn't know; I only knew (or imagined) that I would be in it always, seeing new and strange things ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... as the ballad or odic form in verse. From his earliest publications we can see he loved to launch a poem with "A letter to the Editor," or to the recipient, as preface. The "Mathematical Problem", one of his juvenile facetiae in rhyme, was thus heralded with a letter addressed to his brother George explaining the import of the doggerel. His first printed poem, "To Fortune" (Dykes Campbell's Edition of the "Poems", p. 27), was also prefaced by a short letter to the editor of the "Morning Chronicle". Among Coleridge's ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... and smiled somewhat; and said: "I rejoice in thy joy. But there be evil things in yonder city also, though they be not fays nor devils, or it is like to no city that I wot of. And in every city shall foes grow up to us without rhyme or reason, and life therein shall be tangled ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... the eyes of the spirit all things appear transfigured, because lifted out of the sphere of material vision. But when we try to put these "beautiful things made new, for the delight of the sky-children" on paper or canvas, in motionless marble or flexible rhyme,—we are weighted by grosser air and the density of bodily feeling. So it was with Angela Sovrani, iwhose compact little head were folded the splendid dreams of genius like sleeping fairies in a magic cave;—and thoughtful ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to persuade people that the human species were made to be nailed to a chair, and to pore over books. He would have them exchange those robust exercises which make us joyous in the performance, and vigorous in the consequences, for the wise labour of scratching our heads for a rhyme and counting our fingers for a verse. Monkeys were as good men as these. A nation of such animals would have no chance with a single regiment of the old English votaries of beef and pudding. He never saw any ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Rani's maid, it appeared, had for no rhyme or reason reviled her in unmeasured terms. She was in such a state, it was no manner of use trying to pacify her by saying I would look into the ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... delineations. Looking it over, here, (amidst the woods and canes of that island where repose the bones of Columbus,) the song of Prince Hoel attached itself to my thoughts, and has been (involuntarily) put into rhyme. This song may be found in the first part of the poem mentioned. The lyric metre in which it now appears must rather injure than improve the belle nature of the original. Still I wish it to be published, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... war fence" (cad-rhail), but on the supposition that it is synonymous with Cattraeth, the rhyme in the Gododin would determine the latter to be the correct term, or that by which Aneurin distinguished the line. The meaning of Cattraeth would be either "the war tract" (cad-traeth), or "the legal war fence" (cad-rhaith); the latter of which ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... on, to Saxon, life seemed bereft of its last reason and rhyme. It had become senseless, nightmarish. Anything irrational was possible. There was nothing stable in the anarchic flux of affairs that swept her on she knew not to what catastrophic end. Had Billy been dependable, all would still have been well. With him to cling to she would have ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... roads, gardens, and houses, like mad! The weather would be talked of. Indeed, it was not easy to talk of anything else. A friend of mine having occasion to write me a letter, thought it worth abusing in rhyme, and bepommelled it through three pages of Bath-guide verse; of which I subjoin ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... may feel the sound of a line formed to suggest a sound in nature. He will know that a meter has been carefully worked out, and that, in the reading, that meter is of the spirit of the poem; it is not to be disregarded. Likewise he will appreciate the place of rhyme, and may not try so to cover it up as entirely to lose its effect. In humorous verse, especially, rhyme plays an effective part; and in all verse, alliteration, variations in melody, the lighter and the heavier touch, acceleration ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the hillside steep and stony, through the old streets of Mentone, Quiet, half-forgotten city of a drowsy prince and time, Through the mild Italian midnight, rolls upon the wave the moonlight, Murmuring in our dreams the cadence of a strange Ligurian rhyme,— Rhymes in which each heart is sharer, Journeying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... here is jubilation in the air And matter made to build the jocund rhyme on, Though in our joyance some may fail to share, Like Mr. RUNCIMAN or Major SIMON, That hardened warrior, he Who won the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... colossal change in discipline, from the days when disobedience was punishable with death to the agreeable moral suasion of the nineteenth century, as exemplified in the "fin de siecle" nonsense rhyme:— ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... old rhyme points out what each of the three districts of Ayrshire, and the neighbouring territory of Galloway, were remarkable for producing in greatest perfection. The mountainous province of Carrick produced robust men; the rich plains of Kyle reared the famous ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... which many intelligent people read in a cheap 'penny dreadful' magazine the incoherent, self-contradictory, and self-incriminating articles of a notorious frenzied fakir, who, like a crazed Malay, is wildly running amuck, and, without rhyme or reason, slashing at the reputations of judges, senators, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... I have preserved the balance of sentences and the prose rhyme and rhythm which Easterns look upon as mere music. This "Saj'a," or cadence of the cooing dove, has in Arabic its special duties. It adds a sparkle to description and a point to proverb, epigram and dialogue; it corresponds with our "artful alliteration" (which in places I have substituted for it) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... retained, depend alike on physiological conditions; and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle grows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium's ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... other five which he reckons as effects of sloth, belong to the "wandering of the mind after unlawful things." This tendency to wander, if it reside in the mind itself that is desirous of rushing after various things without rhyme or reason, is called "uneasiness of the mind," but if it pertains to the imaginative power, it is called "curiosity"; if it affect the speech it is called "loquacity"; and in so far as it affects a body that changes place, it is called "restlessness of the body," when, to wit, a man shows ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... BOWLES might have been proud to claim. Each one is warranted to contain a thought; an hour or so would suffice for the completion of half a dozen such. Observe too, that little deviation is necessary from the original, the words falling naturally into both rhythm and rhyme. We commence with a few translations from Carlyle. The initial specimen is taken from Herr TEUFELSDROeCKH'S remarks on BONAPARTE. This ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... and esteem, as I mean to simmer it—and waiting patiently for the natural consequences of things, as I mean to wait—you must, like a boy as you are, have it all out in a minute, set the whole house by the ears, and throw yourself out of it without rhyme or reason, or profit to any body. Now, sit down, and tell me what you mean to do ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... when I see the words as they come. There is danger in this, which is most clearly illustrated When my hand writes verse—especially rhymed verse—for the last word in each line suggests to my conscious mind a possible rhyme for the ending of the following line; this rouses up my mind, my own ideas get mixed with those of the communicating intelligence, and confusion is the result." The above statement of Mr. Stead becomes doubly interesting and valuable when we remember that through his hand, controlled by ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... deliquium that attends opium when it does not put one absolutely to sleep. I don't believe that the deity who formerly practised both poetry and physic, when gods got their livelihood by more than one profession, ever gave a recipe in rhyme; and therefore, since Dr. Johnson has prohibited application to pagan divinities, and Mr. Burke has not struck medicine and poetry out of the list of sinecures, I wish you may get a patent for life for exercising both faculties. It would be a comfortable event for me for, since I cannot ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... tear-drop, as he thought of Mrs. Wimp and Wilfred. As for Grodman, there was almost a lump in his throat. Denzil Cantercot was the only unmoved man in the room. He thought the episode quite too Beautiful, and was already weaving it into rhyme. ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... roughly hewn from the gray rocks of the island, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and relatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some were inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters, which the moss and wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate. These, these were graves where loved ones slept! It is an old theme of satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies; but when affection and sorrow grave the letters with their own ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was courting old Tim Bunce's daughter Martha, down Stony Creek Road. How that girl did take to me! She used to say she knew the sound of my hoofs on the road, of a still night, when we were a mile away; and she'd say over a little rhyme ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... afterwards—but we are advancing matters. Suffice it to say, he wrote poems and relieved himself very much. When a man's grief or passion is at this point, it may be loud, but it is not very severe. When a gentleman is cudgelling his brain to find any rhyme for sorrow, besides borrow and to-morrow, his woes are nearer at an end than he thinks for. So were Pen's. He had his hot and cold fits, his days of sullenness and peevishness, and of blank resignation and despondency, and occasional mad paroxysms ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in difficulties. English idiom requires that, when the pronoun has to be again referred to, it should be used itself a second time. The correct usage is shown by Pope: 'One may be ashamed to consume half one's days in bringing sense and rhyme together.' It would be against idiom to ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... he was kind", etc. For the rhyme of 'fault' and 'aught' in this couplet Prior cites the precedent ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Phoenix, Luciana, who believed Antipholus of Syracuse to be her sister's husband, attempted, by a discourse in rhyme, when alone with him, to make him kinder to Adriana. In reply he told her that he was not married, but that he loved her so much that, if Luciana were a mermaid, he would gladly lie on the sea if he might feel beneath him ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... for her notes, as she grew older, speak of studying Butler's Analogy, Paley's Evidences, logic, geometry, and Latin. Her library of poetry is said to have consisted only of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and Macpherson's Ossian; but hymns must have filled her ear with the ring of rhyme, for she was continually versifying, sometimes passages of Scripture, sometimes Ossian, long before she was halfway through her teens. Very foolish, sing-song, emotional specimens they are, but notable as showing ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... But the German is still guileless enough to be satisfied with his station in life when it is sufficiently honourable and prosperous, and for this wedding two little nieces had prepared this card of samples and composed a rhyme for each ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... governesses and Paris and a convent. It was too much for him. And there she sat, telling the tales to the open space, not to him, arrogating a curious superiority to him, a distance between them, something strange and foreign and outside his life, talking, rattling, without rhyme or reason, laughing when he was shocked or astounded, condemning nothing, confounding his mind and making the whole world a chaos, without order or stability of any kind. Then, when they went to bed, he knew that he had nothing to do with her. She was back in her childhood, he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... sandy-haired assistant at the grocer's shop supplied a flute obbligato, and the fishmonger and the young lady from the stationer's repository assured each other ardently that their true loves owned their hearts; two school-children with corkscrew curls held a heated argument—in rhyme—on the benefits of temperance; and, most surprising and thrilling of all, Mr Jevons, the butler from The Manor, so far descended from his pedestal as to volunteer "a comic item" in the shape of a recitation, bearing ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of men and women all over the land who can rhyme with facility. Anyone of them can take almost any idea you suggest off hand, and on the instant sing you a song that plays up that idea. These persons are the modern incarnations of the old time minstrels who wandered over the land and sang extemporaneous ditties in praise of their ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... So soft a day as this, through shade and sun, With glad grave eyes that scanned the glad wild way, And heart still hovering o'er a song begun, And smile that warmed the world with benison, Our father, lord long since of lordly rhyme, Long since hath haply ridden, when the lime Bloomed broad above him, flowering where he came. Because thy passage once made warm this clime, Our father Chaucer, here ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the "laurel," handed in a poem written on some subject suggested by the teacher. This time the subject assigned to Walter was "Goodness," which probably had some reference to his former behavior, and was a hint for the improvement of his moral character. But Walter had already put goodness into rhyme so often, and found the subject so dry and tedious and worn-out that he had taken the liberty of "singing" something else. He selected ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... we hope. The accidental rhyme in this passage is the only blemish that has been objected to in the address, and it is ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... nature of his inspiration, even to the laws of poesy, and to the secret and irreducible antinomy that exists between art and thought. When, for example, Theophile Gautier reproached him with being too little impressed with the exigencies of rhyme, his criticism was not well grounded, for richness of rhyme, though indispensable in works of descriptive imagination, has no 'raison d'etre' in poems dominated by sentiment and thought. But, having said that, we must recognize in his poetry an element, ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... photoplay fairy-tale may rise to exquisite heights, it begins with pictures akin to this rhyme. Mankind in his childhood has always wanted his furniture to do such things. Arthur names his blade Excalibur. It becomes a person. The man in the Arabian tale speaks to the magic carpet. It carries him whithersoever he desires. This yearning for personality in furniture begins to be ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... He laughed merrily, though, and chaffed us on making "secret plans." Dick hasn't a very nice laugh. It's too explosive and loud. (Don't you think other animals must consider the laughter of humans an odd noise, without rhyme ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... in happy ignorance of it; nevertheless, he confides to me that it is in the legs that he begins to feel his seventy-two years. His face has a very startling appearance. It is so scratched and torn that it makes me think of the man of the nursery-rhyme who jumped into the quickset-hedge; and, as it turns out, this one was just such another, only his movement was involuntary. He tells me how he came to be so disfigured. He was coming home with some cronies, at a late hour, from one of those Friendly Society ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... found in Greece; the only one I know of in England is that of Sir Morris Ximenes, who, I presume, claims descent from the celebrated cardinal. The mention of that name reminds me of the songs of the improvisatore, Theodore Hook, and his address in finding a rhyme for such an awkward name as Ximenes. Few possess the talent of improvising. In Italy it is more common, because the Italian language admits the rhyme with so much facility; but a good improvisatore is rare even in that country. There was a Dutchman who was a very good improvisatore, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... everybody applauded and he made a nice bow, though he said that in the last stanza there was an imperfect rhyme which he hoped they would excuse for the sake of the great feeling in it; and everybody said, "Yes, yes," and then when they were quiet Mr. 'Coon rose and said that now the program of performances would begin, and that it would open and close with flying exhibitions—the first by Mr. and Mrs. Robin, ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to work digging deeper than before, and found a much richer treasure than the former. Another version of this rhyme is found in Transactions of the Cambridge Antiquarian ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme |
