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More "Ballad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this ballad over and over again until he was tired, then sat still, smiling and stroking the fox skin. He had learned the song when he was a child from his mother, who had sung it all day long one spring while she was shearing the sheep. And he could not think of ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... England" (the inverted commas were in the doctor's sneer) were being welcomed on their return from the ends of the earth. He had intended going to hear what they could do; but Phillida should go instead; she was not past the ballad stage. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... Caucasus. Through his grandmother's efforts he was permitted to return from the Caucasus about eight months later, to a hussar regiment. By this time people were beginning to appreciate him; he had written his magnificent "Ballad of Tzar Ivan Vasilievitch, the Young Lifeguardsman, and the Bold Merchant Kalashnikoff," which every one hailed as an entirely new phenomenon in Russian literature, amazing in its highly artistic pictures, full of power and dignity, combined with an exterior like that of the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... liveliness. One evening she told the story of John Gilpin's ride in a way that tickled the poet's fancy, set him laughing when he woke up in the night, and obliged him to turn it next day into ballad rhyme. Mrs. Unwin's son sent it to the Public Advertiser, for the poet's corner. It was printed in that newspaper, and thought no more of until about three years later. Then it was suggested to a popular actor named Henderson, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... with blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair-day in a fishers' village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... majestic, seeking some fitting antagonist. This was the great ship that afterwards sank ignobly at its anchorage at Spithead, with "twice four hundred men," a tale which, for every English boy, is made famous in Cowper's immortal ballad. But what an image of terror and of battle the Royal George seemed as in the bitter November storm she bore down on the French fleet! Hawke disdained meaner foes, and bade his pilot lay him alongside Conflans' flagship, Le Soleil Royal. ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... Taillefer, sang a song before the Battle of Hastings: but the Normans loved the purely martial strain, and this was a ballad of French composition, perhaps a fragment of the older "Roland's Song." The "Roman de Rou," composed by Master Wace, or Gasse, a native of Jersey and Canon of Bayeux, who died in 1184, is very minute in its description of the Battle of Val des Dunes, near Caen, fought by Henry of France and William ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... orders are seen unfavorably when enjoying themselves. In labour and trouble they are more dignified and less noisy. Your suggestion as to a series of soliloquies is very flattering and has taken hold of me to the extent of writing a similar ballad on Simon de Montfort. The order in which they come is rather incongruous, particularly if I include the list I have in mind for the future thus—Danton, William III, Simon de Montfort, Rousseau, David and Russell. . . . I rejoice ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... been despatched fast and far through England, to warn each town and village that the enemy had come at last. In every seaport there was instant making ready by land and by sea; in every shire and every city there was instant mustering of horse and man. [In Macaulay's Ballad on the Spanish Armada, the transmission of the tidings of the Armada's approach, and the arming of the English nation, are magnificently described. The progress of the fire-signals is depicted in lines which are worthy of comparison with the renowned ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... the notes to that story. In his Northern Mythology, vol. I., in the footnotes at p. 290, Thorpe mentions a maiden's grave from which spring "three lilies which no one save her lover may gather." I think he must quote from a Danish ballad. ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... these, Owen had fancied that he was alone in the house. It seemed not, however. There was a primeval piano in his sitting-room, and on the second morning it suited his mood to sit down at this and sing 'Asthore', the fruity pathos of which ballad appealed to him strongly at this time, accompanying himself by an ingenious arrangement in three chords. He had hardly begun, however, when Mr Dorman appeared, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of AEolus, by Peligrino Tibaldi, in the Institute at Bologna Sonnet on Rembrant; occasioned by his Picture of Jacob's Dream Sonnet on the Luxembourg Gallery Sonnet to my venerable Friend, the President of the Royal Academy The Mad Lover at the Grave of his Mistress First Love: a Ballad The Complaint Will, the Maniac: ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... my dear sir, if we had tried to make you weep! What fault you would have found with us! Suppose we had been like the ballad-singers and story-tellers who put in lamentable tales in the hope of reducing their audience to tears! What would you have said about us then? Why, even now, when you know we only wish to amuse you, not to make you suffer, you must needs ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... his tutors; and there is a story, preserved with great pride, of a fight on the beach between him and a bathing-machine boy, at whose father's property the Prince was throwing stones. An account of this historic battle is preserved in a doggerel ballad, printed and sold locally, and composed Heaven knows where, which is called "Tapping the War-Lord's Claret: Why Kaiser Bill ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... the name Rohtraut by chance in an old German lexicon. The full vowel coloring appealed to him and called forth this ballad. ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... placidly smoking our post-prandial cigars; the ladies were below, Miss Merrivale being seated at the piano, accompanying her sister, who—having by this time quite recovered her health and spirits—was singing some quaint, old-fashioned ballad in a full, rich contralto voice that could be distinctly heard from one end of the ship to the other, and probably far beyond. As for the chief mate, he was pacing the deck thoughtfully and steadily to and fro ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Grace and glimmer of romance, Bring the moonlight into noon Hid in gleaming piles of stone; On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet, Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square. Let statue, picture, park and hall, Ballad, flag and festival, The past restore, the day adorn And make each morrow a new morn So shall the drudge in dusty frock Spy behind the city clock Retinues of airy kings, Skirts of angels, starry wings, His fathers shining in bright ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which a Turkish princess is espoused—to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.' The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness; it neither found them, nor made them, equal.... Rowe's ballad of The Despairing Shepherd is said to have been written, either before or after marriage, upon this ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tree: it more generally signifies a graceful woman: this is the very comparison made by Ulysses looking upon Nausicaa, though more naively expressed. ... And now there comes to me the recollection of a creole ballad illustrating the use of the phrase,—a ballad about a youth of Fort-de-France sent to St. Pierre by his father to purchase a stock of dobannes, [24] who, falling in love with a handsome colored ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... be, and he looked on the smart, egoistic vanity of so many with a kindly, tolerant, almost parental eye. Poor little organisms growing on the tree of life—they would burn out and fade soon enough. He did not know the ballad of the roses of yesteryear, but if he had it would have appealed to him. He did not care to rifle them, willy-nilly; but should their temperaments or tastes incline them in his direction, they would not suffer vastly in their lives because of him. The fact was, the man ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... what I had gathered from the ratcatcher, when all on a sudden a light glared upon the horse's face, who purled round in great terror, and flung me out of the saddle, as from a sling, or with as much violence as the horse Grayman, in the ballad, flings Sivord the Snareswayne. I fell upon the ground—felt a kind of crashing about my ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... was long since made secure. Madame Cole has taken part in nearly all the great musical events in this country during the past four years. She has sung everywhere in London—with the Royal Choral Society at the Albert Hall, at the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, at the Ballad Concerts, at the Monday Popular Concerts, at Sir Charles Halle's Concerts, and at Bristol, Chester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other leading towns. As seems to have been the case with most well-dowered musicians, Madame Cole's talent owes something to heredity. Musical ability, greater or less, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... oblivion and dilapidation. At the end, immediately beneath the colossal window, grows an alder of considerable luxuriance, which, added to the situation of every other object, brought Mr. Southey's pathetic ballad of 'Mary the Maid of the Inn,' so forcibly before my imagination,[5] that I involuntarily turned my eye to search for the grave, where the murderers concealed their victim." He likewise tells us of "the former garden of the monastery, still cultivated, and exhibiting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... always told of Indians, but by some is supposed to have happened to a pair of White lovers. The better account, however, makes them Indians. What adds to the interest of this tradition is, that Mr. Thomas Moore has made it the subject of a beautiful ballad entitled "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp." His having taken up the story should, I am aware, have prevented me from attempting to tell it, since it is impossible that any thing from my pen should equal his ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... the seafarers, in the heart of industrial activity; and the anecdotes and glimpses which we enjoy show, just what might have been guessed, that these houses often became scenes of riotous excess and debauch. Lydgate's ballad of "London Lickpenny" helps one to imagine what such resorts must have been in the first part of the fifteenth century. It is almost permissible to infer that the street contained, in addition to the ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... passing through a deep hollow in the wood where the gnarled and protruding roots of cypress and juniper made walking difficult, and where a strong hand was needed to push aside the wet and pendent masses of vine. Regulus, fifty yards behind them, began to sing a familiar broadside ballad, torturing the words out of all resemblance to English. The rich notes rang sweetly through the forest. Down from the far summit of a pine flashed a cardinal bird, piercing the gloom of the hollow like a fire ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... trip that they had, so the legend says, that strange interview with Judas Iscariot, out of which Matthew Arnold has made a ballad. Sailing in the wintry northern seas at Christmas time, St. Brandan saw an iceberg floating by, on which a human form rested motionless; and when it moved at last, he saw by its resemblance to the painted pictures he had seen that it must be Judas Iscariot, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... only a moment. The tuning of instruments outside broke off, and the first bars of a waltz droned invitingly out: "If you really love me," the song that had been in her ears all the evening, a flimsy ballad of the year, hauntingly sweet, as only such short-lived songs can be. Moving to the tune of it, Judith crowded with the other girls out ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... Ivanovna; then there was a literary man, young but already well known, who had written stories, novels, and plays. Who else? Why, Vassily Vassilyitch, a landowner and amateur illustrator and vignettist, with a great feeling for the old Russian style, the old ballad and epic. On paper, on china, and on smoked plates, he produced literally marvels. In the midst of this free artistic company, spoiled by fortune, though refined and modest, who recalled the existence of doctors only in times of illness, and ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... arose within the hall the din of voices and the sound of song; the instruments also were brought out and Hrothgar's minstrel sang a ballad for the delight of the warriors. Waltheow too came forth, bearing in her train presents for Beowulf—a cup, two armlets, raiment and rings, and the largest and richest collar that could be ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... replied Pollux. "Still he is sinning against the laws of beauty which I desire to win you over to, and which will survive every whim of fashion, as certainly as Homer's Iliad will survive the ballad of a street-singer, who celebrates the last murder that excited the mob of this town.—Am I the first artist who has attempted to represent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... father Thames is desired to tell who drives the hoop, or tosses the ball, and then adds, that father Thames had no better means of knowing than himself; when he compares the abrupt beginning of the first stanza of the bard, to the ballad of Johnny Armstrong, "Is there ever a man in all Scotland;" there are, perhaps, few friends of Johnson, who would not wish to blot out ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... sweeping kind they web Here was the little society of the back parlour broken up, and scattered far and wide. Here was no audience for Lovely Peg, even if there had been anybody to sing it, which there was not; for the Captain was as morally certain that nobody but he could execute that ballad, he was that he had not the spirit, under existing circumstances, to attempt it. There was no bright face of 'Wal'r' In the house;—here the Captain transferred his sleeve for a moment from the Midshipman's uniform ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... else what rapture it would yield, When cook sent up the salad, To find within its depths concealed A touching little ballad. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... accessible steeps. Then came the chapel of St. Clements and the opposing village of Asmannshausen; the lofty Rossell, built at the extremest verge of the cliff; and now the tower of Hatto, celebrated by Southey's ballad, and the ancient town of Bingen. Here they paused a while from their voyage, with the intention of visiting more minutely the Rheingau, or valley ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for this volume from a large mass of material that came into my ballad hopper while hunting cowboy songs as a Traveling Fellow from Harvard University, I have included the best of the verse given me directly by the cowboys; other selections have come in through repeated recommendation of these men; others are vagrant verses from ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... presently with a guitar. "I've been wanting to play a little," he confessed as he tuned the neglected instrument, "but it seemed sort of sacrilegious—after coming home and finding my father gone and the ranch about to go. However—why sip sorrow with a long spoon? What's that ballad about the old-fashioned garden, Miss Kay? I like it. If you'll hum ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... her head back restfully against the small down pillow tied by gay ribbons to her chair; but her resting soul leaned against an Arm,— mighty to save, and tender to feel. Amid all her musings ran the sweet strains of the old English ballad the others were singing inside, whose refrain ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... the game. He thrust his pistol into a broken oak where a woodpecker had nested, then flapped his reins and clucked to his mule. For the sake of a bold appearance he raised his voice in a spirited and cheerful ballad, but from time to time he broke off since he had stern need for ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the consequence due to an ancient name in which the rest of us forgot to feel any pride. But this was my sister Margery's way; to whom, as honour was her passion, so the very shadows of old repute, dead loyalties, perished greatness, were idols to be worshipped. By a ballad, a story of former daring or devotion, a word even, I have seen her whole frame shaken and her eyes brimmed with bright tears; nay, I have seen tears drop on her clasped hands, in our pew in St. Sampson's Church, ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Dithyramb The Four Ages of the World The Maiden's Lament To My Friends Punch Song Nadowessian Death Lament The Feast of Victory Punch Song The Complaint of Ceres The Eleusinian Festival The Ring of Polycrates The Cranes of Ibycus (A Ballad) The Playing Infant Hero and Leander (A Ballad) Cassandra The Hostage (A Ballad) Greekism The Diver (A Ballad) The Fight with the Dragon Female Judgment Fridolin; or, the Walk to the Iron Foundry The Genius with the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... or" Robinson Crusoe," or "The Vicar of Wakefield,"—was worth any conceivable amount of attainments when rated as an evidence of anything that could justly denominate a man "admirable." One felicitous ballad of forty lines might have enthroned Crichton as really admirable, whilst the pretensions actually put forward on his behalf simply install him as a cleverish or dexterous ape. However, as Lady Carbery did not forego her purpose of causing me to shine ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Ballad of the banished and returning Count The Violet The Faithless Boy The Erl-King Johanna Sebus The Fisherman The King of Thule The Beauteous Flower.. Sir Curt's Wedding Journey Wedding Song The Treasure-digger The Rat-catcher The Spinner Before a Court of Justice The ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... played his own accompaniment, his fingers, stiffened though they were with hard work, ran lightly over the keys. Every person sat still to listen. Even Martha Perkins forgot to twirl her fingers and leaned forward. It was a simple little English ballad he sang: ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... Hermes to Red Jim, keeping him from complete infatuation when she sang to him, playing her own lightly-touched accompaniment at the piano. He had never been entertained like this before. And when a girl sang a love ballad and at the same time looked at him with eyes at once serious and laughing, he had to set his teeth and shake himself to keep from taking the words of the poet too literally. Perhaps Marianne was going a little farther than she intended. But ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... in this collection the lyrical quality predominates above the narrative page 255 (cf. the many rimes in-or in Fonte-frida and El prisionero). Abenamar is properly a frontier ballad, and La constancia, perhaps, belongs with the Carolingian cycle; but the rest are detached poems of a romantic nature. (See S.G. Morley's Spanish Ballads, New ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... street, smiled. My missus has just got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don't you know: in the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can't he hear the difference? Think he's that way inclined a bit. Against my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that smallpox up ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to Lady John Russell by Lord Wriothesley Russel, written after reading Lady Minto's ballad in which these words ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... Rivals; Xerxes (1699), a tragedy acted only once; The Provoked Husband (acted 1728), completed from Vanbrugh's unfinished Journey to London; The Rival Queens, with the Humours of Alexander the Great (acted 1710), a comical tragedy; Damon and Phyllida (acted 1729), a ballad opera; and adaptations from Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden, Moliere and Corneille. A bibliography of the numerous skits on Cibber is to be found in Lowe's Bibliographical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... opens his eyes, and selects the key of your room without further delay. I am inclined to think that the selection will not be made in any way to your detriment by reason of that freedom of speech. The lady in the ballad who spoke out her own mind to Lord Bateman, was sent to her home honorably in a coach and three. Had she held her tongue, we are justified in presuming that she would have been returned on a pillion ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... for joy the moment he finds peace; gives him a fierce cathartic during conversion, and a rapturous cataplasm in his "reconciliation." Primitive Methodism occupies the same place in religion as the ballad does in poetry. It has an untamed, blithesome, healthy ring with it; harmonises well with the common instincts and the broad, common intuitions of common life; can't hurt a prince, and will improve a peasant; won't teach a king wrong things; is sure to infuse happiness ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... habit for the occasion). The spirit, for such was the seeming Mrs. Veal, continued to waive the ceremony of salutation, both in going and coming, which will remind the reader of a ghostly lover's reply to his mistress in the fine old Scottish ballad:— ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... a deliciously brown oblong of the Dutch plaice of the ballad that Samuel Levine appeared to be struck by an idea. He threw down his knife and fork and exclaimed ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... he and his two companions threw themselves on horseback, and went off at a gallop. Yet, even above the clatter of their hoofs did the incorrigible Nanty hollo out the old ballad— ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... wight, whose muse, Now sighs and sobs, like newly bottled ale, Now splits her ugly mouth with grinning.[10] Reynolds,[11] whose muse most monstrous and misshapen, Outvies the hideous form that Horace drew. Dibdin[12] a ballad monger—and for Cherry— But Cherry has no ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... delightful ballad, invites a pretty page to wait till he comes to forty years: well, I have waited—indeed, I have somewhat overshot the mark—and to-day the sight of all this brisk life, going on just as it used to do, with the same insouciance ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to having more than once assailed in print Daniel O'Connell and his kind, and to have written a pair of once famous poetical fly-leaves, "Erin go bragh" and "Hurrah for Repeal!" copies of which (beyond my archived ones) can now only be found in the Ballad Collection of the British Museum, which I used to supply with my Sibyllines, at a chief librarian's request: I forget the name, but he collected such placards. I fear the two above were not very ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the fires of the bivouacs shine up ruddily, those of the French near at hand, those of the Russians in a long line across the mid-distance, and throwing a flapping glare into the heavens. As the night grows stiller the ballad-singing and laughter from the French mixes with a slow singing ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... one's hair and dye it black, and cock a dirty slouch hat over one ear and take a guitar and sit on a flat stone by the roadside and cross one's legs, and, after a few pings and pongs on the strings, strike up a Ballad with the refrain— ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... buildings around. Up in the bunk-house some man was wailing a verse of "Ella Re," accompanied by a guitar, and the doleful drone of the hackneyed chorus was caught up by the other men "off shift." But, nauseating as it was to him, this piebald ballad of the hills, it contained one shrieking sentence: "Lost forevermore!" That was it! Joan ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... of etherial spirit which is inevitable in the transfer of poetic thoughts from one language to another. The word popular is also to be taken in a limited meaning regarding all translations. Cowper's ballad of John Gilpin is twenty times more popular than his Homer; yet the latter work is deservedly popular in comparison with the bulk of translations from antiquity. The same thing may be said of Cary's Dante; it is, like Cowper's Homer, as adequate and popular as translated poetry ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... mixed; and their subdivisions into music for different voices and different instruments—if we observe the many forms of sacred music, from the simple hymn, the chant, the canon, motet, anthem, etc., up to the oratorio; and the still more numerous forms of secular music, from the ballad up to the serenata, from the instrumental solo up ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... her to be just a sort of moon-Toby. Another girl would have wanted nothing better. Sally told herself that she was different. She went out by herself, one evening, instead of working; and walked up to Highgate. And as she went up the hill she sang to herself the ballad "The ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... hands or at the mouths of the male carousers. Men and women are figured together, but it would be very hard to find a woman in one of these rough cuts with a pipe in her hand or at her mouth. An example, in the "Shirburn Ballads" lies before me. The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called "A Knotte of Good ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... had burnt them all— This were a medley! we should have him back Who told the "Winter's tale" to do it for us. No matter: we will say whatever comes. And let the ladies sing us, if they will, From time to time, some ballad or a song To give us breathing-space.' So I began, And the rest followed: and the women sang Between the rougher voices of the men, Like linnets in the pauses of the wind: And here I give the story and ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... in country districts is languishing because the folk hear nothing of their regiments, and local attachment is very strong. Unfortunately this ballad had to be founded on material supplied by the C——r. However, the permitted references to Germans ought at any rate to convince the public that the ballad has no connection whatever ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... yet been appropriated to the purposes of poetry or the drama. The stage was a new thing; and those who had to supply its demands laid their hands upon whatever came within their reach: they were not particular as to the means, so that they gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old ballad; Othello on an Italian novel; Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition: one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last in Hollingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, are authenticated in the old Gothic ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... last week, MR. W.S. LILLY—i.e. W. "SHIBBOLETHS" LILLY—delivered an excellent lecture on the Papal-Italian question, and although at Birmingham, it was by no means a brummagem discourse. But to quote the immortal ballad of Billy Taylor, "When the Captain he come for to hear on't, He werry much applauded what she'd done," and, to apply the lines to the present instance, "When the POPE he comes for to hear on't," will he "werry much applaud," the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... popular tunes of the moment, that it requires very little imagination to picture the schoolboy of Revolutionary days shouting lustily verses from "The Battle of the Kegs," and other rhymed stories of military incidents. Such a ballad was "A Song for the Red Coats," written after the successful campaign against Burgoyne, ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... had been full of excitement. The most memorable engagement in which he took part was a very celebrated one, in November, 1759. A stirring ballad has been written about it by ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... It is all the worse that they should be destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind of beauty there is in an English village, the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... perfect antithesis to Peer. When Peer is an outlaw she deserts her father's house and follows him to his hut in the forest. The scene in which she presents herself before Peer and claims to share his lot is worthy to stand beside the ballad of the Nut-browne Mayde: indeed, as a confessed romantic I must own to thinking Solveig one of the most beautiful figures in poetry. Peer deserts her, and she lives in the hut alone and grows an old woman while her lover roams ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... think and speak too after the forms of what you heard my cousin call heathenism, that she would never have discovered, had she been as wide awake as she was sound asleep, that the song I sung was anything but a good Christian ballad." ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... living. All this must surely be of great consequence for the rise of a mental outlook that cares only for gain; and who will deny that colonial activity generates it? "Our rivulets and streams turn mill wheels and bring rafts into the valleys, as they do in Scotland. But not one ballad, not a single song, reminds us that on their banks men and women live who experience the happiness of love and the pangs of separation; that under each roof in the valleys life's joys and sorrows come and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of a kerchief. The gaiety of the day seemed infectious, and to have seized even him. People stared to see Black Jem, or Surly Jem, as he was indifferently called, so joyous, and wondered what it could mean. He then fell to singing a snatch of a local ballad at that time in ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler, writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These three persons were combined, and the result ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine people. Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... the room. Vine remained, leaning against the mantelpiece, and whistling softly to himself. He went through the whole of a popular ballad, and then he tried it in a different key. When he was sure that the three men had had time to leave the building, he too took up ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... him from censure, and would join with others of the young men in the college in hunting, as they called it, the servitor who was thus diligent in his duty, and this they did with the noise of pots and candlesticks, singing to the tune of Chevy Chase the words in the old ballad,— ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... circle of minds. Our authors have described to us in copious and entertaining detail the romance and the poetry, the writings and the imaginations, of the Scandinavian races, interspersed with abundant and well-selected specimens of the historical, romantic, legendary, chivalric, ballad, dramatic, song, and critical literature of Northern Europe. They have brought to light the treasures of the illustrious poets, historians and bards of Scandinavia, in a work of astonishing ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... presence of the innumerable fry. One would expect the giants of the deep to keep down their population. Not far off is another small lake, Loch Awe, which has invisible advantages over Loch Borlan, yet there the trout are, or were, "fat and fair of flesh," like Tamlane in the ballad. Wherefore are the trout in Loch Tummell so big and strong, from one to five pounds, and so scarce, while those in Loch Awe are numerous and small? One occasionally sees examples of how quickly trout will increase in ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... home, I always regret leaving my dear kind mistress, particularly when I have been a good deal with Her Majesty, as I have been this waiting. We sang again last night, and after Costa went away, I sorted a quantity of music for the Queen; and then Prince Albert said he had composed a German ballad, which he thought would suit my voice, and he wished me to sing it. So his royal highness accompanied me, and I sang it at sight, which rather alarmed me; but I got through it, and it is very ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... herself in the prettiest attitude in the world,—"and beg your blessing—please forgive us this time, and we'll never do so any more! And then you will turn your face away, like the baron in the ballad,— ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... of the ancient ballad seems to have been made choice of for this ode, on account of the subject; and it has, indeed, an air of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... with a glory of fair curls that fell low upon her waist and mingled with the wild pink roses at her bosom. The fiddler sat quietly as if he heard nothing until she began to sing, when he turned to look at her. The elder announced, after the ballad, that he had brought with him a wonderful musician who would favour them with some sacred music. He used the word 'sacred' because he had observed, I suppose, that certain of the 'hardshells' were looking askance at the ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... surprise and alarm, to a female figure who stands on the right. This woman has a dark physiognomy, ample flowing drapery of red and white, a white turban twisted round her head, and stretches out her hand with the air of a sibyl. The explanation of this striking group I found in an old ballad-legend. Every one who has studied the moral as well as the technical character of the various schools of art, must have remarked how often the Venetians (and Giorgione more especially) painted groups from the popular fictions and ballads of the time; and it has often been regretted ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick"; mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's "Dispensary," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a camp ballad, popular in 1862, will give a faint idea of the enthusiasm excited by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... sturdy Daniel Malcom and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,—to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... only fixed attribute. And so it has come about that side by side with tomes of Calvinistic divinity, there has been transmitted to Scotsmen an equally characteristic product of the mind of their race—a body of folksong, of ballad poetry, of legend and of story in that quaint and copious Doric speech which makes so direct an appeal to the hearts of men whether they are to the manner born or not. It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... NILS FINN. "There has hardly been written later so excellent a continuation of the old Norwegian humorous ballad as this poem (from the winter of 1856-57),written originally in the Romsdal dialect with which Bjrnson wished 'to astonish the Danes.'" ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the "twa bonnie lassies" of a Scotch ballad, daughters of two Perthshire gentlemen, who in 1666 built themselves a bower in a spot retired from a plague then raging; supplied with food by a lad in love with both of them, who caught the plague and gave it to them, of which they ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... attending such inquiries as arise out of matters so trivial as an old ballad, are curiously illustrated by the answers already printed respecting the "wooing frog." In the first place, it was attributed to times within living memory; then shown to exceed that period, and supposed to be very old,—even as old as the Commonwealth, or, perhaps, as the Reformation. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... desperate defence of a convoy in the Mediterranean against seven Sallee rovers, in which, after a hard engagement lasting four hours, the Mary Rose triumphed decisively without losing a single sail of her convoy. A rude song was made about the action, and the two lines of the ballad, summing up the results, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... which Nancy and Robert Burns lived in dangerous nearness to each other, considering her youth, her temperament, and the passion of admiration which she held for him; three days of poetry and folk-tales and ballad-singing, with the man's dangerous magnetism at ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... name, but without his participation; in which every one was commanded to seize and punish all Papists, who, contrary to law, pretended either to carry arms or exercise any act of authority. It may not be unworthy of notice that a merry ballad, called Lillibullero, being at this time published in derision of the Papists and the Irish, it was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even by the king's army, who were strongly seized with the national spirit. This incident both discovered and served ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... accord, repeat the remark that it is a "barren" period, with nothing admirable about it, at any rate in England; that it shows us the works of Hoccleve and Lydgate near the beginning, The Flower and the Leaf near the middle (about 1460), and the ballad of The Nut-brown Maid at the end of it, and nothing else that is remarkable. In other words, they neglect its most important characteristic, that it was the chief period of the lengthy popular romances and of the popular plays out of ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... possible that it was square;[394] but there is abundant evidence to show that it was not. The very name, Globe, would hardly be suitable to a square building; Jonson describes the interior as a "round";[395] the ballad on the burning of the house refers to the roof as being "round as a tailor's clew"; and the New Globe, which certainly was not square, was erected on the old foundation.[396] The frame, we know, was of timber, and the roof of thatch. In front of the main door was suspended a sign of ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... Unwin, and became a third in their friendship. It was she who told Cowper the story of John Gilpin. The story tickled his fancy so that he woke in the night with laughter over it. He decided to make a ballad of the story, and the next day the ballad was finished. I think I need hardly give you any quotation ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... men's thunder. Their social degeneracy may be traced in the dictionary. The chanter of the "gests" of kings, gesta ducum regumque, dwindled into a gesticulator, a jester: the honored jogelar of Provence, into a mountebank; the jockie, a doggrel ballad-monger. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... he did for revenge. We may imagine that he joined his power to the Moors and harried the land of Leon during his after life, at length reaching Alfonso's heart with his vengeful blade. But of this neither ballad nor legend tells, and with the pathetic scene of the dead father's ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... not hear of such strife between fere and frere, I know not; but Duke Richard sent Hastings to Ireland, and, a month after, the Lady Katherine married Lord Bonville's son and heir,—so, at least, tell the gossips and sing the ballad-mongers. Men add that Lord Hastings still loves the dame, though, certes, he ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of amusement in observing the various personages that daily passed and repassed beneath my window. The character which most of all arrested my attention was a poor blind fiddler, whom I first saw chanting a doleful ballad at the door of a small tavern near the gate of the village. He wore a brown coat, out at elbows, the fragment of a velvet waistcoat, and a pair of tight nankeens, so short as hardly to reach below his calves. A little foraging cap, that had long since seen its ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... some crocuses." These two incidents are a key to the working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had the rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use a song of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole symphony of transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain. To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and a memory which retained and developed powerfully year by year all associations ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... tramping along the high-road, whistling an old ballad of lugubrious tune when a sharp turn brought him face to face with Jase Mallows. Jerry himself was for passing on with a brief salutation, but the other halted him and fell ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... powerless. The quiet world outside their rays receded far away and ceased to be. And the talk, the wonderful talk flowed on—or was it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song—chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique? Did it change into the cry of the wind, plaintive at first, angrily shrill as it freshened, rising to ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... menace the good town of Chesterfield with destruction. Here an incident occurred, on the opening of a vault, which it is needless to relate, but which supplied me with a hint for the commencement of my romance, as well as for the ballad entitled "The Coffin." Upon this hint I immediately acted; and the earlier chapters of the book, together with the description of the ancestral mansion of the Rookwoods, were completed ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... running in my head at intervals through nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless ballad—sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly monotonous the burden, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... gently on the shoulder, and humming a music-hall ballad cheerfully, started off into the garden. He had only gone a few steps when his mother called to him. He stopped. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... The ballad entitled "The Black Shawl" has obtained a degree of popularity among the author's countrymen, for which the slightness of the composition renders it in some measure difficult to account. It may, perhaps, be explained by the circumstance, that the verses are in the original exceedingly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... land he had heard many a sweet ditty sung by noble ladies to the harp and lute, that the children would ever sing at their sports, and that he, too, had oftentimes uplifted his voice in singing of madrigals, she besought him that he would make proof of some ballad or song. The rest of the company joining in her entreaties she left him no peace till he gave way to her desire, and after that he had protested that his singing was no better than the twitter of a starling or a bullfinch, and his ditty only such as he remembered from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... music to surpass herself and vie with her pretended rival; for this theory implies that all sacred music is equally good, and, therefore, better than any other. I grant that Madame Catalani's singing of sacred music is superior to Miss Stephens's ballad-strains, because her singing is better altogether, and an ocean of sound more wonderful than a simple stream of dulcet harmonies. In singing the last verse of 'God Save the King' not long ago her voice towered above the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... he played far more parts than Byron, and crowded more genuine romance into his tragic life than even the sixth Baron of Rochdale. In "The Sick Stock Rider" he reproduces the colonial bush as keenly as Kipling reproduces India. His "How we Beat the Favourite" is the finest ballad of the turf in the language. He is, above everything, the sportsman's poet. This edition contains twelve stirring illustrations in colour by Captain G. D. Giles. 336 pages. Buckram, 5/- net. Bound in Velvet Persian, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... pockets. Every one roared out, and she flew to the door, crying piteously. But she was soon caught by the King, and taken into the back parlor. "Don't you know me, my darling?" said he. "I'm both King Whiskers, your husband the ballad-singer, and the drunken huntsman. Your father knew me well enough when he gave you to me, and all was to drive your pride out of you." Well, she didn't know how she was, with fright, and shame, and joy. Love was uppermost, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... no more for me."—There is a well-known ballad of this name, said to have been written by a Scotchman named "Low." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... labour in the field of sham ballad writing may be fresh to many people who merely know him as the real author of "Barthram's Dirge" and of "The Slaying of Anthony Featherstonhaugh." In an undated letter of 1806, Scott, writing from Ashestiel, thanks Surtees for his "obliging communications." Surtees manifestly began the correspondence, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... tradition immortalized by a fine ballad of Southey's, it is said that the abbots of Aberbrothwick, in their munificent humanity preserved a beacon on that dangerous reef of rock in the German Ocean, which is supposed to have received its name of the "Bell Rock" from the peculiar character of the warning machinery ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... Ericson watched its shadows, the music must have taken hold of him too; for when Robert ceased, he sang a wild ballad of the northern sea, to a tune strange as itself. It was the only time Robert ever heard him sing. Mysie's eyes grew wider and wider as she listened. When it ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... and has left behind him one of the purest of names, encountered the rebels with a considerable force, composed entirely of his own men; these the rebels were the less able to withstand, as they knew that still more troops were on the march. As the ballad of a northern minstrel says, the gold-horned bull of the Nevilles, the silver crescent of the Percies, vanished from the field: the chiefs themselves fled over the Scotch border, their troops dispersed, their declared partisans underwent the severest punishments. ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... January 26th, 1660-61, and February 8th, 1662-3), doubtless formed part of the ceremony of undressing the bridegroom, which, as the age became more refined, fell into disuse. All the old plays are silent on the custom; the earliest notice of which occurs in the old ballad of the wedding of Arthur O'Bradley, printed in the Appendix to "Robin ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... about the affliction of his niece, who had gone from one fainting-fit to another ever since her uncle was found hanging on the St. Michael's pear tree with his pockets inside out. The village poet likewise commemorated the young lady's grief in seventeen stanzas of a ballad. The selectmen held a meeting, and in consideration of Mr. Higginbotham's claims on the town determined to issue handbills offering a reward of five hundred dollars for the apprehension of his murderers and the recovery of the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forth. Not a word written except interlocutors. But this won't do. I have tow on the rock, and it must be spun off. Let us see our present undertakings. 1. Napoleon. 2. Review Home, Cranbourne Chase,[492] and the Mysteries. 3. Something for that poor faineant Gillies. 4. Essay on Ballad and Song. 5. Something on the modern state of France. These two last for the Prose Works. But ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... willow-twig again and began carving a head of Rudolf at the other end, chatting and laughing, and singing a ballad the while. ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sang a drawing-room ballad in which the words "dear heart" seemed to occur with astonishing frequency. Then the entertainment took a ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... lived. Seven centuries have not dimmed the memory of them, or of her. The King was away in a distant part of the country when they sent to him in haste with the message that the queen was dying. The ballad tells of his fears as he sees Dagmar's page coming, and they proved only ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... at each gate of the city. The suspension of civic authority during fair-time was for centuries a source of frequent quarrels. As late as the eighteenth century a ballad-singer was punished by ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... and bright, and rich in fruity treasure, I've heard the blackbird with delight repeat his merry measure; The ballad was a lively one, the tune was loud and cheery, And yet with every setting sun I ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... had gone. Never mind. They were here. We heard quite suddenly the familiar accents of English Tommies in provincial towns of France, and came unexpectedly upon khalfi-clad battalions marching and singing along the country roads. For the first time there rang out in France the foolish ballad which has become by a queer freak the war song of the British Army: "It's a long way to Tipperary," learnt with comical accent by French peasants and French girls, who, in those early days, in the first fine thrill of enthusiasm, sang it emotionally as ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... [An ancient Scottish ballad written in America in 1870, to show how much may be said by the judicious and economical use of a very ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... in three sides of the so-called Peckwater Quadrangle of Christ Church, which were erected after his designs. He bore a great reputation for conviviality, and wrote a humorous Latin version of the popular ballad— ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... traced to an earlier source. To the same year belongs the first version of a poem which he himself regarded as his best work, and which still retains something of its former popularity. This was the ballad of 'Edwin and Angelina', otherwise known as 'The Hermit'. It originated in certain metrical discussions with Percy, then engaged upon his famous 'Reliques of English Poetry'; and in 1765, Goldsmith, who through ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the town full of lampoons and invectives against Dutchmen, only because they are foreigners, and the king reproached and insulted by insolent pedants, and ballad-making poets, for employing foreigners, and for being a foreigner himself, I confess myself moved by it to remind our nation of their own original, thereby to let them see what a banter is put upon ourselves in it; ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... the castle and brought the harp thence, and the Lady Loise took the harp and tuned it and struck it and played upon it. And the lady sang very sweetly a ballad that she knew Sir ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... many as if the poor farmer was never to have any rest; no sooner were the long wars over and pestilences in some sense diminished, than the evils of enclosure and the dissolution of the monasteries came upon him. Many ills were popularly ascribed to the fall of the monasteries; in an old ballad in Percy's Reliques one of the ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... tone of a powerful, fresh, often uncouth, but very tender popular ballad no other writer of the time displayed like Luther. And whilst seeking to compose or re-arrange hymns for congregational use in church, he now busied himself with the Psalter, paraphrasing its contents in an evangelical spirit and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... so complex naturally necessitated a fellow having to climb up one hatchway and go down another before he could speak to his chum in the next flat, thus causing one to go through 'sich a getting upstairs' like that mentioned in the celebrated negro ballad. The difference of the deck plan of a modern cruiser, as compared with that of my old ship the Active, was not the only thing I had to learn on being drafted to the Mermaid; for the drills were quite as strange to me at first ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... an illegal and forbidden emblem! A conviction in this case would degrade the symbol of nationality into a badge of faction! To every fevered anxious mind at this moment rose the troubled memories of gloomy times—the "dark and evil days" chronicled in that popular ballad, the music and words of which now seemed to haunt ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine. A ballad, written in monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... may put out my eyes with a ballad-maker's pen, and hang me up for the sign of blind ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from her size and stature you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth,—running the primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the ship till pumped out, by reason of her flat bottom, which prevents it from going to the well of the pump; it is always (especially if the ship does not leak) of a dirty colour and disgusting penetrating smell. It seems to have been a sad nuisance in early voyages; and in the earliest sea-ballad known (temp. Hen. VI.) it is thus ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately offensive; for presently, having first served us with beer which for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was, for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... experience, and I have told this story often in the German ballad form to girls of ten and twelve in the high schools in England, I have never found one girl who sympathized with the lady or who failed to appreciate the poetic justice meted out to her in the end by the dignified renunciation ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Round, Soe famous in those dayes; Whereatt a hundred noble knights And thirty sat alwayes; Who for their deeds and martiall feates, As bookes done yett record, Amongst all other nations Wer feared through the world." Legend of King Arthur (Old Ballad). ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Poetical Remains of Some of the Scottish Kings, containing "Peblis to the Play," "Christ's Kirk on the Green," "The Gaberlunzie Man," and "Ane Ballad of Good Council," ed. ...
— Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scotch • George Tobias Flom
... subject is not only exceedingly interesting to the student of literature, but also to the student of the general history of the west. There is something very curious in the reproduction here on this new continent of essentially the conditions of ballad-growth which obtained in mediaeval England; including, by the way, sympathy for the outlaw, Jesse James taking the place of Robin Hood. Under modern conditions however, the native ballad is speedily killed ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... of water over the trim grass, and far to the rear a man in rubber boots was hosing off a phaeton before a carriage house. On the back porch, an elderly cook was peeling potatoes and gently crooning some old ballad of Erin. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... is Odin. Indeed, it is here suggested that the name Herne may in some way be connected with one of Odin's titles, Hari, the High One. It was the legend of the Wild Huntsman that inspired Sir Walter Scott to write one of his finest ballads of the mysterious. An Edinburgh friend had perused a ballad by Burger, entitled Lenore, but all he could remember of it were the following four lines: Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride; Splash, splash, across the sea. Hurrah! the dead can ride apace, Dost fear to ride ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... Prayer" and the "Liebestod," and when she was recalled at the end of the concert, she sang Senta's ballad as a bonne bouche, something that the audience had not expected, and would send her friends away more than ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Herder, in his Volkslieder, communicated a popular ballad from this dialect. See Literatur und Kunst, Vol. VII. p. ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... daughter, a maiden young and fair, Lifting to light her sweet blue eyes and pride of soft brown hair, The master of the village school, sleek of hair and smooth of tongue, To the quaint tune of some old psalm, a husking-ballad sung. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... favorite melodies which we had often sung in camp, when, as on a pleasant Sunday evening, we were met together in little knots, to mingle our emotions in plaintive song, thinking of dear friends at home. One of these was a simple ballad describing the following incident—one of the most touching of the war. A youthful soldier from the state of Maine died in New Orleans, with none but strangers—as has been the lot of many—to watch over him in his dying hours, or to perform the sad rites of burial. ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... convoy in the Mediterranean against seven Sallee rovers, in which, after a hard engagement lasting four hours, the Mary Rose triumphed decisively without losing a single sail of her convoy. A rude song was made about the action, and the two lines of the ballad, summing up the results, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet; Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square; Let statue, picture, park, and hall, Ballad, flag, and festival The past restore, the day adorn, And make ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... end, a miniature stage supporting the orchestra and, temporarily, the gyrations of a lady in a vivacious scarlet costume—mistress of the shopworn contralto—who was "vamping with the feet" the interval between two verses of her ballad. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... still see them in the Tyrol or the Higher Alps, and coming down thence but once a week, never wanted for illusions in the desert. One child had seen this, some woman had dreamed that. A new saint began to rise. The story went abroad in the shape of a ballad with doggrel rhymes. They sang and danced to it of an evening at the oak by the fountain. The priest, when he came on Sunday to perform service in the woodland chapel, found the legendary chant already in every mouth. He said to himself, "After all, history is good, is edifying.... ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... old popular poetry will recognize, in the principal incident of this story, the subject of the well-known ballad, "The Heir of Linne." ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... of the ballad, which was about a recent double suicide: "The sorrowful ditty of Tamayone and Takejiro,— composed by Tabenaka Yone of Number Fourteen of the Fourth Ward of Nippon-bashi in the South District of the City of Osaka." It had evidently been printed ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... Heaven forbid! But who that knows you have been a single Hour in Wilding's Hands, wou'd not swear you have lost your Maidenhead? And back again I'm sure you dare not go unmarried; that wou'd be a fine History to be sung to your eternal Fame in a Ballad. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... one of his great repeal meetings, of his eloquent speech in the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, and his genial letters to Lucretia Mott, in favor of woman's right to vote. After three cheers for O'Connell, they shouted, "Go on, go on." The Hutchinsons then sang their stirring ballad, "The good time coming." The reception at each booth was respectful, and at the end of the speech or song there followed three hearty cheers for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... rhymes of Bjoernson, such as Killebukken, Lokkeleg and Haren og Raeven ("The Hare and the Fox"), are significant because of the masterly security with which they strike the national key and keep it. Not a word is there that rings false. And with what an exquisite tenderness the elegaic ballad strain is rendered in Venevil and "Hidden Love" (Dulgt Kaerlighed), and the playful in the deliciously girlish roguery of Vidste du bare ("If you only knew"), and the bold dash and ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Saxony, though fancy has not gone so far in his case as in that of the French paladin and the Welsh hero of knight-errantry, for, though he and his predecessor Hermann became favorite characters in German ballad and legend, the romance heroes of that land continued to be the mythical Siegfried and his partly fabulous, partly historical companions of the epical song ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... Robin Hood's Bower, where the maidens collected money for the "ales," and "all went merry as a marriage bell"—rather too merry sometimes, for the ale was strong and the villagers liked it, and the ballad-singer was so merry, and the company so hearty—and was it not all for a good cause, the support of the poor? The character of these festivals deteriorated so much, until at last "church ales" were prohibited altogether, on account of the excess ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... work. He was going to write some Biblical plays; one entitled "Pharaoh" first, and then one called "Ahab and Jezebel," which he pronounced Isabelle. Deeper problems, too, were much in his mind: he was already at work on "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," but before coming to that let me first show how happy the song-bird was and how divinely he sang when the dreadful cage was opened and he was allowed to use his wings in ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... sun. The introduction, a bold, exhorting strain, in grandiose style, full of large intervals, was given with a glorious fervor, and no lark ever carolled more blithely or more at ease than her voice as it soared to F in alt! Benedict's English ballad, 'Take this Lute,' she sang with a simplicity and pathos that won the audience completely; and no part seemed more genuine or more expressive than the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... to Burton major. Old Butt grinned like an owl. He didn't know what I was drivin' at; but King jolly well did. That was really why he hove us out. Ain't you grateful? Now shut up. I'm goin' to write the 'Ballad of ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... grasping in each hand a serried pyramid of brass bells, which chimed merrily as he squatted, leaped, and executed eccentric steps with his feet, while his arms beat time and his fine voice rolled out the solo of a rollicking ballad, to which the rest of the company furnished the chorus as well as their laughter and delighted applause of his efforts permitted. His tightly fitting dark green trousers, tall boots, and jacket of white cloth trimmed with yellow set off ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... Ponce and figured by Bonet was common in Spanish almanacs hawked by ballad-mongers upon the streets of Madrid in the days of De l'Epee, and although rejected by him, it was adopted by his pupils. This with slight modifications became the French manual alphabet which was introduced ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... Maldon' is a ballad, containing an account of a fight between the Northmen and the East Saxons under the Aldorman, Byrhtnoth. The incident is mentioned in one MS. of the Chronicle under the date of 991; in another, under the date of 993. The poem is exceedingly graphic. The ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... away" Mr Arnold "fully conjugated in his desk." The poem is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and "nineteenth century" in its looking back to a simple and pathetic story of the Middle Age—love, bereavement, and pious resignation. It is divided into three parts. The first, in trochaic ballad metre, telling the story, is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia Cruscans. The second, describing the church where the duke and duchess sleep, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... miscellaneous division of Ballads, Songs, etc., is much more fruitful. "The Leaf and the Fountain," beginning "Tell me, kind seer, I pray thee," though rather long, is singularly good of its kind—the kind of half-narrative ballad. So in a lighter strain is "The Indian Bark." Nor is Moore less at home after his own fashion in the songs from the Anthology. It is true that the same fault which has been found with his Anacreon may be found ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... persisted and Billy finally obliged with what the boys called a pathetic little ballad, entitled: "I Didn't Raise My Dog to be ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... participation; in which every one was commanded to seize and punish all Papists, who, contrary to law, pretended either to carry arms or exercise any act of authority. It may not be unworthy of notice that a merry ballad, called Lillibullero, being at this time published in derision of the Papists and the Irish, it was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even by the king's army, who were strongly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... women screaming, fiddlers playing, pipes squeeling, youngsters, dancing, hammering up of standings and tents, thumping of restive or lazy animals, the show-man's drum, the lottery-man's speech, the ballad-singer's squall, all come upon us; and lastly, the unheeded sweep of the death-bell, as it tells with sullen tongues that some poor mortal has for ever departed from the cares and amusements, the trade and traffic, of this ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Birkenhead. But because in that Mersey town most of the crowd was sure to be English, wi' a sprinkling o' Irish, the management had suggested that I should leave out my Scottish favorites when I made up my list o' songs. So I began wi' a sentimental ballad, went on wi' an English comic song, and finished with "Calligan-Call-Again," the very successful Irish song I had ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... them, he divined them, and these are the only pieces of color which in the least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's second period. As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to become interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly before him; then—and this seems to have always been the difficult and tedious part—to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to fill in the outlines with radiant color. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... certain strains of the Carolina wren's vigorous lays, but this songster's voice was of a finer quality and had less volume than that of the Carolina. The little bird was found flitting among the pines, and continued to sing his gay little ballad with as much vigor as before. Indeed, my presence seemed to inspire him to redouble his efforts and to sing with more snap and challenge. He acted somewhat like a wren, but was smaller than any species of that family with which I was acquainted, and no part ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... herself in matters culinary, Jeremy and I lighted the forge and got us to work. And very often above the ring and clamour of our hammers would rise the wonder of her voice singing some wild air of the Zingari or plaintive old ballad; so often and so gloriously she sang that at last, as I blew the fire for another heat, Jeremy bade me hush, and silent thus we ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of Mark Twain and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing "The Doleful Ballad of the Neglected Lover," an old piece of uncollected erotica. One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke "to find his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement," ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with the remains of a fortification on its summit, said to have been erected by the Picts; the field of Harlaw, famed in song, where the battle was fought in 1411, in which Donald of the Isles was defeated. There are many traditional ballads and stories relating to Benachie and Noth. There is a ballad called "John O'Benachie" and another, "John O'Rhynie, or Jock O'Noth" and they do not appear in any collection of ancient ballads I have seen. It is said that long "before King Robert rang," two giants inhabited these mountains, and are supposed to be the respective ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... the store at the moment; but from the rear the sobbing tones of a violin took up the strains of "Silver Threads Among the Gold." Janice listened. There seemed, to her ear, a sadder strain than ever in Hopewell's playing of the old ballad. For a time this favorite had been discarded for lighter and brighter melodies, for the little family here on the by-street had been ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... as the manifestation of law is essential to an intelligent hearing of music. The listener should have at least a rudimentary knowledge of musical construction from the simplest ballad to the most complex symphony. Having this knowledge it will be possible to receive undisturbed the impressions music has to give, and to distinguish the trivial and commonplace from the ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... of a Scottish ballad, well known to collectors in that department; and the history of the conversion of the murderess, and of her carriage at her execution, compiled apparently by one of the clergymen of Edinburgh, has been lately printed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... melody rose and fell like the waves on the shore; and Rita would curl herself like a panther in the sun, and murmur with pleasure, and call for more. Then, perhaps, Margaret would sing that lovely ballad of Hogg's, which begins, ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... error, has inadvertently committed another. Monsieur de la Palisse is the hero alluded to in the popular song which was written at the commencement of the eighteenth century by Bernard de la Monnoye, upon the old ballad, composed after the battle ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... take heed to my little ballad, which shall lead you into all virtues. My mistakes I submit ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... ballad of Der Zauberlehrling (L'Apprenti Sorcier) which Dukas so cleverly made into music? There, in the absence of his master, an apprentice set working some magic spells, and so opened sluice-gates that no one could shut; and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... our discourse, but when we were again alone the conversation returned to poetry, and I told Goethe that I had of late been once more studying his little poems, and had dwelt especially upon two of them, viz., the ballad[20] about the children and the old man, and the "Happy Couple" ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Warrington said, "and a great deal too calm; I've tried 'em." "The monotony of that existence must be to a certain degree melancholy—like the tune of a long ballad; and its harmony grave and gentle, sad and tender: it would be unendurable else. The loneliness of women in the country makes them of necessity soft and sentimental. Leading a life of calm duty, constant routine, mystic reverie—a ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation" in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and horror knew no bounds. ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... during the last two generations, and has discovered methods of trivial elegance which were quite unknown to our forefathers. Here must certainly be said a word in favor of those French forms of verse, all essentially lyrical, such as the ballad, the rondel, the triolet, which have been used so abundantly as to become quite a feature in our lighter literature. These are not, or are but rarely, fitted to bear the burden of high emotion; but their precision, and the deftness ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... the footprints they had lately made, watched the lithe figure tripping to and fro, and, as he looked, murmured to himself the last line of a ballad Debby ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... Cornwall, is Pentargain, a headland called after him "Arthur's Head." Other localities take his name in Brittany. In the Middle Ages, in Germany, Arthur's Courts were buildings in which the patricians assembled. One such still remains at Danzig. There was one anciently at Thorn, about which a ballad and legend exist. Milton was meditating an Arthurian epic in 1639; and in our own day the interest of the legends about King Arthur and his knights has been revived by Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" and some of Wagner's operas. We must not omit to note the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... came not here, I thought if we could find the sea We should be sure to meet him there, And once again might happy be.-Ballad. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men * have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... scattered all too easily; but the new servants, their words and ways, not only kept his hands full, but gave strange food for thought. The silent evenings, timed by the plash of a frog in a pool, a cry from the river, or the sing-song of a "boy" improvising some endless ballad below-stairs; drowsy noons above the little courtyard, bare and peaceful as a jail; homesick moments at the window, when beyond the stunted orangery, at sunset, the river was struck amazingly from bronze to indigo, or at dawn flashed from pearl-gray ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... her piano and struck into a brilliant strain. For a few moments the music was of a forced and defiant character, loud, gay, but with no real or rollicking mirth in it, and it soon ceased. Then in a sharp contrast came a sad, weird German ballad, and this was real. In its pathos her burdened heart found expression, and whoever listened then would not merely have admired, but would have felt. One song followed another. All the pent-up feeling of the day seemed to find natural flow in the plaintive ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... of his mind he realized he ought to adjust his oxygen flow, but before he brought himself to make the adjustment the surplus took its effect. He began to hum, then to dance awkwardly over the sand. A moment later he was singing a wild space ballad that he thought he had forgotten years before. After ten feet he tripped and went sprawling down in the sand. He lay there, trickling the violet sands through the gloves of his spacesuit, feeling very lightheaded and very foolish all at ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... National poetry I ever read was one compiled by Charles Gavan Duffy—"The Ballad Poetry of Ireland." I should say that this has been one of the most popular books ever issued. There are none of his own songs in this volume. The few he did write are in the "Spirit of the Nation" and other collections. These make us regret he did not write more, for, in ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... back, clapping and laughing. This was as it should be. Fun, youth, gaiety. She went to her easel in the north room, humming Joan's old ballad, and never did better work in her life than ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... the doleful and incongruous love ballad of old lands, and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl of earth who touched a guitar and taught him ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... heavens, and the sun above gives the same warning that is given here on earth by the flowers and the bright insects of the day. There is a tinge of sadness about the radiance of sunset, and the melody was sad. It was a song widely known in the days of yore, a ballad of love and sorrow that once had served to stir a national hatred of France for England. Beaumarchais, in a later day, had given it back its true poetry by adapting it for the French theatre and putting it into the mouth of a page, who pours out ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... has during this little homily), for suddenly Laurie's ghost seemed to stand before her, a substantial, lifelike ghost, leaning over her with the very look he used to wear when he felt a good deal and didn't like to show it. But, like Jenny in the ballad... ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... volume on "Lyric Declamation: Recitative, Song and Ballad Singing," will be discussed the practical application of these basic principles of Style to the vocal music of the German, French, Italian ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... Chaucer prefixed to the Aldine edition of his poetical works, there is published, for the first time, "a very interesting ballad," "addressed to him by Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary French poet," of which I beg leave to quote the first stanza, in order to give me the opportunity of inquiring the meaning of "la langue Pandras," ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... supernatural as at something wild and barbaric. Such ghosts as presume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and even elegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet's William and Margaret (1759). which was founded on a scrap of an old ballad out of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Margaret's wraith rebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. But spirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were more likely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. Johnson expresses the attitude of his age when, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... an inexpressible confusion. He saw himself now forsaken not only by those whom he had trusted and favored most, but even by his own children. And the army was in such distraction that there was not any one body that seemed entirely united and firm to him. A foolish ballad was made at that time treating the papists, and chiefly the Irish, in a very ridiculous manner, which had a burden, said to be Irish words, lero, lero, lilibulero, that made an impression on the army that cannot be well imagined by those ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... evening with Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, cheering Cowper greatly by her liveliness. One evening she told the story of John Gilpin's ride in a way that tickled the poet's fancy, set him laughing when he woke up in the night, and obliged him to turn it next day into ballad rhyme. Mrs. Unwin's son sent it to the Public Advertiser, for the poet's corner. It was printed in that newspaper, and thought no more of until about three years later. Then it was suggested to a popular actor named Henderson, who gave ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... mysterious government, recounted, with a rapid utterance, and in language suited to the popular ear, at the foot of the spars which upheld the conquered banners of Candia, Crete, and the Morea, the ancient triumphs of the Republic; while there, a ballad-singer chanted, to the greedy crowd, the glory and justice of San Marco. Shouts of approbation succeeded each happy allusion to the national renown, and bravos, loud and oft-repeated, were the reward of the agents of the police, whenever they most administered ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the lightest tints of mirth to the sombre shades of tender pathos. The variety of feeling awakened by these lyrics is remarkable—and to say that, is to bear sympathetic testimony to the excellence of each separate piece. Even the beautiful ballad of 'Agnes,' chronicling the loves of Sir Harry Frankland and Agnes Surraige of the Hopkinton Frankland mansion, and which will be deemed one of the most perfect of new ballads of the olden school, does ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... regal splendor which he sometimes displayed, dazzled a people who have much in common with children. Even now, after the lapse of more than fifty years, the natives of India still talk of him as the greatest of the English, and nurses sing children to sleep with a gingling ballad about the fleet horses and richly-caparisoned elephants ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it. For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient, while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he is most frequently and justly chargeable. One ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... pleasure and a pastime for a nation; it is a source of progress; it elevates and develops the moral nature of men at the same time that it amuses them and stirs them deeply. We have just seen what oaths were taken by the knights and administered by the priests; and now, here is an ancient ballad by Eustache Deschamps, a poet of the fourteenth century, from which it will be seen that poets impressed upon knights the same duties and the same virtues, and that the influence of poetry had the same aim as that ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... their departure at the unfashionable hour of nine, and in the interval engaged themselves in dancing, in games, in listening to brilliant executions on different musical instruments and the rich melody of well-trained voices, in ballad and song, clever repartees and intellectual conversation, while the supper table, laden with all the delicacies procurable, was a continual feast from the opening to the close of the entertainment. The guests were escorted down the avenue by ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... somebody else when I'm in fault; but I suppose my master would never think of doing that, else it's a mighty relief. However, he could eat no tea, and was altogether put out and gloomy. And the little faithful imp-lad, perceiving all this, I suppose, got up like a page in an old ballad, and said he would run for his life across country to Comberford, and see if he could not get there before the bags were made up. So my master gave him the letter, and nothing more was heard of the poor fellow till this morning, for ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of Captain Kidd.—"My name was Captain Kidd as I sailed," are famous lines of an old ballad which was once familiar to our grandfathers. The hapless hero of the same was born about the middle of the seventeenth century, and it is thought, near Greenock, Scotland. He resided at one time in New York, near ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... that he had been led round in an exact triangle, for through the green meshes of the trees he caught a glimpse of the lake and a thin blue column of fire-smoke, and then in the surrounding silence he heard Kiddie's well-known voice singing a snatch of a Scots ballad— ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... in nearly all the great musical events in this country during the past four years. She has sung everywhere in London—with the Royal Choral Society at the Albert Hall, at the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, at the Ballad Concerts, at the Monday Popular Concerts, at Sir Charles Halle's Concerts, and at Bristol, Chester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other leading towns. As seems to have been the case with most well-dowered musicians, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... proud spirit—change surprising to all, but as natural as any other of the thousand changes which are produced in the progress of moments by the arch-magician, Love. Heretofore, her song had disdained the ordinary topics of the youthful ballad-monger. She had uttered her apostrophes to the eagle, soaring through the black, billowy masses of the coming thunder-storm; to the lonely but lofty rock, lonely in its loftiness, which no foot travelled but her own; to the silent glooms of the forest—to the majesty of white-bearded ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... one service; he turns novelist late in life when the success of his poetry seems to be over. His early experiments in verse are queerly suggested and full of hazard. It needs a foreign language—German—to encourage him to rhyme. The fascination of Buerger's Lenore is a reflection from English ballad poetry; the reflected image brought out what had been less remarkable in the original. The German devices of terror and wonder are a temptation to Scott; they hang about his path with their monotonous and mechanical jugglery, their horrors made all the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... some possibly inoffensive enough person, whose every word, look or action jars on the nerves. It flashes, too, a brilliant comic light on the natural tendencies of asceticism. Side by side with this poem, under the general name of Camp and Cloister, was published the vigorous and touching little ballad now known as Incident of the French Camp, a stirring lyric of war, such as Browning has always been able, rarely as he has cared, to write. The ringing Cavalier Tunes (so graphically set to music by Sir C. Villiers Stanford) strike the same note; so, too, does ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... expect to find him while thinking of your upper C, you will hit him lightly on the shoulder with your sword, and then he can die to his own particular tune. If you have been severely wounded in battle, or in any other sort of row, and have got to sing a long ballad before you finally expire, you don't want to have to think how a man would really behave who knew he had only got a few minutes to live and was feeling bad about it. The chances are that he would not want to sing at all. The woman who really loved him would ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... under their Eyes. He is now laying the same Snares for the present Generation of Beauties, which he practised on their Mothers. Cottilus, after having made his Applications to more than you meet with in Mr. Cowley's Ballad of Mistresses, was at last smitten with a City Lady of 20,000L. Sterling: but died of old Age before he could bring Matters to bear. Nor must I here omit my worthy Friend Mr. HONEYCOMB, who has often told us in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... stone pitcher from the bench by the wall she went out, and, sheltered by the ridge of rocks behind which the cottage stood, made her way to the spring which dripped from a crack in the cliffs. While she waited for the pitcher to fill, she sang, in sheer lightness of heart, the old ballad which not only floated on the air of Abersethin and its neighbourhood, but which she had heard her mother sing in the far-off land ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... marriage), though of a high order, and exerted to the utmost, failed to please. Miss Pillbody's thorough knowledge of French, and the higher branches of an elegant education, as well as her proficiency on the piano, and her sweet, simple style of ballad singing, were worse than useless acquirements in ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... he, who despises and defies, and has lampooned the Whigs all round, only invented out of wantonness, and for the sake of annoying me—and he has certainly succeeded, thanks to your circulating this filthy ballad. As for his Lordship's vulgar notions about the mob, they are very fit for the Poet of the Morning Post, and for nobody else. Nothing in the ballad annoyed me but the charge about the Cambridge club, because nothing else had the semblance of truth; and I own it has hurt me very much to find ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... in the drawing-room of the Dark House, with her eyes half closed, as if listening to the ballad Lydia was singing in a low tone in the corner of the back room, while Capel stood by ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... an ancient ballad of the time of good King Arthur, called "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine," which you may some time read yourself, in stout English of early times; and as he sang, all listened to that noble tale of noble knight and his sacrifice to his king. But ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... he alleged many a Scripture, but those I valued not; the Scriptures, thought I, what are they? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings' price.[39] Alas! What is the Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables;[40] but for the holy Scriptures I cared not. And as it was with me then, so it is with my brethren now, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Kentucky's soldier poet—and a score of others who won fame, even if some of them lost life—on far different fields. There rare "Ran" Tucker—later famed in Congress and law school—told inimitably the story of "The time the stars fell," or sang the unprecedented ballad of "The Noble Skewball," in his ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... lady to take a 'set to' with him; while Bloody Mike stumbled over the prostrate form of the lady's maid, who occupied a temporary bed upon the floor. Forgetting his assumed part, he yelled out for something to drink, and forthwith began to sing in tones of thunder, the pathetic Hibernian ballad ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... and the hopeful mind might have expected to reach somewhere important by nightfall. I did not expect that; neither, on the other hand, did I expect that after we had gone a mile and only four, as the early ballad would say, that we should pull up and anchor against a small village for the night; but this we did, the captain going ashore to see for cargo, and to ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... is still in her chamber, and, as for the waiting maid, I heard her but five minutes since singing away as if there were no music in the world but her own. Truly, it sounded more like a snatch from some profane ballad than a godly hymn. I will tutor her about this levity. Now do not be angry, dear life," added the dame, whose heart was made more tender, and her tongue more communicative, by the anxieties she had suffered ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... modern trash. They are not at all difficult, and the second player has something to employ his mind besides accompanying chords. They are meaty, and effective almost to the point of catchiness. The "Tale of the Knights" is full of chivalric fire and martial swing, while the "Ballad" is as exquisitely dainty as a peach-blossom. The "Hindoo Maiden" has a deal of the thoroughly Oriental color and feeling that distinguish the three solos of "Les Orientales," of which "Clair de ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... which quickened other germs of what was afterwards to be known as romanticism, brought with it a notable renascence of the ballad. By general consent the first place in the balladry of the time belongs to Brger's Lenore (1774). The uncanny supernaturalism and onomatop[oe]ic word-jingles, which had lent a mysterious fascination to many an old ballad, but had virtually disappeared from the lyric ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... following summer. During this second visit (September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroism, Herve Riel, was written, though its publication belongs to four ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... songs,—his happy, cheery melody,—all about the earth, the sky, the sun, the tree he and his mate have chosen to build in,—a song of the little brook where he means to get the water to wet the clay to plaster his nest,—a ballad of the blue eggs it will hold, and the greedy little Robins, all eyes and mouth, that will come out of them. But as he sings something frightens him; then he cries, 'quick! quick! quick!' and hurries away in a rather clumsy fashion. If any one could understand the meaning of all that ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... was "Monk" Lewis. As the author of the Monk and the Tales of Wonder, he not only found his way into the best circles, but had gained a high reputation in the literary world. His poetic talent was undoubted, and he was intimately connected with Walter Scott in his ballad researches. His Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene was recited at the theatres, and wherever he went he found a welcome reception. His West Indian fortune and connections, and his seat in Parliament, gave him access to all the aristocratic circles; from which, however, ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... Bottles arose amid a burst of applause, and began to sing a ballad which had been written in Bristol or Bath in celebration of ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "for which no rhyme our language yields," next door to a pastry shop that claimed to have furnished the mise en scene for the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche "down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves." Ah, well-a-day! I have known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his Paris, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... brilliant incidents for their songs or ballads, which were chanted at the royal festivals and at the table of the Inca. *8 In this manner, a body of traditional minstrelsy grew up, like the British and Spanish ballad poetry, by means of which the name of many a rude chieftain, that might have perished for want of a chronicler, has been borne down the tide of rustic melody ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... A BALLAD, made by a Gentleman in Ireland, who could not have Access to a Lady whom he went to visit, because the Maid the Night before had over-laid her pretty Bitch. To the Tune of, O ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... a twopenny 'bus, as was my mistaken belief, but quite the reverse—that is to say, the "bandy-legged conductor" of the same vehicle. A gentleman in Ireland was even so obliging as to send me another ballad by Harry Clifton, on the front of which is his portrait and on the back a list of his triumphs—and they make very startling reading, at any rate to me, who have never been versatile. The number of songs alone is appalling: no fewer than thirty to which he had ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... blank verse as the most suitable metre for the translation of a long and dignified narrative poem, as the metre which can most nearly reproduce the strength, the nobility, the variety and rapidity of the original. The ballad measure as used by Lumsden in his translation of Beowulf is monotonous and trivial, while the measure used by Morris and others, and intended as an imitation of the Old English alliterative measure, ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can "on horror's head horrors accumulate." He assimilates the sluggish sympathies of his readers to those of sailors and vulgar ballad readers, who cannot be excited to an interest in the battle of the Arethusa, unless they learn that "her sails smoaked with brains, and her scuppers ran blood;"—a line which threatens him with formidable competitors from before ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... approaching the scullery. I heard a door open, then a man's voice singing. He was warbling in a fine mellow baritone that popular German ballad: ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... sing ballad music," she said, loftily. "Indeed I could not do myself justice in anything this evening. I make it a matter of conscience not to attempt a note unless I am in perfect tune throughout—mentally, spiritually and physically. I should consider it an offence against the noblest of ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... toward the sensational part of the ballad, the place where a real gentleman would quit, but Lightfoot only ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... blindness continue, Salemina," I said, searching for a small lump so as to gain time, "I shall write you a plaintive ballad, buy you a dog, and stand you on a street corner! If you had ever permitted yourself to 'get on' with any man as Francesca is getting on with Mr. Macdonald, you would now ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... an angular and hurried little girl: she is all quips and cranks and wreathed smiles now. And meek, humble-minded Martha, in former days so diffident, blushing and taciturn, has found out the value of a deferential demeanor and the knack of being a good listener, and can sing a ballad with a pathos and dramatic effect that eclipse the highly-embellished performances of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... night out the boys noted a change in Al Howard; the third night they asked one another 'what had come over the old man.' For whereas formerly his had always been the gayest voice around the camp fire, his the tongue to spin a yarn or start a cowboy ballad, now he withdrew after a silent supper and threw himself down on the ground and stared at the stars, his thoughts his own behind the locked ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... catastrophe which had changed all their lives, had been well taught under their father's influence; and the former, who had inherited much of his talent and poetical nature, had availed herself of every scanty opportunity of feeding her imagination by book or ballad, story-teller or minstrel; and the store of tales, songs, and fancies that she had accumulated were not only her own chief resource but that of her sisters, in the many long and dreary hours that they had to pass, unbrightened save by the inextinguishable buoyancy of ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would you hear of a Spanish lady, How she woo'd an Englishman? Garments gay, as rich as may be, Decked with jewels she had on. Old Ballad. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had lifted in his arms at Windsor as he rode out in fatal pomp for Ireland. Three years later, when their marriage was real, she died in childbirth, and it is to her I think that he wrote in his prison the ballad ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... ceremonies over Jesse James's remains drew a great concourse of people, and there were many indications of popular sympathy. Stories of his exploits have had an extensive sale, and his name has become a center of legend and ballad somewhat after the fashion of the medieval ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... fields of literature. The facts of the history lesson will be given an additional attractiveness if the pupil is directed to some well-written biography or drama embodying the same facts, or if the teacher reads or recites to the class some spirited ballad, such as Bonnie Dundee, bearing upon the lesson. The interest in the observations made in nature study will be intensified by reading some nature story written in ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Convention" (Vol. vii., p. 596.).—L. EVANS will find the whole of the ballad of "Bonnie Dundee," the first line of which he quotes, in Sir Walter Scott's Doom of Devorgoil, where it is introduced as a song. Singularly enough, his best ballad is thus ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... pipes filled and lighted, some one would strike up a "chantey"—one of those interminable, monotonous ballad-songs which are peculiar to the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... crocuses." These two incidents are a key to the working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had the rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use a song of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole symphony of transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain. To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and a memory which retained and developed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... a cask, when shaken, if the cask be not full;" and to guggle, as a "straight-necked bottle, when it is emptying;" and yet I am inclined to believe that the word also signifies to swallow, as in England. In the humorous ballad of "Rise up and bar the door," clunk seems to be used in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... striking ballad (together with the yet grander one of the "Fight with the Dragon") amongst those designed to depict and exalt the virtue of Humility. The source of the story is in AEgidius Tschudi—a Swiss chronicler—and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... state attended by a hastily-summoned physician. In the fifth Act the play breaks with the narrative of Beaumarchais, which does not supply material for the necessary tragic conclusion, and is based on an old German ballad, with an evident recollection of the scene of Hamlet and Laertes at the grave of Ophelia. While stealing from his house under cover of night, as had been arranged with Carlos, Clavigo passes the Guilberts' door, where he sees three mourners standing with torches in their ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... of exaltation and rejoice with the heir when he comes, upon reversion, into the property from which he has been so long excluded? Mr. Blewitt treats this incident with a sense of romance and picturesqueness of language reminiscent of the ballad of "The Lord of Lynn." In its facts the ballad bears a striking resemblance to those so graphically described by our author, but in point of execution lacks the true breath of poetic inspiration which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... the "Guardian" is wonderful. The Gladstonian tee-to-tum cannot have many more revolutions to make. The only thing left for him now, is to turn Agnostic, declare Homer to be an old bloke of a ballad-monger, and agitate for the prohibition of the study ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... waters done in quicksilver. Whether his evil deeds were interred with his bones, who can say?—certainly his living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the Book of Odes, Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over men so buried alive with their ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... willing to depict Hotspur as scorning the arts. When Glendower praises poetry, Hotspur vows he'd "rather be a kitten and cry mew ... than a metre ballad-monger. ..." Nothing sets his teeth on edge "so much as mincing poetry": and a little later he prefers the howling of a dog to music. When he is reproved by Lord Worcester for "defect of manners, want of government, ... pride, haughtiness, disdain," ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... instance, he would write a chanson; In England a six canto quarto tale; In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on The last war—much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he 'd prance on Would be old Goethe's (see what says De Stael); In Italy he 'd ape the 'Trecentisti;' In Greece, he sing some sort of hymn ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Scawen Blunt, poet, patriot, and breeder of Arab horses, who is a descendant of the Gales, has a long poem entitled "Worth Forest," wherein old Leonard Gale is a notable figure. Among other poems by the lord of Crabbet is the very pleasantly English ballad of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... ever know a person who met Fortune in that way, whom the goddess did not regard kindly? Are not even bad people won by a constant cheerfulness and a pure and affectionate heart? When the babes in the wood, in the ballad, looked up fondly and trustfully at those notorious rogues whom their uncle had set to make away with the little folks, we all know how one of the rascals relented, and made away with the other—not having the heart to be unkind to so much innocence and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Abbotsford, is a piece of pleasantry, which would have formed an excellent pendent to Sir Walter's Study, in our last; Zadig and Astarte, by Delta, are in the writer's most plaintive strain; the recollections of our happiest years, are harmoniously told in "Boyhood;" a ballad entitled "The Captive of Alhama," dated from Woburn Abbey, and signed R——, is a soul-stirring production, attributed to Lord John Russel; and the Pixies of Devon has the masterly impress of the author of Dartmoor. And last ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... attic ladder (they called it the 'mainmast tree' out of the ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, and Dan 'swarved it with might and main,' as the ballad says) they saw a man sitting on Duck window-sill. He was dressed in a plum-coloured doublet and tight plum-coloured hose, and he drew busily in ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... only the fear of impinging on Mr. Young's copyright that prevents me reprinting the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the prologue of The Strollers, which reads like a page from the prelude to some Old-World miracle play. The setting of these things is frequently antique, but the thought is the thought of today. I think there is ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... The music was first-class in every respect and nearly every piece was encored. Gilder's Galop de Concert and Orlandini's Largo al Factotum most emphatically so. Mrs. Blake distinguished herself as an accomplished vocalist in Millard's song, When the Tide Comes In, and in the favorite old Scotch ballad, John Anderson, My Joe. It was supposed from the low price that these concerts would be beneath the notice of the high toned dilettanti of the city, but the performance last evening has completely disabused ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... Medsger, the naturalist of Lincoln High School, Jersey City, N. J., for reading with critical care those parts of the manuscript that deal with flowers and insects, as well as for the ballad of the Ox-eye, the story of its coming to America, and ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... Colonel had been singing his ballad there had come into the room a gentleman, by name Captain Costigan, who was in his usual condition at this hour of the night. Holding on by various tables, he had sidled up without accident to himself or any of the jugs and glasses ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the drama. The stage was a new thing; and those who had to supply its demands laid their hands upon whatever came within their reach: they were not particular as to the means, so that they gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old ballad; Othello on an Italian novel; Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition: one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last in Hollingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... relating to the yeomanry the most important was the "Pleasant Historic of Thomas of Reading; or, The Sixe Worthie Yeomen of the West," by Thomas Deloney, a famous ballad-maker of the 16th century. It is the narrative of the life and fortunes of a worthy clothier of Henry the First's time, telling how he rose to wealth and prosperity, and was finally murdered by an innkeeper. There is interwoven a relation ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... issued at the rate of three each month,—a story, a ballad, and a Sunday tract. They were collected and published in one volume in 1795. It is said that two million copies were sold the first year. There were also editions in 1798, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Through the Looking Glass ballad singer for shaking conversation out of people, tho somewhat too strenuous, is less fatiguing than Sherlock Holmes's inductive methods. Like Sherlock without his excuse, the kind and generous must confess to ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... is more generally known through the medium of the novel, the opera, and the print-shop than by the pages of history. Procopius, Gibbon, and Lord Mahon have done less for his universal popularity than some unknown Greek romancer or ballad-singer in the middle ages. Our ideas of the hero are involuntarily connected with the figure of a tall old man, clad in a ragged mantle, with a stout staff in his left hand, and a platter to receive an obolus in his right, accompanied by a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... apprentice before marriage), though of a high order, and exerted to the utmost, failed to please. Miss Pillbody's thorough knowledge of French, and the higher branches of an elegant education, as well as her proficiency on the piano, and her sweet, simple style of ballad singing, were worse than useless acquirements in ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... the task of seeking him. In fact, if he had not committed the murder at Towcester, I am convinced that the public would have elevated him to the position of a great popular hero. Even as it was, he had no lack of apologists; and an eminent ballad-monger celebrated his exploits in some verses, which were immensely applauded when recited by long-haired enthusiasts at smoking concerts and similar gatherings. All this was gall to Forrest; and at last one day, three ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... several weeks with even increased violence. The proprietors now sent in hired bruisers, to MILL the refractory into subjection. This irritated most of their former friends, and, amongst the root, the annotator, who accordingly wrote the song of "Heigh-ho, says Kemble," which was caught up by the ballad-singers, and sung under Mr. Kemble's house-windows in Great Russell-street. A dinner was given at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, to celebrate the victory obtained by W. Clifford in his action against Brandon the box-keeper, for assaulting him for wearing the letters O. P. in his hat. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... referred to the then popular song of 'Marlbrook,' which she used to sing. 'When the Dauphin,' she said, 'was born, a nurse was procured for him from the country, and there was no song with which she could soothe the babe but 'Marlbrook,' an old ballad, sung till then only in the provinces. The poor Queen heard the air, admired, and brought it forward, making it the fashion.' This is the only one of Mme. de Peleve's stories which I remember, although I was very greatly amused by them, and could have listened to her ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... nice. We must have some grand singing matches, but you mustn't sing that ballad. It's Ruth's special property. She sings it ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... murmured, bending over her sewing. "But it wouldn't have been so happy if the defender of his kindred hadn't slaved on the high seas 'for to maintain his brither and me,' like Henry Martin in the ballad." ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... ballads; and as his brother, who had often heard it before, expressed his readiness to hear it again, he responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a section of the bookcase that had been locked, read us The White Ship. I have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it remains to me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by the author's reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all matchable with Rossetti's elocution; his rich deep voice lent ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... admitted grudgingly, "I suppose not. But you will come sometimes, won't you? I have a perfectly lovely idea for a ballad and I want to ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Plymouth speedilye took they ship valiantlye, Braver ships never were seen under sayle, With their fair colours spread, and streamers o'er their head: Now, bragging foemen, take heed of your tayle. OLD BALLAD, 1596. ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... all in the humor, mamma," said she; nevertheless she rose. Nicolas sat down to the piano; and standing, as usual, in the middle of the room, where the voice sounded best, she sang her mother's favorite ballad. ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... not you; my own abilities place me there. But come, each one sing"; and she commenced a ballad, well known to the ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... grave of sturdy Daniel Malcom and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,—to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... with the belief that the perpetrator of a murder, or a death spell, could be detected when he approached his victim's corpse. If there was no wound to "bleed afresh", the "death thraw" (the contortions of death) might indicate who the criminal was. In a Scottish ballad regarding a lady, who was murdered by her lover, the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Marius Reybas of the Bobino lifts a mighty larynx in "Mahi Mahi." Great talent? Well, maybe not. But show me a group of vaudevillians and acrobats who, like this group at the Gaite, can amuse one night with risque ballad and somersault and the next with Moliere—and not be shot dead on ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... In a ballad, entitled "The Fairy Queen," in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Nichols's edition, vol. iii., p. 172, are stanzas similar to the Welsh verse given above, which also partially embody the Welsh opinions ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... triangle, for through the green meshes of the trees he caught a glimpse of the lake and a thin blue column of fire-smoke, and then in the surrounding silence he heard Kiddie's well-known voice singing a snatch of a Scots ballad— ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... tendency to look askance at the supernatural as at something wild and barbaric. Such ghosts as presume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and even elegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet's William and Margaret (1759). which was founded on a scrap of an old ballad out of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Margaret's wraith rebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. But spirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were more likely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... moonlight into noon Hid in gleaming piles of stone; On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet, Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square. Let statue, picture, park and hall, Ballad, flag and festival, The past restore, the day adorn And make each morrow a new morn So shall the drudge in dusty frock Spy behind the city clock Retinues of airy kings, Skirts of angels, starry wings, His fathers shining in bright fables, His ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... main efforts appeared in Germany another epoch-making book—Wolf's Introduction to Homer. In this was broached the theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are not the works of a single great poet, but are made up of ballad literature wrought into unity by more or less skilful editing. In spite of various changes and phases of opinion on this subject since Wolf's day, he dealt a killing blow at the idea that classical works are necessarily to be taken at what may ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the translators of the Iliad, or of parts of it, the metres which have been selected have been almost as various: the ordinary couplet in rhyme, the Spenserian stanza, the Trochaic or Ballad metre, all have had their partisans, even to that "pestilent heresy" of the so-called English Hexameter; a metre wholly repugnant to the genius of our language; which can only be pressed into the service by a violation of every rule of ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... daughter hath soft brown hair (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) And I met with a ballad I can't say where, That wholly consisted of lines like these, (Butter and eggs ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... being the hero of that romantic affair. "Sir Urian Legh was knighted by the Earl of Essex at the siege of Cadiz, and during that expedition is traditionally said to have been engaged in an adventure which gave rise to the well-known ballad of 'The Spanish Lady's Love.' A fine original portrait of Sir Urian, in a Spanish dress, is preserved at Bramall, which has been copied for the family at Adlington." So that between these two chivalrous knights it is difficult to decide which is the famed gallant. From the care exercised ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... light and shadow fleet: She is walking in the meadow, And the woodland echo rings. In a moment we shall meet; She is singing in the meadow, And the rivulet at her feet Ripples on in light and shadow To the ballad that ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... entertainer, recited a ballad; and Delia also "spoke a piece," an amusing episode of child life, which she rendered with much humor. The next turn was Irene's, and the girls, who were in a mood for listening, clamored for ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... authors have described to us in copious and entertaining detail the romance and the poetry, the writings and the imaginations, of the Scandinavian races, interspersed with abundant and well-selected specimens of the historical, romantic, legendary, chivalric, ballad, dramatic, song, and critical literature of Northern Europe. They have brought to light the treasures of the illustrious poets, historians and bards of Scandinavia, in a work ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... took place while Agnes was in the garden picking oranges and lemons, and filling the basket which her grandmother was to take to the town. The silver ripple of a hymn that she was singing came through the open door; it was part of a sacred ballad in honor of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... several favorite melodies which we had often sung in camp, when, as on a pleasant Sunday evening, we were met together in little knots, to mingle our emotions in plaintive song, thinking of dear friends at home. One of these was a simple ballad describing the following incident—one of the most touching of the war. A youthful soldier from the state of Maine died in New Orleans, with none but strangers—as has been the lot of many—to watch over him in his dying hours, or to perform the sad rites of burial. When the funeral service ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... in a book any thing which contradicts God's book, cast it away, trample it under foot, believe that it is the devil tempting you by his cunning, alluring words, as he tempted Eve, your mother. Would to God all here would make that rule,—never to look into an evil book, a filthy ballad, a nonsensical, frivolous story! Can a man take a snake into his bosom and not be bitten?—can we play with fire and not be burnt?—can we open our ears and eyes to the devil's message, whether of covetousness, or filth, or folly, and ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... young woman in so poetical a light," replied she in the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad. It is a grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery. The storm, the startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the stroke of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 'Erbert 'Iggins A Song of Winter Weather Tipperary Days Fleurette Funk Our Hero My Mate Milking Time Young Fellow My Lad A Song of the Sandbags On the Wire Bill's Grave Jean Desprez Going Home Cocotte My Bay'nit Carry On! Over the Parapet The Ballad of Soulful Sam Only a Boche Pilgrims My Prisoner Tri-colour A Pot of Tea The Revelation Grand-pere Son The Black Dudeen The Little Piou-piou Bill the Bomber The Whistle of Sandy McGraw The Stretcher-Bearer ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... expert care. And when new ground is covered and new troops are seen, we capture sometimes those sharp delightful moments of thirsting interest that made the Retreat into an epic and the Advance a triumphant ballad. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... trod on; his words rang in mine ears, but I kept them from mine heart. I remember he alleged many a Scripture, but those I valued not; the Scriptures, thought I, what are they? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings' price.[39] Alas! What is the Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables;[40] but for the holy Scriptures I cared not. And as it was with me then, so it is with my brethren now, we were all of one spirit, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... she managed to throw into her part. Covered with glory, she gave place to her successor, who, while bewailing the hardness of her luck in having to follow so smart a performance, recited a humorous ballad which won peals of applause. Mrs. Arnold again dipped her hand into the bag and unfolded a ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... begins his stirring ballad of the Armada. The lines have helped to perpetuate a popular error—one of the many connected with the story as it is generally told in our English histories. It somehow became the fashion at a very early date to speak of the defeat of the so-called "Invincible Armada" of Spain. ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... wit, there is a play on the meaning of words. Punning is an art easily acquired; but a pun is usually an impertinence to be excused only by its felicity. Hood was one of the most ingenious of punsters; and in his ballad, "Faithless Nelly Gray," the wit of each stanza is found ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... and Music did their business together (with the Dance conjoined as third partner); and that, by practice, men have tended to trust Poetry, for an interpreter, more and more above Music, while Dancing has dropped out of the competition. The ballad, the sonnet, have grown to stand on their merits as verse, though their names—ballata, sonata—imply that they started in dependence upon dance and orchestra. This supersession of music by verse, whether as ally or competitor, is a historical ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Auvergne and Languedoc in 1840,{2} she states that she picked up three charming ballads, and was not aware that they had ever been printed. She wrote them down merely by ear, and afterwards translated Me cal Mouri into English (see page 57). The ballad was very popular, and was set to music. She did not then know the name of the composer, but when she ascertained that the poet was "one Jasmin of Agen," she resolved to go out of her way and call upon him, when on her journey to the Pyrenees about two years later.{3} She had already heard ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... home there was a refined family life; the father had profited by the unusual privilege of three years' study abroad, and his library of some four thousand volumes was not limited to theology; the mother, whose maiden name was Spence and who traced her Scotch ancestry back to the hero of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, taught her children the good old ballads and the romantic stories in the Fairie Queen, and it was one of the poet's earliest delights to recount the adventures of Spenser's heroes and heroines ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Widow Jones, a Familiar Ballad To My Old Oak Table The Horkey, a Provincial Ballad The Broken Crutch, a Tale Shooter's Hill A Visit to Ranelagh Love of the Country The Woodland Hallo Barnham Water Mary's Evening Sigh Good Tidings; or, News from ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... stands in perfect antithesis to Peer. When Peer is an outlaw she deserts her father's house and follows him to his hut in the forest. The scene in which she presents herself before Peer and claims to share his lot is worthy to stand beside the ballad of the Nut-browne Mayde: indeed, as a confessed romantic I must own to thinking Solveig one of the most beautiful figures in poetry. Peer deserts her, and she lives in the hut alone and grows an old woman while her lover roams the world, seeking everywhere and through ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Wright's England under the House of Hanover, illustrated by the Caricatures and Satires of the Day, given in the Athenaeum (No. 1090.), cites a popular ballad on the flight and attainder of the second Duke of Ormonde, as taken down from the mouth of an Isle of Wight fishmonger. This review elicited from a correspondent (Athenaeum, No. 1092.) another version of the same ballad as prevalent in Northumberland. I ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... and dim, there came, borne to me by the night wind, a gay young voice, blithely carolling the sweet strains of a well-remembered song, familiar to me long years ago in another and distant clime. It was a simple ballad, one heard most frequently in my youth, old when I was young; it was like a voice from the dead—a thought from the shrouded past appealing to my soul. There was something so solemn and strange, so mystically spiritual in the fact that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for the sale of cakes, fruit, sweetmeats, toys, combs, cheap jewelry, glass, crockery, boots and shoes, holy-water vessels, rosaries, medals, and little colored prints of saints and martyrs; there were brass bands, and string bands, and ballad-singers everywhere; and there was an atmosphere compounded of dust, tobacco-smoke, onions, musk, and every ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... So sang a ballad-monger of the Revolution; and the opinion which he voiced persisted after him. According to some American historians of the first half of the nineteenth century, the Loyalists were a comparatively insignificant class of vicious criminals, and the people ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... Fortune, suggesting his Motive for repining at her Dispensations," with his celebrated "Pastoral Ballad, in four parts." were alike produced by what one of the great minstrels of our own times has so ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... best traditional ballads of England and Scotland. The scheme of classification by subject-matter, arbitrary and haphazard as it may seem to be at one point or another, has, I think, proved more satisfactory than could have been anticipated; and in the end I have omitted no ballad without ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... found another ballad which he thought might figure with advantage in the Spring Annual, and consigning these two precious documents to Warrington, the pair walked from the Temple to the famous haunt of the Muses and their masters, Paternoster Row. Bacon's shop was an ancient low-browed building, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... very beautiful picture in the manner of a great English Pre-Raphaelite. This was called "Thomas the Rhymer, meeting with the Faerie Queen," but it did not follow the description of the ballad. The Faerie Queen, a figure of a Botticellian grace, was coming, with all her fellowship, out of a wonderful pinewood, while Thomas the Rhymer, handsome and young and lean and brown, his harp across his back, had just crossed a mountain-stream by a rough bridge. He appeared suddenly ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... were, I could give a long detail of the arts and tricks made use of behind the counter to wheedle and persuade the buyer, and manage the selling part among shopkeepers, and how easily and dexterously they draw in their customers; but this is rather work for a ballad and a song: my business is to tell the complete tradesman how to act a wiser part, to talk to his customers like a man of sense and business, and not like a mountebank and his merry-andrew; to let him see that there is a way of managing behind a counter, ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... shall hear more of the Puritans and Christ-tide, only my scheme is to treat the season chronologically, and, consequently, there must be a slight digression; and the following ballad, which must have been published in the time of James I., because of the allusion to yellow starch (Mrs. Turner having been executed for the poisoning of Sir Thomas ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... usually been considered a sort of nuisance: now, by the persevering labours of these ingenious gentlemen, converted into an instrument of public gratification. Most of the guards of the stage-coaches now make their entrance and exit to the tune of some old national ballad, which, though it may not, perhaps, be played at present in such exact time and tune as would satisfy the leader of the opera band, is yet pleasant in comparison to the unmeaning and discordant strains which formerly issued ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... "A most delightful ballad, truly," said the Baron. "But like many others of our little songs, it requires a poet to fell and understand it. Sing them in the valley and woodland shadows, and under the leafy roofs of garden walks, and at night, and alone, as they were written. Sing them not in ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... climbed the attic ladder (they called it the 'mainmast tree' out of the ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, and Dan 'swarved it with might and main,' as the ballad says) they saw a man sitting on Duck window-sill. He was dressed in a plum-coloured doublet and tight plum-coloured hose, and he drew ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... the Diary is started, chatty, full of gossip and incident. She writes, October 30th: "A ballad-singer was this morning singing beneath my window in a strain most unmusical and melancholy. My own name caught my ear, and I sent Thomas out to buy the song. Here ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Raeven ("The Hare and the Fox"), are significant because of the masterly security with which they strike the national key and keep it. Not a word is there that rings false. And with what an exquisite tenderness the elegaic ballad strain is rendered in Venevil and "Hidden Love" (Dulgt Kaerlighed), and the playful in the deliciously girlish roguery of Vidste du bare ("If you only knew"), and the bold dash and young wantonness ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... MS. poem in the Brit. Mus. (Bibl. Sloan. 1489) entitled "The Trimming of Tom Nash," written in metre-ballad verse, but it does not relate to our author, though written probably not very long after 1600, and though the title is evidently borrowed from the tract by Gabriel Harvey. Near the opening it contains some notices of romances and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Greek songs illustrate the conversion of the Armatole into the Klepht in the age preceding the Greek revolution. Thus, in the fine ballad called "The Tomb of Demos," which Goethe has translated, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... in a ballad, made upon the quarrel between George the First and the Prince of Wales, at the christening recorded at p. 83 when the Prince and all his household were ordered to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... subject of a Scottish ballad, well known to collectors in that department; and the history of the conversion of the murderess, and of her carriage at her execution, compiled apparently by one of the clergymen of Edinburgh, has been lately printed by Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, whose merits as an author, antiquary, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... tuned the neglected instrument, "but it seemed sort of sacrilegious—after coming home and finding my father gone and the ranch about to go. However—why sip sorrow with a long spoon? What's that ballad about the old-fashioned garden, Miss Kay? I like it. If you'll hum ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... machines, as patronised by the nobility (either sex) when travelling"; another of "Mrs. Rodd's anatomical ladies' stays (which ensure the wearer a figure of astonishing symmetry";) and another of a "Brilliant burlesque ballad, 'Get along, Rosey,' sung with the most positive triumph every evening by ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... as it has been collected, consists of a wedding-song of the fifteenth century, to be found in Camerarius, with addition of, perhaps, a dozen such morceaux as the following approaches to song, epigram, and ballad, respectively. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... talk of Prohibition in Scotland, we are informed that one concert singer began the chorus of the famous Scottish ballad by singing "O ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... a new ballad ready on the Golden Dog, which I shall sing to-night—that is, if you will care to listen to me." Jean said this with a very demure air of mock modesty, knowing well that the reception of a new ballad from him ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... calculations of consequences, which he applies wisely and prudently to the trifles of the present, forgets to ask himself, 'And, after all that is done, what shall I do then?' You remember the question in the old ballad: ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Oracle.—Appeared in the University Magazine for June, 1878. The legend on which it is founded, a mediaeval myth here transferred to classical times, is also the groundwork of Browning's ballad, ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... to room in the bright September sunshine—now sitting down to the piano to trill out a ballad, or the first page of an Italian bravura, or running with rapid fingers through a brilliant waltz—now hovering about a stand of hot-house flowers, doing amateur gardening with a pair of fairy-like, ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... Recessional The Vampire To the Unknown Goddess The Rubaiyat of Omar Kal'vin La Nuit Blanche My Rival The Lovers' Litany A Ballad of Burial Divided Destinies The Masque of Plenty The Mare's Nest Possibilities Christmas in India Pagett, M. P. The Song of the Women A Ballad of Jakko Hill The Plea of the Simla Dancers Ballad of Fisher's Boarding-House ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... last sixty years that the Russians have become generally aware that their country possesses this wonderfully rich treasure of epic, religious, and ceremonial songs. In some cases, the epic lay and the religious ballad are curiously combined, as in "The One and Forty Pilgrims," which is generally classed with the epic songs, however. But while the singing of the epic songs is not a profession, the singing of the religious ballads is of a professional character, and is used as a means ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... Idle, 'I have not done with Annie Laurie yet.' And he proceeded with that idle but popular ballad, to the effect that for the bonnie young person of that name he would 'lay him doon and dee'—equivalent, in prose, to ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... quaint ballad-verses on the young hero give a realistic touch to one of the most ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... and still more with Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama passes away, and the triumph of the court is complete. The Elizabethan court could find no use for the popular ballad, but, like other forms of literature, it was attracted from the country-side to the city. Forgetful of the greenwood, it now battened on the garbage of Newgate, and 'Robin Hood and Guy of Gisburn' yields place to 'The Wofull Lamentation of ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of the German ballad of Leonora? ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... pressure from without had assaulted Greece, it was of particular service to that little rascally system that they were split into sections more than ever we have counted or mean to count. They throve by mutual repulsion, according to the ballad: ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And tho' this, probably the first essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig'd to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... for a nation; it is a source of progress; it elevates and develops the moral nature of men at the same time that it amuses them and stirs them deeply. We have just seen what oaths were taken by the knights and administered by the priests; and now, here is an ancient ballad by Eustache Deschamps, a poet of the fourteenth century, from which it will be seen that poets impressed upon knights the same duties and the same virtues, and that the influence of poetry had the same ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Which a Certain Songster Treats the Company To a Dolorous Ballad Whereby Mr. Irons ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... side, there is the reminder and exhortation: 'He is thy Lord, worship thou Him.' The beggar-maid that, in the old ballad, married the king, in all her love was filled with reverence; and the ragged, filthy souls, whom Jesus Christ stoops to love, and wash, and make His own, are never to forget, in the highest rapture ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thing I do: I cannot doubt but to find a welcome, since she is a banished woman, without friends or protection; and especially, when she shall see how civilly you have handled her here, in your doggerel ballad: I will teach you to be a wit, sir; and so your humble servant.'—And leaving him almost wild with his fears, he went directly to Sylvia, where he told her his nephew was going to make up the match between himself and madam ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... dishonour? Or who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or laugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by some living sweetness once. Nor are the decivilised to blame as having in their own persons possessed ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... The situation here is a common one. Parallels will be found in the "Voyage de Charlemagne", in the first tale of the "Arabian Nights", in the poem "Biterolf and Dietlieb", and in the English ballad of "King Arthur and King Cornwall". Professor Child, in his "English and Scotch Ballads", indexes the ballads in his collection, which present this motive, under the following caption: "King who regards himself as the richest, most magnificent, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... the pieces fall under the denomination of "Legends," if we except "the Feast of alle Deuiles, an ancient ballad;" "the Costly Dague;" "the Ladye's Counselloure;" and "the Dole of Tichborne;" which are in the quaint olden style. Throughout the other papers there is a pleasant spice of dry humour and knowledge of character, intermixed with a few touches of pathos, and a nice perception ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... lunch to fold his napkin, And if one biscuit graced the platter 'Twas ever less than fighting matter, Or if they'd beans—no doubt they had 'em— They failed to snap a few at Adam. I fear me as they ate their salade They hummed some raw primeval ballad, And when the Serpent came to dinner, They made remarks about the sinner. No doubt they criticised the cooking And hooked the fruit when none was looking, And when they'd soup—O my! O Deary! The very notion makes me weary. About these youngsters ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... would keep it out of her husband's way: it might be the cause of another duel! Mrs. Germaine, in spite of all her endeavours to conceal her vexation, was obviously so much hurt by this mock heroic epistle, that the laughers were encouraged to proceed; and the next week a ballad, entitled, "THE MANUFACTURER TURNED GENTLEMAN," was circulated with the same injunctions to secresy, and the same success. Mr. and Mrs. Germaine, perceiving themselves to be the objects of continual enmity and derision, determined to leave the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... marriages of her sons, and showed some of his practised skill in dignifying such themes; but it is not here that he found his work as laureate. He achieved greater success in the poems which he wrote to honour the exploits of our army and navy, in the past or the present. In his ballad of 'The Revenge', in his Balaclava poems, in the 'Siege of Lucknow', he struck a heroic note which found a ready echo in the hearts of soldiers and sailors and those who love the services. Above all, in the great ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... mean to say about its darkest expression, and be done with it for good. Some charitable critics see no more than a jeu d'esprit, a graceful and trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg (Grosse Margot). I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this polite extreme. Out of all Villon's works that ballad stands forth in flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... LILLY UN!"—One day last week, MR. W.S. LILLY—i.e. W. "SHIBBOLETHS" LILLY—delivered an excellent lecture on the Papal-Italian question, and although at Birmingham, it was by no means a brummagem discourse. But to quote the immortal ballad of Billy Taylor, "When the Captain he come for to hear on't, He werry much applauded what she'd done," and, to apply the lines to the present instance, "When the POPE he comes for to hear on't," will he "werry much applaud," the opinions ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation" in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... my lord," responded the courageous young girl, "ought also to know the ballad that is ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... bellowing. Apart stood Potters from far Saxony, with their crockery in fair rows; Nurnberg Pedlers, in booths that to me seemed richer than Ormuz bazaars; Showmen from the Lago Maggiore; detachments of the Wiener Schub (Offscourings of Vienna) vociferously superintending games of chance. Ballad-singers brayed, Auctioneers grew hoarse; cheap New Wine (heuriger) flowed like water, still worse confounding the confusion; and high over all, vaulted, in ground-and-lofty tumbling, a particolored Merry-Andrew, like the genius of the place and ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... submarine vessel. He made several attacks upon the enemy by means of automatic torpedoes, none of which met with complete success. One of these attacks, made at Philadelphia in December, 1777, furnished the incident upon which is founded the well-known ballad of the "Battle of ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Jig was little other indeed than a ballad opera in embryo lasting about twenty-five minutes and given as an after-piece. It was a rhymed farce in which the dialogue was sung or chanted by the characters to popular ballad tunes. But after the Restoration the Jig assumed a new and more serious complexion, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... fine gentleman, and master of arts Of Henry the Fourth's time, that made disguises For the King's sons, and writ in ballad-royal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... in that gentle, polite weary voice of his, 'but was I mistaken in thinking that I caught a familiar word just now? Were you not singing some old ballad of Babylon?' ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... life was to be passed in the dark, in chase of the Kilkenny mail, as we read in the true history of the flying Dutchman, who, for his sins of impatience—like mine—spent centuries vainly endeavouring to double the Cape, or the Indian mariner in Moore's beautiful ballad, of whom we are ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries of London' (1866) and Lilly's 'Black Letter Ballads and Broadsides,' (1867) will also be of use to you here, as will the publications of the Percy, Ballad, and Philobiblon Societies. In 1856 J. Russell Smith, the antiquarian publisher of Soho Square, issued a 'Catalogue of a Unique Collection of Four Hundred Ancient English Broadside Ballads, Printed Entirely in the Black Letter' which he had for sale—a small octavo ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... amusement in observing the various personages that daily passed and repassed beneath my window. The character which most of all arrested my attention was a poor blind fiddler, whom I first saw chanting a doleful ballad at the door of a small tavern near the gate of the village. He wore a brown coat, out at elbows, the fragment of a velvet waistcoat, and a pair of tight nankeens, so short as hardly to reach below his calves. A little foraging cap, that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Ercildoune, Jedburgh, Yetholm, the Cowdenknowes, the Yarrow, and Ettrick, all lie on different sides within a circle of twenty miles, and most of them much nearer. Smailholme Tower, the scene of some of Scott's youthful days, and of his ballad of "The Eve of St. John," is also one of these. Grose tells us that "The ruins of Dryburgh Monastery are beautifully situated on a peninsula formed by the Tweed, ten-miles above Kelso, and three below Melrose, on the southwestern confine of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecot near Stratford; for which he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge himself of this supposed ill usage, he made a ballad upon him; and tho' this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the Scottish shepherds sang a song, entitled "The frog that came to the myl dur." In 1580 a later ballad, called "A most strange wedding of a frog and a mouse," was licensed by the Stationers' Company. There is a second version extant in Pills to ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... Here am I, her father, not only consenting to the cutting out of the match, but willing to see you two as closely united together as ever needle stitched buckskin. And with all this on thy side—fortune, father, and all—thou lookest like a distracted lover in a ballad, more like to pitch thyself into the Tay than to woo a lass that may be had for the asking, if you can but choose ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... died a few days after he uttered these words. His last hours were spent in humming over a Scotch ballad he ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... now gone to his rest, just when his work was done; and we must turn round and face a few land-going problems not quite so easy of solution. So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the sloop's bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... another began in something of the same strain, but singing more of a song than a story ballad; and thus much ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... certainly never had as many as two hundred looms in his own house, while our Thomas Paycocke probably had not more than a dozen. But the poet must have his licence, for, after all, the spirit of the ballad is the thing, and it is always a pleasant ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... which we had often sung in camp, when, as on a pleasant Sunday evening, we were met together in little knots, to mingle our emotions in plaintive song, thinking of dear friends at home. One of these was a simple ballad describing the following incident—one of the most touching of the war. A youthful soldier from the state of Maine died in New Orleans, with none but strangers—as has been the lot of many—to watch ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... and craked for two and a half hours the song of the practically accepted suitor. It was a good song, and Thisbe seemed pleased, though I fancy she rather resented the note of assurance which he imparted to his ballad. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... she was merrier than usual at dinner; after it, sang ballad after ballad to please Liftore; then went to her room and told Caley to arrange for yet a visit, the next morning, to Mr Lenorme's studio. She positively must, she said, secure her father's portrait ere ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the broadsides of various classes, including the Ballad, popular and political, the Advertisement and the Proclamation. So far as we know, the second division exhibits the most ancient specimen in our own literature, and is a notification on a single leaf by Caxton respecting Picas of Salisbury use. This precious relic, of which only two copies ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... spiritual sustenance and literary power, a similar collocation of the Bible and Aristotle would sum up, with a greater approach to truth, the ideals of the medieval schoolman. Popularity fell to Piers Plowman. Apart from the large currency given to it by ballad singers, many manuscripts were in existence, for even now forty-five of them, more or less complete, remain. As M. Jusserand aptly remarks: "This figure is the more remarkable when we consider that, contrary to works written in Latin or in French, Langland's book ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... of detail, but here is the focus of what makes life valuable. It is this spirit which makes poverty the best servant to the ideal of human nature. I am content with this type, and will only quote, in addition, a ballad I found in a foreign periodical, translated from Chamisso, and which forcibly recalled my own laundress as an equally admirable sample of the same class, the Ideal Poor, which we need for our consolation, so long as ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... poetry or the drama. The stage was a new thing; and those who had to supply its demands laid their hands upon whatever came within their reach: they were not particular as to the means, so that they gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old ballad; Othello on an Italian novel; Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition: one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last in Hollingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, are authenticated in the old Gothic history. There was also this connecting link ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... temper of England's Rulers was against vain pastimes and junketings. The Maypoles had been pulled down; the players whipped and banished; the bear and bull baitings, and even the mere harmless minstrelsy and ballad-singing of the streets, all rigorously pulled down. But whatever the worthy Turkey merchant and his household could do in the way of carrying Arabella about to suppers, christenings, country gatherings, and so forth, was cheerfully and courteously done. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... come better: he shall come in. I love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... flower that clings To the turrets and the walls; 'T is a morning pure and sweet, And the light and shadow fleet: She is walking in the meadow, And the woodland echo rings. In a moment we shall meet; She is singing in the meadow, And the rivulet at her feet Ripples on in light and shadow To the ballad that she sings. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Miss Stephens would only have to sing sacred music to surpass herself and vie with her pretended rival; for this theory implies that all sacred music is equally good, and, therefore, better than any other. I grant that Madame Catalani's singing of sacred music is superior to Miss Stephens's ballad-strains, because her singing is better altogether, and an ocean of sound more wonderful than a simple stream of dulcet harmonies. In singing the last verse of 'God Save the King' not long ago her voice towered above the whole confused noise of the orchestra ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Rose. "That's what I want to know. How can any one help thinking he's ridiculous. Of course if you were alone on a desert island with him like the Bab Ballad, I suppose you'd make the best of him. But with any one else that was—real, you ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Brittle Bones Apples and Water Manticor in Arabia Outlaws Baloo Loo for Jenny Hawk and Buckle The "Alice Jean" The Cupboard The Beacon Pot and Kettle Ghost Raddled Neglectful Edward The Well-dressed Children Thunder at Night To E.M.—A Ballad of Nursery Rhyme Jane Vain and Careless Nine o'Clock The Picture Book The ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... relatives, she thought she saw good reasons for breaking and setting aside the contract which had united them; and no doubt the poor woman must have felt the hardship of living with such a melancholy outlaw. Having nothing in common with the devoted Emma, drawn in the ballad of "The Nut-brown Maid," she must have hated that wandering about from, place to place, living in lonely country-houses, under perpetual terror of robbers in the night, and subsisting for the most part on potatoes and Platonism; and she must have especially hated the Latin Grammar. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Mediterranean against seven Sallee rovers, in which, after a hard engagement lasting four hours, the Mary Rose triumphed decisively without losing a single sail of her convoy. A rude song was made about the action, and the two lines of the ballad, summing up the results, were painted around ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... then Prince William of Prussia, was sent here with his tutors; and there is a story, preserved with great pride, of a fight on the beach between him and a bathing-machine boy, at whose father's property the Prince was throwing stones. An account of this historic battle is preserved in a doggerel ballad, printed and sold locally, and composed Heaven knows where, which is called "Tapping the War-Lord's Claret: Why ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... was to Horace, the robin-redbreast has been to the children of old England. In the celebrated ballad of the "Children in the Wood", we are told that, after their murder by the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... may be devastated by the awful curse. It throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony. What was it that silenced Sheridan's voice and shattered the golden sceptre with which he swayed parliaments and courts? What foul sprite turned the sweet rhythm of Robert Burns into a tuneless ballad? What brought down the majestic form of one who awed the American Senate with his eloquence, and after a while carried him home dead drunk from the office of Secretary of State? What was it that crippled the noble spirit of one of the heroes of the last war, until the other night, in a drunken ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... We learn from Ben Jonson, that Scoggan, or Skogan, was M.A., and lived in the time of Henry IV. "He made disguises for the King's sons, writ in ballad-royal daintily well, and was regarded and rewarded." Jonson calls him the moral Skogan; and introduces him with Skelton, the poet laureate of Henry VIII., into his Masque, entitled "The Fortunate Isles," where he keeps them in character, and makes them ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... wandered during the reading, or else the reader spoilt the sonnet; but let us leave that subject, and come to my ballad. ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... been cabin boy on Captain Riquer's xebec, and which assaulted the frigate Felicidad, captained by the formidable corsair "the Pope." Stirred by these heroic recollections, he hummed in his quavering old voice the ballad in which Ivizan sailors had celebrated the triumph, verses in Castilian, for greater solemnity, whose ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... her friends may say; and to make short of it," says he, "I'm come to a determination upon the spot;" with that he swore such a terrible oath, as made me cross myself; "and by this book," said he, snatching up my ballad book, mistaking it for my prayer book, which lay in the window; "and by this book," says he, "and by all the books that ever were shut and opened, it's come to a toss-up with me, and I'll stand or fall by the toss; and so Thady, hand me over that pin[8] out of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... between them" is in a similar predicament. We now speak of no love being lost between A. and B., when we would intimate that the warmth of their mutual affection may be accurately represented by 32deg Fahrenheit. That this has not always been the meaning of the phrase, the following verse from the old ballad of The Children in the Wood ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... or gloves, marking what was for sale within; or if in words, they might be misspelt, and thus adapted to a rude understanding. Large placards on the walls advertised the theatres. Street musicians performed on their instruments. Ballad-singers howled forth the story of the last great crime. Amid all the hubbub, the nimble citizen who had practiced walking as a fine art, picked his careful way in low shoes and white silk stockings; hoping to avoid the necessity of calling ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... that once before. Say it again.) Rom. Remus, my blackguard brother, hold thy tongue. Rem. Romulus, may I be spared to see thee hung. Maidens. Alas! to see two brothers bicker thus is sad, Let's laugh and sport and turn to something glad. Mary Ann (blushing). I'll sing you a simple ballad if you like. (All shuddering). Good gracious! (Aside) Certainly, by all means. Mary Ann. How doth each naughty little lad Delight to snarl and bite, And kick and scratch, It's very bad, It isn't at all right. Oh, don't ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... ancient name in which the rest of us forgot to feel any pride. But this was my sister Margery's way; to whom, as honour was her passion, so the very shadows of old repute, dead loyalties, perished greatness, were idols to be worshipped. By a ballad, a story of former daring or devotion, a word even, I have seen her whole frame shaken and her eyes brimmed with bright tears; nay, I have seen tears drop on her clasped hands, in our pew in St. Sampson's Church, with no more cause than old Parson Kendall's stuttering through the prayer ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... 1816, d.1861) was born in Maine, but removed at an early age to Vermont, where he was connected with the press at Burlington, Woodstock, and Montpelier. He published a volume of poems in 1848, written in a happy lyric and ballad style, and faithfully portraying ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the Forest; as its name implies it was established in a wood of limes, a tree said to have been introduced into England only in the sixteenth century. It is already spoken of in the tenth century Anglo-Saxon ballad ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... man, when freely addressed, generally opens his eyes, and selects the key of your room without further delay. I am inclined to think that the selection will not be made in any way to your detriment by reason of that freedom of speech. The lady in the ballad who spoke out her own mind to Lord Bateman, was sent to her home honorably in a coach and three. Had she held her tongue, we are justified in presuming that she would have been returned on a ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... nodding amicably to the general, signed to him not to interrupt the recitation. He then got behind his chair, and stood there with his left hand resting on the back of it. Thanks to this change of position, he was able to listen to the ballad with far less embarrassment than before. Mrs. Epanchin had also twice motioned to the new arrivals to be quiet, and stay where ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... abundance of these amusing tracts eagerly bought up in their day, but which came in the following generation to the ballad-stalls, are in the present enshrined in the cabinets of the curious. Such are the revolutions of literature! [It is by no means uncommon to find them realise sums at the rate of a guinea a page; but it is to be solely attributed to their extreme rarity; for in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the hall the din of voices and the sound of song; the instruments also were brought out and Hrothgar's minstrel sang a ballad for the delight of the warriors. Waltheow too came forth, bearing in her train presents for Beowulf—a cup, two armlets, raiment and rings, and the largest and richest collar that could be found in all ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... of a camp ballad, popular in 1862, will give a faint idea of the enthusiasm excited ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... better than to have set an example of rhyming before Archie Blair. He turned and looked down at the elder, and the sight of him marching peaceably beside Captain Jimmie reminded him of an old doggerel ballad: "But man, there's worse than that written in your own history," ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... patted her shoulders. "Now you sing some soft little thing for them, my girl," he commanded—and looking up at him again, Azalea obeyed. She chose an old ballad, one with no chance in it to show the range of her voice. She sang it exquisitely, and the Cashier stood by and turned her music as if he considered it a high privilege. Yet, half-way through, the little Dot woke up. Azalea broke off in the ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... possible—but improbable. He has no knowledge of life, no feeling for style, no real sense of the dramatic. Throughout, from the first line to the last, his story moves on the plane of tawdriness, theatricality, and ballad pathos. There are some authors of whom it may be said that they will never better themselves. They are born with a certain rhapsodic gift of commonness, a gift which neither improves nor deteriorates. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... cycle, and "Sir Galahad." "The Prisoner of Chillon" was Arethusa's favorite of Byron's representation; she knew it from end to end. And she knew all of those specifically named off by heart, for the swinging lines of a ballad form were Arethusa's idea of what real poetry should be. But the compilers of the big brown book, which was sacred to the marble-topped center table in the parlor at the Farm, had not stayed entirely on the other side of the ocean; and so Arethusa ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... carousers. Men and women are figured together, but it would be very hard to find a woman in one of these rough cuts with a pipe in her hand or at her mouth. An example, in the "Shirburn Ballads" lies before me. The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called "A Knotte of Good ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... tale. Another of his remarks gave me less pleasure. He detected the identity of the King with the wandering knight, Fitz-James, when he winds his bugle to summon his attendants. He was probably thinking of the lively, but somewhat licentious, old ballad, in which the denouement of a royal intrigue takes ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Lincoln green for the Plantagenet plush, and consented to be enrolled among royal flunkies for three pence a day. And again, admitting all this, we are finally obliged by Mr. Hunter's document to concede that the stalworth archer (who, according to the ballad, maintained himself two-and-twenty years in the wood) was worn out by his duties as "proud porter" in less than two years, and was discharged a superannuated lackey, with five shillings in his pocket, "poar cas qil ne ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the nurse of her Royal Highness; a lady equally anxious with ourselves to instil into the infant mind an utter contempt for everything English, except those effigies of her illustrious mother which emanate from the Mint. The original of this exquisite and simple ballad is too well known to need a transcript; the Italian version, we doubt not, will become equally popular with aristocratic mamas ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... Lower him to the mould below; With the well-known sailor ballad, Lest he grow more cold and pallid At the thought that Ocean's child, From his mother's arms beguiled, Must repose for countless years, Reft of all her briny tears, All the rights he owned by birth, In the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... happens on a Saturday the weather will be bad during the month. On the other hand, in Suffolk the old moon in the arms of the new one is accounted a sign of fine weather; contrary to the belief in Scotland, where, it may be remembered, in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, it is taken as a presage ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... a slighter and more humorous sketch, with a somewhat similar moral. It has wise humour, sharp characterisation, and ballad-like simplicity. Still more perfect a poem, still more subtle, still more Heinesque, if it were not better than Heine, is the little piece called Confessions. The pathetic, humorous, rambling snatch of final memory in the dying man, addressed, by a delightful ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... which she used to sing. 'When the Dauphin,' she said, 'was born, a nurse was procured for him from the country, and there was no song with which she could soothe the babe but 'Marlbrook,' an old ballad, sung till then only in the provinces. The poor Queen heard the air, admired, and brought it forward, making it the fashion.' This is the only one of Mme. de Peleve's stories which I remember, although I was very greatly amused ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... emotions far too beneficent to waste on things outside the ambit of our own immediate life. If they are wise they will come to Irish history as to a school, and they will learn one lesson that runs through it like the refrain of a ballad. A very simple lesson it is, just this: Ireland cannot be put down. Ireland always has her way in the end. If the opposite view is widely held the explanation lies on the surface. Two causes have co-operated to produce the illusion. Everybody agrees that Great Britain has acted in a most ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... such an angular and hurried little girl: she is all quips and cranks and wreathed smiles now. And meek, humble-minded Martha, in former days so diffident, blushing and taciturn, has found out the value of a deferential demeanor and the knack of being a good listener, and can sing a ballad with a pathos and dramatic effect that eclipse the highly-embellished ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... lane I went with lazy feet, This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat; And it seemed, as I retraced the ballad line by line, That but half of it was hers and one half ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... that I shall not appear to degrade the office of criticism by making a ballad the subject of it, especially since that now before me is of so excellent a nature. If it is objected to, I must shelter myself under the authority of Addison, who has written a critique on Chevy-Chace, to which, I venture to affirm, this ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... JIG, merry ballad or tune; a fanciful dialogue or light comic act introduced at the end or during an interlude ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... birth, cf. William Bellenden's translation (1553) of Livy (ii. 124) "than was in Rome ane nobill childe ... namit Caius Mucius." The spelling "childe" is frequent in modern usage to indicate its archaic meaning. Familiar instances are in the line of an old ballad quoted in King Lear, "childe Roland to the dark tower came," and in Byron's Childe Harold. With this use may be compared the Spanish and Portuguese Infante and Infanta, and the early French use ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Lilith Gordon who broke the chain by offering to sing. The diversion was welcomed by Mrs. Strachey, and Lilith went to the piano. But her nervousness was such that she broke down half-way in the little prelude to the ballad. ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... and Sky Blue" is a child's book, very funny in its illustrations—this we see—and funny, we suspect, in its contents; for we lighted on a ballad in which a most scientific piscator, standing on the Norway coast, casts his fly for whale and hooks and lands several which he rose on the Faroe Isles, and is at last beaten by a Kraken or the ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... of light, the shapely cone of the hop-oast rises at the end; there are swallows and flowers, and ricks and horses, and so it is beautiful because it is natural and honest. It is the simplicity that makes it so touching, like the words of an old ballad. Now at Mayfield there is a timber house which is something of a show place, and people go to see it, and which certainly has many more lines in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not appeal to me, because it seemed too purposely ornamental. A house designed to look well, even age has ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... ma?" said her dutiful daughter, "I'm sure I hope not! Really, I'm very well satisfied with it;" and, getting up and going to the mirror, she set about altering the riband in her hair, humming the while the old ballad— ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the Spanish, and brisk Gaiety of the Dutch. Come, come, begin all. Enter Dutchmen and Women dancing. Nay, I'll shew you what I can do too, come, Gload. [They two dance. There's for you now, and yet you have not seen half my good Qualities; I can sing the newest Ballad that has been made, so I can. [Sings ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... escape him thus. He approached, and set about turning over the heaps one by one. As soon as he paused, tantalized and puzzled, he was directed anew by an imitative kiss which came from her hiding-place, and by snatches of a local ballad in the smallest voice she ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... decrees to an endless existence of ineffable torment; and upon this situation of affairs the excellent Michael Wigglesworth proposes to make poetry." His "Day of Doom," a horribly realistic description of every terror of the expected judgment, was written in a swinging ballad measure that took instant hold of the popular mind. No book ever printed in America has met with a proportionate commercial success. "The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... of country, and retained it until his death, which, to the general regret, occurred in a few years after he had entered upon political life. Mr. Davis was a poet, although not of a high order; several specimens of good ballad composition are amongst his remains. He cultivated classic literature with success; as an antiquary and an historian acquired reputation; wrote energetically and fluently; spoke in public with earnestness and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... thus been said of his work at the closing chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop, nothing now calls for more special allusion, except that in his town-walks in November, impelled thereto by specimens recently discovered in his country-walks between Broadstairs and Ramsgate, he thoroughly explored the ballad literature of Seven-Dials, and took to singing himself, with an effect that justified his reputation for comic singing in his childhood, not a few of these wonderful productions. His last successful labor of the year was the reconciliation of two friends; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... His name was Simon Symonds. The popular ballad absurdly exaggerates his deeds, and gives them untrue amplitude. It is not older than the last century, and is ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... woodlands are fatal to men. The legend has been told to me in the Highlands, and to Mr. Stevenson in Samoa, while my cousin, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, actually knew a Kaneka who died in three days after an amour like that of Anchises. The Breton ballad, Le Sieur Nan, turns on the same opinion. The amour of Thomas the Rhymer is a mediaeval analogue ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. BRAND has gone down to the East! To give the Electors a musical feast, And save her fine treble she weapons has none; Yet she means with that voice that the seat shall be won. So good at a lay, at a ballad so grand, There never was dame like the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... and such a singer! Not a theater singer nor a ballad-singer; no, but a singer of the woods. For she wandered through the gay, green forest, and had a concert there for ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... with her that the lack of costumes and scenery was not felt in the force of the reality that she managed to throw into her part. Covered with glory, she gave place to her successor, who, while bewailing the hardness of her luck in having to follow so smart a performance, recited a humorous ballad which won peals of applause. Mrs. Arnold again dipped her hand into the bag and unfolded a ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... The beautiful ballads and songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn have perhaps had a similar power over German minds; but, as far as I am aware, no German poet has has ever succeeded in inventing a metre suitable for dramatic purposes, which yet retained the mediaeval ballad's sonorous swing and rich aroma. The explanation of the powerful impression produced in its day by Henrik Hertz's Svend Dyring's House is to be found in the fact that in it, for the first time, the problem ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... a storehouse of every kind of primitive folklore, being as it is the production of an Urvolk, a nation that has undergone no violent revolution in language or institutions—the 'Kalevala' has the peculiar interest of occupying a position between the two kinds of primitive poetry, the ballad and the epic. So much difficulty has been introduced into the study of the first developments of song, by confusing these distinct sorts of composition under the name of popular poetry, that it may be ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... was slumbering peacefully, half overflowing the wet surface of a table; Anthony had discovered musical talent in the bartender and was seated at a battered piano, laboriously experimenting with the accompaniment to an Irish ballad; Higgins and Locke were talking earnestly. It was the slackest, blackest hour in an all-night dive; the nocturnal habitues had slunk away, and the day's trade had not yet begun. Higgins, drawn and haggard beneath ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... thank you, Jeremiah! I should like to live in a caravan, and go about the country, and wood fires out of doors." Was it, Fenwick wondered, the gipsies they had seen to-day that had made her think of this? and then he recalled how he afterwards heard the kitten singing to herself the old ballad: ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Buell's marching columns, the thunderous roar of the navy guns, the demoniacal scream of the projectile, and mingled with it all is the sweet, plaintive music of that old song. We had an army version of it I have never seen in print, altogether different from the original ballad. The last stanza of this army production ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... of the Puritans and Christ-tide, only my scheme is to treat the season chronologically, and, consequently, there must be a slight digression; and the following ballad, which must have been published in the time of James I., because of the allusion to yellow starch (Mrs. Turner having been executed for the poisoning of Sir Thomas ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... differently in "Goulart's Admirable and Memorable Histories," 1607; both versions are reprinted in Mr. Hazlitt's "Shakspeare Library," vol. iv., part I, pp. 403-414. In Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" we find the adventure told in a ballad entitled "The Frolicksome Duke; or, the Tinker's Good Fortune," from the Pepys collection: "whether it may be thought to have suggested the hint to Shakspeare or is not rather of latter date," says Percy, "the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... a book was meant to be read, you mean, for one thing, of course, that it was not meant to be studied. You do not study a good story, or a haunting poem, or a battle song, or a love ballad, or any moving narrative, whether it be out of history or out of fiction—nor any argument, even, that moves vital in the field of action. You do not have to study these things; they reveal themselves, you do not stay to see how. They remain with you, and will not be forgotten or laid ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... it:—"Tulloch-gorum is a lively clever song, but I would never have edited this collection had I thought with Burns that it is the best song Scotland ever saw. I may say with the king in my favourite ballad,— ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... foolhardiness. Signs of these false hopes are not wanting in the slight, but equally bold, satire on the sycophants represented as composing Walpole's levee, which was shortly added to the Register. This little sketch, in which a protest concerning the damning, early in the year, of Fielding's ballad farce Eurydice is combined with the political satire, was advertised ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... shone through him as through Ossian's misty ghosts. Altogether, he was made up of that eccentric mixture of humor and melancholy peculiar to the German people. This was especially expressed in the droll and affecting manner in which he sang that extraordinary popular ballad, "A beetle sat upon the hedge, summ, summ!" There is one fine thing about us Germans—no one is so crazy but that he may find a crazier comrade who will understand him. Only a German can appreciate that song, and in the same breath laugh and cry himself to death over it. On this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in a sharp tone; for her "Wind of the Summer Night" had not gone well, owing to a too copious supper. "Posing for Lorelei," she added, as Ruth began to sing, glad to oblige the kind old gentleman. They expected some queer ballad or droning hymn, and were surprised when a clear sweet voice gave them "The Three Fishers" and "Mary on the Sands of Dee" with a simple pathos that made real music-lovers thrill with pleasure, and filled several pairs ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... patriot, and breeder of Arab horses, who is a descendant of the Gales, has a long poem entitled "Worth Forest," wherein old Leonard Gale is a notable figure. Among other poems by the lord of Crabbet is the very pleasantly English ballad of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... in which every one was commanded to seize and punish all Papists, who, contrary to law, pretended either to carry arms or exercise any act of authority. It may not be unworthy of notice that a merry ballad, called Lillibullero, being at this time published in derision of the Papists and the Irish, it was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even by the king's army, who were strongly seized with the national spirit. This incident both ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... by the chanting of this touching ballad, Sam and Pumble returned to the consideration of their day's programme. A great many amusements were proposed, discussed, and rejected in their respective turns. Almost any one of them would have been held entirely satisfactory on any ordinary occasion, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... the evening. His voice was strong, but, like many strong things, under imperfect control; his tune was nowhere, and his intended pathetic unction was simply maudlin. Coristine could recall but little of the long ballad to which he listened, the story of a niggardly and irate father, who followed and fought with the young knight that had carried off his daughter. Two verses, however, could not escape his memory, on account of the disinterested and filial light in ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Alice's Through the Looking Glass ballad singer for shaking conversation out of people, tho somewhat too strenuous, is less fatiguing than Sherlock Holmes's inductive methods. Like Sherlock without his excuse, the kind and generous must confess to a colossal ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... sang the ballad Leonora was beguiled, by her singing, into a mood of vague but overpowering melancholy. It seemed tragic that that fresh and pure voice, that innocent vanity, and that untested self-confidence should change and fade as maturity succeeded adolescence and decay succeeded maturity; it seemed ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... child, from whom they had never been willing to separate. Imagine the happiness of the poor parvenu peasant as he listened to his charming Cesarine playing a sonata of Steibelt's on the piano, and singing a ballad; or when he found her writing the French language correctly, or reading Racine, father and son, and explaining their beauties, or sketching a landscape, or painting in sepia! What joy to live again in a flower so pure, so lovely, which had never left the maternal stem; an angel whose budding ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... twilight steals on with her starry train ere he rests from his employment. Then the old farmer comes out on the porch to take his evening pipe; and the good dame sits by his side with her knitting, and the sweet voice of Ursula warbles a simple ballad to please the ears of the aged pair. The young man bares his brow to the delicious breath of evening, and carefully placing his sketch within the portfolio, saunters on toward the little gate. And now Ursula hushes her song, and the old ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... had obtained a copy of the recognizance, signed by the magistrate, he chuckled inwardly and marched out of the office. If there was a flaw in anything, Thomas Harrison had a jocose way of saying, "There is a hole in the ballad." As they went into the street together, his friend said, "Thomas, there's a hole in the ballad. The recognizance we have just signed is good for nothing. The United States have not the slightest claim ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... boldest spirits that ever sounded a war-cry, and defended to the death by men whose swords were their only charters of right, have passed into other hands, and the names of the warlike holders serve now only to give a grim charm to a Border ballad. An extraordinary lesson may be read on the banks of the Liddel and the Esk—there is a strange eloquence in the silence of these quiet dales. Stand for a while among the graves of the chief of Gilnockie and his fifty followers, in the lonely churchyard of Carlenrig—cast ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... the first toll-house, while the toll-keeper was changing some money, I experienced the envy of the gods which hitherto I had known only in Schiller's ballad. A pedestrian passed—the teacher whom I had offended by playing all sorts of pranks during his French lesson. Not one ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so clear, so direct, so resonant. We need not imitate his mannerism; we may all learn to be ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... over, and pipes filled and lighted, some one would strike up a "chantey"—one of those interminable, monotonous ballad-songs which are peculiar ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... figures in the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "for which no rhyme our language yields," next door to a pastry shop that claimed to have furnished the mise en scene for the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche "down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves." Ah, well-a-day! I have known my Paris now twice as long ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... body forth: there is room for the manifestation of this prime literary gift in all sort of subjects. It may be shown in a fable of AEsop, in Robinson Crusoe, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's Esmond, in Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his Hamlet, in a sonnet of Dante's Vita Nuova or in his Inferno. AEsop's communication of his point of view ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... now, it was verse—that is to say, the ballad—which set its seal on the popular incident of the moment. When the event was an unlucky one, the song was a burlesquely pathetic complaint, and always with a vein of raillery running through it. Such was the effusion with which every ruelle rang, and it was really set to music, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine people. Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... noticed, as he said, about the deck during the still hours of the early morning, when all sounds seem so much louder than in the daytime, both aboard ship and ashore, declared that during the height of the pampero he had heard Sam Jedfoot's voice distinctly singing that old negro ballad of which he used to be so fond when in life, chaunting it almost regularly every evening on the fo'c's'le to the ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... at carving in wood, and both he and Gretel were good gardeners. Gretel could sing and sew and run on great, high homemade stilts better than any other girl for miles around. She could learn a ballad in five minutes and find, in its season, any weed or flower you could name; but she dreaded books, and often the very sight of the figuring board in the old schoolhouse would set her eyes swimming. Hans, on the contrary, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... before the rebel army, whose tragic fall, with that of his eight sons, has received such commemoration and embellishment as the pathetic strains of a nameless but probably contemporary bard could bestow. The excellent ballad entitled "The Rising in the North[69]" impressively describes the mission of Percy's "little foot page" to Norton, to pray that he will "ride in his company;" the council held by Richard Norton with his ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... music, and, in comparison with starving, thrived; though the wealthy might possibly have said that in comparison with thriving he starved. During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had done for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she smiled on him as her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... mingled with the firmness of decisive crises. Edgar Quinet retained all his lofty judgment, Noel Parfait all his mental vivacity, Yvan all his vigorous and intelligent penetration, Labrousse all his animation. In a corner Pierre Lefranc, pamphleteer and ballad-writer, but a pamphleteer like Courier, and a ballad-writer like Beranger smiled at the grave and stern words of Dupont de Bussac. All that brilliant group of young orators of the Left, Baneel with his powerful ardor, Versigny and Victor Chauffour with their youthful daring. Sain ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... without carping criticism, wrong-headedness and the culte of the common-place, together with absolute and unworthy cruelty to weaker vessels. The reviewer denounces as "too conceited to be passed over without comment" the good old English "whenas" (for when, vol. ii. 130), the common ballad-terms "a plump of spearmen" (ii. 190) and a "red cent" (i. 321), the only literal rendering of "Fals ahmar" which serves to show the ancient and noble pedigree of a slang term supposed to be modern and American. Moreover this Satan even condemns fiercely the sin of supplying him with "useful ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... his sleep, and was afterwards discovered to be an imposter; the last benefaction in the parish church, for two poor Irish gentlewomen on their journey home, recommended by letters from the Council; the last new ballad. ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... upon him, should now remain quiet in the very midst of turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to the banners of liberty—the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who—as the ballad runs—had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for King Monmouth's army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they were fools rushing in wicked frenzy ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... homeward through the lane I went with lazy feet, This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat, And it seem'd as I retrac'd the ballad line by line That but half of it was hers, and one half of it ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... Henry III, 1272 to 1216.—Example from an old ballad entitled Richard of Almaigne; which Percy says was "made by one of the adherents of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, soon after the battle of Lewes, which was fought, May 14, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... interred with his bones, who can say?—certainly his living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the Book of Odes, Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over men so buried alive with their ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... even increased violence. The proprietors now sent in hired bruisers, to MILL the refractory into subjection. This irritated most of their former friends, and, amongst the root, the annotator, who accordingly wrote the song of "Heigh-ho, says Kemble," which was caught up by the ballad-singers, and sung under Mr. Kemble's house-windows in Great Russell-street. A dinner was given at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, to celebrate the victory obtained by W. Clifford in his action against ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... her father. Count Julian, filled with a righteous anger at this unwarranted act on the part of his liege lord, openly revolted, called in the Moors, and unwittingly opened his country to an invader who would be slow to leave. The story is told in the old ballad, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... August 18th.—While I was practising I came across that pretty piece of ballad pathos, "The Banks of Allan Water," and sang myself into sobbing. Luckily I was interrupted by Dall and my father, who came in with a little girl, poor unfortunate! whose father had brought her to show how well she deserved an engagement at Covent Garden. She sat down to the piano at ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... what there is in it," said Harry, "I'll leave you to make that out; but I tell you what I did when I heard it, I made a ballad of it, and so if you like I'll try ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... he condemns the apostrophe, in which father Thames is desired to tell who drives the hoop, or tosses the ball, and then adds, that father Thames had no better means of knowing than himself; when he compares the abrupt beginning of the first stanza of the bard, to the ballad of Johnny Armstrong, "Is there ever a man in all Scotland;" there are, perhaps, few friends of Johnson, who would not wish to blot ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... confusion. He saw himself now forsaken not only by those whom he had trusted and favored most, but even by his own children. And the army was in such distraction that there was not any one body that seemed entirely united and firm to him. A foolish ballad was made at that time treating the papists, and chiefly the Irish, in a very ridiculous manner, which had a burden, said to be Irish words, lero, lero, lilibulero, that made an impression on the army that cannot be well imagined by those who saw it not. The whole army, and at last ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... franks into the country. From one it spread to another, till it travelled almost over the whole island. Falling at length into the hands of the musician, it was set to music; and it then found its way into the streets, both of the metropolis and of the country, where it was sung as a ballad; and where it gave a plain account of the subject, with an appropriate feeling, to those who ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... midst of my shame, I could hardly help admiring the clever way in which he had remembered all the details, and twisted them into a comic ballad, which he had composed overnight, and which he now recited with a mock heroic air and voice, which made every point tell, and kept the boys in convulsions of laughter. Not a smile crossed his long, lantern-jawed ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... book, when you find in a book any thing which contradicts God's book, cast it away, trample it under foot, believe that it is the devil tempting you by his cunning, alluring words, as he tempted Eve, your mother. Would to God all here would make that rule,—never to look into an evil book, a filthy ballad, a nonsensical, frivolous story! Can a man take a snake into his bosom and not be bitten?—can we play with fire and not be burnt?—can we open our ears and eyes to the devil's message, whether of covetousness, or filth, or folly, and not be haunted ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... just ready to fall uttered a prayer to Father Tiber, plunged into the muddy torrent, fully armed as he was, and swam to the opposite shore amid the plaudits of the rejoicing people, as related in the ballad of Lord Macaulay. Then it was, too, that the people determined to erect a bridge which could be more readily removed in case of necessity. Baffled in this attempt to enter Rome, the enemy laid siege to the city, and as it was unprepared, it soon suffered the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... not without a species of vertigo or dizziness in my head, which would probably have struck me lifeless at his feet, had not a thought like that of the old ballad— ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... there is the deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else beside. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the wild legend of Odysseus, he met with a ballad, recording the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon. His noble mind seized the hint that there presented itself, and the Achilleis(32) grew under his hand. Unity of design, however, caused him to publish ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... wherever a cleared spot has lain still enough for the trees to look friendly, with their exposed sides cultivated by the light, and the grass to look velvet warm, and be embroidered with flowers. These Western woods suggest a different kind of ballad. The Indian legends have often an air of the wildest solitude, as has the one Mr. Lowell has put into verse in his late volume. But I did not see those wild woods; only such as suggest to me little romances of ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... twinkling in the clear heavens as we drove outside the yard of our hotel. Horses, driver, and travelers were alike exhilarated in the sharp atmosphere and we dashed off at courier pace. The driver was a musical fellow, and endeavored to sing a Russian ballad while we were ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves loomed up in the distance. Now and then as he advanced he sang a snatch of West Indian ballad. As he espied the "switcheros" a smile broke out on his features and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on the water-pail. In a working species of Spanish he made some request of the boys, the while wiping his ebony ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... had gathered around a rough-looking man with a bundle of papers under his arm. He was waving a leaflet in the air and shouting, "Ladies and Gentlemen—Whist now till I sing you a song of Old Ireland. 'Tis the Ballad of the Census Taker!" Then he began to sing in a voice as loud as a clap of thunder. This was the ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... of France, ever since the days of the poetry-making and ballad-singing Francis and Marguerite, and before, for that matter, made of literature—at least the written and spoken chronicle of some sort—a diversion and an accomplishment. Royal or official patronage given these mediaeval story-tellers did not always produce the truest tales. Then, as now, writer ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... one after the other, producing folds in the fluttering skirts which Greuze would have found to his taste, amid peals of laughter, the Toulousan Tholomyes, who was somewhat of a Spaniard, Toulouse being the cousin of Tolosa, sang, to a melancholy chant, the old ballad gallega, probably inspired by some lovely maid dashing in full flight upon ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... frequently led or ridden into the hall where folk sit at banquet: so in Chaucer's Squire's tale, in the ballad of King Estmere, and ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... poet does of that heritage of an already-formed language to which he owes so much; historiographers bind together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... has ceased. That wretched woman with the infant in her arms, round whose meagre form the remnant of her own scanty shawl is carefully wrapped, has been attempting to sing some popular ballad, in the hope of wringing a few pence from the compassionate passer-by. A brutal laugh at her weak voice is all she has gained. The tears fall thick and fast down her own pale face; the child is cold and hungry, and its low half-stifled wailing adds to the misery ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... a drawing-room ballad in which the words "dear heart" seemed to occur with astonishing frequency. Then the entertainment ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... person, strictly historical, Knight Eppo, of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler, writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These three persons were combined, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... always intimately acquainted with the details of current politics, but when a subject fairly roused his interest he was not slow to take part in its discussion. This is notably illustrated, in this very year 1806, by the outspoken and energetic political ballad he produced over the acquittal of Lord Melville from a serious charge. This ballad, which went very straight to the heart of its subject, and left no doubt as to the party feeling of the writer, not only arrested general attention but gave considerable offence to the leaders on the side so sharply ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... interruption of sight, his mind became a perfect echoing chamber, where every movement of the day and every change of public passion whispered itself into rhyme or quaint saying. By the time he had grown to manhood he was the admitted rector of all the ballad-mongers of the Liberties. Madden, the weaver, Kearney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow, Martin from Meath, M'Bride from heaven knows where, and that M'Grane, who in after days, when the true Moran was no more, strutted in borrowed plumes, or rather in borrowed rags, and gave out that ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... Stanzas were designed to introduce a Ballad upon the Story of a Danish Prince who had fled from Battle, and, for the sake of the valuables about him, was murdered by the Inhabitant of a Cottage in which he had taken refuge. The House fell under a curse, and the Spirit ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... no want of such poets in Latium. Latin "strolling minstrels" or "ballad-singers" (-grassatores-, -spatiatores-) went from town to town and from house to house, and recited their chants (-saturae-(4)), gesticulating and dancing to the accompaniment of the flute. The measure was of course the only one that then existed, the so-called Saturnian.(5) ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to be Sally: he wanted her to be just a sort of moon-Toby. Another girl would have wanted nothing better. Sally told herself that she was different. She went out by herself, one evening, instead of working; and walked up to Highgate. And as she went up the hill she sang to herself the ballad "The Love ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... For I, with a fop's audacity, had thought my love for you of sufficient moment to have been long since observed; and, strong in my conceit, had scorned a pleasing declaration made up of faint phrases and whining ballad-endings. I spoke as my heart prompted me; but the heart has proven a poor counsellor, dear lady, and now am I rewarded. For you had not even known of my passion, and that which my presumption had taken for a reciprocal tenderness ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... between the animal and the spiritual part of their lives, and to clothe their surroundings with a higher and holier significance than can arise from the events and associations of the work-day life. In art the missing link is found, and whether it be the simple ballad in the evening circle or the modest print that graces the humble cottage walls—and the humbler the habitation the deeper the manifestation, because the more touching—it is but the expression of the people's appreciation of the needs, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... St Helena Lullaby 'Poor Honest Men' The Conversion of St Wilfrid Eddi's Service Song of the Red War-Boat A Doctor of Medicine An Astrologer's Song 'Our Fathers of Old' Simple Simon The Thousandth Man Frankie's Trade The Tree of Justice The Ballad ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... a single exception, embodying native legends. In "Telling the Bees," Mr. Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of exquisite grace and feeling. "The Garrison of Cape Ann" would have been a fine poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point of a sword. It is pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad English and worse Latin. With all his faults, that conceited ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... begin "sometimes to read" her father's legacy "with her." This must have been entirely new reading for Bunyan, and certainly at first not much to his taste. What his favourite reading had been up to this time, his own nervous words tell us, "Give me a ballad, a news- book, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables." But as he and his young wife read these books together at their fireside, a higher taste was gradually awakened ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... disposed to overlook them, was the perfect silence they preserved. They walked side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty by the hand that was passed through the basket strap. Whether this apparent cause were the real cause, or whether it were an assumed one to escape an intercourse ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... with a visage charged with nearly double its ordinary degree of importance, employed sedulously in brushing his master's cloak, and refreshing himself with whistling or humming, from interval to interval, some snatch of an old melancholy Scottish ballad-tune. Although sufficiently convinced of the identity of the party, Lord Glenvarloch could not help expressing his surprise in the superfluous question—"In the name of ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... in the whole world into which sin and chicanery has less extensively permeated than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and propitious and all the men honest and expedient, must, indeed, be an idol. It reminds me,' says I, 'of Goldstein's beautiful ballad entitled "The Deserted ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... Ancient Ballad Poetry of Great Britain, Historical, Traditional and Romantic; with Modern Imitations, Translations, Notes, and Glossary, &c. Edited by J.S. Moore. New and Improved Edition, 8vo. ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... There is a whole ballad—nay, a whole history of the middle ages in this story; for among thousands I can recall none as perfectly characteristic of the times. The absolute aristocratic control of the life of a white slave; its abuse by transferring it to the arbitrary will of an upper servant; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Dream," "Elizabeth's Prayer" and the "Liebestod," and when she was recalled at the end of the concert, she sang Senta's ballad as a bonne bouche, something that the audience had not expected, and would send her friends away more than ever pleased ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... see the signal has become as hackneyed as a popular ballad, and in its superficial aspect, showing Nelson as the mere fighting man, who, like a plucky dog, could not be dragged off his antagonist, might well now have been dismissed with the shortest and most summary mention. Of late ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... correspondents may be able to give me information respecting an old ballad that has very recently fallen in my way, on a story similar to that of Shakspeare's Winter's Tale, and in some particulars still more like Greene's novel of Pandosto, upon which the Winter's Tale was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... you don't know it, I will write out for you, ready as it offers itself to my Memory. Mrs. Frere of Cambridge used to sing it as she could sing the Classical Ballad—to a fairly expressive tune: but there is a movement (Trio, I think) in one of dear old Haydn's Symphonies almost made for it. Who else but Haydn for the Pastoral! Do you remember his blessed Chorus ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... end of the second volume, and tie them on to the end of the first! I could not and would not hear of this, because I had set my mind on having 'Dead Pan' to conclude with. So there was nothing for it but to finish a ballad poem called 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship,' which was lying by me, and I did so by writing, i.e. composing, one hundred and forty lines last Saturday![99] I seemed to be in a dream all day! Long lines too—with ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... ballads. They were entered, without regard to metre, as so much prose. A stanza or two of the song entitled Chanson nouvelle sur le chant: "N'allez plus au bois jouer," and evidently adapted to the tune of a popular ballad of the day, may suffice to indicate the character of the most vigorous of these compositions. It is addressed to Michel d'Arande, a friend of Farel, whom Bishop Briconnet had invited to preach the Gospel in his diocese of Meaux, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
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