The Forms of Prose Literature

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C. Scribner's, 1900 - 498 pages

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Page 171 - It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That o'er the green corn-field did pass In the spring time, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding : Sweet lovers love the spring.
Page 49 - As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.
Page 169 - She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of innocents, and the little feet were stiffened...
Page 492 - Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sablewinged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years.
Page 125 - And Cushi answered, The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is.
Page 97 - To lend himself, to project himself and steep himself, to feel and feel till he understands, and to understand so well that he can say, to have perception at the pitch of passion and expression as embracing as the air, to be infinitely curious and incorrigibly patient, and yet plastic and inflammable and determinable, stooping to conquer and serving to direct - these are fine chances for an active mind, chances to add the idea of independent beauty to the conception of success.
Page 492 - ... for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. Eound the whole square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafe-s, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals ; in its centre the Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes, — the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening round them, — a crowd which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that...
Page 457 - You will please, sir, to remember,' he continued, ' that our family hath ruined itself by fidelity to yours ; that my grandfather spent his estate, and gave his blood and his son to die for your service ; that my dear lord's grandfather (for lord you are now, Frank, by right and title too) died for the same cause ; that my poor kinswoman, my father's second wife, after giving away her...
Page 487 - ... on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only sees like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling suddenly into invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangor of theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing,...
Page 197 - Thus the small differences distinguishing varieties of the same species, steadily tend to increase, till they equal the greater differences between species of the same genus, or even of distinct genera.

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