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More "Sonorous" Quotes from Famous Books



... scribe, sat listening intently while the company around the guest-house fire discoursed in monk-Latin of werewolves in Ireland. "In saecula saeculorum"—"ab incunabilis horrendum"—"quocunque nomine notandum"—"coram diabolo"—the sonorous many-syllabled phrases clattered like the noise of rooks in treetops. It was January, the "wolf-month" of old English shepherds. Meadows ran floods of icy half-melted snow; mountain winds were screaming about the cloisters, and for two days travelers ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey

... The noble, sonorous music, the solemn movement of the poem are in great part lost by its version into English; yet, I hope that enough are left to suggest the original. I think it quite unsurpassed in its combination of great artistic and moral qualities, which I am sure ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... of this interview, Johnson talked to his Majesty with profound respect, but still in his firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice, and never in that subdued tone which is commonly used at the levee and in the drawing-room. After the King withdrew, Johnson shewed himself highly pleased with his Majesty's conversation and gracious behaviour. He said to Mr. Barnard, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... Freeman's voice could hardly, even by courtesy, be called musical; in fact, it was harsh and strident; but this evening the hills, and the trees, and the wide open spaces, Nature's mighty modulator, subdued the harshness, so that the voice rolled up to the people clear, full, and sonorous. Nor was the preacher possessed of great learning nor endued with the gift of eloquence. He had, however, a shrewd knowledge of his people and of their ways and of their needs, and he had a kindly heart, and, more ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... as good as his word in the matter, and gave out some very sonorous discourses, without in the least stopping the round of gayeties kept up by these dissipated Katy-dids, which ran on, night after night, till the celebrated Jack Frost epidemic, which occurred somewhere about ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... regale. Be that thy boon. He spake, and, downward sway'd, fell resupine, With his huge neck aslant. All-conqu'ring sleep Soon seized him. From his gullet gush'd the wine With human morsels mingled, many a blast Sonorous issuing from his glutted maw. Then, thrusting far the spike of olive-wood Into the embers glowing on the hearth, I heated it, and cheer'd my friends, the while, 440 Lest any should, through fear, shrink from his part. But when that stake of olive-wood, though green, Should soon have ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... he drowns all other sounds with his own sonorous phrases; private interest he replaces by devotion to the public welfare; for competition he substitutes emulation and rewards. After having posited industrial hierarchy as a principle, it being a necessary consequence of his faith in God, authority, and genius, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... To stay still might seal his fate. Onward, therefore, he pushed. At length, however, from want of food and water, his strength failed him. His sight grew dim, and, fainting, he fell on the ground. How long he had lain there he knew not, when he heard a strange, deep-toned, sonorous voice. Languidly he opened his eyes, and saw standing over him a tall Indian, of dignified appearance and full costume ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston

... without a ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent), we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... in the single instance of the guttural j. He, and all others who heard it spoken, describe it as "soft and not less liquid than the Latin," "rich in vowels and pleasant to the ear," an idiom "simple, sweet, and sonorous."[20] ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton

... dropped the bow upon the strings. Strong and round, mellow and sweet, the note swelled forth. Starting with the least filament of sound, it wove itself into a compact chord of sonorous resonance; filled the great parlors; passed through the doorway into the receptive stillness outside; charged it with throbbings—thus held the air a moment; reigned in it—then, calling its powers back to itself, drew in its ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... the phantom to flight, but it again took shape in the distance, and slowly swelled to its whilom proportions; it was Henri once more following her into the dining-room, and still murmuring: "I love you! I love you!" These words rang within her breast with the sonorous clang of a bell; she no longer heard anything but them, pealing their loudest throughout her frame. Nevertheless, she desired to reflect, and again strove to escape from the apparition. He had spoken; never would she dare to look on his face again. The brutal passion of the man had ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... human life is at stake—he is dying. You must come with me and let the doctor be free to do his work. I command you to come!" she added, in a stern, ringing, sonorous voice that seemed to thrill the other to her very heart's core and fascinate her—ay, fairly paralyze her will-power. "Come!" repeated Bernardine, laying a hand on her shoulder—"come out into the grounds with me, Mrs. Gardiner—out into ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey

... as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and musical voice, the ballad of Betty Foy. I was not critically or sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the rest for granted. But in the Thorn, the Mad Mother, and the Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman, I felt that deeper power ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... versification in general harmonious. By the mixture of obsolete words, it possesses an air of solemnity well adapted to abstruse researches; at the same time that by the frequent resolution of diphthongs, it instils into the Latin the sonorous and melodious powers ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... organization of a distinct political body, no other charge against the administration proved so plausible and so continuously serviceable as this. It invited to florid declamation profusely illustrated with impressive historical allusions, and to the free use of vague but grand and sonorous phrases concerning "usurpation," "the subjection of the life, liberty, and property of every citizen to the mere will of a military commander," and other like terrors. Unfortunately men much more deserving of respect than the Copperheads, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with the flames of fire." Still repeating the awful words, his voice broken to a terrified whisper, "His rebuke with the flames of fire!" And in particular moods, when the prophets, however sonorous, were inadequate to his need, my uncle would have recourse to his own pithy vocabulary for terms with which to anathematize himself; but these, of course, may not be ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... the sight, such as the waking eye never beheld; and the ear is ravished with music which no earthly skill could produce. The dreaming sense magnifies all sounds and sights which exist in nature. The thunder deepens its sonorous tone, ocean sends up a louder voice, and the whirlwind shakes the bending ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie

... Thompson, to whom the metrical review had been apportioned, "is couched in sonorous lines, of haunting melody and charm; and yet so closely inter-related as to be scarcely quotable with justice to the author. To be appreciated the poem should be read as a whole,—I shall say as ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... venial. But though I put my own self into him, I shall not be beaten like him." He jumped to his feet and threw down his pen so that it stood quivering in the table. "For surely it was of me that Heine was thinking when he wrote: 'Yes, a third man will come'"—and Lassalle's accent became dramatically sonorous—"'and he will conclude what Luther began, what Lessing continued, a man of whom the Fatherland stands in such ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... asked to walk into Sabina's boudoir (for Claude is out in the garden), to sit down, and deliver his message: which he does after a due military salute, sitting bolt upright in his chair, and in a solemn and sonorous voice. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... rather full of this clock. It was of the good old-fashioned "grandfather" type. It stood eight feet high, in a carved-oak case, and had a deep, sonorous, solemn tick, that made a pleasant accompaniment to the after-dinner chat, and seemed to fill the room with an air ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome

... of the room, as upon a three-dimensional screen, the four Terrestrials saw themselves seated in the control-room of the Skylark. They saw and heard Margaret take up her guitar, and strike four sonorous chords in "A." Then, as if they had been there in person, they heard themselves sing "The Bull-Frog" and all the other songs they had sung, far off in space. They heard Margaret suggest that Dorothy play some "real music," and heard ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... even temper; to their complacent gurglings and sleepy murmurs. One—and the most Infantile of all—not of the Family, has a distinctive note, a copyright tone which none imitates, and which becomes at times a sonorous swelling boom, a lofty recitative, for even an island has its temper and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... power to do much for us, and then diffidently tendered a guinea. A portly dealer in feminine luxuries talked largely of the claims of our indigent brethren, and the sacred obligations of charity, and wound up his sonorous homily with the climax of half-a-crown. We found one burly gentleman, buried up to the elbows in red-tape and legal documents, who professed a perfect horror, a rooted antipathy, to the poor in every shape, and who had a decided conviction that poverty was a nuisance which ought to be put down. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various

... Woe be unto him if they found him. A favorite ruse on the part of the culprit was to plunge into his tent and be placidly snoring when the victims began their hunt. Sometimes the simulation would be too sonorous, and give him away, and then he had trouble on hand for the next hour. The ingenuity of these sons of Belial in their pranks was beyond description. I have laughed until absolutely exhausted many a time. How did I know so much about them? Well, I had two of the liveliest of these ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock

... he might play it: and Leonardo took with him that instrument which he had made with his own hands, in great part of silver, in the form of a horse's skull—a thing bizarre and new—in order that the harmony might be of greater volume and more sonorous in tone; with which he surpassed all the musicians who had come together there to play. Besides this, he was the best improviser in verse of his day. The Duke, hearing the marvellous discourse of Leonardo, became so enamoured of his genius, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari

... suffering so adherent with such lightness of demeanour—then, more dangerous than these, a sense of added unlooked-for nearness to her, and a resultant calling not merely of the spirit of youth in him to that same spirit resident in her, but the deeper, more compelling, more sonorous call from the knowledge of tragedy in him to that same terrible knowledge now first made evident in her.—And here Richard's heart—in spite of pity, in spite of tenderness which would have borne a hundred miseries to save her five ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... labored, accompanied by a guttural sound. The respirations ceased for some time and several anxiously looked at their watches until the profound silence was disturbed by a prolonged inspiration, which was followed by a sonorous expiration. ...
— Lincoln's Last Hours • Charles A. Leale

... not always plant her poets where they belong, but if we look carefully their affinities betray themselves. The youth will carry his Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved so well. The man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous couplets of Pope which ring in his ears were written on the banks of the Thames. The old man, as he nods over the solemn verse of Wordsworth, will recognize the affinity between the singer and the calm sheet that lay before him as he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Rogue's Hall," exclaims a deep, sonorous voice, that echoes along the aisle. The vote-cribber, having paused over Tom, as if to contemplate his degradation, turns inquiringly, to see from whence comes the voice. "It is me!" again the voice resounds. Two glaring eyes, staring anxiously through the small iron grating of a door ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... have just quitted. The hymn is sung—not by paid singers, but by the whole assembly at the loudest pitch of their voices, unaccompanied by any musical instrument, the words being given out, two lines at a time, by the clerk. There is something in the sonorous quavering of the harsh voices, in the lank and hollow faces of the men, and the sour solemnity of the women, which bespeaks this a strong-hold of intolerant zeal and ignorant enthusiasm. The preacher enters the pulpit. He is a coarse, hard-faced man of forbidding aspect, ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... the patriotic eloquence of the representative. The painter was glad to see and hear so great a man in the hour of his glory, though so much as a fragment of the oration does not now remain in his memory. In size, in figure, in expression, in the sonorous tones of his voice, Mr. Sutton was everything that a congressman should be. "The people," said Isaac D. Worthington in presenting him, "should indeed be proud of such an able and high-minded representative." We shall have cause to recall that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... him it was only the burning of the villages, which the country people had abandoned to the flames. After this he retired to rest, and it is most certain he was so little disquieted as to fall into a sound sleep, for his breathing, which, on account of his corpulence, was rather heavy and sonorous, was heard by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... the cabin door, and listened outside to learn whether any one were stirring. He could still hear the sonorous snore of Jack, and could distinguish the deep breathing of his hostess. All seemed to ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger

... deep sonorous tone, that was wonderfully different from that in which he had just been speaking to Henry; "get out the boat. Arm yourselves and jump in. There is ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne

... began slowly, and with the air of searching her mind for properly sonorous phrases; "I have done receive your letter, an' I take my pen in han' to now reply. I was very glad to know dat you is well, an' I am sorry to say I am not; I think I ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray

... ever did so much by a single word, by felicitous expressions. In the tribune he was immovable. His self-possession never left him in the greatest disorders. He was always master of himself. His voice was full, manly, and sonorous, and pleased the ear; always powerful, yet flexible, it could be as distinctly heard when he lowered it as when he raised it. His knowledge was not remarkable, but he had an almost miraculous faculty of appropriating whatever he heard. He paid ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... clear, still evening air the words rang out over the desert, sonorous, imposing, peaceful. As the notes of the verse died away the answer came from other ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... a furious bound He wrench'd a rocky fragment from the ground By far more ponderous, and more huge by far Than what Phaeacia's sons discharged in air. Fierce from his arm the enormous load he flings; Sonorous through the shaded air it sings; Couch'd to the earth, tempestuous as it flies, The crowd gaze upward while it cleaves the skies. Beyond all marks, with many a giddy round Down-rushing, it ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... fitted for the part of Venus. Without knowing the lady I gave my consent to this excellent proposal, and moreover agreed to the engagement of a Mlle. Sax, a still unspoiled young singer with a very beautiful voice, as well as of an Italian baritone, Morelli, whose sonorous tones, as contrasted with the sickly French singers of this class, had greatly pleased me during my visits to the Opera. When these arrangements were concluded, I thought I had done all that was really necessary, though I did not cherish any very ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... "is a sonorous name, the brilliant renown of which would only be enhanced by the title ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... the song of birds. Of all natural objects, different kinds of reeds and the hollow stalks of plants are, owing to their hollow and cylindrical form, best adapted for the imitation of a bird's beak and the sonorous transmission of breath. In many languages the word for a flute is the same as that for a reed. In Sanscrit, vanca and venu mean a flute and bamboo; in Persian, na and nay mean a flute and reed; in Greek [Greek: donas], ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... independent of language, and is as universally current as an Arabic numeral. But this divorce of spoken and written language is of questionable advantage. It at once destroys all permanent improvement in a tongue through elegance of style, sonorous periods, or delicacy of expression, and the life of the language itself is weakened when its forms are left to fluctuate uncontrolled. Written poetry, grammar, rhetoric, all are impossible to the student who draws his knowledge from such ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... those high grasses screen us, hide us from all the rest of the world; no one knows where we are, what we are about—while with us is poetry, we are saturated in it, intoxicated with it, something solemn, grand, mysterious is happening to us.... Punin, by preference, kept to poetry, musical, sonorous poetry; he was ready to lay down his life for poetry. He did not read, he declaimed the verse majestically, in a torrent of rhythm, in a rolling outpour through his nose, like a man intoxicated, lifted out of himself, like the Pythian priestess. ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... for the development of this country." I remember that I was at that time reading with great enthusiasm Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," but on the evening of "Old Settlers' Day," to my surprise, I found it difficult to go on. Its sonorous sentences and exaltation of the man who "can" suddenly ceased to be convincing. I had already written down in my commonplace book a resolution to give at least twenty-five copies of this book each year to noble young people of my acquaintance. It is perhaps fitting in ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... there, finally, under the influences of transcendental philosophy, emblematic Freemasonry took root and grew and flourished, developing ten thousand splendours of symbolic grades, of romantic legends, of sonorous names and titles. In a word, the Mysticism of Europe concentrated its forces at Paris and Lyons, and all French Mysticism gathered under the shadow of the square and compass. To that, as to a centre, the whole movement gravitated, and thence it ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... speaks well. Tarhe believes his words," answered Tarhe in his sonorous voice. "The Lenapee seek the death of the pale face. Wingenund grieves for his son. He is Tarhe's friend. Tarhe is old and wise and he is king here. He can save the White Chief from Wingenund and Cornplanter. Listen. Tarhe is old and he has no son. He will make you a great chief and give you lands ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey

... the new comers. On observing the strangers, however, who sat on one of the sofas, instead of addressing them in 'Moors,' we took our hands out of our pockets, drew ourselves up, and making a most ceremonious bow, exclaimed in pure and sonorous Castilian, 'Cavaliers, at your feet! What may ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... beautiful, stately hexameters, which, whatever cavilling critics may say, are delightfully adapted for epic narrative in any fairly polysyllabic language. And Swedish, which is the most sonorous of all Germanic tongues, and full of Gothic strength, produces the most delectable effects in the long, rolling line of slow-marching dactyls and spondees. The tempered realism of Tegner, which shuns all that is harsh ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... the conduct of some nobles, who, unmindful of their own dignity, and of that of their country, assume an unbounded license of vice and folly. They contend with each other in the empty vanity of titles and surnames, and curiously select or invent the most lofty and sonorous appellations —Reburrus or Fabunius, Pagonius or Tarrasius—which may impress the ears of the vulgar with astonishment and respect. From a vain ambition of perpetuating their memory, they affect to multiply their likeness in statues of bronze and marble; nor are they satisfied unless ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... Till heavy slumbers seal their eyelids langourous, drooping lowly, And raving phrenzy flies each brain departing softly, slowly. But when Dan Sol with radiant eyes that fire his face of gold Surveyed white aether and solid soil and waters uncontrol'd, 40 And chased with steeds sonorous-hooved the shades of lingering night, Then sleep from waking Atys fled fleeting with sudden flight, By Nymph Pasithae welcomed to palpitating breast. Thus when his phrenzy raging rash was soothed to gentlest rest, Atys revolved deeds lately done, as thought from breast unfolding, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... around the great work of the "Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada"—such is the object of these few pages. To place facts before the reader, and suggest remedies; to sound the call of the West, loud and sonorous as the bugle pealing a great "reveille," strong and clear as the trumpet blast that stirs the blood; to prompt a timely and generous response in the East, by uniting the Church of Canada in a crusade ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... seemed, those songs sonorous, When they came to me unbidden; Voices single, and in chorus, Like the wild birds singing o'er us In ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... head as he struck the chords of his harp with a bold and vigorous hand. I learnt that they were uncle and niece. I shall not readily forget the effect of these figures, or of the songs which they sang; especially the sonorous notes of the mastersinger, or minstrel. He had a voice of most extraordinary compass. I quickly perceived that I was now in the land of music; but the guests seemed to be better pleased with their food than with the songs of this old bard, for ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... that on the head, but Puritanism was at least preoccupied with moral ideas, and developed an excitement about sin which was at all events a sign of intellectual ferment. And then we did indeed decline into a comfortable sort of security, into a stale classical tradition, with pompous and sonorous writing on the one hand, and with neatness, literary finish, and wit rather than humour on the other. That was a dull, stolid, dignified time; and it was focussed into a great figure of high genius, filled with the combative common-sense which Englishmen admire, the figure of Dr. Johnson. His ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson

... him. They set off, humming song's wild enough to frighten anybody who might be listening. Truechen remained behind at table with Porthos. While the two wine bibbers were looking behind the firewood for what they wanted, a sharp, sonorous sound was heard like the impression of a pair of lips on ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... and talk. Besides this, they held there on stated occasions the ceremonial dances; such were the dances of war and of triumph, when the warriors, painted red and black, returned, carrying the scalps of their slain foes on branches of evergreen pine, while they chanted the sonorous song of victory; and such was the Dance of the Serpent, the dance of lawless love, where the women and young girls were allowed to do whatsoever ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... rules, will speedily be made aware that the English language "super-abounds in short syllables." Why then should we rigidly adhere to rules repugnant to the genius of our language, if they can be modified so as to adapt the sonorous Hexameter to the structure of our mother-tongue? Can they be so modified? I have attempted it. I venture to change them ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon

... breathlessly still, except for the drone of insects at the screens, attracted by the glow of the library lamp. A steeple clock clanged its ten sonorous strokes, and still the old men chatted on, and the Duke had not hinted at ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... words ending in "ation" and "ention" were especially fitted. Trumpet-words, he called them, brazen notes which penetrated the deepest crevices of the brain. I must admit that in the practice of his theory he was wonderfully successful, for after thirty years I can still hear his sonorous voice filling the church with the announcement that the "Jewish congregation was a segregation for the preservation of the Jewish nation." I can see him pausing in his discourse to lubricate his vocal ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... "wouldn't quite understand that. We done got the idea that sometimes there's such a thing as a quarrel that is right and just." The President's melancholy face lit up with animation and his voice rose to the sonorous vibration of the negro preacher. "We learn that out of the Bible, we coloured folks—we learn ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock

... pub. in 1711 under the title of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times. In his philosophy he maintains, as against Hobbes, the existence of a moral sense, a view subsequently developed by the Scottish school of philosophy. The style of S. is stately and sonorous but laboured. He d. at Naples, whither he had gone in search of health, at the early age of 42. Though his writings are directed strongly against Atheism, they have been held to be hostile to ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... twitter from one of the many cages that hung about the room. But afterwards young Sam had his reward; the library, a toby, long before he was old enough to smoke, and his grandfather reading aloud in a wonderful voice, deep, sonorous, flexible—Shakespeare, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, there was nothing personal in such reading—it was not done to give pleasure to young Sam. Every night the old man rumbled out the stately lines, sitting by himself ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland

... of the leaders of the Protestants. In the hamlet of Tareau, close to Gap, Guillaume Farel, a celebrated French reformer, was born in 1489. He died on the 13th Sept. 1565. The most remarkable features of his character were dauntlessness and untiring energy and zeal. He possessed a sonorous and tuneful voice, fluency of language, and passionate earnestness; yet, although seldom failing to arrest the attention of large audiences, he often, by imprudent torrents of denunciation, aroused against ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... hat; for things seemed squally. But the people cried, "Go on! go on!" and some applauded. Dennis, still confused, but flattered by the applause, to which neither he nor I are used, rose again, and this time tried No. 2: "I am very glad you liked it!" in a sonorous, clear delivery. My best friends stared. All the people who did not know me personally yelled with delight at the aspect of the evening; the Governor was beside himself, and poor Isaacs thought he was undone! Alas, it was ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... making a clearance of death on behalf of life. Transcendent alchemists, they were transforming that horrible putrescence into a living and inoffensive product. They were draining the dangerous corpse to the point of rendering it as dry and sonorous as the remains of an old slipper hardened on the refuse-heap by the frosts of winter and the heats of summer. They were working their hardest to render ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... government. As things stand, an intelligent grappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is almost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, not in proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible, but in proportion a she excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences against them. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins; the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... providential visitation, endeavoring only to hold fast our faith in the divine government of the world in the midst of so much that was past understanding. But we lost sight of the metaphysical truth, that, though men may fail to convince others by a never so incessant repetition of sonorous nonsense, they nevertheless gradually persuade themselves, and impregnate their own minds and characters with a belief in fallacies that have been uncontradicted only because not worth contradiction. Thus our Southern politicians, by dint of continued reiteration, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... after this, when he was coming in from a trip alone on part of the line, when his ear caught some strange sounds in the woods ahead; deep, sonorous, semi-human they were. Strange and weird wood-notes in winter are nearly sure to be those of a raven or a jay; if deep, they are likely to ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... told to this Fisherman by a certain Grand Old Voice, vague but sonorous, and voluble exceedingly, that if he would only make a complete change in his nets, and in the fashion of his fishing, miraculous draughts would become as common as minnows in a brook. This Voice visited our Fisherman often in his visions. And, behold, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various

... of his writing is always balanced and sonorous, and everywhere and always is he "the friend of the wise and ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge

... of her marvellous voice embraces twenty-seven notes, reaching from the sonorous bass of a baritone to a few notes above even Jenny Lind's highest. The defects which the critic cannot fail to detect in her singing are not from want of voice, or power of lung, but want of training alone. If her present tour proves successful, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter

... went to bed as usual. He felt no desire to sleep, and would not have dared to do so if he had. He heard the old kitchen clock strike ten. The house was still, for all had long ago retired to their rest, and he could hear the sonorous snores of the paupers in the adjoining rooms. His heart beat quick with anxiety. It was a novel position in which he found himself. He had been accustomed to do everything fairly and "above board," and the thought ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic

... couple was genuine. They did not stir or do anything except to breathe in their sonorous fashion. Jack took hold of the bison skin to draw it aside, when he found the door was locked. It was an easy matter, however, to unfasten it, and a single step ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... Russia was celebrated in a "Pindaric Ode" duly distributed into strophes and antistrophes; and, when the allies entered Paris, the school put his services into requisition to petition for a holiday in honour of the event. He addressed his tutor in a short poem, which begins with a few sonorous and effective couplets, grows more and more like the parody on Fitzgerald in "Rejected Addresses," and ends in a peroration of which the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... poetic enthusiasm in my breast. Long ago I first saw these scenes from the window of an humble cottage of Levis, half-hidden in a screen of foliage; and in my youngest days, ere I knew the method or formation of a verse, I felt the fluttering against the cage of my heart of that golden bird, whose sonorous voice is styled Poetry. In fact, gentlemen, I was carried towards a literary career from the very outset, and in this connection you will permit me to relate a little anecdote. You will pardon me if I appear egotistical, but your cordial reception warrants me in looking for your indulgence. ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... whereas had the right been silent, the wrong, in his judgment, would thereby have been proved victorious. This will justify us at times in talking over the heads of our readers and hearers, and in not sparing sonorous polysyllables, abstruse technicalities, or even the pompous parade of syllogistic arguments with all their unsightly joints sticking out for public admiration. Some hands may be too delicate for this coarse work; but there will always be those to whom it is easy and congenial; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... after years she was given to making light of her choice, but the command was scarcely spoken before she began, in her lovely, sonorous voice, the song which it was her heritage ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane

... they are,) while nothing can represent Him like to Himself." Those who love the quarrels of commentators should look at the notes in the Variorum editions of Padua or Florence to see with what amusing asperity they have treated each other's solutions of the passage. Italian words of abuse have a sonorous quality which gives grandeur to a skirmish of critics. One is declared by his opponent to have ingarbugliato the clearest meaning; another guasta il sentimento and sproposita in grammatica; a third brings falso and assurdo to the charge, and, not satisfied with their force, adds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... the next afternoon, forty-eight laughing, shouting boys reported to Bill McCormack, bluff and kindly member of the Eastshore Common Council who would, in a larger municipality, have been called "Streets and Highways Commissioner" or by similar sonorous title. ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence

... and the multitude, which, just before, had been shouting and screaming, became suddenly silent, and gazed up at the weaver with intense expectation. A breathless silence ensued, and, far down the street, sounded the prophet's loud and sonorous voice. He pointed to the last of his pictures, which, in coarse, clumsy drawing, represented a town, from the houses of which flames arose in ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... an Amen that lasted five minutes; and the priest, in an unctuous voice, murmured some Latin words, of which one could hear only the sonorous endings. He then walked round the boat, sprinkling it with holy water, and next began to murmur the "Oremus," standing alongside the boat opposite the sponsors, who remained motionless, hand ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... spectacles telegraphed a meaning message to the other eyes glancing over the paper now and then; and both these friends in deed as well as name felt assured that this woman needed all the comfort they could give her. But the busy needles never stopped their click, and the sonorous voice read on without a pause, so Christie never knew what mute confidences passed between mother and son, or what helpful confessions her traitorous ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott

... educated. I went back four years in life, and with all the enthusiasm of a college student I raved of poetry and romance. We read German together, and we talked of love in French; and the musical tongue of Italy, it seemed to me, befitted her mouth better than her own sonorous native language, and when in conversation she would look me one of those dreamy glances which had at the first set my heart in agitation, it perfectly bewildered me. You needn't smile, Langley, (poor Bill's face was guilty of no such distortion,) but if your little ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... about to pass from one house into another. He was seated in his little bed—he used a small and very narrow one—and, at its side, was his wife, Veronica, almost his equal in years. In a clear and sonorous voice he told me why he would be able to leave this life with a valiant soul.... Feeling a little later the failure of vital force, he exclaimed, 'Glad and full of hope will I go with you, my good God!' He then composed himself; and having closed his eyes, as though about to sleep, ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry

... a singular contact of minds. It was very well for me to spin sonorous generalities, but I had never till now dreamed of being so vulgar as to translate them into practice. I had always detested the meddlesome alarmist, who veils ignorance under noisiness, and for ever wails ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... in fact go out with Hemmings. The secretary was sea-sick, and his prostration, dignified but noisy, remained a memory for ever; it was sonorous and fine—the prostration of superiority; and the way in which he spoke of it, taking casual acquaintances into the caves of his experience, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... driver the gentleman—for his appearance and bearing fully indicated his right to the title—spoke English, though somewhat imperfectly; with the lady he talked in sonorous Castilian. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... to have attempted resistance against more than a hundred men, armed with guns, fish-spears, iron-crows, spades, and bludgeons, would have been an act of utter insanity. Mr. Geddes, with his strong sonorous voice, answered the question about the superintendent in a manner the manly indifference of which compelled them ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... moment the guitars had ceased, but their players, swarthy, velvet eyed, and unmistakable children of Italy, sat at ease, their instruments still held in brown hands ready for further plucking of the sonorous strings. And the room was alive with the uproar of Italian voices talking their native language, with the large and unselfconscious gestures of Italian hands, with the movement of Italian heads, with the flash and sparkle of animated ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... his hold; round eyes upon the Golden Girl. She spoke—in sonorous, reverberating monosyllables—and I was set upon my feet; I leaped to the side of the Irishman. He lay limp, with a disquieting, abnormal sequacity, as though every muscle were utterly flaccid; the antithesis of the rigor mortis, thank God, but terrifyingly toward the other end of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... the State when he had ridden into the town three years before and in behalf of the people of the new commonwealth which had been carried at last triumphantly into the Union, to bid his excellency welcome in an address conceived in the most sonorous English of the period; and afterwards for many years author of the now famous "Notes," which will perhaps make his name immortal among American historians. On this evening of the ball at the home of General James Wilkinson, the great Mr. Bradford ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen

... were endeavoring to bring order out of the immense mass of humanity in the streets, six splendid bands from Richmond, Newbern, Raleigh, Wilmington, Fayetteville and Salem, besides the Cadet band of the Carolina Military Institute, were exerting their sonorous energies to move the listening million by "concord of sweet sounds," and thereby prevent them from ever becoming subjects "fit for ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter

... replaced in the Latin edition by iambic or trochaic tetrameters, is to be attributed not so much to any want of skill on the part of the editors who knew well how to handle the trimeter, as to the uncultivated taste of the Roman public which was pleased with the sonorous magnificence of the long verse even where ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... Manner of Flies," set to a shrill, buzzing, whirring accompaniment, which increases in volume and energy as the locusts appear, but bound together solidly with the phrase of the tenors and basses frequently repeated, and presenting a sonorous background to this fancy of the composer in insect imitation. From this remarkable chorus we pass to another still more remarkable, the familiar Hailstone Chorus ("He gave them Hailstones for Rain"), which, like the former, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... moments of greatest serenity and even gaiety; an atmosphere of sunshine seems to envelope them all, though the sun sink behind a cloud in the last. His music now is that of a rippling stream, whereas in his earlier days he spoke weightier and more sonorous words, with ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not lie flat, offered cartridges publicly ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... new thing. In one or another form, varying in particulars, but agreeing in substance, it has been before the world ever since the days of Democritus, and more especially of his follower, Epicurus. Lucretius clothed it in sonorous and majestic verse, for it is a theme fitted above all others to excite the fancy, and to receive the richest embellishments from the imagination. Modern authors have promulgated it again and again, with little other change than what was requisite to adapt it to recent improvements in science, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... few squares, he came to the building that he sought. It was a new flathouse, bearing carved upon its cheap stone portal its sonorous name, "The Vallambrosa." Fire-escapes zigzagged down its front—these laden with household goods, drying clothes, and squalling children evicted by the midsummer heat. Here and there a pale rubber plant peeped from the miscellaneous mass, as if ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... the by-standers can endure it no longer. It is often the ring of the words, often the sense, often both, by which the children are impressed. The child repeats them because they seem to him strange or very sonorous." (Kussmaul.) ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... throng of poor women with extravagant hats and clothes that looked as though they were hung on a bean-pole; feminine Bohemians, rebellious and rabid against their lot, who were proud to have her as their leader and who made it a point to call her "Countess" in sonorous tones at every other word, in order to flatter themselves with the distinction of this friendship. The Alberca woman was greatly amused at her following of admirers; she laughed at ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... with the sonorous voice of a man-at-arms; "when ladies once determine to have their own way, it is nearly impossible to stop them; is ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... quiet, so quiet that as they stepped along the path which had been cleared away to the cow-house, they almost started at the sound of their own voices, which the atmosphere rendered more peculiarly sonorous and ringing. Alfred had his rifle on his shoulder, and walked in ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... late to dinner. Some dozen of us were already assembled on a flight of steps at the bottom of the garden when he appeared. He spied me at once [a woman speaks!] across the green lawn and a vase of tall fuchsias, and called out in his sonorous voice: ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... raised a check for a cool million or so without the formalities of a pious purloiner from the people's purse. No criminal in history had ever slept with a smoother rhythm to his heart-beat than this one, with the elite of New York's private detective bureaus hot upon his trail for a long chase. His sonorous snore might have sent a waver through the mind of the crafty Tescheron, and made the wily Smith feel that the case would dwindle to less than a week's job, when he was probably figuring on a good two thousand dollars in it, having sized up ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... without himself: he may be compared to an Eolian harp, that issues sounds of itself, and should demand what it is that causes it to give them forth? It does not perceive that the sensitive quality of its chords causes the air to brace them; that being so braced, it is rendered sonorous by every gust of wind with which it ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... glow at the most astounding array of figures. A nation lives only through its literature, and its mental life is immortal. And if we have a literature, it should be a national literature; no feeble or sonorous echo of Germany or England, but essentially American in its tone and object. No matter how meritorious a composition may be, as long as any foreign nation can say that it has done the same thing better, so long shall we be spoken of with contempt, or in a spirit ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... Theseus—here, the Vanguard;" as he spoke each name sonorous,— Minotaur, Defence, Majestic, stanch old comrades of the brine, That against the ships of Brucys made their broadsides roar in chorus,— Ranging daisies on his doorstone, deft he mapped ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone

... helped a little; but it was a severe morning, and on his way home at noon he did not recover heart enough to practice the bullfrog's croak, the craft that Sam Williams had lately mastered to inspiring perfection. This sonorous accomplishment Penrod had determined to make his own. At once guttural and resonant, impudent yet plaintive, with a barbaric twang like the plucked string of a Congo war-fiddle, the sound had fascinated him. It is made ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... time as this miserable mockery proceeded the clerk in the rusty black cassock mechanically droned out a sonorous 'Ah-men', and after the conclusion of the lesson the clergyman went out of the church, taking a short cut through the grave-stones and monuments, while the bearers again shouldered the coffin and followed the clerk to the grave. When they arrived within a few yards of their destination, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... Whence is viewed the distant landscape, Whence is seen the rural beauties Of this land of agriculture. Near this pinnacle so lofty, Is the ever-warning town-clock, Is the pendulum vibrating, To diurnal revolutions, Is the fire-alarm resounding, Over hill and dale and meadow, Is the heavy bell sonorous, ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... contains commands, its heart is conformable to regulations, its ear is thoroughly acute in hearing, its tongue utters sincerity, its colour is luminous, its comb resembles uprightness, its spur is sharp and curved, its voice is sonorous, and its belly is the treasure of literature." Like the dragon, tortoise, and unicorn, it was considered to be a spiritual creature; but, unlike the Western phoenix, more than one Fung Hwang was, as I ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... sonorous steam-chant of triumph the brave little vessel rode at last into the bayou, and anchored hard by her accustomed resting-place, in full view of the hotel, though not near enough to shore to lower her gang-plank.... But she had sung her swan-song. Gathering in from the northeast, the waters of ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... heard the uncouth music of sixteen iron-shod hoofs beating hard from the earth rhythmic notes which presently grew hollow and sonorous as they came rattling over the wooden bridge ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... time for Horace," I returned, ruthlessly cutting short his enjoyment, while the sonorous sentence still rolled in his mouth; "but I've attended to this affair of the mortgage, and you shan't be bothered again. Why on earth didn't you come ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... a very stout, muscular man, with a ruddy countenance; he never wore gloves, and you saw at once he was not a gentleman by birth. He had a fine voice: it was deep, mellow, and, when he chose, sonorous. This, and his person, ample, but not obese, gave him great weight, especially with his female pupils. If he was not quite so much reverenced by the men, yet he was both respected and liked; in fact, he had qualities that make men welcome in every situation,—good humor, good sense, and tact. A ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... covered a large altar-tomb in the chancel, and with the Bathurst and other monuments called forth first the fear and then the pride of the parish clerk's eldest son. In those days the clerk had just below the pulpit the desk from which his sonorous "Amen" sounded forth, while his family occupied a low gallery rising from the same level up behind the pulpit. There the boys of the free school also could be under the master's eye, and with instruments of music like those of King David, but ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... found in him, it is that he is sometimes too luxuriant, too redundant; says more than he needs, like my friend "the Plain Dealer," but never more than pleases. Add to this that his thoughts are as just as those of Horace, and much more elevated; his expressions are sonorous and more noble; his verse more numerous; and his words are suitable to his thoughts, sublime and lofty. All these contribute to the pleasure of the reader; and the greater the soul of him who reads, his transports are the greater. Horace ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... of the letter, who had travelled so far for so curious a welcome, had found a beaten trail which led him back to the woodland road. He had gone a score of yards by this time; but the voice pursued him—level, heavy, sonorous, driven by full lungs. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... writing for it he was attempting to make a trade of his genius,—an arrangement from which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It was easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they marched. Except in "All for Love," "the only play," he tells us, "which he wrote to please himself,"[60] there is no trace of real passion in any of his tragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but only personages, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... and listened. The house was still quite silent. He walked on tip-toe to the end of the corridor, pausing at every cell. There was no sound anywhere, except the sonorous breathing of some heavy sleeper and the ticking of the clock in ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... you should develop in your speaking voice are the pure, deep, round, flexible, resonant, musical, clear, sympathetic, smooth, sonorous, powerful, silvery, melodious, full, strong, natural, mellow, magnetic, expressive, carrying, and responsive. Endeavor to keep your voice free from such undesirable qualities as the harsh, breathy, sharp, rough, rigid, throaty, guttural, thin, shrill, nasal, unmusical, discordant, muffled, explosive, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser

... the Holy Land, being two of the saintly men who kept vigil over the sepulchre of our Blessed Lord at Jerusalem. He of the tall and portly form and commanding presence was Fray Antonio Millan, prior of the Franciscan convent in the Holy City. He had a full and florid countenance, a sonorous voice, and was round and swelling and copious in his periods, like one accustomed to harangue and to be listened to with deference. His companion was small and spare in form, pale of visage, and soft and silken and almost whispering in speech. "He had a ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... half-closed eyelids. But roused by the footsteps and voices they rose slowly, came towards the Ancients, whom they recognised by their dress, and rubbed themselves against their thighs, arching their backs with sonorous yawns; the vapour of their breath passed across the light of the torches. The stir increased, doors closed, all the priests fled, and the Ancients disappeared beneath the columns which formed a deep ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... easily to the ground in front of the testing shed and the wanderers leaped out, to be greeted by the half-hysterical Jap. Shiro's ready vocabulary of peculiar but sonorous words failed him completely, and he bent himself double in a bow, his yellow face wreathed in the widest possible smile. Crane, one arm around his wife, seized Shiro's hand and wrung it in silence. Seaton swept Dorothy off her feet, pressing her slender form against his powerful body. Her ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... in spite of his weariness, was all fidgets. He would walk round and round the house in the dark, unable to settle down to anything; tired, but incapable of rest. What is this uneasiness in the mind, he asked himself? The great sonorous drumming of the summer night was like the bruit of Time passing steadily by. Even in the soft eddy of the leaves, lifted on a drowsy creeping air, was a sound of discontent, of troublesome questioning. Through the trees he could see the lighted ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley

... now he heard only the down-pour of the rain, the sonorous gusts of the wind, the multitudinous voices ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... must have fallen. But now a strange diversion occurred. On the balcony appeared General Baker, noted as the city's greatest orator. In his rich, sonorous tones, he began a political speech. It rang even above the excited shouts of the mob. Instantly there was a pause, an almost imperceptible let-down of the tension. Those who could not see asked eagerly of others, "What's the matter ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... theology. Great institutions of higher learning—the universities— were now founded, in which centered the revived study not only of philosophy but of law and medicine as well, and over which appeared the first cloud-wrapped dawn of modern experimental science. And side by side with the sonorous Latin tongue, which long continued to be used by scholars, were formed the vernacular languages—German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.—that gave a wealth of variety to reviving popular literature. Majestic cathedrals with pointed arch and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... stir him as the heart of the war horse is said to be stirred by a trumpet. He demands a spire at least of his hostess; and names with a Saxon ring in them, names recalling deeds of Norman chivalry awaken remote sympathies, inherited perhaps; sonorous titles, though they be new ones, are better than plain Mr. and Mrs.; 'ladyship' and 'lordship' are always pleasing in his ears, and an elaborate escutcheon more beautiful than a rose. After all, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... happiness no longer; and to view her good fortune in perspective, as it were, she would walk down to the fringe of the surf, and look back with welling eyes at the hen coop, the open-air kitchen, the sonorous pig-pen, and finally the boat itself, its bow and stern projecting from a maze of fences, cane-work and thatch, and painted a clean dazzling white like some bark of dream-land tossed by a hurricane ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit. Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed it to scorn. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... Theatri in book i. of the Novum Organum. (5) Cogitata et Visa, perhaps the most important of the minor philosophical writings, dating from 1607 (though possibly the tract in its present form may have been to some extent altered), and containing in weighty and sonorous Latin the substance of the first book of the Organum. (6) The Descriptio Globi Intellectualis, which is to some extent intermediate between the Advancement and the De Augmentis, goes over in detail the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... softer than any other excepting lead, more elastic, and more sonorous. Though tin is the lightest of all metals, its ore is, when rich, the heaviest of all metallic ores. It has both smell and taste; is less ductile than some harder metals, though it may be beaten into very thin leaves; and it fuses so quickly, that it requires a heat much less than ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... moment ten thousand frogs started from the morions of Gog and Magog, and furiously assailed the knight on every side. In vain he roared, and invoked fair Dulcinea del Toboso: for frogs' wild croaking seemed more loud, more sonorous than all his invocations. And thus in battle vile the knight was overcome, and spawn all ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... he rumbled with a raucously sonorous vehemence. He regarded Mary with a stare of almost reverential wonder. "A crook appealing to ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... strikes the branches of the trees, nor the sharp jingle of the rings of the rattlesnake (not an aggressive reptile, it is true, but one of the most venomous); neither the bawling voice of the horned toad, the most hideous of its kind, nor even the solemn and sonorous croak of the bellowing frog, which, though it cannot equal the bull in size, can surpass ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne

... throughout assumed to be the author of the Clamor, and as such is pursued through many pages in a strain of invective, in which banter is mingled with ferocity. The Hague tittle-tattle about Morus's love-affairs is set forth in the pomp of Milton's loftiest Latin. Sonorous periods could hardly be more disproportioned to their material content. To have kissed a girl is painted as the blackest of crimes. The sublime and the ridiculous are here blended without the step between. Milton descends ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... has reference to hearing in air—or, as Hunter long ago remarked, "is constructed upon the same principle as in the quadruped"; yet, as Owen says, "the outer opening and passage leading therefrom to the tympanum can rarely be affected by sonorous vibrations of the atmosphere, and indeed they are reduced, or have degenerated, to a degree which makes it difficult to conceive how such vibrations can be propagated to the ear-drum during the brief moments in which the opening may be ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... whether or not the berths were occupied. If there were any soldiers there, they were as quiet as statues; but while he was watching for a movement, he heard a decided snore. There was at least one man there, and he continued to hear his sonorous breathing as long as he remained at the window, which was the first on the ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic

... High aloft he tossed his great sword as he rode, and sang the time a song of war; and as he sang, the thousands of deep throats behind him made chorus terrible but stirring in its chesty melody, for ictus to the song each warrior smiting sword on shield in a mighty unison whose high, sonorous note thrilled like the voice of actual war. Steady the strong eyes gleamed out and onward as they rode. From the steel-clad breast of each there shone forward a glancing ray of light, as though it came direct from the heart, untamed even by a thousand years ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough

... last words distinctly, after the approved practice of a Dublin watchman, on being awoke from his dreams of row and riot by the last toll of the Post-office, and not knowing whether it has struck "twelve" or "three," sings out the word "o'clock," in a long sonorous drawl, that wakes every sleeping citizen, and yet tells nothing how "time ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever

... soon arranged, and the girls went to admire Merry's golden butter cups among the green leaves, under which lay the ice that kept the pretty flowers fresh. The boys were down below, where the cackling was very loud, but not loud enough to drown the sonorous bray which suddenly startled them as much as it did the horses outside. A shout of laughter followed, and away went the lads, to see what the fun was, while the girls ran out on the balcony, as someone said, "It's that rogue of a Grif with ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... shall obtain heavenly delight. Oh, huka! thou that sendest forth volumes of curling smoke, that hast a winding tube shaming the serpent! oh, bowl that beautifies thy top! how graceful are the chains of thy turban; how great is the beauty of thy curved mouthpiece; how sonorous the murmur of the ice-cool water in thy depths! Oh, world enchantress! oh, soother of the fatigues of man, employer of the idle, comforter of the henpecked husband's heart, encourager of timid dependents, who can know thy glory! Soother of the sorrowing! thou givest courage to the ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

... on the celebrated musician who recognised the sonorous qualities of a piece of Tung timber burning in the kitchen fire effectually diverted the conversation from the inconvenient direction it had taken, and shortly ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various

... the appellation of juddies or fiddlers, and compares them to the Irish rhymsters, or, as we should now compare them, to the Italian improvisatori. By some other authors they are called jelle, or jillemen; the instruments on which they perform being rudely made of wood, having a sonorous sound, on account of its extreme hardness, and in some instances they exhibit the knowledge of the power of an extended string, by fastening a piece of the gut of an animal across a plane of wood, and beating on it ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... competitor. She was a neutral-tinted figure, taken-for-granted, obscured, and so near being nobody at all, that, as Richard Lindley walked beside her this morning, he glanced back at the lagging couple and uttered a long and almost sonorous sigh, which he would have been ashamed for anybody to hear; and then actually proceeded on his way without the slightest realization that anybody ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain fingers. She was waiting for the thrilling moment when he should tuck the instrument away under his pendulous double chin and draw his bow across the strings in the long sonorous singing chord, which ran up and down Sylvia's back ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... intersection of those lofty and massive piers which divide transept from choir and nave; what effect of magnitude after the eye gets accustomed to the vast proportions! Oh, what silence reigns around! How difficult, even for the sonorous chants of choristers and priests to disturb that silence,—to be more than echoes of a distant music which seems to come from the very courts of heaven itself: to some a holy sanctuary, where one may meditate among crowds and feel alone; where one breathes an ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... peculiar sound that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... standing solitary and morose on a little knoll in his pasture, caught sight of the strange, dark figure of the running moose. A spark leapt into his heavy eyes. He wheeled, pawed the sod, put his muzzle to the ground, and bellowed a sonorous challenge. The moose stopped short and stared about him, the stiff hair lifting angrily along the ridge of his massive neck. Last Bull lowered his head and tore up the sod ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... she glided down the stairs toward her father's room. He was awake, for ere her hand touched the doorknob, his sonorous "Who's thar?" fell on her ear. This somewhat disconcerted her, for she had intended stopping near his door, to devise the best means by which to break the intelligence. But "Who's thar?" was ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes

... Caleb, spoke briefly and kindly of the departed and with a rough eloquence that stirred none present—not even Nan, who, up to that moment, entirely ignorant of The Laird's intention, could only gaze at him, amazed and incredulous—more than it stirred The Laird himself. The sonorous and beautiful lines of the burial service took on an added beauty and dignity as he read them, for The Laird believed! And when he had finished reading the service, he looked up, and his kind gaze lay gently on Nan Brent as ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... forth another of his sonorous roars, and all laid on their oars and listened, when, so softly as to be almost imperceptible as the men held their breath, there came a low hail, which grew fainter and fainter and then ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn

... which we have already referred in the course of this narrative, that the secondary charm of the History of the World resides. It is to these that we turn when we have exhausted our first surprise and delight at the great bursts of poetic eloquence, the long sonorous sentences which break like waves on the shore, when the spirit of the historian is roused by some occasional tempest of reflection. In either case, the book is essentially one to glean from, not to read with consecutive patience. Real historical philosophy is absolutely wanting. ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... consider what effect has been produced on the English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin form "damno," in translating the Greek [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], when people charitably wish to make it forcible; and the substitution of the temperate "condemn" for it, when they choose to keep it gentle; and what notable sermons have been preached by illiterate ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... do not understand you, Mr. Saddletree," said Butler, thus pushed hard for an answer. His faint and exhausted tone of voice was instantly drowned in the sonorous bray ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... repertory—only he did not call it that: he spoke of the Vieuxtemps compositions and of Vieuxtemps himself. "Vieuxtemps wrote in the grand style; his music is always rich and sonorous. If his violin is really to sound, the violinist must play Vieuxtemps, just as the 'cellist plays Servais. You know, in the Catholic Church, at Vespers, whenever God's name is spoken, we bow the head. And Wieniawski would always ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... triumph over this dearth of expression. Few authors ever introduced more new terms into descriptive writing: yet are his innovations ever chastened, and in good taste. His style, in its elegant simplicity, is, indeed, perfection. It is at once sonorous and sweet, and always in harmony with the sentiment he would express, or the subject he would discuss. Chenier might well arm himself with "Paul and Virginia," and the "Chaumiere Indienne," in opposition to those ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... records its every pulse-beat. His genius has the rich, salty tang of an Elizabethan adventurer and the spaciousness of those times. Imagine a Polish sailor who read Flaubert and the English Bible, who bared his head under equatorial few large stars and related his doings in rhythmic, sonorous, coloured prose; imagine a man from a landlocked country who "midway in his mortal life" began writing for the first time and in an alien tongue, and, added to an almost abnormal power of description, possessed the art of laying bare the human soul, not after the meticulous manner of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... wrapped in her furs, with snow packing full every fold and wrinkle of her clothing left uncovered by the robe, did not hear the aimless argument that followed between Hank and Murphy. The sonorous shwoo-oosh of the wind-tormented pine tops surged through the very soul of her, the diapason accompaniment to the miserere of motherhood. Somewhere on this wild mountainside was Jack, huddled from the wind in a cave, or wandering miserably through the storm. Wrapped in soft luxury all her life, ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... little bride seemed to those gathered to greet her! In that vast chamber, with its remote ceiling, its majestic pillars, its distances and sonorous echoes, her ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... Mr. Riley related the incident and then dismissed it. "I studied Poe's methods. He seemed to have a theory, rather misty to be sure, about the use of 'm's' and 'n's' and mellifluous vowels and sonorous words. I remember that I was a long time in evolving the name Leonainie, but at length the verses were ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... living symbols of the devouring sun. They were slumbering with half-closed eyelids. But roused by the footsteps and voices they rose slowly, came towards the Ancients, whom they recognised by their dress, and rubbed themselves against their thighs, arching their backs with sonorous yawns; the vapour of their breath passed across the light of the torches. The stir increased, doors closed, all the priests fled, and the Ancients disappeared beneath the columns which formed a ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... green men sought the bunks and soon were stretched in sonorous slumber. It was, Norman reflected, exactly the existence of domesticated animals—to eat and sleep and give food to their masters. A deeper horror of the frog-men shook him, and a deeper determination to escape them. He waited until all in the room were sleeping ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... center of all eyes, made pompous preparation; he pulled down his vest, arranged his sleeves and, in sonorous, cadenced voice began to recite his alexandrines, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

... the best entertainment they had had in many a day, shouting jingles at them in the midst of his speeches and mercilessly ridiculing the Republicans. Here was none of the boredom of most political speeches, none of the long sonorous sentences with classical allusions which the big-name orators of the day poured out. His bold statements, his clipped rapid-fire sentences held the people's attention whether they agreed with him ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... a ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent), we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play. I am ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... his knees. One arm went around his aged wife and the little fellow she cuddled in her lap. In sonorous tones he lifted up his voice and gave thanks from the depths of his heart for the great mercy shown to ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson

... full high advanced, Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind, With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed, Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while Sonorous ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... inaudible, so that the throng of people before him leaned forward in sympathetic intentness, and silence became absolute in the great hall except for the high quavering of his tones. But then came a miracle of reinvigoration. Little by little his voice swelled until it was full, sonorous, richly warm and compelling, the words pouring from him with a fluency that enchained. Little by little his leaning, drooping posture of weakness became one of towering strength, the head flung back, the gestures free and potent. Little by little his burning eyes seemed to send their ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson

... hats, and he gave them money; others showed him a crucifix, and he kissed it; others contented themselves with pronouncing in his ear great names of powerful families, and he replied to these by inviting them into his grand' salle, where the echoes were more sonorous; still others showed him their old cloaks, when they had carefully effaced the bees, and to ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... percolation of calcareous matter, resist the daily tides longer, and hence project as a ledge. The cemented mass is generally of a white colour, but in some few parts reddish from ferruginous matter; it is very hard, and is sonorous under the hammer; it is obscurely divided by seams, dipping at a small angle seaward; it consists of fragments of the corals which grow on the outer margin, some quite and others partially rounded, some small and others between two and three feet across; and of masses of previously ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin

... to be a very sound maxim. And one of my greatest difficulties in the task I have undertaken has been to try and preserve something of the "musical movement" of the sonorous Sanscrit poetry in the English translation. Much of tile Sanscrit Epic is written in the well-known Sloka metre of sixteen syllables in each line, and I endeavoured to choose some English metre which is familiar to the English ear, and which would reproduce ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous

... Wentworth read without pausing to look up, his sonorous voice filling the room, and his mind wholly given to the subject in hand; then he raised his eyes—and almost dropped the book in his hand: ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... shirt and trousers edged with black; a Burmese woman sweeping; two little brown half naked children—a boy and girl playing on the stone pavement with the guttering wax of candles at the side of the arches; and the kneeling youths and seniors bowing and repeating their sonorous prayers, all within a few yards of each other, without one disturbing or apparently distracting the other. Only I felt out of place, a long standing Western figure from the Western world in topee and flannels with a sketch book, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... The sonorous accents subsided, and a tense wait ensued, none speaking. Rutton stood in stony apathy, his eyes lifted to a dim corner of the ceiling, his gaze—like his thoughts—perhaps ranging far beyond the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... Quandt's text was in these words: "Thine are we, David, and on thy side, thou Son of Jesse; Peace, peace be unto thee, and peace be to thine helpers; for thy God helpeth thee." [First Chronicles, xii. 18.] Quandt began, in a sonorous voice, raising his face with respectful enthusiasm to the King, "Thine are we, O Friedrich, and on thy side, thou Son of Friedrich Wilhelm;" and so went on: sermon brief, sonorous, compact, and sticking close to its text. Friedrich stood immovable, gazing on the eloquent Demosthenic Quandt, with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... a little more of the curb, Fraeulein Lenore," cried a sonorous voice near her. Lenore looked round in amazement. A tall slight figure leaned against the tree, arms crossed, and a satirical smile playing over the fine features. The stranger advanced and took off his hat. "Hard work for the old gentleman," said he, pointing ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... long, sonorous whistle the steamer which I was aboard came to a standstill, and a boat was seen making toward us from the shore. The man rowing the boat was stark naked, except for a piece of red cloth girt round his loins. A barbarous place, this! though he may have been excused for it ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri

... door open? Had his knock gone unheard? Should he knock again, louder? And then his eye fell upon the great iron bell-pull and chain, and he stepped towards it. Of course—one entered a place like this on the sonorous clanging of a deep-throated bell that roused the echoes of the whole vast congeries of buildings encircled by the hideous twelve-foot wall, unbroken save by the great gatehouse before which he stood insignificant. As ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... eye-glass to his eyes during the Morning Hymn, and then lifted up his head erect and sang out loud and joyfully. He made the responses louder than the clerk—an old man with a piping feeble voice, who, I think, felt aggrieved at the Captain's sonorous bass, and quivered ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... gives the spice to much of Pope's satire. Young, a singularly clever writer, was eclipsed by Pope because he kept to denoting general types and was not intimate with the actors on the social stage. Johnson, still more of an outsider, wrote a most effective and sonorous poem with the help of Juvenal; but it becomes a moral disquisition upon human nature which has not the special sting and sparkle of Pope. No later satirist has approached Pope, and the art has now become obsolete, or is adopted merely as a literary amusement. One obvious reason is the absence ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... began to sing. He owned a light tenor, clear and melodious, and the air had a curiously barbaric lilt which, musically considered, was reminiscent of the gypsies' chorus in "The Bohemian Girl." But the words were couched in a strange tongue, sonorous and full voweled, and the Hungarians in the room became greatly stirred when it dawned on them that a semi-intoxicated American stoker was chanting a forbidden national melody. Far better than he knew, he sounded uncharted deeps in human nature. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun stated an eternal ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... full, sonorous voice, 'I am by no means satisfied with you. In the management of this business, you have shown a carelessness that I can not tolerate. Why, zounds! your acquaintance with Pepito was a most excellent pretext for gaining access to the enemy's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... his voice properly sonorous, sounding out the rounded periods of the rolling tongue which they had all been taught during the voyage, using Cam's recording. Yes, the Terrans would join with pleasure in so good and great a cause. They would lend ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... cocked hat (which answers to the black cap in England), and pronounced the sentence of the law in the usual terms: "To be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and may the Lord have {p.036} mercy upon your unhappy soul!" Having concluded this awful formula in his most sonorous cadence, the Judge, dismounting his formidable beaver, gave a familiar nod to his unfortunate acquaintance, and said to him in a sort of chuckling whisper, "And now, Donald, my man, I think I've checkmated you for ance." The Regent laughed heartily ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... converted by the preaching of the Nazarene Prophet, and the scene closes by the triumphant entry into Jerusalem amid the waving of palm-branches, the strewing of flowers, and "sonorous metal blowing martial sounds." The pathetic and sublime lament, "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! thou that killest the prophets!" was delivered with ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... Marche, clean as a new pin and in his merriest mood, sat erect as the King of Yvetot in the bow of the long canoe which held the Lady de Tilly and her family. His sonorous violin was coquettishly fixed in its place of honor under his wagging chin, as it accompanied his voice while he chanted an old boat-song which had lightened the labor of many a weary oar on lake and river, from the St. Lawrence to the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... and graceful poet was Richard Furness[70], parish clerk of Dore, five miles from Shalfield, a secluded hamlet. He was then styled "The Poet of the Peak," of sonorous voice and clear of speech, the author of many poems, and factotum supreme of the village and neighbourhood. Two volumes of his poems have been published. He combined, like many of his order, the office of parish clerk with that of schoolmaster, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... Mr. Mackay displays himself the master of a style marked by all the characteristics of the best rhetoric. He has a keen sense of rhythm and of general balance; his verse is excellently sonorous.'—Globe. ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow

... drops fell from the invisible sky as Ivanov walked across the meadows; at first they were sparse, pattering noisily on his leather jacket; then they began to fall more heavily and he was soon enveloped in the sonorous downpour of a vernal shower. Close to the manor Gek darted aside and disappeared down the ravine, from whence arose the rustling of wings, and the perturbed cries of cranes. Gek barked, some dogs on a neighbouring farm answered him; to these, others responded from a distant village, and ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak

... presently from the surrounding gloom a darker figure stole, slow-moving and silent, at sight of which my captors halted to kneel, one and all, with bowed heads, whereupon the form raised a shadowy arm in salutation or blessing. And then a voice spake in sonorous Spanish, very soft and low and sweet, yet a voice that chilled me none ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... closed all the family passed by the head of the deceased and kissed the face of their loved one for the last time, while all the visitors followed and laid their hands reverently on the forehead. Only when the master of ceremonies, who is always specially appointed, had cried out in a sonorous voice, "Any more?" and met with no response, was the ceremony ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... birds or of other signs—this, for as much as it is an art which supplies from the reasoning faculty mind (nous) and information (istoria) to human thought (oiesis) they originally termed oionoistike, but the word has been lately altered and made sonorous by the modern introduction of the letter Omega (oionoistike and oionistike), and in proportion as prophecy (mantike) is more perfect and august than augury, both in name and fact, in the same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior ...
— Phaedrus • Plato

... was reinforced at this moment by the entry into Parliament of the second and youngest son of Chatham himself. William Pitt had hardly reached his twenty-second year; but he left college with the learning of a ripe scholar, and his ready and sonorous eloquence had been matured by his father's teaching. "He will be one of the first men in Parliament," said a member to Charles Fox, the Whig leader in the Commons, after Pitt's earliest speech in that house. "He is so already," replied Fox. Young ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... the camp the drums sonorous beat, With bellowing horns and blasts of trumpet clear. The Pagans arm themselves, and least of all The Emir would th' advance delay—He wears A hauberk saffron—'broidered round the sides, And clasps his helm with gold and gems inlaid. ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier

... all the other interludes was the composition of Luca Bati, a man of this art most excellent." After this celestial music another part of the heavens opened and disclosed God the Father. A ladder was let down, and God leaning upon it "sang majestically to the sound of many instruments in a sonorous bass voice." ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson

... demeanour—then, more dangerous than these, a sense of added unlooked-for nearness to her, and a resultant calling not merely of the spirit of youth in him to that same spirit resident in her, but the deeper, more compelling, more sonorous call from the knowledge of tragedy in him to that same terrible knowledge now first made evident in her.—And here Richard's heart—in spite of pity, in spite of tenderness which would have borne a hundred miseries to save her five minutes' discomfort—sang Te Deum, and that lustily enough! ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... signifies a solemn pledge to remain faithful to the memory of the dead. Furthermore, the wife loses her living name among all her friends and relatives, and is thereafter addressed only by a fragment of her kaimyo—as, for example, 'Shin-toku-in-San,' an abbreviation of the much longer and more sonorous posthumous name, Shin-toku-in-den-joyo-teiso-daishi. [16] Thus to be called by one's kaimyo is at once an honour to the memory of the husband and the constancy of the bereaved wife. A precisely similar pledge is taken by a man after the loss of a ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... what is absolute and full." ... It is no use grumbling about the Latin. The nature of great disasters calls out for that foundational tongue. They roll as it were (do the great disasters of our time) right down the emptiness of the centuries until they strike the walls of Rome and provoke these sonorous echoes worthy of ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc

... a tall figure standing on the rail. It came down and pushed through the crowd, marching with a heavy tread towards the light on the quarterdeck. Then again the sonorous voice said with insistence:—"Wait!" The lamplight lit up the man's body. He was tall. His head was away up in the shadows of lifeboats that stood on skids above the deck. The whites of his eyes and his teeth gleamed distinctly, ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... coming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see the lantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spirit of the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pass, and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towers of Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing window squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, or mining stock promoters planning a new cast of ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... none from other sources from which he had a right to expect it. He called an extra session of the House to enact laws to meet the crisis, to invest him with greater authority and to vote money for defence. He closed his Speech from the Throne with a declaration delivered in sonorous, ringing tones ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey

... peering under his hand over the waste of waters; another at the tiller encouraged the rowers with cordial and well-meant abuse. A hundred people shouted futile directions from the ship. The gravity of the Indian Ocean was disturbed by the babble of dialects. One voice rose above all the rest, sonorous, masterful, cursing the ship into order with a deliberate flow of invective that had the dignity and force ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... But the sonorous voice of Torquil thundered out, "Far eil air son Eachin!" (Another for Hector!) and the two brethren who flanked their chief on each side thrust forward upon Henry, and, striking both at once, compelled him to ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... bright, black eyes, instinct with vivacity, intelligence and kindly fire; roundish brow, delicate oval face, full, rapid expression; figure light, nimble, pretty, though so small, perhaps hardly five feet four in height.... His voice clear, harmonious, and sonorous, had something of metallic in it, something almost plangent ... a strange, swift, sharp-sounding, fitful modulation, part of it pungent, quasi latrant, other parts of it cooing, bantery, lovingly quizzical, which no charm of his fine ringing voice (metallic tenor, of sweet tone), ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... effect. But if not only their proper names of men and places, but many of their phrases and a majority of their words, be simply and unconnectedly considered, they will be found to abound with vowels and to produce sounds sometimes mellifluous and sometimes sonorous. What ear can object to the names of Colbee, (pronounced exactly as Colby is with us) Bereewan, Bondel, Imeerawanyee, Deedora, Wolarawaree, or Baneelon, among the men; or to Wereeweea, Gooreedeeana, ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench

... them are monsters, who violate the primitive condition on which the earth was given to man; they are guilty by the general verdict of human-kind." Sheridan concluded his speech by an appeal to British justice, which, as it is preserved to us, is a mere sonorous roll of words, with a common-place meaning; after which he acted a stage-trick; as if fainting, he fell back into the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Billy, and Archie who had promised to come East in time for the holidays. There was need for strict division of labor. Billy, more familiar with theatres, was able to supply the stage craft and the plot, while Theodora padded the skeleton and covered the dry bones of his outline with sonorous speeches over which she was forced to pause, now and ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray

... porcelains called You-kouo-thien-tsing; brilliant as a mirror, thin as paper of rice, sonorous as the melodious stone Khing, and colored, in obedience to the mandate of the Emperor Chi-tsong, "blue as the sky is after rain, when viewed through the rifts of the clouds." These were, indeed, the first of all porcelains, likewise called Tchai-yao, which no man, howsoever wicked, could find ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... Orbajosa heard in the twilight vagueness of their morning slumbers the same sonorous clarionet, and they ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teos. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable draperies, where ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... with all the sincerity and warmth of his heart and with all the powers of his mind, was heard, says Schurz, by a great and brilliant audience. His first faltering words were followed by regained power; the old elevation of sentiment, the sonorous flow of words, the lofty energy of action, were enhanced by the pathetic sense that this was the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... and felt for himself, ask himself first what he does not believe, and then, if wise or needful, avow it. Next let him ask himself what he does believe, and pursue it to its true and full conclusions. Neither loose accommodation nor sonorous principles will long give them rest. It is of as little use to surrender the more glaring contradictions of Science as it is to evaporate discredited doctrine into a few vague precepts. That end will not be attained by our authors by subliming Religion into an emotion, and making an armistice with ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... such a moment! Move on! Would that thoughtless policeman have given Mr Moses three hundred precious sovereigns to put himself in locomotion? Not he. Then came two or three mysterious individuals, travellers apparently from the east, with long beards, heavy bags on their backs, and sonorous voices, who had evidently letters of introduction to Methusaleh, for they deposited their burdens before him as they passed, and entered with him into friendly conversation, or rather sought to do so; for he was proof against temptation, and, for the first time in his life, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various

... sternly. "A human life is at stake—he is dying. You must come with me and let the doctor be free to do his work. I command you to come!" she added, in a stern, ringing, sonorous voice that seemed to thrill the other to her very heart's core and fascinate her—ay, fairly paralyze her will-power. "Come!" repeated Bernardine, laying a hand on her shoulder—"come out into ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey

... dashing against one another, and the particular noise produced by dead leaves when accumulated in compact masses on the ground. By degrees the rollings of the drum became more frequent and louder, the chants more sonorous and shrill; and at last our Indian shrieked, howled, and roared in the most frightful manner; he struggled and struck his instrument with extraordinary rapidity; it was a real tempest, to which nothing was wanting, not even ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... lists were surrounded by even a larger number of Saracens than Richard had seen on the preceding evening. When the first ray of the sun's glorious orb arose above the desert, the sonorous call, "To prayer, to prayer!" was poured forth by the Soldan himself, and answered by others, whose rank and zeal entitled them to act as muezzins. It was a striking spectacle to see them all sink to earth, for the purpose of repeating their devotions, with their faces turned ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... of the fire, none could guess, for it had not yet streamed out against the sky; but know it they did; and the dove goes to its cote not more directly than they centred from all parts of the district upon the exact spot of the fire. Meanwhile, Uncle Ith lashed his mighty instrument into a sonorous fury; and all the other bells played their echo, even to the far-away tinkler on Mount Morris, which, having few fires in its own neighborhood to report, took a pleasure in telling its little world of those which were ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... voice some notes higher, bellowing like a bull of Bashan as he rolled off sonorous sentences very deftly learned and remembered, in which glory and the service of the state and the example of old Rome were cleverly compounded into a most patriotic pasty. Even as he was in the thick of his speaking there came a flourish of trumpets at the ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... window-curtains could be seen a slender silver crescent of moon gliding among the flitting clouds. The young man went at once to his bed; but notwithstanding the fatigues of the day, sleep did not come to him. Through the partition he could hear the clear, sonorous voice of Reine singing her father to sleep with one of the popular ballads of the country, and while turning and twisting in the homespun linen sheets, scented with orrisroot, he could not help thinking of this young girl, so original in her ways, whose grace, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... superficial, least essential aspect. Projection is a partial truth, and to it many painters sacrifice other and higher truths. Manet, recovering the "innocence of the eye" and faithful to it, has penetrated the secrets and won the truth of light. Botticelli saw the world as sonorous undulations of exquisite line; and his subtly implicated, evanescent patterns of line movement, "incorrect" as they may be superficially in drawing, caress the eye as music finds and satisfies the soul. When such ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... flung down the lid of his strong box, which shut with a sonorous clang. He locked it, and put the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... programme of the rapidly successful Metropolitan forces, of the new German Opera, with Seidl-Krauss singing Elizabeth, and Brandt in Fidelio. Even here, after so long, he vibrated again to the exquisite beauty of Lenore's constancy and love. Then Dr. Damrosch dead, the sonorous funeral in the Opera House ... That had been changed with the rest; the baignoires were gone, the tiers of boxes newly curved; gone the chandeliers and Turkey red carpet and gold threaded brocade that had seemed the final expression ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... ship is as quiet as the Quaker meeting in the Jerseys, before your good old grandfather used to break the charm of silence with his sonorous voice." ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper

... ladies are yearning for sensations: but yet the north is better than the south of Russia, in spring at any rate. In our part nature is more melancholy, more lyrical, more Levitanesque; here it is neither one thing nor the other, like good, sonorous, but frigid verse. Thanks to my palpitations I haven't drunk wine for a week, and that makes the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... speedily as I could to where I had last seen the lighted torch, and as I got further and further into the cave, the sound of running water grew more distinct, until I heard it just at my feet. It was not the singing ripple of a shallow rivulet, but the sonorous sound of a deep stream that, so far as I could make out, ran athwart the cavern. I went down on my knees and put my hand in the water to feel which direction it took, for I did not now doubt that my companion had fallen in, and was even now struggling ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... as through a woodland reach: Their odes drop sweetness like the ripening peach In laden orchards on late summer days. Their work is Nature's own—not theirs the praise By culture won which midnight studies teach. Sounds the loud cataract in their sonorous speech, And strikes the keynote of their tuneful lays. As to remotest ages in the past We trace thy joyous story, more and more Bards won high honour mid thy hills and vales. So, Cymru, while this world of ours ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones

... itself, and should demand what it is that causes it to give them forth? It does not perceive that the sensitive quality of its chords causes the air to brace them; that being so braced, it is rendered sonorous by every gust of wind with which it happens to ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... of the ear, and how it is fitted to respond to sonorous vibrations, we may divide it into three parts: the sound-conducting part, known as the external ear, the middle ear, and the deeply placed nerve portion, the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... tall, well made, and his wild, Grecian eyes fascinate me. He is conscious of self, but modest. His voice is sweet and sonorous, his eyes are bright with intellect. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... re-entered the smoking-room, his shoes in his hand; Logan as tactfully occupied Merton's room, and then they waited. Presently, the smoking-room door being slightly ajar, Merton heard Logan snoring very naturally; the Spanish bull-dog was yet more sonorous. Gianesi came in, walked upstairs to his bedroom, and shut his door; in half an hour he also was snoring; it was ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... grace, or "ask a blessing"? First, with simplicity and sincerity. Avoid long, elaborate, ornate phrases. It is better to err in rhetoric than in feeling and reality. The sonorous grace may soon become stilted and offensive. It is better to say in your own words just what you mean, for that will help all, even to the youngest, to mean ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... gift which he liked to exercise when he could find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit. Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed it to scorn. "You are not old," ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... reasons for my preferences. With some, I was caught by a melodious echo, or a sonorous ring; with others by the hint of a picture, or a story, or by some sacred suggestion that attracted me, I knew not why. Of some I was fond just because I misunderstood them; and of these I made a free version in my mind, as I murmured them over. One of my first favorites was ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom

... legal supremacy, and moved by love of drama, opened proceedings with all the dignity and authority of a judge, explaining in sonorous terms that this was an adjourned session of an inquest upon the death of one Edward Watson, a ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... similar to the Swedish that I used the latter, with a few alterations, and easily made myself understood. The Norwegian dialect, I imagine, stands in about the same relation to pure Danish as the Scotch does to the English. To my ear, it is less musical and sonorous than the Swedish, though it is often accented in ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... anything which might happen, both realized at the same moment that it was only the whirr of the grandfather clock which always prefaced the striking of the hour; and in another second the hour itself struck, with one deep, sonorous note which reverberated through ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... with this trifling," cried the sonorous voice of Bois-Rose, whose generosity made him averse to profit by his advantages, and who scrupled always to shed blood if he could avoid it. "You have heard that we wish no harm to any but your chief, and you must make up your mind to let us take him. ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... that "his voice was clear and sonorous, his eye beaming with fire, his head of the antique cast, his hands beautiful, and his gesture graceful and abounding—at once Rabelais and Fontaine, with the droll humor of the one and the polished elegance of ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss

... her. Her voice, at first faint and fearful, gradually lost its quaver, grew under her control and subject to her modulation; it rose on long swells, it fell in subtile cadences, now and then its tones pealed out like bells from distant belfries on fresh sonorous mornings. She sung the song through, and, wondering lest his name of Indian Devil were not his true name, and if he would not detect her, she repeated it. Once or twice now, indeed, the beast stirred uneasily, turned, and made the bough sway at his movement. As she ended, he snapped his jaws together, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... name will rank with that of Fox, in the art of extempore debate, could not fail to be the leader of a large party, and the popular idol of a large mass, by the manly energy of his character, his devotion to popular principles, and a rich and sonorous eloquence, which ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... to whom the metrical review had been apportioned, "is couched in sonorous lines, of haunting melody and charm; and yet so closely inter-related as to be scarcely quotable with justice to the author. To be appreciated the poem should be read as a whole,—I shall say as much in my ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... Sonnet among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge is to be taken as the true text; and there the word is "talks." Phillips had doubtless the echo of "rings" in his ear from the Sonnet to Fairfax. The more sonorous reading, however, has found such general acceptance that an editor hardly ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... linguam astrinxere; mutus est," said Colonel Graeme, indicating the younger man, and added a sentence in sonorous ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... accordingly the conversation is chiefly interesting as illustrating what Johnson meant by his politeness. He found that the King wanted him to talk, and he talked accordingly. He spoke in a "firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice," and not in the subdued tone customary at formal receptions. He dilated upon various literary topics, on the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, on some contemporary controversies, on the quack Dr. Hill, and upon the reviews of the day. All that is worth ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... counting her guests, and assuring herself that the number of teacups would suffice. She had heard the lecture many times before, and with repetition its sonorous periods had lost hold upon her, although her brother had been at pains ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... to these inexplicable sounds with increasing alarm until the sonorous clock from somewhere outside boomed 'one,' when, quite unaccountably, he fell asleep, awaking on the stroke of two from a ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... the emotions, and many-cadenced chords of sweet and simple sentiment—for to those who love Art for its own sake all other things are added—yet, the effect which they pre-eminently seek to produce is purely an artistic one. Such a poem as The Sea-King's Grave, with all its majesty of melody as sonorous and as strong as the sea by whose pine-fringed shores it was thus nobly conceived and nobly fashioned; or the little poem that follows it, whose cunning workmanship, wrought with such an artistic sense of limitation, one might liken to the rare chasing ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... called death 'the great bankruptcy which would make the worldly man, in a moment, the only person in his house not worth a shilling,' the preacher glanced unconsciously at a secret fear in the caverns of Sturk's mind, that echoed back the sonorous tones and grisly theme of the rector with ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... that looked as though they were hung on a bean-pole; feminine Bohemians, rebellious and rabid against their lot, who were proud to have her as their leader and who made it a point to call her "Countess" in sonorous tones at every other word, in order to flatter themselves with the distinction of this friendship. The Alberca woman was greatly amused at her following of admirers; she laughed at their ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... a sonorous voice at the entrance. Turning suddenly, she espied the athletic beggar standing erect, with his staff and satchel, on one side ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... extract passages to illustrate Marlowe's fondness for classical allusions, his use—Miltonic, if we may anticipate the term—of the sonorous effect of names, his introduction of sustained similes, his trick of repeating a sound at intervals (a trick borrowed by Greene later), his habit of letting a speaker refer to himself in the third person (Tamburlaine loves to boast the greatness ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... rather jarring monotony, especially when the rest of the narrative is designed to show that there was no majesty nor dignity nor wisdom involved in the matter. We feel that the writer was thinking more of his sonorous sentence than of the real fact. On the other hand, nothing but a want of candour or taste can lead any one to overlook the rare and great excellences of Gibbon's style. First of all, it is singularly ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... of production. The nobles were still the patrons of literature, and they fancied old things which were grand, in new and gaudy English dresses. The age was also marked by rapid and uniform progress in the English language. The sonorous, but cumbrous English of Milton had been greatly improved by Dryden; and we have seen, also, that the terse and somewhat crude diction of Dryden's earlier works had been polished and rendered more ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... delightfully in this quaint-looking apartment, half study, half drawing-room. Scott had read several passages from the old romances of Arthur, with a fine deep sonorous voice, and a gravity of tone that seemed to suit the antiquated black-letter volume. It was a rich treat to hear such a work, read by such a person, and in such a place; and his appearance as he sat reading, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... rumbled with a raucously sonorous vehemence. He regarded Mary with a stare of almost reverential wonder. "A crook ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... pronouncing the last words distinctly, after the approved practice of a Dublin watchman, on being awoke from his dreams of row and riot by the last toll of the Post-office, and not knowing whether it has struck "twelve" or "three," sings out the word "o'clock," in a long sonorous drawl, that wakes every sleeping citizen, and yet tells nothing how "time speeds on ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever

... attempting to make a trade of his genius,—an arrangement from which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It was easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they marched. Except in "All for Love," "the only play," he tells us, "which he wrote to please himself,"[60] there is no trace of real passion in any of his tragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but only ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... behind her, the voice of the Abbe, sonorous and important. "Mademoiselle, permit me the honor to present to ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner

... companion with tales and poems of the days of chivalry when men were brave and women fair and all the world was young. And, Mary, inthralled, enrapt, adoring her father, and seeing every picture conjured up by his sonorous rhythm or quaint phrase, was much more familiar with the deeds and gossip of King Arthur's court than with events of her own day ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly

... new crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal increased, and while the field-guns had been multiplying at a great rate the "heavies" had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and more sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolled over the battlefields ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... provided with a certain number of strings stretched over two bridges and fastened to pegs at the extremities. This box carries a ring that serves for suspending it. Kircher recommends that the box be made of very sonorous fir wood, like that employed in the construction of stringed instruments. He would have it 1.085 meters in length, 0.434 meter in width, and 0.217 meter in height, and would provide it with fifteen catgut ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various

... my head—the whirl of waters was in my ears; yet I struggled against the surging tide, and Claude Bainrothe's grasp upon my hand strengthened and revived me. I was roused from my apathy by hearing Mr. Gerald Stanbury's loud, sonorous voice speaking out clearly: "I decline to serve, Mr. Bainrothe, after that erasure. You understand that, of course. It was a farce to send for ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... and a certain sonorous resignation in the death-song of the Pawnee, which rendered it unlike any thing else. The Shawanoe and Sauk had heard it sung more than once, and, accustomed as they were to the most dreadful scenes, they were always relieved when it ended; it was too much like a despairing refrain ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... dome,—larger than the Pantheon, rising two hundred feet from the intersection of those lofty and massive piers which divide transept from choir and nave; what effect of magnitude after the eye gets accustomed to the vast proportions! Oh, what silence reigns around! How difficult, even for the sonorous chants of choristers and priests to disturb that silence,—to be more than echoes of a distant music which seems to come from the very courts of heaven itself: to some a holy sanctuary, where one may meditate ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... great one in the public eye, he who paid me—put in this and that sonorous phrase, full of echoing emptiness, launched an antithesis which had done good service a time or two on the hustings or in the House of Commons, and—signed the article. Well, I do not object. That was what I was there for, and after all I made myself necessary to the Universal Review. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... labial; and when one endeavours to teach them to pronounce these words, they tell one they think it ridiculous that they must shut their lips to speak. Their language abounds with gutturals and strong aspirations: these make it very sonorous and bold; and their speeches abound with metaphors after the manner of the eastern nations. Sometimes one word among them includes an entire definition of the thing: for example—they call wine Oneharadeschoengtseragherie, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various

... unsophisticated creatures, that though they behold what lies on the surface, they have no idea of what is inside hidden from view. They're just like a piece of yellow cedar made into a mallet for beating the sonorous stones with. The exterior looks well enough; but ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... of the bay. They gained the cliff, and five minutes after, rubbed up against it to avoid a big pool of water which was advancing like a gulf stream in the middle of the sea-shore. Then they saw an archway which opened above a deep grotto; it was sonorous and very bright, like a church, with descending columns and a carpet of sea-wrack all along its ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... were quelled somewhat by the sound of a human voice, a full, rich voice, very deep and sonorous, upraised in song; and this voice being so powerful and the night so still, I ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... the valley, with its dismantled cornfields and snow-covered haystacks, beyond the ice-bound river, floated slow, and sonorous, the mellow clanging of church bells. They were ushering in ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... enough to suffocate, and every fellow would pile out and hunt for the culprit. Woe be unto him if they found him. A favorite ruse on the part of the culprit was to plunge into his tent and be placidly snoring when the victims began their hunt. Sometimes the simulation would be too sonorous, and give him away, and then he had trouble on hand for the next hour. The ingenuity of these sons of Belial in their pranks was beyond description. I have laughed until absolutely exhausted many a time. ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock

... and sonorous title," said Count Lesle, smiling, while he stretched himself out comfortably in the great armchair which Count Schwarzenberg had rolled forward for him, "and it is also a great and influential office. The Emperor's Majesty knows very well what a mighty and potent man the Stadtholder ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach

... York County would have shrunk into his muffler and snapped and snarled on the slightest provocation, Life Lane opened his great throat when he passed over the bridges at Moderation or Bonny Eagle, and sent forth a golden, sonorous "Yo ho! halloo!" into the still air. The later it was and the stormier it was, the more vigor he put into the note, and it was a drowsy postmaster indeed who did not start from his bench by the fire at the sound of that ringing halloo. Thus the old stage-coach, in Life Lane's ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... whose pacific name of Boniface his master had changed into the infinitely more sonorous name of Mousqueton. He had entered the service of Porthos upon condition that he should only be clothed and lodged, though in a handsome manner; but he claimed two hours a day to himself, consecrated ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... were an interesting nation who lived in the province of Michoacan, due west of the valley of Mexico. They were a polished race, speaking a sonorous, vocalic language, so bold in war that their boast was that they had never been defeated, and yet their religious rites were almost bloodless, and their preference was for peace. The hardy Aztecs ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... Kesini. And Vahuka, who was the king in disguise, recognising Indrasena with her brother, advanced hastily, and embracing them, took them up on his lap. And taking up his children like unto the children of the celestials, he began to weep aloud in sonorous accents, his heart oppressed with great sorrow. And after having repeatedly betrayed his agitation, Naishadha suddenly left children, and addressed Kesini, saying, 'O fair damsel, these twins are very like my own children. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... waved his hand; Miller Lyddon and his daughter left the vicarage; while both heard, as it seemed, his studied phrases and sonorous voice rolling after them all the way home. But poor Phoebe felt that the main issues as to conscience were now only too clear; her last anchor was wrenched from its hold, and that night, through a mist of unhappy tears, she succumbed, promised to marry John ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... poet of pessimism, born, a sailor's son, at Port-Glasgow, and brought up in an orphanage; was introduced to literature by MR. BRADLAUGH (q. v.), to whose National Reformer he contributed much of his best poetry, including his gloomy yet sonorous and impressive "The City of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... is a sonorous verse; but it is not Dante's verse, unless all detached means on every side is open to visitation, and impassive air means living air. Beneath its sway, also, is not Dante's; nor can we accept umbrageous wood, with its unmeaning epithet, for the wood because ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... essays is in refreshing contrast to most Elizabethan prose, to the sonorous periods of Hooker, to the ramblings of Sidney, to the conceits of Lyly and Shakespeare. The sentences are mostly short, clear, simple; and so much meaning is crystallized in them that they overshadow even the "Poor Richard" maxims of Franklin, the man ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... of pretty D—-, put me strangely in mind of them; and then the words!—by-the-by, was it not the magic of the words which brought the dear enchanting past so powerfully before the mind of Lavengro? for the words were the same sonorous words of high import which had first made an impression on his childish ear in the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... of these words a bray came from his throat, so sonorous and so prolonged that all the spectators laughed, and more especially all the children who were in ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi

... forehead smooth, his eyes black and modest, his mouth pretty; his hair was of chestnut color, his beard black, but scanty, his body very thin, his skin delicate, his speech pleasing and animated, his voice strong and piercing, but altogether mild and sonorous." ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... fact, it was harsh and strident; but this evening the hills, and the trees, and the wide open spaces, Nature's mighty modulator, subdued the harshness, so that the voice rolled up to the people clear, full, and sonorous. Nor was the preacher possessed of great learning nor endued with the gift of eloquence. He had, however, a shrewd knowledge of his people and of their ways and of their needs, and he had a kindly heart, and, more than all, he had the preacher's gift, the divine capacity ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... to the organization of the Constitutional Convention of 1820. I well remember the venerable figure of John Adams, as he took the seat of honor at the right hand of the president, and I remember the sonorous voice of Josiah Quincy, the Secretary. I was staying at the house of Mr. Evarts, and remember your father's dining there, and discussing the deportment and characteristics of several of the more prominent members. Among them was the tall member from Worcester, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... Azazel as his right, a Cherube tall: Who forthwith from the glittering Staff unfurld Th' Imperial Ensign, which full high advanc't Shon like a Meteor streaming to the Wind With Gemms and Golden lustre rich imblaz'd, Seraphic arms and Trophies: all the while Sonorous mettal blowing Martial sounds: 540 At which the universal Host upsent A shout that tore Hells Concave, and beyond Frighted the Reign of Chaos and old Night. All in a moment through the gloom were ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... irresistible desire to laugh shone in her eyes, passed like a slight shiver over her delicate cheeks, made her upper lip curl and her nostrils dilate, and at last a clear, bright burst of mirth came from her lips, a torrent of gayety which was lively and sonorous as the song of a bird. She repeated, with little mischievous exclamations which issued from between her white teeth, and hurt Parent as much as a bite would have done: "Ha!... ha!... ha!... ha! she beat ... she beat ... my husband ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... other sounds or movements of any consequence. Sally became uncomfortably susceptible to the undercurrent of high nervous tension, conscious of a slight dew on her hands and forehead, and surprisingly conscious of the sonorous thumping of her heart. Unaccountably, nobody else seemed ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... referred in the course of this narrative, that the secondary charm of the History of the World resides. It is to these that we turn when we have exhausted our first surprise and delight at the great bursts of poetic eloquence, the long sonorous sentences which break like waves on the shore, when the spirit of the historian is roused by some occasional tempest of reflection. In either case, the book is essentially one to glean from, not to read with consecutive ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... to fine clothes, but not flashy or gaudy in his attire. He was of low stature, slender frame, lithe and compact, sinewy, nervous, and very agile. His eyes were blue and large, of bold expression. His voice was full and sonorous. He had served as Assistant County Treasurer for two years, handled a large aggregate of money in that capacity, and his accounts squared to a cent when he handed over the books to his successor. ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara

... Johnson and Burke. He finished his great history three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a monumental work, and will live as long as the English language. It is one of the books which every cultivated gentleman should read. The style is stately and sonorous, and the industry and erudition involved in its ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... of Timmendiquas expressed little, but his voice was sonorous, and his words were such as ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler

... William with reckless bravado, and advanced boldly upon the animal. The animal very slightly lowered its horns (perhaps in sign of greeting) and emitted a sonorous mo-o-o-o-o. Like lightning the gallant pair made for ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton

... manner, to that we have just quitted. The hymn is sung—not by paid singers, but by the whole assembly at the loudest pitch of their voices, unaccompanied by any musical instrument, the words being given out, two lines at a time, by the clerk. There is something in the sonorous quavering of the harsh voices, in the lank and hollow faces of the men, and the sour solemnity of the women, which bespeaks this a strong-hold of intolerant zeal and ignorant enthusiasm. The preacher ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... to the breast, which is made up of cartilaginous rings nicely set one within another, and lined within with a very smooth membrane, in order to render the air that is pushed from the lungs more sonorous. On the side of the roof of the mouth the end of that pipe is opened like a flute, by a slit, that either extends, or contracts itself as is necessary to render the voice either big or slender, hollow or clear. But ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon

... a rebirth of Tom Linkhorn—she would have a son who would wear a black coat like Lawyer Macneil and Colonel Hardin way back in Kentucky, and make fine speeches beginning "Fellow countrymen and gentlemen of this famous State." She had a passion for words, and sonorous phrases haunted her memory. She herself would have a silk gown and a bonnet with roses in it; once long ago she had been to Elizabethtown and seen just such a gown and bonnet.... Or Tom would be successful in this wild Indiana country and be, like Daniel Boone, the father ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... by conscience, was happily still remaining then in Scotland, taking the place of the mediaeval 'by St. Andrew,' we in England, long before the Scot, having lost all sense of the Puritanical appeal to private conscience, as of the Catholic oath, 'by St. George;' and our uncanonized 'by George' in sonorous rudeness, ratifying, not now our common conscience, but ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... Paris and France to the most absurd folly and the most insatiable greed.' It was not the fault of Amiens if the efforts of Mazuyer and Kersaint demanding a law to show 'whether the French nation was sovereign, or the Commune of Paris,' and the sonorous eloquence of Vergniaud denouncing the 'citizens of Paris' as the 'slaves of the vilest scoundrels alive,' only led in the end to making France herself for a time the slave of these ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... On a sonorous phrase it ceased. A flutter of applause ran round the tables. Lanyard mastered a sense of daze that he saw reflected in the opening eyes of the woman as she slipped from his arms. In an instant they were themselves once more, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... was at home. It was his own sonorous voice which answered Gilbert's knock, bidding him enter with a muttered curse upon the interruption by way of addendum. The room into which Mr. Fenton went upon receiving this unpromising invitation was in a state of chaotic confusion. An ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon

... (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).—Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... sometimes it contains particles unnecessary to the meaning—both signs of an attempt at metre. Though almost constantly unrhymed, it carries alliteration and assonance to a degree beyond what is usual in prose, and prefers forms of words more sonorous than the ordinary. But these many and distinct passages of poetry issue from and run into contexts of prose unmistakable. For two reasons we are not always able to trace the exact border between the prose and the verse—first because ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... his writing is always balanced and sonorous, and everywhere and always is he "the friend of the wise and ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge

... night [Str. 7. Sounds lovelier than the light And light more sweet than song from night's own bird Mixed each their hearts with other, till the gloom Was glorious as with all the stars in bloom, Sonorous as with all the spheres in chime Heard far through flowering heaven: the sea, sublime Once only with its own Old winds' and waters' tone, 250 Sad only or glad with its own glory, and crowned With its own light, and thrilled with its own sound, Learnt now their song, more sweet than heaven's ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... principal entrance in the Rue de Lille, and a door upon the side next the river. Between two lofty walls overgrown with ivy, and united by imposing vaulted arches, the brougham shot in, announced by two strokes of a sonorous bell which roused Jenkins from the reverie into which the reading of his newspaper seemed to have plunged him. Then the noise of the wheels became deadened on the sand of a vast court-yard, and they drew up, after describing an elegant curve, before the steps ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... see that the unfortunate doctor was in the last stage of indecision, from which he was rescued by the deep, sonorous voice of the red-bearded Duke, which boomed ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... deep and sonorous voice he was pointing out to a group of uniformed sailors, burdening his point with a club-like forefinger with which he pounded on the edge of the teak bar, that while he rarely drank off duty, he never drank when on. This claim Peter had reason to ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts









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