"Ballad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his practised skill in dignifying such themes; but it is not here that he found his work as laureate. He achieved greater success in the poems which he wrote to honour the exploits of our army and navy, in the past or the present. In his ballad of 'The Revenge', in his Balaclava poems, in the 'Siege of Lucknow', he struck a heroic note which found a ready echo in the hearts of soldiers and sailors and those who love the services. Above all, in the great ode on ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... furred robes, with aigrettes in their caps, and curved sabres garnished with precious stones and enamel, attracted and held spellbound the silent child, while through the window floated in, sung by some shepherd, or played by wandering Tzigani, the refrain of the old patriotic ballad 'Czaty Demeter', the origin of which is lost in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... he was specially susceptible to the notion of being immortalised. 'The design is already settled, and the canvas stretched'; and I have no doubt that in the original German these words ring like the opening of a ballad. 'The anchor's up and the sail is spread,' as I (and you, belike) recited in childhood. The ship in that poem foundered, if I remember rightly; so that the analogy to Goethe's words ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... large, which had evidently been cast away as useless by some former owner, himself squalid. These she managed to keep on by tying the tops with wrapping-cord. A more unlovely human being it would have been hard to find in all the great city. There she sat, crooning a ballad to herself in a high, cracked voice. It sounded ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... but drink. I'll tell thee all about it presently, and then we'll sing the Andalusian Tirana."—[A kind of ballad.] ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... this ballad over and over again until he was tired, then sat still, smiling and stroking the fox skin. He had learned the song when he was a child from his mother, who had sung it all day long one spring while she was shearing the sheep. And he could not think of ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... England" (the inverted commas were in the doctor's sneer) were being welcomed on their return from the ends of the earth. He had intended going to hear what they could do; but Phillida should go instead; she was not past the ballad stage. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... Caucasus. Through his grandmother's efforts he was permitted to return from the Caucasus about eight months later, to a hussar regiment. By this time people were beginning to appreciate him; he had written his magnificent "Ballad of Tzar Ivan Vasilievitch, the Young Lifeguardsman, and the Bold Merchant Kalashnikoff," which every one hailed as an entirely new phenomenon in Russian literature, amazing in its highly artistic pictures, full of power and dignity, combined with an exterior like that of the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... liveliness. One evening she told the story of John Gilpin's ride in a way that tickled the poet's fancy, set him laughing when he woke up in the night, and obliged him to turn it next day into ballad rhyme. Mrs. Unwin's son sent it to the Public Advertiser, for the poet's corner. It was printed in that newspaper, and thought no more of until about three years later. Then it was suggested to a popular actor named Henderson, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... with blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair-day in a fishers' village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... majestic, seeking some fitting antagonist. This was the great ship that afterwards sank ignobly at its anchorage at Spithead, with "twice four hundred men," a tale which, for every English boy, is made famous in Cowper's immortal ballad. But what an image of terror and of battle the Royal George seemed as in the bitter November storm she bore down on the French fleet! Hawke disdained meaner foes, and bade his pilot lay him alongside Conflans' flagship, Le Soleil Royal. ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... Taillefer, sang a song before the Battle of Hastings: but the Normans loved the purely martial strain, and this was a ballad of French composition, perhaps a fragment of the older "Roland's Song." The "Roman de Rou," composed by Master Wace, or Gasse, a native of Jersey and Canon of Bayeux, who died in 1184, is very minute in its description of the Battle of Val des Dunes, near Caen, fought by Henry of France and William ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... orders are seen unfavorably when enjoying themselves. In labour and trouble they are more dignified and less noisy. Your suggestion as to a series of soliloquies is very flattering and has taken hold of me to the extent of writing a similar ballad on Simon de Montfort. The order in which they come is rather incongruous, particularly if I include the list I have in mind for the future thus—Danton, William III, Simon de Montfort, Rousseau, David and Russell. . . . I rejoice ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... been despatched fast and far through England, to warn each town and village that the enemy had come at last. In every seaport there was instant making ready by land and by sea; in every shire and every city there was instant mustering of horse and man. [In Macaulay's Ballad on the Spanish Armada, the transmission of the tidings of the Armada's approach, and the arming of the English nation, are magnificently described. The progress of the fire-signals is depicted in lines which are worthy of comparison with the renowned ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... the notes to that story. In his Northern Mythology, vol. I., in the footnotes at p. 290, Thorpe mentions a maiden's grave from which spring "three lilies which no one save her lover may gather." I think he must quote from a Danish ballad. ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... these, Owen had fancied that he was alone in the house. It seemed not, however. There was a primeval piano in his sitting-room, and on the second morning it suited his mood to sit down at this and sing 'Asthore', the fruity pathos of which ballad appealed to him strongly at this time, accompanying himself by an ingenious arrangement in three chords. He had hardly begun, however, when Mr Dorman appeared, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of AEolus, by Peligrino Tibaldi, in the Institute at Bologna Sonnet on Rembrant; occasioned by his Picture of Jacob's Dream Sonnet on the Luxembourg Gallery Sonnet to my venerable Friend, the President of the Royal Academy The Mad Lover at the Grave of his Mistress First Love: a Ballad The Complaint Will, the Maniac: ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... my dear sir, if we had tried to make you weep! What fault you would have found with us! Suppose we had been like the ballad-singers and story-tellers who put in lamentable tales in the hope of reducing their audience to tears! What would you have said about us then? Why, even now, when you know we only wish to amuse you, not to make you suffer, you must needs ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... his tutors; and there is a story, preserved with great pride, of a fight on the beach between him and a bathing-machine boy, at whose father's property the Prince was throwing stones. An account of this historic battle is preserved in a doggerel ballad, printed and sold locally, and composed Heaven knows where, which is called "Tapping the War-Lord's Claret: Why Kaiser Bill ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... the name Rohtraut by chance in an old German lexicon. The full vowel coloring appealed to him and called forth this ballad. ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... placidly smoking our post-prandial cigars; the ladies were below, Miss Merrivale being seated at the piano, accompanying her sister, who—having by this time quite recovered her health and spirits—was singing some quaint, old-fashioned ballad in a full, rich contralto voice that could be distinctly heard from one end of the ship to the other, and probably far beyond. As for the chief mate, he was pacing the deck thoughtfully and steadily to and fro ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Grace and glimmer of romance, Bring the moonlight into noon Hid in gleaming piles of stone; On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet, Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square. Let statue, picture, park and hall, Ballad, flag and festival, The past restore, the day adorn And make each morrow a new morn So shall the drudge in dusty frock Spy behind the city clock Retinues of airy kings, Skirts of angels, starry wings, His fathers shining in bright ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which a Turkish princess is espoused—to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.' The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness; it neither found them, nor made them, equal.... Rowe's ballad of The Despairing Shepherd is said to have been written, either before or after marriage, upon this ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tree: it more generally signifies a graceful woman: this is the very comparison made by Ulysses looking upon Nausicaa, though more naively expressed. ... And now there comes to me the recollection of a creole ballad illustrating the use of the phrase,—a ballad about a youth of Fort-de-France sent to St. Pierre by his father to purchase a stock of dobannes, [24] who, falling in love with a handsome colored ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... be, and he looked on the smart, egoistic vanity of so many with a kindly, tolerant, almost parental eye. Poor little organisms growing on the tree of life—they would burn out and fade soon enough. He did not know the ballad of the roses of yesteryear, but if he had it would have appealed to him. He did not care to rifle them, willy-nilly; but should their temperaments or tastes incline them in his direction, they would not suffer vastly in their lives because of him. The fact was, the man ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... what I had gathered from the ratcatcher, when all on a sudden a light glared upon the horse's face, who purled round in great terror, and flung me out of the saddle, as from a sling, or with as much violence as the horse Grayman, in the ballad, flings Sivord the Snareswayne. I fell upon the ground—felt a kind of crashing about my ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... was long since made secure. Madame Cole has taken part in nearly all the great musical events in this country during the past four years. She has sung everywhere in London—with the Royal Choral Society at the Albert Hall, at the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, at the Ballad Concerts, at the Monday Popular Concerts, at Sir Charles Halle's Concerts, and at Bristol, Chester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other leading towns. As seems to have been the case with most well-dowered musicians, Madame Cole's talent owes something to heredity. Musical ability, greater or less, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... oblivion and dilapidation. At the end, immediately beneath the colossal window, grows an alder of considerable luxuriance, which, added to the situation of every other object, brought Mr. Southey's pathetic ballad of 'Mary the Maid of the Inn,' so forcibly before my imagination,[5] that I involuntarily turned my eye to search for the grave, where the murderers concealed their victim." He likewise tells us of "the former garden of the monastery, still cultivated, and exhibiting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... always told of Indians, but by some is supposed to have happened to a pair of White lovers. The better account, however, makes them Indians. What adds to the interest of this tradition is, that Mr. Thomas Moore has made it the subject of a beautiful ballad entitled "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp." His having taken up the story should, I am aware, have prevented me from attempting to tell it, since it is impossible that any thing from my pen should equal his ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... the seafarers, in the heart of industrial activity; and the anecdotes and glimpses which we enjoy show, just what might have been guessed, that these houses often became scenes of riotous excess and debauch. Lydgate's ballad of "London Lickpenny" helps one to imagine what such resorts must have been in the first part of the fifteenth century. It is almost permissible to infer that the street contained, in addition to the ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... passing through a deep hollow in the wood where the gnarled and protruding roots of cypress and juniper made walking difficult, and where a strong hand was needed to push aside the wet and pendent masses of vine. Regulus, fifty yards behind them, began to sing a familiar broadside ballad, torturing the words out of all resemblance to English. The rich notes rang sweetly through the forest. Down from the far summit of a pine flashed a cardinal bird, piercing the gloom of the hollow like a fire ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... trip that they had, so the legend says, that strange interview with Judas Iscariot, out of which Matthew Arnold has made a ballad. Sailing in the wintry northern seas at Christmas time, St. Brandan saw an iceberg floating by, on which a human form rested motionless; and when it moved at last, he saw by its resemblance to the painted pictures he had seen that it must be Judas Iscariot, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... only a moment. The tuning of instruments outside broke off, and the first bars of a waltz droned invitingly out: "If you really love me," the song that had been in her ears all the evening, a flimsy ballad of the year, hauntingly sweet, as only such short-lived songs can be. Moving to the tune of it, Judith crowded with the other girls out ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... Ivanovna; then there was a literary man, young but already well known, who had written stories, novels, and plays. Who else? Why, Vassily Vassilyitch, a landowner and amateur illustrator and vignettist, with a great feeling for the old Russian style, the old ballad and epic. On paper, on china, and on smoked plates, he produced literally marvels. In the midst of this free artistic company, spoiled by fortune, though refined and modest, who recalled the existence of doctors only in times of illness, and ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... arose within the hall the din of voices and the sound of song; the instruments also were brought out and Hrothgar's minstrel sang a ballad for the delight of the warriors. Waltheow too came forth, bearing in her train presents for Beowulf—a cup, two armlets, raiment and rings, and the largest and richest collar that could be ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... replied Pollux. "Still he is sinning against the laws of beauty which I desire to win you over to, and which will survive every whim of fashion, as certainly as Homer's Iliad will survive the ballad of a street-singer, who celebrates the last murder that excited the mob of this town.—Am I the first artist who has attempted to represent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... father Thames is desired to tell who drives the hoop, or tosses the ball, and then adds, that father Thames had no better means of knowing than himself; when he compares the abrupt beginning of the first stanza of the bard, to the ballad of Johnny Armstrong, "Is there ever a man in all Scotland;" there are, perhaps, few friends of Johnson, who would not wish to blot out ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... sweeping kind they web Here was the little society of the back parlour broken up, and scattered far and wide. Here was no audience for Lovely Peg, even if there had been anybody to sing it, which there was not; for the Captain was as morally certain that nobody but he could execute that ballad, he was that he had not the spirit, under existing circumstances, to attempt it. There was no bright face of 'Wal'r' In the house;—here the Captain transferred his sleeve for a moment from the Midshipman's uniform ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... else what rapture it would yield, When cook sent up the salad, To find within its depths concealed A touching little ballad. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... accessible steeps. Then came the chapel of St. Clements and the opposing village of Asmannshausen; the lofty Rossell, built at the extremest verge of the cliff; and now the tower of Hatto, celebrated by Southey's ballad, and the ancient town of Bingen. Here they paused a while from their voyage, with the intention of visiting more minutely the Rheingau, or valley ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for this volume from a large mass of material that came into my ballad hopper while hunting cowboy songs as a Traveling Fellow from Harvard University, I have included the best of the verse given me directly by the cowboys; other selections have come in through repeated recommendation of these men; others are vagrant verses from ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... presently with a guitar. "I've been wanting to play a little," he confessed as he tuned the neglected instrument, "but it seemed sort of sacrilegious—after coming home and finding my father gone and the ranch about to go. However—why sip sorrow with a long spoon? What's that ballad about the old-fashioned garden, Miss Kay? I like it. If you'll hum ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... her head back restfully against the small down pillow tied by gay ribbons to her chair; but her resting soul leaned against an Arm,— mighty to save, and tender to feel. Amid all her musings ran the sweet strains of the old English ballad the others were singing inside, whose refrain ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... the game. He thrust his pistol into a broken oak where a woodpecker had nested, then flapped his reins and clucked to his mule. For the sake of a bold appearance he raised his voice in a spirited and cheerful ballad, but from time to time he broke off since he had stern need for ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the consequence due to an ancient name in which the rest of us forgot to feel any pride. But this was my sister Margery's way; to whom, as honour was her passion, so the very shadows of old repute, dead loyalties, perished greatness, were idols to be worshipped. By a ballad, a story of former daring or devotion, a word even, I have seen her whole frame shaken and her eyes brimmed with bright tears; nay, I have seen tears drop on her clasped hands, in our pew in St. Sampson's Church, ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Dithyramb The Four Ages of the World The Maiden's Lament To My Friends Punch Song Nadowessian Death Lament The Feast of Victory Punch Song The Complaint of Ceres The Eleusinian Festival The Ring of Polycrates The Cranes of Ibycus (A Ballad) The Playing Infant Hero and Leander (A Ballad) Cassandra The Hostage (A Ballad) Greekism The Diver (A Ballad) The Fight with the Dragon Female Judgment Fridolin; or, the Walk to the Iron Foundry The Genius with the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... or" Robinson Crusoe," or "The Vicar of Wakefield,"—was worth any conceivable amount of attainments when rated as an evidence of anything that could justly denominate a man "admirable." One felicitous ballad of forty lines might have enthroned Crichton as really admirable, whilst the pretensions actually put forward on his behalf simply install him as a cleverish or dexterous ape. However, as Lady Carbery did not forego her purpose of causing me to shine ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Ballad of the banished and returning Count The Violet The Faithless Boy The Erl-King Johanna Sebus The Fisherman The King of Thule The Beauteous Flower.. Sir Curt's Wedding Journey Wedding Song The Treasure-digger The Rat-catcher The Spinner Before a Court of Justice The ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... played his own accompaniment, his fingers, stiffened though they were with hard work, ran lightly over the keys. Every person sat still to listen. Even Martha Perkins forgot to twirl her fingers and leaned forward. It was a simple little English ballad he sang: ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... Hermes to Red Jim, keeping him from complete infatuation when she sang to him, playing her own lightly-touched accompaniment at the piano. He had never been entertained like this before. And when a girl sang a love ballad and at the same time looked at him with eyes at once serious and laughing, he had to set his teeth and shake himself to keep from taking the words of the poet too literally. Perhaps Marianne was going a little farther than she intended. But ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... in this collection the lyrical quality predominates above the narrative page 255 (cf. the many rimes in-or in Fonte-frida and El prisionero). Abenamar is properly a frontier ballad, and La constancia, perhaps, belongs with the Carolingian cycle; but the rest are detached poems of a romantic nature. (See S.G. Morley's Spanish Ballads, New ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... street, smiled. My missus has just got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don't you know: in the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can't he hear the difference? Think he's that way inclined a bit. Against my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that smallpox up ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to Lady John Russell by Lord Wriothesley Russel, written after reading Lady Minto's ballad in which these words ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... Rivals; Xerxes (1699), a tragedy acted only once; The Provoked Husband (acted 1728), completed from Vanbrugh's unfinished Journey to London; The Rival Queens, with the Humours of Alexander the Great (acted 1710), a comical tragedy; Damon and Phyllida (acted 1729), a ballad opera; and adaptations from Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden, Moliere and Corneille. A bibliography of the numerous skits on Cibber is to be found in Lowe's Bibliographical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... opens his eyes, and selects the key of your room without further delay. I am inclined to think that the selection will not be made in any way to your detriment by reason of that freedom of speech. The lady in the ballad who spoke out her own mind to Lord Bateman, was sent to her home honorably in a coach and three. Had she held her tongue, we are justified in presuming that she would have been returned on a pillion ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... for joy the moment he finds peace; gives him a fierce cathartic during conversion, and a rapturous cataplasm in his "reconciliation." Primitive Methodism occupies the same place in religion as the ballad does in poetry. It has an untamed, blithesome, healthy ring with it; harmonises well with the common instincts and the broad, common intuitions of common life; can't hurt a prince, and will improve a peasant; won't teach a king wrong things; is sure to infuse happiness ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... habit for the occasion). The spirit, for such was the seeming Mrs. Veal, continued to waive the ceremony of salutation, both in going and coming, which will remind the reader of a ghostly lover's reply to his mistress in the fine old Scottish ballad:— ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... a deliciously brown oblong of the Dutch plaice of the ballad that Samuel Levine appeared to be struck by an idea. He threw down his knife and fork and exclaimed ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... he and his two companions threw themselves on horseback, and went off at a gallop. Yet, even above the clatter of their hoofs did the incorrigible Nanty hollo out the old ballad— ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... wight, whose muse, Now sighs and sobs, like newly bottled ale, Now splits her ugly mouth with grinning.[10] Reynolds,[11] whose muse most monstrous and misshapen, Outvies the hideous form that Horace drew. Dibdin[12] a ballad monger—and for Cherry— But Cherry has no ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... delightful ballad, invites a pretty page to wait till he comes to forty years: well, I have waited—indeed, I have somewhat overshot the mark—and to-day the sight of all this brisk life, going on just as it used to do, with the same insouciance ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to having more than once assailed in print Daniel O'Connell and his kind, and to have written a pair of once famous poetical fly-leaves, "Erin go bragh" and "Hurrah for Repeal!" copies of which (beyond my archived ones) can now only be found in the Ballad Collection of the British Museum, which I used to supply with my Sibyllines, at a chief librarian's request: I forget the name, but he collected such placards. I fear the two above were not very ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the fires of the bivouacs shine up ruddily, those of the French near at hand, those of the Russians in a long line across the mid-distance, and throwing a flapping glare into the heavens. As the night grows stiller the ballad-singing and laughter from the French mixes with a slow singing ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... one's hair and dye it black, and cock a dirty slouch hat over one ear and take a guitar and sit on a flat stone by the roadside and cross one's legs, and, after a few pings and pongs on the strings, strike up a Ballad with the refrain— ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... buildings around. Up in the bunk-house some man was wailing a verse of "Ella Re," accompanied by a guitar, and the doleful drone of the hackneyed chorus was caught up by the other men "off shift." But, nauseating as it was to him, this piebald ballad of the hills, it contained one shrieking sentence: "Lost forevermore!" That was it! Joan ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... of etherial spirit which is inevitable in the transfer of poetic thoughts from one language to another. The word popular is also to be taken in a limited meaning regarding all translations. Cowper's ballad of John Gilpin is twenty times more popular than his Homer; yet the latter work is deservedly popular in comparison with the bulk of translations from antiquity. The same thing may be said of Cary's Dante; it is, like Cowper's Homer, as adequate and popular as translated poetry ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... mixed; and their subdivisions into music for different voices and different instruments—if we observe the many forms of sacred music, from the simple hymn, the chant, the canon, motet, anthem, etc., up to the oratorio; and the still more numerous forms of secular music, from the ballad up to the serenata, from the instrumental solo up ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... her to be just a sort of moon-Toby. Another girl would have wanted nothing better. Sally told herself that she was different. She went out by herself, one evening, instead of working; and walked up to Highgate. And as she went up the hill she sang to herself the ballad "The ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... hands or at the mouths of the male carousers. Men and women are figured together, but it would be very hard to find a woman in one of these rough cuts with a pipe in her hand or at her mouth. An example, in the "Shirburn Ballads" lies before me. The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called "A Knotte of Good ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... had burnt them all— This were a medley! we should have him back Who told the "Winter's tale" to do it for us. No matter: we will say whatever comes. And let the ladies sing us, if they will, From time to time, some ballad or a song To give us breathing-space.' So I began, And the rest followed: and the women sang Between the rougher voices of the men, Like linnets in the pauses of the wind: And here I give the story and ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... in country districts is languishing because the folk hear nothing of their regiments, and local attachment is very strong. Unfortunately this ballad had to be founded on material supplied by the C——r. However, the permitted references to Germans ought at any rate to convince the public that the ballad has no connection whatever ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... yet been appropriated to the purposes of poetry or the drama. The stage was a new thing; and those who had to supply its demands laid their hands upon whatever came within their reach: they were not particular as to the means, so that they gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old ballad; Othello on an Italian novel; Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition: one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last in Hollingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, are authenticated in the old Gothic ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... last week, MR. W.S. LILLY—i.e. W. "SHIBBOLETHS" LILLY—delivered an excellent lecture on the Papal-Italian question, and although at Birmingham, it was by no means a brummagem discourse. But to quote the immortal ballad of Billy Taylor, "When the Captain he come for to hear on't, He werry much applauded what she'd done," and, to apply the lines to the present instance, "When the POPE he comes for to hear on't," will he "werry much applaud," the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... popular tunes of the moment, that it requires very little imagination to picture the schoolboy of Revolutionary days shouting lustily verses from "The Battle of the Kegs," and other rhymed stories of military incidents. Such a ballad was "A Song for the Red Coats," written after the successful campaign against Burgoyne, ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... had been full of excitement. The most memorable engagement in which he took part was a very celebrated one, in November, 1759. A stirring ballad has been written about it by ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... It is all the worse that they should be destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind of beauty there is in an English village, the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... perfect antithesis to Peer. When Peer is an outlaw she deserts her father's house and follows him to his hut in the forest. The scene in which she presents herself before Peer and claims to share his lot is worthy to stand beside the ballad of the Nut-browne Mayde: indeed, as a confessed romantic I must own to thinking Solveig one of the most beautiful figures in poetry. Peer deserts her, and she lives in the hut alone and grows an old woman while her lover roams ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... think and speak too after the forms of what you heard my cousin call heathenism, that she would never have discovered, had she been as wide awake as she was sound asleep, that the song I sung was anything but a good Christian ballad." ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... living. All this must surely be of great consequence for the rise of a mental outlook that cares only for gain; and who will deny that colonial activity generates it? "Our rivulets and streams turn mill wheels and bring rafts into the valleys, as they do in Scotland. But not one ballad, not a single song, reminds us that on their banks men and women live who experience the happiness of love and the pangs of separation; that under each roof in the valleys life's joys and sorrows come and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of a kerchief. The gaiety of the day seemed infectious, and to have seized even him. People stared to see Black Jem, or Surly Jem, as he was indifferently called, so joyous, and wondered what it could mean. He then fell to singing a snatch of a local ballad at that time in ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of Kuesnach, who, while acting as bailiff for the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler, writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These three persons were combined, and the result ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine people. Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... the room. Vine remained, leaning against the mantelpiece, and whistling softly to himself. He went through the whole of a popular ballad, and then he tried it in a different key. When he was sure that the three men had had time to leave the building, he too took up ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... him from censure, and would join with others of the young men in the college in hunting, as they called it, the servitor who was thus diligent in his duty, and this they did with the noise of pots and candlesticks, singing to the tune of Chevy Chase the words in the old ballad,— ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... circle of minds. Our authors have described to us in copious and entertaining detail the romance and the poetry, the writings and the imaginations, of the Scandinavian races, interspersed with abundant and well-selected specimens of the historical, romantic, legendary, chivalric, ballad, dramatic, song, and critical literature of Northern Europe. They have brought to light the treasures of the illustrious poets, historians and bards of Scandinavia, in a work of astonishing ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... presence of the innumerable fry. One would expect the giants of the deep to keep down their population. Not far off is another small lake, Loch Awe, which has invisible advantages over Loch Borlan, yet there the trout are, or were, "fat and fair of flesh," like Tamlane in the ballad. Wherefore are the trout in Loch Tummell so big and strong, from one to five pounds, and so scarce, while those in Loch Awe are numerous and small? One occasionally sees examples of how quickly trout will increase in ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... home, I always regret leaving my dear kind mistress, particularly when I have been a good deal with Her Majesty, as I have been this waiting. We sang again last night, and after Costa went away, I sorted a quantity of music for the Queen; and then Prince Albert said he had composed a German ballad, which he thought would suit my voice, and he wished me to sing it. So his royal highness accompanied me, and I sang it at sight, which rather alarmed me; but I got through it, and it is very ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... herself in the prettiest attitude in the world,—"and beg your blessing—please forgive us this time, and we'll never do so any more! And then you will turn your face away, like the baron in the ballad,— ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... of the ancient ballad seems to have been made choice of for this ode, on account of the subject; and it has, indeed, an air of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... with a glory of fair curls that fell low upon her waist and mingled with the wild pink roses at her bosom. The fiddler sat quietly as if he heard nothing until she began to sing, when he turned to look at her. The elder announced, after the ballad, that he had brought with him a wonderful musician who would favour them with some sacred music. He used the word 'sacred' because he had observed, I suppose, that certain of the 'hardshells' were looking askance at the ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... surprise and alarm, to a female figure who stands on the right. This woman has a dark physiognomy, ample flowing drapery of red and white, a white turban twisted round her head, and stretches out her hand with the air of a sibyl. The explanation of this striking group I found in an old ballad-legend. Every one who has studied the moral as well as the technical character of the various schools of art, must have remarked how often the Venetians (and Giorgione more especially) painted groups from the popular fictions and ballads of the time; and it has often been regretted ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick"; mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's "Dispensary," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a camp ballad, popular in 1862, will give a faint idea of the enthusiasm excited by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... sturdy Daniel Malcom and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,—to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... only fixed attribute. And so it has come about that side by side with tomes of Calvinistic divinity, there has been transmitted to Scotsmen an equally characteristic product of the mind of their race—a body of folksong, of ballad poetry, of legend and of story in that quaint and copious Doric speech which makes so direct an appeal to the hearts of men whether they are to the manner born or not. It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... NILS FINN. "There has hardly been written later so excellent a continuation of the old Norwegian humorous ballad as this poem (from the winter of 1856-57),written originally in the Romsdal dialect with which Bjrnson wished 'to astonish the Danes.'" ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the "twa bonnie lassies" of a Scotch ballad, daughters of two Perthshire gentlemen, who in 1666 built themselves a bower in a spot retired from a plague then raging; supplied with food by a lad in love with both of them, who caught the plague and gave it to them, of which they ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... attending such inquiries as arise out of matters so trivial as an old ballad, are curiously illustrated by the answers already printed respecting the "wooing frog." In the first place, it was attributed to times within living memory; then shown to exceed that period, and supposed to be very old,—even as old as the Commonwealth, or, perhaps, as the Reformation. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... desperate defence of a convoy in the Mediterranean against seven Sallee rovers, in which, after a hard engagement lasting four hours, the Mary Rose triumphed decisively without losing a single sail of her convoy. A rude song was made about the action, and the two lines of the ballad, summing up the results, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... which Nancy and Robert Burns lived in dangerous nearness to each other, considering her youth, her temperament, and the passion of admiration which she held for him; three days of poetry and folk-tales and ballad-singing, with the man's dangerous magnetism at ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... name, but without his participation; in which every one was commanded to seize and punish all Papists, who, contrary to law, pretended either to carry arms or exercise any act of authority. It may not be unworthy of notice that a merry ballad, called Lillibullero, being at this time published in derision of the Papists and the Irish, it was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even by the king's army, who were strongly seized with the national spirit. This incident both discovered and served ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... accord, repeat the remark that it is a "barren" period, with nothing admirable about it, at any rate in England; that it shows us the works of Hoccleve and Lydgate near the beginning, The Flower and the Leaf near the middle (about 1460), and the ballad of The Nut-brown Maid at the end of it, and nothing else that is remarkable. In other words, they neglect its most important characteristic, that it was the chief period of the lengthy popular romances and of the popular plays out of ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... possible that it was square;[394] but there is abundant evidence to show that it was not. The very name, Globe, would hardly be suitable to a square building; Jonson describes the interior as a "round";[395] the ballad on the burning of the house refers to the roof as being "round as a tailor's clew"; and the New Globe, which certainly was not square, was erected on the old foundation.[396] The frame, we know, was of timber, and the roof of thatch. In front of the main door was suspended a sign of ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... Unwin, and became a third in their friendship. It was she who told Cowper the story of John Gilpin. The story tickled his fancy so that he woke in the night with laughter over it. He decided to make a ballad of the story, and the next day the ballad was finished. I think I need hardly give you any quotation ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... men's thunder. Their social degeneracy may be traced in the dictionary. The chanter of the "gests" of kings, gesta ducum regumque, dwindled into a gesticulator, a jester: the honored jogelar of Provence, into a mountebank; the jockie, a doggrel ballad-monger. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... he did for revenge. We may imagine that he joined his power to the Moors and harried the land of Leon during his after life, at length reaching Alfonso's heart with his vengeful blade. But of this neither ballad nor legend tells, and with the pathetic scene of the dead father's ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... not hear of such strife between fere and frere, I know not; but Duke Richard sent Hastings to Ireland, and, a month after, the Lady Katherine married Lord Bonville's son and heir,—so, at least, tell the gossips and sing the ballad-mongers. Men add that Lord Hastings still loves the dame, though, certes, he ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of amusement in observing the various personages that daily passed and repassed beneath my window. The character which most of all arrested my attention was a poor blind fiddler, whom I first saw chanting a doleful ballad at the door of a small tavern near the gate of the village. He wore a brown coat, out at elbows, the fragment of a velvet waistcoat, and a pair of tight nankeens, so short as hardly to reach below his calves. A little foraging cap, that had long since seen its ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... some crocuses." These two incidents are a key to the working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had the rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use a song of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole symphony of transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain. To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and a memory which retained and developed powerfully year by year all associations ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... tramping along the high-road, whistling an old ballad of lugubrious tune when a sharp turn brought him face to face with Jase Mallows. Jerry himself was for passing on with a brief salutation, but the other halted him and fell ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... powerless. The quiet world outside their rays receded far away and ceased to be. And the talk, the wonderful talk flowed on—or was it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song—chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique? Did it change into the cry of the wind, plaintive at first, angrily shrill as it freshened, rising to ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... menace the good town of Chesterfield with destruction. Here an incident occurred, on the opening of a vault, which it is needless to relate, but which supplied me with a hint for the commencement of my romance, as well as for the ballad entitled "The Coffin." Upon this hint I immediately acted; and the earlier chapters of the book, together with the description of the ancestral mansion of the Rookwoods, were completed ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... running in my head at intervals through nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless ballad—sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly monotonous the burden, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... gently on the shoulder, and humming a music-hall ballad cheerfully, started off into the garden. He had only gone a few steps when his mother called to him. He stopped. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... The ballad entitled "The Black Shawl" has obtained a degree of popularity among the author's countrymen, for which the slightness of the composition renders it in some measure difficult to account. It may, perhaps, be explained by the circumstance, that the verses are in the original exceedingly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... land he had heard many a sweet ditty sung by noble ladies to the harp and lute, that the children would ever sing at their sports, and that he, too, had oftentimes uplifted his voice in singing of madrigals, she besought him that he would make proof of some ballad or song. The rest of the company joining in her entreaties she left him no peace till he gave way to her desire, and after that he had protested that his singing was no better than the twitter of a starling or a bullfinch, and his ditty only such as he remembered from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... music to surpass herself and vie with her pretended rival; for this theory implies that all sacred music is equally good, and, therefore, better than any other. I grant that Madame Catalani's singing of sacred music is superior to Miss Stephens's ballad-strains, because her singing is better altogether, and an ocean of sound more wonderful than a simple stream of dulcet harmonies. In singing the last verse of 'God Save the King' not long ago her voice towered above the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... he played far more parts than Byron, and crowded more genuine romance into his tragic life than even the sixth Baron of Rochdale. In "The Sick Stock Rider" he reproduces the colonial bush as keenly as Kipling reproduces India. His "How we Beat the Favourite" is the finest ballad of the turf in the language. He is, above everything, the sportsman's poet. This edition contains twelve stirring illustrations in colour by Captain G. D. Giles. 336 pages. Buckram, 5/- net. Bound in Velvet Persian, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... pockets. Every one roared out, and she flew to the door, crying piteously. But she was soon caught by the King, and taken into the back parlor. "Don't you know me, my darling?" said he. "I'm both King Whiskers, your husband the ballad-singer, and the drunken huntsman. Your father knew me well enough when he gave you to me, and all was to drive your pride out of you." Well, she didn't know how she was, with fright, and shame, and joy. Love was uppermost, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... no more for me."—There is a well-known ballad of this name, said to have been written by a Scotchman named "Low." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... labour in the field of sham ballad writing may be fresh to many people who merely know him as the real author of "Barthram's Dirge" and of "The Slaying of Anthony Featherstonhaugh." In an undated letter of 1806, Scott, writing from Ashestiel, thanks Surtees for his "obliging communications." Surtees manifestly began the correspondence, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... tradition immortalized by a fine ballad of Southey's, it is said that the abbots of Aberbrothwick, in their munificent humanity preserved a beacon on that dangerous reef of rock in the German Ocean, which is supposed to have received its name of the "Bell Rock" from the peculiar character of the warning machinery ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... Ericson watched its shadows, the music must have taken hold of him too; for when Robert ceased, he sang a wild ballad of the northern sea, to a tune strange as itself. It was the only time Robert ever heard him sing. Mysie's eyes grew wider and wider as she listened. When it ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... and has left behind him one of the purest of names, encountered the rebels with a considerable force, composed entirely of his own men; these the rebels were the less able to withstand, as they knew that still more troops were on the march. As the ballad of a northern minstrel says, the gold-horned bull of the Nevilles, the silver crescent of the Percies, vanished from the field: the chiefs themselves fled over the Scotch border, their troops dispersed, their declared partisans underwent the severest punishments. ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... January 26th, 1660-61, and February 8th, 1662-3), doubtless formed part of the ceremony of undressing the bridegroom, which, as the age became more refined, fell into disuse. All the old plays are silent on the custom; the earliest notice of which occurs in the old ballad of the wedding of Arthur O'Bradley, printed in the Appendix to "Robin ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... about the affliction of his niece, who had gone from one fainting-fit to another ever since her uncle was found hanging on the St. Michael's pear tree with his pockets inside out. The village poet likewise commemorated the young lady's grief in seventeen stanzas of a ballad. The selectmen held a meeting, and in consideration of Mr. Higginbotham's claims on the town determined to issue handbills offering a reward of five hundred dollars for the apprehension of his murderers and the recovery of the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
