"Lilt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pounded out of the room and there was a clatter of dishes that ably expressed her frame of mind. Above the clatter and down from the children's bedroom floated Lydia's little contralto lilt: ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was falling. It was rather an impressive moment and the pipers, rising to the occasion, played "Blue bonnets o'er the Border." Behind was the sunset in a sky of brilliant crimson. In front stretched great uplands of a dim green, while we, the new Crusaders, crossed over to the lilt of the pipes, whose music astonished Palestine now heard for the first time; and with us in great columns moved guns and cavalry, camels and transport, half seen in a haze of hanging dust. These of course are after thoughts, at the time one's point of view was rather different. One asked oneself ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like If this were Faith and The Woodman, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world's ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... the love of pleasure. The guitars and banjos were playing some wailing tune, with a note of sadness in the core of it so keen and penetrating that it made the water come to Harry's eyes. But it changed suddenly to something that had all the sway and lilt of the rosy South. Men sprang to their feet and clasping arms about one another began to sway back and forth in the ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody," he writes at another time. His best poems move to the cadence of a tune. He probably heard them as did Milton the lines of "Paradise Lost". Sometimes there was a lilt like the singing of a bird, and sometimes the lyric cry, and yet again the music of the orchestra. "He has an ear for the distribution of instruments, and this gives him a desire for the antiphonal, for introducing an answer, or an echo, or ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... a sky beyond the skies Where only one star shines— The Star of Laughing Bells— In Chaos-land it lies; Cold as morning-dew, A gray and tiny boat Moored on Chaos-shore, Where nothing else can float But the Wings of the Morning strong And the lilt of laughing song From many ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... lungs and the wind was blowing their way but they heard it distinctly. It was a quaint syncopated tune, but not one of the Invincibles had any doubt that it came from some daring detachment of the Union Army. The notes with their odd lilt seemed to swell through the forest, but it was strange to both ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... quite empty. From drawing-room and library and dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... value. To do the man justice, however, I had no fault to find with the very pleasant little circle into which he insisted on ushering me, at one end of the glazed veranda, and should have enjoyed my evening but for an inquisitive anxiety to get in touch with the unsuspecting pair. Meanwhile the lilt of a waltz had mingled with the click of billiard balls and the talking and laughing which make a summer's night vocal in that outpost of pleasure on the silent heights; and some of our party had ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... you," she said, with a whimsical lilt in her voice. "I was thinkin' how elegant it is when we get home ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... walkin on the strand, I spied ane auld man sit On ane auld black rock; and aye the waves Cam washin up its fit. His lips they gaed as gien they wad lilt, But o' liltin, wae's me, was nane! He spak but an owercome, dreary and dreigh, A burden wha's sang was gane: "Robbie and Jeanie war twa bonnie bairns; They playt thegither i' the gloamin's hush: Up cam the tide and the mune ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Sam's lilt ceased abruptly. The riders came hurrying. Sam appeared, with Mormon waddling after, too swiftly for his best ease or grace of motion, both grabbing at Sandy, swatting him on ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... love, if soothing, Is no sweeter than pincers are soft—and a new sickle Cuts no sharper than crab's claws nip, keen as boar's toothing! Yet crab's love's no less fervent than bard's, if less musical— 'Tis a new thing I'd lilt—but a true thing. ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is struck by a conviction that this or the other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... calling of birds, The lowing of cattle Must blend with the words. Without these, indeed, you Would find it ere long, As though I should read you The words of a song That lamely would linger When lacking the rune, The voice of the singer, The lilt of the tune. ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... 'My bird, my bonnie, bonnie bird, Is that a sang ye borrow? Are these some words ye've learnt by heart, Or a lilt o' dool an' sorrow? 'Oh, no, no, no,' the wee bird sang; 'I've flown sin' mornin' early; But sic a day o' wind an' rain— Oh, wae's me for ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... ayont the Tweed, Your skins wi' claes o' tartan cleed, An' lilt alang the verdant mead, Or blithely on your whistles blaw, An' sing auld Scotia's barns an ha's, Her bourtree dykes an mossy wa's, Her faulds, her bughts, an' birken shaws, Whare love an' ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the town with a movement somewhat like that of a tall thin lily stalk swayed by zephyrs—with a lilt, a cadence, an ever changing rhythm of joy: plain walking on the solid earth was not for her. At friendly houses along the way she peeped into open windows, calling to friends; she stooped over baby carriages on the ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... it appeared. All through that time he wore an odd look of excitement, triumph, pleasure, which lifted him away from himself. There was a sort of lilt in his very step; his eyes shone, his cheeks were flushed. When he cleared a pile of freshly-ironed, starched things from the end of a table, so as to spread out a score upon it, laid them on the floor where the cat padded them over with dirty feet, and his mother railed at him, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... The easy flow, the careless charm of their versification, is by no means the artless matter it may seem to a careless reader. Nor is it the easiest of metrical tasks to poise perfectly the loose lilt ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... her songs being of her own land, one of the highlands, with the perfume of the gorse and the heather in the lilt of it, and the second, by demand of Sandy, the gipsy song which had been handed down from woodland mother to woodland child for hundreds of years; a song which sent Nancy's lawless blood to her cheeks and set her heart beating with an inherited remembrance of raids and sea-fights, and lawless loves; ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... though none deplore us, We who go reaping that we sowed; Cities at cock-crow wake before us— Hey, for the lilt of the London road! One look back, and a rousing chorus! Never ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... though he seemed to be Only a boy—I loved him so!) And ah, how pleasant he made it all! And the things he knew that I should know!— The stage, the "drop," and the frescoed wall; The sudden flash of the lights; and oh, The orchestra, with its melody, And the lilt and jingle and jubilee Of "The Little Man ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... shifting his position to ease his cramped limbs after the manner of the range rider. In spite of himself, his eyes would drift toward the jaunty little figure on the pinto. The masculine in him approved mightily her lissom grace and the proud lilt of her dark head, with its sun-kissed face set in profile to him. He thought her serviceable costume very becoming, from the pinched felt hat pinned to the dark mass of hair, and the red silk kerchief knotted loosely ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... a day in spring when the desire mastered the fear that was in her. It was a perfect afternoon, the air a-lilt with bird-songs, and full of the perfume of early flowers. Her husband was ploughing in a distant field, and surely would not return for an hour or two; what might one not do in an hour? She called her little friend, Petie, who was ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... was a stir, there was a bustle in the court; a sparkle in the eyes of some as they glanced slyly and under their lashes at the house, a lilt in the tread of others as they stepped to and fro. He divined that hands would fly to caubeens and knees seek the ground if a certain face showed at a window: moreover, that that at which he merely guessed was no secret to the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... stick, I swung off in that direction. It was bright, but cold, and the surf, I remember, was booming loudly, though there had been no wind in our parts for days. I zigzagged up the steep pathway, breathing in the thin, keen morning air, and humming a lilt as I went, until I came out, a little short of breath, among the whins upon the top. Looking down the long slope of the farther side, I saw Cousin Edie, as I had expected; and I saw Jim Horscroft walking ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the daisy, and that her hair, which was yellow as the primrose, should have tumbled in wavelets about them. There ought to have been sunshine in the blue eyes, and laughter on the red lips, and merry lilt in the soft voice. But the pink had faded from the girl's cheek; the shadow had chased the sunshine from her eyes; her lips had taken a downward turn, and a note of sadness had stolen the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... his eyes the lilt of the girl's movements. Apparently he had not heard what the officer said. At least ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Perhaps it was the lilt of a Gaelic song in these pages that brought a sorrow on me. That very sweet language will be gone soon, if not gone already, and no book learning will revive the suppleness of idiom, that haunting misty ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... at the same moment a singing voice became audible in the trees behind them. The song came floating to them through the sunlight with a sound of wind and birds. It had a marvellous quality, very sweet and very moving. There was a lilt in it, a laughing, happy lilt, as though the Earth herself ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... ocean old; 140 From fireside lone and trampling street Let thy life garner daily wheat; The epic of a man rehearse, Be something better than thy verse; Make thyself rich, and then the Muse Shall court thy precious interviews, Shall take thy head upon her knee, And such enchantment lilt to thee, That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow From farthest stars to grass-blades low, 150 And find the Listener's science still Transcends ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... and late. Their merit is of a supreme quality; some of the most famous musical composers, inspired by his works, have graced them with admirable music. One of the most attractive features in his lyrics is their spontaneous ease of expression. They seem to lilt into music of their own accord, as naturally as birds sing. The best of these are found in the comedies of the Second Period and in the romantic plays of the Fourth. "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more" in Much Ado About Nothing; "Blow, blow, thou winter wind" ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... any Negro poet writing in the dialect to-day, summons to his work the lilt, the spontaneity and charm of which Dunbar was the supreme master whenever he employed that medium. It is well to say a word here about the dialect poems of James Edwin Campbell. In dialect, Campbell was a precursor of Dunbar. ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... of letters could reproduce Dougal's accent, and I will not attempt it. There was a touch of Irish in it, a spice of music-hall patter, as well as the odd lilt of the Glasgow vernacular. He was strong in vowels, but the consonants, especially the letter "t," ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... "Dolores" he understood thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not understand it, he concluded. How could she, living the refined life she did? Then he chanced upon Kipling's poems, and was swept away by the lilt and swing and glamour with which familiar things had been invested. He was amazed at the man's sympathy with life and at his incisive psychology. Psychology was a new word in Martin's vocabulary. He had ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... followed the trail to Yeager's Spur—one a man, brown and forceful; the other a girl, with sunshine in her dancing eyes and a voice full of the lilt of laughter. What they might come to be to each other both were already speculating about, though neither knew as yet. They were the best of friends—good comrades, save when chance eyes said unguardedly too much. For the girl that sufficed, but it was not enough for the man. He knew that he had ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... the Great Spirit's children dwelt Forever hushed is the papoose's wail, and stilled the squaw's low-crooning lilt. No longer shimmers starlight from eyes of savage maids Worshippers of the fire and sun, poor dwellers of the caves— The sisters of the deer and lo, shy startled fawns of Aztec race Or coy ancestral dams of ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... prison. Some of them, too, are welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing that bewails ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... know that my fancy flows, With the lilt of a dear old-fashioned tune, Through "Lewis Carroll's" poemly prose, And the tale of "The ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... Lilt thy song, and lute away In the wildest fashion:— Pour thy rippling roundelay O'er the heights of passion!— Flash it down the fretted strings Till thy mad lips, missing All but smothered whisperings, Press ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... will stay. The poet and the orator have this in common. Each must so express and clothe his thought that it shall penetrate and take possession of the soul, and, having penetrated, must abide and stay. How this is done, who can tell? Carlyle defines poetry as a "sort of lilt." Cicero finds the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... was it in death's cold land there was no perfume Of the scented flowers, or lilt of a bird's gay tune. No sea there, or no cool of a wind's fresh breath, No woods, no plains, no ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson
... constant accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in—an effect of perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony. Were its metrical harmony tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... came the dynamite explosions blowing up the city in blocks. When the muffled roar was over, the gathering quiet was pierced by the thin, high notes of gramophones. From the shadow of trees Caruso's voice rose in the swaggering lilt of "La Donna e Mobile," to be answered by Melba's, crystal-sweet, from a machine stored in a crowded cart. There were ragtime melodies, and someone had a record of "Marching Through Georgia" that always drew forth applause. Then, as the night advanced, a gradual hush ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a plentiful feast in the maple-tree shade, The lilt of a song to an old-fashioned tune, The talk of a friend, or the kiss of a maid, To sweeten the cup that we drink to the noon. Oh, the deep noon, the full noon, Of all the day the best! When the blue sky burns, and the great sun turns To his home by ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... did he come near to breaking his promise. One evening, when March was melting into April, and the pulses of spring were stirring under the lingering snow, he was walking home from school alone. As he descended into the little hollow below the manse a lively lilt of music drifted up to meet him. It was only the product of a mouth-organ, manipulated by a little black-eyed, French-Canadian hired boy, sitting on the fence by the brook; but there was music in the ragged urchin and it came out through his simple toy. It tingled over Felix from head ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... mien and laughing voice I followed, followed the swing of her white dress That rocked in a lilt along: I watched the poise Of her feet as they flew for a space, then paused to press The grass deep down with the royal burden of her: And gladly I'd offered my breast ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... flute gliding along with her. And oh, how beautiful it was for her! How beautiful it was to sing the little song in the sweetness of her own spirit. How sweet it was to move pure and unhampered at last in the music! The lovely ease and lilt of her own soul in its motion through the music! She wasn't aware of the flute. She didn't know there was anything except her own pure lovely song-drift. Her soul seemed to breathe as a butterfly breathes, as ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... you struck by the gloom and horror of those long-held notes, to which the words are set: 'Dans la foret prochaine'? We find here all the sinister spells of Jerusalem Delivered, just as we find all chivalry in the chorus with the Spanish lilt, and in the march tune. How original is the alegro with the modulations of the four cymbals (tuned to C, D, C, G)! How elegant is the call to the lists! The whole movement of the heroic life of the period is there: the mind enters into it; I read in it a romance, ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... thinking he has given you your heart's desire. Why, then, hurt him by telling him that the shoes are not your desire? Why not, with head held high, lead the dance you speak of, and forget shoes, and remember only the movement of the dance, the lilt of the music?" ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... ditty, ballad, onody, chansonnette, lyric, lilt, lied, paean, cantata, aria, sonnet, strain, round, rhapsody, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... an' turn King David owre, And lilt wi' holy clangor; O' double verse come gie us four, An' skirl up the Bangor: This day the kirk kicks up a stoure; Nae mair the knaves shall wrang her, For Heresy is in her pow'r, And gloriously she'll whang her Wi' pith ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Dud to Jim, as they made their way through the chatting, laughing throng, and caught the lilt of the music on the beach beyond, where bathers, reckless of the church bells' call, were disporting themselves in the sunlit waves. "It's tough, with a place like this so near, to be shut up on a desert island for a whole vacation. I say, Jim, let's ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... him. Shallow as was his mental observation, there was that in the things which had happened which made his little power of analysis useless. Carrie was still with him, but not helpless and pleading. There was a lilt in her voice which was new. She did not study him with eyes expressive of dependence. The drummer was feeling the shadow of something which was coming. It coloured his feelings and made him develop those little attentions ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... brain—with the hate of an Italian who sees another taking the bread out of his mouth. All this, coupled with the fact that your Italian is a natural-born hater, may indicate that the life of Mary Gowd had not the lyric lilt that life is commonly reputed to ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... mi muse, an' lilt me a spring, Tho'daghtless awhile tha's been on the wing; But yet tha mun try to cum up ta t'mark, An' give us sum rhyme for a bit of a lark: An' tho' at thy notes in this sensation age, Wiseacres may giggle an' critics may rage, Thou art my sole hobby there is no mistake, So sing us t'Excursion ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... perfect of body, too sound of health, not to revel in such a dawn as swept across the flats next morning. The sun caressed her throat, her bare head, the uplifted face. As the tender light of daybreak was in the hills, so there was a lilt in her heart that found expression in her voice, her buoyant footsteps, and the shine of her eyes. She had slept soundly in Beaudry's blankets while he had lain down in his slicker on the other side of ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... prospector had begun at the end of Front Street to make a systematic search of the gambling-houses. Although it was very late they were running noisily, and at last he found the man he wanted playing "Black Jack," the smell of tar in his clothes, the lilt of the sea in his boisterous ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... D. Roberts Sweet Wild April William Force Stead Spinning in April Josephine Preston Peabody Song: On May Morning John Milton A May Burden Francis Thompson Corinna's Going a-Maying Robert Herrick "Sister, Awake" Unknown May Edward Hovell-Thurlow May Henry Sylvester Cornwell A Spring Lilt Unknown Summer Longings Denis Florence MacCarthy Midsummer John Townsend Trowbridge A Midsummer Song Richard Watson Gilder June, from "The Vision of Sir Launfal" James Russell Lowell June Harrison Smith Morris Harvest Ellen Mackay Hutchinson Cortissoz ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... certain family resemblance, in the melody as in the theme, that to the untrained and unaccustomed ear may convey an impression of monotony. But to each ballad, as to each psalm, there belongs a peculiar strain or lilt, touched, as a rule, with a solemn or piercing pathos, often cast in the plaintive minor mode, that alone can bring out the full inner meaning of the words, and that is endeared and hallowed by centuries of association. ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... within him. It was impossible to keep the lilt of it entirely out of his eyes. They were radiant with this ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... changed hands. One agent had brought in a big steel safe and a tent and was buying coal lands right and left. More young men drifted in from all points of the compass. A tent-hotel was put at the foot of Imboden Hill, and of nights there were under it much poker and song. The lilt of a definite optimism was in every man's step and the light of hope was in every ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... and the jeweled miniature which she held in her hand seemed no longer to attract her. The odor of rose and heliotrope pervaded the gently stirring air. From the convent garden came the melting lilt of the golden oriole. By and by madame's gaze returned to the miniature. For a brief space poppies burned in her cheeks and the seed smoldered in her eyes. Then, as if the circlet of gold and gems was distasteful to her sight, she hastily thrust it into the bosom of ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... with Maurice for the past quarter of an hour, while from the ballroom close by came as in a dream to her the gentle lilt of the waltz, and from behind her, a cluster of sweet-scented crimson roses filled the air with their fragrance. Crystal didn't feel that she wanted to talk, only to sit here quietly with the sound ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... sunbeams were playing hide-and-seek through the branches that dance in the soft wind. All the air was sweet and the little girl couldn't help being light-hearted. She sang, too; not measured hymns of sorrow and repentance, but a gay lilt that followed the bird voices. And she went down to breakfast and said ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... espial, Danced her down with sound of viol; Wheeling angels, past espial, Descanting on "Viola." ANGELS. Sing, in our footing, a Lovely lilt of "Viola!" ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... made the very heart of our Lord glad. What a surprise it was to those in that gloomy old prison. They had heard the walls ring with groans and shrieks. They had heard bitter oaths in the night, but songs with the lilt of an irrepressible joy in them—they had never heard ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... the unromantic night, out of the somber blurring January fog, came a voice lifted in song, a soprano, rich, full and round, young, yet matured, sweet and mysterious as a night-bird's, haunting and elusive as the murmur of the sea in a shell: a lilt from La Fille de Madame Angot, a light opera long since forgotten in New York. Hillard, genuinely astonished, lowered his pipe and listened. To sit dreaming by an open window, even in this unlovely first month of the year, in that grim unhandsome city which boasts of its riches ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... impersonal glance, saw that she had destroyed him utterly, relented, and graciously acquiesced. When they left the office Matt Peasley was stepping high, like a ten-time winner, for he had suddenly made the discovery that life ashore was a wonderful, wonderful thing. There was such a lilt in his young heart that, for the life of him, he could not forbear doing a little double shuffle as he waited at the elevator with Cappy and his ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... holding forth within. The wonder was, not that the man should play egregiously ill, but that the effect of good music should be produced by his evil playing. The people were evidently excited to sorrow when the attempt was at a mournful strain, and to ardour when the lilt took a loftier flight. To me who stood by, the difference of intention on the part of the performer was hardly discernible; indeed to be recognised only by the occasional catching of some familiar word in the burden of the song. The same observation may apply to the current ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... long before this mad dance sobered down to regular rhythm and form. From Corinth, where Arion first laboured, we pass to Sicyon, where the taming of the dithyramb into an art form was accomplished by Praxilla, a poetess who added a new charm to the lilt of this Bacchic ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... spirituous liquors. My lads had made no such resolution. The big iron pot was now, like an honest old sailor that had done his duty, kicked aside the corner; the drummer and fifer seating themselves on the keel of the inverted dinghy, and struck up a lilt, and:— ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... house at Kootenay! I hate to think of it empty. We had such good times there twelve months ago. They have a song here to a nursery rhyme lilt, Apres le Guerre Finis; it goes on to tell of all the good times we'll have when the war is ended. Every night I invent a new story of my own celebration of the event, usually, as when I was a kiddie, just before ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, caught and bound in rose thickets. All was dedicated to love and a lover's madness, and there were songs in it which haunted him with their lilt and refrain. When the book was finished it replaced the loose leaves as his constant companion by day and night. Three times a day he repeated his ritual to himself, seeking out the loneliest places in the woods, or going up to his room; and from the fixed ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... what's brewing To the lilt of his lyric wiles: The fiddler knows what rueing Will come of ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... Struck by the note of appeal in her voice, so unlike its lilt of the moment before, he added: "Ride on if ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... standing with white face and quivering lip in a corner of the mean chamber. Then he laughed again, and in a hoarse voice, sorely suggestive of the bottle, he broke into song. He lay back in his chair, his long, spare legs outstretched, his spurs jingling to the lilt of his ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... a-thrill and a-bound With the vigor of boyhood and morning, and the noontide's rapture of ease! Was there ever a weary heart in the world? A lag in the body's urge or a flag of the spirit's wings? Did a man's heart ever break For a lost hope's sake? For here there is lilt in the quiet and calm in the quiver of things. Ay, this old oak, gray-grown and knurled, Solemn and sturdy and big, Is as young of heart, as alert and elate in his rest, As the nuthatch there that clings to the tip of the twig And scolds at the ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... At the lilt in her voice Mollie, at her end of the wire, sat up and stared inquiringly into the black mouth of ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... thus, within the cool, green twilight, watchful of eye and with heavy quarter-staff poised upon his shoulder, he presently heard the music of a pipe now very mournful and sweet, anon breaking into a merry lilt full of rippling trills and soft, bubbling notes most pleasant to be heard. Wherefore he went aside and thus, led by the music, beheld a jester in his motley lying a-sprawl beneath a tree. A long-legged knave was he, ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... "song" was written to music or at least written that it might be set to music, but now it must sing itself. It may dress in sober iambics if it pleases, but there must be a lilt and go to the words to suggest music. Among the best examples of this form open to the reader are the songs of Robert Burns. Though written to fit old Scotch airs the words themselves suggest a melody to any one with the slightest ear ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... no rhyme that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech, And ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... of being a "white man," to say nothing of his victories in the region of gallantry. He made no wealth; he only got that he might spend. Irishman-like he would barter the chances of fortune for the lilt of a voice or the clatter of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... The lilt of this little romance, with its pretty repetitions, is delightful, and the symbolism is, of course, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... of the dear old time— So full of the dear old friends I knew. And under its rhythm, and lilt, and rhyme, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... remain stationary while the wind is on or near the base of the bobbin. When the cone of the bobbin diminishes so as to materially increase the pull on the traveler, the conical drums are started by a belt shipper attached to the lilt motion. By the movement of the belt on these drums a continually accelerated motion is given to the rings, their maximum speed being about one-twentieth the number of revolutions per minute as the spindle has at the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... instead Of your brows direct and wise, Of the little lilt of your head And your dark-lashed, sky-clear eyes, Of the soft brown braids demure, The poise as of quiet light, The perfect profile, sweet and pure,— Never I dream ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... she?" he said to Mihul. He made vague curving motions in the air with one hand, more or less opposing ones with the other. "That sort of an up-and-sideways lilt when ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines To Get the Final Lilt of Songs indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See My Prologue.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See The Mage.] were not ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... slope could be traversed. A fast-running dog is not an easy mark for a bullet—especially if the dog be a collie, with a trace of wolf—ancestry in his gait. A dog, at best, does not gallop straight ahead as does a horse. There is almost always a sidewise lilt to his run. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... 'King Charles, the Young Hero'. Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' is technically a finer poem than anything Tegnr has written, but it lacks the deep, virile bass, the tremendous volume of breath and voice, and the captivating martial lilt which makes the heart beat willy nilly to the rhythm of the verse" (Essays on ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... Nothing like having things in leases. The business instinct—what? Put it in black and white, says I. 'La Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca, of the Palazzo Sebastiani, via Quattro Fontane, Rome, party of the second part.' A beau vers, is n't it? The lilt, the swelling cadence, the rich rhyme, the hidden alliterations,—and then the sensitive, haunting pathos, the eternal verities adumbrated by its symbolism. I 've stood upon Achilles' tomb, and heard Troy ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... sang the reckless words to their merry, careless lilt, he looked down at her and wondered—wondered at her—at himself. This was no place for him by this woman's side, under her husband's roof- tree. Yet here he was, and he should have gone days before. After the years he was just getting acquainted ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... lilt of the waltz rippled to us, And through us the exquisite thrill of the air: Like the scent of bruised bloom was her breath, and its dew was Not honier-sweet than her warm kisses were. We stood there enchanted.—And O the delight of The sight of the stars and the moon and the ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... in from the kitchen to say that he must have some of the good old rousing Scotch songs they used to sing when he was home. So Mary brought out the old tartan-covered song-book and they sang it through, from the dreamy wail of "Ye Banks and Braes" to the rollicking lilt of the Hundred ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... drive through Cairo to the Pyramids, whether you spin out there in a motor, or trot on a donkey, or lilt on a camel, squatting cross-legged on a load of green bersim. Past the great swinging bridge, and the Island of Ghezireh (the word that in itself means "island") begins the six-mile dyke, which is the road made by Ismail ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the sky I love, But one unbroken sapphire spanning all; And nobler than the branches of a pine Aslant upon a precipice's edge Are the strained spars of some great battle-ship Plowing across the sunset. No bird's lilt So takes me as the whistling of the gale Among the shrouds. My cradle-song was this, Strange inarticulate sorrows of the sea, Blithe rhythms upgathered from the Sirens' caves. Perchance of earthly voices the last voice ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... not, it is certain that the gallery had. All the evening they had been stewing in an atmosphere like that of the inner room of a Turkish bath, and they were ready for anything. It needed but a trifle to set them off. The lilt of that unspeakable Yankee melody supplied that trifle. Kay's malcontents, huddled in their seats by the window, were the first to break out. Feet began to stamp in time to the music—softly ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... screws, and a faint windy whistle the ship's speed made in the rigging. The passengers were all below. Then, suddenly, a burst of music came up as some one opened a saloon port-hole and as quickly closed it again—a tenor voice singing to the piano some trivial modern song with a trashy sentimental lilt. It was—in this setting of sea and sky—painful; O'Malley caught himself thinking of a barrel-organ ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... young of his kind Yearn for the paths that the vagabonds find, He leads them out over loitering ways Where the Southland beckons with luring days; To wait till the laughter-like lilt of his song Is ripe for the ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... answer him immediately and he smiled to himself as he paddled in silence. For, if the truth must be told, Mr. Philip Kendrick was enjoying himself immensely. He had only the sound of her voice from which to draw deductions; but the cultured tones of it and the lilt of her low laughter bespoke an education and refinement with which he failed to reconcile the idea that she ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... swore her laughter had the lilt Of chiming waters that are spilt In sprays of spurted melody From founts of carven porphyry, And in the billowy turbulence Of her dusk hair drowned soul and sense— Dark tides and deep, ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... remained with him, clear and insistent after yesterday's impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she now, when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and every little gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager change of the glowing face, were fresh and living, in all their beautiful reality, but a matter of minutes past? He no longer resisted the bewitchment; he wanted ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... and as they passed, the hum of voices and laughter and the cheery lilt of island melody died away, and the paddlers looked shoreward to the motionless figure of Prout, who, with the child by his side, seemed to heed naught but the wide sweep of ocean that ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... wherein consists the true lyrical magic. In that line of Burns's, clearly, it lies in the harmony of lyric thought and lyric lilt. In— ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt, which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer joy ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... sky was deepest blue and flecked with summer clouds. Loud-voiced birds called gaily of the summer's ending, talked of travel in a glad, gay lilt. The bees droned on; the bullfrogs gave forth a deep wise thought or two; while softly, deeply, brownly, flowed the stream beside the path, with only a far, still fisherman here and there who noticed not. But Courtland ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... right spirit, but a sense of form beyond the common. She does not pretend to heroics and she seldom allows herself to touch a note of pathos; her mission is just to inspire other hearts with the infectious gay courage of her own. It finds a natural expression in the easy lilt of her measures. She is fluent rather than polished and never overlays her designs with excess of embroidery. Long practice has made her familiar with a craft which is not so easy as it looks; and in particular she has learnt the art of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... The old lilt died on his lips. With a startled oath he reined in sharply and, shielding his eyes from the sun-glare, remained staring straight in front of him. They had just topped the crest of the rise. The eastward slope showed a low-lying, undulating ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... was a salve for all external ills that flesh is heir to. It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering. It could not fail. He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt. It was his own discovery. An obscure chemist's assistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, hit ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... the quiet charm and dry humor of the original. If the reader will observe the following general rules (which of necessity ignore many differences in pronunciation of fourteenth-century English), he may, in an hour or two, learn to read Chaucer almost as easily as Shakespeare: (1) Get the lilt of the lines, and let the meter itself decide how final syllables are to be pronounced. Remember that Chaucer is among the most musical of poets, and that there is melody in nearly every line. If the verse seems rough, it ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and not too nice in its sentiments, as, indeed, why should it be, to please its hearers? There was a lilt in its chorus which even Stefan's unmusical voice could not hide, and it set the men's heads nodding in time as they roared it out together, waking the echoes with the declaration that—"The eye of a maid may sparkle, And the fools may for ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... the freer music is in the unique chant, "Over the sea our galleys went:" a song full of melody and blithe lilt. It is marvellously pictorial, and yet has a freedom that places it among the most delightful of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... expansive liberalism movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the world, to extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into trousers, and train the teeming myriads of India to appreciate the exquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some absurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not let the fact that the middle Victorians counted Scott, the suffrage and pantaloons among the supreme blessings of life, conceal from us the very real nobility of their dream ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... through sound of bees and river. The notes fell, round and starred, between young leaves, Trilled to a spiral lilt, stopped on a quiver. The Lady Eunice listens and believes. Gervase has many tales of her dear Lord, His bravery, his knowledge, his charmed life. She quite forgets who's speaking in the gladness Of being this man's wife. Gervase ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... definitely—they knew where they were going; momently one would detach itself from the others in a burst of joyous energy and sweep a great circle and back again to its comrades, and then away, away, away to the skyline.—Ye swift ones! O, freedom and sweetness! A song falling from the heavens! A lilt through deep sunshine! Happy wanderers! How fast ye fly and how bravely—up and up, till the earth has fallen away and the immeasurable heavens and the deep loneliness of the sunlight and the silence ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... judgement would be wrong. Charles of Orleans has a note quite new and one that after him never failed, but grew in volume and in majesty until it filled the great chorus of the Pleiade—the Lyrical note of direct personal expression. Perhaps the wars produced it in him; the lilt of the marching songs ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... was unusually fresh and original. Contrast it with the maudlin "Keep the home fires burning," which holds the field to-day, and it touches great art. I never hear it even now on the street organ without a certain pleasure—a pleasure mingled with pain, for its happy lilt comes weighted with the tremendous emotions of those unforgettable days. It is like a butterfly caught in a tornado, a catch of song in the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... operator was swift of the swiftest; he despatched with a lightning lilt, and the keenness of his ears, for which he was famous on more than one ocean, made it possible for him to receive signals with rarely the necessity for ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... me that his mother always sang him this song when he had been a good boy; I replied that mine had done the same. How many French mothers have sung the merry little lilt, I wonder? We sang one snatch and another, and I could not see that the marquise had had the advantage of the little peasant girl, if it came ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... as well look over them at once," said Lancelot firmly, uncoiling them. "It won't take you five minutes—just let me play one to you. The tunes are rather more original than the average, I can promise you; and yet I think they have a lilt that——" ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... reached the door, the reception was nearing its highest tide. The rooms were bright with uniforms and with trailing gowns, gay with the hum of voices; and the lilt of a waltz came softly to them from across the distance. As they halted on the threshold, Weldon lifted his eyes and suddenly found them resting full upon Ethel Dent. The girl was quite at the farther end of the long room, the central figure of a little throng, and wholly unconscious ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... the Green Meadows rose the clear lilt of Carol the Meadow Lark, and among the alders just where the Laughing Brook ran into the Smiling Pool a flood of happiness was pouring from the throat of Little Friend the Song Sparrow. Winsome Bluebird's sweet, almost plaintive, whistle seemed to fairly float in the air, ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... not wait for his music. Dropping him a little demure, mocking curtsy she turned and ran down the box-edged path, singing as she went, and the air she sang was Stephen La Mothe's "Heigh-ho! love is my life; Live I in loving and love I to live!" and the lilt of the music set Master Homer's ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... sing noo, Charlie," replied Geordie, clearing his throat, "but I'll confess that I hae seen the day when I could lilt it wi' ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... touch now brightens into jade Lintel and door, and when she lifts the blind Floats through the darkened chamber of her sleep; While leagues away my love-winged messages Go flocking home; and though they mingle not, Our thoughts seek one another. In the lilt Of winds I hear her whisper: "Oh that I Might melt into the moonbeams, and with them Leap through the void, and shed myself with them Upon my lover." Slow the night creeps on. Sleep harbours in the little room. She dreams — Dreams of a fall o' ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... specially interesting in the original, inasmuch as it is rhymed throughout, although printed as prose. A kind of lilt is perceptible in many of the Skazkas, and traces of rhyme are often to be detected in them, but "The Mizgir's" mould is different from theirs. Many stories also exist in an artificially versified form, but ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... tales 'Neath flaunting pageants fall, And over Pantomime prevails The Muse of Music Hall. Still echoes, wafted through the din, A lilt of one old tune— Of Columbine and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... we may have experienced the like. As we turn over the leaves, we may find ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt, and sing themselves to music of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the delightful collection of folk-poetry entitled, Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England (1846). Mr. Dixon wrote comparatively little poetry himself, but his song, "The Milkin'-time," has the lilt of the best Scottish folk-songs and well deserves its inclusion here. In a longer poem, "Slaadburn Faar" (1871), he gives a humorous and racy description of the adventures of a farmer and his wife on their journey from Grassington to Slaidburn to attend the local fair. In general idea it resembles ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... was received with cheers, and after he had gone through the mockery of clearing his throat, and pitching his voice after the usual manner of your would-be fine singers, he gave out, to the tune of a well-known rollicking Irish lilt, the following burlesque version of the subject of ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... making his bold eyes round), Peppina, Ruffo. They went by and returned, gathered about her, separated, melted away as people do in our musings. Her eyes were fixed on the low roof of the cave. The lilt of the water seemed to rock her soul in a cradle. "Madre—Ruffo! Madre—Ruffo!" The words were in her mind like a refrain. And then the oddity, the promiscuity of life struck her. How many differences ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... his greatest weapon in life He felt things, he did not study them If women hadn't memory, she answered, they wouldn't have much Lilt of existence lulling to sleep wisdom and tried experience Lonely we come into the world, and lonely we go out of it Never to be content with superficial reasons and ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... nervous hands, and turning about in a little space like an animal in a cage, over the hedge through the apple-boughs a boy's clear voice rose suddenly, singing a rollicking tune, with a snapping of fingers and tapping of feet in time to its merry lilt. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett |
