"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conducted by William Cullen Bryant, and to the United States Review. In 1827 appeared 'The Buccaneer and Other Poems'; in 1833 the same volume was enlarged and the contributions to The Idle Man were added, under the title 'Poems and Prose Writings.' Seventeen years later he closed his literary career by publishing the complete edition of his 'Poems and Prose Writings,' in two volumes, not having materially added either to his verse or fiction. After that time he lived in retirement, spending his summers ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the Moon are generally common. In Esthonia it is generally the Woman in the Moon, as may be seen in the two beautiful legends of Videvik, and of the Maiden at the Vaskjalla Bridge. The short legend which follows these resembles that in the Prose Edda relative to two children carrying a bucket (Jack and Jill?) who were taken to himself by the Moon. The story of the Moon-Painter might have been inserted here; but it seemed to come in more ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... Toloza, and recounts the crusade of the Albigenses, and his novel, The Reds of the Midi, first published in New York in the English translation of Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier, is probably the most remarkable prose work that has been written in Provencal.[4] Only the future can tell whether the Provencal will pass through a prose cycle after its poetic cycle, in the manner of all literatures. To many serious thinkers the attempt to create a complete literature ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... It was under the influence of this persuasion that Spenser laid down the plan of the Faery Queen. It was, so he proposed to himself, to be a work on moral, and if time were given him, political philosophy, composed with as serious a didactic aim, as any treatise or sermon in prose. He deems it necessary to explain and excuse his work by claiming for it this design. He did not venture to send the Faery Queen into the world without also telling the world its moral meaning and bearing. He cannot trust it to tell ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... its security. He writes in the spirit of John Adams when he said that the French and the American Revolution had nothing in common, and of that eulogy of 1688 as the true Restoration, on which Burke and Macaulay spent their finest prose. A sentence which he takes from Judge Cooley contains the brief abstract of his book: "America is not so much an example in her liberty as in the covenanted and enduring securities which are intended to prevent liberty degenerating into licence, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... have not yet read Orlando Inamorato. I am now in a course of reading the Italian historians, and am confirmed in my former opinion that that language has not produced one author who knew how to write elegant correct prose though it contains several excellent poets. You say nothing to me of your ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... with the simplicity of antiquity as it is with the simplicity of style: it is the highest thing which we recognise and must imitate; but it is also the last. Let it be remembered that the classic prose of the Greeks is also ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... fine a moral atmosphere, such noble thoughts, such stately and beautiful descriptions, that to read it is like conversing with a hero. So there is no better reading than the Defence of Poesy, that noble hymn of loyalty to intellectual beauty. Hallam well calls Sidney "the first good prose writer" in our language, and scarcely had he finished in his Defence an exquisite criticism of English poetry to that time than the full choir ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... summaries. In this e-text, they are always collected into full sentences. In some verse selections, sidenotes appear immediately before their original location, with no further marking. In other selections— including all prose passages— sidenotes are collected into longer paragraphs and placed after the text they refer to. These will be identified either by line number or by lower-case letters [a] ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... and it was in the 10th century that they were re-imported from Byzantium to Italy by the Archpriest Leo, who had gone as Envoy to the Eastern Capital from John Duke of Campania.[17] Romantic histories on this foundation, in verse and prose, became diffused in all the languages of Western Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia, rivalling in popularity the romantic cycles of the Round Table or of Charlemagne. Nor did this popularity cease till the 16th ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... incorrect however to attribute the satirical allusions in the poetry wholly to the influence of the classical revival; for the romantic epic in which they occur is the offshoot of the old prose romance of mediaeval chivalry, which had in earlier ages amused the courts of princes by directing its banter against ecclesiastical persons and institutions.(303) But the tone of the poetry is now changed. The satire is directed against religion ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... short prose play, in which the poet satirised the jargon of Dr. Herrenschwand, brother of the doctor I had consulted at Soleure. The play proved ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... end, without flirtation of either an inward or an outward nature. Of all her heroines, Rosalind was the one she liked the best, because from the first moment of her passion she knew herself and what she was about, and loved her lover right heartily. Of all girls in prose or poetry she declared that Rosalind was the least of a flirt. She meant to have the man, and never had a doubt about it. But with such a one as Flora MacIvor she had no patience;—a girl who did and who didn't, who would and who wouldn't, who could and who couldn't, and who of all flirts was to ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... adventures, yours and mine shall stand linked as friends to posterity, both in verse and prose, and (as Tully calls it) in consuetudine studiorum. Would to God our persons could but as well and as surely be inseparable! I find my other ties dropping from me; some worn off, some torn off, some relaxing daily: my greatest, both by ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... the countess; and the dinner was characterized by some unfortunate incidents. D'Argenton was particularly fond of repeating the replies he had made to the various editors and theatrical managers who had declined his articles, and refused to print his prose or his verse. His mots on these occasions had been clever and caustic; but with Madame de Barancy he was never able to reach that point, preceded as it must necessarily be with lengthy explanations. At the critical moment Ida would invariably ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... especially at the French sale, were very high. A dedication copy to Mademoiselle de Montpensier, with the signature of Charles de Lorraine on the title-page, of Recueil des Portraits et Eloges en vers et en prose (de personnages du temps par Mademoiselle de Montpensier et autres), Paris, 1659, with a morocco binding of the seventeenth century, ornamented with fleurs-de-lis, fetched fourteen thousand francs; La Fontaine's Fables Choisies, five volumes, Paris, 1678, 1679 ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... was an England of great deeds, but of greater dreams. Elizabethan literature, take it for all in all, has never been surpassed; myriad-minded Shakespeare remains unequalled still. Elizabethan England was indeed 'a nest of singing birds.' Prose was often far too pedestrian for the exultant life of such a mighty generation. As new worlds came into their expectant ken, the glowing Elizabethans wished to fly there on the soaring wings of verse. To them the tide ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... his thoughts to paper became a less irksome occupation, Hogg began, with commendable prudence, to attempt composition in prose; and in evidence of his success, he had the satisfaction to find short essays which he sent to the Scots Magazine regularly inserted in that periodical. Poetry was cultivated at the same time with unabated ardour, though the bard did not yet venture to expose his verses beyond ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... death in battle." He was promoted to the Intelligence Department of the service where the personal risk was the greatest, and was killed in action at the battle of the Ourcq, July 30, 1918. He was buried within sound of the river. Since his death two volumes containing his complete work in prose and verse, his letters from abroad, and an excellent memoir written by his friend, Robert Holliday, have been published and will do much to perpetuate the memory ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... nor Addison who is ultimately Mr. Saintsbury's idol among the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century. His idol of idols is Swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love and admire Dr. Johnson and Fielding. He makes no bones about confessing his preference of Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... once more, in honest prose," said Lucy, "that, though I will never wed man without the consent of my parents, yet neither force nor persuasion shall dispose of my hand till you renounce the right I have given you ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... phrases suddenly discovered thrill us to the heart like a startling revelation; but the lines which follow are just like all other verse, the further flow of prose is like all ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... Wortley[1] has left twenty-one large volumes in prose and verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety to have them published. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... has been conjectured that the Catechism may even have been printed separately, and that the first part of the following entry may refer to it: "The catechisme in two partes; the first in Scotch poetry, having a kalender before it. The second part in Latin and Scotis prose, entituled Catechismus ecclesiae Geneuensis.... Edinburgh: Imprinted by John Ross for Henrie Charteris, 1574" (Dickson and Edmond's Annals of Scottish ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... 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 ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... several, hardly deserve to be dignified with so high a title. At no part of his life had Bunyan much title to be called a poet. He did not aspire beyond the rank of a versifier, who clothed his thoughts in rhyme or metre instead of the more congenial prose, partly for the pleasure of the exercise, partly because he knew by experience that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that form. Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse than is commonly held, remarks that though ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... on that thought for a few seconds; and continued, 'Then the question arose, what was I to do? I felt that to write prose would be an uncongenial occupation, and altogether a poor prospect for a woman like me. Finally I have decided ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Duke of Angouleme. May watchful Europe, may the factions, if such there be still, see in the accord of all Frenchmen, in the union of the people and the army, the pledge of our strength and of the peace of the world!" The author of the Genie du Christianisme thus closed his prose dithyramb: "May God grant to Louis XVIII. the crown immortal of Saint Louis! May God bless the mortal crown of Saint Louis on ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... them how to live? But if on the battle-field woman must prove her right to justice and equality, history abundantly sets forth her claims; the records of her brave deeds mark every page of fact and fiction, of poetry and prose. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... flowing sentences. Then there is a translation into blank verse of the third book of the Argonauticon of Apollonius Rhodius. The other books are lost, but he translated the whole poem, extending to about 6000 lines.... And I may mention here, though it happens to be in prose, that of two plays, one, a tragedy, survives. It has no title, but is complete in all its other parts.... He was fond of parodying the Odes of Horace, with applications to modern incidents and people, and did it very successfully. The Otium Divos was long remembered. Notwithstanding ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... Newcastle standing upon Tyne) But this town situation doth confine Near Cheshire, in the famous county Stafford, And for their love, I owe them not a straw for't; But now my versing muse craves some repose, And whilst she sleeps I'll spout a little prose. ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... not pained, but pleased with this allusion to his situation, she was emboldened to go on; and feeling in herself the right of seniority of mind, she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularize, mentioned such works of our best moralists, such collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... original writing in America at the time they were written; and if there had been, it would hardly have commended itself to the old-fashioned taste of Dr. Bryant, to whom Pope was still a power in poetry, as Addison, no doubt, was in prose. It was natural, therefore, that he should offer his boy to the strait-laced Muses of Queen Anne's time; that the precocious boy should lisp in heroic couplets, and that he should endeavor to be satirical. Politics were running high in the first decade of the present century, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... not lend itself very readily to poetry, does it?" Astolphe remarked to Chatelet. "Cicero's prose is a thousand times more poetical to ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... There remained but three courses for the queen to take to withdraw into France, Spain or England. On the advice of Lord Herries, which accorded with her own feeling, she decided upon the last; and that same night she wrote this double missive in verse and in prose to Elizabeth: ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... 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 accomplishment ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... speech; and the person who fails to catch the subtle melody of a poem gets but little from it even though he understands perfectly the meaning of the words. To illustrate this, put into commonplace prose a passage of beautiful verse,—for instance, lines 358-372 of The Ancient Mariner, beginning, "Sometimes a-dropping from the sky,"—and then compare the prose version with the original. The two will be found as unlike as the flower after it has been ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... arose a master of language, who expressed the deepest mysteries in sounds most simple. Here, if ever, there was created in the German language and spirit, and in brief compass, a work of art of German prose. If ever the gods blessed a man to create, consciously or unconsciously, on the soil of the people and their needs, a perfect work of popular art in the spirit of the people and in the terms of their speech, to the weal of the people and their youth throughout the centuries, it was here. The ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... illustrative quotations from eminent poets, chief of whom is that learned and ingenius cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines bear his initials. To Father Jape's kindly encouragement and assistance the author of the prose ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order," as he has elsewhere defined it. And, in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose— words in their best order; poetry—the best words ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... was born in 1804, at Coleford, England. She wrote many charming stories for children in prose and verse, and also translated many from Swedish, Danish, and German authors. This story is arranged from one in a collection named "Peter Drake's Dream, and Other Stories." She ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of Napoleon's later years, and they show us a nature dominated by the tangible. As for belief in the divine Christ, there seems not a trace. A report has come down to us, enshrined in Newman's prose, that Napoleon once discoursed of the ineffable greatness of Christ, contrasting His enduring hold on the hearts of men with the evanescent rule of Alexander and Caesar. One hopes that the words were uttered; but they conflict ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... out the advocate who is to plead the cause of morals and propriety: this one rises, and, in the course of his exordium, takes care to throw out all the sarcasm he can against his rival, who rouses himself, and the battle of tongues begins, and is carried on in a sort of rhyming prose, in which nothing is spared to give force to jest or argument against the reigning vices or follies of the day. As the orators proceed and become more and more animated on the subject, they are frequently interrupted by loud applause. Sometimes, in these intervals, the poet ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... 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 all family fools, Of whatever degree, Must ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Epilogue for Lee Lewes Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (1) Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (2) The Captivity. An Oratorio Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... support of German literature, became estranged from the German people; and the insecurity of the times was unfavorable to literary pursuits. Williram's German had lost the classical correctness of Notker's language, and the "Merigarto," and similar works, are written in a hybrid style, which is neither prose nor poetry. The Old High-German had become a literary language chiefly through the efforts of the clergy, and the character of the whole Old High-German literature is preeminently clerical. The Crusades put an end to the preponderance of the clerical ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... survey of its poetry, both non-dramatic and dramatic, to the work done in the fifteenth century for the development of English prose. Until quite towards the close of the fourteenth century England can hardly be said to have possessed any prose literature not avowedly or practically of a didactic character. To save some one's soul or to improve some one's morals were ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... paramount authority of Rome and the common standard for the Latin world which she had set were lost. When some men tried to imitate Cicero and Quintilian, and others, Seneca, there ceased to be a common model of excellence. Similarly a careful distinction between the diction of prose and verse was gradually obliterated. There was a loss of interest in literature, and professional writers gave less attention to their diction and style. The appearance of Christianity, too, exercised a profound influence on literary Latin. Christian writers and preachers made their ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Talk; (I abounded in Cowper, for I happened to have a volume of his poems in my chest;) "Ille et nefasto" from Horace, and Goethe's Erl King. After I had got through these, I allowed myself a more general range among everything that I could remember, both in prose and verse. In this way, with an occasional break by relieving the wheel, heaving the log, and going to the scuttle-butt for a drink of water, the longest watch was passed away; and I was so regular in my silent recitations, that ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... speaking effectively and of "thinking on his feet." The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and of history were accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered about the technique of declamatory prose. Not that the rhetorical study was itself made absolutely practical. The teachers unfortunately would spin the technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over several years. But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed on the parents, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... she industriously applies herself when not speaking to the audience. She wears the plain Quaker dress and close-fitting white cap. Mrs. Frances D. Gage, the president, is a woman of sound sense and a good writer of prose and poetry. Mrs. Caroline Severance has an easy, pleasing way of speaking. Mr. Charles Burleigh, a Quaker, appears to be an original character. He has long hair, parted in the middle like a woman's, and hanging down his back. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... little writing in prose until the era of their decadence, and showed little instinct to use the concise and unified form of the short-story. The conquering Romans followed closely in the paths of their predecessors and did little work in the shorter narratives. The myths of Greece and Rome were not bound by facts, and ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... contemplation of human suffering; and the polished monotony of Pope's verses begins to fall upon those who shall tread in his steps. Some daring sceptics are even inquiring whether he is a poet at all. And simultaneously, though Addison is still a kind of sacred model, the best prose writers are beginning to aim at a more complex structure of sentence, fitted for the expression of a wider range of ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of Gaelic literature connected with the name of Ossian is of very considerable extent and of respectable antiquity. The oldest texts, prose for the most part, but also in verse, are preserved in Irish MSS. of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and go back to a period from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty years older at least. The bulk of Ossianic literature is, however, ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... "great waters," "floating houses," "truncated pyramids," "hard taskmasters," "winds," "climates," "religions," and "laws of population," we believe to be unsurpassed by anything ever perpetrated in prose or rhyme, by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Our prose, I mean,—how beauty Appears to you and me; The truth that seems so simple, Which they ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... of the vowel, or mute syllable, concerns the sound, not the duration. Let it die away gently; but for Heaven's sake, do not murder it! Voltaire wrote: "You reproach us with our E mute, as a sad, dull sound that dies on our lips, but in this very E mute lies the great harmony of our prose and verse." Littre recognizes two forms of the E mute: the E mute, faintly articulated as in "ame;" and the E mute sounded as in me, ce, le; but he does not allude to an E which is ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value, and though the early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a boy's ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and in the whole range of ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... Professor Dowden, 'our chief living authority on all that relates to Shelley's writings.' His name stands securely linked for all time to Shelley's by a long series of notable words, including three successive editions (1876, 1882, 1892) of the Poems, an edition of the Prose Remains, as well as many minor publications—a Bibliography ("The Shelley Library", 1886)and several Facsimile Reprints of the early issues, edited for the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... refreshment," I said. She only looked at me, whose small attempts at prose composition had up to that time been altogether unsuccessful, and then addressed herself to reply ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... and true could not but make that month a memorable one. It is not strange that while the young man most admired "Heroism" and "Self-Reliance," the girl preferred "Love" and "Friendship," reading them over and over like prose poems, as they are, to the fitting accompaniment of sunshine, solitude, and sympathy, for letters went to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... verse and prose from 100 authors, including: James R. Lowell, Burroughs, Herrick, Thackeray, Scott, Vaughn, Milton, Cowley, Browning, Stevenson, Henley, Longfellow, Keats, Swift, Meredith, Lamb, Lang, Dobson, Fitzgerald, Pepys, Addison, Kemble, Boswell, Holmes, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Hallowe'en, how it absorbed some customs belonging to other days in the year,—such as May Day, Midsummer, and Christmas. The context is illustrated by selections from ancient and modern poetry and prose, related to Hallowe'en ideas. ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... the world in the form of a novel or a poem. She thought that to produce a second "Evangeline" would be a matter of but slight difficulty, but on the whole she was inclined to give the world her experience in the fiery and untrammelled words of prose. ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... loutish in their manner to women, the blame lies with their sisters who, in their foolish fondness and indulgence, or in their boyish camaraderie, have allowed them to slouch up into a slovenly manhood. The man at most is the fine prose of life, but the woman ought to be its poetry and inspiration. It is her hand that ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Luther the most noteworthy prose is found in the sermons of Berthold von Regensburg, the great 13th century preacher, and in the somewhat later writings, largely sermons, of the mystics Eckhart, Seuse, Tauler and Meerschwein. Their interest is rather more religious than literary. The earliest example of imaginative ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... The secondhand dealers never made any objection to his reading books upon the shelves. His purchases were perhaps two books a week, at ten or even five cents each. Now and again he would find one of his own "Irving's Latin Prose Composition" texts in the five-cent pile. Opening the book, he usually would discover strange pencilled pictures drawn scrawlingly over many of the pages. His "Latin Composition" wasn't published after 1882, the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... English literature was intermittent. He was apparently a stranger to our eighteenth-century authors, both in poetry and prose; of those who followed them in time, he undervalued Scott, disliked Macaulay, admired Napier, admired Trollope. Wordsworth he condemned as puerile, inheriting the Edinburgh Review estimate of his poetry, and often ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... cried the apparition, as though illustrating a point. Leaning his white sleeves on the rail, cigar in one fist, Tauchnitz volume in the other, he roared down over the side a passage of prose, from which his visitors caught only the words "Ginger Dick" and "Peter ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... women who cross the path of such men cannot unfrequently testify—oftentimes assiduously wooed, won, and lightly discarded, to furnish an artistic study of the female capacity for suffering, as well as to supply renewed inspiration for further poetic bemoanings. In the prose narrations of Edgar Poe, the same skilful handling of mystery, and the turning to account of any incident susceptible of dramatic effect, are always apparent as in his poems. But the want of extended sympathy with mankind, the artist egotism, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Bibliographicum,—such proclamation is immediate notice to many fortunate possessors who were no more aware of the value of their dingy-looking volumes than Monsieur Jourdain knew himself to be in the habitual daily practice of talking prose. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... man of genius. A clever engineer and professor of mathematics, he was Minister of Finance during the early days of the Revolution. His first play took the world of Madrid by surprise and even by storm. La Esposa del Vengador had an unprecedented success, and at least thirty subsequent dramas, in prose and in verse, have made this mathematician, engineer, and financier one of the most famous men of his day. His art and his methods are purely Spanish. I have already referred to the phenomenal success of Perez Galdos's Electra within the last few ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... are the sweet and musical strains that he has sung about the bells, and he often wished that "somebody would bring together all the best things that have been written upon them, both in prose ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... us that that only is good poetry which may be translated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any very profound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it is not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy over the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... WILLIAM J. THOMAS, F.S.A., Secretary of the Camden Society, Editor of "Early Prose Romances," "Lays and Legends of all Nations," &c. One object of the present work is to furnish new contributions to the History of our National Folk-Lore; and especially some of the more striking Illustrations of the subject to be found in the Writings ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... himself as hero—a hero who is a hopeless lover, blighted by premature decay, or a wanderer doomed to share the sins and sorrows of mankind to all eternity. This attitude found vent in a mass of sentimental verse and prose, much of it more or less surreptitiously published, which the researches of specialists have brought to light, and which need ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Soames the benefit of the doubt. I had read 'L'Apres-midi d'un Faune' without extracting a glimmer of meaning. Yet Mallarme—of course—was a Master. How was I to know that Soames wasn't another? There was a sort of music in his prose, not indeed arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden perhaps with meanings as deep as Mallarme's own. I awaited his ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Otherwise, we should only be acting fantastically. We should be saying peremptorily, "In my opinion this is mental," and there would be no more ground for discussion than, if the assertion were "I prefer the Romanticists to the Classicists," or "I consider prose superior ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... wholesome, and particularly well adapted to refined life. It is safe to add that she is the best English prose writer for children. A new volume from Mrs. Molesworth is always ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr uebel: all dim, misty, squally, disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede. He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His Sartor is indeed more contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's Confessions, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... exerted over the minds of Englishmen an influence certainly greater than any other of modern times, which has been in most people's hands, and with the contents of which even those who cannot read are to a certain extent acquainted; a book from which the most luxuriant and fertile of our modern prose writers have drunk inspiration; a book, moreover, to which, from the hardy deeds which it narrates, and the spirit of strange and romantic enterprise which it tends to awaken, England owes many of her astonishing discoveries both by sea and land, and no inconsiderable part ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Tagore Teas are now all the rage. At these elegant and up-to-date entertainments China tea is absolutely proscribed, the refreshments, solid and liquid, being exclusively of Indian origin. After tea the guests cantillate passages from the prose and poetry of the Great Indian Master to the accompaniment of gongs (the Sanskrit tum-tum) and one-stringed Afghan jamboons, for the space of two or three hours, when their engagements permit. Sometimes the reading is varied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... indeed from cheerful; but she had done her best; and, as she was afraid of not sustaining well a part which was uncongenial to her feelings, she had overacted it. Her deportment was the subject of reams of scurrility in prose and verse: it lowered her in the opinion of some whose esteem she valued; nor did the world know, till she was beyond the reach of praise and censure, that the conduct which had brought on her the reproach of levity and insensibility ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the literary side of the matter is concerned. On the musical much more is demanded. He must recognize unrhythmical, uncadenced, disjointed, and ejaculatory prose dialogue, with scarcely a lyrical moment in it, as a fit vehicle for music. He must not only be willing to forego vocal melody, but even the semblance of melody also in the instrumental music upon which the dialogue ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... nothing but to dance and to spin like weathercocks with their heads as well as their heels." Certainly Sainte Aldegonde had learned other lessons than these. He was one of the many-sided men who recalled the symmetry of antique patriots. He was a poet of much vigor and imagination; a prose writer whose style was surpassed by that of none of his contemporaries, a diplomatist in whose tact and delicacy William of Orange afterwards reposed in the most difficult and important negotiations, an orator whose discourses on many great public occasions attracted the attention of Europe, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... writing was unknown among the Norsemen, and it was their custom to fix the history of their great achievements, as well as much of their more domestic doings, in their memories by means of song and story. Men gifted with powers of composition in prose and verse undertook to enshrine deeds and incidents in appropriate language at the time of their occurrence, and these scalds or poets, and saga-men or chroniclers, although they might perhaps have coloured their narratives and poems slightly, were not likely ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... year Jasmin addressed the poet Beranger in a pleasant poetical letter written in classical French. Beranger replied in prose; his answer was dated the 12th of July, 1832. He thanked Jasmin for his fervent eulogy. While he thought that the Gascon poet's praise of his works was exaggerated, he believed in ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... D'Aubigne's Life of Cromwell. Neal's History of the Puritans. Macaulay's History of England. Godwin's Commonwealth. The common histories of England. Milton's prose writings may be profitably read in this connection, and the various reviews and essays which have of late been written, on ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Vita Propria, ch. xxxiii. p. 106, he fixes into his prose an entire line of Horace, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... million of men are vainly seeking employment, millions of their fellows should have no respite from arduous ill-requited toil and should be hastening to a premature death through overwork."[48] In prose and verse the British workers are constantly told that they are slaves[49] who are driven into ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my prairie material, the desertion came about naturally. Swiftly, inevitably, the unplowed valleys, the waterless foothills and the high peaks, inspired me, filled me with desire to embody them in some form of prose, of verse. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Chant of Darkness" I did not intend to set up as a poet. I thought I was writing prose, except for the magnificent passage from Job which I was paraphrasing. But this part seemed to my friends to separate itself from the exposition, and I made it into ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... 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, at least ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... brought 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, Icelandic has not ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she received from Tourgeneff on ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... only to put this poetry into common prose to obtain this argument, namely,—The presence of evil in the world is not compatible with the idea of the goodness of God. Here is the objection in all its force. And what is the answer? Simply this, that God did ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his early notions about England, political and theological at least, gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old kindness for it, by looking at it only ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the writing of pages of prose does not give one anything like the joy of completing a single poem. One's emotions take on such perfection of form in a poem; they can, as it were, be taken up by the fingers. But prose is like a sackful of ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... priest, Who at the mass on Sunday sings, Save that upon his upper lip His beard, a good palm's length least, Level and pointed at the tip, Shot sideways, like a swallow's wings. The poets read he o'er and o'er, And most of all the Immortal Four Of Italy; and next to those, The story-telling bard of prose, Who wrote the joyous Tuscan tales Of the Decameron, that make Fiesole's green hills and vales Remembered for Boccaccio's sake. Much too of music was his thought; The melodies and measures fraught With sunshine and the open air, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of our tongue the beauty does not fade, Shall make us love the very ink that trac'd them." "Brother!" he cried, and pointed at a shade Before him, "there is one, whose mother speech Doth owe to him a fairer ornament. He in love ditties and the tales of prose Without a rival stands, and lets the fools Talk on, who think the songster of Limoges O'ertops him. Rumour and the popular voice They look to more than truth, and so confirm Opinion, ere by art or reason taught. Thus many of the elder ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... interesting. It is not, however, under the figure of the etcher's art or of the process of the mint that we can fully represent Bergson's resources of style. These suggest staccato effects, hard outlines, and that does not at all represent the prose of this writer. It is a fine, delicately interwoven, tissue-like fabric, pliant and supple. If one were in the secret of M. Bergson's private thoughts, it might be discovered that he does not admire his style so much as others do, for his whole manner of thought must, one suspects, have led him often ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... make their characters talk under all the restraints of rhyme and rhythm. But we pronounce this departure from literal truth a merit and not a defect. We consider Goethe's second "Iphigenie," written in verse, far preferable to the first one written in prose; nay, it is the rhythm or metre itself which communicates to the work its incomparable beauty. In a review of Longfellow's "Dante," published last year, we argued this very point in one of its special applications; the artist must copy ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the title which the wits gave to a series of satires that mocked the prose of the day. If an editor published a piece of bloated writing, the bubble was pricked by the poetical version; if a politician disclosed his weakness, his words were caught up and made to turn him into ridicule. The wits were on ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... epics, like Roland, and the romances in verse and prose, there were numberless short stories in verse (the fabliaux), which usually dealt with the incidents of everyday life, especially with the comical ones. Then there were the fables, the most famous of which are the stories of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... throughout the country. How was science encouraged there? One hour per week, exactly one-fifth of the time devoted weekly, not to Greek and Latin (that would have been almost sacrilegious), but to the writing of Greek and Latin prose and alleged Greek and Latin verse—that was the amount of time which was devoted to what was called science. I suppose I had an ingrained vocation for science, for it was the only subject, except English composition, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... gaineth west, To see this floure, how it will go to rest. For fear of night, so hateth she darkness, Her cheer is plainly spread in the brightness Of the sunne, for there it will unclose; Alas, that I ne had English rhyme or prose Suffisaunt this floure ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... subconsciousness, "the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley, the darkness of Browning—to take only modern ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... linger, to wander among the older children of men, where intuitively the hungry listener follows him into his Temple of Mirth, all should rejoice, for those who knew him not, can while away the moments imbibing the genius of his imagination in the poetry and prose here presented. ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... Hugh with much animation. "It is impossible in prose; but you shall have her very picture in a verse of one of my ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pretending to cry for it, for the writer is obviously insincere. I see the Saturday Review says the passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose is free from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer will not go hunting over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose. This, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... short, simple sentence in written prose is difficult. In spoken discourse, as well, it is so easy to fall into the First Primer style that while the advantages of the use of the simple sentence are great, the ability to produce good sentences in ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... whole of this story (which is apparently intended as an example of the flowery style (el bediya) of Arab prose) is terribly corrupt and obscure, and in the absence of a parallel version, with which to collate it, it is impossible to be sure that the ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... note with it, with some verses telling how happy children made every one near them happy also, and advising her to keep the lines, and some day, when she was 'grown a stately demoiselle,' it would make her 'glad to know she gave pleasure long ago,' all in a very lame fashion, with just a note of prose at the end, telling her to mind her doll and the dog, and not trouble her little head just now to understand the bad verses; for some time when she was ill, as I am now, they would be plain to her and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He seems to have been told that he has wit and humor, and—strange delusion!—to believe it. He writes as if he imagined that he possessed the inventive power: never was a greater mistake. These qualities and these mistakes make his prose writings unreadable and intolerable, at least all the later ones. But when to the charms of his ordinary style are added the attractions of verse, then the sense aches with the combined and heightened beauties. The present volume exaggerates all his literary ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... whose eyes were almost starting from his head, "your words are the knell of poetry, philosophy, and prose—especially of prose. They are the grave of history, which, as you know, is made up of the wars and intrigues which have originated in the brains of public men. If your sordid views were true, how do you suppose for one minute that in this great epic struggle we could be consoled by the thought ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the bush is purer and that life is better there, But it doesn't seem to pay you like the 'squalid street and square'. Pray inform us, City Bushman, where you read, in prose or verse, Of the awful 'city urchin who would greet you with a curse'. There are golden hearts in gutters, though their owners lack the fat, And we'll back a teamster's offspring to outswear a city brat. ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... might accrue from extensive acquisitions, to the ideal of spreading French civilisation as a beneficent force. He wished his country to share in a great work of discovery that would redound to its glory as well as to its influence. Glory, he wrote, in a fine piece of French prose, is the dominant passion of kings; but their common and inveterate error is to search for it in war—that is to say, in the reciprocal misfortunes of their subjects and their neighbours. But there never is any true glory for them unless ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... privilege in prose, and so he put it in verse. Kedzie found it in her mail at the stage door. She huddled in a corner of the big undressing-room where the nymphs prepared for their task. The young rowdies kept peeking over her shoulder and snatching at her letter, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... betrothed bride. They were dated from Jena, whither he had gone to complete his studies in jurisprudence. Every word expressed the lover's ardent longing, every line was pervaded by the passion that had filled the writer's heart. Often the prose of the young scholar, who as a pupil of Doctor Groot had won his bride in Delft, rose to a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... skill and undaunted resolution of the Dutch Polar explorers aroused unmingled admiration among all civilised nations, and that the narrative of their wintering was received with unbounded interest and formed the subject of innumerable writings and reproductions both in prose and verse in almost all civilised languages. Only a few facts from the journal of the wintering need therefore ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... (1783-1872) was especially noted as a student of Old Germanic literature. He began his career in 1806 by his studies on the Edda. This was followed by a book on Northern Mythology (1810), and by various creative works in verse and prose, the subjects of which were usually drawn from old Danish history. An account of his labors on the Beowulf will be found in the following section. His interest in Old English literature continued through his long life, ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... that the legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and he said to him, 'If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you let me have it for a poem?' To this Hawthorne consented, and promised, moreover, not to treat the subject in prose till Longfellow had seen what he could do with it in verse. Longfellow seized his opportunity and gave to the world 'Evangeline, or the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... from his contributions under the title of "The Spirit of the Farmer's Museum and Lay Preacher's Gazette." He also contributed poems to the Farmer's Weekly Museum, to the Portfolio, to the Columbia Centinel, to the New England Galaxy, and to the Polyanthus. Prose works were likewise included therein. Some of his contributions to the Farmer's Museum were gathered together in 1798 under the title of "Colon and Spondee Papers," and issued by the pioneer American printer, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists - 1765-1819 • Various
... of his special calling—in acquiring knowledge, in solving knotty problems, or in scaling the heights of abstract contemplation—is probably as inferior in keenness of zest to that which the poet knows, as the best prose is inferior in charm to the best poetry. It may even be that both poet and philosopher owe, on the whole, more unhappiness than happiness—the one to his superior sensibility, the other to his superior enlightenment, and yet neither would ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... prospered;—and the intimate participation of his agents in all the intrigues of the queen of Scots was notorious. Dr. Wylson, a learned civilian, an accomplished scholar, and one of the first refiners of English prose, had published in 1571, with the express view of rousing the spirit of his readers against this formidable tyrant, a version of the Orations of Demosthenes against the king Philip of his day, and had been at the pains of pointing out in the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... to be beautiful which is not just, and has not its foundation in the nature of things; that the basis of all wit is truth; and that no thought can be valuable of which good sense is not the groundwork. Boileau has endeavoured to inculcate the same notion in several parts of his writings, both in prose and verse. This is that natural way of writing, that beautiful simplicity which we so much admire in the compositions of the ancients, and which nobody deviates from but those who want strength of genius to make a thought shine ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... the seven wise men, B. C. 586, when Pherecydes of Syrus, the first prose writer, was about fourteen years old. Mr. Clinton fixes the acme of Pherecydes about B. C. 572. Cadmus of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... censured Lord Elgin for what they called his Vandalism in removing the relics from their native land. Among those who assailed him on this score was Lord Byron, who hurled anathemas at him both in prose and verse. "The Curse of Minerva" may fairly be said to have made Lord Elgin's name immortal. The case made against him in that fierce philippic, however, is grossly one-sided, as the author himself subsequently acknowledged; ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to her young imagination. She was passing through an ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Earl of Mulgrave, was created Marquess of Normanby, 1694, and Duke of Buckingham and Normanby in 1702/3. He succeeded the Duke of Devonshire as lord steward of the household on September 21st, 1710. He was the author of a poetical "Essay on Poetry," and an interesting prose "Account of the Revolution." As patron to Dryden he received the dedication of that poet's "Aurengzebe." Pope edited his collected ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the same thing in prose, and affirm that a man, to free himself from some great disease or exceedingly acute pain, if he have not at hand sword or hemlock, ought to leap into the sea or throw himself headlong from a precipice; neither of which is hurtful, or ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... questions in which Sir Henry Yule[2] took an interest in, was the problem of the authorship of the book of Travels which bears the name of SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE, the worthy Knight, who, after being for a long time considered as the "Father of English Prose" has become simply "the name claimed by the compiler of a singular book of Travels, written in French, and published between 1357 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... they will dress it: And bandage and press it, By making the least, to make the most of it! As you may suppose, She had plenty of beaux Bowing around her beautiful toes, Praising her feet, and eyes, and nose In rapturous verse and elegant prose! She had lots of lovers, old and young: There was lofty Long, and babbling Lung, Opulent Tin, and eloquent Tung, Musical Sing, and, the rest among, Great Hang-Yu ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... slight literary advantages; yet the simple pathos, beauty, and eloquence of their dying messages moved every heart. Poor Larkin was, of all three, the least endowed with education, yet his letter has been aptly described as "a perfect poem in prose." here append those ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself revolutionary to a point of madness, you shall find one who calls you reactionary. The scorners came in together—Moe Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct actionist, and Jane Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose—and they sat silently sneering ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, but there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and therefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his great pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The Empire did decline, but it did not fall. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... oft-quoted lines go to show is, that a falsity in verse will travel faster and endure longer than a falsity in prose. The man who would sneer or stare at a silly proposition nakedly put, will admit that "there is a good deal in that" when "that" is the point of an epigram shot into the ear. The rhetorician's rules—if they are rules—teach him not only to name his tools, but to use his ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... purpose is surely the same as Montaigne's, to reveal himself to us, and it would be hasty to decide that his skill is inferior. For while Montaigne had nothing but prose at his command, and not too rich a prose, as he himself complains, Shakespeare in magic of expression has had no equal in recorded time, and he used the lyric as well as the dramatic form, poetry as well as prose, to give ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labours! The heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness, or heroism, to sympathise in their fate. Besides, there is much uncertainty even in the best authenticated ancient or modern histories; and that love of truth, which in some minds ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... image. Faint and imperfect images they must be called, because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... occasion. Lincoln's part was to pronounce the formal words of dedication. It was a busy time—all times were busy with him, but this was unusually busy—and he wrote it on a sheet of foolscap paper in such odd moments as he could command. In form it is prose, but in effect it is a poem. Many of its sentences are rhythmical. The occasion lifted him into a higher realm of thought. The hearers were impressed by his unusual gravity and solemnity of manner quite as much, perhaps, as by the words themselves. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... acquainted with it; at least, I frequently find upon my crockery sentences the meaning of which to me is very dark, though it is true these sentences are mostly verses, which are, of course, more difficult to understand than mere prose.' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... pickings are scanty,—enough anatomical reconstruction for to-day...." And now he was thinking, as he sat opposite Foster, "If I had only picked up another bone or two, I might really have put together the domestic organism. Yet why should I trouble? It would all be plain, humdrum prose, no doubt. Glamour doesn't spread indefinitely. And ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... wither'd Misses! how they prose O'er books of travell'd seamen, And show you slips of all that grows From England to Van Diemen. They read in arbours clipt and cut, And alleys, faded places, By squares of tropic summer shut And warm'd in ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... 1. THE FAASALELEANGA.—In prose and poetry this part of the island, and even the whole of Savaii, is often called Sa Lafai, or sacred to Lafai, and among the legends that chief, Lafai, has an early place. Tupailelei, or Tupai the good, married a daughter of the king of Tonga, and her father ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... do, indeed, imply important and fundamental elements of his system of belief; but they can be taken in detachment as the exposition of a view of the nature and value of culture by a man who was himself the fine flower of English university training and a master of English prose. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... life that I've always been reluctant to let the glamour go. Children ought to be brought up on fairy tales! They're incipient poetry, and should be woven into the web of our lives as a beautiful border, before all the dark prose part follows. If the shuttle only weaves matter-of- fact ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... 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, whether of sunny ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... achievements of literature—those permanent and vital works which we will never let die—require a devotion as unceasing, as patient, as inexhaustible, as the devotion that is required for the works that adorn your walls; and we have luckily in our age—tho it may not be a literary age—masters of prose and masters of verse. No prose more winning has ever been written than that of Cardinal Newman; no verse finer, more polished, more melodious has ever been written than that of Lord Tennyson ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... (Conversations, 1824, pp. 234-238) what purports to be the prose sketch of a Second Part of Heaven and Earth (he says that Byron compared it to Coleridge's promised conclusion of Christabel—"that, and nothing more!"), detects two other strains in the composition of the "Mystery," an echo of Goethe's Faust ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... too, that he gave the lectures which resulted in his most important prose-writings, "The Science of English Verse," "The English Novel," ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... his little circle of the "great unwashed," is very oracular, and his infallibility a dogma with his followers and readers. How much he himself and his vulgar trash of prose run mad, stand in need of that wholesome reform which some of his English brother-firebrands have been taught in Coldbathfields and Newgate, let my reader judge from the following extract. The Times newspaper ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... still a genius worthy to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner. Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painful subject; only quoting—if I may be permitted to quote—Mr. Burton's wise and gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan," he says, "though a ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... thoughts which come unbidden. However, this is all mere Thaumaturgy, which has been so deadly to Truth in the old a priori psychology, and still works mischief, albeit it has its value in suggesting very often in Poetry what Science afterwards proves in Prose. ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... having permitted her to ignore it. There was a difference now—a difference which their discovery by an outsider had made unpleasantly manifest. De Folligny's appearance at Verneuil had made Markham thoughtful, but Olga's intrusion now had paraphrased their pastoral lyric into unworthy prose. Parnassus wept with them, but no amount of weeping could destroy the ugly doggerel as Olga had written it. Their idyl was smirched, the fair robe of Euterpe was trialing in ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... eye of the west. It was the hour before afternoon school, and already I could hear my father's voice within declaiming as to unnecessary datives and the lack of all feeling for style in the Latin prose of ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... dress—not of the material, but of the cut of it. If she had been Susan in Susan's dowdy and wrinkled alpaca, he would have translated his just emotion into what critics call "simple, nervous English"—that is to say, Shakespearean prose. But the aristocratic, insolent perfection of Helen's gown gave ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... throughout, and the orthography of Latin words has been brought into conformity with our practice. Many liberties have been taken with the text itself, especially in the latter part, in the way of making it approximate more closely to our rather strict notions of the standards of model prose. A few words and uses of words not found in the prose writers of the republic have been retained, but nothing, it is hoped, that will seriously mislead the young student. I shall welcome any criticism that may lead to further changes in ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... not speak. But those who are proper judges maintain that in simplicity and lucidity, vigour, and power, softness, elevation, and eloquence, the style of Machiavelli is 'divine,' and remains, as that of Dante among the poets, unchallenged and insuperable among all writers of Italian prose. ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... else! Easily seeing the approaching catastrophe, I wrote long persuading essays to him. It was pathetically useless. Proudly he continued to write his Rise and Fall of the Western Plainsman in a lucid, passionate prose which would evoke an imperishable ...
— Droozle • Frank Banta
... many speculations, started a periodical, in prose and verse, entitled The Watchman, with the motto, "that all might know the truth, and that the truth might make us free." He watched in vain! Coleridge's incurable want of order and punctuality, and ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... Peau d'Ane. "Catskin" was told by Mr. Burchell to the young Primroses in "The Vicar of Wakefield,'" and has been elaborately studied by the late H. C. Coote, in Folk-Lore Record, iii. 1-25. It is only now extant in ballad form, of which "Cap o' Rushes" may be regarded as a prose version. ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... yes. If Henry, there, will translate it And put it in verse and print as he promised To do when it happened. Will he do it? I doubt. He dislikes to dabble with rhyme and with measure. Says that good honest prose is the best and the sweetest If the words be well chosen, short, Saxon, and pithy. And that making of verse is the business of women, Of green boys at school, and of lovers when spooning. But try him. It may be he will. For a lesson Is in it, and ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... Marsh Maiden, by Leigh Ritchie; next is the Jacobite Exile and his Hound: Retrospections of Secundus Parnell, are an infliction upon the reader; and these, with two mediocre tales, and a sketch or two, make up the prose contents. The poetry has greater merit, though almost in one unvaried strain. Mr. Watts has contributed but one lyric, and Mrs. Watts a stirring ballad of Spanish revenge; Mary Howitt has contributed a fairy ballad, pretty enough; and the Sin of Earl Walter, a tale of olden popish times in England, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various |
