"Gaelic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regaining all his strength as if by a miracle. The gaunt look had left his face. Almost it seemed that its contour was already fuller. There is a beautiful old Gaelic legend of a Fairy who wooed a Prince, came again and again to him, and, herself invisible to all but the Prince, hovered in the air, sang loving songs to draw him away from the crowd of his indignant nobles, who heard her voice and summoned ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... content with "Weel on to eighty." None hinted at less than seventy. No one could remember his coming to Muirtown, and none knew whence he came. His birthplace was commonly believed to be the West Highlands, and it was certain that in dealing with a case of aggravated truancy he dropped into Gaelic. Bailie McCallum used to refer in convivial moments to his schooldays under Bulldog, and always left it to be inferred that had it not been for that tender, fostering care, he had not risen to his high estate in Muirtown. ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... him with delight, for his memory was stored with a never-ending stock of stories, many of which were wonderfully like those I have since heard while sitting by the African evening fires. Our grandmother, too, used to sing Gaelic songs, some of which, as she believed, had been composed by captive islanders languishing ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... work. Nothing could be quoted as a more distinctive note of his genius than that blend. It is seen perhaps most clearly in such stories as The Last Supper and The Fisher of Men. In these tales of unsurpassable power and beauty, Fiona Macleod has created the Gaelic Christ. The Christ is the same as He of Galilee and of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and His work the same. But he talks the sweet Celtic language, and not only talks it but thinks in it also. He walks among the rowan trees of the Shadowy Glen, while the quiet light flames ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... beautiful romance of the Shetland Islands, with a handsome, strong willed hero and a lovely girl of Gaelic blood as heroine. A sequel ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... (in the essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad, 1830), he said: "In their spirit and diction they nearly resemble fragments of poetry extant in Gaelic." By this time he was probably reverting to the earlier opinion which had made the ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Mulvaney; I could have listened to him all day. Over there a platoon of Highlanders are practising the taking of German trenches. At the blast of a whistle they clamber out of a length of trench built for the purpose, and, with shrill Gaelic yells, go swarming across a stretch of broken ground, through a tangle of twisted wire, and over the top of the German parapet, whereupon a row of German soldiers, stuffed with straw and automatically controlled, spring up to meet them. If a man fails to bury ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... the Gaelic on pages 77 and 78 were made by the late P. H. Pearse, who was executed in Dublin for his part in the Easter Rebellion. The translations appeared in New Ireland, and I am indebted to the Editor of that review for permission to ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... went on Drysdale. "I thought old Murdock would have wept on his neck. As it was, he scattered snuff enough to fill a pint pot over him out of his mull, and began talking Gaelic. And Blake had the cheek to jabber a lot of gibberish back to him, as if he understood ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the corn-land reaper And plaided mountaineer,— To the cottage and the castle The piper's song is dear. Sweet sounds the Gaelic pibroch O'er mountain, glen, and glade, But the sweetest of all music ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... with a drink; as the Highlander says, Skeoch doch nan skial ['Cut a tale with a drink;' an expression used when a man preaches over his liquor, as bons vivants say in England. S.]; and that 's good Gaelic.—Here is to the Countess Isabelle of Croye, and a better husband to her than Campobasso, who is a base Italian cullion!—And now, Andrew Arnot, what said the muleteer to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... for temporal wants by the directors of the Company. Nearly one third of the emigrants who sailed with the second expedition were Highlanders, who did not understand a word of English; and not one of the four chaplains could speak a word of Gaelic. It was only through interpreters that a pastor could communicate with a large portion of the Christian flock of which he had charge. Even by the help of interpreters he could not impart religious instruction to those heathen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... neither—it would be next thing to running the country. For shame, Muhme—give me the dirk. You cannot tell by the colour the difference betwixt the blood of a black bullock and a white one, and you speak of knowing Saxon from Gaelic blood. All men have their blood from Adam, Muhme. Give me my skenedhu, and let me go on my road. I should have been half way to Stirling brig by this time—Give me my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... and cursed him soundly in both English and Gaelic, without avail, but the child's cry so full of pain and weakness roused him with a start. In a minute Dr. Frederick Barner was himself. He took the child gently from his mother and laid ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... property at Lochshiel, Mr. Hope-Scott personally acquainted himself with his smaller tenantry, and entered into all their history, going about with a keeper known by the name of 'Black John,' who acted as his Gaelic interpreter. His frank and kindly manners quite won their hearts. Sometimes he would ask his guests to accompany him on such visits, and make them observe the peculiarities of the Celtic character. On one of these occasions he and the late Duke of Norfolk went to visit an old peasant who ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... never peace. It is the rule of party war. Who, then, can hope for peace where into the strife is imported a race difference, where the division is not of party but of people? That is in truth the vain hope. And be it borne in mind the race difference is not due to our predominating Gaelic stock, but to the separate countries and to distinct households in the human race. If we were all of English extraction the difference would still exist. There is the historic case of the American States; it is easy to understand. When a man's children ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... by all the nations from the mouth of the Columbia to the falls. It is hard and difficult to pronounce, for strangers; being full of gutturals, like the Gaelic. The combinations thl, or tl, and lt, are as frequent in the Chinook ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... Donald," said he, in the Gaelic; "and I will tell you that the Skye College in the old times never turned out a better pupil. And will you take a glass of whiskey now, or a glass of claret? And it is a great pity your hair is red, or they would call you Donull Dubh, ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Lavender, he could not help confessing to a sense of lightness and vivacity that the young man seemed to bring with him and shed around him. Nor was this matter of the sketches the only thing that had particularly recommended Lavender to the old man. Mackenzie had a most distinct dislike to Gaelic songs. He could not bear the monotonous melancholy of them. When Sheila, sitting by herself, would sing these strange old ballads of an evening, he would suddenly enter the room, probably find her eyes filled with tears, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... ascent is made of Ben Lomond, the greatest elevation in these parts. The boatmen are fine, athletic men; one of those with us this evening, a handsome young man of two or three and twenty, sang to us some Gaelic songs. The first, a very wild and plaintive air, was the expostulation of a girl whose lover has deserted her and married another. It seems he is ashamed, and will not even look at her when they meet upon the road. She implores him, if he has not ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... stop at old McTaggart's. He's the head-keeper and a real friend. McTaggart "has the Gaelic." But he hasn't much else, so perhaps you'd prefer ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... freshness to all the adornable parts of the room. Immediately opposite the lectern, which was illuminated with wax candles, placed in last century candlesticks, and attached to the gallery railings, was a fine collection of Lochaber axes, clustered around a genuine wooden Gaelic shield studded with polished knobs of glittering brass. Long before the hour of eight the company had increased to such an extent that the room was crowded to the doors, but not inconveniently as the ventilation was unexceptionable. With accustomed punctuality, James Stevenson, Esq., acting in the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... was a Scotch literary man, who in 1760 published "Fingal" in six books, which he declared he had translated from a poem by Ossian, son of Fingal, a Gaelic prince of the third century. For a moment the work was accepted as genuine in some quarters, especially by some of the Edinburgh divines. But Dr. Johnson denounced it as an imposture from the first. He pointed ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... is, at present, spoken throughout Great Britain, is neither the ancient primitive speech of the island, nor derived from it; but is altogether of foreign origin. The language of the first inhabitants of our island, beyond doubt, was the Celtic, or Gaelic, common to them with Gaul; from which country, it appears, by many circumstances, that Great Britain was peopled. This Celtic tongue, which is said to be very expressive and copious, and is, probably, one of the most ancient languages in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... belonging to the Celtic group are the Gallic, spoken in ancient Gaul; the Breton, still spoken in the modern French province of Brittany; the Irish, which is still extensively spoken in Ireland among the common people, the Welsh; and the Gaelic of the ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... might like to see a START, as it is called. The head stalker told him, however, that the wind had changed which affects the scent, and that nothing could be done that day. The Duke tried to make us amends by making some of his people sing us Gaelic songs and show us some of the athletic Highland games. The little lodge he also went over with us, and said that the Duchess came there and lived six or seven weeks in the autumn, and that the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch rented it for many years while he was ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... blushing daughter of Torman," a Gaelic bard in the Songs of Selma, one of the most ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... in Scotland and, as has been said, was a philologist of the better class, is scrupulously exact in spelling proper names as a rule. Perhaps Loch Fyne is not exactly "Le Lac Beau" (I have not the Gaelic). But from Pentland to Solway (literally) he makes no blunder, and he actually knows all ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... which they claim descent. "The chief of the family which holds the chief rank in the stock is called 'The Great Man of the Crocodile'. Precisely in the same way the Duchess of Sutherland is styled in Gaelic 'The Great Lady of the Cat,'" though totemism is probably not ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... endowed, was still unsuited to the world in its higher stages of development. In Britain, Gaul, and Spain they were displaced and absorbed by the Germanic races. And now for long centuries no Keltic people of importance has maintained its independence; the Gaelic of the Scotch Highlands and of Ireland, the native dialect of the Welsh and of Brittany, being the scanty remains of that great family of related tongues which once occupied more territory than German, Latin, and Greek combined. ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... the present name of the town have always been a matter of conjecture. There seems reason to believe that it refers to the time when the site, or a portion of it, formed an island, as sea-sand is the subsoil even of the oldest quarters. Another derivation is from Gaelic words meaning "the island beyond the bend." With Dysart, Kinghorn and Kirkcaldy, it unites in returning ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... this kingdom. The Irish came into the new order of things frankly and in good faith; and if wise counsels prevailed then amongst our rulers, oh, what a blessed ending there might have been to the bloody feud of centuries. The Irish submitted to the Gaelic King, to whom had come in the English crown. In their eyes he was of a friendly, nay of a kindred race. He was of a line of Gaelic kings that had often befriended Ireland. Submitting to him was not yielding to the brutal Tudor. Yes, that was the hour, the blessed opportunity ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... spur! the charge resounds! On Gaelic spear the Northman bounds! Through helmet plumes the arrows flit, And plated breasts the pikeheads split. The double-axe fells human oaks, And like the thistles in the field See bristling up (where none must yield!) The points hewn off by ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... sickness; for the exposures of a year had browned his round and ruddy face, if it had not dimmed the brightness of his blue eye; and the heavy waved brown hair and moustache in which he retained so prominent a characteristic of his Gaelic ancestry of a hundred years before, added materially to the appearance of manly maturity. Were it a preux chevalier sitting under this verbal lens for his photograph, there might be difficulty in proceeding farther in this description; for though your knight of old seems to have ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the entire body of legends, has imbued himself with their ultimate spirit and significance, and has bodied it forth in his music with splendid veracity and eloquence. He has attempted no mere musical recounting of those romances of the ancient Gaelic world at which he hints in his brief motto. It would be juster to say, rather, that he has recalled in his music the very life and presence of the Gaelic prime—that he has "unbound the Island harp." ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... hat when visited by King Charles II., and apologizing for his apparent want of respect, by saying, that he should never be able to keep his scholars in subjection, if they thought that there was a greater man in the world than himself. The same feeling seems to have actuated the Gaelic chiefs, who were excessively proud of their rank and prerogatives. When the first Marquess of Huntly, then the chief of the clan Gordon, was presented at the court of James VI., he did not so much as incline his head before his sovereign. ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... around. The old creature was moaning and moping over the fire, and drawing the plaid close round her as if she were cold, although the weather was extremely warm. At first she took no notice whatever of the entrance of her visitors, but kept muttering to herself in the Gaelic tongue. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... had accompanied the bailiff was a Scotchman called Stracan, the head of the Reformed College of Loudun. Hearing this answer, he called on the demon to translate aqua into Gaelic, saying if he gave this proof of having those linguistic attainments which all bad spirits possess, he and those with him would be convinced that the possession was genuine and no deception. Barre, without being in the least taken aback, replied that he would make the demon say it if God ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... in Western Europe; but these have since been driven before superior nations into a few corners, and are now only to be found in the highlands of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and certain parts of France. The Gaelic of Scotland, Erse of Ireland, and the Welsh, are the only living branches of ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... named Calphurnius espoused Conchessa, the niece of St. Martin of Tours. Heaven blessed their union with several children, the youngest of whom was a boy, who received at his baptism the name of Succath, which in the Gaelic tongue signifies "valiant." ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... on the shoulder with a huge hand, and his voice took on the Gaelic accent of his childhood learned from his father, that McCrae who had in his time ruled a thousand miles of wilderness for the ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... light broke across Jocelyn Thew's face as he listened, and the tears stood in his eyes. The man was reciting Gaelic verses, verses familiar to him from childhood. The whole desolate picture seemed to envisage thoughts which he had never been able to drive from his mind, seemed in the person of this old man to breathe ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... history begins Goidels were only to be found in Ireland, though at a later time they colonised a part of what is now known as Scotland, and sent some offshoots into Wales. At present the languages derived from that of the Goidels are the Gaelic of the Highlands, the Manx of the Isle of Man, and the Erse of Ireland. The only language now spoken in the British Isles which is derived from that of the Britons is the Welsh; but the old Cornish ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... in Gaelic,[44] in Welsh,[45] and in Irish,[46] have been published. The works of American authors are included in Allibone's Dictionary, referred to under English literature, but special books have also been prepared, ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... such the practice of the people whom Roger Casement and one or two other enthusiasts for Gaelic culture in Ireland have sought to make the dominant power in that country, because it will ...
— Ireland and Poland - A Comparison • Thomas William Rolleston
... an article for Dana too. Are we going to be read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope you will ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... He looked upon the building of churches at the front as an act of such piety that it would guarantee to him at any time the certain admission into heaven. He attributed his piety to the claim which his clan made to be the descendants of St. Paul. Apparently in Gaelic, Macphail means "the son of Paul." The Colonel was always fond of insisting upon his high lineage. He came to see me once when I was ill at Bruay, and after stating the historical claims of his ancestors, asked me if I had not observed some traits in his character which were like those of St. Paul. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... shouted out, and then fell on my knees on the rock and reached up my hands and prayed to them. They were near enough to hear—I could even see the color of their hair; and there was no doubt but they observed me, for they cried out in the Gaelic tongue and laughed. But the boat never turned aside, and flew on, right ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... hiccoughed the skipper, eyeing the bottle, and added with a brutal laugh that "he could weather the roughest gale that ever wind did blow." A whole Gaelic society, he ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... heard the songs by Liffey's wave That maidens sung. They sang their land, the Saxon's slave, In Saxon tongue. Oh, bring me here that Gaelic dear Which cursed the Saxon foe. When thou didst charm my raptured ear Mo ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... kingdom unexplored. But, when we examine his narrative, we find that he had never ventured beyond the extreme skirts of the Celtic region. He tells us that even from the people who lived close to the passes he could learn little or nothing about the Gaelic population. Few Englishmen, he says, had ever seen Inverary. All beyond Inverary was chaos, [320] In the reign of George the First, a work was published which professed to give a most exact account of Scotland; and in this work, consisting of more than three ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... third officer, grinned a welcome to me from among the disordered raffle of the fo'c's'le head, while that excellent artificer, Maclean, oil-can and spanner in hand, greeted me affectionately in Gaelic from the entrance to the engine-room. The skipper was ashore, so I seated myself on the steps leading to the hurricane deck, and ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... was that of translating into English "the best and most approved poetry of the Ancient and Modern Scoto-Gaelic Bards, with such notes on the usages and superstitions therein alluded to, as will enable the English reader to form a clear and correct idea of the originals." In the course of a rather ornate letter, Borrow offers himself as the translator and compiler ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... composed of elements as motley as ever met under any commander. On the Paris and Rouen Railway eleven languages were spoken— English, Erse, Gaelic, Welsh, French, German, Belgian (Flemish), Dutch, Piedmontese, Spanish, and Polish. A common lingo naturally sprang up like the Pigeon English of China. But in the end it seems many of the navvies learnt to speak French pretty ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Pembrokeshire; the Ban in Co. Wexford, Bana in Co. Down, Banney (i.e. Ban-ea, "ea" also meaning water) in Yorkshire, Bain in Herefordshire; Banavie (avon) is a place on the brightly running river Lochy in Argyleshire; and, as meaning "white," a fair-haired boy or girl is called in Gaelic "Bhana." ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... stood up as straight as she could, and glanced from the traveller to the two men who had put her out of her home. Then, in the strongest terms her native Gaelic would afford, she addressed these two men. She assured them that, sooner than enter that contemptible little hut again, she would sleep out on the bare moor. She told them to go to their master and tell him that she did not want his house, and that ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... Folk.—In Gaelic they are usually called "The Peace People" (sithchean). Other names are "Wee Folk" (daoine beaga); "Light Folk" (slaugh eutrom), etc. As in the Lowlands, they are also referred to as "guid ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... at his own will. It was the best of all possible educations, this atmosphere of books. And the wealth of old engravings and prints fascinated the child. He would sit among these before a glowing fire, while from the adjoining room floated strains "of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences." It is recorded as his mother's chief happiness,—"her hour of darkness and solitude and music." Of such fabric are poetic impressions woven. The atmosphere was what Emerson called the "immortal ichor." The boy was companioned ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... another of these tiny hovels, much farther up the road. A faint light struggled through the small thick panes of glass of a window little more than a half-yard square. The door opened as they drew up, and a woman came out, talking very fast and shrilly in the native Gaelic, which the children had often heard spoken, but understood scarcely at all. Elsie could make out that she was scolding very much, but that was all. As she came near her eyes fell upon the two children. ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... tourists, English, French, and American, are for ever passing to view Glencoe, and to write their names in the hotel book after luncheon, then flying to other scenes. There has even been a strike of long duration at the Ballachulish Quarries, and Labour leaders have perorated to the Celts; but Gaelic is still spoken, second sight is nearly as common as short sight, you may really hear the fairy music if you bend your ear, on a still day, to the grass of the fairy knowe. Only two generations back a ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... a cat, was playing at being on a raft. The boy's name was Gervase Taunton, but he was known to a large circle of acquaintances as "the Mhor," which, as Jean would have explained to you, is Gaelic for "the great one." Thus had greatness been thrust upon him. He was seven, and he had lived at The Rigs since he was two. He was a handsome child with an almost uncanny charm of manner, and a gift of make-believe that made his days one ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... volume of verse a Celtic Psaltery because it mainly consists of close and free translations from Irish, Scotch Gaelic, and Welsh Poetry of a religious or serious character. The first half of the book is concerned with Irish poems. The first group of these starts with the dawning of Christianity out of Pagan darkness, and the spiritualising ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... the speed grew more headlong moment by moment. They tried to pull up, but in vain, for the horses seemed to have gone mad. The guide had thrown the reins on to the neck of the old white horse, and was waving his arms and singing a wild Gaelic song. Suddenly they saw the thin gleam of a river, at an immense distance below, and knew that they were upon the brink of the abyss that is now called Lug-na-Gael, or in English the Stranger's Leap. The six horses sprang forward, and five screams went up into the air, ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... (1283). Thus Wales was joined to England; and the king gave to his son the title of "Prince of Wales," which the eldest son of the sovereign of England has since worn. Edward was for many years at war with Scotland, which now included the Gaelic-speaking people of the Highlands, and the English-speaking people of the Lowlands. The king of England had some claim to be their suzerain, a claim which the Scots were slow to acknowledge. The old line of Scottish princes of the Celtic race died out. Alexander ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... know, a Highland gentleman of good family, who devoted much of his time to collecting and studying the oral traditions of his own district and of many lands. His equipment as a student of West Highland folklore was unique. He had the necessary knowledge of Gaelic, the hereditary connection with the district which made him at home with the poorest peasant, and the sympathetic nature which proved a master-key in opening the storehouse of inherited belief. It is not likely that another Campbell of Islay will arise, and, ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... tongues have furnished their quota. Of these the Celtic is perhaps the oldest. The Britons at Caesar's invasion, were a part of the Celtic family. The Celtic idiom is still spoken in two dialects, the Welsh in Wales, and the Gaelic in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. The Celtic words in English, are comparatively few; cart, dock, wire, rail, rug, cradle, babe, grown, griddle, lad, lass, are some ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... interesting. Perhaps, as some would tell us, seventeen years ago was a benighted time; at any rate we must admit it was rather dark from an Irish literary, or even "Irish Ireland," point of view. It was before the Gaelic movement, and before we had such things as "intellectuals" and the "economic man," or even the Irish Literary Theatre. Leamy's gentle and loyal soul could have taken no influence from the asperity of some of the intervening ferment, ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... To do his ghostly battling, With curdling groan and dismal moan, And lots of chains a-rattling! But no—the chiel's stout Gaelic stuff Withstood all ghostly harrying; His fingers closed upon the snuff Which upwards he ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... jargon half Gaelic, Exclaim'd, "Hoot awa, mon, you're a' gane astray"— And declared that "whoe'er might prefer the METALLIC, They'd shoe their ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... has seemed to us proved, that the names, Volces, Volsks, Bolgs, Belgs, Belgians, Welsh, Welchs, Waels, Wuelchs or Walchs, Walls, Walloons, Valais, Valois, Vlaks, Wallachians, Galatians, Galtachs, Galls, Gaels or Caels, Gaelic, Galot, Gallegos, Gaul, and even Ola, Olatz, and Vallus, were but one and the same word under ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... words like one unused to speak much. They were in the Gaelic language, which was often spoken by Simon and his family. Madge immediately brought her some food; she was evidently famished. It was impossible to say how long she might have ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... interest which invests this earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, viz., that in fact this translation was the earliest publication to the human race of a revelation which had previously been locked up in a language destined, as surely as the Welsh language or the Gaelic, to eternal obscurity amongst men, I go on to mention that the learned Jews selected for this weighty labor happened to be in number seventy-two; but, as the Jews systematically reject fractions in such cases (whence it is that always, in ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... touching thing I ever heard." The melody was Gaelic, slow and plaintive, and though Maggie gave the English words with her own patois, the beauty and simplicity of the song was by no means injured. "Put by the books, David," said Allan. "I have no heart now for dry-as-dust lessons. Let us speak of Maggie. How is she going to live ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... Douglas, who first encouraged Macpherson to undertake his translations. While taking the waters at Moffat in the fall of 1759, he was pleased to meet a young Highland tutor, who was not only familiar with ancient Gaelic poetry but who had in his possession several such poems. Home, like nearly all of the Edinburgh literati, knew no Gaelic and asked Macpherson to translate one of them. The younger man at first protested that a translation "would give a very imperfect idea of the original," but Home "with some difficulty" ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... example—on the faith of a friend of his who had seen them—that Japanese were fighting with the English in France, dressed as Highlanders—his friend had heard these Asiatic Scotsmen talking Japanese, he declared. I thought of the Gaelic-speaking battalions of the Camerons and could hardly ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... of his own heart; there was no fault to find with him or in him; he was as brave as he was kind, as sincere as he was clever, as strong as he was gentle; he could play on the bagpipes, and very nearly talk Gaelic, but his mother was a Campbell, and for that there was no help. To be on loving terms with one in whose veins ran a single drop of the black pollution was a thing no MacDhonuill must dream of. He had lived a man of honour, and he would die a man of honour, hating the Campbells to their last generation. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... own. They used their claymores, their dirks, their scythes fastened upon poles, against the horses, then, springing up, put long arms about the horsemen and, regardless of sword or pistol, dragged them down. They shouted their Gaelic slogans; their costume, themselves, seemed out of a fiercer, earlier world. A strangeness overclouded the senses; mist wreaths were everywhere, and an uncertainty as to the numbers of demons.... The cavalry ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this genius has delighted in mischievous extravagance, like that of the Gaelic poet's curse upon his children, 'There are three things that I hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms that are waiting for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care neither for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... learned to love the Highland character and ways of life. He was a good shot, rode and swam well, and taught his boys athletic exercises, boating, salmon fishing, and such like. He learned to dance a Highland reel, and began the study of Gaelic; but that speech proved too stubborn, craggy, and impregnable even for Jenkin. Once he took his family to Alt Aussee, in the Stiermark, Styria, where he hunted chamois, won a prize for shooting at the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... the holy renowned bishop, head of justice and faith in the Gaelic island came into Ireland, i.e. Patrick sent by Celestinus, the Pope. Aongus Mac Nathfrich went to meet him soon as he heard the account of his coming. He conducted him (Patrick) with reverence and great honour to his own ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... busy with a lamb that had lost its way and hurt itself. Carmichael marked with a growing tenderness at his heart how gently the old man washed and bound up the wounded leg, all the time crooning to the frightened creature in the sweet Gaelic speech, and also how he must needs give the lamb a drink of warm milk before he set ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... spending money. He said he tried to get into public notice one time by planting a little public square on the east side with garlic for free use of the poor; but Carnegie heard of it, and covered it over at once with a library in the Gaelic language. Three times he had jumped in the way of automobiles; but the only result was five broken ribs and a notice in the papers that an unknown man, five feet ten, with four amalgam-filled ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... the shore, among rocks and sand, and was covered by the sea at every tide. "The people lay scattered in inaccessible straths and spots among the mountains, where they lived in family with their pigs and kyloes (cattle), in turf cabins of the most miserable description; they spoke only Gaelic, and spent the whole of their time in indolence and sloth. Thus they had gone on from father to son, with little change, except what the introduction of illicit distillation had wrought, and making little or no export from the country ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... thank ye, daddy, and they were richt weel made," replied the lad, whose mode of speech was entirely different from his grandfather's: the latter had learned English as a foreign language, but could not speak Scotch, his mother tongue being Gaelic. ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... to appear en Francaise, my true character," smiled Berthe. "I never could sacrifice my Gaelic taste to the hideous color mixtures and utilitarian ugliness of the English machine-made toilette. An Englishwoman can only be trusted with a blue serge, a plain gray traveling dress, or in the easy safety of black or white. They are not the 'glass of fashion and the mold ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... "Oct. 7, Evening.—In the Gaelic Chapel, on 'I know that my Redeemer liveth,' with more seeming power on the people than for a while. I never remember of compelling souls to come in to Christ so much as in ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... who—and that the combat took place in this square. Now, my dear fellow, here is the prison, which ought to give you some idea of human vicissitudes. Gil Blas didn't change his condition more often than this monument its purposes. Before Caesar it was a Gaelic temple; Caesar converted it into a Roman fortress; an unknown architect transformed it into a military work during the Middle Ages; the Knights of Baye, following Caesar's example, re-made it into a fortress; the princes of Savoy used it for a residence; the aunt of Charles ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... to form another acquaintance that for some time afforded us some amusement, en passant. We discovered that a very ugly old widow, who resided in that quarter, had two very pretty young daughters, to whom we discoursed in Gaelic; they answered in Iroquois; and in a short time the best understanding imaginable was established between us, (Mac and myself, be it always understood.) No harm came of it, though; I vow there did not; the priests, it seems, thought otherwise. Our acquaintance ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... Donal learned also not a little of the capabilities of his own language; for, Celt as he was by birth and country and mental character, he could not speak the Gaelic: that language, soft as the speech of streams from rugged mountains, and wild as that of the wind in the tops of fir-trees, the language at once of bards and fighting men, had so far ebbed from the region, lingering ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... lawyers!" he cried fiercely. "I will be begging your pardon, Mr. Coulson," he added apologetically. "But it will be a great peety that a fine man like yourself would be hafing anything to do with the tribe. But if they had jist been hafing the Gaelic, I would haf been giving it to them. Och, but it will be a peety about the English. It would be ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... pictures of people and things, but it is not full of beauty and of tender imagination like many of the Gaelic stories. Among the most beautiful and best known of these are perhaps the Three Sorrows of Story-Telling. These three stories are called: The Tragedy of the Children of Lir; The Tragedy of the Children of Tuireann; and Deirdre and the Sons of ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... will do to you whatever, if you cannot keep off that crapeau yonder a little better," said Big Mack, reaching for a Frenchman who kept dodging in upon him with annoying persistence. Then Mack began to swear Gaelic oaths. ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... obscure origin of which several corruptions are found in early Scottish. It is rather a favourite with writers of "sword and feather" novels. Other sham antiques are slug-horn, Chatterton's absurd perversion of the Gaelic slogan, war-cry, copied ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... picked up great numbers of tales, which they repeated; "and as the country people made the telling of these tales, and listening to hear them, their winter night's amusement, scarcely any part of them would be lost." In these tales Gaelic words were often used which had dropped out of ordinary parlance, giving proof of careful adherence to the ancient forms; and the writer records that the previous year he had heard a story told identical with one he had heard forty years before from a different man ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... its soil, subject to the Danes 600 years and more before the Danes themselves are supposed to have discovered it. In the face of such a revelation as this, nowhere else to be found but in Ossian, what does it signify that the Gaelic text of Inisthona has perished? The fact that it survives in English is only a greater miracle, for which we are indebted solely to the patience and fidelity of a man who has been called ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... By the time he had done shouting the coronach or cry of help, the Highlanders speaking Erse or Gaelic ...
— English Satires • Various
... of soul and mentality. Heredity seemed to have done its best for her. The Gaelic fire and the brilliance and irresponsibility of her misguided father seemed to have been balanced and tempered by the gentle woman soul of her mother. And through the eyes of both she gazed out upon the world, inspired and supported ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots. Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called catch, written with an apostrophe, and often or always the gravestone of a perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to this day. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Iberians; their weapons, their war-chariots, their mode of life and their treatment of women, are all so closely similar to that of the Greeks of Homer that a theory has been advanced and ably defended, that the Homeric Greeks were really invading Celts—Gaelic or Gaulish tribes from the north of Europe. If it indeed be so, we owe to the Celts a debt of imperishable culture and civilisation. To them belongs more especially, in our national amalgam, the passion for the past, the ardent patriotism, the longing for ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... any attempt have succeeded. There are specimens which exist, independent of those collected by Macpherson, which present a peculiarity of form, and a Homeric consistency of imagery, distinct from every other species of Gaelic poetry. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... na Dearshul agha"—"The tenderness of heartsweet Deirdre"—so runs a line in an old, old Gaelic verse, and it is always of her tenderness as well as her beauty ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English, offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb back into its Gaelic shell. ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... so long ago, when Dan and I kneeled on the stone-flagged floor beside one another and listened to my uncle pray and pray and pray in Gaelic, I whispered— ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... that it was not the primitive and original tongue of any of the British Islands, nor yet of any portion of them. Indeed, of the whole of Great Britain it is not the language at the present moment. Welsh is spoken in Wales, Manks in the Isle of Man, and Scotch Gaelic in the Highlands of Scotland; besides which there is the Irish Gaelic ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... disparages Tennyson and raises Browning to the seventh heaven calls Locksley Hall old-fashioned and sentimental, but to me it is the greatest poem of its age. Next to this I would place In Memoriam, which has never received its just recognition. Readers of Taine will recall his flippant Gaelic comment on Tennyson's conventional but cold words of lament. Nothing, it seems to me, is further from the truth. The many beautiful lines in the poem depict the changing moods of the man who mourned for his dead and finally found comfort ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... tear was shed by the females of the family, as Mrs Murray, the baby and Polly, with the gentlemen of the party, embarked on board the Stella, which was to convey them to Oban. The men waved their bonnets, and uttered a prayer in Gaelic that the laird and his good wife and the "bairn" might be brought back ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... their sound historical sense, and their trained memories, that we owe much information regarding the British Isles themselves from the ninth to the thirteenth century. The contact of the Scandinavian peoples with the English race on the one hand, and the Gaelic on the other, has been an important factor in the subsequent history of Britain; and this is naturally a subject on which the Icelandic evidence is of the highest value." ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... canopied roof with its in- terstices filled up with its yellow lutings; the same precision of outline in the prismatic angles, sharp as though chiseled by a sculptor's hand; the same sonorous vibration of the air across the basaltic rocks, of which the Gaelic poets have feigned that the harps of the Fingal minstrelsy were made. But whereas at Staffa the floor of the cave is always covered with a sheet of water, here the grotto was beyond the reach of all but the highest ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... street to get a look at the place, but a genuine Scotch mist covering me with water soon compelled me to return. I heard the people, a well-limbed brawny race of men, with red hair and beards, talking to each other in Gaelic, and saw through the fogs only a glimpse of the sides of the mountains and crags ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... are, however, so far determined by the fragments of Gaelic originals, since published by Scottish antiquaries, that the amplifications of Macpherson can ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Remember we have to do with a Scotchman, and a Scotchman never realises anything 'instantly.' The Gaelic mind works slowly, though it works exceeding sure. He will be exceeding sure, when he has contemplated you for a while, that I am a 'verra poor judge o' women,' and that Nurse Gray is a far finer woman than I described. But he will have already created for ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... William Butler Yeats published his Wanderings of Oisin; in the same year Douglas Hyde, the scholar and folk-lorist, brought out his Book of Gaelic Stories. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... of vain repining for the past. He had to be up and doing, for a man's-sized task now confronted him. He had approximately seven months in which to rehabilitate an estate which his forebears had been three generations in dissipating, and the Gaelic and Celtic blood in him challenged defeat even in the very moment when, for all he knew to the contrary, his worldly assets consisted of approximately sixty dollars, the bonus given him by the government ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... In the days of Malcolm the Second, a Scottish man having killed with his own hand Enrique, a Danish general, presented the head of the enemy to his Sovereign, and, holding in his hand the bloody dagger with which the deed had been performed, exclaimed, in Gaelic, "Eris Skyne," alluding to the head and the dagger; upon which the surname of Erskine was imposed on him. The armorial bearing of a hand holding a dagger, was added as a further distinction, together with the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... he, "and they talk Gaelic and French also; the first two they learned from their father, and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... potatoes were looking fine, however, the elder made no response—unless a gout of tobacco smoke could be so counted. With eyes screwed up and mouth drawn down, he gazed off into space—a Highland sphinx, a Gaelic Rhadamanthus. ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... were the priests or ministers of religion among the ancient Celtic nations in Gaul, Britain, and Germany. Our information respecting them is borrowed from notices in the Greek and Roman writers, compared with the remains of Welsh and Gaelic ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... fellow Gibbie Mackerrach, one of the band of gipsies who are staying here just now,' he said. 'Go away, Gibbie,' he added in Gaelic, shaking his head, since it was unlikely that the gipsy would be able to hear distinctly where ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... Mr Brand! Macnab didna like what ye said. He had a laddie killed in Gallypoly, and he's no lookin' for peace this side the grave. He's my best friend in Glasgow. He's an elder in the Gaelic kirk in the Cowcaddens, and I'm what ye call a free-thinker, but we're wonderful agreed on the fundamentals. Ye spoke your bit verra well, I must admit. Gresson will hear tell of ye as ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... various denominations, but was particularly interested in my own, the Protestant Episcopal. The Rt. Rev. H. C. Potter, Bishop of New York, and his secretary, Rev. Percy S. Grant, were passengers on board our ship, the Gaelic. The special purpose of the Bishop's visit to Honolulu was to effect the transfer of the Episcopal churches of the Sandwich Islands to the jurisdiction of our House of Bishops. He expressed himself as delighted with his cordial reception and with the ready, Christian-like manner with which the ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... native school, though by no means excluded, does not make so good a show as its energy and talents would seem to warrant. Our native composers are especially noticeable for their wide range of themes, for the Celtic and Gaelic glamour which they infuse into their treatment of them, and for their realistic titles. We have drawn up a list of instrumental works which illustrate these characteristics, but which are unfortunately conspicuous by their absence from Sir HENRY WOOD'S scheme. As, however, it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... powerfully the glories of the Mississippi; ay, and she would find her name known and reverenced in every hamlet, and see copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the shepherd's shieling, beside Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the Life of Sir William Wallace, Rob Roy, and the Gaelic Bible. I saw copies of it carried by travellers last autumn among the gloomy grandeurs of Glencoe, and, as Coleridge once said when he saw Thomson's Seasons lying in a Welsh wayside inn, 'That is true fame,' I thought this was fame ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... people of an entirely different appearance. 'Both the men and women have, in general, lighter hair, taller figures, and far handsomer features. I visited several of their cabins, and found myself surrounded by physiognomies so Norwegian, that I could have fancied myself in Scandinavia itself, if the Gaelic language now spoken by the people, and their wretched dwellings, had not reminded me that I was in one of those poor districts in the north-west of Europe where the Gaels or Celts are still allowed a scanty existence. The houses, as in Shetland, and partly in Orkney, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... from the Gaelic, and are charming examples of the naive beauty of the old Irish, and of Dr. Hyde's accurate and sympathetic modern rendering. From "Beside ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... Chapter VII) the idea of a General Convention took firm root and led to remarkable developments. For the present, the chief work of these clubs was the circulation of Paine's volumes (even in Welsh, Gaelic, and Erse) at the price of sixpence or even less. They also distributed "The Catechism of the French Constitution" (of 1791), drawn up by Christie, a Scot domiciled at Paris, which set forth the beauties of that child of many hopes. Less objectionable was a pamphlet—"The ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... to which Edward sat down, told of the Chief's immense hospitality. After the meal, healths were drunk, and the bard of the clan recited a wild and thrilling poem in Gaelic—of which, of course, Edward could not understand so much as one word, though it excited the clansmen so that they sprang up in ecstasy, many of them waving their arms about in sympathy with the warlike verses. ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... the weather, sat down under the shade of a birch tree on the solitary road of Lowran, that winds along the margin of Loch Ken, in Galloway. Here he was found dead; and this incident forms the subject of these verses.—Note by the Author. "The Highlander" is set to a Gaelic air in the fifth volume of R. A. Smith's ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... deck then, and with the wisdom of the Celt she understood. She put her lean hand upon the great head of the Russian and blessed him in Gaelic. Ivan bowed before her, then as she offered him a rosy apple he led her toward Anna, a great Viking leading a withered old woman who walked with the grace of ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... sculptured cross, the holy well, and the commemorative name of almost every townland and parish in the whole island.' We get, in short, 'the most detailed information upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic life, a vast quantity of valuable details of life ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... whence Hindustanee. 2. Zend, whence Persian. 3. Greek, whence Romaic. 4. Latin, whence Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Wallachian (Romance). 5. Keltic, whence Welsh, Irish, Gaelic. 6. Gothic, whence Teutonic, English, Scandinavian. 7. Slavonic, whence ...
— 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.
... by the Highland Society of Scotland, with English-Gaelic and Latin-Gaelic Vocabularies, 2 vols. 4to. (pub. at 7l. 7s.). ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... have, from an early date, been, to some extent, intermingled, and this mixture of blood renders necessary some account of the racial relationship. It has been a favourite theme of the English historians of the nineteenth century that the portions of Scotland where the Gaelic tongue has ceased to be spoken are not really Scottish, but English. "The Scots who resisted Edward", wrote Mr. Freeman, "were the English of Lothian. The true Scots, out of hatred to the 'Saxons' nearest to them, leagued with the 'Saxons' farther off."[2] Mr. Green, writing ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... probably not correctly transcribed. In the Scoti Chronicon they are "Clanquhele" and "Clankay. Hector Boece writes Clanchattan" and "Clankay," in which he is followed by Leslie while Buchanan disdains to disfigure his page with their Gaelic designations at all, and merely describes them as two powerful races in the wild and lawless region beyond the Grampians. Out of this jumble what Sassenach can pretend dare lucem? The name Clanwheill appears so late as 1594, in an Act of James VI. Is it not possible that it ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... remarkable. Dr. Johnson was still alive when Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died eight years before. But a new spirit was abroad in the younger generation. Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," a collection of folk-ballads and rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had long refused to consider as poetry, was published ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Man Part of the Norwegian Kingdom of the Hebrides until the 13th century when it was ceded to Scotland, the isle came under the British crown in 1765. Current concerns include reviving the almost extinct Manx Gaelic language. Isle of Man is a British crown dependency but is not part of the UK. However, the UK Government remains constitutionally responsible for its ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... dead, and without a thought of his relations, he read the legends of Meath on his way out; he often sat considering his adventures, the circus, the mining camp, and his sympathy with the Cubans in their revolt against Spain; these convinced him of his Gaelic inheritance and that something might be done with Ireland. England's power was great, but Spain's power had been great too, and when Spain thought herself most powerful the worm had begun. Everything has its day, and as England decayed, Ireland would revive. A good time ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... of 1814. Like generals on field of war they laid out their campaign. Duncan Cameron, a United Empire Loyalist officer of the 1812 War, is to don his red regimentals and proceed to Red River, where his knowledge of the Gaelic tongue may be trusted to win over Selkirk settlers. "Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony will satisfy some," wrote one of the fiery Nor'westers to a brother officer. Such was the mood of the Nor'westers when they came back from their annual meeting on ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social world" of those days who enjoyed nothing in literature except pseudo-classic attitudes and gestures; just as it is only the preposterous "social world" with us who enjoy nothing but Gaelic mythology ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... was crowded by Gaelic Leaguers and the proceedings were marked by some disorderly scenes, until the magistrates ordered their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... to his feelings in Gaelic when labouring under strong excitement. On this occasion his utterances were terrible in tone ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... Peyton loose among his folios, and invite him to afflict that innocent orphaned brute with some dreadful seven-syllabled abomination, which he will convince you is Arabic, or Sanscrit, classic or mediaeval, Gaelic, Finnish or Norse, but which I warn you will serve your jaws (more elegant form—'maxillary bones') very much as an attack of mumps would, and will torture the victim into hydrophobia. Be pitiful, and say Teazer, Tiger, Towser, but don't throw the sublime nomenclature of the classics literally ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... room after his fragile wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars, and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors, listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... a grey-headed man, slack in the twist but limber in the joints—distinguished by a constant lowering of the eye and a spasmodic twitching of the corners of the mouth. He was active and nimble, and in moments of excitement much given to spitting Gaelic oaths like a wild-cat. But, spite his half-century of life, he was still the best and the most daring man of a company who had taken daring as ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... more complicated example of the folk-tale as illustrative of the connection between history and tradition. Mr. J. F. Campbell printed a tale in the second volume of the Transactions of the Ethnological Society (p. 336), which had been sent to him in Gaelic by John Davan, in December, 1862—that is, after the publication of the fourth volume of his Highland Tales. The tale is only in outline, but in quite sufficient fulness for my present purpose, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... familiar ground to the Phoenician colonists of ages ago. I am sure you know that! The Gaelic tongue is the genuine dialect of the ancient Phoenician Celtic, and when I speak the original language to a Highlander who only knows his native Gaelic he understands ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... mention that the Finnish language is very remarkable. Like Gaelic, it is musical, soft and dulcet, expressive and poetical, comes from a very old root, and is, in fact, one of the most interesting languages we possess. But some of the Finnish words are extremely long, in ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... in Europe, such as the Norse tale of Big Peter and Little Peter, the Danish tale of Great Claus and Little Claus; the German tale (Grimm) of the Little Farmer; the Irish tale of Little Fairly (Samuel Lover's collection of Irish Fairy Legends and Stories); four Gaelic versions in Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands; a Kaba'il version in Riviere's French collection (Contes populaires Kabylies); Uncle Capriano in Crane's recently published Italian Popular Tales; and a Latin mediaeval version (written probably in the I **1th century) in which the hero ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... inscription over one of the brazen portals of Fakreddin's valley, reminding us of what Ossian said to Oscar, when he resigned to him the command of the morrow's battle, "Be thine the secret hill to-night," referring to the Gaelic custom of the commander of an army retiring to a secret hill the night before a battle to hold communion with the ghosts of departed heroes. But, as it has been often remarked of secrets—both political and social—they ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... picked up Billiken at once and at once she had ceased to roar and soothed to a whimpering cry. "Hush, now acushla," he said, "hush now,—let you be still, solis na suile!" The baby stopped altogether, her ear intrigued by the purling Gaelic. "If you'll be slipping out now, the way she won't be noticing, I'll have her fine and fast asleep in two flips of ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... English, Welsh (about 26% of the population of Wales), Scottish form of Gaelic (about ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... said, in a long walk by a young man with his advantages. And if you had not had your knife in him last night I do not think she would have accompanied us this morning to attend the ministrations of Father McColl. He preached in Gaelic.' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... fringe of the Gaelic land where he walked as a boy, the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to humble itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of his little village began to climb quite suddenly and seemed resolved to go to heaven. The sky seemed to fall down ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... viii., pp. 5. 111.)—A slight knowledge of Gaelic enables me to supply the meaning of some of the words that have puzzled your Irish correspondents. Molchan (Gaelic, Mulachan) ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... the Scotch," he said. Francoise could not imagine what it was to Gaelic. People had not Gaelic-ed on the Chaudiere, where she was brought up until the children were obliged to scatter from the narrow farm. But the priest had never warned her against it, and since M'sieu' Brownee's mother was addicted to the practice, it must be ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... slippery, of which he gave us proof by chattering and singing in a most uncouth way. Of all the horrible noises I ever heard, those which a half-drunken Tartar makes are the most discordant. The deep nasal and guttural noises he emits would beat Welsh and Gaelic by a ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... heroic, the ill-fated, James Dawson, and a regiment three hundred strong. Lord James Drummond had landed at Montrose with men, money, and supplies. The Young Chevalier's troops were eager to advance; they were flushed with victories, their hearts were high; they believed, in the wild Gaelic way, in the sanctity of their cause; they believed that the Lord of Hosts was on their side, and such a belief strengthened ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... preserved silence, interrupted only by the monotonous and murmured chant of a Gaelic song, sung in a kind of low recitative by the steersman, and by the dash of the oars, which the notes seemed to regulate, as they dipped to them in cadence. The light, which they now approached more nearly, assumed a broader, redder, and more irregular splendour. It appeared plainly to be a large ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott |
