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More "Metrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kind of monotonous chant, the clapping of hands, the striking of rude instruments: there are measured movements, measured words, and measured tones. The early records of historic races similarly show these three forms of metrical action united in religious festivals. In the Hebrew writings we read that the triumphal ode composed by Moses on the defeat of the Egyptians, was sung to an accompaniment of dancing and timbrels. The Israelites danced and sung ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... success. And, as Lockhart has sufficiently shown, it was impossible for Scott to get to it except through the years of exploration and editing, the collection of the Border ballads, the study of the old metrical romance of Sir Tristrem. The story of the Goblin Page was at first reckoned enough simply for one of the additions to the Border Minstrelsy on the scale of a ballad. Scott had tried another sort of imitation in the stanzas composed in old English and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... city a circular was sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal—not metrical—translation and had issued them ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... of the nature jocularly imputed to them by the Baron, were really laid to the charge of the Highland insurgents; for which many traditions, and particularly one respecting the Knight of the Mirror, may be quoted as good evidence. [Footnote: A homely metrical narrative of the events of the period, which contains some striking particulars, and is still a great favourite with the lower classes, gives a very correct statement of the behaviour of the mountaineers respecting this same military license; and, as ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... means a screw of five feet in length and two inches in diameter was cut with fifty threads to the inch; the Nut to fit on to it being twelve inches long, and containing six hundred threads! This screw was principally used for dividing scales for astronomical and other metrical purposes of the highest class. By its means divisions were produced with such minuteness that they could only be made visual ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... temporal proportion. Those groups which are identical in figure must also be uniform in duration if they are to enter as substitutionary groups into a rhythmical sequence.[5] When the acatalectic type is alternately departed from and returned to in the course of the rhythmical sequence, the metrical equivalents must present total time-values which, while differing from that of the full measure in direction and degree, in dependence on the whole form of their structure, maintain similar fixed relations to the primary type. The changes which these flexible quantities undergo will here ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... even remotely concerned with metrical analysis. For that phase, with a discussion as to the effect of the various metrical systems, see Klotz, Grundzuge der altromischen Metrik, esp. p. 370 ff. Cf. Duff, A Lit. Hist. of Rome, p. 196. Note Donat, de Com. VIII. 9 ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... The cardinal of St. George, in his poetical, or rather metrical history of the election and coronation of Boniface VIII., (Muratori Script. Ital. tom. iii. P. i. p. 641, &c.,) describes the state and families of Rome at the coronation of Boniface VIII., (A.D. 1295.) Interea titulis redimiti ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... pastoral duties, a diligence and faithfulness such as to put him for the most part above censure, the young husband toiled hard in literary work for the support of his household, and by various publications of a theological character in verse and prose—at one time a metrical Life of Christ, at another a treatise on The Hebrew Points, and chiefly by articles in Dunton's Athenian Oracle—he earned the means of keeping his ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art—unfailing ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... and the only things about which he was enthusiastic in Italy, except the fragments of antiquity which he loved for their associations, were the paintings of Raphael and Guido Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metrical effects, those sublime inventions in prosody, with which the great masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this respect, and Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless. Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of complicated wholes, were never his. He is supreme, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... greater importance, however, are the works which constitute Anglo-Norman historiography. The first Anglo-Norman historiographer is Geoffrey Gaimar, who wrote his Estorie des Angles (between 1147 and 1151) for Dame Constance, wife of Robert Fitz-Gislebert (The Anglo-Norman Metrical Chronicle, Hardy and Martin, i. ii., London, 1888). This history comprised a first part (now lost), which was merely a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, preceded by a history of the Trojan War, and a second part which carries us as far as the death ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... by your unions. The social and recreative side of life you have now taken over into your keeping, you order recreation which shall be as music or as poetry in your associated lives, harmonious, melodious, rhythmic, metrical. All that I have said to-night leads up to this, that the Associated Life is necessary for the enjoyment and the attainment of the best and the highest things that the world can give, as the Guild and the Company formerly, and the Trade Union is now, for the safeguarding ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... feels hurt when a rhythm is maimed or curtailed as if it had been defrauded of due payment. It dislikes even more whatever is prolonged and runs on beyond the proper bounds, since too much is more offensive than too little. Not that everyone knows the metrical feet, or understands anything about rhythm, or is aware of what offends him, or where, or why; it is rather that nature has set in our ears a power of judging the length and brevity of sound, as also the acute and grave ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... or not on the part of the writer, the concluding words, in which the intention of the Laws is conveyed, assume a metrical form: ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... instructed both in sacred and in secular letters, they gathered a crowd of disciples, and rivers of wholesome knowledge daily flowed from them to water the hearts of their hearers; and, together with the books of Holy Scripture, they also taught them the metrical art, astronomy, and ecclesiastical arithmetic. A testimony whereof is, that there are still living at this day some of their scholars, who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... may be noticed here:—the rigmarole, snatches of which probably most of us have heard, which contains an immense number of mere truisms having no connexion with each others, and no bond of union but the metrical form in which their juxtaposition is effected, and the rhyme, which is kept up very well throughout, though sometimes by the introduction of a nonsense line. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... Mr. Kinosling. "No tobacco for me. No cigar, no pipe, no cigarette, no cheroot. For me, a book—a volume of poems, perhaps. Verses, rhymes, lines metrical and cadenced—those are my dissipation. Tennyson by preference: 'Maud,' or 'Idylls of the King'—poetry of the sound Victorian days; there is none later. Or Longfellow will rest me in a tired hour. Yes; for me, a book, a volume in the hand, held ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... imitation it would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose of daily life. Does a beautiful arch or dome or tower of a building imitate any part of reality? Is its architectural value dependent upon the similarity ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... single piece of verse, a smooth and pleasing lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle him to a high place ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the period after the Norman Conquest, the remains which furnish us with direct or indirect evidence concerning them hardly enable us to form an opinion. But we know that (the cavilling spirit of Chaucer's burlesque "Rhyme of Sir Thopas" notwithstanding) the efforts of English metrical romance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were neither few nor feeble, although these romances were chiefly translations, sometimes abridgments to boot—even the Arthurian cycle having been only imported across the Channel, though it may have thus ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... from Sir John Bowring's "Specimens of the Russian Poets," rather than attempt a metrical translation myself. It is reasonably close to the original—as close as most metrical translations are—and gives the spirit extremely well. Sir John Bowring adds the following footnote: "This is the poem of which Golovnin says in his narrative, that it has been rendered into Japanese, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... wandering Esquimaux, their ditties, which, however insignificant in comparison with the compositions of the former nations, still are entitled in every essential point to the name of poetry; if poetry mean metrical compositions intended to soothe and recreate the mind fatigued by the cares, distresses, and anxieties to which mortality ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... me each metrical puppy Might make of such parodies two pair a day; Mocking birds think they obtain for each copy Paradise plumes for the parodied lay:— Ladder of fame! if man can't reach thy top, he Is right to sing just as high up as he may; I'd be a Parody, made by a puppy, Who makes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... are of varied metrical structure; but their intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... him at Nunappleton are now in the Bodleian, the treasures of which he had protected in troubled times. He loved to handle medals and coins, and knew the points of old engravings. He wrote a history of the Christian Church down to our own ill-conducted Reformation, and composed a complete metrical version of the Psalms of David and of the Song of Solomon. These and many other productions, which he characterised as "The Employment of my Solitude," still remain in his own handwriting. Amongst them, Yorkshire men will hear with pleasure, is a "Treatise ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... for the most part derived. The same violent Lancastrian sympathy runs through Walsingham and the fifth book of Knyghton's Chronicle. The French authorities on the other hand are vehemently on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at this time, is supplemented by the metrical history of Creton ("Archaeologia," vol. xx.), and by the "Chronique de la Traison et Mort de Richart" (English Historical Society), both works of French authors and published in France in the time of Henry the Fourth, probably with the aim of arousing French feeling against the House of ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... alone is a tether, and not a very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Rouse, a member of the English Parliament, had recently produced his Metrical Version of the Psalms. It was fresh and fragrant and greatly admired. The Assembly after a careful revision adopted it. Five years later, having passed through the purifying furnace of revision at the hands of the General Assembly of Scotland, it was authorized as "The only paraphrase ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... metrical renderings of Benedicite exist, one of the 18th and two of the 19th century, by J. Merrick, J.S. Blackie, and Richard Wilton respectively. The first of these writers, who expands freely, concludes with a stanza designed to put the Song unmistakeably into the ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... alluded to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors of his "Dernier Jour d'un Condamne" by ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... physicists of the whole world will spread more and more. It is right to remark that a few errors still occur with regard to this unit, and that these errors have been facilitated by incoherent legislation. France herself, though she was the admirable initiator of the metrical system, has for too long allowed a very regrettable confusion to exist; and it cannot be noted without a certain sadness that it was not until the 11th July 1903 that a law was promulgated re-establishing the agreement between the legal ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... to Stocktaking, Table of Relative Values of Potter's Materials, Hourly Wages Table, Workman's Settling Table, Comparative Guide for Earthenware and China Manufacturers in the use of Slop Flint and Slop Stone, Foreign Terms applied to Earthenware and China Goods, Table for the Conversion of Metrical Weights and Measures on the Continent and South America ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... with the pupil surpassing the master, for while it has the subject and characters of a medieval European romance, the spirit and settings are entirely Malay. It is written in the peculiar Tagalog verse, in the form of a corrido or metrical romance, and has been declared by Fray Toribio Menguella, Rizal himself, and others familiar with Tagalog, to be a work of no mean order, by far the finest and most characteristic composition in that, the richest of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... which play so memorable a part in the "Tale of King Edward and the Shepherd" {516} (Hartshorne's Ancient Metrical Tales) been explained? The shepherd's instructions (pp. 48, 49.) seem more zealous than luminous; but it has occurred to me that perhaps "passelodion," "passilodyon," or "passilodion" may have some reference to the ancient custom of drinking from a peg-tankard, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... Norwich, in an edition of five hundred copies, of which two hundred were reserved for Norwich and sold at half a guinea each copy; the rest went to London. Allan Cunningham wrote a very eulogistic metrical dedication. The subscription list reveals a very varied list of subscribers, including Bishop Bathurst, Benjamin Haydon, Thomas Campbell, and John Thurtell, who was hanged before the book appeared. Borrow's biographers generally ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... person had strongly encouraged my own researches into this species of legendary lore; but I had never dreamed of an attempt to imitate what gave me so much pleasure." He then speaks of some successful metrical translations which he made at the High School; but in original rhyme he was less fortunate. "In short," says Sir Walter, "except the usual tribute to a mistress' eyebrow, which is the language of passion rather than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at our first meeting without political ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... business, he must so train his ear that he shall be able to weigh the rhythm of every word as it falls from his pen. This, when it has been done for a time, even for a short time, will become so habitual to him that he will have appreciated the metrical duration of every syllable before it shall have dared to show itself upon paper. The art of the orator is the same. He knows beforehand how each sound which he is about to utter will affect the force ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... any tongue is more informed with rhythmic life than the Divine Comedy. And yet, such is its extraordinary distinction, no poem has an intellectual and emotional substance more independent of its metrical form. Its complex structure, its elaborate measure and rhyme, highly artificial as they are, are so mastered by the genius of the poet as to become the most natural expression of the spirit by which the poem is inspired; while ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... natural for a mind suddenly disgusted with mechanic toil to seek relief from its opposite, it can easily be imagined that my next resource was Poetry. Every one rhymes now-a-days, and so can I. Shall I write an Epic, or a Tragedy, or a Metrical Romance? Epics are out of fashion; even Homer and Virgil would hardly be read in our time, but that people are unwilling to admit their schooling to have been thrown away. As to Tragedy, I am a modern, and it is a settled thing that no modern can write a tragedy; ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 1835 included two poems, signed "J. R.," and entitled "Saltzburg" and "Fragments from a Metrical Journal; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... "Short Story" are the only poems in the book which seem to follow a clearly rhymed pattern. If any misguided schoolmistress had ever suggested that a poem should have rhyme and metre, this book would never have been "told." In "Moon Doves," however, there is a distinctly metrical effect without rhyme. But the great majority of the poems are built upon cadence, and the subtlety of this little girl's cadences are a delight to those who can hear them. Doubtless her musical inheritance has all to do with this, for in poem after poem the instinct ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... it ought always to do or not to act at all, but excludes it. In a far greater degree are Pope's epitaphs debased by faults into which he could not I think have fallen if he had written in prose as a plain man and not as a metrical Wit. I will transcribe from Pope's Epitaphs the one upon Mrs. Corbet (who died of a cancer), Dr. Johnson having extolled it highly and pronounced it ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... verse, they are only too plenty For ringing the changes on metrical chimes; A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty, Have filled that great ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the house. The tick-tick of the clock, very even, slow, dryly metrical, increased the silence and solitude. I put my ear to the door of the room, in hope of hearing a groan, a word, an insult, anything that would be a sign of life, that might bring back peace to my conscience; I was ready to let myself be struck ten, twenty, a hundred ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... utterly savage long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible. Metrical composition, therefore, which, in a highly civilised nation, is a mere luxury, is in nations imperfectly civilised almost a necessity of life, and is valued less on account of the pleasure which it gives to the ear than on account of the help which it gives to the memory. A man who can invent or ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... mind's eye into its different parts. He would never mistake the calyx for a petal, and he would be able to determine at once the peculiarities of each part. In addition to the melodic phrases the pupil should be able to see the metrical divisions which underlie the form of the piece. He should be able to tell whether the composition is one of eight-measure sections or four-measure sections, or whether ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... this scene is printed as verse in the 4to. I have printed the early part as prose, that the reader's eye may not be vexed by metrical monstrosities. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... solemn moments he believed that his poetry would live, live beyond his own lifetime and his age, even, perhaps, as long as the Pontifex Maximus and the Vestal Virgin should ascend to the Capitol in public processional. He had said laughingly of his published metrical letters that they might please Rome for a day, travel on to the provinces, and finally become exercise-books for school-boys in remote villages. But his odes were different. They were not prosaic facts and comments put into metre: they were poetry. If he were only a laborious bee compared with ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... Enius is despatched even with more succinctness, but in Montalvan's 'Vida y Purgatorio de San Patricio', all his early crimes are detailed nearly in the order and almost in the very words that Calderon has used. Sir Walter Scott mentions, in his Border Minstrelsy, that there is a curious MS. Metrical Romance, in the Advocates' Library of Edinburgh, called, "The Legend of Sir Owain," relating his adventures in St. Patrick's Purgatory; he gives some stanzas from it, descriptive of the knight's passage of "The Brig O'Dread;" which in the legend, is placed between Purgatory ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... that metre is a species of verbal gymnastics, or legerdemain, of which the object is to win the admiration of the crowd. That is not so. Metre is born as all beauty is born the universe through. The current set up within well-defined bounds gives metrical verse power to move the minds of men as ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... his Gaelic collection. It soon became popular in the Highlands, and the authorship came to be assigned to different individuals. Fletcher afterwards announced himself as the author, and completely established his claim. He was the author of various metrical compositions both ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sexagesimal numeration, the metrical system of Babylon and Nineveh was "the most scientific of all those known and practised by the ancients: until the elaboration of the French metrical system, it was the only one whose every part ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... shows, Lydgate, in his Minor Poems at least, uses ye only, as do Lord Berners in his Arthur of Lytil Brytayne, ab. 1530, the Ormulum, Ancren Riwle, Genesis and Exodus, William of Palerne, Alliterative Poems, Early Metrical Homilies, &c.[2] ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... this somewhat unlettered Indian we catch faint glimpses of the poetic beauty with which the tradition glowed when actually related at the wigwam door. An attempt has been made to retain and crystallize this poetic beauty in the preceding metrical version of ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... interesting journal, edited by a committee of the junior class—with a capital "N" and a superfluous "t" in the monosyllable referred to, as it appears in the present memoir. The conceit was Nott thought a bad one, and those who were not in the secret gave my hero more credit for his metrical skill, than ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... might be made the starting-point of the fast either by the choice of the votary or by the cast of the die. A third method is instanced in the "Popish Kingdom" of Barnabe Googe (1570), actually an English metrical version of a truculent German satire by one Thomas Kirchmeyer, who was scholar enough to Latinize, or Graecize, his homely patronymic into the more imposing correlative "Naogeorgus." ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... against the Government, was sure to be eagerly read and warmly approved of. As a specimen of this kind of literature, and an illustration of the public opinion of the time, I may translate here one of those metrical tirades. Though it was never printed, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... "jingles," and he also rightly points out that "all genuine nursery rhymes . . . have never become nursery rhymes until the historical fact has been practically forgotten by those who used them, and nothing but the metrical ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... line will be seen in the context, which, for plainness as well as curiosity, I quote from a metrical version of the first book of the poem,[51] entitled, "The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem, by Edward Sherburne," which was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... other pastoral, is apparently of Roman origin. Milton, employing the noble freedom of a great artist, has here united ancient mythology, with what may be called the modern mythology of Camus and Saint Peter,—to direct Christian images.—The metrical structure of this glorious poem is partly ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Wiwert in Vrieslant," i.e., "The 150 Psalms of David, translated afresh into Dutch verse in accordance with the Dutch text, by J.D., lover of poetry, at Wieuwerd in Friesland." Explaining the deficiencies of the metrical version by Petrus Dathenus, the writer sets forth his wish to make a better translation (from French into Dutch), and narrates how the opportunity at last arrived "when I found myself called upon for the second time to make a journey to New ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Italy, we eventually find him in St. Petersburg, where he undertook the translation of the Bible into the Mandschu-Tartar language, and issued in 1835, through Schulz and Beneze, his "Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects." While in Russia, he made many friends amongst the nobility there, who frequently invited him to their country homes. In the same year that saw the publication of "Targum," he returned home. His stay in England, however, was a very short one. The ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... resist the opportunity of giving the late Sir Walter Scott's metrical translation of this sublime ode, a translation which, as a hymn, is ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... France, Italy, Austria, and Russia. Of his adventures in these countries there is unhappily no record. In St. Petersburg he must have made a long stay, for there he superintended the translation of the Bible into Mandschu- Tartar, and published in 1835 his Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects. In 1835 Borrow returned to London, and being already known to the Bible Society for his biblical labours in Russia, was offered, and accepted, the task of circulating the Scriptures ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... render possible that ideal representation of the great passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... of King Richard is an ancient romance, translated originally from the Norman; and at first certainly having a pretence to be termed a work of chivalry, but latterly becoming stuffed with the most astonishing and monstrous fables. There is perhaps no metrical romance upon record where, along with curious and genuine history, are mingled more absurd and exaggerated incidents. We have placed in the Appendix to this Introduction the passage of the romance in which Richard figures as an ogre, or ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... published "Sir Tristrem, a Metrical Romance of the Thirteenth Century, by Thomas of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... bookseller's in Holborn. Already ambition devoured him, and the genuine love of knowledge goaded his brain. He allowed himself but three or four hours of sleep; he wrought doggedly at languages, ancient and modern; he tried his hand at metrical translations; he planned tragedies. Practically he was living in a past age; his literary ideals were formed on ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... and drilled into us well. The unfortunate part of it was that there was hardly more than one boy in the class who enjoyed learning anything about just that particular thing. Instruction in Danish was, for Holst, instruction in the metrical art. He explained every metre and taught the boys to pick out the feet of which the verses were composed. When we made fun of him in our playtime, it was for remarks which we had invented and placed in his mouth ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Luther, about the year 1517, first introduced metrical psalmody into the service of the church, which not only kept alive the enthusiasm of the reformers, but formed a rallying point for his followers. This practice spread in all directions; and it was not long ere six thousand persons were heard singing together at St. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this moment compelled by the market to put their reflections into the form of novels, just as Marlowe and Chapman were forced to write plays. With one exception, the law of supply and demand determines the metrical shape of the poet's frenzy, and the prose mould of the ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... educational addresses, and metrical discourses on memorable occasions filled the years from 1829 to 1840. He felt the demon of insanity lurking behind him, now close at his heels, now farther away; and it was a desperate race, in which life and death, nay, worse than death, was at stake. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... certain expressions, gentle reader, which occur in the notes to the life of Robin Hood, prefixed to the ballads which go under his name: 1795. 2 vols. 8vo.—also a Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy in the first vol. of Ancient Metrical Romances, 1802, 3 vols. 8vo. A very common degree of shrewdness and of acquaintance with English literature will shew that, in Menander and Sycorax, are described honest TOM WARTON and snarling ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... has come down in a very corrupt state. A sadly tattered appearance is presented by the metrical passages. I have ventured to patch only a few of the many rents in ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... which is of great importance to the duration of a language, because the first change will naturally begin by corruptions in the living speech. The want of certain rules for the pronunciation of former ages, has made us wholly ignorant of the metrical art of our ancient poets; and since those who study their sentiments regret the loss of their numbers, it is surely time to provide that the harmony of the moderns may ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... "regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the present version is the appearance, for the first time, in English metrical shape, preserving the external form and rhyme movement of the originals, of the whole of the poetry with which the Arabic text is so freely interspersed. This great body of verse, equivalent to at least ten thousand twelve-syllable English lines, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... and varied drama, the richness and ripeness of dramatic imagination, of character portrayal, representation as distinct from analysis, of vigorous scenes that sweep through the excited brain of the reader with the rush of the hurricane, and owe nothing to metrical sweetness, to lyrical melody—that has never come ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... the metrical version. No that I would preen my faith to that clink neither; but it's bonny, and easier to mind. "Who go to sea in ships," they ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... And yet it is not on account of want of metrical harmony in respect to the lyre, to borrow the words of Plato, that cities quarrel with cities and friends with friends, and do and suffer the worst woes, but on account of deviations[670] from law and justice. And ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... translation, prose has been employed instead of verse, for two reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which, in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in the second place, to the writer's thinking, ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... have always wished for a more happy metrical version than they have yet obtained of the Book of Psalms. This wish the piety of Blackmore led him to gratify, and he produced (1721) "A New Version of the Psalms of David fitted to the Tunes used in Churches," which being recommended by the archbishops and ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... the editors hope, be found more accurate and useful than either of the preceding editions. Further corrections in text and glossary have been made, and some additional new readings and suggestions will be found in two brief appendices at the back of the book. Students of the metrical system of Bewulf will find ample material for their studies in Sievers' exhaustive essay on ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... been ashamed of his present. The Italians carried this taste to excess. The manners of our country were more rarely tainted with this deplorable licentiousness, although I have observed an innocent tendency towards it, by examining the illuminated manuscripts of our ancient metrical romances: while we admire the vivid colouring of these splendid manuscripts, the curious observer will perceive that almost every heroine is represented in a state which appears incompatible with her reputation. Most of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... comes to its defence with a tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical. To hint this once, is sufficient. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... the language and the metrical form of which exclamation afford no ground for disputing its authenticity, when the habits and education of those times are fairly considered.' It is quite likely that, having already abdicated the throne, Charles regarded the comet ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... selections from the Amyntas quoted in this article have been selected from the admirable metrical translation of Mr. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... should employ the dash; and, lastly, the dash itself becomes a point of all work, replacing indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention—for, in Shelley's hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to indicate the structure or elucidate ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... an increasingly large section of the reading public who while they may not be expert in Latin composition, nevertheless do not think that a Latin word in itself is a cause for laughter. A French phrase thrown in now and then for metrical effect does not strike them as essentially an affectation, and they are willing to have references made to characters whose native language may not have been that noblest of all ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... fyve of the secunde Kyng Richard after the conquest, in al the gramer scoles of Engelond children leveth Freynsch, and construeth and turneth an Englysch." To the first half of this period belong a Metrical Chronicle, attributed to Robert of Gloucester; Langtoft's Metrical Chronicle, translated by Robert de Brunne; the Agenbite of Inwit, by Dan Michel of Northgate in Kent; and a few others. But to the second ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... defeat in the Pyrenees in 777-778, and adds that Hroudlandus was slain. From this bald statement arose the mediaeval "Chanson de Roland," which was still sung at the battle of Hastings. The probable author of the French metrical version is Turoldus; but the poem, numbering originally four thousand lines, has gradually been lengthened, until now it includes more than forty thousand. There are early French, Latin, German, Italian, English, and Icelandic versions of the adventures of Roland, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... help, I might not have found my way for many a year to come. My reading, till now, had been almost wholly English or classical; she sent me to the old French literature—to the Chansons de Geste; to the metrical romances of the Trouveres; to the Chronicles of Froissart, Monstrelet, and Philip de Comines, and to the poets and dramatists ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... 1645 text and Milton's manuscript read self-consum'd; after which word there is to be understood a metrical pause to mark the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... villages are frequently the substance of the chants of these bards. More than this, the line between singing and narration is so faintly drawn, that the bards themselves often interpose great patches of prose between the metrical portions of their recitations. Fairs, festivals, and marriages all over India are attended by the bards, who are always ready to perform for pay and drink. Mr. Leland believes the stories he obtained from the Christian Algonkins of New England, concerning the ancient heroes of the race and ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Style, the Musical accent must be carefully distinguished from the Metrical accent which is determined by Time, or Measure, as well as from the Verbal accent whereby the import of a word is rendered clear to the listener. Here is an example of Musical accent, from Act III of ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... born in London; did much to promote the study of early English literature; contributed to the Anti-Jacobin, and was joint-author of the "Rolliad," a satire on Pitt, and of "Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances"; Scott declared him to be the best conversationalist he had ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... parts; but in airs I find no use they have, unless it be to make a vulgar and trivial modulation seem to the ignorant strange, and to the judicial tedious." It is among the curiosities of literature that this true poet, who had so exquisite a sense of form, and whose lyrics are frequently triumphs of metrical skill, should have published a work (entitled "Observations in the Art of English Poesy") to prove that the use of rhyme ought to be discontinued, and that English metres should be fashioned after classical models. "Poesy," he writes, "in all kind of speaking ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... carried me over the whole ground of the Rowley controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familiarized me with the "Black Letter," that I had begun to find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances; and in Chaucer, though acquainted as yet only with part of his works, I had perceived and had felt profoundly those divine qualities, which, even at this day, are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen. With this knowledge, and this enthusiastic ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Tennyson, and Browning sweep the soul upward to spiritual heights, and answer some of the deepest questionings of the soul of man. And hence literature is no longer merely a thing of vocabulary, of phrase, of rhythm, of assonance, of alliteration, or of metrical and philosophical form. It is a revelation of the progress of the soul, of its standards, of its triumphs, its defeats, and its desires. It is the unfolding of one's intellectual helplessness before the unmoved, calm ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between "the literature of power and the literature ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... 366. 1. The metrical unit in versification is a short syllable, technically called a mora ( v ). A long syllable ( ) is regarded as ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... increasing since, till they defied enumeration. In the Protectorate they swarmed. Matchless still among the tributes in verse was Milton's single Sonnet of May 1652, "Cromwell, our chief of men," and Milton had written no more to or about Cromwell in the metrical form since the Protectorate had begun, but had contented himself with adding to his former prose tributes in various pamphlets that most splendid and subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his Defensio Secunda. It ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... far as I can give the Reader any satisfaction, he is to. know that Island was first inhabited (in the year 874) by a Colony of Norwegians; who brought hither the Traditions of their Forefathers, in certain metrical Composures, which (as is usual with Men transplanted into a Foreign Land) were here more zealously and carefully preserv'd and kept in memory than by the Men of Norway themselves. About 240 years after this (A. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy to compete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine; and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed his heirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his later work his mannerisms in prose ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of this volume are set forth in the beginning of Lecture I. Lecture II. explains the various metrical forms in which I understand Jeremiah to have delivered the most of his prophecies, and which I have endeavoured, however imperfectly, to reproduce in English. Here it is necessary only to emphasise the variety of these forms, the irregularities ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... in finding and putting together the inscriptions of four of these early popes, and, with Cuvier-like sagacity, he reconstructed, out of a hundred and twelve separate, minute, and scattered pieces, the metrical inscription in which Damasus expressed his desire to be buried with them, but his fear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... taken to be a cubit, but seems at this time to have been nine hundred and ninety millimetres, which is sometimes called "a double cubit." On these suppositions the SAR would be a square, each side measuring about twenty-two yards, about one-tenth of an acre, or four ares on the metrical system. But it is certain that both in early times and during the First Dynasty of Babylon the GAR was only 12 U, and the U, if a cubit, would not be much over eighteen inches. This would make the SAR a square of about ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... A verse of twelve syllables, with the stress on the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh syllables, makes a dodecasyllable of amphibrachs. This dodecasyllable has a short metrical pause after the sixth syllable, and a longer ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the Iliad.[1] Of course there was a Homer, and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the prime of life, and interrupted in some literary undertakings and projects of great pith and moment. He had written a portion of a treatise on the "Evidences of Christianity," and was meditating some works, such as a "Metrical Version of the Psalms" and a tragedy on the history of Socrates, still more suitable to ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... we should employ the dash; and, lastly, the dash itself becomes a point of all work, replacing indifferently commas, colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention—for, in Shelley's hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to indicate the structure ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in troubled times. He loved to handle medals and coins, and knew the points of old engravings. He wrote a history of the Christian Church down to our own ill-conducted Reformation, and composed a complete metrical version of the Psalms of David and of the Song of Solomon. These and many other productions, which he characterised as "The Employment of my Solitude," still remain in his own handwriting. Amongst them, Yorkshire men will hear ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... and Warner. Henry Vaughan the Silurist, Sir John Davies, George Sandys, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Donne, Lovelace, and Wither belong to the sister University, so did Dr. Brady—but Oxford must not claim all the merit of the metrical version of the Psalms, for Brady's colleague, Dr. Nahum Tate, was a Dublin man. Otway and Collins, Young, Johnson, Charles Wesley, Southey, Landor, Hartley Coleridge, Beddoes, Keble, Isaac Williams, Faber, and Clough are names of which their University may well ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you have a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... published his "True-born Englishman," a satire upon the English people for their stupid opposition to the continental policy of the King. This is the only metrical composition of prolific Daniel that has any pretensions to be called a poem. It contains some lines not unworthy to rank with those of Dryden at his second-best. For instance, ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... which Hayward and some of his reviewers have instituted in advance against the possibility of a good and faithful metrical translation of a poem like Faust, they seem to the present translator full of paradox and sophistry. For instance, take this assertion of one of the reviewers: "The sacred and mysterious union of thought with verse, twin-born and immortally wedded from the moment of their common birth, ...
— Faust • Goethe
... instruments: there are measured movements, measured words, and measured tones; and the whole ceremony, usually having reference to war or sacrifice, is of governmental character. In the early records of the historic races we similarly find these three forms of metrical action united in religious festivals. In the Hebrew writings we read that the triumphal ode composed by Moses on the defeat of the Egyptians, was sung to an accompaniment of dancing and timbrels. The Israelites danced and sung "at the inauguration of the golden calf. And as it is generally agreed ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... elevated and underground railways, beautiful theatres and parks, cars which ran without horses or steam, and millions of inhabitants produced no impression whatsoever, my most improbable tale being received with a diffident condescension, equalled only by the metrical repose that stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. Given a few months in New York or Paris, and Mindanao's future Sultana would bloom like a rose in manners and millinery, for, despite her reserve, she is adaptable and what the Spaniards ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... the provincialisms to be met with in this volume, I may say that the reader will not find one which is not (as I believe) either native or imported with the early settlers, nor one which I have not, with my own ears, heard in familiar use. In the metrical portion of the book, I have endeavored to adapt the spelling as nearly as possible to the ordinary mode of pronunciation. Let the reader who deems me over-particular ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Gaelic collection. It soon became popular in the Highlands, and the authorship came to be assigned to different individuals. Fletcher afterwards announced himself as the author, and completely established his claim. He was the author of various metrical compositions ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... successive phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very well pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; but one following another will produce an instant impression of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. The ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the improvements which this new school had effected in poetry;[H] but shall lay the grounds of our opposition, for this time, a little more broadly. The end of poetry, we take it, is to please—and the name, we think, is strictly applicable to every metrical composition from which we receive pleasure, without any laborious exercise of the understanding. This pleasure, may, in general, be analyzed into three parts—that which we receive from the excitement of Passion or emotion—that which is derived from the play of Imagination, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... universities to educate the working classes to appreciate what is best in standard English poetry. I do not deny that much maybe done in this way, but let us not forget that something more will be needed than a course of instruction in poetic diction and metrical rhythm. Our great poets depict a world which is only to a very small extent that of the working man. It is a world of courts and drawingrooms and General Headquarters, a world of clubs and academies. ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... has been said that an enemy could in justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... No one could drink of this cup without spilling the contents if he were a cuckold. Drinking from this cup was, then, one of the many current tests of chastity. Further light may be thrown on the passage in our text by the English poem "The Cokwold's Daunce" (in C.H. Hartshorne's "Ancient Metrical Ballads", London, 1829), where Arthur is described as a cuckold himself and as having always by him a horn (cup) which he delights in trying on his knights as a test of their ladies' chastity. For bibliography see T.P. Cross, "Notes on the Chastity-Testing Horns and Mantle" in "Modern ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... different state of intellectual and social development, and yet feels bound to reproduce the impressions made upon the ancient Greek. The translator has to be an accurate scholar and to give the right shade of meaning for every phrase, while he has also to approximate to the metrical effect. The conclusion seems to be that the only language into which Homer could be adequately translated would be Greek, and that you must then use the words of the original. The actual result is that the translator is cramped ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... themselves what it was that they meant by 'correctness;' an idea that, in its application to France, Akenside afterwards sternly ridiculed. Neither of the two literati stopped to consider whether it was correctness in thought, or metrical correctness, or correctness in syntax and idiom; as to all of which, by comparison with other poets, Pope is conspicuously deficient. But no matter what they meant, or if they meant nothing at all. Unmeaning, or in any case inconsistent, as this talk about 'correctness' ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... and in secular letters, they gathered a crowd of disciples, and rivers of wholesome knowledge daily flowed from them to water the hearts of their hearers; and, together with the books of Holy Scripture, they also taught them the metrical art, astronomy, and ecclesiastical arithmetic. A testimony whereof is, that there are still living at this day some of their scholars, who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their own, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... such a metrical disquisition it is not easy to separate the poetry, which in places is very good, from the intellectual content, which is not so good from a modern point of view. By the joint aid of several sciences laboriously piecing together bits ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... translation of a poem than with one in verse, it has seemed to me that a uniform translation of the Tain Bo Cualnge in prose would destroy one of its special characteristics, which is that in it both prose and verse are mingled. It was not in my power, however, to reproduce at once closely and clearly the metrical schemes and the rich musical quality of the Irish and at the same time compress within the compass of the Irish measure such an analytic language as English, which has to express by means of auxiliaries what is accomplished in Early Irish by inflection. But I hope ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... For metrical purposes Bret Harte has here taken the same kind of liberty with "Resanoff," and in another poem with Portola, as Byron took with Trafalgar, ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... in the list of ROMANCES, of exceedingly rare occurrence. These romances are called Tyturell and Partzifal. The author of them was Wolfram von Escenbach. They are each of the date of 1477, in folio. The Tyturell is printed prose-wise, and the Partzifal in a metrical form. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Christian Armour namely, which I fear Mr Cupples had chosen more for its wit than its devotion. While making these discoveries, Alec chanced to observe—he was quick-eyed—that some of the dusty papers on the table were scrawled over with the first amorphous appearance of metrical composition. These moved his curiosity; for what kind of poetry could the most unpoetic-looking Mr Cupples produce from that great head of his with the lanky colourless hair?—But meantime we must return to the commencement of ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... angel of man's nearest heaven, whose vital breath is music. Its sweet warbling is only the metrical palpitation of its life of joy. It goes up over the rooftrees of the rural hamlet on the wings of its song, as if to train the human soul to ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... it a musical element which its continental parallels lacked. The dividing line between alliteration and rhyme, and between antithesis and rhythm, is not a broad one[80]. Indeed Pettie found it so narrow that he occasionally lapsed into metrical rhythm. And so, though we cannot say that euphuism is verse, we can say that it partakes of the nature of verse. In this endeavour to provide an adequate structure for the support of the mass of imagery that the taste of the age demanded, it showed itself superior to the rival prose fashions. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... the region of letters I only can dimly foresee, But guess that from metrical fetters The verse you'll affect must be free; And I shan't be surprised or astounded If your generation rebels Against adulation unbounded Of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... planned, as he says, by Nicolo de Lazina, a Cremonese noble, who was chancellor at the time. It is interesting both from the point of view of the carving and costume, and as showing the apparatus of an alchemist's laboratory. Close by it on the wall is the "metrical epitaph," which De Diversis says the chancellor composed. The columns, which are of Curzola marble, belong to the earlier building, though the entasis shows that classical feeling was beginning to affect even architects who worked in Gothic. Mr. T.G. Jackson's explanation of the addition of the ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... centuries. Its quaintness and the unintentional humor of its simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to escape. He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical versions of the almost undecipherable Saxon English to the polished and perfect measure of the late English laureate. For three years Mallory's "History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table" was the delight ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Commission upon Weights and Measures also continues its work in Paris. I invite your attention to the necessity of an appropriation to be made in time to enable this Government to comply with its obligations under the metrical convention. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the Vates' vision of Milton and Dante to Alfred Austin's yaller doggerel—to the raucous twitterings of grown men who aspire to play Persian bulbul instead of planting post-holes, who mistake some spavined mule for Bellerophon's Mount and go chasing metrical rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind adown the shining blade of a bucksaw; from the flame sighs of Sappho, that breed mutiny in the blood, to the green- sick maunderings of atrabilarious maids who ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... cardinal of St. George, in his poetical, or rather metrical history of the election and coronation of Boniface VIII., (Muratori Script. Ital. tom. iii. P. i. p. 641, &c.,) describes the state and families of Rome at the coronation of Boniface VIII., (A.D. 1295.) Interea titulis redimiti sanguine et armis Illustresque viri ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... tobacco for me. No cigar, no pipe, no cigarette, no cheroot. For me, a book—a volume of poems, perhaps. Verses, rhymes, lines metrical and cadenced—those are my dissipation. Tennyson by preference: 'Maud,' or 'Idylls of the King'—poetry of the sound Victorian days; there is none later. Or Longfellow will rest me in a tired hour. Yes; for me, a book, a volume in the hand, held ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... these matters the most able of all men to give information) that our Author appears to have been beholden to some Novels which he hath yet only seen in French or Italian: but he adds, "to say they are not in some English dress, prosaic or metrical, and perhaps with circumstances nearer to his stories, is what I will not take upon me to do: nor indeed is it what I believe; but rather the contrary, and that time and accident will bring some of them to light, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... noteworthy from his childhood up. They bore names, indeed, of no more than one or two syllables, but each had its sense. They were for the most part the beginning of some word which reminded him of a thing he cared to remember. First he had, in sport, named some of them after the metrical feet of Latin verse, which had been but ill friends of his in his school days, and in his kennel there was a Troch, Iamb, Spond and Dact, whose full names were Trochee, Iambus, Spondee and Dactyl. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... A second form of metrical evidence is found in the proportion of 'masculine' and 'feminine' endings in the verse. A line has a masculine ending when its last syllable is stressed; when it ends, for example, on words or phrases like behold', control', ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Italian, had already discovered that verse-making was at any rate a delectable pastime for a gentleman of wit, especially if he had a love-affair on hand; a pastime certainly pleasing to himself and probably agreeable to his mistress. They made metrical experiments, introducing both the sonnet and blank verse. The example they set was followed by others, and Tottel's Miscellany, published towards the end of Mary's reign, shows that a considerable skill in this minor art had already been ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... prose translation of Homer, by Mr. T. A. Buckley, has just appeared in London. No prose version will cause any just notion of the spirit of Homer. Of the half dozen metrical translations published recently, we think that of our countryman Munford the best. Henry W. Herbert has given us parts of the Iliad in admirable style. No one, however, has yet equalled old Chapman—certainly not Pope nor Cowper. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... verse of twelve syllables, with the stress on the second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh syllables, makes a dodecasyllable of amphibrachs. This dodecasyllable has a short metrical pause after the sixth syllable, and a longer ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... experience that it was hardly fair to oust so many of the regular worshippers from their own place of worship, and so we arranged for the extra service at 5.30. It was to be purely a soldiers' service. But a word or two about the Friday evening special Lenten service. Familiar hymns, a metrical litany, and part of the Commination Service were gladly joined in by a large number of men, the cathedral being more than half full, and the archdeacon gave us a very helpful address. After that service a good number of men stayed behind, at our invitation, to practise ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... associated with Tyndall and Huxley and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at our first meeting without ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... "Chirurgerie," with portrait of the translator, appeared in 1565. He would have been an eminently suitable father, distinguished alike in his art and his character, author of "The Court of Virtue," and many metrical Bible translations; but he died in 1566, and the Stratford Dr. John Hall was born in 1575. Halliwell-Phillipps[187] suggests that he may have been connected with the Halls of Acton, Middlesex, because he left ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party playing 'bouts rimes.' In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Friederike, October 15, 1770) Notice how all nature is personified and assumes human attributes. In the opening stanzas impetuous haste is stirring, the first two lines have a marked rising rhythm. Notice the quieting effect of the metrical inversion at the beginning of 17, 18, and 19 and of the break in 25 after ach and how the whole poem ends with ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... in 1853, to compile and publish an edition of the text of the '[S']akoontala' from various original MSS., with English translations of the metrical passages, and explanatory notes. A second edition of this work has since been published by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press. To the notes of that edition I must refer all students of Sanskrit literature who desire a close and literal translation of the present drama, and in ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... early sixteenth century. The number of English monosyllables was sometimes complained of, because to ears trained on the classical languages they sounded harsh, barking, unfitted for eloquence; sometimes because they were believed to impede the metrical flow in poetry; sometimes because, being particularly characteristic of colloquial speech, they were considered low; and often because they were associated with the languages of the Teutonic tribes which ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... of the Minnesingers fell upon the guilds of musical amateurs in the growing commercial cities. Less poetic than their predecessors, these Mastersingers, as they named themselves, often took refuge in arbitrary rules and set metrical forms that made a poor substitute for real inspiration. That there was some genuine poetic feeling and humour among them is shown by the work of Hans Sachs, the greatest of their number. He wrote many poems and plays, of which the ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... songs'is the influence of Burns. Browne has caught something of the Scottish poet's racy vigour, and in his use of a broken line of refrain in the song, "Ye loit'ring minutes faster flee," he is employing a metrical device which Burns had used with great success in his "Holy Fair" and "Halloween." The eclogue, "Awd Daisy," the theme of which is a Yorkshire farmer's lament for his dead mare, exhibits that affection for faithful animals which we meet with in Cowper, Burns, and other poets of the Romantic ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... Lochlevin, the author of a Metrical Chronicle, written about the year 1420, when recording the appointment of Robert Duke of Albany as Governor of Scotland, in the year 1405, commends him for his ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the 'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne, 'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or instinct as the greatest writer ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... author of the following lines fears that he has failed to do full justice to the metrical purity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... ninety millimetres, which is sometimes called "a double cubit." On these suppositions the SAR would be a square, each side measuring about twenty-two yards, about one-tenth of an acre, or four ares on the metrical system. But it is certain that both in early times and during the First Dynasty of Babylon the GAR was only 12 U, and the U, if a cubit, would not be much over eighteen inches. This would make the SAR a square ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... remains which furnish us with direct or indirect evidence concerning them hardly enable us to form an opinion. But we know that (the cavilling spirit of Chaucer's burlesque "Rhyme of Sir Thopas" notwithstanding) the efforts of English metrical romance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were neither few nor feeble, although these romances were chiefly translations, sometimes abridgments to boot—even the Arthurian cycle having been only imported across the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the other sonnets in the collection, with the exception of the one from the Portuguese, is framed according to the legitimate Italian model, which, in the author's opinion, possesses no peculiar beauty for an ear accustomed only to the metrical forms of our own language. The sonnets in this collection are rather poems in fourteen ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... it was Spenser, for whom he had no great affection, which he had not pondered over and clearly considered as does a lawyer his cases. He delighted in a complete success, and grieved over any lapse from the fold of metrical virtue, over any ill-sounding rhyme or unhappy expression. The circulation of Lyra Elegantiarum was somewhat interfered with by a 'copyright' question. Mr. Locker had a great admiration for Landor's short poems, and included no less than forty-one ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... learned from books. But, as respects his accuracy, again we must recall to the reader the state of Greek literature in England during Coleridge's youth; and, in all equity, as a means of placing Coleridge in the balances, specifically we must recall the state of Greek metrical composition at that period. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... successive generations; the Atharvan represents different ages; each Br[a]hmana appears to belong in part to one era, in part to another; the earliest S[u]tras (manuals of law, etc.) have been interpolated; the earliest metrical code is a composite; the great epic is the work of centuries; and not only do the Upanishads and Pur[a]nas represent collectively many different periods, but exactly to which period each individually is to be assigned remains always doubtful. Only in the case of the Buddhistic writings is there ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... first demonstration in Belfast, had become a kind of battle song. It is, I think, characteristic of the Irish Protestants that they should have a tune of their own for this hymn. Elsewhere, in England, in Scotland, in the United States and the Colonies this metrical version of the 90th Psalm is sung to a fine simple tune called St. Ann. But we are not and never have been as other men are. Without a quiver of our nerves we run atilt at the most universally accepted ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... pedant comes to its defence with a tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical. To hint this once, is sufficient. (see 1765, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... are the only poems in the book which seem to follow a clearly rhymed pattern. If any misguided schoolmistress had ever suggested that a poem should have rhyme and metre, this book would never have been "told." In "Moon Doves," however, there is a distinctly metrical effect without rhyme. But the great majority of the poems are built upon cadence, and the subtlety of this little girl's cadences are a delight to those who can hear them. Doubtless her musical inheritance has all to do with this, for in poem after poem ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... Visitation, Purification, and Assumption—any one of which might be made the starting-point of the fast either by the choice of the votary or by the cast of the die. A third method is instanced in the "Popish Kingdom" of Barnabe Googe (1570), actually an English metrical version of a truculent German satire by one Thomas Kirchmeyer, who was scholar enough to Latinize, or Graecize, his homely patronymic into the more imposing correlative "Naogeorgus." The passage ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... activity, parliamentary labors, educational addresses, and metrical discourses on memorable occasions filled the years from 1829 to 1840. He felt the demon of insanity lurking behind him, now close at his heels, now farther away; and it was a desperate race, in which life ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... importance to the duration of a language, because the first change will naturally begin by corruptions in the living speech. The want of certain rules for the pronunciation of former ages, has made us wholly ignorant of the metrical art of our ancient poets; and since those who study their sentiments regret the loss of their numbers, it is surely time to provide that the harmony of the moderns ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... manhood. Some of the members, ashamed of the paltry nature of the volumes circulated in the name of the club, bethought themselves of uniting to produce a book of national value. They took Sir Frederick Madden into their counsels, and authorised him to print eighty copies of the old metrical romance of Havelok the Dane. This gave great dissatisfaction to the historian, who muttered how "a MS. not discovered by a member of the club was selected, and an excerpt obtained, not furnished by the industry or under the inspection of any one member, nor edited by a member; but, in fact, after ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... story, "The Two Muleteers," he has also translated. To these must be added, besides several shorter ballads from Duran's Romancero General, "The Poem of the Cid," "The Romance of Gayferos," and "The Infanta of France." The last is a metrical tale of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, presenting analogies with the "Thousand and One Nights," and probably drawn from an Oriental source. His translations from the Latin, chiefly of mediaeval ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... should be placed side by side with Comus and Alexander's Feast. Other eminent statesmen and orators, Walpole, Pulteney, Chatham, Fox, wrote poetry not better than his. But fortunately for them, their metrical compositions were never thought worthy to be admitted into any collection of our ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... form the divisions required by the sense; secondly, emphatic or rhetorical pauses,—such as particularly call the hearer's attention to something which has been, or is about to be, uttered; and lastly, poetical or harmonic pauses,—such as are peculiar to the utterance of metrical compositions. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen a ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... founded on the account given by Saxo-Grammaticus (Lib. VIII.) of the guilt, penitence, and death of Starkather, a fabulous Scandinavian hero, famous throughout the North for his bodily strength and warlike achievements, as well as for his poetical genius, of which traces are still to be found in the metrical traditions and phraseology of his country. According to the old legend, the existence of Starkather was prolonged for three lifetimes, in each of which he was doomed to commit some act of infamy; but this fiction has not here been followed out. Oehlenschlaeger's drama, bearing the name ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... diction there is very little art. Rhyme, although it is known to the mountaineers, is seldom used, and their poetry is, as a rule, nothing more than rhythmical or blank verse broken into irregular stanzas of from seven to eleven metrical feet. This kind of verse they improvise with great readiness and facility. It seems to be the form of expression which their stronger feelings naturally take. I have heard an Avarian mother chant amid her sobs an improvised but rhythmical lament ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... define poetry as the metrical expression of lofty or beautiful thought, feeling, or action, in imaginative and artistic form. Its metrical character distinguishes it from prose; for there is no such thing as prose poetry, though ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... evident that this could never be done in the strict pattern of a metrical form, but the flowing, fluctuating rhythm of vers libre seemed to open the door to such an experiment. First, however, I considered the same method as applied to the more pronounced movements of ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... necessary to use different words for the same thing to suit the exigencies of metre. And if there ever was an argument that demanded precise statement, it was that of Parmenides. As it is, his poem has the faults we should look for in a metrical version of Euclid. On the other hand, Parmenides is the first philosopher of whom we have sufficient remains to enable us to follow a continuous argument; for we have nothing of Pythagoras at all, and only detached fragments of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... a subordinate relation it is one part of a larger whole—this idea represents accurately enough the use of the word rhapsodia in the latter periods of Greek literature. Suppose the word canto to be taken in its literal etymological sense, it would indicate a metrical composition meant to be sung or chanted. But what constitutes the complexity of the idea in the word rhapsodia is that both its separate elements, the poetry and the musical delivery, are equally essential; neither is a casual, neither a ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... existing forms of worship in the reformed churches. The gradual change in the French language since the date of its composition has rendered necessary some modernizing of the style both of the prayers and of the accompanying psalms. These modifications, much more radical in the case of the metrical psalms, took place in the eighteenth century, and commended themselves so fully to the good sense of all French-speaking Protestants as soon to be everywhere adopted. The MS. records of the French church in New York (folio 45) contain, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... cannot get a whimper out of him. He likes the storm of things, and is out for it. He has a perfect craft in recording wild natural emotions. The verse in this first book has occasional faults, but as a rule the lines move, driven by that inner energy of emotion which will sometimes work more metrical wonders than the most conscious art. The words hiss at you sometimes, as in "The Dancer," and again will melt away with the delicacy of fairy bells as in "The Watcher," or will run like deep river water, as in "The Whisperer," which in some moods ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... reached a crypt, a sort of little hall, where the graves of several popes had been found; among others that of Sixtus II, a holy martyr, in whose honour there was a superbly engraved metrical inscription set up by Pope Damasus. Then, in another hall, a family vault of much the same size, decorated at a later stage, with naive mural paintings, the spot where St. Cecilia's body had been discovered was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... review of some of the more interesting works in each period. It is hardly necessary to say that the conclusion is one "in which nothing is concluded," and that whole tracts of literature have been barely touched on—the English metrical romances, the Middle High German poems, the ballads, Northern and Southern—which would require to be considered in any systematic treatment ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... [in metre?] In the primers, there are metrical graces, such as, I suppose, were used ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... faithfulness such as to put him for the most part above censure, the young husband toiled hard in literary work for the support of his household, and by various publications of a theological character in verse and prose—at one time a metrical Life of Christ, at another a treatise on The Hebrew Points, and chiefly by articles in Dunton's Athenian Oracle—he earned the means of keeping his ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... of the best prose is in style and sentiment of a true poetic character, lacking only the metrical form. To become familiar with Tennyson and Shakespeare, and the brilliant catalogue of British poets is in itself a liberal education. Rolfe's Shakespeare is in handy volumes, and so edited as to be of most service. Palgrave's "Golden Treasury" of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... strolling musicians as panegyrics on occasions of joy, grief, or worship. Through them the knowledge of events in the lives of prominent persons or the annals of the nation were perpetuated. The chief art lay in the formation of short metrical sentences without much regard to the rhythmical terminations. Monosyllables, dissyllables, and trisyllables had each their distinct time. The natives repeat their lessons, orders received, or scraps of ancient song, or extemporize in this monotonous singsong tone for hours together, ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... Esquimaux, their ditties, which, however insignificant in comparison with the compositions of the former nations, still are entitled in every essential point to the name of poetry; if poetry mean metrical compositions intended to soothe and recreate the mind fatigued by the cares, distresses, and anxieties to which mortality ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... his poems, his letters, his literary criticism, his comedy, The Beggars, and his metrical translation of the Aeneid, acquired high rank in the judgment both of Italy ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... were inscribed on clay tablets and treasured in libraries, do not throw much light on the progress of medical knowledge, for the genuine folk cures were regarded as of secondary importance, and were not as a rule recorded. But these metrical compositions are of special interest, in so far as they indicate how poetry originated and achieved widespread popularity among ancient peoples. Like the religious dance, the earliest poems were used for magical purposes. They were composed in the first place by ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... disorderly people hanging about his place for his personal security; from these very people his boys picked up the love of dog-fights, cock-fights, &c.; and they, from the fights of their pets, fought amongst themselves, and were always fighting with their sisters; so the reader will see the "metrical romance" was not overcharged in its ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... seen the piece before he wrote his own lines in question is almost impossible, for this portion of the Carmina Burana had not, so far as I am aware, been edited before the year 1847. The coincidence of metrical form, so far as it extends, only establishes the spontaneity of emotion which, in the case of the medieval and the modern poet, found a similar rhythm for the utterance ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... lyric entitled "Love Again", which is not unlike his previous poem, "Love, Come Again". As an amatory poet, Mr. Kleiner shows much delicacy of sentiment, refinement of language, and appreciation of metrical values; his efforts in this direction entitle him to a ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... on one occasion to attempt a metrical description of a match between Bedford and Dulwich. The nature of this poetical effusion may be ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... implies persons acting, it necessarily follows, in the first place, that Spectacular equipment will be a part of Tragedy. Next, Song and Diction, for these are the medium of imitation. By 'Diction' I mean the mere metrical arrangement of the words: as for 'Song,' it is a term whose sense every ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... not already spoken of Layamon out of true order in following the story of Arthur, it is here that we should speak of him and of his book, The Brut. So, perhaps, it would be well to go back and read chapter vii., and then we must go on to the Metrical Romances. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... of Philadelphia," a company of young puzzlers, have sent us four clever metrical answers to Mr. Cranch's poetical charades published in the April number. We are sorry that we have not room to print all these answers, but here are ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... principles," said Raleigh, "Johnson is right. We invite these people here to see our club-house, not to give them an exhibition of our metrical powers, and I think all exercises of a formal nature ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... Energy. How to Find Out the Power Developed. The Test. Calculations. The Foot Measure. Weight. The Gallon. The Metric System. Basis of Measurement. Metrical Table, Showing Measurements ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... have been doing this evening? Still under the spell of Loches and its weird associations, we have been trying to turn the French verse, which Lydia copied for you, into metrical English. It seemed so strange that we four twentieth century Americans and one Franco-American should be translating the pathetic little verse of the ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... as this was possible, I have adhered to the rhyming structure of my originals, feeling that this is a point of no small moment in translation. Yet when the choice lay between a sacrifice of metrical exactitude and a sacrifice of sense, I have not hesitated to prefer the former, especially in dealing ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... surprised to find himself at so great a distance from the object with which he set out."—Id.; also Murray cor. "Few rules can be given which will hold good in all cases."—Lowth and Mur. cor. "Versification is the arrangement of words into metrical lines, according to the laws of verse."—Johnson cor. "Versification is the arrangement of words into rhythmical lines of some particular length, so as to produce harmony by the regular alternation of syllables differing in quantity."—L. Murray et al. cor. "Amelia's friend ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the age; while even Persius, although at his best and in his more declamatory passages he is at least Juvenal's equal, does not maintain the same level of excellence, and his more frequent employment of the traditional dialogue of satire gives him fewer opportunities for striking metrical effect. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... to be expected from Landor, Southey, Rogers, Campbell, and such other writers of the Georgian era as still were numbered with the living. On the other hand, Tennyson, though already the most remarkable among the younger poets, was still but exercising himself in the studies in language and metrical music by which his consummate art was developed; Browning had published only 'Pauline,' 'Paracelsus,' and 'Strafford;' the other poets who have given distinction to the Victorian age had not begun to write. And between the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... a mere boy when he began to write, turning from the first to the metrical form of expression and remaining faithful to it in most of his subsequent efforts. His poems and essays have been printed in almost all the leading magazines. So far he has published five volumes ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... and measures, known as the metrical, was planned, and a new mode of reckoning time was introduced. The names of the months were altered, titles being given them expressive of the character of each. Each month was divided into three periods of ten days ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... from the Designs of T. Rowlandson, with Metrical Illustrations by the Author of 'Doctor ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... subjects of verse, they are only too plenty For ringing the changes on metrical chimes; A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty, Have filled that great ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... smoothing of the road in some places. Especially will this be observed in the chapter on Involution. The author has never felt satisfied with the usual treatment of that subject by means of circles and anharmonic ratios. A purely projective notion ought not to be based on metrical foundations. Metrical developments should be made there, as elsewhere in the theory, by the introduction of infinitely ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... a few of the most striking papers. Among the metrical gems is Conradin, a fine battle-piece, by Mr. Charles Swain; an Every-day Tale, by Montgomery—one of "the short and simple annals of the poor," written in behalf of a Society for relieving distressed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... literature which he invented and popularised, that of familiar poetry, was one which proved singularly suited to the Latin genius. He speaks of his own works under the name of Sermones (talks)—a name which was retained by his great successor and imitator Horace; but the peculiar combination of metrical form with wide range of subject and the pedestrian style of ordinary prose received in popular usage ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... of poetry, as commonly understood, is that portion of human feeling which expresses itself through rhythmical and preferably metrical language. In this field "the poet" labors. The human feeling which he embodies in verse comes to him originally, as feeling comes to all men, in connection with a series of mental images. These visual, auditory, motor or tactile images crowd the stream of consciousness as it sweeps inward to the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... advertisements—at least to my beholding. And similarly went it with my poor epic: scarcely had a general plan suggested itself to my musings, and divers particular morsels thereof assumed "their unpremeditative lay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a goodly array of metrical specimens; when some intrusive newspaper displayed to me in black and white a good-natured notice of somebody else's 'Home, an Epic.' So, as in the case of 'Nero,' and haply of other subjects, had it come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... measure, so eminently felicitous, with which the preceding ode commences; together with the bold image of freedom triumphing over power. If the merits of the Rowleian Controversy rented solely on this one piece, it would be decisive; for no man, in the least degree familiar with our earlier metrical compositions, and especially if he were a poet, could hesitate a moment in assigning this chorus ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... legerdemain, of which the object is to win the admiration of the crowd. That is not so. Metre is born as all beauty is born the universe through. The current set up within well-defined bounds gives metrical verse power to move the minds of men as vague ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... the monks of the convent, who had gotten possession of one of the thigh-bones that had been preserved by the Viscount of Falaise, re-interred it, and, out of gratitude to their founder, raised, in 1642, a new monument of black marble, at great expense. One side of it bore the original metrical epitaph, composed by Thomas, Archbishop of York, beginning with ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... having looked up the "portion" which he proposed to read, then turned to the Metrical Psalms. These were sung night by night in unswerving rotation throughout the year, a custom which, while it offered the pleasing prospect of variety, occasionally left something to be desired on the ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... Scott's "Marmion," Browning's "Pied Piper" and "How They Brought the Good News," Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." Let him read mainly for the senses rather than for the mind, getting the reward in the quickening of life through the throbbing rhythms; then the metrical system of poetry will become as real to him as the rhythmic movements of the planets are to an astronomer. There is no other way to get a feeling for the pulsations of poetry than through this intimate acquaintance. Without this, months of reading of amphibrachs ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... were in my case abbreviated. The older members of the family sat in a silent semicircle round the smouldering fire, each holding, and some possibly reading, a book, the suitableness of which for use at such a time was beyond question. The Bible, the metrical version of the Psalms, and one or two volumes of discourses by divines of undoubted orthodoxy, formed the only literature recognised on these occasions. For myself, I had brought with me from home a copy of the delightful, though now forgotten, book called ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... magnificently in Lycidas than in any other pastoral, is apparently of Roman origin. Milton, employing the noble freedom of a great artist, has here united ancient mythology, with what may be called the modern mythology of Camus and Saint Peter,—to direct Christian images.—The metrical structure of this glorious poem is partly derived from ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... couplet was a violation of the Italian rule, which may be fairly considered as prejudicial to the harmony of the whole structure, and which has insensibly caused the English sonnet to terminate in an epigram. The famous sonnet of Surrey on his love, Geraldine, is an excellent example of the metrical structure as adapted to the supposed necessities of English rhyming, and as afterwards adhered to by Shakspere in his long series of love-poems. Surrey, while adopting the form of the sonnet, kept quite clear of the Petrarchist's mannerism. His language is simple and direct: ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... which, by far the most usual, the iambic trimeter, denoted the regular progress of the action, and the other, the trochaic tetrameter, was expressive of the impetuousness of passion. It would lead us too far into the depths of metrical science, were we to venture at present on a more minute account of the structure and significance of these measures. I merely wished to make this remark, as so much has been said of the simplicity of the ancient tragedy, which, no doubt, exists in the general plan, at least in the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... 'Wreck of the Hesperus,' which was given at the examination of Oswell's school. Then all sung, 'There is a happy land, far, far away,' and it, with some of the Christian hymns, was beautiful. They speak English perfectly, but with a little foreign twang. All joined in a metrical prayer before retiring. They have been taught all by their father, and it was very pleasant to see that this teaching had brought out their natural cheerfulness. Native children don't look lively, but these were brimful ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... eighteenth century that the three most popular of English Christmas hymns belong. Nahum Tate's "While shepherds watched their flocks by night"—one of the very few hymns (apart from metrical psalms) in common use in the Anglican Church before the nineteenth century—is a bald and apparently artless paraphrase of St. Luke which, by some accident, has attained dignity, and is aided greatly by the simple and noble ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Much has been written on the proposed scheme of settling in the wilds of America;—the spot chosen was Susquehannah,—this spot Coleridge has often said was selected, on account of the name being pretty and metrical, indeed he could never forbear a smile when relating the story. This day-dream, as he termed it, (for such it really was) the detail of which as related by him always gave it rather a sportive than a serious character, was a subject on which it is ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... translation into verse, and especially into rhymed verse, cannot be as literal as a translation into prose; this disadvantage I have used my best pains to minimize. I hope it may be said that nothing of real moment has been omitted from the verses; and where lack of metrical skill has compelled expansion, I have striven to make the additions ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... advantage of this opportunity to say that my translation of BEOWULF, of which the last reprint was issued in 1910, is not in prose, as some have misconceived it, but it is in the same metrical form as the translations in the present volume,—an accentual metre in rough imitation of the original. I agree with Professor Gummere and others that this is a better form for the translation of Old English poetry ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... hymn-books, as we have. There were just a few hymns, generally bound up at the end of the Prayer-Book, which had been written during the reign of good King Edward the Sixth; but hardly any English hymns existed at all then. They had one collection of metrical Psalms— that of Sternhold and Hopkins, of which we never sing any now except the Hundredth—that version known to every ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... assistant at a bookseller's in Holborn. Already ambition devoured him, and the genuine love of knowledge goaded his brain. He allowed himself but three or four hours of sleep; he wrought doggedly at languages, ancient and modern; he tried his hand at metrical translations; he planned tragedies. Practically he was living in a past age; his literary ideals were formed on the study ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... materials, too, collected for many years past by Mr. William Archer, I have received important help. Indeed, of Mr. Archer it is difficult for an English student of Ibsen to speak with moderation. It is true that thirty-six years ago some of Ibsen's early metrical writings fell into the hands of the writer of this little volume, and that I had the privilege, in consequence, of being the first person to introduce Ibsen's name to the British public. Nor will I pretend ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... latter part of the sixteenth century, and at what may be called the golden era of the frottola was generally and successfully applied to that species of composition. Whatever the troubadours and minnesingers may have done toward establishing a metrical melodic form of monophonic character was soon obliterated by the swift popularity of part singing and the immense vogue of the secular songs of the polyphonic composers. When the desire for the vocal solo made itself felt in the exquisitely sensuous life of medieval Italy, it found its only ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... expeditione Attilae, Regis Hunnorum, in Gallias, was published in the year 1780, by Fischer at Leipsic. It contains, with the continuation, 1452 lines. It abounds in metrical faults, but is occasionally not without some rude spirit and some copiousness of fancy in the variation of the circumstances in the different combats of the hero Walther, prince of Aquitania. It contains little which can be supposed historical, and still less which is characteristic ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... me read to him) the first book of the Fairie Queene; but I took little pleasure in it. The poetry of the present century he saw scarcely any merit in, and I hardly became acquainted with any of it till I was grown up to manhood, except the metrical romances of Walter Scott, which I read at his recommendation and was intensely delighted with; as I always was with animated narrative. Dryden's Poems were among my father's books, and many of these he made me read, but ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... depredations; and several, to the extent and of the nature jocularly imputed to them by the Baron, were really laid to the charge of the Highland insurgents; for which many traditions, and particularly one respecting the Knight of the Mirror, may be quoted as good evidence. [Footnote: A homely metrical narrative of the events of the period, which contains some striking particulars, and is still a great favourite with the lower classes, gives a very correct statement of the behaviour of the mountaineers respecting this same military license; ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... semi-metrical proverb expresses the season at which the haddock and some other articles of aliment are supposed to be at their best. This, however, as far as the haddock is concerned, would appear questionable, as there is an almost universal notion ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... frequently brought forth in connection with speech-making that some points regarding metrical reading may be quite in place in a speaker's training. Practice in verse reading is of use also because of the frequency of quoted lines from the poets in ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
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