"Quatrain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it freezes or snows The greater the value of fat, And the larger the appetite grows Of John, Sandy, Taffy and Pat. (Conversely, in Midsummer days, When liquid more freely one swigs, Less viand the appetite stays— This quatrain's a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 14, 1917 • Various
... by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed furniture comported itself as though it had but three legs—the whitewashed walls had for their only ornament the following quatrain ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... peuple d'impos. This was enough to make the farrier popular and to cause those unhappy sufferers to centre in this poor windbag their hopes for a better future. His portrait was engraved in copper-plate, and below it was written the quatrain of Nostradamus. M. d'Argenson,[2764] who was at the head of the police department, had these portraits seized. They were suppressed, so says the Gazette d'Amsterdam, on account of the last line of the quatrain written beneath the portrait, the line which runs: En delivrant ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter's delight in that fact that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism. He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, "Say, isn't it great, that quatrain about 'Take the cash and let ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... ruin, but that was no reason why he should not sip his iced sherbet and laugh with a pretty French actress to-night. His epicurean formulary was the same as old Herrick's, and he would have paraphrased this poet's famous quatrain into ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... not best to give too much weight to the opinion that Shakespeare has been over-influenced by Daniel in the adoption of the quatrain and couplet structure. The whole period from Wyatt to Shakespeare shows a slow and steady mastery of the native over the foreign tendency. The change was not a sudden leap on the part of Daniel and Shakespeare, but ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... moment and then, while John was pondering over the thoughts that were in his mind when he had said, "The end of it, I suppose," Brennan without another word, quoted a quatrain from the verse that he had recited while they were waiting to overhear the conversation ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... together and form a kind of literary club, meeting at certain periods to read essays or poems on subjects previously agreed upon by all. We heard of one youth who, burning for the poet's laurel, produced the following quatrain on snow, which had been chosen as ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... in 1900 or 1901. In the first quatrain "spoken" does not rhyme with "open"; Butler knew this and would not alter it because there are similar assonances in Shakespeare, e.g. "open" and "broken" in ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... his perplexity, he sought the advice of the celebrated Metastasio, who had been for some time established at Vienna as the favorite poet of the court, and the Italian, with the ready wit of his country, at once supplied him with a quatrain, which, in her disappointment itself, could mid ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... not, but in our present state of development, cannot. The quatrain is the analogue of the Greek gem, the consummate flower of the national art of the period. It will take at least a century to perfect and exhaust it. Have you ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... marks the style of Davenant, though in a less degree than that of the metaphysical poets, and though chequered with many examples of a simpler and chaster character. Some part of this deviation was, perhaps, owing to the nature of the stanza; for the structure of the quatrain prohibited the bard, who used it, from rambling into those digressive similes, which, in the pindaric strophe, might be pursued through endless ramifications. If the former started an extravagant thought, or a quaint ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... in seven hours, the last three over the angry waters of the open North Sea. To my surprise the steamer, though island-owned, did not fly the British red ensign, but the Heligoland flag of horizontal bars of white, green, and red. There is a local quatrain explaining these colours, which ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... regret is not wholly sentimental may be proved, I think, by an exchange of verses, which we owe to Vasari's literary sagacity. He tells us that when the statue of the Night was opened to the public view, it drew forth the following quatrain from an author unknown to himself ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... memory, for, like that erudite body, it takes pleasure in trying to better what is done. On the occasion of the meeting of which the following gems of poesy are the result, the several members of the club engaged to write up the well-known tradition of the Purple Cow in more elaborate form than the quatrain made famous by Mr. ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... whom the king had appointed her a maid of honor. It is a question whether she did not even then exercise over Charles VII. that influence, serviceable alike to the honor of the king and of France, which was to inspire Francis I., a century later, with this gallant quatrain: ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... quatrain has the distinction of having been touched upon by Thackeray. When Mr. Locker's manuscript went to the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... short account of this is in the story of King Dathi (O'Curry Lectures, p. 286). The tale seems to be alluded to in the quatrain on p. 10 of ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... verses of Canute, on passing Ely; the lines to a cuckoo, given by Warton as the oldest specimen of English verse; a translation "by a gentleman in Devonshire," of the death-song of Regner Lodbrog; and the beautiful quatrain omitted in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... provision in the will of Olild, against Kellachan Cashel (A.D. 940-2), but at the Convention held at Glanworth, on the river Funcheon, for the selection of king, the aged mother of Kellachan addressed his rival in a quatrain, beginning— ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... two generations before her people lived and thought. So that I have a grasp on the past which many might envy, and yet the present and the future are even more to me, as they were to my mother. On her death in 1887 I wrote a quatrain for her memorial, and which those who ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... 23: This is a description of the Tuscan rispetto. In Sicily the stanza generally consists of eight lines rhyming alternately throughout, while in the North of Italy it is normally a simple quatrain. The same poetical material assumes in Northern, Central, and Southern Italy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... giving her daughter to the Duc d'Aumale. She even went so far that certain authors declared she gave more than mere good-will to the gallant Cardinal de Lorraine; and the lampooners of the time made the following quatrain on Henri II: ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the decasyllabic quatrain for the triple rhyme of the Italian, we suppose Dr. Parsons desired rather to please the reader's ear with a familiar stanza, than to avoid the difficulties (exaggerated, we think, by critics) of the terza rima, and he could certainly have chosen no more felicitous form after once departing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... some, it is the best in our literature; to others, it is not poetry at all, but merely rhythmic prose. It is lacking in passion, in poetic glow—for how can fire come out of an iceberg?—but about some of it there is the clean-cut beauty of the cameo. You know, of course, his immortal quatrain, ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... fire of 1618. Two other very plausible explanations exist: First, the great flaming star, a foot broad, and a cubit high, which fell from heaven, as every one knows, upon the law courts, after midnight on the seventh of March; second, Theophile's quatrain,— ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... reason, the rather insipid quatrain was tortured into a baleful prophecy. It was considered very ominous that the battery should be first opened against this Sibylline tower. The chimes, too, which had been playing, all through the siege, the music of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Frank's father would have disapproved of the way my Philosopher takes his poetry. His favorite poem is "A frog he would a-wooing go,"—especially the first quatrain. His analysis is very defective; he takes it as a whole. He likes the mystery of it, the quick ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Friponne, determined to supply the people with food at low prices. The enmity between Philibert and the Intendant was common talk, and over his doorway the merchant had hung, beneath the figure of a dog in bas-relief, the following whimsical quatrain:— ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the Roman writers,—then the eighteenth century deluged us with ill-natured witty epigrams of the like brief form. It was not until comparatively modern times that our Western world fully recognized the value of the distich, triplet or quatrain for the expression of beautiful thoughts, rather than for the expression of ill-natured ones. But now that the recognition has come, it has been discovered that nothing is harder than to write a beautiful poem of two or four lines. Only great masters have been truly successful ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... Porson in the Greek chair. As a specimen of this translation,[27] we cite one stanza; and we cannot be supposed to select unfairly, because it is the stanza which Mathias praises in extravagant terms. "Here," says he, "Gray, Cook, and nature, do seem to contend for the mastery." The English quatrain must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... resemble the following quatrain in the Satyre Menippee, being one of the several verses appended to the tapestry on which was wrought ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... Power of a Commonwealth. His style is clear, manly, and vigorous. He tried to write poetry too. At the advanced age of eighty-five, he wrote a translation of the whole of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into rhymed English verse, using the same quatrain and the same measure that Dryden employed in his 'Annus Mirabilis.' Two lines are still remembered of this translation: speaking of a child and his mother, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... quatrain is also very effective. The poem on the whole, however, is chiefly to be admired for the graceful insouciance of its metre, so well in accordance with the character of the sentiments, and especially for the ease of the general manner. This "ease" or naturalness, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
