"Metre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the midst of the market-place, like those churches in Italy, in which people seem so much at home. The verse is quaint, homely, not so archaic when it is spoken as one might suppose in reading it; the metre is regular in heat, but very irregular in the number of syllables, and the people who spoke it so admirably under Mr. Poel's careful training had not been trained to scan it as well as they articulated ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... than s, form the possessive by the addition of the apostrophe and the letter s. The only exceptions to this rule are, that, by poetical license the additional s may be elided in poetry for sake of the metre, and in the scriptural phrases "For goodness' sake." "For conscience' sake," "For Jesus' sake," etc. Custom has done away with the s and these phrases are now idioms of the language. All plural nouns ending in s form the possessive by the addition of the apostrophe only as boys', ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... and people are starving here in St. Pierre; there is clothing for almost nothing, and poor girls cannot earn enough to buy a dress. The pretty printed calicoes (indiennes) that used to be two francs and a half the metre, now sell at twelve sous the metre; but nobody has any money. And if you read our papers,—Les Colonies, La Defense Coloniale,— you will find that there are sons wicked enough to beat their mothers: oui! yche ka batt manman! ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... writing this work he was very quiet and sober-minded; he filed and polished every line, and as he had chosen to submit himself to the limitations of metre, he did not rest until all was pure and musical. When, however, he had at length finished it and read it aloud to himself he was seized with horror and awful dread, and he screamed, "Whose hideous voice is this?" But he soon came ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed. The Spanish ballad, or romance, was a stanza (redondilla, roundel) of four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement—just the metre, in short, of "Locksley Hall." Only the second and fourth lines rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. The subjects ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... interrupted Miss Maxwell. "Though they don't amount to anything as poetry, they show a good deal of promise in certain directions. You almost never make a mistake in rhyme or metre, and this shows you have a natural sense of what is right; a 'sense of form,' poets would call it. When you grow older, have a little more experience,—in fact, when you have something to say, I think you may write very good verses. Poetry needs knowledge ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... think favourably of it. [Footnote: Bouterwek's Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit.—Ersten Band, s. 334, &c.] According to his description, it resembles the older pieces of the Spanish stage before it had attained to maturity of form, and in common with them it employs the stanza for its metre. The attempts at romantic drama have always failed in Italy; whereas in Spain, on the contrary, all endeavours to model the theatre according to the rules of the ancients, and latterly of the French, have from the difference of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... temp. Mohammed: the Alfiyah-grammar of Ibn Malik is in Rajaz Muzdawij, the hemistichs rhyming and the assonance being confined to the couplet. Al-Hariri also affects Rajaz in the third and fifth Assemblies. So far Arabic metre is true to Nature: in impassioned speech the movement of language is iambic: we say "I will, I will," not ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... smiths at their forges Worked the red St. George's Cannoneers; And the "villainous saltpetre" Rung a fierce, discordant metre Round their ears; As the swift Storm-drift, With hot sweeping anger, came the horse-guards' clangor On our flanks. Then higher, higher, higher burned the old-fashioned fire Through ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... abuses, and is thoroughly filled with the spirit which, four years after the second recension of his book, found expression in the Peasants Revolt of 1381. With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than Chaucer, reflects the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... the four orders perform sacrifices; four are the cardinal points; four is the number of letters; and four also, as is ever known, are the legs of a cow."[29] Vandin said, "Five is the number of fires; five are the feet of the metre called Punki; five are the sacrifices; five locks, it is said in the Vedas, are on the heads of the Apsaras; and five sacred rivers are known in the world."[30] Ashtavakra said. "Six cows, it is asserted by some, and paid as a gratuity ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... in a certain circle rime was discredited as being, to use Milton's words nearly a century afterwards, 'no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre.' A similar attempt was made in the course of the sixteenth century in other parts of Europe, and with the same final issue. Gabriel Harvey was an active leader in this deluded movement. When Sidney too, and Dyer, another poet of the time, proclaimed a 'general surceasing ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... has his own opinions upon everything. It was but the other day that he would have it that I was wrong when I said that one of the windows in the Trianon was smaller than any of the others. It was the same size, said he. I brought Le Metre with his measures, and of course the window was, as I had said, too small. But I see by your clock that it is four o'clock. I ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... disgust with his profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly abandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these inspired works were not jumped at by the publishers with all the eagerness they deserved, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... entire rhythmical system was renewed or was purified. His dexterity in various metres was that of a great virtuoso, and it was not the mere dexterity which conquers difficulties, it was a skill inspired and sustained by the sentiment of metre. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the hexameter upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel Harvey,—a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,—whose chief claim to remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... and the jagati metre are described, the last two, however, not by name. Narada's speech, p. 236, is in sloka, 16 syllables to the line; the first distich, p. 233, is in tristubh, 22 syllables to the line. ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... is our own romantic land transposed into terms of classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You could just as well hear Glueck as Keats; you could just as well see the world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch the smoke of old altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West become ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Calendar consists of twelve compositions, with no other internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre, character, and excellence. They are called AEglogues, according to the whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the classical writers called Eclogues: "AEglogai, as it were aigon or aigonomon ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... life and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express by the contradictory phrase of innate experience. We copy one of the shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a little dimness in the filling ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it written—rapidity and antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are half-a-dozen works of the highest excellence in ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... to the Norman Conquest, the MSS. in the Anglo-Saxon or Southern dialect are fairly numerous, and it is mainly to them that we owe our knowledge of the grammar, the metre, and the pronunciation of the older forms of English. Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer will enable any one to begin the study of this dialect, and to learn something valuable about it in the course ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... convince themselves that the greater part of the book is not mere prose, written out into the form of verse, he is persuaded that its melody is more obvious and perceptible than that of our vulgar measures. "One advantage," says Mr. Southey, "this metre assuredly possesses; the dullest reader cannot distort it into discord: he may read it with a prose mouth, but its flow and fall will still be perceptible." We are afraid, there are duller readers in the world than Mr. Southey is ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... various measures and with diverse feet. The rhythm is easy and flows along trippingly from the tongue with such regular emphasis and cadence as to lead instinctively to a sort of sing-song in the recital of it. Ballads are more frequently written in common metre lines of eight and six syllables alternating. Such is the famous ballad of "Chevy Chace,"[5] which has been growing in popular esteem for more than three hundred years. Ben Jonson used to say he would rather have ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... nine of diamonds, show, this Stromboli of the Athabasca to be the gathering-place of up and down-river wanderers. You can boil a kettle or broil a moose-steak on this gas-jet in six minutes, and there is no thought of accusing metre to mar your joy. The Doctor has found a patient in a cabin on the high bank, and rejoices. The Indian has consumption. The only things the Doctor could get at were rhubarb pills and cod-liver oil, but these, with faith, go a long way. They may have eased the mind of poor Lo, around ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... you merely take some dauntless Englishmen, Guns, heroism, slaughter, and a fleet— Ingredients you mingle in a metre with a jingle, And there you ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... He thought of metre, he thought of rhyme. 'Twas a race between weary brains and time. He tried to write as he used to when His heart was as ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... is sense, let it grow where it will, and I guess we raise about the best kind, which is common sense, and I warn't to be put down with short metre, arter that fashion. So I tried the old man; sais I, 'Uncle,' sais I, 'if you will divorce the eatables from the drinkables that way, why not let the servants come and tend. It's monstrous onconvenient and ridikilous to be a jumpin' up for everlastinly ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... metre is essential to the full sense of the meaning and of the beauty of all poetry. Even the rhymeless flow of blank verse is absolutely necessary to an accurate and entire perception of the effect the author intends to produce: it is in both cases as the colouring to a picture. It may be, indeed, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... decree caused the danger which then hung round our city to pass away like a cloud." But the modulation is as perfect as the sentiment itself is weighty. It is uttered wholly in the dactylic measure, the noblest and most magnificent of all measures, and hence forming the chief constituent in the finest metre we know, the heroic. [And it is with great judgment that the words hosper nephos are reserved till the end.[2]] Supposing we transpose them from their proper place and read, say touto to psephisma hosper nephos epoiese ton tote ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... society, it won't be enough, of course, for me alone to preside; it will be necessary to invite two others to serve as vice-presidents; you might then enlist Ling Chou and Ou Hsieh, both of whom are cultured persons. The one to choose the themes and assign the metre, the other to act as copyist and supervisor. We three cannot, however, definitely say that we won't write verses, for, if we come across any comparatively easy subject and metre, we too will indite a stanza if we feel so disposed. But you four will positively have to do so. If you agree ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... produce a copy of that early effusion; it would prove that my judgment is not severe. Wretched it was,—worse, a great deal, than reams of poetry that is written by children about whom there is no fuss made. But Miss Dillingham was not discouraged. She saw that I had no idea of metre, so she proceeded to teach me. We repeated miles of poetry together, smooth lines that sang themselves, mostly out of Longfellow. Then I would go home and write—oh, about the snow in our back yard!—but when Miss Dillingham came to read my verses, they limped and they lagged and ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... lifted the platform, and to his great surprise and wonder found a low ladder made of diamond bars, leading down into a small apartment all shining bright as if it were day. Here he found two columns of diamond bars, each a foot in thickness and a metre in height, whose brightness shot through all the corners like sunbeams. This subterranean chamber immediately led to another in which there was a big safe about five feet in height and three feet ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... land. He gives a practical expression to his scorn by quavering in a reedy voice, the feeble chansonnettes of an inferior French composer, and by issuing a volume of poems in which the laws of English Grammar are trampled under foot, and the restrictions of English metre are defied. In his lyrical effusions he breathes the passionate desire of a great soul for Love that is not of the earth. He aspires to the stars, and invokes the memory of dead heroes, his intimates. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... Tautologia, or the figure of selfe saying.] Ye haue another manner of composing your metre nothing commendable, specially if it be too much vsed, and is when our maker takes too much delight to fill his verse with wordes beginning all with a letter, as an English rimer that said: The deadly droppes of darke disdaine, Do daily drench ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... letter to The International states that he is now printing at Copenhagen three Anglo-Saxon poems of the eleventh century, namely: The Old Testament Story, On the Sixth Day's Work, and The New Testament Story, by Aelfric, Archbishop of York, now just translated into the metre and alliteration of the original. The three poems will make a quarto volume of about thirty sheets, and copies may be ordered (price three dollars), through the Hon. H. W. Ellsworth, late United States Charge d'Affaires in Sweden, at New-York, or Dr. S. H. Smith, of Cincinnati. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... register, so that it embraced every form and degree of human thought, feeling, and emotion, and clothed them all, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the slightest to the most intense and concentrated, in the dress of exactly appropriate style and language. His metre also is a perfect vehicle of the language. If we think the range of his knowledge limited, yet it was all that his country and his age possessed, and it was very greatly more than has been supposed by readers that dwelt only on the surface. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming brethren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that which is known as Burns's peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditional forms of his country's poetry, and from earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... of groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Huke," says Minshen, "is a mantle such as women use in Spaine, Germanie, and the Low Countries, when they goe abroad." Lovelace clearly adopts the word for the sake of the metre; otherwise he might have ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... of 188 lines, in heroic metre, and is followed by a shorter poem, entitled "A Comfortable Exhortation to the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... a number of repetitions in the tune, and has a chorus that is sung at the end of each verse. I have not presumed to arrange it in metre; but the following is the substance: "We are assembled in the habiliments of war, and will go in quest of our enemies. We will march to their land and spoil their possessions. We will take their women ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... days it was believed that the spelling of every English word had been settled for all time. Thence to the present day, though the severities then inaugurated, so far as metre and artistic composition are concerned, been generously relaxed—though we have had a Whistler, a Walt Whitman, and a Wagner—the rigours of spelling have continued unabated. There is just one right way of spelling, and all ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... interrupting him, said: "By Jupiter, Socrates, you have done well in reminding me. With respect to the poems which you made, by putting into metre those Fables of AEsop and the hymn to Apollo, several other persons asked me, and especially Evenus recently, with what design you made them after you came here, whereas before, you had never made any. If, therefore, you care ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... MS. poem in the Brit. Mus. (Bibl. Sloan. 1489) entitled "The Trimming of Tom Nash," written in metre-ballad verse, but it does not relate to our author, though written probably not very long after 1600, and though the title is evidently borrowed from the tract by Gabriel Harvey. Near the opening it contains some notices ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... hair is a crown, I can truthfully state 'Tis a metre long, nor curly nor straight, And it is as yellow as plumbic chromate In a slightly ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... prisoning circumstance looked up and afar, how the heart ached to think of them!' The natural bent of Gissing's talent was towards poetry and classical antiquity. His mind had considerable natural affinity with that of Tennyson.[26] He was passionately fond of old literature, of the study of metre and of historical reverie. The subtle curiosities of Anatole France are just of the kind that would have appealed irresistibly to him. His delight in psychological complexity and feats of style are not ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... soliloquy with great gusto. Why he should have taken it into his head to get a child, as I was, to write poetry I cannot tell. One afternoon he sent for me to his room, and asked me to try and make up a verse; after which he explained to me the construction of the payar metre of ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... must be pure literature; as much so as the poem. But poetry—now that the day of the broad Homeric epic is past, or temporarily eclipsed—appeals to a taste too exclusive and abstracted for the demands of modern readers. Its most accommodating metre fails to house our endless variety of mood and movement; it exacts from the student an exaltation above the customary level of thought and sentiment greater than he can readily afford. The poet of old used to clothe in the garb of verse ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... retained, depend alike on physiological conditions; and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony, metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle grows as there is more or less ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... he was for, without an instant's hesitation and just like a hunted creature at bay, he turned sharply on his heel and then ran back down the street as hard as he could tear. He passed close to within half a metre of Tournefort, and as he flew past he hit out with his left fist so vigorously that the worthy agent of the Committee of Public Safety, caught on the nose by the blow, staggered and measured his length upon the flagged ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... extant, for example, the German Shakespeare, Homer, Calderon, they may still be called better than indifferent. One great merit Mr. Taylor has: rigorous adherence to his original; he endeavours at least to copy with all possible fidelity the term of praise, the tone, the very metre, whatever stands written ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... hand of the official clock dropped into its slot somebody called the Naval Observatory. The call was so faint as to be barely audible, in spite of the fact that Hood's instrument was tuned for a three-thousand-metre wave. Supposing quite naturally that the person calling had a shorter wave, he gradually cut out the inductance of his receiver; but the sound faded out entirely, and he returned to his original inductance and shunted ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... even in the disasters of war, would be working out advantages which, after the war was done, would give England many friends and fewer enemies, give her treaties and new territory, and set her higher than she was now by a political metre. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... one of the graves in his family burying-ground, situated in the back-yard of the Hudson Street house, from which he was taken before he was nine years of age. The monument stood against the fence, and this is the legend it bore—rhyme, rhythm, metre, ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... succeeded in obtaining a free-and-easy translation of the lyric; but in my anxiety to preserve the metre and something of the spirit of the original, I have made several blunders and many anachronisms. Mr. Free, however, pronounces my version a good one, and the world must take his word till some more worthy translator shall have ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." The invention of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights. The discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. The sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take messages and turn wheels marks another. But, after all, the vital stages of human progress are marked by steps toward ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... our race is presumably tougher than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use, perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the constitutions to ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... cave, took from his pocket a ball of string and a tape-measure, tied the string to the flint corner, fastened a pebble at the nineteenth metre and flung it toward the land side. The pebble at most reached the end ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... 6. The metre reverts here again to the asonante form, which is kept up for the remainder of this act. The vowels here used are e, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... broke in Adams, "or he would have stopped it short metre; but I guess be saw you pitching into the pump which you did uncommonly strong—and of ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. In the abstract, all is simple, and we are not troubled with the twofold love; but when they are applied in education with their accompaniments of song and metre, then the discord begins. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair Urania and the coarse Polyhymnia, who must be indulged sparingly, just as in my own art of medicine care must be taken that the taste of the epicure be gratified ...
— Symposium • Plato
... remote times of history; his amazing inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his impulse towards the infinite and the constant ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Church-Yard," the quatrains are spaced in normal fashion. The injunction shows Gray's sensitiveness as to metrical form. He had called the poem an Elegy only after urging by Mason, and he possibly doubted if his metre was "soft" enough for true elegy. The metre hitherto had not been common in elegies, though James Hammond's "Love Elegies" (1743) had used it and won acclaim. But the heroic (hendecasyllabic) quatrain was regarded in general as ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... same as those followed in the translation of Schiller's complete Poems that was published by me in 1851, namely, as literal a rendering of the original as is consistent with good English, and also a very strict adherence to the metre of the original. Although translators usually allow themselves great license in both these points, it appears to me that by so doing they of necessity destroy the very soul of the work they profess to translate. ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... interesting insight into the author's moods and views. The opinions of literary men of course differ as to the relative excellence of the different poems. "Marmion" certainly had great merit, and added to the fame of the author. There is here more variety of metre than in his other poems, and also some passages of such beauty as to make the poem immortal,—like the death of Marmion, and those familiar lines in reference ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... that I was a good deal disturbed at one time," said Mr. Cabot frankly; "but never mind that now, you are through," and he heaved a sigh of relief, "and nicely established with Van Metre and Cartwright. It's the best law firm in the town, Pickering." Mr. Cabot brought his elbow off from the mantel enough to smite his palms together smartly in enthusiasm. "I got you ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... Drew. I felt ashamed of the lightness of my own thoughts, but I had to tell him of my speculations upon after-the-war developments in aviation: nurses flying Voisins, with the cars filled with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties taking comfortable outings in gigantic biplanes of the R-6 type; mothers, as of old, gazing apprehensively at speed-dials, cautioning fathers about "driving too fast," and ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... metre has been too violently censured. He found the measures reformed in so many passages, by the silent labours of some editors, with the silent acquiescence of the rest, that he thought himself allowed to extend a little further the license, which had already been carried so ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... a history of English poetry, but relinquished the design to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The "Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among Gray's prose remains, are apparently ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life. Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else. The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... onar.] The plot was, as I believe, suggested by the "Twa Briggs" of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of the last century, as that found its prototype in the "Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey" by Fergusson, though the metre of this latter be different by a foot in each verse. I reminded my talented young parishioner and friend that Concord Bridge had long since yielded to the edacious tooth of Time. But he answered me to this effect: that there was no greater mistake ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... And/ Scotch Reviewers./ A Satire./ I had rather be a kitten, and cry, mew!/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers./ Shakspeare./ Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,/ There are as mad, abandon'd Critics too./ Pope./ London:/ Printed for James Cawthorn, British Library,/ No. 24, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... display a rare and versatile gift of parody, great command of metre, and a very pretty ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... The person in the taxi-cab might have been observed searching his pockets curiously, and to be counting what money he found therein as he cast anxious glances toward the dial of the taxi-metre. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... 'So I've had to live alone, with no company but my own voice. Maybe you heard me singing as you came. It wasn't much of a song, I admit, for elegance of rhyme and metre don't seem to come easy, but a song like that is more comfort than you'd believe.' ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... English. The second marks the passages that struck me as flat or mean. The third is a note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book language. The last mark implies bad metre.' ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... a big badger) were numerous. One day we dug a two-metre hole, and next day found eight live ones. They have teeth one and a-half ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... however, that he should remain quiet, he announced to us, that for the rest of his life he meant to dedicate himself to the intense cultivation of the tragic drama. He got to work instantly; and very soon he had composed the first act of his "Sultan Selim;" but, in defiance of the metre, he soon changed the title to "Sultan Amurath," considering that a much fiercer name, more bewhiskered and beturbaned. It was no part of his intention that we should sit lolling on chairs like ladies and gentleman that had paid ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... unfortunate than the correction of "princely;" Mr. Collier, on the other hand, follows Steevens and Malone, and reads "princely," observing the Tieck's reading ("precise") "sounds ill as regards the metre, the accent falling on the wrong syllable. Mr. Collier's choice is determined by the authority of the second folio, which he considers ought to have considerable weight, whilst Mr. Knight regards the authority of that edition as very trifling; and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... organism, each a member of one created unity, the whole a tree of healing and of comfort to the nations, a growth from small beginnings to mighty ends." And again: "As the growth is more and more closely watched and discerned, we shall more and more clearly see that his metre, his words, his grammar and syntax, move but with the deeper changes of mind and soul of which they are outward signs, and that all the faculties of the man went onward together. . . . This subject of the growth, the oneness of Shakespeare . . . is the special business of the present, the second ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the charms of poetic harmony. He had not even sufficient ear to feel the rhythm, of poetry, and he never could recite a verse without violating the metre; yet the grand ideas of poetry charmed him. He absolutely worshipped Corneille; and, one day, after having witnessed a performance of 'Cinna', he said to me, "If a man like Corneille were living in my time I would make him my Prime Minister. It is not his ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... eight 30-metre contour lines in one centimetre works out roughly at 27 deg., which is a steeper slope than most people care to take straight, running over unknown country. Anything steeper than this is apt to ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... with me a month, for the manse after her decease was very dull, and it was during this visit that he gave me an inkling of his wish to go out to India as a cadet, but the transactions anent that fall within the scope of another year—as well as what relates to her headstone, and the epitaph in metre, which I indicated myself thereon; John Truel the mason carving the same, as may be seen in the kirkyard, where it wants a little reparation and setting upright, having settled the wrong way when the second Mrs Balwhidder ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... seeing himself in print, and so chose rather to imitate the imitable, and to follow Prout, this time with careful outlines on the spot, than to idealize his notes in mimic Turnerism. He kept a prose journal, chiefly of geology and scenery, as well as a versified description, written in a metre imitated from "Don Juan," but more elaborate, and somewhat of a tour de force in rhyming. But that poetical journal was dropped after he had carried it through France, across the Jura, and to Chamouni. The drawing crowded it out, and for the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... though not seldom successful in restoring the text, Mr. Rossetti pushed revision beyond the bounds of prudence, freely correcting grammatical errors, rectifying small inconsistencies in the sense, and too lightly adopting conjectural emendations on the grounds of rhyme or metre. In the course of an article published in the "Westminster Review" for July, 1870, Miss Mathilde Blind, with the aid of material furnished by Dr. Garnett, 'was enabled,' in the words of Mr. Buxton Forman, 'to supply omissions, make authoritative ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of literature and of inference from the two great epics which have come down to us. So reconstructed, the earliest period appears to us as a time of slow development in which the characteristic epic metre, diction, and structure grew up slowly from crude elements and were improved until the verge ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... a poem to {391} Miss Cuzzona. They are however in fact selected from two poems addressed to daughters of Lord Carteret, and are put together arbitrarily, out of the order in which they stand in the original poems. There is a short poem by Philips in the same metre, addressed to Signora Cuzzoni, and dated May 25, 1724, beginning, "Little syren of the stage;" but none of the verses quoted in the Treatise on the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... and add all the authority which I can give to yourself, or to the Consul of France at New York, to do with those effects whatever I might do. Certainly it would be a great gratification to me to receive the Metre and Grave committed to Mr. Dombey for me, and that you would be so good as to be the channel of my acknowledgments to Bishop Gregoire, or any one else to whom ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... took place on the point south-east of the north-west rock; when she cleared this rock, which is at this spot thirteen feet below the surface, leaving a large white furrow, she ran a hundred and sixty feet further, and struck on the south-east rock, which is only about four feet (one metre twenty centimetres) below the surface. She again marked the rock very distinctly. The sea, which is often very rough on this spot, has left nothing remaining but the massive part of the engine, where it can be perceived between the two ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... ancient "Sapientem pascere Barbam," there would in fact have been no end of it. With this turn, however, his time was not quite thrown away, nor his gravity. In conjunction with Dampier, Langley, and Serjeant, who were styled the learned Cons, he composed a very long English poem, in the same metre as the Bath Guide, and of which it was then held a favour to get a copy. He had so much of advanced life about him, that the masters always looked upon him as a man; and this serious manner followed ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... grog-drinking, cock-fighting, cudgel-playing Professor of Moral Philosophy would be too degrading. I could have demolished every paragraph of the defence. Croker defended his thuetoi philoi by quoting a passage of Euripides which, as every scholar knows, is corrupt; which is nonsense and false metre if read as he reads it; and which Markland and Matthiae have set right by a most obvious correction. But, as nobody seems to have read his vindication, we can gain nothing by refuting it. ["Mr. Croker has favoured us with some Greek of his own. 'At the altar,' say Dr. Johnson. 'I recommended my ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... other articles on ballooning from the French. It is also interesting that she retained in her translation the original units which Verne used (metre, feet, leagues), a practice forgotten until recently. This may be the first appearance of a work by Jules Verne in the ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... "SEVERELY great," not being understood by the blockhead, was printed serenely great. Swift's own edition of "The City Shower," has "old ACHES throb." Aches is two syllables, but modern printers, who had lost the right pronunciation, have aches as one syllable; and then, to complete the metre, have foisted in "aches will throb." Thus what the poet and the linguist wish to preserve is altered, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... I have been more successful with the metre than usual," she added, "having been guided by a little poem, a favourite of mine, which, as it also inculcates kindness to the brute creation, you will do well, Harry, to commit to ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... omitted, as has been seen, sundry stanzas, and I have changed the order of others. The text has nowhere been translated verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn has been given to many sentiments which were judged too Oriental. As the metre adopted by Haji Abdu was the Bahr Tawil (long verse), I thought it advisable to preserve that peculiarity, and to fringe it with the rough, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... make a very neat quarto, to which the title "Miscellaneous Poems" might be given. I was pleased with this, as it gave me an opportunity of quietly imitating well-known and celebrated authors. I had composed a good number of so- called Anacreontic poems, which, on account of the convenience of the metre, and the lightness of the subject, flowed forth readily enough. But these I could not well take, as they were not in rhyme; and my desire before all things was to show my father something that would please him. So much the more, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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 his original, but he must not copy ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... type of parallelism in Biblical literature may be called 'Antique Rhythm.' It is the metre of most of the traditional poetry preserved in the historic books of Scripture. Its unit consists in a couplet, of which either member may be strengthened by a parallel ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... is the poetry of naked thought. They have neither rhyme nor metre to adorn it," says Schoolcraft (Oneota, 14). The preceding poem has both; what guarantee is there that the translator has not embellished the substance of it as he did its form? Yet, granting he did not embroider the substance, we know that weeping and longing ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... isn't true, I tell you that there is at least a cubic metre in it. It is the method that ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... of brains than most players care for. The ordinary rhyming game, without using paper, is for one player to make a remark in an easy metre, and for the next to add a line completing the couplet. Thus in one game that ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... once rise to the greatest works. Already there existed in Leipzig a sort of literary centre, where Gottsched was regarded as a dictator in matters of taste. This literary autocrat praised Bodmer's translation of 'Paradise Lost' more than the original poem, in which he condemned the rhymeless metre. A sharp controversy soon divided the literary world into two hostile parties, known in German literature as the "conflict between Leipzig and Zuerich." Gottsched followed Voltaire in considering the English style rude and barbarous; whereas Bodmer, with keener artistic perception and deeper ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... large assortment of verses, Sexton's Daughter, Hymns of a Hermit, and I know not what other extensive stock of pieces; concerning which he was now somewhat at a loss as to his true course. He could write verses with astonishing facility, in any given form of metre; and to various readers they seemed excellent, and high judges had freely called them so, but he himself had grave misgivings on that latter essential point. In fact here once more was a parting of the ways, "Write in Poetry; write in Prose?" upon which, before all else, it much concerned ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... with the poems of Theocritus, but almost certainly is by another hand. I have therefore ventured to imitate the metre ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... had, whose name was RALPH, That in th' adventure went his half: Though writers, for more stately tone, Do call him RALPHO; 'tis all one; 460 And when we can with metre safe, We'll call him so; if not, plain RALPH: (For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which like ships they steer their courses.) An equal stock of wit and valour 465 He had laid in; by birth a taylor. The mighty Tyrian Queen, that gain'd With subtle ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... its subject as well as by the wish of friends. A few extracts appeared in a magazine several years ago, and it was afterwards completed without any view to publication. It follows the present Irish text[8] as closely as the laws of metre will allow. Since these pages were in the printer's hands Mr. Aubrey de Vere has given to the world his treatment of the same theme,[9] adorning as usual all that he touches. As he well says: "It is not in the form of translation that an ancient ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... comparing the passage from the manuscript given in the appendix with the corresponding place in the text. Milton's own spelling revels in redundant e's, while the printer of the 1645 book is very sparing of them. But in cases where the spelling affects the metre, we find that the printed text and Milton's manuscript closely correspond; and it is upon its value in determining the metre, quite as much as its antiquarian interest, that I should base a justification of this reprint. Take, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... yttself moste bee ytts owne defense; Som metre maie notte please a womannes ear. 50 Canynge lookes notte for poesie, botte sense; And dygne, & wordie thoughtes, ys all hys care. Canynge, adieu! I do you greete from hence; Full soone I hope to taste of your good cheere; Goode Byshoppe Carpynter dyd byd mee saie, 55 Hee wysche you healthe ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... peaceful spectator of others?[105] The Bacchic and Corybantic dances one can also modulate and quell, by changing the metre from the trochaic and the measure from the Phrygian. Similarly, too, the Pythian priestess, when she descends from her tripod, possesses her soul in peace. Whereas the love-fury, when once it has really seized on a man and inflamed him, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... was [Greek: elpidos leptes], which Euripides has changed to [Greek: asthenous rhomes], though the other had equally suited the metre. But Euripides is fond of slight alterations in ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... Greek Prose, The source of my woes! (This metre's too tough, I must draw to a close.) May Sargent be drowned In the ocean profound, And Sidgwick be food ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... is fish or flesh, and especially if he be a courtier as well, as I was, and had to change his taste with every mouth. But tell me, are there many of these folk now on earth?" "Yes, plenty," answered I, "if a man can patch together any sort of metre, straightway he becomes a chaired bard. And of the others, there is such a plague of barristers, petty lawyers, and clerks that the locusts of Egypt preyed less heavily on the country than they. In your time, sir, there were only roadside bargains and a hands-breadth of ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... Hebrew MSS. from which they translated, or added of themselves; the rest is made up of what are probably original phrases but omitted from the Hebrew by the carelessness of copyists; yet none of these differences is of importance save where the Greek corrects an irregularity in the Hebrew metre, or yields sense when the Hebrew fails ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... were too much for them; they seemed to enter heartily into the other portions of the service—but the psalms in metre are a great Shibboleth. My beadle, who always sat where he could command the congregation, has often assured me that when a psalm was announced he could soon tell the sheep from ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the 'Faery Queene' is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in doubling ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... of its position, consists the chief art of appropriate harmony. Accentuation of syllables, which seems, to answer the idea of long and short syllables in the dead languages, is the foundation of English, metre.—Tripple rhymes used with judgment have been admitted by the best English poets, and now and then the introduction of an Alexandrine, or verse of ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... battlefield. As the Japanese said, it was this "flying telephone" that enabled Oyama to manipulate his forces as handily as though he were playing a game of chess. It was in this war, too, that the Mikado's soldiers strung the costliest of all telephone lines, at 203 Metre Hill. When the wire had been basted up this hill to the summit, the fortress of Port Arthur lay at their mercy. But the climb had ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... various forms to the solution of fundamental problems. To mention only a few of those that have helped to establish Michelson's fame, we may recall that our exact knowledge of the length of the international metre at Sevres, the world's standard of measurement, was obtained by him with an interferometer in terms of the invariable length of light-waves. A different form of interferometer has more recently enabled him to measure the minute tides within the solid ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... of condensation. It was, as it were, a hand in embryo. It had apparently become detached, or had detached itself, from the medium, and remained sufficiently solid to leave an impression of itself upon the plate, held about half a metre from it. It was, in fact, a form of materialization, but of so shadowy a texture that it remained often quite invisible ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... and fixing jealously on all that fed his fancy. Such books as Grimm's Fairy Tales and Masterman Ready were wells of delight, enacted as they were in a strange and exciting world; and he was sensitive, too, to the beauty of metre and sonorous phrases, learning poetry so easily that it was supposed to be a species of wilfulness in him that the Collects and texts, and the very Psalms—that seemed to him so unreal and husk-like then, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Syrian vulgar term for Mawliyah or Mawliyah, a short poem on subjects either classical or vulgar. It generally consists of five lines all rhyming except the penultimate. The metre is a species of the Basit which, however, admits of considerable poetical license; this being according to Lane ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... Eve the real Scott first shows, and the better of the two is the second. It is not merely that, though Scott had a great liking for and much proficiency in 'eights,' that metre is never so effective for ballad purposes as eights and sixes; nor that, as Lockhart admits, Glenfinlas exhibits a Germanisation which is at the same time an adulteration; nor even that, well as Scott knew the Perthshire Highlands, they could not appeal to him ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the other hand, we have still the six books on music, likewise begun at Milan, which he finished, almost as an amusement, at Thagaste. They are dialogues between himself and his pupil, the poet Licentius, upon metre and scansion. But we know from himself that he intended to make this book longer, and to write a second part upon melody, that is to say, music, properly so called. He never found the time: "Once," he says, "the burthen of ecclesiastical affairs was placed on my shoulders, all ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... joys and sorrows, its struggles and victories in the land of promise. The women listen, nodding and swaying their bodies sympathetically. He works himself into a frenzy, in which the fiddlers vainly try to keep up with him. He turns and digs the laggard angrily in the side without losing the metre. The climax comes. The bride bursts into hysterical sobs, while the women wipe their eyes. A plate, heretofore concealed under his coat, is whisked out. He has conquered; the inevitable collection is ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding pas de quatre. He ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Bojardo shows tact and delicacy perhaps without a parallel in literature. No chance of improvement is missed, while nothing of value is dropped or thrown away. {125} There is just now and then a momentary return perceptible to the skipping metre and fantastic manner of the first period, which may have been unconsciously suggested by the nature of the task in hand—a task of itself implying or suggesting some new study of old models; but the main style of the play ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... my measure, and so end my lay, Too long already. I can't manage well The metre of that master of the lyre, Who Hiawatha, and our forest tribes Deftly described. Hexameters, I hate, And henceforth do eschew their company, For what is written irksomely, will be Read in like manner. What did I say last In my late canto? Something, I believe Of ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... inspiration. Surrendering himself to the full possession of the spirit which shall speak through him, he receives, also, a portion of the same creative power. Mr. Lewes reaches this conclusion: "If, therefore, we reflect what a poem Faust is, and that it contains almost every variety of style and metre, it will be tolerably evident that no one unacquainted with the original can form an adequate idea of it from translation,"[E] which is certainly correct of any translation wherein something of the ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... experience of the whole world has established the superior convenience of a smaller unit, such as the braccio, the cubit, the foot, and the palm or span, and in practical life every man finds that he haa much more frequent occasion to use a fraction than a multiple of the metre. Of course, he must constantly employ numbers expressive of several centimetres or millimetres instend of the name of a single smaller unit than the metre. Besides, the metre is not divisible into ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... whole passage in the "Poetics" runs: "It is not by writing in verse or prose that the Historian and Poet are distinguished. The work of Herodotus might be versified; but it would still be a species of History, no less with metre than without. They are distinguished by this, that the one relates what has been, the other what might be. On this account Poetry is more philosophical, and a more excellent thing than History, for Poetry is chiefly conversant ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... character; but the Cufic letters, the groundwork of the present alphabet, were invented on the banks of the Euphrates; and the recent invention was taught at Mecca by a stranger who settled in that city after the birth of Mahomet. The arts of grammar, of metre, and of rhetoric, were unknown to the freeborn eloquence of the Arabians; but their penetration was sharp, their fancy luxuriant, their wit strong and sententious, [40] and their more elaborate compositions were addressed with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... jarring chord in his little orchestra of lyric and ornithologic song. He might have kept it by him till the longer growing of his critical beard, and then, if still a devotee at that singular shrine, have expanded it into a volume or two explanatory of the imagination, animus and metre of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... part which dealt with the meaning and the part which dealt with the sound, or as Chrysippus phrased it, concerning significants and significates. Under the former came the treatment of the alphabet, of the parts of speech, of solecism, of barbarism, of poems, of amphibolies, of metre and music—a list which seems at first sight a little mixed, but in which we can recognise the general features of grammar, with its departments of phonology, accidence, and prosody. The treatment of solecism and barbarism in grammar corresponded to that ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... There were no significant italics in this text. Lines longer than 75 characters have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two spaces. This etext was transcribed ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... easy as you suppose, miss. To begin with, the original is in verse; a late Latin poem in a queer metre, and by whom written nobody knows. But you are quite right about my wasting my time. . . . What troubles me is that I have been wasting yours, when you ought to have been out at play ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fly. They three will escape and live together, far away from men, in an Aegean island. The description of this visionary isle, and of the life to be led there by the fugitives from a dull and undiscerning world, is the most beautiful that has been written this century in the rhymed heroic metre. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... grateful to God for having permitted me to retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy." The "Ballad of Cassandra Southwick" she esteemed as one of the finest things of our time; and of "Astrea" she said,—"Nobody in England can write the glorious resonant metre of Dryden like that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... "all," the organist promptly strikes the chords of "Old Hundred," and, to its accompaniment, the Master calling up the Lodge, all unite in singing the long-metre doxology.) ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... your Christian Poet, a poem by Sir H. Wotton—'How happy is he born or taught, that serveth not another's will'? It is very beautiful, and fit for a Paradise of any kind. Here are some lines from old Lily, which your ear will put in the proper metre. It gives a fine description of a fellow walking in Spring, and looking here and there, and pricking up his ears, as different birds sing. 'What bird so sings, but doth so wail? Oh! 'tis the ravished nightingale: "Jug, jug, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... had a smooth floor of inlaid silver and silken hangings, the windows looking forth on the gardens of the palace and its fountains and cool recesses of shade and temperate sweetness. While they sat there conversing in this metre and that, measuring quotations, lo! the old woman, the affianced of Shibli Bagarag—and she sumptuously arrayed, in perfect queenliness, her head bound in a circlet of gems and gold, her figure lustrous with a full robe of flowing crimson silk; and she wore ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... l'Histoire des Arabes by Caussin de Perceval, iii. 481-485, and Weil, Gesch. der Chal. i. pp. 65 et seq.) to watch the movements of his troops. This step was regarded as a proof of cowardice, and a Mussulman in the army composed the following verses against him (thawil metre):— ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... Notwithstanding the Shower, he continued in the Garden, and never quitted it, till he had found one Moiety of the Tablet, which was unfortunately broke in such a Manner, that even the half Lines were good sense, and good Metre, tho' very short. But what was still more remarkably unfortunate, they appear'd at first View, to be a severe satyr upon the ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... in order to remind us, in all we do, of the great laws of Divine government and human polity, that composition in the arts should strongly affect every order of mind, however unlearned or thoughtless. Hence the popular delight in rhythm and metre, and in simple musical melodies. But it is also appointed that power of composition in the fine arts should be an exclusive attribute of great intellect All men can more or less copy what they ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... is the principal unit of both fluid and dry measures, is the contents of 1 cubic decimetre (decimetre 1/10 metre).) ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... Scyles, the Hellenising king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek religion and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and partly relish that extravagance. Subject and audience alike stimulate the romantic temper, and the tragedy of the Bacchanals, with its innovations in metre and diction, expressly noted as foreign or barbarous—all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing of the chorus, notwithstanding—with its subtleties and sophistications, its grotesques, mingled with and heightening a real shudder at the horror of the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... reasonably hope, small need of the law any how, and we may be pretty sure that the verses which have touched the great popular heart are made in a spirit which is better than any law, even the law of metre. On reading attentively the poem in question we find a touching theme handled with simplicity, and in a certain sense earning its popular place, though no poem could possibly be so good as the simple fact—an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Lagrange and Laplace, born at Toulouse; obtained the professorship of Mathematics in the Military School at Paris, and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1783; he was one of the commissioners to determine the length of the metre, and held many posts under the Republic and the Empire; among many works his best known is the "Elements of Geometry" (1794), translated ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... materials. Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than Shakspeare. He would as soon hear "a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry wheel grate on the axletree." He was as much of a man—not a twentieth part as much of a poet as Shakspeare. With but little ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... I will finish my hymn of 'Church of the Quick and Dead,' and get thee to write a processional tune. The metre is (last verse)— ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... gauge, rule; dimensions, capacity, size, extent, degree, limit; quantity, amount; proportion, allotment, share; metre; act, step, means. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... obligations to Professor R. M. Alden, whose Introduction to Poetry and English Verse I have used in my own Harvard courses in poetry. His views of metre have probably influenced mine even more than I am aware. The last decade, which has witnessed such an extraordinary revival of interest in poetry, has produced many valuable contributions to poetic theory. I have found Professor Fairchild's Making of Poetry particularly suggestive. Attention ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... in the chancel, others in the body of the church; some in a seat made in the church; some in a pulpit, with their faces to the people; some keeping precisely to the order of the book; some intermix psalms in metre; some say with a surplice, and others without one. The table stands in the body of the church in some places, in others it stands in the chancel; in some places the table stands altarwise, distant from the wall a yard, in others in the middle of the chancel, north and south. Some administer ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... simply very pious and unexceptionable doggerel and no one would admit such fact more quickly than Mistress Anne herself, who laid it away in after days in her drawer, with a smile at the metre and a sigh for the miserable time it chronicled. There were many of them, for among the same papers is ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... ballads, and Lockhart's translations from the Spanish, are mostly composed in one metre, though written down in either of two ways. Macaulay's Roman Lays and "Ivry" are in this metre. Take an example ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Any innovation on the stereotyped methods appealed to him with the grace and relish of a new metre to a neophytic rhymester. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... for the old days of the Firm, when, like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be sweet, But Hymen's tenderness is sweeter; And though all virile love be meet, You'll find the poet's love is metre. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... speech, beginning "Should we be silent and not speak," is nearly word for word from Plutarch, with some additional graces of expression, and the charm of metre superadded. I shall give the last lines of this address, as illustrating that noble and irresistible eloquence which was the crowning ornament of the character. One exquisite touch of nature, which is distinguished by italics, was beyond ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... took more time than Tom's; as much indeed as his sister's, after they parted. But they were conducted by means of that marvel of marvels, the telegraph,—the chief of whose marvels is that it compels even a long- winded generation like ours to speak in very short metre. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... task, I will proceed to say a few words on some of the special questions which a translator of the Satires and Epistles has to encounter, and the way in which, as it appears to me, he may best deal with them. These questions, I need hardly say, mainly resolve themselves into the metre and the style. With regard to the metre, I have myself but little doubt that the measure in which Horace may best be represented is the heroic as I suppose we must call it, of ten syllables. The one competing ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... that she had "such a gracious coldness" that her lovers "could not press their futures on the present of her courtesy." Is that human speech? One other objection and our carpings shall be dumb. Miss Barrett, in our opinion, has selected a very bad, dislocated, and unmelodious metre for the story of Lady Geraldine's courtship. The poem reads very awkwardly in consequence of the rhymes falling together in the alternate lines and not in couplets. Will Miss Barrett have the goodness to favour the public with the sequel of this poem? We should like to know how ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... of the five-foot blank-verse line in the work of, say, Shakespeare and Milton, is so great that we can safely say that their rank as poets would not be lower than it is if they had written nothing else. Clearly their constancy to this metre was not the result of any technical deficiency. Even if Milton had not written the choruses of Samson Agonistes and Shakespeare his songs, nobody would be so absurd as to suggest that they adopted this five-foot line and spent their mighty artistry in sending supple and ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater |
