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More "Dirge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passed and yet another. When eleven struck, the measured beat of the great church clock seemed to sound the dirge of our hopes. Lestrade and Mycroft were fidgeting in their seats and looking twice a minute at their watches. Holmes sat silent and composed, his eyelids half shut, but every sense on the alert. He raised his ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be no public ceremony, no funeral dirge, and but few weeping mourners. The people are too much impressed with the necessity of immediate and constant work ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... placidly through heaven, The spirits of the seasons seem to stand— Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form, And Winter with his aged locks—and breathe, In mournful cadences that come abroad Like the far wind-harp's wild and touching wail, A melancholy dirge o'er the dead year, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... walked aimlessly down the deserted corridor, his footsteps echoed hollowly like a dirge. A line from an old poem sprang to his mind: "We are the dead, row on row we lie—" He was the dead, but still he chased the chimera of hope, yet knowing in ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... feel it moving swiftly through the atmosphere now, feel the tortured rush of air that whipped against the sides of the projectile in a moaning dirge that mingled with the roar of the exploding ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... behind, old Cattaneo, battered with storms, walked heavily, swinging his long arms and looking into the day's face as if he would try another fall with Death yet. Priests and acolytes, tapers, banners, vestments and a great silver Crucifix, they drifted by, chanting the dirge for Simonetta; and she, as if for a sacrifice, lifted up on her silken bed, lay couched like a white flower ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... I complain, in piteous strain, Grief-laden, tear-evoking, shrill; Ah woe is me! woe! woe! Dirge-like it sounds; mine own death-trill I pour, yet breathing vital air. Hear, hill-crowned Apia, hear my prayer! Full well, O land, My voice barbaric thou canst understand; While oft with rendings I assail My byssine vesture ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... here! upon the Earth And in the heavens, the signs of death are hung; For o'er the Earth's brown breast stalks pale decay, And 'mong the lowering clouds the wild winds wail, And, sighing sadly, chant the solemn dirge O'er summer's fairest flowers, all faded now. The Winter god, descending from the skies, Has reached the mountain tops, and decked their brows With glittering frosty crowns, and breathed his breath Among the trumpet pines, that herald ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... to stir, by these to brighten, By these to lift the soul from earth, The Poet dares our joys to frighten, And thrills the dirge of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Ruth The cruel dart withdrew! "False Tirrell shot the bolt," she said, "That my Sir Morven slew!" Deep in the forest lurks the foe, While gayly shines the morn: Hang up the broken spear, and blow A dirge upon the horn. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... world, and will not leave the earth; some who sing, others who hum, others who talk. Certain poems are like clarions, and celebrate the battle of Crecy, of which Chaucer had not spoken; others resemble lovers' serenades; others a dirge for the dead. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Lost! Lost! The cry floated over the waves — Far over the pitiless waves; It smote on the dark and it rended the clouds; The billows below them were weaving white shrouds Out of the foam of the surge, And the wind-voices chanted a dirge: Lost! Lost! Lost! Wailed wilder the lips ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... their knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall a while repair, To dwell a weeping ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... rejoinder. My fingers stray idly up and down the glass; but it is no longer a giddy waltz that they are executing—if it is a tune at all, it is some little dirge. ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead: Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart; Which epitaph containeth, "Her eyes were once his dart." From so ungrateful fancy; From such a female frenzy; From them that use ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... tempest, so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a hasty step. This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands, and exclaimed aloud, "William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge!" As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... over his breast, whilst entwined in his fingers was a bronze cross and rosary, that St. Peter, seeing his devotion, might, without questioning, admit him to a better world. The scene was weird beyond description. Outside, the wind moaned a sad dirge; great bats and black moths, the size of birds, flitted about in the midnight darkness. These, ever and anon, made their way inside and extinguished the candles, which flickered and dripped as they fitfully shone on the shrunken features of the corpse. He had been ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... that he should sleep not in the vaults of his haughty line; and his last dwelling is surrounded by a green and pleasant spot. The trees shadow it like a temple; and a silver though fitful brook wails with a constant yet not ungrateful dirge at the foot of the hill on which the tomb is placed. I have stood there in those ardent years when our wishes know no boundary and our ambition no curb; yet, even then, I would have changed my wildest vision of romance for that quiet grave, and the dreams ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indeed a dreadful evening. The howling of the storm mingled with the shrieks of the sea-fowl, and sounded like the dirge of the three devoted beings, who, pent between two of the most magnificent, yet most dreadful objects of naturea raging tide and an insurmountable precipicetoiled along their painful and dangerous path, often lashed by the spray of some giant billow, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... be ere provision is needed for the like purpose," answered Bucklaw; "but you should not drink up the last flask at a dirge; there is ill luck ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Garioch, is still sung; the 'Woes of the Children of the Mist' are yet rehearsed in the ears of their children in the most plaintive measures. Innerlochy and Killiecrankie have their appropriate melodies; Glencoe has its dirge; both the exiled Jameses have their paean and their lament; Charles Edward his welcome and his wail;—all in strains so varied, and with imagery so copious, that their repetition is continually called for, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... him. Next she applied the horn to the spot and blew with all her force till, at length, the blood began to move. After that she spread some of the deer fat out of the calabash over the wound, which she held in the steam of the hot water. Last of all, she sang in a low voice a dirge over the Rover ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung, There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay. And Freedom shall awhile repair, To ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... the risk of being torn in pieces by the furious Muscovites. She wandered a long time through extensive quarters, the solitude of which astonished her, when a distant and doleful sound thrilled her with terror. It was like the funeral dirge of this vast city: fixed in motionless suspense, she beheld an immense multitude of persons, of both sexes, in deep affliction, carrying their effects and their sacred images, and leading their children ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... requiem was about to be sung—a dirge full of soul-stirring reflections and sacred grandeur—Margaret's head was full of bitterness, and she failed to respond to the sympathetic sublimity of the service, or to notice its serene beauty either. To her it was nothing more than ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... an end to him at once,' said Miss Gwynne, 'and I think we had better play his funeral dirge. Lady Mary, will you give us 'The Dead March in Saul,' or something appropriate? Never mind, Netta; I daresay cousin Howel will turn out a great man by-and-by;' this last clause was whispered to Netta, whilst the young hostess went towards a grand piano that stood invitingly open, and begged ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... o'er each scene Where cisterns had so lately been: Away in frantic haste he sprung, And sought to cool his burning tongue. He howled, and to his famished cry The dreary echoes gave reply; And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim, Rolled back ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music—the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... borne to the grave under military escort, the soldiers marching to the mournful strains of the funeral dirge and muffled drums; the corpse was lowered to its last resting-place; the burial service read with a trembling voice by the chaplain,—for the missionary had taken his place among the mourners by the side of the ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... and restless, is pacing the hall in his castle. Outside, on the castle terrace, appear four phantom shapes clothed as women in dusky robes. They are Want, Guilt, Care, and Need. The four grey sisters make halt before the castle. In hollow, awe-inspiring tones they recite in turn their dirge-like strains: they chant of gathering clouds and darkness, and of their brother—Death. They approach the door of the castle hall. It is shut. Within lives a rich man, and none of them may enter, not even Guilt—none save only Care. She slips through the keyhole. ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... presented a clear expanse of the most delicate blue, except along the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a thin drapery of pale clouds which never varied their form or colour. The long, measured, dirge-like well of the Pacific came rolling along, with its surface broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows, would leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... his formidable neighbor. Rob Roy maintained a cold, haughty civility during their short conference; and so soon as he had left the house, 'Now,' he said, 'all is over—let the piper play Ha til mi tulidh' [we return no more], and he is said to have expired before the dirge ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... This woeful dirge of the mother's heart, and the wife's sorrow, had almost every eye in tears; and, indeed, it was impossible that the sympathy for her should not be deep and general. They all knew the excellence and mildness of her husband's character, and that ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... blessed reunion in the hereafter: this is the typical elegy. On the one side it shades off into the ode, some poems being susceptible of classification in both groups; on the other it may take the form of sonnets, many of which answer every requirement of the dirge. Many poems are therefore elegiacal that are not strictly elegies. A rigid classification is never necessary, but an association of these beautiful pieces, all thoroughly impregnated with the personal grief of the author, gives to each a greater ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... bid in vain. Alas! than mine a mightier hand Has tuned my harp, my strings has spanned! I touch the chords of joy, but low And mournful answer notes of woe; And the proud march which victors tread Sinks in the wailing for the dead. O, well for me, if mine alone That dirge's deep prophetic tone! If, as my tuneful fathers said, This harp, which erst Saint Modan swayed, Can thus its master's fate foretell, Then ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... little drum, and Iris, with long black ribbons fastened to her flowing chestnut locks, was walking behind, carrying the tiny coffin. Iris, as she walked, rang an old dinner bell in a very impressive manner, and also sang a little dirge to the accompaniment of the bell and the two other children's music. These were the words ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... star, Nor heeds the public scorn, or transient curse, Unknown alike to honour and remorse. Behold the leering belle, caress'd by all, Adorn each private feast and public ball, 140 Where peers attentive listen and adore, And not one matron shuns the titled whore. At Peter's obsequies[5] I sung no dirge; Nor has my satire yet supplied a scourge For the vile tribes of usurers and bites, Who sneak at Jonathan's, and swear at White's. Each low pursuit, and slighter folly, bred Within the selfish heart ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... drawing himself up to his full height, as if it were a matter with which Heaven should be acquainted at the earliest possible opportunity, he indulged, as we before said, in the melancholy consolation of a whistled death-dirge, occasionally interrupted by a long-drawn interlude half sigh, half ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her not our whole lives long, We to whose ears her dirge was cradle-song, The dirge men sang who laid in earth her living head, Is it by such light that we live to see Rise, with rent hair and raiment, Liberty? Does her grave open only ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and hearty blows, And dreams of coming gifts withheld by Fate From morrow unto morrow, till her great Dread eyes 'gan tell of other gifts than those, And her advancing wings gloomed like a pall; Her speech foretelling joy became a dirge As piteous as pitiless; and all My company had passed beyond the verge And lost me ere Fate raised her blinding wings.... Hark! through the dusk a bird "at heaven's ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... excitement were all in his veins. He was full of the strong joy of living. And then, in the midst of it all, came a dull, crashing blow. It was as though all his castles in the air had come toppling about his ears, the blue sky had turned to stony grey and the sweet waltz music had become a dirge. Always a keen watcher of men's faces, he had glanced for a second time at a gaunt, sallow man who wore a loose check suit and a grey Homburg hat. The eyes of the two men met. Then the blood had turned to ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the incessant dirge, grown resignedly sweet now; so intense in its infinite peace, that a calm of love, beyond all human understanding and above all earthly passions, sank deep into my soul, and so permeated my whole being with rest and peace, that my lips smiled and my eyes drooped in ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... conceal a beautiful spirit. It will shine through an ugly face, a shriveled form, a bad complexion. Nothing made of clay can hide it. No beauty of person can conceal deformity of spirit. A bad temper will look hateful in the prettiest face. A hollow heart will sound its dirge of woe through the most perfectly organized form. Peering through all outward Beauty is seen the hateful demon of a bad heart. Shining through all bodily deformity are always visible the angel faces of the virtues that cluster in a beautiful spirit. All wise young ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... bivouac apart from his lady, and sit below my bedroom window, to keep me awake with his screeching lamentation. Only I own he is not equal in melody to Lord Byron, for Fare-thee-well—and if for ever, etc., is a very sweet dirge indeed. After all, C'est genie mal loge, and that's all that can be ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... one may choose out of Villon. It follows and completes the epitaph which in his will he orders to be written in charcoal—or scratched—above his tomb: the sad, sardonic octave of "the little scholar and poor." It is a kind of added dirge to be read by those who pass and to be hummed or chaunted over him dead. But it is ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, Are mingled together like sunshine and rain; And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other like surge ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... anew to writhe, stretched in Disease's shapes abhorred, or mown in battle by the sword, like grass beneath the scythe! Even I am weary in yon skies to watch thy fading fire: test of all sumless agonies, behold not me expire! My lips, that speak thy dirge of death, their rounded gasp and gurgling breath to see, thou shalt not boast; the eclipse of Nature spreads my pall, the majesty of Darkness shall receive my parting ghost! The spirit shall return to Him who gave its heavenly ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... know, O ransomed brother, That we stand upon the verge, Where old time fills up his ages, And the lost will mourn his dirge? ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... miserable day In the rich house that late was full of pride; Then the sun fell, and all the paths were grey, And Menelaus from the mountain-side Came, and through palace doors all open wide Rang the wild dirge that told him of the thing That Helen, that the Queen had strangely died. Then on his ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... After Scott. This dirge belongs to the north of England and is said to have been chanted, in Yorkshire, over the dead, down to about 1624. Lyke-Wake, dead-watch. Sleete, salt, it being the old peasant custom to place a quantity of this on the breast of the dead. Whinny-muir, Furze-moor. A manuscript ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... singing when his lodger entered the kitchen, but his was no joyful ditty. It was a dirge, which he was intoning as he bent over the cookstove. A slow and solemn and mournful wail dealing with death and burial of one "Old Storm Along," whoever he ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the adjective is redundant. Nobody ever thinks of a cheerful phantom. Strangely enough, considering her evident sadness, she was whistling softly to herself, over and over, some dreary little minor air that sounded like a Bohemian dirge. She glanced up quickly when I made a misstep and my dishes jingled. All considered, the tray was out of the picture: the sea, the misty starlight, the girl, with her beauty—even the sad little whistle that stopped now and then to go bravely on again, as though it fought against ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the floor in a corner of the room, and weeps for me as the Russian peasants weep for their dead, mingling with her sobs memories of our common past, praises of my good qualities, and so forth. All this, uttered in a low sing-song, is like a sort of funeral dirge. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and on he went, Till he attained the forest's verge, The garish day was well-nigh spent, Birds had already raised its dirge. Oh what a scene! How sweet and calm! It soothed at once his wounded pride, And on his spirit shed a balm That all its ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... (xvi.). Then an angel shows John Babylon riding triumphantly upon a beast as the mother of harlots, drunken with the blood of the martyrs, and he explains how she shall be destroyed by her subject kings (xvii.). There follows a solemn dirge on Babylon (xviii.). Then comes a triumphant chorus for the judgment of the city (xix. 1-8). John is forbidden to worship ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... McCulloch were present. After prayer by the chaplain, the Declaration of Independence was read by Hon. EDWARD MCPHERSON, Clerk of the House. After the reading of the Declaration, followed by the playing of a dirge by the band, Hon. SCHUYLER COLFAX, Speaker of the House of Representatives, introduced the orator of the day, Hon. J. A. ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... man continued to go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, declaring the woes that were to come upon the city. By day and by night he chanted the wild dirge, "A voice from the east! a voice from the west! a voice from the four winds! a voice against Jerusalem and against the temple! a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides! a voice against the whole people!" This strange being was imprisoned and scourged, but no complaint ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... sudden, and with a moaning of wind instruments punctuated by the roll of drums, the band struck into a dirge. The procession moved. And all of a sudden Sammy found that Scalawag was marking time just as he had been taught to do in the ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... the contemplation of these difficulties by a sudden change in Rory's tune. He stopped in the midst of his low, wailing dirge and struck up loudly the lively air that told again and again of the mirth produced when "Jinny banged the Weaver." Scotty raised his head and looked across the pasture-field. That tune always ushered Weaver Jimmy upon the stage, and ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... I could not hold still whether in hand or foot; the slowness of the men, tired as dogs after our rough experience outside, irritated me like something personal; and the irrational screaming of the seabirds saddened me like a dirge. It was a relief when, with Nares, and a couple of hands, I might drop into the boat and move off at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trace the a-coo-o, coo-o, coo-oo, coo-o to its source in the thick foliage in some tree in an out-of-the-way corner of the farm, or to an evergreen near the edge of the woods. The slow, plaintive notes, more like a dirge than a love-song, penetrate to a surprising distance. They may not always be the same lovers we hear from April to the end of summer, but surely the sound seems to indicate that they are. The dove is a shy bird, attached to its gentle and refined mate with a devotion that has passed ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... he was so glad, did he slink off to his study forthwith and play a dirge on his piano, and there sit listlessly in his chair for the rest of the morning staring out of the window through his glass, till Jill tripped in and fetched him ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis." Not many years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friend ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... many interments? What valley of desolation is this, where the peaceful songs which follow the hard labors of the day are replaced by the death dirge? where the repose of evening is exchanged for the repose of eternity? What is this valley of the shadow, where every village mourns for its many dead, and buries them at the same ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... jolly nut-brown bowl; And here, kind mate, to thee! Let's sing a dirge for Saint Hugh's soul, And drown ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... the dead of winter. The country was gowned like a bride in white. But the white on this occasion was not the emblem of purity; rather was it the pallor of icy death. The rigorous storms seemed to prophesy of trouble; the very winds were rehearsing a dirge to be plaintively sung over mountains and moors in the ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... who roams at vanity fair, In robes that rival the tulip's glare, Think on the chaplet of leaves which round His fading forehead will soon be bound; Think on each dirge the priests will say When his cold corse is ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... down the silver streams of Eridan,[90] On either side banked with a lily wall, Whiter than both, rides the triumphant swan, And sings his dirge, and prophesies his fall, Diving into his watery funeral! But Eridan to Cedron must submit His flowery shore; nor can he envy it, If, when Apollo sings, his swans ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... to steer, but he soon found that the blacks could manage the canoe perfectly well without his assistance. The heat was so great on the water that we were all thankful to avoid any unnecessary exertion. The blacks as they paddled sang a low monotonous song, more like a dirge. What it was about we could not tell. By looking back we saw that we had got some distance from the land, although we appeared not to have approached nearer the opposite shore, which still remained as indistinct ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... Neglect—desolation is engraven on all around, and even the little wicket, as it swings slowly to and fro, seems to say, "All gone! go-ne!" The wind, how meaningly it steals through the deserted rooms, as though breathing a funereal dirge over the departed! How "eloquent of wo" is that sound! Now swelling forth, as it were, in wild and uncontrollable grief, and now sinking exhaustedly into a low and touching mournfulness which seems almost ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... from morn till evening, Till the cruel night enwrapped her, As she reached the sandy margin, Reached the cold and dismal sea-shore, Sat upon the rock of sorrow, Sat alone in cold and darkness, Listened only to the music Of the winds and rolling billows, Singing all the dirge of Aino. All that night the weary maiden Wept and wandered on the border Through the sand and sea-washed pebbles. As the day dawns, looking round her, She beholds three water-maidens, On a headland jutting seaward, Water-maidens four in number, Sitting ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... be there The funeral dirge to sing, Who day and night by the taper's light Their aid to ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... While she whom thou hast driven away Is bold amidst the chilly spray? What good is all thy vain remorse? Thinkst thou from jaws of death to force A sacrifice so lightly thrust Upon the altar of thy lust? A host like thee could nothing urge To meet one tone of her sad dirge: ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... the wandering musicians who had, at the open grave, played as a dirge, or, rather, as a ringing hymn of resurrection and deliverance, the chant of the fatherland-that dark girl to whom he had said: "Bring me this jewel, and come and live in peace with the Zilahs"—was the mother of this beautiful, fascinating creature, whose every word, since he ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... praise;" and then "as a steed refreshed after toil," he will "stoutly that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which The Four Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, were published; and also a Dirge (Daphnaida) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges, the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (Prothalamion), on the marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, late in 1596. But he was only a visitor ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... moving across the roofs or winging through the air. The sad sound of their flapping wings rose and fell like a solemn dirge. Most of them were appareled all in white, like his captors; but others had markings of red or blue or yellow slashed across ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... deepest emotion. The scene produced an effect upon the spirit of Jane which was never effaced. The wreath of flowers which crowned the beautiful victim; the veil enveloping her person; the solemn and dirge-like chant, the requiem of her burial to all the pleasures of sense and time; the pall which overspread her, emblematic of her consignment to a living tomb, all so deeply affected the impassioned child, that, burying her face in her hands, she ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... a sudden chill O'er her ardent spirit crept; A sad presentiment of ill— She turned away and wept. Far off the sigh of ocean stole— The sweeping of the sounding surge— In plaintive murmurs o'er her soul, Like wailing of a funeral dirge. ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... seemed doomed to so early a death, with a slight indication of pity crossing his composed features, but it would immediately revert again to its former gaze, as if already looking into the womb of futurity. Much of the time he was chanting a kind of low dirge in the Delaware tongue, using the deep and remarkable guttural tones of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... just a little—just sufficiently to keep the fakir cognizant of its position. The fakir howled out a sort of singsong dirge, which plainly had imperatives in every line of it. At each short pause for breath he added something in an undertone that made ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... own misfortunes, and the vanishing of the dreams of glory which haloed his life. The chorus with which the tragedy winds up—"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"—the words appropriately carved upon his tombstone at St. Onofrio—is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words are changed, the spell is lost, and the way ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... hers. Fainter fell the harmony; then ceased altogether—a hymn destined to become interwoven with terrible memories, the tragic massacre of the Huguenots on the ill-fated night of St. Bartholomew. Again prevailed the tristful dirge ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... tossing seas and the wind blowing a dirge through the rigging—well, a man may be brave enough to fight all the Germans this side the Russian line, but if he is new to sea life he is apt to see things. Two soldiers were standing on deck when our naval officer ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... spirit! and, oh, For this did I doubt her?... a light word—a look— The mistake of a moment!... for this I forsook— For this? Pardon, pardon, Lucile! O Lucile!" Thought and memory rang, like a funeral peal, Weary changes on one dirge-like note through his brain, As he stray'd ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... within, while outside all seems fair and sound. It was so with the Charter Oak; and when this monarch of the forest was unexpectedly laid low, rich and poor, great and small, were gathered to mourn its loss. A dirge was played and all the bells in the city were tolled at sundown, for this monument of the past was a link gone that ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... praise for those devoted sons of the motherland, the Kundu and the Chakravarti zamindars. If only, say they, the country had a few more of such staunch patriots, the mills of Manchester would have, had to sound their own dirge to the tune ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... of his own music were not very definite. In 1903, when he had finished all that he was to write, he expressed a preference for the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite above anything that he had composed. "Of all my music," he confessed at this time, "the 'Dirge' in the 'Indian' suite pleases me most. It affects me deeply and did when I was writing it. In ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... festival, and thirty profesti, beside the Sundays, they are all brought unto seven and twenty, and, with them, the superfluous numbers of idle wakes, guilds, fraternities, church-ales, help-ales, and soul-ales, called also dirge-ales, with the heathenish rioting at bride-ales, are well diminished and laid aside. And no great matter were it if the feasts of all our apostles, evangelists, and martyrs, with that of all saints, were brought to the holy days that follow upon Christmas, Easter, ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... from her hand; and listened, without daring to draw her breath, to the deep-toned lamentations. She thought that she had never before heard the dirge of her country so piercing, so thrillingly awful. Her head fell on the armor and scarf. "Sweet lady," sighed she to herself, "who is it that dares thus invade thy duties? But my gratitude-gratitude ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... was watching their sleeping faces he suddenly heard a soft singing; somewhere at a distance a woman was singing, and it was difficult to tell where and in what direction. The song was subdued, dreary and melancholy, like a dirge, and hardly audible, and seemed to come first from the right, then from the left, then from above, and then from underground, as though an unseen spirit were hovering over the steppe and singing. Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out where the strange song came from. Then ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... says 'Weep, this is the moment,' or 'Rejoice, the hour has come,' and we chant our dirge or kindle our bonfires accordingly. Why, it means a little martyrdom to the occasional sinner who selects his own occasion ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... pale swan in her watery nest Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending; 'Few words,' quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass best, Where no excuse can give the fault amending: In me moe woes than words are now depending; And my laments would be drawn out too long, To tell them all with one ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... the "elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest," "Midsummer Night's Dream," the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques. The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo his celebrated dirge over ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... appearance of eight emperor penguins from a crack 100 yds. away at the moment when the pressure upon the ship was at its climax. They walked a little way towards us, halted, and after a few ordinary calls proceeded to utter weird cries that sounded like a dirge for the ship. None of us had ever before heard the emperors utter any other than the most simple calls or cries, and the effect of this concerted effort ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... poets sing a dirge: The year must perish; all the flowers are dead; The sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail Runs in the stubble, but the ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... twentieth I felt considerable apprehension of being well ducked; and at about the thirtieth time of crossing, I almost fancied there was but little chance of escaping a watery grave, with sharks for sextons, and the wild surf for a dirge! The truth is that at each successive time of passing this formidable barrier of surf we become better and better acquainted with the dangers and ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... nothing could ever disturb the even rhythm of Beaumont's pulse. He tried to show his sympathy by turning his mind to all that was mournful and sombre in art and literature. One day he brought to her from New York what he declared to be the finest arrangement of dirge music for the piano extant, and she quite surprised him by declaring with sudden passion that she could not and would not play a note ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... night. But alas! this world was made to break hearts in, while love was sent from heaven to heal them. The precious balm, though, is so scarce that many must die for want of it. Oh, the might-have-been! What human soul has not sung that dirge? Verily, the winds come, howling it by like an invisible band of mourners from the grave of all things. Alas! is anything in this life real, or are we indeed shadows, and this world altogether a shadowy land, while the blackened skies above give us only glimpses of a far-off better home, better ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... she retired.... The twilight deepened to dusk, to darkness. The storm, having spent the intensity of its passion in those first moments of heavy downpour and wind, had relaxed to a gentle rain that pattered on the roof, and from the stream came recurringly the dirge of the frogs. All I could see of Nancy was the dim outline of her head and shoulders: she seemed fantastically to be escaping me, to be fading, to be going; in sudden desperation I dropped on my knees beside her, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the blind night. Our lamp burned low. Hollis, stripped to the waist, lay stretched out on the lockers, with closed eyes and motionless like a despoiled corpse; at his head Jackson twanged the guitar, and gasped out in sighs a mournful dirge about hopeless love and eyes like stars. Then we heard startled voices on deck crying in the rain, hurried footsteps overhead, and suddenly Karain appeared in the doorway of the cabin. His bare breast ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... poor Ximena; lay thy dear one down to rest; Let his hands be meekly folded, lay the cross upon his breast; Let his dirge be sung hereafter, and his funeral masses said; To-day, thou poor bereaved one, the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... night. A few poor old men, in tattered garments, were employed to officiate at the ceremony by holding "old torches and torches' ends" to light the gloomy precincts of the chapel during the time while the monks were chanting the funeral dirge. ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... says Charles Lamb, "like this funeral dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the element ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... with the twain too dear! My words are few, And shortly none will hear my failing voice, But the same language with more full appeal Shall hail thee. Many are the sons of song Whom thou hast heard upon thy native plains, Worthy to sing of thee; the hour is come; Take we our seats and let the dirge begin. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... even at a distance without raising their hats. Twice during the day I passed groups of women of the peon class carrying in procession several framed chromo representations of Saint Quien Sabe, bearing in his arms an imaginary Christ child, all of them wailing and chanting a dismal dirge as they splashed along through the ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the lofty limes were falling silently across the sombre evergreens, while the lights and shadows slept side by side: there was no sound but the cawing of the rooks, which to the accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge. Lydgate, conscious of an energetic frame in its prime, felt some compassion when the figure which he was likely soon to overtake turned round, and in advancing towards him showed more markedly than ever the signs of premature age—the student's bent shoulders, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... halfway across the south side of the room. The white floor, well sanded and polished, seemed only to accentuate the general gloom, and the great clock, ticking solemnly behind the bar, seemed to be marking time for a funeral dirge. But suddenly all changed to brightness when Betty entered. Pickering was talking to me, standing between me and the girl, so that she did not see me when she first came into the room. She stepped behind the bar for some purpose ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... the poet hurries us rapidly from the ominous preparation to the fatal moment of decision: the city is saved, the two competitors for the throne fall by each other's hands, and the whole is closed by their funeral dirge, sung conjointly by the sisters and a chorus of Theban virgins. It is worthy of remark that Antigone's determination to inter her brother, notwithstanding the prohibition with which Sophocles opens his own piece, which he names after her, is interwoven ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... through his head like a threat—a dirge. His aim wavered. Bullet after bullet sped harmlessly about Torrance. A cold sweat broke out on the Pole. He leaned out to order others into the surrounding trees—but realised as he glowered into their upturned faces that this was no time for ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... across the border; and from this year dates the immigration from Quebec into New England which has had such an influence on its manufacturing cities and such a reaction on the population which remained at home. Another fruit of this ill-starred rebellion was the haunting dirge of Gerin-Lajoie, Un Canadien errant. Twelve of the leaders were {30} tried for treason, were found guilty, and were hanged in Montreal. Some of these had been pardoned once for their part in the rising of the previous year; some were implicated in plain ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... upon my straw mattress until past two o'clock. One 4.2 fell near enough to rattle the remaining window-panes. The wail through the air and the soft "plop" of the gas shells seemed attuned to the dirge-like soughing of the wind. ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... knows that, when a warrior is about to meet death, he must sing a death dirge. Hakadah thought of his Ohitika as a person who would meet his death without a struggle, so he began to sing a dirge for him, at the same time hugging him tight to himself. As if he were a human being, he whispered in ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... as if I dreamed, Far distant, sweet and lone, The funeral dirge it ever seemed Of ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... Temples have fallen, and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the god's house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to the old divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants. It is none of the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian shepherds of our time, "Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee, what offering to the other world? The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose. I will send thee my tears shed on a napkin, and what though it burneth ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... tomb of coral, the dirge of bee, The grey apes' guttural groan For Alliolyle, for Lallerie, ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... of the wind brought mournful strains of the victim's dirge to our lodge. I fastened the door, with robes against it to keep the sound out. Then a smell of burning drifted through the window, and I stop-gapped ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... sacred earth afford thee room, Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb, Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest, And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast. Here shall the morn her earliest tears bestow— Here the first roses of the year shall blow; While angels with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... permitted to go to the street indicated, and they had hardly secured a good place before they heard martial music, playing a solemn dirge. ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... the waving of their solemn forests, and never will they see Ben-Nevis looking down over his clouds or Loch Lomond basking amidst her sunny braes, or in grim Glencoe listen to the Cona singing her lonely and everlasting dirge beneath Ossian's Cave, which gashes the breast of the cliff above it, without remembering the glorious Shade from whose evanishing lips Macpherson has extracted the wild ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... exceedingly solemn and beautiful, in a far different style from the maimed rites that had been bestowed upon poor Queen Joanna in Scotland. The young King's face was more angelic than ever, and as psalm and supplication, dirge and hymn arose, chanted by the full choir, speaking of eternal peace, Eleanor bowed her head under her veil, as her bosom swelled with a strange yearning longing, not exactly grief, and large tears dropped ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whistling?" asked Lialia, gaily, as she came across the garden. "It's like a dirge for your ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... partial nature mark'd me for her pet; That Phoebus doom'd me, kind indulgent sire! To mount his car, and set the world on fire. Fame's steep ascent by easy flights to win, With a neat pocket volume I'll begin; And dirge, and sonnet, ode, and epigram, Shall show mankind how versatile I am. The buskin'd Muse shall next my pen descry: The boxes from their inmost rows shall sigh; The pit shall weep, the galleries deplore Such ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... far among old Ireland's mountains I hear the breezes sing a sad dirge, low, Wild, and yet soft, with tears from many fountains And murmuring riven wailing ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... home, a young girl passed him, walking very briskly. She paused for a moment just ahead of him to give some money to a poor woman who, doubled up on the pavement in a black shawl, was grinding out from a wheezy little organ a thin, dirge-like strain. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... think of her, anyway? Her cheeks burned hot in the dark over that question. Strange she had not thought of it at all either beforehand or while she sat beside him during that wonderful ride! And now the thing that Wainwright had said shouted itself out to her ears: "Rotten! Rotten! Rotten!" like a dirge. Suppose he were? It couldn't be true. It just couldn't, but suppose he were? Well, suppose he were! How was she hurt by doing a kind act? Having taken that stand against all her former ideas Ruth had instant peace and drifted into dreams ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... may be compared to that which would be felt, if we should detach the songs of the artificial drama from their original impulse and feeling, (for instance, the willow dirge of Desdemona, and the fantastic moans of Ophelia,) and produce them in a parlor. Not but that these lyrics have a universal fitness, and a value which no time can change or circumstance diminish; but as we are looking at them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... sing a dirge,— A dirge for myriad chances dead; In grief your mournful accents merge: Sing, sing the girls ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... episode, several free States passed strong laws against the detention of fugitive slaves, and the Northern press and pulpit teemed with new lessons and fresh morals. John Brown's body, in the language of the sentimental dirge, "lay moldering in his grave"; but the spirit of the Kansas boomer actually ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... had taken up a sheet of paper on which Senor Perkins had evidently been essaying some composition in verse. It seemed to have been of a lugubrious character. The titular line at the top of the page, "Dirge," had been crossed out for the substituted "In ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... had with him; and when they were in mid Aegean, the sailors rose against him. As I was swimming alongside, I heard all that went on. 'Since your minds are made up,' says Arion, 'at least let me get my mantle on, and sing my own dirge; and then I will throw myself into the sea of my own accord.'—The sailors agreed. He threw his minstrel's cloak about him, and sang a most sweet melody; and then he let himself drop into the water, never doubting but that his last moment had come. But I caught ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... dirge-like swell of the ocean, though soothing, in the regularity and monotony of its sluggish motion, sounded ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... in others, many noble traits of character. The Harper, O'Dugan, was the last companion that clung to the last of the Desmonds; the Bard of Tyrconnell, Owen Ward, accompanied the Ulster chiefs in their exile, and poured out his Gaelic dirge above their Roman graves. Although the Bardic compositions continued to be chiefly personal, relating to the inauguration, journeys, exploits, or death of some favourite chief, a large number of devotional poems on the passion of our Lord and the glories of the Blessed Virgin are ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift, A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the Emperor Inkyo (A.D. 453), the Korean Court sent eighty musicians robed in black, who marched in procession to the Yamato palace, playing and singing a dirge as they went." ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the schooner convinced him that she had at least a month's supply of food and water. Only one thought surged through his mind, and that was the awful necessity for haste. The anchor came in with a rush, the Kanaka boys chanting a song that sounded to Neils like a funeral dirge, and Neils went below and turned the gasoline engines wide open. The Maggie II swung around and with a long streak of opalescent foam trailing behind her swung down the bay and faded at last in the ghostly moonlight beyond Diamond Head; after which Neils ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... women stood for a moment silent and motionless. They both listened to the dirge of their love and their happiness, and this simple, hearty song sounded to them horrible and awful in the boundless desolation of their hearts. At last the song ceased, and a voice, too well known and ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... Indian died. At the same time that the body is being fitted for interment, the squaws having immediate care of it, together with all the other squaws in the neighborhood, keep up a continued chant or dirge, the dismal cadence of which may, when the congregation of women is large, be heard for quite a long distance. The death song is not a mere inarticulate howl of distress; it embraces expressions eulogistic in character, but whether or not any particular formula of words is adopted on such occasion ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... this, with my love. Mr. Chorley saw the entrance of the Empereur into the Tuileries. He looked radiant. The more I read that elegy on the death of Daniel Webster, the more I find to admire. It is as grand as a dirge upon an organ. Love to the dear ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the heaven above, whence the hail and the levin are hurled, But the wind that is swept around us by the rush of the rolling world? The wind that shall scatter my ashes, and bear me to silence and sleep With the dirge, and the sounds of lamenting, and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... thanked me, and made a pretence of eating the wing, just to please me; but when the waiter was taken away to the kitchen, I found all the bird on the plate. This morning, just before daylight, I heard her playing a wild, mournful thing on the piano, that sounded like a dirge or a wail; and Ruth says when she went into the parlor to open the blinds, she found her praying, and thinks she was on her knees for an hour. Please God! sometimes I wish she was in heaven with my mother, for she will never see any ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... evening, and he would be a delightful neighbor if only his voice were pleasing. But there is little charm in the music, for it is in truth a dismal chant, with the air and cheerfulness of a funeral dirge—a pessimistic performance that inspires the listener with a desire to choke him then ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... itself, is no subject for tragedy, and the poet hurries us rapidly from the ominous preparation to the fatal moment of decision: the city is saved, the two competitors for the throne fall by each other's hands, and the whole is closed by their funeral dirge, sung conjointly by the sisters and a chorus of Theban virgins. It is worthy of remark that Antigone's determination to inter her brother, notwithstanding the prohibition with which Sophocles opens his own piece, which he names after her, is interwoven with the conclusion ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... disappointed by the immortal agony (dashed with one stroke of magnificent wrath) of 'Helen of Kirkconnell,' the bustle, frolic, and battle-joy of the Border pieces proper, the solemn notes of 'The Lyke-Wake Dirge,' the eeriness of 'Clerk Saunders' and 'The ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the wind brought mournful strains of the victim's dirge to our lodge. I fastened the door, with robes against it to keep the sound out. Then a smell of burning drifted through the window, and I stop-gapped that, too, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... unquiet slumber, vexed by deformed, fleeting, shapeless phantoms; and, waking, as the sun, through a veil of hazy cloud, glinted with a sickly ray across the casement, she heard her father settled back betimes to his one pursuit, and calling forth from his Familiar a low mournful strain, like a dirge over the dead. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sometimes looking up to the height of Heaven, calling out with shrieks of agony, as if invoking the Father of Nature; others grovelled upon the ground, beating their foreheads with their hands, while others again made their moan in a sort of dirge, in their own way, for though one could not understand the words, the sense of all was plain in the agony ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... lifted locks. Thou, night! the while Dost listen to his sad harp's wild complaint, Mother of shadows! as to thee he pours The broken strain, and plaintively deplores The fall of Druid fame! Hark! murmurs faint Breathe on the wavy air! and now more loud Swells the deep dirge; accustomed to complain Of holy rites unpaid, and of the crowd Whose ceaseless steps the sacred haunts profane. O'er the wild plain the hurrying tempest flies, And, mid the storm unheard, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Song has been compared with Webster's "Call for the robin redbreast" in The White Devil, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel's Fourth Song,—"Where the bee sucks"? Dowden saw ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... music, literature or poetry, but the contour of the finished product and the purpose it will serve depends upon the arrangement of the raw materials, which is subject to the constructor's design. Building materials may be formed to prison or palace; notes may be arranged as fanfare or funeral dirge; words may be indited to inspire passion or peace, all according to the will of the designer. So also the majestic rhythm of the Word of God has wrought the primal substance: arche, into the multitudinous forms which comprise the phenomenal world, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... men and women. They seated themselves in ranks in one of the courtyards of the pa, stripped to the waist. An old chieftainess, who moved along the ranks with regular steps, brandishing an ornamental spear in time to her movements, now recited the first verse of a song in a monotonous, dirge-like measure. This was joined in by the others, who also kept time by quivering their hands and arms, nodding their heads and bending their bodies in accordance with each emphasis ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... mysterious voices of po, the tenebrae of the Tahitian gods; the boom of the cascade in the abyss; the deep bass of the river in the rocky chute; the sigh of the wind in the trees; the murmur of the stream near by; the fantasia and dirge of the lofty night in the tropics. What a setting for her telling some old legend ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... passion urge For the one whelming wave to spring aloof. She, tenderness, is pitiless to them Resisting in her godhead nature's truth. No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem; Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth. These miserably disinclined, The lamentably unembraced, Insult the Pleasures Earth designed To people and beflower the waste. Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by: For death they live, in life ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... diftongo. Diploma diplomo. Diplomacy diplomatio. Diphtheria difterio. Dire terura. Direct (govern) direkti. Direct (command) ordoni. Direct (straight) rekta. Directly (time) tuj. Directly rekte. Director direktoro. Directory adresaro. Dirge funebra kanto. Dirt (soil) malpurigi. Dirt malpurajxo. Dirt (mud) koto. Dirtiness malpureco. Dirty malpura. Disable kripli. Disadvantage malutilo. Disagree malkonsenti. Disagreement malkonsento. Disappear malaperi. Disappoint malkontentigi. Disappointment malkontentigo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... us sing a dirge,— A dirge for myriad chances dead; In grief your mournful accents merge: Sing, sing the girls we ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... ardent speaker into observant host as Atticus turned with a whispered order to the slave who stood behind him. He was shocked, too, failing to perceive its note of defiant bitterness, by a laugh from Lucian and his careless, "My felicitations, Atticus, on your welding of dirge and exhortation into one epideictic oration! Aulus," he added, looking across the table, "don't forget to make a note of the prepositions the master used in ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... had made elaborate preparations for the final services. The funeral in Springfield was on May 4th. The order of service included a dirge, a prayer, the reading of his second inaugural address, and an oration. The latter was by Bishop Simpson and was worthy of the noble and eloquent orator. It was a beautiful day, the rain which had been falling during the long journey was over, and May sunshine filled earth and ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... commemorations. First came the Fourth of July, when, in obedience to the old custom which I had known so well in my student days, the American colony visited the cemetery of the Rue Picpus and laid wreaths upon the tomb of Lafayette,—the American band performing a dirge, and our marines on duty firing a farewell volley. It was in every way a warm and hearty tribute. A week later was the unveiling of the statue of Camille Desmoulins in the garden of the Palais Royal,—this ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Court, preceded by Chief Justice Chase. Of the Cabinet Secretary Stanton and Secretary McCulloch were present. After prayer by the chaplain, the Declaration of Independence was read by Hon. EDWARD MCPHERSON, Clerk of the House. After the reading of the Declaration, followed by the playing of a dirge by the band, Hon. SCHUYLER COLFAX, Speaker of the House of Representatives, introduced the orator of the day, Hon. ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... Sing another dirge in wailing, For another vessel sailing With the shadow-ships at sea; Shadow-ships for ever sinking — Shadow-ships whose pumps are clinking, And whose thirsty holds are ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... moving swiftly through the atmosphere now, feel the tortured rush of air that whipped against the sides of the projectile in a moaning dirge that mingled with the roar ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... as we drove through the clean, white streets, feeling absolutely hushed with the beauty which assailed us on every side, suddenly we heard the sound of music, mournful as a dirge—a martial dirge. And presently we saw approaching us the saddest, most touching yet awful procession I ever beheld. It was a military funeral. First came the band; then came two men bearing aloft the cover to the casket, wreathed in flowers and streaming with crape. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... passed the plains, the place of the sleepless winds where wan white skies bent above the grass of the hot dry pulse, the lifeless grass that wailed into the ceaseless wind its dirge ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... Youth, love and roses blossom; the gaunt ward Dislimns and disappears, and, opening out, Shows brooks and forests, and the blue beyond Of mountains. Small the pipe; but oh! do thou, Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick, These dying, sound the triumph over death. Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy Unknown before, in dying; for each knows A hero dies with him - though unfulfilled, Yet conquering truly - and not dies ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the common marvel of this "harp of thousand strings?" And sorrow! it veils all faces, and bows all forms alike, and sends the same shudder through the frame, and casts the same darkness upon the walls, and peals forth in the same dirge of maternal agony by the dead boy's cradle in the sumptuous chamber, and the baby's last sleep on its bed of straw. And Death! how wonderfully it makes them all alike who in the street wore such various garments, and had such distinct aims, and were whirled apart ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There honor comes a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall awhile repair To dwell a weeping ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... road, as the animal moved, the curtains were parted for a few inches only. Through the gap in the dark draperies a wan white hand appeared; waved tremulously a last farewell; and vanished from my view. The curtains closed again on her dark and solitary life. The dreary wind sounded its long, low dirge over the rippling waters of the lake. The ponies took their places in the ferryboat which was kept for the passage of animals to and from the island. With slow, regular strokes the men rowed us to the mainland and took their leave. I looked back at the distant house. I thought of her in the dark ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... midnight, by the fitful glare of the dying embers, those two silent men and that pale woman seemed to be keeping a vigil in an abode of death. And the pattering rain and moan of the night-wind sounded like a dirge. ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... opened his eyes the following morning, the soft hum of insects fell on his ear instead of the roar of London traffic. Through the open window the southern air blew upon his face. Above the sound of busy wings the distant sea sang its low dirge. It was a living perspective of sound. The least rustle near at hand overpowered it, and yet it was always there—an unceasing throb to be felt as much as heard. Some acoustic formation of the land carried the noise, for the sea was eight miles away. It was ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... the hall in grand and solemn state. Then thousands gathered to bow the head in reverence as the plumed hearse drove down the line. There was all the pomp of military display—drooping flags, battalions with reversed arms, and bands playing dirge-like airs. Now, the wife of the President was leaving the White House, and there was scarcely a friend to tell her good-by. She passed down the public stairway, entered her carriage, and quietly drove to the depot where we took the cars. The ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... But the fittest dirge is his own last lay, written on the day he completed his thirty-sixth year, soon after his arrival at Missolonghi, when his hopes of obtaining distinction in the Greek cause were, perhaps, brightest; and yet it breathes of dejection ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... hand in the air. "Please!" she interrupted. "He can't be that bad! You make him sound like a dirge player at a Hindu funeral. What did he tell you? What did you ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... tried, with that strange Greek pertinacity that understands no refusals, all the hotels and tourist agencies he had called at the day before, he became weary and disconsolate. The march had become a dirge; no longer it suggested happiness to be, but failure. An Englishman threw him a piastre, and he turned into a cafe. Calling for a glass of wine, he flung himself down on the wooden bench and tried to think. But really ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... Pecksniffs and Mrs. Todgers had perished by spontaneous combustion, and the serenade had been in honour of their ashes, it would have been impossible to surpass the unutterable despair expressed in that one chorus: 'Go where glory waits thee.' It was a requiem, a dirge, a moan, a howl, a wail, a lament, an abstract of everything that is sorrowful and hideous ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... daughter of the wandering musicians who had, at the open grave, played as a dirge, or, rather, as a ringing hymn of resurrection and deliverance, the chant of the fatherland-that dark girl to whom he had said: "Bring me this jewel, and come and live in peace with the Zilahs"—was the mother of this beautiful, fascinating ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... round—weird little tune! . . . Well, and what now? Only one thing certain. Sooner give up life than give her up! Far sooner! Love her, achieve her—or give up everything, and drown to that tune going on and on, that little dancing dirge of summer! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... up suddenly, all aglow with light within. Out into the night came the dirge of the organ for ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... . . . For the next twenty-four hours he did not come out of it. The postilion Antipka said afterwards that he saw Gerasim through a crack in the wall, sitting on his bedstead, his face in his hand. From time to time he uttered soft regular sounds; he was wailing a dirge, that is, swaying backwards and forwards with his eyes shut, and shaking his head as drivers or bargemen do when they chant their melancholy songs. Antipka could not bear it, and he came away from the crack. When Gerasim came out of the garret next day, no particular ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper'd ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... prisoners in Fidelio,—the sublime and adoring hymn of the "Alleluia" in The Mount of Olives,—the matchless pomp of the Sinfonia Eroica,—the passionate beauty of the sentiment of Adelaida,—the aerial grace of his quartets and waltzes,—the thrilling and almost awful pathos of the dirge written for six trombones,—but, above all, they will recall to mind the noblest work ever conceived and perfected by composer, one of the greatest achievements of the human mind, the Mass in D. And, bearing these wonders in their memory, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... 'There went a dirge through the forest's gloom. ...An exile was borne to a lonely tomb, "Brother;"—so the chant was sung In the slumberer's native tongue— "Friend and brother! not for thee Shall the ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... poor girl. Not hers the hovering sense of marriage bells Tuning the air with fragrance of sweet sound; But the low dirge that ever rose and died, Recurring without pause or any close, Like one verse chaunted aye in sleepless brain. Down to the shore it drew her from the heights, Like witch's demon-spell, that fearful moan. She knew that somewhere in the green abyss His body swung in curves of watery force, Now in a ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... with the stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady climbing ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... giants. Well! to-night, I think the officers who chance to be in town will go to the President's House with these thoughts in mind. To-morrow we return to the lines; and a great battle chant will be written before we tread these streets again. For us it may be a paean or it may be a dirge, and only the gods know which! We salute our flag to-night—the government that may last as lasted Greece or Rome, or the government which may perish, not two years old! I think that General Lee will be there for a short time. It is something like a recognition ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... The consciousness of life need be no comfort to me. In that wild chaunt there is breathing a keen spirit of vengeance. Oh! that I had not survived to hear it! Too surely do I know what will follow that dirge of death. It might ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... his veins. He was full of the strong joy of living. And then, in the midst of it all, came a dull, crashing blow. It was as though all his castles in the air had come toppling about his ears, the blue sky had turned to stony grey and the sweet waltz music had become a dirge. Always a keen watcher of men's faces, he had glanced for a second time at a gaunt, sallow man who wore a loose check suit and a grey Homburg hat. The eyes of the two men met. Then the blood had turned to ice in Trent's veins ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... papers are full of praise for those devoted sons of the motherland, the Kundu and the Chakravarti zamindars. If only, say they, the country had a few more of such staunch patriots, the mills of Manchester would have, had to sound their own dirge to ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... is putting an end to him at once,' said Miss Gwynne, 'and I think we had better play his funeral dirge. Lady Mary, will you give us 'The Dead March in Saul,' or something appropriate? Never mind, Netta; I daresay cousin Howel will turn out a great man by-and-by;' this last clause was whispered to Netta, whilst the young hostess went towards a grand piano that ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... they buried the lad Godwin, with chant and dirge; and when the funeral was done Hereward went up toward the high altar, and bade Winter and Gwenoch come with him. And there he knelt, and vowed a vow to God and St. Guthlac and the Lady Torfrida his true love, never to leave from slaying while there was a Frenchman ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... men of the party have dived into "The Welsh Rarebit Warren," there to spend the early hours of the morning, listening to sentimental songs chanted amid fumes of tobacco and spirits, to hear sorry wit, and make vapid remarks. The great feature of the evening being a melodramatic dirge, supposed to be sung by a condemned felon—a triumphant lamentation and delineation of brutal character,—so eloquent and thrilling, in its monosyllabic groans of anguish, that it is a wonder the kidneys, consumed in such numbers, are ever digested. ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... Palestinian winter, which are dreaded as peculiarly unhealthy, while verse 4b and verse 5 present the advent of spring, and contrast the new life in animals and plants with the feebleness of the man dying in his chamber and unable to eat. Still another explanation is that the whole is part of a dirge, to be taken literally, and describing the mourners in house and garden. I venture, though with some hesitation, to prefer, on the whole, the old allegorical theory, for reasons which it would be impossible to condense here. It is by no means free from difficulty, but is, as I think, less difficult ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and touching his reminiscence of his lost youth and the priceless boon of liberty. He commences in a quiet descriptive way, leaving one at a loss to know whether it is to be a joyful lyric a dirge he ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... funeral discourse. Then all accompanied the remains to the rock-hewn cemetery. Men bore the coffin on their shoulders, and on the coffin lay the dead man's sword, crowned with garlands, and his shako pierced with a bullet-hole. Leading the procession marched a student chorus singing a dirge, while weeping women brought up the rear. When the family vault was reached, the seven brothers of the deceased took the coffin and laid it in the niche prepared to receive it; then they rolled a great stone before the opening, came out of the ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... number of rents in an old, ragged, faded, dusty coat. Indeed, that morning all comparisons seemed to take on a tinge of melancholy; the reason being that throughout the previous evening there had been moaning in my soul a mournful dirge on the future life. ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... never see beneath the wall That timid little creature, all too bright, That stretches her fair neck, slender and white, Invoking the pale moon, and vainly tries Her throbbing throat, as if to charm the night With song—but, hush—it perishes in sighs, And there will be no dirge ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... soul played upon by the unknown musician of the sleepless hours. Now a mad, ecstatic chorus dinned in her ears and set her blood coursing; and again despair seized her with a dirge. Periods of semiconsciousness only came to her, and from one of these she was suddenly startled into wakefulness by her own words. "I have the right to make of my life what I can." But when she beheld the road of terrors that stretched between her and the shining ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... exultation, like a huge volcano's roar! There they stand, the batter'd columns, underneath the murky sky, In the hush of desperation, not to conquer but to die. Hark! the bagpipe's fitful wailing—not the pibroch loud and shrill, That, with hope of bloody banquet, lured the ravens from the hill— But a dirge both low and solemn, fit for ears of dying men, Marshall'd for their latest battle, never more to fight again. Madness—madness! Why this shrinking? Were we less inured to war When our reapers swept the harvest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... possession of me, a heavy weight to settle down upon my spirits. I played on dreamily, until suddenly I was stopped by a cry from Constance, 'Do for pity's sake stop that wail, Hilda; one would think you were playing our funeral dirge!' ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... borne together and was lessened because it was shared. I stand there sometimes now, where the two dead trees are leaning close together, and as the wind sighs through the bare boughs, it chants no dirge to me, but only a hymn ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... nights, and still days, steps of Time in his flight. The days shall pass rapid as swifts on the wing. O'er the face of the hills, o'er the face of the seas, O'er streamlets of silver, and forests that ring With a dirge for the dead, chanted low by the breeze; The face of the waters, the brow of the mounts Deep scarred but not shrivelled, and woods tufted green, Their youth shall renew; and the rocks to the founts ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... song for the willow, the wild weeping willow, That murmurs a dirge to the rapturous days, And moans when the kiss of the breeze laden billow Entangles and dangles among the sad sprays! A musical ditty to scatter the sadness, A warble of wildness to banish its tears, Till tremulous measures of bountiful gladness Be sounding and bounding ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... music echoes from the walls, But music with a dirge-like sound; And pale and silent are the guests, And every ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... tenderly to rest, Those for their country dying,— Let breaking hearts and trembling lips Pour the sad dirge of sighing. Yet louder than the requiem raise The song of exultation, That the great heritage is ours To ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... insures the absence forever of death, and mourning, and pain, and crying. The dirge music has sung its last song. The minor chords are gone. All the old things of a sorrowful sort are quite gone. And as John looks He that sitteth on the throne makes the glad announcement, "Behold, I make all things new." And John is bidden to ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... rear of the Confederate line and it was a weird and ghastly ride. Now and then his horse's feet sank in mud, and the frogs still dared to croak around the pools, making on such a night the most ominous of all sounds. It seemed a sort of funeral dirge for both North and South, a croak telling of the ruin and death that were to ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... strength and assurance which these simple children obtain from their Moses and the Prophets. Yet external Nature does its share in their training; witness that most poetic of all their songs, which always reminds me of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" in the "Scottish ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... their own, and at first Bibbs wished to avoid this, but upon reflection he offered no objection—he divined that the Knights and their service would be not precisely a consolation, but a satisfaction to his father. So the Knights led the procession, with their band playing a dirge part of the long way to the cemetery; and then turned back, after forming in two lines, plumed hats sympathetically in hand, to let the hearse and the carriages ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... man!" continued the woman wrathfully. "Will you hold your old doddering tongue, Caleb, and let the gentlefolk speak!" But there was no cessation of the dreary, dirge-like sounds. They found out afterwards that Caleb always worked with cotton-wool in his ears, so his wife's remonstrance failed to ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... wind sang a dirge all through the night, and ceased not till day darted over the hills. It was not very pleasant for the old tree to hear the children's regrets and words of grief as they came around it in the morning to play and ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... a melancholy dirge in Norman French; the words, of which the following is an imitation, were united to a tune as doleful as they ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... final statement, whether intentional or not, is something I shall remember to my grave. I don't think that Carse meant it literally—on my own head—but I was unable to shake his words out of my ears, and throughout the night and the following day they hung about me like a dirge. ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... was turned from the contemplation of these difficulties by a sudden change in Rory's tune. He stopped in the midst of his low, wailing dirge and struck up loudly the lively air that told again and again of the mirth produced when "Jinny banged the Weaver." Scotty raised his head and looked across the pasture-field. That tune always ushered Weaver Jimmy upon the stage, and there he was, coming over the field, easily recognisable ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... although the adjective is redundant. Nobody ever thinks of a cheerful phantom. Strangely enough, considering her evident sadness, she was whistling softly to herself, over and over, some dreary little minor air that sounded like a Bohemian dirge. She glanced up quickly when I made a misstep and my dishes jingled. All considered, the tray was out of the picture: the sea, the misty starlight, the girl, with her beauty—even the sad little whistle that stopped now and then to go bravely ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... silent, steadfast stone, Dirge and song and shoutings low In thy heart Dwell serene,—and sorrow? No, It has none, [10] ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... thee on Time's remotest age, Ten thousand years, ten thousand times told o'er; Still, still with thee my onward course I urge; And now no longer hear the surge Of Time's light billows breaking on the shore Of distant earth; no more the solemn dirge— Requiem of worlds, when such are numbered o'er— Steals by: still thou art on ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... all pass, and they that bide can but make the dirge. But I'll be obliged if you'll say to Mr. Alexander that if there is aught—" He gathered up the reins. "It will be snowing presently. I always thought that I'd like to part on a day like this, gray and quiet, with all the color and the shouting lifted elsewhere." He was gone, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... ears, but he dared not,—as if he should like to rush down the stairs, but he could not. For the old man fixed him with his eyes, and, keeping his head turned towards his prisoner, began to march up and down the broken stone floor, and blew so wild a dirge that in a few moments ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... streams of Eridan,[90] On either side banked with a lily wall, Whiter than both, rides the triumphant swan, And sings his dirge, and prophesies his fall, Diving into his watery funeral! But Eridan to Cedron must submit His flowery shore; nor can he envy it, If, when Apollo sings, his ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... sanctified, About the bed there sighing stood The sweet and flowery sisterhood: Some hung the head, while some did bring, To wash her, water from the spring; Some laid her forth, while others wept, But all a solemn fast there kept: The holy sisters, some among, The sacred dirge and trental sung. But ah! what sweet smelt everywhere, As Heaven had spent all perfumes there. At last, when prayers for the dead And rites were all accomplished, They, weeping, spread a lawny loom, And closed her up as in ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... as their rapid course they urge, A passing bell, a solemn dirge; Hoarse ravens join the strain. They see a coffin on a bier, A priest and mourners too appear, Slow ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... One went so far as to declare it "the happiest part of a negro's life." They aver that the Africans, on their way to slavery, are so merry, that they dance and sing. But upon a careful examination of witnesses, it was found that their singing consisted of dirge-like lamentations for their native land. One of the captains threatened to flog a woman, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful to him. After meals they jumped up in their irons for exercise. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... poet, a geographer, a roughly clever diplomat, a fighter, a man with a polyhedric personality, that caught and gave, something from and to every one. And he died dissatisfied, at Trieste, in 1890, at the age of sixty-nine, and Swinburne sang a dirge for him that was ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... wearied by the festivities, soon fell asleep. He was presently awakened by the sound of music, and, looking about the apartment, saw at the opposite end, three phantom ladies, grotesquely attired, singing a mournful dirge. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... lament for his beautiful boy he uttered the voice of parental sorrow in immortal accents. In the poems, "In Memoriam," and in "The Dirge," he records how lonely the lovely Concord Valley is to him since his brothers are gone as he wanders there in ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... there a burdened branch creaked under its travail. Now and then the wind that drove the snow rose to a gusty whisper, and a stark limb scraped the eaves of the house with grating, lifeless fingers. But between the occasional stress-cries of the storm, there came the low, dirge-like monotony of the sifting snowfall. And as always in old houses there were the little voices and the minute nameless stirrings of the night. The ghost-moan of drafty chimneys and the creak of warped timbers became audible accentuators of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... that old Rabbits had come by just at the wrong moment! They took his impending punishment even more cheerfully than he did himself, as our friends generally do, and promised to go in a body and see the operation. One, indeed, Simmonds, lamented over his sad fate, and sang by way of a dirge— ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... that, among several other proposals, some were for having the funeral procession made through the triumphal gate, preceded by the image of Victory which is in the senate-house, and the children of highest rank and of both sexes singing the funeral dirge. Others proposed, that on the day of the funeral, they should lay aside their gold rings, and wear rings of iron; and others, that his bones should be collected by the priests of the principal colleges. One likewise proposed to transfer the name of August to September, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... battle field, and the cold pale moon Look'd down on the dead and dying, And the wind pass'd o'er with a dirge and a wail, Where the young and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... he would never desert Ulster, nevertheless made it plain that Ulster on this occasion should take her place beside the rest of Ireland. Only Mr. GINNELL remained obdurate. In his ears the Convention sounds "the funeral dirge of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... Clarke tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine that we ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... with his back to the trunk. About his feet dry wood was then placed, and half way up his body. When this had been accomplished, the Indians formed themselves in a circle about the unhappy man, and began to chant a slow weird dirge in the ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung, There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay. And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... a motley throng, Slow measures chanting of a dirge-like song. In one great circle dizzily they swing, A squaw and chief alternate in the ring. Coarse raven locks stream over robes of white, Their deep set orbs emit a lurid light, And as through pine ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... lungs, for the most part; with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy was in the spectacles through which I chose to look. He was conscious of inconvenience, and above all of a great renouncement; but how could he have heard a mere dirge in the bells of his accession? The sagacity and the jealousy were mine, and his the impressions and the harvest. Of course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I was worsted in my encounters, for wasn't the state of his health the very reason for ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... roses well, Mademoiselle," said she; "in three days I shall be here for a bouquet, and in less than thrice three days I promise you there shall be a dirge sung for the lady ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... dost thou shiver, While she whom thou hast driven away Is bold amidst the chilly spray? What good is all thy vain remorse? Thinkst thou from jaws of death to force A sacrifice so lightly thrust Upon the altar of thy lust? A host like thee could nothing urge To meet one tone of her sad dirge: ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... of a bird courtship and marriage with its attendant feast and tragedy, all followed by the long dirge of No. 142, constitutes one of the longest nursery novels. Its opportunities for the illustrator are very marked, and a copy illustrated by the children themselves would be an addition to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... chair in a corner, where he sat chanting a funeral march in a sepulchral murmur, allowing a parenthetical hic to punctuate the dirge in place of the drum. Whenever a batch of newcomers entered, he rose to drink with them; and, at such times, after pouring off his liquor with a rich melancholy, shedding tears after every swallow, he would make an exploring tour of the room on his way back to his corner, stopping to look ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... they parted asunder and gave place to the wain. And the others when they had brought him to the famous house, laid him on a fretted bed, and set beside him minstrel leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay, while the women made moan with them. And among the women white-armed Andromache led the lamentation, while in her hands she held the head of Hector slayer of men: "Husband, thou art gone young from life, and leavest me a widow in thy halls. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... attention to the game, he puffed out his cheeks and began to chant the De profundis. When he had got to the end of it, he began it all over again. The game came to a conclusion in the midst of this dirge. It was he who was beaten, but his defeat did not seem to ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... Honor playing now—a sort of dirge or lament for the chief of a clan. Suddenly she stops, and her head droops low over the keys. She has forgotten everything but the sore pain at her own heart and the anxious dread that is making every ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... be his own, and his friends treated his efforts as the wanderings of fatuity. The proofs of his capacity are, his Ode on Evening, his Ode on the Passions (particularly the fine personification of Hope), his Ode to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines on Thomson's Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of which are admirable. But perhaps his Ode on the Poetical Character is the best of all. A rich distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Air, fitly praised by our neighbor of the Albion, as one of the finest productions of the present time. We do not know of any poet at home or abroad to whose fame it would not have added new luster. In the July number of the Knickerbocker we find the following "Dirge," which ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... both gondoliers crossed themselves. The Veronese also bared his head and made the sign of reverence, for they were passing the island of San Michele, toward which a mournful procession of boats, each with its torch and its banner of black, was slowly gliding, while back over the water echoed the dirge from those sobbing cellos. Here, where only the dead were sleeping, the sky was as blue and the sea as calm as if sorrow had never been born ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... was a worshipper of Art and sensualistic beauty, and who regarded the sciences as the mere handmaids of Art, exalting the aesthetic above the moral nature in man, quite naturally regretted that he had not lived in the palmy days of the anthropomorphic creed of Hellas, before the dirge of Pan was chanted in the Isle of Naxos. His "Gods of Greek Land" is as fine a piece of heathenish longing as could well be written at so late a day. His heart was evidently far away from the century in which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... You hear Tennyson, indeed, sometimes, and Byron sometimes, in some passages of the Roman; but then again you have a new note,—nowhere clearer than in a certain brief lyric, sang in a meeting of minstrels, a sort of dirge over a dead brother;—THAT not only charmed the ear and brain, it soothed ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... many noble traits of character. The Harper, O'Dugan, was the last companion that clung to the last of the Desmonds; the Bard of Tyrconnell, Owen Ward, accompanied the Ulster chiefs in their exile, and poured out his Gaelic dirge above their Roman graves. Although the Bardic compositions continued to be chiefly personal, relating to the inauguration, journeys, exploits, or death of some favourite chief, a large number of devotional poems on the passion ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... summer sun. Poor was their lot, their bread in labour found; No parent blessed them, and no kindred owned; They smiled to hear the wise their choice condemn; They loved—they loved—and love was wealth to them! Hark—one short week—again the holy bell! Still shone the sun; but dirge like boomed the knell,— The icy hand had severed breast from breast; Left life to toil, and summoned Death to rest. Full fifty years since then have passed away, Her cheek is furrowed, and her hair is gray. Yet, when she speaks of him (the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ugly face, a shriveled form, a bad complexion. Nothing made of clay can hide it. No beauty of person can conceal deformity of spirit. A bad temper will look hateful in the prettiest face. A hollow heart will sound its dirge of woe through the most perfectly organized form. Peering through all outward Beauty is seen the hateful demon of a bad heart. Shining through all bodily deformity are always visible the angel faces of the virtues ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... 63 On the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland; considered as the Subject of Poetry; inscribed to Mr. John Home 66 An Epistle, addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer, on his Edition of Shakespeare's Works 78 Dirge in Cymbeline, sung by Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead 87 Verses written on a Paper which contained a Piece of Bride-cake, given to the Author by a Lady 89 To Miss Aurelia C——R, on her Weeping at her Sister's Wedding 91 Sonnet 91 Song. The Sentiments ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... terribly cut up at the premature death of his follower; Lizzie, having smothered her head with fluffy feathers from some cockatoos that had been roasted for supper, employed herself in chanting a most weird kind of dirge over the body, to which she beat a species of accompaniment on the bottom of a pint pot; while Ferdinand, by Dunmore's directions, had set to work to strip a sheet of bark off a tea-tree, to act as a rude coffin. A great difficulty now presented itself, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... at his work, wrestling with his confused ideas. And all the time a curious stifled sound was in his ears—a grievous sound, as though something were incessantly complaining. Perhaps it was only the dirge of poverty itself, some strophe of which was always ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe. Bob, with the pack on his back, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... chair, except those behind the counters, in the store. Miss Keith took that with an exclamation of impatience. Crawford Smith, whistling a mournful dirge, sauntered to the end of the counter and sat down upon a ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... looking for one another and quietly murmuring. One of the black-boys, whose turn at watching had just come, was already riding round with one leg cocked lazily over the pommel of the saddle, and chanting a coroboree dirge, both to let the cattle know that he was about and ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
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