"Tuneful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more than an exaggerated and richly designed compliment, the most beautiful of its kind. In selecting suitable extracts one is drawn from scene to scene, uncertain which deserves preference. The two offered here illustrate respectively the tuneful variety of Peele's verse and the delicate embroidery of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... drooping Soul.—DEATH's dark domains Throw mournful shadows o'er the Aonian clime; For in their silent bourne my filial bands Lie all dissolv'd;—and swiftly-wasting pour From my frail glass of life, health's sparkling sands. Sleep then, my LYRE, thy tuneful tasks are o'er, Sleep! for my heart bereav'd, and listless hands Wake with rapt touch thy glowing strings ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... in the flat country where Kent and Surrey meet. "Small, shining, neat, methodical, and buxom was Miss Peecher; cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. A little pincushion, a little hussie, a little book, a little work-box, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman all in one. She could write a little essay on any subject exactly a slate long, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... along the stone balustrades. The trees are clothed with green buds and tender leaves. When I throw open my jingling casement, I smell the odour of mignonette, and hear the hum of the bees from the flowers against the sunny wall, with the varied song of the throstle, and the cheerful notes of the tuneful little wren. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... Harmony This universal frame began: When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, Arise, ye more than dead! Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And Music's power obey. From harmony, from heavenly harmony This universal frame began: From harmony, to harmony, Through all the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... and she was regarding him with eyes that were half veiled, a slow, insolent smile upon her matchless face. Presently at something that he said she laughed outright, a laugh so tuneful and light-hearted that I thought I must be dreaming all this. It was the gay, frank, innocent laughter of a child; and I never heard in all my life a sound that caused me so much horror. He leaned across to her, and stroked her velvet cheek with his ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Layton during the night, lest the natives might discover them and attempt an attack. The night however passed over quietly, and at the hour proposed, Miantomah, rousing up the party, led the way towards the hills. The birds were saluting the early dawn with their tuneful notes, when, just as the hills came in sight amid the trees, a shot was heard, ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... the soprano scale, and the number that runs the pitch up to inaudibility. We know the number of vibrations of light necessary to give us a sensation of red or violet. These, apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear, pour not only light to one organ, but tuneful harmonies to another. The morning stars do sing together, and when worlds are gone, and heavy ears of clay laid down, we may ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... give you an imitation of that popular and favourite songster, the Thrush—better known to some of you, I daresay, as the Throstle, or Mavis! (He gives the Thrush—which somehow doesn't "go.") I shall next endeavour to represent that celebrated and tuneful singing-bird—the Sky-lark. (He does it, but the Lark doesn't quite come off.) I shall next try to give you those two sweet singers, the Male and Female Canary—the gentleman in the stalls with the yellow 'air will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... charms already widely blown! His be the meed whose pencil's trace Hath touched our very swamps with grace, And round whose tuneful way All Southern laurels bloom; The Poet of "The Woodlands," unto whom Alike are known The flute's low breathing and the trumpet's tone, And the soft west-wind's sighs; But who shall utter all the debt, 0 Land! wherein all ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... painted blossoms on the peerless dinner-service of rare old Sevres vied in every respect save fragrance with their living counterparts. An unseen orchestra, stationed in the conservatory, sent forth strains of music, now grave, now gay, as Gounod or Offenbach ruled the tuneful spirit of the hour. Twelve guests only were present, including Mrs. John Archer, to whom Mrs. Rutherford had in this fashion testified her forgiveness, and who had accepted the proffered olive-branch ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... Apollo, was a happy man as he journeyed on foot through the country where the wild flowers grew thick and the trees were laden with blossom towards the city of Corinth. His tuneful voice sang snatches of song of his own making, and ever and again he would try how his words and music sounded on his lyre. He was light of heart, because ever had he thought of good, and not evil, and had always sung only of great ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... visions, which will hum their melody in their tuneful flight through life!... Journeys in later life, great towns and moving seas, dream countries and loved faces, are not so exactly graven in the soul as these childish walks, or the corner of the garden seen every day through ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... are wandering sadly from our subject; it is perhaps quite as well that we have done so, for we should have become dangerous had we dwelt much longer on it. We were on the point of wishing (Nero-like) that our popular professors of the tuneful art had but one neck, that we might exterminate them at a blow, or hang them with one gigantic fiddle-string; but now, thanks to our episode, our exacerbated feelings are so far mollified, that we will be content with wishing them sentenced ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... votive lay, While Pales3 shall the flocks and pastures love, Or Faunus to frequent the field or grove, At least if antient piety and truth With all the learned labours of thy youth May serve thee aught, or to have left behind A sorrowing friend, and of the tuneful kind. Go, seek your home, my lambs, my thoughts are due To other cares than those of feeding you. 50 Yes, Damon! such thy sure reward shall be, But ah, what doom awaits unhappy me? Who, now, my pains and perils shall divide, As thou wast wont, for ever at my side, Both ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... together the next morning. The speaker then resumed his seat, and glanced persuasively around him for some tokens of assent or approbation. But the men, whom he had thus undertaken to wheedle, had been taught by experience to heed the caution so well recommended by the tuneful Burns,— ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... me as I flew on, and once, looking back, I saw she had started on her journey, and was creeping slowly along a tiny thread of water, almost hidden in the grass. I next floated upon some dark green trees, that sent out a spicy odor as I touched their boughs, and when I moved they sang a low, tuneful melody; their song was of the snowy mountain peak, the clouds, the bubbling spring, the sunshine and the green grass; yes, and there was something else, a deep undertone that I did not then understand, and the melody was a loom that wove them all into ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" (1886), "Demeter and Other Poems" (1889), and "The Death of Oenone, Akbar's Dream, and Other Poems," in the year of the Poet's death (1892). In these various volumes there is much admirable work and many tuneful lyrics in the old charming, lilting strain, with not a few serious, thoughtful, stately pieces of verse, "the after-glow," as Stedman phrases it, "of a still radiant genius.... His after-song," continues this fine critic, "does not wreak itself upon the master passions of love and ambition, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... commemoration of whose advent—and this is one secret of their pathos, waking high thoughts in the soul, too long brooding over and degrading itself with the mean cares and hopes of this life—the humble musicians make night tuneful, "scraping the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... the elbows of his shooting jacket, as, with both arms round them, he made Punch for them with his handkerchief and his fingers, and chattered to them in English, while they chattered in Welsh. By him sat another Englishman, to whom the three tuneful Snowdon guides, their music-score upon their knees, sat listening approvingly, as he rolled out, with voice as of a jolly blackbird, or jollier monk of old, the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... song came back to him,—one of those wailing chants of a score of verses dear to the Mexican heart. In any other place he would have deemed it a funeral dirge with variations, but with Indian women at sunrise it meant tuneful content. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... to see. His bow flew like lightning. His long fingers drummed and slid along the strings of the violin with bewildering swiftness. The little instrument jetted and effervesced its melody. The continuous and resounding noise poured out of it in tuneful bubbles. The air was filled with tinkling fragments of sound. The Lad's body swayed to and fro. His face glowed. His eyes flashed. The sweat stood in drops on his forehead, but still the bow snapped and crinkled, and the instrument ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... greater sumptuousness than the people had seen for many years; his orchestra, though faulty in composition as well as execution, did some admirable work under Signor Vianesi; his chorus was prompt, vigorous, and tuneful; his ensembles were carefully and intelligently composed, and his selection of operas was judicious from a managerial point of view. He gave to New York the strongest combination of women singers that the city had ever known; nor has it been equaled in any one season since. The financial failure ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gifts the understanding of women did not rank high. He was too robust, he had been too successful. Your very successful hero regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the other—figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their sisters. His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that time the child's heart was lighter than ever, and she sang all day long like a tuneful mocking-bird, blending all the sweet strains of her friends in one delightful song, until winter passed away, and the snow melted, and the snow-drop peeped out of the ground, and said, timidly, "I am here: ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... seat who throng With tuneful ecstasies of praise: O! teach our feeble tongues like yours the song Of fervent gratitude to raise— Like you, inspired with holy flame 5 To dwell on that Almighty name Who bade the child of Woe no longer sigh, And Joy in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... changed it all of course, and are as fortunate as we can expect. But it is good to be with Theocritus, for he lets you live awhile in the happy age and under the happy heaven that were his. He gives you leave and opportunity to listen to the tuneful strife of Lacon and Comatas; to witness the duel in song between Corydon and Battus; to talk of Galatea pelting with apples the barking dog of her love-lorn Polypheme; under the whispering elms, to lie drinking ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... his tuneful voice, When it, in soothing whispers, meets my ear; That sound, which oft has made my heart rejoice, I now all-trembling ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... career is o'er, And mute his tuneful strain; Quench'd is his lamp of varied lore, That loved the light of song to pour; A distant and a deadly shore ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... me himself. He brought the score of the operetta to Gray Gables last night and we tried it over on the piano. The music is beautiful. It is so tuneful it lingers. I've been humming snatches of it ever since he played it for me. The 'Rebellious Princess' has some wonderful songs. That clever young man, Eric Darrow, composed the libretto and thought out the plot. It's about a princess who ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... banner! For our freedom fight! 'Neath the banner, 'neath the banner, Riflemen unite! Graybeard in the Storting Gives his vote for right and truth, Rifle-voice supporting Of our armd youth. Music runeful Ring out tuneful Bullets sent point-blank, Fiery coursing, Freedom forcing Way to royal rank; They from silent valleys To the Storting's rallies Bring the clear "Rah! Rah!" And there clamors o'er us Loud the rifle chorus, Piercing and repeated: ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... of a story which we call the "plot.") A novel may be largely a study of character; a short-story may deal with action which takes place wholly unseen in the soul of man; a play or a musical comedy may be chiefly a series of scenic pictures or tuneful caperings; but a true photoplay must act out a story—a story with a big central point, supported by contributing points, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... the once tuneful voice was harsh and grating. Still were her eyes blank with misery. Again and again she murmured: ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... could build a tower; Sonnets and elegies to Chloris, Might raise a house about two stories; A lyric ode would slate; a catch Would tile; an epigram would thatch. Now Poets feel this art is lost, Both to their own and landlord's cost. Not one of all the tuneful throng Can hire a lodging for a song. For Jove consider'd well the case, That poets were a numerous race; And if they all had power to build, The earth would very soon be fill'd: Materials would be quickly spent, And houses would not give a rent. The God of Wealth ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... awake! Sleep no more, my gentle mate! With your tiny tawny bill, Wake the tuneful echo shrill, On vale or hill; Or in her airy rocky seat, Let her listen and repeat The tender ditty that you tell, The sad lament, The dire event, To luckless Itys that befell. Thence the strain Shall rise again, And soar amain, Up to the lofty palace gate Where mighty ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... music,—there were at least a dozen of them, all playing different pieces at one and the same moment, which had a somewhat distracting effect on those sensitively-eared people who weakly prefer one air at a time and do not appreciate tuneful tornadoes. As the procession went by at a brisk pace, it was curious enough to notice how the last wailing notes of "A noble race was Shenkin," played by a band in advance, blended with the brisk music of "My name's David Price, and I'm come from Llangollen," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... her slanting eyes: Dead is she long ago, From her fan sliding slow Parrot-bright fire's feathers Gilded as June weathers, Plumes like the greenest grass Twinkle down; as they pass Through the green glooms in Hell, Fruits with a tuneful smell— Grapes like an emerald rain Where the full moon has lain, Greengages bright as grass, Melons as cold as glass Piled on each gilded booth Feel their cheeks growing smooth; Apes in plumed head-dresses Whence the bright heat hisses, Nubian faces sly, Pursing ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... mournful fate Lamenting for her slaughtered mate; And still his lips, in absent mood, The verse that told his grief, renewed: "Woe to the fowler's impious hand That did the deed that folly planned; That could to needless death devote The curlew of the tuneful throat!" ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Cooper was under the immediate orders of Margaret Campbell. After hours, the Sergeant used to play a piccolo, and among other tuneful lays he piped one called "The Campbells Are Coming." It was on one such musical occasion that the young couple simply walked off and got married, thus proving a point which I have long held, to wit: Music ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... whose blasted top betrayed it the lightning's victim, were grouped the dogs, each one shoving to better his place in the bunch, each with tuneful throat and uplifted tail. Occasionally one from the outskirts would rush around the crowd of his fellows and try to push in from the other side of the ring. The ones nearest the tree snuffed at a hole in the trunk between the roots, and dug ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... magnificent attendance and generous support, announced that on Saturday evening he would have great pleasure in presenting, providing negotiations in contemplation were perfected, for their consideration, the melodious and tuneful grand comic opera, "Pinafore," in the presentation of which the company would be reinforced by several valuable additions, who were expected to arrive early on Saturday from the Metropolitan Grand ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... If rightly tuneful bards decide, If it be fixed in Love's decrees, That Beauty ought not to be tried But by its native power to please, Then tell me, youths and lovers, tell— What ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... portion of the Abbey is dedicated to poets, literary men, musical composers, and others of the gentle artist-breed, and even into that small nook of sanctity men of other pursuits have thought it decent to intrude themselves. Methinks the tuneful throng, being at home here, should recollect how they were treated in their lifetime, and turn the cold shoulder, looking askance at nobles and official personages, however worthy of honorable interment elsewhere. Yet it shows aptly and truly enough what portion of the world's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... careless and unthoughtful lying, Hear the soft winds above me flying, With all their wanton boughs dispute, And the more tuneful birds to both replying; ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... can soften pain to ease, And make despair and madness please; Our joys below it can improve, And antedate the bliss above. This the divine Cecilia found, And to her Maker's praise confin'd the sound. When the full organ joins the tuneful quire, Th' immortal pow'rs incline their ear; Borne on the swelling notes our souls aspire, While solemn airs improve the sacred fire; And angels lean from Heav'n to hear. Of Orpheus now no more let poets tell, To bright Cecilia greater pow'r is given; His numbers ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... extinguished, and running under full steam, the "Alabama" slipped right under the broadside of her enemy, getting clean away, so quietly that the "San Jacinto" remained for four days guarding the empty trap, while the "Alabama" was off again on another voyage of destruction, and the tuneful souls in the forecastle were ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Amphion's tuneful kit Thebes rose, with towers encircling it; As to the Mage's brandished wand A spiry palace clove the sand; To Thin's indomitable financing, That phantom crescent kept advancing. When first the brazen bells of churches ...
— Moral Emblems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform singing The Sweet By-and-By with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of them ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the whites. They seem to be free from want or desires. No cruel enemy to dread; nothing to give them disquietude but the gradual encroachments of the white people. Thus contented and undisturbed, they appear as blithe and free as the birds of the air, and like them as volatile and active, tuneful and vociferous. The visage, action, and deportment of the Seminoles form the most striking picture of happiness in this life; joy, contentment, love, and friendship, without guile or affectation, seem inherent in them, or predominant in their vital principle, for it leaves them with but the last ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... through one city and behold collections of this latter sort predominating and then through another, where my eyes were gladdened with evidences of good taste, of love for humor that is wholesome, sentiment that is sane, verse that is tuneful and noble, I should at once call on the public librarian and I should say to him, "Thou art the man!" The literary taste of your community is a reflection of your own as shown forth in your own institution—its collection of books, the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... sang this at the top of his tuneful voice, and waved his hand as the sharp craft shot ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... see stars catches their first matin hymns. In the longest June days the robin strikes up about half- past three o'clock, and is quickly followed by the song sparrow, the oriole, the catbird, the wren, the wood thrush, and all the rest of the tuneful choir. Along the Potomac I have heard the Virginia cardinal whistle so loudly and persistently in the tree- tops above, that sleeping after four o'clock was out of the question. Just before the sun is up, there is a marked lull, during which, I imagine, the birds ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... tuneful chords among, May make mad discord of the sweetest song. E'en so with dissonant clamor through the breast Of Gawayne rang the Green Knight's merry jest; But what wild meaning must it not impart To the vague fears of gentle Elfinhart? For she had heard in the first trumpet-blast ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... that it might do freer service to the jealous god of visible beauty. The overpowering rivalry of speech would rob it of all its symbolic intent and leave its bare picture. Literature has favoured rather the way of the ear and has given itself zealously to the tuneful ordering of sounds. Let it be repeated, therefore, that for the traffic of letters the senses are but the door-keepers of the mind; none of them commands an only way of access,—the deaf can read by sight, the blind by touch. It is not amid the bustle of the live senses, but in ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... mosaick art the piece combine, And boast the glitter of each dulcet line: Johnson adventur'd boldly to transfuse His vigorous sense into the Latian muse; Aspir'd to shine by unreflected light, And with a Roman's ardour think and write. He felt the tuneful Nine his breast inspire, And, like a master, wak'd the[59] soothing lyre: Horatian strains a grateful heart proclaim, While Sky's wild rocks resound his Thralia's name.— Hesperia's plant, in some less skillful hands, To bloom a while, factitious heat demands; ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... and Elsie, and, rather to the astonishment of the girls, the boys also took it up with enthusiasm, and volunteered their assistance. They enlisted the help of the village schoolmistress, and some of the most tuneful among her pupils, and all on the spur of the moment made ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... tuneful name, Isoude—so sweet to hear Because its music was the same With one long holden dear— Now, like a bell discordant, fell, And brought ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... my Orpheus, sweeping oft the tuneful strings, Of gliding streams and nimble winds and such poor things; But lend your measures to a theme of noble thought, And crown with laurel these ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... laureate, And representative of all the race. Although 'tis true that you turned out a Tory at Last, yours has lately been a common case. And now my epic renegade, what are ye at With all the lakers, in and out of place? A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye Like four and twenty blackbirds ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... poetic fancy to its noblest flights. Then we should learn that while the ink from good Langland's pen was yet scarcely dry after his third revision of "Piers Ploughman," Geoffrey Chaucer came forward with his sweet imaginings bodied in immortal verse, his tuneful numbers, his "well of English undefiled,"—and English poetry, which now for more than five centuries has been the chief glory of our literature, had its ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... substantive signifying a circle. The following is a specimen, elegant in the selection of words, and what the French called richly rhymed, but in fact they are fine verses without any meaning whatever. Pope's Stanzas, said to be written by a person of quality, to ridicule the tuneful nonsense of certain bards, and which Gilbert Wakefield mistook for a serious composition, and wrote two pages of Commentary to prove this song was disjointed, obscure, and absurd, is an excellent ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Wesley have set up a temple, built before the period of Methodist conversion to the principles of architectural religion. And here—most striking object of all—on the site where thousands of lights once sparkled; where sweet sounds of music made night tuneful till morning dawned; where the beauty and fashion of London feasted and danced through the summer seasons of a century—spreads, at this day, an awful wilderness of mud and rubbish; the deserted dead body of Vauxhall Gardens ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... of fantasy And frenzied mem'ry wrought, advance From out the shades; O spectral utterance, Untwine thy chains, thy fair autocracy Unveil, have being, declare Thy state and tuneful sovereignty. ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... changeless Sphinx! The very dawn of Time Beheld thee sculptured from the living rock! Still wears thy face its primal look sublime, Surviving all the hoary ages' shock: Still royal art thou in thy proud repose, As when the sun on tuneful ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... pitifully mean! How paltry! Nay How ludicrous, as you yourself divined! That seed, however, fell not by the way, But bred another fancy in my mind Of a far more illuminating kind. You, as I saw it, were no falcon, but A tuneful dragon, out of paper cut, Whose Ego holds a secondary station, Dependent on the string for animation; Its breast was scrawled with promises to pay In cash poetic,—at some future day; The wings were stiff with barbs and shafts of wit That wildly beat ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... cleric heading his little boys and their cricket, and there are the tuneful party in the fern on the opposite side. They have rather good voices, unless they gain ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the task thus set for him, and began to write. The first book of The Task is called The Sofa, and through all the six books we follow the course of his simple country life. It is the epic of simplicity, at once pathetic and playful. Its tuneful, easy blank verse never rises to the grandeur of Milton's, yet there are fine passages in it. Though Cowper lived a retired and uneventful life, the great questions of his day found an echo in his heart. Canada had been ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... touch—the lightest breath of natural feeling that broke up the hot crust, that shut down the fountain of tears—Rosa's voice, tuneful and sad as a nightingale's, chanting the border-lays ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... drawing-room music,"—safe criticisms. The men said little about the music, but they clustered around the singer. Mrs. Lawton looked significantly at Isabelle and winked. One old gentleman, something of a beau as well as a successful lawyer, congratulated Vickers on his "tuneful" music. "It must be a pleasant avocation to write songs," ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... those of the writers who are more or less of his school, to me seem worthy at best to collect a crowd in the street round a grinding organ, as an accompaniment to the capers of a puppet show. I even prefer French music, and I can say no more. Long live German music!" cried he, "when it is tuneful," he added ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... village which we passed, a music-loving squire had made a concert for his friends and neighbours, and doubtless, too, for our vagrant delight; we stood uninvited to listen to a tuneful stir of violins, which with a violoncello booming beneath, broke out very pleasantly from the windows of a ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... be much hurt by the harshest of them, I determined to lend my own assistance in swelling the triumphant roar. It seemed but a proper courtesy to the first Lady in the land, whose guest, in the largest sense, I might consider myself. Accordingly, my first tuneful efforts (and probably my last, for I purpose not to sing any more, unless it be "Hail Columbia" on the restoration of the Union) were poured freely forth in honor of Queen Victoria. The Sergeant smiled like the carved head of a Swiss nutcracker, and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... orphan girl, awake! The wild birds flutter free, And all the trumpet blossoms quake, Amid the tuneful glee. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... in its narrative of incredible adventures and more than Spartan hardships to assure the future reader that, "ye peale of his laugh was as clear and tuneful as ye fox horn with which our Virginia gentry were wont to go afield with horse and hound." There had possibly been a touch of wistfulness in that mention of a renounced life of greater affluence and pleasure for hard upon it followed ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... had the happiness of giving additional publicity to Petrarch's reputation. That the poet sought his patronage need not be concealed; and if he used a little flattery in doing so, we must make allowance for the adulatory instinct of the tuneful tribe. We cannot live without bread upon bare reputation, or on the prospect of having tombstones put over our bones, prematurely hurried to the grave by hunger, when they shall be as insensible to praise as the stones themselves. To speak seriously, I think that a poet sacrifices ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... rose to tuneful heights. Not only the landings, but the house, the long flight of steps, and the windswept balcony and shining Light ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... falls, where rains never slant through the shuddering leaves, the jocund foresters met to sing and drink October ale. There came Little John and Will Scarlet and Alan-a-Dale in glittering garments, with smooth, fair brows and tuneful voices, to circle and sing. Fadeless and untarnished was each magnificent cloak and doublet, slashed with green or purple; straight and fair and supple was every back and limb. No marks of toil anywhere, no lines of care, no hopeless hunger, no threatening task; nothing ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... thou? wherefore not this pleasant mount Ascendest, cause and source of all delight?" "And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious floods of eloquence Have issued?" I with front abash'd replied. "Glory and light of all the tuneful train! May it avail me that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have conn'd it o'er. My master thou and guide! Thou he from whom alone I have deriv'd That style, which for its beauty into fame Exalts me. See the beast, ...
— The Vision of Hell, Part 1, Illustrated by Gustave Dore - The Inferno • Dante Alighieri, Translated By The Rev. H. F. Cary
... home at midnight, tumbles in beside me as a salmon flounces in a net, oversets the economy of my bed, belches the fumes of his drink in my face, then twists himself round, leaving me half naked, and listening till morning to that tuneful nightingale, his nose.' It is at least forty-three years since I read the BEAUX' STRATAGEM, and I now quote from memory; but the passage has always occurred to me whenever I have seen a sottish husband; and though that species of revenge, for the taking of which ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... upon by the mildness of the spring air, the high, tuneful shrillness of the frogs' voices, the darkness, sweet and thick. She would not amuse them; no, she would really tell them, move them. She chose the deeper intonations of her voice, she selected her words with care, she played upon her own feeling, quickening it into genuine emotion as ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to Sylvia that months had passed since last those white birch stems had leaned toward her and waved green banners of welcome. "Ah. Listen!" she exclaimed. A tuneful jangle as of melodious bells fell on the quiet air, and then, like the clear tones of a silver flute, ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... of Green Erin, break thine icy slumbers! Strike once again thy wreathed lyre! Burst forth once more and wake thy tuneful numbers! Kindle ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... "beg" at a venture because it is the fashion; the workmen clipping the olive-trees sing; the urchins, who dance about the foreigner in the street, vocalize their petitions for un po' di moneta in a tuneful manner, and beg more in a spirit of deviltry than with any expectation of gain. When I see how hard the peasants labor, what scraps and vegetable odds and ends they eat, and in what wretched, dark, and smoke-dried ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tuneful mavis, I sing on the branches early, And such my love of song, I sleep but half the night-tide rarely; No raven I, of greedy maw, no kite of bloody beak, No bird of devastating claw, but a woodland songster meek. I love the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to the farther side of the circle, and Phorenice stood alone before the altar. She lifted up her voice, sweet, tuneful, and carrying, and though the din of the siege still came from over the city, no ear there lost a word of ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... Pretty but not coquettish are these communistic maidens of Amana. At Tiffin, the stilly air of night, is made joyous with the mellifluous voices of whip-poor-wills-the first I have heard on the tour-and their tuneful concert is impressed on my memory in happy contrast to certain other concerts, both vocal and instrumental, endured en route. Passing through Iowa City, crossing Cedar River at Moscow, nine days after crossing the Missouri, I hear the distant whistle of a Mississippi ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... knight! In eyes so young, and so benign, What is it speaks of Palestine? Of toils in early life I prov'd, And of a comrade dearly lov'd! 'Tis true, he, like this maid, was young, And gifted with a tuneful tongue! His looks [Errata: locks], like her's, were bright and fair, But light and laughing was his eye; The prophecy of future care In those thin, helmet lids we spy, Veiling mild orbs, of changeful ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... tuneful lyre, Still poets' hymns to thee belong; Though lips are cold Whereon of old Thy beams all turn'd to worshipping ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... to these two questions, specially important at Christmas time, will be found in Professor HOFFMANN's Encyclopaedia of Card and Table Games, published by ROUTLEDGE. Here you will learn the mysteries of "Go-Bang," "Reverse,"—and after learning the latter, you, if Nature has blessed you with a tuneful voice, will be able to sing with GEORGE GROSSMITH (if he'll let you), "See me Reverse." The motto for the Professor's book should have been the emphatic exclamation of the street Arab, "My heye! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... weary face of one Who in the adjacent gardens charged his string, Nightly, with many a tuneful tender thing, Till stars were ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... were what it was before your appearance, a strumming of wearisome idyls, insipid eclogues, tuneful nothings, I should renounce it forever:" but in your hands it becomes ennobled; a melodious "course of morals; worthy of the admiration and the study of cultivated minds (DES HONNETES GENS). You"—in fine, "you inspire the ambition to follow ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... strain Comes from an alley watered by a drain; The little Mincio, dribbling to the Po, Beats all the epics of the Hoang Ho; If loved in earnest by the tuneful maid, Don't mind ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Starring the withered leaves with rosy bloom. The woods were bare: and every night the frost To all my longings spoke a silent nay, And told me Spring was far and far away. Even the robins were too cold to sing, Except a broken and discouraged note,— Only the tuneful sparrow, on whose throat Music has put her triple finger-print, Lifted his head and sang my heart a hint,— "Wait, wait, wait! oh, wait a ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... they'll do," whispered Roger to Dr. Watkins, whose clear tenor supported him. Dorothy's sweet voice soared high, Tom's croak made a heavy background, and the more or less tuneful voices of the others added a hearty body of sound. There was no response from the house except that a corner of an upstairs curtain was drawn aside ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... of Smoke and Sacrifices, Bullocks and Goats, and the Fat of Lambs? Is not the Ascent of Christ into Heaven, and his Triumph over Principalities and Powers of Darkness a nobler Entertainment for our tuneful Meditations than the removing of the Ark up to the City of David, to the Hill of God, which is high as the Hill of Bashan? Is not our Heart often warm'd with holy Delight in the Contemplation of the Son of God our dear Redeemer whose Love was stronger than Death? Are not our ...
— A Short Essay Toward the Improvement of Psalmody • Isaac Watts
... work's originality. There must be individuality in new music to make it worthy of our attention, and that, after all is all that matters. For the tiniest folk-song often persists in the hearts and minds of the people, often stirs the pulse of a musician, pursuing its tuneful way through two centuries, while a mighty thundering symphony of the same period may lie dead and rotting, food for the Niptus Hololencus and the Blatta Germanica. We still sing The Old Folks At Home and Le Cycle du Vin but we have laid aside Di Tanti Palpiti. Any piece ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... and reasonings of an author have, as I have said, a personal character, no wonder that his style is not only the image of his subject, but of his mind. That pomp of language, that full and tuneful diction, that felicitousness in the choice and exquisiteness in the collocation of words, which to prosaic writers seem artificial, is nothing else but the mere habit and way of a lofty intellect. Aristotle, in his sketch ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... a spirometer. Then he would come back and re-occupy his old seat among the orchestra, and look paler and sadder than ever. What strange, mysterious being was he? Why did he inflict his pale, sad presence upon that galaxy of tuneful revellers? ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... and sing, ye waters, May the music of your song Silence all the dark forebodings That have plagued the world too long; He who made your voices tuneful Comes ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... unlocked the door into the bedroom, whence had come the tuneful lyrics, threw it wide open, and revealed to my astonished gaze no less an object than a large talking-machine still engaged in the strenuous fulfilment of ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... native heath, was astonishment at their lack of mechanical skill and at their inability to grapple with numbers and the simpler processes of arithmetic. Another characteristic of the same nature was their wonderful lack of musical ability, or of any kind of tuneful creativeness. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Actors, mimes, and tuneful minstrels fair Panchala's court will throng, Famed reciters of puranas, dancers skilled and ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... superintendence of the affairs of the widow and fatherless: one of his principal delights was to assist merit, to bring it before the world and to procure for it its proper estimation: it was he who first discovered the tuneful genius of blind Parry; it was he who first put the harp into his hand; it was he who first gave him scientific instruction; it was he who cheered him with encouragement and assisted him with gold. It was he who instructed the celebrated Evan Evans in the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Lily, fair, my hand among her curls, If we were Red Branch Knights, or high and noble Earls, Or poets grand like Burns, instead of simple girls, We might do some noble deed, Or touch some tuneful reed, Something for the land we love to bring her high renown, The land where we were born; Is spoken of with scorn, Her children's songs should praise her, ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... captivates the world's heart And don't know it. Hear him lilt! See him tilt! Then suddenly he stops, Peers about, flirts, hops, As if looking where he might gather up The wasted ecstasy just spilt From the quivering cup Of his bliss overrun. Then, as in mockery of all The tuneful spells that e'er did fall From vocal pipe, or evermore shall rise, He snarls, and mews, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... majesty; rather would I learn from the tuneful songsters whom God has taught. Perhaps some of these days I may try ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... them spoke, but all of them, little and big, looked at him—very shyly, and yet with intense interest. He stood staring after them, and presently their tuneful young voices sounded again, filled the air with virginal music. He swung his leg over the stile, and went along the path through the trees where he ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... still thinking of him when she fell asleep, and when she awakened the first sound that fell on her ears was his tuneful whistle. Indeed she had an indistinct memory of him in the night, wrapping the blankets closer about her when the chill air had half stirred her from her slumber. The day was still very young, but the abundant desert light dismissed sleep summarily. She shook and brushed ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... brown-red sycamores clustered thick by the margin of the stream. It may be supposed that when the sun mounted high she would tie the picturesque, richly ornamented baby-frame containing her boy to some drooping branch to swing from its leathern thong in the cooling breeze. We may imagine her tuneful voice singing the mother's Wa Wa song, the soft lullaby of the sylvan glades. Thayendanegea's eyes blink and tremble; he forgets the floating canopy above him and ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... slumbers; The ladies listen on the narrow stair, And Captain Andrew straight forgets his numbers. Cats and mice give o'er their battling, Pewter plates on shelves are rattling; But falling down the noise my lady hears, Whose scolding drowns the trump more tuneful than ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... pretense, Mr. Scott. The tuneful or merry folk of the Middle Ages did not travel with arms. They had no enemies, and they were welcome everywhere. Nor did they travel as we do to the accompaniment of war. The sound of the ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the white heat of the imagination and gives one the sense of artistic perfection is not often there. His verse is never cold, never trivial; but; it does lack artistic distinction. Its highest claim is to give expression to the maxims of a ripe culture in tuneful verses and pleasing imagery that impress themselves readily upon the general heart. This is what he does in the most famous of all his poems, 'The Song of the Bell'. It is not great poetry, but it is a pleasing production ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... attendance on Mr. Smerdon I had written, as I observed before, several tuneful trifles, some as exercises, others voluntarily, (for poetry was now become my delight) and not a few at the desire of my friends. When I became capable, however, of reading Latin and Greek with some degree of facility, that gentleman employed all my ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... pleading?" for quartet and chorus, is remarkable for its attractive melody. It is followed by a soprano solo and chorus ("Happy are we, with such a Saviour") of a reflective character, which gives out still another very tuneful melody. The hymn is then resumed with the verse, "Faint and worn, thou yet hast sought us," for duet and chorus, which is of the same general character. The next verse, "Lord, for Anguish hear us moaning," for quartet and chorus, is very effective ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... gods, how I pity The ears those sweet sounds never heard; More tuneful than loveliest ditty E'er poured from the throat of a bird. There's a prize for each honest endeavour, But none for the man who's a shirk; And the pluck that we've showed on the river, Shall tell in the ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... glad you have received my books safe, and are content with them. I have little idea of Mr. Bentley's; though his imagination is sufficiently Pindaric, nay obscure, his numbers are not apt to be so tuneful as to excuse his flights. He should always give his wit, both in verse and prose, to somebody else to make up. If any of his things are printed at Dublin, let me have them; I have no quarrel with his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... since expanded, Gather no down upon their tender crests; The flower still lingers in the amaranth[92], Imprisoned in its bud; the tuneful Koil, Though winter's chilly dews be overpast, Suspends the liquid volume of his song Scarce uttered in his throat; e'en Love, dismayed, Restores the ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... higher still riven crags, split into all fantastic shapes, frowned forth as though to menace the world. And all around, clinging about the feet of these stupendous heights, soft, luxuriant forests, tuneful with the murmur of innumerable glacier streams. A very Paradise of beauty and grandeur side by side, thought Laurence—amid which the shields and spears, the marching column of the savage host ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... and joy Have haunted me,—dreams that were born in sin, Yet swathed in stainless snow. I've dreamed, and dreamed, Of wondrous trees, crowned with perennial green, Whose soft still shadows gleamed with golden lamps Of pensile fruitage, or were flushed with life Radiant and tuneful when broad flocks of birds Swept in and out like sheets of living flame. I've dreamed of aisles tufted with velvet grass, And bordered with the strange intelligence Of myriad loving eyes among the flowers, That watched me with ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... across the Piazza del Municipio; a good-bye to the public scriveners sitting at their little tables by the San Carlo; sharp round the corner, and along by the Porto Grande with its throng of vessels. All the time he sings a tune to himself, caught up in the streets of the tuneful city; an ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... axe, And helm and cuirass ring; The foam flies from the charger's flanks, Like wreaths of winter's snow; Spears shiver, and the bright shafts start In thousands from the bow— Strike up, strike up, my minstrels all Use tongue and tuneful chord— Be mute!—My music is the clang Of cleaving ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... back from one another, hand in hand, and smiled as they listened to the tuneful plaint. Then the man unfolded a wonderful plan to this girl whom he loved. Her willing ears drank in the details like one whose heart is set with a great purpose. They also talked of their love in their own practical way. There was little display ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... with us. Think what enthusiastick happiness I shall have to see Mr. Samuel Johnson walking among the romantick rocks and woods of my ancestors at Auchinleck[934]! Write to me at Edinburgh. You owe me his verses on great George and tuneful Cibber, and the bad verses which led him to make his fine ones on Philips the musician[935]. Keep your promise, and let me have them. I offer my very best compliments to Mrs. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... gracious garden-flowers he held so dear, Oldworld English blossoms, all his homestead store, Oldworld grief had strewn them round his bier of yore, Bidding each drop leaf by leaf as tear by tear; Rarer lutes than mine had borne more tuneful token, Touched by subtler hands than echoing time can wrong, Sweet as flowers had strewn his graveward path along. Now may no such old sweet dirges more be spoken, Now the flowers whose breath was very song are broken, Nor may sorrow find again ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... am a poet, too— Taught by the muses how to smite the harp And lift the tuneful voice, although, like you And Brooks, I sometimes flat and sometimes sharp. But let me say, with no desire to taunt you, I never murder even the girls I ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... branches. Yet let none Of woman born, presume to build his hopes On the worn cliff of brief prosperity, Or from the present promise, predicate The future joy. The exulting bird that sings Mid the green curtains of its leafy nest His tuneful trust untroubled there to live, And there to die, may meet the archer's shaft When next it spreads the wing. The tempest folds O'er the smooth forehead of the summer noon Its undiscover'd purpose, to emerge Resistless from its armory, and whelm In floods ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... mourning are ended, The lean years of famine are fled, When, sick for a spoonful of aught that was tuneful, We've sorrowed as over the dead For Music, forlorn and unfriended, Gone down into glimmerless gloom, While rude "rag-time" revels were dancing a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... faith is firm, but I have no time To explain it all in this tuneful rhyme. Science cannot say much, I fear, But must admit that God is here, And if the priests would let us alone, Perhaps a little more might be known. Spirit is fact, and this I assume, For Matter is nothing but ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like some ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a long age digging and searching for some fragment ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... never cared much for poetry, except ballads and his contemporary Byron. He desired, as he said in the note to "Romantic Ballads," not the merely harmonious but the grand, and he condemned the modern muse for "the violent desire to be smooth and tuneful, forgetting that smoothness and tunefulness are nearly synonymous with tameness and unmeaningness." He once said of Keats: "They are attempting to resuscitate him, I believe." He regarded Wordsworth as a ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the notes of holy song On Milton's tuneful ear have died? Think ye that Raphael's angel throng Has ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... I beat her," shrieks he, with the last note left in his tuneful pipe. He staggers the last yard or two and falls into Joyce's arms, that are opened wide to receive him. Who shall say he is not a happy interlude? Evidently Joyce ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... leaping upon a large stone, now creeping into an open space under the rocks, all the while picking up some kind of seed or nut or insect. It was very confiding, coming close to me, but vouchsafing neither song nor chirp. Farther on I shall have more to say about these tuneful birds, but at this point it is interesting to observe that they breed abundantly among the mountains at a height of from eight thousand to eleven thousand feet, while the highest nest known to explorers was twelve ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... they find an inclination, and at last feel less remorse at the actual commission, than they had conceived horror at the bare recital. But Mr. Pope is a Poet, and as you entertain no great affection for the tuneful tribe, perhaps his authority may have little weight; you are, however, a staunch believer, and an excellent Bible-scholar; I shall therefore try the efficacy of a scriptural inference. Moses, in his celebrated apologue of the fall, ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... than mine a mightier hand Has tuned my harp, my strings has spanned! I touch the chords of joy, but low And mournful answer notes of woe; 125 And the proud march, which victors tread, Sinks in the wailing for the dead. O well for me, if mine alone That dirge's deep prophetic tone! If, as my tuneful fathers said, 130 This harp, which erst Saint Modan swayed, Can thus its master's fate foretell, Then welcome be ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... at no great distance, a strange, merry air and stranger words; and the voice was loud, yet tuneful and mellow, and the words (the which I came to know all too ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of the piece in the form of Miss Adela Vane was late in appearing. The thing was dragging, too, or so it seemed to Field. All at once there were voices at the back of the stage as if somebody was quarrelling. Suddenly the bright tuneful chorus broke off altogether and a female voice screamed. A little puff of smoke came from ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... tire of this," said the gentle-hearted wife, in whose spirit was a tuneful chord for every outward touch of beauty; "it looks as lovely now as yesterday; it was as lovely yesterday as the day my eyes first ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... extraordinarily pleasant voice, deep and tuneful, and the "Insolent" stood over six feet high and was as slender as Tamara herself almost—in spite of his shoulders and air ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... raven, perched upon the elm, Gave forth a scraping note, And ere the sound had died away, Had cut its tuneful throat. ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... again, as I listen, I seem to hear The strains of old, half-forgotten Mear, And solemn China, and grave Dundee, And stately Rockingham, calm and free, And rare Old-Hundred's majestic swell, And tender Hebron we loved so well, And tuneful Stonefield's melodies sweet, Bridgewater, Windham, and Silver-street, And rich St. Martin, and yet again Old Coronation's exultant strain, And sweet Devizes' slow, warbled tone, Resounding Lenox and Arlington, ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... singing, but here, as in everything, we must keep pace with development, or the older ones, especially the boys, may get bored by what suits the less adventurous. In all cases the music should be good and tuneful, modelled not on the modern drawing-room inanity, but on the healthy and vigorous nursery ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... dress is preferable to gawdy colours and meretricious ornaments. The style in vogue at present, is an innovation, against every thing just and natural; it is not even manly. The luxuriant phrase, the inanity of tuneful periods, and the wanton levity of the whole composition, are fit for nothing but the histrionic art, as if they were written for the stage. To the disgrace of the age (however astonishing it may appear), it is the boast, the pride, the glory of our present orators, that their periods ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... decked the leafy bowers, And pranked the russet plain, She bore his cage where breathing flowers Inspired a tuneful strain; ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... air be good, and your composition will be so likewise, and will assuredly delight," says tuneful Father Haydn, and Music's outline in melody limns, as does that of Nature, the beauty of her design. It speaks of wood or stream, of billowed sky, and now of sombre shadow. It ripples in dainty dance, or tumbles down in cascades of joy. Music's melody vies with the drive and bluster of the ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... trophies on a post? Shall fun'ral eloquence her colours spread, And scatter roses on the wealthy dead? Shall authors smile on such illustrious days, And satirize with nothing—but their praise? Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train, Nor hears that virtue, which he loves, complain? Donne, Dorset, Dryden, Rochester, are dead, And guilt's chief foe, in Addison, is fled; Congreve, who, crown'd with laurels, fairly won, Sits smiling at the goal, while others run, He will not ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... when Eustace sung Of plighted love's perennial joys, Now silent is that tuneful tongue, That graceful form the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the tuneful birds, How pleasant 't is to see! No spot can be a cheerless place Where'er their ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... perceives to give substance to the particular recollection he favours: thus, according to the mood of the dreamer and the idea that fills his imagination at the time, a gust of wind blowing down the chimney becomes the howl of a wild beast or a tuneful melody. Such is the ordinary mechanism ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... such scenes the fancy loves to dwell, The stomach oft a different tale will tell; Then, leave the wood, and seek the shelt'ring roof, And put the pantry's vital strength to proof; The aerial banquets of the tuneful nine, May suit some appetites, but faith! not mine; For my coarse palate, coarser food must please, Substantial beef, pies, puddings, ducks, and pease; Such food, the fangs of keen disease defies, And such rare feeding Hornsey ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... old when Ephraim envied Judah and Judah vexed Ephraim! Nevertheless, times without number, a concert in the midst of strife, such as that described above, sufficed to draw together all classes in friendliest possible intercourse, and seemed a tuneful prophecy of the better days that are ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... accessit,[23] I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not," said the meek and tuneful ecclesiastic. "I am acquainted with the lady, a most respectable person, and she has shown me the certificate ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... harp to prelude sweet, Entered the youth, so pensive, pale, and fair; Advanced respectful to the virgin's feet, And, lowly bending down, made tuneful parlance there. Like perfume, soft his gentle accents rose, And sweetly thrilled the gilded roof along; His warm, devoted soul no terror knows, And truth and love lend fervor to his song. She hides her face upon her couch, that there She may not see him die. No groan—she springs Frantic between ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... and surly grumbles, came out blinking, to indulge in several painful barks, waiting, as dogs will, with eyes shut and nose strained in the air, for the effect of each bark, and consciously enjoying the tuneful echo. A stern-featured, middle-aged woman came out quickly, almost as if annoyed at the interruption, but on seeing who it was she dropped a quick courtsey, and spoke ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson |
