"Rhythm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... turkey trot and the tango, things have changed however. No one is too stout, too old or too clumsy to go walking solemnly round, in or out of time to the music. I confess to a consciousness of absurdity when, to the exciting rhythm of Tres Moutard, I back Mrs. Jones slowly down the room ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... classical period of German literature was a time of youthful freshness, of pure harmony, plunged in verse and song, full of the richest tones and the noblest rhythm, so that rhyme and song alone must be looked for as the form of poetic creations. Accordingly it had no proper prose. Like our own youth, it was a happy, free, and true youth, it knew no prose; like us it dreamed to speechless ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... stream is the river of Time, As it runs through the realm of tears, With a faultless rhythm and a musical rhyme, And a boundless sweep and a surge sublime, As it blends with ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... a Methodist hymn, far above his comprehension in point of language, but of which the swinging rhythm had caught his ear, and which he repeated with all the developed cadence of a member of parliament. When Margaret had duly applauded, Nicholas called for another, and yet another, much to her surprise, as she found him thus oddly and unconsciously ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the table in the dining room. Jarvis Alexander Mackworth sat on the piano-stool, again playing the piano in rhythm rather than in accompaniment with the records ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... poet has impressively said, "Paris was proclaiming to the world in it somewhat of the pent-up fire and fury of her nature, the bitterness of her heart, the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and political repression. It is an execration in rhythm,—a dance of fiends, which Paris has invented to express in license what she ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... cacophony. Of these the former delighted, even enraptured him, while he avoided the latter, even when harmonically justified, as much as possible. Instead of accenting a composition in accordance with sense and rhythm, he exaggerated and prolonged the notes and intervals that were pleasing to his ear; he did not even hesitate to repeat them arbitrarily, when an expression of ecstasy frequently passed over his face. Since he disposed of the dissonances ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a section of a river in which there is a number of villages of one tribe or of friendly tribes, its approach may be signalled throughout the district by the beating of the TAWAK. The same peculiar rhythm is used for this purpose by all the tribes, though it probably has been copied from the Kayans by all the others. It consists in a rapid series of strokes of increasing rate upon the boss, followed by one long deep note, and two ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... as lightly as possible. An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible. For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an invaluable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes. Lord Dunsany, perhaps the greatest living prose artist, derived nearly all of his stylistic ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Schelling. "The only real existence," he said, "is the relation; subject and object, which seem contradictory, are really one,—not one in the sense of Schelling, as opposite poles of the same absolute existence, but one as the relation itself forms the very idea. Not but what in the threefold rhythm of universal existence there are affinities with the three ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... time. Scores of waitresses, in pale green and white, moved to and fro like an alien and mercenary population. The heat, the stir, the hum, and the clatter were terrific. And from on high descended thin, strident music in a rapid and monotonous rhythm. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... which a regiment of tall Highlanders moves behind its music, solemn and inevitable, like a natural phenomenon. Who that has seen it can forget the drum-major pacing in front, the drummers' tiger-skins, the pipers' swinging plaids, the strange elastic rhythm of the whole regiment footing it in time—and the bang of the drum, when the brasses cease, and the shrill pipes take up the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... exactly two-twenty, the Pennington eleven trotted, unheralded, onto the field and, tossing off their blue Indian blankets, began to run through some snappy signal work, from the Pennington stands a mass of red and blue rose and fell in perfect rhythm to the tune of "The ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... just God afford any longer to be patient? Time has been obliterated in the last four years; space and centuries telescoped; the sufferings of a century compressed into a few cycles of months. No, there is something wrong, some break in the rhythm of the universe, or those grotesque ghouls who started the whole thing, those full-bodied, cold-blooded hangmen, who for forty years have been sitting back planning the future of men and women as they planned the cards of their sniggering skat games, would awake to a sun dripping ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... attached a great many emotions and extraneous incidents known to nobody but myself. My old poetic favourites have been lying in various corners of my brain for forty or fifty years; I know every turn, rhyme and rhythm of them; and as they have served my need and alleviated my sorrow so long, I do not intend to give them many fellow-lodgers more. I do not know at what particular time literary nausea sets in, but Solomon had it when he said that of the making of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the ground of antiquity, we should rather be thinking of them that they were invented at a time when unison singing was cultivated in the highest perfection, so much so that a large number of these tunes are, on account of their elaborate and advanced rhythm, not only far above the most intelligent taste of the minds with which we have to deal, but are also so difficult of execution that there are few trained choirs in the country that could render them well. To the simpler tunes, however, these objections do not apply: in fact there are only ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... to give a few lines of the original hymn of Bernard of Clugny, a Breton monk of English parentage of the 12th century—"the sweetest of all the hymns of heavenly homesickness of the soul," and for generations one of the most familiar, through translations, in many languages. The rhyme and rhythm are so difficult, that the author was able to master it, he believed, only by ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed. He sat by John Thornton's fire, a broad-breasted dog, white-fanged and long-furred; but behind him were the shades of all manner of dogs, half-wolves and wild wolves, urgent ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... to look straight before her at the glowing evening sky, and so did he. The crickets and katydids had commenced their chorus and the tree-toads their long rhythm. Fire-flies flitted in the uncertain light. There came from the woods the call of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... raising his head, sniffed the night air. The Indian stepped from his rock and stood alert with his eyes on the reach of the back-trail. And then softly, almost inaudibly to the ears of the girl came the sound of horses' hoofs pounding the trail in monotonous rhythm. ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... eyes and gazed at Costello, and in her gaze was that trust of the humble in the proud, the gentle in the violent, which has been the tragedy of woman from the beginning. Costello led her among the dancers, and they were soon drawn into the rhythm of the Pavane, that stately dance which, with the Saraband, the Gallead, and the Morrice dances, had driven out, among all but the most Irish of the gentry, the quicker rhythms of the verse-interwoven, pantomimic dances of earlier days; and while they danced there came over them the unutterable ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... sleeplessness, but their beauty is affirmed by the general voice of mankind. These three noises appear to have an infinite capacity for giving us pleasure—a capacity, probably, beyond that of any music of instruments. It may be that on hearing them we become a part of some universal music, and that the rhythm of wave, bird and insect echoes in some way the rhythm of our own breath and blood. Man is in love with life and these are the millionfold chorus of life—the magnified echo of his own pleasure in being alive. At the same time, our pleasure in the hum of insects is also, I think, a pleasure of reminiscence. ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... had their beauty for her, but those of the flowers had far the most. She had never noted any flowers in her life before, save those she strung together for the Zephyrs. Her youth was a military ballad, rhymed vivaciously to the rhythm of the Pas de Charge; but other or softer poetry had never by any chance touched her until now—now that in her tiny, bronzed, war-hardened palms lay the while foliage, the delicate art-trifles of this Chasseur, who bartered his talent to get a touch of ice for ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... this poem a pleasant rhythm and a clearness of meaning that is absent from much good poetry. Chesterton has caught the wild romantic background of the time when the King of England could play a harp in the camp of his enemies; when he could, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... that they meet the child's natural wants in a truly wonderful manner, and that used in connection with conversations and stories and games they address and develop his love of movement and his love of rhythm; his desire to touch and handle, to play and work (to be busy), and his curiosity to know; his instincts of construction and comparison, his fondness for gardening and digging in the earth; his social impulse, and finally ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... pueblo with light. At every ato the dance circle was started in its swing, and barely ceased for a month. A group of eight or ten men formed, as is shown in Pl. CXXXI, and danced contraclockwise around and around the small circle. Each dancer beat his blood and emotions into sympathetic rhythm on his gangsa, and each entered intently yet joyfully into the spirit of the occasion — they had defeated an enemy in the way they ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... the current that had marked the first half of the fiercely contested race, both young crews seemed to be keeping in perfect rhythm with the movements of their coxswains. And doubtless those shrewd leaders were keenly on the alert for any advantage that might come to them through either a quickening of the pace, if they thought the rowers capable of standing it, or some other change ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... perfection was not mechanical, was not attained without labour and care. In Dr. John Brown's works, in his essay on Thackeray, there is an example of a proof- sheet on which the master has made corrections, and those corrections bring the passage up to his accustomed level, to the originality of his rhythm. Here is ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... shrivelled grey pope, Interrupting the speaker, "The harrow went smoothly Enough, till it happened To strike on a stone, Then it swerved of a sudden. In telling a story Don't leave an odd word out 620 And alter the rhythm! Now, if you knew Ermil You knew his young brother, Knew Mityenka, ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... steps out of the door. There is quick rhythm of marching feet as the departing regiment passes not very far ...
— War Brides: A Play in One Act • Marion Craig Wentworth
... marvellous music of Shelley's verse we need not dwell, except to note that he avoids that metronomic beat of rhythm which Edgar Poe introduced into modern lyric measures, as Pope introduced it into the rhyming heroics of his day. Our varied metres are becoming as painfully over-polished as Pope's one metre. Shelley could at need sacrifice ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... unfathomable sea of the universal will. If I retire from the world upon my own private feelings, I am still short of the true life, for I am asserting myself against the world. I should seek a sense of unison with a world whose deeper heart-beats I may learn to feel and adopt as the rhythm of my own. The folly of willing for one's private self is the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... bleeding before us? Every gift, however small, from a loyal soul, will be greeted, every good giver welcomed. Let us listen to the most sublime of all music, the great heart-throbs of a free people chiming together in the vigorous rhythm of the Divine charities. Let our nation comprehend from within the march of its vast destinies, its true and ever-growing force in the love and self-sacrifice of its children. Let the benediction of our American ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... little changes—a phrase made more musical, a word moved from one place to another, some small banality tracked down and excised, a brilliant adjective inserted, the plan altered in small ways, the rhythm of it made more delicate and agreeable. Here, in "The Line of Love," there is another curious example of his high capacity for revision. It is not only that the book, once standing isolated, has been brought into the Cabellian canon, and so related ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Montaigne says: "Every place of retirement requires a Walk. My thoughts sleep if I sit still; my Fancy does not go by itself, as it goes when my Legs move it." What Montaigne seems to mean is that we love rhythm. Body and mind must move together in harmony. So it is with the Mohammedan over the Koran, and the Rabbi over the Talmud. Jews sway at prayer for the same reason. Movement of the body is not a mere mannerism; it is part of the emotion, like the ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... rhythm of her dancing! Lithe with the jaguar's grace, Ah, the sweet fire of her glancing, The love-litten lure of her face! And ah, in my fierce arms to hold her This strange scarlet flower of the South. Close to my heart-beat to fold her Drinking the wine ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... aspirations. Their deportment is very nice, but it is not always genteel." Here Elizabeth had a real inspiration. A quotation from Shelley's "Skylark" came into her mind. John and Charles Stuart had memorized it one evening, and the glorious rhythm of it had sung itself into her soul. There were some things one could not help learning. Then, too, as it was from the Fourth Reader, Elizabeth felt that Miss Hillary would see that she was familiar with that book and feel assured she was ready for it. So she wrote such stanzas as she ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... not for lack of trying. And she could not ask you back to her room, for it was "not very clean, I'm afraid," so she must catch you in the passage, or take a chair in Hyde Park to explain her philosophy. The rhythm of the soul depends on it— ("how rude the little boys are!" she would say), and Mr. Asquith's Irish policy, and Shakespeare comes in, "and Queen Alexandra most graciously once acknowledged a copy of my pamphlet," she would say, waving the little boys magnificently away. But she needs ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... knew how, for her own music had been most desultory, and nobody had ever cared whether she practiced or not. She had been allowed to ramble among the great masters for the most part unconducted, with the meagerest technique, and her own interpretation. She could read well and her sense of time and rhythm were natural, else she would have made worse work of it than she did. But she forthwith set herself to practicing, realizing that it might yet stand her in good stead since she had to earn ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... that it was as poor old hard-working Don he moved toward her. But there was magic in her lithe young body; there was magic in her warm hand; there was magic in her swimming eyes. As he fell into the rhythm of the music and breathed the incense of her hair, he was whirled into another world—a world of laughter and melody and care-free fairies. But the two most beautiful fairies of all were her two beautiful eyes, which urged him to dance faster and faster, and which left ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... radiance a shadow loomed—the shadow of the Princess, still seated, still patient, still with her hands in her lap. The rumble of the wheels, the slow rocking of my bed beneath me, fitted themselves to the intermittent flash of the stars, and beat out a rhythm in my memory—a rhythm, and by degrees the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... there the night is close, and there Darkness is cold and strange and bare; And the secret deeps are whisperless; And rhythm is all deliciousness; And joy is in the throbbing tide, Whose intricate fingers beat and glide In felt bewildering harmonies Of trembling touch; and music is The exquisite knocking of the blood. Space is no more, under ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... personality in favor of his, so that you may become, as nearly as possible, the person whom it is your business to represent. Naturally, if you have any ear at all, your sentences will tend to fall into the rhythm of his style; and if you have any temperament (whatever that may be) your imagined mood will diffuse an ineluctable aroma ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... his mouth, and tried to bite. The big man struggled with both. The bulky form of the lady was swung back and forth by his cunning arm; and one heard the crowd stand by, press in, rush back, in rhythm to the movements of the battlers. A moment later the lady was down and out. A sudden blow at the breast from the great elbow. I heard her fall.... I heard ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot help giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them, and should wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some slight idea of the language, the measure, and the rhythm. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... and purity incarnate—that is what she seemed; and what she was. "La plus forte des forces est un coeur innocent," said Victor Hugo—and if you translate this literally into English, it comes to exactly the same, both in rhythm and sense. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... with much {47} favour. We cannot all have the momentous question put in the witching hour of moonlight, or in the suggestive stillness of a summer's eve, but the tactful man will know when to speak, and how to turn dull prose into the sweetest rhythm. ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... sort of deceptive semblance of it —whereas it is only under the magic of the Third that that defect would disappear. Also, without doubt, it is the Third Degree that contributes another remarkable specialty to Christian Science: viz., ease and flow and lavishness of words, and rhythm and swing and smoothness. There must be ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of both physical and mental power. Not only the voluntary muscles become impotent, but the involuntary ones lose in effectiveness. Digestion is partly or wholly suspended. "Scared stiff" is a popular and truthful expression. The bodily rhythm is lost, the breathing becomes jerky and the heart beats out ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... shared the income of the shop with her without the folly of marriage, but Valdoreme has strange, barbaric notions which were not overturnable by civilised reason. Still my action was not wholly mercenary, nor indeed mainly so. There was a rhythm about her name that pleased me. Then she is a Russian, and my country and hers were at that moment in each other's arms, so I proposed to Valdoreme that we follow the national example. But, alas! ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... skyward, studying the clouds; when he sat with Virginia and the Mother under the evening lamp or with feet on the fender gazed into the heart of the red embers, or when he lay in his bed in the quiet and dark—wherever he was, whatever he did, the phrases and the rhythm of the new poem were filtering through his sub-consciousness, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... was thrilling, if you like, in spite of the halting rhythm. And yet, even at that supreme moment, the vision of the umbrella and the rather shabby hat would crop up again, and Austin didn't quite know whether to let himself be thrilled or to lean back and roar. The conspiracy burst out a few minutes ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... is composed, follow in rhythmic order. The eye finds in this order, in the periodical return of the same forms, what the ear distinguishes in the cadenced succession of sounds and concords. Can we then admit a doubt that the feeling of rhythm manifests itself in man at the first dawn of civilization, and in the rudest essays of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... a roar, an irresistible swaying, a rattle of musket ramrods, a rhythm of marching feet, and the grating of heavy iron-bound wheels. Seven men appeared in sight above the heads, clinging to each other for support, and being drawn slowly along. The little worsted balls on the infantry ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... seemed more than ever alone. The green space was bare around her as if cleared by the sweep of her gown. She moved quietly, with a long and even undulation, a yielding of her whole body to the rhythm of her feet. She had reached the far end of the lawn as Lucy neared her, and he looked for her ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... telescope. The thing was visible to the naked eye. No power could save them! Carr hurled himself at the guard and tore at the hairy paw which gripped the lever. The throbbing of strange energies filled the air of the room, and Carr's brain pulsed with the maddening rhythm. The red discharge appeared at the projections of the control panels. He forgot the fleet of the Llotta, forgot the menace to his own world. Only Ora mattered now, and he had not the power ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... writers Thomas De Quincey must be given the palm for rhythmical prose. He is as stately as Milton, with more than Milton's command of rhythm. If you read aloud his best passages, which are written in what he calls his bravura style, you have a near approach to the music of the organ. De Quincey was so nice a judge of words, he knew so well how to balance his periods, that one of his sentences ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... selected for a seat was a little damp, but he thought nothing of it, and lighting his pipe began sketching. He worked for an hour, putting the weed-draped rocks and long swells that broke over them into his book, and then, lulled perhaps by the monotonous rhythm of the ocean, lay back on the cushions and fell asleep. The next he knew he was awakened by a cold sensation and found the tide had risen until it wet his feet. Hastily getting up, he took the cushions and returned to where he had left the boat, only to find it had disappeared. The rising tide ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... answer. He led the way. And the others followed in a strange procession. Somehow, automatically, they fell into single file, and they moved on their magnetic-soled slippers toward a passage tube in one wall. Their slipper soles clanked and clicked in an erratic rhythm. Brent walked with the mincing steps necessary for movement in weightlessness. The others imitated him. Their hands no longer hung naturally by their sides, but tended to make extravagant gestures with the slightest muscular impulse. They swayed ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... severance had come between them. Harry Feversham watched Ethne laugh and talk as though she had never a care, and was perpetually surprised, taking no thought that he wore the like mask of gaiety himself. When she swung past him the light rhythm of her feet almost persuaded him that her heart was in the dance. It seemed that she could even command the colour upon her cheeks. Thus they both wore brave faces as she had bidden. They even danced together. But all the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling. I don't know that you must break any bones in a poet's mechanism before his thought can dance in rhythm, but read your Milton and see what training, what patient labor, it took before he could shape our common speech into his ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... complete investigation of whose members constitutes the further business of the Science of Knowledge as a theory of the nature of reason. In this the Science of Knowledge employs a method which, by its rhythm of analysis and synthesis, development and reconciliation of opposites, became the model of Hegel's dialectic method. The synthesis described in the third principle, although it balances thesis and antithesis and unites them in itself, still contains contrary elements, in order to whose combination ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... is a strong, simple melody, made on the intervals of the diatonic scale, square-cut in rhythm, firm and dignified, and, like the mastersingers, complacent and a trifle pompous in stride. The three melodies which are presented in opposition to the spirit represented by the mastersingers and their typical music, are disclosed by a study of the comedy to be associated ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... its note. Even as we sat there its languorous, passionate rhythm passed away, to be succeeded by the quicker, cleaner notes of some old martial music. It came to me like a cold douche. I remembered that I had been—was still—a soldier. I remembered that my word was pledged to certain undertakings, and that after all I was fighting on her side. The momentary ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... some one started the song with the chorus containing the words: "They'll never go for England, because England's got the dibs." This spread like a line of fire in dry grass, and in a moment the vast crowd was rocking to the jingling rhythm of the song, the summer air quivering to the volume of its ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... was his invariable custom to get up when any one came into a room; and when he advanced to meet them, it might certainly have been said that, in his case, the tail literally wagged the dog, for his hind-quarters were moved from the middle of his back and went in rhythm with the tail. His looks were perfect. Being by Pagan I., he possessed not only eyes set in black and a coal-black snout, but also that further characteristic of dogs of his date, the blackest of black ears—a feature now entirely lost in the case ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... instinct with grace, and reserved rather than boisterous. If any such there be, let them know at once that they are hopelessly old-fashioned. The New Poetry in its highest expression banishes form, regularity and rhythm, and treats rhyme with unexampled barbarity. Here and there, it is true, rhymes get paired off quite happily in the conventional manner, but directly afterwards you may come upon a poor weak little rhyme who will cry in vain for his mate through half a dozen interloping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... this syncopation is evident in the apparent recognition, and even reproduction in reading aloud, of a regularity of rhythm where none really exists; as when protracted reading or listening develops or seems to develop a monotonous sing-song. But this phenomenon cannot be explained briefly, and the details must be omitted here.[11] In verse also syncopation frequently ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... hidden foe, ready at a moment's notice to charge into the blackness that lay engulfed in those dreary passes. But the enemy did not wait for them. As the Eighth Division advanced, making the rocky headlands ring with the rhythm of their martial tread, the Boers fell back like driven deer, and the bugle spoke to the Scottish bagpipe until the silent hills gave tongue, and echo answered echo until the wearied ear sickened for silence. Onward we swept, until Commando Nek lay like a grinning ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... and leaned out for a brief refreshment, what a delightful confusion of sounds met his ear! Pianos rolled noisily up and down, ploughing one through the other, beating one against the other, key to key, rhythm to rhythm, each in a clamorous despair at being unable to raise its voice above the rest, at having to form part of this jumble of discord: some so near at hand or so directly opposite that, none the less, it was occasionally possible to follow them through the persistent ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... nineteenth century; in whom some strange inherited instinct had planted a definite, complete, and elaborately-finished conception of what the ever-beloved shape of woman should be—from the way the hair should grow on her brow and her temples and the nape of her neck, down to the very rhythm that should regulate the length and curve and position of every single individual toe! and who had found, to his pride and delight, that his preconceived ideal was as near to that of Phidias as if he had lived in the time of ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... harmonious arrangement of form and colour. In other words, his prose-poems should be compared to the paintings which aim at an effect analogous to that of stately pieces of music. Milton is the poet whom he seems to regard with the sincerest admiration; and he apparently wishes to emulate the majestic rhythm of the 'God-gifted organ-voice of England.' Or we may, perhaps, admit some analogy between his prose and the poetry of Keats, though it is remarkable that he speaks with very scant appreciation of his contemporary. The 'Ode to a Nightingale,' with ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the bridal, might have turned older and wiser heads; but what moved the boy, and set wonderful joy pictures flitting before his vision, was the rapid jingle of the frequent rhymes and the swing of the rhythm. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... these things. In his ears was but one sound, the baying of the wolf-pack on the hunt. He could almost see them come, red tongues slavering between white fangs, gray shoulders rising and falling in uneven rhythm, great, gray brushes flowing straight out behind... He looked back. They had gained; they traveled almost two feet to his one. Yet, if there were no accident it was possible he could reach ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... melancholy was the music made by the running waters. Never had the artist heard such music, and in the luminous haze of his mind it seemed familiar. Three tones, three Gs in the treble and in octaves, sounded clear to him; and again and once more they were heard in doubled rhythm. A rippling prelude rained upon the meadows and Mychowski lay perfectly entranced. He knew what was coming and knew not the music. Then a melody fell from the trees as they whispered over the banks of the brook ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... had known in a dream was no more in reality than a cold strange dwelling; all was there, the whitewash, the thatch, the delft on the dresser, but as a home it was stillborn. The turf did not burn well and the swallows shunned the eaves, feeling, in nature's occult way, that the essential rhythm was wanting. Nor would bees be happy in the skips, but must swarm otherward. One would have said the house was built on some ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Schroder-Devrient, yet the exceptional precision, fire, and richly organised rendering of the whole was new to me. I gained a fresh insight into the peculiar dignity of big theatrical representations, which in their several parts could, by well-accentuated rhythm, be made to attain the highest pinnacle of art. This extraordinarily distinct impression took a drastic hold of me, and above all served to guide me in my conception of Rienzi, so that, speaking from an artistic point of view, Berlin may be said to have ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... system?—that is the question which is now being solved in blood and agony and tears on the battlefields of the Old World. The answer given by the New World has never been in doubt, but its clarion note was necessarily withheld in all its magnificent rhythm until President Wilson delivered his Message to Congress last April. I have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Wilson's utterance will become immortal. It is a new declaration of the Rights of Man, but ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... as men pray continually without reason for things that can but come in a due order. I still went forward a little, because when I sat down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune; and because my feet, going painfully and slowly, yet gave a little balance and rhythm to the movement ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... require to be spoken to twice before answering a question, as though his thoughts were far away; would even hum to himself as though entirely alone; or put the cap to his insolence by taking a book from his pocket and reading, sometimes even marking the rhythm of a verse aloud. So from day to day there was growing a hatred for the duke in Danvers by reason of his jealousy and the accumulative discourtesy which he was ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... a habit, the intellectual level rises rapidly, and organized order causes good conduct to become a habit. Children then work with order, perseverance, and discipline, persistently and naturally; the permanent, calm, and vivifying work of the physical organism resembles the respiratory rhythm. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... unlimited orders for Constitutions, to be filled up and presented after the domination of Napoleon was destroyed, all classes hastened, fervid with hope and anti-Gallic feeling, to offer their best men for the War of Liberation. Then the poets took again their rhythm from an air vibrating with the cannon's pulse. There was Germanic unity for a while, fed upon expectation and the smoke of successful fields. Most of the songs of this period have been already translated. Ruckert, in a series of verses which he called ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in time to the rhythm. She was not sure whether a rill was a fountain or a stream, so she decided, as there was no dictionary convenient, to think of it as like the creek where it crossed the road at the foot ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... ground, it seemed, chanting the monotonous cadence of a hoisting song: Oh ... oh ... isa! and a number of boys would tug at the mast they were stepping, pulling all together at the proper beat in the sleepy rhythm. It was dinner time; and tangle-haired women kept calling in shrill notes from the galley doors; for the "cats" were off gadding in the barn, looking at the oxen. In every direction the heavy mallets of calkers could be heard hammering away in deadening regularity. And ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of true and uncultivated genius." The real Burns, though indeed a genius of song, was far better read than the expectant world wished to believe, particularly in those whom he called his "bosom favorites," the sentimentalists Mackenzie and Sterne; and his sense of rhythm and melody had been trained by his emulation of earlier Scotch lyricists, whose lilting cadences flow towards him as highland rills to the gathering torrent. Sung to the notes of his native tunes, and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... them in an excellent imitation of Aytoun, but on the opposite side. In view of his own later developments such a line as "Drive the trembling Papists backwards" has an ironic humour. But one wonders what Aytoun himself would have made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words, turned his hero into a traitor ("false Montrose") and his traitor Argyll into a hero! I have left the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... by a union of all elements to produce perfect harmony. The Harmonist of the Renaissance is his title. And this harmony extended to a blending of thought, form, and expression, heightening or modifying every element until they ran together with such rhythm that it could not be seen where one left off and another began. He was the very opposite of Michael Angelo. The art of the latter was an expression of individual power and was purely subjective. Raphael's art ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... after a prayer, they entered upon the peculiar method of their service. Round and round the room they trooped in two large circles, sister following sister, brother brother, keeping time with their hanging hands to the rhythm of the hymn. Clustered in the centre was a little knot of men and women, the high dignitaries, who seemed to lead the singing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... how I looked. He would look at me presently, he said, and decide. Mrs. Bliss skimmed by us with nods and smiles; as she vanished our eyes followed her, and we talked vaguely on various matters, sounding ourselves and each other. When a furious redowa set in which cut our conversation into rhythm he pushed up the window and ...
— Lemorne Versus Huell • Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
... along at no greater speed, but with better swing and rhythm. They were, in fact, perfect soldiers—-the best ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... reached the door, he found himself walking in rhythm to the music, his head swaying. It came slowly, insidiously; before he was aware, his body no longer obeyed his will. Muscles refused to move other than in coordination with the music. His arm relaxed, the heat-rod ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... him, that seemed to ooze from his baton; that psychic something that compelled the player to feel as his director felt—the force we call magnetism. The firmness of mouth showed that the determination to dominate was still there, but the absence of that mental power left only the automatic rhythm and swing, sans heart, sans soul, sans feeling. The beat was the beat of the finely trained academic conductor, but the genius of it was gone. The ghost of a departed Von Barwig was beating time for the Von Barwig that had ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... of the playing was high, and, after a somewhat nervous opening (and perhaps just a few affectations of the fourth-wall school), the piece swung into a pleasant rhythm. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... the living doing of the plant from stage to stage we become aware of a significant rhythm in its total life cycle. This, when first discovered by Goethe, gave him the key to an understanding of nature's general procedure in building living organisms, and in maintaining ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... well on the end of his oar, he ran a serious risk of falling backwards after the manner of beginners who catch crabs. The side swoops of the Tortoise were equally trying. They seemed to Frank to disturb hopelessly the whole rhythm of the rowing. Nothing but the encouragement which came to him from Miss Rutherford's esoteric slang kept him from losing his temper. He could not have been greatly blamed if he had lost it. It was after three o'clock. He had breakfasted, meagrely, on bread ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... there we fear is the rub. The character of music! That seems to have been forgotten. If all these melodies be adapted to their original aims, can they be suited to new ones so different? Is there really in musical form, rhythm, melody, and harmony, no capacity for any real expression? Will the same tune do as well for a dance as for a prayer, for a moonlight serenade as for ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... back angrily, inspecting its mechanism in the manner of a mother with a wayward son and began again. There was desperate determination in his shoulders as he added his forward thrust to the protesting rhythm. The machine went at the grass like a bulldog attacking a borzoi: it bit, chewed, held on. It cut a new six inches readily, another foot slowly—and then with jolts and misfires and loud imprecations from the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... was all over now. They were safely before the house, with the colt lying a little apart from his mother—regarding her with curious intentness—and with Felipe bustling about the team and now and again bursting out in song of questionable melody and rhythm. Felipe was preparing the horses for the corral at the rear of the house, and soon he flung aside the harness and seized each of the horses by ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... recognize a familiar spirit, "Do you know how to tango? . . ." The tango had taken possession of the world. It was the heroic hymn of a humanity that was suddenly concentrating its aspirations on the harmonious rhythm of the thigh joints, measuring its intelligence by the agility of its feet. An incoherent and monotonous music of African inspiration was satisfying the artistic ideals of a society that required nothing better. The world was dancing . . . ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Sachems stood, tall and motionless, behind the altar; the drumming never ceased, and from around the massed circle rose a low sing-song chant, keeping time to the hollow rhythm of ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... henceforth the whole serious production of Latin poetry for centuries was a continuous effort to master and adapt Greek structure and versification; the Odyssey of Livius was the first and, with one notable exception, almost the last sustained attempt to use the native forms of Italian rhythm towards any large achievement; this current thereafter sets underground, and only emerges again at the end of the classical period. It is a curious and significant fact that the attempt such as it was, was made not by a native, but by ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... enter, he saw Gro "tall and slender in the pale light." "Let me out, let me out!" she begged. "I am afraid here below—not of you—but of myself and of the dark—let me out!" "For the first time Soelver heard a soft rhythm in this voice smooth as steel. A soft breath breathed itself in her entreaty. He became a man, a protector and felt his power grow ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... London, the matter is easy as the height will compare, roughly speaking, with Westminster Abbey. The only change in text I should adopt is to avoid the constant enumeration of the list of rulers and the musical instruments. In doing this, I am aware that I am sacrificing something of beauty in the rhythm, but, on the other hand, for narrative purpose the interest is not broken. The first time the announcement is made, that is, by the Herald, it should be in a perfectly loud, clear and toneless voice, such as you would naturally use when shouting through a ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... was most exquisite dancing by Bucephalus, and by Caesar, whose steppings were in perfect rhythm to the music. Then the latter turned in a circle to the right or the left and walked around defining the figure eight, just as any one in the audience chose to request; and Abdallah came in with a string of bells around ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... barcaruola, a boat-song) properly a musical term for the songs sung by the Venetian gondoliers, and hence for an instrumental or vocal composition, generally in 6-8 time, written in imitation of their characteristic rhythm. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... allied [Teutonic] troops in the nights preceding the attack had pushed forward closer to the enemy and had assumed positions in readiness for the forward rush. In the night from May 1 to 2 the artillery fired in slow rhythm at the enemy's positions. Pauses in the fire served the pioneers for cutting the wire entanglements. On the 2d of May at 6 A.M. an overwhelming artillery fire, including field guns and running up to the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of the poet was filled with such strange, mystic beauty which thus found expression in rhythm and song, for Acadia has an enchantment all its own and can best be interpreted by the diviner thought of ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... conceptions. Many contain archaic expressions, for which the shaman can assign a meaning, but whose etymology cannot now be learned; and some embody obsolete words whose meaning is lost even to the priesthood. There are many vocables known to be meaningless and recited merely to fill out the rhythm or to give a dignified length to the song. For the same reasons a meaningless syllable is often added or a ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... was a startling one; the forte pedal was held down throughout; the big chords were crashed and banged with all the strength a pair of twelve-year-old arms could put into them; and wrong notes were freely scattered. Still, rhythm and melody were well marked, and there was no mistaking the ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... of the earth, insensible to pain, bloodless. We will not reproach the poet for these mistakes; they were then generally believed, and were perpetuated long afterwards, until the exploring eye of scientific observation was directed upon them. And in minor poetry, whose principal merit lies in rhythm and harmony, we must not look at things ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... or nearly so, an abstract should be made of it, and a rough draught of the whole work put down, not yet distributed into its parts; the detailed arrangement should then be introduced, after which adornment may be added, the diction receive its colour, the phrasing and rhythm be perfected. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... song it could be called, that had only a wild rhythm, and flowed forth in the fitful measure of a wind-harp, did not clothe itself in the sharp brilliancy of the Italian tongue. The words, so far as they could be distinguished, were German, and therefore unintelligible ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on this occasion. He consulted a Russian lady whom he met at the hotel, on the names he was introducing in 'Ivan Ivanovitch'. It would be interesting to know what suggestions or corrections she made, and how far they adapted themselves to the rhythm already established, or compelled changes in it; but the one alternative would as little have troubled him as the other. Mrs. Browning told Mr. Prinsep that her husband could never alter the wording of a poem without rewriting it, indeed, practically converting it into another; though he more than ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... smitten the King's heart to remember that the tender poet, whose rhythm none could appreciate better than he, was also the sturdy Puritan pamphleteer whose blows had thwacked so terribly upon the last props that held up his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... probably by many such. How, why, and wherefore—I catch your crowd of questions in advance—we need not seek exactly to discover, although the answer of no uncertain kind, I hear within the stillness of a heart that has learned to beat to a deeper, sweeter rhythm ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood |
