"Murmurous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... risen, the Prince in brief while went Forth to the market-place, where babblement Of them that bought and them that sold was one Of many sounds in murmurous union— buzzing as of bees about their hives, With shriller gossiping of garrulous wives Piping a tuneless treble thereunto: In midst whereof he went his way as who Looketh about him well before he buys, To mark the manner of their merchandise; Till chancing upon one ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... within the murmurous vestibule His young disciple. "'Tis no common rule, Lycius," said he, "for uninvited guest To force himself upon you, and infest With an unbidden presence the bright throng Of younger friends; yet must I do this wrong, And you forgive me." Lycius blush'd, and led ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... evening about a week after their arrival, when they were all seated, as usual, in the open air, under a lime-tree on the lawn. The sun was beginning to set, and the rain of golden sunlight fell over them through the green ambrosial foliage of the tree whose pale blossoms were still murmurous with bees. Eric was leaning back in an easy chair, with Wildney sitting on the grass, cross-legged at his feet, while Montagu, resting on one of the mossy roots, read to them the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and the ladies were busy with ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... our feet. A shell had crashed into the house and exploded in the room above us. Bushels of plaster fell among us. That modest and murmurous ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... only a funny scratchy sound; then a murmur, growing louder, as she tuned the instrument to the required wave length. The murmurous sound grew louder—more distinct. Amy squealed right out loud! For it seemed as though somebody ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... realisation of sound. The world about me was alive with a murmurous humming. It was as if in passing through the silent aisles of sleep, some door had been unexpectedly thrown open and let in the tumultuous roar of life from without—or as if after a brief absence I had returned ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... the voice of waters falling From cliffs that echo back their murmurous song; Less sweet the summer sound of breezes calling Through pine-tree tops sonorous all day long; Than are thy rhymes, the soul of grief enthralling, Thy rhymes o'er field and forest borne along: If she but hear ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the doctor spoke. They were low, faint, murmurous sounds, for the lips were nearly at rest. Wanted no more for utterance, they were going back to the holy ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... glided on and on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide—how peaceful ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... open doorway of the ranch came the faint clink of glasses and the murmurous flow of voices. Presently the boom of the veterans' jovial laugh swelled the "concourse of sweet sounds," and ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... the atmosphere between them. In wild, savage gusts, she heard the military bands playing the infamous Dequelo, whose notes of blood and fire commingled, shrieked in every ear—"NO QUARTER! NO QUARTER!" A prolonged shout, the booming of cannon, an awful murmurous tumult, a sense of horror, of crash and conflict, answered the merciless, frenzied notes, and drowned them in the shrieks and curses they ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... and his touch was magical with sleep. Valentine had surely evoked him by a strange effort of will. He came, and his feet were shod so that he moved without noise. He filled the atmosphere with heaviness, and with a murmurous melody, like the melody of the drooping streams that hang their silver ribands over the hills of the far Lotus land. Passing the doctor, he stole to the place where Cuckoo sat between Julian and Valentine. And then he paused. The doctor divined his mission, to weave a veil ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... were picketed in an open glade at a little distance: in recurrent pauses in the talk, the sound of their grazing on the scanty grass came to the ear; all else was silence save the tinkling of a mountain rill,—a keen detached appoggiatura rising occasionally above the monody of its murmurous flow,—and the melancholy chiming of some lingering cicada, the latest spared of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... which made persons who knew no better give Mr Wentworth credit for tact, a quality unknown to him. He was walking slowly in a perplexed manner under the lime-trees. They were all in glorious blossom, filling the air with that mingling sense of fragrance and music which is the soul of the murmurous tree: but the short figure of the Squire, in his morning-coat, with his perplexed looks, was not at all an accessory in keeping with the scene. He was taking his walk in a subdued way, pondering something—and it puzzled him sorely in his straightforward, unprofound ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the night, murmurous with little rivulets of snow-water, the gurgling of full troughing, and the patter of rain on the iron roof of the house and the miniature roofs of the beehives, Hazel, waking from uneasy slumber, heard those words and ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... what's it like in Kansas? I'm going down through there some day." He spoke harshly. But the real Carl was robed in light and the murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics down ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... acts of supplication, as I used to witness them at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, were accompanied by stretchings out of the hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, by deep breathings, by murmurous sounds which seemed just breaking out of silence, like Virgil's bees out of the hive, 'magnis clamoribus'. My Father fortified his religious life by prayer as an athlete does his physical life by lung-gymnastics and ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... mist, the lamplight fell upon a face upturned from a murmurous gutter, a yellow face, wide and flat, with lips grinning back from locked teeth and eyes frozen in a staring question to which no living man ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... doorstep in the late afternoon. Great tranquillities were all about them in land and sea and sky. Silvery gulls were soaring over them. The horizons were laced with long trails of frail, pinkish clouds. The hushed air was threaded with a murmurous refrain of minstrel winds and waves. Pale asters were blowing in the sere and misty meadows between them and ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... breeze, then fell back against the softness of her arm. A great grey-winged night moth fluttered past them. From the high bough of a distant maple came the frightened twitter of little birds, wakeful in the night, and the soft, murmurous voice of the brooding mother, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... of home. It was the season of goldenrod and aster on the hillsides: a hot swooning silence lay upon the late afternoon. The weight and closeness of the air had struck even the insects dumb. Under the pines, generally so murmurous, there was something almost gruesome in the blank stillness: a suspension so absolute that the ears felt dull and sealed. He tried, involuntarily, to listen more clearly, to know if this uncanny hush were ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... sudden burst of leaf and bloom, The sun shines redly through the gloom, And the wind with its many melodies Hath a murmurous sound like the noise of bees, Singing and humming,—blowing and growing, Of springing blade, and of fountain flowing; And night and silence under the ground Listen—and thrill—and move to the sound, And answer, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... the Lady chapel he sat down, still trembling a little, and threw all his attention into his ears, determined to hear the first movement that the kneeling figure made behind him. So he sat minute after minute. The Cathedral was full of echoes—murmurous rebounds of the noises of the streets, drawn out and mellowed into long, soft, rolling tones, against which, as against a foil, there stood out detached, now and then, the sudden footsteps of someone leaving or entering ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... A few murmurous sounds, and then the voice that had uttered its confession in that deep confessional of a gloomy soul said, and there was almost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... well awake, you find you are twice as good as new, and after breakfast, if you are sagacious, no one belonging to you will have any peace until you are striking out into the woods again,—the green, murmurous woods, tenanted by innumerable hosts of butterflies in their sunny outskirts, light-winged Psyches hovering in the warm, rich air, stained and spotted and splashed with every bright hue of yellow and scarlet and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... breakfast, he began to take an enforced interest in our proceedings. Like a dove above the dovecot, he circled for an hour or two about the table—a deal one, such as thimble-riggers use, borrowed, under protest, from his own humble bedroom—and then, with a murmurous coo about the weather showing no signs of clearing up, he took a hand. Constant dropping—and it was much worse than dropping—will wear away a stone, and it is my belief if it had gone on much longer his reverence would have ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... gone slack. He walked in a heavy white dream. The city drew him deeper into its murmurous heart. The walls pressed closer and hid him away. The souks swallowed him under their shadowy arcades. The breath of the bazaar, fetor of offal, stench of raw leather, and all the creeping perfumes of Barbary, attar of roses, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Matthew Arnold antedate the Bergsonian theory of the elan vital minus the sine of Y since Barbarians, Philistines and Populace make up the eternal flux wo die citronen bluhn—but fortunately the Wellesley mind does concentrate, and uncomplainingly. The students are working in these murmurous classrooms with a new seriousness and a devotion which disregard all ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... creeds was stilled in the darkened and sumptuous chamber, as the three women bent with murmurous affection over the bed on which lay, swathed in a redolent apparatus of eau-de-Cologne and fine linen, their hope and the hope of English literature. Towards midnight, when the agony had somewhat abated, Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie reluctantly retired ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... but just as the child was beginning to smile, and to express an approbation of life by murmurous gurglings, an infantile disease gripped it, held it, would not release it. And Winifred knelt beside it, dead, and thought, with a new and vital horror, of the invalid world playing cards upon the drawn ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Coaxed by the bright promise of the place, she drew near, and, seeing no one, entered softly. It was all kinglier than her father's home, and as she stood in wonder and awe, soft airs stirred about her. Little by little the silence grew murmurous like the woods, and one voice, sweeter than the rest, took words. "All that you see is yours, gentle high princess," it said. "Fear nothing; only command us, for we are here to ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... those positions of his which looked as if he could so sit and peruse till the end of time. I knew that his response would be so cordially given that it would brim over me, and so melodiously that it would echo in my heart for a great while; yet it would be as brief as the single murmurous stroke of one from a cathedral tower, half startling by its intensity, but which attracts the birds, who wing by preference to that lofty spot. A source of deep enjoyment to my father was a long visit from his sister, Ebie Hawthorne (he having given her that pretty title instead of any other abbreviation ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... her betwixt us and then suddenly with a soft, murmurous cry, she lifted her arms to the glory of the wide firmament above us and with shuddering sigh let them slowly fall, and with this sigh the strange, wild soul of her sped away back to the Infinite whence it ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... world, even if she put love out of her life, was brimming over with beauty. It was good to be alive; it was good to watch the crowd in the street, to see the sunlight on the pavement, to taste the air, to feel the murmurous currents of the city flow around her as she walked home in the twilight. It was good to earn her bread and to go back in the evening to the joyful shouts of two well and happy children. She saw it all ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... gives forth murmurous music; and the dance goes on without hands and feet. It is played without fingers, it is heard without ears: for He is the ear, and He is the listener. The gate is locked, but within there is fragrance: and there the meeting is seen of none. ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... for some moments at the crimson and yellow trees, on which a murmurous laughter of mocking winds arose, at times, and rustled on, and died away into the psithurisma of Theocritus; and the songs of the oriole and mocking-bird fluttering among the ripe fruit, or waving up into the sky, brought a pleasant smile to her lips. The ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... ovals and upon them many tiny people scurried here and there, without sound, like a fish at the bottom of a pool. It was only the vehicles that sent high, unmistakable, the deep bass of their movement. And yet after listening one seemed to hear a singular murmurous note, a pulsation, as if the crowd made noise by its mere living, a mellow hum of the eternal strife. Then suddenly out of the deeps might ring a human voice, a newsboy shout perhaps, the cry of a ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... no army," repeated Decius, in a murmurous monotone, when, for a moment, there were silence and space around him. "We marched by the Lake Trasimenus, and the fog lay thick upon us. Then came a noise of shouts and clash of arms and shrieks, but we saw nothing—only sometimes a great, white, naked body swinging ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... the river through the forests, always, I noticed, by a route which took us away from the village. Each day I discovered some new accomplishment. Sometimes I would read Heine or Goethe to her, and she would grow rapt and silent. In the midst of some murmurous stanza I would suddenly stop, only to see her start and look at me as though I had committed a sacrilege, in that I had spoiled some dream of hers. Then again I myself would become lost in dreams, to be aroused by a soft voice saying: "Well, why do you not go on?" Two people of the opposite sexes ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... was awake that night, and throughout Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the country side like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And overhead, growing larger and brighter as the earth rolled on ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... had ceased; there was no sound of music, and the bells had left off their clangour; while in place there came a low, dull, murmurous roar as of surf beating upon some rocky coast, a strange mingling of voices, hurrying foot-steps, indescribable, indistinct, and yet apparently expressive of excitement and the change ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... I wondering saw The stars through the window, and listened with awe To the sigh of the winds as they tremblingly crept Through the trees where the robin so restlessly slept: Where I heard the low, murmurous chirp of the wren, And the katydid listlessly chirrup again, Till my fancies grew faint and were drowsily led Through the maze of the dreams ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... occupied a wicker chair above her. "Julia, dressed for a walk"—how scant the words! It was a summer walk that Julia had dressed for: and she was all too dashingly a picture of coolness on a hot day: a brunette in murmurous white, though her little hat was a film of blackest blue, and thus also in belt and parasol she had almost matched the colour of her eyes. Probably no human-made fabric could have come nearer to matching them, though she had once met a great traveller—at least he went far enough in ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... alone impelled him to a new life. When he thought of it all, the reception-rooms, the scientific kitchen, the vast scullery, the four large bedrooms, the bathroom, the three attics, the cistern-room murmurous with water, and the water tirelessly, inexhaustibly coursing up and down behind walls—he thrilled to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... triumph, excitement, congratulations, a sort of sunburst of gladness, after a long night of gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees —a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous surf-beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually done with bolts ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... narrow, neglected, shady street, the slope of Shackamaxon went gently shelving to the edges of long sunny wharves, nearly as in the day when Penn selected this greensward to meet his Indian friends, and barter tools and promises for forest levels and long rich valleys, now open to the sky and murmurous with ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... violin, The hushed oboe and the distant din, Of muffled drum or viol's raucous groan— Sudden arises one pure voice-like tone, A silver trumpet's tongue that stirs the soul To feel the theme, and the harmonious whole A sonant setting seems for that alone; So, high above earth's murmurous stir and strife, Riseth thy voice in clear enringing song— No minor plaint of dull despairing pain, But one true note of hope that bids us long For higher things; and all the din of life Seems to subserve the sweetness of ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... shone with light; it grew murmurous with ecstatic approval. The virginal face of Laurencine shot its rapture to Lucas as she turned to shake ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... of the world's heart to that glory; to see unveiled the beauty that should be, and, unveiled too, the shame that is; to have a spiritual nature that thrills at the touch of the perfect love and life, and responds to every note of pain borne in upon it from the murmurous trouble of the world,—this is to have inward fitness for the high work of the Kingdom. Yes, and it is the pledge that this work shall be done. There is such a thing as artistic grief. There is the vain and languorous pity of aestheticism. Its robe of sympathy ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... man!"—and the rough voice of Nero sounded harshly above the murmurous din—"The world was never the worse for one woman the less! Wouldst thou also be a Christian? Take heed! Our lions are still hungry! Thy love is dead, 'tis true, but WE have not killed her! She trusted in her God, and He has robbed ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli |
