"Mellifluous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expressing the rare quality of her millionaire soul—in the great drawing-room, with its bow-windows looking on to a clump of old trees powdered with snow, Christophe would find Colette sitting at her piano, repeating the same passage over and over again, delighting her ear with mellifluous dissonance. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... say in the advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far. Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and mellifluous excuses on the part of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you ragamuffin!" exclaimed the mellifluous tones of footman Wilson. "You hadn't oughter ring the door-bell! The ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... prey to some misgivings. It was not difficult for me to imagine that the frank nature of Jerry's visits to Una might have given the girl a false notion of the state of Jerry's mind, for it was like the boy to have told her of Marcia's mellifluous contrition which, as I knew, was no more genuine than any other of her carefully planned emotional crises. I did not know what Marcia thought of Una's approaching visit or whether Jerry had even told her of it, but I had no fancy to see Una Habberton again ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... support any motion that may do honour to the Admiral; but I cannot join in an attack on the Secretary of State. For, to my knowledge, their Majesties have no more zealous, laborious or faithful servant than my Lord Nottingham." Finch exerted all his mellifluous eloquence in defence of his brother, and contrived, without directly opposing himself to the prevailing sentiment, to insinuate that Russell's conduct had not been faultless. The vote of censure on Nottingham was not pressed. The vote which pronounced ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thou loiter, by what murmuring hollows, Where oleanders scatter their ambrosial fire? Come, thou subtle bride of my mellifluous wooing, Come, ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... the Affairs in Germany, in which he describes the dispositions and interests of the German princes, like a man inquisitive and judicious, and recounts many particularities, which are lost in the mass of general history, in a style, which, to the ears of that age, was undoubtedly mellifluous, and which is now a very ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... hark! peace, peace, O, peace! O sweet, admirable, swanlike, heavenly! hark, O most mellifluous strain! O, what a pleasant close was ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... situation very annoying, and she therefore resolved to get one of her sudden attacks of headache. She retired, with signs of disgust on her pretty face, to another corner, and when Borgert joined her soon afterward, she requested him in mellifluous tones to ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... deep, mellifluous voice—while the rain beat upon the windows, crying out the sorrows of the poor—the curate unfolded the poignant story: the terms simple, the recital clear, vivid, complete.... And to the heart of this child the appeal was ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... when daintily falling, Sweet as its plaintive, mellifluous song, Voices of absent ones seem to be calling:— "Come to us! Come! ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... was divided from it by nothing but a strip of garden. It had a deep doorway, and without ceremony, I pushed open the little gate in front, and drew Miss Raven within its shelter. We had not stood there many seconds, our back to the door (which I never heard opened), when a soft mellifluous voice sounded close ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... me, darling?" he asked in that mellifluous voice of his which no woman had yet been found strong ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends &c. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and Tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Kostanzhoglo's mellifluous periods fell upon Chichikov's ear like the notes of a bird of paradise. From time to time he gulped, and his softened eyes expressed the pleasure which ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... mellifluous of languages—the "lovely lingo," we used to call it; everywhere we saw the people of the quarter lounging in doorways or windows or on galleries, dressed as if they were about to appear in a rendition of the opera of "The Barber of Seville," ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... done more sua [sic]; still his mannerism prevailed; still he tapped his snuff-box; still he smirked, and smiled, and rounded his periods with the same air of good-breeding, as if he were conversing with men. His mouth, mellifluous as Plato's, was a round hole, nearly in the centre of his ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... appearance, of the Board Room. It was almost as if the apartment itself was becoming historic, like those chambers they pointed out to the tourist wherein crowned heads had slept. The manner of the Marquis lent itself charmingly to this illusion. He spoke in a facile, mellifluous voice, and as fluently as if he had been at work for a long time preparing a dissertation on this subject, instead of taking it up now by chance. In his tone, in his gestures, in the sustained friendliness of his facial expressions, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... said, it must have heard some pealing and tolling of the St. Martin's Church bells—and what charmingly mellifluous and melodious bells they are! I do not profess to be a campanologist or a bell hunter, but I have a loving ear for a sweet-toned church bell, and can think of few belfries whose contents surpass St. Martin's, Birmingham. Although I have not heard the "Bells ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... bounded on to his feet, and protested that I was not entitled to put this question now, since I had not dared to allege in my letters or pleadings that I had breached my promise owing to any misconduct of plaintiff. But, instead of submitting to such objection, JESSIMINA answered in mellifluous accents that she had never manifested more than ordinary civility towards any gentleman-boarder, but that I had displayed passionate jealousy of them all prior to my engagement—though never since, because she had never afforded the ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had a little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not listening to him. At a considerable distance behind this couple strolled a young girl, apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender, and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect. He was combed and ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... dusty, and smell unpleasantly. (All these circumstances are expressed by pretty rapid fiddling for some minutes, winding up with a puff from the orpheclide played by an intoxicated Teuton with an atrocious breath—it is impossible to misunderstand the description.) Now rises o'er the plains, in mellifluous accents, the grand ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... But ere the mellifluous pleonast had done oiling his paradox with fresh polysyllables, to make it slip into the banker's narrow understanding, he met with a curious interruption. Jane Hardie fluttered in to say a man was at the door accusing himself ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... much at home as when alone, the mellifluous Sundown's imagination expanded, till it embraced the farthest outpost of his theme. He became the towering center of things terrestrial. The world revolved around but one individual that glorious morning, and he generously decided to let it revolve. ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... some bewildering way, reached a second edition in 1886. In the opening "distich" Mr. Dutt makes the claim to be the first Asiatic poet to write in English, and if that is true this insignificant work becomes the seed of which the full flower is the gifted Rabindra, son of Tagore, whose mellifluous but mystic utterances lie, I am told, on every boudoir table. Me they, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... based on anti-black legislation, Plaatje became a lone voice for old black liberalism. He turned from politics and devoted the rest of his life to literature. His passion for Shakespeare resulted in mellifluous Tswana translations of five plays from "Comedy of Errors" to "Merchant of Venice" and "Julius Caesar". His passion for the history of his people, and of his family in particular, resulted in a historical novel, "Mhudi (An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago)", dedicated to ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... enjoying much favor at Rome. As early as 1609, David della Rocca published a second edition of her translation, dedicating it to the charming authoress. To put the highly wrought, artificial poetry of the Hebrew Dante into mellifluous Italian verse was by no means easy. While Rieti's poetry is not distinguished by the vigor and fulness of the older classical productions of neo-Hebraic poetry, his rhythm is smooth, pleasant, and polished. Yet her ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... painted Stoa next; ... To sage philosophy next lend thine ear. From Heaven descended to the low roof'd house Of Socrates; see there his tenement, Whom, well inspired, the oracle pronounced Wisest of men; from whose mouth issued forth Mellifluous streams that water'd all the schools Of Academics old and new, with those Surnamed Peripatetics, and the sect Epicurean, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But he was sincere and kindly intentioned ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... collection of declamations, or school rhetorical exercises on set themes; cf. Section 17. (5) Came from Egypt; cf. Section 24; Xois and Thmuis were in that country. (6) Is said to have been appointed professor of rhetoric at Athens by Commodus purely on account of his mellifluous voice; cf. ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... School. Inverting his pyramid, after beginning with the cone, he put in the base, taking up the work of undergraduate, and studying for an A.B. At Harvard he is best remembered as Creon in the Oedipus Tyrannus, where his handsome face and figure and mellifluous Greek won much admiration. Soon after, he cast to the winds both his Greek and theology and was in London fighting his way in the Press. Since then he has become famous for Oriental travel and observation, in which field he is ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Day, a Vision of Her in the $200 Rig that she had flashed on the Night of the Party. It never occurred to him that she could wear any other Costume. He would close his Eyes and try to hear once again the dulcet and mellifluous Tones of that Voice which, to him, sounded as Good as an AEolian Harp moved by gentle Zephyrs within a Bower of ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... the hypocrites, and the wedding-drolls, the observant and the lax, the purse-proud and the lowly, the coarse and the genteel, the wonderful chapmen and the luckless Schlemihls, Rabbi and Dayan and Shochet, the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and the cantors who trolled it off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men who never listened to it; the grimy Russians of the capotes and the earlocks, and the blue-blooded Dons, "the gentlemen of the Mahamad," who ruffled it with swords and knee-breeches in the best Christian society. Those who kneaded the toothsome ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sort. These people wondered why I wanted variety of tone color—who had ever heard of such a demand from a choir?—and many of my friends even thought I was demanding too much when, in rehearsing Berlioz's Faust, I asked for something harder in tone than the usual fluty, mellifluous sound in order to depict the hearty laugh of the peasants in the first chorus. They were almost scandalized when I asked for a somewhat raucous, devil-may-care carousal, tone in the "Auerbach's Wine-cellar" scene, and when a fiendish, ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... thickness of voice, concerning which the choir-master speaks with aggravating persistence, is a matter of no real importance; fearing that the friends of another contemporary boy, who is said by the choir-master to have an exceedingly mellifluous voice, may defeat his paternal aspirations. The momentous question agitates many humble homes in Canterbury; and whilst Mr. Abbott, the barber, is encouraged to hope the best for his son, the relatives ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... not bring my lips to use the word with any mental honesty, of what service was the "watch argument" to me? Very lightly did the President pass over all these initial difficulties of his religion. I see him now, a gentleman with lightish hair, with a most mellifluous voice and a most pastoral manner, reading his prim little tracts to us directed against the "shallow infidel" who seemed to deny conclusions so obvious that we were certain he could not be sincere, and those of us who had never seen an infidel might well be pardoned for supposing that ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... up the balcony, and the mellifluous voice is whistling Schumann's Carnival. Whither shall she fly? But even now it is too late, for he meets her in the ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... am not so deficient as not to be aware that a man singeth from the mouth; yet is thy voice mellifluous, sweet as ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of the country the hedge-schoolmaster was often also a poet who wrote mellifluous songs in Irish, which were sung throughout the entire district and sometimes earned him enduring fame. Eoghan Ruadh O'Sullivan and Andrew MacGrath, called An Mangaire Sugach or "the Jolly Pedlar," are well-known instances ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... master. Patrick had heard of him in Paris. He begged for another song and she complied, accepting the one he selected as the favourite of his brother Philip's, though she said: 'That one?' with a superior air. It was a mellifluous love-song from a popular Opera somewhat out of date. 'Well, it's in Italian!' she summed up her impressions of the sickly words while scanning them for delivery. She had no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer, she confessed, yet she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Both were turned away from the clerical office by a revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer of the Nativity and of Paradise is a ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... in the first place a special feature of the situation has to be noted. The Japanese language was then undergoing a transition. In order to fit it to the Chinese ideographs for literary purposes, it was being deprived of its mellifluous polysyllabic character and reduced to monosyllabic terseness. The older words were disappearing, and with them many of the old traditions. Temmu saw that if the work of compilation was abandoned solely to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... would speak of is to cast out the demagogue. They are the fellows that are the curse of both and of all political parties. We have had them from the days of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony down to date. [Laughter.] These smooth, sleek, mellifluous-tongued fellows that always have the same blood-stained garment to hold up before the populace, and some forged will to read, whereby the people were to get great legacies which they never could collect, let us cast them out. Let us ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... natural speech or the common forms of nature is only one amongst an infinite number of possible problems. There are still ladies who feel sure that had they been in Laura's shoes Petrarch might have experienced something more vivid than what comes through his mellifluous but elaborate rime. To them he would have expressed himself otherwise. Possibly: but whatever he experienced could not have become art—significant form—till it had been withdrawn from the world of experience and converted into poetry by ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... retirement, to wit, at a village five miles from the Dales' farm. She was too ashamed of her young gentleman and herself to be seen with him in her native village. On the road down he was full of little practical attentions; she received them coldly; his mellifluous mouth was often at her car, pouring thanks and praises into it; she never vouchsafed a word of reply. All she did was to shudder now and then, and cry at intervals. Yet, whenever he left her side, her whole body became restless; and ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... which she has innocently given to it. These faults are found to a much smaller degree in her miscellaneous poems. Her sonnets, here printed for the first time, seem to me to be of great beauty, and her longer piece entitled "Our Casuarina Tree," needs no apology for its rich and mellifluous numbers. ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... interesting part of the evening to Lewisham. Parkson suddenly rose, got down "Sesame and Lilies," and insisted upon reading a lengthy mellifluous extract that went like a garden roller over the debate, and afterwards Bletherley became the centre of a wrangle that left him grossly insulted and in a minority of one. The institution of marriage, so far as the South Kensington student is concerned, ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... or so," the mellifluous woman explained the case to the two anxious gentlemen. "A quiet sleep and a cup of warm tea goes for more than twenty doctors, it do—when there's the flutters," she pursued. "I know it by myself. And a good cry beforehand's better than ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... but she died before the baby was three days old. The baby hated it herself when she reached years of discretion, and when she found that she possessed a voice and had a possible career before her, she saw plainly that something more mellifluous must be substituted if programmes should ever be in question. Meantime she was Tommy to her friends, and the gay little name suited her to a T. The gay little rhyme suited her, too, for like the Tommy Tucker in Mother Goose, she had to "sing for her supper"; for her breakfast, and her dinner, ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... who submit themselves meekly to tailors and schoolmasters. There is always corn in their Egypt, and no village is so small but it lifts a smokestack toward a sky that yields nothing to Italy's. The heavens are a soundingboard devised for the sole purpose of throwing back the mellifluous voices of native orators. At the cross-roads store, philosophers, perched upon barrel and soap-box (note the soap-box), clinch in endless argument. Every county has its Theocritus who sings the nearest creek, the bloom of the may-apple, the squirrel ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... strive to recall him as he stood before his audience. There was but little animation; his theme did not seem to stir him into life; even the usual repose of his countenance was rarely broken up; he used little or no action; and his voice, though mellifluous, was monotonous: he lacked, indeed, that earnestness without which no man is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Judges," he said in a mellifluous voice, clearer than the fluting of a bell-bird, "it is useless to look for words from this old man, for it is manifest that he himself is nothing, and that his lanthorn is alone concerned in this affair. But, reverend Judges, bethink you ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete, wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witness his 'Venus and Adonis;' his 'Lucrece;' his sugred 'Sonnets' among his private friends.... As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy amongst the Latines: so Shakspere ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... bees inebriate with floral honey and resounding with the notes of the peacock, the king at last reached the sacred lake of Dwaitavana. And the spot which the king reached swarmed with bees inebriate with floral honey, and echoed with the mellifluous notes of the blue-throated jay and was shaded by Saptacchadas and punnagas and Vakulas. And the king graced with high prosperity proceeded thither like the thunder-wielding chief of the celestials himself. And, O thou best of the Kuru race, King Yudhishthira the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... followed this little extempore speech,— applause accompanied by an odorous rain of flowers. There were many women in the crowd, and these had pressed eagerly forward to catch every word that dropped from the Poet-Laureate's mellifluous lips,—now, moved by one common impulse, they hastily snatched off their posies and garlands, and flung them in lavish abundance at his feet. Some of the blossoms chancing to fall on Theos and cling to his garments, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... not be offended, sir—you mean, of course, sir, that you would like me to state exACTly what your father said, proceeding as if I was under oath." It is indescribable how soft and mellifluous his voice had ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the voice, to hurl abuse, curses, and imprecations from the mouth of the cave. Great shouts of laughter exploded above, and they seemed to hold their breath to hear more; or Manuel, hanging over, would praise in mocking, mellifluous accents the energy of his denunciations. I tried to pull him away from there, but he turned upon me fiercely; and from prudence—for all hope was not dead in ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... accompany the poem, setting forth how Poe came to write it and how all these years it had been lost to view. In a few words Mr. Riley related the incident and then dismissed it. "I studied Poe's methods. He seemed to have a theory, rather misty to be sure, about the use of 'm's' and 'n's' and mellifluous vowels and sonorous words. I remember that I was a long time in evolving the name Leonainie, but at length the verses were finished and ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... is sharp and tedious to them that be guilty; but to the innocent and guiltless it is mellifluous. Here droppeth the delectable dew; here floweth the pleasant nectar; here runneth the sweet milk; here is plenty of all good things. And although the place itself be desert and barren, yet to me it seemeth a large walk, and a valley of pleasure; here to me is ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... difficult to find a perfectly satisfactory one. However, the hour was late enough to excuse his beginning the reading without farther delay. It was not a success. There was a stoppage somewhere in the current of his mellifluous eloquence; and the exposition was concluded so soon, and indeed abruptly, that Mrs. Danvers retired to rest with a feeling of disappointment and inanition, such as one may have experienced when, expecting a "sit-down" supper, we are obliged to content ourselves with a meagrely-furnished buffet. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... small withdrawing-room at Whitehall an agreeable young gentleman pensioner, in love with his own voice, which was in truth mellifluous, read aloud to a knot of the Queen's ladies. The room looked upon the park, and the pale autumn sunshine flooding it made the most of rich court raiment, purple hangings, green rushes on the floor, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... contemptuous grimace at his back, and said, in mellifluous tones: "Very well, dear. I may as well go at once, and perhaps she will come with me to that dressmaking ally of hers, Miss Trant. I hear she is raising her prices, but she will not do so to me if I am ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... Spring's fair lap, CERULEAN SISTERS! pour 530 From airy urns the sun-illumined shower, Feed with the dulcet drops my tender broods, Mellifluous flowers, and aromatic buds; Hang from each bending grass and horrent thorn The tremulous pearl, that glitters to the morn; 535 Or where cold dews their secret channels lave, And Earth's dark chambers hide the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... of treachery in regard to "controversial business" was consummated on the 18th of September, when the Home Rule Bill received the Royal Assent. On the 15th Mr. Asquith put forward his defence in the House of Commons. In a sentence of mellifluous optimism that was to be woefully falsified in a not-distant future, he declared his confidence that the action his Ministry was taking would bring "for the first time for a hundred years Irish opinion, Irish sentiment, ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Garonne, and by its robbers'-castles; at Agen, with its barber troubadour; in the haunts of Gaston de Foix and Jeanne d'Albret and her son; in the gloomy valleys of the proscribed Cagot; and where the mellifluous accents of the Basquaise enchant the ear. All the impressions made by these scenes I have endeavoured to convey to my readers, as I did before, inviting them to follow my footsteps, and judge if I ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... pleasure will soon cloy. You must examine your sentiments towards an author. If when you have read an author you are pleased, without being conscious of aught but his mellifluousness, just conceive what your feelings would be after spending a month's holiday with a merely mellifluous man. If an author's style has pleased you, but done nothing except make you giggle, then reflect upon the ultimate tediousness of the man who can do nothing but jest. On the other hand, if you are impressed by what an author has said to you, but are ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... achieves is a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure as the ring of glass upon glass, and with a mellifluous after-tone or echo of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingering fall—melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... wall and swim the choking foss. Ye dauntless archers, twang your cross-bows well; On, bill and battle-axe and mangonel! Ply battering-ram and hurtling catapult, Jerusalem is ours—id Deus vult." After which comes a mellifluous description of the gardens of Sharon and the maids of Salem, and a prophecy that roses shall deck the entire country of Syria, and a speedy reign of peace be established—all in undeniably decasyllabic lines, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hope, my dear son," said the Rev. Mr Bastian, with a face and voice as mellifluous as a honeycomb, "that all the members of your household are faithful, and well affected towards the Church ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... had the poet's heart, he had not the concentration of the great poet. All through his life he loved to string together verses, grave and gay. Some of his pasquinades are very clever; some of his serious verse is mellifluous enough; but as a poet he is not even a minor bard. Yet one of his early effusions, named Melville Island, written when he was twenty, was not without influence on his future. Such was its merit that Sir Brenton Halliburton, a very grand ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... trembling lyre, Silence, ye vocal choir, And thou, mellifluous lute, For man soon breathes his last, And all his hope is past, And all his ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... know what Dr. Johnson was like, he could have found him in Forster. There was the same social intolerance; the same "dispersion of humbug"; the same loud voice, attuned to a mellifluous softness on occasion, especially with ladies or persons of rank; the love of "talk" in which he assumed the lead—and kept it too; and the contemptuous scorn of what he did not approve. But then all this was backed by admirable training and full knowledge. He was a deeply read, cultivated man, ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... that is rich! Have a cigar, deluded youth, while I enlighten you concerning this mellifluous couple. Did you mark the gentleman particularly? You can't take him in at a glance: there's too much of him. Goodwin his name is—Timothy Goodwin: 'Good Timothy' his friends dub ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Miller's Daughter,' or in those tender lyrics such as 'Mariana,' 'Sir Galahad,' 'The Dying Swan,' and 'The Talking Oak.' In the ballads and songs, how felicitous again is the poet's work, and how rich yet mellifluous is the strain! Had Tennyson written nothing else but these, with the verse included in the volumes issued by him in 1832 and 1842, how high would he have been placed in the choir of song, and how ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... mellifluous voice suddenly intervened. Otto Schmidt thought fit to assume a role for which Lord Valletort ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... French than Gascon, detected in his poems many comparatively unknown words,—not indeed of his own creation, but merely the result of his patient and long-continued investigation of the Gascon dialect. Yet they found the language, as written and spoken by him, full of harmony—rich, mellifluous, and sonorous. Gascon resembles the Spanish, to which it is strongly allied, more than the Provencal, the language of the Troubadours, which is more allied ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... what she had seemed before this trouble came. One evening as he left Leopold, he heard her singing, and stood on the stair to listen. And to listen was to marvel. For her voice, instead of being hard and dry, as when he heard it before, was, without any loss of elasticity, now liquid and mellifluous, and full of feeling. Its tones were borne along like the leaves on the wild west wind of Shelley's sonnet. And the longing of the curate to help her from that moment took a fresh departure, and grew and grew. But as the hours and days and ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... o'clock on the morning of Sunday, the 8th of February, 1857, Policeman Smithers, of the Third District, was meditatively pursuing his path of duty through the quietest streets of Ward Five, beguiling, as usual, the weariness of his watch by reminiscent AEthiopianisms, mellifluous in design, though not severely artistic in execution. Passing from the turbulent precincts of Portland and Causeway Streets, he had entered upon the solitudes of Green Street, along which he now dragged himself dreamily enough, ever extracting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... several tongues with ease, well-read, too, and one that could talk to her lovers, when they had the time or the inclination for talking, of the ancient authors of Rome, and of Greece, too, for that matter—did I not say her mother was a Greek?—and could say you or sing you the stanzas of mellifluous poets, most ravishingly to the ear. She knew all the verses of Guido Guinicelli by root of heart, and to hear her repeat ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the Cosmos, though our upbringing is still too rhetorical and mediaeval to appraise its authors at their true worth. Youth is prone to judge with the heart rather than the head; youth thrives on vaporous ideas, and there was a time when I would have yielded to none in my enthusiasm for these mellifluous babblers; one had a blind, sentimental regard for their great names. It seems to me, now, that we take them somewhat too seriously; that a healthy adult has nothing to learn from their teachings, save by way of warning example. Plato is food ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... oftenest. Infants are charmed with the melody of sounds, and old age is animated by enlivening notes. The Arcadian shepherds drew pleasure from their reeds; the solitude of Achilles was cheered by his lyre; the English peasant delights in his pipe and tabor; the mellifluous notes of the flute solace many an idle hour; and the charming of snakes and other venomous reptiles, by the power of music, is well attested among the Indians. "Music and the sounds of instruments," says Vigneul de Marville, "contribute to the health of the body and mind; they assist the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... in the street, he asked himself whether he might not have been rather less respectful. He went over in memory those strange confidences—which have, naturally, been much abridged here, for they needed a volume to convey their mellifluous abundance and the graces which accompanied them. The retrospective perspicacity of this man, so natural, so profound, was baffled by the candor of that tale and its poignancy, and by the tones ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... eight white horses and a Yankee coachman, originally, no doubt, called Brown, but now answering to the mellifluous appellation of Bruno; A—— with her French cap, and loaded with sundry mysterious looking baskets; I with cloak and bonnet; C—-n with Greek cap, cloak, and cigar; the captain of the Jason also with cloak and cigar, and very ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... turrets of monasteries, castles and soaring church spires of Coventry looked luminous in the morning sunshine, while the brazen tongues of century bells rolled their mellifluous matin tones in voluminous welcome to the great multitude of revelers within her embattled walls ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... He shook the hands of his brother-captains, as if he would have wrung them off, and then threw himself into a chair to recover from his exertions; but, when he began to speak, instead of the rough voice one might have expected, a soft, mellifluous tone was heard, which might better win a woman's ear than vie with the howling of the tempest. He at once waived all the right he might claim to lead the attack on the island, and cordially agreed to the ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Greek, a language above all others blest in the happy marriage of sweet words, and which in our language are mere printer's compound epithets—such as quaffed divine 'joy-in-the-heart-of-man-infusing' wine, (the undermarked is to be one word, because one sweet mellifluous word expresses it in Homer);—excepting this, it has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the 'Faery Queene';—it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... bounding roe. Alas! no more shall we behold that look So venerable, yet so blent with mirth, And festive joy sedate; that ancient garb Unvaried,—tartan hose, and bonnet blue! No more shall Beauty's partial eye draw forth The full intoxication of his strain. Mellifluous, strong, exuberantly rich! No more, amid the pauses of the dance, Shall he repeat those measures, that in days Of other years, could soothe a falling prince, And light his visage with a transient smile Of melancholy joy,—like ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... her look and figure that completely fill up that ideal which exaggerated fancies have wrought out of the Grecian heaven. The vision steals upon you at all hours,—now rounding its flowing outline to the mellifluous metre of Epic hexameter, and again with its bounding life pulsating with the glorious dashes ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... Emma's honest brow we read display'd The constant virtues of the Nut Brown Maid; Mellifluous sounds on Clara's tongue we hear, Notes that once lured a Seraph from his sphere; Cecilia's eyes such winning beauties crown As without song might ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the same old stage Which I have graced so long, Though oft, when sick, or in a rage, I've sworn to give up song, Still somehow, like mellifluous REEVES, I flow, and flow, and flow. Stage-stars, though fond of taking leaves Are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... affect. They have olive skins, black curly hair, flashing eyes, and fingers that dance with gemmy rings. A new-comer arrives, unhooking from his shoulders the wooden tray which holds the group of statuettes that he has been hawking round Streatham and Norwood. He salutes them in mellifluous tones, and sits down. He orders nothing; but a heaped-up dish of macaroni is put before him, and he attacks it with fork and finger. There are few women to be seen, but those few are gaudily arrayed in coloured handkerchiefs, their mournful eyes and purring voices touching the stern ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... admiration grew upon him. Mrs. Barton, to hide her emotion, engaged in an ardent discussion concerning the rearing of calves with Mrs. Gould. Lady Sarah bit her lip, and, unable to endure her enemy's triumph any longer, she said in her most mellifluous tone: ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Californian to tell him how to ask for du pain in English. "My donkeys," was the prompt reply, and the joke was winked down the table, while the Spaniard was hammering away at "My donkeys" till he got the pronunciation perfect. The waiter came round, and the unhappy man, in confident but mellifluous tones, pointing to the ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... the dry and bushy places I found him at my elbow—or, rather, some distance away, but in evidence by his mellifluous song. Let me enumerate the localities in which I found my little favorite: Forty miles out on the plain among some bushes of a shallow dip; among the foothills about Colorado Springs and Manitou; on many of the open bushy ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... made exceedingly clear to me that Yasmini and not I was deliverer of ultimatums. She had the whole future of the world doped out, and her golden voice proceeded to herald a few of the details in mellifluous Punjabi. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... countenance had little of that flexibility which anticipates the tongue, that his eye had scarcely anything of that language which, by preparing the spectator for the coming sentence, enchains the attention, that his voice was neither silvery nor mellifluous. Nevertheless, by a subtlety of discrimination, that seemed almost intuitive, by a force of judgment and a fervency of mind, that were simply exquisite and irresistible, this was the very man who could at any moment, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... he inclosed her two clasped ones within it, as the little voice ran over an utterly unintelligible form of childishly clipped Latin, sounding, however, sweet and birdlike from the very liberties the little memory had taken in twisting its mellifluous words into a rhythm of her own. And there was catchword enough for Richard to recognize and follow it, with bonnet ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ever; the sibylline Marian Evans with her long, weird, dreamy face; Lewes, with his big brow and keen thoughtful eyes; Browning, pale and spruce, his eye like a skipper's cocked-up at the weather; Peacock, with his round, mellifluous speech of the old Greeks; David Gray, great-eyed and beautiful, like Shelley's ghost; Lord Houghton, with his warm worldly smile and easy-fitting enthusiasm. Where are they all now? Where are the roses of last summer, the snows of yester year? I passed by the Priory to-day, and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... neighbors. I shall not easily forget the brightening eye, the swift glance of intelligence in the face of another old negro, an hostler, in Nova Scotia. He was from Virginia, and adopting the sweet, mellifluous language of his own home, I asked him whether he liked best to stay where he was, or go back to "Old Virginny?" "O massa!" said he, with such a look, "you must know dat I has de warmest ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... hour. First shalt thou reach the Sirens; they the hearts Enchant of all who on their coast arrive. The wretch, who unforewarn'd approaching, hears The Sirens' voice, his wife and little-ones 50 Ne'er fly to gratulate his glad return, But him the Sirens sitting in the meads Charm with mellifluous song, while all around The bones accumulated lie of men Now putrid, and the skins mould'ring away. But, pass them thou, and, lest thy people hear Those warblings, ere thou yet approach, fill all Their ears with wax moulded between thy palms; But as for thee—thou hear them ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... PADRE,—Oh, that I could reply to you in kind, but alas and alack! the gift divine has been denied me. My Nancy comes to me tomorrow—Praise be to Allah! and I shall duly, and in appropriate and prideful language, I trust, present her with your mellifluous lines. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... too constant inspection disturbed you. Myriad pardons for me," began the Swami in his mellifluous voice. "It is the tribute. When I feel deep interest I am prone to forget all but my study. See, I am the last of a family once powerful and wealthy; yet I hardly regret that heritage that I have lost. I look at you. You are the type of another fate. You are a bride, ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... three staircases and three landings; which was I to choose? I was meditating, when from the wall close beside me proceeded a most plaintive wail, rather, on my honour, like an infantine donkey. I listened going close to the wall, when I discovered the mellifluous accents proceeded from the throat of the missing giant, Sir Tilton. I put my ear to the wall and told the poor boy to speak in accents loud; he confessed that seeing a spring in the wall he touched it—it opened, he entered where he was mantled in Egyptian darkness, and could ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... called obviously because of the shape of its flowers, has a most mellifluous and pleasing botanical name, Liriodendron Tulipifera—is not that euphonious? Just plain "liriodendron"—how much better that sounds as a designation for one of the noblest of American forest trees than the misleading "common" names! "Tulip-tree," for a resemblance of the form only of its extraordinary ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... would have taxed a less rugged nature, did not end here. About five o'clock one afternoon a pleasant-appearing gentleman with a mellifluous voice turned up who introduced himself as ex (State) Senator Grady. The senator was from Newcastle, that city out of the mysterious depths of which so many political stars have arisen. Mr. Crewe cancelled a long-deferred engagement with Mrs. Pomfret, and invited the senator ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... emblem of Ireland, despised and rejected though she be, is the sweetest-tongued of all music-making things in this vale of tears. For her, no lion, tempest-crowned, for her no prowling bear, for her no screaming eagle—but the harp, mellifluous and tender. And although its liquid strain hath for centuries been touched by sorrow, yet there hath been music in its voice for all the happier listening world, and the day draweth near, please God, when its unfleeting joy shall descend and rest on her own fields and meadows, ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... alone can keep literature alive is shown by literary history after Shakespeare. Just after him you have the "mellifluous poets" of the next period on the one hand, with style enough, but with such attenuated ideas that their work has died. Who knows Drayton or Brown or Wither? On the other hand, there came the metaphysicians with ideas in abundance, but not style, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... dropped off one by one into sweet forgetfulness; so that when the rising sun of December looked through the painted windows on mouldering embers and flickering lamps, the vaulted roof was echoing to a mellifluous concert of noses, from the clarionet of the waiting-boy at one end of the hall, to the double bass of the Reverend Doctor, ringing over the empty ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Tho. Pope, Chr. Beeston, Joh. Dyke." These evidences of prominence are more than corroborated by the famous passage in the Palladis Tamia (1598) of Francis Meres, in which he not only compares the "mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare" with Ovid for his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, "his sugred sonnets among his private friends," but with Plautus and Seneca for his excellence "in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... for perturbation are not imaginary or based on the hallucinations of a hypersensitive mind. They are prompted and justified by the notorious facts, established by the leading psycho-analysts, that, just as mellifluous and melodious names exercise a mollifying influence on the activities of the sub-conscious self, so the possession or choice of strange or ferocious appellations incites the bearer, if I may be permitted to use so commonplace a term, to live ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... had gone, I raised the magic horn again, emitted a few hankering whines, then broke into a louder, farther reaching call that thrilled up echoes from across the lake and seemed to fill the woods for miles around with its mellifluous pleading. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... dispelled by the sound of most mellifluous music bursting upon my senses; and as I turned my eyes to discover the source from whence it proceeded, I beheld, resurrected before me, a group of dear old friends, whose bodies were already dust and ashes in the Swedish grave-yards, and in the cemeteries of the old ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... sped through the sides. On mountain peaks of picturesque scenery and regions sacred to the gods, abounding with dappled herds and echoing with the melodies of feathered tribes, herself assuming the handsomest form decked with every ornament and pouring forth at times mellifluous strains. Hidimva sported with the Pandava and studied to make him happy. So also, in inaccessible regions of forests, and on mountain-breasts overgrown with blossoming trees on lakes resplendent with lotuses and lilies, islands of rivers and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a very formidable and perplexing indictment, sparkling with learning and bristling with difficulties. But when these mellifluous mysticisms are once translated into "the vulgar tongue" they prove to be, strange to say, easily within the comprehension of the ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... published a pastoral that was no way equal to the pastoral he wrote with trees, walks, and water upon his land; yet there are few cultivated readers who have not some day met with it, and been beguiled by its mellifluous seesaw. How its jingling resonance comes back to me to-day from the "Reader" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the family, with the most excruciating anxiety, and Miss Brook Dingwall was formally introduced to her future companions. The Miss Crumptons conversed with the young ladies in the most mellifluous tones, in order that Miss Brook Dingwall might be properly ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... read, you heard the first verse read in a mellifluous and cultured voice. Perhaps it was the evening of the twenty-eighth day of the month, and you listened to the sacred words of Psalm cxxxvii., "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion." Then followed a bellow from ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... one tooth and bleared an eye, but it was not enough. Finally Cheever got to him with a sledge-hammer smash in the groin. It hurled Dyckman against and along the big table, just as he put home one magnificent, majestic, mellifluous swinge with all his body in it. It planted an earthquake ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... harmonious; a mind that felt, and therefore never erred in its emphasis; alternately touching the chord of pathos, or advancing with equal ease into the region of argument or passion; and then let him remember that every sentiment he uttered was clothed in expressions as mellifluous as perhaps ever fell from the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... lot of talk about the soul. Sentimentalists wallow in the word, and realists deride it. What it really is I do not pretend to know. Probably as good a word as any—and certainly a very mellifluous word—for some obscure chemical combination of finer essence than the obvious material part of us, that craves a foretaste of immortality while we are still mortal. Perhaps we are descended from the gods after all, and unless we listen when they whisper ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton |
