"Versifier" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contemporary, that he "not only acted every day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every day for several years; but many of his plays being composed loosely in taverns, occasions them to be so mean." Besides his labors as a playwright, he worked as translator, versifier, and general maker of books. Late in life he conceived the design of writing the lives of all the poets of the world, including his contemporaries. Had this project been carried out, we should have known something about the external life of Shakespeare; for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... reputation was owing to the softness and smoothness of his numbers, it is proper to consider those minute particulars to which a versifier must attend. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... irregular trader, Captain Wollaston, with some thirty or forty people, chiefly servants, established himself in 1625 two miles north of Wessagusset, calling the place Mount Wollaston. With him came that wit, versifier, and prince of roysterers, Thomas Morton, who, after Wollaston had moved on to Virginia, became "lord of misrule." Dubbing his seat Merrymount, drinking, carousing, and corrupting the Indians, affronting the decorous Separatists at Plymouth, Morton later became a serious menace ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... though he lacked the highest art of the versifier, Darwin had, beyond peradventure, the imagination of a poet coupled with profound scientific knowledge; and it was his poetic insight, correlating organisms seemingly diverse in structure and imbuing the lowliest flower with a vital personality, which led him to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... similar nature. To children, however, the best-known volume of the series was Burton's illustrated versification of Bible stories called "The Youth's Divine Pastime." But the subjects chosen by Burton were such as belonged to a very plain-spoken age; and as the versifier was no euphuist in his relation of facts, the result was a remarkable "Pastime for Youth." The literature read by English children was, of course, the same; the little ones of both countries ate of the same tree of knowledge of facts, ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... fair example of the genealogy of the traditions. Phillips, a friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605, leaving a servant, Christopher Beeston (he, too, was a versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682; he is "the chronicle of the stage." Through him Davenant gets the story, through him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere "knew Latin pretty well," and had been a rural dominie. Mr. Greenwood {57a} devotes much space to ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Valla. Maggi, Jerome, Venetian statesman. Maintenon, Madame de, Memoirs. Mariana, John, Spanish historian. Marolles, L'Abb de, translator. Marot, Clement, poet, versifier of Psalms. Marprelate, Martin, nom-de-plume of various Puritan authors. Melanchthon, reformer, works published by Peucer. Molinos, Michael, Spanish theologian. Montague, Lord, victim of Reginald Pole's book. Montanus, Arius, translator of Polyglot Bible. Montgomery, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Skelton thought it necessary in his Phylyp Sparowe to make his 'young maid' excuse herself for her ignorance of 'polished terms' and 'English words elect.' Every one in these days was searching anxiously for the right word, which is indeed the most proper object of every versifier's search. Unluckily, they only ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... is noticeable because he was the first English versifier to adopt the French fashion of writing in couplets, was born in Warwickshire in 1605. He was elected to Parliament at the age of seventeen, and was a member of that body during the greater part of his life. At the beginning of the difficulties between the king ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... individual who had succeeded him after his deposition. On hearing the narrative, Lockhart retired to his apartment and drew up the plan of his tale, which was ready for the press within the short space of three weeks. In 1823, he became known as an elegant versifier, by the publication of his translations from the "Spanish Ballads." He subsequently published a "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte," in "Murray's Family Library;" and produced a "Life of Robert Burns," for "Constable's Miscellany." At this period ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... been called "The Garden of Rest" by some sentimental versifier, but there was no rest for the dead who tried to sleep within its broken walls. The sea kept undermining the crumbling cliffs upon which it stood, carrying away earth, and tombstones, and bones. Nor was it ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... prejudgment."—Red Book, p. 172. "Fertileness, fruitfulness; Fertily, fruitfully, abundantly."—Johnson's Dict. "Chastly, purely, without contamination; Chastness, chastity, purity."—Ib., and Walker's. "Rhymster, n. One who makes rhymes; a versifier; a mean poet."—Johnson and Webster. "It is therefore an heroical achievment to dispossess this imaginary monarch."—Berkley's Minute Philos., p. 151. "Whereby, is not meant the Present Time, as he imagins, but the Time Past."—Johnson's Gram. Com., p. 344 "So far is this word ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... If, as a versifier, Alfred de Vigny does not equal the great poets of his time, if they are his superiors in distinction and brilliancy, in richness of vocabulary, freedom of movement, and variety of rhythm, the cause is to be ascribed less to any lack of poetic genius than to the nature of his inspiration, ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... is nothing more than the measure used by old Drayton in the Polyolbion, and one in which a great deal of the earlier English poetry is written. It is very favourite measure of our Russian poet, who has, however, increased, in some degree, its difficulty for an English versifier, by introducing a great number of double terminations. It will be found, indeed, that these double rhymes are as numerous as the single ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists (Romantiker), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of literature may this be considered: namely, that the same versifier who in his youth fifty years ago saw the coronation from a gallery seat in Westminster Abbey, overlooking the central space, and wrote a well-known ode on the occasion, to be found in his Miscellaneous Poems, is still in full force and loyalty, and ready to supply ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... unusual proportion, artistic workmanship, lyric inspiration; an absence of so much as a trace of morbid feeling, a felicitous and poetic choice of subjects and intuitive good taste raise the writer at once above the ranks of the versifier."—The Arrowhead. ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... of your correspondents be so obliging as to give the years of birth of Merrick, the poet and versifier of the Psalms, and of his biographer, Tattersall. The years of their deaths are given respectively 1769 {61} and 1829: but I can nowhere ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... the flocks of Mr Laidlaw at Blackhouse, was not wholly derived from his skill as a versifier, and capabilities as a musician, but, among the fairer portion of the creation, was perhaps scarcely less owing to the amenity of his disposition, combined with the handsomeness of his person. As a candidate for the honour of feminine approbation, he was successful alike in the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... prose version, dropping into rime only where the modern equivalent of the Middle German took the form of rime naturally. After regular rime becomes established—with Heinrich von Veldeke—I have employed it in all my translations. For my shortcomings as a German versifier I hope to be regarded with a measure of indulgence. The question of inclusion or exclusion could not be made to turn on the prexistence of a good translation, because too much that is important and interesting would have ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... and peaceful character, contrasting therein the tendencies some might have expected from his muscular development of Christianity. He was a great reader of poetry, but he disliked Scott and Byron, whom he considered flashy and noisy; he maintained that Pope was only a versifier, and that the greatest poet in the language was Wordsworth; he did not care much for the ancient classics; he refused all merit to the French poets; he knew nothing of the Italian, but he dabbled in German, and was inclined ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... prose-writer, and a bolder and more varied versifier than Pope. He was a more vigorous thinker, a more correct and logical declaimer, and had more of what may be called strength of mind than Pope; but he had not the same refinement and delicacy of feeling. Dryden's eloquence ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... there is little animation or poetry in his general manner, he usually succeeds in riveting the reader's attention; and the speeches he puts into the mouths of his heroes glow with at least rhetorical fire. And as a critic truly remarks—'Injustice to the ancient versifier, we should remember that he had still only a rude language to employ, the speech of boors and burghers, which, though it might possess a few songs and satires, could afford him no models of heroic ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... its own sake. Many wished for power; a strange desire indeed, since it is but another form of slavery. Old people wished for the delights of youth; a fop for a fashionable coat; an idle reader, for a new novel; a versifier, for a rhyme to some stubborn word; a painter, for Titian's secret of coloring; a prince, for a cottage; a republican, for a kingdom and a palace; a libertine, for his neighbor's wife; a man of palate, for green peas; and a poor man, for a crust of bread. The ambitious desires ...
— The Intelligence Office (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
