"Mellowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the open loft at the top of his house, where still in the old beams stuck the rusty old nails upon which he hung up his violins. And I saw out upon the north the wide blue sky, just mellowing to rich purple, and flecked here and there with orange streaks prophetic of sunset. Whenever Stradivarius looked up from his work, if he looked north, his eye fell on the old towers of S. Marcellino and S. Antonio; if he looked west, the Cathedral, ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... vast interest in the fair sex, owning plainly that he had a "heart of Wax, Soft, and Soon mellowing," though he was careful on every page to make everything seem perfectly straight and proper for the suspicious perusal of his English wife; but any nineteenth-century reader can read between the lines. His famous long-winded eulogies of the Boston virgin, the ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... stole away into the mellowing sunshine. He walked westward, till he found himself on the Embankment by Albert Bridge; here, after hesitating awhile, he took the turn into Oakley Street. He had no thought of calling to see Miss Elvan; upon ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... the more impervious the package containing tea is to the air, the more perfectly the finer qualities of the tea are preserved. If there is a necessity for ripening or mellowing by time, air should be rigidly excluded ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... calling forth his children. The ponds become margined with green, and new creatures everywhere stir the earth and the waters. Life and matter become, as it were, a new creation, and one can believe anything when he sees how many forms life and matter can assume under the mellowing rays of the sun. The clod becomes a flower; the egg a reptile, fish, or bird. The cunning woodchuck, that looks out of his hole on the awakening earth and blue sky, seems almost to have a sense of the miracle that has been wrought. The boy who ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... prosperously; there are sweet women to kiss; There are good women to breed. In a golden fog, A large, full-stomached faith in kindliness All over the world, the nation, in a dream Of money and love and sport, hangs at the paps Of well-being, and so Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down Into a rich deliquium ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... play on history's stage eternal, That lurid, partial act of war and peace—of old and new contending, Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long suspense; All past—and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing Victor and vanquished—Lincoln's and Lee's—now thou with them, Man of the mighty day—and equal to the day! Thou from the prairies?—and tangled and many veined and hard has been thy part, To admiration ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... helped me to dress and train my garden-vines. Now and then we renewed our rambles of the morning, heedfully observing the different aspects of the same scenes and object, which had then delighted us, under the mellowing smiles of the sun at its decline. With books, music, and chess, our evenings passed away without our consciousness; and day melted into night, and night departed and gave place to the new-born day, as quietly as if life had, in truth, become to us a great instrument of ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... Magra. The upper valley is beautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hill-sides breaking down into thick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace for nearly an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; but the fruit was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In the still October air the husks above our heads would loosen, and the brown nuts rustle through the foliage, and with a dull short thud, like drops of thunder-rain, break down upon the sod. At the foot of this rich ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Missions." "No, no, indeed," he continued, "they are not green, for greenness implies verdure, and beauty, and there is not a single atom of verdure in their parched and withered up souls." Under the burning satire and mellowing pathos of his tremendous appeal for heathendom, tears welled out from every eye in the house. I leaned over toward the reporter's table; many of the reporters had flung down their pens—they might as well have attempted to report a thunder storm. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... mellowing influence, and leads to the observation and love of nature, while historical pictures stimulate research, and nerve the mind to deeds of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... it," it ran. All the mellowing effects of a good dinner passed away from Roland. He was feverishly irritated. He paid his ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... even with its scant capacity for accretion; it was singularly stale, even in its newness and freshness of material. Unspeakably dreary as it was in shadow, the sunlight visited it in a blind, aching, purposeless way, as if despairing of mellowing its outlines or of even ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sun was mellowing the grey stone of the terrace and enriching the green of the weeds thrusting themselves into life between the uneven flags when she reached Stornham, and passing through the house found Lady Anstruthers sitting there. In sustenance of her effort to keep up ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rode away from her, and she had watched his tall figure disappear into the dusk, she turned back toward the house, and saw it and the world round it with new eyes. The moon shone on the old front, mellowing it to a brownish ivory; the shadows of the trees lay clear on the whitened grass; and in the luminous air colors of sunrise and of moonrise blended, tints of pearl, of gold, and purple. A consecrating beauty lay on all visible things, and spoke to ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... harrow, and with old Doll and Queen—quiet and faithful span—I drove upon the field which I had plowed the previous October, there to plod to and fro behind my drag, while in the sky above my head and around me on the mellowing soil the life of the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... she is mellowing! I told you it would come. The child is turning into a woman—and a bonnie woman she will be too. Dear ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... office-door, are open for all that can possibly come into them; we consider the wealthy as our salary, the poor as our perquisites. What is this, but a picture of your member of parliament ripening into a minister, your patriot mellowing into your placeman? And mark me, Mr. Nabbem! is not the very language of both as similar as the deeds? What is the phrase either of us loves to employ? 'To deliver.' What? 'The Public.' And do not both invariably deliver it of the same thing,—namely, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... warriors in the days of Castilian knighthood and glory. What enchantment hangs about these rude battlements, "rich with the spoils of time!" In looking back upon the ancient days it is fortunate that the mellowing influence of time dims the vision, and we see down the long vista of years as through a softening twilight, else we should behold such harshness as would arouse more of ire than of admiration. The olden time, like the landscape, appears best in ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... way. It was a little bit of the Thames far away from London, with a bank of many-tinted trees on one side, and out beyond a range of low hills, purple in the evening light. In the sky was a rosy sunset glow, melted above into saffron color, and this was reflected in the water, gilding and mellowing the foreground of sedge and water lilies. But what made the picture specially charming was that the artist had really caught the peculiar solemn stillness of evening; merely to look at that quiet, peaceful river brought ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... arranging and re-perusing my notes (perhaps for the purpose of convincing myself that I am not in a madhouse). At present I am lonely and alone. Autumn is coming—already it is mellowing the leaves; and, as I sit brooding in this melancholy little town (and how melancholy the little towns of Germany can be!), I find myself taking no thought for the future, but living under the influence of passing moods, ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... down the city Dagonet danced away; But through the slowly-mellowing avenues And solitary passes of the wood Rode Tristram toward Lyonnesse and the west. Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt With ruby-circled neck, but evermore Past, as a rustle or twitter in the wood Made dull his inner, keen his outer ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... From that great play on history's stage eterne, That lurid, partial act of war and peace—of old and new contending, Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long suspense; All past—and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing, Victor's and vanquish'd—Lincoln's and Lee's—now thou with them, Man of the mighty days—and equal to the days! Thou from the prairies!—tangled and many-vein'd and hard has been thy part, To admiration has ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... from Troy derived, Make merry with rough rhymes and boisterous mirth, Grim masks of hollowed bark assume, invoke Thee with glad hymns, O Bacchus, and to thee Hang puppet-faces on tall pines to swing. Hence every vineyard teems with mellowing fruit, Till hollow vale o'erflows, and gorge profound, Where'er the god hath turned his comely head. Therefore to Bacchus duly will we sing Meet honour with ancestral hymns, and cates And dishes bear him; ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... revealed Himself not in whirlwind nor earthquake nor lightning. He doubtless felt at home among these tempestuous outbreaks. They suit his temper. But something startlingly new came to him in that exquisite "sound of gentle stillness," hushing, awing, mellowing, giving a new conception of the dominant heart of his God. Some of us might well drop things, and take a run ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... land to the depth of two feet, or, better still, run a plow through it, if the size of the place warrants. Work in plenty of well-rotted manure, and during the winter the frost and snow will greatly improve conditions, killing the weeds, and mellowing the soil as ...
— Making a Lawn • Luke Joseph Doogue
... the rising ground, and one of them, at least, gazed anxiously into the purple shadows now mellowing the gray monotony of the plateau. The point where the Du Vallon left the main road was invisible from where they stood. Marigny had laid his plans with skill, so his humorous treatment of their plight was not marred by any lurking fear of ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... and the painful and choking sensations of sympathy, compassion, regret, admiration, all uniting, all mellowing into one fearful hope for his acquittal, made themselves felt through ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be So when the faithful pencil has designed Some bright idea of the master's mind Where a new world leaps out at his command And ready nature waits upon his hand When the ripe colors soften and unite And sweetly melt into just shade and light When mellowing years their full perfection give And each bold figure just begins to live The treacherous colors the fair art betray And all the bright ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... nightmare. It would seem as if he had consoled himself by frequent appliances to the bottle; it would even seem that (toward the end) he had ceased to depend on Joseph's frugal generosity and called for the flagon on his own account. The effect, at least, of some mellowing influence was visible in the record: Abbas became suddenly a willing witness; he began to volunteer disclosures; and Julia had just looked up from her seam with something like a smile, when Morris ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... artist—the two are indissolubly fused—and the result of such just treatment of whatever lowly themes or characters we can but love and loyally approve with all our human hearts. Such masters necessarily are rare, and such ripe perfecting as is here attained may be in part the mellowing result of age and long observation, though it can be based upon the wisest, purest spirit of the man as ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... children see their heirs, Have numberless, diverging cares! Less pure for them affection glows,— Less of intrinsic joy bestows, Less mellowing, less enlivening, flows! Oh! such not even could divine A moment's tenderness like mine! Had he been destin'd to a throne, His little darling self alone, Bereft of station, grandeur, aught But life and virtue, love and thought, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... this night together with me canst thou rest thee Here on the verdant leaves; for us there are mellowing apples, Chestnuts soft to the touch, and clouted cream in abundance; And the high roofs now of the villages smoke in the distance, And from the lofty mountains are falling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... whole question of the imitative use of language. In national literatures many a passage, poetry or prose, is heightened in effect by assonance, alliteration, a certain movement or rhythm of phrase. Subtle suggestion slides in sound through the ear and falls with mellowing cadence into the heart. Soothed senses murmur their own music to the mind; the lullaby lilt of the lay swells full the linked sweetness ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... up but not yet stripped for the long day's race to the west. The eastern skies still gleamed through a faery haze with the soft iridescence of a young ormer shell, the tender pinks and greens and golds of the new day's birth-chamber mellowing upwards into the glorious blue of a ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... My will, but Thine be done" - So spake the Son. Be this our charm, mellowing Earth's ruder noise Of griefs and joys: That we may cling for ever to Thy ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble |
