"Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... son kept staring at Thorgerda Glum's daughter; his wife Thorhillda saw this, and she got wroth, and made a couplet upon him. ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... to tell her that she must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... hard of you to keep the name of Hessian as a term of reproach forever, just because a few poor miserable fellows once came over here to fight you. Was it not enough to have treated them as you say you did in the Jerseys? For the benefit of you and those less prejudiced, I will translate the couplet:— ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... conjunction of end-rhyme with alliteration. Eddie verse is governed solely by the latter, and the strophic arrangement is simple, only two forms occurring: (1) couplets of alliterative short lines; (2) six-line strophes, consisting of a couplet followed by a single short ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... the drowsy hum of bees; and butterflies were there, thick as motes in the midday sun. Roberta's observant, nature-loving eyes roved delightedly from one point to another of the sunny landscape, while she repeated gaily to Mam' Sarah a little couplet. The child's memory ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... attempt to break in where one is known to be kept." Sir Walter heeded the advice, and, in his housekeeping experience, afterward, confirmed the good qualities of the terrier, as related to him by the burglar. He also commemorated the conversation by the following not exceedingly poetical couplet: ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... upon me a fine of 12,000 tomauns, which the king, on the plea that I was the first poet of the age, would not allow. It happened one day, that in a large assembly, the subject of discussion was the liberality of Mahmoud Shah Ghaznevi to Ferdousi, who gave him a miscal of gold for every couplet in the Shah Nameh. Anxious that the king should hear what I was about to say, I exclaimed: "The liberality of his present majesty is equal to that of Mahmoud Shah—equal did I say?—nay greater; because in the one case, it was exercised towards the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... horrible witch laughed and danced as before, repeating the same couplet; and the old hag, Wolde, danced ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, was the son of a former governor of Massachusetts,—that upright, sturdy, narrow, bigoted old Puritan, Thomas Dudley, in whose pocket was found after his death the notable couplet,— ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... a couplet so apropos, and so well delivered, as to have the immediate effect of restoring order and making the farmer look foolish. Encouraged by the voice of his great patron, Green once more essayed to finish his speech, ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... and pass away with the answer of the tryst-folk: "Yadi Husein" (Memory of Husein) still ringing in their ears. The new party is composed of Bombay Musulman youths, the tallest of whom carries an umbrella made out of pink, green and white paper, under which the rest crowd and sing the following couplet relating to the wife ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... as a piece of authentic history, that as [O]ta Dokan, the great builder of the castle of Tokyo, was pierced through with a spear, his assassin, knowing the poetical predilection of his victim, accompanied his thrust with this couplet— ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that "he writes very well for a gentleman." His serious pieces are sometimes elevated; and his trifles are sometimes elegant. In his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained. In his Odes to Marlborough there are beautiful lines; but in the second Ode he shows that he knew little of his hero, when he talks of his private virtues. His ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... did not spare the vulnerable points of his own countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... great, silent mass of the people, the true temper seems to be struck off in a popular poem of the time, written in response to one of the calls for more troops, a poem with refrains built on the model of this couplet: ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... followed after an unusually good dinner, when the world and the Madigans were young together, had inspired Old Mother Gibson. The original couplet, with which all Madigans are familiar, is not strictly quotable; it was not invented, but adopted, by them. And it served merely to give a name to the game, which was half a war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted couplets composed ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... mandolins, and occasional scratching of heads or turbans, to remember all that Hafiz had ever written, or to aid their attempts at improviso versification. Time flew on, and no one of the young rayahs appeared inclined to begin. At last one stepped forward, and named the rose, in a borrowed couplet. He was dismissed with a graceful wave of the hand by the princess, and broke his mandolin in his vexation, as he quitted the hall of audience. And thus did they continue, one after another, to name flower after flower, and quit the hall of audience in despair. Then might these ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... was to write during the next half-century. In many respects he was a curious survival of the cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. He might have been, like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed couplet, an instinctive social sense, a feeling for the presence of an imaginary audience of congenial listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" between his clever lines. In many of the traits of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" resembled such a ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... may quote the only couplet in which beasts as well as birds are subjected to this searching analysis. I think you will admit that it is the most sagacious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... inscriptions on the pedestal record the destruction and restoration of the city; and down to the year 1831 there was also an inscription untruthfully attributing the fire to "the treachery and malice of the popish faction;" this has been effaced, and to it Pope's couplet alluded: ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... that he would not himself have chosen this particular piece, but as it had been chosen for him he would read it. And this he did, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution of emphasis which made the charm of his delivery as a lyceum lecturer. When he came to the couplet, ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... again, but with a note of tenderness in his voice, and took her hand to lead her away, humming in an undertone the last couplet of his song: ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... cares, he could give himself unreservedly to authorship. In 1660 he published a satire upon the vices of Paris, which inaugurated his great success. Seven satires appeared in 1666, and he afterward added five others. Their malicious wit, their novel form, the harmonious swing of the couplet rhyme, forced immediate attention. They held up contemporary literary weaknesses to scorn, and indulged in the most merciless personalities, sparing not even his own brother, the poet Gilles Boileau. All retorts upon himself the author bore with complacent ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... special literary interest as the most modern thing of the Renaissance. It would be far less surprising to find this written by one of the young republicans under the Second Empire (for instance) than to find a couplet of Malherbe's straying ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... delights deep in the heart of the pleasant forest. I heard him indulging in memories and anecdotes of date sittings after long hunts; but I was myself always on a hunt for my beginning, and none of his words clearly reached my intelligence until I was aware of his reciting an excellently pertinent couplet:— ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... The Queen broke silence and said to the King, "Do you hear, Sire, what Campan says to us?"—"Yes, I hear," said the King, and continued his game. Monsieur, who was in the habit of introducing passages from plays into his conversation, said to my father-in-law, "M. Campan, that pretty little couplet again, if you please;" and pressed the King to reply. At length the Queen said, "But something must be said to Campan." The King then spoke to my father-in-law in these words: "Tell M. d'Inisdal that I cannot consent to be carried off!" The Queen enjoined M. Campan to take care and, report ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... often that a poet loses his head for a single couplet, but this seems to have been the fate of Caspar Weiser, Professor of Lund in Sweden. At first he showed great loyalty to his country, and wrote a panegyric on the coronation of Charles XI., King of Sweden. But a short time afterwards he appears to have changed his political opinions, for ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... inconsolavel—are prose translations from Mery, cleverly done, but not worth the doing. Horacio e Lydia (1872), a translation from Ronsard, is a good example of artifice in manipulating that dangerously monotonous measure, the Portuguese couplet. As an indication of a strong spiritual reaction three prose fragments (1873)—Anna, Mae de Maria, A Virgem Maria and A Mulher do Levita de Ephrain—translated from Darboy's Femmes de la Bible, are full of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build and keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would give us a new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some meaning in our poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we can be and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us all back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long time more ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... allowed several ballads of ten, twenty, or thirty couplets to be sung through, feigning by his silence to admit his defeat. Then the bridegroom's camp rejoiced and sang aloud in chorus, and thought that this time the foe was worsted; but at the first line of the last couplet, they heard the hoarse croaking of the old hemp-dresser bellow forth the second rhyme. ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... understanding, that they were practically unassailable by reason of their ramparts of wealth, that they lived in comfort, if not in luxury, while those whom they dominated were struggling hard for a bare subsistence. I can imagine the youth reciting the couplet ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... the envelope containing the message and the fingerprints in his pocket, then moved to follow his friend, already on his way to the stairs. He paused at the door, however, and came back rather hesitatingly. "Say—just how did that couplet run?" ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... all verse, as distinguished from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably—it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... possible that an occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical student, would have deplored its destruction, if its demerits—hardly relieved, as his first competent editor has happily remarked, by the occasional incidence of a fine and felicitous couplet—could in that case have been imagined. His translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the original and falls short of it; often inferior to the Latin in point and weight of expressive rhetoric, now and then brightened by a ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... ever learned such Hymns when a child. If he did, he must later have had a revival of more hopeful ideas. He could write that couplet that has been so ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... crams into one couplet after another, philosophy after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean, Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid," and finds "the gorgeous table ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the purpose to be, to do, and to suffer all God's will. Its essence, already given in the words of Paul, is given also in the words of the Saviour. "Not My will but Thine be, done," which is beautifully versified by Frances Ridley Havergal, in the couplet, ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... signs seldom fail,—a red and angry sunrise, or flushed clouds at evening. Many a hope of rain have I seen dashed by a painted sky at sunset. There is truth in the old couplet, too:— ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... the great piles as they make fast in the slip. Nancy was such a pile—but what an odious figure! He thought of her face as he had first seen it on the night of the Vernal, when, slightly flushed and smilingly expectant, she had peered into the costume closet. A couplet floated out of Freshman English into his mind—something about a countenance which had in it sweet records and promises as sweet. He jumped out of bed to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... Until the year 1792, there existed at Paris no theatre specially appropriated to this style of performance, which was given at the Comedie Italienne. It attracted crowds; and Sedaine, the composer, vexed to see it preferred to his comic operas, wrote a couplet against it, exhibiting more spleen than poetical merit. The attack, however, together with the refusal of a small pension which he had claimed from the Italian Comedy, to whose treasury he had brought millions of francs, irritated Piis, the vaudevilliste then in vogue, the Scribe of his day. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... The concluding couplet of the following lines is amusingly characteristic of that mixture of fun and bitterness with which their author sometimes spoke in conversation;—so much so, that those who knew him might almost fancy they ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... warm, lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal, and wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town, at these hours, must be ghostly enough on its neighboring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect, - as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the door, to summon the others, as they came out, to a meeting for the decision of this important matter. On a knoll in a field near by, the boys assembled; and then Oscar announced that he had found a pretty couplet, suitable to the occasion, which he proposed as a motto for the banner, and he read in a ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... tamer, the production of crowing hens was discouraged (the wise old hens laid no eggs with a crow in them, according to the well-known principle of heredity), and the man who had in his youth exterminated the hen of progress actually went about quoting that false couplet as an argument against the higher ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... production there are also dreary stretches of rambling loquacity, hollow rhetoric and unintelligible jumbles of words and phrases. He could be insupportably dull and again express more in a single stanza, couplet or phrase than many have said in a whole book. A study of his poetry is, therefore, not unlike a journey through a vast country, alternating in fertile valleys, barren plains and lofty heights with entrancing views into far, ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... can do what he pleases with, but of which only a few ever learn the real scope and capabilities. Besides, the difficulty was increased by the fact that the nearest approach to it in measure was the heroic couplet, so well known in our language, although scarce one who has used it has come up to the variousness of its modelling in the hands of Chaucer, with whose writings Surrey was of course familiar. But various as is its melody in Chaucer, the fact of there being always an anticipation of the perfecting ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... hair grows low about her brow, and swoops upwards and backwards in a sort of tidal wave, and breaks loose in little curling tendrils,—it's absolutely lyrical. And the smile at the bottom of her eyes is exactly like silent music. And her mouth is a couplet in praise of love, with two red lips for rhymes. And her chin is a perfect epithalamium of a chin. And then her figure! And then her lilac frock! Oh, it's a thousand, thousand pities that painting should ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... not dissimilar situation in Sen. Oed. (936), where Oedipus meditates in very similar style, as to how he may expiate his guilt. The couplet vivere si poteris, &c., is ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... which one might actually chance to meet her; the unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... not to be found in the large edition. There are probably still many copies of album verses which have not yet seen the light. In the London Magazine, April, 1824, is a story entitled "The Bride of Modern Italy," which has for motto the following couplet:— ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... no doubt of it—blind fool that I am, who cannot behold the boasted inspiration of the Apollo! I cannot help—pity me!—I cannot help preferring the Antinous. Was it not Socrates who said that the statuary found his statue in the block of marble? Then Michael Angelo was by no means original in his couplet— ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form. The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler, easier tone of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... pickles. Philip the Bold granted armorial ensigns (1382) to Dijon, with the motto moult me tarde (I wish for ardently). The merchants of Sinapi copied this on their wares, the middle word of the motto being accidentally effaced. A well-known couplet of lines supposed to occur in Hudibras (but not to be found there), has long baffled the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... on record of the encounter of this fish with other fishes, or of their attacks upon ships. What can be the inducement for it to attack objects so much larger than itself is hard to surmise. We are all familiar with the couplet from Oppian: ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... early this morning, renewing the never-regretted consecration. I seemed led to run over the 'Take my Life,' and could bless Him verse by verse for having led me on to much more definite consecration than even when I wrote it—voice, gold, intellect, etc. But the eleventh couplet—" ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... the wandering Alchymist and The Reply of the Alchymist to Nature. Poetry and alchymy were his delight, and priests and women were his abomination. A pleasant story is related of him and the ladies of the court of Charles IV. He had written the following libellous couplet upon the fair sex: ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Unfortunate Lady (1717), are more worthy of attention. Nowhere, probably, in the language are finer specimens to be met with of rhetorical pathos, but poets like Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can touch the heart more deeply by a phrase or couplet than Pope is able to do by his elaborate representations of passion. The reader is not likely to be affected by the following response of Eloisa to an invitation ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... in a corner of the house must he stand and repeat that couplet, till some tender-hearted lass relieves him. Now for the questions which are most deeply laid, or so touching to him, that he finds much difficulty to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... attains its highest excellence in poetry. The art of composing short poems in which a thought, emotion or spiritual experience is expressed with a few simple but pregnant words in the compass of a single couplet or short hymn, was carried by the early Buddhists to a perfection which has never been excelled. The Dhammapada[645] is the best known specimen of this literature. Being an anthology it is naturally more suited for quotation or recitation in sections than for ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... 'something' which had been expected of the venerable commander of the army of the Shenandoah. He had spent three months of time, and ten millions of money, and had only emulated the acts of that Gallic sovereign whose great deeds are immortalized in the brief couplet, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... story about to be told is qualified as "stu bellissimu cuntu" (this very fine story). Ordinarily they begin, as do our own, with the formula, "once upon a time there was." The ending is also a variable formula, often a couplet referring to the happy termination of the tale and the relatively unenviable condition of the listeners. The Sicilian ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... but they have also tied it down to a harmonious uniformity. A foreigner, to whom antiquated and new are the same, may perhaps feel with greater freedom the advantages of the more ancient manner. Certain it is, the rhyme of the present day, from the too great confinement of the couplet, is unfit for the drama. We must not estimate the rhyme of Shakspeare by the mode of subsequent times, but by a comparison with his contemporaries or with Spenser. The comparison will, without doubt, turn ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... which he had in any way departed from the regular customs were passed in review, and it was remembered that he had taken upon himself to have inscribed on the tripod at Delphi, which was dedicated by the Hellenes as the first-fruits of the spoil of the Medes, the following couplet: ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... work; but it was printed at Oxford in the year of its success, and again at the same place, separately or with other prize poems, in 1846, 1863, and 1891. It may also be found in the useful non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in the consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to fifty lines, it is "good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope used to say to the younger; but a prudent taster would perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than in the case of the Alaric, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... was a man who hid a great deal of tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet with terror, for I knew beforehand that ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... at sea," returned Hollis. He laughed. "I suppose you've read Ace's poem in the Kicker?" He caught Norton's nod and continued. "Well, Ace succeeded in crowding a whole lot of truth into that effort. Of course you remember the first couplet: ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... resources, and its artistic finish, was really adequate to fulfil the highest demands of genius. In this direction their most important single achievement was their elevation of the 'Alexandrine' verse—the great twelve-syllabled rhyming couplet—to that place of undisputed superiority over all other metres which it has ever since held ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the Poem. It admits both of simplicity and magnificence of sound and of language, beyond any other stanza that I am acquainted with. It allows the sententiousness of the couplet, as well as the more complex modulation of blank verse. What some critics have remarked, of its uniformity growing at last tiresome to the ear, will be found to hold true, only when the poetry ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... jolly tar, you! Here's a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. "Here's a stanza[6] On Braganza— Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup Of warm water—" "What's the matter?" "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... oft" it looked in their case to be one long, continued and alarming drama, but on the 30th day of August, the day of their landing on the banks of the Red River, shall we recite the epic of Lord Selkirk's Colonists, and it will be of the temper of Browning's couplet: ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... surprising in connection with the quaint humor in the description of the old man who is the subject of the poem. There is a delicious Irish character in this, as in many other pieces of Holmes, reminding us of the familiar couplet ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:— ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Round was lost at sea, and in the grave-yard of his native place a stone was erected with the following couplet ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... would have it, on this day Tai-jui was, on account of business, compelled to go home; and having left them as a task no more than a heptameter line for an antithetical couplet, explaining that they should find a sentence to rhyme, and that the following day when he came back, he would set them their lessons, he went on to hand the affairs connected with the class to his elder grandson, Chia Jui, whom he asked to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Eventually he was coaxed home and got upstairs, but then, in a gush of politeness, he insisted on seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking, Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet, which covered a multitude of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of thing is not allowed in comic poetry. When I opened my well-known military epic, "Riddles of the King," with the couplet, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... hand the wand which she again thrust into the frying pan, saying, "O fish! O fish! be ye constant to your olden covenant?" And behold, the fish lifted their heads, and repeated "Yes! Yes!" and recited this couplet: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... wind we passed inside of the Bermudas, and, notwithstanding the old couplet, which was quoted again and again by those who thought we should have one more touch of a storm before ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... to the above couplet, states that Mr. Gage and Lady Mary Herbert, " each of them, in the Mississippi scheme, despised to realize above three hundred thousand pounds: the gentleman with a view to the purchase of the crown of Poland, the lady on a vision of the like royal nature: they have since retired ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Pope, we believe, coined the contemptuous phrase, "I care not a pin." The pin has never been done justice in the world of poetry. As one might say, the pin has had no Pindar. Of course there is the old saw about see a pin and pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck. This couplet, barbarous as it is in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a profound truth. When you see a pin, you must pick it up. In other words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are. Their instinctive affinity ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... interesting, as in this case, to trace the same notion in different countries, although it is by no means possible to account for such undesigned resemblance. The common ash (Fraxinus excelsior), too, is a lightning plant, and, according to an old couplet: ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the most numerous, the majority of the remainder being distinguished by two stars, or the signature "Lilbourne." These are understood to have been from the pen of James Ralph, whose poem of Night gave rise to a stinging couplet in the Dunciad, but who was nevertheless a man of parts, and an industrious writer. As will be remembered, he had contributed a prologue to the Temple Beau, so that his association with Fielding must have been of some standing. Besides Ralph's essays ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... to the style and versification of the Monody, the heroic couplet in which it is written has long been a sort of Ulysses' bow, at which Poetry tries her suitors, and at which they almost all fail. Redundancy of epithet and monotony of cadence are the inseparable companions of this metre in ordinary hands; nor could all the taste and skill of Sheridan keep it ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... couplet must delight you, I think. I will also give you the two last verses about Clora: though it is more complete and better without them: strange to say. You must have the goodness to repeat those you know over first, and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... question whether the children are amused. Occasionally there is a line with the old ring to it, a couplet seasoned with Attic salt, but for the rest there is the body without the spirit,—there is the well of English undefiled, but it is pumped dry! Probably the desire to publish was never so great as during Landor's last years, when the interests of his life had narrowed down to reading and writing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... times. Granting that no human effort is perfect, the fact remains that these institutions have lived up to the high purpose for which they were founded, and are still being liberally supported and endowed. What more could be required by rational beings? This couplet may be suggestive: ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... expression has not a little conduced to this effect. Every one must have observed how much more the sense is condensed in the verses of Pope and his imitators, who never ventured to continue the same clause from couplet to couplet, than in those of poets who allow themselves that license. Every artificial division, which is strongly marked, and which frequently recurs, has the same tendency. The natural and perspicuous expression which spontaneously rises to the mind will often refuse ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... one should make an extempore couplet to the same rhyme and measure. Every one accordingly repeated his verse. As we had been very merry, I repeated the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the old classical couplet sent his thoughts off to the Aegean sea and the Greek fishermen, and the superstitions which are the soul ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... had been wriggling about in his seat, twitching his beard, and at every couplet looking up expectantly, as if he desired the company to think, that he was counting upon that line as the last; But now, starting to his feet, he exclaimed, "Hold, minstrel! thy muse's drapery is ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... defined as the enemy, while the excise claimed by the birds is head-money for his extirpation. An adaptation of this instructive couplet to gardening for the guidance of those of us who do not farm, but garden in a small way, would naturally enlarge the allowance of the cut-worm. From the more limited demesne the crow and the grakle ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... The last couplet Milton afterwards, on his Italian journey, entered in an album belonging to an Italian named Cerdogni, and underneath it the words, Coelum non animum muto dum trans mare curro, and his signature, Joannes Miltonius, Anglus. The juxtaposition of these verses is ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... beside Pitt in the great Paine Parliament (December, 1792), had protested that he had not abandoned his party through expectation of a pension, but the general belief of those with whom he had formerly acted was that he had been promised a pension. A couplet of the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... which most students of his work read, The Arraignment of Paris and David and Bethsabe. Of the first it may be said boldly, without fear of contradiction, that, considered metrically, the verse is unsuited to ordinary drama. The arbitrary and constantly changing use of heroic couplet, blank verse (pentameters), rhyming heptameters, alternate heptameters and hexameters rhyming together, and the swift transition from one form to another in the same speech, possibly help towards the lyrical effect aimed at; the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... much of a poet not to impress his own individuality upon his work. He makes some few additions to Geoffrey's Arthurian history, but his real contribution to the legend is the new spirit that he put into it. In the first place his vehicle is the swift-moving French octo-syllabic couplet, which alone gives an entirely different tone to the narrative from that of Geoffrey's high-sounding Latin prose. Wace, moreover, was Norman born and Norman bred, and he inherited the possessions of his race—a love of fact, the ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... on love, though overcharged with quaint conceits, are often noble and true, and end at least with one fine couplet: ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... was readily answered by Evan, with the old jest, The deil take them wha have the least pint stoup.' ['The Scotch are liberal in computing their land and liquor; the Scottish pint corresponds to two English quarts. As for their coin, every one knows the couplet— ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... and shouted out, "Well done, old fellow!" Then he took it to himself and read it all over again, introductions and all, and has raved ever since. I wish you could see Aubrey singing out some profane couplet of "midnight and not a nose," or some more horrible original parody, and then dodging apparently in the extremity of terror, just as ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... day Silas saw the party in Squire Payne's big wagon, with Thomas driving, and the cousin's pink cheeks and white plumed hat conspicuous in the midst, pass merrily on their way to a cherryless picnic at a neighboring pond, and the young college men shouted out a doggerel couplet which the wit of the party had made and set to ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... king—that is the tradition—and on this occasion it was easier than usual to crown the heir apparent. At least twenty girls were making love to Jim, and he was quite unconscious of it all, except that he thought them a little free, and at length he recited an appropriate couplet from "The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk": "They are so unaccustomed to man, their tameness is shocking to me." He joked and laughed with all; but ever he drifted over toward Belle, to consult, ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... used to-day, but in the days when these terms meant something in real life there was a distinction. The talisman was probably at first an astronomical figure, but later the term became more comprehensive. Pope portrays this astrological import in his couplet, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... his mother. "That is the best yet. But we might branch out a little, I think, Willy. This condensed couplet is forcible, but not very graceful. How do ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... believe that these studies, these finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... insulting jests passed upon them by the despots. Mamercus, who plumed himself on his poems and tragedies, gave himself great airs after conquering the mercenaries, and when he hung up their shields as offerings to the gods, he inscribed this insolent elegiac couplet upon them. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... preserving every outward form prescribed by Guru Govind Singh. Some of the Akalis wear a yellow turban underneath the blue one, leaving a yellow band across the forehead. The yellow turban is worn by many Sikhs at the Basant Panchmi, and the Akalis are fond of wearing it at all times. There is a couplet by Bhai ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... been communicated to him; and then, filled with joy, not only on account of the eternal felicity again promised him, but because the time was fixed when his soul was to be released from the prison of his body, he added this further couplet to his canticle: "Be Thou praised, my Lord, for death our sister, from which no living man can escape," etc. "Blessed are they who, at the hour of death, are found conformed to Thy holy will, for they will not be overtaken by the second death. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! May all creatures ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... various visual experiments of this and the following chapters, the first word of the couplet which describes the condition of the experiment, for example, white-black, always designates the visual condition which the animal was to choose, the second that which it was to avoid on penalty of an electric shock. ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... France, had broken from his contract of marriage before its consummation; her second, the Infante of Spain, died immediately after their union; and her third, the duke of Savoy, left her again a widow after three years of wedded life. She was a woman of talent and courage; both proved by the couplet she composed for her own epitaph, at the very moment of a dangerous accident which happened during her journey into Spain to join her ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... He leisurely adorns for her. Landscapes thereon he would design, A tombstone, Aphrodite's shrine, Or, with a pen and colours fit, A dove which on a lyre doth sit; The "in memoriam" pages sought, Where many another hand had signed A tender couplet he combined, A register of fleeting thought, A flimsy trace of musings past Which ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Commodus Hercules, and upon it was inscribed the well known couplet, viz.: "Hercules I, Jove's son, Lord of Fair Fame, Not Lucius, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... far as we know, in the Empire who is relieved of the duty of welcoming and escorting transient officers. It was the multiplicity of such duties, so harassing, that persuaded Fang Kuan-ch'eng to write the couplet on one of the city gateways: Jih pien ch'ung yao, wu shuang ti: T'ien hsia fan nan, ti yi Chou. 'In all the world, there is no place so public as this: for multiplied cares and trials, this is the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... walk and talk and sing and dance, and yours can't do anything, can she?" asked Jamie with pride, as he regarded his Pokey, who just then had been moved to execute a funny little jig and warble the well-known couplet, ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... by Charles H. Ross, Esq."—twenty-six letters which, when applied to the cryptograph, will give a couplet from ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous |
