Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Metrical   /mˈɛtrɪkəl/   Listen
Metrical

adjective
1.
Based on the meter as a standard of measurement.  Synonym: metric.  "Metrical equivalents"
2.
The rhythmic arrangement of syllables.  Synonyms: measured, metric.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Metrical" Quotes from Famous Books



... which, as it seems to me, a Horatian translator ought to aim, is some kind of metrical conformity to his original. Without this we are in danger of losing not only the metrical, but the general effect of the Latin; we express ourselves in a different compass, and the character of the expression is altered accordingly. ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... though his family was both by extraction and by actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besancon, especially now when it has settled down into the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... 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, no one but a poet should attempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous

... See Ballads and Metrical Tales, illustrating the Fairy Mythology of Europe (anonymous, London, 1857) for a metrical version of ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... experience of life beyond college walls. His choice of models—the artificial pastorals in which the Renaissance had modelled itself on Virgil and Theocritus, rather than Virgil and Theocritus themselves—was not altogether happy. He showed, indeed, already his extraordinary metrical skill, experimenting with rhyme-royal and other stanzas, fourteeners or eights and sixes, anapaests more or less irregular, and an exceedingly important variety of octosyllable which, whatever may have ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... scholarship and culture given by the universities at that time. He was an extreme classicist; all his admiration was for classical models and works that savoured of them; he it was who headed the attempt made in England to force upon a modern language the metrical system of the Greeks and Latins. What baneful influence he exercised over Spenser in this last respect will be shown presently. Kirke was Spenser's other close friend; he was one year junior academically to the poet. He too, as we shall see, was a profound admirer of Harvey. After ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales

... Spain shortly before her death, and whose prose 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 ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... incidents of the wars which the Albyn had waged with their enemies of Scandinavia. To the same period we are disposed to assign the "Song of the Owl," though it has been regarded by a respectable authority[10] as of modern origin. Of a portion of this celebrated composition we subjoin a metrical translation from the pen of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... great, and hung aside; His eyen were hollow, his mouth was wide; Lothly he was to look on than, And liker a devil than a man. His staff was a young oak, Hard and heavy was his stroke." Specimens of Metrical Romances, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... Euripides, and also a great number of small and much less known poems. He held the professorship of poetry at Oxford from 1821 to 1831, and as his lectures, according to the custom which then prevailed, were delivered in Latin, he had the happy thought of diversifying them by English metrical translations of the different poems he treated. They range over a wide field of obscure Greek poets, as well as of epitaphs, votive inscriptions, and inscriptions relating to the fine arts, and in addition to ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... 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 are best qualified to build soft-soap or take a fall out of the corrugated ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... 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 for a moment that it is not ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... Eve. The eighteenth century is farther off; the genuine mediaeval inspiration is nearer. And it is especially noticeable that, as in most of the early performances of the great poetical periods, an alteration of metrical etiquette (as we may call it) plays a great part. Scott had not yet heard that recitation of Christabel which had so great an effect on his work, and through it on the work of others. But he had mastered for himself, and by study of the originals, the secret of the Christabel metre, that is ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury

... Caesar wrote in youth several poems, of which Tacitus grimly says that they were not better than Cicero's. This list includes a tragedy, 'Oedipus,' 'Laudes Herculis' (the Praises of Hercules), and a metrical account of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... 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 had escaped the full refining influence of Roman civilization. ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob

... heart of movement, for the lack of which no metrical science could atone. He goes far because ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... sight of movement. Dancing, music, and poetry were primitively so closely allied as to be almost identical; they were still inseparable among the early Greeks. The refrains in our English ballads indicate the dancer's part in them. The technical use of the word "foot" in metrical matters still persists to show that a poem is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... exception of Solomon ibn Gabirol—a big exception, I admit—the best love songs were written by the best hymn writers. Even Ibn Gabirol, who, so far as we know, wrote no love songs, composed other kinds of secular poetry. One of the favorite poetical forms of the Middle Ages consisted of metrical letters to friends—one may almost assert that the best Hebrew love poetry is of this type—epistles of affection between man and man, expressing a love passing the love of woman. Ibn Gabirol wrote such epistles, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... means of the actual, would be, at best, a paltry deception. All the externals of a theatrical representation are opposed to this notion; all is merely a symbol of the real. The day itself in a theatre is an artificial one; the metrical dialogue is itself ideal; yet the conduct of the play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a part. Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of time and place ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and others, and in the excellent prose version (Inferno) of John Aitken ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... has the following note here: "The ancient and powerful family of Graham (which, for metrical reasons, is here smelled after the Scottish pronunciation) held extensive possessions in the counties of Dumbarton and Stirling. Few families can boast of more historical renown, having claim to three of the most remarkable characters in the Scottish annals. Sir John the Graeme, the faithful ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... of Chinese Poetry, being the Collection of Ballads, Sagas, Hymns, etc., translated by C. E. R. Allen, 1891. (The best book available on the Odes of Confucius. It contains a complete metrical translation.) ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng

... 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, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... of 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 lines ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... the laws he lays down for himself of his own free-will, and subordinate to them every word, and yet his matter and his song should seem to float on a free and soaring wing. Now, even the original Hebrew text of the Psalms has no metrical laws." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... 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 basket with ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... 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," ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various

... which tells us how Browning wished his metrical movement to be judged. This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of life—the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... studied history and law; he heard Ernst Moritz Arndt interpret the Germania of Tacitus; but more especially did he profit by official and personal relations with A.W. Schlegel, who taught Heine what he himself knew best, namely, the secret of literary form and the art of metrical expression. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... a metrical chronicle, written by one of the sons of Gustavus Vasa, and containing one or ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson

... still earlier period, and which give a contemporary history of the country in the Gaelic language of the fifth century. There is no other modern nation in Europe that can point to such a literary past. The Scotch Celts had early metrical verse, of which the Ossian, wherein is related the heroic deeds of Fingal, was supposed to have been sung by all the ancient Celtic bards. In the eighteenth century, Macpherson, a Scotchman, found some of these poems sung in the Highlands of Scotland; and, making a careful ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis

... 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 ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... 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 remember this caution ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... 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 ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis

... stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet. The elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could find no counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative power, though twisting it too often into contortion and excess, appears to have been little known as a lyrist ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick

... it would be impossible for him to recall spring up in his mind like flowers and weeds in the soil. But to-night he was truly in a state of lyrical inspiration, his eyes flashing, his face glowing, and his whole composition chanted out in an almost metrical form. He began by mourning the death of a certain Harriet whom he had let go to foreign parts, and who had died at sea. He described her as having "blue, sparkling eyes, and a sweet smile," and lamented that ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... 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 ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... and 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. ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt

... not 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 and ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... It brings me happier dreams than the others, and takes no more time in bringing them. Preparation for my lectures made me remember a great deal of the poem. I did not request my auditors to admire the beauty of the metrical version: ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... 1826 they were issued by S. Wilkin, Upper Haymarket, 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 ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper

... Andromeda almost succeeds in that impossible feat—the revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the countrymen of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexameter is a metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of consonants over vowels, the want of inflected forms, and other peculiarities in our language—make ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... Richard James; an English Poem, written in 1636, containing a Metrical Account of some of the Principal Families and Mansions in Lancashire; from the unpublished MS. ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... long after, my interest in the story of Chatterton had 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 ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... improvements which this new school has effected in poetry: 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 same, we think, is strictly applicable to every metrical composition from which we receive pleasure, without any laborious exercise of the understanding. Their pleasure may, in general, be analysed into three parts—that which we receive from the excitement of Passion or emotion—that which is derived from the play of Imagination, or the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... prefixed to the Polychronicon desires a translation in prose, "for commonly prose is more clear than rhyme, more easy and more plain to understand";[48] but apparently the only one of Orm's successors to put into words his consciousness of the complications which accompany a metrical rendering is the author of The Romance ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... extant form of the story of the Holy Grail is the French metrical romance of "Perceval" or "Le Conte du Graal" of Chretien de Troies, written about 1175. Chretien died leaving the poem unfinished, and it was continued by three other authors till it reached the vast size of 63,000 lines. The religious signification of the Grail ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

... 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 to ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... Politics in which you know I little meddle. . . . March 20. Why, see how the Time goes! And here has my Letter been lying in Sir W. Ouseley for the last ten days, I suppose. To-day I have been writing twenty pages of a metrical Sketch of the Mantic, for such uses as I told you of. It is an amusement to me to take what Liberties I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... Honour and his Epistle on the Battle of the Boyne 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 ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the reasonable confidence of the people of England.” In 1801 she wrote of “Pitt’s low and perfidious manœuvres,” and she never changed her opinion of him. She seemed unable to write what is called plain English. Archdeacon Vyse is described by her as “a man of prioric talents in a metrical impromptu.” Another person “evinced an elevated mind,” while a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an “attic warbler.” It ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin

... 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

... metrical division, I have (unless a special note on any one particular line draws attention to the contrary) in this difficult matter followed the first quartos, as at this point 1724 proves not so satisfactory, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... contributes the 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 ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... in the songs interspersed in the Eclogues that Drayton's best work at this time is to be found: already his metrical versatility is discernible; for though he doubtless remembered the many varieties of metre employed by Spenser in the Calendar, his verses already bear a stamp of their own. The long but impetuous lines, such as 'Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree', afford ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... The first productions were handed down by memory. Poetry is easily memorized and naturally lends itself to singing and musical accompaniment. Under such circumstances, even prose would speedily fall into metrical form. Poetry is, furthermore, the most suitable vehicle of expression for the emotions. The ancients, unlike modern writers, seldom undertook to make literature unless they felt so deeply that silence ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... His verses to his brother, in the glyconic measure, written when he was seventeen, are remarkably easy and elegant. Some of his other odes are deformed by the Pindaric folly then prevailing, and are written with such neglect of all metrical rules as is without example among the ancients; but his diction, though perhaps not always exactly pure, has such copiousness and splendour, as shews that he was but at a very little ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts

... be found recoverable to measure by that restitution of the Mute E which we since, too exclusively perhaps, connect with the name of Tyrwhitt. The confidence felt in his text, however—the only one upon which a metrical scholar dares work—in some sort justifies the honour. Meanwhile, this metrical theory, from his time, has been generally received; and the renown of the founder of our poetry settled on all the wider ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... "falling in love"; and there is hardly a more vital thing in life than this act. For it is something taking place in the subconscious self; it is a revolution, and a growth. It happened that after dinner, Conall wished to hear Ian sing again that loveliest of all metrical Collects, "Lord of All Power and Might," and Thora went with Ian to do her part as accompanist on the piano. As they sang Conall appeared to fall asleep, and no more music ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... say in 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 ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... author's power of accurate imitation is, after all, the primary and indispensable test of his having even the capability of becoming a poet. He who cannot write in a style which he does know, will certainly not be able to invent a new style for himself. The first and simplest form in which any metrical ear, or fancy, or imagination, can show itself, must needs be in imitating existing models. Innate good taste—that is, true poetic genius—will of course choose the best models in the long run. But not necessarily at first. What shall be the student's earliest ideal must needs be ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... we must distinguish again between the original collection of the hymns or Mantras, called the Sanhita or the collection, being entirely metrical and poetical, and a number of prose works, called Brahmanas and Sutras, written in prose, and giving information on the proper use of the hymns at sacrifices, on their sacred meaning, on their supposed authors, and similar topics. These works, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... called forth this poem. (Compare Goethe's first letter to 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

... Amyntas quoted in this article have been selected from the admirable metrical translation ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... 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 ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa

... 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... their character The Mahawanso Scriptural coincidences in Pali books (note) Sanskrit works: Principally on science and medicine Elu and Singhalese works: Low tone of the popular literature Chiefly ballads and metrical essays Exempt from licentiousness Sacred poems in honour of Hindu gods General literature ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... work an artist's pains. He has made a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse the effect of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness, but of his art. He is one of the modern poets who have broken away from the metrical formalities of Swinburne and the older men, and who, of set purpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... 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 eighteen feet on each side. The fact that a SAR ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... surprised that this romance did not strike the fancy of the novelist, asked if he himself might use it for a poem; and Hawthorne, readily assenting, promised not to attempt the subject in prose until the poet had tried what he could do with it in metrical form. No one rejoiced more heartily in the success of the world-renowned poem than the writer who generously gave up an opportunity to win fame from his working up ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase

... the 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 tune now attached to it. Charles Wesley's "Hark, the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... 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

... this appointment were a series of lectures on metrical forms, which appeared, in 1880, in a volume entitled The Science of English Verse. It is an original and suggestive work, in which, however, the author's predilections for music carry him too far. He has done well to emphasize the time element in English ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... 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 of knowledge that have nothing to do ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various

... good deal of poetic feeling, although without any special indication of originality of thought. The verses entitled "Morning" ought to have rhymes, as it is not blank verse. You ought to study the rules of metrical composition before putting your thoughts into metre. This is as essential to the construction of verse, as to be acquainted with those of harmony or counterpoint, before attempting to ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various

... inscription is not Cretan, but may represent a script, perhaps Lycian, in use in the coast-lands of Asia Minor. No interpretation of the writing can yet be given, but Dr. Evans has pointed out evidences of a metrical arrangement among the signs, and has suggested that the inscription may conceivably be a hymn in honour of the Anatolian Great Mother, a goddess who corresponded to the Nature Goddess worshipped in Minoan Crete, whose traditions have survived under the titles of Rhea, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... all in lyrical form—if the word form may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical conventions. Her lines are rugged and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and the "thought-rhymes" which she ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... addresses, presented to the Convention at various periods, might form a curious history of the progress of despotism. These effusions of zeal were not, however, all in the "sublime" style: the legislative dignity sometimes condescended to unbend itself, and listen to metrical compositions, enlivened by the accompaniment of fiddles; but the manly and ferocious Danton, to whom such sprightly interruptions were not congenial, proposed a decree, that the citizens should, in future, express their adorations in plain prose, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... avenger of oaths, compeller of clouds, utterer of thunder (and pray add any other epithets; those cracked poets have plenty ready, especially when they are in difficulties with their scansion; then it is that a string of your names saves the situation and fills up the metrical gaps), O Zeus, where is now your resplendent lightning, where your deep-toned thunder, where the glowing, white- hot, direful bolt? we know now 'tis all fudge and poetic moonshine— barring what ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... 'the breath 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 ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company

... recension. It comes in awkwardly and may I think be considered as an interpolation, but I paraphrase a portion of it as a relief after so much fighting and carnage, and as an interesting glimpse of the monotheistic ideas which underlie the Hindu religion. The hymn does not readily lend itself to metrical translation, and I have not attempted here to give a faithful rendering of the whole. A literal version of the text and the commentary given in the Calcutta edition will be ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... 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 in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... for an Elizabethan establishment comprises the observance of decorum and duty at table, and is at least as valuable and curious as those metrical canons and precepts which form the volume (Babees' Book) edited for the Early English Text ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt

... vestries early adopted the custom of appointing godly laymen as readers whose duty it was to assist the minister by leading the congregation in the responses in the Church service, and in raising tunes for the singing of metrical version of the Psalms. Later, when it was found desirable to erect chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went his usual round ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon

... records a partial 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

... of musical devotion 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 ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson

... MacConglinne's hatred of the Church and clergy, for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well, or when the crowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing a metrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of Biblical adventure. He would stand at a street comer, and when a crowd had gathered would begin in some such fashion as follows (I copy the record of one who knew him)—"Gather round me, boys, gather ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats

... as here by Gray. In the Elegy the quatrain has not the somewhat disjunctive and isolating effect that it has in some other works where there is continuous argument or narrative that should run on with as few metrical hindrances as possible. It is well adapted to convey a series of solemn reflections, and that is its ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... as modern Italian is from the language of St. Augustine or Cicero. Ancient Greek possessed a pitch-accent only, which allowed the quantitative values of syllables to be measured against one another, and even to form the basis of a metrical system. In Romaic the pitch-accent has transformed itself into a stress-accent almost as violent as the English, which has destroyed all quantitative relation between accented and unaccented syllables, often wearing away the latter altogether at the termination ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... was about to embark in the lighthouse yacht. He took it with him on his voyage, and, on returning home again, wrote to Mr. Train, expressing the gratification he had received from several of his metrical pieces, but still more from his notes, and requesting him, as he seemed to be enthusiastic about traditions and legends, to communicate any matters of that order connected with Galloway which he might not himself think of turning ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... mean its rhythmical structure. This, improbable though it seems, will be found to come under the same generalization with the others. Like each of them, it is an idealization of the natural language of strong emotion, which is known to be more or less metrical if the emotion be not too violent; and like each of them it is an economy of the reader's or hearer's attention. In the peculiar tone and manner we adopt in uttering versified language, may be discerned its relationship to the feelings; and the pleasure which its measured ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer

... specimen which has been rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has been well caught. Perhaps it should be added that the effect is greatly increased ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... 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 ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... published, and Christopher North, in Blackwood, saluted it as "by far the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event in literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society in 1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848, or Wendell Phillips's in ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... greatest versative power. How different, for instance, are the first lines of the "Tale of Troy Divine," and the more familiar adventures of Ulysses. The ad libitum alternation of dactyl and spondee make the lively or the grave; and the whole metrical glow is all life and action, without hitch ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... passage already quoted, Solomon is said to have discoursed of plants, "from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,"—from the great tree to the minute herb; and Cowley rose, in his metrical treatise, as has been shown, from descriptions of herbs and flowers to descriptions of fruit and forest trees. And as in every age in which there existed a terrestrial vegetation there seem to have been "trees" as certainly ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... instruction and discipline, he[FN38] bestowed on Sang Tsung the Kachaya handed down from Bodhidharma, and authorized him as the Third Patriarch. It is by Sang Tsung that the doctrine of Zen was first reduced to writing by his composition of Sin Sin[FN39] Ming (Sin zin-mei, On Faith and Mind), a metrical exposition of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... another, but in one poet it will be relatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but material upon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being a relatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changing metrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions," subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a corresponding alternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain that other subjects of its ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater

... 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

... books were chiefly devoted to a complete revisal and correction of all the translations, which my friend had finished, from the Latin and Italian poetry of Milton; and we generally amused ourselves after dinner in forming together a rapid metrical version of Andreini's Adamo. But the constant care which the delicate health of Mrs. Unwin required rendered it impossible for us to be very assiduous in study, and perhaps the best of all studies ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... have casually 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 ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... well-known difficulty that most popular variety-artists experience in the metrical delivery of decasyllabic couplets, the lines which follow have been written as they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various

... speak, and stimulated her to clothe her feelings and sentiments in a metrical form. It is not difficult to understand the effect which, on a warm imagination and sensitive temperament, that richly-coloured panorama of "the isles of Greece," and that exquisite prospect of Constantinople and the Golden Horn, would necessarily produce. For some time, as she herself tells ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... struggling, the hatchery boatman seized it by the tail with a strong grip, swung it clear out of the net and over his left arm, laying it immediately on the measuring platform. This consisted merely of a wide board with an upright at one end, a rule giving both metrical and standard measures being nailed to the side of the board. Instantly the measurer called out the length and the professor noted it down, the hatchery foreman—famous for his expertness in judging the weight ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... of 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 the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... duty of parents to make their children acquainted with La Fontaine? Well, then, no better opportunity of so doing could possibly be afforded them than is given by the new Bodley Head edition. It is a metrical version of the time-honoured favourites, and every fable has a picture filling the page opposite. The child would be hard to please who did not find hours of amusement in the artist's ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst

... all 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... 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 and in verse are ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... from the fabliau, in being interspersed with musical interludes; but I suspect they were generally translations from the British. The word is said to be derived from leudus; but laoi seems to be the general name of a class of Irish metrical compositions, as "Laoi na Seilge" and others, quoted by Mr. Walker (Hist. Mem. of Irish Bards), and it may be doubted whether the word was not formerly common to the ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham

... unhallowed and unprofitable exercise of her understanding was so impressed upon her spirit, that, although the sacrifice was considerable, she caused all the unsold copies to be destroyed. It is interesting to observe how, in later years, this talent for metrical rhythm, which had been so misapplied, became consecrated, as were all her faculties, to the promotion ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley

... in 1100. Late discovery of the chansons. Their age and history. Their distinguishing character. Mistakes about them. Their isolation and origin. Their metrical form. Their scheme of matter. The character of Charlemagne. Other characters and characteristics. Realist quality. Volume and age of the chansons. Twelfth century. Thirteenth century. Fourteenth, and later. Chansons in print. Language: oc and oil. Italian. Diffusion of the chansons. Their ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... of 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

... poured forth a series of ejaculations expressive of intense and rapturous delight, very strange to listen to in such a place and from an old man's lips. Then the language he spoke changed from English into Gaelic, and there came a kind of hymn of adoration. His sentences followed each other in metrical balance like the Latin of the old liturgies, and suited themselves naturally to a subdued melody, half chant, half cry, like the mourning of the keeners round a grave. At last, rising from his knees, he spoke, and his voice became wholly unemotional, ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... are both indescribably fine. (Is Marvell's Horatian Ode good enough? I half think so.) But my great point is a fear that you are one of those who are unjust to our old Tennyson's Duke of Wellington. I have just been talking it over with Symonds; and we agreed that whether for its metrical effects, for its brief, plain, stirring words of portraiture, as—he "that never lost an English gun," or—the soldier salute; or for the heroic apostrophe to Nelson; that ode has never been surpassed in any tongue or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... whatever that 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 be done with ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... whole pages of his are like so many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds his scriptural motto ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... 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 and the scientific ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... served as lists for the combatants, is said by Gervase to have been the work of the pagan invaders of Britain. In the metrical romance of Arthour and Merlin, we have also an account of Wandlesbury being occupied by the Sarasins, i.e. the Saxons; for all pagans were Saracens with the romancers. I presume the place to have been Wodnesbury, in Wiltshire, situated on ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... 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 sense. For this reason the original pointing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... and Hadrian were "fully 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

... 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 vague and indefinite ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore

... these early heraldic Rolls records, in a metrical form, and in Norman-French, the siege and capture of the fortress of Carlaverock, on the Scottish border, by EDWARDI., in the year 1300. In addition to very curious descriptions of the muster of the Royal troops at Carlisle, their march ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell

... Wilson to come to me. I had taken down all the books from a hitherto undisturbed corner, and had seated myself on a heap of them, no doubt a very impersonation of the genius of the place; for while I waited for the housekeeper, I was consuming a morsel of an ancient metrical romance. After waiting for some time, I glanced towards the door, for I had begun to get impatient for the entrance of my helper. To my surprise, there stood Lady Alice, her eyes fixed upon me with an expression I could not comprehend. Her face instantly altered to its usual look of indifference, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... poem, de prima 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... death. It was not published during his life, but after his death it appeared in the New York Tribune. Immediately it took rank as one of the three greatest poems Poe ever wrote. It is long enough to be complete, it has none of those metrical imperfections found in his earlier poems, and it possesses in a wonderful degree that haunting thrill so characteristic of all the best things Poe wrote. Moreover, it has a musical flow surpassing any other of Poe's poems ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... most detailed account of Cuchulain told with great sympathy in dignified, often metrical prose. Contains: Cuchulain's youth, Strife for the dun cow, Cuchulain and Ferdia, Cuchulain's death, Fate of the sons ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various

... "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 a ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... 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 beautiful line ending with the word stars. Were you ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Bale wrote, "to erect a Church of the Purity" (we may perhaps trace in the sneer the origin of their later name of Puritans), found a fresh refuge at Basle and Geneva, where the leaders of the party occupied themselves in a metrical translation of the Psalms which left its traces on English psalmody and in the production of what was afterwards ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... the other edition have been occasionally preferred, and where obvious typographical errors have been rectified. Every minute particular in which the second 4to differs from the first, I have thought it unnecessary to note. The absurd punctuation and faulty metrical arrangement of the old copy have not been followed; and I must be allowed to add that I have retained the original spelling only in accordance to the decision of the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various

... are taken from a well known manuscript in the Cottonian collection, marked Nero A. x, which also contains, in the same handwriting and dialect, a metrical romance,[1] wherein the adventures of Sir Gawayne with the "Knight in Green," are most ably ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... 'numerous', 'penetrate', 'penetrable', 'indignity', 'savage', 'scientific', 'delineation', 'dimension'—all which he notes to have recently come up; so too 'idiom', 'significative', 'compendious', 'prolix', 'figurative', 'impression', 'inveigle', 'metrical'. All these he adduces with praise; others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their ground, as 'placation', 'numerosity', 'harmonical'. Of those neologies which he disallowed, he only anticipated ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... Walter Scott's Border Minstrelsy, Percy's collection, Ellis's early English Metrical Romances, the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction; the history of the Troubadours, by Fauriel; even the far-back cumbrous old Hindu epics, as indicating the Asian ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... 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 ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... brought to abandon the point of view whence things are seen in their immediate relation to the individual soul. This kind of research is the work of letters; here are facts of human life to be noted that are never like to be numerically tabulated, changes and developments that defy all metrical standards to be traced and described. The greater men of science have been cast in so generous a mould that they have recognised the partial nature of their task; they have known how to play with science as a pastime, and ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... perfectly possess. In some respects he was as childish (to use the word in no contemptuous sense) as in others he was precocious. And it is a thousand pities that the difficulties of Chatterton's language and the peculiar charm and invention of his metrical technique cannot be appreciated till the boyish love of adventure, delight in imagined bloodshed, and ignorance of sentimental love, have generally been left behind. Nothing—to give an example—could be more frigid ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton

... 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 ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... 1645 text and Milton's manuscript read self-consum'd; after which word there is to be understood a metrical pause to mark the violent ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... 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 yet some, who ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch



Words linked to "Metrical" :   metrics, rhythmical, rhythmic, prosody, metre, metric, metrical foot, meter, measured



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com