"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... myself somewhat on my knowledge of human nature, which, in regard to children, conformed to comparatively simple laws. I knew that the change would involve plenty of hard work, self-denial and careful managing, which nothing could redeem from prose; but I aimed to add to our exodus, so far as possible, the elements of adventure and mystery so dear to the hearts of children. The question where we should go was the cause of much discussion, the studying of maps, and the learning of not a ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... erudition, and accomplishments Burke had no rival among Parliamentary speakers. His prose is, as we read it now, the most fascinating, the most musical, in the English language. It bears on every page the divine lineaments of genius. Yet an orator requires something more than mere force of words. He must feel, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... types, for their appeal to the plain people—pioneer types who really entertained monarchistic principles. There was already much talk that Texas was being drawn toward the United States by the slavocracy. Well, what of it? The main thing was to get Texas. What is this sanctimonious talk in prose and verse in England about Texas? Douglas was very contemptuous ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... newspaper up to him in bed; he gives him the crusts of his toast to eat; he sends him on little errands about the house; he tells him to come to me for sixpences. In short," said Caddy cheerily, "and not to prose, I am a very fortunate girl and ought to be very grateful. Where ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... spontaneously go out. Memorable is the visit paid by Buonarroti, with an unwonted regard for ceremonious courtesy, to Titian in his apartments at the Belvedere, as it is recalled by Vasari with that naive touch, that power of suggestion, which gives such delightful colour to his unstudied prose. No Imaginary Conversation among those that Walter Savage Landor has devised equals in significance this meeting of the two greatest masters then living, simply as it is sketched in by the Aretine biographer. The noble Venetian representing the alternating radiance and gloom of earth, its fairest ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... the Sage. "The prose of the Restaurateur—which by the way sounds as if I were alluding to the literature of the Restauration,—hath insensibly superseded the poesy of the peerless Portuguese. Well, Gentlemen, in vain may 'sterner ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... are tomes which not even a Bacon could master in one lifetime. Moreover, he should buy back his cane fields. That would keep him much out of doors, as overseers are of little more worth than negroes." Then Lord Hunsdon had an inspiration. "Encourage him to write prose. There need be no fury of creation in that. The greater part of his mind is capable of accomplishing anything unassisted. Interest him in politics. He is a Tory and he loves me. Remind him constantly of the Whig inferno from which we have just emerged. I am sure he would write ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... has been brought into conformity with our practice. Many liberties have been taken with the text itself, especially in the latter part, in the way of making it approximate more closely to our rather strict notions of the standards of model prose. A few words and uses of words not found in the prose writers of the republic have been retained, but nothing, it is hoped, that will seriously mislead the young student. I shall welcome any criticism that may lead to further changes in the text in ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... shall still be a seat of world Empire, one of several seats, if you will—where the ruling council of the world assembles. Then the arts will cluster round this city, as gold gathers about wisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and beautiful rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate, austere and courageous imagination of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Shelley, "will publish ours together." He then began his tale of the Vampire; and, having the whole arranged in his head, repeated to them a sketch of the story[120] one evening,—but, from the narrative being in prose, made but little progress in filling up his outline. The most memorable result, indeed, of their story-telling compact, was Mrs. Shelley's wild and powerful romance of Frankenstein,—one of those original conceptions that take hold of the public mind at ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, why may not any one acquiesce in the privation of his sight, when God has so amply furnished his mind and his conscience with eyes?—Milton's Prose Works. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... of being abused. Alcohol not one of these; alcohol always pernicious. Fiction, on the other hand, a good thing. Antiquity of fiction. In early days couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French novels usually immoral, and why. Remarks on Popery. To be avoided. ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... prose writer of this or any other age is M. Tullius Cicero; and as his life is copiously related in biographical works, it will be sufficient to mention his writings. From his earliest years, he applied himself with unremitting assiduity to the cultivation of literature, and, whilst he was yet a boy, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... believed what he wrote, and though his dramas and poems do not rise above fair mediocrity, and the great number of his prose stories are injured by a certain monotony, the charm of them is in their elevation of sentiment and the earnest faith pervading all. His knights might ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... been a great deal of poetry and very little plain prose written about the valley of Mexico. At an early morning hour I stood upon the heights of Rio Frio; at another morning, as already said, at the Cross of the Marquis; again, upon the highest peak of the Tepeyaca, behind Guadalupe, I saw a tropical morning sun disengage ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... politics; practical aim of Milton's prose writings; the reforms advocated by him, with one exception, unachieved; critical mourners over Milton's political writings; the mourners comforted; Milton's classification of his prose tracts; the occasional nature of these tracts; allusions in the early prose works to the story of Samson, and ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... without experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him! In due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me more satisfaction than a whole volume of prose on such subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas. There were a couple of hundred volumes on the shelves—theology, history, biography, philosophy, science, travels, essays, and some old forgotten fiction; but no ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... that you do not understand Italian; but I can tell you, that, like the 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme', who spoke prose without knowing it, you understand a great deal, though you do not know that you do; for whoever understands French and Latin so well as you do, understands at least half the Italian language, and has very little occasion for a dictionary. And for the idioms, the phrases, and the delicacies ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... our question is two thousand years old. [Cheers.] In the truest sense, it did not begin in 1848, as my friend Dr. Hunt stated; it began centuries ago. Did you ever hear of the old man who went to the doctor, and asked him to teach him to speak prose? "Why, my dear fellow," was the reply, "you have been speaking prose all your life." But he did not know it. So with some people in regard to the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of any pretensions must acquire the art of speaking effectively and of "thinking on his feet." The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and of history were accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered about the technique of declamatory prose. Not that the rhetorical study was itself made absolutely practical. The teachers unfortunately would spin the technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over several years. But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... to the young Primroses in "The Vicar of Wakefield,'" and has been elaborately studied by the late H. C. Coote, in Folk-Lore Record, iii. 1-25. It is only now extant in ballad form, of which "Cap o' Rushes" may be regarded as a prose version. ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... very voluminous author in verse and prose, original and translated, and is certainly to be reckoned among the predecessors of Shakespeare in dramatic composition. His earliest work, as far as can be now ascertained, was "The Mirror of Mutability," 1579, when he was in his 26th year: he dedicates it to the Earl of Oxford, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... formerly undertaken by Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland, in adapting to our language the songs of Heine, is now well supplemented with some versions from among his prose works by another Philadelphian translator, Mr. Simon Adler Stern. Heine's prose, delicate in its pellucid brightness as any of his poetry, cannot be held too precious by the interpreter. The latter must have all his wits ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Poems, finished May 30th, 1830. Contents:—1. The Churchyard; 2. Description of the Duke of Wellington's Palace on the Pleasant Banks of the Lusiva; this article is a small prose tale or incident; 3. Pleasure; 4. Lines written on the Summit of a high Mountain of the North of England; 5. Winter; 6. Two Fragments, namely, 1st, The Vision; 2nd, A Short untitled Poem; the Evening Walk, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... gondoliers. But Milly, let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't yet had occasion—circulating with a clearness ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... educational agents. Music will prove a ladder to the loftier regions of thought; indeed I have long found for myself that I cannot attain to the highest range of my intellectual power except when hearing good music. All poets, and most writers of prose, will say that their thought is never so exalted, their sense of beauty and proportion never so just, as when they are listening either to the artificial music made by man, or to some of the grander tones of nature, such as the roar of a western ocean, or the ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... frame of the open kitchen door, her delicate face quivering with emotion and longing, her attitude simplicity and unconsciousness itself. The baldest of Shaker prose turned to purest poetry when Susanna dipped it in the alembic of ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... what she meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to her young imagination. She was passing through an exquisite phase ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... They consulted the same oracle; they celebrated the same national festival: mingled their deliberations in the same amphictyonic and subordinate assemblies, and sat together upon the free benches to hear their glorious history read aloud, in the prose of Heroditus, the poetry of Homer and of Pindar. We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution. We can meet together to celebrate no national festival. But the thousand tongues of the press—clearer far than the silver trumpet of the jubilee,—louder ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... these lines is difficult to understand. The prose order of the line is 'yogatah yuktesu (madhye) yasya yatha, etc., vikrama (tatha vakshyami); atmani pasyatah (janasya) yuktasya yogasya (yatha) siddhi (tatha vakshyami).' Yogatah means upayatah, i.e., according to rules and ordinances. Vikrama ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... influenced, was accustomed to say that for at least a generation almost the whole of the best intellect of Oxford was controlled by it. It possessed in Newman a writer of most striking and undoubted genius. In an age remarkable for brilliancy of style he was one of the greatest masters of English prose. His power of drawing subtle distinctions and pursuing long trains of subtle reasoning made him one of the most skilful of controversialists, and he had a great insight into spiritual cravings and an admirable gift of interpreting and appealing ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... I will work in prose and rhyme, And praise thee more in both Than bard has honored beech or lime, Or that Thessalian growth In which the swarthy ring-dove sat And mystic ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... tried my hand at turning into literal Italian prose (only marking the lines) a lyric on Rome sent lately to America; and I may show it to you one ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile herself with facts—she could only recall a moment, as of waking from a dream, which now seemed to her ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and had the ear of Ministers; ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... obstinate and pedantic old Puritan wrote, we might have suppressed him. Still, there is no knowing what women and children will not read. While MILTON'S lines certainly measure generally about the same length, it is preposterous to call by the name of poetry what could be written in prose with so little modification. It is true that the same objection might be applied to HOMER and SHAKSPEARE. The former has the advantage of being written in Greek, so that very few people can read it. SHAKSPEARE has a popularity ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... permanent reputation are few. If we survey American literature from the time of Cotton Mather (who may perhaps be called the first author of the country whose works are still remembered and read) to the present, we find that a majority of the best authors, both in prose and verse, ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... the poet gets his chance, When even wingless Pegasi will prance; Yet We, whose pinions oft outsoared the crow's, Have hitherto confined Ourself to prose. But who shall doubt that We could sing as well as That Warrior-bard TYRTAEUS, late of Hellas, Who woke the Spartans up with words and chorus Twenty-six centuries B.U. (Before Us)? Also, since Truth is near allied to Beauty, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... speaker and councillor, and had become editor of the Nova Scotian, and the Morning Chronicle, of which Mr. Annand was the proprietor. In these influential organs of the Liberal party—papers still in existence—Mr. Howe attacked Lord Falkland, both in bitter prose and sarcastic verse. All this while the governor and his council contrived to control the assembly, sometimes by two or three votes, sometimes by a prorogation when it was necessary to dispose ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric, sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... French and English writers, but while his verdicts have been shaken, they have not been reversed. The world still fails to doubt their substantial reality. Tacitus, adds Cruttwell, has probably exercised upon readers a greater power than any other writer of prose whom ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... have been somewhat small. Why the Upper Fifth were so favoured in preference to the Sixth or Remove is doubtful. Possibly it was felt that, what with the Jones History, the Smith Latin Verse, the Robinson Latin Prose, and the De Vere Crespigny Greek Verse, and other trophies open only to members of the Remove and Sixth, those two forms had enough to keep them occupied as it was. At any rate, to the Upper Fifth the prize was given, and every year, three weeks after the commencement of the ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... civilised peoples and wanting in the others respectively? This is an exercise worth attempting. If poetry is to be defined, survey some typical examples of what good critics recognise as poetry, and compare them with examples of bad 'poetry,' literary prose, oratory, and science. Having determined the characteristics of each kind, arrange them opposite one another in parallel columns. Whoever tries to define by this method a few important, frequently occurring words, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... just that smack of romance about it that tickled this man of prose. Could he have run the risk himself, he who could hardly swim to the bottom, he would have ventured it with laughing heart. Was he justified ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... preface) has most learnedly discussed the etymology, origin, resemblance, and disagreement of the Greek satyrs, a dramatic piece, which was acted after the tragedy; and the Latin satires, (from Satura,) a miscellaneous composition, either in prose or verse. But the Caesars of Julian are of such an original cast, that the critic is perplexed to which class he should ascribe them. * Note: See also Casaubon de Satira, with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... spirit of his fine originals, that I find he at several times printed some critical treatise to back his last, or usher in his new version; giving the world reasons why the versions which had been given of that particular author, "soit en prose, soit en vers, ont ete si pen approuvees jusqu'ici." Among these numerous translations he was the first who ventured on the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, which still bears an excessive price. He entitles his work, "Les quinze Livres ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... deplorable deficiency of his education struck him. What preparation had he for his life's vocation? Of mathematics he knew absolutely nothing! The priceless years had been squandered on mere Latin, English prose, French verbs and ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... held the Fort. The aim had not been to foster theatrical tastes, nor to produce startling dramatic effects, but to render in a natural and easy manner, historic, patriotic and practical selections, both of poetry and prose. Music, vocal and instrumental, lent its charm to the ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various
... can expect with our present limited data and powers to solve the dense mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... requires the tact of knowing when and where to stop, to attain the universal praise which ought to follow it. I look upon the alteration of "It's hame and it's hame," and "A wet sheet and a flowing sea," as among the best songs going. His prose has often admirable passages; but he is obscure, and overlays his meaning, which will not do now-a-days, when he who ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... to Chatterton's memory to say his poverty never made him claim kindred with the richest, or more enriching branches, yet that his ingenuity in counterfeiting styles, and I believe hands, might easily have led him to those more facile imitations of prose—promissory notes." The literal meaning of this paragraph stamps the littleness of the man's mind. A slight—a very slight effort on his part might have turned the current of the boy's thoughts, and saved him from misery and death. We do not call ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... misses his lost sheep, and the woman her lost coin, and the father his lost son, so, Christ says, we are all missed by God until, with our heart's love, we satisfy the hunger of His. The genius of a prose poet shall tell us the rest. We have all read of Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how she went into the far country, and what brought her home again. "It iss weary to be in London"—this was Flora's story as she told ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... others with his own feelings; a Macaulay or a Froude will give what color he please to the story of a nation and compel all but the most wary readers to see as through his eyes. We are too much accustomed to reserve the title of literary artist for the creator of fiction, whether in prose or in verse. Mr. Wilson is no less truly an artist because the vision that fires his imagination, the vision he has spent his life in making clear to himself and others and is now striving to realize in action, is a political conception. He has seen it in terms of life, as a thing ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... interesting. It is not, however, under the figure of the etcher's art or of the process of the mint that we can fully represent Bergson's resources of style. These suggest staccato effects, hard outlines, and that does not at all represent the prose of this writer. It is a fine, delicately interwoven, tissue-like fabric, pliant and supple. If one were in the secret of M. Bergson's private thoughts, it might be discovered that he does not admire his style so much as others ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... strength and originality, where mine made some contemptible composition in pence. That is why I have been a failure at fiction—oh, yes, I have! That is why Pharazyn would have succeeded, if only he had stuck to plain ordinary narrative prose. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... twenty-seventh cabbage as he had been when administering the hundred and sixtieth potato. At any rate, the fact remains that, as that fateful vegetable changed hands across the fence, something resembling a proposal of marriage did actually proceed from him. As a sustained piece of emotional prose it fell short of the highest standard. Most of it was lost at the back of his throat, and what did emerge was mainly inaudible. However, as she distinctly caught the word 'love' twice, and as Tom was shuffling his feet and streaming with perspiration, and looking everywhere at once except at her, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... our table to vary the usual talk, by the reading of short papers, in prose or verse, by one or more of The Teacups, as we are in the habit of calling those who make up our company. Thirty years ago, one of our present circle—"Teacup Number Two," The Professor,—read a paper on Old Age, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... reconstruction for to-day...." And now he was thinking, as he sat opposite Foster, "If I had only picked up another bone or two, I might really have put together the domestic organism. Yet why should I trouble? It would all be plain, humdrum prose, no doubt. Glamour doesn't ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... might be an impromptu charade party, bringing out something of that taste in arrangement of costume, and capacity for dramatic effect, of which there is more latent in society than we think. It might be the reading of articles in prose and poetry furnished to a common paper or portfolio, which would awaken an abundance of interest and speculation on the authorship, or it might be dramatic readings and recitations. Any or all of these pastimes might make an evening ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the form of poetry and the function of prose. Being thought, it distinguishes objects from the experience that reveals them and it aspires to know things as they are; but being poetical, it attributes to those objects all the qualities which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... story? Why, yes. If Henry, there, will translate it And put it in verse and print as he promised To do when it happened. Will he do it? I doubt. He dislikes to dabble with rhyme and with measure. Says that good honest prose is the best and the sweetest If the words be well chosen, short, Saxon, and pithy. And that making of verse is the business of women, Of green boys at school, and of lovers when spooning. But try him. It may be he will. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... of Saint Eustace, it commemorates a vision which tradition attributes alike to Saint Julian the Hospitaller, to Saint Felix, and to Saint Hubert. The genius of Flaubert, who was certainly one of the greatest prose writers of this century, has told the story of the first of these in very beautiful language, and the legend of Saint Hubert is familiar to every one. Saint Eustace is perhaps less known, for he was a Roman saint of early days, a soldier ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... which by any man, young or old, in our land, I do not think has ever been displayed. Nature has done wonderful things for him; but alas! he has thus far done but little for himself. The great pieces he has sometimes given us have cost him but little effort, and he has thrown out his productions, in prose as well as poetry, with a profusion and a variety that seem miraculous; and yet, of all our bards, he has met with the most severe and merciless censures. In some measure he has deserved the treatment. In College ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... parenthesis, And by way of putting me quite at my ease, "You know I'm to polka as much as I please, And flirt when I like—now, stop, don't you speak— And you must not come here more than twice in the week, Or talk to me either at party or ball, But always be ready to come when I call; So don't prose to me about duty and stuff, If we don't break this off, there will be time enough For that sort of thing; but the bargain must be That, as long as I choose, I am perfectly free— For this is a kind of engagement, you see, Which ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... the most famous, not, however, on account of its greater intrinsic value, but partly because the orchestral accompaniments can be most easily dispensed with, and more especially because Schumann has immortalised it by—what shall I call it?—a poetic prose rhapsody. As previously stated, the work had already in September, 1828, been for some time at Vienna in the hands of Haslinger; it was probably commenced as far back as 1827, but it did not appear in print till 1830. [FOOTNOTE: It appeared in a serial ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... "Alide," a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she received from ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would have detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well where to find an equal poetic charm in prose. He was so enamored of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in very light esteem in the comparison. He admired Aeschylus and Pindar; but, when some one was commending them, he said that "Aeschylus and the Greeks, in describing Apollo and Orpheus, had given no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... school of readers exists is proved by the popularity of F.P.A's verses and prose. If any one had told Mark Twain that a man could run a daily newspaper column in New York and amass any degree of fame through translations of the "Odes of Horace" into the vernacular, the veteran humorist would probably have slapped Albert Bigelow ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... was a satisfaction to us to be allowed to remain together; and during the evenings, when our work was over, I had a constant source of amusement in endeavouring to impart such knowledge as I possessed to Harry. I fortunately remembered portions of the Bible, and numerous pieces of poetry and prose; and by repeating them to him, he also was able to get them by heart. I used to tell him all about England, and how various articles in common use were manufactured. I taught him a good deal of history and geography; and even arithmetic, by making use of pebbles. By this exercise ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... impertinent, to renew here at any length the old debate between reviewers as reviewers, and reviewers as authors—the debate whether the reissue of work contributed to periodicals is desirable or not. The plea that half the best prose literature of this century would be inaccessible if the practice had been forbidden, and the retort that anything which can pretend to keep company with the best literature of the century will be readily relieved from the objection, at once sum up ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Aristophanes Roman poetry Naevius, Plautus, Terence Roman epic poetry: Virgil Lyrical poetry: Horace, Catullus Didactic poetry: Lucretius Elegiac poetry: Ovid, Tibullus Satire: Horace, Martial, Juvenal Perfection of Greek prose writers History: Herodotus Thucydides, Xenophon Roman historians Julius Caesar Livy Tacitus Orators Pericles Demosthenes Aeschines Cicero Learned men: Varro ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... a genius," he said. "He is an artist, he is a poet, he is also a writer of subtile prose. His sonnets to Euphrasie—in the day of Euphrasie—awakened the admiration of the sternest critics: they were so tender, so full of purest fire! Some of the same critics also could scarcely choose between these and his songs to Aglae in her day, or ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... four pages. The captain, instead of treasuring up this little gem, called at the office next day, and demanded with quite unnecessary warmth what the thing meant, and I was compelled to translate it all back into prose. On this, as on other similar occasions, my employer took me severely to task—for he was, you see, a man entirely devoid of all pretensions ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... periodical called 'The United States Literary Gazette,' the sapient editor of which magazine once kindly advised the ardent young scholar to give up poetry and buckle down to the study of law! 'No good can come of it,' he said; 'don't let him do such things; make him stick to prose!' But the pine-trees waving outside his window kept up a perpetual melody in his heart, and he could not choose but ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... the "Iron Knight of Legitimacy" and the "Invincible Champion of Government by the Grace of God." (I may mention in passing that Mr. Hesekiel has done the life of Prince Bismarck into similar adulatory prose). At the age of fourteen—he relates—the boy-prince, Alexander, in going through a state room of the Palace, was respectfully greeted by the assembled high dignitaries of the Empire, senators, generals, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... the syllable, but the vowel plus all the consonants that come between it and the next vowel. Thus inf['e]rnus, where the penultimate vowel is short, no less than supr['e]mus, where it is long, has the stress on the penultima. In volucris, where the penultimate unit was short, as it was in prose and could be in verse, the stress was on the o, but when ucr made a long unit the stress comes on the u, though of course the vowel remains short. In polysyllables there was a secondary stress on the alternate vowels. Ignorance of this usage has made a ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... of Aylwin and the Rhona Boswell of The Coming of Love. Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I enjoyed his intimate friendship in his later years—during the time when he lived in Hereford Square; and since his death I have written a good deal about him—both in prose and in verse—in the Athenaeum, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in other places. When, some seven or eight years ago, I brought out an edition of Lavengro (in Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co.'s Minerva Library), I prefaced that delightful book by a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Papers John Greenleaf Whittier: A Memoir Walt Whitman The Amateur Spirit A Study of Prose Fiction The Powers at Play The Plated City Salem Kittredge and ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... with the shepherdesses, or Gopia, form the subject of various celebrated mystical writings, especially the Prem-Sagar, or "Ocean of Love" (translated by Eastwick and by others); and the sensuous Gita-Govinda of the Bengalese lyric poet Jayadeva (translated into French prose by Hippolyte Fauche, and chastely rendered into English verse by Edwin Arnold in the "Indian Song of Songs"). See also Burnouf's partial translation of the Bhagavata Parana, and Theodore Pavie's "Krichna et sa doctrine." ... The same theme has inspired some of the strangest productions of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without strain and yet with ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... engrossing hour. In place of the children's story she anticipated, she had found herself, on opening the book, confronted by the queerest stuff she had ever seen in print. From the opening sentence on. To begin with, it was a play—and Laura had never had a modern prose play in her hand before—and then it was all about the oddest, yet the most commonplace people. It seemed to her amazingly unreal—how these people spoke and behaved—she had never known anyone like them; and yet again so true, in the way it dragged ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... to a mouse, That he met in the house, Let us both go to law: I will prose— cute you.— Come I'll take no denial: We must have the trial; For really this morning I've nothing to do. Said the mouse to the cur, 'Such a trial, dear sir. With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' said cunning old Fury: ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... edition of Swift—the whole of Swift, and nothing but Swift—has long been one of the pressing needs of students of English literature. Mr. Temple Scott, who is preparing the new edition of Swift's Prose Works, has begun well, his first volume is marked by care and knowledge. He has scrupulously collated his texts with the first or the best early editions, and has given various readings in the footnotes.... ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... absorbed in the furor poeticus, which (as skilful physicians assure me) is difficultly cured. But doctors differ, and I don't despair of a cure." Fortunately, he at last accomplished that cure, for his early poetry gives no indications of future excellence. His prose is much more poetic, even in those early letters, than his verse. A great poet unquestionably is a great man; but Burke's greatness was to be achieved in another sphere. It is only in the visions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... prose work on his consulship in Greek (Ad Attic. i. 19), and also a poem in three books in Latin ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... you allow me twice the time I named—if I may be permitted to write it in blank verse, that is, and of course, with the understanding that what I write is not intended to be anything but mere versified prose." ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... frippery of a French translation. O Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller! No wonder that European fiction sounds cold and meagre, after the wonderful effects which I have seen the romances of the East ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... expression she has naturally—and something more than this. In short—." The rest of this amour, and one strange scene to which it led, very like an incident in an Italian comedy, is no concern of this book. For those who wish to know more, it is to be found, in prose, in the Letters, and, ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... called, because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young reader into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... literature, has performed a considerable service in making better known the life and work of the most famous of Polish poets. ... His pathetic story is told in great detail and with deep sympathy by Miss Gardner. ... Some of her prose renderings are of great beauty—often with the wild and wayward beauty which we associate with Chopin." (Rest of review, three-quarters of a column, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... grant your honour long life, which I wish you with all my heart!" concluded the worthy man, as if he doubted what reception the pious verses he had just recited might receive in heaven, and was determined to clinch the matter in prose of his ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... [Footnote: There is also an Old Fr. Gulafre which will account for some of the Gullivers.] and perhaps also as Juniper. It is probably also the source of Genn and Ginn, though these may come also from Eugenia or from Jane. The later prose versions of the Arthurian stories, such as those of Malory, are full of musical and picturesque names like those used by Mr. Maurice Hewlett, but this artificial nomenclature has left no ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... wants a history of them, and the world ought to want it, the book of their acts, is it not written in singing prose in Le Goffic's "Dixmude, un Chapitre de l'histoire des Fusiliers Marins"? Le Goffic is a Breton and his own son is with the fighting sailors. He deals with their autumn exploits in Dixmude on the Yser, that butt-end of wreck. Legends will spring out of them and ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... angelic, though he sometimes suffered from severe depression. He was adored by his pupils both at Oxford and in Bohemia. His memory was always bright, and his conversation always sparkled with fresh thoughts and poetical ideas. He composed with extraordinary facility in Latin prose and verse; but the extant fragments of these literary exercises do not strike us as being of unusual excellence, though genuinely admired in their day. He was certainly an ideal missioner: saintly, inspired, eloquent, untireable, patient, consumed with the desire for the ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... departments. The first class, which in those days consisted of the senior boys, passed a good Examination in Greek Testament, a play of Aeschylus, Homer, Thucydides, Horace, and Vergil, Geography and Ancient History. The Latin Prose Composition of two or ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... sort of guide to the soul in its journey through the underworld; romances, and fairy tales, among which is "Cinderella and the Glass Slipper"; autobiographies, letters, fables, and epics; treatises on medicine, astronomy, and various other scientific subjects; and books on history—in prose and verse—which fully justify the declaration of the Egyptian priests to Solon: "You Greeks are mere children, talkative and vain; you know nothing ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... developed independently of foreign influences. From the sovereign down to the lowest subject, everyone composed verses. These were not rhymed; the structure of the Japanese language does not lend itself to rhyme. Their differentiation from prose consisted solely in the numerical regularity of the syllables in consecutive lines; the alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables each. A tanka (short song) consisted of thirty-one syllables arranged thus, 5, 7, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... highest perfection, especially in the cycle directly inspired by the death of Socrates. All his philosophical writings, except the Apology, are cast in this form. As the greatest of all masters of Greek prose style, Plato lifted his favourite instrument, the dialogue, to its highest splendour, and to this day he remains by far its most distinguished proficient. In the 2nd century a.d. Lucian of Samosata achieved a brilliant success with his ironic dialogues "Of the Gods," "Of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the church to the village, Miss Dover lagged behind, and then Severne infused into his voice those tender tones, which give amorous significance to the poorest prose. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... at Portsmouth, N. H., Nov. n, 1836) is an artist to his finger tips, whether working in verse or prose. His short story of a non-existent heroine, "Marjorie Daw" has been repeatedly mentioned by the critics as a masterpiece of dainty workmanship. Consequently most readers are familiar with it. It gave title to a volume of short ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... with which he had actually serenaded Miss Ethel Harrogate, the highly conventional daughter of a Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he was neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked a certain thing and was it. His poetry was as straightforward as anyone else's prose. He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals or cloudy compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger or even crime. Like fire or the sea, he was ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... tell you, my dear friends? For hours, twenty generations came defiling past me in Hans Burckhardt's ancient mansion—Christians and Jews, nobles and commoners, fools and wise men of high art, and men of mere prose. Every one proclaimed his indefeasible right to the property; every one firmly believed himself sole lord and master of all he surveyed. Alas! Death breathed upon one after another, and they were all carried out, each ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to 'Volpone' tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the average morality ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... described how the Prince on landing from the gondola emptied his purse into the hands of a picturesque old beggar, while the lady, a little way off, stood gazing back at Venice with the dog romantically stretched at her feet. One of Versoy's beautiful prose vignettes in a great daily that has a literary column. But some other papers that didn't care a cent for literature rehashed the mere fact. And that's the sort of fact that impresses your political man, especially if the lady is, well, such as ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... me and Sandy Webb, the little guard thereof, as he whirled onward into the eye of the west. It was the hour before afternoon school, and already I could hear my father's voice within declaiming as to unnecessary datives and the lack of all feeling for style in the Latin prose of the seniors. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... affront offered to myself. But hold! I perceive I am running on quite smoothly in my own praise. Indeed, my friend, it is well I have taken that office upon myself, for I fear no one else would undertake it. The most atrocious calumnies have been invented against me; I have been vilified both in prose and verse; and, amongst the great number of persons on whom I have conferred the greatest obligations, none has been found with sufficient courage or gratitude to stand forward and undertake my defence. I do not even except madame de Mirepoix, whose conduct towards me ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... take from a man that which he never possessed. Burton was a very great man, Mr. Payne is a very great man, but they differ as two stars differ in glory. Burton is the magnificent man of action and the anthropologist, Mr. Payne the brilliant poet and prose writer. Mr. Payne did not go to Mecca or Tanganyika, Burton did not translate The Arabian Nights, [10] or write The Rime of Redemption and Vigil and Vision. He did, however, produce the annotations of The Arabian Nights, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... particular, and the freethinkers would be triumphant. The evilly disposed newspapers would sing songs of victory for six months; my mother's name would be dragged through the mire and brought into the prose of Socialistic journals, and my father's would be bespattered. It was impossible that such a thing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... and golden sky. Land at last, with fresh streams, and cooling fruits, and free room for cramped and scurvy-weakened limbs. And there, too, might be gold, and gems, and all the wealth of Ind. Who knew? Why not? The old world of fact and prose lay thousands of miles behind them, and before them and around them was the realm of wonder and fable, of boundless hope and possibility. Sick men crawled up out of their stifling hammocks; strong men fell on their knees and gave God thanks; and all eyes and hands were stretched eagerly toward the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Poetical and Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mrs. Shelley. Moxon, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Another person “evinced an elevated mind,” while a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an “attic warbler.” It is true, however, he was writing poetry, not prose. Though a Bluestocking, her praise was usually generously bestowed; she knew well how to flatter. She, though unacquainted with Latin, paraphrased Horace; and she admitted her ignorance of French. She loved all animals, notably ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... comparatively modern; for abstraction is in its nature slow, and always follows the progress of philosophy. Men had always friends and enemies before they knew the exact nature of vice and virtue; they naturally, and with their best powers of eloquence, whether in prose or verse, magnified and set off the one, vilified and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him, I suppose; But certain parts of courtin' a feller must do in prose. He rhymed her each day a letter, but that didn't serve to get her; He waited so long, she married another man from spite, An' sent him word she'd done it, an' ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... principles of philology which are unsurpassed in any ancient writer, and even in advance of any philologer of the last century. May we suppose that Plato, like Lucian, has been amusing his fancy by writing a comedy in the form of a prose dialogue? And what is the final result of the enquiry? Is Plato an upholder of the conventional theory of language, which he acknowledges to be imperfect? or does he mean to imply that a perfect language can only be based on his own theory of ideas? Or if this latter ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... appreciation of the country weekly is a prose poem written by Professor Bristow Adams, editor of the New York State College of Agriculture, and presented at the first country newspaper conference held at that institution during Farmers Week 1920, entitled "I am the Country Weekly,"[46] and which vividly depicts its ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... a fence with results somewhat unsatisfactory. He was more successful as tutor for two of my boy friends. He finally became printers' devil in the office of the "Northern Californian," where he learned the case, and incidentally contributed graceful verse and clever prose. ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... later days were passed in Cooperstown, where he lived to be the village man of letters, delighting his contemporaries with contributions of picturesque prose and graceful verse that would have given him a wider renown had he written otherwise than, as it seemed, for the mere pleasure of writing for the entertainment of his friends. His twelve years of service at Malta, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... of Lodge's "Rosalynde" has grown out of a need felt by the editor for an example of Elizabethan prose suitable for use in a general survey course in English, designed for college freshmen. "Rosalynde," of all the books that were considered, seemed on the whole best to fulfill the desired conditions. As a pastoral ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... have mentioned the one poet for whom I have any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense. He never cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the bargain. But common sense would be just as good in prose ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... and tried it, to their sorrow. A sort of inflation can be traced in English sailors' minds as their work expanded. Even Hawkins—the clear, practical Hawkins—was infected. This was not in Drake's line. He kept to prose and fact. He studied the globe. He examined all the charts that he could get. He became known to the Privy Council and the Queen, and prepared for an enterprise which would make his name ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... scoundrels, out of my sight! Gallows birds are ye all—now in the devil's name will you not begone? There are none left now but the good souls who love to laugh; not the snivelers who burst into tears in prose or verse, whatever their subject be, who make people sick with their odes, their sonnets, their meditation; none of these dreamers, but certain old-fashioned pantagruellists who don't think twice about ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... is The Paladins of France; it was written by Manzanares in Italian prose and is in three volumes. It does not always agree with the other versions of the same story; but that is only as it should be, for romances have always been re-written to suit the audience they are intended for. It has been going on about four months, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... attempts to convey to the English reader some notion, however inadequate, of the genius and mind of Schiller. It is in these Poems, rather, perhaps, than in his Dramas and Prose works, that the upright earnestness of the mind, and the rich variety of the genius, are best displayed. Here, certainly, can best be seen that peculiar union of intellect and imagination which Mr Carlyle has so well distinguished ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... found it not in my power to translate this song with literal fidelity preserving at the same time the Alcaic movement, and have therefore added the original, with a prose translation. Some of my readers may be ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... new-modelled and abridged a work, translated from the Dutch, entitled, Young Grandison: she began a translation from the French, of a book, called, the New Robinson; but in this undertaking, she was, I believe, anticipated by another translator: and she compiled a series of extracts in verse and prose, upon the model of Dr. Enfield's Speaker, which bears the title of the Female Reader; but which, from a cause not worth mentioning, has hitherto been printed with a ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... conceptions of the middle age, it has come to [17] have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents and sentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. In the junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and want of skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put together ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... summoned the people of Ireland to prepare to assert their rights by the only means now left them—the bullet and the pike. And the eyes of men whose hearts were "weary waiting for the fray," began to glisten as they read the burning words of poetry and prose in which the Nation preached the gospel of liberty. It was to take its side by that journal, and to rival it in the boldness of its language and the spirit of its arguments, that the Irish Felon was established; and it executed its mission well. "I ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... Spectator 122.] but they are surrounded by circumstances peculiar to themselves, and so are much more highly individualized. The Tatler and the Spectator very greatly extended the range of essay-writing, and with it the flexibility of prose style; it is this extension that gives to them their modern quality. Nothing came amiss: fable, description, vision, gossip, literary criticism or moral essays, discussion of large questions such as marriage and education, or of the smaller social amenities—any subject ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... many parents and teachers argue that it is better to bring the young acquainted with our standard poets and prose authors of a worldly cast, while they are yet under careful superintendence, so as to neutralize what may be unprofitable by judicious remark, and to avert the dangers attendant on such fascinating introductions ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... plan is simple; choose a spot, Then focus with decision Your thoughts upon it till you've got A clear-cut mental vision; And though from fact it widely errs, Remember in conclusion Only the man of prose prefers Eyewitness to illusion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... old and young women respectively sing "my young son," and, "my young brother:" the metre and rhyme are also very carefully preserved, and the word Kardang is evidently expressly selected for this purpose; for were they speaking in prose they would use a term denoting eldest brother, youngest brother, second brother, or some similar one; whilst I have heard the word Kardang always used in this chant whether the deceased was the first, second, or ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Lion of Venice, "a proper emblem of knowledge and action, being all head and paws," was set up to receive letters and papers for the Guardian.[82] The Tatler and the Spectator were born in the coffee house, and probably English prose would never have received the impetus given it by the essays of Addison and Steele had it not been for ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... high antiquity. Many strophes are found in them of the same meter as those on the tombstones of the Viking Age and those in which the songs of the Edda are chiefly written. In other instances the texts consist of alliterative prose, which proves its earlier metrical form. The expressions have, in places, remained heathen, although used by Christians, who are ignorant of their true meaning, as, for instance, in the following formula of an oath, in the West Gothic law: Sva se mer gud hull (So help me the ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... Mr. Browne is the author of a small volume of poems, "Volunteer Grain" (1895). He also compiled and edited several anthologies,—"Bugle Echoes," a collection of Civil War poems (1886); "Golden Poems by British and American Authors" (1881); "The Golden Treasury of Poetry and Prose" (1883); and seven volumes of "Laurel-Crowned Verse" (1891-2). He was one of the small group of men who, in 1874, founded the Chicago Literary Club; and for a number of years past he has been an honorary member of that organization, as well as of the Caxton Club (Chicago) ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... narrative. We may follow here as elsewhere the translation of Hakluyt, which is itself three hundred years old, and seems in its quaint and picturesque form more fitting than the commoner garb of modern prose. ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... great story of the little penny steamers of the Thames—a story lost amid the gigantic whole. Who will tell it right? Who will make this drop of perfect valor shine in prose or verse for future eyes to see? Imagine a Hoboken ferry boat, because her country needed her, starting for San Francisco around Cape Horn, and getting there. Some ten or eleven penny steamers under their ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... book is a prose-poem in praise of Germany's ineffable greatness. He sees in the present war, "a holy struggle for Germany's might and future," and like all his compatriots, makes no mention of Austria. If the Central Powers should be victorious, there is no doubt that Germany ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the prose of Boethius—and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints—together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... felt somewhat surprised and mortified, on being informed that I had not heard of him before. In his work he speaks of the meeting, and he makes me state to him that six lines which I wrote in an album he presented to me for the purpose, were my own composition. Now, I am a plain prose writer, and I neither wrote, nor said I wrote, the lines in question. You may recollect ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... that this phrase of "golden verses" is applied emphatically to the works of that philosopher who imposed 'silence' on all with whom he had to deal. Besides, is it not somewhat improbable that Talleyrand should have preferred prose to rhyme, when the latter alone 'has got the chink'? Is it not likewise curious that in our official answer no notice whatever is taken of the Chief Consul, Bonaparte, as if there had been no such person existing; notwithstanding that his existence is pretty generally admitted, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Grecian slate did guide, And Greece gave laws to all the world beside; Then Sophocles with Socrates did sit, Supreme in wisdom one, and one in wit: And wit from wisdom differed not in those, But as 'twas sung in verse, or said in prose. Then, OEdipus, on crowded theatres, Drew all admiring eyes and list'ning ears: The pleased spectator shouted every line, The noblest, manliest, and the best design! And every critic of each learned age, By this just model has reformed the stage. Now, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... works I have always considered as one of the blots (alas! there are too many) of the biography of the Church of England; a self-conceited, coarse-minded, persecuting, vulgar priest, and (by way of 'anti-climax') one of the first corrupters of and epigrammatizers of our English prose style. It is not true, that Sir Thomas Brown was the prototype of Dr. Johnson, who imitated him only as far as Sir T. B. resembles the majority of his predecessors; that is, in the pedantic preference of Latin derivations to Saxon words of the very same force. In the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... try to save the multitude and teach them how to live? But if on the battle-field woman must prove her right to justice and equality, history abundantly sets forth her claims; the records of her brave deeds mark every page of fact and fiction, of poetry and prose. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... his language more out of prose, Homer seems to have affected the compound epithets. This was a sort of composition peculiarly proper to poetry, not only as it heightened the diction, but as it assisted and filled the numbers with ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... was wonderful. She was perpetually at work, although often—nay, generally—with little of physical strength, and sometimes utterly prostrated by illness. Yet the work must be done, as her poems and prose were usually for periodical publications, and a given day of the month it was impossible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of prose; it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their means of expression. But it produced prose of rare quality too, and there is delightful reading in the works of its essayists and occasional writers. In its form the periodical ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... on her father's estate, "Chiefswood," that Pauline Johnson was born. And it is inevitable that the loyalty to Britain and Britain's flag which she inherited from her Red ancestors, as well as from her English mother, breathes through both her prose ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... the process of translating an Oriental language, full of depths of subtlety of thought and expressing Oriental ideas in an Oriental manner, much, if not most, of its beauty and charm must be lost. That is, I think, why the Japanese prose and poetry when translated into English seem so bald and lifeless. We know by experience that even a European language loses in the process of translation which is, except in very rare instances, a purely mechanical art. How much more so must ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... excellent in verse and in prose. His prose had all the clearness imaginable, together with all the nobleness of expression; all the graces and ornaments proper and peculiar to it, without deviating into the language or diction of poetry. I make this observation, only to distinguish his ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... his father by observing that "In Memoriam" seemed to him a shocking instance of wasted energy; he would undertake to compress the whole significance of each section, with its laborious rhymings, into two or three lines of good clear prose. Naturally the young man had undergone no sentimental troubles; he had not yet talked of marrying, and cared only for the society of mature women who took common-sense views of life. His religion was the British Empire; his saints, the men who had made it; his prophets, the ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... are viewed on opposite sides, and of the different inclinations which they must constantly raise in him that contemplates them, a more striking example cannot easily be found than two Greek epigrammatists will afford us in their accounts of human life, which I shall lay before the reader in English prose. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... and a want of tenderness—but still a genius worthy to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner. Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painful subject; only quoting—if I may be permitted to quote—Mr. Burton's wise and gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan," ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... funk is the viva voce Latin prose," said Coote. "I say, Dick, what's the gender of 'Amnis, ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... prepared for an audience. Like Macaulay, his prevailing style suggests the speaker, and his methods throughout are suited to declamation and oratory. He lacks the ease and delicacy that we are accustomed to look for in the best prose writers, and occasionally one feels the justice of Johnson's stricture, that "he sometimes talked partly from ostentation", or of Hazlitt's criticism that he seemed to be "perpetually calling the speaker out to dance a minuet with him before ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... the determination of this question. The monthly figures for each of the ten Birmingham libraries are given separately, and it is clear at a glance that without exception the maximum number of readers of prose-fiction at all the libraries during 1897-98 is found in the month of March. (I have chiefly taken into consideration the figures for 1897-98; the figures for 1896 are somewhat abnormal and irregular, probably owing to a decrease ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... least part of the interest of the Minstrelsy itself was the editor's appearance as a prose-writer. Percy had started, and others down to Ritson had continued, the practice of interspersing verse collections with dissertations in prose; and while the first volume of the Minstrelsy contained a long general introduction of more than a hundred pages, and most of the ballads had ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... personal enjoyment. Hence, it follows that not only to form a liaison, but even to contract marriage, is, from a Christian point of view, not a progress, but a fall. Love, and all the states that accompany and follow it, however we may try in prose and verse to prove the contrary, never do and never can facilitate the attainment of an aim worthy of men, but always make it more difficult. This is my ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... AND DECLAIM A course of instruction in reading and declamation which will develop graceful carriage, correct standing, and accurate enunciation; and will furnish abundant exercise in the use of the best examples of prose and poetry. Cloth, $1.50, net; ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... brought with than the language then spoken throughout the whole of Scandinavia. This ancestor of the modern Scandinavian tongues has been preserved in Iceland so little changed that every Icelander still understands, without the aid of explanatory commentaries, the oldest preserved prose written in their country 850 years ago. The principal reasons for this were probably limited communications between Iceland and other countries, frequent migrations inside the island, and, not least important, a long and uninterrupted literary tradition. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... I say, has in its Black Piggish way devoured finally the chances of any romance in this affair; that which once consisted of absurd but thrilling combats in the streets, has degenerated into something which is the very prose of warfare—it has degenerated into a siege. A siege may be defined as a peace plus the inconvenience of war. Of course Wayne cannot hold out. There is no more chance of help from anywhere else than of ships from the moon. And if old Wayne had stocked ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... always worship success of monarches, generals, or artists, then felt the wildest admiration for the victorious Napoleon. The Moniteur was full of dithyrambic eulogies, in prose and verse. Flattery appeared as it had never appeared before. Bishops became conspicuous for their ardent praise; some phrases from their charges may be quoted. Thus the Bishop of Versailles said: "God ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... pagan deities, especially the most distinguished of them, with the manifestation of demoniac power, and concluding that the descent of our Saviour struck them with silence, so nobly expressed in the poetry of Milton, is not certainly to be lightly rejected. It has been asserted, in simple prose, by authorities of no mean weight; nor does there appear anything inconsistent in the faith of those who, believing that, in the elder time, fiends and demons were permitted an enlarged degree of power ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott |
