"Lilt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I may no more, The world's heart throb at my workshop door. The sun was keen, and the day was still; The township drowsed in, a haze of heat. A stir far off on the sleepy hill, The measured beat of their buoyant feet, And the lilt and thrum Of a little drum, The song they sang in a cadence low, The piping note of ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... the lyric means singing without an object; as every one does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay, it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself. Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery and quite one-sided satisfaction ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... And at the same moment a singing voice became audible in the trees behind them. The song came floating to them through the sunlight with a sound of wind and birds. It had a marvellous quality, very sweet and very moving. There was a lilt in it, a laughing, happy lilt, as though the Earth herself were ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... could reproduce Dougal's accent, and I will not attempt it. There was a touch of Irish in it, a spice of music-hall patter, as well as the odd lilt of the Glasgow vernacular. He was strong in vowels, but the consonants, especially the letter "t," were ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... rattle, The calling of birds, The lowing of cattle Must blend with the words. Without these, indeed, you Would find it ere long, As though I should read you The words of a song That lamely would linger When lacking the rune, The voice of the singer, The lilt of the tune. ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... hymn, chant, lay, ditty, ballad, onody, chansonnette, lyric, lilt, lied, paean, cantata, aria, sonnet, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... what's brewing To the lilt of his lyric wiles: The fiddler knows what rueing Will come ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... common. Each must so express and clothe his thought that it shall penetrate and take possession of the soul, and, having penetrated, must abide and stay. How this is done, who can tell? Carlyle defines poetry as a "sort of lilt." Cicero finds the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... instead of a rival organization from Wells, which the Colonel often imported upon private and public occasions. Jerry Dugan was getting old, too, like the Judge and the Honourable Joe. He had not lost the peculiar wail and lilt from his fiddling, but he had made few recent additions to his repertoire. Just now the band concert in front of Odd Fellows' Hall was winding up with his old favourite: ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... and Devar began to sing. He owned a light tenor, clear and melodious, and the air had a curiously barbaric lilt which, musically considered, was reminiscent of the gypsies' chorus in "The Bohemian Girl." But the words were couched in a strange tongue, sonorous and full voweled, and the Hungarians in the room became greatly stirred when it dawned on them that a semi-intoxicated American stoker ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... devotions under the guidance of the Mother Superior. Madame was not very busy with her eyes, and the jeweled miniature which she held in her hand seemed no longer to attract her. The odor of rose and heliotrope pervaded the gently stirring air. From the convent garden came the melting lilt of the golden oriole. By and by madame's gaze returned to the miniature. For a brief space poppies burned in her cheeks and the seed smoldered in her eyes. Then, as if the circlet of gold and gems was distasteful ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... shaking herself, gravely composing her face, and clearing her throat, she began, in a high, shrill, piercing voice, rocking her head to the peculiar lilt of the words, and interpolating short explanatory remarks, ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... Starkweather, "I'm sure all my boys know it. I've sung them all to sleep by it; and 'Tis one I sing about my work, for 'Tis a cheerful and a merry lilt." ...
— A Little Maid of Province Town • Alice Turner Curtis
... could be so beaten down and crushed by suffering, should have risen to such an ecstasy. Her letters had a swinging lilt, a hurried beat, like a song bursting, a heart ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... the lilt of them and the keen beauty of the night, the inherited pain of the ages rose from the depths of the young girl's heart, so that she thought it must break; for what reason she could not have told, since she was without care or sorrow that she knew, except the French ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Sam's lilt ceased abruptly. The riders came hurrying. Sam appeared, with Mormon waddling after, too swiftly for his best ease or grace of motion, both grabbing at Sandy, swatting him on ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... sang, her songs being of her own land, one of the highlands, with the perfume of the gorse and the heather in the lilt of it, and the second, by demand of Sandy, the gipsy song which had been handed down from woodland mother to woodland child for hundreds of years; a song which sent Nancy's lawless blood to her cheeks and set her heart ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... forward in the brilliance, but he did not smoke; he paced restlessly about and at last crept into his bunk and lay with his face to the wall. Larry sat long before the fire. "It's the music that's got in my blood," he said. "Katherine could sing and lilt the Scotch airs like a bird. She had a touch for the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like If this were Faith and The Woodman, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... you might just as well look over them at once," said Lancelot firmly, uncoiling them. "It won't take you five minutes—just let me play one to you. The tunes are rather more original than the average, I can promise you; and yet I think they have a lilt that——" ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... catch of its lilt, would suddenly make me start up, wide awake, with every nerve in my body dancing to ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... As the folk came flocking from every side; For they knew their Gipsy Joe of old, His free wild words and his laughter bold: So high and low all gathered together By the village well in the autumn weather, Lured by the gipsy's bargain-chatter And the reckless lilt of his hare-brained patter. And there the Revd. Salvyn Bent, The parish church's ornament, Stood, as it chanced, in discontent, And eyed with a look that was almost sinister The Revd. Joshua Fall, the minister. And the Squire, ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... from her eyes, drew the tent flaps together modestly under her chin, and looked out upon a world which swam in the enchanted light of a dawn primeval. The eastern sky was faintly pink with the promise of a coming sun. The sweet, penetrating lilt of the lark flung ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... body, too sound of health, not to revel in such a dawn as swept across the flats next morning. The sun caressed her throat, her bare head, the uplifted face. As the tender light of daybreak was in the hills, so there was a lilt in her heart that found expression in her voice, her buoyant footsteps, and the shine of her eyes. She had slept soundly in Beaudry's blankets while he had lain down in his slicker on the other side of the fire. Already she was quite herself again. The hours of agony in the ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... once more, bounding about with rigid necks, playing the while in perfect time and tune. It chanced that out of one of the bundles there stuck the end of what the clerk saw to be a cittern, so drawing it forth, he tuned it up and twanged a harmony to the merry lilt which the dancers played. On that they dropped their own instruments, and putting their hands to the ground they hopped about faster and faster, ever shouting to him to play more briskly, until at last for very weariness all ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... she said, with a whimsical lilt in her voice. "I was thinkin' how elegant it is when ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... that direction. It was bright, but cold, and the surf, I remember, was booming loudly, though there had been no wind in our parts for days. I zigzagged up the steep pathway, breathing in the thin, keen morning air, and humming a lilt as I went, until I came out, a little short of breath, among the whins upon the top. Looking down the long slope of the farther side, I saw Cousin Edie, as I had expected; and I saw Jim Horscroft walking ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... eye, let the wanderer go by. Woman-love and wistful heart, let the gipsy one depart. For the farness and the road are his glory and his goad. Oh, the lilt of youth and Spring! Eyes laugh and lips sing. Yea, but it is good to ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... one of the guests was improvising an accompaniment on the colonel's new piano, had struck up "Camptown Races," and the rollicking lilt of the chorus was ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... come near to breaking his promise. One evening, when March was melting into April, and the pulses of spring were stirring under the lingering snow, he was walking home from school alone. As he descended into the little hollow below the manse a lively lilt of music drifted up to meet him. It was only the product of a mouth-organ, manipulated by a little black-eyed, French-Canadian hired boy, sitting on the fence by the brook; but there was music in the ragged urchin and it came out through ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a hot day, and wheat fields all about us were ripening to their harvestry. The wind gossiped with the grasses along our way, and over them the buttercups danced, goldenly-glad. Waves of sinuous shadow went over the ripe hayfields, and plundering bees sang a freebooting lilt ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... brain—with the hate of an Italian who sees another taking the bread out of his mouth. All this, coupled with the fact that your Italian is a natural-born hater, may indicate that the life of Mary Gowd had not the lyric lilt that life is commonly reputed to ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... substitution of the two-syllable foot for the three-syllable foot. The following, from "The Burial of Sir John Moore," illustrates what is done. Notice, however, that the beat is quite regular, and the lines lilt along as if ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... my fingers split the sand On the sun-flooded beach? Hath not my naked body felt the water sing When the sea hath enveloped it With rippling music? Have I not felt The lilt of waves beneath my boat, The flap of sail, The strain of mast, The wild rush Of the lightning-charged winds? Have I not smelt the swift, keen flight Of winged odours before the tempest? Here is joy awake, aglow; Here is the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... certainly did, before the day was over. The outlaws came in, as fine a looking lot and as handsome as one would wish to see, and joined the village dance. It was an old English dance, called a "Morris Dance," with a lilt and a tilt which set ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... not have written 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in the same tune and key as 'Treasure Island'; and the music of 'Marxheim' differs from both. The reason is organic: the writer is inspired by his theme, and it passes through his mind with a lilt and measure of its own. It makes its own style, just as a human spirit makes its own features and gait; and we know Stevenson through all his transformations only by dint of the exquisite distinction and felicity of word and phrase that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... youth in black, standing with white face and quivering lip in a corner of the mean chamber. Then he laughed again, and in a hoarse voice, sorely suggestive of the bottle, he broke into song. He lay back in his chair, his long, spare legs outstretched, his spurs jingling to the lilt of his ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... from her mother, and found the distinguished composer, as was often the case at that time of day, sitting dreamily at her piano, trying over on the gamut strange, fanciful chords of her own peculiar witch-like character. The music waxed and waned in a familiar lilt. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... in its grandest prime, The earth is green and the skies are blue; But where is the lilt of the olden time, When life was a melody set to rhyme, And dreams were so ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of talk, in which the clock tinker indulged so freely, afforded his young friend no little amusement. His tongue had long obeyed the lilt of classic diction; his thought came easy in Elizabethan phrase. The slight Celtic brogue served to enhance the piquancy of his talk. Moreover he was really a man of ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... the trail to Yeager's Spur—one a man, brown and forceful; the other a girl, with sunshine in her dancing eyes and a voice full of the lilt of laughter. What they might come to be to each other both were already speculating about, though neither knew as yet. They were the best of friends—good comrades, save when chance eyes said unguardedly too much. For the girl ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... music. Dropping him a little demure, mocking curtsy she turned and ran down the box-edged path, singing as she went, and the air she sang was Stephen La Mothe's "Heigh-ho! love is my life; Live I in loving and love I to live!" and the lilt of the music set ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... muse, an' lilt me a spring, Tho'daghtless awhile tha's been on the wing; But yet tha mun try to cum up ta t'mark, An' give us sum rhyme for a bit of a lark: An' tho' at thy notes in this sensation age, Wiseacres may giggle an' critics may rage, Thou art my ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... in the maple-tree shade, The lilt of a song to an old-fashioned tune, The talk of a friend, or the kiss of a maid, To sweeten the cup that we drink to the noon. Oh, the deep noon, the full noon, Of all the day the best! When the blue sky burns, and the great sun turns To ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... operator was swift of the swiftest; he despatched with a lightning lilt, and the keenness of his ears, for which he was famous on more than one ocean, made it possible for him to receive signals with rarely the necessity ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... Meadows rose the clear lilt of Carol the Meadow Lark, and among the alders just where the Laughing Brook ran into the Smiling Pool a flood of happiness was pouring from the throat of Little Friend the Song Sparrow. Winsome Bluebird's sweet, almost plaintive, whistle seemed to fairly float ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... emanated from this young girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... go to Lueneburg!" repeated the boy, with a mocking lilt in his voice. "And Lueneburg is twenty miles from Hamburg. Hadst thought ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... harmony throughout, many pretty rustic scenes, and sufficient interest to carry the reader pleasantly over the ground. The Gentle Shepherd is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay's power than his songs alone would warrant. His lyrical pieces, though not wholly without the lilt and charm such verse exacts, are perhaps mainly of service in showing the immeasurable superiority of Burns. Ramsay was a successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man of business. He exchanged wig-making ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines To Get the Final Lilt of Songs indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See My Prologue.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See The Mage.] were not dismayed ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... wistful green. A dream Of Summer warmth the wine-sweet breezes hold, Fair wildings blow—bright buttercups agleam Like shining sequins scattered on the wold, And daffodills—a wealth of faery gold. The building birds their coming bliss presage With lilt and lyric brimming o'er the page Of Nature's volume bound in green and gold. Here 'mid the birds and blossoms 'neath the blue— My heart unburthened of the old regret— Let me forget long striving to forget; For life is sweet to-day and hope seems ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... right spirit, but a sense of form beyond the common. She does not pretend to heroics and she seldom allows herself to touch a note of pathos; her mission is just to inspire other hearts with the infectious gay courage of her own. It finds a natural expression in the easy lilt of her measures. She is fluent rather than polished and never overlays her designs with excess of embroidery. Long practice has made her familiar with a craft which is not so easy as it looks; and in particular she has learnt the art of the final line. Miss POPE may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... miles per hour and that if all the energy of Niagara Falls were utilized it could supply the world with seven million horse-power. I do wish Gershom would get over trying to pat the world on the head, instead of shaking hands with it! I'm afraid I'm losing my lilt. I can't understand why I should keep feeling as blue as indigo. I am a well of acid and a little sister to the crab-apple. I think I'll make Susie come down so we can humanize ourselves with a little music. For I feel like a Marie ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... unrolled—the brave white road. Heaven alone could tell the deeds of valour which had achieved the impossible, making and remaking that road! It should have some great poem all to itself, I thought; a poem called "The Road to Verdun." And the poem should be set to music. I could almost hear the lilt of the verses as our car slipped through the tangle of motor camions and gun-carriages on the way thither. As for the music, I could really hear that without flight of fancy: a deep, rolling undertone ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... greatest weapon in life He felt things, he did not study them If women hadn't memory, she answered, they wouldn't have much Lilt of existence lulling to sleep wisdom and tried experience Lonely we come into the world, and lonely we go out of it Never to be content with superficial ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... dark, and the girls could not make out what she looked like, but they could see that she was small and graceful and her voice—well, her voice had a gay lilt that made one want to laugh even though all she said was "what a pleasant day it is." No wonder, with that father and mother, Connie ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... Library in Edinburgh, making himself an able antiquary at a time when most youth are idling or philandering. Moreover, he was himself the son of a border chief and knew minstrelsy almost at his nurse's knee: and the lilt of a ballad was always like wine to his heart. It makes you think of Sir Philip Sidney's splendid testimony to such an influence: "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... not you struck by the gloom and horror of those long-held notes, to which the words are set: 'Dans la foret prochaine'? We find here all the sinister spells of Jerusalem Delivered, just as we find all chivalry in the chorus with the Spanish lilt, and in the march tune. How original is the alegro with the modulations of the four cymbals (tuned to C, D, C, G)! How elegant is the call to the lists! The whole movement of the heroic life of the period is there: the mind ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... her down with sound of viol; Wheeling angels, past espial, Descanting on "Viola." ANGELS. Sing, in our footing, a Lovely lilt of "Viola!" ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... my flushed hours I dream (High thought) instead of armour gleam Or warrior cantos ream by ream To load the shelves - Songs with a lilt of words, ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by, and as they passed, the hum of voices and laughter and the cheery lilt of island melody died away, and the paddlers looked shoreward to the motionless figure of Prout, who, with the child by his side, seemed to heed naught but the wide sweep of ocean ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... saw, instead Of your brows direct and wise, Of the little lilt of your head And your dark-lashed, sky-clear eyes, Of the soft brown braids demure, The poise as of quiet light, The perfect profile, sweet and pure,— Never ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... I wonder how it would sound to me now—the rollicking lilt of Barney Leave the Girls Alone—even if a sweet maid flung its banter at me with flashing fingers ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... roams the Valley of the Rocks to see the studious pilgrims at his pages. Stevenson haunts the gloomy inlet where the Admiral Benbow stood and where old Pew came tapping in the night. In the flesh I shall join their revels as an equal comrade. Clovelly, however, although its lilt was pleasant to the ear, ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... for all external ills that flesh is heir to. It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering. It could not fail. He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt. It was his own discovery. An obscure chemist's assistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, hit on ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... with a loose pulley on the large end of the receiving cone as to remain stationary while the wind is on or near the base of the bobbin. When the cone of the bobbin diminishes so as to materially increase the pull on the traveler, the conical drums are started by a belt shipper attached to the lilt motion. By the movement of the belt on these drums a continually accelerated motion is given to the rings, their maximum speed being about one-twentieth the number of revolutions per minute as the spindle ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... instrument We favour, still the lilt will stop; And with a gorgeous chalice blent Oft lurks the tiny poisoned drop. I'm not so spry myself to-night; I'll try a dose of arrowroot. You'll own that Indigestion's quite A Rift ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... no sign of wanting to but Jerry did not wait for encouragement. With a lilt of enjoyment in his voice he said a rhyme he had learned sometime—he could not ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... crouse, and maybe they'll get a fricht the noo." When the Vale scored their goal a wag, primed with a fair-sized pocket pistol, no doubt containing the best—well, every public-house salesman will tell you at anyrate, it is the "best," and charge for it, too, as "special"—began to lilt a verse of the popular pantomime song, "Their funeral's to-morrow," hinting heavily about the decline and fall of the Queen's Park. Many saw the point, and laughed; while others gave the jolly fellow a ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... dance sobered down to regular rhythm and form. From Corinth, where Arion first laboured, we pass to Sicyon, where the taming of the dithyramb into an art form was accomplished by Praxilla, a poetess who added a new charm to the lilt of this Bacchic ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... he said to Mihul. He made vague curving motions in the air with one hand, more or less opposing ones with the other. "That sort of an up-and-sideways lilt when ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... Nae linties lilt on hedge or bush: Poor things! they suffer sairly; In cauldrife quarters a' the nicht, A' day they feed but sparely. Now, up in the mornin's no for me, Up in the mornin' early; A pennyless purse I wad rather dree, Than rise ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... any Negro poet writing in the dialect to-day, summons to his work the lilt, the spontaneity and charm of which Dunbar was the supreme master whenever he employed that medium. It is well to say a word here about the dialect poems of James Edwin Campbell. In dialect, Campbell was a precursor of Dunbar. A comparison of his idioms ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... its way through sound of bees and river. The notes fell, round and starred, between young leaves, Trilled to a spiral lilt, stopped on a quiver. The Lady Eunice listens and believes. Gervase has many tales of her dear Lord, His bravery, his knowledge, his charmed life. She quite forgets who's speaking in the gladness Of being this man's wife. Gervase is ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... mother always sang him this song when he had been a good boy; I replied that mine had done the same. How many French mothers have sung the merry little lilt, I wonder? We sang one snatch and another, and I could not see that the marquise had had the advantage of the little peasant girl, if it came ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... with fire Cynthia heedlessly spoke these words. They had no deeper significance to her than the lilt of a world-old song. Marriage was the end-all and consummation of her magic stories and, in this case, it had simply been a trifle more difficult to consider on account of the social difference between Sandy and her. However, that had been ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... Bertha, which was beautiful and dignified, instead of that silly "Rilla"? She did not mind Walter's version, but nobody else was allowed to call her that, except Miss Oliver now and then. "Rilla-my-Rilla" in Walter's musical voice sounded very beautiful to her—like the lilt and ripple of some silvery brook. She would have died for Walter if it would have done him any good, so she told Miss Oliver. Rilla was as fond of italics as most girls of fifteen are—and the bitterest drop in her cup was her suspicion that he told Di ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was the lilt of a Gaelic song in these pages that brought a sorrow on me. That very sweet language will be gone soon, if not gone already, and no book learning will revive the suppleness of idiom, that haunting misty loveliness.... It is a very pathetic thing ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... a lilt, a go, a flourish. To employ a vulgarism of the hour, it had the punch. It landed you and between the eyes. It required neither commentaries nor explanation. It was all there. It was tangible as a brickbat, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... much greater the glory if I spoke up with a devil-may-care lilt in my voice, and shipped in the hottest packet afloat! Glory!—why, I would be the unquestioned cock of any foc'sle I afterward happened into. You know, in those days the ambitious young lads regularly shipped in the hot clippers; it was a postgraduate ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... had brought a paste tiara and crowned Margot—Margot, who was in flaming red to-night, and looked a devil's daughter indeed, with her fire-like sequins and her red ankles twinkling as she threw herself into the thick of the dance and kicked, and whirled, and flung her bare arms about to the lilt of the music and the fluting of her own ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... At the lilt in her voice Mollie, at her end of the wire, sat up and stared inquiringly into the black ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... their habitation, came the dynamite explosions blowing up the city in blocks. When the muffled roar was over, the gathering quiet was pierced by the thin, high notes of gramophones. From the shadow of trees Caruso's voice rose in the swaggering lilt of "La Donna e Mobile," to be answered by Melba's, crystal-sweet, from a machine stored in a crowded cart. There were ragtime melodies, and someone had a record of "Marching Through Georgia" that always drew forth applause. Then, as the night advanced, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... proved worth while. He was saluted from a hundred laughing heads at a score of windows with the song that had followed him all over Canada. He drove into the College, not to the stirring strains of "Oh, Canada," but to the syncopated lilt of "Johnny's in Town." ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... battle-field, and there must be a band of musicians, so you shall be the little harp of Jesus. But no concert is complete without singing, and if Jesus plays, must not Celine make melody with her voice? When the music is plaintive, she will sing the songs of exile; when the music is gay, she will lilt the airs of her ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... silently. Yet, the music was there. The pity was that one could not hear it. The pomp, the swagger, the swing of the Guards, the shifting movement, the bright array—all these were unmistakable. The very lilt of the air made itself felt. Very cheery. Certainly, the ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... me wes the wy the bairns were ta'en in wi' him. Man, a've seen him tak a wee laddie on his knee that his ain mither cudna quiet, an' lilt 'Sing a song o' saxpence' till the bit mannie wud be lauchin' like a gude ane, an' pooin' the ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... April Josephine Preston Peabody Song: On May Morning John Milton A May Burden Francis Thompson Corinna's Going a-Maying Robert Herrick "Sister, Awake" Unknown May Edward Hovell-Thurlow May Henry Sylvester Cornwell A Spring Lilt Unknown Summer Longings Denis Florence MacCarthy Midsummer John Townsend Trowbridge A Midsummer Song Richard Watson Gilder June, from "The Vision of Sir Launfal" James Russell Lowell June Harrison Smith Morris Harvest Ellen Mackay Hutchinson ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... a stir, there was a bustle in the court; a sparkle in the eyes of some as they glanced slyly and under their lashes at the house, a lilt in the tread of others as they stepped to and fro. He divined that hands would fly to caubeens and knees seek the ground if a certain face showed at a window: moreover, that that at which he merely guessed was no secret to the barefooted ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... makes special appeal. A bit of history about this same Andante shows how the composer prized national themes and folk tunes, and strove to secure them. It is said that morning after morning he was awakened by the singing of a laborer, working on the house below his window. The song had a haunting lilt, and Tschaikowsky wrote it down. The melody afterwards became that touching air which fills the Andante of the First String Quartet. Another String Quartet, in F major, was written in 1814, and at once acclaimed by all who heard it, with the single exception ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... The lilt of the joyous words had often been with him as he sped through the sleeping fields to his ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... the world! To the world! Let us carol its song, Let us conquer its grief and the wrath of its wrong, Till the lilt of its laughter shall sweeten the sod With the joys of the skies and ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... said Dud to Jim, as they made their way through the chatting, laughing throng, and caught the lilt of the music on the beach beyond, where bathers, reckless of the church bells' call, were disporting themselves in the sunlit waves. "It's tough, with a place like this so near, to be shut up on a desert island for a whole vacation. ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... works of Shakespeare. Katharine's ignorance of Shakespeare did not prevent her from feeling fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer's brain. Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively masculine; women neither practice them nor ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... ideas and vision. He liked the lilt and swing of the Lays and Ballads, and enjoyed the Essays with their superb colouring. Disputing Macaulay's dictum that neither painters nor poets are helped by the advances in civilisation, science and refinement, he wrote: "This argument disproved by the examples of men like Shakespeare ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... in a shadowy corner of the crowded room, and listened to the singing, wild and strong, and with no hint of coming battle in its full rolling lilt. He noted with satisfaction how the "Long, Long Trail," and "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag" gradually gave place to "Tell Mother I'll Be There," and "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder," growing strong and full and solemn in the grand old melody of "Abide With Me." There ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... residence was illumined from top to bottom, its windows great squares of gold against the night. The door stood open, but except for a servant or two there was no one in the wide hall. The guests were dancing in the ballroom at the back, and George caught the lilt of the music as he skirted the house, then the sound of voices, the light laughter of the women, the deeper voices of ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... was the face of him that most compelled attention for it revealed a multitude of emotions. His fancy ran far ahead of the tramping force thudding the dust on the highway. He was now the Army's child indeed, stepping round the world to a lilt of the bagpipes, with the currachd—the caul of safety—as surely his as it was Black Duncan the seaman's. There were battles in the open, and leaguering of towns, but his was the enchanted corps moving from country to country through victory, and always the ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... Shon had won the reputation of being a "white man," to say nothing of his victories in the region of gallantry. He made no wealth; he only got that he might spend. Irishman-like he would barter the chances of fortune for the lilt of a voice or the clatter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... one which was invaluable to lift their feet along, as they expressed it, was the following. There was a kind of spring and lilt to it, quite ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... them in his bottom low And lilt them up above his billows thin; The waters so east up a branch or bough, By violence first plunged and dived therein: But when upon the shore the waves them throw, The knights for their fair guide to look begin, And ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... her voice held the singing lilt of the Foanna. Somehow she had crossed some barrier to become a paler, perhaps a lesser, but still a copy of the three aliens. Was this what they had meant when they warned of a change which might come to those who followed them into the ritual of ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... bards ayont the Tweed, Your skins wi' claes o' tartan cleed, An' lilt alang the verdant mead, Or blithely on your whistles blaw, An' sing auld Scotia's barns an ha's, Her bourtree dykes an mossy wa's, Her faulds, her bughts, an' birken shaws, Whare love an' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... think it made the very heart of our Lord glad. What a surprise it was to those in that gloomy old prison. They had heard the walls ring with groans and shrieks. They had heard bitter oaths in the night, but songs with the lilt of an irrepressible joy in them—they had never heard ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... the grass, puris naturalibus, are basking in the sun, or regaling themselves on buns and cocoa. The whole place is vibrant with the intense zest the young feel in life, and with the whole-hearted powers of enjoyment of boyhood. A school-song set to a captivating waltz-lilt record the charms of Ducker. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... From drawing-room and library and dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she drew a ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... or not, it is certain that the gallery had. All the evening they had been stewing in an atmosphere like that of the inner room of a Turkish bath, and they were ready for anything. It needed but a trifle to set them off. The lilt of that unspeakable Yankee melody supplied that trifle. Kay's malcontents, huddled in their seats by the window, were the first to break out. Feet began to stamp in time to the music—softly at first, then more loudly. The wooden dais gave out ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... what a noise to call music! Faix, I'd pay something if Teddy Flaherty was here to give 'em one lilt o' the pipes. They'd know ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... continued the symphonies of her soft, deep, loving eyes and her smiling mouth. Every now and then she burst into song; and then her thrilling voice, so sweet and fresh, had tones in it that only birds and good women full of love may compass. Mostly the song was a lilt or a verse which spoke for her own heart and love; but just as the clock struck three, she broke into a low laugh which ended in a merry, mocking melody, and which was evidently the conclusion of her argument concerning ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... Saturday morning, radiated no doubt from the head of the concern himself. He flitted about restlessly, tugged at his whiskers continually, and his voice, as he rattled off his correspondence to Miss Brown, had a happy boyish lilt. Occasionally, chancing to catch Miss Summers' eye, he would nod with a ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... in a dogged silence, and Elspeth's cheery whistling was the only sound in that sullen morning. It fairly broke my heart. She was whistling the old tune of "Leezie Lindsay," a merry lilt with the hill wind and the heather in it. The bravery of the poor child was the hardest thing of all to bear when I knew that in a few hours' time the end might come. The others were only weary and dishevelled and ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... dreamy; there was a cadence in it now as if some soul within were forcing her to chant it all, with almost the lilt of ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... at Kootenay! I hate to think of it empty. We had such good times there twelve months ago. They have a song here to a nursery rhyme lilt, Apres le Guerre Finis; it goes on to tell of all the good times we'll have when the war is ended. Every night I invent a new story of my own celebration of the event, usually, as when I was a kiddie, just before ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the very breath, of the sea are kept ever present. The body of the music is made up of music growing out of the passage in the sailor-song (g); this goes through a hundred transformations, and is put to a hundred uses as the action progresses; and the swing and lilt of it never fail to conjure up a vision of smooth rollers and the sea-wind filling the sail and driving the ship fast towards Cornwall. It takes one shape when Brangaena tells Isolda that they will land before evening; and in nearly the same shape it returns when Brangaena ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the ceaseless wagons clattered; Listened we for an English voice ever, ever in vain; Far in the west, year out, year in, terrible thunders battered, Drumming the doom of whom—of whom? Hope in our hearts lay shattered.... Then we heard the lilt of Highland pipes and English ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... a-bound With the vigor of boyhood and morning, and the noontide's rapture of ease! Was there ever a weary heart in the world? A lag in the body's urge or a flag of the spirit's wings? Did a man's heart ever break For a lost hope's sake? For here there is lilt in the quiet and calm in the quiver of things. Ay, this old oak, gray-grown and knurled, Solemn and sturdy and big, Is as young of heart, as alert and elate in his rest, As the nuthatch there that clings to the tip of the twig And scolds at the wind that it ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... groups laughing and talking in voices pitched shrill with crates excitement. In the brown light of the wharf, full of rows of yellow and barrels and sacks, full of racket of cranes, among which winds in and out the trivial lilt of the Hawaiian tune, there is a flutter of gay dresses and coloured hats ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... nervous hands, and turning about in a little space like an animal in a cage, over the hedge through the apple-boughs a boy's clear voice rose suddenly, singing a rollicking tune, with a snapping of fingers and tapping of feet in time to its merry lilt. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... no marked melody from the instruments, but the boys' voices, humming lightly as they enter, gradually evolve a little dance song. There are no words but the lilt up and down of the boys' ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... Lilt thy song, and lute away In the wildest fashion:— Pour thy rippling roundelay O'er the heights of passion!— Flash it down the fretted strings Till thy mad lips, missing All but smothered whisperings, Press ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... Contrast it with the maudlin "Keep the home fires burning," which holds the field to-day, and it touches great art. I never hear it even now on the street organ without a certain pleasure—a pleasure mingled with pain, for its happy lilt comes weighted with the tremendous emotions of those unforgettable days. It is like a butterfly caught in a tornado, a catch of song ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner) |
