"Nursery rhyme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went on, husky, gallant. "If we could have looked an hour ahead an hour ago, you and I, dripping pity on that boy, feeling so utterly secure ourselves—'Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?' M.D., I got a silver thimble for learning that by heart when I was eight. Rollicking nursery rhyme, wasn't it? But I adored it, especially the parts I didn't understand. 'From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud'—you know, for years I thought it meant one of those fascinating places with swinging half-doors and rows and rows of feet visible ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... her exclaim, 'if that's not a nursery rhyme of my childhood that I've not heard for sixty years and more! I declare,' she added with innocent effrontery, 'I've not heard it since I was ten years old. And I was born ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... storm breaking over the deck. Now the ship struck. She could feel her grinding upon the rocks. She seemed to be sinking, sinking—There was a knocking, knocking at the door of the cabin, and a voice calling to her—how far away it seemed! . . . Was she dying, was she drowning? The words of a nursery rhyme rang in her ears distinctly, keeping time to the knocking. She wondered who should be singing a nursery rhyme on ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... true—and to promenade on the boulevards. But now comes stalking on that which will make you shudder indeed! Do you know what I have just read in the Independance Belge? Ah! poor Paris, the days of your glory are past, your ancient fame is destroyed, the old nursery rhyme will mock you, "Vous n'irez plus au Bois, vos lauriers sont coupes."[62] This is what has happened; you are supplanted on the throne of fashion. The world, uneasy about the form of bonnet to be worn this sorrowful year, and ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... of us. Five had been ditched. The weeding-out process had begun nobly, and it continued station by station. Now we were fourteen, now twelve, now eleven, now nine, now eight. It reminded me of the ten little niggers of the nursery rhyme. I was resolved that I should be the last little nigger of all. And why not? Was I not blessed with strength, agility, and youth? (I was eighteen, and in perfect condition.) And didn't I have my "nerve" with me? And furthermore, was I not a tramp-royal? ...
— The Road • Jack London
... quaint, carved, and uncomfortable-looking cradle, had she crooned above him the old saga-songs that told of valor and dauntless courage and all the stern virtues that made up the heroes of those same old saga-songs. Many a time she had trotted the little fellow on her knee to the music of the ancient nursery rhyme that has a place in all lands and languages, from the steppes of Siberia to the homes of ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... with flashes of yellow frilling it all about, just what a grand sunflower would look if you set a countenance where the black seeds are. And the moon was just such a one as you may see the cow jumping over in the pictured nursery rhyme. She was a crescent, of course, that she might have a face drawn in the hollow, and turned towards the sun, who seemed to be her husband. He looked merrily at her, and she looked trustfully at him, ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... parallel from The Laird of Logan: "As the Paisley steamer came alongside the quay[3] at the city of the Seestus,[4] a denizen of St. Mirren's hailed one of the passengers: 'Jock! Jock! distu hear, man? Is that you or your brother?'" And to the same point is the old nursery rhyme,— ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... is, loud enough to be audible to your own ears. In this way the idea is reinforced by the movements of lips and tongue and by the auditory impressions conveyed through the ear. Say it simply, without effort, like a child absently murmuring a nursery rhyme. Thus you avoid an appeal to the critical faculties of the conscious which would lessen the outcropping. When you have got used to this exercise and can say it quite "unself-consciously," begin to let ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... This simple nursery rhyme is in the familiar style of question and answer, which is always pleasing; and it is remarkable that two excellent moral lessons are to be ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... ashes out of his pipe and put it in his pocket. There was no time like the present, and he at once went toward Diana's, "clothed all in leather," like the old man in the nursery rhyme. ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... Scottish incident which it records; and, from the fact of its including a popular burden, we may presume it was adapted to the tune. Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, which records a piece of Scottish news of no importance whatever, has become an English nursery rhyme. In Jamie Douglas an historical fact has been interwoven with a beautiful lyric. Indeed, the chances of corruption and contamination ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... the unit by no other name than Mary, fittingly taken from the nursery rhyme which inquires, "Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?" The similarity between Mary of the Blue Marines and Mary of the nursery rhyme ends, however, with the first line, since Blue Marine Mary made ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... or fold or farm-yard, is laid to his charge. Starlight Tom, in fact, answers to his name; he seems to walk in darkness, and, like a fox, to be traced in the morning by the mischief he has done. He reminds me of that fearful personage in the nursery rhyme: ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... my dear lost, angel mother! how that picture recalled the far-off happy days of childhood, when I sat upon your knees, and saw my own joyous face reflected in those dove-like eyes! when, ending some nursery rhyme with a kiss, you bowed your velvet cheek upon my clustering curls, and bade God bless and keep your darling boy! Would that I could become a child again, or that I could go to you, though ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... origin of the nursery rhyme has been said to be as follows: When monasteries and their property were seized, orders were given that the title-deeds of the abbey estates of Mells, which were very valuable, should be given up to the commissioners. The mode chosen ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... it nestled, seeming far from hastening Time, As a teeny-tiny village in some quaint old nursery rhyme, And a teeny-tiny river by a teeny-tiny weir Sang a teeny-tiny ditty that I stayed a while ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... to marry you, my pretty maid." The words were out before he could check them. He blushed furiously. To propose in a nursery rhyme was something that shocked his sense of fitness. He was amazed to find that he meant what he said in just the very way he had ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... "from grave to gay, from lively to severe," (for novelty in quotations we find to be contagious,) have recounted the wildly erratic history "of that false matron known in nursery rhyme, Insidious ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... intoning the nursery rhyme, and Patty and Philip strolled through the hall, swinging the bucket between them, and acting like two country children going for water. They climbed the stairs, laboriously, as if clambering up a steep hill, and as ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... start. My thoughts kept stupidly running on the old chest. It had mechanically possessed me. I felt no disturbing curiosity concerning its contents; I was not annoyed at the want of the key; it was only that, like a nursery rhyme that keeps repeating itself over and over in the half-sleeping brain, this chest kept rising before me till I was out of patience with its intrusiveness. It brought me wide awake at last; and I thought, as I could not sleep, I ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... sang again the song of the red-cheeked little prince, who slept in his golden cradle, a red-cheeked apple in his hand. It was but a simple nursery rhyme, but Neddy put his soul into it, for he was but a child himself in spite of his tall stature and ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things; and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat "bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his money," was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs |
