"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mind, for he persisted in executing a continuous fugue of ecstatic praise of Nurse Haley in various keys and tempos, her pluck, her cleverness, her skill, her patience, her jolly laugh, her voice, her eyes. To her eyes the Sergeant ever kept harking back as to the main motif of his fugue, till Cameron would have dearly loved to chuck him and his fugue ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... [119] Motif des etudes qui ont ete faites apres Lecons Preliminaires, p. 67. Lejeune prince connoissoit deja le systeme des operations de son ame, il comprenoit la generation de ses idees, il voyoit l'origine et le progres des habitudes qu'il avoit ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... encore susceptible de reduction, par le puissant motif d'interet et d'honneur public auquel chaque membre de la societe doit ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... itself was simple. Instead of a plot, a complication, it built itself around a central idea, and it was the originality of this idea, this motif, that had impressed Trevor so strongly. Indeed, Rosella's draft could convey no more than that. Her treatment was all to follow. But here she was sure of herself. The style would come naturally as ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... too, they tune their souls up to the pitch of their "masks." The surface of things is the heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head, the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People think with their bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are words, tones, whispers, in ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... resurrection of the body. In death there is no physical decay. The singing planets of the human body merely part to combine in other songs, recurring again in the end to their old disposal and song, exchanging other worlds for their own once more, and recurring to the first motif of the symphony. I was sad this afternoon for the will failed me in my work. Sitting on the sand this morning the singing dunes had attained to the harmony of silence. All at once a little wisp of seaweed—hardly more than a thread—started to ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... had come to the window and stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a cleared circle in the heart of the lanternlight Mrs. Kent was performing one of the more expurgated and perfunctory of her dances for the benefit of the select audience that remained, to scattered, perfunctory applause. The motif of ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... conceived as taurine and characterized as a human bull. The base of the Equestrian is surrounded by a frieze of architecturalized fish and the rearing sea horses that furnish the principal upper motif for the play of water. Energy himself is presented as a nude male, typically American, standing in his stirrups astride a snorting charger - an exultant super-horse needing no rein - commanding with grandly elemental gesture of extended arms, the ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... man while apparently playing a part in a drama is older as a dramatic motif than "Pagliacci," and Leoncavallo's employment of it gave rise to an interesting controversy and a still more interesting revelation in the early days of the opera. Old theatre-goers in England and America remember ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... people whose faces we had stepped on, or who had been suddenly interrupted in a snore of powerful dimensions by the violent impact of a hard head against the diaphragm. By the time we had reached our own place the remarks had swelled to a chorus with a deplorable motif. ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... unanimous in being grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnham—oh, of course, quite pour le bon motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I simply can't understand how you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her. Perhaps she ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... heron preserve, however, is Mr. McIlhenny's individual enterprise, and really furnished the motif of the larger movement. Of its inception and development, he has kindly furnished me the following account, accompanied by many beautiful photographs of egrets breeding in sanctuary, one of which appears ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... descend from the breast of Mary and take rest for several hours in the arms of Saint Giangiuseppe, who, on being disturbed by some priestly visitor, exclaimed, "O how I have enjoyed holding the Holy Babe in my arms!" This is an old and favourite motif; it occurs, for example, in the Fioretti of Saint Francis; there are precedents, in fact, for all these ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the Park on Sunday. She's Red Crossing. Had on the most elaborate costume you ever saw. Imagine a nurse's uniform brought up to the standard of the highest art, or perhaps I ought to say an artistic dress with the red cross for motif. She told me that she expects to go to the ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Shakespearean influence are the aggressive female like Mirrha, reminiscent of Shakespeare's Venus; the hunting motif in Dom Diego and Amos and Laura, recalling Adonis' obsession with the hunt; and the catalog of the senses in Philos and Licia, pp. 15-16, and Hiren, stanzas 75-79, which imitates Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha among these poems, however, makes ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... easy adaptability to use in the first natural period of art— expression, the Colossal period. They are selections with an easily distinguishable theme. Throughout these chapters the mind of the student should be engaged with the motif of the selection as it first catches the mind. Nothing in later study can make up for the loss of the first glow, the undefined answering response to the animating spirit of a writer's message. His differentiated meanings, his elaborations of theme for the purpose of increased force, intensity ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... chintz papers are lovely for bedrooms or morning-rooms, with fresh crisp muslin curtains and plain silk or linen or chambray side-curtains. Either painted or mahogany furniture could be employed. A motif from the paper can be used for the furniture or it can simply be striped with the color chosen for the plain curtains. Some of the good and rather stunning bird design papers treated with this special glazing make beautiful halls with plain rugs and ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... (the Valhalla motif). At first it seemed to produce the opposite effect, for the pulse was lowered. Later it rose to a rate double the normal, and the tension was diminished. The impression described by the subject afterward was a feeling of "lofty grandeur and calmness." ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... les sujets Bulgares, quelle que soit leur religion, jouiront d'une complete egalite de droits. Ils pourront concourir a tous les emplois publics, fonctions et honneurs, et la difference de croyance ne pourra leur etre opposee comme un motif d'exclusion. ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... delineation of happy maternity. These she has portrayed with delicacy, refinement, and sentiment. Her technique appeals equally to the layman and the artist, and her color has all the tenderness and charm that accompanies so engaging a motif." ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... deal of a Babbitt, but never completely one." Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers—a need for self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic kind of experience?—that would become a recurrent motif ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... une lettre que j'ai recue d'un de mes concitoyens les plus distingues, avec une correspondance touchant une matiere a laquelle il me semble que le Danemark ne soit guere moins interesse que ne le sont les Etats Unis; le premier y ayant contribue le digne motif, l'autre en ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... therefore more acceptable to customers." As prostitutes are frequently married by their patrons, it is believed that not a few women from "special villages" are taken to wife without their origin being known. Unwitting marriage with an Eta woman has long been a common motif in fiction and folk story. Many members of the "special tribes" go to Hokkaido and there pass into the general body of the population. The folk of this class are "despised," I was told by a responsible Japanese, "not so ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... The old man in the corner was unconscious or asleep; the woman who tended him had stopped her spiritual ministrations. A child, propped up in one of the rear seats, had awakened to cry, fallen asleep, awakened and wept again. She had in her voice a thick, mucous note, which became to Eleanor the motif in that symphony of misery. Otherwise, no one seemed to be making sound except the two physicians. Her own doctor came up once, pressed a syringe again into the bare arm, whispered that it ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... Bormans has added the following note: "Jean Mandeville, ou Manduith, theologien et mathematicien, etait ne a St. Alban en Angleterre d'une famille noble. On le surnomma pour un motif inconnu, ad Barbam et magnovillanus. En 1322, il traversa la France pour aller en Asie, servit quelque temps dans les troupes du Sultan d'Egypte et revint seulement en 1355 en Angleterre. Il mourut a Liege ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... recently divorced him, finds that a visit is due from his Aunt Selina, an elderly lady having ideas about things quite apart from the Bohemian set in which her nephew is a shining light. The way in which matters are temporarily adjusted forms the motif of ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... was a mere decorative border, I now realized was a motif I have seen all my life! A tiny lighthouse sending forth a beam! The trademark of ...
— With a Vengeance • J. B. Woodley
... steady throb and swing of the heavier stringed instruments? Ah! why does the rhythm stop? A few chords breaking up the dream, the sound of a bugle calling you away, and the valse goes into the farewell motif with its tender longing and passionate anguish. Good-bye! you will be true? Your heart is mine, good-bye, sweetheart! Stop! that discord of angry notes—she is false to her soldier lover! The stars ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... few, indeed, are those hangings which pertain to the earlier date, but a study of those few, taken in conjunction with the still fewer that remain of the 16th century, prove the gradual growth of the designs that have the tree motif which makes ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside he found—it had been put there for him by Amanda—among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all philoprogenitive ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... doubtfully ascribed to Theocritus. The motif is that of a well-known Anacreontic Ode. The idyl has been ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... at once the strain abandoned the woods-note and took another motif. At first it played softly in the higher notes, a tinkling, lightsome little melody that stirred a kindly surface-smile over a full heart. Then suddenly, without transition, it dropped to the lower register, and began to sob ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... The motif and locale of the stories and very infrequent articles usually stemmed from the areas, people, and occult knowledge previously mentioned. The manly art of self defense must have occupied some of Mundy's attention during his early career. A series of stories about Billy Blain, ...
— Materials Toward A Bibliography Of The Works Of Talbot Mundy • Bradford M. Day, Editor
... so abruptly, though the special music of this gathering reasserted itself, the motif of the marching song, once it had ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... he could spread a New York Success on the marble-top Table and dissect it until nothing was left but the Motif, and then he would heave that into the Waste Basket, thereby leaving the Stage in America flat on ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... The Love-Motif. On the one hand, there is the persistent desire to be attractive, which manifests itself in the subtlest ways. How many of the yearnings and activities of human life have their roots in this ancient and honorable desire! The love of pretty clothes,—however it may seem to ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... the six succeeding years gave him the opportunity to work out his own individuality. Some noble altar-pieces were produced in these years. Pleasant reminiscences of Titian still appear in such work, as in the often-used motif of baby angels; but in the subjects of the Crucifixion and the Pieta, he stands quite apart. These works are distinctly his own, and ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... had the devil of a time getting rid of her," was the motif of the men's conversation. The women said, "And I just couldn't shake ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... The outside public engaged in speculation to a degree not before known. Exaggerated gains, violent fluctuations in prices, meteoric rises and collapses—these gave rein to a gambling spirit perennial in man. The word "Projects" enters into literature as a recurrent motif, strangely familiar to our present generation, which needs only to turn Defoe's Essay on Projects into contemporary language to see the similarities between the year 1697 and the year 1939. That essay is filled with talk of "new Inventions, ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... autorisations pour les fouilles ne devront etre accordees qu'aux personnes qui offrent des garanties suffisantes d'experience archeologique. Aucune des Puissances mandataires ne devra, en accordant ces autorisations, agir de facon a ecarter, sans motif valable, les savants ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... for sixty-five years. He'd have impressed nobody—of importance. The super-motif, or dominant, of his era, was Exclusionism, and the notion of seeds in the air ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... gown knotted about the waist; her arms were bare, and her hair unbound and flowing loose over her shoulders to her girdle. She was to die in this act; it promised to be harrowing; and the first few notes she uttered recurred again later on as the motif for the famous quartet in ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... a typical actress of the Musical Comedy Stage, treating of her career and her love affairs with a realism that is convincing, but free of offence. The heroine allures and for a long time retains the devotion and affection of a typical solitary Londoner, who is not less devoted to the bon motif; but the inevitable break occurs. There is plenty of humour and of first-hand knowledge in this study of upper Bohemian life of to-day, and the characters are ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... things they bestowed upon Briar Rose in association with the fairy wand in Cinderella and the good things it brought her; the visit of the Wolf in The Wolf and Seven Kids with the visit of the Wolf in Three Pigs and of the Fox in The Little Rid Hin. It is interesting to note that a clog motif, similar to the motif of shoes in The Elves and the Shoemaker, occurs in the Hindu Panch-Rhul Ranee, told in Old ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... frankness. It is filled throughout with a genial humanity, as bright and as expressive as that which fills the atmosphere of She Stoops to Conquer or A School for Scandal. The characters are neither demons, like Cousin Betty, nor reckless debauchees, like Gertrude in The Stepmother. The whole motif is comic. Moliere himself might have lent a touch of his refined and fragrant wit to the composition; and the situation is one which the author could realize from experience, but had only learned to regard from a humorous standpoint in the ripeness of his premature old age. ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... in the empty spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man owed to beings whose existence ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State,"[8] they urge the formation of labor parties as soon as proper preparations have been made and the time is ripe for effective class action. All through the Manifesto runs the motif that every class struggle is a political struggle. Again and again Marx and Engels return to that thought in their masterly survey of the historical conflicts between the classes. They show how the bourgeoisie, beginning as "an oppressed class under the sway of ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... served with lemon and mint in tall glasses. The sandwiches were tiny and round and filled with pink strawberry jam which made them seem like delectable apple-blossom petals. Betty happened to have bluebird plates and she used paper napkins with a bluebird motif. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... than any modern performances I ever heard of." A French dramatic version of it under the same title appeared three years after the publication of the novel and a little later Voltaire in his "Nanine" used the same motif. Lady Mary's reference to chambermaids is significant; it points to the new sympathy on the part of the novelist and the consequent new audience which the modern Novel was to command; literally, all classes and conditions of mankind were to become its patrons; and as one result, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... beautiful. And in time these new beauties have become worn away like the trite metaphors that are now no longer metaphors, but part of the "funded capital." That was a ridiculous device of Schumann's, who found a motif for one of his loveliest things by using the letters of his temporary fair one's name—A B E G G; but it may not be so utterly unlike the procedure by ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... the Hills" has a motif unusual in life, and new in fiction. Its hero, who has only acquired his own strength and resourcefulness by a lifelong struggle against constitutional frailty, has come to make the question of bodily soundness his dominant thought. ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... well played. It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a nervous swoon as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, the squat tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme, the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject—in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at last faced ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... to hang out at the Studios she took up with the Musical Set that couldn't talk about anything but Technique and Shading and the Motif and the Vibrato. She began to fill up the Parlor with her new Friends, and the first thing Oliver knew he was in the Side Pocket and ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... described as "the most venerable symbol employed in ornamental art and the favourite and most highly decorative motif in artistic design". It has been the inspiration of much, if not most, of the world's great literature in every age and clime, and the nucleus around which a wealth of ethical symbolism has accumulated ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of this work that survives in common use is the immortal lyric, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," founded on a motif in the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. This, with Doddridge's hymn, "My God, and is thy table spread?" continued for a long time to be the most important church hymn and eucharistic hymn in the English language. We should not perhaps have looked for the gift of them to two Congregationalist ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... building there comes floating the dull roar of the turbulent river Kura, mingled with shouts from the hucksters of the Avlabar Bazaar (the town's Asiatic quarter) and as a cross motif thrown into these sounds, the sighing of the wind and the cooing of doves. In fact, to be here is like being in a drum which a ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... episode of Just's dog, as the servant relates it in the 8th scene of the 1st act, could have adorned the Sentimental Journey, but the similarity of motif here in the treatment of animal fidelity is pure coincidence. Certainly the method of using the episode is not reminiscent of any similar scene in Sterne. Just's dog is not introduced for its own sake, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... preoccupied by the work in hand she failed to notice it, and, advancing till she faced the great mirror, she executed a few steps in front of it, humming the motif of The Swan-Maiden music ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... matron, or of any other subject that the advertiser had chosen for its association with the emotions of trust or affection. When music plays a larger part in English public education it may be possible to use it effectively for advertisement, and a 'Parramatta Motif' would in that case appear in all the pantomimes, in connection, say, with a song about the Soldier's Return, and would be squeaked by a gramophone in every ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... partly scientific. We know the secondary objective of the spheres. It's the same as man's or any other living creature. The spheres are alive and their objective is to keep on living, but that isn't their primary motif. The primary objective is the difference between a good man and a bad one. Whatever is more important to a man than life ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... talked about music, with great display of knowledge concerning things operatic. First one, then another went to the piano and ran through some motif that the rest hummed a little first, then shouted in a rousing chorus. Then they drank more, amid a perfect fracas of talk and laughter. Ivan Petrovitch and Athanase Georgevitch walked across and kissed the general. Rouletabille saw all around him great children who amused ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... becoming anything of value to each other. Naturally I have seen that you are not happy, though there have been moments when you were the very personification of light-hearted ness, and I have known for a long time that the motif of your whole nature is resentment. Believe me, Miss Durwent, if I could be a friend—and I mean that to the last ditch—I should be deeply grateful for ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... theatre was the prose farce of "Mr. H——," in which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts. The piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and damned. The eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a sensation at Bath, as he is believed to be a nobleman travelling ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... commanding gesture, but I was far from confident that he would not catch me out. He opened his cigarette- case, took out a visiting card and wrote the Schlummermotif on the back before giving it to me. After telling him what the motif was, I looked at his very long name on the back of the card: Graf ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... appears the result of an attempt to cross the theme of the funeral march of the "Eroica Symphony" with the famous four raps of Beethoven's Fifth. In the first movement of the Second Symphony, just before the appearance on the oboe of the scarcely disguised "Sleep" motif from "Die Walkuere," a theme almost directly lifted out of Beethoven's violin concerto is announced on the 'cellos and horns. And the andante of the same symphony derives from both the allegretto of Beethoven's Eighth and the andante of his "Pastoral Symphony"; might, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... play a noisy Strauss waltz, which started with such a mighty and rapid trill as made even Gedeonovsky start; in the very middle of the waltz, she abruptly changed into a mournful motif, and wound up with the aria from "Lucia": "Fra poco."... She had reflected that merry music was not compatible with her situation. The aria from "Lucia," with emphasis on the sentimental notes, greatly affected ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... your motif be? Heh? I must study dat for a leetle before I can decide de question, or even trost him as a human ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... of low life. Women play an important role in the narrative, more important perhaps than they do in any other kind of ancient literature—at least their individuality is more marked. The efficient motif is erotic. I say the efficient, because the conventional motif which seems to account for all the misadventures of the anti-hero Encolpius is the wrath of an offended deity. A great part of the book has an atmosphere of satire about ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... of the artist. He must start by having a definite objective, what in studio phrase is called a "motif"; something that has given him a certain impression which he wants to convey to others, but which cannot be stated as an isolated fact without any surroundings. Then the surroundings must be painted so as to have a natural relation to the main ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... Brenton," Reed warned him. "Therefore I advise you to keep a steady hand. I'm too big a brand for a slim chap like you to pluck from the burning, to our mutual comfort. Apropos, there's another grand idea for your sermon. You can suppress the naughty nicotine motif for the theme, if you choose. But what in thunder, made you put on the harness, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... taking up the thread of the talk where it had been left the previous watch; but neither was in a talking mood, and they soon fell silent. Presently a girl's rich voice rose to the accompaniment of Oddington's banjo, an instrument but poorly adapted to the motif of the music, which was plaintive, yearning. The deep contralto notes brought full meed of meaning, although the words were German; low, deep, uncertain at first—the ponderings of love, of devotion, of doubt—then swelling loud and full and free at the end; ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... suis revenu ici il y a deux jours apres avoir fait en Autriche un voyage imprevu dont vous avez connu le motif et le resultat. J'ai ete recu par l'auguste malade [Footnote: The Comte de Chambord, known among the Legitimists as Henri V.] avec une affectueuse cordialite qui m'a profondement touche, et j'ai quitte Vienne en conservant quelque ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... he was sitting in the company of the young couple. Andreas Doederlein, being in an unusually happy mood, went to the piano, and began playing the shepherd's motif from Wagner's ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... they have developed an excessive modesty in regard to bodily exposure which is in striking contrast to people who live on the warm sands of the South Seas. Inca sculptors and potters rarely employed the human body as a motif. Tiahuanaco is pre-Inca, yet even here the images are clothed. They were not represented as clothed in order to make easier the work of the sculptor. His carving shows he had great skill, was observant, and had ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... else—something that the superficial reader would never discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way the interest and enjoyment for such a reader. It was this, and not the mere story, that impelled Martin to write it. For that matter, it was always the great, universal motif that suggested plots to him. After having found such a motif, he cast about for the particular persons and particular location in time and space wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing. "Overdue" was the title he had decided for it, and its length he ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... waist should be of white and blue beads—large beads that will catch glitter from the sun. About her head a band of tan, and a white quill. The embroidery about the neck of her Indian robe is of pearls. The basket which she carries should be white, with a motif of rich blue and scarlet. She wears a tan (dressed deerskin) girdle, heavily embroidered in red beads. Her stockings and moccasins are tan-colored also, the moccasins embroidered in scarlet. The ends of her braids are bound in scarlet ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... last night, after you had gone to bed, and I was watching the stars through the pines. I won't read it to you yet, for it wants working up, but it's good—I am sure it is good! And that little stream along from the house; I found a song motif in that,—'Clear babbling over amber bed!' How's that for a word- picture? Shows the whole thing, doesn't it? The crystal clearness of the water; the music of its flow, the curious golden colour of the rocks. I'm always pleased when I can hit off a description in a line. I'm glad we ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to pools below. First an octave of two notes of purest silver, then a varying strain of eight or ten notes, so sweet and powerful, so individual and meaningful that it might stand for some wonderful motif in a great opera. I shut my eyes, and I was deaf to all other sounds while the wren sang. And as it dwelt on the last note of its phrase, a cicada took it up on the exact tone, and blended the two final notes into a slow vibration, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... one or more verses, either exactly repeated or slightly modified, at the end of a stanza or less frequently at another fixed place (4, 10, 34). Aside from its rhythmic-melodic effect the refrain helps to center the attention on a certain idea or motif. ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... sang a song of sunshine dancing on grass, of meadowlarks flinging out their carefree notes of joy. Through it like a golden thread ran for a motif little melodies that had to do with a man who had staggered into Fort Desolation out of the frozen North, sick and starved and perhaps wounded, but still indomitably ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... dance, the "dancing men" bored her. And she did not understand the district's quota of intellectuals very well; she was good at listening to symphony concerts, but she never had much luck in discussing the cleverness of the wood winds in taking up the main motif. It is history that she refused a master of arts with an old violin, a good taste in ties, and an income of ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... pointed out the wrong done to Flinders in labelling the southern coast of Australia "Terre Napoleon," and in giving French names to geographical features of which Flinders, not Baudin, was the discoverer. He continued: "the motive for that species of national plagiarism* is evident. (* "Le motif de cette espece de plagiat national.") The Government wished to create for itself a title for the occupation of that part of New Holland." Malte-Brun should have known Napoleon better than that. When he wanted territory, and was strong enough ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... who waver in the path of duty—especially in these days of vast military operations when a whole world is in arms. It belongs in patriotic literature by the side of Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country." The motif is the same—that of obligation and service and loyalty to ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis
... ago I endeavored to plan for the Zoological Society the most humane and satisfactory bear dens on earth. Fortunately we knew something about bears, both wild and captive. Never before have we written out the exact motif of those dens, but it is easily told. We endeavored to give each bear ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... sing them again to Sister Mayberry, child, that her ears may be rejoiced with mine." And Mother Mayberry caught at the top of the gate as the girl slipped the nodding baby down into her arms and in her wonderful muted voice hummed the Grail motif while the Deacon raised his thin old ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Kempelin. At this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand passion of science became henceforth the master-motif of his life. ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... ecrie "que son coeur lui disoit que pour trouver la terre, il falloit gouverner vers le sud-ouest." L'inspiration d'Alonzo etoit moins mysteriuse qu'elle peut le paraitre au premier abord. Pinzon avoit vu dans la soiree passer des perroquets, et il savoit que ces oiseaux n'alloient pas sans motif du cote du sud. Jamais vol d'oiseau n'a eu ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... center of the Tablet of the Sun at Palenque (Pl. 22, fig. 6) shows a face in which the motif seems to be the full-face view of the horned owl. The hooked bill curves over the mouth at each side of which is the curious scroll seen in the same connection in the figures of Pl. 21. The ears are somewhat shorter in proportion than ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... du pere. Hum!... Je ne sais, au reste, ce que vous penserez d'une imagination[44] qui est venue a mon fils: elle est bizarre, il en convient lui-meme; mais le motif est pardonnable et meme delicat: c'est qu'il m'a prie de lui permettre de n'arriver d'abord chez vous que sous la figure[45] de son valet, qui, de son cote, fera le ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... and elsewhere, there have been legends similar to the story of Audunn, where a man, after having been to the Norwegian king with a tame bear, decides to present it to the king of Denmark. However, we know of no earlier source for this motif than the story of Audunn. Whatever its value as historical fact, it could well be the model to which the other versions might be traced. This story is preserved in the Morkinskinna, an Icelandic ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... then a wild burst of thunderstorms, mad elemental uproar and rain. Through it all, against illness, heat, confusion of mind, one master impetus prevailed with me, to keep the shipping going, to maintain one motif at least, whatever else arose or ceased, the chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek of the barrows, the pluppa, pluppa, pluppa, as the men came trotting along the swinging high planks, and then at last, the dollop, dollop, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... since been on your track, but it was reserved for me to discover the last of the Birkenheads in the anonymous author of the 'Baronet's Wife.' That romance, in which you have had the baseness to use your knowledge of a mother's guilt as a motif in your twopenny plot, unveiled to me the secret of your hidden existence. You must stop the story, or alter the following numbers; you must give up your discreditable mode of life. Heavens, that a Birkenhead should be a ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... three teeth were clashing in a noisy contest, full of hideous interjections. But all that could be clearly distinguished was this LEIT-MOTIF: ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... looked on that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to it all.... She was often in Dublin these ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... "Right on the Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the very essence of passion, the voluptuousness that is a veritable anguish.... These long, slow rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It reminds one of 'Phedre'—'Venus toute entiere,' and the rest of it; and Wagner has the same. You find it again in Isolde's motif continually." ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... education movement, for they devoted their time to developing the moral and spiritual ideals and character of the individual. And then the great teacher of Nazareth was a Rabbi, a Jew. The social motif is exceedingly strong throughout Jewish history and literature. Social justice, social service, and the universal brotherhood of man are the dominant ideas in the Old Testament, and they constitute a heritage of priceless value to the world and to ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... exhibit common qualities of structure which mean that they have grown from the same antecedents, while even the larger divisions or classes of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibia, and fishes, possess a deep underlying theme whose dominant motif is the backbone, which proves their ultimate unity in ancestry. The greater and lesser branches have reached different levels, for the fish is clearly simpler in its make-up than the highly specialized ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... motif—express?" Ingolby asked coolly. "I know there was catastrophe, the tumblings of avalanches, but the voice that cried-the soul of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... President Wilson. That picketing had compelled Congress to see the question in terms of political capital is also true. From the first word uttered in the House debate, until the final roll-call, political expediency was the chief motif. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... the vertebrates, is seen between the arches. The piers, arches, reeds and columns bear legendary decorative motifs of the transitional plant to animal life in the forms of tortoise and other shell motifs - kelp and its analogy to prehistoric lobster, skate, crab and sea urchin. The water-bubble motif is carried through all vertical members which symbolize the Crustacean Period, which is the second stratum of ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... possible the cause of his failure, he was struck by the similarity of one of his compositions to another. They all seemed to contain the same melody, in one form or another, and he saw plainly at last that he was subconsciously haunted by the leading motif of the first movement of his last symphony, the symphony that was played on that dreadful night for the first and last time. The inference was plain enough. This melody haunted him, he could not forget it; it showed itself in all his work and he realised ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... "wasn't that 'Marche Triomphante to-night great?" He hummed a bar from the motif, "That's it—my—" he cried, hitting his chair arm with his fist, "but that's a big thing—almost good enough for Wagner to have done; big and insistent and strong. I'm getting to like music with go to it—with bang and brass. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... wife with serious attention. Lighting his pipe, he lay back in the Turkey-red chair, puffing in silence. At last he laid the pipe down and, laboriously pulling off his boots, hummed an air which had for its sole motif the undynamic suggestion: ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... category, and the remaining figures in the second. Now if the ordinary order cells be represented by white, and the reverse ordinary by black, just such a pattern has been created as forms the decorative motif of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... that were a characteristic of all men, if that were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their existence? For herself she considered that ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and wrong The motif of his song; Who sings our racial good, Bestows us honor's place, The cosmic brotherhood ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called Michael Scott's Wooing, not the one I proposed beginning now—and also have long designed a picture under the same title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote a romance called Sir Michael Scott, but ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... crept news of big doings down south. There was a new sound in the air—a distant continued thunder that was different from any previous sound—the big drums of the devil's orchestra were booming an accompaniment that was the motif of hell's cantata. Up the line ran the rumor of a battle intenser than any yet fought—more guns being massed in a few miles than the world had ever seen before. Into every heart crept the dread of what might await us down there, and to every ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... a classical equanimity which he was never able to reach. He would have us love fate and laugh and dance; but there were drops of scorching tears upon the page of his prophecy and the motif of his challenge was the terrible gravity of his own nature; though the conclusion of his seriousness was that we must renounce all seriousness. It is Nietzsche himself who teaches us that in estimating the value of a philosopher we have to consider the psychology ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Here the motif was distinctly one of officialdom. Although the Southern element was not lacking, it was not so marked as in the library or in the hall. The place was appointed for utility rather than ornament. Everything was in perfect ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... of which are given on Pl. 139, Figs. 1 and 2. If these two latter designs are compared with the hornbill design of the Long Glat, a figure of which, taken from Nieuwenhuis [9, Pl. 86] is given (Pl. 139, Fig. 3) a certain similarity in the MOTIF of the designs can be recognised. It must be remembered that the Long Glat design is tatued in rows down the front and sides of the thigh, whilst these Kayan designs have been modified to form more or less of a sinuous ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... had given the signal; some of them did not conceal their hilarity. The audience, certain then that the music was laughable, rocked with laughter. This merriment became general; it increased at the return of a very rhythmical motif which the double-basses accentuated in a burlesque fashion. Only the Kapellmeister went on through the uproar ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register—it was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening, soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine at sad little tables in their so-called ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry |
