"Alexandrine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and talked till bedtime, when the squires made up the beds in the hall, and brought in supper—dates, figs, nutmegs, spices, pomegranates, and at last lectuaries, suspiciously like what we call jams; and "alexandrine gingerbread"; after which they drank various drinks, with or without spice or honey or pepper; and old moret, which is thought to be mulberry wine, but which generally went with clairet, a colourless grape-juice, or piment. At least, here are the lines, and one may translate ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... a mere reduplication of the same notes. And in his translations of the AEneid (not published in Tottel's Miscellany) he has the great honour of being the originator of blank verse, and blank verse of by no means a bad pattern. The following sonnet, combined Alexandrine and fourteener, and blank verse ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... shall answer you that in this district of Etampes the best houses are as yet the inns. There is certainly a royal castle, in the which lives the queen, the wife of the deceased king; nevertheless his Majesty was pleased to give audience in this hostelry, all covered expressly with cloth of Alexandrine velvet, with lilies of gold at the spot where the king was placed. As soon as the speech was ended, his Majesty rose up and gave quite a brotherly welcome to the brilliant ambassadors. The king has a very good countenance, a smiling countenance; he is forty years ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... model to the incantations of the Druids.[25] The lyrical measures of the Gael are various, but the scansion is regular, and there is no description of verse familiar to English usage, from the Iambic of four syllables, to the slow-paced Anapaestic, or the prolonged Alexandrine, which is not exactly measured by these sons and daughters of song.[26] Every poetical composition in the language, however lengthy, is intended to be sung or chanted. Gaelic music is regulated by no ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... language which is used by few singing poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the "Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Gu['e]rin somewhat too unusual. Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate talk." Eug['e]nie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold's ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the Greek particles in the Wisdom of Solomon, and in the works of Philo, is sufficient to confute the hypothesis of Philo being the author. As little could it have been written by a Christian. For it could not have been a Christian of Palestine, from the overflowing Alexandrine Platonism;—nor a Christian at all; for it contradicts the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and in no wise connects any redemptory or sacrificial virtue with the death of his 'just man';—denies original sin in the Christian sense, and ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... licentiousness of Plautus and Terence, if he read delightfully those comedies wherein the worst weaknesses are excused and glorified, I believe that he took still more pleasure in the Latin Elegiacs who present without any shame the romantic madness of Alexandrine love. For what sing these poets even to weariness, unless it be that no one can resist the Cyprian goddess, that life has no other end but love? Love for itself, to love for the sake of loving—there is the constant subject of these sensualists, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... these men of the highest brain-power there are found in the thirteenth century mystics, that is, poets and eccentrics, both by the way most interesting. It was St. Bonaventura who, being persuaded, almost like an Alexandrine, that one rises to God by synthetic feeling and not by series of arguments, and that one journeys towards Him by successive states of the soul each more pure and more passionate—wrote The Journey of the Soul to God, which is, so to speak, a manual of mysticism. Learned ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... with arras of the fairest, though he might not tell what was the history done therein. The chairs and stools were of carven work well be-painted, and amidmost was a great ivory chair under a cloth of estate, of bawdekin of gold and green, much be-pearled; and all the floor was of fine work alexandrine. ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... time Trypho, the Alexandrine architect, was there. He planned a number of countermines inside the wall, and extending them outside the wall beyond the range of arrows, hung up in all of them brazen vessels. The brazen vessels hanging ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... it 'whispers through the trees;' If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep,' The reader's threatened (not in vain) with 'sleep': Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth or languishingly slow; And praise the easy vigour of a ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... however, is changed in another composition, the Rondeau a la Mazur, Op. 5, dedicated to the Comtesse Alexandrine de Moriolles (a daughter of the Comte de Moriolles mentioned in Chapter II), which, like the Rondo, Op. 1, was first published in Warsaw, and made its appearance in Germany some years later. I do not know the exact time of its composition, but I presume it was a year ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Faerie Queene is written in a nine-lined stanza, which has since been called the Spenserian Stanza. The first eight lines are of the usual length of five iambic feet; the last line contains six feet, and is therefore an Alexandrine. Each stanza contains only three rhymes, which are disposed in this order: a b a b b c b c c. —The music of the stanza is long-drawn out, beautiful, involved, and even luxuriant. —The story of the poem is an allegory, like the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... to such a wonder, or, believing it, to make rich a use as he here does of it?—The present is the Archbishop's translation from the ancient Greek copy of the Epistle, which is at the end of the celebrated Alexandrine MS. of the Septuagint and New Testament, presented by Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, to King Charles the First, now in the British Museum. The Archbishop, in prefacing his translation, esteems it a great blessing that this "Epistle" was at last so happily ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... Parma, to whom Napoleon had given Tuscany in 1801 as the Kingdom of, Etruria. Her husband had died in May 1808, and she governed in the name of her son. Lucien, whose first wife, Anne Christine Boyer, had died in 1801, had married his second wife, Alexandrine Laurence de Bleschamps, who had married, but who had divorced, a M. Jonberthon. When Lucien had been ambassador in Spain in 1801, charged among other things with obtaining Elba, the Queen, he says, wished Napoleon should marry an Infanta,—Donna Isabella, her youngest daughter, afterwards ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of glass were in favorite use among the Romans. The manufactory of glass, originating in Sidon, had reached its climax of perfection, both with regard to color and form, in Alexandria about the time of the Ptolemies. Many of these Alexandrine glasses have been preserved to us, and their beauty fully explains their superiority in the opinion of the ancients to those manufactured in Italy. Here also, after the discovery of excellent sand at Cumae and Linternum, glass works ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... color is pure pink and white. In her forty-second year, she affects the young woman, buys little baby stockings, walks about followed by a nurse, embroiders caps and tries on the cunningest headdresses. Alexandrine has resolved to instruct her daughter by her example; she is delightful and happy. And yet this is a trouble, a petty one for you, a serious one for your son-in-law. This annoyance is of the two sexes, it is common to you and your wife. In short, in ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... Wrtemberg he lived some years in France and England, where he became familiar with the literary forms and fashions of the Renascence. These he imitated in German, writing odes, songs (for the reader), anacreontics, sonnets, epigrams, elegies in alexandrine verse, and occasional poems of elaborate metrical structure. For the most part his substance is very thin, consisting in extravagant and affected praise, with much infusion of Roman mythology, of the high-born personages ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... stanza. The Alexandrian line consists of twelve syllables (iambic hexameter). Neither the acrostic nor the Alexandrine has the property assigned to it here. A palindrame reads the same forward as ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... regretted that this splendid poem should show Cowley as the writer of the alexandrine that divides into two lines. For he it was who first used (or first conspicuously used) the alexandrine that is organic, integral, and itself a separate unit of metre. He first passed beyond the heroic line, or at least he first ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... being an ardent sportsman and preferring his estates near Neufchatel-en-Bray, where there was more game. Saint-Clair was occupied by Mme. d'Ache, an invalid who rarely left her room, and her two daughters, Louise and Alexandrine, as well as d'Ache's mother, a bedridden octogenarian, and a young man named Caqueray, who was also called the Chevalier de Lorme, who farmed the lands of M. and Mme. d'Ache, whose property had recently been separated by law. Caqueray looked upon himself as one of ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... stanza consists of nine lines: the first eight are iambic pentameters, and the last line is an iambic hexameter or Alexandrine. Burns makes use of this stanza in The Cotter's Saturday Night. The following stanza from that poem shows the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... a large and costly slab of Alexandrine mosaic, is the grave of Bishop Allen (1836-1845), to whose memory a monument in white marble has been erected in the south aisle of the Choir. A little further southward is a monument erected over the grave of Dr. ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... stanza of but eight lines and having the first four lines to rhyme alternately, and the last four immediately, and by having the concluding line an Alexandrine, as in the Spenserean stanzas, the difficulty, arising from the necessity of having so many similar rhymes, would be obviated, and the poet would have much greater facilities in expressing himself ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... could have congratulated himself. Even Caligula would have envied him. He had done his worst; he had deified not a lad, but a lust. And not for the moment alone. A half century later Tertullian noted that the worship still endured, and subsequently the Alexandrine Clement discovered consciences ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... be comun assent To Sem, which was the Sone eldeste; For that partie was the beste And double as moche as othre tuo. And was that time bounded so; 560 Wher as the flod which men Nil calleth Departeth fro his cours and falleth Into the See Alexandrine, Ther takth Asie ferst seisine Toward the West, and over this Of Canahim wher the flod is Into the grete See rennende, Fro that into the worldes ende Estward, Asie it is algates, Til that men come unto the gates 570 Of Paradis, and there ho. And schortly for to speke it so, ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... removed—looked out in a bold, well defined character, in as fresh a black, in some places, as when newly written; in others, in a dim, rusty colour, which a practised eye only could decipher. Thus the war against knowledge has gone on. The Caliph Omer burnt the Alexandrine library. Next came the little busy creatures the monks, who, mothlike, ate up the ancient manuscripts. Last of all appeared the Pope, with his Index Expurgatorius, to put under lock and key what the Caliph had spared, and the monks had not been able to devour. ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... slave to the Alexandrine, yet he remarked to Symons, a propos of the translation of Les Aubes, that while he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version, he found it ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... snow-flakes cannot exist without their peculiar crystalizations. It is thus that the Iliad is inseparably united, and, as it were, immersed in the stately hexametre, and the French epics, in the graceful Alexandrine verse. The metre of the Kalevala is the "eight-syllabled trochaic, with the part-line echo," and is the characteristic verse of the Finns. The natural speech of this people is poetry. The young men and maidens, the old men and matrons, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the alexandrine (probably from the name of an Old French poem in this metre). It is still the standard line in classical French verse; but the French alexandrine differs from the English, principally in having four stresses ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Ogis Guidry. Old Miss was Laurentine. Dey had four chillen, Placid, Alphonse and Mary and Alexandrine, and live in a big, one-story house with a gallery and brick pillars. Dey had a big place. I 'spect a mile 'cross it, ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... L'Aveugle, La Jeune Malade, Bacchus, Euphrosine and La Jeune Tarentine, the last a synthesis of his purest manner, mosaic though it is of reminiscences of at least a dozen classical poets. As in glyptic so in poetic art, the Hellenism of the time was decadent and Alexandrine rather than Attic of the best period. But Chenier is always far more than an imitator. La Jeune Tarentine is a work of personal emotion and inspiration. The colouring is that of classic mythology, but the spiritual element is as individual ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... flourished in the latter half of the 17th century. At his appearance, Corneille, the great French Dramatist, was in the full splendour of his fame, whose rival he was afterwards recognised to be. Athalie is a Tragedy in rhyme, consisting of six Iambic feet, similar to the Alexandrine verse found occasionally in our English poets at the termination of a sentence or paragraph. Dryden, and a few others of less note, in the reign of Charles IL, introduced the rhyming drama to the English public; ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley |
