"Mellowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little concern with the story of his son's life. He sailed over many seas, he visited many lands, mellowing by contact with many peoples the unyielding temper of his race. The possibility of failure never once entered into his mind. The Thayers always had succeeded, for they always had worked. In consequence, he took it quite as ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... a librarian's duty to his successors. I will suggest a service not there mentioned: to choose every year the best contemporary books that he can find worthily printed on time-proof papers and have them bound in parchment; then let him place them on his shelves to gather gold from the touch of the mellowing years through the centuries to come and win him grateful memory such as we bestow upon the unknown hands that wrought for these volumes the garments of their present and ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... of the sun was mellowing the grey stone of the terrace and enriching the green of the weeds thrusting themselves into life between the uneven flags when she reached Stornham, and passing through the house found Lady Anstruthers sitting there. In sustenance of ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dark screen. He interposed A prism of glass. He saw the sunbeam break And spread upon the screen its rainbow band Of disentangled colours, all in scale Like notes in music; first, the violet ray, Then indigo, trembling softly into blue; Then green and yellow, quivering side by side; Then orange, mellowing richly into red. Then, in the screen, he made a small, round hole Like to the first; and through it passed once more Each separate coloured ray. He let it strike Another prism of glass, and saw each hue Bent ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... alone for a few minutes to study and form his own opinion as to Lady Bridget's setting. She was a woman who, whatever her surroundings, must always impress them with her personality. This bush parlour was original in its simplicity. Walls lined with unvarnished wood which was mellowing already to a soft golden brown. Boards bare, but for a few rugs and skins. A fine piece of tappa from the Solomons, of barbaric design in black and orange, made the centre of an arrangement of South Sea Island and aboriginal weapons. Divans heaped with cushions flanked the great fireplace. Two ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... weekly, buy it," it ran. All the mellowing effects of a good dinner passed away from Roland. He was feverishly irritated. He paid his bill and ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... finished. A sliding panel in the wall near the chapel had been pushed back, and the mellow music of Dr. Tallis pealed softly in, giving a sweet and melodious background, scarcely perceived consciously by either of them, and yet probably mellowing and softening their modes of expression during ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... is a night sun in the empires of the Columbia and the Puget Sea. No nights in the world can be more clear, lustrous, and splendid than those of the mellowing autumn in the valleys of Mount Saint Helens, Mount Hood, and the Columbia. The moon rises over the crystal peaks and domes like a living glory, and mounts the deep sky amid the pale stars like a royal torch-bearer of the sun. ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... to keep what he writes by him for nine years, the conclusion is irresistible, that he hoped by that time the writer would see the wisdom of suppressing his crude lucubrations altogether. No one knew better than Horace that first-class work never wants such protracted mellowing. ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... children who kept up the home at Marlborough Place after the elder ones had married or gone out into the world, enjoyed more opportunities of his ever-mellowing companionship. Strongly as he upheld the conventions when these represented some valid results of social experience, he was always ready to set aside his mere likes and dislikes on good cause shown; to follow reason as against the mere prejudice ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... ye laurels, and once more, Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... virgin coldness, round which in the beginning he had hovered. His heart was high, swelled by the promise of her beaming looks and ready smiles. At last, in this drama of slow winning she was drawing closer, shyly melting, her whims and perversities mellowing to the rich, sweet ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... stole away into the mellowing sunshine. He walked westward, till he found himself on the Embankment by Albert Bridge; here, after hesitating awhile, he took the turn into Oakley Street. He had no thought of calling to see Miss Elvan; upon that he could not venture; but he thought ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... to be a sign of cultivation to "pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new" in favor of something which has at least the appearance of age with or without the richness and mellowness thereof. After all, the mellowness is the essence; if the years merely age without mellowing a thing, they have done it no good; the same thing new is the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the city Dagonet danced away. But thro' the slowly-mellowing avenues And solitary passes of the wood Rode Tristram toward Lyonesse and the west. Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt With ruby-circled neck, but evermore Past, as a rustle or twitter in the wood Made dull his inner, keen his outer eye For all that walk'd, or crept, ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... rode away from her, and she had watched his tall figure disappear into the dusk, she turned back toward the house, and saw it and the world round it with new eyes. The moon shone on the old front, mellowing it to a brownish ivory; the shadows of the trees lay clear on the whitened grass; and in the luminous air colors of sunrise and of moonrise blended, tints of pearl, of gold, and purple. A consecrating beauty lay on all visible things, and spoke to the ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the sea. That is excluded by the lower hills which hem the Magra. The upper valley is beautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hill-sides breaking down into thick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace for nearly an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; but the fruit was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In the still October air the husks above our heads would loosen, and the brown nuts rustle through the foliage, and with a dull short thud, like drops ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... cabin, so disastrously begun, finished, under the mellowing influence of wine and woman, in excellent feeling and with some hilarity. Mamie, in a plush Gainsborough hat and a gown of wine-coloured silk, sat, an apparent queen, among her rude surroundings and companions. The dusky litter of the cabin set off her radiant trimness: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... In the Epilogue the poet informs his readers that those who expect from him, or from any poet, strong wine of verse which is also sweet demand the impossible. Sweet the strong wine can become only after it has long lain mellowing in the cask. The experience of Browning's readers contradicted the assertion. Some who drank the good wines of 1855 and of 1864 in the year of the vintages found that they were strong and needed no keeping to be sweet. Wine-tasters must make distinctions, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Dagonet danced away; But through the slowly-mellowing avenues And solitary passes of the wood Rode Tristram toward Lyonnesse and the west. Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt With ruby-circled neck, but evermore Past, as a rustle or twitter in the wood Made ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... ceased mellowing out the favorite medley which begins with "Casta Diva" and runs over into the lovely cadences of "Gentle Annie"; and the abrupt transition from that mournful strain to a light cotillon air warned four hundred holiday-people that the festive dance was about to begin on the wide ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... casts the shadow of divorce on her pathway, but it is only the warm, restful shadow of a ripening and mellowing sorrow. Do not fear to have Millie walk ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... total of all that is good and grand in the ages past, and the constant and almost imperceptible influence of her most excellent system of public worship, as indicated in the Book of Common Prayer, silently but effectively issues, in moulding and mellowing good Christian character. She teaches not only through the prayer book, but by the yearly round of feast, festival and fast, of which, like a great panorama the acts and incidents in the life of her ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... a romantic temperament, could have been more attractive. The subdued twilight of that northern clime reigned over the face of nature, softening and mellowing all objects, but in no way obscuring them. The light was not so bright as that of the day, and yet it partook in no way of the characteristics of night. It was more like the warm light of the dawn of a summer day in the south, just before the sun rises ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it. The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. And there was a great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. We had hit a lucky moment, evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that. At the front where ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Castle delivered this afternoon resembled this eponymous beverage, for it was decidedly effervescent. But the other ingredients were wrongly apportioned—too much of the bitters and not enough of the mellowing spirit. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... or, as much as possible, individual histories among the English community. It is already so long ago since we lived in that lovely place, that events, trials, joys, and the usual vicissitudes of life, are wrapt in that mellowing haze of the past, which, while it dims the vividness of feeling, throws a robe of charity over all, and perhaps causes actors and actions to assume a more true proportion to one another than when we walked amongst them. I have, however, not depended on memory alone for the ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... put 'em in here," says Mr. Glentworthy, laconically, lighting his lamp. "I hope to get old Saddlerock in here. Give him such a mellowing!" He turns his light, and the shadows play, spectre-like, along a low, wet aisle, hung on each side with rusty bolts and locks, revealing the doors of cells. An ominous stillness is broken by the dull clank of chains, the muttering of voices, the shuffling of limbs; then ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... doubt that the more impervious the package containing tea is to the air, the more perfectly the finer qualities of the tea are preserved. If there is a necessity for ripening or mellowing by time, air should be rigidly excluded during ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... lounging in an easy-chair most of the day, with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... tear away the sanguine string, For war is not the theme I sing. Proclaim the laws of festal right,[1] I'm monarch of the board to-night; And all around shall brim as high, And quaff the tide as deep as I. And when the cluster's mellowing dews Their warm enchanting balm infuse, Our feet shall catch the elastic bound, And reel us through the dance's round. Great Bacchus! we shall sing to thee, In wild but sweet ebriety; Flashing around such sparks of thought, As Bacchus could alone ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... failing flask, which he said contained a panacea for all ills of the mind, and enjoined him to partake. The man exhibited no timidity in accepting the invitation, for having taken two or three swallows, he smacked his lips in approval, and said, he already felt it mellowing his temper. He then searched in his wallet, and finding some crusts and a ham bone, threw them to his dog, who generously shared them with his companion, the pig. This done, we took seats by the roadside, while the drover began, in brief, to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... foolish extrauagant spirit, full of formes, figures, shapes, obiects, Ideas, apprehensions, motions, reuolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memorie, nourisht in the wombe of primater, and deliuered vpon the mellowing of occasion: but the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... all things seemed drowsy—where the only spectators were the mellowing apples that reddened the boughs above her, and her sole auditors the brown partridges that nestled in the tall grass, and the shy cicadae ambushed under the clover leaves—her pent-up pain and disappointment bubbled over in a gush of ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... was just beginning to come in. She sat down on the big boulder where Reeves had fallen asleep. Beyond stretched the gleaming blue waters, mellowing into ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... clouds, With London spread beneath him like a map. Under his tower, a flock of prentices Calling like bells, of little size or weight, But bells no less, ask that the Bell of Bow Shall tell the tale of Richard Whittington, As thus." Then Gregory Clopton, mellowing all The chiming vowels, and dwelling on every tone In rhythm or rhyme that helped to swell the peal Or keep the ringing measure, beat for beat, Chanted this legend ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... venturing to eat or speak until the plates of all had been heaped with a little of everything upon the table,—the meal became very genial and pleasant. A huge brown pitcher of stinging cider added its mild stimulus to the calm country blood, and under its mellowing influence Mark announced the most important fact of his life,—he was to have ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... hunger to get; Happiness is the hunger to give. True happiness must ever have the tinge of sorrow outlived, the sense of pain softened by the mellowing years, the chastening of loss that in the wondrous mystery of time transmutes our suffering into love and ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... on the frozen ground; while the story followed the life and work of this great historic character through the slow unfolding out of the depths of the past; the development from the springtime of youth into the fruitful summer of maturity; the mellowing into the richness and beauty of autumn; the coming at last into the snowy spotlessness of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... a large, and often a rambling, building of one storey, except where a tower served as a store-room for the mellowing wine or a loft for the mellowing fruit. When we read in Horace about the liberal stack of wood to be kept in readiness near the hearth, and about the wine-jar drinking in the smoke in the store-room ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... even one's head) with its luxuriant masses, until, with the nettle, it almost meets the pendent, pale-green branches of the old apple-trees where apples, round and lustrous as bone, but as yet unripe, are mellowing in the heat of the sun. Below, again, are seen young raspberry-shoots, twining themselves around the partially withered, leafless parent plant, and stretching their tendrils towards the sunlight, with green, needle-shaped blades of grass and young, dew-coated pods peering ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... withdraw the lofty actors, From that great play on history's stage eterne, That lurid, partial act of war and peace—of old and new contending, Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long suspense; All past—and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing, Victor's and vanquish'd—Lincoln's and Lee's—now thou with them, Man of the mighty days—and equal to the days! Thou from the prairies!—tangled and many-vein'd and hard has been thy part, To admiration has it ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... breast. The child was wrapped in vestments soft and fine, Each fold a work of Nature's matchless art; The mother looked on it with love divine, And strained the loved one closely to her heart. And there it lay, and with the warmth grew strong And hearty, by the salt sea breezes fanned, Till Time with mellowing touches passed along, And changed the infant to ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... exerts a mellowing influence, and leads to the observation and love of nature, while historical pictures stimulate research, and nerve the mind to deeds ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... memory, striving to divine Phantom to-morrows, to outrun the past; For yet the tears of final, absolute ill And ruinous knowledge of my fate I shun. Even as the frail, instinctive weed Tries, through unending shade, to reach at last A shining, mellowing, rapture-giving sun; So in the deed of breathing joy's warm breath, Fain to succeed, I, too, in colorless longings, hope ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... sorrow-stricken were supplied with brimming goblets of Lethe; and it was shrewdly conjectured that a certain golden vase, from which only the more distinguished guests were invited to partake, contained nectar that had been mellowing ever since the days of classical mythology. The cloth being removed, the company, as usual, grew eloquent over their liquor and delivered themselves of a succession of brilliant speeches,—the task of reporting which we resign to the more adequate ability ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... filling his lungs with great draughts of the balmy air and looking about him, eager-eyed. And thus, beholding the beauty of wooded hill and dale, already mellowing to Autumn, the heaviness was lifted from his spirit, his drooping back grew straight, and raising his eyes to the blue expanse of heaven, he gloried ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... margined with green, and new creatures everywhere stir the earth and the waters. Life and matter become, as it were, a new creation, and one can believe anything when he sees how many forms life and matter can assume under the mellowing rays of the sun. The clod becomes a flower; the egg a reptile, fish, or bird. The cunning woodchuck, that looks out of his hole on the awakening earth and blue sky, seems almost to have a sense ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... note an hour ago, I saw a hamlet and a spire. All the valley at my right hand was full of pasture- fields, and cornfields, and wood; and a glittering stream ran zig-zag through the varied shades of green, the mellowing grain, the sombre woodland, the clear and sunny lea. Recalled by the rumbling of wheels to the road before me, I saw a heavily-laden waggon labouring up the hill, and not far beyond were two cows and their drover. Human life and human labour were near. I must struggle on: strive ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... traces of declining powers, a greater tendency to digression, a lack of concentration and vigour, and even of dexterity of language. But the change is due in all probability not merely to advance in years nor to the calming and mellowing influence of old age, but also to a change that was gradually passing over the Roman world. The material for savage satire was appreciably less. Evil in its worst forms had triumphed under Domitian. With Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian virtue began slowly and uncertainly ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... have arisen to house the well-to-do. Our interest in Cairo, therefore, is centred in the native quarters, where miles of streets and alleys, rich in Arabesque buildings, are untouched except by the mellowing ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... Rasping voices lifted themselves in song. No laughter, no shouting—only the sounds of men whose memories are more sensitive than their feelings, who live in the past or the future, never in the present. Evening was fluttering gently down, mellowing line and tone. ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan |
