"Distich" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of compression and brevity in narration, unattainable in any language but the Greek, the following distich was quoted: ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... companion to shame. The people of Holbein's day not only saw in this subject the beginning of that toil which is the lot of humankind, but, as they looked upon the common ancestors of all men, laboring for the means of life, they asked, in the words of an old distich,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... fine print of the elder Bobart, now extremely scarce, "D. Loggan del., M. Burghers, sculp." It is a quarto of the largest size. Beneath the head, which is dated 1675, is this distich: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... opera-bouffe, To-morrow breakfasts with burlesque, And tights and tinsel, face to face, Encounters, pink and picturesque. Nor frown, if, in next week's review, His gropings after the artistic Should crop out into verse, and take The form of some SWINBURNIAN distich. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... distich, in which another poet of beautiful talents has attempted to depreciate a name, to which, probably, few of his readers are ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... an eagle to come at his call, and stoop down to him in its flight; and that, as he passed among the people assembled at the Olympic games, he showed them his golden thigh; besides many other strange and miraculous seeming practices, on which Timon the Phliasian wrote the distich,— ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... The sentiment, or its equivalent in Ball's famous distich, was not new; it was employed for mystical purposes in ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... went down the slopes to the darkening vale I heard him crooning to himself in a high, quavering voice the single distich; then in a little his weariness took him again, and he plodded on with no thought save ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the most cogent reasons that we assert our opinion, that the distich of Pope, "Worth makes the man," or the title appended by Colley Cibber to one of his dramas, "Love makes the man," ought henceforth to yield, in point of truth, to the irrefragable principle which we here solemnly advance, "that it is the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... Epigram, with little art composed, Is one good sentence in a distich closed. These points, that by Italians first were prized, Our ancient authors knew not, or despised; The vulgar, dazzled with their glaring light, To their false pleasures quickly they invite; But public ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... only so were finally incorporated into the great family of English words{51}. Thus of Greek words we have the following: 'pyramis' and 'pyramides', forms often employed by Shakespeare, became 'pyramid' and 'pyramids'; 'dosis' (Bacon) 'dose'; 'distichon' (Holland) 'distich'; 'hemistichion' (North) 'hemistich'; 'apogaeon' (Fairfax) and 'apogeum' (Browne) 'apogee'; 'sumphonia' (Lodge) 'symphony'; 'prototypon' (Jackson) 'prototype'; 'synonymon' (Jeremy Taylor) or 'synonymum' (Hacket), and 'synonyma' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... horse presently did throughe him of his backe against a poste & clave his hed in sonder. Mistress Mannocke did knowe ye man, for his mother was her nurse. Grave judicium Dei in irrisorem patris sui." These little scraps of Latin, sometimes running into a distich, are frequent signs of a certain classical proclivity of the writer. Any one who should infer, from the good man's arbitrary mode of spelling many words, that he was an illiterate person, would be grievously ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... comestibles, From Slater, and Fortnum and Mason; Billiard, ecarte, and chess tables; Water in vast marble basin; Luminous books (not voluminous) To read under beech-trees cacuminous; One friend, who is fond of a distich, And doesn't get too syllogistic; A valet, who knows the complete art Of service—a maiden, his sweetheart: Give me these, in some rural pavilion, And I'll envy no ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... acquisitions of the House of Hapsburgh in Italy. Thus that house was aggrandised by a war which was to itself most disastrous. But Austria has often found other means of extending her dominion than military triumphs, as is recorded in the celebrated distich of Mathias Corvinus: ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... system of small roundish clouds in the upper regions of the atmosphere, commonly moves in a different current of air from that which is blowing at the earth's surface. It forms the mackerel sky alluded to in the following distich:— ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes; but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a distich. Milton's eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his model in more than four hundred instances of very ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... his lyric softness and emphatical Muse maimed; that there is a general defection from his genuine harmony. Those I must tell, I have in this translation rather sought his spirit than numbers; yet the music of verse not neglected neither, since the English ear better heareth the distich, and findeth that sweetness and air which the Latin affecteth and (questionless) attaineth in sapphics or iambic measures."[419] Dryden frequently complains of the difficulty of translation into English metre, especially ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... of a new and old town. In the old town is a hall, in which Mary Queen of Scots lodged whilst visiting the Buxton waters for her health, as a prisoner under charge of the Earl of Shrewsbury. A Latin distich, a farewell to Buxton, scratched on the window of one of the rooms, is attributed to the hand ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... epics of Vyasa and Valmiki are composed is called the Sloka, which is thus described by Schlegel in his Indische Bibliothek, p. 36: "The oldest, most simple, and most generally adopted measure is the Sloka; a distich of two sixteen syllable-lines, divided at the eighth syllable." According to our prosodial marks, ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... that very clever distich concerning the great fleas and the little fleas which tells us that no animal is too humble to have its parasite. Even Major Tifto had his inferior friend. This was a certain Captain Green,—for the friend also affected military honours. He was a man somewhat older than Tifto, of whose antecedents ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... facts in the case. As for Madame Maverick, I am sure you will find no trifling in her (if you ever meet her); she is terribly in earnest. I tell her she would have made a magnificent lady prioress, whereat she thumbs her beads and whispers a Latin distich, as if she were exorcising a demon. Yet I should do wrong if I were to represent her as always severe, even upon such a theme; there certainly belongs to her a tender, appealing manner (reminding of Adele in a way that brings tears to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the legend in p. 134, where "Râm Dâs at noon halted and bathed the god, and prepared his food, and presented it, and then took the prasâd, and put it in a vessel, and fed upon what remained." (The food consecrated at the temple of Puri is especially called the Mahâprasâda.) There is a distich current ...
— The Tattva-Muktavali • Purnananda Chakravartin
... that sprang from the Etruscan Kings, not only graced poets by his bounty, but also by being a poet himself; and as JAMES VI., now King of Scotland, is not only a favourer of poets, but a poet; as my friend Master RICHARD BARNFELD hath in this distich ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe |
