"Dirge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never more! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!— An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young— A dirge for her the doubly dead in that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... captain in the dying man's cabin and I repaired to my stateroom, very moved by this scene. All day long I was aquiver with gruesome forebodings. That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge. Was it a prayer for the dead, murmured in that language I ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead. ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... Diana followed him beating a little drum, and Iris, with long black ribbons fastened to her flowing chestnut locks, was walking behind, carrying the tiny coffin. Iris, as she walked, rang an old dinner bell in a very impressive manner, and also sang a little dirge to the accompaniment of the bell and the two other children's music. These were ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... the first time since cedars grew upon Clarke's Island bit into the heart of one of their number, we well might fancy that, mingling with the east wind and the sound of the surf on Salthouse Beach rose the echo of the dirge, startling the sailors of Egean shores, ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... church-bell's intermittent moan, The dirge's melancholy monotone, The measured march, the drooping flags, attest A great man's progress to his place of rest. Along broad avenues himself decreed To serve his fellow men's disputed need— Past parks he raped away from robbers' ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... day, many years after he had taken up his abode on the rocky height, Roland missed the graceful form he loved, and heard, instead of the usual psalm, a dirge for the dead. Then he noticed that six of the nuns were carrying a coffin, which they ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... but every step he took beat in his mind like the accents of a dirge. For he had betrayed into the hands of the Eurasian his most loved and loyal friend. Betrayed him! Despicably egotistical he had been in submitting to the chair, in not making one last wild break for freedom at that time. He had thought he could beat Ku Sui at his ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... Mirabelle wailed, "And one grows by the knife. I shall grow in my soul In that awful strife. Let me go, let me grow," Was the theme of her dirge; "Let the sobbiest of sobs Through my ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... Ireland's mountains I hear the breezes sing a sad dirge, low, Wild, and yet soft, with tears from many fountains And murmuring riven ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... dirge-like air went on, but the player did not turn his head, playing away with grave importance, and giving himself a gentle inclination now and then to make up for the sharp twitches caused by ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... the shore Beside the knelling surge, And Sea-nymphs evermore Shall sadly chant thy dirge. They come, they come, The Spirits of the deep,— While near thy seaweed pillow ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... could writer go to a better source for inspiration than to ballads preserving in homely setting such gems as this, from "Bartham's Dirge": ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead: Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart; Which epitaph containeth, "Her eyes were once his dart." From so ungrateful fancy; From such a female frenzy; From them that use ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... twilight shadows deepen and the far-off lands are dim, And the vesper dirge is stealing like the chant of cherubim, There's a prayer within my bosom that's responsive to the sound, There's a thought that springs within ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... ringing. Dirge-like your melody swells; But Hope wipes the tears that are springing, Mournful-toned memory-bells! Above your deep knelling Her soft voice is swelling, Sweeter than angel-tones, silvery clear, Singing:—in Heaven above, All is unchanging ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... no song-hour after sun rise to compare with this for spirit and volume of sound. The difference between the singing in the dusk and in the dawn is the difference between the slow, sweet melody of a dirge and the triumphant, full-voiced peal of a wedding march. Even one who has always lived in the country can scarcely believe his ears the first time he is afield in June at ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... has a snatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.—What are "Luke's iron crown", the brazen bull of Perillus, Procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification by degrees! To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... dirge," mumbled this provoking individual, with something about the form of his cheek that being taken by Rachel for a derisive smile, made her exclaim vehemently, "You do not mean to undervalue an action like that in comparison with mere animal pugnacity ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the rhythm. And for myself, although I am past my sportive days, the sound of a street organ, if any, would inflame me to a fox-trot. Even a surly tune—if the handle be quickened—comes from the box with a brisk seduction. If a dirge once got inside, it would fret until it came out ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... stooping by a distant tomb reading its epitaph to little Jennie, who listened with the deepest interest. There was no sound to mar the stillness of that peaceful retreat, the whispering winds went, dirge-like, through the waving grass, and the leaves rustled ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... look and manner to detach herself. As the young lady flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young lady ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... the demands of dramatic fitness and the needs of musical structure. In the Coda, beginning measure 258, Schumann—now that he is free from considerations of structure—gains a dramatic effect of truly impressive power. The horns, supported by trumpets and trombones, intone a funeral dirge of touching solemnity (evidently suggested by the closing death scene of the drama) while, above, hover portions of the Astarte motive, as if even in his death her influence was paramount in Manfred's ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... have dived into "The Welsh Rarebit Warren," there to spend the early hours of the morning, listening to sentimental songs chanted amid fumes of tobacco and spirits, to hear sorry wit, and make vapid remarks. The great feature of the evening being a melodramatic dirge, supposed to be sung by a condemned felon—a triumphant lamentation and delineation of brutal character,—so eloquent and thrilling, in its monosyllabic groans of anguish, that it is a wonder the kidneys, consumed in such numbers, are ever digested. But, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... plunge into the golden pool the pool vanished. The crimson ball kept sinking until it was buried in a region of darkness. When the last fiery speck of it disappeared the sky broke into an evensong of color so solemn, so pensive that my wretched mood interpreted it as a visible dirge for the dead sun. Rose lapsed into purple, purple merged into blue, the blue bordering on a field of hammered gold that was changing shape and hue; all of which was eloquent of sadness. It seemed as though the heavens were in an ecstasy of grief and everybody about ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Nereus were tossing hither and thither on the shore bewailing the death of the best of the Athenians and the folly of the frenzied city. The waves broke on the rocky coast with a growl of lament. Their booming sounded like a funeral dirge. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... the dirge; let no one raise the cry, Or make unseemly show of grief and gloom, Nor think o'er me, who shall not really die, To rear the empty honor ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... Pedgift Junior. "I'll accompany you, sir, with the greatest pleasure. This is the sort of thing, I think." He seated himself cross-legged on the roof of the cabin, and burst into a complicated musical improvisation wonderful to hear—a mixture of instrumental flourishes and groans; a jig corrected by a dirge, and a dirge enlivened by a jig. "That's the sort of thing," said young Pedgift, with his smile of supreme confidence. ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... when his lodger entered the kitchen, but his was no joyful ditty. It was a dirge, which he was intoning as he bent over the cookstove. A slow and solemn and mournful wail dealing with death and burial of one "Old Storm Along," whoever ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... stand with thee on Time's remotest age, Ten thousand years, ten thousand times told o'er; Still, still with thee my onward course I urge; And now no longer hear the surge Of Time's light billows breaking on the shore Of distant earth; no more the solemn dirge— Requiem of worlds, when such are numbered o'er— Steals by: still thou ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... With dirge-like music, low, Sounds forth again the solemn harp of Time; Mass for the buried hours, a funeral chime O'er human joy and woe. The sere leaves wail around thy passing bier, Speed to thy dreamless ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... wind sang a dirge all through the night, and ceased not till day darted over the hills. It was not very pleasant for the old tree to hear the children's regrets and words of grief as they came around it in the morning to play and sit as usual under its pleasant shade. It had hoped to have been far away ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... What good is all thy vain remorse? Thinkst thou from jaws of death to force A sacrifice so lightly thrust Upon the altar of thy lust? A host like thee could nothing urge To meet one tone of her sad dirge: ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... except those behind the counters, in the store. Miss Keith took that with an exclamation of impatience. Crawford Smith, whistling a mournful dirge, sauntered to the end of the counter and sat down upon a ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... this pale swan in her watery nest Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending: 'Few words,' quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass best, Where no excuse can give the fault amending: In me more woes than words are now depending; And my laments would be drawn out too long, To tell them all ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... day In the rich house that late was full of pride; Then the sun fell, and all the paths were grey, And Menelaus from the mountain-side Came, and through palace doors all open wide Rang the wild dirge that told him of the thing That Helen, that the Queen had strangely died. Then on his threshold ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... women stood for a moment silent and motionless. They both listened to the dirge of their love and their happiness, and this simple, hearty song sounded to them horrible and awful in the boundless desolation of their hearts. At last the song ceased, and a voice, too well known ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... me the sense of strength and assurance which these simple children obtain from their Moses and the Prophets. Yet external Nature does its share in their training; witness that most poetic of all their songs, which always reminds me of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... trap was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a dirge for ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... mirthful shows And clasping loves, with hate and hearty blows, And dreams of coming gifts withheld by Fate From morrow unto morrow, till her great Dread eyes 'gan tell of other gifts than those, And her advancing wings gloomed like a pall; Her speech foretelling joy became a dirge As piteous as pitiless; and all My company had passed beyond the verge And lost me ere Fate raised her blinding wings.... Hark! through the dusk a bird ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... poet of no mean ability. Lawrence Gilman says, in his thorough analysis of his work, that, writing as he usually does from some poetic theme, the effect is lost if the hearer does not know the idea around which the composition is woven. For instance, one is apt to take "A.D. 1620" for a funeral dirge, just to hear it without knowledge of the subject, as it somewhat resembles the Chopin Funeral March; but the title suggests something historic, and knowing the lines that inspired it, one can easily distinguish the waves and the majestic ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... fortunes of Scotland receives further guarantee in 1513. Whether as chaplain or as common soldier, and under what designation, no available narrative declares. But certain it is that the stubborn fight which evoked Scotland's most waefu' dirge, no less than that which occasioned her immortal paean of victory, was graced by an abbot of this monastery. The respective fates of these two divines, however, were widely different. Not even monks, clad though they be in all the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... of London states that the convocation assembled on the day of St. Edmund the King, and continued until December; and "that the archbishop and bishops, at St. Paul's Cross, accursed Sir John Oldcastle on the Sunday, after the dirge was performed royally at Westminster for Richard II., on the ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... their attention was roused by the sounds of the natives, and it was at length discovered, that they had lighted a chain of small fires between the sand-hill Captain Barker had ascended and the opposite side of the channel, around which their women were chanting their melancholy dirge. It struck upon the ears of the listeners with an ominous thrill, and assured them of the certainty of the irreparable loss they had sustained. All night did those dismal sounds echo along that lonely shore, but as morning dawned, they ceased, and Mr. Kent and his ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Through the gap in the dark draperies a wan white hand appeared; waved tremulously a last farewell; and vanished from my view. The curtains closed again on her dark and solitary life. The dreary wind sounded its long, low dirge over the rippling waters of the lake. The ponies took their places in the ferryboat which was kept for the passage of animals to and from the island. With slow, regular strokes the men rowed us to the mainland and took their leave. I looked back at the distant house. I thought ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... steer, but he soon found that the blacks could manage the canoe perfectly well without his assistance. The heat was so great on the water that we were all thankful to avoid any unnecessary exertion. The blacks as they paddled sang a low monotonous song, more like a dirge. What it was about we could not tell. By looking back we saw that we had got some distance from the land, although we appeared not to have approached nearer the opposite shore, which still remained as indistinct as before. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... Hawthorne this, with my love. Mr. Chorley saw the entrance of the Empereur into the Tuileries. He looked radiant. The more I read that elegy on the death of Daniel Webster, the more I find to admire. It is as grand as a dirge upon an organ. Love to the dear ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... which is very much to the point. It is said that after Orpheus had been torn to pieces by the Thracian women, his head and his lyre were carried down the Hebrus into the sea; the head, it seems, floated down upon the lyre, singing Orpheus's dirge as it went, while the winds blew an accompaniment upon the strings. In this manner they reached the coast of Lesbos; the head was then taken up and buried on the site of the present temple of Bacchus, and the lyre was long ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... lamentation; "Weep for our warrior slain, Ne'er shall we see again, Our mighty captain." Rises the harpist old, Calls for his harp of gold, Sweeps through its mournful strings, And loud the music rings, The dirge of Rhuddlan. ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... first Clay was the last Golfer framed, And that last Golfer's latest Score was named When the first Morning of Creation sang The Dirge of every ...
— The Golfer's Rubaiyat • H. W. Boynton
... the crevices between the shingles, and the cracks in the walls, and behold the stars gleaming from the unfathomable spaces. He wondered how far they were away. He listened to the wind chanting a solemn dirge, filling his soul with longings for he knew not what. He thought over his grandfather's stories, and the words he had spoken about courage, truth, and honor, till a shingle clattering in the wind took up the refrain, and seemed to say, Truth and honor,—truth and honor,—truth and honor,—so ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... are: the already-described No. 2; the sweetly-melancholy No. 3; the artistically more dignified No. 9; the popular No. 13; the weird No. 15; and the impressive, but, by its terrible monotony, also oppressive No. 17 ("Poland's Dirge"). The mazurka movement and the augmented fourth degree of the scale (Nos. 2 and 4) present themselves, apart from the emotional contents, as the most strikingly-national features of these songs. Karasowski states ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... regarded as of great sanctity, and all who could sought a place in it, the most dearly coveted spot being near the high altar; (ii.) when elaborate tombs were the fashion, they were built inside the church for the sake of security, 'gay tombs' being liable to be 'robb'd' (see the funeral dirge in Webster's White Devil). As these two considerations gradually ceased to have power, and other considerations of an opposite tendency began to prevail, the inside of the church became comparatively deserted, except when ancestral reasons gave no ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... few, And shortly none will hear my failing voice, But the same language with more full appeal Shall hail thee. Many are the sons of song Whom thou hast heard upon thy native plains, Worthy to sing of thee; the hour is come; Take we our seats and let the dirge begin. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... thickets in the rear of the Confederate line and it was a weird and ghastly ride. Now and then his horse's feet sank in mud, and the frogs still dared to croak around the pools, making on such a night the most ominous of all sounds. It seemed a sort of funeral dirge for both North and South, a croak telling of the ruin and death that were to come ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... out another way, and sent a message to my Lord Shrewsbury, who knew me at court. As I waited in the courtyard, the musicians there were playing 'The Witches' Dirge,' as is done at the burnings—and all to mock at my queen! At last a halberdier was sent to ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... not be breaking the promise that our visit to the exhibition is not to involve us in a description of all its wonders, if we walk up-stairs and look into the Tunisian Cafe, attracted by the well-known drumming and the moaning dirge which Easterns call music. Tunis is best seen out of Tunis, for the broidered gold and bright-coloured slippers can then be enjoyed without those horrible scenes of filth—dead camels, open sewers, and maimed beggars which encase the shabby mud walls I have seen so near the marble ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... folded over his breast, whilst entwined in his fingers was a bronze cross and rosary, that St. Peter, seeing his devotion, might, without questioning, admit him to a better world. The scene was weird beyond description. Outside, the wind moaned a sad dirge; great bats and black moths, the size of birds, flitted about in the midnight darkness. These, ever and anon, made their way inside and extinguished the candles, which flickered and dripped as they ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... body was borne to the grave under military escort, the soldiers marching to the mournful strains of the funeral dirge and muffled drums; the corpse was lowered to its last resting-place; the burial service read with a trembling voice by the chaplain,—for the missionary had taken his place among the mourners by the side of the widow,—the ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... fragile bones to rest for twenty-four months under three feet of Christian law. Interest tempered the fright which Romulus and Moses felt when from the forward carriage came the sound of rasping oboes, belly-less fiddles, brazen tom-toms, and harsh cymbals, playing a dirge for little Wang Tai; playing less for godly protection of her tiny soul than for its exemption from the ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... ere provision is needed for the like purpose," answered Bucklaw; "but you should not drink up the last flask at a dirge; there ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... beautiful spirit. It will shine through an ugly face, a shriveled form, a bad complexion. Nothing made of clay can hide it. No beauty of person can conceal deformity of spirit. A bad temper will look hateful in the prettiest face. A hollow heart will sound its dirge of woe through the most perfectly organized form. Peering through all outward Beauty is seen the hateful demon of a bad heart. Shining through all bodily deformity are always visible the angel faces of the virtues that cluster in a beautiful spirit. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... storm Moan'd in his lifted locks. Thou, night! the while Dost listen to his sad harp's wild complaint, Mother of shadows! as to thee he pours The broken strain, and plaintively deplores The fall of Druid fame! Hark! murmurs faint Breathe on the wavy air! and now more loud Swells the deep dirge; accustomed to complain Of holy rites unpaid, and of the crowd Whose ceaseless steps the sacred haunts profane. O'er the wild plain the hurrying tempest flies, And, mid the storm unheard, the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... twelve of the bravest, boldest nobles, mourning their king, singing his praises, chanting a dirge, telling of his glorious deeds, while over the broad land the Gothic folk lamented the death of their tender prince, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... dirge from the steeple rang out upon the night air, the king stood at the window of the palace trembling in every nerve. Hardly had the first tones of the alarm-bell fallen upon his ear when the report of a musket was heard, and the first ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... 'Weep, this is the moment,' or 'Rejoice, the hour has come,' and we chant our dirge or kindle our bonfires accordingly. Why, it means a little martyrdom to the occasional sinner who selects his own occasion ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... remorse. Behold the leering belle, caress'd by all, Adorn each private feast and public ball, 140 Where peers attentive listen and adore, And not one matron shuns the titled whore. At Peter's obsequies[5] I sung no dirge; Nor has my satire yet supplied a scourge For the vile tribes of usurers and bites, Who sneak at Jonathan's, and swear at White's. Each low pursuit, and slighter folly, bred Within the selfish heart and hollow head, Thrives uncontroll'd, and blossoms ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... Used. Reasons Therefor. Criticism of Affairs; its Effect. Magazines and their Clientele. Prose Writers ante bellum. Rebel War Rhymes. Origin and Characteristics. The Northern "National Hymn". Famous Poets and Their Work. Dirge Poetry and Prison Songs. Father Ryan and the Catholic Church. "Furled Forever!" Musical Taste. How Songs were Utilized. Military Bands. Painters and Paintings. No Southern ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... poets sing a dirge: The year must perish; all the flowers are dead; The sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail Runs in the stubble, but the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... officers who chance to be in town will go to the President's House with these thoughts in mind. To-morrow we return to the lines; and a great battle chant will be written before we tread these streets again. For us it may be a paean or it may be a dirge, and only the gods know which! We salute our flag to-night—the government that may last as lasted Greece or Rome, or the government which may perish, not two years old! I think that General Lee will be there for ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the white rivulet gleam, And the leaf of December fall sere on the stream; While Irfon his dirge whispers on through the combe, And the purple-topt hills gather round ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... litter way. Arrived within the royal house, they stretch'd The breathless Hector on a sumptuous bed, And singers placed beside him, who should chant The strain funereal; they with many a groan 905 The dirge began, and still, at every close, The female train with many a groan replied. Then, in the midst, Andromache white-arm'd Between her palms the dreadful Hector's head Pressing, her lamentation thus began. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... would part suddenly to make way for a battalion marching to the front, or for a single soldier riding, with muffled drums, to his grave in Hollywood. The quick step or the slow gait of the riderless horse; the wild cheers or the silence on the pavement; the "Bonnie Blue Flag" or the funeral dirge before the coffin; the eager faces of men walking to where death was or the fallen ones of those who came back with the dead; the bold flags taking the wind like sails or the banners furled with crepe as they drooped ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... masters. As was to be expected, my son had for Welsh music a strong natural sympathy. He held that "Men of Harlech" was one of the greatest of all battle hymns, and that "Morfa Rhuddlan," the ancient Cymric dirge, had never been surpassed as a piece of funereal music. Some of the old Welsh hymn tunes he regarded as unique in their wistfulness and devout aspiration; and as for Welsh choral singing, he thought it was matchless for ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Foreman was in a particular jolly mood the next morning, for he had spent the night bidding against Pierrepont Morgan at an auction sale of old masters; but he listened patiently while Sowers called off the figures in a sort of dirge-like singsong, and until he had wailed out his final note of despair, a bass-drum crash, which he thought would bring Foreman to a realizing sense of ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... unsparingly beat on her thin fragile form; Her black eyes flash'd sternly whence reason had fled, And she glanc'd on my sight like some ghost of the dead, As she sang a loud strain to the hoarse dashing surge, That rang on my ears like the plaint of a dirge. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... dying. 'Tis weary, dreary, dreary here, The yellow leaves are falling sere, With mournful rustling, The little bird has hush'd his song, And close the greener boughs among He's coldly nestling. How sad the high wind's sounding dirge, As 'twere old ocean's moaning surge, Around our dwelling; I well may tell the reason why, But oh! the teardrops in mine eye Are swiftly swelling. The world is sad, and I am so; Does Marian hear my plaint? Oh, no; She's far away. Ye envious streams—ye ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... never forget the dismal service which was held, for some reason or other, at ten o'clock at night. Rain was falling, and we marched off into the woods by the light of two smoky lanterns to the place selected as a military cemetery. To add to the weirdness of the scene two pipers played a dirge. In the dim light of the lanterns, with the dropping rain over head and the dripping trees around us, we laid the poor boy to rest. The whole scene made a lasting impression ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the heaven above, whence the hail and the levin are hurled, But the wind that is swept around us by the rush of the rolling world? The wind that shall scatter my ashes, and bear me to silence and sleep With the dirge, and the sounds of lamenting, and voices ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... it was cold, much colder than before, darker, too, no moon now, only the silver stars; it makes one shiver. Nature seemed to lie stark and stiff and dead, and that accursed craake her dirge. All tended to shivering and gloom. Yet a ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... compared with Webster's "Call for the robin redbreast" in The White Devil, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... hath caught Guilt, and to justice brought The son and sire commingled in one bed. O child of Laius' ill-starred race Would I had ne'er beheld thy face; I raise for thee a dirge as o'er the dead. Yet, sooth to say, through thee I drew new breath, And now through thee I feel a second death. ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... Fe Trail The Firemen's Ball The Master of the Dance The Mysterious Cat A Dirge for a Righteous Kitten Yankee Doodle The Black Hawk War of the Artists The Jingo and the Minstrel I ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... proposes to Grub'binol that they should repair to a certain hut and sing "Gillian of Croydon," "Patient Grissel," "Cast away Care," "Over the Hills," and so on; but being told that Blouzelinda was dead, he sings a dirge, and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... few rods, but invisible, being hidden by the plain that occupied the intervening space, at an elevation of some forty feet higher than the point where the river, rushing down its rocky bed, made its presence known by a ceaseless roar, and seemed to chant a dirge over the vanished ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... could have concocted, and none but British soldiers would have sung. It had no known author and no known composer. It sort of "growed," like Topsy. If it had had a title given to it I suppose it would have been called "I want to go home," for that was its dirge-like refrain, always sung very cheerfully indeed, or with mock earnestness. Time and again I heard its chorus taken up with terrific gusto from end to end of this trench, and the whole extraordinary composition spread to other trenches ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... when conspicuous my name By absence shall appear; When I have lost all hopes of fame, Which once I held so dear; When 'plucked' I seek a vain relief In plaintive dirge or sonnet; Thou wilt have caused that bitter grief, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... to their grief, which is expressed by loud wailings, with beating of their breast and tearing their dishevelled hair. While professional wailers are rare, nevertheless friends and relatives congregate and add volume to the dirge of sorrow. The leading women mourners will often express in weird chant and appropriate words their praises of the virtues and the beauties of the departed ones. The men of the household mourn in silence, ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... should like to stick his fingers in his ears, but he dared not,—as if he should like to rush down the stairs, but he could not. For the old man fixed him with his eyes, and, keeping his head turned towards his prisoner, began to march up and down the broken stone floor, and blew so wild a dirge that in a few ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... morn, as the sun rose over the bay, Still floated our flag at the mainmast head Lord, how beautiful was Thy day! Every waft of the air Was a whisper of prayer, Or a dirge for the dead. ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... etc., noted their "fashions commonly used at the Bank, and such like naughty places, where they much haunt"; and in 1547 the Bishop of Winchester made complaint that at a time when he intended to have a dirge and mass for the late King, the actors in Southwark planned to exhibit "a solemn play, to try who shall have the most resort, they in game or I in earnest."[196] The players, therefore, were no strangers to "the Bank." And when later ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... blasphemy, as senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism. In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... chants the suggestive use of place names becomes still more apparent. Dr. Hyde tells us (Hawaiian Annual, 1890, p. 79): "In the Hawaiian chant (mele) and dirge (kanikau) the aim seems to be chiefly to enumerate every place associated with the subject, and to give that place some special epithet, either attached to it by commonplace repetition or especially devised for the occasion as being particularly characteristic." An example of ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... The dirge, as distance blended all the voices, was very plaintive, even musical; nor did the diminution of distance destroy the harmony entirely; some of the chants were really beautiful, but rendered perhaps too harsh for our ears in actual ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... girls struck the palms of their left hands with their fans. The boys were in clean working dress. Some had towels wound round their heads, some wore caps and others hats. The girls were got up in all their best clothes with fine obi and white aprons. The music was dirge-like. It was not at all what Western people understand to be singing. The performers emitted notes in a kind of falsetto, and these five or six notes were repeated over and over and over again. The only word I can think of which approximately describes what I heard, but it ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the mountains were reached, and the travellers did at last lose their resolute cheerfulness, and had just sat down in the shade to have a good cry, when they suddenly heard the sound of singing. Not exactly singing; rather a melancholy droning, or chanting, as of a dirge. Listening intently, they could ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... went so far as to declare it "the happiest part of a negro's life." They aver that the Africans, on their way to slavery, are so merry, that they dance and sing. But upon a careful examination of witnesses, it was found that their singing consisted of dirge-like lamentations for their native land. One of the captains threatened to flog a woman, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful to him. After meals they jumped up in their irons for exercise. This was considered so necessary for their health, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... distant hills, turned toward the young pair, who seemed doomed to so early a death, with a slight indication of pity crossing his composed features, but it would immediately revert again to its former gaze, as if already looking into the womb of futurity. Much of the time he was chanting a kind of low dirge in the Delaware tongue, using the deep and remarkable guttural tones of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... after we three were left alone in the Stygian darkness of the wine cellar, no word was spoken. The rolling of the thunder drum was muffled now, as it were booming out the dirge of the man who had digged a pit and had himself fallen therein; and the lightning flashes coming at longer intervals served but to intensify the gloom they lit ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... topmost surge, She shudders o'er the dark abyss; The foaming waters round her hiss And hoarse waves ring her funeral dirge; The chafing billows round her close; But ere her burning planks are riven, Shoots up one ruddy spout of fire,— Her last farewell to earth and heaven. Down, down to endless night she goes! So may the traitor's hope expire, So perish all ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... purity and peace when that song was nightly sung to her; after so many weary years of sin and suffering, to hear those notes again! It is but a simple thing which has the power so to move her, a mere nothing; half dirge, half hymn, familiar to her long-forgotten childhood, once sung by her mother as a cradle song! With her wretched face buried in her hands, she hears it, and clearly the past rises before her: her childhood in its innocence; her girlhood ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... like a dirge, but still the leader of the hawks of the desert kept it up. He bellowed it out now in a harsh, shrill voice. It rasped uncomfortably, like rusty iron grating ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... indignation against crime; let the Devil color it with personal passion, and you have a mighty race of true and tender-hearted men living for centuries in such bloody feud that every note and word of their national songs is a dirge, and every rock of their hills is a gravestone. Take the love of beauty, and power of imagination, which are the source of every true achievement in art; let the Devil touch them with sensuality, and they are stronger than the sword or the flame to blast the cities where they were ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... no vestiges to be seen of the fearful gulfs over which I had passed so cautiously. My ascent had been to the top of the hogshead, and my descent to the bottom thereof. Holding one another by the hand, and chanting a low dirge, the Mystic Twelve revolved about me. This concluded the ceremony. With a merry shout the boys threw off their masks, and I was declared a regularly installed member of ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... this order occurs in connection with the family of one of our members, but it is of a much commoner and less striking type than either of the above, consisting only of a solemn and impressive strain of dirge-like music, which is heard apparently floating in the air three days before the death takes place. Our member, having himself twice heard this mystic sound, finding its warning in both cases quite accurate, ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... down the silver streams of Eridan,[90] On either side banked with a lily wall, Whiter than both, rides the triumphant swan, And sings his dirge, and prophesies his fall, Diving into his watery funeral! But Eridan to Cedron must submit His flowery shore; nor can he envy it, If, when Apollo sings, his ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... "Alleluia" in The Mount of Olives,—the matchless pomp of the Sinfonia Eroica,—the passionate beauty of the sentiment of Adelaida,—the aerial grace of his quartets and waltzes,—the thrilling and almost awful pathos of the dirge written for six trombones,—but, above all, they will recall to mind the noblest work ever conceived and perfected by composer, one of the greatest achievements of the human mind, the Mass in D. And, bearing these wonders in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... That it may give this sense of something half-forgotten, it must be sung with a certain lack of minute feeling for the meaning of the words, which, however, must always remain words. The songs in "Deirdre," especially the last dirge, which is supposed to be the creation of the moment, must upon the other hand, at any rate when Miss Farr's or Miss Allgood's music is used, be sung or spoken with minute passionate understanding. I have rehearsed the part of the Angel in "The Hour-Glass" ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... that made those sounds more sweet[ag] Is hushed, and all their charms are fled; And now their softest notes repeat A dirge, an anthem o'er the dead! Yes, Thyrza! yes, they breathe of thee, Beloved dust! since dust thou art; And all that once was Harmony Is worse than discord ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... seen with our own eyes the safe return: and yet our mind, self-taught, keeps chanting within itself a dirge of fate. These inner pulses cannot be in vain: heaven send they prove false ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... passed through the massive doors, she smiled, and drew her hand knife-like across her neck, and then there went up a wail from all assembled there, the wail of titled women, of sacred nuns, of magdalens and thieves, a dirge of inconsolable sorrow, of humanity weeping for its best ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... may be compared to that which would be felt, if we should detach the songs of the artificial drama from their original impulse and feeling, (for instance, the willow dirge of Desdemona, and the fantastic moans of Ophelia,) and produce them in a parlor. Not but that these lyrics have a universal fitness, and a value which no time can change or circumstance diminish; but as we are looking at them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... may be said of Milton. His early poems show great variety. There are the dirge notes in Lycidas; the sights, sounds, and odors of the country, in L'Allegro; the delights of "the studious cloister's pale," in Il Penseroso; the impelling presence of his "great Task-Master," ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck |
