"Trilling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bright-eyed children feeding their testy pet, for I dread the cannibal temptation of those soft fair fingers, when brought into collision with Polly's hook and eye; gigantic Newfoundlanders dragging their perpetual chains, larks and linnets trilling the faint song of liberty behind their prison bars, cold green snakes stewing in a school-boy's pocket, and dormice nestling in a lady's glove, summon my antipathies; a cargo of five hundred pigs, with whom I had once the honour of sailing from Cork to London, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... about the room like an intoxicated bird, waving the letter, and trilling and running joyful chromatic scales, for the most ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... female, who are lacking velocity and the power of trilling, seem to me like horses without tails. Both of these things belong to the art of song, and are inseparable from it. It is a matter of indifference whether the singer has to use them or not; he must be able to. The teacher who neither teaches nor can teach ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... 'Tis that enamoured nightingale Who thus gives me the reply:— To his partner in the vale Listening on a bough hard by Warbling thus his tuneful wail. Cease, sweet nightingale, nor show By thy softly witching strain Trilling forth thy bliss and woe, How a man might feel love's pain, When a bird can feel his so. No: it was that wanton vine That in fond pursuit has sought The tall tree it doth entwine, Till the green weight it hath brought Makes the noble trunk decline. Green entwining boughs that ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... lark has sprung, Still trilling as he flies; The linnet sings as there he sung; The unseen ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and clear," till he rose so high that the sounds came faintly, and nothing could be seen of him but a little black speck high up against the edge of the white flecky cloud; and still the sweet song came trilling down so soft and clear, that the birds clapped their wings and cried "Bravo!" while the jackdaw said he would take lessons from the lark in that style of singing, for he thought it would suit his voice, and ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... the nightingale is trilling Songs of love to lovers' ears, Which, to hearts with sorrow thrilling, Seem but sighs ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... of the woods into a plain beyond, where he was to meet Wetzel at sunset. A smoky haze like a purple cloud lay upon the gently waving grass. He could not see across the stretch of prairie-land, though at this point he knew it was hardly a mile wide. With the trilling of the grasshoppers alone disturbing the serene quiet of this autumn afternoon, all nature seemed in harmony with the declining season. He stood a while, his thoughts becoming the calmer for the silence and ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... range, towards Ceuta. Nearer, astride of a grey rock an almost naked goatherd, a lithe brown stripling with a cord of camel-hair about his shaven head, intermittently made melancholy and unmelodious sounds upon a reed pipe. From somewhere in the blue vault of heaven overhead came the joyous trilling of a lark, from below the silken rustling of ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... after we had called as usual one morning and found the house empty, he brought his pretty snow-birdlings in their tidy striped bibs up to the grove at the back door, where we often heard his sharp trilling little song, and saw him working like some bigger papas to keep the dear ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... thought she had done enough in pointing out to him the path which would conduct him to success, if he had deserved it, she did not think it worth while to enter into any farther explanation; since he refused to cede, for her salve, so trilling an objection: from this instant she resolved to have done ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... its sprint, stumbled, went on again, tripped again. A second machine-gun farther down the line caught it up, and the two ran along in perfect step for a while. Then a third joined in, like some distant canary answering its mates. The first two stopped and left it trilling along by itself, catching occasionally like a motor-car engine that misfires, until it, too, stuttered into silence. "Some poor devils being killed, I suppose," you think to yourself, "suppose they've ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... very busy plucking the feathers off a bird and dropping them on a sheet placed for that purpose on the floor. She is trilling to herself in the lightness of her heart. We may remember that Tweeny, alone among the women, had dressed wisely for an island when they fled the yacht, and her going-away gown still adheres to her, though ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... walk that morning he had noted many things with new eyes—the flowers gladdening the face of nature; the trees rearing their proud heads and standing each in his own place—each doing his own work; the birds trilling their songs of praise and stirring in the soul those holy aspirations whose feet scarce touch the earth and whose face is set toward heaven—all these doing the Father's work and answering with the quick response of perfect obedience, perfect sympathy to the divine will. Viewing them ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... been brought to, and that was a man beating a fellow creature! What a crime! It was as though a sharp dagger had pierced me right through. I stood as if I were struck dumb, while the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing and the birds were trilling the praise of God.... I hid my face in my hands, fell on my bed and broke into a storm of tears. And then I remembered my brother Markel and what he said on his death-bed to his servants: "My dear ones, why do you wait ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... chewing of such a salad as grew there. And now the Captain slid off stealthily; and smiling comically, and hitching up his great jack-boots, and moving forward with a jerking tiptoe step, he, just as she was trilling the last o-o-o of the last no in the above poem of Tom D'Urfey, came up to her, and touching her lightly on the ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Josette received orders to appear in full dress. The garden was raked. The old maid regretted that she couldn't come to an understanding with the nightingales nesting in the trees, in order to obtain their finest trilling. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Ripheus in this round was set Fifth of the saintly splendours? now he knows Enough of that, which the world cannot see, The grace divine, albeit e'en his sight Reach not its utmost depth." Like to the lark, That warbling in the air expatiates long, Then, trilling out his last sweet melody, Drops satiate with the sweetness; such appear'd That image stampt by the' everlasting pleasure, Which fashions like itself all lovely things. I, though my doubting were as manifest, As is through glass the hue that mantles it, In silence ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... telephone. Dejectedly, wistful-eyed, she went. Just what were the words that hummed across the wire into the pink little ear of the bride-to-be, Billy never knew; but a Marie that was anything but wistful-eyed and dejected left the telephone a little later, and was heard very soon in the room above trilling merry snatches of a little song. Contentedly, then, Billy went back to ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... and though there may be examples of echo-words which have been bettered by losing all trace of their simple spontaneous origin, this is not one. It is like burr, purr, and whirr; and these words are best spelt with double R and the R should be trilled. The absurdity of not trilling this final R is seen very plainly in burr, because that word's definition is 'a rough sounding of the letter R.' This is not represented by the pronunciation b[schwa]:. What that 'southern English' pronunciation does indicate is the vulgarity and inconvenience of ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... most appealing in the trilling of their notes: It is innocence that's pouring from their little baby throats; And I gaze at them enraptured, for my joy's a real thing Every evening when the kiddies and their ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... single-hearted, too relying in her trust fora doubt so dreadful; but her step grew heavier day by day—her cheek so very, very pale, except at the post-man's hour, when it would burn with a feverish brightness, and then fade to its former pallid hue again; her sweet voice was heard no longer trilling forth those thrilling melodies which had gladdened the heart of young and old to hear. The visits to Dream-dell were less and less frequent, for now how each remembrance so fondly connected with that spot, came fraught with pain; the works of her favorite ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... and vacant above the strange, discordant music. Then the flashing, changing, whirling colors of the dancers struck Lane as oriental, erotic, bizarre—gorgeous golds and greens and reds striped by the conventional black. Suddenly the blare ceased, and the shrill, trilling laughter had dominance. The rapid circling of forms came to a sudden stop, and the dancers streamed in all ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... species of warblers appeared during the month: the pine-creeping warblers, already spoken of, who were trilling on the 14th; the yellow-rumped, who came on the 23d; and the yellow red-polls, who followed the next morning. The black-throated greens were mysteriously tardy, and the black-and-white creepers ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... will take them to the 'Garden of Sleep,' where among the tombstones and long grass they can watch the sea sparkling in a golden haze, and listen to the waves as they break on the yellow sands; where the birds are ever trilling forth their songs without words; those days for ever are stored in the minds of some of them as the loveliest summer ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... the Hall, gazing with wistful eyes at the still ice-covered lake, and occasionally consulting an open letter in his hand with frowning looks of meditation. The sweet voice of Jessie Lumley came from the interior of the Hall, trilling a tuneful Highland air, which, sweeping over the lawn and lake, mingled with the discords of the plover and geese, thus producing ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... Korean influence, the man of Old Japan found himself truly in a world of spirits and demons. They spoke to him in the sound of tides and of cataracts in the moaning of wind and the whispers of leafage, in the crying of birds, and the trilling of insects, in all the voices of nature. For him all visible motion—whether of waves or grasses or shifting mist or drifting cloud—was ghostly; and the never moving rocks—nay, the very stones by the wayside—were informed with viewless ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... she ordered, nodding her head, "A song of the rippling Spring that is gone— A song that's different from songs that are dead— Different as sunset is from the dawn. Sparkling with happiness, heavy with dew, Trilling and thrilling, all the way through; Fill it with heaven's own laughing blue— Write it!" she said. So I ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... exceptional activity, but for the first time he had passed through the trial untaxed. He was slowly recovering from a sense of disappointment similar to that felt by a metropolitan at some Arcadian retreat, when he stands on the lonely platform at nightfall, listening to the trilling of the frogs increasing as the rumble of the train diminishes in the distance, and experiences a wild impulse to return at once to the fulness of life from which ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... from their element, Anne in weaving in wreaths the gorgeous tinted wild flowers, sweet scented violets, and glossy green of the running pine. The children heeded not time, nor the distance they were placing between themselves and the camp, but wandered on. The wild birds were trilling the most delicious music, which burst on the ear enchantingly, and was the only sound that broke the solemn stillness that reigned around, save the soft gurgling of the water, as it glided over its pebbly bed. The forest ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... state, or dreams of happy love, will be dwelt upon; oblivious sleep and the wan-faced moon will be invoked, and death will be called upon for respite. Love and the praises of the loved one was the theme. On this old but ever new refrain the sonneteer devised his descant, trilling joyously on oaten pipe in praise of Delia or Phyllis, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... seriously,' she said to her one morning after breakfast, as they were waiting for the postman in the garden, and Elfie had seated herself on the top bar of the gate, swinging herself to and fro, and trilling out an old English ditty as she ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... said last year Sounds yet in my ear,— Birdlike at the window sitting, Tapping, trilling there, Singing, in would bear Joy the warmth ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... ridges those first, faint signs of yellow that foretell a coming ripeness, the grass-mantled prairie lay beneath the warm noon sun. The little girl, cantering over it toward the sod shanty on the farther river bluffs, frightened the trilling meadow-larks, as she passed, from their perch on the dripping sunflowers, and scattered the drops on the wild wheat-blades with the hoofs ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... jewelling e'er Like the bud and the flower Of the groves on thy breast, Where rejoices to rest His magnificent crest, The mountain-cock, shrilling In quick time, his note; And the clans of the grot With melody's note, Their numbers are trilling. No foot can compare, In the dance of the green, With the roebuck's young heir; And here he is seen With his deftness of speed, And his sureness of tread, And his bend of the head, And his freedom of spring! Over corrie careers he, The wood-cover clears he, And merrily steers he With bound, and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea- tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the woods of the White Mountains the wild flowers were springing joyously and the birds were pouring out the fulness of life and joy and love from trilling throats. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the sea of the whole vast flare of light.... Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with vapor; frogs commence to make a queer bubbling noise; and some unknown creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high, keen, as of a thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents, aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees of our hotel I hear a continuous dripping ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... tell whence it came. Bells were ringing a lively chime with silvery notes, now breaking slowly on the ear, as if they could scarcely detach themselves from each other; now blending in groups, in strange flourishes; now trilling, and swelling sonorously. The music was merry and fantastic, although of a somewhat primitive character, it is true, like the many-colored town over which it poured its notes like a flight of birds; indeed, it seemed to harmonize so well with the character of the city that it appeared to be its ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... mischief which she was trying to hide from him. In that laugh there was something which was not like Melisse. Slight as the change was, he noticed it; but instead of displeasing him, it set a vague sensation of pleasure trilling like a new song ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... mist lay over the salt meadows; the fairy trilling of the little owl had ceased. Marsh-fowl were sleepily astir; the last firefly floated low into the shrouded bushes and its lamp glimmered ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme! For you! for you, I am trilling these songs, In the love of comrades, In the high-towering ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... naturally as a bird. She has some phenomenal high notes, which are clear as bells. She makes that usually tedious grand aria, which every singer makes a mess of, quite lovely and musical, hovering as she does in the regions above the upper line like a butterfly and trilling like a canary-bird. A Chinese juggler does not play with his glass balls more dexterously than she plays with all the effects and tricks of the voice. What luck for her to have blossomed like that into a full-fledged prima-donna with so little effort. I have got to know her quite well, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... was strolling along under the hedge, heard a Blackbird trilling on a branch. Quick as thought she jumped and seized the little fellow, and was about to gobble him down then and there. But the Blackbird ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... through the woods, the birds are trilling among the trees. It is their merry morning lay, but it gives him no gladness. There is still ringing in his ears that harsh monosyllable, "no." The wild-wood songsters appear to echo it, as if mockingly; ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... yet in leaf—only some tiny green shoots. "We shall not have any lilac this year till the middle of May. Was there ever such a season?" Larks were everywhere, ascending in short flights, trilling as they ascended; and Evelyn listened to their singing, thinking it most curious—quaint cadenzas in which a note was wanting, like in the bagpipes, a sort of aerial bagpipes. But on a bare bough a thrush sang, breaking out presently into a little tune of five notes. "Quite ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... well as to others that he felt no difference. He felt the limpness and dejection in Nelly. He saw that her roses had faded, that she walked without the old joyous spring. He heard her no longer talking to the dogs, trilling to the canary. It was January now, and raw, cold weather. It seemed as though the sunshine had vanished from the house for good. The General had been wont to say that the cheerfulness of his house was within it, not without it. He had ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... animal murderers, by catching some fish which we broiled to satisfy our carnivorous appetites. It was delightful to float in that tiny boat, gazing through the green canopy of leaves at the great white clouds sailing over like ships upon the sea, listening to the ecstatic trilling of the orioles, and the flute-like melodies of the mockingbird of ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... away and wash her dishes, that she might creep to her own room under the eaves. Through her open casement came up to her the sounds of the April night: a heightened chorus of little frogs in a rain-fed branch; nearer in the dooryard a half-dozen tree-toads trilling plaintively as many different minors; with these, scents of growing, sharpened and sweetened by the dark. And all night the cedar tree which stood close to the porch edge below moved in the wind of spring, and, chafing against the shingles, spoke through the miniature music in its deep, muffled ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... hold on, you have got all mixed up," said the old man. "She does not gargle. That is called warbling, or trilling, or trolling, or something. And no girl has a tenor voice. She must be ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... between his fingers with the manual dexterity that one sometimes sees in stupid persons. His head was quite empty of all thought, and he did not whistle over his work as another man might have done. The canary made up for his silence, trilling and chittering continually, splashing about in its morning bath, keeping up an incessant noise and movement that would have been maddening to any one but McTeague, who seemed to have ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... increased their steps; timorously glanced at it sidelong, out of the corner of the eye; while others even crossed themselves. But late in the night the fear of death somehow subsided, grew bearable. All the rooms were occupied, while in the drawing room a new violinist was trilling without cease—a free-and-easy, clean-shaven young man, whom the pianist with the cataract had searched out ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... lark in a cage, and heard him trilling out his music as he sprang upwards to the roof of his prison, but we felt sickened with the sight and sound, as contrasting, in our thought, the free minstrel of the morning, bounding as it were into ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... Bouffe. It was difficult, in fact, to decide whether the inner nature of Ward was more truly expressing itself when he was firing off some train of scholastic paradoxes on the Eucharist or when he was trilling the airs of Figaro and plunging through the hilarious roulades of the Largo al Factotum. Even Dr. Pusey could riot be quite sure, though he was Ward's spiritual director. On one occasion his young penitent came to ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... uttered a high, trilling laugh, and the other girls joined in so heartily that, for a moment, or so, work came to a standstill. Hippy then briskly attacked the packs, while Tom secured them to the backs ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... astonishing and perspiring genius of a Newton, who first deplored and enveloped the cause of it. Cannot the poor man, sir, precipitate into all the beauties of nature, from the loftiest mounting up to the most humblest valley as well as the man prepossessed of indigence? Yes, sir; while trilling transports crown his view, and rosy hours allure his sanguinary youth, he can raise his mind up to the laws of nature, incompressible as they are, while viewing the lawless storm that kindleth up the pretentious roaring thunder, and fireth up the dark and rapid ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... and agree that it is all damned nonsense. There is something very melancholy and very ludicrous in all this, and though that great bull calf the public does not care about such things, and is content to roar when he is bid, there are those on the alert who will turn such trilling and folly to account, and convert what is half ridiculous into something all serious. Winchelsea and Newcastle after all did not vote the other night; they said they wanted no evidence, that they would have no such Bill, and would not meddle with the discussion at all except ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... as very injurious to morality. For first, they conceive it to be great presumption in men to summon God as a witness in their trilling ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... obeisances and laid both hands on the ground, while looking into Eva's eyes. Then he arose and held up his finger to command silence. From the broad stretches of the fields with their young crops came the thousand-throated trilling of the larks. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... at Robert's side. It was Tayoga trilling forth a melody, wonderfully clear and penetrating, a melody that carried far ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his drooping spirits by eating heartily of three dozen insects of different kinds and sizes, he felt so cheerful that he couldn't help trilling a few songs. It was almost evening; and he was glad not to let the sun go down without thanking him in that way for shining ...
— The Tale of Rusty Wren • Arthur Scott Bailey
... words sounded like a rally call. With that the girl fled down the hall, trilling the merriest sort ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... a strong Covenanter's ring in the chorus. Growing bolder as he went on, he at last filled the quiet night with the strenuous sweep of his chant. Surprised at his own fervor, he paused for a moment, listening, half frightened, half ashamed of his outbreak. But there was only the trilling of the night wind in the leaves, or the far-off yelp of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... gentle pieman in the road behind me trilling, "'Tira! lira!' stop him, stop him! 'Tra! la! la!' ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... feeling his oats," flung back Chunky. The boy hugged himself delightedly. What he had done was to give a trilling tongue movement accompanied by a hiss. It was a perfect imitation of the trilling hiss of the rattlesnake. When Stacy had first given the imitation he did not realize what he was doing. He had fooled his pony. The Pony Rider Boy was delighted. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys with the Texas Rangers • Frank Gee Patchin
... themselves for adjustment between the two countries were, after all, of no particular importance and were easily arranged. The days seemed to have gone by for that over-strained sensitiveness which was continually giving rise to senseless bickerings, when every trilling breeze seemed to fan the smouldering fires of jealousy. The two great English-speaking nations appeared finally to have realized the absolute folly of continual disputes between countries whose destiny and ideals were so completely ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... guessed that the music of the gray morn when we started found a ready echo in my heart. The whistle of a plover cut the breaking day, the meadow larks piped clear above us in chorus with the trilling of the thrush, the wimpling burn tinkled its song, and the joy that took me fairly by the throat was in tune with all of them. For what does a lover ask but to be one and twenty, to be astride a willing horse, and to be ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... purple-green vines that always reminded him of a gate to a garden. There was a quiet simplicity to this small clearing where he and Gistla met. There was an aloneness to it, and only the sound of the flat shiny leaves sliding together and the high, trilling sound of the small Venusian birds broke the peaceful silence. They had ...
— George Loves Gistla • James McKimmey
... was grand to hear her trilling out the pretty love speeches of Juliet, declaring the wrongs of Constance or Katherine, moaning out the woes of Desdemona. She had Shakespeare almost by heart, and she loved the ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... the whole row of boxes shone like a vast coronet set with thousands of precious stones. When the music did not amuse society, the diamonds and rubies twinkled and glittered uneasily, but when Cordova was trilling her wildest they were quite still and blazed with a steady light. Afterwards the audience would all say again what they had always said about every great lyric soprano, that it was just a wonderful ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... Almack's balls - Willis's sometime named - In those two smooth-floored upper halls For faded ones so famed? Where as we trod to trilling sound The fancied phantoms stood around, Or joined us in the maze, Of the powdered Dears from Georgian years, Whose dust lay in sightless sealed-up biers, ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... the fluttering Bob-o-link, Whose trilling song above the meadow floats; The eager air speeds tremulous to drink The bubbling sweetness of the liquid notes, Whose silver cadences arise and sink, Shift, glide and shiver, like the trembling motes In the full gush of sunset. One might think Some potent ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... yon thrush's trilling; Phyllis, Phyllis, are you willing, When love speaks from cave and tree, Only we ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... rapids, where their interesting motions never fail to attract the angler and bird-student;" and this of their voices: "In early spring, the male birds may be seen perched on some moss-covered stone, trilling their fine clear notes;" and again: "I have stood within a few yards of one at the close of a blustering winter's day, and enjoyed its charming music unobserved. The performer was sitting on a stake jutting from a mill-pond ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... few minutes neither spoke, and from the garden there came loud and clear the joyous trilling of the birds. ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... and stand for a few minutes by the wall that overlooked the moor, watching great shafts of sunlight fall from a gray sky on to brown wastes of heather and bracken, listening to the call of the curlews or to the trilling autumn warble of the robin, perched on the red-berried hawthorn bush. Kind Mother Nature could always soothe her spirits, and send her back with fresh courage for the day's work. And, in the evening, when husband and children came home to fire and lamp-light, she had ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... her, she leaned against him, their slow steps so harmonising the one with the other that they accorded with the harmony of music; the nightingales trilling and bubbling in the rose trees were not affrighted by the low murmur of their voices; perchance, this night they were so near to Nature that the barriers were o'erpassed, and they ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to a great singer," continued this world-defying skeptic, "trilling like a thrush, scampering over the scales, I see a clumsy lot of ah, ah, ahs, awkwardly, uncertainly ambling up the gamut, saying, 'were it not for us she could not sing thus—give us ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... thee a wife; and by thy burdensome stone, oh groom, I make thee a husband. Live and be happy, both; for the wise and good Oro hath placed us in Mardi to be glad. Doth not all nature rejoice in her green groves and her flowers? and woo and wed not the fowls of the air, trilling their bliss in their bowers? Live then, and be happy, oh bride and groom; for Oro is offended with the unhappy, since he meant ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the trilling cry, which is made by raising the voice to its highest pitch and breaking it by a rapid succession of touches on the palate with the tongue-tip, others "Ziraleet" and Zagaleet, and one traveller tells us that it began at the marriage-festival of Isaac and Rebecca (!). Arabs term it classically ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... to follow the nurse, a big car whirled through the gate, and there sounded the trilling laughter of girls, the deeper jovial bass ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... even hear the question. Trilling a gay song, he had rushed off where the stir and lively spectacle of ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... called the tresillo, from its shape, it being an old form of the figure three, reversed, thus, . It is the only true guttural in the language, being pronounced forcibly from the throat, with a trilling sound (castaneteando). ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... girl, screened from view by the trees. Softly he whistled. It was a signal that Minnetaki had taught him on his first trip into the North, and he knew of only two who used it in all that Northland, and those two were the Indian maiden and himself. The girl turned as she heard the trilling note, and Rod drew himself farther back. He whistled again, more loudly than before, and Minnetaki came hesitatingly toward the forest's edge, and when he whistled a third time there came a timid response from her, as if she recognized and yet doubted the notes ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... Her trilling laughter smote upon his reverie, and he stepped to the screen-door, through which he could see her running down the path to the beach. At her heels ran two of her sailors, Papehara and Mahameme, in scarlet lava-lavas, with ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... the army, I started to write literary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There was ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... soubrette trilling snatches of her topical song as she creamed off her make-up, came to them through the sulky gloom of the corridor. Behind the closed door of Miss De Voe's dressing room, the gabble of the pink satin ponies was like hash in the chopping. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the building to Page's ears vibrated to a strange and ominous humming. She heard it in the distant clicking of telegraph keys, in the echo of hurried whispered conversations held in dark corners, in the noise of rapid footsteps, in the trilling of telephone bells. These sounds came from all around her; they issued from the offices of the building below her, above her and on either side. She was surrounded with them, and they mingled together to form one prolonged and ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... is now, I dare say, one immense field of corn, lucerne, or flax, and the people who now live and labour there know nothing of its former beautiful inhabitants, nor have they ever seen or even heard of the purple- plumaged trupial, with its chestnut cap and its delicate trilling song. And when I recall these vanished scenes, those rushy and flowery meres, with their varied and multitudinous wild bird life—the cloud of shining wings, the heart-enlivening wild cries, the joy unspeakable it was to me in those early years—I am glad to think I shall never revisit them, that ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called "false shakes" a hundred and fifty years ago. Incidentally it may be remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear it has become an ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... himself by leading out the lady who had played the guitar in the arbor. Thereupon he began to dance with extraordinary artistic skill, and describe all sorts of letters on the grass with the points of his toes, really trilling with his feet, and now and then jumping pretty high in the air. But he soon had enough of it, for he was rather corpulent. His jumps grew fewer and clumsier, until at last he withdrew from the circle, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of the morn, of the morn of the year, Chanting your lays in the bosky dell, Higher and fuller your round notes swell, Till the Fauns and the Dryads peer forth to hear The trilling lays of your feathery band: Ye came not, ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... small hill, and was lost to view on the other side. The woodland, being so near the city, was not dense, but the girls thought they had never seen foliage so vividly green nor grass so soft and luxuriant. The beckoning shadows of the trees, the fragrance of the dew-drenched flowers, the trilling music of a thousand carefree, joyous little songsters, all combined in one ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... room, and trilling some blithe air, Opened my wardrobe, wondering what to wear. Momentous question! femininely human! More than all others, vexing mind of woman, Since that sad day, when in her discontent, To search for leaves, our fair first mother went. All undecided what I should put on, At ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... lain beneath the pine trees just to hear the thrush's calling, I have waited for the throstle where the harvest fields were brown, I have caught the lark's sweet trilling from the depths of cloud-land falling And the piping of the linnet through the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... health, that I would be an easy prey to his blandishments? Did he dream that the prospect of liberty which newspaper rumour and semi-official information held out to me was too dear to be forfeited for a trilling forfeiture of honour? Did he believe that by an act of secret turpitude I would open my prison doors only to close them the faster on others who may or may not have been my friends—or did he imagine he had found in me a Massey to be moulded and manipulated into the service ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... o'erspread, with groves o'erhung! Where musing now, now trilling her sweet lay, Most like what bards of heavenly spirits say, Sits she by fame through every region sung: My heart, which wisely unto her has clung— More wise, if there, in absence blest, it stay! Notes now the turf o'er which her soft steps stray, Now where her angel-eyes' mild beam is ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... diagram all right. He poked his beak at it, and with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos to Mars, and then sketched in ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... that this whistling and chirping, trilling and cuckoo calling, came from the same throat; but when the bird notes ceased just outside the door, and Barbara, with bright mirthfulness and the airiest grace, sang the refrain of the Chant des Oiseaux, 'Car la saison est bonne', bowing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... dark water; they quivered and were broken up on the surface—and from that alone it could be seen that the river was flowing rapidly. It was still. Drowsy curlews cried plaintively on the further bank, and in one of the bushes on the nearest side a nightingale was trilling loudly, taking no notice of the crowd of officers. The officers stood round the bush, touched it, but the nightingale ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Then she brought them straight to the bed, and stooping down gave me the only kiss with which she has honored me—her show kiss, I call it—saying, 'My darling' (how soft she said it, too, with a little trilling cadence upon the sweet old word!)—'My darling, you are not to speak, or even look, save this once: now I must cover up my dearie's eyes;' and she laid her cool hand over my eyes and held it there while they ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... trees were trilling audibly. Then came a sudden gust that swept the fronds of the taller ferns into their faces, and laid the thin, lithe whips of alder over their horses' flanks sharply. It was followed by the distant sea-like roaring of ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... at the table he left the talk to him and his host. They supped in a room opening into a sort of wing; beyond it was a small kitchen, from which an elderly woman brought the dishes, and where that girl whom he heard singing kept trilling away as if she were excited, like a canary, by the sound of the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... Arthur kept up with them for many miles, and there was a running fight and much wounding and slaying all through the fresh green countryside, where the hedges were laden with May-blossoms, and in the sky the larks were trilling. ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... find the place crowded to its utmost capacity, but were even more astonished when, after a preliminary bar or so on the mouth-organ, Dick Sullivan began softly to play The Blue-bells of Scotland, and Peace's red lips took up the melody, whistling with beautiful accuracy and clearness, trilling through measure after measure with bird-like notes, following all of Dick's variations, and adding a few of her own under the inspiration lent by the presence of ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... yesterday's downpour. While they were harnessing me a cart, I went for a stroll about a small orchard, now neglected and run wild, which enclosed the little lodge on all sides with its fragrant, sappy growth. Ah, how sweet it was in the open air, under the bright sky, where the larks were trilling, whence their bell-like notes rained down like silvery beads! On their wings, doubtless, they had carried off drops of dew, and their songs seemed steeped in dew. I took my cap off my head and drew a glad deep breath.... On the slope of a shallow ravine, close to the hedge, could be seen ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... fluttering at his window blind; a honeysuckle vine tapped lightly on the pane. Birds were trilling, warbling, whistling. From the street came the rumbling of wagons, merry cries of greeting, and the barking of dogs. What was it made him feel so young and strong and light-hearted? The breeze brought him the smell of June roses, fresh and sweet with dew, and then he knew why he had come ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... the clear call Of the tree-cricket, Frailest of creatures, Green as the young grass, 25 Mark with his trilling Resonant bell-note, How ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... A delicious, trilling laugh greeted the panic of his first words. Then the clear, sweet voice, serious again, replied, "So you swam ashore from the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... game, he will find himself beset with "varmints" innumerable. The wolves will entertain him with a concerto at night, and skulk around him by day, just beyond rifle shot; his horse will step into badger-holes; from every marsh and mud puddle will arise the bellowing, croaking, and trilling of legions of frogs, infinitely various in color, shape and dimensions. A profusion of snakes will glide away from under his horse's feet, or quietly visit him in his tent at night; while the pertinacious humming of unnumbered mosquitoes will banish sleep from his eyelids. When thirsty with a ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... quite surprised one day when a lark sprang suddenly from a field of long grass and went soaring up and up in the clear sunshine till it looked only like a speck, and at last could scarcely be seen, but yet all the time kept trilling and singing its ...
— Naughty Miss Bunny - A Story for Little Children • Clara Mulholland
... to distil her words. I stood then in the door of a little ante-room opening into the drawing-room and looking on the courtyard, and gazed thence at those three pictures, as if it were all a delirament, till out of them Effie stepped in person, and danced, trilling to herself, through the groups, flashing, sparkling, flickering, and disappeared. Oh, but Mrs. Strathsay's eyes gleamed in a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... were sawing wood near the station. And after work they were going home; they walked without haste one after the other. Broad saws curved over their shoulders; the sun was reflected in them. The nightingales were singing in the bushes on the bank, larks were trilling in the heavens. It was quiet at the New Villa; there was not a soul there, and only golden pigeons—golden because the sunlight was streaming upon them—were flying over the house. All of them—Rodion, the two Lytchkovs, and Volodka—thought of the white horses, the little ponies, the fireworks, ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Birds," the songsters of the woods are frequently heard trilling their lays. As they were only befeathered men, this must have been a somewhat comic performance. The king of birds, transformed from Tereus, King of Thrace, twitters in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange |
