"Tuneful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when with joy we sung, Were wont their tuneful parts to bear, With silent strings, neglected hung, On willow trees, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... Harmony, from heavenly Harmony This universal frame began: When nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high Arise, ye more than dead! Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry In order to their stations leap, And Music's power obey. From harmony, from heavenly harmony This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... these poems of the lights That now run over them, nor brief the doubt In my own breast if such should interrupt (Or follow so irreverently) the voice Of Attic men, of women such as thou, Of sages no less sage than heretofore, Of pleaders no less eloquent, of souls Tender no less, or tuneful, or devout. Unvalued, even by myself, are they,— Myself, who reared them; but a high command Marshalled them in their station; here they are; Look round; see what supports these parasites. Stinted in growth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... did her tender heart rejoice, What prayers she then preferred, That she might with her tuneful ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... then, let hardy poets sing, And be her tuneful laureates and upholders, Who do not feel as if they had a ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform singing The Sweet By-and-By with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... but a touch—the lightest breath of natural feeling that broke up the hot crust, that shut down the fountain of tears—Rosa's voice, tuneful and sad as a nightingale's, chanting the border-lays she ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... gold of the summer about us floats, Soft melody crowneth the haze Of the yellow ether with choral notes Through these tuneful autumn days. Speak, sphinx of the hearthstone, cricket dear! Is the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... offered to a thirsty fair (His words half-drowned amid those thunders tuneful) Some frozen viand (there were many there), A tooth-ache ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... high The tuneful village choir, With flute, bassoon, and clarionet, Their notes rose ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... things spake to us of Thee, for the hand of a Father made all. Forgive us if we have loved life too well; we have always felt that the rhythmed pulse of our own hearts throbbed but in obedience to Thy tuneful laws! Loving our fellow men, we have labored to awake them to a sense of Thy tenderness, O Creator of Love and of Beauty, so unsparingly casting the ever-new glories around them! Father, we have loved Thee ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... if you're desirous of attaining Pre-eminence in places where they play, Don't supply the smallest spoonful of the pleasing or the tuneful Or you'll chuck your very finest chance away. But be truculent, ferocious and ungentle And the critics will infallibly acclaim Your work as unalluring, elemental But arresting and exalted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... cuirass ring; The foam flies from the charger's flanks, Like wreaths of winter's snow; Spears shiver, and the bright shafts start In thousands from the bow— Strike up, strike up, my minstrels all Use tongue and tuneful chord— Be mute!—My music is the clang Of cleaving ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me - PROXIME ACCESSIT, I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... brought the score of the operetta to Gray Gables last night and we tried it over on the piano. The music is beautiful. It is so tuneful it lingers. I've been humming snatches of it ever since he played it for me. The 'Rebellious Princess' has some wonderful songs. That clever young man, Eric Darrow, composed the libretto and thought out the plot. It's about a princess ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... hearth sat, or rather crouched, Andrew Bolton. He was wearing a smoking-jacket of crimson velvet and a pipe hung from his nerveless fingers. Only the man's eyes appeared alive; they were fixed upon Lydia at the piano. She was playing some light tuneful melody, with a superabundance of trills and runs. Jim did not know Lydia played; and the knowledge of this trivial accomplishment seemed to put her still further beyond his reach. He did not know, either, that she had acquired her somewhat indifferent skill after long years ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... the nursery tales in vogue come to us without a trace as to their origin. In James I.'s time the ending of ballads ran with a tuneful ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... midnight, tumbles in beside me as a salmon flounces in a net, oversets the economy of my bed, belches the fumes of his drink in my face, then twists himself round, leaving me half naked, and listening till morning to that tuneful nightingale, his nose.' It is at least forty-three years since I read the BEAUX' STRATAGEM, and I now quote from memory; but the passage has always occurred to me whenever I have seen a sottish ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... the old distinction between superficial or "fanciful" resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient one in lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or passion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse. The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized the Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative imagination, which may be, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... is strong of wing, with remarkable legs and feet, and a body so formed that it can take in a wonderful amount of air. He is a beautiful bird, too, and a glance at him gives you the impression that he is very knowing—as is, indeed, the fact. He has not a tuneful voice, for he does not belong to the singing birds, but he utters a plaintive and wild cry, which seems to suit the regions that are usually his home. For, though the species does not keep entirely to the cold northern regions, where summer is brief ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... gaze around—I view a throng, The radiant slaves of pride and art. Oh! can they prize my simple song, The soft low breathings of the, heart? Take back the lute, its tuneful string Is moisten'd by a sorrowing tear, To-night, I may not, cannot sing The friends that love me ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... Harry whose tuneful and well measur'd Song First taught our English Musick how to span Words with just note and accent, not to scan With Midas Ears, committing short and long; Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, With praise enough for Envy to look ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... night of intense excitement. Now that they began to beat through the air in the old tuneful way, and there was nothing more to claim their attention until they should arrive at Aden sometime in the morning, Bob and Paul took to their hammocks for sleep, but first Bob got Khartum on the wireless and delivered their position ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... truly sorry to hear it," said Solomon Longways. "We can ill afford to lose tuneful wynd-pipes like yours when they fall among us. And verily, to mak' acquaintance with a man a-come from so far, from the land o' perpetual snow, as we may say, where wolves and wild boars and other dangerous animalcules be as common as blackbirds here-about—why, 'tis ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... the potency of music as a remedial force. Tuneful strains were believed by the physicians of old to be uncongenial to the spirits of sickness; but among medicine-men of many American Indian tribes, harsh discordant sounds and doleful chants have long been a favorite means of driving away these same spirits.[178:3] Aulus ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... downcast, rose to tuneful heights. Not only the landings, but the house, the long flight of steps, and the windswept balcony and shining ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... morning, ending the severest frost experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January as in April. Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a kingfisher passed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who belonged there, and had been to ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... not this disturb thy tuneful head; Thou writ'st for thy delight, and not for bread; Thou art not cursed to write thy verse with care; But art above what other poets fear. What may we not expect from such a hand, That has, with books, himself at free command? Thou ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... afforded to reflective powers— And thus he profited by these spare hours. Greatly did it delight him to behold Fair Nature glittering in green and gold: And the pure melody in different groves Reminded him of his own early loves; Or led him to break out, with tuneful voice, In some sweet hymn, which made his heart rejoice. For he had now begun to feel the worth Of Heavenly things, ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... tuneful throng His obsequies forbid, He still shall live, shall live as long!— 'As ever dead ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... whence the tuneful cries Of clustering pea-fowls shrill and frequent rise, Teach tender feelings to each human breast, And please alike ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... of them spoke, but all of them, little and big, looked at him—very shyly, and yet with intense interest. He stood staring after them, and presently their tuneful young voices sounded again, filled the air with virginal music. He swung his leg over the stile, and went along the path through the trees where he ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Greece' surpassed his earlier efforts. To please Wieland he aimed at Horatian correctness, and he came near hitting the mark. There is no progress toward lightness of touch or melody of phrasing,—Schiller was not the man for tuneful titillation of the ear,—but the poem is tolerably free from the bizarre hyperboles that mar its predecessors. It is intellectual, argumentative, but suffused at the same time with genuine feeling, and the stanzas ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the showman himself must be able to create from his available material, which he will find and develop in dialogue, lyrics, tuneful music, voice, singing, dancing, characterization, costumes, settings, scenery, properties, lighting, and everything else connected in any way with the stage picture or the presentation of his offering. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... voice. 'Will this do, sir?' he said, raising his hat, and addressing Sir George. The party had reached a smooth glade or lawn encompassed by thick shrubs, and to all appearance a hundred miles from a street. A fairy-ring of verdure, glittering with sunlight and dewdrops, and tuneful with the songs of birds, it seemed a morsel of paradise dropped from the cool blue of heaven. Sir George felt a momentary tightening of the throat as he surveyed its pure brilliance, and then a sudden growing anger against the fool who ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... that art the Summer's Nightingale, Thy Sovereign Goddess's most dear delight, Why do I send this rustic Madrigal, That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite? Thou only fit this argument to write, In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bower, And dainty Love learned sweetly to indite. My rhymes I know unsavoury and sour, To taste the streams that, like a golden shower, Flow from ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... minster—old, even then—the vast assemblage, grouped beneath the trees around the sacred precincts, lifted up their voices and joined in the funeral hymn, while many wept tears of genuine sorrow. It was awe inspiring, that burst of tuneful wailing, as the monks entered the sacred pile, and it made men's hearts thrill with the sense of the unseen world into which their king had entered, and where, as they believed, their supplications might yet ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... learn'd and great, (In order to perpetuate The tuneful Strains and witty Flights, Of him that Studies while he sh - - ts) Decree all Landlords, thro' the Nation, Shall lay (on Pain of Flagellation) In some meet Corner of their Dark Hole A cuspidated Piece of Charcoal; Or, where the Walls are cas'd with Wainscot, A Piece of Chalk with ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like some ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a long age digging and searching for ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... continued for many minutes, then came more singing of songs from various rivals to the tuneful Steevy. And presently all joined together in a boisterous chorus which ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... in 1695, produced a subject for all the writers; perhaps no funeral was ever so poetically attended. Dryden, indeed, as a man discountenanced and deprived, was silent; but scarcely any other maker of verses omitted to bring his tribute of tuneful sorrow. An emulation of elegy was universal. Maria's praise was not confined to the English language, but fills a great part of the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... to his failing sight Their forms stand in a vision heavenly bright; And piercing through his drowsed ears Enters their tuneful cry Of summons, audibly, Thither where flow no mourners' tears: So, dearest Love, my spirit, sore oppressed, Would weeping in ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... a soul as ever came from God, And one more gentle never walkt the earth In mortal guise. Of sweet external, too: Fresh as the wakening morn with violet breath; And every action, look, thought, word, and trace, Were strung to tuneful melody. Her life Was music's echo—stealing o'er the soul Like dying strains, soft and retiringly. In childish grace to womanhood she grew, And like the virgin lily stood and smiled— Flinging ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... good, and your composition will be so likewise, and will assuredly delight," says tuneful Father Haydn, and Music's outline in melody limns, as does that of Nature, the beauty of her design. It speaks of wood or stream, of billowed sky, and now of sombre shadow. It ripples in dainty dance, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... old and original songs took place between them; for every piece of flattery was overlaid with a tuneful quotation. Unfortunately, however, the entertainment flowed so swiftly that I was unable to note down ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... know the reason Why the nightingale Through the drear night season Pipes her tuneful tale? She was, once, like you, a maid, Who her wedding day delayed, And her swain, All in vain, For her ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... your faculty of flight; How pitifully mean! How paltry! Nay How ludicrous, as you yourself divined! That seed, however, fell not by the way, But bred another fancy in my mind Of a far more illuminating kind. You, as I saw it, were no falcon, but A tuneful dragon, out of paper cut, Whose Ego holds a secondary station, Dependent on the string for animation; Its breast was scrawled with promises to pay In cash poetic,—at some future day; The wings were stiff with barbs and ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... on days of festival Clear, gay, and loud is heard; My second grudges others' good; To state a truth my third; And of my tuneful fourth of old A wild and ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... this at the top of his tuneful voice, and waved his hand as the sharp craft shot away over ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... contest of the tuneful shepherds: and, surely, it is not without some reproach to his inventive power, that of ten pastorals Virgil has written two upon the same plan. One of the shepherds now gains an acknowledged victory, but without any apparent superiority, and the reader, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... more to cast off the fetters of meaning that it might do freer service to the jealous god of visible beauty. The overpowering rivalry of speech would rob it of all its symbolic intent and leave its bare picture. Literature has favoured rather the way of the ear and has given itself zealously to the tuneful ordering of sounds. Let it be repeated, therefore, that for the traffic of letters the senses are but the door-keepers of the mind; none of them commands an only way of access,—the deaf can read by sight, the blind by touch. It is not amid the bustle ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... Boy Scouts were just as merry as before. A banjo had been brought along, and to the plunkety-plunk of its tuneful music they sang every popular song known among ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... when we first swam this fragrant, golden sea—twilight, and the birds were singing in every bush; the thrushes and blackbirds in the blossoming cherry and chestnut-trees were so many and so tuneful that the chorus was sweet and strong beyond anything I ever heard. There had been a shower or two, of course; showers that looked like shimmering curtains of silver gauze, and whether they lifted or fell the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... till sunset pass'd the festive hours; Nor lack'd the banquet aught to please the sense, Nor sound of tuneful lyre, by Phoebus touch'd, Nor Muses' voice, who in alternate strains Responsive sang: but when the sun had set, Each to his home departed, where for each The crippled Vulcan, matchless architect, With wondrous skill a ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... grateful heart Called on the lovely wanderer who bestow'd That timely light to share his joyous sport. And hence a beaming goddess, with her nymphs, Across the lawn, and through the darksome grove (Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes, By echo multiplied from rock or cave), Swept in the storm of chase, as moon and stars Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slacked His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thank'd The Naiad. Sunbeams, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... spirometer. Then he would come back and re-occupy his old seat among the orchestra, and look paler and sadder than ever. What strange, mysterious being was he? Why did he inflict his pale, sad presence upon that galaxy of tuneful revellers? ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... patriarch by oral tradition. Nor did the fancy of Milton take too bold a flight when it pleased itself with the idea that our first parents, taught by the carols of the birds in the garden of Eden, raised their voices in tuneful notes of praise to the Creator of all, when they walked forth in the cool of the day to meet their God before the fall. But this is certain, that one of our Lord's last acts of social worship on earth was to sing a hymn with his disciples. Few, therefore, can be slow to understand, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... stream. It may be supposed that when the sun mounted high she would tie the picturesque, richly ornamented baby-frame containing her boy to some drooping branch to swing from its leathern thong in the cooling breeze. We may imagine her tuneful voice singing the mother's Wa Wa song, the soft lullaby of the sylvan glades. Thayendanegea's eyes blink and tremble; he forgets the floating canopy above him and ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... sets were uniformly handsome, and some of them showed greater sumptuousness than the people had seen for many years; his orchestra, though faulty in composition as well as execution, did some admirable work under Signor Vianesi; his chorus was prompt, vigorous, and tuneful; his ensembles were carefully and intelligently composed, and his selection of operas was judicious from a managerial point of view. He gave to New York the strongest combination of women singers ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and he believed that never was summer morning half as bright, or as sweet, or as fair as she. The glimpse which he had just caught of her filled his heart with delight, and almost put all thought of hunting out of his head, when suddenly the tuneful cries of the hounds, answered by a hundred echoes from the ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... to Hill, with whom he had had a former misunderstanding. Hill replied to these assaults by a ponderous satire in verse upon "tuneful Alexis;" it had, however, some tolerable lines at the opening, imitated from Pope's own verses upon Addison, and attributing to him the same jealousy of merit in others. Hill soon afterwards wrote a civil ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... the rogue who was curled in the whin; She pounced at his brush with a drive and a snap, "Yip-Yap, boys," she told 'em, "I've found him, Yip-Yap;" And they put down their noses and sung to his line Away down the valley most tuneful and fine. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... we will no longer conceal that this Woman's Club was composed of the tuneful Nine—acknowledged that there was a great deal in what their contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her one bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just so themselves in her place; but being as it were professionally dedicated to the beautiful in all ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... work, John Cooper was under the immediate orders of Margaret Campbell. After hours, the Sergeant used to play a piccolo, and among other tuneful lays he piped one called "The Campbells Are Coming." It was on one such musical occasion that the young couple simply walked off and got married, thus proving a point which I have long held, to wit: Music is a secondary ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... elegies to Chloris, Might raise a house about two stories; A lyric ode would slate; a catch Would tile; an epigram would thatch. Now Poets feel this art is lost, Both to their own and landlord's cost. Not one of all the tuneful throng Can hire a lodging for a song. For Jove consider'd well the case, That poets were a numerous race; And if they all had power to build, The earth would very soon be fill'd: Materials would be quickly spent, And houses would not give a rent. The God of Wealth was therefore ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... wandering sadly from our subject; it is perhaps quite as well that we have done so, for we should have become dangerous had we dwelt much longer on it. We were on the point of wishing (Nero-like) that our popular professors of the tuneful art had but one neck, that we might exterminate them at a blow, or hang them with one gigantic fiddle-string; but now, thanks to our episode, our exacerbated feelings are so far mollified, that we will be content with wishing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... heading his little boys and their cricket, and there are the tuneful party in the fern on the opposite side. They have rather good voices, ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... coarsely built, not fair of face, nor light in the dance, nor tuneful in her song. She had broad cheeks, thick lips and a flat nose. She had very red cheeks, very dark hair. She was exuberant in figure, moving with vigor and life. Her clothes were shabby but bright in color. Red bands ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... traditions, most of which have a strong savour of the supernatural, in strong tuneful ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... thoughts and reasonings of an author have, as I have said, a personal character, no wonder that his style is not only the image of his subject, but of his mind. That pomp of language, that full and tuneful diction, that felicitousness in the choice and exquisiteness in the collocation of words, which to prosaic writers seem artificial, is nothing else but the mere habit and way of a lofty intellect. Aristotle, in his sketch of the magnanimous man, tells us that his voice is deep, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... pleasant breeze, Whereat the tremulous branches readily Did all of them bow downward towards that side Where its first shadow casts the Holy Mountain; Yet not from their upright direction bent So that the little birds upon their tops Should cease the practice of their tuneful art; But with full-throated joy, the hours of prime Singing received they in the midst of foliage That made monotonous burden to their rhymes, Even as from branch to branch it gathering swells, Through the pine forests on the shore of Chiassi, When Aeolus unlooses the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... almost doubled up with laughter. Edna sang like a little woodthrush, and Eunice also had a sweet and tuneful voice. ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... The woods were bare: and every night the frost To all my longings spoke a silent nay, And told me Spring was far and far away. Even the robins were too cold to sing, Except a broken and discouraged note,— Only the tuneful sparrow, on whose throat Music has put her triple finger-print, Lifted his head and sang my heart a hint,— "Wait, wait, wait! oh, wait ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... all ye who join, With hands your hearts unite; So shall our tuneful tongues combine To ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... genius of the people also found an appreciative echo in his heart. When at last he handed me a long box with a gorgeous medal and ribbon, and bade me good-bye, I vowed I could sing "God save the King" louder than ever if I could do so without harrowing the feelings of my more tuneful neighbours. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... 'twill be when I am gone That tuneful peal will still ring on; While other bards shall walk these dells, And sing your praise, sweet ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... homely bench, with the soft pleasant smell of cows from beneath, and the melodious chiming tinkle of many sweet-toned bells—not the wretched tin or iron jangling affairs secured to sheep or kine in England, but tuneful, well-made bells, carefully strapped to the necks of the cattle, and evidently appreciated by the wearers, several of which stood about, gently swaying their heads, blinking their great soft eyes, ruminating, and waiting ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... might discover them and attempt an attack. The night however passed over quietly, and at the hour proposed, Miantomah, rousing up the party, led the way towards the hills. The birds were saluting the early dawn with their tuneful notes, when, just as the hills came in sight amid the trees, a shot was heard, ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat, The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... best to collect a crowd in the street round a grinding organ, as an accompaniment to the capers of a puppet show. I even prefer French music, and I can say no more. Long live German music!" cried he, "when it is tuneful," he added to ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... she ne'er would leave him till he sung old Scotia's plains— The daisy, and the milk-white thorn he tuned in lovely strains; And sung of yellow autumn, or some lovely banks and braes: And make each cottage home resound with his sweet tuneful lays, And sing how Coila's genius, on a January morn, Appeared in all her splendour when Robert Burns ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... and humor and music, which at that time were unrivalled, although the early notes of a tuneful choir of awakening songsters were already heard, the young Holmes added the brisk and crisp and sparkling charm of his prose. From the beginning his coursers were paired, and with equal pace they have constantly held ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... mulberries, here!" A tuneful voice,—and light, light measure; Though I hardly should count these mulberries dear, If I paid three times the price for ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... scenes the fancy loves to dwell, The stomach oft a different tale will tell; Then, leave the wood, and seek the shelt'ring roof, And put the pantry's vital strength to proof; The aerial banquets of the tuneful nine, May suit some appetites, but faith! not mine; For my coarse palate, coarser food must please, Substantial beef, pies, puddings, ducks, and pease; Such food, the fangs of keen disease defies, And such rare feeding Hornsey House supplies: Nor these alone, the joys that court us here, ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... and there invoke Old midnight's sister, contemplation sage (Queen of the rugged brow and stern-fixed eye), To lift my soul above this little earth, This folly-fettered world: to purge my ears, That I may hear the rolling planet's song And tuneful ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... vernal flow'r; With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tasteless meats, and joyless wines, And luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, [bb]Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd Orpheus near; Nor lute nor lyre his feeble pow'rs attend, Nor sweeter musick of a virtuous friend; But everlasting dictates crowd his tongue, Perversely grave, or positively wrong. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... the canyons of the City, and its voice accompanied Kew in his tuneful meditations. A 'bus is not really well adapted for meditation. On my feet I can stride across unseen miles musing on love, in a taxi I can think about to-morrow's dinner, but on a 'bus my thoughts will go no further than my eyes can see. So Kew, although he thought he was thinking ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... in the furrow feeds; Nor sudden breeze that shakes the quaking leaves, And lightly rustles thro' the scatter'd sheaves; Nor floating straw that skims athwart his nose, The deeply musing youth may discompose. For Nelly fair, and blythest village maid, Whose tuneful voice beneath the hedge-row shade, At early milking, o'er the meadows born, E'er cheer'd the ploughman's toil at rising morn: The neatest maid that e'er, in linen gown, Bore cream and butter to the market town: The tightest lass, that with untutor'd air E'er footed ale-house floor at wake or ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... afraid not," said the meek and tuneful ecclesiastic. "I am acquainted with the lady, a most respectable person, and she has shown me the certificate ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... the matter with the town of Archibong? It isn't quite as lively as Boulong; But the name is very tuneful— Yes, I'll have another spoonful, For I never liked my soda-water strong; It's wrong For a man to drink ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... we passed, a music-loving squire had made a concert for his friends and neighbours, and doubtless, too, for our vagrant delight; we stood uninvited to listen to a tuneful stir of violins, which with a violoncello booming beneath, broke out very pleasantly from the windows ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... blossoms are gleaming as colorful and fragrant today as they did in the Long Ago. The bird-songs are as tuneful now as they were then. The sun is shining just as golden and as genial this moment as it did when we sat on the beams of the mill-race and felt on our faces the spray of tumbling waters sun-warmed in ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... Berecynthian horns, Drums, clappings, bacchanalian shouts, and howls, Drown'd the soft lyre. Then were the stones distain'd With silenc'd Orpheus' blood. The Bacchae first Drove wide the crowding birds, the snakes, the beasts, In throngs collected by his tuneful voice; Glory of Orpheus' stage. From thence they turn'd Their gory hands on Orpheus, and around Cluster'd like fowls that in the day espy The bird of darkness. Then as in the morn The high-rais'd amphitheatre ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... to have admirers, was out of favour, not only with those who considered Tillotson the model preacher, but also with High Churchmen. Jeremy Taylor would hardly have ranked high in Bishop Bull's estimation. His wit and metaphors, and 'tuneful pointed sentences,' would almost certainly have been adjudged by the good Bishop of St. David's unworthy of the grave and solemn dignity of the pulpit.[1204] And brilliant as were the sallies of Dr. South's vigorous and highly seasoned declamations, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... and fro, rising, bending—now thrown back, then leaning over the marble bar of the tribune—continued to pour forth his scathing sarcasm, his crushing invective, his eloquent persuasion and his unanswerable argument in tones, now soft and tuneful as a silvery bell, then sad and pitiful as an evening zephyr, then clear, high and sonorous as a clarion, then hoarse and deep as the thunder, for a period of four hours, unbroken and continuous, ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... harmonious, harmonical^; in concord &c n., in tune, in concert; unisonant^, concentual^, symphonizing^, isotonic, homophonous^, assonant; ariose^, consonant. measured, rhythmical, diatonic^, chromatic, enharmonic^. melodious, musical; melic^; tuneful, tunable; sweet, dulcet, canorous^; mellow, mellifluous; soft, clear, clear as a bell; silvery; euphonious, euphonic, euphonical^; symphonious; enchanting &c (pleasure- giving) 829; fine-toned, full-toned, silver-toned. Adv. harmoniously, in harmony; as ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and the letters of Murray remind one strongly of Thomas Davidson's, as published in that admirable and touching biography, A Scottish Probationer. It was my own chance to be almost in touch with both these gentle, tuneful, and kindly humorists. Davidson was a Borderer, born on the skirts of 'stormy Ruberslaw,' in the country of James Thomson, of Leyden, of the old Ballad minstrels. The son of a Scottish peasant line of the old sort, honourable, refined, devout, he was educated in ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... Sphinx! The very dawn of Time Beheld thee sculptured from the living rock! Still wears thy face its primal look sublime, Surviving all the hoary ages' shock: Still royal art thou in thy proud repose, As when the sun on tuneful Memnon rose, ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... possessed by the rights of chivalry, that nothing was more rare than to hear of such errant damsels sustaining injury or wrong, and they passed and repassed safely, where armed travellers would probably have encountered a bloody opposition. But though licensed and protected in honour of their tuneful art, the wandering minstrels, male or female, like similar ministers to the public amusement, the itinerant musicians, for instance, and strolling comedians of our own day, led a life too irregular and precarious to be accounted a creditable part of society. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Lord Eldon caused a loud laugh while the old Duke of Norfolk was fast asleep in the House of Lords, and amusing their lordships with "that tuneful nightingale, his nose," by announcing from the woolsack, with solemn emphasis, that the Commons had sent up a bill for "enclosing and dividing Great Snoring in the county ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... tuneful lyre, Still poets' hymns to thee belong; Though lips are cold Whereon of old Thy beams all turn'd to worshipping ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... colt in the stall beside the sorrel. But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers. His was not a tuneful throat—but harsh melodies burst from it as he locked the barn and sprang up the hill to the house. He reached the kitchen-porch and turned the door-handle; but the door did not yield to ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... laid her finger on her lips. Then there came the ripple of a lute from the outer room, played not unskilfully. Mary smiled again and nodded at Anthony. Then, a metallic voice, but clear enough and tuneful, began to sing a verse of the little love-song of Harrington's, Whence ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... remaining to see Nevil, was an agitating question that had to be silenced by an appeal to her instincts of repulsion, and a further appeal for justification of them to her imaginary sisterhood of gossips. How could she sit and eat, how pass an evening in that house, in the society of that man? Her tuneful chorus cried, 'How indeed.' Besides, it would have offended Mr. Romfrey to hear that she had done so. Still she could not refuse to remember Miss Denham's marked intimations of there being a reason for Nevil's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ye winds, and sing, ye waters, May the music of your song Silence all the dark forebodings That have plagued the world too long; He who made your voices tuneful Comes ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... mount Ascendest, cause and source of all delight?" "And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious floods of eloquence Have issued?" I with front abash'd replied. "Glory and light of all the tuneful train! May it avail me that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have conn'd it o'er. My master thou and guide! Thou he from whom alone I have deriv'd That style, which for its beauty into fame Exalts me. See the beast, from whom I fled. O save me from her, thou illustrious ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... progressive, climax-reaching arrangement of the events of a story which we call the "plot.") A novel may be largely a study of character; a short-story may deal with action which takes place wholly unseen in the soul of man; a play or a musical comedy may be chiefly a series of scenic pictures or tuneful caperings; but a true photoplay must act out a story—a story with a big central point, supported by contributing points, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians, more tuneful in the expression of their own ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... from his pocket and read it by their light. It was a favourable review of a song he had composed, and which had just been published. "Though there is no genius displayed in this little composition, it is extremely pleasing; the air is catching, and the accompaniment is tuneful without ostentation. 'Winged Love' should become a popular favourite." This is what he read; and having read it (of course not for the first time), he seemed to form a sudden resolution on the strength of it. He looked ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... firm, but I have no time To explain it all in this tuneful rhyme. Science cannot say much, I fear, But must admit that God is here, And if the priests would let us alone, Perhaps a little more might be known. Spirit is fact, and this I assume, For Matter ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... fate's severest rage disarm; Music can soften pain to ease, And make despair and madness please; Our joys below it can improve, And antedate the bliss above. This the divine Cecilia found, And to her Maker's praise confin'd the sound. When the full organ joins the tuneful quire, Th' immortal pow'rs incline their ear; Borne on the swelling notes our souls aspire, While solemn airs improve the sacred fire; And angels lean from Heav'n to hear. Of Orpheus now no more let poets tell, To bright Cecilia greater pow'r is given; His numbers rais'd a shade from Hell, ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... were his constant companions, by night as well as by day. "I never tire of them," he would say; "they are always a revelation. And how grand is Milton's prose! quite as fine as his poetry!" He was very fond of repeating the following celebrated lines that have the true ring to a tuneful ear as well as to an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... in the ladies' society. The obliging widow was easily prevailed upon to gratify a passion he had lately developed for tuneful and romantic melody, and she thrummed through five waltzes and the whole of two comic operas, while he sat on the sofa holding Jean's hand and exchanging confidential smiles. Jean was in the seventh heaven of happiness; the widow enthusiastically approved of the symptoms; and the only critic present ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... wild narrative, and so he never wrote, and perhaps never cared much for poetry, except ballads and his contemporary Byron. He desired, as he said in the note to "Romantic Ballads," not the merely harmonious but the grand, and he condemned the modern muse for "the violent desire to be smooth and tuneful, forgetting that smoothness and tunefulness are nearly synonymous with tameness and unmeaningness." He once said of Keats: "They are attempting to resuscitate him, I believe." He regarded ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Ere on the cypress wreath, which overshades The throne of Death, I hang my mournful lyre, And give its wild strings to the desert gale. Rise, Son of Salem! rise, and join the strain, Sweep to accordant tones thy tuneful harp, And, leaving vain laments, arouse thy soul To exultation. Sing hosanna, sing, And halleluiah, for the Lord is great, And full of mercy! He has thought of man; Yea, compass'd round with countless worlds, has thought Of us poor worms, that batten in the dews Of ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... oft the tuneful strings, Of gliding streams and nimble winds and such poor things; But lend your measures to a theme of noble thought, And crown with laurel these great heroes, ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... poetic fancy to its noblest flights. Then we should learn that while the ink from good Langland's pen was yet scarcely dry after his third revision of "Piers Ploughman," Geoffrey Chaucer came forward with his sweet imaginings bodied in immortal verse, his tuneful numbers, his "well of English undefiled,"—and English poetry, which now for more than five centuries has been the chief glory of our literature, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Felix, they appear once more following their flocks and herds. But they are entirely forgetful of all Greek and Roman civilization; their morals have not improved, and their quarrels are more bitter than ever. In the old times they tootled on the tuneful reed, and sang in purest Latin the sweetest ditties ever heard, in praise of Galatea and Amyntas, Delia and Iolla. But they never tootle now, and never sing, and when they speak, their tongue is that of the unmusical barbarians. ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... elegant Boscawen; Thrale, in whose expressive eyes Sits a soul above disguise, Skill'd with-wit and sense t'impart Feelings of a generous heart. Lucan, Leveson, Greville, Crewe; Fertile-minded Montagu, Who makes each rising art her care, 'And brings her knowledge from afar!' Whilst her tuneful tongue defends Authors dead, and absent friends; Bright in genius, pure in fame:— Herald, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Critics! if to censure bent, Think on this fact, and scorn the harsh intent; Our Bard would fain discordant things unite, As hard to reconcile as day and night: He strives within chaste Hymen's bands to draw The tuneful maids and sages of the law; Or, what's alike—nor think he means a joke— Melpomene to wed with old judge Coke. Yet still, if you'll not let his faults pass free, The Grecian rev'rence pay ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... as they ended with harmonies in the style of Richard Strauss. "This will never do. We must grapple with the anthem this term—you're as tuneful ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... I touch the chords of joy, but low And mournful answer notes of woe; And the proud march which victors tread Sinks in the wailing for the dead. O, well for me, if mine alone That dirge's deep prophetic tone! If, as my tuneful fathers said, This harp, which erst Saint Modan swayed, Can thus its master's fate foretell, Then ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snow track; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful whisper. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... roadside, and the swelling buds of trees, gave forth delicious odors; a spring haze softened the outline of the mountains, and made them almost as beautiful as if clothed with foliage; robins, song-sparrows, and other birds were so tuneful that Mousie said she wished they might form the choir at the church. Indeed, the glad spirit of Spring was abroad, and it found its way into our hearts. We soon learned that it entered largely also into Dr. Lyman's sermon. We were not treated as strangers and intruders, but welcomed and ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... look'd it once, when Eustace sung Of plighted love's perennial joys, Now silent is that tuneful tongue, That graceful form the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... have dream'd."—"Yes," said the supreme shape, "Thou hast dream'd of me; and awaking up Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side, Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast Unwearied ear of the whole universe Listen'd in pain and pleasure at the birth Of such new tuneful wonder. Is't not strange That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth, What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs 70 To one who in this lonely isle ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... away as if for dear life, his head wagging, his elbow leaping back and forth, while his scalpless crown shone like the side of a peeled onion and his puckered mouth wagged grotesquely from side to side keeping time to his tuneful scraping. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... English; for the other there was no precedent that might not rather have been called a warning. His matter was to be arranged and his verse handled by his own ingenuity and at his own peril. He left a highroad behind him, along which many a tuneful pauper has since limped; but before him he found nothing but the jungle and false fires. In considering his style, therefore, it is well to treat the problem as it presented itself to him, and to follow his achievement as he won step by step out ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... them any half a century ago. As a matter of act, we are three friends reading for our M.A. degrees, neither more nor less. And I will trouble you, my elder brother," she added, turning to Tu, "to explain to me what the poet means by the expression 'tuneful Tung' in the line: ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... with strength of faith and belief, like Abraham son of Terah. A man loving, gentle, forgiving of heart, like Moses son of Amram. A man patient and steadfast in enduring suffering and trouble, like suffering Job. A psalmist full-tuneful, full-delightful to God, like David son of Jesse. A dwelling of true wisdom and knowledge like Solomon son of David. A rock immovable whereon is founded the Church, like Peter the apostle. A chief universal teacher ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... creatures' wondrous acts I treat, The ranks and mighty leaders of their state, Their laws, employments, and their wars relate. A trifling theme provokes my humble lays. Trifling the theme, not so the poet's praise, If great Apollo and the tuneful Nine First, for your bees a proper station find, 10 That's fenced about, and sheltered from the wind; For winds divert them in their flight, and drive The swarms, when loaden homeward, from their hive. Nor sheep, nor ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the different students, pursuing the bent of their inclinations, constructed instruments of various forms, according to their individual fancies; and to this whimsical accident we are indebted for the tuneful ney and the heart-exhilarating rabab, and, in short, all the other instruments of ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... resumed his seat, and glanced persuasively around him for some tokens of assent or approbation. But the men, whom he had thus undertaken to wheedle, had been taught by experience to heed the caution so well recommended by the tuneful Burns,— ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... the township in a minute if we don't head him," said Penfentenyou, leaping to his feet, and crashing into the garden. We headed him with pebbles till he retired through a window to the tuneful reminder that he had left a lot of little things behind him. As we passed the front door it swung open, and showed Jimmy the artist sitting at the bottom of a newly-cleaned staircase. He waggled his hands at us, and when we entered we saw that the man was ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... All lustily singing; They sing of the Volga, The daring of youths And the beauty of maidens ... A hush falls all over The road, and it listens; And only the singing Is heard, broadly rolling In waves, sweet and tuneful, Like wind-ruffled corn. 480 The hearts of the peasants Are touched with wild anguish, And one little woman Grows pensive and mournful, And then begins weeping And sobs forth her grief: "My life is like day-time With no sun to warm it! My life is like night ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... widely blown! His be the meed whose pencil's trace Hath touched our very swamps with grace, And round whose tuneful way All Southern laurels bloom; The Poet of "The Woodlands," unto whom Alike are known The flute's low breathing and the trumpet's tone, And the soft west-wind's sighs; But who shall utter all the debt, 0 Land! wherein all powers are met That bind a people's heart, The world doth ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Borgia's fame, Whom Rome should place, for charms and chastity, Above that wife who whilom bore her name. Strozza and Tebaldeo — Anthony And Hercules — support the honoured dame: (So says the scroll): for tuneful strain, the pair A very Linus and an ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... scenes the fancy loves to dwell, The stomach oft a different tale will tell; Then, leave the wood, and seek the shelt'ring roof, And put the pantry's vital strength to proof; The aerial banquets of the tuneful nine May suit some appetites, but faith! not mine; For my coarse palate coarser food must please, Substantial beef, pies, puddings, ducks, and peas; Such food the fangs of keen disease defies, And such rare feeding Hornsey-house supplies: Nor these alone the joys that court us here, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... again, as I listen, I seem to hear The strains of old, half-forgotten Mear, And solemn China, and grave Dundee, And stately Rockingham, calm and free, And rare Old-Hundred's majestic swell, And tender Hebron we loved so well, And tuneful Stonefield's melodies sweet, Bridgewater, Windham, and Silver-street, And rich St. Martin, and yet again Old Coronation's exultant strain, And sweet Devizes' slow, warbled tone, Resounding Lenox and Arlington, And gentle Boyleston, and many more Which Memory holds in her treasured store, That ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... pleasure To the people of Wainola. Thus the sacred harp is finished, And the minstrel, Wainamoinen, Sits upon the rock of joyance, Takes the harp within his fingers, Turns the arch up, looking skyward; With his knee the arch supporting, Sets the strings in tuneful order, Runs his fingers o'er the harp-strings, And the notes of pleasure follow. Straightway ancient Wainamoinen, The eternal wisdom-singer, Plays upon his harp of birch-wood. Far away is heard the music, Wide the harp of joy re-echoes; Mountains dance and ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... would, if alone, have at once got on extremely well together. The lady had the clearest voice imaginable—infinitely softer and more tuneful than could have been reasonably expected from forty years—and a form decidedly inclined to embonpoint. This voice Caroline liked; it atoned for the formal, if correct, accent and language. The lady would soon have discovered she liked it and her, and in ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... among the reeds; entering the recesses of a hollow column, and causing to issue from thence a pleasing, flute-like sound; blowing his quiet, soothing lays in zephyrs; or rushing around our dwellings, singing his tuneful yet minor refrain,—in these, and in even other ways, does this mighty element of the Creator contribute to the production of melody in the world of nature. A writer in "The Youth's Companion" speaks very entertainingly of "voices in trees." ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... he mused. What was the meaning of it? Had that master of craft and silence found a breach in the enemy's fortifications? He rubbed the chill from his nose, crossed and re-crossed his legs and teetered till the spurs on his boots set up a tuneful jingle. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... aptitude to learn human sounds; doves coo in an amorous and mournful manner, and are emblems of despairing lovers; the wood-pecker sets up a sort of loud and hearty laugh; the fern-owl, or goat-sucker, from the dusk till day-break, serenades his mate with the clattering of castanets. All the tuneful passeres express their complacency by sweet modulations, and a variety of melody. The swallow, as has been observed in a former letter, by a shrill alarm bespeaks the attention of the other hirundines, and bids them be aware that the hawk is at hand. Aquatic and ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... night long had heard The owls in tuneful concert strive; No doubt too he the moon had seen; For in the moonlight he had been 445 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... tuneful kit Thebes rose, with towers encircling it; As to the Mage's brandished wand A spiry palace clove the sand; To Thin's indomitable financing, That phantom crescent kept advancing. When first the brazen bells of churches Called ...
— Moral Emblems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fantasy And frenzied mem'ry wrought, advance From out the shades; O spectral utterance, Untwine thy chains, thy fair autocracy Unveil, have being, declare Thy state and tuneful sovereignty. ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... 'T was the slow undoing Of long sweet months of unimpeded wooing. It was to hide and cover and conceal The truth—assuming, what I did not feel. It was to dam love's happy singing tide That blessed me with its hopeful, tuneful tone, By feigned indiff'rence, till it turned aside, And changed its channel, leaving me alone To walk parched plains, and thirst for that sweet draught My lips had tasted, but another quaffed. It could be done. For no words yet were spoken— None to recall—no ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... who on the very first morning had begun to get together materials for a nest. His whistle is one of the clearest and loudest, but he makes little pretensions to music. I have been pleased and interested, however, to see how tuneful he becomes in August, after most other birds have ceased to sing, and after a long interval of silence on his own part. Early and late he pipes and chatters, as if he imagined that the spring were really coming back again forthwith. What the explanation of this lyrical revival may ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... that I was at the Academy of Music, and that the orchestra were tuning their instruments for the overture. A louder strain than usual caused me to start up, and I saw through the open window a robin on a maple bough, with its tuneful throat swelled to the utmost. This was the leader of my orchestra, and the whole country was alive with musicians, each one giving out his own notes without any regard for the others, but apparently the score had been written for them all, since the innumerable strains ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... component characteristics of the young David Drennen of twenty were, perhaps, a careless generosity, a natural spontaneous gaiety which accepted each day as it came, a strong though unanalysed faith in his fellow being. Life made music in tuneful chords upon the strings of his heart. The twin wells of love and faith were always brimming for his friends; overflowing for the one man whose act was to turn their waters brackish and bitter. That man was his father, John Harper Drennen, a man prominent enough in the financial world to make ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... offence: there's no offence, I hope, In taking a dummy for a tuneful man. Is it for can't or ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... received my books safe, and are content with them. I have little idea of Mr. Bentley's; though his imagination is sufficiently Pindaric, nay obscure, his numbers are not apt to be so tuneful as to excuse his flights. He should always give his wit, both in verse and prose, to somebody else to make up. If any of his things are printed at Dublin, let me have them; I have no quarrel with his talents. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... dozen voices together, in a most tuneful chorus, as her stern went down with a roll and a bubble into the ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... vulgarity and morbidity. And if I were to walk through one city and behold collections of this latter sort predominating and then through another, where my eyes were gladdened with evidences of good taste, of love for humor that is wholesome, sentiment that is sane, verse that is tuneful and noble, I should at once call on the public librarian and I should say to him, "Thou art the man!" The literary taste of your community is a reflection of your own as shown forth in your own institution—its collection of books, the assistants with which you have surrounded yourself, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Then with mosaick art the piece combine, And boast the glitter of each dulcet line: Johnson adventur'd boldly to transfuse His vigorous sense into the Latian muse; Aspir'd to shine by unreflected light, And with a Roman's ardour think and write. He felt the tuneful Nine his breast inspire, And, like a master, wak'd the[59] soothing lyre: Horatian strains a grateful heart proclaim, While Sky's wild rocks resound his Thralia's name.— Hesperia's plant, in some less skillful hands, To bloom ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... her," shrieks he, with the last note left in his tuneful pipe. He staggers the last yard or two and falls into Joyce's arms, that are opened wide to receive him. Who shall say he is not a happy interlude? Evidently Joyce regards ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... carry out the pretense, Mr. Scott. The tuneful or merry folk of the Middle Ages did not travel with arms. They had no enemies, and they were welcome everywhere. Nor did they travel as we do to the accompaniment of war. The sound of the guns ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lightning. His long fingers drummed and slid along the strings of the violin with bewildering swiftness. The little instrument jetted and effervesced its melody. The continuous and resounding noise poured out of it in tuneful bubbles. The air was filled with tinkling fragments of sound. The Lad's body swayed to and fro. His face glowed. His eyes flashed. The sweat stood in drops on his forehead, but still the bow snapped and crinkled, and ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... place, cowled in ancient legends. Here the Black Huntsman stalled his steed, and the death-pack coming to its precincts, ceased into the hill. Here, in November twilights, when the dumb birds cowered in the dark pines, you might hear from the summit a horn blown-very clearly, with tuneful devilry, and a scattered sound of deep barking like the noise of sawing timber, and then the blood-curdling tumult of the pack ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... with, the part of the township nearest us was the quarter of round grass roofs, where the aborigines lived; and the Bantu heart responds to tuneful noise, as readily as powder to the match. All that section of Muanza, man, woman and child, came and squatted outside the cactus hedge. (It was streng politzeilich verboten for natives to enter the European camping-ground, so that except when they ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy |
