"Rhythmical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gallery filled the church with its drawling tones, like an enlarged accordion, and the nuns standing beside it intoned the old chant, rhythmical as a march, the "Adeste Fideles," while below the novices and the faithful repeated after each stanza the sweet chorus of ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... struggle that he was bound to continue to the end. But these personal confessions are scarce. After all, in oratorio Handel's best music is that in which he seeks to attain the sublime. In his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps you away with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at you at just the right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the opening of "Fixed in His everlasting seat," or the last (before the cadence) in "Then round about the starry throne." ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... late one afternoon, to the big lake at the headwaters of a wilderness river. Above the roar of rapids far behind, and the fret of the current near at hand, the rhythmical clunk, clunk of the poles and the lap, lap of my little canoe as she breasted the ripples were the only sounds that broke the forest stillness. We were silent, as men always are to whom the woods have spoken their deepest message, and to ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... first purely fanciful ballad I ever wrote. I have been at work on it for two months, and I think it is the best piece of literary work I have done, although it is somewhat above the class of work that is popular. You will like it for its rhythmical smoothness and for its weirdness. But Mrs. Field prefers "Krinken," "Marthy's Younkit," et id omne genus. My next verse will be "John Smith, U.S.A.," a poem suggested by seeing this autograph at Gilley's. In it I shall use ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... sewing-machine. But, as order is Heaven's first law, it is true that music tends to move in definite, symmetrical groups; and where departure is made from this practise the effect is one most carefully planned. The matter deserves earnest consideration, for, in what is known as the "rhythmical sense," Americans—as a people, in comparison with foreign nations—are still woefully deficient. As rhythm is the basic element in all music, there is nothing in which the listener should more definitely train his faculties than in ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... always something one of us wanted to get even for. But the commonest trick was one of mine. Mac and I would come down to breakfast, say, at a hotel, and when everyone was seated I'd start, in a very low voice, to sing. Rather, I didn't really sing, I said, in a low, rhythmical tone, with a sort of half tune ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... have been accepted as the standard, in default of anything more satisfactory: the English critics, generally sustaining the translator in his views concerning the secondary importance of form in Poetry, practically discouraged any further attempt; and no one, familiar with rhythmical expression through the needs of his own nature, had devoted the necessary love and patience to an adequate reproduction of the great ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the first element of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty.' 'It is not,' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is a wild effort to reach the beauty above.... Inspired with a prescient ecstasy of the beauty ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... which is no improvement upon "Declarations of Independence," so far as I can see. "Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen" seems to be "General-statesrepresentativesmeetings," as nearly as I can get at it—a mere rhythmical, gushy euphemism for "meetings of the legislature," I judge. We used to have a good deal of this sort of crime in our literature, but it has gone out now. We used to speak of a things as a "never-to-be-forgotten" circumstance, instead of cramping it into the simple and sufficient word "memorable" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... varied occasionally, under some new access of pain, with other utterances. Though ordinarily so little endowed with the poetic gift as never to have attempted to write a line of verse, yet at this time, and for a few days previous, I had experienced a strange development of the rhythmical faculty, and on this particular occasion I made verses, such as they were, with incredible ease and rapidity. I remember being greatly troubled by the necessity for a popular national hymn, and manufactured several with extempore rapidity. Had their merit at all corresponded ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... the little woods which surrounded this elegant pleasure-ground, the white painted stands with all their flags flying on the blue summer air, the glitter of the carriages, the colour of the parasols, the bright jackets and caps of the jockeys, the rhythmical movement of the horses. Some sailed along with their heads low, others bounded, their heads high in the air. While Owen watched Evelyn's pleasure, his face expressed a cynical good humour. He was glad she ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... by the Tagala people of the Philippines (given by Thevenot), and by the Bugis people of Celebes (given by Captain Forrest), vary at least as much from these and from each other as the Rejang from the Batta. The Sanskrit scholar will at the same time perceive in several of them an analogy to the rhythmical arrangement, terminating with a nasal, which distinguishes the alphabet of that ancient language whose influence is known to have been extensive in this quarter. In the country of Achin, where the language differs considerably from the Malayan, the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... shows Spenser's wonderful technique. His exquisite effects are produced, it will be noticed, partly by the choice of musical words and partly by the rhythmical cadence of the verse phrases. It is an example of perfect "keeping," or adaptation of sound to sense. Cf. Chaucer's description of the waterfalls in the Cave of Sleep in his Boke of the ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... whistling of the wind through the cordage, and the wash of the waves as they raced over each other and broke with a seething 'whish' into masses of foam, and the motion of the ship gently rocking to and fro like a pendulum as she lurched this way and that with rhythmical regularity, my eyes presently began to close. So, cuddling myself up in the tarpaulin, for the air fresh from the north felt rather chilly, I dropped off into a sound nap, not waking again until ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... advantage. You attack me after I've been dancing for two hours, while I'm still reeling drunk with the movement, when I've lost my head, when I've got no mind left but only a rhythmical body! It's as bad as making love to someone you've ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the consciousness of his own identity John Silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power. In a deep, modulated voice he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that slowly rolled through the air like a rising sea, filling the room with powerful vibratory activities that whelmed all irregularities of lesser vibrations in its own swelling tone. He made certain sigils, gestures ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest laughter a chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits raised for war, going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate shoulders, and feet of distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze a rhythmical drill-sergeant. I exulted at the first reading, shuddered at the second, and at the third felt desperate, destroyed them and sat staring at vacancy as if I had now ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Nic to himself; but to his surprise he kept on, finding the canter a delightfully easy pace, and that it was far less difficult to keep his seat in the saddle, the swing was so pleasant, elastic, and rhythmical. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... of them had a singular effect on the brains of certain bright young women and sombre young and middle-aged men who were arranged in clasped couples: with the result that the brains of the women and men sent orders to their legs, arms, eyes, and they shifted to and fro in rhythmical movements. Each woman placed herself very close—breast against breast—to each man, yielding her volition absolutely to his, and (if the man was the taller) often gazing up into his face with an ecstatic expression of pleasure and acquiescence. The physical ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... academic career to accept a tutorial appointment, which demanded of its holder a knowledge not only of the classics but also of English and French. He also displayed at a very early age a talent for poetry, and some of his juvenile extempore effusions were remarkable for their easy versification and rhythmical flow. In his eighteenth year he was called upon to deliver in the Lyceum of his native city, the anniversary oration in honour of a royal birthday. His address on this occasion excited an extraordinary sensation both by the graceful ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... did not hold the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation.1 His Latin Grammar and Glossary 2 were written for his pupils after the two books of homilies. A third series of homilies, the Lives of the Saints, dates from 906 to 997. Some of the sermons in the second series had been written in a kind of rhythmical, alliterative prose, and in the Lives of the Saints (ed. W. W. Skeat, 1881-1900, for the Early English Text Society) the practice is so regular that most of them are arranged as verse by Professor Skeat. By the wish of AEthelweard he also began a paraphrase 3 of parts of the Old ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... present occasion merited attention. A long canoe, with paddles flashing back the rays of the westering sun, was crossing the current from above and urging in for the eddy. Hay Stockard watched it intently. Three men rose and dipped, rose and dipped, in rhythmical precision; but a red bandanna, wrapped about the head of one, ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... of the neck of the bladder the male animal may stand with the tail slightly raised and making rhythmical contractions of the muscle beneath the anus (accelerator urinae) (see Pl. IX, fig. 2), but without passing a drop of liquid. In the female the hind legs are extended, widely parted, and the back is arched as if to urinate, but the effort is vain. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... of God, and one sent upon a mission of a serious sort and grave political import. So then the gracious Queen imagined and contrived that simple and witching costume which I have described to you so many times, and which I cannot think of even now in my dull age without being moved just as rhythmical and exquisite music moves one; for that was music, that dress—that is what it was—music that one saw with the eyes and felt in the heart. Yes, she was a poem, she was a dream, she was a spirit when she was clothed ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... common in the South, and—for he was very young—Hetty found a mischievous pleasure in noticing his almost too open admiration for Flora Schuyler, who sat close beside them. A girl was singing indifferently, and when she stopped, Miss Allonby raised her head as a rhythmical sound became audible through the closing chords ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... space, he got his first glimpse of the quinta. It was dark, except for one low light. From the farther side there came faintly to his ear a rhythmical sound, with brief intervals of quiet, as if some one hard at labor were stopping from time to time for breath. At that distance, Carroll could not interpret the sound, but some unidentified quality of it struck ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in the rhythmical way of Tennesseans, emphasizing the auxiliary verbs beyond their usual value. After reading the letter he extended his hand. "I am very glad to meet you, sir. I am indeed. Bill, take care of Mr.——" He paused, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the author is that of the rhythmical variations of level, or "seiches," of deep lakes; he applies the usual formula to Lake Tahoe, and calculates from it the length of a complete longitudinal and of a transverse "seiche;" these are found to be eighteen or nineteen minutes in the first case ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... look-out for the preliminary symptoms of mumps to have leisure to bestow much attention on this phenomenon. The discomfort it caused was not sufficient to keep him awake, and presently he turned on his side and began to fill the room with a rhythmical snoring. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... ever written. And, while every one was wondering whose music it could be, a woman glided out from behind a screen, and stood for a second swaying herself slightly in the centre of the drugget. Even that slight rhythmical motion of her body seemed to bring her into perfect sympathy with the curious melody which was filling the hushed room. And while the people watched her, already, in varying degrees, under the spell ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... literature that embodies beautiful thought, feeling, or action in melodious, rhythmical, and (usually) metrical language, in imaginative and artistic constructions. Poetry in a very wide sense may be anything that pleasingly addresses the imagination; as, the poetry of motion. In ordinary usage, poetry is both imaginative and metrical. There may be poetry without ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... a Styrian country-dance—a musical recitative accompanied by the cithern and set to a tune sufficiently rhythmical to act as one of the original purposes of a ballad, ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... monument remained virgin of this defilement. In the evening, Paris assumed the aspect, strange and prodigious, of a city asleep. Nowhere were there any lights, rare pedestrians, no omnibuses, no carriages. The footsteps of a patrol which resounded rhythmical and sonorous in the distance, and the qui vive? of the sentinels, alone came to break the mournful silence which hung over the capital. The long line of boulevards, black and sombre, displayed the mourning of the city. Paris was superb in ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... too curiously inquired into. As I have already remarked, they may certainly be classed along with the above-discussed works. The first is the more interesting of them. In both we meet with passages that point to more perfect specimens of the kind—for instance, certain rhythmical motives, melodic inflections, and harmonic progressions, to the familiar Waltzes in E flat major (Op. 18) and in A flat major (Op. 34, No. 1); and the D major portion of the Waltz in B minor, to the C major part of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... last century, was another brilliant pianist, numbering among her teachers one of Mozart's sons. She seems to have won the esteem of Schumann, who dedicated his humoreske to her, and gave high praise to many of her works. According to his reviews, her Second Caprice is "fresh and rhythmical, full of life and vivacity and delicate workmanship;" her fantasie, "Adieu et Retour," has two movements that are "highly original, characteristic, and scarcely offering a weak point for attack;" while her waltzes ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... music, and Painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting—of sound, in music—of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... them were brought to conquer their inherent aversion to the book, they could not read a page in it without being tired and disgusted with its style. In the Koran they possess the purest and most elegant composition in their language, the rhythmical prose of which, exclusive of the sacred light in which they hold it, is alone sufficient to make a strong impression upon them. The Arabic of the greater part of the Bible, on the contrary, and especially that of the Gospels, is ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... sort of dim, mental twilight, so obscure that I was not even certain of my own identity. Gradually, however—very gradually,— the twilight brightened with returning life and reason, and I found myself beginning to identify my surroundings. I became conscious of a rhythmical rising and falling and swaying movement, accompanied by a creaking, grinding sound, and the wash and gurgle of water outside the planking that formed two of the three walls of the triangular apartment in which ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... and artist makes no direct attempt to be poetical, any more than he does to be melodious or rhythmical. He approaches these qualities and results as it were from beneath, and always indirectly; they are drawn to him, not he to them; and if they appear absent from his page at first, it is because we ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... also one of his store houses, and the rank grasses, at their seeding time, are his chief support." Another writer, whose study of this bird has been made with care, calls our American Goldfinch one of the loveliest of birds. With his elegant plumage, his rhythmical, undulatory flight, his beautiful song, and his more beautiful soul, he ought to be one of the best beloved, if not one of the most famous; but he has never yet had half his deserts. He is like the Chickadee, and yet different. He is ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... Singing a rhythmical dancing-tune, with the upper portion of the body bent forward, and executing dainty steps with their feet, they circled faster and faster ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and it was a luxury to lie flat upon my back on the beach, listening to the rhythmical thud of the big, long wave at my feet, and the song of the stars overhead. There is something unspeakably tranquillizing in the studded dome of heaven; there is also something unspeakably sad. It bends over the struggling, yearning, aching human heart, as a ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... colons, semicolons or periods. Inadequate and sometimes haphazard as it is, however, Shelley's punctuation, so far as it goes, is of great value as an index to his metrical, or at times, it may be, to his rhetorical intention—for, in Shelley's hands, punctuation serves rather to mark the rhythmical pause and onflow of the verse, or to secure some declamatory effect, than to indicate the structure or elucidate the sense. For this reason the original pointing has been retained, save where it tends to obscure or pervert the poet's meaning. Amongst the Editor's Notes at the end of the Volume ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... close there was a procession which is worth considerable description. Six men with censers of silver lined up before the high altar, and stood there, slowly swinging the fragrant bowls at the end of their long chains. The music died down. One could hear the rhythmical, faint clangour of the metal. And then, intensely sudden, away in the west gallery, but almost as if from the battlements of heaven, pealed out silver trumpets in a fanfare. The censers flew high in time with it, and the sweet clouds of ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... all real rhythmical life; it may have the metre of poetry, but it has not often got its music, nor can there be any true delicacy in the ear that tolerates such rhymes as 'chord' and 'abroad.' Even the claim that Mr. Sharp puts forward for him, that his muse takes her impressions directly from ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... straw, the noise of the stamping was deadened; a man's voice talking to the animals and swearing at them was heard from the rear of the building. A faint tickle grew soon into a clear and continuous jingling, rhythmical with the movements of the horses, now stopping, now resuming in a sudden peal accompanied by the deadened noise of an iron-shod hoof, pawing ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... undoubted native origin. It is nearly certain that the prehistoric Japanese did not borrow the literary forms of the god-way from China, as any one familiar with the short, evenly balanced and antithetical sentences of Chinese style can see at once. The norito are expressions, in the rhythmical and rhetorical form of worship, of the articles of faith set forth in the historic summary which we have given. We propose to illustrate the dogmas by quoting from the rituals in Mr. Satow's masterly translation. The following was ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... upon a green mound with a cool hedge of rock behind her, her feet on the margin of solid sunlight, her forehead bared. Her hair sprinkled round her as she gently threw back her head. Her face was full on Hilton. She was telling him something. Her gestures were rhythmical, and admirably balanced. Because they were continuous or only regularly broken, it was clear she was telling him a story. Hilton gravely, delightedly, nodded response now and then, or raised his eyebrows ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sun blazed fiercely down upon a smooth, sparkling sea, gently ruffling under the faint, warm breeze to a surface of pale, glowing sapphire, along which the barque, wooing the soft zephyr with studding-sails spread on both sides, from the royals down, swam with a sleepy, rhythmical swaying of her taunt spars, at a speed of some ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... every case. Their spelling is modernized. In those cases in which they needed for the rhythm, certain inflectional endings, e, en, es, are retained and are printed in parentheses. The reader has only to remember that he must pronounce every syllable needed to make the lines rhythmical. In only four cases has the rhyme been affected by the changed spelling. For defense of this modern spelling of Chaucer, the reader is referred to Lounsbury's "Studies in Chaucer," Vol. III., ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... and enjoyment that it had been encored. Some of the men were talking and laughing just a little loudly, and the women's faces were flushed with the one glass of champagne which is generally all they permit themselves, the spell of the music, and the excitement of rapid and rhythmical movement. Couples found their way into the anterooms and recesses, or sat very close together in corners of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... stretch of country. There were golden orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend, having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of this plant, was soon snoring—another senile trait—snoring in a rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes, and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... related to himself and set about producing flat simplicity of planes of color to produce a very distinguished notion of light. He dispensed with the photographic attitude toward objectivity and yet at the same time held to the pleasing rhythmical shapes in nature. He did not resort to divisionalism or to ultra-violence of relationship. The pictures that I have seen such as "February", for instance, in the Boston Museum, present for me the sensation of a man of great private spiritual and intellectual means, having the wish to express ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... proper pace of a piece of music is determined by the particular character of the rendering it requires. The question therefore comes to this: Does the sustained, the cantilena, predominate, or the rhythmical movement? The conductor ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... his sower's bag at his waist, was returning towards them, scattering the seed with broad rhythmical gestures. He had heard his wife, and he paused to say to her: "Let him nurse and sleep till the sun comes back. He will be a man by harvest time." And, pointing to the great field which he was sowing with his assistants, he added: "All this will grow and ripen ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... expressed by the words which the rich man spake to his soul, "Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry" (St. Luke xii. 19), was not acceptable to the man who was tired of life, and he at once addressed to his soul a series of remarks, couched in rhythmical language, in which he made it clear that, so far as he was concerned, death would be preferable to life. He begins by saying that his name is more detested than the smell of birds on a summer's day when the heavens are hot, and the smell of a handler of fish newly caught ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... that spot: carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative of its fine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and it flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume so oddly rhythmical that the well stood always full to the brim, whatever quantity might be drawn from it, seeming to answer with strange alacrity of service to human needs, like a true creature and pupil of the philanthropic god. Certainly the little crowd around seemed to find singular refreshment in gazing on it. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... paper,[21] in formal Latin the stress became very slight, and the pitch grew to be the characteristic feature of the accent. Consequently, when Virgil read a passage of the AEneid to Augustus and Livia the effect on the ear of the comparatively unstressed language, with the rhythmical rise and fall of the pitch, would have been very different from that made by the conversation of the average man, with the accented syllables more clearly marked ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... clear, I think, that the old instinct which tended to make a division between poetry and prose is being gradually obliterated. The rhythmical structure of poetry, and above all the device of rhyme, is essentially immature and childish: the use by poets of rhythmical beat and verbal assonance is simply the endeavour to captivate what is a primeval and even barbarous instinct. The pleasure which children take in beating their ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... obviously original or masterly, not at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness, not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting simply a gift for acting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute observation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling of the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by commercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... in poetry the meaning and the sounds are one: there is, if I may put it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance. If you read the line, "The sun is warm, the sky is clear," you do not experience separately the image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and certain unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you experience them together, side by side; but you experience the one in the other. And in like manner when you are really reading Hamlet, the action and the characters are not something which you conceive apart from the words; you apprehend them ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... for long days and nights of glory and of love, for intense hours of emotion and of life lived with exultant desperation. It was a melody that seemed to set the soul of Creation dancing before an ark. The tomtoms accompanied it with an irregular but rhythmical roar which Domini thought was like the deep-voiced shouting of ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... eagle-like beak, and which he held loosely, ready for action, in his disengaged left hand; for, his right was ever at work oscillating between the magazine of snuff in his deep waistcoat pocket and the nasal promontory that consumed it with almost rhythmical regularity, sniff and snort and resonant trumpet blast of satisfaction succeeding each other in systematic sequence, as the veteran came down the stairway leisurely, ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... became distinctly conscious of the sound of his own footsteps. He stopped and listened. Yes, there were other sounds—the twitter of birds in the bushes by the roadside, the hum of insects, and the faint rhythmical murmur of lapsing ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... as the Iliad is not an entire whole, not an organism; but a number of pieces strung together, a collection of reflections arranged in accordance with aesthetic rules. It is certainly the standard of an artist's greatness to note what he can take in with a single glance and set out in rhythmical form. The infinite profusion of images and incidents in the Homeric epic must force us to admit that such a wide range of vision is next to impossible. Where, however, a poet is unable to observe artistically with a single glance, he usually piles conception on conception, and endeavours ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... time the sound of musketry grew faint and the cannon boomed in the distance. The sun, suddenly apparent, blazed among the trees. The insects were making rhythmical noises. They seemed to be grinding their teeth in unison. A woodpecker stuck his impudent head around the side of a tree. A bird flew on ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... them, on the floor below, the stillness in the cottage was merrily broken by an outburst of dance-music—with a rhythmical thump-thump of feet, keeping time to the cheerful tune. Toff was playing his fiddle; and Toff's boy was dancing to his ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... in the midst of a veritable tempest, bird cries, cat-calls, and a heavy rhythmical refrain of "Ruy Blas! Ruy Blas! Victor Hugo! ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... to an instant decision. He opened his lips, but the words he had planned to speak were never uttered. The strong, rhythmical dip of oars suddenly ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... She was going to give Helen her dear, golden-haired baby. There was no thought, now, of her hatred for Ebenezer, only wondrous anticipation of his joy at receiving his little girl out of the storm. Through the white light, Tess could outline the rounded figure in the snow. Rhythmical breathing assured her the little one slept in security. Once more, Tess got to her feet and, once more, she gathered up the living bundle. She was almost at the end of her journey. The short rest had given her new strength, and when she got to the stone porch she was able to mount the steps, ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... and the two Milky Ways reveal themselves,—that of the Cosmos and that ghostlier one which stretches over the black deep behind us. This alternately broadens and narrows at regular intervals, concomitantly with the rhythmical swing of the steamer, Before us the bows spout: fire; behind us there is a flaming and roaring as of Phlegethon; and the voices of wind and sea become so loud that we cannot talk to one another,—cannot make our words heard ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... seemed to enter my brain and fingers, hurrying me into a Bacchanalian frenzy of sound; and the faster I played, the more furiously her dizzily gliding feet flashed hither and thither in a bewildering, still-renewing maze, so that from her to me and me to her an electric impulse of rhythmical movement perpetually ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... sight of the continually passing troops; a platoon off to musketry training; a battalion, brown and dusty, on a route march with full equipment, whistling "Tipperary"; sections of an Army Service train cursing good-humouredly at their mules; a battery of artillery thundering along at a clean, rhythmical trot which, considering what they were like in their slovenly jogging and bumping three months ago, afforded me prodigious pleasure. On the passing of these last-mentioned I felt inclined to clap my hands and generally proclaim my appreciation. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... critical instinct which he brought to the task of creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth but pleasure—the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. Hence the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... those military geniuses who on the field of battle convert disaster into victory. There was no time for deliberation; so, with my forefinger under a part of the straw that cast no shadow, I found myself impulsively and automatically imitating the rhythmical movements which my colleague had prophesied the heart would undergo. I kept the experiment from failing; and not only saved my colleague (and the turtle) from a humiliation that but for my presence of mind ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... felt the exquisite agony of cramp, and when, after sundry attempts to stretch himself, he at length found a position that afforded him temporary relief, it was only to become aware of a more refined species of torture. The springs of the carriage rising and falling regularly, produced a rhythmical beat, which began to painfully absorb his attention, and to slowly merge into a senseless echo of one of his observations to Mlle de Nurrez. And when he was becoming reconciled to this inferno, another ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... that waltz was of the old-fashioned swingingly sorrowful sort, and it would be hard to say how long it was after that before the boy could hear the air played without a recurrence of the bitterness of that moment. The rhythmical pathos of the violins was in such accord with a faint sound of weeping which he heard near him, presently, that for a little while he believed this sound to be part of the music and part of himself. Then it became more distinct, and he raised himself on ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... who dragged the guns another thirty miles to the far side of the Tagliamento at Latisana. And as they hauled, they sang, until they were too tired to go on singing, and could only raise, from time to time, their rhythmical periodic cry ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... crags, and folded their wings for the night. Around the lonely islet thundered the ocean, whose waves rocked never-endingly, until Yaspard, gazing fixedly on them, felt as though the holme itself were some tremulous cradle swinging with the rhythmical ebb and flow ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... order, and admit no inversions whatever for the sake of the line; and it should set a value on expression, never for its own sake, but solely for the sake of the dramatic purpose to be accomplished in the scene. Verse such as this would permit of every rhythmical variation known in English prosody, and through the appeal of its rhythm would offer the dramatist opportunities for emotional effect that prose would not allow him; but at the same time it could be spoken with entire naturalness by actors as ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... other days. Then comes in Jack's song, which neither Calabressa nor any one else present could say was meant to be comic, or pathetic, or a demoniac mixture of both. The accompaniment which the handsome young English fellow played was at once rhythmical, and low and sad, like the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... and lower ends of the sticks together, occasionally half inverting them and thus striking the upper ends together in an underhand way. They struck once for each accented syllable of the following rhyme, making it a very rhythmical game. ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... suppose the conductor to be perfectly well acquainted with the times of the different movements in the work of which he is about to conduct the performance or rehearsals; he wishes to impart to the musicians acting under his orders the rhythmical feeling within him, to decide the duration of each bar, and to cause the uniform observance of this duration by all the performers. Now this precision and this uniformity can only be established in the more or less numerous ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... opposite tradition for grandiloquence—and, true to the spirit of it, he seeks the maximum of effect through the minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty of which is ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... among whom they have arisen. The history of religion stands in a close connection with the development of the fine arts,—architecture and sculpture, painting, music, and also poetry. The earliest rhythmical utterance was in hymns to the gods. To worship, all the arts are largely indebted for their birth and growth. This, however, is only one of the ways in which religion is interwoven with the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... "The purest and most typical expression of simple feeling," as Hirn remarks, "is that which consists of mere random movements."[288] When these motions assume, as they so easily do, the character of a fixed sequence in time, that is to say when they are rhythmical, they can be and inevitably are, as by a sort of inner compulsion, imitated by the onlookers. "As soon as the expression is fixed in rhythmical form its contagious power ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... which baffle individual description. It embraces counting-out rimes, jigs, lullabies, child-rimes, nonsense-rimes, and ditties. They are always rhythmical, and usually rimed, varying in length from a couplet to an endless improvisation. The following list is an ...
— A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs • Hubert G. Shearin
... that Wiedeman shall hear some day (if we all live) the verses he wrote to him; and I have it in my head that little Wiedeman will be very sensitive to verses and kindness too—he likes to hear anything rhythmical and musical, and he likes to be petted and kissed—the most affectionate little creature he is—sitting on my knee, while I give him books to turn the leaves over (a favorite amusement), every two minutes he puts up his little ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... state of things went on till 1022, when Cnut, as Leland says, "for ill lyvynge expellyd secular clerks, and by the counsell of Wolstane (Wulfstan), Bysshope of Wurcestar, bringethe in monkes." The monks introduced by Cnut were of the Benedictine rule, or Black monks, as Parker calls them in his "Rhythmical History of the Abbey." ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... impeded, or the energies of the individual held in check, there music is cramped. In China, where conditions have crushed spiritual and intellectual liberty, the art remains to this day in a crude rhythmical or percussion state, although it was early honored as the gift of superior beings. The Chinese philosopher detected a grand world music in the harmonious order of the heavens and the earth, and wrote voluminous works on musical theory. When it came to putting this into practice tones ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... after, light, airy music was heard in the front parlor, followed by the rhythmical cadence of light feet and the rustle of silks like a ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... still one with the body. There was something that resembled a human head, covered with long golden hair, but it was horrible; it was an uncouth mass, without eyes or nose or mouth. The colour was a kind of sickly pink, and it was almost transparent. There was a very slight movement in it, rhythmical and slow. It ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... reeled through a muggy haze as she lurched across the surf-swept shoals. She floated high and light, her muddy side rising like a wall as she steadied between the rolls that dipped her channels in the foam. Outside, the swell was regular and the roll long and rhythmical; the haze thinned, the air got sweet and cool, and the hearts of the crew got lighter as she steamed out to open sea. For all that, men lowered their voices and trod quietly when they passed the poop cabin ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... national anthem, "Kimi-ga yo," which has been thus translated: "May Our Gracious Sovereign reign a thousand years, reign till the little stone grow into a mighty rock, thick velveted with ancient moss." And finally the orphans would raise their shrill voices with the rhythmical national shout, "Tei-koku Ban-zai, Tei-koku Ban-zai"; "Imperial-land, a myriad years, Imperial-land, a myriad years." This thoughtful farewell was maintained for the four or five days during which the troops were embarking for the seat of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her soft chin as it held the violin in place against her round, girlish throat that Gaites felt a lump in his own larger than his Adam's-apple would account for to the spectator; the delicately arched wrist of the hand that held the bow, and the rhythmical curve and flow of her arm in playing, were means of the spell which wove itself about him, and left him, as it were, bound hand and foot. It was in this helpless condition that he rose at the urgence of a friendly young fellow who had ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... And a breeze came down piping shrilly; and upon the deck they fastened the ropes separately round the well-polished pins, and ran quietly past the long Tisaean headland. And for them the son of Oeagrus touched his lyre and sang in rhythmical song of Artemis, saviour of ships, child of a glorious sire, who hath in her keeping those peaks by the sea, and the land of Iolcos; and the fishes came darting through the deep sea, great mixed with small, and followed gambolling along the watery paths. And as when in the track of the shepherd, ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... The rhythmical rocking of the little engine of the West Donegal line running across from Killygordon ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... little sleep for the last thirty hours, nor can I sleep at the crisis of our misfortunes. It is a still grey morning, with heavy cloud in the East, and lapping rhythmical waves beating upon the windows of the house as though anon a gale must blow and all this torrid silence be ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... rhythmical, and there was a perceptible interval between each one and the next; they were drawn out and intolerably slow, and seemed to have lasted through ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... punctuality, regularity, steadiness. V. recur in regular order, recur in regular succession; return, revolve; come again, come in its turn; come round, come round again; beat, pulsate; alternate; intermit. Adj. periodic, periodical; serial, recurrent, cyclical, rhythmical; recurring &c. v.; intermittent, remittent; alternate, every other. hourly; diurnal, daily; quotidian, tertian, weekly; hebdomadal|, hebdomadary|; biweekly, fortnightly; bimonthly; catamenial|; monthly, menstrual; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... and I could hear nothing, but presently we detected the rhythmical beat of the hoofs of a horse approaching at a smart canter. Somebody was coming up from San Remo—for though a wheeled vehicle could not pass over the "forty rods," a horseman could pick his way—and knowing that nobody ever came that way in the "soft" season unless our house was his destination, ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... the Lat. cadentia, from cadere, to fall), a falling or sinking, especially as applied to rhythmical or musical sounds, as in the "fall" of the voice in speaking, the rhythm or measure of verses, song or dance. In music, the word is used of the closing chords of a musical phrase, which succeed one another in such a way as to produce, first ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... began with a slow, strongly accented, rhythmical movement, which continued to grow more and more intricate. Rhythmical diminution continued in a most astounding manner until a frenzied climax was reached; in other words, until the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... rhythmical cadence, they seem to be intoning litanies. "Cluck," says one; "click," responds another, on a finer note; "clock," adds a third, the tenor of the band. And this is repeated indefinitely, like the bells of the village pealing on a holiday: "cluck, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... sowing and thrashing and grinding the grain, in baking bread, in the preparation of food and drinks, of wine and beer, in the making of pots and baskets, and in spinning, the women worked together; and, as is common still among primitive peoples, these occupations were largely carried on in a rhythmical manner. From this co-operation of the women it resulted that they were the first creators of poetry and music. The men, on the other hand, hunted singly in the forests. The birth of their poetic activity followed only after they had monopolised ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... find a name of such distinction as the late Laureate's formally opposed to Tyrwhitt, and committed to the opinion which may seem to have been Dryden's, that the verse of Chaucer is "rhythmical, not metrical." This hardly self-explicating distinction of Dr Geo. Fred. Nott's, Southey in his Life of Cowper has explained in set terms—a verse for which the number of beats or accents is ruled is rhythmical—for example, the verse of Coleridge's Christabel. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... touching expression of simplicity, youth, and innocence. When he spoke, in his soft sing-song voice, his speech flowed as from a well-spring. He never thought about what he had said or was going to say next, and the vivacity and the rhythmical inflections of his voice gave it a penetrating persuasiveness. Night and morning, when going to rest or getting up, he said, 'O God, let me sleep like a stone and rise up like a loaf.' And, sure enough, he had no sooner lain down than he slept like a lump of ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... story flows in a calm, clear, sparkling current, with every charm which simplicity and ease can give." He delineates character with great clearness and power; his speeches are noble rhetorical compositions; his sentences are rhythmical cadences. He was not a critical historian, like Herodotus, for he took his materials secondhand, and he was ignorant of geography; nor did he write with the exalted ideal of Thucydides, but as a painter of beautiful forms, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... recollection of his past sufferings in prison, "Well I know the weight of galling chain"—has to be declaimed with great energy. So far as the relative value of the notes is concerned, it is entirely ad libitum, the rhythmical figure in the orchestra having ceased one half-bar before. It is said that Dabadie, a basso cantante rather than baritone, to whom was entrusted the role of Tell on the first production of the work at the Opera, Paris, on August 3, 1829, finding it impossible ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... lost in ease when I heard a footstep approaching and the rhythmical rustling of drapery, and knew eyes were now regarding me that I feared, yet much ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... perceptible twittering of the little broods above, among the dull gold beams of the ceiling. Those who have been familiar with the sanctuaries of Islam know, as well as I, that there is no book so exquisitely rhythmical as that of the Prophet. Even if the sense of the verses escape you, the chanted reading, which forms part of certain of the offices, acts upon you by the simple magic of its sounds, in the same way as the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... leaden-coloured even," save where the misty blue ridge of the Persian mountains links heaven to earth, gleaming with a ghostly chain of snow beneath a rose-flushed sky. A few marsh Arabs' reed huts and a distant fire are the only signs that the world is inhabited. A faint rhythmical beating is growing more distinct, the herald of the slow ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... through sex. We may go even farther and say with Mr. Grant Allen that everything high and ennobling in our nature springs directly from the fact of sex. He claims that to it 'we owe our love of color, of graceful forms, of melodious sound, of rhythmical motion, the evolution of music, of poetry, of romance, of painting, of sculpture, of decorative art, of dramatic entertainment. From it,' he says, 'springs the love of beauty, around it all beautiful arts circle as their centre. Its subtle aroma pervades all literature, and to it we owe the heart ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... absorbed in meditation, until suddenly I became conscious that something or other disturbed, disquieted, irritated me. I spied about, and found that at quite a distance away, near a low bosket of light green, a head covered by a yellow straw hat emerged and vanished again in rhythmical alternation. I recognized the chief gardner of the city park, a German with whom I was well acquainted. I went slowly up to him and was about to ask him what game he was playing—I had almost taken him for a ghost—when I observed in his hand a small basket nearly half filled with leaves. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... rhythm alone are employed; also in other arts, such as that of the shepherd's pipe, which are essentially similar to these. In dancing, rhythm alone is used without 'harmony'; for even dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement. ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... in this extraordinary key, introducing all the ornaments peculiar to the ancient Arabic chant with a facility which an operatic singer might have envied. Then there was a moment's silence, broken again almost immediately by a succession of heavy sounds which can only be described as resembling rhythmical thunder, rising and falling three times at equal intervals; another short but intense silence, and again the voice burst out with the wild clang of a trumpet, echoing and reverberating through the galleries and among ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... variations of his own as made him the envy and despair of all other fiddlers in the vicinity. Indeed, he could rarely get away from a great house without a sample of his powers in this direction, and then blending with the rhythmical cadence of feet, the rustle of garments, would be evoked ripples of mirth and bursts of laughter that were echoed back from the dim pine-groves without. Finally, when with his great foot beating time on the floor and every muscle of his body ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... canvas, filled with a rhythmical group of dim figures, already beautiful, though they had caught the artist and his work in the very act of true creation—when after weeks or months of brooding, of hard work, of searching study of this or that, of inspiration tested ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the book are better known for their work in prose than in poetry: W.E.B. Du Bois whose well-known prose at its best is, however, impassioned and rhythmical; and Benjamin Brawley who is the author, among other works, of one of the best handbooks on the English drama that has yet appeared ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... history of the Jews and the Chinese—evidence which is curious, but not convincing. Among the Aryan nations, it has hitherto been considered as a general rule that poetry precedes prose. Now the Yagyas and Nivids are prose, and though Dr. Haug calls it rhythmical prose, yet, as compared with the hymns, they are prose; and though such an argument by itself could by no means be considered as sufficient to upset any solid evidence to the contrary, yet it is stronger than the argument derived from the literature of nations who are neither ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... seventy centimetres in diameter, on which is stretched a skin of seal or walrus gut. The drum is beaten with a light stick of whalebone. The sound thus produced is melancholy, and is so in a yet higher degree when it is accompanied by the natives' monotonous, commonly rhythmical songs, which appear to me to have a strong resemblance to those we hear in Japan and China. A still greater resemblance I thought I observed in the dances of these peoples. Notti is a splendid yarar-player. After some ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... debate made the issue between liberty and slavery so clear that a wayfaring man, though a fool, could not misunderstand; declared that if slavery was not wrong, there was nothing that was wrong. Soon he came to be looked upon as one who each year would coin the happy phrase and the rhythmical watchword that would be taken upon the lips of 30,000,000 of people; was made the leader of the new "party ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... sleeves of her pink gingham dress, her thin knees outlining beneath the scanty folds of the skirt. Her neck was long, her shoulder-blades troubled the back of her blouse at every movement. She was a creature full of ostentatious joints, but the joints were delicate and rhythmical and charming. Annie had a charming face, too. It was thin and sunburnt, but still charming, with a sweet, eager, intent-to-please outlook upon life. This last was the real attitude of Annie's mind; it was, in fact, Annie. She was intent to please ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... phrase must be of due length and cadence; every sentence must be perfectly balanced before it left his lips. Exact precision characterized his style. He was easily the first legal orator America has produced. The rhythmical fullness and poise ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... is possible with the other combinations, but hiatus is preferable even with the above combinations, in a syllable on which the rhythmical accent falls (see ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer |
