"Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attains its highest excellence in poetry. The art of composing short poems in which a thought, emotion or spiritual experience is expressed with a few simple but pregnant words in the compass of a single couplet or short hymn, was carried by the early Buddhists to a perfection which has never been excelled. The Dhammapada[645] is the best known specimen of this literature. Being an anthology it is naturally more ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... leave the general concern To track our Hero on his path of Fame: He must his laurels separately earn— For fifty thousand heroes, name by name, Though all deserving equally to turn A couplet, or an elegy to claim, Would form a lengthy lexicon of Glory, And, what is worse still, a much ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... which must be laid chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms. Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing classical metres. Creech says of Horace, "'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the poet,"[418] and leaves the matter there. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... gravest have more than one light passage. To draw a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more of deep and sustained gravity than is to be found in any similar production ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Latin language. Horace, by adopting stricter rules, produces a much more harmonious effect. The same is true of Catullus's treatment of the elegiac, as compared with that of Propertius or Ovid. The Greek elegiac does not require any stop at the end of the couplet, nor does it affect any special ending; words of seven syllables or less are used by it indifferently. The trisyllabic ending, which is all but unknown to Ovid, occurs continually in Catullus; even the monosyllabic, which is altogether avoided by succeeding poets, occurs once. [124] Another ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... over this couplet, for it was indelibly stamped upon my memory, and is as fresh to-day as when the lines were penned. This my first literary effort was carried to somewhere about the middle of the first canto. It stuck there—I ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... few dollars to the good. During one of the two years a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day. It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on the tombstones they ordered. They themselves, in most cases, knew none, and they asked Francois to supply them—as though he kept them in stock like marble and sand-paper. He had no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... couplets to be sung through, feigning by his silence to admit his defeat. Then the bridegroom's camp rejoiced and sang aloud in chorus, and thought that this time the foe was worsted; but at the first line of the last couplet, they heard the hoarse croaking of the old hemp-dresser bellow forth the second rhyme. Then ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... adorns for her. Landscapes thereon he would design, A tombstone, Aphrodite's shrine, Or, with a pen and colours fit, A dove which on a lyre doth sit; The "in memoriam" pages sought, Where many another hand had signed A tender couplet he combined, A register of fleeting thought, A flimsy trace of musings past Which might for many ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... said solemnly, in order to save the situation: "That last couplet is not at all necessary;" and Daddy Taille, who had got red up to the ears, looked round ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement; it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy heroes, instead of letting them ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the kind of fool you're going to make of yourself," cried Septimus, a ray of wonderful lucidity flashing across his mind. "There's a couplet of Tennyson's—I don't read poetry, you know," he broke off apologetically, "except a little Persian. I'm a hard, scientific person, all machinery. My father used to throw poetry books into the fire if he caught me with one, but ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe three score years and ten ago, bore on its foaming crest Victor Hugo, prince of romanticists. Near by was Henri Heine,—he left Heinrich across the Rhine,—Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet. The star of classicism had seemingly set. In the rich conflict of genius were Gautier, Schumann, and the rest. All was romance, fantasy, and passion, and the young men heard the moon sing silvery—you remember De ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... to be supposed that the smaller Procellariae are only visible before a storm is not very apparent. In point of fact, there is no more reason for associating the petrel specially with storms than there is for the belief expressed in the old Scotch couplet quoted in ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... is a remarkable specimen of the affected style of compliment prevalent in the time of Elizabeth. The third couplet, at first sight, appears to have a signification exactly opposed to that which the context requires. We should expect, instead of "the tongue all impatient to speak," to find "the ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... band of inhabitants, ordered his general, Michi, to construct a spacious hut (muro) and invite the eighty doubtful characters to a banquet. An equal number of Jimmu's soldiers acted as hosts, and, at a given signal, when the guests were all drunk, they were slaughtered. Jimmu composed a couplet expressing his troops' delight at having disposed of a formidable foe so easily, and in this verselet he spoke of one Yemishi being reputed to be a match for ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... around a bend in the road by this time. When Tom returned to the scene of the encounter, Mr. Wood was not in sight. Mr. Chripp laughed, and paraphrased an old couplet. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... f. tax. convencer to convince. conveniente useful, fitting, proper. convenir to agree, fit, suit. convento convent. convertir to convert. convicto convicted. convidar to invite. convoy m. convoy, escort, train. copa cup. copla couplet, ballad, song. corazon m. heart. cordillera chain of mountains. corneta cornet; —— de llaves cornet-a-pistons. corona crown. coronar to crown. coronel colonel. coronilla crown of the head. corral m. yard. correo mail, post-office. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene, beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by Shakespeare in the Rape of Lucrece, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes, and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a third rhyme comes forward in the last ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is a broad stone plinth panelled in front. The stalls stand on the plinth west of the screen, and the backs are painted with scenes from the monkish legends of St. Anthony the Hermit, St. Cuthbert, and, in the south choir aisle, St. Augustine. A rhymed couplet explains each picture; and the paintings, though rudely executed, give good examples of late fifteenth-century dress and ornament. Prior Gondibour caused the work to be done, and as Richard Bell was bishop at the time he may have ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... And yet, 'tis true, There are as mad, abandoned critics, too!" This couplet, penned by Pope, is ever new— But then, dear friends, the second line ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... Besides this, after each couplet of the Angelus, is recited that short hymn of praise, beginning with the words which the angel of the annunciation addressed to Mary,[1] "Ave Maria." This is why the hour after sunset is so often called the hour ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... furze blossoms which Eleanor was very fond of. Then the scorpion grass, of both kinds, proclaimed that it was summer; and borage was bright in the sitting-room. Eleanor could hardly look at it without an inward smile and sigh, remembering the cheering little couplet which attached to it by old usage; and Julia from whose lips she had first heard it; and the other lips that had given it to Julia. Corn-marigold was gay again in July, and the white blackberry blossoms came with crane's bill and flax, campion and willow-herb, speedwell and vetchling. ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... keen sympathy with his kind, his fine common-sense and his genial humour. The same qualities, tempered by a certain grace and tenderness, also enter into the best of his poems. Avoiding the epigram of Pope and the austere couplet of Johnson, he yet borrowed something from each, which he combined with a delicacy and an amenity that he had learned from neither. He himself, in all probability, would have rested his fame on his three chief metrical efforts, 'The Traveller', 'The Hermit', and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... farmer's life is composed merely of coursing, hunting, shooting, and fishing. These alone, said he, are very well, when occasionally and moderately used as a recreation; but a farmer must learn his business before he is capable of conducting and managing a farm—for, remember the old couplet, "he that by the plough would thrive, must either hold himself or drive." I would, therefore, have you think this matter over, before you finally make your choice. If you should like to be a clergyman, I have now an opportunity of purchasing the next presentation ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... prayed a 'respite,' it was not that he was scared at the approach of death. His mind was never brighter and happier. To this moment may well be attributed, as it has been by popular tradition, his composition of the couplet: ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... intently in that direction, until the form faded into a mere shadow; and then, as darkness increased, seemed to multiply before my aching eyes, and assume all sorts of fantastical shapes. Every now and then, a couplet, or a stanza, came sweeping up. It was evident the lady, whoever she might be, was not singing merely to amuse the child. The notes were sometimes lively, but, in general, sad and plaintive. I listened long after the last quaver had died away; and was rather sulky when Ali came with the persevering ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... also be done; in a corner of the house must he stand and repeat that couplet, till some tender-hearted lass relieves him. Now for the questions which are most deeply laid, or so touching to him, that he finds much difficulty to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... Lord Mallow were standing in the embrasure of a window, walled in by the crowd of aristocratic nobodies and intellectual eccentricities, talking earnestly of poor Erin and her chances of ultimate happiness, the lady, almost unawares, quoted a couplet of her own which seemed peculiarly applicable ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... That couplet was not his first one, by a good deal. The habit, it would seem, had taken a pretty strong hold of him, when the whipping ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... (except, of course, those that are written in stanzas), or influence the structure of the Latin, it must be considered as a happy circumstance for those who wish to render Horace into English. In respect of restraint, indeed, the English couplet may sometimes be less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is, on the whole, easier to run couplet into couplet than to run quatrain into quatrain; but the couplet seems hardly suitable for an English lyrical poem of any length, the very notion of lyrical poetry apparently ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... it! And the changing Taste Of changing Time leaves half your Work a Waste! My Childhood fled your Couplet's clarion tone, And sought for Homer in the Prose of Bohn. Still through the Dust of that dim Prose appears The Flight of Arrows and the Sheen of Spears; Still we may trace what Hearts heroic feel, And hear the Bronze that hurtles on the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... blocks of calico and white cotton intermingled, and on every white block was written a verse from the Bible or a couplet from one of our best hymns. On the central block, in letters so large as to catch the careless eye, was that faithful saying, in which is our hope and strength—'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.' And below it the prayer ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... says to us?"—"Yes, I hear," said the King, and continued his game. Monsieur, who was in the habit of introducing passages from plays into his conversation, said to my father-in-law, "M. Campan, that pretty little couplet again, if you please;" and pressed the King to reply. At length the Queen said, "But something must be said to Campan." The King then spoke to my father-in-law in these words: "Tell M. d'Inisdal that I cannot consent to be carried ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and said to him, "O damned one, O dog of the Nazarenes, art thou come to such power that thou durst assail me with the King of the Franks?" Then quoth he to his guards, "Take this accursed and do him die"; and he repeated this couplet,[FN26] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... is too apt to connect itself with self-love, and the disquieting passions which follow in the train of that our natural infirmity. Fix your eye upon acquiring independence by honourable business, and let the Muses come after rather than go before. Such lines as the latter of this couplet, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... (Memory of Husein) still ringing in their ears. The new party is composed of Bombay Musulman youths, the tallest of whom carries an umbrella made out of pink, green and white paper, under which the rest crowd and sing the following couplet relating to the wife and ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... evidence must be added the information derivable from the posthumous publications enumerated in the former part of this article. The publication of 1723 was made by direction of the duchess of Buckingham. The couplet, "Tho' prais'd," &c., and the appended note, were omitted. In 1726 Mr. alderman Barber republished the volumes "with several additions, and without any castrations," restoring the couplet and note as they ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... Michael Malcolm, of Loch Ore, an eccentric baronet, pronounced this oracular couplet in his old age, when troubled with the talk of the French Revolution. As a picture of meditative serenity and neutrality, it seems ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like "the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice," which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be called the worst couplet in the world's literature. In his real poetry (even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always crests the ridge triumphantly and ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the church is the very decorative 'Greenway' chapel. John Greenway was a rich wool-merchant of Tiverton, and on the walls of the chapel was inscribed this couplet: ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... great theory of idealism in which he affirmed that there is no proof of the existence of matter anywhere save in our own perceptions. Byron, in his light-hearted way, more than two generations later, dismissed Bishop Berkeley and his theory in the famous couplet— ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... truth there was the moon between the legs of the cow! She did not remain there long however, but was soon on the cow's back, as she crept up and up in the face of the sun. He bethought him of a couplet that Grizzie had taught him ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... fashion of the present day? How far the judgment of that is worth a poet's pain I can't pretend to say. But of one thing I am sure, that while I could as easily square the circle as compose a simple couplet addressed to the heart of a simple audience with sufficient felicity to decoy their praises into Max's begging-tray, I could spin out by the yard the sort of verse-making which characterizes the fashion ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has done in the following couplet, which, most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the power ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... a man of much ability and considerable culture for the times in which he lived. At the same time he was a man of strong personality though of evil repute in the Gaelic-speaking districts, as the following couplet still current among ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... which had been expected of the venerable commander of the army of the Shenandoah. He had spent three months of time, and ten millions of money, and had only emulated the acts of that Gallic sovereign whose great deeds are immortalized in the brief couplet, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... earliest playthings were French alphabet-blocks, and the set which served as toys and tasks for each of the elder brothers came at last to him as his legacy. The letters were formed by the human figure in different attitudes, and each block had a little couplet below the picture, beginning with the letter on the block. The Y represented a gymnast hanging by his hands to a trapeze, and being a letter which does not occur in the Hungarian language except in combinations, excited most the interest ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... (line 10) answering to desolate and state (lines 4 and 5), instead of to the halfway rhymes aforesaid. As to Antistrophe 2b, that follows Antistrophe 2a, so far as it goes; but after line 9 it breaks off suddenly, and closes with two lines corresponding in length and rhyme to the closing couplet of Antistrophe 1b, the section immediately preceding, which, however, belongs not to this group, but to the other. Mr. Locock speaks of line 124 as 'a rhymeless line.' Rhymeless it is not, for shore, its rhyme-termination, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... spoke Mr. Lagg, being now too interested to quote a couplet. "Matters were going on well, and I expected to close the deal, and make a pretty penny, when the doctors said they couldn't take the property, as it was haunted, and of course a haunted house, with queer noises in the night, would never ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... have lost my wits very finally when I forget the first time that I pleased my father with a couplet of English verse (after many a year of trials); and the radiant joy on his face as he declared, reading it aloud to my mother with emphasis half choked by tears,—that "it was as fine as anything that Pope or ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... one of the most respectable of the governors, was found, at his death, with a copy of verses in his pocket, which included the following couplet: ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... couplet with full lung power through all the repetitions, till the inevitable "glory, glory hallelujah" had the voice of every soldier in the fort. The song "took," and the marching chorus of the Federal armies of the Civil War was started on its way. Mrs. Howe gave it a poem that made its rusticity sublime, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... some title. Until the year 1792, there existed at Paris no theatre specially appropriated to this style of performance, which was given at the Comedie Italienne. It attracted crowds; and Sedaine, the composer, vexed to see it preferred to his comic operas, wrote a couplet against it, exhibiting more spleen than poetical merit. The attack, however, together with the refusal of a small pension which he had claimed from the Italian Comedy, to whose treasury he had brought millions of francs, irritated Piis, the vaudevilliste then in vogue, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the Layards. This Stella had died at the age of twenty-five in the year 1741, and her tombstone recorded that in mind she was clean and sweet, and in body beautiful. Also at the foot of it was a doggerel couplet, written probably by her ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... about a sixteenth part of the sum he had promised. The indignant author would accept no remuneration at all, but wrote a satire upon Mahmood instead; but he was merciful in his revenge, for he reached no more than the seven-thousandth couplet. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Colliers: on reading in a Comic Paper absurd comparisons between the wages of Curates and Colliers Wanted—a Wife: a Voice from the Ladies Sympathy A Fragment Law versus Theology: on an Eminent County Court Judge The Broken Model Impromptu: on an Inveterate Spouter A Character Couplet Pause: on the hesitation of the Czar to Force a Passage of the Danube, June, 1877 The Test of the Stick Note: concerning Iuan Wyllt, an Eisteddfod at Neath, and a First ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... mingled and interwove itself with the drone of the music from the table. He was reciting verses; from his favourite poem, no doubt. But though the sound of them ran in my ears like a brook, I can remember one couplet only,— ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to do with poetry," comments Montaigne on this couplet, "to say about this that not only is there nothing barbarous in this fancy, but that it is altogether worthy of Anacreon." Such is his enthusiasm, indeed, that he finds in this simple and faithful expression of sentiment ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... possessed numerous rings in ancient times. In the romance of "Sir Degrevant" a couplet ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... country and their king." This concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:— ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to thee, while I, alas! who have been blessed by thy pure heart and love for thee for sixteen years, lo! now I have lost thee." Still greater sticklers for the truth at the expense of convention are two fond husbands who borrowed a pretty couplet composed in memory of some woman "of tender age," and then substituted upon the monuments of their wives the more truthful phrase "of middle age,"[33] and another man warns women, from the fate of his wife, to shun ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... the Persians are of several kinds; the gazel or ode usually treats of love, beauty, or friendship. The poet generally introduces his name in the last couplet. The idyl resembles the gazel, except that it is longer. Poetry enters as a universal element into all compositions; physics, mathematics, medicine, ethics, natural history, astronomy, grammar—all lend ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... exercise of the higher intelligence which besets those who are known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them anonymously to magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of "How we Beat the Favourite" that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a versemaker. The success of his republished "collected" poems gave him courage, and the unreserved praise which greeted "Bush Ballads" ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... been used by Koenig,[284] and I will first give some of his results. But I regret to say that I am unable to discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches which are rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts only speeches which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he counts any speech consisting of two lines or more, but omits not only one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less than two; but I ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... all. Granted;—for private enjoyment; and for private enjoyment keep them. They are not at all the less written you know, because you divide them. The couplet does not cease to be, nor does its meaning change. But take it away, and all appropriation ceases, and a very pretty gallant charade remains, fit for any collection. Depend upon it, he would not like to have his ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... published in the "Cambro-Briton" is somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... expert in all manly exercises, but not equally graceful; and the same defect attended his otherwise striking eloquence in public assemblies. His putting to flight the assassins in Ferrara gave him such a reputation for courage, that there went about in his honour a popular couplet ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... {epigramma} almost in the sense of sepulchural epigrams; {epigegrammai grammata legonta tade}, and a little further on, {epixosmesantes epigrammasi xai stelesi}, "epitaphs and monuments". Among these epitaphs is the celebrated couplet of Simonides[3] which has found a place in all ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... jealousy in matters literary; and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of the eighteenth-century couplet. Erskine offered, and Lewis gladly accepted, contributions from Scott, and though Tales of Wonder were much delayed, and did not appear till 1801, the project directly caused the production of Scott's first original work in ballad, Glenfinlas and The ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... out "the ambiguity of this couplet, which indeed gives a sense exactly contrary to that intended; to avoid which one must break the grammatical construction." The poet's meaning ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... therefore seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may easily be made to confront its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the visible shame of refutation. Such shame would settle upon every page of Pope's satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. And the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... question whether the children are amused. Occasionally there is a line with the old ring to it, a couplet seasoned with Attic salt, but for the rest there is the body without the spirit,—there is the well of English undefiled, but it is pumped dry! Probably the desire to publish was never so great as during Landor's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... expressive. Even now, when I think of the expression which a great painter should give to genius, I always have before me that magnificent head. I had a moment of enthusiasm." And further, he adds that one day he saw him listening to Monti while the latter was singing his first couplet in the "Mascheroniana." "I shall never forget," said he, "the divine expression of his look; it was the serene look of genius ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... ear, and seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the Poem. It admits both of simplicity and magnificence of sound and of language, beyond any other stanza that I am acquainted with. It allows the sententiousness of the couplet, as well as the more complex modulation of blank verse. What some critics have remarked, of its uniformity growing at last tiresome to the ear, will be found to hold true, only when the poetry is ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... it to the camp. This has resulted in my having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... giving more time to the word "great" in the first line, and to the word "world" in the last line. The idea may be indicated by supposing that the word "O" has been omitted from the beginning of the first and last line. The first line of the last couplet is peculiar in that every one of the four feet contains three syllables with the accent on the last. All the other lines consist each of four feet of either two or three syllables. Technically the poem is anapestic tetrameter much varied by the introduction ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... immediate successors. Of the higher poetic qualities, imagination, sympathy, insight, and pathos, he had no great share; but for the work which in his original writings, as distinguished from translations, he set himself to do, his equipment was supreme, and the medium which he used—the heroic couplet—he brought to the highest technical perfection of which it is capable. He wrote for his own age, and in temper and intellectual and spiritual outlook, such as it was, he exactly reflected and interpreted it. In the forging ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... performed his obsequies. It appears that the abbey of S. Maximin was about 120 paces from the cell of the saint at Treves, and it is therefore most probable that the writer was a monk of the Benedictine order then belonging to that foundation; but he puts his name out of doubt by the following couplet, inscribed at the end of ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... great Duke of Marlborough, whose two chief qualities of mind were very happily hit off in the couplet 'On a High Bridge over a Small ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... come over from Nonsuch Palace by Epsom to fish in the Mole. Perhaps he did, and drank Elinour's "noppy ale"; in any case, a portrait of the Leatherhead ale-wife found its way into one of his books, with a rhymed couplet beneath it:— ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... came to reside in the district, a firm believer in the wisdom of the couplet: "A woman, a spaniel and a walnut tree, The more you beat them the better they be." The spaniel and the walnut tree he did not possess, so his wife had the benefit of his undivided energies. Whether his treatment had improved her ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the custom of Shakespeare's age, to conclude acts and scenes with a couplet, a custom which was continued for nearly ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... various Government works, if the five stanzas concerning Castlereagh should risk your ears or the Navy List, you may omit them in the publication—in that case the two last lines of stanza 10 [i.e. 11] must end with the couplet (lines 7, 8) inscribed in the margin. The stanzas on Castlerighi (as the Italians call him) are 11, 12, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... when filled up, shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... are many superstitions as to the fitness or unfitness of days, times, and seasons; but in England May appears to be the only month supposed to be unlucky for weddings. The reason for this does not seem clear. The couplet ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... consists of thirty-seven stanzas; the second of seventy-two; the third of forty-eight; each stanza of eight ten-syllable verses, of which the first six rhyme alternately; the last two are a couplet. There is a short argument, in verse, prefixed to each poem. That of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... in general use domestically so late as in 1687; for in the diary of Henry, Earl of Clarendon, he registers that "Pere Couplet supped with me, and after supper we had tea, which he said was really as good as any he had drank in China." Had his lordship been in the general habit of drinking tea, he had not probably made it a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... are on record of the encounter of this fish with other fishes, or of their attacks upon ships. What can be the inducement for it to attack objects so much larger than itself is hard to surmise. We are all familiar with the couplet from Oppian: ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... up with them. From a distance I saw in a pool of moonlight on the yellow road the black irregular mass of the convoy. Then I heard a weary dirge; the wretches were singing. One, in a sad and gutteral voice, gave the couplet, which trailed dismally through the depths of ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... of vinegar in a dressing, like that of onions and its relatives, on most occasions should be suspected only. Wyvern and other true epicures consider the advice of Sydney Smith, as expressed in the following couplet, "most pernicious":— ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... two poets eyed each other like two cocks seeking an opportunity to engage. Then through the crowd a stalwart carpenter, a constant attendant of Gigi's, elbowed his way. He leaned over the table with a hand on each shoulder, and in a neatly turned couplet he then addressed the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... New York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe" with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet occurred: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal and wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town at these hours must be ghostly enough on its neighbouring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... know not where the truth may be; I tell the tale as 'twas told to me." (Probable misquotation of old couplet.) ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... latter somewhat bowed, making him appear even shorter than he was. It was these legs of his, together with his big round head and shock of reddish hair, that inspired some genius of the school with a couplet which was often chanted by the boys when they caught sight of Joe in the street. ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... divide. Give others riches, power, and station, 'Tis all on me an usurpation. I have no title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher. In Pope I cannot read a line, But, with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Pox take him and his wit!' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous, biting way. Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 'eternal lines' clearly alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song. That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Essay on Criticism, Part II. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... give an affirmative meaning to the words "angkynnull agkymandull agkysgoget," the couplet might be ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... said the great poet Saxe. "Oh, how many a slip 'twixt the couplet and the cup! Abdomen dominates. When Homer had no ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... with Lady Mary and with Hervey was discontinued, merely because they had too much wit for him. Towards the latter end of 1732, 'The Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace,' appeared, and in it Pope attacked Lady Mary with the grossest and most indecent couplet ever printed: she was called Sappho, and Hervey, Lord Fanny; and all the world knew the characters ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... confounding incomprehensibility and power. She has some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian model, and generally end with a couplet. Her blank verse is the worst of all. The most ambitious poem in the book is that called "A Day in the Life of Mary Stuart," a dramatic poem in three scenes, dated the last of January, 1567. It contains a scene between the queen and her maidens, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... cause of a metamorphosis so singular and so absolute, Wayland only answered by singing a stave from a comedy, which was then new, and was supposed, among the more favourable judges, to augur some genius on the part of the author. We are happy to preserve the couplet, which ran ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... will be disposed to admit the truth, that the collection contained "a very great variety of uncommon books, and scarce ever to be met withal," &c. There is, at bottom, a small wretched portrait of Hearne, with this well known couplet subjoined: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... fantastic manner, the only woman devotee whom we chanced to see in Japan. She held out a lacquered salver for money, presumedly for religious purposes, and on receiving the same she commenced a series of gyrations worthy of the whirling dervishes of Cairo. It was impossible not to recall De Foe's couplet as applied to this ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... They were insecure! The city rested upon three columns, one of them intact, another quite decayed away, the third partially corroded and soon to crumble into ruin. He peered up from, his blue depths, and in a fateful couplet of verses warned the townsmen of their impending doom. In this prophetic utterance ascribed to the fabulous Cola Pesce is echoed a popular apprehension that was ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Walter, Rupert and Foch succeeded. Stephanie just missed. Walter and Rupert and Foch had jolly soft roes, a fact which is recorded in a cynical little poem by the precocious Foch, believed to be the only literary work of a whitebait now extant. We have only space here to quote the opening couplet:— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... this putting all the strength and beauty of a Shakespearean couplet? Shakespeare uses such figures as this often, and in them he is his greater self. His is the splendor of imagination and clearness of vision of a prince of poets. Time hastes. This task is decoying. To cease is a hardship; for "Job" lends itself with such wealth ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... invited. It was in the Rue des France-Bourgeois, close to La Force. As I expected, my officer was there. I went up to him as he was singing a love ditty and looking tenderly at a lady, and interrupted him exactly in the middle of the second couplet. 'Monsieur,' said I, 'does it still displease you that I should frequent a certain house of La Rue Payenne? And would you still cane me if I took it into my head to disobey you? The officer looked at me with astonishment, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, "from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history." Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... tittering curiously before, remained spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness of the ending of comedies, of the regret which lingers in the remembrance of past laughter. In a couplet of passionate melancholy she asked, where are the roses of yesterday? whither vanish ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... with Aurat, Beza, de L'Hopital, Montdore and Turnebus, as one of the foremost Latin poets of his time. Here also Buchanan formed a lasting friendship with Julius Caesar Scaliger; in later life he won the admiration of Joseph Scaliger, who wrote an epigram on Buchanan which contains the couplet, famous in its day:— ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... mund, is hand, and by periphrasis "land of fist"; so that Hallmund is meant by this couplet, and that was the real name of "Air," who is not a mere man, but a ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... am all at sea," returned Hollis. He laughed. "I suppose you've read Ace's poem in the Kicker?" He caught Norton's nod and continued. "Well, Ace succeeded in crowding a whole lot of truth into that effort. Of course you remember the first couplet: ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... never heard Horace's famous couplet, Segnius irritant, etc., she was Horatian by the plain, hard, positive intelligence, which, strange to say, characterizes the judgment of her sex, when feeling happens not to blind it altogether. She gauged ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... couplet was sung by Panshin with special power and expression, the sound of waves was heard in the stormy accompaniment. After the words "and longing vain," he sighed softly, dropped his eyes and let his voice gradually die away, morendo. When he ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... through the shades of night, awoke me, behold! my chamber was deserted, and far off was the place of our meeting. He says also,' continued the eunuch, 'that he cannot complete the piece, and will give a rich present to anyone who adds to it a second couplet to his satisfaction.' ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... ways, by Johnson, in his ,Vanity of Human Wishes," and by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter of Mr. Hawes, a South Sea director, and died in 1788. Lord Vane died in 1789. Boswell distinctly states, that the lady mnentioned in Johnson's couplet "was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose Memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett, but Ann Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London." See Boswell's Johnson, vol. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... it should be ascribed to him who appeared the most calculated to have written it, and who indeed claimed it for his own—the chevalier de Boufflers. I do not know whether you recollect the lines in question. I will transcribe them from memory, adding another couplet, which was only known amongst our own particular circle, but which proves most incontestably the spirit of kindness with which the stanzas were composed. Lise, ta beaute seduit, Et charme tout le monde. En vain la duchesse en rougit, Et la princesse en gronde, Chacun sait que ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... acting of Mrs. Siddons; had conversed with Napoleon in his seclusion at Elba, and had ridden with the Duke of Wellington along the lines of Torres Vedras. It was not without reason that Lord Russell, when reviewing his career, epitomized it in Dryden couplet: ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... variety of metrical resources, and its artistic finish, was really adequate to fulfil the highest demands of genius. In this direction their most important single achievement was their elevation of the 'Alexandrine' verse—the great twelve-syllabled rhyming couplet—to that place of undisputed superiority over all other metres which it has ever since held in ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... a garret—let him know't who will— There was my bed—full hard it was and small; My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun; For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days when ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... weather, were better for a free man than the court and the cheaping-town; of the taking from the rich to give to the poor; of the life of a man doing his own will and not the will of another man commanding him for the commandment's sake. The men all listened eagerly, and at whiles took up as a refrain a couplet at the end of a stanza with their strong and rough, but not unmusical voices. As they sang, a picture of the wild-woods passed by me, as they were indeed, no park-like dainty glades and lawns, but rough and tangled thicket and bare waste and heath, solemn under the morning sun, and dreary with ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... the republication by the National Assembly of this spell of healing potency and virtue. The enlightened Dr. Ball, when he wished to rekindle the lights and fires of his audience on this point, chose for the test the following couplet:— ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
