"Lilt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 round the pretty throat, to the leggings beneath the corduroy ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... charming intention. "The Great Cloud" rolls over a strip of lowland, lowering in a vast imperial whiteness, vague and shadowy as sleep or death. Ruysdael would have stopped for a moment to watch it. But its lyrical lilt would trouble a mind that could only think in prose; Shelley would like it better, and most certainly it would not fail to recall to his ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... 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 barefooted colleens who fed the pigs, or the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... ditty, ballad, onody, chansonnette, lyric, lilt, lied, paean, cantata, aria, sonnet, strain, round, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... brewing To the lilt of his lyric wiles: The fiddler knows what rueing Will come of this ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... the way, too, but silently. Yet, the music was there. The pity was that one could not hear it. The pomp, the swagger, the swing of the Guards, the shifting movement, the bright array—all these were unmistakable. The very lilt of the air made itself felt. Very cheery. Certainly, ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passed on her way, her head high, an invincible lightness in the spring of every footstep, a splash of scarlet berries making a star among her dark hair, and humming the graceless lilt which told how— ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... and Fred said it. They said it together. There was the same lilt of triumph in each voice, and both smiles vanished ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... thy life with hopes and sins and fears, And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears; Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire, When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar, Villon, our sad ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... English poetry awoke, long after the Conquest (or, as I should prefer to put it, after the Crusades) it awoke a new thing; in its vocabulary as much like Anglo-Saxon poetry as ever you will, but in metre, rhythm, lilt—and more, in style, feeling, imaginative play—and yet more again, in knowledge of what it aimed to be, in the essentials, in the qualities that make Poetry Poetry—as different from Anglo-Saxon poetry as cheese is from chalk, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... indeed, with its promise of plenty. Much superior to the next, which bears in its bosom the hollow and unwelcome ring of a "toom girnal"—a sound no child should ever know. It is yet a lilt familiar to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... shrill way through the heavy mist that hung above the Missouri, came a strange, new trumpet-call from Brannon. The opening notes, reiterated and smooth-flowing, were unlike the first sprightly lilt of reveille. As Dallas stilled the squeaking of the well-pulley to listen, they fell upon ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... 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 stretch of snow-bound country, sparsely dotted ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... 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 ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... past 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
... station to meet him on a fine young Saturday morning at the beginning of June. She set out from the house which maintained a sort of lordly aloofness among pine-covered hills, more than usually conscious of the lilt of summer in air ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... 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.
... emanated from this young girl. 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, close-folded nymph among the sedges may ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... that magnificent dithyrambic declamation, '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" ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... minute or two." Struck by the note of appeal in her voice, so unlike its lilt of the moment before, he added: "Ride on ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... Moral Matron, and the Young Person, with a love of larkiness and lilt, but a distrust of politics, pugilism, and deep potations, the following eclectic adaptation of this prodigiously popular ballad may perhaps be not ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... 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
... skirl shrilly through old Boulogne, and to catch the sound of English voices in the clarion notes of the "Marseillaise," but, strangest of all to French ears, to listen to that new battle-cry, "Are we down-hearted?" followed by the unanswerable "No—o—o!" of every regiment. And then the lilt of that new marching song to which Tommy Atkins ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... strains of some minstrel 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... the lilt of a drinking-song as he reflected thus, for he considered himself quite equal to handling the whole batch of rascallions if only he had a wall of some kind to back him. He was fondling the possibility that they had given ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... neck with noble ring: nay, sad in spirit and shorn of her gold, oft shall she pass o'er paths of exile now our lord all laughter has laid aside, all mirth and revel. Many a spear morning-cold shall be clasped amain, lifted aloft; nor shall lilt of harp those warriors wake; but the wan-hued raven, fain o'er the fallen, his feast shall praise and boast to the eagle how bravely he ate when he and the wolf were ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... 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
... difficulty. We talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion which, for the life of me, I could not discover myself. Possibly I recited with a certain joyous lilt which was my own, for—his memory was good, and at a second rendering, very often the first, he made a quatrain his own—he recited the same lines and invested them with an unrest and passionate revolt ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... bride!" More of the ballad followed, for Johnston trolled it lustily as he strode back to the shanty, and the refrain haunted me as I swept on through the cool dimness under the conifers, for the lilt of it went fittingly with the clang of iron on quartz outcrop and the jingle of steel. It also chimed with my own thoughts the while, and the last lines broke from my lips triumphantly when we raced out of the dusky woods into the growing light under a ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... lilt of them and the keen beauty of the night, the inherited pain of the ages rose from the depths of the young girl's heart, so that she thought it must break; for what reason she could not have told, since she was without care or sorrow that she knew, except the French ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... two hundred fathoms across the weed, being now, with what we had made previously, no more than some thirty fathoms in from the edge of the weed. And there stood Mistress Madison beside me, doing somewhat of a dainty step-dance upon the flooring of the look-out, and singing a quaint old lilt that I had not heard that dozen years, and this little thing, I think, brought back more clearly to me than aught else how that this winsome maid had been lost to the world for so many years, having ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... hold of Billy somewhere and made him forget his hunger. Like a sweet incense which induces pleasant daydreams they were wafted in upon him through the rich, mellow voice of the solitary camper, and the lilt of the meter entered ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that my fancy flows, With the lilt of a dear old-fashioned tune, Through "Lewis Carroll's" poemly prose, And the ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... hours I dream (High thought) instead of armour gleam Or warrior cantos ream by ream To load the shelves - Songs with a lilt of words, that ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their habitation, 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, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... 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. A comparison of his idioms and phonetics with those ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... 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! ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... heart of mine, Keep still, and make no sign! The world hath learned a newer joy— A sweeter song than thine! Tho' all the brooks of June Should lilt and pipe in tune. The music by and by would cloy— ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... judgment on him for impiously endeavouring to find pleasure otherwise than by the practice of the domestic virtues. Disquieting memories of bursting boilers surge up to the surface of the mind, and old catches like the weird ballad of Sir Patrick Spens lilt themselves to the clank of the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... The wind gossiped with the grasses along our way, and over them the buttercups danced, goldenly-glad. Waves of sinuous shadow went over the ripe hayfields, and plundering bees sang a freebooting lilt ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... scaled, on my lips the lilt of an Andalusian dance, The steep redoubt under a rain of fire; I've staked my life upon a hazard of the dice Careless, as though it were a ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... that followed is well known. At the end of a pleasant evening when there had been music—in which James himself was the first connoisseur in Scotland, inventing, some say, the national lilt, the rapidly rising and falling strain which is so full of pathos yet so adaptable to mirth—"and other honest solaces of grete pleasance and disport," the sound of trampling feet and angry voices broke upon the conventual stillness ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... chill with the bite of winter and though tiny snowflakes drifted aimlessly to earth with a quite deceitful innocence, as if they knew nothing of more to come and were only idling through the air, the blood of Charming Billy rioted warmly through his veins and his voice had a lilt which it had long lacked and he sang again the pitifully foolish thing with which he was wont to voice ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... 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 and say those ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... umbrella then. And 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 were singing of ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... her to avoid her own suspicions as to what he knew, as well as to keep from arousing those of others, his heart was telling a very different story all the time. He could see again the dainty grace with which she had danced for him, heard again that low voice breaking into a merry piping lilt, warmed once more to the living, elusive smile, at once so tender and mocking. He might set his will to preserve an even front to her gay charm, but it was beyond him to control the thrills that ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... gravely composing her face, and clearing her throat, she began, in a high, shrill, piercing voice, rocking her head to the peculiar lilt of the words, and interpolating short explanatory ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... pulley on the large end of the receiving cone as to 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 same moment. This action is reversed when the lift ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great 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, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark which chants the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that breaks the silence of the most wonderful nights. I hear the wisdom of the rooks in the great elms; the lifting lilt of the linnet, and the robin's quaint little summer song. The starlings chatter ceaselessly, their queer strident voices harsh against the melodious gossip of the other birds; the martins shrill softly as they swoop to and fro busied with their nesting under the caves; ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... wrote The Song of the Wrens, for music. Tennyson had not that positive aversion to music which marked Dr Johnson, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and some other poets. Nay, he liked Beethoven, which places him higher in the musical scale than Scott, who did not rise above a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty. The Wren songs, entitled The Window, were privately printed by Sir Ivor Guest in 1867, were set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and published by Strahan in December 1870. "A puppet," Tennyson called the song-book, "whose only merit is, perhaps, that it can ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Bryce Cardigan strode, and there was a lilt in his heart now. Already he had forgotten the desperate situation from which he had just escaped; he thought only of Shirley Sumner's face, tear-stained with terror; and because he knew that at ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 was a lady ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... lilt of songs, To penetrate the inmost lore of poets—to know the mighty ones, Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespere, Tennyson, Emerson; To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... 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 the natural ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... 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 and praises the destiny of man at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 this ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... never sang with less restraint in all my life than I did that quiet morning on the Boulogne road. I raised my voice and let it have its will. And I felt my spirits rising with the lilt of the melody. My voice rang out, full and free, and it must have carried far ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... 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 ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... 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 ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... 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 ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... knew their Gipsy Joe of old, His free wild words and his laughter bold: So high and low all gathered together By the village well in the autumn weather, Lured by the gipsy's bargain-chatter And the reckless lilt of his hare-brained patter. And there the Revd. Salvyn Bent, The parish church's ornament, Stood, as it chanced, in discontent, And eyed with a look that was almost sinister The Revd. Joshua Fall, the minister. And the Squire, it happened, was riding by, ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... 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
... one case, as in the other, there is a 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. As easily might we explain why the words and air of the 'Old Hundredth' ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... ditty, 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 ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... eyes and her smiling mouth. Every now and then she burst into song; and then her thrilling voice, so sweet and fresh, had tones in it that only birds and good women full of love may compass. Mostly the song was a lilt or a verse which spoke for her own heart and love; but just as the clock struck three, she broke into a low laugh which ended in a merry, mocking melody, and which was evidently the conclusion of her argument concerning Sophy's ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... hasn't 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 she walks." ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... dignified Grecian lyre; but it was 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 ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... remembrance, Jack Cockrell saw this salty relic of the Spanish Main among the crew which had disported itself on the tavern green at Charles Town,—the old man sitting aside with a couple of stray children upon his knees while his head nodded to the lilt of the fiddle. And again there had been a glimpse of him trudging in the column which had followed Stede Bonnet, with trumpet and drum, to attack the hostile Indians. Jack's heart warmed to Trimble Rogers and also to young Bill Saxby. ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... The lilt of the joyous words had often been with him as he sped through the sleeping fields to ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... 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
... the hush of night— Sleep, little babe, sleep on! (Twig to the lilt, I have got it all right) Sleep, little babe, sleep on! Dark are the dark and darkling days Winding the webbed and winsome ways, Homeward she creeps in dim amaze— Sleep, little babe, sleep on! (But it waked ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... in that, now!" cried his interlocutor, with an odd Celtic lilt which sometimes invaded his speech; "but she has an immortal soul, and I'm by no means sure that yours is still ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... a very good sword, and is cunning of fence, for your comfort," said Randal. So I hummed the old lilt of the Leslies, whence, they say, comes ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... rock wall seemed to leap forward in the brilliance, but he did not smoke; he paced restlessly about and at last crept into his bunk and lay with his face to the wall. Larry sat long before the fire. "It's the music that's got in my blood," he said. "Katherine could sing and lilt the Scotch airs like a bird. She had a ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... seen your son, With the regiment"—sang Camarade Duclos, another old-eyed youngster. There was amiable adventure with an amiable "blonde" (oh, if you could have seen your son); another with a "jolie brune" (oh, ma mere, ma mere); and still another lecon d'amour. The refrain had a catchy lilt to it, and the ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... Macaulay lacked ideas and vision. He liked the lilt and swing of the Lays and Ballads, and enjoyed the Essays with their superb colouring. Disputing Macaulay's dictum that neither painters nor poets are helped by the advances in civilisation, science and refinement, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... I was 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 and the sterns, And pairtit ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... 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 a ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... 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 is wounded, grave indeed, the word Is kindly said, but to a softer ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... he suddenly saw the girl. She was huddled in a corner, wrapped in fear, but the eyes that watched him were as blue as the skies over Caronne. The ragged dress did not hide the gentle curves of her body, nor did the tear-streaked grime spoil the lilt of her face. "Why, 'tis springtime in here," cried Cappen, "and Primavera herself is strewing flowers ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... Madame was not very busy with her eyes, 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 her gown. Madame had not slept ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... instrument We favour, still the lilt will stop; And with a gorgeous chalice blent Oft lurks the tiny poisoned drop. I'm not so spry myself to-night; I'll try a dose of arrowroot. You'll own that Indigestion's quite A Rift in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... and comforting lilt, indeed, with its promise of plenty. Much superior to the next, which bears in its bosom the hollow and unwelcome ring of a "toom girnal"—a sound no child should ever know. It is yet a lilt ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... 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
... neat one must be to be killed by the French, I'm sick of parading, Through wet and cowld wading, Or standing all night to be shot in a trench. To the tune of a fife They dispose of your life, You surrender your soul to some illigant lilt; Now, I like Garryowen, When I hear it at home, But it's not half so sweet when you're going ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and "athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees" and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... 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 ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... of wanting to but Jerry did not wait for encouragement. With a lilt of enjoyment in his voice he said a rhyme he had learned sometime—he could not remember ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... crowned Margot—Margot, who was in flaming red to-night, and looked a devil's daughter indeed, with her fire-like sequins and her red ankles twinkling as she threw herself into the thick of the dance and kicked, and whirled, and flung her bare arms about to the lilt of the music and the fluting of ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... 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
... 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
... 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 by ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... how the composer prized national themes and folk tunes, and strove to secure them. It is said that morning after morning he was awakened by the singing of a laborer, working on the house below his window. The song had a haunting lilt, and Tschaikowsky wrote it down. The melody afterwards became that touching air which fills the Andante of the First String Quartet. Another String Quartet, in F major, was written in 1814, and at once acclaimed by all who heard it, with the ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... sixteen cents. Rent deducted two dollars. Wood thirty-five cents. Due commissary for goods furnished—here, Mr. Kidd," he said to the book-keeper, "let me see Miss Smith's account." It was shoved to him across the desk. Kingsley elevated his glasses. Then he adjusted them with a peculiar lilt—it was his way ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... will some ticket, When his statue's built, Tell the gazer "'Twas a cricket Helped my crippled lyre, whose lilt Sweet and low, when strength usurped Softness' place i' the scale, ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... went on swiftly through the heat of the early afternoon. It was very silent up there. Now and then, a brilliant blue-jay would lilt from a stunted oak with the flute-like love-notes of spring; or a lonely little brown fellow would hop with a low chirp from one bush to another as though he had been lost up there for years and had grown quite hopeless about seeing his kind again. ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to be as deadly dull as a British Sunday—not dull as other men are dull, but dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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
... his eyes the lilt of the girl's movements. Apparently he had not heard what the officer said. At least he ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... impossible, making and remaking that road! It should have some great poem all to itself, I thought; a poem called "The Road to Verdun." And the poem should be set to music. I could almost hear the lilt of the verses as our car slipped through the tangle of motor camions and gun-carriages on the way thither. As for the music, I could really hear that without flight of fancy: a deep, rolling undertone of heavy wheels, of jolting ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... mistaken; her voice held the singing lilt of the Foanna. Somehow she had crossed some barrier to become a paler, perhaps a lesser, but still a copy of the three aliens. Was this what they had meant when they warned of a change which might come to those who followed them into ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... circulation in the literary world" (Medwin, Conversations, 1824, p. 261), and he may have heard without heeding this and other passages quoted by privileged readers; or, though never a line of Christabel had sounded in his ears, he may (as Koelbing points out) have caught its lilt at second hand from the published works of Southey, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... sound. I will engage two Manxmen quarrelling in Manx to make more noise in a given time than any other two human brethren in Christendom, not excepting two Irishmen. Also I think the Manx must be capable of notes of sweet feeling, and I observe that a certain higher lilt in a Manx woman's voice, suggesting the effort to speak about the sound of the sea, and the whistle of the wind in the gorse, is lost in the voices of the younger women who speak English only. But apart from tangible loss, I regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of sentiment. In this old ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... Shon had won the reputation 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 a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... scenes, and sufficient interest to carry the reader pleasantly over the ground. The Gentle Shepherd is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay's power than his songs alone would warrant. His lyrical pieces, though not wholly without the lilt and charm such verse exacts, are perhaps mainly of service in showing the immeasurable superiority of Burns. Ramsay was a successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man of business. He exchanged wig-making for bookselling, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... sleep a little, my darling. I will say thee a psalm, or perhaps one of those old Manx ballads thou didst use to lilt so lightly." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... in to the boathouse landing to the lilt of a familiar rowing song. Wyn's camping days were over; the outing of the Go-Ahead ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... plentiful at the court of Charlemagne. Now, Angilbert was a poet of exquisite grace, and surprisingly modern is his music, which is indeed a wonderful anticipation of the lilt of Edgar Poe. I compare ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... might just 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
... 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. ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... dawn descends the hills, And round me, as I greet the day, I hear the lilt of laughing rills And songs of fountains at ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... TO D'ARGENS. A volley of most rough-paced off-hand Rhyming, direct from the heart; "Ode [as he afterwards terms it, or irrepressible extempore LILT] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Passing of the Gael" is known wherever there are Irish emigrants, but there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna Johnstone MacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is a balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whose natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for more than a ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the purely comic is wide; with an inflection of the voice, a bend of that curious long thin body which seems to be embodied gesture, she can suggest, she can portray, the humour that is dry, ironical, coarse (I will admit), unctuous even. Her voice can be sweet or harsh; it can chirp, lilt, chuckle, stutter; it can moan or laugh, be tipsy or distinguished. Nowhere is she conventional; nowhere does she resemble any other French singer. Voice, face, gestures, pantomime, all are different, all are purely her own. She is a creature of contrasts, and suggests ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... to deal, and no longer with pulpit abstractions. But while they stood thus, another turn in the affairs which revolved around the lonely barn carried with it a new sound; a horse's trot was plainly heard, likewise the humorous lilt of a ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... LILT-PYPE, s. a musical instrument, the upper part of which was in the form of a flageolet, terminating below in a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... a lilt of girlish laughter running through the words. "You mean 'bribes,' don't you? For I assure you, dear cousin, it is the metallic clink of American gold, and nothing else, that lures your great men over the sea. As for my silence, ma belle, I have been uncommunicative ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... wonderful 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 to please the Empress Eugenie. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... no American poetry with a truer lilt of song than these early verses, and there has been none since. Two years later, in 1833, Holmes went to complete his medical studies in Paris, and the lines ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... sound is held up on the word take, because the k is followed by the t in to; and what a wonderful musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were to denote the tones the syllables should be—shall I say sung on? Now French is an example of a language without stresses; you know how each syllable ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... shadowy corner of the crowded room, and listened to the singing, wild and strong, and with no hint of coming battle in its full rolling lilt. He noted with satisfaction how the "Long, Long Trail," and "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag" gradually gave place to "Tell Mother I'll Be There," and "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder," growing strong ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... At the lilt in her voice Mollie, at her end of the wire, sat up and stared inquiringly into the black mouth ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope |
