United States or Uruguay ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The very character of the authorship of the time, its love of compendiums and abridgements of such scientific and historical knowledge as the world believed it possessed, its dramatic performances or mysteries, the commonplace morality of its poets, the popularity of its rimed chronicles, are proof that literature was ceasing to be the possession of a purely intellectual class, and was beginning to appeal to the nation at large.
Even the larger animals, the caribou, the moose had either turned a dull gray, or were so rimed by the frost as to have lost all appearance of solidity. It was ever a surprise to find these phantoms bleeding red, to discover that their flesh would resist the knife.
Every day they yelled the two names as they passed the big house. They yelled them on their way to and from school, and on their way to Giddings's Hill to slide. The older boys took it up, and yelled it when they saw Abbie and Old Chris on Main Street Saturday mornings. And finally they rimed it into a couplet, "Ab-bie Sno-ver, an' Old Chris We saw Chris an' Ab-bie kiss!" It was too much.
'All the percentage of the house an' niver a bit to the man that's buckin'. The Devil himself'd niver tackle such a cinch and damned if I do. There were chuckles, throttled in gurgling throats, and winks brushed away with the frost which rimed the eyelashes, as the men climbed the ice-notched bank and started across the street to the Post.
It is an amateurish performance, partly in prose, partly in verse, either blank or rimed in couplets. Where the author adopts verse as a vehicle, his language becomes crabbed and ungrammatical in its endeavour to accommodate itself to the unwonted restraint of metre, which it nevertheless fails to do.
He must have been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. He had seen his danger ere we saw him, and, tilting his body on the blast, he carelessly veered clear of collision. His head and neck were rimed with age or frost we could not tell which and his bright bead-eye noted us as he passed and whirled away on a great circle into the snow to leeward. Margaret's hand shot out to mine.
The scene consists of a cross-fire of feminine amenities, not of the most delicate, it is true, and therefore not here to be reproduced, yet of a keenness of temper and a ringing mastery in the rimed verse little less than brilliant in themselves, and little less than a portent at the date of their appearance.
Chaucer had used the rimed couplet wonderfully well in his Canterbury Tales, but in Chaucer it is the poetical thought more than the expression which delights us. With the Restoration writers, form counts for everything.
This was All for Love, which was written in blank verse, most of the others being in rimed couplets. During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London, and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him.
The cumbrous allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form the staple of Langland's work, are only broken here and there by phrases of a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad Hogarthian humour.
Word Of The Day