"Prosody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Earth, I at once disclosed it to my mother. It served to prove that he who was small to look at might yet have a considerable amount of bigness about him. I used also to recite to her the scraps of poetry used as illustrations in the chapter on prosody or rhetoric of our Bengali grammar. Now I retailed at her evening gatherings the astronomical tit-bits I had ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Shakespeare, broken lines and redundant syllables are numerous, but under his hand they become things of beauty, and "the irregularity is the foundation of the larger and nobler rule." To quote the historian of English prosody—"These are quite deliberate indulgences in excess or defect, over or under a regular norm, which is so pervading and so thoroughly marked that it carries them off on its wings."(44) Heine in his unrhymed "Nordseebilder," has many irregular lines—irregularities suitable ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... where he would write his poetry and hide his manuscripts. Here he made the acquaintance of artists and literary young men as unfledged as himself, but who possessed the advantages of a regular scholastic education. They taught him the rules of prosody and the exercises proper to overcome the mere mechanical difficulties of versification. This society made Murger more than ever ambitious; a secret instinct told him that the pen was the arm with which he would win fame and fortune. He determined to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Keil). Before a vowel and not preceded by an accented syllable with final consonant, he says that i "passes over to the force of a consonant." That it differs from i the vowel, is also clear from the fact that in prosody it lengthens the ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... the Brahmacharya mode of life, as one possessed also of self-control and ascetic virtues. And know me further as one that has never spoken disagreeably unto his preceptor, as one possessed of every virtue indeed, as one that is sinless. I repeat the Vedas, I know their prosody; indeed, I have studied all the Vedas letter by letter. I am not a pigeon. Oh, do not yield me up to the hawk. The giving up of a learned and pure Brahmana can never be a good gift." And after the pigeon said so, the hawk addressed the king, and said, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to compose a Latin distich of the greatest beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in short, ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Epistle, An). Keats, J.: prosody in Endymion; Bright Star; his conception of Beauty; preface to Endymion; his doctrine; of beauty. Kipling, R., allusions to Browning ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the Martyrdom of St. Denys, the Blessed Virgin, St. Ann, &c. were printed at Nuremburgh. Her verses in praise of Otto II. would be tolerable, if they were not Leonines: there are in them some errors of prosody." Bib. Univers. et ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... Diary, June 11, 1828, "having made his acquaintance for the purpose of gaining information about Lord Byron. Knew Byron for the first time when he himself was a little boy, from being in the habit of playing with B.'s dogs. Byron wrote to him to school to bid him mind his prosody. Gave me two or three of his letters to him. Saw a good deal of B. at Hastings; mentioned the anecdote about the ink-bottle striking one of the lead Muses. These Muses had been brought from Holland; and there were, I think, only eight of them arrived safe. Fletcher had brought ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... us have forgotten the greater part of what we learned at school. The dates which made up so large a part of our historical lessons, the rules we slavishly committed as we struggled to master the difficulties of syntax and prosody, our latinity, our grounding in the tongue of ancient Greece so hardly won—who amongst us, having grey hairs in abundance, could face to-day the examination room where once we triumphed in these things? Yet in a sense they are all still with us. We reproduce them in effectiveness in ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... genius overriding great obstacles, and of talent succumbing to ignorance and inexperience. That it should have been performed at all is so extraordinary that we forget to be surprised at its inequality. The English verse is sometimes exquisite; at other times the rules of our prosody are absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that the Hindoo poetess was chanting to herself a music that is discord in an English ear. The notes are no less curious, and to a stranger no less bewildering. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms for its prosody, that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences which form the "content of consciousness" may be vivified and trippingly run over, like the syllables ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... time came he had thrust away from him the inefficient lists with which he had been supplied, and trusted himself wholly to his imagination. So may be seen the inspired schoolmaster who has beneath his hands the wretched verses of a dull pupil. For awhile he attempts to reduce to reason and prosody the futile efforts of the scholar, but anon he lays aside in disgust the distasteful task, and turning his eyes upwards to the Muse who has ever been faithful, he dashes off a few genial lines of warm poetry. The happy juvenile, with wondering pen, ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... of Garcillaso de la Vega, that the Inca bards formed a separate and highly respected class, and that in their hands the supple Qquichua tongue had been brought under well recognized rules of prosody. He mentions the different classes and subjects of their poems, compares them to similar compositions in Spanish, and even gives specimens of two short ones, of undoubted antiquity, and adds that, when a boy, he knew many others. "What would not one now give," ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... paper and put you down every syllable With those clever clerkly fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers 695 In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering —More fault of those who had the hammering Of prosody into me and syntax, 700 And did it, not with hobnails but tin-tacks! But to return from this excursion— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... is not a mere compilation) that the chapter on the Arthurian Romances summarises, for the first time in print, the result of twenty years' independent study of the subject, and that the views on prosody given in chapter v. are not borrowed from ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of ever satisfactorily impressing their subtle distinctions on certain, shall we say athletic, imaginations. It seems I was wrong. I had not enough faith. I am sorry. It is evident that these Scylla and Charybdis of prosody have no longer any terrors for you, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... enough to show anybody the whole art. If you look back across the sands of time and find out that it is that ridiculous old "Thirty days hath September," which comes to you when you are trying to think of the length of October—if you can quote your old prosody, ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... was at the full, he stands in English literature as the most singular of its curiosities. His will is an awful jest; his declaration of his religious opinions a tissue of contradictions and absurdities: he bequeathes to a clergyman his humility; to Mr. Burgum his prosody and grammar, with half his modesty—the other half to any young lady that needs it; his abstinence—a fearful legacy—to the aldermen of Bristol at their annual feast! to a friend, a mourning ring—"provided he pays for it himself"—with the motto, "Alas, poor ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... inheritance. Great part of the history of the North is misread, unless account is taken of the artistic study, the invention, the ingenuity, that went to the making of those poems. This variety is not the confusion of barbarous tradition, or the shifts and experiments of improvisers. The prosody and the rhetorical furniture of the poems might prevent that misinterpretation. It might be prevented also by an observation of the way the matter is dealt with, even apart from the details of the language and the style. The proof from these two quarters, from ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the museum at Alexandria a number of very learned men, who lived within its walls and were provided with salaries, the whole system closely resembling a university. Grammar, prosody, mythology, astronomy and philosophy were studied, and great attention was given to the study of medicine. Euclid was the teacher of Mathematics, and Hipparchus of Alexandria was the father of Astronomy. The teaching of medicine and of astronomy was for long based upon observation of ascertained ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Spanish it was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, of writing the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-odd years to do it in. I taught myself the language, or began to do so, when I knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of the book. My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himself written a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let me plunge into the sea of Spanish ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of these four friends and their respective merits. It may, however, be remarked that Mr. Manmohan Ghose's work possesses a peculiar interest on account of its really notable command of the subtleties of English prosody and diction, combined with just a touch of foreign feeling. The artful employment of imperfect rhymes in "Raymond and Ida" illustrates what I mean. Occasionally, too, Mr. Ghose produces exactly the right phrase by means of a felicitous simplicity. Notice the line which I have italicised ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... which constituted Irving's popularity, one of them might have been the beauty of his name, whose secret is revealed by the laws of prosody. Washington is a stately dactyl; Irving is a sweet and mellow spondee, and thus we have a combination which poets in ancient and modern days have sought with sedulous care, and which should close every line of hexameter verse. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of a distempered imagination? I do not mean the culture of a prize poet, or a poet on a newspaper staff, or a gentleman who writes verses for society, or a professor of poetry, or an authority who knows the history and laws of prosody in every tongue, and can play the bard or the critic with equal facility. Alan Walcott had never ceased to work in distemper, because his nature was distempered to begin with, and his taste had not been modified to suit the conventional canons of his critics. Therefore it was not much to be wondered ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... comprehending the sacred ancient history of the creation and prophets (Chapters iii., iv., v. and vi.), (2) the traditions and legends connected with early Moslem History and (3) some auxiliary sciences as grammar, syntax and prosody; logic, rhetoric and philosophy. See p. 18 of "El-Mas'udi's Historical Encyclopaedia etc.," By my friend Prof. Aloys Springer, London 1841. This fine fragment printed by the Oriental Translation Fund has been left unfinished whilst the Asiatic Society of Paris has printed in Eight Vols. 8vo the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... of the Categories, finds also its minor representative in this domain in the Numbers, Singular, Dual, and Plural, incorporated into the Conjugation of the Verb. This leads us to the consideration of Grammatical Agreement and Government; carries us over into Syntax, Prosody, Logic, and Rhetoric; back to Lexicology, the domain of the Dictionary or mere Vocabulary in Language; and thence upward to Music, and finally again to Song, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... discussed, attacked, defended, eulogised, ridiculed. It was praised with the most fulsome adulation; assailed with the most violent condemnation. Editorials were written upon it. Special articles, in literary pamphlets, dissected its rhetoric and prosody. The phrases were quoted,—were used as texts for revolutionary sermons, reactionary speeches. It was parodied; it was distorted so as to read as an advertisement for patented cereals and infants' foods. Finally, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... difficulties in point of law. But I would by no means trust these alterations to the owners themselves; who, as they are generally no great clerks, so they seem to have no large vocabulary about them, nor to be well skilled in prosody. The utmost extent of their genius lies in naming their country habitation by a hill, a mount, a brook, a burrow, a castle, a bawn, a ford, and the like ingenious conceits. Yet these are exceeded by others, whereof some have contrived anagramatical appellations, from ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... proverb runs, and that proverb's truth was doubtless forced home upon the Lord Giovanni at an early stage of his excursions into the flowery meads of prosody. Fortunately he lacked the supreme vanity that is the attribute of most poetasters, and he was able to see that such things as after hours of midnight-labour he contrived to pen, would evoke nothing but her amusement—unless, indeed, ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a new illustration of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wrong yourself, but you wrong mankind," said Goethe, kindly. "In the world, and in literature, you bear an honored name; every one of education is familiar with your excellent work on 'Prosody of the German Language'—has read also your spirited Journey to England. You have no right to ask that one should separate the kernel from the shell in hastily passing by. If you surround yourself with a wall bedaubed with caricatures, you cannot expect that people will look ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... and romances. The language in which these works were written was steadily becoming more like our modern English. The dialectical differences become less acute; the inflections begin to drop away; the vocabulary gradually absorbs a larger romance element, and the prosody drops from the forms of the West Saxon period into measures and modes that reflect a living connexion with the contemporary poetry of France. Thus, even in the literature of a not too literary age, we find abundant tokens of that strenuous national life ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose words seem naturally to bourgeon into assonant terminations. But Japanese poetry is original in every sense of the term. Imitative as the Japanese are, and borrowers from other nations in every department of ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... well-versed in all that occurred in ancient kalpas (cycles), conversant with Nyaya (logic) and the truth of moral science, possessing a complete knowledge of the six Angas (viz., pronunciation, grammar, prosody, explanation of basic terms, description of religious rites, and astronomy). He was a perfect master in reconciling contradictory texts and differentiating in applying general principles to particular cases, as also ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... unutterable things; he threw Himself at length within the leafy nooks Where the wild branch of the cork forest grew; There poets find materials for their books, And every now and then we read them through, So that their plan and prosody are eligible, Unless, like Wordsworth, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... version of the multiplication table. Nor am I altogether without hope that some day it may enter into the heads of the tutors of our schools to try whether it is not as easy to make an Eton boy's mind as sensitive to falseness in policy, as his ear is at present to falseness in prosody. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... and the rules in relation thereto; must be able to parse any ordinary sentence given to them, and, generally, must understand those portions of the subject usually taught in the higher academies and schools throughout the country, comprehended under the heads of Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... 756-762), and rose to be Governor of Chia-chou. What remains of his verse mostly takes the form of quatrains, yet for originality of thought, wealth of imagery and style, they have seldom been excelled. He was a master of metre, and contributed certain modifications to the laws of Chinese prosody which exist to the ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... natural order, and admit no inversions whatever for the sake of the line; and it should set a value on expression, never for its own sake, but solely for the sake of the dramatic purpose to be accomplished in the scene. Verse such as this would permit of every rhythmical variation known in English prosody, and through the appeal of its rhythm would offer the dramatist opportunities for emotional effect that prose would not allow him; but at the same time it could be spoken with entire naturalness by actors as ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... told me it was customary for individuals who visited the cataract to insert their names. I took up the book which contained a number of names mingled here and there with pieces of poetry. Amongst these compositions was a Welsh englyn on the Rhyadr, which, though incorrect in its prosody, I thought stirring and grand. I copied it, and subjoin it with a translation which I made ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... move on the generalized linguistic plane or may be inseparable from specific linguistic conditions. Language as a collective art. Necessary esthetic advantages or limitations in any language. Style as conditioned by inherent features of the language. Prosody as conditioned by the phonetic dynamics of ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... as Espronceda, the student must be able to read his verse in the original. This cannot be done without some knowledge of the rules which govern the writing of Spanish poetry. It therefore becomes necessary to give some account of the elementary principles of Spanish prosody. This is not the place for a complete treatment of the subject: only so much will be attempted as is necessary for the intelligent comprehension of our author's writings. A knowledge of English prosody will hinder rather than help the student; for the Spanish poet obeys ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and leveling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... ballads; not only rendering faithfully his thoughts, imagery, and phraseology, but even preserving in my translation the alliterative euphony which constitutes one of the most remarkable features of Welsh prosody? Yes, I had accomplished all this; and I doubted not that the public would receive my translations from Ab Gwilym with quite as much eagerness as my version of the Danish ballads. But I found the publishers as intractable ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... largeness and grandeur. His graceful "Fly, White Butterflies," and "In Harbor," and the dramatic setting of "The Loreley," the jovial "Gather Ye Rosebuds" of jaunty Rob Herrick, the foppish tragedy of "La Vie est Vaine" (in which the composer's French prosody is a whit askew), that gallant, sweet song, "My True Love Hath My Heart," and a gracious setting of Heine's flower-song, are all noteworthy lyrics. He has set some of Tolstoi's words to music, the sinister love of "Doubt Not, O Friend," and the hurry and glow of "The First Spring Days," ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... civilisation, accent and rhythm began to displace quantity and metre in Latin versification. Quantitative measures, like the Sapphic and Hexameter, were composed accentually. The services and music of the Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of medieval Latin—that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by Augustine in the prose of the Confessions, and gifted with poetic inspiration in such hymns as ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... sunshine and the weird radiance of the Northern Lights; but prosody is not taught in your "Normal" school. The thing is a vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas, notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes, and sentiments upon a race to which, in great measure, they must ever be foreign and unintelligible. ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee is joined ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... which Butts began life, had some bitter stories on that subject. Chalmers was a perfect scholar, but he was not agreeable. He had black finger-nails, and wore dirty collars. Having a lively remembrance of his friend's "general acquaintance" with Latin prosody, Chalmers' opinion of Providence was much modified when he discovered what Providence was doing for Butts. Clem took to the Church when he started for himself. It would have been madness in him to remain a Dissenter. But in private, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... classics were not taught as literature at all, but as exercises in grammar and prosody. They were dissected by teachers who were simply lecturers on the science of language, and who had not large views even about that. Our whole attention being directed to the technicalities of the pedagogue, we ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... As regards Bjoernson's prosody, I am aware that it is sometimes defective. Measured by the Tennysonian standard it is often needlessly rugged and eccentric. But a poet whose bark carries so heavy a cargo of thought may be forgiven if occasionally it scrapes ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... verses two facts are of especial interest: that, where the rules of prosody require synalepha, hiatus sometimes occurs ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... comparison betwixt blank verse and rhyme, and the professors opened with great clamour; but, instead of keeping to the subject, they launched out into tedious dissertations on the poetry of the ancients; and one of them, who had been a school-master, displayed his whole knowledge of prosody, gleaned from Disputer and Ruddiman. At last, I ventured to say, I did not see how the subject in question could be at all elucidated by the practice of the ancients, who certainly had neither blank verse nor rhyme in their poems, which were measured by feet, whereas ours are reckoned ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... of this reign was Apollonius Dyscolus, so called perhaps from a moroseness of manner, who wrote largely on rhetoric, on the Greek dialects, on accents, prosody, and on other branches of grammar. In the few pages that remain of his numerous writings, we trace the love of the marvellous which was then growing among some of the philosophers. He tells us many remarkable stories, which he collected ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... this manner of learning is, that I never understood prosody, much less the rules of versification; yet, anxious to understand the harmony of the language, both in prose and verse, I have made many efforts to obtain it, but am convinced, that without a master it is almost impossible. Having learned the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... surpassed him in an accurate knowledge of the Greek and poetical criticism. In the former, indeed, he seems to have obtained a greater repute than any Spanish scholar of the time. He composed some valuable works, especially on ancient prosody. The unwearied assiduity and complete success of his academic labors have secured to him a high reputation among the restorers of ancient learning, and especially that of reviving a livelier relish for the study of the Greek, by conducting it on principles of pure criticism, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... say that within a couple of years from my first attempt, that is by the time I was about fourteen and a half, I had experimented not only in most of the chief measures, but in almost all the chief stanzas used by the English poets. To these, indeed, I added some of my own devising. In this way Prosody early became for me what it has always been, a source of pleasure and delight in itself. I liked discovering metrical devices in the poets, analysing them, i.e. discovering the way the trick worked, and in making experiments ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... consanguinity and hostility. Scott, McNeill, and McRee, in arms against Gordon, Hay, and Maconochie. And the harsh Scotch nomenclature, compared with the more euphonious savage Canada, Chippewa, Niagara, which latter modern English prosody has corrupted from ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... more impetuous foot, of fuller and of hastier breath, more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to have done. Cowley left the line with all this lyrical promise within it, and if his example had been followed, English prosody would have had in ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... full of sensibility and emotion, giving, effect to the Italian language, so pompous and so sonorous, produced upon Oswald an impression entirely novel. The English prosody is uniform and veiled, its natural beauties are all of a sombre cast; its colouring has been formed by clouds, and its modulation by the roaring of the sea; but when Italian words, brilliant as an Italian festival, resonant ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... perforce return thither sooner or later, at the risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and, with all his contempt for the "asinine" vulgar, was not fastidious. His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to [243] the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... outrage upon harmony, as dissonance, it would particularly wound certain poetic minds, and I do not think it would be scandal to consider all infractions of moral beauty as a species of sin against rhythm and universal prosody. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... while he sat in his stocking feet, trying to ease the chilblains which every boy used to have from his snow-soaked boots, before the days of india-rubbers, he found something in the back of his grammar which made him forget all about the pain. This was a part called Prosody, and it told how to make verses; explained the feet, the accents, the stanzas—everything that had puzzled him in his attempts to imitate the poems he had heard his father read aloud. He was amazed; he had never imagined that ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... his penetration into political affairs is Lowell's command of the pure Yankee dialect. His knowledge of it is perfect; he elevates it to the dignity of a distinct tongue, having its own peculiar etymology, and only adopting the current rules of prosody in tender consideration for its thousands of English readers. There is, however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have descended ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the dyer's hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll of phrases. He is woozy on words—locoed by syntax and prosody. The libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry in a morning Martini." A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to describe Villiers de l'Isle Adam might be applied with equal success to the author of "The ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... lessons in that language, to which I devoted several hours daily. I had learned to read Sanscrit and to translate easy passages in the chrestomathy, and devoted myself with special zeal to the study of the Latin grammar and prosody. Professor Julius Geppert, the brother of our most intimate family friend, was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... facts. It is, in fine, the science, the philosophy of language. In following the process of nature, neither individuals nor nations ever arrive at the science first. A language is spoken, and poetry written, many years before either a grammar or prosody is even thought of. Men did not wait till Aristotle had constructed his logic, to reason." In short, as grammar was made after language, so ought it to be taught after language: an inference which all who recognise the relationship ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... of English versification labored under two difficulties: an undue adherence to the traditions of Greek and Latin prosody more or less perfectly understood, and an exaggerated formalism. But recently the interest and excitement (now happily abated) over free-verse have reopened the old questions and let in upon them not a little light. Even today, however, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Poet-Laureate) writes to say that, having given special study to the hexameter, he was much interested to find that the measure now in vogue amongst bishops was that of six feet and over. He hoped to treat the subject exhaustively in his forthcoming treatise on Ecclesiastical Prosody. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... of the Colonel, who liked pretty faces about him, and had been kind to her; but she could not resist a slight feeling of repulsion at what she considered an abject maneuver of Miss Prosody's. His ball, by an unskilful miss, was left in her power; her duty to her side required her to crack it to the other end of the ground, but a glance at the irritable gloom of his countenance induced her to discover it to be more to her advantage to attack one rather beyond, and, judiciously ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... the common lot. It is the supreme cry of the discoverer, offering sympathy and asking for it in a single gesture. In attending a University Extension Lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for. It is well to remind ourselves that literature is first and last a means of life, and that the enterprise of forming one's literary ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... was fond of his little sister and very proud of her talents. The poor child, whose courage had all disappeared, sang in a fresh, trembling little voice, a romance revised and corrected at her boarding-school. The word love had been replaced by that of friendship, and to repair this slight fault of prosody, the extra syllable disappeared in a hiatus which would have made Boileau's blond wig stand on end. But the Sacred Heart has a system of versification of its own which, rather than allow the dangerous expression to be used, let ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in the year 1760, published, by the house of B. Mecom in Boston, a 72 page brochure entitled "The Rudiments of Latin Prosody with a Dissertation on Letters and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic and Prosaic Composition, collected from some of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... exercises in history were never a compulsory lesson, there was another kind of composition which was so, namely, writing verses, and it was one of the most disagreeable of my tasks. Greek and Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the prosody of those languages. My father, thinking this not worth the time it required, contented himself with making me read aloud to him, and correcting false quantities. I never composed at all in Greek, even in prose, and but little in Latin. Not that my father could be indifferent to the value ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... the poet and Karlkammer was silenced. Pinchas was dithyrambic, sublime, with audacities which only genius can venture on. He was pungently merry over Imber's pretensions to be the National Poet of Israel, declaring that his prosody, his vocabulary, and even his grammar were beneath contempt. He, Pinchas, would write Judaea a real Patriotic Poem, which should be sung from the slums of Whitechapel to the Veldts of South Africa, and from the Mellah of Morocco to the Judengassen ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the Latin with a perfection, which, in the golden age of Polish literature, was one of its characteristic features. It is therefore surprising, that the Polish language in poetry, although in other respects highly cultivated, does not admit the introduction of the classical prosody. We mean, the Polish language in its present state; for it is very probable, that in its original character it possessed, in common with all the other Slavic languages, the elements of a regular system of long and ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... theoretically, but the whole rhythm is practically, to the most obtuse ear, would be annihilated by Pope's false quantity, is a blunder which serves to show his utter ignorance of prosody. But, even as a version of the sense, with every allowance for a poet's license of compression and expansion, Pope's translation is defective, and argues an occasional inability to construe the text. For instance, at ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... verse of The Nights it may be advisable to enlarge a little upon the prosody of the Arabs. We know nothing of the origin of their poetry, which is lost in the depths of antiquity, and the oldest bards of whom we have any remains belong to the famous epoch of the war Al-Basus, which would place them about A.D. 500. Moreover, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... but a vague idea of prosody, understood simply that she had again incurred the displeasure of D'Argenton. The fact is that he had begun to affect her in a manner quite beyond her own control, and which, in its unreasoning terror, was somewhat like the timid worship offered ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... and Bassora a number of distinguished men proceeded, who analyzed with the greatest subtlety all its rules and aided in perfecting it. As early as in the age of Ali, the fourth Caliph, Arabian literature boasted of a number of scientific grammarians. Prosody and the metric art were reduced to systems. Dictionaries of the language were composed, some of which are highly esteemed at the present day. Among these may be mentioned the "Al Sehah," or Purity, and "El Kamus," ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... true church music, look through the old monkish chorals, etc., also the most correct translations of the periods, and perfect prosody in the Catholic ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... "flies in the shambles." Such a soul has GAMBETTA. He is all language. If you were to cut him up in little bits and put each atom under a microscope, you would find in every molecule the text of some proclamation. The genii of syntax and prosody are his guardian angels, and the love of "gabble" is the be-all and the end-all of his political existence. He loves not GARIBALDI. He would have done violence to his grandmother rather than consent to the invitation of the Italian liberator. For short, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical volume, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, that, when he began to write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact, was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the first draft of Innisfree will remember how it gives one the impression of a new imagination stumbling ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... quotes and names many other writers, including fourteen Greek; and generally impresses us with his earnest studentship. An Irish monk named Donatus wandered to Italy and became bishop of Fiesole (c. 829); he, too, was a scholar acquainted with Virgil, a teacher of grammar and prosody, and a lecturer on the saints.[1] Sedulius, the commentator, an Irish monk of Liege, copied Greek psalters, wrote Latin verses, knew Cicero's letters, the works of Valerius Maximus, Vegetius, Origen, and Jerome; was well acquainted with ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... it is somewhat different from that of most, if not all, of its predecessors. I have usually gone on the principle (which I still think a sound one) that, in studying the literature of a country, or in dealing with such general characteristics of parts of literature as prosody, or such coefficients of all literature as criticism, minorities are, sometimes at least, of as much importance as majorities, and that to omit them altogether is to risk, or rather to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... groaned the Westminster-Oxford law lord, softening his reproof by an allusion to his Scottish nationality, "Cur[a]tors, Mr. Crosbie, Cur[a]tors: I wish our countrymen would pay a little more attention to prosody."—"My lord," replied Mr. Crosbie, with delightful readiness and composure, "I can assure you that our countrymen are very proud of your lordship as the greatest sen[a]tor and or[a]tor of ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... says Riouffe, (Memoires, Sur les Prisons, i., pp. 55-7.) 'in those large black eyes of hers, full of expression and sweetness. She spoke to me often, at the Grate: we were all attentive round her, in a sort of admiration and astonishment; she expressed herself with a purity, with a harmony and prosody that made her language like music, of which the ear could never have enough. Her conversation was serious, not cold; coming from the mouth of a beautiful woman, it was frank and courageous as that of a great men.' 'And yet her maid said: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... verse professionally can realize the extent to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that prodigious composition, the Overture to Tannhaeuser, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the extraordinary perfection of his prosody have occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "The Raven" and "The Bells," he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be objected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and even Tennyson ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Adriatic coast. Its picturesque scenery has formed the background for more than one of his stories. At the age of fifteen, while still a student at Prato, he published his first volume of poems, 'Intermezzo di Rime' (Interludes of Verse): "grand, plastic verse, of an impeccable prosody," as he maintained in their defense, but so daringly erotic that their appearance created no small scandal. Other poems followed at intervals, notably 'Il Canto Nuovo' (The New Song: Rome, 1882), 'Isotteo e la Chimera' (Isotteo and the Chimera: Rome, 1890), 'Poema Paradisiaco' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the sixteen "Bahr" (metres) in Arabic prosody; the easiest because allowing the most license and, consequently, a favourite for didactic, homiletic and gnomic themes. It means literally "agitated" and was originally applied to the rude song of the Cameleer. De Sacy calls this doggrel "the poet's ass" (Torrens, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... merge in those haunting and friendly presences, they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as parts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the barbaric prosody of an ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... prosody's rules, dies such a hymn on the ear. Thee, Aurora, I used to own as the friend ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... Aldhelm's approval, and Cellanus, an Irish monk from Peronne, was one of his correspondents. Aldhelm was the first Englishman, so far as we know, to write in Latin verse, and his letter to Acircius (Aldfrith or Eadfrith, king of Northumbria) is a treatise on Latin prosody for the use of his countrymen. In this work he included his most famous productions, 101 riddles in Latin hexameters. Each of them is a complete picture, and one of them runs to 83 lines. That his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... speak evenly, clearly, articulately, to pronounce correctly and without affectation, to understand and use the accent demanded by grammar and prosody. Train him to avoid a common fault acquired in colleges, of speaking louder than is necessary; have him speak loud enough to be understood; let there be ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... beautiful of all languages must be that which is at once, the most complete, the most sonorous, the most varied in its twists and the most regular in its progress, that which has most compound words, that which by its prosody best expresses the soul's slow or impetuous movements, that which ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... a purely literary kind, reflection on which is to me, at least, pleasurable (though many persons of literary taste may, perhaps, regard it as a bore), is the relation of modern prosody to ancient, and more particularly to Latin. It has always seemed to me that the lengthening and shortening of syllables according to their position, as happens in classical Latin, with regard to the syllables that follow them, must always have corresponded with the ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... said Deacon Reyner, addressing the future historian on this head, "I have secured a correct copy of poor Prosody's epitaph, as you asked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... Latin. After my discovery of Christian Science most of the knowledge I gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined that grammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea of God in man's origin and signification. Syntax was spiritual order and unity. Prosody the song of angels and no earthly ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... might live! The logical result of this teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr. Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to make the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the Roman baths, or the chariot races, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan |
