"Alexandrine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sickness,' said Alexandrine one day, 'and what grieves you so sorely. You know that you can trust me, for I have served you truly, and perhaps I may be able to help you in ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming."[26] Pope, among his many thousand rhymed couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 48. Caesar follows Pompeius into Illyria. The lines of Dyrrachium and the Battle of Pharsalus. The beginning of the Alexandrine War. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... the exception of a few recent poets, who have written in blank verse, and a few weak attempts to adapt the Greek principles of accent to the Polish language, all Polish poetry is, like the French, in rhyme; and the French Alexandrine is the favourite form ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... so that the epigram by little and little approached the form which in its purest age the Italian sonnet possessed. In this guise it was cultivated with taste and brilliancy at Alexandria, Callimachus especially being a finished master of it. The first Roman epigrammatists imitate the Alexandrine models, and, making allowance for the uncouth hardness of their rhythm, achieve a fair success. Of the epigrams of Ennius, only the three already quoted remain. [9] Three authors are mentioned by Aulus Gellius [10] ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... literature and art of the period. We do not agree with Mr. Mahaffy in his panegyric of the Laocoon, and we are surprised to find a writer, who is very indignant at what he considers to be the modern indifference to Alexandrine poetry, gravely stating that no study is 'more wearisome and profitless' than that of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of but eight lines and having the first four lines to rhyme alternately, and the last four immediately, and by having the concluding line an Alexandrine, as in the Spenserean stanzas, the difficulty, arising from the necessity of having so many similar rhymes, would be obviated, and the poet would have much greater facilities in expressing himself well, without impairing the dignity or strength of what might still ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... would have envied him. He had done his worst; he had deified not a lad, but a lust. And not for the moment alone. A half century later Tertullian noted that the worship still endured, and subsequently the Alexandrine Clement discovered ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... collection of imaginary letters, one hundred and eighteen in number, arranged in three books. Their value depends partly upon the curious and interesting pictures given in them of the life of the post-Alexandrine period, especially of the low life, and partly upon the fact that they are the first successful attempts at character-drawing to be found in the history of Greek prose fiction. They form a connecting link between the novel of pure incident and adventure, and the more fully developed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... author of the Alexandrine Chronicum says that Marcus, being moved by the entreaties of Melito and other heads of the church, wrote an Epistle to the Commune of Asia in which he forbade the Christians to be troubled on account of their religion. Valesius supposes this to be the letter or rescript which is contained ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... England, to find the buildings of Port Royal, under Lescarbot's care, bright with lights, and an improvised arch bearing the arms of Poutrincourt and De Monts, to be received by Neptune, who, accompanied by a retinue of Tritons, declaimed Alexandrine couplets of praise and welcome, and to sit at the sumptuous table of the Order of Good Times, of which I have just spoken, furnished by this same lawyer- poet's agricultural industry. We may even stop a moment longer ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... the heroic couplet, but the difference in style is very marked. The influence of Dryden's narrative-poems (his translations from Boccaccio and Chaucer) is clearly traceable in the metre, style, and construction of the later poem. Like Dryden, Keats now makes frequent use of the Alexandrine, or 6-foot line, and of the triplet. He has also restrained the exuberance of his language and gained force, whilst in imaginative power and felicity of diction he surpasses anything of which Dryden was capable. The flaws in ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... theatre was, owing to the Gallomania of the period, merely a bad imitation of the French stage. Gottsched,[4] who greatly contributed toward the reformation of German literature, still retained the stilted Alexandrine and the pseudo-Gallic imitation of the ancient dramatists to which Lessing put an end. Lessing wrote his "Dramaturgy" at Hamburg, recommended Shakespeare and other English authors as models, but more particularly nature. The celebrated Eckhof, the father of the German stage, who ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... celebrated,—namely, the deeds of Alexander the Great,—mixed fantastically the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome with the then prevailing ideas of chivalry, and with the figments of fairy lore. (The metrical form employed in these poems gave its name to the Alexandrine line later so predominant in French poetry.) The volume of this quasi-epical verse, existing in its three groups, or cycles, is immense. So is that of the satire and the allegory in metre that followed. From this latter store of stock and example, Chaucer drew to supply his muse ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... his proceedings in carrying them"; "he himself was satisfied with the agrarian law "; "whether it could be vetoed by a tribune or no was nothing to do with him"; "he thought the time had come for the business of the Alexandrine king to be settled"; "it was no business of his to inquire whether Bibulus had been watching the sky on that occasion or no"; "as to the publicani, he had been willing to oblige that order"; "what ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... fresh a black, in some places, as when newly written; in others, in a dim, rusty colour, which a practised eye only could decipher. Thus the war against knowledge has gone on. The Caliph Omer burnt the Alexandrine library. Next came the little busy creatures the monks, who, mothlike, ate up the ancient manuscripts. Last of all appeared the Pope, with his Index Expurgatorius, to put under lock and key what the Caliph had spared, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... that of Jerusalem was built at Onion near Heliopolis, the modern Tel el-Yahudiya, or "Mound of the Jews," and the books of the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek. A copy of the Septuagint, as the Greek translation was called, was needed for the Alexandrine Library. ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... Bourbon, Prince of Parma, son of the Duke of Parma, to whom Napoleon had given Tuscany in 1801 as the Kingdom of, Etruria. Her husband had died in May 1808, and she governed in the name of her son. Lucien, whose first wife, Anne Christine Boyer, had died in 1801, had married his second wife, Alexandrine Laurence de Bleschamps, who had married, but who had divorced, a M. Jonberthon. When Lucien had been ambassador in Spain in 1801, charged among other things with obtaining Elba, the Queen, he says, wished Napoleon should marry an Infanta,—Donna Isabella, her ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... gallantry. The first word of the seventeenth line should read "small" instead of "swell". As misprinted, this line conveys a rather incongruous impression. "Mountains in Purple Robes of Mist", a vivid and powerful poem of Nature by Rev. Eugene B. Kuntz, is cast in Alexandrine quatrains, a rather uncommon measure. The only possible defect is in line thirteen, where the accent of the word "sublime" seems to impede the flow of the metre. Line nineteen apparently lacks two syllables, but the deficiency ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Ernest and dear Alexandrine will come in June, and stay some time quietly with us in the country. I saw another beautiful letter of hers, so well and sensibly and religiously written, it would have pleased you. Now adieu! Ever ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... till you shall please to revoke it and leave me at liberty to make my thoughts public. In the meantime, that I may arrogate nothing to myself, I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin and Spenser in English have been my masters. Spenser has also given me the boldness to make use sometimes of his Alexandrine line, which we call, though improperly, the Pindaric, because Mr. Cowley has often employed it in his odes. It adds a certain majesty to the verse when it is used with judgment, and stops the sense from ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... England, where he became familiar with the literary forms and fashions of the Renascence. These he imitated in German, writing odes, songs (for the reader), anacreontics, sonnets, epigrams, elegies in alexandrine verse, and occasional poems of elaborate metrical structure. For the most part his substance is very thin, consisting in extravagant and affected praise, with much infusion of Roman mythology, of the high-born personages ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... immensely successful. When I arrived, your brother was restoring peace, the young Briton holding out his hand—swearing he was sorry, begad! but how the deuce was he to have known ?—and M. Raoul saving the situation, and still demanding blood with a face as long as an Alexandrine: ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... have its peculiar verse, just as snow-flakes cannot exist without their peculiar crystalizations. It is thus that the Iliad is inseparably united, and, as it were, immersed in the stately hexametre, and the French epics, in the graceful Alexandrine verse. The metre of the Kalevala is the "eight-syllabled trochaic, with the part-line echo," and is the characteristic verse of the Finns. The natural speech of this people is poetry. The young men and maidens, the old men and matrons, in their interchange of ideas, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... before the fire and talked till bedtime, when the squires made up the beds in the hall, and brought in supper—dates, figs, nutmegs, spices, pomegranates, and at last lectuaries, suspiciously like what we call jams; and "alexandrine gingerbread"; after which they drank various drinks, with or without spice or honey or pepper; and old moret, which is thought to be mulberry wine, but which generally went with clairet, a colourless grape-juice, or piment. At least, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... this century must not be omitted, the dispersion of the great Alexandrine library, collected by the Ptolemies. In the siege of Alexandria by Julius Caesar, the Philadelphian library in the museum, containing some 400,000 volumes, had been burned; but there still remained the "daughter library" ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... Jeune Malade, Bacchus, Euphrosine and La Jeune Tarentine, the last a synthesis of his purest manner, mosaic though it is of reminiscences of at least a dozen classical poets. As in glyptic so in poetic art, the Hellenism of the time was decadent and Alexandrine rather than Attic of the best period. But Chenier is always far more than an imitator. La Jeune Tarentine is a work of personal emotion and inspiration. The colouring is that of classic mythology, but the spiritual element is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... common in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes, in those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." The present sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of that long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli serves as pattern even ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... participating soul. If he took pleasure in the licentiousness of Plautus and Terence, if he read delightfully those comedies wherein the worst weaknesses are excused and glorified, I believe that he took still more pleasure in the Latin Elegiacs who present without any shame the romantic madness of Alexandrine love. For what sing these poets even to weariness, unless it be that no one can resist the Cyprian goddess, that life has no other end but love? Love for itself, to love for the sake of loving—there is the constant subject ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... on the side of excess. Though I am far from thinking such to be the result in the present instance. The effect of the whole translation is pleasing to me, and the mock-heroic effect I think not a little assisted by the reiterated use of the triplet and alexandrine. As to any evidence of authorship derivable from the appearance of the manuscript, I will only add another word. The lines in the translation have been carefully counted, and the number is marked in Goldsmith's hand at the close of his transcription. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... chose plus belle." Here is an Alexandrine written three hundred years ago, as simple as bon jour. Professor Aytoun is more ornate. After elegantly complimenting the spring, and a description of her Royal Highness's well-known ancestors ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... goes to Petersburgh, and converses with the Empress— Persuades the Russians and Turks to cease cutting one another's throats, and in concert cut a canal across the Isthmus of Suez—The Baron discovers the Alexandrine Library, and meets with Hermes Trismegistus—Besieges Seringapatam, and challenges Tippoo Sahib to single combat—They fight—The Baron receives some wounds to his face, but at last vanquishes the tyrant—The Baron returns to Europe, and raises ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... was the history done therein. The chairs and stools were of carven work well be-painted, and amidmost was a great ivory chair under a cloth of estate, of bawdekin of gold and green, much be-pearled; and all the floor was of fine work alexandrine. ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... many of us ever read or ever will read Drayton's "Poly-Olbion?" Twenty thousand long Alexandrines are filled with admirable descriptions of scenery, natural productions, and historical events, but how many of us in these days have time to read and inwardly digest twenty thousand Alexandrine verses? I fear that the specialist is apt to hold his intelligent reader or hearer too cheap. So far as I have observed in medical specialties, what he knows in addition to the knowledge of the well-taught general practitioner is very largely curious rather than important. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... were written in assonating lines of variable length. There were also numerous monkish narrative poems (mester de clerecia) in stanzas of four Alexandrine lines each, all ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... woman to let her speak again. And you craved for yet more and more of the voix d'or which rang in one's ears as the frail yet exquisite instrument of a mighty music. Never before had it been brought home to me what dramatic art might be, or the power of the French Alexandrine. And never did I come so near quarreling with "Uncle Matt" as when, on our return, after having heard my say about the genius of Sarah Bernhardt, he patted my hand indulgently with the remark, "But, my dear child, you ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... variations in the Old Testament and 150,000 in the New Testament, are very significant facts. The oldest manuscripts of the New Testament are the Alexandrine Codex, known since the commencement of the seventeenth century, and believed to date back to the middle of the fifth century, the Sinaitic, and the Vatican Codices, each believed to have been executed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... are to be recognised in these ideas about the new law. It is not Judaeo-Christianity that lies behind the Christianity and doctrines of the Apologists, but Greek philosophy (Platonic metaphysics, Logos doctrine of the Stoics, Platonic and Stoic ethics), the Alexandrine-Jewish apologetics, the maxims of Jesus, and the religious speech of the Christian Churches. Justin is distinguished from Philo by the sure conviction of the living power of God, the Creator and Lord of the world, and the steadfast confidence in the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... district of Etampes the best houses are as yet the inns. There is certainly a royal castle, in the which lives the queen, the wife of the deceased king; nevertheless his Majesty was pleased to give audience in this hostelry, all covered expressly with cloth of Alexandrine velvet, with lilies of gold at the spot where the king was placed. As soon as the speech was ended, his Majesty rose up and gave quite a brotherly welcome to the brilliant ambassadors. The king has a very good countenance, a smiling countenance; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... in Alexandrine couplets, and is, I believe, the only English poem of any length written in this metre since Drayton's Polyolbion. Browning's metre has scarcely the flexibility of the best French verse, but he allows himself occasionally ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Moreover, in its further development, it led to that necessary contact and interaction between the state systems of the east and the west, which the first Punic war had only foreshadowed; and thereby gave rise to the proximate decisive interference of Rome in the conflicts of the Alexandrine monarchies. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... versification in his historical genre poems celebrating Frederick the Great. The capricious heroes with pigtails do not tolerate smooth verses. The favorite verse-form of their day, however, the stiff alexandrine, characterizes the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... I had observed many years ago, and of which I could then give no satisfactory explanation. I was shooting in the marshes which surround the ruins of Gabia, and where there are still remains supposed to be of the Alexandrine aqueduct; I observed a small insulated hill, apparently entirely composed of travertine, and from its summit there were formations of tufa which had evidently been produced by running water, but the whole mass ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... the, great harm either in giving credit to such a wonder, or, believing it, to make rich a use as he here does of it?—The present is the Archbishop's translation from the ancient Greek copy of the Epistle, which is at the end of the celebrated Alexandrine MS. of the Septuagint and New Testament, presented by Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, to King Charles the First, now in the British Museum. The Archbishop, in prefacing his translation, esteems it a great blessing that this "Epistle" was at ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... Rome to acquire them for Philip V. Eight of them may still be seen in the Museum of Madrid, but the ninth muse, Urania, from which the d'Estes could not then be induced to part, is now in the Sala delle Muse of the Vatican. This is the Urania which Ebers imagines to have been carved by the young Alexandrine sculptor, Pollux, from the Selene whom we are told Antinous ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... read prefaces, and Martelli proves there that his verses have the same effect in Italian as our Alexandrine ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Sone eldeste; For that partie was the beste And double as moche as othre tuo. And was that time bounded so; 560 Wher as the flod which men Nil calleth Departeth fro his cours and falleth Into the See Alexandrine, Ther takth Asie ferst seisine Toward the West, and over this Of Canahim wher the flod is Into the grete See rennende, Fro that into the worldes ende Estward, Asie it is algates, Til that men come unto ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... agree in assigning the primary model to the incantations of the Druids.[25] The lyrical measures of the Gael are various, but the scansion is regular, and there is no description of verse familiar to English usage, from the Iambic of four syllables, to the slow-paced Anapaestic, or the prolonged Alexandrine, which is not exactly measured by these sons and daughters of song.[26] Every poetical composition in the language, however lengthy, is intended to be sung or chanted. Gaelic music is regulated by no positive ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... city that he had a secret interview with his brother Lucien, with whom he wished to be reconciled, but on one absolute condition, sine qua non. It will be remembered that Lucien, against the First Consul's wishes, had married Alexandrine de Bleschamps, widow of M. Jouberthon; who, after being a broker in Paris, had died in Saint Domingo, whither he had followed the French expedition. Napoleon, who was anxious to marry Lucien with Queen Marie Louise, daughter of Charles IV. of Spain, and widow of Louis I., King ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... hardly any Roman or Italian blood in its composition, like the Attic ship which had been repaired with cedar until it retained no fragment of its original oak. Thus, the legion stationed at Antioch became entirely Syrian; that stationed at Alexandria, Grecian, Jewish, and, in a separate sense, Alexandrine. Caesar, it is notorious, raised one entire legion of Gauls (distinguished by the cognizance upon the helmet of the lark, whence commonly called the legion of the Alauda). But he recruited all his legions in Gaul. In Spain the armies of Assanius ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... people, coming and going, gazing at their Duke. He is attired in crimson hose and doublet of black damask. Black velvet slippers are on his feet, and his ducal cap is of black velvet. The mantle of the Garter, made of dark-blue Alexandrine velvet, hooded with crimson, lined with white silk damask, and embroidered with the badge, drapes the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca, that "lily in the mouth of Tartarus." Hunt took Dryden's "Fables" as his model in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent variation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song. That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Essay on Criticism, Part II. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... sister or cousin who plays a sort of superior confidante's part, is by no means uncommon in Romance. Alexandrine, for instance, who plays this in William of Palerne, is a very nice girl. But Urraque or Urraca,[61] the sister of Melior—whether full and legitimate, or "half" illegitimate, versions differ—is much more elaborately dealt with, and is, in ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury |
