|
|
|
More "Melody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their hands in pleasant labors, for some of them were again crowning the worn-out thyrsus, so as to make it leafy with ivy; and some, like horses quitting the painted yoke, shouted in reply to another a Bacchic melody. And the miserable Pentheus, not seeing the crowd of women, spake thus: O stranger, where we are standing, I can not come at the place where is the dance of the Maenads; but climbing a mound, or pine ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... sweet passion In advanced age a great painter. Happy teacher, happy scholar, In the honeysuckle arbour! 'Twas as if the only safety Of the German empire rested On this trumpet-call's performance. But within their souls was stirring Quite a different melody: That sweet song, old as creation, Of the bliss of youthful lovers; True, a song without the words yet, But they had divined its meaning, And beneath a playful manner Hid the blissful consciousness, Startled by this trumpet-blowing ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... a sweet, soft sound of music, at which our venerable father was so moved, God being thus abundantly manifest among us, that he sank down in tears, and for a long time could not continue the service—we all remaining stupified, hearing the melody, and feeling the marvellous effects of it upon our spirits, but knowing neither whence it came nor whither it went. Only our hearts rejoiced as we perceived that God ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... critics these babies are! What a perverse preference they have for the soft jingle of nonsensical melody; blank verse with its five accents and want of rhythm does not ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... do work that would please the gentlemen who controlled the music trades, but failed. One day, while looking over his manuscripts to discover if possible the cause of his failure, he was struck by the similarity of one of his compositions to another. They all seemed to contain the same melody, in one form or another, and he saw plainly at last that he was subconsciously haunted by the leading motif of the first movement of his last symphony, the symphony that was played on that dreadful night for the first and last time. The inference was plain enough. This ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... nothing but how marvelous it was, so that whether the two differed all through I am not sure. It was every time a new rapture to me as well as to him. One of his beginnings that I had time to note before I was lost in the flood of melody was of two notes, the second a fifth higher than the first, with a "grace-note," very low indeed, before each one. The other beginning was also two notes, the second at least a fifth lower than the first, with an indescribable jerk between, and uttered so softly that if I had been a ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... inattentive to the voice of absent man, a hard, hollow goddess, a flute for the piping of heaven—composing and chanting unmusical songs, her inner ear fastened upon another melody. And heaven, protecting a creature at that moment so estranged from earth, led her down the wild road, held back the threatening forest branches, brought her, all but standing up at the wheel like a lunatic, safely to the foot of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... at my window-ledge for his matutinal crumbs, was stretching his tiny crimson throat to its fullest extent, with quivering heart-notes of choral song, from a solitary poplar-tree in the adjacent garden on which my room out- looked, making the still air re-echo with his melody; my old retriever, Catch, a good dog and true, was pawing and scratching at the door to be admitted, in his customary way, and sniffing a cordial welcome, as he wondered and grumbled, in the most intelligible doggy language, at my being so late in taking him out for his preprandial ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... somewhat less than a quarter of a mile from the shore, and in the morning we were awakened by the singing of the birds. The number was incredible, and they seemed to strain their throats in emulation of each other. This wild melody was infinitely superior to any that we had ever heard of the same kind; it seemed to be like small bells, exquisitely tuned; and perhaps the distance and the water between might be no small advantage to the ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... also musical notes, indicating the time of the melody,—metronome-marks, so to speak; and "Gittith" and "Shiggaion" are marks that indicate the kind of melody to which the psalm ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... and melody harmonised with our feelings and lent them a deeper tone as our united voices floated out upon the soft, ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... a cottage in the centre of a flower garden, and at one extremity of another garden a building, imitative of an Indian pagoda, stood, appropriated to a fine band breathing, throughout the evening, all the pathos and melody of Italian music. The cottage itself was set apart for refreshment, and one might descend to a cup of coffee, or mount to the limitless command of a dinner. I had dined very early, and, feeling the effects of good digestion, desired to dine again. The persons who attended the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; children ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... faithfulness to his love may very well take the place of the Congressional medal which, unfortunately, was lost on the night the soldier was killed. Between the two, there is little doubt that the accolade of fame bestowed in the buffoon's simple melody is more vital and enduring than that accorded by special act of the Congress of the United States ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... me! leave me! Every one tries to form a circle, of which he may be the centre. As long as there remains a bird in these woods to greet the rising sun with its melody, I ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... my child; Brangaene knows the melody thereof. And she shall teach it thee that thou ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... clean white blouse of Hop Yet's and his best cap with the red button, from which dangled a hastily improvised queue of black worsted, he proceeded to convulse everybody with his Mongolian antics. These consisted of most informal remarks in clever pigeon English, and snatches of Chinese melody, rendered from time to time as he carried dishes into the kitchen. Elsie laughed until she cried, and Laura sat in the shadiest corner, her head ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... with the complexion, spring from the shoulders upwards, and against them leans the divine head. The eye seems fixed on the centre of being, and the lips are gently parted, as if uttering strains of celestial melody.' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... music comes from? Where do you suppose any music comes from that is not mere imitation? The greatest composers of the world have been mere receptacles of sound; and the emptier they were of self-love and vanity, the greater quantity of heaven-born melody they held. The German Wagner—did he not himself say that he walked up and down in the avenues, 'trying to catch the harmonies as they floated in the air'? Come with me—come back to the place you left, and I will see if you, like Wagner, are able ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... it "Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles," making melody that still lures with its ancient charm. A city for angels, verily. A city of angels? Verily; some fallen, indeed, for there is much nefarious trafficking in real estate, but all in all the majority of souls in Los Angeles are celestial ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... him, as he began to play "My Old Kentucky Home." They sang one negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, its shriveled ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... ferocious pedants like Professor Francis Newman, and conventional worshippers of such idols as Scott and Macaulay, when they found him poking his seraphic fun at the notion that Homer's song was like "an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast," or at ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... never-to-be-forgotten melodies, containing the element of beauty per se so richly developed. Cannot the whole world produce one man, who, with all the expanded musical knowledge of the present day, can unite for us Italian gift of melody and German power of orchestral and choral effect, whose endowments shall be both lyric and dramatic, and whose taste shall be pure, refined, and ennobling? Should we recognize such a genius were he actually ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... never be said of the boom from a Buddhist temple, even though it pour waves of sound through sunny leagues. There is a vast difference between the peal and play of the chimes of Europe and the liquid melody which floods the landscape of Chinese Asia. The one music, high in air, seems ever to tell of faith, triumph and aspiration; the other in minor notes, from bells hung low on yokes, perpetually echoes the pessimism of despair, the folly of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... me alone with my joy, my delirium, my wild fancies.... I was not then mistaken: the prince royal will come to see me. Yes; the prince palatine told me so; he has never seen anything comparable to me. This phrase haunts my memory like a delicious strain of melody. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... was heard one day, in his father's castle, the sweetest music that mortals ever listened to. Nobody knew whence the bewitching sounds came; for they seemed to be now here, now there: yet every one was charmed with the delightful melody, and declared that only angels could make music so heavenly. Then suddenly there came into the chamber where Ogier lay six fairies, whose beauty was so wonderful and awful, that none but a babe might gaze upon them ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... again in five minutes with a face which drove all thoughts of melody from Peter's head. In fact, at sight of it, he came instantly to a sitting position and his guitar slid ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... exchange: for a cruel task-master, a loving Father; for a dread monster, an holy City; for the base and ugly slime of the river, the fair paving of the golden streets, and the soft waving of the leaves of the tree of life, and the sweet melody of angel harps. Truly, I think this good barter. If a man were to exchange a dead rat for a new-struck royal, [see Note 1] men would say he had well traded, he had bettered himself, he was a successful merchant. Lo, here is worse than a dead rat, ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... in the room, but as if deaf to any sounds but those he made, Nat played softly to himself, forgetting every thing in his delight. It was only a simple Negro melody, such as street-musicians play, but it caught the ears of the boys at once, and silenced them, till they stood listening with surprise and pleasure. Gradually they got nearer and nearer, and Mr. Bhaer came up to watch the boy; for, ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... glad, and glorious harmony, This joyful merle, so salust[3] she the day, While rung the woodis of her melody, Saying, 'Awake, ye lovers of this May; Lo, fresh Flora has flourish'd every spray, As nature, has her taught, the noble queen, The fields be clothed in a new array; A lusty life ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... tender that night and Billy felt a strange constriction in his throat. But you never would have guessed, as Lynn Severn turned at the end of her melody to search the dimness for the presence she felt had entered, that he had been under any stress of emotion, the way he grinned at her and ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... up as they sat down to table with variations on the air Vive le roy, vive la France, a melody which has never found popular favor. It was then five o'clock in the evening; it was eight o'clock before dessert was served. Conspicuous among the sixty-five dishes appeared an Olympus in confectionery, surmounted by a figure of France modeled in chocolate, ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... the ladies was playing on the piano as we entered. It was a curious composition—very rhythmic, with a peculiar thread of monotonous melody ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... transparent there, and the sun shines with a strange brilliancy, and a delightful grove of green leafy trees presents itself to the eyes and charms the sight with its verdure, while the ear is soothed by the sweet untutored melody of the countless birds of gay plumage that flit to and fro among the interlacing branches. Here he sees a brook whose limpid waters, like liquid crystal, ripple over fine sands and white pebbles that look like sifted gold and purest pearls. There ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... lovely valse? Doesn't the music seem to sweep round and tie us all up in a garland of melody! How far, far above all these twirling human microbes it is!—as far as heaven from earth! If we could really obey the call of that music we should rise on wings and fly to such wonderful worlds!—as it is, we can only hop round and round like motes in a sunbeam and ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... hand was needed to brush off the tears that were gathering in her large dark eyes. At once her attitude was changed. The hare could not have started more suddenly from her form. She heard accents well known concluding the melody: ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... familiar and endeared; so that the annals and the aspects of no State in the Union are better known—even to the local peculiarities of life and language—to the general reader, than those of Virginia, from negro melody to picturesque landscape, from old manorial estates to field sports, and from improvident households to heroic beauties; and among the freshest touches to the historical and social picture are those bestowed by Irving in some of the most charming episodes ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... measure. meditar to meditate. Mediterraneo Mediterranean. mejilla cheek. mejor better, best. mejorar to ameliorate, better. melancolia melancholy. melancolico melancholy. melocoton m. peach. melejo sweet? melodia melody. memoria memory; memorias (a) compliments, regards (to). menester m. necessity. menguar to diminish. menor minor, smaller, younger. menos less, least; except. mentar to mention. mente ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... of song seemed breathed into her, and every nook and corner of the house appeared to vibrate with melody. Even the servants in distant rooms said that it seemed that an angel was singing. After she ceased, the audience sat spellbound for a moment, and then followed prolonged thunders of applause, the portly brewer, Mr. Brown himself, leading off again ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... tunneled, revetted, embrasured and battlemented citadel filled with rusty armor and broken lances. A hock shop, a junkyard, a hall of distorting mirrors. A cemetery by the sea, a peak of glory, a slough of despond. A radiant light, an encroaching dark, the sweetest of melody, the sourest of discord. A library of trivia, museum of curiosa, sideshow of freaks, and shrine of greatness. It was the lowering pendulum, the waiting pit, the closing walls. It was the vaulting spirit, the gallant heart, the just and ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... fine selection, and then, as he was tumultuously encored, he went back to the platform alone. Without accompaniment he played the little song, "Beware," that Patty had sung, and, improvising, he made a fantasia of the air. He was clever as well as skilled, and he turned the simple little melody into thrilling, rollicking music with trills and roulades until the original theme was almost lost sight of, only to crop up again ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... company of knightly minstrels he sought to forget his great sorrow, and that later he composed many pretty songs. One of them has survived the centuries, and was recently discovered, along with the melody, in an ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... the woodland sights and sounds: the tapping of a woodpecker on a distant tree, the occasional call of a catbird, the soft scurrying of a rabbit or a squirrel, the buzzing of a laden bee—all mingled into one melody of summer of which she did not consciously distinguish the individual notes. Just as pleasantly confused were her thoughts, pictures of which her drowsiness blurred the outlines, so that she passed ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... thought of the initials he had carved on the tree nearest the gate, and wondered if the bark had grown over them. And the old fence where the boys had gathered in the soft twilight of spring evenings and sung the songs that had been handed down through college generations. How the melody from hundreds of voices had swelled out ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... of a Hungarian waltz came floating down to them. She half closed her eyes. Her head moved slowly with the melody. Tavernake looked away. ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the immortal words of "Home, Sweet Home," adapting them to the beautiful Sicilian melody, now so familiar to us all, he gave to the world a precious legacy, which has brought sunshine into millions of hearts. "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." And there is no other place in all the world where the little courtesies of life should be so tenderly given; where ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... plaintive, neither sad nor joyous, but simply human, seeking what it might find on earth. The song changed subtly from mood to mood, expressing that which nothing but itself could express; and presently there was a low and gentle menace, thrice repeated under the melody of the song, and the reply of the song was a proud cry, a haughty contempt of these furtive warnings, and a sudden winged leap into the empyrean towards the Eternal Spirit. And then the melody ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... eloquence standing on the seashore, up to my middle in the breakers. I ran, roaring up steep hills—I stretched myself at length by the side of meandering brooks, or in slumberous forests of pine, and sought, by the merest whispers, to express myself with distinctness and melody. But there was something yet more requisite than these, and this was language. My labors to obtain all the arts of utterance did not seem less successful. I could dilate with singular fluency, with classical propriety, and great natural vigor of expression. I studied directness of expression ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... and sun, and the river passes there through some little clumps of reeds. Well, as I sat there, doing nothing, but just looking and listening, I heard the sound quite distinctly of some flute-like instrument playing a strange unending melody. I thought at first it was some musical yokel on the highway and did not pay much attention. But before long the strangeness and indescribable beauty of the tune struck me. It never repeated itself, but it never came to an end, phrase after phrase ran its sweet course, it worked gradually and inevitably ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... in the six weeks' interval between my last record and that which I begin to-day, has become almost as familiar as the oldest friends of my youth. 'Non piu mesta'—I hear my niece strumming the notes I know so well in the parlour below my room, as I write these lines, and the sound of the melody brings before me the image of a sweet pale face ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... — N. melody, rhythm, measure; rhyme &c (poetry) 597. pitch, timbre, intonation, tone. scale, gamut; diapason; diatonic chromatic scale^, enharmonic scale^; key, clef, chords. modulation, temperament, syncope, syncopation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... their reflection in the water beneath. Only the soft rustling of the leaves, and the hum of thousands of insects as they sang together a sweet, dreamy forest song was to be heard. The very sunbeams seemed to echo this melody as they followed closely the two wanderers, as if this man and woman had come beneath their ban and would have some penalty to pay for crossing their shining path so carelessly. Suddenly an unexpected barrier stood in their way. From a thickly wooded elevation, ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... of his principal tragedy—an article doing more justice to the dramatic than to the lyric quality of his genius. But it is by his songs that his name is kept in the minds of men to-day—exquisite snatches of melody, full of the peculiar charm of that Elizabethan age to which they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... more and more true and pungent in proportion as language becomes a more complex instrument, its progress resembling the evolution of an organ from a shepherd's pipe. As it thus progresses, its delicate possibilities of melody, metaphor, and subtle emphasis increase, and masters of the literary art enchant with ever new surprises multitudes who have no capacity for the literary art themselves. So far, then, as literature is in this sense literature for its ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... harvest's guerdon While the tree is yet in bloom? Wherefore drudge beneath the burden Of an unaccomplished doom? Wherefore let the scarecrow clatter Day and night upon the tree? Brothers mine, the sparrows' chatter Has a cheerier melody. ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... minstrel, or jongleur, with an immense beard and mustachios, was tuning, with no inconsiderable skill, a lute which had accompanied him in all his wanderings—and suddenly changing its notes into a wild and warlike melody, he commenced in a loud and deep ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that they cannot fail to become friends and intimates at once. In them, as in all the tunes, the compass of ordinary voices has been considered; and although nothing has been left undone which could give beauty to melody or scholarly variousness to harmony, the whole has been brought within the range of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... turned and bowed repeatedly with a grimacing smile. The music, usually Viennese, was muted and emotional; its strains blended perfectly with the floating scents of the women and the faintly perceptible pungent odors of dinner. Every little while a specially insinuating melody became, apparently, tangled in the women's breathing, and their breasts, cunningly traced and caressed in tulle, ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, around him the sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquillity of the moonlight, churning an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... reading about Orpheus, and how he charmed all the wild beasts with his melody. It was true the boy had not a lyre, but he had no doubt that his concertina would do as well, and he was quite certain he had seen a fox while taking his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... a taste for music is one thing, and a real submission to the influence of religion is another; how the ear may be regaled by the melody of sound, and the heart may utterly refuse the proper impression of the sense that is conveyed by it; how the sons and daughters of the world may, with their every affection devoted to its perishable vanities, inhale all the delights of enthusiasm, as they sit in crowded assemblage, around the ...
— On Singing and Music • Society of Friends
... bedchamber at last. Why was I still not at my ease? Why was I rude enough, when I thought of the widow, to say to myself, "Damn her!" Why did I find Gluck's magnificent music grow wearisome from want of melody as it went on? Let the learned in such things realize my position, and honor me by ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... were interesting. Even more inspiring was another new-found friend, Henry Simmons Frieze; a thorough musician, and a most lovely character. He broached no theories, uttered no comments, but sat rapt by the melody and harmony—transfigured—"his face as it had been the face of an angel.'' In these Liebig concerts we then heard, for the first time, the music of a new composer,—one Wagner,—and agreed that while it was all very strange, there was ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... that, like a brook beside the way, Sang to my steps through all the wandering year, Has ceased from melody—O Love, ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... which his story is told though less complicate and beautiful than the Spencerian, is equally ancient; and favorable to a pensive melody, is also ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... Degge, "the swift and heart-grappling recollection of the woman you gave up in the cause of common-sense,—roused by some melody she liked, or some shade of color she was wont to wear, or by hearing from other lips some turn of speech to which she was addicted. My Lord Duke, that memory wakes on a sudden and clutches you by the throat, and it chokes you. ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... like the intonations of a hunter's horn—but of so harsh and hoarse a character, that I could scarcely believe them to be produced by such an instrument. As a profound silence succeeded, I began to think my senses had been deceiving me; but once more the same rude melody broke upon my ears, in a tone that, taken in connexion with the place where I listened to it, impressed me with an idea of the supernatural. It had something of the character of those horns used by the shepherds of the Swiss valleys; and it seemed to ascend out of ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... of the last is simply miraculous, and miraculously assisted by what may be called the internal sub-rhyme of sedisti and redemisti. This latter effect can rarely be attempted without a jingle: there is no jingle here, only an ineffable melody. After the Dies Irae, no poet could say that any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and Shakespeare ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of their return to the castle, the Chieftain warmly pressed Waverley to remain for a week or two, in order to see a grand hunting party, in which he and some other Highland gentlemen proposed to join. The charms of melody and beauty were too strongly impressed in Edward's breast to permit his declining an invitation so pleasing. It was agreed, therefore, that he should write a note to the Baron of Bradwardine, expressing his intention to stay a fortnight at Glennaquoich, and requesting him to forward ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... (for so it is called) is not artistic to the eye and loses all its poetry when one sees its owner blowing his nose into it but the notes emanating from it breathe a vague sense of melody and ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... village in the southern boundary of St. Leonard's Forest, the key to some very rich country. Before the days of bicycles Bolney was practically unknown, so retired is it. The church, which has a curious pinnacled tower nearly 300 years old, is famous for its bells, concerning whose melody Horsfield gives the following piece of counsel: "Those who are fond of the silvery tones of bells, may enjoy them to perfection, by placing themselves on the margin of a large pond, the property of Mr. W. Marshall; the reverberation of the sound, coming ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... to frenzy. In this act, played almost solely by Crescentini, this admirable singer communicated to the hearts of his audience all that is touching and, pathetic in a love expressed by means of delicious melody, and by all that grief and despair ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Even in his most insignificant works of the stereotyped sort, with much sound and very little thought and feeling, the hand of a master is visible, and talent is perceptible; while many passages are remarkable for their poetic figures, melody of versification, and beauty and force of expression. No poet previous to Pushkin can be compared to him for talent, and for direct, independent inspiration. His poetry is chiefly the poetry of figures and events, of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... tasteful way that warmed lonely Aunt Betty's heart, as she watched her, more than the blazing fire could; and while she worked, she talked, or sang little snatches of college songs learned at school, which rippled out in her rich voice with a melody never heard in the old ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... they had reached was so perfectly still that every cloud in the sky, every mangrove, root and spray, and every bending bulrush, was perfectly reproduced in the reflected world below. Plaintive cries of wild-fowl formed appropriate melody, to which chattering groups of monkeys and croaking bull-frogs contributed a ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... the witness to abide? Then study the word of God, and live by it; sing and make melody in your heart to the Lord; praise the Lord with your first waking breath in the morning, and thank Him with your last waking breath at night; flee from sin; keep on believing; look to Jesus, cleave to Him, follow Him gladly, trust the efficacy of His blood, and the ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... and intermingled, weaving melody with joy, Till the magic circle clustered round a blooming baby-boy; And they threw aside their treasures in an ecstasy of glee, And bent, with dazzled faces and with ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... have no more power, When tears can tell no more, The heart of all regret Is uttered by a falling wave Of melody. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... first pages of a more wondrous legend still. Lifted above the many-gabled roof, yet not cut off from the echo of human speech, the little grove seemed a green sanctuary, fringed about with violets, and full of summer melody and bloom. Gentle creatures haunted it, and there was none to make afraid; wood-pigeons cooed and crickets chirped their shrill roundelays, anemones and lady-ferns looked up from the moss that kissed ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... crowding upon her, but the cold eyes of strangers were upon her, and pride came to her aid. She began the prelude to a song that required great artistic skill and expression. Her listeners sat in silence, while her very soul floated away on the waves of melody. When she had finished, there was astonishment depicted ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... the eventide was come, the birds began all with one voice to sing, and clap their wings, crying, "Thou, O God, art praised in Zion, and unto Thee shall the vow be performed in Jerusalem." And always they repeated that verse for an hour, and their melody and the clapping of their wings was like music which drew tears ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... six. Terry O'Sullivan was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole winged her first butterfly flight. And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of entomology they shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned melody of Maggie's one ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... promenade in pairs. Each provides himself with the plaintive flute and plays the simple cadences of his people, while his person is completely covered with his fine robe, so that he cannot be recognized by the passerby. At every pause in the melody he gives his yodel-like love-call, to which the girls respond with their musical, ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... back—you live the scene again, as an actor does, and you shape it and you master it. And now in the midst of it, you find this highest of all moments is gone! It is gone, and you can not find it! Those words that came as a trumpet-clash, burning your very flesh—that melody that melted your whole being to tears—they are gone—you can not find them! You search and you search—but you can not find them. And so you stumble on, in despair and agony; and still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this until ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... nursery, songs for childhood, for girlhood, boyhood, and sacred songs—the whole melody of childhood and youth bound in one cover. Full of lovely pictures; sweet mother and baby faces; charming bits of scenery, and the dear old Bible ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... axe and a hatchet in his hand, he went to the monastery of Lestingay, signifying that he came to work, and not to be idle; which he made good by his behavior in the monastic state. This monk declared, that he one day heard a joyful melody of some persons sweetly singing, which descended from heaven into the bishop's oratory, filled the same for about half an hour, then mounted again to heaven. After this, the bishop opening his window, and seeing him at his work, bade him call the other ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... torches were extinguished of themselves, and those of Charles and his suite cast their dim, flickering light upon the old-fashioned tapestry with which the chamber was usually hung, and which was now slightly moved by the wind. During some minutes longer a strange sort of melody was heard, a harmony compared by one of the eye-witnesses of this unparalleled scene to the murmur of the breeze agitating the foliage, and by another to the sound emitted by the breaking of a harp-string. All agreed ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... since you my chief Parnassus be; And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, More soft than to a chamber melody,— Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet, My Muse and I must you of duty greet With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. Be you still fair, honour'd by public heed, By ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... quality of sounds has a simple physical measure for its basis; and the rate of vibration is complicated by its sweep or loudness, and by concomitant sounds. What a rich note is to a pure and thin one, that a chord is to a note; nor is melody wholly different in principle, for it is a chord rendered piece-meal. Time intervenes, and the harmony is deployed; so that in melody rhythm is added, with its immense appeal, to the cumulative effect already secured by rendering many notes together. The heightened effect ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... melody that the Germans were singing profane songs indeed. It could also be distinguished that the singers were not more than about a dozen, and that they all repeated only one burden which resounded far and wide in the forest, ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... strings upon the harp of God, because without it no real lasting joy could be had by mankind. In due time its benefits shall result to the entire human race; and all who appreciate it will sing aloud and rejoice with exceeding joy. They will have melody in their hearts and upon their lips because of this wonderful provision made by Jehovah for man's benefit. For thousands of years divine wisdom has been working out his plan concerning man; and the ransom sacrifice is the very pivotal part of that plan. Its importance cannot be overstated. ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... haphazard way, will often suffice to change the whole intention and career of a life for good or for evil. It is as though a musician in the composition of a symphony should suddenly bethink himself of a new and strange melody, and, pleasing his fancy with the innovation, should wilfully introduce it at the last moment, thereby creating more or less of a surprise for the audience. Something of this kind happened to Innocent after her meeting with the painter who bore the name of her long idealised knight of ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... red and white. * * * When they had come to the Tower at the approach to the bridge, as it were at the entrance to the authorities to the city. * * * Banners of the Royal arms adorned the Tower, elevated on its turrets; and trumpets, clarions, and horns, sounded in various melody; and in front there was this elegant and suitable inscription upon the wall, 'Civitas Regis justicie'—('The city to the King's righteousness.') * * * And behind the Tower were innumerable boys, representing angels, arrayed in white, and with countenances shining with gold, and glittering ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... its little circle of waiting leaves, there would be a stir beside me in the underbrush, or overhead in the fir; then tinkling out of the darkness, like a brook under the snow, would come the low clear strain of melody that always set my heart a-dancing,—I'm here, sweet Killooleet-lillooleet-lillooleet, the good-night song of my gentle neighbor. Then along the path a little way, and another match, and another song to make one better and ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... by an arch called the "Devil's Bridge." The lofty, elevated plains were covered with scanty patches of grain and potatoes, and the boys tended their goats on the grassy slopes, sometimes trilling or yodling an Alpine melody. An hour's walk brought us to Einsiedeln, a small town, whose only attraction is the Abbey—after Loretto, in Italy, the most celebrated resort for ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Wit and Science is the earliest known instance of a Moral-Play regularly distributed into five Acts, and these again into scenes. The allegory is quite elaborate and wire-drawn; and the piece has something of humour in the matter, and of melody in the versification. Like Will to Like, Quoth the Devil to the Collier, printed in 1568, has some rude approaches to individual character; which is my reason for noticing it. Nichol Newfangle, though in fact the hero, enacts the Vice, and is armed ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... suggest some inner, darker meaning? There were times when she seemed old—old as vice and cruelty, hoarse with complaints, with curses, and then again her lips were childishly sweet, and her voice carried only the wistful accents of adolescence or the melody ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... a tune? any kind of a tune, but a catchy one the best. In a little while you'll hear another person pick it up and hum or whistle, just the same way; so on, till nobody knows how many have caught and heard the wandering melody and passed it onward through a crowd. Did you ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... afternoon he would "ride circle" again, over the hills; and at night, from ten to twelve, he would again be on guard, riding round the cattle, humming some eerie lullaby. It was always the same song that he sang, but what the words were or the melody is a secret that ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... to the waterside, and the three resumed their walk. The chime of little joy-bells and the silvery flourish of melody continued to ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... Further, Jerome in his commentary on Eph. 5:19, "Singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord," says: "Listen, young men whose duty it is to recite the office in church: God is to be sung not with the voice but with the heart. Nor should you, like play-actors, ease your throat and jaws with medicaments, and make the church ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Philammon's. He had been listening to the whole lecture; and yet not so much listening as watching, in bewilderment, the beauty of the speaker, the grace of her action, the melody of her voice, and last, but not least, the maze of her rhetoric, as it glittered before his mind's eye like a cobweb diamonded with dew. A sea of new thoughts and questions, if not of doubts, came rushing in at every sentence on his acute Greek ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... did not know he was listening, he heard her low, sweet laugh; and it had a joyous ring and melody which repeated itself like a haunting refrain of music. He would say smilingly, "It is circumstantial ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... and of good report, of whatsoever is manful and ennobling, of whatsoever is worthy of praise and honour. Music, to that man, speaks of a divine order and a divine proportion; of a divine harmony, through all the discords and confusions of men; of a divine melody, through all the cries and groans of sin and sorrow. What says a wiser and a better man than I shall ever be, and that not of noble music, but of such as we may hear any day in any street? "Even that vulgar music," he says, "which makes ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... The glorious triumphant melody rose like a great rising tide of faith and of communion; Susan forgot where she was, forgot that there are pain and loss in the world, and, finishing, turned about on the piano bench with glowing ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... a stop to his classic lore, while the followers of Ceres arranged themselves in order, and began to sing. The contagious and wild melody of the Ranz des Vaches rose in the square, and soon drew the absorbed and delighted attention of all within hearing which, to say the truth, was little less than all who were within the limits of the town, for, the crowd ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... there is music in light! Hence, Phoebus is god of the Sun and of the Lyre, and Memnon yields sweet sounds to welcome approaching day. For this reason, the disciples of Zoroaster and Pythagoras hail the rising sun with the melody of harps; and the birds pour forth their love of light in song. Perchance the order of the universe is revealed in the story of Thebes rising to the lyre of Amphion; and Ibycus might have spoken sublime truth, when he told of music in the ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... his love proclaim With all her different tongues; And spread the honours of his Name In melody and songs. ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... the Fairy Queen receiv'd With happy Mourning Cheer The Body of this valiant Knight, Whom she esteem'd so dear; For with her dancing Nymphs in Green She fetch'd him from his Bed, With Musick and with Melody, As soon ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... like a review of troops, giving an opportunity for all to see them, they descended from the grotto and formed themselves into a little company fantastically arranged, while an orchestra of thirty violins discoursed sweet music, and marched to the melody of these violins by a beautiful dance step, approaching and halting before their majesties. After this they danced their ballet, so fantastically invented, with so many turns and convolutions, twinings and twistings, in which no lady failed to find her own place again, ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Boswell himself had met Whitefield; for mentioning him in his Letter to the People of Scotland (p. 25), he adds:—'Of whose pious and animated society I had some share.' Southey thus describes Whitefield in his Life of Wesley (i. 126):—'His voice excelled both in melody and compass, and its fine modulations were happily accompanied by that grace of action which he possessed in an eminent degree, and which has been said to be the chief requisite of an orator. An ignorant man described his eloquence oddly but strikingly, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... side." Then the services began, the preacher leading the hymns, and the cracked voices of the old ladies joining in at the wrong places. But after a while a venerable negro in the gallery tuned up, and sang down the shrill swallows with natural melody. The prayers were long, and broken by ejaculations from the pews. The text was announced amid profound silence, after everybody had coughed several times, and then the itinerant launched into his sermon. ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... was under the influence of a nightmare, and making an effort she sat up in the bed. Suddenly she heard a distant sound of sweet music, a mysterious melody whose notes ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... sing—how oft in glee Came a truant boy like me, Who loved to lean and listen to your lilting melody, Till the gurgle and refrain Of your music in his brain Wrought a happiness as keen ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... tongueless and log-struck bells of Buddhism are sombre and saddening. "As merry as a marriage bell," could never be said of the boom from a Buddhist temple, even though it pour waves of sound through sunny leagues. There is a vast difference between the peal and play of the chimes of Europe and the liquid melody which floods the landscape of Chinese Asia. The one music, high in air, seems ever to tell of faith, triumph and aspiration; the other in minor notes, from bells hung low on yokes, perpetually echoes the pessimism of despair, the folly ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... the actor in him. When telling a story he never mimicked his personages; his drama seldom lay in clash of character, but in thought; it was the sheer beauty of the words, the melody of the cadenced voice, the glowing eyes which fascinated you and always and above all the scintillating, coruscating humour that lifted his monologues ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... these shells That at their bidding casements open wide And Innocence puts vine-leaves in her hair, And wantons like a maenad. Let that pass. Your lute I know is chaste. And therefore play: Ravish my ears with some sweet melody; My soul is in a prison-house, and needs Music to cure its madness. Good Bianca, Entreat ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... 'Dorothy Q,' written to the portrait of my great-grandmother which you see on the wall there. All these I have a liking for, and when I speak of the poems I like best there are two others that ought to be included—'The Silent Melody' and 'The Last Leaf.' I think these are ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... recollection old Homer, Ossian, and Milton, and associating with his performance the melancholy grandeur of their geniuses; you are to imagine that you hear his slow, solemn, well-accented enunciation, and his voice of affecting trembling melody; you are to remember the pitch of passion and enthusiasm to which the congregation were raised; and then the few moments of portentous, deathlike silence which reigned throughout the house; the preacher removing his white handkerchief from his aged face, (even yet wet from the recent torrent ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... be said that, when they begin to learn mathematics, their whole souls are absorbed in tracing the connection between the premisses and the conclusion, and that to them geometry is pure science. So I think it may be said that mechanics and osteology are pure science. On the other hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it. So, again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "harmony in grey," touches none but the aesthetic faculty. But a great mathematician, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Nativity of the Virgin, all the chants were taken from older Masses, e.g., from the masses of Advent and of certain Virgins and Martyrs. The Procession of the Purification, both words and melody, was borrowed from the Greeks by Pope Sergius. For the Mass of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross all the chants were taken from elsewhere, with the possible exception of the Communion. The Introit and the Gradual were taken from Maundy Thursday, the Alleluia ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... the American organ; see HARMONIUM) when the bellows are expanded. The pitch of the note is determined by the length and thickness of the reeds, reduction of the length tending to sharpen the note, while reduction of the thickness lowers it. The right hand plays the melody on the keyboard, while the left works the bellows and manipulates the two or three bass harmony keys, which sound the simple chords of the tonic and dominant. The archetype of the accordion is the cheng (q.v.), or Chinese organ, between which and the harmonium ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... strength to lift a languid head:— Rose and fainting violet By the water's margin set Swoon and sink as they were dead Though their weary leaves be fed With the foam-drops of the pool Where it trembles dark and cool Wrinkled by the fountain spraying O'er it. And the honey-bee Hums his drowsy melody And wanders in his course a-straying Through the sweet and tangled glade With his golden mead o'erladen, Where beneath the pleasant shade Of the darkling boughs a maiden— Milky limb and fiery tress, All at sweetest random ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... which these poets produce, you can hardly give from German poetry. Examples enough you can give from German poetry of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feeling expressing themselves in clear language, simple language, passionate language, eloquent language, with harmony and melody; but not of the peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of style. Every reader of Dante can at once call to mind what the peculiar effect I mean is; I spoke of it in my lectures on translating Homer, and there I took an example of it from Dante, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... people who, absorbed in commerce, politics, and other pursuits, think that music is a mere family pastime—an ear-gratifying enjoyment. Great popularity has its drawbacks as well as its advantages, and there is no doubt that the widespread, instantaneous appreciation and popularity of melody has detracted somewhat from the proper recognition of the higher and graver attributes of music. But that music is a power and has influenced humanity with dynamic force in politics, religion, peace, and war, no one ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... from ship to ship, as the foxhunters, swelled in numbers from all sides, and those that could not run mounted some neighbouring hummock of ice and gave a loud halloo, which said far more for robust health than for tuneful melody." ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... seem justly destined to live in perpetual favor, and it must surround these with clusters of new tunes, which shall be as solid and correct in their harmony as the older, while their lightness and fluency of melody belong to the present day. There must be anthems and chants, and there must be a clear and thorough exposition of the elements of vocal music to help on the tyros who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... at the ranch the previous evening. He was sitting now with his fiddle on his knee, having gone through the repertory most favored by his hostess, with the exception of "Silver Threads." That was an afternoon melody, Banjo maintained, and one would have strained his friendship and shaken his respect if he had insisted upon the musician putting bow to ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... into their congregational services. The early Christians followed the example of the synagogue; and when they celebrated the praises of God "in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs," [216:6] their melody was "the fruit of the lips." [216:7] For many centuries after this period, the use of instrumental music was unknown ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Gathering again in drops upon the pines, And tremulous as they, in the deep night 85 My being was condensed; and as the rays Of thought were slowly gathered, I could hear His voice, whose accents lingered ere they died Like footsteps of weak melody: thy name Among the many sounds alone I heard 90 Of what might be articulate; though still I listened through the night when sound was none. Ione wakened then, and said to me: 'Canst thou divine what troubles me to-night? I always knew, what I desired ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Hyacinth and Rose-Blossom. The rhythmic prose Hymns to Night exhale a delicate melancholy, moving in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than experienced. Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above life. In his Spiritual Poems we feel a simple, passionate intensity of adoration, a yearning sympathy for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to the voice of absent man, a hard, hollow goddess, a flute for the piping of heaven—composing and chanting unmusical songs, her inner ear fastened upon another melody. And heaven, protecting a creature at that moment so estranged from earth, led her down the wild road, held back the threatening forest branches, brought her, all but standing up at the wheel like a lunatic, safely to the foot of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... interest and my joy as I learned that the Zikites are looking forward to a period of time corresponding to our Millennium. Their religious literature is full of references to this coming golden age, and many poetical compositions point to it with rapturous melody ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... happier moments, which irresistibly interested and absorbed your attention: he could make you forget everything but himself, and the rich, easy, yet earnest eloquence, which gave colour to his language and melody to his voice. In that hour of renewed intercourse with one who had at first awakened, if not her heart, at least her imagination and her deeper thoughts, certain it is that even Legard was not missed. As ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... establish this mysterious rapport between an inert material and himself. He could not have divined at the first stroke all its resources and caprices, its faults and its virtues. His instrument only became a soul for him and a source of melody after long study; he only came to understand it as two friends ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... flute-like notes which soared above the soft murmur of a viol still strumming in the villa as a skylark cuts the mists. It was not another nightingale as I at first thought, but Imperia's voice from the laurel thicket mocking the melody. As she sang there appeared within the circle of the tiny temple's columns a white-robed figure, outlined against the pale green and lemon yellow of the dawn. It might have been a statue save that as the song of the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... Lord of lords, who alone rulest always in eternity, and who correctest all our wanderings,—Giver of melody to the choir of the angels, listen Thou a little to our bitter grief, and come and rule us, oh Thou highest King, with Thy love which ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... spray of pine needles rustled along the roof, or a pine cone dropped with a quick reverberating tap-tap that for an instant startled her. Lying thus, wide awake, she fell into a dreamy reminiscence of the past, hearing snatches of old melody in the moving pines, fragments of sentences, old words, and familiar epithets in the murmuring wind at her ear, and even the faint breath of long-forgotten kisses on her cheek. She remembered her mother—a pallid creature, who had slowly faded out of one of her ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... are having it now; and whatever happens to the fashion of the age, it makes no difference—there are always high and brave and amusing lives to be lived; and a change of key, however exotic, does not exclude melody. Even Chinamen, hard as we find it to believe, enjoy being Chinese. And the Chinaman stands alone to be unthinkable; natural enough, as the representative of the only other great civilisation. Take my people ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... long poles clothed with all kinds of flowers then in season, and which were afterwards carried through the streets of the town with much solemnity, the clergy, singing men and boys, dressed in their sacred vestments, closing the procession, and chanting in a grave and appropriate melody the "Benedicite." The boundaries of the parish were marked in many points by Gospel trees, where the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... years was it since the simple words had been sung in that house, and the notes of the old piano sounded to the lilting cadence of its melody? And now, of the two who had sung it together, one was gone, and the other—well, for the other some of the golden radiance still shone after all the bitter years fate had meted out; and the scent of the ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... happily. Miss O'Dowd was delighted with her hosts, whose character she resolved to maintain in spite of their reputation for pride and haughtiness. Lady Jane sang an Irish melody for her, Lady Callonby gave her slips of a rose geranium she got from the Princess Augusta, and Lord Kilkee won her heart by the performance of that most graceful step 'yclept "cover the buckle" in an Irish jig. But, alas! how short-lived is human bliss, for ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... insignificant works of the stereotyped sort, with much sound and very little thought and feeling, the hand of a master is visible, and talent is perceptible; while many passages are remarkable for their poetic figures, melody of versification, and beauty and force of expression. No poet previous to Pushkin can be compared to him for talent, and for direct, independent inspiration. His poetry is chiefly the poetry of figures ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... which attract our admiration, or excite our fears, the greater part display their appetites, or develope their instincts, during the day time only; especially—with few exceptions—all those remarkable for beauty of plumage, and vocal melody. Predacious animals are chiefly distinguished for their nocturnal habits; and ideas of rapine, terror and blood, are ever associated with the tiger, the hyena, and the wolf. Among the feathered tribes, the owl and the bat, also companions of darkness, are shunned ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... Gray," along with many more, shows how warm was the impulse to this expression of feelings, which were at once intensified and drawn out of the sphere of revelations too individual by the breath of the melody which carried them forth. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... elevated dignity; her mien and motion superb, and gracefully majestic; her voice full, clear, and strong; so that no violence of passion could be too much for her; and when distress or tenderness possessed her, she subsided into the most affecting melody and softness. In the art of exciting pity, she had a power beyond all the actresses I have yet seen, or what your imagination can conceive. In scenes of anger, defiance, or resentment, while she was impetuous and terrible, she poured out the sentiment with an enchanting harmony; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the Sea who had married an earthly maiden; and was at last deserted by her from some scruples of conscience. The original features of it are strictly preserved, and it is told indirectly by the old Sea King to his children in a wild, irregular melody, of which the following extract will convey but an imperfect idea. It is Easter time, and the mother has left her sea palace for the church on the hill side, with a ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... that week she went back to that same place with that same cry. The last time she went some one was in the church. It was the organist, practising some new Easter music for the next day's services. A burst of triumphant melody greeted her as she noiselessly opened the side door. She met the florist coming out, for he had just completed the decorating, and the place was a mass of bloom. All around the chancel stood the tall, white Easter lilies, waiting, like the angels ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... until then, began to sing softly in Creole French, a Louisianian air. The words of this melody were soft and expressive. Although restrained, the noble contralto overpowered the noise of the torrents of rain and violent gusts of wind, which seemed to shake the old house to ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... was an hour high when he walked his horse up the last hill that hides the valley of the Saar. Already, through the constant rushing melody of bird music, his ears had distinguished another sound—a low, incessant hum, monotonous, interminable as the noise of a stream in a gorge. It was not the river Saar moving over its bed of sand and yellow pebbles; it was not the breeze ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual—ten, fifteen years backwards—to my student life in Paris, and set me to thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero, friend, and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair's composition, a melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to sing a good deal, half in fun, half in earnest, to ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... burst of music from a piano, in which I felt Zenobia's character, although heretofore I had known nothing of her skill upon the instrument. Two or three canary-birds, excited by this gush of sound, sang piercingly, and did their utmost to produce a kindred melody. A bright illumination streamed through, the door of the front drawing-room; and I had barely stept across the threshold before Zenobia came forward to meet me, laughing, and ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the chant rose a second melody, a single melodious voice, and the King seemed to hear the words: "I am an angel, and thou ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... lamp or two flashed in our eyes from the other side of a little cove, and sparkled in broken lights upon the uneasy wavelets which splashed and tinkled against the sides of several coasting-vessels moored near at hand. The semi-silence of the night was broken by musical sounds, scarcely melody, but an uneven kind of chant, commencing in unison, and dying away in a prolonged melancholy, wailing chord, swelling and falling, almost like the notes produced by an AEolian harp as the wind sweeps over its strings. ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... reverently to her human nature, kindly to her present weakness, encouragingly to her hopes; receive her counsels with respect and confidence, so far as they are worthy, and be assured that a better day will begin to dawn. The birth of a new spiritual life will be given in this new marriage, and melody as from the harps of angels will be breathed from the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... heard, we are told, in the regions south of St. Louis even in Our days. A young French officer, the Chevalier d'Artaguette, captured by the Chickasaws, was burned at the stake. He and his kin were loved by all the French and the song they used to sing of him is kept in a negro melody ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... every external form in which it may be lodged. We may "pshaw" and "pooh" at Harry Gill and the Idiot Boy; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of sentiment, the strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and unvarying purity, which pervade all the writings of Wordsworth, and the exquisite melody of his lyrical poems, must ever continue to attract and purify the mind. The very excesses into which his one-sided theory betrayed him, acted as a useful counter-agent to the prevailing bad taste of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... liking for "Prometheus Unbound" may be reckoned the touch-stone of a man's capacity for understanding lyric poetry. The world in which the action is supposed to move, rings with spirit voices; and what these spirits sing, is melody more purged of mortal dross than any other poet's ear has caught, while listening to his own heart's song, or to the rhythms of the world. There are hymns in "Prometheus", which seem to realize the miracle of making words, detached from meaning, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... catcalls and squawks as have given the bird his common name, is a wonder when in the next moment his throat swells and beginning phut-phut-coquillicot, he gives forth a long glorious song, only second to that of the wood thrush in melody. He is a jester, a ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the foot of the chromatic scale, sound, round and full, each semitone in succession and at separate intervals. The instrument is mute to every note until you strike the one to which the guitar string is attuned; then indeed, the spirit of melody imprisoned within the musical string recognizes its kindred sound, and springs sweetly forth to meet it. You pause, and a low, sweet strain sighs softly through the room, as if a zephyr had swept the string, dying gently away like the faintest breathing of the evening ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank. It was easy at all events to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... horsehair hanging about her face, a red and black robe, a staff, and cabalistic signs upon her cloak. Hugo demanded a potion to make Zara adore him, and one to destroy Roderigo. Hagar, in a fine dramatic melody, promised both, and proceeded to call up the spirit who would ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... was also very gloomy. My vis-a-vis was an old Buffalo girl who must have remembered coming out to "dance by the light of the moon" a couple of generations ago, when that melody was popular. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... confessed and began to make his excuse, "Silly knight!" said she, "who couldst not guess that my falcon, too, was abroad to avenge the blessed Stephen. Or dost think that it was a hawk, of all birds, that sang a melody in the ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Romanus." The phrase sounds strangely, in my ears, like the accents of an unknown language or the burden of a half-forgotten melody. In those four initial letters there seems to me always to lie embodied an epitome of the world's history—the rise and decline and fall of Rome. On the escutcheons of the Roman nobles, the S.P.Q.R. are still blazoned forth conspicuously, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... was still audible. The melody of voices suggested that its occupants were busy telling each ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... tail begemmed with painted plumage." "Wherefore {give} me," he retorted, "a beauty that is dumb, if I am surpassed in voice?" "By the will of the Fates," {said she}, "have your respective qualities been assigned; beauty to you, strength to the Eagle, melody to the Nightingale, to the Raven presages, unpropitious omens to the Crow; all of {these} are contented ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... help clapping his hands and crying bravo! As bad luck would have it, this triumph, to which she had not been accustomed, instead of encouraging the musician, frightened her so much, that voice and harpsichord stopped at the same instant, and silence immediately succeeded to the melody for which the chevalier had so imprudently ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... where our birds are there is scarcely a tree in sight to tangle the singing in. It is a meadow with miles of sunlight in it. It seems like a kind of world-melody to walk in the height of noon there—infinite grass, infinite sky, gusts of bobolinks' voices—it's as if the air that drifted down made music of itself; and the song of all the singing everywhere—the song the soul hears—comes on the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... strain touched some chord in the sodden brain. The man gave a feeble whinny, trying to follow the melody. He pulled himself together and lurched forward in a sudden impulse to join the band of pilgrims. But by the time he had taken three steps they had vanished, miraculously, as it seemed ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... The divine melody ceased; the elder stranger rose; the words were on the lips of Egremont, that would have asked some explanation of this sweet and holy mystery, when in the vacant and star-lit arch on which his glance was fixed, he beheld a female form. She was apparently in ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... now within that valley Through the red-litten windows, see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid, ghastly river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh—but ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... key!" Master left the cooks and joined the artists. The melody was heard again, this ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... direction. There were piano solos that were not tedious,—full of melody and feeling, and with few of the pyrotechnical displays which are too common in modern virtuoso-playing; vocal duets and quartets from the Italian operas, and from Orfeo and other German masterpieces; and solos, if not equal to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... tune, and a prolonged squeal of the instrument, gave the congregation below matter to speculate upon. Wilfrid put up his finger and sat reverently down, while Emilia plunged tremblingly at the note that was howling its life away. And as she managed to swim into the stream of the sacred melody again, her head was turned toward her lover under a new sensation; and the first words she murmured were, "We have never been ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the end of the square, fleeing from the publicity of the street. They came to the Moorish arcades of the evangelist temple, whose colors were beginning to grow pale, vanishing into the shade of dusk. Before either of them could utter a word they were enveloped in a wave of soft melody,—music that seemed to come from afar, stray chords from the organ, the voices of virgins and children who were chanting in English with bird-like notes ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Then this was the tall figure he had seen striding over the hills—this was the neighbor he had shunned and avoided, preferring solitude. How kind he was, and how his voice affected him! It was like long-forgotten melody. He asked himself whether he had seen the earl anywhere. He could not remember. He could not recall to his mind that they had ever met, yet he had most certainly heard his voice. He fell asleep thinking of this, and dreamed of Madaline ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... spray, stopping his whistling now and then to sing,—foolish songs without words or rhyme or rhythm, the songs of a heart too much engrossed with the joy of living to take cognizance of mere rules of melody! ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... banks of the Thames. But though the country seems to be the seat of contemplation, two great writers have been in opposite opinions. Cicero says, woods and groves, and rivers winding through the meadows, and the refreshing breeze, with the melody of birds, may have their attraction; but they rather relax the mind into indolence, than rouse our attention, or give vigour to our faculties. Sylvarum amaenitas, et praeterlabentia flumina, et inspirantes ramis arborum aurae, volucrumque cantus, et ipsa late circumspiciendi libertas ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... and buffaloes were to be seen, the latter sporting with their young ones on the plains, the former preferring to browse on the slopes and uplands; and innumerable birds of all shapes and sizes enlivened the scene with their varied gyrations, and filled the air with melody. ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... the placid melancholy of which was still heightened by its calm and sweet melody, ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... on she played; one ranchman after another softly suggesting some desired melody, and her eager little fingers rendering it upon the instant. The men ceased sprawling and sat up. If they had found the Gray Lady's voice a marvel, here was a greater. That any child—a despised "female" child—could evoke such music seemed past belief; ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... bewitched by supple allurement of her motion, by the black flame of her gaze, by the savage melody of her chant—wonders more and more who she may be, while she waits for him with her ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... watching the stars or the trees lit up now and then by the flickering flames of the wood fire; till all at once, unasked, as if moved by the rippling stream hard by, Ida began to sing in a low voice the beautiful old melody of "Flow on, thou Shining River," and Hester took up the second part of the duet till about half through, the music sounding wonderfully sweet and solemn out in those primeval groves, when suddenly Hester ceased singing, and sat with lips apart ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... a man dealt with more generously by posthumous fame. In the Civil War, two lines of verse, fitted to a stirring melody, became the marching song ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... hungry, and ignorant, but free forever from anything but the memorial scars of the fetters and the whip, singing rude songs in which the new triumph of freedom struggled and heaved below the sad melody that had been shaped for bondage; as in their camps and hovels there grew up to their half-superstitious eyes the image of a great Father almost more than man, to whom they owed their freedom,—were they not half right? For ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... singularly responsive to musical thoughts and effects; indeed, she found a peculiar pleasure and incentive in glancing at his face from time to time, for she saw reflected there the varied characteristics of the melody. But once, as she looked up to see how he liked an old English ballad, she caught that which instantly brought the ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... "manifestations" were really only different in detail from the first. The guitar was placed on the lap, the curtain fell and it played; so did the fiddle—out of tune, as usual—and also a little glass harmonicon with actually a soupcon of melody. A mouth-organ tootle-tooed, and what Colonel Fay described as a "shingle nail" was driven with a hammer into a piece of wood. A third of a tumbler of water laid on the lap of the Indescribable Phenomenon was drunk, and the great ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... all night, and sometimes gets shot for them, and always deserves it—so there were no cadences and fiorituri, the trite, turgid, and feeble expletives of song, the skim-milk with which mindless musicians and mindless writers quench fire, wash out colour, and drown melody ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... smile of encouragement for Maddy, who was pale with nervous timidity, he listened while her sweet, birdlike voice trembled for a moment with fear; and then, gaining from its own sound, filled the room with melody, and made those who had wandered off to other parts of the building hasten back ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... played lightly a delicate movement, and then broke into an Irish air, "The Harp that once through Tara's Halls." From one Irish melody to another her light fingers wandered. She played with perfect correctness—with fire, with spirit. Soon she forgot herself. When she stopped, tears were running down ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... immobile, listening for a while and then began to play so plaintive and wistful a melody that Harry felt the old sorrow wake and stir within his heart and demand a reckoning of the forgetful years. Not realizing that he did so, he arose and began to pace up and down the room, nor remembered where he was until he looked up to see Pearl watching him, surprise ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... insisted, her fingers breaking suddenly into a livelier melody. "Tell it me at once? You were there all the time. I could see you watching. Tell ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... deeply. I asked my sisters about Beethoven, and learned that the news of his death had just arrived. Obsessed as I still was by the terrible grief caused by Weber's death, this fresh loss, due to the decease of this great master of melody, who had only just entered my life, filled me with strange anguish, a feeling nearly akin to my childish dread of the ghostly fifths on the violin. It was now Beethoven's music that I longed to know more thoroughly; I came to Leipzig, and found his music ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... will repay the reader to peruse, even if the version has not much charm, the long extract from Gottfried's Tristan, with an eye to the noble and knightly way in which the legend is conceived and taken up. Mr. Kroeger, who can give it no grace in translation, is a warm partisan in matters of melody and rhythm, appreciating Coleridge and Swinburne. Altogether, he is a sincere and useful interpreter between our public—rather careless of musty poetry—and the fine old ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... that year, and there can be little doubt that Borrow intended The Gold Horns for that volume, and rejected it at last. He was conscious, perhaps, that his hand had lacked the skill needful to reproduce a lyric the melody of which would have taxed the powers of Coleridge or of Shelley. Nevertheless, his ...
— The Gold Horns • Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
... versifyings to the naming of places. Which has the right of it, let us not undertake to pronounce without consideration. England herself has long ago determined the question. As Mr. Emerson says of English names,—"They are an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over the land; older than all epics and histories which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits close to the body." Dean Trench, who handles words as a numismatist his coins, has said substantially the same thing. And it is true not of England only; for the various lands of Europe are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... still. His heroine is not the tragic figure that stands out in lines of fire from the pages of Apollonius. His lovers' speeches have a certain beauty and tenderness of their own, but they lack the haunting melody and the resistless passion that make the Rhodian's lines immortal. And while to a great extent he lacks the peculiar merits of the Greek,[491] he possesses his most serious blemish, the blemish that ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... out of mere street-buffoonery into an ideal fairyland of the grotesque, how much more stateliness must verse and music have added to their tragedy! And how much have we lost, toward a true appreciation of their dramatic art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of their melody and harmony, but even the true metric time of their odes!—music and metre, which must have surely been as noble as their poetry, their sculpture, their architecture, possessed by the same exquisite sense of form and of proportion. One thing we can understand—how this ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... forwards to his slow melody, and gave themselves up to the enjoyment of it, and coppers, and even silver, poured into the handsome singer's hat, and more than one of them would have liked to have followed the penny which she threw to him, and to have ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... not philosophic enough to resolve such difficult questions," she answered, smiling; "but, yonder are the musicians, waiting to sooth us with the melody of sweet sounds; we are all prepared for a dance, and here is my hand, if you will look a little more in the dancing mood,—if not, I ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... Queen was delivered of a male child, so beautiful that it filled all beholders with delight. His eyes were as sunshine, his forehead like the glow of the full moon, his lips like clustered roses, and his cry like the melody of many instruments; and the Queen loved him, and comforted ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... aloes and of pastils, that came from the house, mixing with the scent of the rose water, completely perfumed and embalmed the air. Besides, he heard from within a concert of instrumental music, accompanied with the harmonious notes of nightingales and other birds. This charming melody, and the smell of several sorts of savory dishes, made the porter conclude there was a feast, with great rejoicings within. His business seldom leading him that way, he knew not to whom the mansion belonged; but he went ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... whole island resounded with the strains of hundreds of Aeolian harps. And suddenly there began a wild unceasing symphony. It swelled in the surrounding woods, filling the air with an indescribable melody. Sad and solemn were its prolonged strains; they resounded like the arpeggios of some funeral march, then, changing into a trembling thrill, they shook the air like the song of a nightingale, and died away in a long sigh. They did not quite cease, but grew louder again, ringing ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... their ears, and after satisfying his own thirst, with that of his weary animals, Major Denham laid himself down by one of the distant wells, far from his companions, and these moments of tranquillity, the freshness of the air, with the melody of the hundred songsters that were perched amongst the creeping plants, whose flowers threw an aromatic odour all around, were a relief scarcely to be described. Ere long, however, the noisy kafila, and ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... under the influence of the drug, and makes one think of "The Ecstasies of Mr. Hochenez." Zizi is passionately fond of music, and, not satisfied with listening to it, he indulges in it himself. Sometimes, in the dead of night, when everybody is asleep, a strange, fantastic melody, which the Kreislers and the musicians of the future might well envy, breaks in upon the silence. It is Zizi walking upon the key-board of the piano which has been left open, and who is at once astonished and delighted at hearing the keys ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... so delightful to listen to the notes of the bells, so familiar to him, whose pure tones had accompanied with their charming melody all his wanderings in childhood and youth. At the same time, the mood in which the best musical ideas came to him suddenly overpowered him. A new air, well worth remembering, pressed itself on him unbidden, and his excited imagination showed him in its train himself, and by his side, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... spill his sugar. He also declined. After the custom that had prevailed in the tavern cellar, the tin cup went round and round, the result was the same or nearly so as at the tavern. Some sang, others danced, one or two slept, some wanted to fight. Alfred attempted to pour melody on the troubled revellers but the only effect of his song was to encourage Ben Paul to knock the bottom out of a new tin pail endeavoring to keep time to the song as he had seen Alfred ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... ouzel (Merula boulboul) is perhaps the finest songster in the Himalayas. Throughout the early summer the cock makes the wooded hillsides ring with his blackbird-like melody. The grey-winged ouzel is a near relative of the English blackbird. Take a cock blackbird and paint his wings dark grey, and cover his bill with red colouring matter, and you will have to all appearances a grey-winged ouzel. In order to effect the transformation of the brown female, it is ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... as titmice, chipmunks, pipits and squinches, are constantly seen in coveys or even bevies just now. A party of pipwinks visited my copse yesterday afternoon, and indulged in delicious morceaux of melody before the red sun ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... his Confinement more tolerable, she would carry him in the Dusk of the Evening, or by the favour of Moon-light, to unfrequented Groves, and Solitudes, and show him where to lye down in Safety, and sleep amidst the Falls of Waters, and Melody of Nightingales. Her Part was to watch and hold him in her Arms, for fear of her Country-men, and wake on Occasions to consult his Safety. In this manner did the Lovers pass away their Time, till they had learn'd a Language ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... admitting no comparison with one another. We have here no series of moments, but prolonged and interpenetrating phases; their sequence is not a substitution of one point for another, but rather resembles a musical resolution of harmony into harmony. And of this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every moment contains a resonance or an echo of past moments. "What are we really, what is our character, except the condensation of the history which we have lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring with us our prenatal dispositions? Without ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... when he departed from the Alhambra she betook herself to her mirador, overlooking the Vega, whence she watched the army as it went in shining order along the road leading to Loxa, and every burst of warlike melody that came swelling on the breeze was answered by a gush ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... kind, all free; pretty women also, and pleasures of endless variety exceeding the dreams of Mohammed as far as the brightness of the meridian sun exceeds the dim twinkle of the glowworm! Program for the voyage: embarkation amid the melody of the best band in the world; that music that so attracted you this morning not to be mentioned in comparison. Appropriate entertainments for each week day, to be announced daily. Each Sunday to be celebrated, first, with ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... to the sum of earthly Bliss, Which I enjoy; and must confess to find In all things else Delight indeed, but such As us'd or not, works in the Mind no Change Nor vehement Desire; these Delicacies I mean of Taste, Sight, Smell, Herbs, Fruits, and Flowers, Walks, and the Melody of Birds: but here Far otherwise, transported I behold, Transported touch; here Passion first I felt, Commotion strange! in all Enjoyments else Superiour and unmov'd, here only weak Against the Charms of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the fence,—at his age! Oh, if I could eliminate the irregular verb 'to chuck' from the vocabulary of this school, I could 'make out of the broken sounds of life a song, and out of life itself a melody,'" and she flew down-stairs like a breeze, to find the patient Mr. Bowker. Mr. Bowker was a nice little man, who had not all his wits about him, but whose heart was quite intact, and who swept with energy and washed windows with assiduity. He belonged to the Salvation Army, and the most ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... little while ago of Stephen Collins Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and could have had, no unkindly thought or purpose. The story of the musical scrapbook rested not with me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S. Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of Old Folks at Home may be found in Schubert's posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradiction for there it is, and this would seem to be in some sort corroborative evidence of the truth of ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... fill the new settlement with harmony. In that terrible snow-storm which occurred in the middle of April, I often saw a sparrow alight on a bough of a tree near the house, and send up to heaven such a strain of full, gushing melody, as melted my heart with pity and admiration. It reminded me of a child of God in the midst of trials and afflictions, yet rejoicing in faith, and trusting continually in the care of a Father in heaven. Was the cold little sparrow singing ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... Old Dominion, its historical romance and social and scenic features, familiar and endeared; so that the annals and the aspects of no State in the Union are better known—even to the local peculiarities of life and language—to the general reader, than those of Virginia, from negro melody to picturesque landscape, from old manorial estates to field sports, and from improvident households to heroic beauties; and among the freshest touches to the historical and social picture are those bestowed by Irving in some of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... recompense which awaited it in the regions of everlasting glory, His Auditors felt their scattered spirits insensibly return. They threw themselves with confidence upon the mercy of their Judge; They hung with delight upon the consoling words of the Preacher; and while his full voice swelled into melody, They were transported to those happy regions which He painted to their imaginations in colours ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... Life and Fate—all are remarkably rhythmic, metric, regular throughout. In all crafts and arts, in all machines, in organic bodies, in our daily occupations everywhere there is rhythm, meter, accent, melody. All that we do with a certain skill unnoticed, we do rhythmically. There is rhythm everywhere; it insinuates itself everywhere. All mechanism is metric, rhythmic. There must be more in it than this. Is it ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... more charming than the sounding of the reveille in Paris. It is dawn. One hears first, nearby, a roll of drums, followed by the blast of a bugle, exquisite melody, winged and warlike. Then all is still. In twenty seconds the drums roll again, then the bugle rings out, but further off. Then silence once more. An instant later, further off still, the same song of bugle ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... pitch, melody, harmony, and rhythm is necessary to the singer, but the orator may, by cultivation, develop a speaking voice of musical quality without being able to distinguish Old Hundred from ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... 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 him up on my back, and swam to shore ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... their own music, and wild, strange melody it is. It seems to inspire one with a wish to dance. The Puerto Ricans are very fond of this amusement, and when they hear the music of the band, they ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... combines means of enjoyment, and discovers unsuspected sources of interest and pleasure. The sense of harmony, modern as it seems to be, must have been a latent and indirect consequence of the development of the sense of hearing and of melody. Use, at least, could never have called it into existence. Nature favours and develops enjoyments to a certain extent, for they subserve self-preservation and sexual and social preference in innumerable ways. ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... was a strange, wild howl that he gave forth; but such as, he declared, was an exact imitation of the savage Albanian mode, laughing, the while, at our disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... is not to be mistaken, the high-figured phrases, loosely welded together, lulling the imagination into acquiescence by the flow of the melody. Lines like these might well occur in Richard II. The same Shakespearian note is clearly audible in such a passage as this, where ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... interest us, in despite of the languor of a continued allegory; Drayton, who, though less known, possesses perhaps equal powers of poetry; Beaumont the elder, whose poem on Bosworth Field carries us back to the days of the Plantagenets; Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, the melody of whose numbers became the model of Waller; besides many others, who ornamented this era of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... soul was full of harsh, unforgiving thoughts. And Margaret Greylston, as she lay with a throbbing head and an aching heart upon her snowy pillow, thought the hours of that bright afternoon and evening very long and very weary. And yet those hours were full of light, and melody, and fragrance, for the sun shone, and the sky was blue, the birds sang, and the waters rippled; even the autumn flowers were giving their sweet, last kisses to the air. Earth was fair,—why, then, ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... somewhere among the hills for days to come, gave her God-speed. But we four fell momentarily silent, as if we meant things which we might not speak. It was almost a relief to hear tapping on the sidewalk the wooden leg of Peleg Bemus, while a familiar, thin little stream of melody from his flute made its ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... was marched out of the area; and, as the clanking sound of his chains became gradually fainter in the distance, the same voice that had before interrupted the proceedings, pronounced a "God be praised!—God be praised!" with such melody of sorrow in its intonations that no one could listen to it unmoved. Both officers and men were more or less affected, and all hoped—they scarcely knew why or what—but all hoped something favourable would ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... breeze of melody The blackbird puffs upon the budding tree, While the wild poppy lights upon the lea And blazes ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... illuminate the external! Ye shall enjoy spiritual and passional freedom; your guides shall no longer be the despotism of ignorant laws, nor the whip of an imaginary conscience,—but the natural impulses of your nature, which are the melody of Life, and the natural affinities, which are its harmony! The reflections from the upper spheres shall irradiate the lower, and Death is the triumphal arch through which we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... at Thankful Rest. The garden was gay with tender leaves and blossoms, and the orchard white with bloom. There the birds made sweet melody as of yore; and, as of yore, the sunny river brawled and whispered and played as it hurried through the ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... for the soldier-like qualities which he possessed, to accompany his son on this his first expedition. So out of the barrack-yard, with something of an air, marched my dear brother, his single drum and fife playing the inspiring old melody, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... boys. Let some leader start up a song in a natural way, and soon you will have a chorus of unexpected melody and harmony. As the fire dies down, let the songs be of a more quiet type, like "My Old Kentucky Home," and ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
