"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... parterre are daily be-rhymed in verse, and vaunted in prose, but the beauties of a vegetable garden seldom meet with the admiration they might claim. If you talk of beets, people fancy them sliced with pepper and vinegar; if you mention carrots, they are seen ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... enlivened by the accompaniment of fiddles; but the manly and ferocious Danton, to whom such sprightly interruptions were not congenial, proposed a decree, that the citizens should, in future, express their adorations in plain prose, and without ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... (with judgment) you may frame your Speech according to the Matter you must worke on, majesticall, pleasant, delicate, or manly, more or lesse, in what sort you please. Adde hereunto, that whatsoever Grace any other Language carrieth in Verse or Prose, in Tropes or Metaphors, in Eccho's and Agnominations, they may all be lively and exactly represented in ours. Will you have Plato's Veine? read Sir THOMAS SMITH; the Ionicke? Sir THOMAS MOORE; Cicero's? ASCHAM; Varro? CHAUCER; Demosthenes? ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... to shoulder fought the men and the women. The Russian woman! Who shall ever do justice or adequately portray her heroism and self-sacrifice, her loyalty and devotion? Holy, Turgeniev calls her in his great prose poem, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... His first prose work, the "Notes of a Sportsman" (Zapiski Okhotnika), a collection of sketches of country life, made a deep and lasting impression upon the minds of the educated classes in Russia, so vigorous were its attacks upon the vices of ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... most beautiful belief regarding children's flowers is that embodied in Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Angel, where the Danish prose-poet tells us: "Whenever a child dies, an angel from heaven comes down to earth and takes the dead child in his arms, spreads out his great white wings, and flies away over all the places the child has loved and picks quite a ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... over an unlimited area. The elements of the story remain, wholly or in part, while the literary clothing is altered according to the 'taste and fancy' of the reciter. The lore is now traditional, whether it be in prose, as Maerchen, or in verse, as ballad. And so it remains in oral circulation—and therefore still liable to variation—until it is written down or printed. It is left 'masterless,' unsigned; for of the original author's composition, may be, only a word ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... these friends had mingled the destinies bright with such glorious promise. Together they read the great works that appeared above the horizon of literature and science since the Peace—the poems of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott, Jean-Paul, Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more. They warmed themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their powers in abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again with new glow of enthusiasm. ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... so much truth as well as humor in the following article, that it must be included. It gives in prose the agonies which Saxe told ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... of Slaughter; Verse and prose, the Laureat Otter, Floats along, diluting song In milk and water. Next (who'll buy?) here's Love in Little, Smooth as glass and eke as brittle; Here are posies, lilies, roses, Cupid's slumbers—out in numbers, Pouting, fretting, fly-not-yetting, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... beautiful lines were written, the kitchen of Whittier's boyhood's home, at East Haverhill, Massachusetts, is shown in the accompanying illustration. It shows a swinging crane. His description of the "laying the fire" can never be equalled by any prose:— ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... writings in prose and verse have made his reputation national has achieved his master stroke of genius in this historical novel of revolutionary days ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... example, hath divested his manners of part of their austerity; and our conversation has, in consequence, been of that pleasant texture, betwixt the useful and agreeable, which best resembles "the fairy-web of night and day," usually called in prose the twilight. It is probable both parties may, on such occasions, have been the better for their encounter, even if it went no farther than to establish for the time a community of feeling between men, who, separated more perhaps by temper ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... earth does she mean?" Peggy demanded in a perplexity not unnatural, considering the highly idealized character of Dorothy's report. It was left to Aunt Abigail to translate the catastrophe into prose. The Dolittle Cottagers were not the only early risers that fine morning. A big hawk, up betimes, and looking for his breakfast, had selected as a choice tit-bit, one of the yellow hen's fast diminishing brood. ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... 'This letter, which was PRINTED in Byron's lifetime, was not published till 1830, when it appeared in Moore's "Life of Byron." It is one of the most vigorous prose compositions in the language. Byron had the highest opinion of ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... procedure, he has learned nevertheless. It would be a good thing to demonstrate this fact to a class; then the pupils would be satisfied to use the most economical procedure. The plan holds good whether the matter be prose or poetry. ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... the strongest and most common-sense young men and women in a thraldom from which few mortals escape. The period when love, in soft silver tones, whispers his first words of adoration, painting our graces and virtues day by day in living colors in poetry and prose, stealthily punctuated ever and anon with a kiss or fond embrace. What dignity it adds to a young girl's estimate of herself when some strong man makes her feel that in her hands rest his future peace and happiness! Though these seasons of intoxication may come ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... be specified in time, With strict regard to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I've got new mythological machinery, And very handsome ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... mantle of romance. Pauline Johnson has linked the vivid present with the immemorial past. Vancouver takes on a new aspect as we view it through her eyes. In the imaginative power that she has brought to these semi-historical sagas, and in the liquid flow of her rhythmical prose, she has shown herself to be a literary worker of whom we may well be proud: she has made a most estimable contribution to ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... than fundamentally like life, and no less charged with purpose and idea than the work of the great Russians, though under cover of reticences and irony little known to them. The great series of prose dramas—from 1867 (The League of Youth) onwards—with their experimental prelude Love's Comedy (1863)—were to be for all Europe the most considerable literary event of the fourth quarter of the century, and they generated affiliated schools ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the light curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois-realistic and the lyrical-romantic—finally deciding that he would no longer "prostitute his talent" to win popularity, but would impose ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... strong in Charlotte Bronte, must have come to a great extent from a similar passion alike in father and mother. Mr. Bronte, indeed, may be counted a prolific author. He published, in all, four books, three pamphlets, and two sermons. Of his books, two were in verse and two in prose. Cottage Poems was published in 1811; The Rural Minstrel in 1812, the year of his marriage; The Cottage in the Wood in 1815; and The Maid of Killarney in 1818. After his wife's death he published no more books. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Believe me, Edwards, to restrain The licence of a railer's tongue Is what but seldom men obtain By sense or wit, by prose or song: A task for more Herculean powers, Nor suited to the sacred hours Of leisure in ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... in "Primeval California": "A dense undergrowth of light green foliage caught and held the sunlight like so much spray." So do Stoddard's pages catch and hold the lights and shadows of a world which is the more beautiful because he beheld it and sang of it—for sing he did. His prose is the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... archery, his generous disposition, his love of fair play, and his ever present courtesy to women, form a picture that has no counterpart in the folk-lore of any other people. The simple ballad English has been most successfully preserved in Mr. Pyle's easy prose, and, as regards the text, this edition is in all respects the most complete and in every way the most desirable that has ever ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... illustrious prose writer of this or any other age is M. Tullius Cicero; and as his life is copiously related in biographical works, it will be sufficient to mention his writings. From his earliest years, he applied himself ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... has left twenty-one large volumes in prose and verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... were not wanting critics in this country, of whose good opinion any author in any part of the world might be proud, who spoke of it in terms it deserved. "Are you not delighted," wrote a literary friend to me, who has since risen to high distinction as a writer, both in verse and in prose, "are you not delighted with the Spy, as a work of infinite spirit and genius?" In that word genius lay the explanation of the hold which the work had taken on the minds of men. What it had of excellence was peculiar and unborrowed; ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... a few cheap novels had sufficed to reveal to her! But then Barbara was herself a world of uncrystallized poetry. What is feeling but poetry in a gaseous condition? What is fine thought but poetry in a fluid condition? What is thought solidified, but fine prose; thought ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... is of great importance for the study of Greek mythology viewed in its different epochs, and for the interpretation and understanding of ancient tragic or lyric poets. Moral or historical inscriptions, in prose and in verse, have also been found on vases. The letters of these inscriptions are capital or cursive; they are very delicately traced, and often require a great deal of attention to perceive. They are traced in black or white with a ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... of free-verse is too complicated to be discussed here. We may say briefly, that we attach the term to all that increasing amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently nor so obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." We refer those interested in the question to the Greek Melic poets, and to the many excellent French studies on the subject by such distinguished and well-equipped authors as Remy de Gourmont, Gustave Kahn, ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness, and playing the part of dangerous abettor of world- wide ambitions. Faithful to no race after the manner of the kindly earth, receiving no impress from ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... support her in his arms when her long vanished son, whom she had never given up for lost, however, suddenly stood before her and said: "Here am I." How fondly she kissed and caressed her dear, cruel, restored fugitive. The singer too loudly expressed his joy alike in verse and in prose, and fetched his best theatrical dress out of the chest to put it on his son in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... piece of Latin prose, too obviously modelled upon the Annals of Tacitus, while the senior tutor was a confirmed Ciceronian, with the Second Philippic constitutionally on the brain? Was it the Greek verse, containing one senarius with a long syllable before the caesura ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... These apparitions come for little or no object—they seldom speak when they do come; if they speak, they utter no ideas above those of an ordinary person on earth. American spirit-seers have published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious dead—Shakespeare, Bacon—heaven knows whom. Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair talent and education; they are wondrously ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... because he speaks his own language. But the American has no language. He is dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that I have heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because I find myself catching through the roll of his rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar fatherland. Get an American lady to read to you "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar," and see how much is, under her tongue, left of the ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensable Louis Veuillot called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout's toys. Mind you don't get one bang on the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the same time he wrote here to Formay: 'Votre roi est toujours un homme unique, etonnant, inimitable; il fait des vers charmants dans de temps ou un autre ne pourrait faire un ligne de prose, il ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... of children who cares for his work only so far as it brings him profit, is a sad teacher; for his pay is indifferent, and his teaching more indifferent still. Of what value is the mercenary journalist? The day you write for the dollar, your prose is not worth the dollar you write for. The more elevated in kind is the object of human labor, the more the mercenary spirit, if it be present, makes this labor void and corrupts it. There are a thousand reasons to say that all toil merits its wage, that every ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... artistic modulated intonations of the finely cultured human voice, or played by some fairy-fingered musician upon the trembling strings of the harp or piano, comes the charming delight we experience from the mastery of English prose, and the spell-binding wizards of song who by their art of divination through their magic wand, the pen, have transformed scenes hitherto unknown and made them as immortal as those spots of the Orient and mountain haunts of the gods, ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... usefulness stands no chance with erratic and rather loose-mannered brilliancy. And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard. So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which, when African poets arise, will doubtless be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Wanting, 2D 2. Epistle dedicatory to Thomas, Earl of Sussex, signed by the translator. Address to the reader. Life of Apuleius. Author's preface translated in verse and prose. This is the fourth edition; the first appeared ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... undiscerning Dokhturov—Kutuzov hastening to rectify a mistake he had made by sending someone else there first. And the quiet little Dokhturov rode thither, and Borodino became the greatest glory of the Russian army. Many heroes have been described to us in verse and prose, but of Dokhturov scarcely ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... considerations not involving the doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure mixture of associations, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... with than the language then spoken throughout the whole of Scandinavia. This ancestor of the modern Scandinavian tongues has been preserved in Iceland so little changed that every Icelander still understands, without the aid of explanatory commentaries, the oldest preserved prose written in their country 850 years ago. The principal reasons for this were probably limited communications between Iceland and other countries, frequent migrations inside the island, and, not least important, a long and uninterrupted literary tradition. As a consequence, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... and who doth you Appose, Seying, youre quaire kepeth non accordaunce, Tell [hym], as yite neyther of ryme ne prose 521 Ye be experte; pray hym of sufferaunce; Childer must be of childly gouernaunce, And they must also entredet[1] be [Sidenote 1: Read entreted] Wyth esy thyng, ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... hand was heavy) a young poet who was always talking about it. I couldn't quite understand her irritation on this score, for she had nothing at stake in the matter. She had a shrewd perception that form, in prose at least, never recommended any one to the public we were condemned to address, and therefore she lost nothing (putting her private humiliation aside) by not having any. She made no pretence of producing works of art, but had comfortable tea-drinking hours in which she freely confessed herself ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... was strongly moved he could rise and soar like that with ease. And not only in the prose form, but in the poetical as well. He had written many pieces of poetry in his time, and these manuscripts he lent around among the passengers, and was willing to let them be copied. It seemed to me that the least technical one in the series, and the one which reached the loftiest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... beautiful romance of the idyllic. A charming picture of life in a Welsh seaside village. It is something of a prose-poem, ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... well know the beauties of that charming valley, and ten years' residence is proof of my affection for the place. I have shown my love of it by the house which I built there. There I began my article "Africa," there I wrote the greater part of my epistles in prose and verse. At Vaucluse I conceived the first idea of giving an epitome of the Lives of Illustrious Men, and there I wrote my treatise on a Solitary Life, as well as that on religious retirement. It ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Toumeville in particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a timely check, after his difference with Pompey, to his feelings of emulation and ambition. Besides what has been said of his love of learning already, one instance more was, that in his youth, upon a suggestion of writing the Marsian war in Greek and Latin verse and prose, arising out of some pleasantry that passed into a serious proposal, he agreed with Hortensius the lawyer, and Sisenna the historian, that he would take his lot; and it seems that the lot directed him to the Greek tongue, for a Greek history of that ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the magazine with much enjoyment, for, doubtless, when its editor was young, the precious prose and poetry of Araminta Perkins and her ilk satisfied him not ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... man has written more stirring tales, in prose or verse, in recent times than Rudyard Kipling. Born (1865) in Bombay, India, the son of an Englishman in the civil service, he became steeped in the ways of the men of the East. Consequently his first writings were ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... hesitation but we should be less likely to say honestest on account of the awkward combination of syllables involved. Adjectives of one syllable usually take the short form but not invariably. The exceptions, however, are more common in poetry than in prose. When any question rises it is usually safer to use the long form of comparison in the case of two-syllable adjectives and to use the short form in the case of one-syllable adjectives. The proper use of the long form is one of those ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... comely monument of long quadrangular form, having four corner pilasters supporting a fair table of black marble, and, within, the pourtraiture of the bishop lying in his Episcopal habit." This was destroyed in 1643. There was a long Latin inscription in prose and verse, and among ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... Thomson was well-nigh ruined by him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is circumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixing equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the majesty and compass of the organ. He was as ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... from boyhood to youth his mental development took its characteristics from the popular demand of the neighborhood. He scribbled verses and satirical prose, wherein the coarse wit was adapted to the taste of the comrades whom it was designed to please; and it must be admitted that, after giving due weight to all ameliorating considerations, it is impossible ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... had no notion of a humble, semi-neutralised Italy, which should have no voice in the world. Cavour lacked the sense of poetry, of art; he hated fads, and he did not believe in the perfectibility of the human species, but his prose was the prose of the ancient Roman; it was the prose of empire. United Italy must be a great power or nothing. Cavour was practical and prudent, as he is represented in the portrait commonly drawn of him, but there was a larger side to his character, which has been less often ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... all that and she believes it," said Miss Sally sarcastically. "You'll both find out that there is a good deal more prose than ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... Pennsylvania, and Peters, Speaker. Colonel Howard is Governor of Maryland. Beverly Randolph, Governor of Virginia; (this last is said by a passenger only, and he seems not very sure.) Colonel Humphreys is attacked in the papers for his French airs, for bad poetry, bad prose, vanity, &c. It is said his dress, in so gay a style, gives general disgust against him. I have received a letter from him. He seems fixed with General Washington. Mayo's bridge, at Richmond, was completed, and carried away in a few weeks. While up, it was ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Graveyard," nine miles from Charlotte, is the tombstone of Mrs. Maria Polk, a grand-aunt of President Polk, containing a lengthy eulogy, in poetry and prose, of this good woman. The first sentence, "Virtus non exemptio a morte"[H] is neatly executed on a semicircle, extending over the prostrate figure of a departed female saint, sculptured with considerable skill on the soapstone slab, but now scarcely visible on account of the over-spreading moss ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... easily familiarized himself with the studies in which he engaged. He early manifested unusual taste and fondness for composition, and his inclination and talent in that direction were much cultivated and improved by assiduous study of the best standard works in prose and poetry. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, wi thout the music, is prose, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... and even less dangerous combats, have been described in good heroic verse; but that of Gurth and the Miller must remain unsung, for want of a sacred poet to do justice to its eventful progress. Yet, though quarter-staff play be out of date, what we can in prose we will do for ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... up in the woman there was a mental quality very rare and sympathetic, a strange fitful brilliance, extremely pleasing. Once or twice on their journey she had expressed the peculiar quality of the scenery in words which were not far off prose poems. It had puzzled him to know how her intellectual refinement could dwell in the same temple ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... more or less vaguely to another great dreamer—and worker—of Germany, Immanuel Kant, and to several great Frenchmen, including De Maillet, Maupertuis, Robinet, and the famous naturalist Buffon—a man who had the imagination of a poet, though his message was couched in most artistic prose. Not long after the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon had put forward the idea of transmutation of species, and he reiterated it from time to time from then on till his death in 1788. But the time was not yet ripe for the idea of transmutation of species ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... has been changed to "eagle," and that all allusions to angels have been changed to "eagles." This knocks the everlasting spots out of the angel business, and the poetry of wanting to be an angel, "and with the angels stand," has become the veriest prose. ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... began to be recognized in his new circle as a poet, he first showed himself a master of prose diction. The occasion came from his loss of an opportunity for personal distinction of a kind he preferred to literary laurels. The hope and the disappointment alike testify that, whatever had been the Queen's demeanour in ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Boehme never cared for plants Until it happed, a-walking in the fields, He noticed all at once that plants could speak, Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him. That day the daisy had an eye indeed— Colloquized with the cowslips on such themes! We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose. ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... of the story have been so often favourably received at the Circuit Mess, that I thought an amplified version of them in prose would not be unacceptable to the general reader, and might ultimately awaken in the public mind a desire for the long-needed reform of our ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... pessimist and master of cadenced lyric prose, urged young writers to lead ascetic lives that in their art they might be violent. Chopin's violence was psychic, a travailing and groaning of the spirit; the bright roughness of adventure was missing from his quotidian existence. The tragedy was within. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... possible to be sapient and not know it," Gus said. "Like the character in the old French play who didn't know he was talking prose." ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... Council, whether he did not think himself obliged to have no buttons to the collar of his doublet, if the King should command it,—a grave argument to convince the deputies of an important company of the obedience due to kings, for which he was severely lampooned both in prose ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... consummate prose of this our chapter moves us with the like rhythmical power upon the spirit, while from Abel and Enoch onwards we hear recited, name by name, the ancestors of the undying family of faith. No wonder that the chapter should have inspired to utterances formed in its own ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... back in his corner of the carriage and for the first time felt how iniquitous were the marriage laws of England. But he would buy Milton's prose works and read his pamphlet on divorce. He might perhaps be able ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war, love, and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... judge the higher by the lower, to remonstrate with Hamlet for not having the speech and manner of Mr. Jones, to wish that Fra Angelico could have seen with the eyes of the Carracci, to wish verse had been prose, and that ideal tragedy were acted with the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... into verse, is related in English prose by Macaulay, who says:—"Thus, or nearly thus, if we remember rightly, runs the ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... significance of Virgil's poem. Carried away by his headstrong nature, he yielded to the heart-rending charm of the romantic story: he lived it, literally, with the heroine. When his schoolmasters desired him to elaborate the lament of the dying Queen Dido in Latin prose, what he wrote had a veritable quiver of anguish. Without the least defence against lust and the delusions of the heart, he spent intellectually and in a single outburst all the strength ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... besides Shakespeare were Burns, Longfellow, Hood, and Lowell. Many of the poems in his personal anthology were picked from the poets' corner of newspapers, and it was in this way that he became acquainted with Longfellow. Lincoln was especially fond of humorous writings, both in prose and verse, a taste that is closely connected with his lifelong fondness for funny stories. His favorite humorous writer during the presidential period was Petroleum V. Nasby (David P. Locke), from whose letters he frequently read to more or less sympathetic listeners. ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... barn, and, to vary the work, fabricating for him a Highland plough. The younger, George, who had wrought for a few years at his trade in the south of Scotland, was a great reader, wrote very tolerable prose, and verse which, if not poetry, to which he made no pretensions, was at least quaintly-turned rhyme. He had, besides, a competent knowledge of geometry, and was skilled in architectural drawing; and—strange ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the above work. I forgot to say that his Ancient Mythology demonstrated is written in verse, and afterwards more fully explained by notes. His poetical abilities, however, neither suit the subject, nor are of a very high order. His prose is better, but here and there shows ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... stroke of ill-luck, the complete and wholly independent Romance here translated has thus been printed by its two former editors as if it were only a part of some other story. M. Potvin describes it as the "First Part, the Romance in Prose," of his "Perceval le Gallois", and Mr Williams accepts it as the "Second Portion" of his "Y Seint Greal". This unhappy collocation has led not a few of M. Potvin's readers to neglect his First Part, under the impression ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... head. All history, all fiction were ransacked by the old friends of the right honourable Baronet, for nicknames and allusions. One right honourable gentleman, who I am sorry not to see in his place opposite, found English prose too weak to express his indignation, and pursued his perfidious chief with reproaches borrowed from the ravings of the deserted Dido. Another Tory explored Holy Writ for parallels, and could find no parallel ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... memory beautiful pieces of literature, either prose or poetry, for recitation before a friendly audience, acting charades or plays, and reading aloud with vivacity and sympathetic emotion, are good means of instruction at home or at school This collection contains numerous ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... that they do not even suspect their own ignorance of its burthen and its powers. They speak a little set of ready-made phrases, they write it scarcely at all, and all they read is the weak and shallow prose of popular fiction and the daily press. That is knowing a language within the meaning of their minds, and such a knowledge a child may very well be left to "pick up" as it may. Side by side with this they will presently set themselves to erect a similar "knowledge" of two or three other ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Monthly Magazine." Though himself a violent Tory, he, singularly enough, chose as his editors two Whigs,—Pringle the poet, and Cleghorn. Hogg lent his aid from the beginning. Scott, too, wrote now and then; and very soon Wilson made his appearance as "Eremus," contributing prose and verse. But the new magazine did not prove to be what was hoped,—a decided success. It was, in fact, quite flat and dull, having nothing life-like and characteristic. The radical error of attempting to build on such heterogeneous foundations was soon perceived. Vigor of action could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... visitors to his establishment. It is a curious work in its way, for the epigrammatic effusions are varied, amusing, and composed in at least half a dozen languages. Some of the authors have chosen a poetic style of commentary, while others content themselves with matter-of-fact prose. A well-known signature is here and there recognisable among these cosmopolitan productions. A famous Italian opera star has rhymed in her native lingo; a popular French acrobat—possibly one of a company of strolling equestrians—has ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... is ever one of the foremost writers of historical tales, and his graphic prose pictures of the hopeless Jewish resistance to Roman sway adds another leaf to his record of the famous wars of the world. The book is one of Mr. ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... verses about the joys of paradise which St. Augustine wrote and I had taught her. [Footnote: This is an error. The following verses are written by the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, Peter Damianus (d. 23d Feb. 1072), after Augustine's prose.] She sobbed for grief ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr—— No, 'tis not even prose; I'm speaking of metres; some poems have welled From those rare depths of soul that have ne'er been excelled; They're not epics, but that doesn't ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... adapted to tragedy than rhymed alexandrines, but then the French language does not admit of blank verse, and to write tragedies in prose, unless they be tragedies in modern life, would deprive them of all charm; but after all I find the harmonious pomp and to use a phrase of Pope's "The long majestic march and energy divine" of the French alexandrine, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... poetic of her books, although it is written in prose, is the delicate interpretation of St. Francis, written for children ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... moved to propose a toast. He lifted his glass of beer—the best Philip's cellar afforded. "Here's to the greatest nation on earth, one drop of whose blood is worth more to Art than all the stolid corpuscles that clog the veins of lesser races. Without it what man can hope to write great prose, or paint great pictures, or mix a great salad? Vive la France!—Benoix, who taught ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Lanzknecht; set to music, it might be sung by fine dilettanti tenors in garrison, but would be stopped at any outpost in the field for want of the countersign. But when Goethe describes what he saw and felt in the campaign in France, with that lucid and observant prose, he reproduces an actual situation. So does Chamisso, in that powerful letter which describes the scenes in Hameln, when it was delivered to the French. But Chamisso has written a genuine soldier's song, which we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her earliest infancy: they had been piled around that bedroom over the roof. Books and book lore and the command of the English tongue were William Wetherell's only legacies to his daughter, and many an evening that spring she had read him to sleep from classic volumes of prose and poetry I hesitate to name, for fear you will think her precocious. They went across the green to Cousin Ephraim Prescott's harness shop, where Jethro had tied his horse, and it was settled that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and his successors (Bks. i.-iv.), the English metrical romance La Morte Arthur of the Thornton manuscript (Bk. v.), the French romances of Tristan (Bks. viii.-x.) and of Launcelot (Bks. vi., xi.-xix.), and lastly to the English prose Morte Arthur of Harley MS. 2252 (Bks. xviii., xx., xxi.). As to Malory's choice of his authorities critics have not failed to point out that now and again he gives a worse version where a better ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... their innocence. The opinion, however, was universally adopted, that good and not bad elves had been thus busily at work; and the fruit, therefore, was gathered without fear of bad consequences, and laid in baskets. The elves were praised both in prose and verse; and there never ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... entertainment, and better than entertainment, as this writer afforded his contemporaries. In the meantime, among judicious readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Stevenson stands, I think it may safely be said, as a true master of English prose; scarcely surpassed for the union of lenity and lucidity with suggestive pregnancy and poetic animation; for harmony of cadence and the well-knit structure of sentences; and for the art of imparting to words the vital quality of things, and making them convey the precise—sometimes, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to hammer home that idea the first book I got from the Institute happened to be an American edition of the collected works of Shelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse. I was soon ripe for blatant unbelief. And at the Young Men's Christian Association I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told me, under promises of the most sinister secrecy, that ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... manifested in those workhouse regulations which separated his own toil-worn age from the equal feebleness of the wife whose human rights he should have died fighting for when he was young. And, as might be expected, this strictly gentlemanly principle looms larger in your forefathers' prose than in their poetry. At last, Burns and Paine flashed their own strong, healthy personalities on the community, marking an epoch; and from that day to this, the Apology of Humanity acquires ever-increasing momentum, and ever-widening scope. Now, if social-economic conditions ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... a private buffoon is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, Both in prose and in verse; Yet though people forgive his transgression, There are one or two rules that all family fools Must observe, if they love their profession. There are one or two rules, Half-a-dozen, maybe, That ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... so heartily tired, that it would be absolutely barbarous to stun your ears any longer; only give me leave to tell you in one good round sentence, that your prose is admirable, and that I am just now (at three o'clock in the morning) sitting over the poor pale remnant of a once glorious blazing fire, and feasting upon it, till I ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... neighbours, no poet am I; but always wrongs burn in the heart until plain prose cannot utter them. Listen to me. If we wrung the Great Charter and the right of self-taxation from Mary in A.D. 1477; if in A.D. 1572 we taught Alva, by force of arms, how dear to us was our maxim, 'No ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... Adela, either at home or by the sea-shore, often carried a book in her hand, and at Adela's request she read aloud. In this way Adela first came to know what was meant by literature, as distinguished from works of learning. The verse of Shelley and the prose of Landor fell upon her ears; it was as though she had hitherto lived in deafness. Sometimes she had to beg the reader to pause for that day; her heart and mind seemed overfull; she could not even speak of these new things, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... down in the hearts of the majority of the human race there exists a profound attachment to the ideals of gallantry and chivalry which were nourished by the stories we loved in childhood, and by the tales of Scottish prowess, in prose and poetry, selected for the school-books in use by the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Edition of Mr. Whittier's writings comprises his poetical and prose works as re-arranged and thoroughly revised by himself or with his cooperation. Mr. Whittier has supplied such additional information regarding the subject and occasion of certain poems as may be stated in brief head-notes, and this edition has been much enriched ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... preface to my translation of the "Iliad" I have given my views as to the main principles by which a translator should be guided, and need not repeat them here, beyond pointing out that the initial liberty of translating poetry into prose involves the continual taking of more or less liberty throughout the translation; for much that is right in poetry is wrong in prose, and the exigencies of readable prose are the first things to be considered in a prose ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... the grammar you can. Read the best of poets and prose authors to see how they have mastered the language, but don't allow your life to become a burden to you and others because of your worry lest you "slip a grammatical cog" here and there, when you know you have something worth saying. And if you haven't anything ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Frank Verbeck; Albert Bigelow Paine, historian. An entertaining tale in prose and verse, as fascinating as "The Brownies." Large quarto, 8x11, with 130 illustrations and cover in color. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... into staying home last night but I'll never again 'list' to your blarney. But it wasn't goblins I believe; however, we'll decide that when we trap 'em. Your benign influence has worked well thus far. I promised to help a freshie with some Latin prose and she never came to collect. Now I suppose I have to spoil my pretty hands with basket ball. Don't you wonder how it was we used to love that unladylike game?" Judith assumed a most sedate attitude, but did not succeed in hiding a forlorn rent in her skirt even with ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... disguises. But then Morano unfolded to him that plan which up to that day had never been tried before, so far as records tell, in all the straits in which fugitive men have been; and which seems from my researches in verse and prose never to have been ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... all your secrets! The Man declares she knows Better than any mortal The wonder-trick of prose. ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... storm, in steering clear of them, was delightful from its novelty. Hard a starboard! Steady! Port! Port! you may!—and we flew past some huge mass, over which the green seas were fruitlessly trying to dash themselves. Coleridge describes the scene around us too well for me to degrade it with my prose. ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... lids like that. I recognized with a physical agony that was more than jealousy how slight was my hold upon her. It was not in her race, in her blood as in mine, to love me and my type. She had lived all her life in the middle of Romance, and the very fire and passion of her South must make me dim prose to her. I remember the flicker of Salazar's returning candle, cast in lines like an advancing scythe across the two walls from ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... model of incisive diction and of moving prose, conceived in the best Oxford manner, drew a terrible picture of what might occur in withdrawing troops from a foreshore in presence of a ferocious foe. Its polished periods portrayed a scene of horror and despair, of a bullet-swept beach, of drowning soldiers ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... 1891 at New York City, to Miss Elaine Goodale, a finely cultured young lady from Massachusetts, herself a poetess and prose writer of ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... said he to himself, "because she doesn't happen to see, or because she doesn't wish to see? How can I make her open her eyes? Shall I speak to her coldly or gently, with mirth or with melancholy, in poetry or in prose?" ...
— Adventures in Toyland - What the Marionette Told Molly • Edith King Hall |
