"Harlequin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other, had caused to break out into explosive action what was nothing more than an inner prompting. We are strangely mistaken as to the part played by poetic imagination, if we think it pieces together its heroes out of fragments filched from right and left, as though it were patching together a harlequin's motley. Nothing living would result from that. Life cannot be recomposed; it can only be looked at and reproduced. Poetic imagination is but a fuller view of reality. If the characters created by a poet give us the impression of life, it is only because they are ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... "Harlequin Hamlet, or Daddy's Ghost and Nunky's Pison," which is all very well — but, gentlemen, if you don't respect Shakspeare, to whom will you be civil? The palace and ramparts of Elsinore by moon and snowlight is one of Loutherbourg's finest efforts. The banqueting hall of the palace ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority. Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions. He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... Nuche, together with the jocantries of the inimitable Blunt, Nick Fetherfool, and the antique Petronella Elenora, are all alive with the genius of Astrea, although it may be possibly objected that some of the episodes with the two Monsters and the pranks of Harlequin are apt to trench a little too nearly on ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... rest, ere the lips could close The sound of a listener's laughter rose. It was not the scream of a merry boy When harlequin waves his wand of joy; Nor the shout from a serious curate, won By a bending bishop's annual pun; Nor the roar of a Yorkshire clown;—oh, no! It was a gentle laugh, and low; Half uttered, perhaps, perhaps, and stifled half, A good old-gentlemanly laugh; Such as my uncle ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the chalk slipped from his fingers, and fell on the coffee-cup, which broke. The china, said Leighton, was expensive. He believed it was impossible to match it now. Each cup was different. It was a harlequin set. The saucer, without the cup, was therefore useless. Would Mr. Elliot please explain to Mrs. ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful personations; and whatever the subject might be, however sublime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance of Adam, the offended Maker, as in ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the times. This invention opened a new field for genius; and when we can for a moment forget their luckless choice of their bony and bloodless hero, who to amuse us by a variety of action becomes a sort of horrid Harlequin in these pantomimical scenes, we may be delighted by the numerous human characters, which are so vividly presented to us. The origin of this extraordinary invention is supposed to be a favourite pageant, or religious mummery, invented by the clergy, who in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... ceilings of the boxes at the theatre, and particularly the bodies of carriages. It was not without mortification that the King observed the Queen's adoption of this style of dress: she was never so lovely in his eyes as when unadorned by art. One day Carlin, performing at Court as harlequin, stuck in his hat, instead of the rabbit's tail, its prescribed ornament, a peacock's feather of excessive length. This new appendage, which repeatedly got entangled among the scenery, gave him an opportunity for a great deal of buffoonery. There was some inclination ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel, and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropics and turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when He falls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to His feet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are but the stepping-stones and rough scaffolding from which He builds His Parthenons, and from the densest basalt gush His rills, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... come in, answered the other.—Here we are!" and entering the room he folded his arms and began twirling his head round and round with immense rapidity, like Harlequin in the Pantomime when he first issues from his cocoon or envelope. Miss Fotheringay laughed with all her heart: a wink of Foker's would set her off laughing, when the bitterest joke Bows ever made could not get a smile from her, or the ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... degrees of astonishment. Fitzgerald moved in a kind of waking sleep. Napoleon IV! That there was a bar sinister did not matter. The dazzle radiated from a single point: a dream of empire! M. Ferraud had not jested; Breitmann was mad, obsessed, a monomaniac. It was grotesque; it troubled the senses as a Harlequin's dance troubles the eyes. A great-grandson of Napoleon, and plotting to enter France! And, good Lord! with what? Two million francs and half a dozen spendthrifts. Never had there been a wilder, more hopeless dreamer than this! ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... spaces on the slope, beyond the farthest shadow-reach of the manzanita, poised the mariposa lilies, like so many flights of jewelled moths suddenly arrested and on the verge of trembling into flight again. Here and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red, breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells. Creamy white were these bells, shaped like lilies-of-the-valley, ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... passage from your mouth to your belly," added an elastic Harlequin, reaching an arm across the women's shoulders. "Come, Cantapresto, we'll help you line it with good wine, to the health of his most superlatively serene Highness, the heir-presumptive of Pianura; and where is that fabulous personage, by ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the most primitive as well as most comprehensive, of all. It is the earliest, as it is the most intuitive—the smiles and frowns of the mother being the first signs understood by the infant. Indeed, if we consider for a moment that all existence is but a Pantomime, of which Time is the harlequin, changing to-day into yesterday, summer into winter, youth into old age, and life into death, and we but the clowns who bear the kicks and buffets of the scene, we cannot fail to desire the general cultivation of an art which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... appearance, are calculated to rend the heart with the profoundest emotions of trouble, do not fetter that exalted principle imbued in her very nature. It is true, her tender and feeling heart may often be moved (as she is thus constituted), but she is not conquered, she has not given up to the harlequin of disappointments, her energies have not become clouded in the last movement of misfortune, but she is continually invigorated by the archetype of her affections. She may bury her face in her hands, and let the tear of anguish roll, she may promenade the ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... distinguished practitioner was Cerberus;{2} bear-garden meetings of mismanaged companies, in which directors and shareholders abuse each other in choice terms, not all to be found even in Rabelais; burstings of bank bubbles, which, like a touch of harlequin's wand, strip off their masks and dominoes from 'highly respectable' gentlemen, and leave them in their true figures of cheats and pickpockets; societies of all sorts, for teaching everybody everything, meddling with everybody's business, and mending everybody's morals; ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... humor seized Packy, or some stage in the game made such action desirable, he would leap the barrier, and jumping up and down like a harlequin in front of the bleacher benches, start his cohort into a combined school yell that must make the hot blood leap through the veins of everyone who called Chester his or ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... letters, to whom every lover of 'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... graver tragic known (Though his best part long since was done), Still on the stage desires to tarry; And he who played the Harlequin, After the jest still loads the scene, Unwilling ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... I believe it, but do not wish to confirm it. There, Minha, you can take your choice between the gray mosquito, the hairy mosquito, the white-clawed mosquito, the dwarf mosquito, the trumpeter, the little fifer, the urtiquis, the harlequin, the big black, and the red of the woods; or rather they make take their choice of you for a little repast, and you will come back hardly recognizable! I fancy these bloodthirsty diptera guard the Brazilian frontier considerably better than the poverty-stricken ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... noisy gaiety of the crowded streets almost stunned me. One of the first objects we encountered was a barouche full of Turks and Sultanas, driven by an old woman in a tawdry court dress as coachman; while a merry-andrew and a harlequin capered behind as footmen. Owing to the immense size of the city, and the difficulty of making our way through the motley throng of masks, beggars, lazzaroni, eating-stalls, carts and carriages, we were nearly three hours ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... knowing that I should find opportunity for reproof, but should probably lack the will. For Pierre was my harlequin, and what man can easily censure his own amusements even when he sees their harm? Then there was more to make me lenient. The man's family had served my own for as many generations as the rooks had builded in our yews, and so, on one side at least, ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... make comparisons,—like Harlequin! No sooner out of one scrape, than we get into another; and all for the sake of those Big Blockheads (L'AMOUR DE CES GRANDS COLOSSES). What the Kurfurst of Koln has done, in his character of Bishop of Osnabruck,"—a deed not known to this Editor, but clearly in the way of snubbing our ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mystery of his vitality, and breathlessly watched him as if I expected to witness some harlequin change in his face and mark the transformation of his polished brow into the lean austerity of wrinkles. His voice sank into a mere whisper at last, and then, ceasing to speak altogether, he dropped ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... were undoubtedly those by which he turned, harlequin-like, a creditor into a lender This was done by sheer force of persuasion, by assuming a lofty indignation, or by putting forth his claims to mercy with the most touching eloquence over which he would laugh heartily when his point was gained. He was often compelled to do this ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... carried out in harlequin flannel surmounts a full brim of restful willow-green. Garnished with intertwined laurel and St. John's-Wort, and decorated with the tail feather of a Surrey fowl, it makes a comfortable and distinguished ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... they lay a board between two boats, and on this two of the youngest and spryest wrestle till one falls into the water.... But all the fun's gone now. When I was young, there was different sport going. That was a sight! the corporation procession with the banners and the harlequin atop, and at Shrovetide, when the butchers led about an ox decked with ribbons and carnival twigs, with a boy on his back with wings and a little shirt.... All that's past now, people are got so fine. St. Knud's Fair is not what it used ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... heard any one who fulfilled my ideal of an orator. Grattan would have been near it, but for his harlequin delivery. Pitt I never heard. Fox but once, and then he struck me as a debater, which to me seems as different from an orator as an improvisatore, or a versifier, from a poet. Grey is great, but it is not oratory. Canning is sometimes very like one. Windham I did not admire, though ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to Pierrot. Pierrot only stared in the sky and laughed inanely. "If you persist in slighting me like this," she whispered in his ear, in a whisper which was like a hiss, "I will abandon you for ever. I will give my heart to Harlequin, and you shall never see me again." But Pierrot continued to stare at the sky, and laughed once more inanely. Then Columbine got up, her eyes flashing with rage; taking Harlequin by the arm she dragged him swiftly away. They danced across the grass ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... away his glass). No, by all the treasures of Mammon, I should not like to go through it a second time. Death is something more than a harlequin's leap, and its terrors are even worse than ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... explains clearly what he means by a humorist, I may as well here repeat the passage: "If humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humorous writer ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Eileen, "he takes life so strangely; at times tremendously seriously; at others as if it meant nothing at all. Now he plays the solemn and mysterious, and again he assumes the role of the irresponsible harlequin. I don't think anyone really understands ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... Parliament of 300 Irishmen, to which admission was to be had for each member by a fee of L.100. And several journals are now telling him that, under the Convention Act, he and his Parliament will be arrested on the day of assembling. Not at all. They do not attend to his harlequin motions. Already he has declared that this assembly, which was to have been a Parliament, is only to be a conciliatory committee, an old association under some new name, for deliberating on means tending to a Parliament in some future year, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... destroy garden vegetables are the well-known green cabbage-worm, the harlequin cabbage-bug, the cabbage hairworm, the asparagus-beetle, the squash-bug, the squash-vine borer, the striped cucumber or melon beetle, the melon aphis, the corn boll-worm, the cornstalk borer and ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure the ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... most valiant in words, but constantly being drubbed by Harlequin. Scaramouch is a common character in Italian farce, originally meant in ridicule of the Spanish don, and therefore dressed in Spanish costume. Our clown is an imbecile old idiot, and wholly unlike the dashing ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... said gently, "I regret to say that another change has overtaken us. Have you ever heard of 'harlequin fate'? 'Tis a very buffoon of mischief and irony that is often permitted to dog our earthly footsteps and prevent us from becoming too content with our lot. For a time you and I, little maid, good comrades though we have been, must tread different paths. Your mother and I are going away, presently, ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... greys, and probably no one has excelled them for delicacy of appreciation, and perfection of gradation. It will be long before the landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before the exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Harlequin" will fade from remembrance, we shall remember them all for their loveliness in design, a gift which never failed him, no matter what the subject. Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that taught him this, and therein lay his special power, a genuine feeling ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... willow pattern." The practice, however, of using for the dessert-service plates of Worcester china painted by hand, and the execution of many of which as works of art call for our admiration as much as any enamel, created a taste for forming what are called harlequin sets, among which, if a ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... Votan, a hero in America, become the god Odin or Woden in Scandinavia; and when his worship as a god dies out Odin survives (as Dr. Dasent has proved) in the Wild Huntsman of the Hartz, and in the Robin Hood (Oodin) of popular legend. The Hellequin of France becomes the Harlequin of our pantomimes. William Tell never existed; he is a myth; a survival of the sun-god Apollo, Indra, who was worshipped ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Snooks is down for trial, Court 2. The legal call-boys bustle in the counsel and others engaged. Mr. Buzfuz, Q.C., pushes his way into Court, surrounds himself with briefs and other documents, when some mysterious harlequin of the Law Courts changes Tomkins v. Snooks to Court 4, and calls upon Brown v. Jones, who are packed away in Court 3, waiting their turn. Buzfuz gets very angry, and bustles off to Court 4. In fact, getting your case into Court reminded me forcibly of that amusing toy, so ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of something I had seen—something funny I had seen somewhere. As I manoeuvred to get alongside, I was asking myself, 'What does this fellow look like?' Suddenly I got it. He looked like a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow—patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... of metaphor, and moving in effect, he would be delightful to the general, and that without sacrificing on the vile and filthy altar of popularity. Here he is successfully himself, and what more is there to say? You clap for Harlequin, and you kneel to Apollo. Mr. Meredith doubles the parts, and is irresistible in both. Such fire, such vision, such energy on the one hand and on the other such agility and athletic grace are ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... I demanded in reply; 'right glad to see you, and to know that old New Hampshire's granite hills have not faded from your memory, nor been absorbed in the quantity of swill it seems necessary to provide for the black-pig. But, I say, Frank, what harlequin-like changes politics take in a republic—now and then! Two years ago, and who'd a' thought a' seeing you here? 'Stonished you yourself, didn't it? Scarcely expected to brush old General Scott's fuss and feathers ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... among a wide range of different types. A variety of corn called "Harlequin" shows stripes on its kernels, and one ear may offer nearly white and nearly red seeds and all the possible intermediate steps between them. From these seeds the next generation will repeat the motley ears, but some specimens will produce ears of uniform kernels ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... adored its theatrical monarch. With his subjects he could do anything, take any liberty, without fear of dethronement. One evening, during an act in which he had not to appear on the stage, he was leaning while chatting with a comrade against that part of the wings known in French as "harlequin's cloak"—in our stage language the prompt-place. A brass knob was under his elbow. "What's this machine for?" he said, examining it. "Don't touch it, Monsieur Frederic," cried an employe: "it's the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... lamp-light and forgetting to look at it before he put it up again, and in short committing so many extravagances that Kit's mother was quite afraid of him. Then, when the horses were to, in he came like a Harlequin, and before they had gone a mile, out came the watch and the fire-box together, and Kit's mother as wide awake again, with no hope of a wink ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... playing fast and loose with the mind? Am I turning in upon myself and playing the mere harlequin in the arena ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... thievery; a trifling transcript of trite twaddle and trapessing tittle-tattle.... Like everything that falls from her pen, it is pert, shallow, and conceited, a farrago of ignorance, indecency, and blasphemy, a tag-rag and bob-tail style of writing—like a harlequin's jacket.' ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Hugh, Earl and Baron Clinton.-D. (This lady was married to Lord Walpole in 1724. In a letter to the Countess of mar, written in that year, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says:- "I have so good an opinion of your taste, to believe harlequin in person will not make you laugh so much as the Earl of Stair's furious passion for Lady Walpole, aged fourteen and some months. Mrs. Murray undertook to bring the business to bear, and provided the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... a very portly man who had passed the maturity of manhood, but active as Harlequin. He had a well-favoured countenance; fair, good-humoured, but very sly. He was dressed like the head butler of the London Tavern, and was particular as to his white waistcoats and black silk stockings, punctilious as to his knee-buckles, proud of his diamond pin; that is ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... days, but his nights, to gleaning the scanty portion of actual information that he scatters through his volumes; they will have a much more substantive foundation than those of the theologian, who shall construct his morality upon the harlequin scenery of systems that so frequently change, even in his own distempered brain. If the atheist, as they please to call those who differ in opinion with themselves, objects to the correctness, of—their systems, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... received as a Queen, Caroline settled down for a time in her now restored villa on Lake Como, celebrating her return by lavish charities to her poor neighbours, and by popular fetes and balls, in one of which "she danced as Columbine, wearing her lover's ear-rings, whilst Pergami, dressed as harlequin and wearing ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... short, black curls a mouth shaped like a bud reluctant to open, blew him a kiss. Then came a cue of music like an avalanche, and quicker than Harlequin's wink the ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... the best-trained orchestra of Old World birds into amazement or confusion, but astonish all the human listeners at an English concert. With what a wonderment would one of these blooming, country milkmaids look at the droll harlequin, and listen to those familiar words of his, set to ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the palate; and he thought that more respect should be paid to his strenuous and manly purpose than to the tickling of the ears or the lures of the feast. Accordingly he flung the bone, which he had stripped in eating the meat, in the face of the harlequin, and drove the wind violently out of his puffed cheeks, so that they collapsed. By this he showed how his austerity loathed the clatter of the stage; for his ears were stopped with anger and open to no influence of delight. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... watch'd heaven, fearing God and the rain— Or gaz'd o'er her bleach-field so fairly engross'd, Till the lines wander'd idle from pillar to post! Ah, where are the playful young pinners—ah, where The harlequin quilts that cut capers in air— The brisk waltzing stockings—the white and the black, That danced on the tight-rope, or swung on the slack— The light sylph-like garments, so tenderly pinn'd, That blew into shape, and embodied the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... turbulent sea! A wild turbulent sea, indeed, over whose foaming waves the ghosts of the departed madly chased one another, their white shrouds floating in the wind, while behind all, goading them on with cracking whip, ran a many-colored harlequin—and I was the harlequin! Suddenly from the black waves the sea monsters raised their misshapen heads, snatched at me with extended claws, and I awoke ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and the irons were taken off. I was then undressed, my clothes were removed to another room, and I was redressed in the prison uniform. This was a grotesque uniform indeed. The suit was red and blue, half and half, like a harlequin's, and to crown all came a hat or cap, like a fool's cap, a foot and a half high and running up to a peak. Miserable as I was, I could scarcely help smiling at the utterly absurd appearance I knew I then presented. I even ventured to remark upon it; ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... benefactor,—by one honest man to another,—his wretched client had been compelled to follow his quondam clerk, his present debtor, from court to court; had found his just claims met with well-invented but unfounded counter-claims, had seen his party shift his character of pursuer or defender, as often as Harlequin effects his transformations, till, in a chase so varied and so long, the unhappy litigant had lost substance, reputation, and almost the use of reason itself, and came before their lordships an object of thoughtless derision to the unreflecting, of compassion to the better-hearted, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... a luxurious couch of a street in which the afternoon lolls like a gaudy sybarite. Overhead the sky stretches itself like a holiday awning. The sun lays harlequin stripes across the building faces. The smoke plumes from the I. C. engines scribble gray, white and lavender fantasies against the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... apple-tree, Made such wanton spoil and rout, Turning blossoms inside out, Hung with head towards the ground, Flutter'd, perch'd; into a round 70 Bound himself, and then unbound; Lithest, gaudiest Harlequin, Prettiest Tumbler ever seen, Light of heart, and light of limb, What is now become of Him? Lambs, that through the mountains went Frisking, bleating merriment, When the year was in it's prime, They are sober'd by this time. If you look to vale or hill, 80 ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... and in all the habitable Planets, that one may as plainly fee what a Clock it is by one of the Dials in the Moon, as if it were no farther off than Windsor-Castle; and had he liv'd to finish the Speaking-trumpet which he had contriv'd to convey Sound thither, Harlequin's Mock-Trumpet had been a Fool to it; and it had no doubt been an admirable Experiment, to have given us a general Advantage from all their acquir'd Knowledge in those Regions, where no doubt several ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... momentary anger I prayed some one might burst a blood-vessel, and frighten the rest. I put on a look of indescribable indignation, and cast a glance of what I intended should be most withering scorn on the assembly; but alas! my infernal harlequin costume ruined the effect; and confound me, if they did not laugh the louder. I turned from one to the other with the air of a man who marks out victims for his future wrath; but with no better success; at last, amid the continued ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... he looked back at the house he was surprised to see that the window through which they had come, and which he was quite sure had always been a straight-up-and-down, old-fashioned window, was now a round affair, with flaps running to a point in the centre, like the holes the harlequin jumps ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... Persepolis for the time; and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams.—Harlequin's Invasion followed; where, I remember, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... dull though very various. You may smoke, you may doze, you may go to the Italian comedy, as good an amusement as either of the former. This entertainment always brings in Harlequin, who is generally a magician, and in consequence of his diabolical art performs a thousand tricks on the rest of the persons of the drama, who are all fools. I have seen the pit in a roar of laughter at this humour, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... display his vocation for polite letters, by publishing an ambitious allegorical poem of the age of chivalry, entitled "Hermin and Gunilde," which was not only exceedingly well reviewed, but received the honour of a parody entitled "Harlequin and Columbine." He also wrote translations of several of the poems of Ossian, and a disquisition upon their genuineness; and then with better inspiration he wrote a considerable treatise on "Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry," with metrical translations, being thus the first ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... burnt cork. I was delighted, too, to see the distressed damsel in faded silk and dirty muslin, who had trembled under his tyranny, and afflicted me so much by her sorrows, now seated familiarly on his knee, and quaffing from the same tankard. Harlequin lay asleep on one of the benches; and monks, satyrs, and Vestal virgins were grouped together, laughing outrageously at a broad story told by an unhappy count, who had been barbarously murdered in the tragedy. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... very sorrow and melancholy did but increase the comic dryness of his sharply-cut features, and increased the laughter of the audience, who showered plaudits on their favourite. The lovely Columbine was indeed kind and cordial to him; but she preferred to marry the Harlequin. It would have been too ridiculous if beauty and ugliness had ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the Christian, a type which was kept up for several centuries.[2041] These personages, remaining unchanged in character, were put in various assumed positions and conjunctures. The actors had to invent the dialogue and work out the situation. The characters have come down to us as Punch, Harlequin, Pantaloon, etc.[2042] Punch (Pulcino, Pulcinella) is only a Neapolitan rendering of Maccus, a character in the atellans. "Maccus," in Etruscan, meant a little cock.[2043] Christian antiphonal singing, like the Greek mystery acts of Dionysus, helped to develop the drama.[2044] ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... lay another child to my son's account; but he replied, "No, that child is too much of a harlequin." ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed abominations not to be named. Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or Ashantee. Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly improved medical science of our century. So while the solemn farce of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen somersets, and ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... consideration: even in those love-lyrics in which Heine does not wilfully destroy the first serious impression by the jingling of his harlequin's cap, as he himself styles it,[211] he does not succeed,—with the few exceptions just referred to,—in convincing us very deeply of the reality of his feelings. They are either trivially or extravagantly stated. Sometimes this sense of triviality ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... habits, grand dances, appropriate music, and other decorations, he exhibited a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, or some other fabulous writer. Between the pauses, or acts, of this serious, representation he interwove a comic fable; consisting chiefly of the courtship of Harlequin and Columbine, with a variety of surprizing adventures and tricks, which were produced by the magic wand of Harlequin; such as the sudden transformation of palaces and temples to huts and cottages, of men and women into wheelbarrows and joint stools, of trees turned into ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... thoughts as she reviewed the situation, her head leaned in the pose of the most plaintive of the pastels that Lord Dungory had commissioned his favourite artist to execute in imitation of the Lady Hamilton portraits. And now, his finger on his lip, like harlequin glancing after columbine, the old gentleman, who had entered on ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... negro Jack Pudding is called; the latter distinguishable by wearing white false faces, and enormous shocks of horsehair, fastened on to their woolly pates. Their character hovers somewhere between that of a harlequin and a clown, as they dance about, and thread through the negro groups, quizzing the women and slapping the men; and at Christmas time, the grand negro carnival, they don't confine their practical jokes to their own colour, but take all manner of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... spent thus disagreeably, a white domino, who for a few minutes had been a very attentive spectator, suddenly came forward, and exclaiming, "I'll cross him though he blast me!" rushed upon the fiend, and grasping one of his horns, called out to a Harlequin who stood near him, "Harlequin! do you ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... fine Arabian horses, and the diminutive, toy-like ponies of Cashmere. Daily marriage processions of the most fantastic description crowd the roadway, with the animals just named caparisoned in a gaudy, harlequin style, accompanied by unskilled musicians on foot, whose qualifications evidently consist in being able to make the greatest amount of noise upon a drum, fife, or horn, which are the three instruments employed on these occasions. Some of ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... harlequin is as wary a bird as he was a thorn! No sooner do we touch his head with our finger than with an audible "click" he is off on a most agile jump, which he extends with buzzing wings, and is even now perhaps aping a thorn among a little ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... bordered with small gold chain. The body-dress, likewise of their own weaving, was of cotton mingled with silk, richly striped and mixed with gold thread; but they wear it no lower than the knees. The youths of fashion were in a kind of harlequin habit, the forepart of the trousers white, the back-part blue; their jacket after the same fashion. They delighted much in an instrument made from some part of the iju palm-tree, which resembled and produced a sound like ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... directly—vigorously always, sometimes vehemently; but with that strong sincerity which administers eloquence to even the most untaught orders of mankind, and without which the most decorated eloquence is only the wooden sword and mask of harlequin. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the King being there to-night, very much crowded. Miss Gunning and her two sisters and a number of people of quality. 'The Tempest,' and 'Harlequin Ranger'; both very foolish to see. ...
— Extracts from the Diary of William Bray, Esq. 1760-1800 • William Bray
... generally associated with suchlike warmint. At last—out of the tunnel! and now, I presume, in the caves. Here someone, gradually assuming a palpable form, emerges from somewhere out of a dark corner, and hands to each of us a long piece of wood about the length of a harlequin's bat (note, pantomime again), only that this is an inch or so thick and quite two inches wide at one end, where presently a candle is fixed by an attendant sprite,—the slave of the tallow candle,—and the wand, so to speak, tapers off towards the ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... made with their monograms, to identify their creations, whether they be burned on the skins of Welsh Rabbits or Frying Pan Ramekins. Salamandering with an iron that has a gay, carnivalesque design can make a sort of harlequin Ramekin. ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... mantle on his back, reaching from the arm-pits down to the mid-thighs, zebra-painted on his breast and legs with black stripes, bear-skin shako on his head, and his arms stretched out at full length along a staff passing behind his neck. Accoutred in this harlequin rig, he dashes at the squaws, capering, dancing, whooping; and they and the children flee for life, keeping several hundred yards between him and themselves." It is believed that, if they were even to touch his stick, their children ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... slice of agnello, and enjoy the delicious air that breathes from the mountains. The old cardinals descend from their gilded carriages, and, accompanied by one of their household and followed by their ever-present lackeys in harlequin liveries, totter along on foot with swollen ankles, lifting their broad red hats to the passers-by who salute them, and pausing constantly in their discourse to enforce a phrase or take a pinch of snuff. Files ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... boatswain, or some such thing; but the world's so censorious. There's old Doctor Hoskins of Bath, who attended poor dear Drum in the quinsy; and poor dear old Fred Hoskins, the gouty General: I remember him as thin as a lath in the year '84, and as active as a harlequin, and in love with me—oh, how he was ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... made a revolution, which will form an epoch in the annals of puppetry; having driven from the stage entirely the graziosissima maschera d'Arlecchino, who used to be the hero of all the pieces represented by the puppets and substituted himself, or rather a puppet bearing his name, in the place of Harlequin, as the principal farceur of the performance. He has contrived to make the puppet Girolamo a little like himself, but so much caricatured and so monstrously ugly a likeness that the bare sight ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... squirmed with delight. Then she turned upon Anthony eyes swimming with tenderness, put up consoling lips.... The entrance of Polichinelle, however, cudgel and all, in the shape of a little white dog, dragging a bough with him, spoiled her game. Harlequin Sun, too, flashed out of hiding—before his cue, really, for ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... airily magnificent as they have the less of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would intervene in her favor. For example, an uncle—who had sailed for India fifty years before, and never been heard of since—might yet return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in each politer Age, Triumphant, rear'd the Trophies of the Stage: But only Farce, and Shew, will now go down, And Harlequin's the Darling of ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... south. They are quite poisonous, but of such retiring habits as hardly to be classed as dangerous. Most of their time is spent hidden under the sand and in the ground, but when they do come out their colors are so brilliant as not to be mistaken. On the harlequin snake the colors are bright coral-red, yellow, and black, which alternate in stripes that encircle the body. Its head is always banded with a broad yellow stripe. The coral-snake is much the same in color, and only a close observer would notice the difference. The ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... Theatre, and as that time had now nearly come, he did not forget to remind them of their promise. His birth-day was the fifteenth of January, which was lucky, because they always perform pantomimes in the Christmas holidays, and he was very desirous of seeing harlequin and columbine, and the clown, as he had heard a great deal about them from his young friends in the square, who had been to see them. As the day approached, Charles could think of nothing but the play, and said he thought it would be the happiest ...
— More Seeds of Knowledge; Or, Another Peep at Charles. • Julia Corner
... many occasional pieces in poetry, of which his Harlequin Horace is the most considerable. This Satire is dedicated to Mr. Rich, the present manager of Covent-Garden Theatre, in which with an ironical severity he lashes that gentleman, in consequence of some offence Mr. Rich ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... tragical face, and complains that it is a base and soulless world. At this very moment, I make no doubt, he is requiring that under the masks of a Pantaloon or a Punch there should be a soul glowing with unearthly desires and ideal aspirations, and that Harlequin should outmoralize Hamlet on the nothingness of sublunary things: and if these expectations are disappointed, as they can never fail to be, the dew is sure to rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... Yokohama; it is purely Japanese in all respects, and possesses a considerable commerce. The day of our arrival was a festal one, being consecrated to the god of the waters; wherefore large boats gayly decked with flags and party-colored streamers, containing crowds of gayly dressed men in harlequin style, were rowing in long processions through the water-ways of the city and under the many high-arched bridges. On the decks of the boats the people were dancing and singing (howling), to the notes of an indescribable instrument, which could give ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Bertie Coote, aged ten, was clown—a wonderfully clever little fellow; and Carrie Coote, about eight, was Columbine, a very pretty graceful little thing. In a few years' time she will be just the child to act "Alice," if it is ever dramatised. The harlequin was a little girl named Gilchrist, one of the most beautiful children, in face and figure, that I have ever seen. I must get an opportunity of photographing her. Little Bertie Coote, singing "Hot Codlings," was curiously ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... stage-plays for the space of a hundred and twenty years together. They were made extempore, and were, as the French call them, impromptus; for which the Tarsians of old were much renowned, and we see the daily examples of them in the Italian farces of Harlequin and Scaramucha. Such was the poetry of that savage people before it was tuned into numbers and the harmony of verse. Little of the Saturnian verses is now remaining; we only know from authors that ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... were odd, but they were natural. Curran used to take him off, bowing to the very ground, and 'thanking God that he had no peculiarities of gesture or appearance,' in a way irresistibly ludicrous; and * * used to call him a 'Sentimental Harlequin.'" ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... trappings! a new passion reigns! The madd'ning monarch revels in my veins. Oh! for a Richard's voice to catch the theme: 'Give me another horse! bind up my wounds! — soft — 'twas but a dream.' Aye, 'twas but a dream, for now there's no retreating: 25 If I cease Harlequin, I cease from eating. 'Twas thus that Aesop's stag, a creature blameless, Yet something vain, like one that shall be nameless, Once on the margin of a fountain stood, And cavill'd at his image in the flood. 30 'The deuce confound,' he cries, 'these drumstick shanks, They never have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... handing them to Minervy who was thrown into a state of ecstacy. "But wait a moment; it lacks completeness," and she ran to her room for a huge pink satin bow. "There, tell Johanna to pin THAT on her head and the harlequin ice ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the last summer, and taking Bergamo in my way homeward to England, it was my hap, sojourning there some four or five days, to light in fellowship with that famous Francattip Harlequin, who, perceiving me to be an Englishman by my habit and speech, asked me many particulars of the order and manner of our plays, which he termed by the name of representations. Amongst other talk he enquired of me if I knew any such Parabolano here ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... and bad, were scarce during the whole time I was up, and I was not altogether surprised when Fred chose me to play in the Seniors' Match. In that game I succeeded in getting a few wickets, and soon afterwards I got my Harlequin cap, which pleased me hugely. I am sure that had I not been such an outrageously bad batsman, Fred would have liked to try me for the 'Varsity, but there happened to be another man who did not bowl any worse than ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... other end of the room. Fenn had upset one chair and the noise had nearly deafened him. Now chairs seemed to be falling in dozens. Bang! Bang! Crash!! (two that time). And then somebody shot through the window like a harlequin and dashed away across the lawn. Fenn could hear his footsteps thudding on the soft turf. And at the same moment other ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... of gratification of this kind; while the glasses are filled to a great height, in a pyramidal shape, and some of them with layers of strawberry, gooseberry, and other coloured ice—looking like pieces of a Harlequin's jacket—are seen moving to and fro, to be silently and certainly devoured by those who bespeak them. Add to this, every one has his tumbler and small water-bottle by the side of him: in the centre ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and drew crowds to his theatre by his originality and by good opera-buffas. He had, moreover, a handsome wife, and "this was an additional reason for our nocturnal adventurers to go and perform their serenades under the harlequin's windows." The comedian was naturally flattered by Haydn's attention. He heard the music, and, liking it, called the composer into the house to show his skill on the clavier. Kurz appears to have been an admirer of what we would call "programme" ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... while Tonio the Fool triumphs over her misery. The husband however returns defeated; panting he claims the lover's name, and Nedda's lips remaining sealed, he is about to stab his wife, when Beppo the Harlequin intervenes, and, wrenching the dagger from his unfortunate master's hands intimates, that it is time to prepare for the play. While Nedda retires, Canio breaks out into a bitter wail of his hard lot, which ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... career on which they had entered. 'Not so bad!' cried Blondy, when I had finished my lecture, 'not so bad.' 'But can you, in the mean time, point out to us any apartment that we can ransack? We are, you see, like Harlequin, and have more need of cash than advice;' and they left me, laughing deridingly at me. I called them back, to profess my attachment to them, and begged them not to call again at my house. 'If that is all,' said Deluc, 'we will keep from that.'—'Oh yes, we'll ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various |
