"Prose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoroughly Hindu repertory. It is the rude beginning of that fictitious history which ripened to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and which, fostered by the genius of Boccaccio, produced the romance of the chivalrous days, and its last development, the novel - that prose-epic of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... perhaps, enough in prose, but the fame of Marion and his men has been fitly enshrined in poetry, and it will not be amiss to quote a verse or two, in conclusion, from Bryant's stirring poem entitled "Song of ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... not bein' invited, and made some poetry about 'em. When I feel poetic I talk prose, and give people as good as they send. I don't ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... I?" he said hotly. "Tell me, what useful thing has he done? To be sure, he has published a few tales, a volume of verses—but name me even a single work of his prose or verse that contains the ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... to give me leave to try what I can be, I have had good fortune I am told by others in Lyrical Verse, which I am sure is one principal part of Poetry, I'll see now if I can match my Antagonist in Rallying Prose. Several ingenious Authors have already, I think, so well confuted his Assertions against the Stage, by proofs from the Antient Poets, the Primitive Fathers, and their Authorities, that they have far excell'd what I can pretend to do ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... of our race? Alas! the Paradise Lost is lost again to us beneath an inundation of graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married his great-aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other. We read a perfect library about the Paradise Lost, but the Paradise Lost itself we do ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... speech have I, most mighty Sovereign," answered the dwarf; "but, in plain and most loyal prose, I do accuse, before this company, the once noble Duke of Buckingham of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the law of effect, thus far traced, explains the superiority of poetry to prose, it will be needful to notice some supplementary causes of force in expression, that have not yet been mentioned. These are not, properly speaking, additional causes; but rather secondary ones, originating from those already specified reflex results of them. In the first place, then, we ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... to the principles of the Protestant faith. He made a companion of his noble pupil, and taught him by conversation in pleasant walks and rides as well as by books. It was his practice to have him commit to memory any fine passage in prose or verse which inculcated generous and lofty ideas. The mind of Henry thus became filled with beautiful images and noble sentiments from the classic writers of France. These gems of literature exerted a powerful influence in moulding his character, and he ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... made a famous parson, and, if all trades fail, may yet. But, now that I am here, what's to come of it? It's not so hard to put on a long face, and prose in scripture dialect; but, cui bono? Let me see—hem! The girl is pretty, devilish pretty—with such an eye, and looks so! There's soul in the wench—life—and a passion that speaks out in every glance and ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... can be fully appreciated only by those who have followed his contributions to magazines and the press of the day, 'Mr Boswell took care to keep the newspapers and other publications incessantly warm with various writings, both in prose and in verse, all tending to touch the heart and rouse the parental and ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. He liked ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... of beauty, its blood of feeling, as its skeleton of logic. For complete utterance, music itself in its right proportions, sometimes clear and strong, as in rhymed harmonies, sometimes veiled and dim, as in the prose compositions of the masters of speech, is as necessary as correctness of logic, and common sense in construction. I should have said conveyance rather than utterance; for there may be utterance such as to relieve the mind of the speaker with more or less ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the lyric, as in the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick, clear instrument of thought in the hands of Addison ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... plays impresses one with the number and mutual destructiveness of his motives for artistic expression. A noted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking the weakness of the other man's speech, rather than the weakness of the other man's argument. His prose was good, though at its best so impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionally well-written leading article. At its worst it was marred by numerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to be feared, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... on July 15th, 1815, after the Waterloo debacle. She took a prominent part in Nelson's great battles at the Nile and Trafalgar. But her end was pitifully ignoble. After a glorious and proud career, she was converted into a convict hulk and re-named the Captivity. A great prose master has reminded us, in words that glow upon his impassioned page, of the slight thought given by the practical English to the fate of another line-of-battle ship that had flown their colours in the stress of war. "Those ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... quality far above natures like that of the countess; and the dinner was characterized by some unfortunate incidents. D'Argenton was particularly fond of repeating the replies he had made to the various editors and theatrical managers who had declined his articles, and refused to print his prose or his verse. His mots on these occasions had been clever and caustic; but with Madame de Barancy he was never able to reach that point, preceded as it must necessarily be with lengthy explanations. At the critical moment Ida would invariably interrupt ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... on talk mode style: neophytes, when in talk mode, often seem to think they must produce letter-perfect prose because they are typing rather than speaking. This is not the best approach. It can be very frustrating to wait while your partner pauses to think of a word, or repeatedly makes the same spelling error ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... must try," she said; "I have never written any prose worth reading in my life. You will be dreadfully disappointed; I ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... story, the first written in English for three hundred years, and the only one we have in prose narrative. For this assertion not to seem ridiculous it must be remembered that a love story is not one in which love is used as an ingredient; if that were so nearly all novels would be love stories; even Scott's historical novels could not be excluded. In the true ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... particularity, and it is possible that this unacknowledged and hitherto unverified "account" was supplied by some literary acquaintance, who failed to explain that his information was common property. Be that as it may, Senebier's prose is in some respects as unhistorical as Byron's verse, and stands in need of some ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... quickened by ever fresh delight in the beauty and strangeness of such things, how they responded to the magic of romance and dreamed of a day when they should themselves help in the creation of such work, how they started a magazine of their own and essayed short flights in prose or verse, can best be read in the volumes which Lady Burne-Jones[50] has dedicated to the memory of her husband. This period is of capital importance in the life of William Morris, and the year 1855 especially was fraught ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... and thought but also the spirit of the age and the ideals of the nation's history. The third aim is to show, by a study of each successive period, how our literature has steadily developed from its first simple songs and stories to its present complexity in prose ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Coleridge, and of the soul's awakening that followed, Hazlitt has left an account (My First Acquaintance with Poets) that will fascinate so long as English prose is read. 'Somehow that period [the time just after the French Revolution] was not a time when NOTHING WAS GIVEN FOR NOTHING. The mind opened, and a softness might be perceived coming over the heart of individuals beneath "the scales that fence" our ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on. I had left the chamber of the—shall I say de jure King of England?—a sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes touched the comic. To harry ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... lady, though her charms outdo the powers of the vehicle of prose. She was tall, slim, and graceful, light of foot as a deer on the corrie. Her hair was black, save when the sun shone on it and revealed strands of golden brown; it was simply arrayed, and knotted on the whitest and shapeliest neck in Christendom. Her eyebrows ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Cid" is all translation from the Spanish, but is not translation from a single book. Its groundwork is that part of the Cronica General de Espana, the most ancient of the Prose Chronicles of Spain, in which adventures of the Cid are fully told. This old Chronicle was compiled in the reign of Alfonso the Wise, who was learned in the exact science of his time, and also a troubadour. Alfonso ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... confronted, felt, known when we reverence mighty cosmic force, 707-m. God confounded with the Demiurge by the mass of the Jews, 558-u. God created man in the image of Deity, Male and Female, 849-l. God created the ideal world only, Logos the material, 251-l. God defined in the Icelandic prose Edda, in a dialog, 619-u. God defined in Sanscrit stanzas, 741-m. God does not tempt nor constrain men to do evil, 848-l. God dying, an inference from a literal interpretation of nature-worship, 588-m. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... intellectual wealth long garnered in the literature and beautiful romance of Northern Europe. From the famous Edda, whose origin is lost in antiquity, down to the novels of Miss Bremer and Baroness Knorring, the prose and poetic writings of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland are here introduced to us in a manner at once singularly comprehensive and concise. It is no dry enumeration of names, but the very marrow and spirit of the various works displayed before us. ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... a delight to her motherly nature to dress and undress Fay's bonny boy. She would prose for hours about Robbie and Elsie as she sat beside the homely cradle that had once held her own children, while Fay listened languidly. It was all she could do to lie there and sleep and eat. Perhaps it was bodily exhaustion, but a sort of lull had come to her. ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a miscellany in prose and verse, neatly got up in imitation of the German Taschenbucher, and edited by M. Hadschitch, is the only annual in Servia. In imitation of more populous cities, Belgrade has also a "Literary Society," for the formation of a complete dictionary of the language, and the encouragement ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... to prose; romance to dull Reality fades; Earths flush of gladness pales in gloom and God again to ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Graveyard," nine miles from Charlotte, is the tombstone of Mrs. Maria Polk, a grand-aunt of President Polk, containing a lengthy eulogy, in poetry and prose, of this good woman. The first sentence, "Virtus non exemptio a morte"[H] is neatly executed on a semicircle, extending over the prostrate figure of a departed female saint, sculptured with considerable skill on the soapstone slab, but now scarcely ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... been watching for her arrival from the panes of the parlour while he meditated upon one of the little prose poems which formed so delectable a contribution to the culture of Riseholme, for though, as had been hinted, he had in practical life a firm grasp of the obvious, there were windows in his soul which looked out onto vague and ethereal prospects which so ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... up the pen and wrote poetry. There is nothing equal to the foolhardiness of youth. It grapples with the most difficult subjects, and knows it can master them. As all of Murger's friends were painters, except his father and mother, and they were illiterate, his insane prose seemed as fine poetry as was ever written, because it turned somersets on feet. Nobody noticed whether it was on five or six or fifteen feet. His father, however, had heard what a dangerous disease of the purse poetry was, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Dickinson was so great that a large and characteristic choice is still possible among her literary material, and this third volume of her verses is put forth in response to the repeated wish of the admirers of her peculiar genius. Much of Emily Dickinson's prose was rhythmic, —even rhymed, though frequently not ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... of poetry were the power of expressing a theory more closely and pointedly than prose, such writing would take a very high place. Some popular philosophers would make a sounding chapter out ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... however is in prose, with some very few exceptions; and it is just possible that the indulgent Reader may endure a specimen or two of the prose of M. Lesne, as readily as he has that of his poetry. These specimens are equally delectable, of their kind. Immediately after the preceding poetical burst, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... in plain prose, we left the Tuscan territory, and re-entered the dominions of His Holiness. After being detained half an hour at the Douane, we proceeded to Acquapendente to breakfast. The country between Radicofani and Acquapendente is dreary, thinly ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... 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 ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... W., F.E.I.S.) The Advanced Prose and Poetical Reader; being a collection of select specimens in English, with Explanatory Notes and Questions on each lesson; to which are appended Lists of Prefixes and Affixes, with an Etymological Vocabulary. 12mo, cloth, ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... Library at Cambridge, No. 1368; thirty-five leaves. It begins with some lines of prose and verse in praise of Amitabha and Sukhavati, and then proceeds: Evam maya srutam ekasmim samaye Bhagavan Ragagrihe nagare viharati sma, Gridhrakutaparvate mahata Bhikshusanghena sarddha, etc. It ends: iti srimad amitabhasya ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... in 1742, and its attacks were mainly levelled at the Laureate. The Laureate replied in a pamphlet, deprecating the poet's injustice, and declaring his unconsciousness of any provocation for these reiterated assaults. At the same time he announced his determination to carry on the war in prose as long as the satirist should wage it in verse,—pamphlet for poem, world without end. Hostilities were now fairly established. Pope issued a fresh edition of his satire complete. The change he had long coveted he now made. The name of Cibber was substituted throughout for that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... inflexions than it has now. The vocabulary of the language contained very few foreign elements. The poetry of the language employed head-rhyme or alliteration, and not end-rhyme, as we do now. The works of the poet Caedmon and the great prose-writer King Alfred belong ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr—— No, 'tis not even prose; I'm speaking of metres; some poems have welled From those rare depths of soul that have ne'er been excelled; They're not ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... watch, another with a valuable cane, and another with a large photograph-album containing the portraits of old Boston friends and parishioners. But the most valuable gift was a large portfolio filled with autograph letters of congratulation in poetry and prose from Sumner, Wilson, Mr. Sigourney, Whittier, Wood, Dana, Holmes, Whipple, and other prominent authors, with other letters signed Moses Williams, Gardner Brewer, William W. Clapp, and other "solid men of Boston." All old differences of opinion were ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... I dearly love the poets, and always long to enrich my plain prose with gems from their verse, it is sometimes a little embarrassing, because one is obliged to disagree with them. If they would only look a little into the ways of birds, and not assert, in language so musical that one can hardly ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... you think the bush is purer and that life is better there, But it doesn't seem to pay you like the 'squalid street and square'. Pray inform us, City Bushman, where you read, in prose or verse, Of the awful 'city urchin who would greet you with a curse'. There are golden hearts in gutters, though their owners lack the fat, And we'll back a teamster's offspring to outswear a city brat. Do you think we're never jolly where the ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that interest, with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in the vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain pretended Illyrian compositions—prose translations, the reader was to understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the instrument of the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic deception, a trick of which there is something ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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; by ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... their eyes, and address their respect to the former. There should then be a third crier, "O, the blockheads!" Men are apt presently to inquire, does such a one understand Greek or Latin? Is he a poet? or does he write in prose? But whether he be grown better or more discreet, which are qualities of principal concern, these are never thought of. We should rather examine, who is better learned, than ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... nature to produce happiness." To do good with it, makes life a delight to the giver. How happy, then, was the life of Jean Ingelow, since what she received from the sale of a hundred thousand copies of her poems, and fifty thousand of her prose works, she spent largely in charity; one unique charity being a "copyright" dinner three times a week to twelve poor persons just discharged from the neighboring hospitals! Nor was any one made happier ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... from the beginning of the anti-slavery agitation, no lack of women sympathizers with it. Some of the best and brightest of the land had poured forth their words of grief, of courage, and of hope through magazines and newspapers, in prose and in verse, and had proved their willingness to suffer for the slave, by enduring unshrinkingly ridicule and wrath, pecuniary loss and social ostracism. All over the country, in almost every town and village, women labored untiringly ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... sell your prayer-book to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself revolutionary to a point of madness, you shall find one who calls you reactionary. The scorners came in together—Moe Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct actionist, and Jane Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose—and they sat silently ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... when dusty, down on his luck, and almost like a leper, he crossed the Rhine and found a real twenty-franc piece held out by the hand of a real friend,—that moment transcends the powers of the prose writer; Pindar alone could give it forth to humanity in Greek that should rekindle the dying warmth of friendship in ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... arisen from this a combat, of which the details might displease the fastidious, but which was noble in so far that Abraham rescued a weaker combatant who was over-matched. But there ensued something more displeasing, a series of lampoons by Abraham, in prose and a kind of verse. These were gross and silly enough, though probably to the taste of the public which he then addressed, but it is the sequel that matters. In a work called "The First Chronicles of Reuben," it is related how Reuben and Josiah, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... accomplish more than one object, by carrying on his work in Europe; he could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home, he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at such ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... while those written in the vulgar tongue are chiefly coarse and trivial. Vondel and Hooft, the great poets of the time, wrote with genius and energy, but were deficient in judgment founded on good taste. The latter of these writers was also distinguished for his prose works; in honor of which Louis XIII. dignified him with letters patent of nobility, and decorated him with the order of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... be recognized in his new circle as a poet, he first showed himself a master of prose diction. The occasion came from his loss of an opportunity for personal distinction of a kind he preferred to literary laurels. The hope and the disappointment alike testify that, whatever had been the Queen's demeanour in 1589, she frowned no longer in 1591. Essex's ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Caledonian tribe; at the same time we respect her philosophers and literary men, who appear to us to compose the first rank of writers. Without mentioning their Ossian, Thompson and Burns, we may enumerate their prose writers, such as Hume, and the present association of truly learned and acute men, who write the Edinburgh Review. A Scotchman may be allowed to show pride at the mention of this celebrated work. As it regards America, this northern ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... verses from time to time, and published a set in his old age, which he called 'Senilia;' in which he shews so little learning or taste in writing, as to make Carteret a dactyl[4]. In matters of genealogy it is necessary to give the bare names as they are; but in poetry, and in prose of any elegance in the writing, they require to have inflection given to them. His book of the Dialects[5] is a sad heap of confusion; the only way to write on them is to tabulate them with Notes, added at the bottom of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... too early yet (says the Telegraph) to announce the title of the latest of the Laureate's plays, but this much may be said, that it is written partly in blank verse and partly in prose, that it is what is known in theatrical circles as a 'a costume play,' and that the scene is laid in England. It may, however, interest sensitive dramatists to know that Lord TENNYSON is liberal enough to place the stage detail wholly in the competent hands of Mr. DALY. He does not wince ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... In plain prose, my arrangement with 'my proprietor,' Mr. Elworthy (thus we speak in the newspaper trade), included a trip to Bombay for myself and Elsie. So, as soon as we had drained Upper Egypt journalistically dry, we returned to Cairo on our road to Suez. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... getting at each other, that we troubled very little about the appearance of our relationship. We met almost openly.... We talked of ten thousand things, and of ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no prose of mine that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing. Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How can I render bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession? I sit here at my desk ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... of both 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., ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... he would be permitted to behold only the "dying away of his glory." No wonder the man who was forty years in the wilderness before that grand exode, and forty more through the unsurveyed deserts, was enabled to write the majestic prose-poems that have lived unaltered through all these thousands of critical years! He was in the region where inspiration is dispensed with hands of infinite wealth. God is ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... his books with him into the monastery, and to have at least a few pious toys in his cell. Ah—but how could he explain that any profane literature was necessary in a convent, that, from an artist's point of view, it was requisite to refresh one's memory of the prose of Hugo, of Baudelaire, of Flaubert—"I am at sea again!" ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude, or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That is why I am now able ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... to the character of the selection of them, and the manner in which they are to be amended and consecrated. But we have not as yet spoken, O illustrious guardian of education, of the manner in which your pupils are to use those strains which are written in prose, although you have been informed what martial strains they are to learn and practise; what relates in the first place to the learning of letters, and secondly, to the lyre, and also to calculation, which, as we ...
— Laws • Plato
... published "Alide," a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she received from Tourgeneff on ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... try, and keep on trying, to bring the affianced pair together, and thus provide the tale with another than its clearly predestined end. Of course he doesn't succeed, but the attempt furnishes capital entertainment for everybody concerned, and proves that Mr. Punch's "C.F.S." can write prose too. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... orphanages and hospitals, lastly, incredible as it may seem, the beautiful octagonal tower of the Cathedral. The incidents of this vandalism have just been graphically described in the new volume of the brothers' Margueritte prose epic, dealing with the Franco-Prussian War, ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... way of expiation, some verse and prose, that, if they merit a place in your truly entertaining miscellany, you are welcome to. The prose extract is literally as Mr. Sprott sent ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... distress; the bard reckons up, with true poetical spirit, the free enjoyment of the beauties of nature, which might counterbalance the hardship and uncertainty of the life, even of a mendicant. In one of his prose letters, to which I have lost the reference, he details this idea yet more seriously, and dwells upon it, as not ill adapted to his ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... born in 1703, and was the second surviving son of Samuel Wesley, the rector of Epworth, in Lincolnshire. His father, who had early abandoned Nonconformity, and acquired some reputation by many works both in prose and verse, had obtained his living from the government of William, and had led for many years a useful and studious life, maintaining a far higher standard of clerical duty than was common in his time. His mother was the daughter of an eminent Nonconformist minister, who had been ejected in 1662, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... ever after that he was wont to boast that his first and last day of fox-hunting, which was an unusually exciting one, had been got though charmingly without any fox at all. It is even said that Queeker, descending from poetry,—his proper sphere,— to prose, wrote an elaborate and interesting paper on that subject, which was refused by all the sporting papers and journals to which he sent it;—but, this not being certified, we do not ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... physicians AEsculapius and Galen, practised the seven liberal arts, and disputed according to the rules of dialectics.[275] Jacques d'Arc's daughter had heard nothing of all that; she knew Saint Catherine from stories out of some history written in the vulgar tongue, in verse or in prose, so many of which were in ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... this poetry into common prose to obtain this argument, namely,—The presence of evil in the world is not compatible with the idea of the goodness of God. Here is the objection in all its force. And what is the answer? Simply this, that God did not ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... brought the meditated words so infallibly and so spontaneously to his lips: they were already welded together in mind. But he had not that kind of memory which, after once reading a page of a book, can recite the whole word for word, whether prose or verse. Single phrases embodying a notable image would remain with him, and remain ready for use as allusive colour or pointed epigram. Many of these were Biblical phrases, for he knew his Bible well, and admired not only the grandeur ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... the fables are to be found in Babrius, who was probably Avianus's source of inspiration, but as Babrius wrote in Greek, and Avianus speaks of having made an elegiac version from a rough Latin copy, probably a prose paraphrase, he was not indebted to the original. The language and metre are on the whole correct, in spite of deviations from classical usage, chiefly in the management of the pentameter. The fables soon ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... addition to which, our indefatigable poet found means to collect and publish a number of smaller poems, some of which will be found among the translations which we are about to offer; and to aid his friend and brother-poet Delvig in an annual volume of prose and verse (illustrated after the manner of our Keepsakes, &c.) entitled "Northern Flowers." This publication was commenced in 1826, and continued to appear, always enriched with something by Pushkin, till its existence closed at the early and lamented ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... natural trend Which safely leads to a successful end, And stories all should have their plots well laid— Which neither prose nor verse can do, when ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled, Doth overflow his purpose with made heat, And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed What should have been an inner instinct's feat; Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned, Lacking the subtler music in his measure, With useless care labours but to be spurned, Courting in alien speech the Muse's pleasure; I study how to love or how to hate, Estranged by consciousness from ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... of some tempting stump, to the delight of the hired hands and the exasperation of the farmer. His budding talents as a writer were not always used discreetly. He was too much given to scribbling coarse satires and chronicles, in prose, and in something which had to him and his friends the air of verse. From this arose occasional heart- burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part according to the custom of the country. Despite his Quaker ancestry and his natural love of peace, he ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... personification is copious beyond example; but it is seldom sufficiently select; rich as it is in imagination, it too commonly wants taste and delicacy; it has the fault of coarseness, which Burke's images in prose two centuries afterwards, sometimes fell into. But Collins's images are as pure, and of as exquisite delicacy, as they are spiritual. They are not human beings invested with some of the attributes of angels, but the whole figure is purely angelic, and of a higher order of creation; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... tongues of many peoples, what is to be the harvest? The full symbol of a Babel does not hold for the tonal art. Music is, in its nature, a single language for the world, as its alphabet rests on ideal elements. It has no national limits, like prose or poetry; its home is the whole world; its idiom the blended song of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... Catholic, covering with the mantle of his Catholicity, a greater multitude of enormities on this very continent, than even charity itself could conceal; and our own gracious Sovereign, whose virtues and whose mildness are celebrated in verse and prose, causing rivers of blood to run, in order that the little island over which she rules may swell out, like the frog in the fable, to dimensions that nature has denied, and which will one day inflict the unfortunate ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... past month a circus, now exhibiting in a neighboring town, had been advertised in glowing prose and lurid pictures on big billboards all over ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... twenty-one large volumes in prose and verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety to have them published. Her family ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... his prophecies, and which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities which are found in them, and the occasional passage of the Prophet from verse to prose and from prose to verse, after the manner of some other bards or rhapsodists of his race. The reader will keep in mind that what appear as metrical irregularities on the printed page would not be felt to be so when sung or chanted; just as is the case ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... poetry: a man might have told 200 lies in prose upon his owne name, and never miscaried.—But, leaving these rude rymes, Ladie, how do you like the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... college, he undertook to acquire academic culture. As is well known, college life with its professorial anecdotes and jokes, its student pranks and grind, is routine drudgery and cob-webbery prose. Bookish professors and conventional students rarely have just such an animate problem of French artistry and Bohemian experience to solve. They did nobly, to be sure, but here was a mind which threw over them ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... Sing, heavenly Muse! Things unattempted yet, in prose or rhyme," A Shilling, Breeches, and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... out of this vile piece of prose, the higher nature of Alfieri and of the Countess of Albany, and (what a satire upon poetic and platonic affection!) most of all, the monomaniac jealousy of Charles Edward, contrived to ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... corner of the carriage and for the first time felt how iniquitous were the marriage laws of England. But he would buy Milton's prose works and read his pamphlet on divorce. He might perhaps be able to ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... receive. He had no conception of the subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling. His influence on me was great, and opposed to the natural unfolding of my character, which was fervent, of strong grasp, and disposed to infatuation, and self-forgetfulness. He made the common prose world so present to me, that my natural bias was controlled. I did not go mad, as many would do, at being continually roused from my dreams. I had too much strength to be crushed,—and since I must put on the fetters, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... beautiful heroic scene; which has gone about the world, circulating triumphantly through all hearts for above a Century past; and has only of late acknowledged itself mythical,—not true, except as toned down to the following stingy prose pitch:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... authors, making the acquaintance of Ovid, Vergil and Horace, and in time won praise for his facility in writing Latin verses. Some of his school exercises have chanced to be preserved. The earliest, dated Jan. 1, 1769, is a Latin translation in prose of some verses which seem to have been supplied by his teacher for the purpose. The handwriting and the Latin tell of faithful juvenile toil and moderate success—nothing more. Nor can we extract much ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... above urged by the load below: Me Emptiness and Dulness could inspire, And were my elasticity and fire. Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offence) And once betrayed me into common sense: Else all my prose and verse were much the same; This, prose on stilts; that, poetry fallen lame. 190 Did on the stage my fops appear confined? My life gave ampler lessons to mankind. Did the dead letter unsuccessful prove? The brisk example never fail'd to move. Yet sure, had Heaven ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... poet. In truth, he loved passionately certain old poets, and that consoled him a little. But no doubt he did not love them as they should be loved. Had he not once expressed, the ridiculous idea that those poets only are great who remain great even when they are translated into prose, and even into the prose of a foreign language, and that words have no value apart from the soul which they express? His friends had laughed at him. Mannheim had called him a goose. He did not try to defend himself. As every day he saw, through the example ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... indeed! I should think not,' says the serjeant. '"Ion" is very different.' The Talfourd household, as it is described by Mr. Lestrange, is a droll mixture of poetry and prose, of hospitality, of untidiness, of petulance, of most genuine kindness and most ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... of the new poetry movement. You haven't? Well, it's a lot of young poets that are breaking away from the old forms and doing a lot of good. Well, what I was going to say was that my book is going to start a new prose movement, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the evening on, I think of our doings—their doings—with a sort of unchanging homesickness. Nothing like them can ever happen again, I know; for it's all gone—settled, sobered, and gone. And whatever wholesomer prose of good fortune waits in our cup, how I thank my luck for this swallow of frontier poetry which ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... are of which only brief scraps remain, almost embedded in the prose of the chronicles:—"The Sack of Canterbury" (1011); "The Wooing of Margaret" (1067); "The Baleful Bride Ale" ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... prosecution of his special calling—in acquiring knowledge, in solving knotty problems, or in scaling the heights of abstract contemplation—is probably as inferior in keenness of zest to that which the poet knows, as the best prose is inferior in charm to the best poetry. It may even be that both poet and philosopher owe, on the whole, more unhappiness than happiness—the one to his superior sensibility, the other to his superior enlightenment, and yet neither would exchange his own lesser happiness ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... to be prepared for the festive season a handsome volume, of the Souvenir family, called the Ruby. A portion, indeed most of its pictorial embellishments are of the first class of engraving, and the letter-press contains poetry and prose worthy of perusal. The work is a beautiful addition to the centre-table, and will of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... and various other poetical effusions you were somewhat wearied, the literary fragments in bumbler prose afforded you equal edification and delight. There might you fully enlighten yourself as to the "Strange and Wonderful News from Kensington, being a most full and true Relation how a Maid there is supposed to have been carried away by an Evil Spirit on Wednesday, 15th ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... autobiography, "when I was between fifteen and sixteen years of age, to apply myself seriously to learning Latin, of which I, at that time, knew little more than some of the most familiar rules of grammar. In the course of three or four years, during which I thus applied myself, I had read almost every prose writer of the age of pure Latinity, except those who have treated merely of technical subjects, such as Varro, Columella, and Celsus. I had gone three times through the whole of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. I ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... independent events. In after-ages Dante, like St. John, showed this care for minute imagery in the midst of verses of mystic vision. The book is the highest example of Christian imagination led and inspired by the Holy Spirit, and although at is written in prose it is of the nature ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... in magnific strain, A young poet sooth'd his vein, But he had nor prose nor numbers To express a princess' slumbers.— Youthful Richard had strange fancies, Was deep versed in old romances, And could talk whole hours upon The great Cham and Prester John,— Tell the field in which the Sophi From the Tartar won a trophy— What he read with such delight ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... constrained to reply that Ingram was one of his literary heresies, whereupon she, with ready resource, supposed that tastes differed, and then, as the result of a luminous thought, she added that a poet would naturally not be so much interested in mere prose. Of course poetry ranked the higher, but she was ashamed to confess—she made the confession without any sign of shame—she scarcely ever read any at all. She had several favourite novelists who each published so ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... between twelve and thirteen, as I should imagine, came into my room with mingled boldness and fear, and made me a low bow. I asked her what she wanted, and she replied in Latin verse to the effect that her mother was in the next room, and that if I liked she would come in. I replied in Latin prose that I did not care about seeing her mother, telling her my reasons with great plainness. She replied with four Latin lines, but as they were not to the point I could see that she had learnt them by heart, and repeated them like a parrot. She went on-still in Latin verse—to tell me that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Whose names he need hardly string into his rhymes,) Punch hopes you may look on this Record sometimes With pleasant reflections. Mere words, he well knows, Will not—"butter your parsnips"—(to put sense in prose): But you have his hearty good will, and you know it,— Right gladly he takes this occasion to show it! And when or wherever another should come, Be sure your friend Punch won't ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... illustrative quotations from eminent poets, chief of whom is that learned and ingenius cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines bear his initials. To Father Jape's kindly encouragement and assistance the author of the prose ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the paramount authority of Rome and the common standard for the Latin world which she had set were lost. When some men tried to imitate Cicero and Quintilian, and others, Seneca, there ceased to be a common model of excellence. Similarly a careful distinction between the diction of prose and verse was gradually obliterated. There was a loss of interest in literature, and professional writers gave less attention to their diction and style. The appearance of Christianity, too, exercised a profound influence ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Giovanni Greco may have been a Giovanni Vergezio, who presented Duke Cosimo with some Greek characters of exquisite finish. Lodovico da Fano is mentioned as an excellent Latin scholar. Annibale Caro was one of the most distinguished writers of Italian prose and verse in the later Renaissance. He spent the latter portion of his life in the ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... an appreciation of poetry when it is so simple a matter to give the young an abiding love for it. A little help now and then, a word of appreciation, a manifestation of pleasure when reading it and almost without effort the child begins to read and love poetry as he does good prose. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... will be specified in time, With strict regard to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I've got new mythological machinery, And ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... affection he bore to them, as well as theirs for his cause, filled her with hopes for a happy life." Napoleon's life at that time was one long deification. Louis XIV. himself, the Sun-King, had never received more flattery in prose and verse. All the official poets had tuned their lyres to sing his marriage, and the Moniteur was full of dithyrambs. It also published a translation of an Italian cantata entitled, "La Jerogamia di Creta, Inno del Cavaliere Vincenzo ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... to the Prince of Orange himself. Above all Hooft strove, to use his own words, "never to conceal the truth, even were it to the injury of the fatherland"; and the carrying-out of this principle has given to the great prose-epic that he wrote a permanent value apart altogether from its merits as a remarkable literary achievement. And yet perhaps the most valuable legacy that Hooft has left to posterity is his collection of letters. Of these a recent writer[7] has declared "that, though it could not be ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... of the Origin of Speech; Laws of Speech; Diction and Idiom; Syntax; Grammatical and Rhetorical Rules; Style; Figures; Poetic Speech; Prose Speech; Poetic-Prose Speech. ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... upon the Table a vast packet of manuscript, and craved the indulgence of the House if he exceeded the usual limits of a maiden speech, I thought of the days when the headline, "The Duke of Devonshire on Technical Education," used to strike on my fevered spirit with a touch of infinite prose. Mr. FISHER began in rather professorial style, but he soon revealed a glowing enthusiasm for his subject which thawed the House. His ambition is to transform the teachers in our elementary schools from ill-paid drudges ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... every shop. She poured them forth—little rushing streams of didacticism. The present work, from which, for its quaintness, I have chosen 'The Journal,' is a kind of Ann and Jane Taylor in very obvious prose. Little girls having spent their half-crowns on themselves, at once meet members of the destitute class, and, having nothing to give them, are plunged into remorse; little boys creeping into the larder to steal jam, eat soft soap by mistake and never are greedy ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas |
