"Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rose up like an apple-dumpling under his single eye,—single, we say—for, alas! there was no speculation in the other. His dexter daylight was utterly darkened, and, indeed, the orb that remained was as sanguinary a luminary as ever struggled through a London fog at noonday. To borrow a couplet or so from ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... villages, when the young people are returning home. They separate in two bands: some holding each other by the waist, some round the neck. The foremost party go about thirty steps in silence, while those behind sing a couplet in chorus; the first then stop, sing the second verse, and wait till those behind have joined them; and the latter sing the third verse as they arrive at home. This chant is called, in the country, Passe-carrere. Every now and then the song is intermingled with ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... he began to study its construction. In his leisure hours, he took it to pieces and put it together again several times, in order to understand it. So of William Hutton, whose name is mentioned in another place. Encouraged by a couplet which he read in ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... supper seemed to me to be most niggardly, and the sight of the dishes put before me disgusted me: but had I been offered ortolans, I would not have been tempted, my heart was so full. The meal finished as it had begun, with a patriotic song. We knelt down at the couplet of the Marseillaise which begins "Amour sacr de la patrie"...Then we filed out, as we had come in, to the sound of a drum, and ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... you! Here's a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. "Here's a stanza[6] On Braganza— Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup Of warm water—" "What's the matter?" "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... this cruel and ungenerous treatment that he never recovered, but died in the same year [1245], after having ruled twelve years with the greatest mildness, prudence, and benevolence. This story of the Pope's arbitrary conduct calls forth a very pithy couplet ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... but little, and the little she did was broken, fitful, and disturbed by hideous dreams, in which her husband and children, Aunt Debie, and herself, were all mixed up in horrible confusion; and when awake she found the couplet of the poet ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... head drearily, as a couplet from Collins's "Camel-Driver," with its strange appropriateness, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... last, truly enough, our pathway led among the chickens and the geese. Indeed, one blustering gander "quite thought to bar our way." But, taking courage from the stirring old couplet, ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... Blood was his element, like that of the other Terrorists, and he never fastened with so much pleasure on a new victim, as when he was at the same time an ancient associate. In an epitaph, of which the following couplet may serve as a translation, his life was represented as incompatible with the existence of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... Dryden were largely influential in establishing the heroic couplet, [Footnote: The heroic couplet consists of two iambic pentameter lines that rime. By "pentameter" is meant that the line has five feet or measures; by "iambic," that each foot contains two syllables, the first short ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... and discord in the world comes from things not matching properly as they should; and he thought there ought to be a certain correspondence between all things that were in juxtaposition to each other, just as there ought to be between the last two words of a couplet of poetry. But he found, very often, there was no correspondence at all, just as words in poetry do not always rhyme when they should. However, he did his best to remedy it. He saw that every one of his children's names was ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... been expected of the venerable commander of the army of the Shenandoah. He had spent three months of time, and ten millions of money, and had only emulated the acts of that Gallic sovereign whose great deeds are immortalized in the brief couplet, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... religious poetry has gone down into the deeps. There are indications of such a tendency in the older times, but neither then were the questions so articulate, nor were the questioners so troubled for an answer. The alternative expressed in the middle couplet seems to me the most imperative of all questions—both for the individual and for the church: Is man fashioned by the hands of God, as a potter fashioneth his vessel; or do we indeed come forth from his heart? ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... too much wit for him. Towards the latter end of 1732, 'The Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace,' appeared, and in it Pope attacked Lady Mary with the grossest and most indecent couplet ever printed: she was called Sappho, and Hervey, Lord Fanny; and all the world knew ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... 'September' we find an eclogue of the 'wise shepherd' type. It is composed in the rough accentual metre, and opens with a couplet which roused the ire ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... direct part in it, did much to embitter the relations of their respective parties.[16] Not less irritating were the jeux d'esprit with which Canning continued to assail the ministry in the newspaper press.[17] The most famous of these is the couplet:— ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... and quality which the received forms can bear, and which are consequently likely to be acceptable to people of artistic perceptions. If a Tennyson had lived in the time of Pope, he would doubtless have used the heroic couplet faithfully, and put into it just a small increase of melody, a slightly more graceful play of thought, a finer observation of natural things—but he probably would not have strayed beyond the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... a 'respite,' it was not that he was scared at the approach of death. His mind was never brighter and happier. To this moment may well be attributed, as it has been by popular tradition, his composition of the couplet: ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... A couplet of verse, a period of prose, may cling to the rock of ages as a shell that survives ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... massive arms and legs, the latter somewhat bowed, making him appear even shorter than he was. It was these legs of his, together with his big round head and shock of reddish hair, that inspired some genius of the school with a couplet which was often chanted by the boys when they caught sight of Joe in the ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian model, and generally end with a couplet. Her blank verse is the worst of all. The most ambitious poem in the book is that called "A Day in the Life of Mary Stuart," a dramatic poem in three scenes, dated the last of January, 1567. It contains a scene between ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... voluntary at the opening of service. Then the old minister said, "Let us continue the worship of God by singing the hymn on page 554." He "lined" the hymn—that is, he read each couplet before it was sung. With the coming in of hymn books and other newfangled things the good old custom of "lining the hymn" has disappeared. But on that Sunday morning the Marquis d'Entremont thought he had never heard anything more delightful than these simple melodies sung thus ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... after an unusually good dinner, when the world and the Madigans were young together, had inspired Old Mother Gibson. The original couplet, with which all Madigans are familiar, is not strictly quotable; it was not invented, but adopted, by them. And it served merely to give a name to the game, which was half a war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted couplets composed by each performer ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Hebrew, each clause consists of three words. In such an antithetic parallelism the words of one couplet, at least, must correspond in meaning, as here memory and name; while the others are in contrast—just and wicked, is blessed and shall rot. Sometimes the two clauses are to be mutually supplied ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... garret—let him know't who will—- There was my bed—full hard it was and small; My table there—and I decipher still Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall. Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away, Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun: For you I pawned my watch how many a day, In the brave days ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was quite common among the Lowland Covenanters; and I believe Peden's Prophecies may still be found among the lumber of the book-shops. An old lady, in Irvine, once repeated to me the following couplet, as ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... conduced to adiposity. They stepped on the stage, taking chairs with them, for in Spain you do not stand to sing, and were greeted with plentiful applause. The little fat man began to play the long prelude to the couplet; the old woman clapped her hands and occasionally uttered a raucous cry. The poetess gazed into the air for inspiration. The guitarist twanged on, and in the audience there were scattered cries of Ole! Her companions ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the day to exercise their wit upon, and there are many allusions to it in the Age and Satirist of the period; but, as their remarks are not always conceived in the best taste, they are better left in the obscurity in which they now dwell. Perhaps, however, this little couplet from ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... it was the character which the Dame Lebrun had reserved for herself; and her couplet would have been out of place in any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... older man, who walked less vigorously, echoed the couplet with slow emphasis, as if savouring every word. Then both together, bowing their cowled ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... was my fault, I suppose it generally is the woman's fault—he took me in his arms and called me his little girl, and kissed me again and again. He ought not to have kissed me if we were to part, he ought not. You know the old couplet: ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... the Stuarts in 1759 the town was hardly at any time in a state of quietude. As described by an observant writer, "every man became a soldier and every house that was not a mere peasant's hut was a fortress." A local poet of the Seventeenth Century summed it up in a terse if not elegant couplet as his ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... it is certain that no poetical student, would have deplored its destruction, if its demerits—hardly relieved, as his first competent editor has happily remarked, by the occasional incidence of a fine and felicitous couplet—could in that case have been imagined. His translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the original and falls short of it; often inferior to the Latin in point and weight of expressive rhetoric, now and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... staring into the dying fire. (That was a jolly fire!) Presently her head bent over to my shoulder, and without looking up she quoted a familiar couplet which must have occurred to the reader ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... nearly the same condition. We do very little, and they do absolutely nothing. All of us in our younger days, I am quite sure, were taught by those who had the care of us a verse which was intended to inculcate the virtue of industry. One couplet ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... reproach forever, just because a few poor miserable fellows once came over here to fight you. Was it not enough to have treated them as you say you did in the Jerseys? For the benefit of you and those less prejudiced, I will translate the couplet:— ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... and by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in one of his Odes.-D. [She was the daughter of Mr. Hawes, a South Sea director, and died in 1788. Lord Vane died in 1789. Boswell distinctly states, that the lady mnentioned in Johnson's couplet "was not the celebrated Lady Vane, whose Memoirs were given to the public by Dr. Smollett, but Ann Vane, who was mistress to Frederick Prince of Wales, and died in 1736, not long before Johnson settled in London." See Boswell's Johnson, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... and Jimmy had almost forgotten that it was a milk pail, and seemed inclined to resent the fact that it had gone empty. He beat time on the bottom of it, and frequently interrupted the Thread Man to repeat a couplet which particularly suited him. By and by he got to his feet and began stepping off a slow dance to a sing-song repetition of lines that sounded musical to him, all the time marking the measures vigorously on the pail. When he tired of a couplet, he pounded the ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... paged. Personae. Couplet headed 'Lectori'. Prologue. Epilogue at the end. The third edition really, two having appeared in 1637. On the verso of the titlepage and of the next leaf are some verses inscribed in ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... ascribed to him who appeared the most calculated to have written it, and who indeed claimed it for his own—the chevalier de Boufflers. I do not know whether you recollect the lines in question. I will transcribe them from memory, adding another couplet, which was only known amongst our own particular circle, but which proves most incontestably the spirit of kindness with which the stanzas were composed. Lise, ta beaute seduit, Et charme tout le monde. En vain la duchesse en rougit, Et la princesse en gronde, Chacun sait que Venus naquit ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... silence and said to the King, "Do you hear, Sire, what Campan says to us?"—"Yes, I hear," said the King, and continued his game. Monsieur, who was in the habit of introducing passages from plays into his conversation, said to my father-in-law, "M. Campan, that pretty little couplet again, if you please;" and pressed the King to reply. At length the Queen said, "But something must be said to Campan." The King then spoke to my father-in-law in these words: "Tell M. d'Inisdal that I cannot consent to be carried off!" The Queen enjoined M. Campan to take ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... I who have lived," writes George Sand, "and not an unreal being created by my pride and my ennui." We all know the use to which Musset put this phrase. He wrote the famous couplet of Perdican with it: "All men are untruthful, inconstant, false, chatterers, hypocritical, proud, cowardly, contemptible and sensual; all women are perfidious, artful, vain, inquisitive and depraved. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... the poem. I have read much indifferent modern verse in my time—I sometimes take a slush-bath after tea at the club—but I could not have imagined the English language capable of such emulsion. It was execrable. The first couplet alone ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of the marriage of my sister Louise and the King of the Belgians. But lo! at the climax of the piece, the principal performer came forward, before the newly married couple, the Royalties, and all the great personages forming the audience, and burst forth with a gag couplet, which nobody expected. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... This beautiful couplet must delight you, I think. I will also give you the two last verses about Clora: though it is more complete and better without them: strange to say. You must have the goodness to repeat those you know over first, and then fall upon these: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... stage have now vanished completely—Gifford deals severely in his "Baviad." "Such is the reputation this gentleman has obtained for epilogue writing, that the minor poets of the day, despairing of emulating, are now only solicitous of assisting him—happy if they can obtain admission for a couplet or two into the body of his immortal works, and thus secure to themselves a small portion of that popular applause so lavishly and so justly bestowed on everything that bears the signature of Miles Andrews!" A few lines make ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... sorceress can straightway be offset by that of her sister. And we have our Scribe's word for it, that the Dervish went as far and as deep with the huris, as the doctors eventually would permit him. That is why, we believe, in commenting upon his adventures there, he often quotes the couplet, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of Brill was April 1st, and Alva, who was then at Brussels, suffered tortures from the Belgian wits. The word Brill, by a happy chance, signifies spectacles, and a couplet was sung ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... the field in a blue satin waistcoat and nankeen trousers. At the instant we entered the dancing-room, he had commenced lisping to Miss Biddy, in a tender love-subdued tone, a couplet which he had committed to memory for the occasion, when a glance of terrible meaning from Terence's eye met his—the unfinished stanza died in his throat, and without waiting the nearer encounter of his dreaded rival, he retreated to a distant corner of the apartment, leaving ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... single flash can show what volumes men might write and not reveal. Pope crippled meaning and weakened force to procure a rhyme—nay, since he actually planned the rhymes to make his couplets before he penned his poetry, to him not infrequently it was far more to rhyme than realise. In Goldsmith's couplet, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... a Welsh couplet, still well known in the neighbourhood of beautiful Bala Lake in Merionethshire, which, translated into ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... having a knitting class, with the woman, her married daughter, and a woman from the camp, as pupils. Then I have gained ground with the man by being able to catch and saddle a horse. I am often reminded of my favorite couplet,— ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Chrestien, by most if not all competent students of him, was pretty uniform, and, though quite favourable, not extraordinarily high. He was recognised as a past-master of the verse roman d'aventures in octosyllabic couplet, who probably took his heterogeneous materials wherever he found them; "did not invent much" (as Thackeray says of Smollett), but treated whatever he did treat in a singularly light and pleasant manner, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... that," spoke Mr. Lagg, being now too interested to quote a couplet. "Matters were going on well, and I expected to close the deal, and make a pretty penny, when the doctors said they couldn't take the property, as it was haunted, and of course a haunted house, with queer noises in the night, would never do as a home ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... lonely wilderness, that ring has shone upon my hand, reminding me always of her who gave it, and on this hand it shall go down into the grave. It is a plain circlet of thick gold, somewhat worn now, a posy-ring, and on its inner surface is cut this quaint couplet: ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... must fetch a draught of water, In the glass with painted wings,[1] Nurse must show her little daughter All her tale of silver rings, Dear sweet nurse must sing a couplet—solemn nurse, who never sings! ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... and the audience, tittering curiously before, remained spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness of the ending of comedies, of the regret which lingers in the remembrance of past laughter. In a couplet of passionate melancholy she asked, where are the roses of yesterday? whither ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... ferry boat throw their ropes over the great piles as they make fast in the slip. Nancy was such a pile—but what an odious figure! He thought of her face as he had first seen it on the night of the Vernal, when, slightly flushed and smilingly expectant, she had peered into the costume closet. A couplet floated out of Freshman English into his mind—something about a countenance which had in it sweet records and promises as sweet. He jumped out of bed to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... a private circle." He regarded Swift, however, as a pattern of correctness both in style and sentiment, and he read to his young friend some of the short poetical addresses to Stella. Amicus says Smith expressed particular pleasure with one couplet— ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... will be good fun for you to find out what it means. He adds that there is but one letter of the alphabet wanting, to make sense; this is used over and over, and, if you put it into the right places, the text will turn into a rhymed couplet. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... communicated to parliament in the midst of a furious discussion of the decree for the commercial monopoly. The first president, who had been absent for a short time, re-entered, and communicated the tidings in a whimsical couplet: ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... out of your Hole."—In Surrey, and most probably in other counties where {133} shell-snails abound, children amuse themselves by charming them with a chant to put forth their horns, of which I have only heard the following couplet, which is repeated until it has the desired effect, to the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... is excellent in this vast production there are also dreary stretches of rambling loquacity, hollow rhetoric and unintelligible jumbles of words and phrases. He could be insupportably dull and again express more in a single stanza, couplet or phrase than many have said in a whole book. A study of his poetry is, therefore, not unlike a journey through a vast country, alternating in fertile valleys, barren plains and lofty heights with entrancing views into ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... a couplet," said the great poet Saxe. "Oh, how many a slip 'twixt the couplet and the cup! Abdomen dominates. When Homer had ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... of French criticism had imprisoned nearly all our poetry in the heroic couplet, outside exercise was allowed only to those who undertook to serve ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... You know the couplet, Mr. Rady. Why shouldn't I quote Sandoe? You know you like him, Rady. But, if you've missed me, I'm sorry. Rip and I have had a beautiful day. We've made new acquaintances. We've seen the world. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was published, Mr. Thomson sent a copy of it as a present to Mr. Joseph Mitchell, his countryman, and brother poet, who, not liking many parts of it, inclosed to him the following couplet; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... instead of four times in the first part. The pause is in them, as in the rest, variously placed through the course of the verses; and thus they bear no more resemblance than their associates, to those minute Elegies of twelve alternate rhimes, closing with a couplet, which assume the name of Sonnet, without any other resemblance to that order of Verse, except their limitation to fourteen lines. I never found the quadruple rhimes injurious to the general expression of the sense, but in the excepted instances. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... distant to get there and back in half an hour. He was just thinking of giving it up and turning back, when a sound behind one of the hedges close to him startled him and sent his heart to his mouth. He stood still to listen, and heard a gruff voice say—or rather intone—the following mysterious couplet: ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... in a gush of politeness, he insisted on seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking, Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet, which covered ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... great antiquity alluded to by Alpha before it came to the Museum. Well, in all of these, with, I believe, only one exception, the account of the moves does occur exactly (!) as I have given them, always excepting or rather excluding a couplet about two camels (die namliche nicht in die Bude des Tachenspielers passten es weiter unten) Und nun geht es echt fesuitisch weiter, Alpha denies the existence (!) (A hat in Gegentheil Hyde I, p. 63 Citirt) ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... not necessarily acetic. The presence of vinegar in a dressing, like that of onions and its relatives, on most occasions should be suspected only. Wyvern and other true epicures consider the advice of Sydney Smith, as expressed in the following couplet, "most pernicious":— ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... mankind in that pillar like some old hermit was the very man of whom to ask his way. Cold, he might be; little sympathy he had, perhaps, with human passion—the column seemed too tall for that; but if Truth didn't live in the base of the Monument, notwithstanding Pope's couplet about the outside of it, where in London (thought Tom) was she ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... is now to be taken in; and as the method of performing this evolution has long been a subject of hot controversy at sea, I take the opportunity of saying, that Falconer's couplet,— ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... his picture to Queen Christina of Sweden to commemorate the peace he concluded with her in 1654, Marvell, though not then attached to the public service, was employed to write the Latin couplet that accompanied the picture. He ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Addresses' should still carry weight. In the burlesque couplet, ascribed in the first edition to the younger Colman and afterwards transferred to ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... water poet, has a doggerel narrative entitled "A New Discovery by Sea with a Wherry from London to Salisbury," 1623, wherein he mentions a woful night with fleas at Goring, and pens a couplet worthy to take a place with the famous description of a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... in the "Cambro-Briton" is somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet: ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... a warm, lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal, and wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town, at these hours, must be ghostly enough on its neighboring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect, - as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, complete ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... about a sixteenth part of the sum he had promised. The indignant author would accept no remuneration at all, but wrote a satire upon Mahmood instead; but he was merciful in his revenge, for he reached no more than the seven-thousandth couplet. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... question whether the children are amused. Occasionally there is a line with the old ring to it, a couplet seasoned with Attic salt, but for the rest there is the body without the spirit,—there is the well of English undefiled, but it is pumped dry! Probably the desire to publish was never so great as during Landor's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... goes in to her this night." When he heard this, he planned to enter the house amongst the mob of women and saw the twain seated on the bridal couch.[FN107] By and by, the bridegroom came up to her, whereupon she sighed heavily and weeping, recited this couplet, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... relationship is the basis of marriage. The famous couplet of Rosalind still holds good. The sex instinct (or rather instincts, for coupled with sex-desire is love of beauty, admiration, joy of possession, triumph, etc.) has the unique place of being more regulated by law and custom than any other basic instinct. The law holds ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... damned one, O dog of the Nazarenes, art thou come to such power that thou durst assail me with the King of the Franks?" Then quoth he to his guards, "Take this accursed and do him die"; and he repeated this couplet,[FN26] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... vegetables grow and live; animals grow, live, and feel;" this is the well-worn, not to say out-worn, diagnosis of the three kingdoms by Linnaeus. It must be said of it that the agreement indicated in the first couplet is unreal, and that the distinction declared in the second is evanescent. Crystals do not grow at all in the sense that plants and animals grow. On the other hand, if a response to external impressions ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... {36} This couplet was introduced by the Authors by way of bravado, in answer to one who alleged that the English language ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... on love, though overcharged with quaint conceits, are often noble and true, and end at least with one fine couplet: ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... men. Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, in their ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in all the tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' the heroic couplet and similar devices can inflict. For all these men had loved Virgil, though not wisely: and now their penance was to hear each other read their ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... also that Addison exhibits, at least in the first of the two essays on Chevy Chase, a degree of the normal Augustan condescension to the archaic—the vision which informs the earlier couplet poem on the English poets. Both in his quotation from Sidney ("... being so evil apparelled in the Dust and Cobweb of that uncivil Age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous Eloquence of Pindar?") and in his own apology for the "Simplicity ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... literature attains its highest excellence in poetry. The art of composing short poems in which a thought, emotion or spiritual experience is expressed with a few simple but pregnant words in the compass of a single couplet or short hymn, was carried by the early Buddhists to a perfection which has never been excelled. The Dhammapada[645] is the best known specimen of this literature. Being an anthology it is naturally more suited for quotation or recitation in sections than for continuous ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... her husband's leave to relinquish her right to it. Like wildfire the news of the young queen's generosity spread throughout Paris; and in all the streets, cafe, and cabarets the people were singing this couplet ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... which he considered her justly entitled, but it would not avail; the purpose of the most resolute man on earth was powerless against a determination equal to his own. Never was more forcibly exemplified the truth of the old couplet: ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... letters on translated verse. He once took an opportunity, in conversation with Mr. Pitt, to magnify that beauty, and to compliment him upon it. Mr. Pitt thought this article far less considerable than Mr. Benson did; but says he, 'since you are so fond of alliteration, the following couplet upon Cardinal Woolsey will ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... He quoted the couplet with a subdued fervour which characterized the man and explained his worldly lot. Elkanah Madden should never have entered the medical profession; mere humanitarianism had prompted the choice in his dreamy youth; ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... lost at sea, and in the grave-yard of his native place a stone was erected with the following couplet inscribed thereon: ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... placid natures fill the allotted scene With lifeless drawls, insipid and serene; While others' thunder every couplet o'er, And almost crack your ears with rant and roar; More nature oft, and finer strokes are shown In the low whisper than tempestuous tone; And Hamlet's hollow voice and fixed amaze, More powerful terror to the mind conveys Than he, who, swollen with impetuous rage, Bullies the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... helpless yet defiant in her desolation, some subtle thread of association, guided, perhaps, by the invisible fingers of her guardian angel, led her mind to a favorite couplet often ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... tangled up between the "sleigh" in the carriage-house, and the act of pussy in mauling the poor little mouse, unmentioned, but of importance, in the couplet: ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... where the difficulty lay. The papers signed C. and L. are by far the most numerous, the majority of the remainder being distinguished by two stars, or the signature "Lilbourne." These are understood to have been from the pen of James Ralph, whose poem of Night gave rise to a stinging couplet in the Dunciad, but who was nevertheless a man of parts, and an industrious writer. As will be remembered, he had contributed a prologue to the Temple Beau, so that his association with Fielding must have been of some standing. ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... about by the old black crow, could be counteracted by repeating the following words, (a translation of the second couplet), with a pause between each line, and thus the last line would assume the form ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... master. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by Shakespeare's contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. {95b} A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... itself, supply it by a preface; but a postscript seems to me the more just way of apology; because otherwise a man makes an excuse before the offence is committed. All the heroic poets were guessed at for its author; but though we could not find out his name, yet one repeated a couplet in ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... be done; in a corner of the house must he stand and repeat that couplet, till some tender-hearted lass relieves him. Now for the questions which are most deeply laid, or so touching to him, that he finds much difficulty to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... {gramma} and {epigramma} almost in the sense of sepulchural epigrams; {epigegrammai grammata legonta tade}, and a little further on, {epixosmesantes epigrammasi xai stelesi}, "epitaphs and monuments". Among these epitaphs is the celebrated couplet of Simonides[3] which has found a place in all ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... his happy serenity. All day long, in the back-shop where the penetrating smell of paste mingled with the fumes of the cabbage-soup, he lived a life of his own, a life of incomparable splendours. His little Corneille, scored thickly with thumb-nail marks at every couplet of Emilie's, was all he needed to foster the fairest of illusions. A face and the tones of a voice were ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... contract of marriage before its consummation; her second, the Infante of Spain, died immediately after their union; and her third, the duke of Savoy, left her again a widow after three years of wedded life. She was a woman of talent and courage; both proved by the couplet she composed for her own epitaph, at the very moment of a dangerous accident which happened during her journey into Spain to ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... sounding. It is persistent even amid the triumph of the drama. Take away from Shakespeare all his bits of natural description, all his casual allusions to the life and aspects of the country, and what a loss were there! The reign of the iambic couplet confined, but could not suppress, this native music; Pope notwithstanding, there came the "Ode to Evening" and that "Elegy" which, unsurpassed for beauty of thought and nobility of utterance in all ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... these finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the Bold granted armorial ensigns (1382) to Dijon, with the motto moult me tarde (I wish for ardently). The merchants of Sinapi copied this on their wares, the middle word of the motto being accidentally effaced. A well-known couplet of lines supposed to occur in Hudibras (but not to be found there), has long baffled ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... is a couplet I remember learning long ago, when I was a child, and how applicable it is to this problem of deception. Truly, it is a tangled web, and the only way to get it untangled is to break off the thread and go back to the ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... fact, was said to have written on the slates in the yard a couplet about a classmate of his who often rode home from the college ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... L'Hopital, Montdore and Turnebus, as one of the foremost Latin poets of his time. Here also Buchanan formed a lasting friendship with Julius Caesar Scaliger; in later life he won the admiration of Joseph Scaliger, who wrote an epigram on Buchanan which contains the couplet, famous in its day:— ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... 62. 7-9 there are some verses to P[u]shan, following which is the most holy couplet of the Rig Veda, to repeat which is essentially to repeat the Veda. It is the famous G[a]yatr[i] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... gayly, and the old classical couplet sent his thoughts off to the Aegean sea and the Greek fishermen, and the superstitions which are the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... pornography. There were not words strong enough for the denunciation—-of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots, had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people ("By that," Herder has said, "it is distinguished from all other nations.")—the faithful people (treues Volk ... Treu meaning everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—the People par excellence, as Fichte says—German Force, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... who neither sing nor say, Grave without thought, and without feeling gay, 60 Whose numbers in one even tenor flow, Attuned to pleasure, and attuned to woe; Who, if plain Common-Sense her visit pays, And mars one couplet in their happy lays, As at some ghost affrighted, start and stare, And ask the meaning of her coming there: For bards like these a wreath shall Mason[97] bring, Lined with the softest down of Folly's ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Verstegan's couplet, even if it be not strictly true, makes a very good text for a discourse on our local names. The ham, or home, and the ton, or town, originally an enclosure (cf. Ger. Zaun, hedge), were, at any rate in a great part of England, the regular nucleus of the village, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... so well known for his great acquisitions in oriental literature, was no less remarkable for his piety.—A friend reciting Sir Edward Coke's couplet of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various |
