"Ballad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hands, and the gracefully turned head and bust, were all evidences of the grade of life to which she belonged. She held the burning hand of the invalid between her own soft, cool palms, and sung in a sweet low voice an old ballad which told of the ancient greatness of the Saxon race. At a short distance from them sat an elderly lady, clad in deep mourning, and her saddened countenance corresponded well with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... fancy is unusual enough: but it is still more unusual to find the stern Justiciar, avenger of blood and redresser of wrong, the reconstructer of a distracted country, capable not only of the broad fun of the rustic ballad-maker, but of so tolerant and humorous a view of the humble commons, the underlying masses upon which society is built. For the first aspect of affairs in Scotland could not be a cheerful one: although it was rather with the nobles and gentlemen, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... fair curls that fell low upon her waist and mingled with the wild pink roses at her bosom. The fiddler sat quietly as if he heard nothing until she began to sing, when he turned to look at her. The elder announced, after the ballad, that he had brought with him a wonderful musician who would favour them with some sacred music. He used the word 'sacred' because he had observed, I suppose, that certain of the 'hardshells' were looking askance at the fiddle. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... had to be reduced to the dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation" in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... the opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the intangible "something," expressed artistically, why not take Benet's "Immoral Ballad"? A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so, incapable of being analyzed by any rules known to the pundits. But it is not vers libre. If it were, its intangible ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... a concession to his patrons, the oculist spent an evening among them. Once after reciting one of the sonnets of Shakespeare he put a hand on the bar and rocking gently back and forth sang in a drink-broken voice a ballad beginning "The harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed." After the song he put his head down upon the bar and wept while the miners looked ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... who had dropped in, was suddenly reminded of that lugubrious old ballad, "The Mistletoe Bough," and recited large worn fragments of it impressively. It tells of how a beautiful girl hid away in a chest during a Christmas game of hide-and-seek, and how she was found, a dried vestige, years afterwards. It took a very powerful hold ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... rests from his employment. Then the old farmer comes out on the porch to take his evening pipe; and the good dame sits by his side with her knitting, and the sweet voice of Ursula warbles a simple ballad to please the ears of the aged pair. The young man bares his brow to the delicious breath of evening, and carefully placing his sketch within the portfolio, saunters on toward the little gate. And now Ursula hushes her song, and the old man ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... estate of Lantine with all the consequence due to an ancient name in which the rest of us forgot to feel any pride. But this was my sister Margery's way; to whom, as honour was her passion, so the very shadows of old repute, dead loyalties, perished greatness, were idols to be worshipped. By a ballad, a story of former daring or devotion, a word even, I have seen her whole frame shaken and her eyes brimmed with bright tears; nay, I have seen tears drop on her clasped hands, in our pew in St. Sampson's Church, with no more cause than old ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... and learned the secrets of the interior mechanism of its style. It is not surprising that his first publication should have been a book of poetry. The merits of The Masque of Shadows and other Poems were acknowledged on all sides. It was seen that the art of ballad writing—which Goethe calls the most difficult of arts—was not, as some averred, a forgotten one. The Masque of Shadows itself is melodious and vivid from the first line to the end, but the captain jewel is the necromantic and thrilling Rime of Redemption—the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... our father came not here, I thought if we could find the sea We should be sure to meet him there, And once again might happy be.-Ballad. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to bed. To her, Brigaut's arrival was an immense event. During the night—that Eden of the wretched—she escaped the vexations and fault-findings she bore during the day. Like the hero of a ballad, German or Russian, I forget which, her sleep seemed to her the happy life; her waking hours a bad dream. She had just had her only pleasurable waking in three years. The memories of her childhood had sung their melodious ditties in her soul. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... critic remark, "of a lower order." He had not in any great degree the MENS DIVINIOR, the dignity of genius. Much, however, must be allowed to the author of a new species of composition, though it be not of the highest kind. We owe to Gay the ballad opera, a mode of comedy which at first was supposed to delight only by its novelty, but has now, by the experience of half a century, been found so well accommodated to the disposition of a popular audience that it is likely to keep long possession of the stage. Whether this new drama was the product ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... immediately to be realised aims of life, but have never faced the larger question which reduces all these smaller aims to insignificance. The simple child's interrogation which in the well-known ballad ripped the tinsel off the skeleton, and showed war in its hideousness, strips many of your lives of all pretence to be reasonable. 'What good came of it at the last?' Can you answer the question that the infant ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to make a subscription to a "testimonial" for one Austen Mackay of Kilshanny, in the County Clare, producing at the same time a copy of the circular which had been sent about to the people. It is a cheaply-printed leaflet, not unlike a penny ballad in appearance, ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... scarce prove our wisdom," said Christina, "to run away with thy mother like a lover in a ballad. Nay, let me first deal gently with thine uncle, and speak myself with Sir Kasimir, so that I may show him the vanity of his suit. Then will we back to Adlerstein without leaving wounds ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... could,—"who ever would have thought that things would turn out as they have when I last patted your dear old head at Bingen, 'Fair Bingen on the Rhine,' eh?" and she murmured to herself the refrain of that beautiful ballad. ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... "Muwashshahah;" a complicated stanza of which specimens have occurred. Mr. Payne calls it a "ballad," which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Mediterranean against seven Sallee rovers, in which, after a hard engagement lasting four hours, the Mary Rose triumphed decisively without losing a single sail of her convoy. A rude song was made about the action, and the two lines of the ballad, summing up the results, were painted around ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... silenced all other connoisseurs and antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine. A ballad, written in monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the castle and brought the harp thence, and the Lady Loise took the harp and tuned it and struck it and played upon it. And the lady sang very sweetly a ballad that she knew ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... suddenly, but it was as suddenly chased away by his hearing the voice of Jane crooning over the words of some doleful old West Country ballad, not of a cheering nature certainly, but sufficient to prove that someone was at ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... perdition. All the ballads of Professor Aytoun and Mr. Theodore Martin are admirable, but there is none which strikes me as more so than the brilliant imitation of Locksley Hall, And how true to nature the state of mind ascribed to the vulgar snob who is the hero of the ballad, who, bethinking himself of his great disappointment when his cousin married somebody else, bestowed his extremest objurgations upon all who had abetted the hateful result, and then summed up ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... entered, without regard to metre, as so much prose. A stanza or two of the song entitled Chanson nouvelle sur le chant: "N'allez plus au bois jouer," and evidently adapted to the tune of a popular ballad of the day, may suffice to indicate the character of the most vigorous of these compositions. It is addressed to Michel d'Arande, a friend of Farel, whom Bishop Briconnet had invited to preach the Gospel in his ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... truth worthy of the famous axioms of La Palice. (Jacques de Chabannes, Seigneur de La Palice [circa 1470-1525]), was a French captain killed at the battle of Pavia. His soldiers made up in his honour a ballad, two lines of ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... his handsome black-letter reprint, published by Pickering in 1836, states, that "it is impossible to fix the date of this ballad," and has not attempted to trace the authorship. We shall be very glad if SEARCH's Query should produce information upon either ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... her soft eyes full of love, Myra sang, with slight alterations of her own, the last verse of the old Scotch ballad, "Huntingtower." ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... the parks and squares in honor of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so with no apparent literary association, but the American must always feel as if he were quoting the name from an old ballad. It gives the mighty town a peculiarly appealing rustic charm, and it remains in bloom almost as long as its namesake month endures. But that is no great wonder: when a tree has worked as hard as a tree must in England to get its blossoms out, it is naturally ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... complete work published by Mr. James Yeowell in 1862. The Essay on the Invention of Printing, by Mr. John Bagford, in vol. XXV. of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was, Dibdin says, drawn up by Wanley. The collection of ballads has been edited by the Rev. J.W. Ebsworth for the Ballad Society. ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... into the door a short time afterwards, he saw nothing that need have caused such a frown to wrinkle up his manly brow, for Lancy was only playing a simple ballad, and Dexie was seated in a low rocker some distance from the piano, her hands clasped behind her head, singing softly, her whole appearance seeming to suggest rest and contentment. Perhaps that very suggestion goaded him to bitterness, for why couldn't Dexie be ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... was merrier than usual at dinner; after it, sang ballad after ballad to please Liftore; then went to her room and told Caley to arrange for yet a visit, the next morning, to Mr Lenorme's studio. She positively must, she said, secure her father's portrait ere the ill tempered ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... snares which bound him. All that sustained his courage was the sanguine disposition of Joe Hawkridge, whose youthful soul had been so battered and toughened by dangers manifold on land and sea that he expected nothing less. Listening to the pirate's moving ballad, they sat and swung their legs from the ship's taffrail while their gaze idly roved to the green curtain of undergrowth which ran lush to the water's edge to the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... wait the verse maker, the student should copy and imitate every stanza form not familiar to him. In this way he will learn for himself why the Spenserian stanza used by Keats in his "Eve of St. Agnes" is good for one sort of narrative and why the ballad stanza used by Coleridge in his "Ancient Mariner" is good for another; why one sort of stanza sings merrily and why another is fitted for funeral hymns. Best of all, he will learn that he does not have to choose among "long meter," "short meter" and "Hallelujah meter," but that an almost indefinite ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... night with the stars twinkling in the clear heavens as we drove outside the yard of our hotel. Horses, driver, and travelers were alike exhilarated in the sharp atmosphere and we dashed off at courier pace. The driver was a musical fellow, and endeavored to sing a Russian ballad while we were galloping over the ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... are many-belled, and crowds of dirty children form endless groups about the steps, or around the shell-fish dealers' trays in these courts, whereof the damp pavements resound with pattens, and are drabbled with a never-failing mud. Ballad-singers come and chant here, in deadly, guttural tones, satirical songs against the Whig administration, against the bishops and dignified clergy, against the German relatives of an august royal family; Punch sets up his theater, sure of an audience, and occasionally of a halfpenny from the ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "The Tale of Gamelyn." Lodge did not invent the plot of "Rosalynde." The story is based upon "The Tale of Gamelyn." This is a narrative in rough ballad form, written in the fourteenth century and formerly attributed to Chaucer. Indeed all the copies of it that have been preserved occur in the manuscripts of the "Canterbury Tales" under the title "The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn." From the "Tale" Lodge borrowed and adapted ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... almost insuperable to the ordinary reader, are the faults which Burns seldom failed to display when writing in English. But to Burns there was given an instrument perfected by long centuries of use—the Scotch vernacular song and ballad; Carleton had to make his own, and the genius for form was lacking in him. Some day there may come a man of pure Irish race who will be to Carleton what Burns was to Ferguson, and then Ireland will have what it lacks; moreover, in the light of his achievement we ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... head back restfully against the small down pillow tied by gay ribbons to her chair; but her resting soul leaned against an Arm,— mighty to save, and tender to feel. Amid all her musings ran the sweet strains of the old English ballad the others were singing inside, whose refrain ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Collection of Printed Broadsides in the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries of London' (1866) and Lilly's 'Black Letter Ballads and Broadsides,' (1867) will also be of use to you here, as will the publications of the Percy, Ballad, and Philobiblon Societies. In 1856 J. Russell Smith, the antiquarian publisher of Soho Square, issued a 'Catalogue of a Unique Collection of Four Hundred Ancient English Broadside Ballads, Printed Entirely in the Black Letter' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... new ballad ready on the Golden Dog, which I shall sing to-night—that is, if you will care to listen to me." Jean said this with a very demure air of mock modesty, knowing well that the reception of a new ballad from him would equal ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the present-day Englishman's ideals of spiritual sustenance and literary power, a similar collocation of the Bible and Aristotle would sum up, with a greater approach to truth, the ideals of the medieval schoolman. Popularity fell to Piers Plowman. Apart from the large currency given to it by ballad singers, many manuscripts were in existence, for even now forty-five of them, more or less complete, remain. As M. Jusserand aptly remarks: "This figure is the more remarkable when we consider that, contrary to works written in Latin or in French, Langland's ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... of my shame, I could hardly help admiring the clever way in which he had remembered all the details, and twisted them into a comic ballad, which he had composed overnight, and which he now recited with a mock heroic air and voice, which made every point tell, and kept the boys in convulsions of laughter. Not a smile crossed his long, lantern-jawed face; but Mr. Thomas Johnson made no effort this time ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... been collecting during the declamation of his young companion. "There are singular things in that book, I must confess; and I thank you for showing it to me, or rather your attempt at translation. I was struck with that ballad of Orm Ungarswayne, who goes by night to the grave-hill of his father to seek for counsel. And then, again, that strange melancholy Swayne Vonved, who roams about the world propounding people riddles; slaying those who ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... indeed. We sing and talk and say over verses. There are so many in that old ballad book. But lovers seem always to break one's heart and to love the wrong one. I shall never have a lover. I shall never marry," and her sweet voice has ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Illustrated. Many of the drawings for these, though of necessity reduced for publication in book form, are in his most delightful and winning manner,—notably perhaps (if one must choose!) the martial ballad of that "Captain of Militia, Sir ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... contempt for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick"; mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's "Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Cocksmoor, and after persuading papa, I got leave to send a ballad about a little girl and a white rose to that school magazine. I don't think papa liked it, but there were some verses that touched him, and one had seen worse. It was actually inserted, and I was in high feather, till, oh, Norman! imagine Richard getting hold of this ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... they any notion of what fields or roads they would be. Their boots were beginning to break up and the confusion of stones tried them severely, so that they were glad to lean on their swords, as if they were the staves of pilgrims. MacIan thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his own country which describes the soul in Purgatory as walking on a plain full of sharp stones, and only saved by its own charities ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... write as easily as Mozart but who have nothing to say, so there are other musicians who write and rewrite, work and rework, study and restudy, and yet what they finally offer the public has not the quality or the force or the inspiration of a common gutter-ballad. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... beyond the Tiber, the Castle of Sant' Angelo, the Vatican and St. Peter's, the Janiculum and the Garibaldi monument on it, and the stupendous prospect of the city from that supreme top, the bridge that Horatius held in Macaulay's ballad, the island in the Tiber formed after the expulsion of the Tarquins by the river sand and drift catching on the seed-corn thrown into the stream from the fields consecrated to Mars, the Temple of Fortune, the once-supposed House of Rienzi, and the former Temple of Vesta; the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... AEolus, by Peligrino Tibaldi, in the Institute at Bologna Sonnet on Rembrant; occasioned by his Picture of Jacob's Dream Sonnet on the Luxembourg Gallery Sonnet to my venerable Friend, the President of the Royal Academy The Mad Lover at the Grave of his Mistress First Love: a Ballad The Complaint ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... the father and the boys, and the fine distinctive coif of the village for the women. "Asked if she had learned any art or trade, said: Yes, that her mother had taught her to sew and spin, and so well, that she did not think any woman in Rouen could teach her anything." When the lady in the ballad makes her conditions with the peasant woman who is to bring up her boy, her "gay goss hawk," and have him trained in the use of sword and lance, she undertakes to teach the "turtle-doo," the woman child substituted ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... the reading of the ballad, slightly transposed and adapted. As Leslie led Sir Charles before the curtain, in response to the continued demand, he ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... the town full of lampoons and invectives against Dutchmen, only because they are foreigners, and the king reproached and insulted by insolent pedants, and ballad-making poets, for employing foreigners, and for being a foreigner himself, I confess myself moved by it to remind our nation of their own original, thereby to let them see what a banter is put upon ourselves in it; since speaking of Englishmen ab ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... comes back"—thus Dave, accepting the offered formula, somewhat in the spirit of the true ballad writer—"she's a-going to set in her own chair with cushions, just here!" He sat down with violence on a spot immediately below the proposed centre of gravity of the chair. "And then oy shall bring her ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... dealing with the familiar story of Nathan Hale, of Revolutionary times, is the nearest approach to the old folk ballad in our history. Its repetitions help it in catching something of the breathless suspense accompanying his daring effort, betrayal, and execution. The pathos of the closing incidents of Hale's career has attracted the tributes of poets and dramatists. Francis Miles Finch, author of "The Blue ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more with Thomas Warton, than with Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... impiously endeavouring to find pleasure otherwise than by the practice of the domestic virtues. Disquieting memories of bursting boilers surge up to the surface of the mind, and old catches like the weird ballad of Sir Patrick Spens lilt themselves to the clank of the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Maxwell, slew Sir James Johnstone at Achmanhill, April 6, 1608, in revenge for his father's defeat and death at Dryffe Sands, in 1593. He was forced to flee to France. Hence his "Good Night." Scott's ballad is taken, with "some slight variations," from a copy in Glenriddel's MSS.—Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1810, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... personal experience, and I have told this story often in the German ballad form to girls of ten and twelve in the high schools in England, I have never found one girl who sympathized with the lady or who failed to appreciate the poetic justice meted out to her in the end by the dignified renunciation of ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... belongs to a class of poems called ballads, all of which possess some, at least, of the characteristics which we have found in Lochinvar. All ballads do not have refrains, but all ballads do contain narratives in simple, often rude style. Most ballad stanzas have only four lines, though ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the music room. Harvey's voice is a remarkably rich baritone. At Ethel's request he sings a ballad which he has ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... to Gray, when he condemns the apostrophe, in which father Thames is desired to tell who drives the hoop, or tosses the ball, and then adds, that father Thames had no better means of knowing than himself; when he compares the abrupt beginning of the first stanza of the bard, to the ballad of Johnny Armstrong, "Is there ever a man in all Scotland;" there are, perhaps, few friends of Johnson, who would not wish to blot ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... source of amusement in observing the various personages that daily passed and repassed beneath my window. The character which most of all arrested my attention was a poor blind fiddler, whom I first saw chanting a doleful ballad at the door of a small tavern near the gate of the village. He wore a brown coat, out at elbows, the fragment of a velvet waistcoat, and a pair of tight nankeens, so short as hardly to reach below his calves. A little foraging cap, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... slab that tells the old rebel's story,—to kneel by the triple stone that says how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... or" Robinson Crusoe," or "The Vicar of Wakefield,"—was worth any conceivable amount of attainments when rated as an evidence of anything that could justly denominate a man "admirable." One felicitous ballad of forty lines might have enthroned Crichton as really admirable, whilst the pretensions actually put forward on his behalf simply install him as a cleverish or dexterous ape. However, as Lady Carbery did not forego her purpose of causing me to shine under ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... of its emotions, and so little are these emotions disposed to expand themselves into any variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that class of simple, household, homely passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry. Their passion is of a quality more venerable, it is true, and deeper than that of the opera, because more permanent and coextensive with human life; but it is not much wider in its sphere, nor more ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the fortune-teller, The school-master, the midwife,[538] and the bawd, The conjurer, the buyer and the seller Of painting which with breathing will be thaw'd, Doth practise physic; and his credit grows, As doth the ballad-singer's auditory, Which hath at Temple-Bar his standing chose, And to the vulgar sings an ale-house story: First stands a porter; then an oyster-wife Doth stint her cry and stay her steps to hear him; 10 Then comes a cutpurse ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... his youth the drama was the popular means of amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a great mass of ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the more imaginative expression of feeling: he represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo; he expands it into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a little story, half ballad, half idyl; and in all these forms his art is so perfect that we never have a sense of artificiality or of unsuccessful effort; but all seems to have developed itself by the same beautiful necessity ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... now-a-days. His versification is generally harmonious, and he displays a fair command of metre. Sometimes he takes a fancy to an obsolete or out-of-the-way stanza; one of his longest and best poems, The Skeleton in Armor, is exactly in the measure of Drayton's fine ballad on Agincourt. His chief fault is an over-fondness for simile and metaphor. He seems to think indispensable the introduction into everything he writes of a certain (or sometimes a very uncertain) number of these figures. Accordingly ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... ornamental belt of metal tubes made from fragments of flat brass; there were also some arrow-heads of the same material. Longfellow, the New England poet, naturally had his attention directed to this discovery (made, 1831), and founded on it his ballad The Skeleton in Armor, connecting it with the Round Tower at Newport. The latter, according to Professor Rafn, "was erected decidedly not later than ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... swaying everything, thus coming back to first principles, almost to the origin of the art, as an art. The dance is the primordial, autochthonic form of music; its foundation so to speak. The song had its origin in the dance as indicated by its name "ballad." It is a comparatively simple matter to trace its upward course in instrumental music, as such. It is conceivable that people from remote times on, had the faculty of originating tunes, and of humming and singing them, and dancing to them long before such things as scales and ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... was this ancient dame a foe to mirth. Her ballad, jest, and riddle's quaint device, Oft cheered the shepherds round their social hearth; Whom levity or spleen could ne'er entice To purchase chat or laughter at the price Of decency. Nor let it faith exceed, That Nature forms a rustic taste so nice. ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... said Mary to herself, as she listened to a romantic ballad in which Purdy, in the character of a high-minded nobleman, sought the hand of a virtuous gipsy-maid. "And he doesn't give her a second thought. If one could just tell her ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... could hardly have mistaken the difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only Southey had as yet written ballad verses with equal vigour and facility; and, I think, he had not yet published any of them. It is Scott who ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... voice of Mary, and by her companions, who twit her with having fallen in love with a shadow instead of thinking only of her lover Erik, the hunter, Senta resumes her work, and to still their chatter sings them the ballad of the Flying Dutchman. When she has described his aimless wanderings and his mournful doom, which naught can change until he finds a maiden who will pledge him her entire faith, the girls mockingly interrupt ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... opera in his coronetted and mitred coach, is not an edifying figure, nor is Louis de Grimaldi, Bishop of Mans, saying Mass in his red hunting-coat and breeches. But the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick's thought the execution for felony of another Protestant dean a capital theme for a merry ballad; and at the end of the eighteenth century Arthur Young painted the English rural clergy in very dark colours. The curates, the rectors, the monks of France as a body, showed under the old regime the same qualities of devout ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Versailles or Quebec. But with this difference: in Quebec you may be virtuous; at Versailles you must not. It is a pity that you may not meet Mademoiselle Duvarney. She would astound you. She was a simple ballad a year ago; to-morrow she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it was adorned by an extremely dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded by mountains, with tombstones in the foreground. This lugubrious frontispiece positively fascinated me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the ballad itself. It was in this copy of mediocre verses that the sense of romance first appealed to me, the kind of nature-romance which is connected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque costumes of old ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... was very bad in its account of the racial affinities of the nations commonly referred to as the barbarians that overturned the Roman empire and culture. Percy, who had failed to edit the ballad MSS. so as to please Ritson, was wise enough to see Mallet's error, and to insist that Celtic and Gothic antiquities must not be confounded. Mallet's translation of the Edda was imperfect, too, because he had followed the Latin ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... overswelling all. But voices near aroused me, and we joined in the chorus, and in the following tune, 'Sweet Home,' the usual finale of our evening programme. Then, as the tones died, Grace lifted her voice and sang with sweet, pure soprano tones, an old-time ballad of love and parting ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... whistling in a yet louder key in the depths of the bluish darkness. They were nearing their destination. The lights of Lourdes already shone out on the horizon. Then the whole train again sang a canticle—the rhymed story of Bernadette, that endless ballad of six times ten couplets, in which the Angelic Salutation ever returns as a refrain, all besetting and distracting, opening to the human mind the portals ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... more or less of my fellow officers, all but Mr. Coventry and Pett; but it matters not. Yes, says my Lord, Sir J. Minnes, who is great with the Chancellor; I told him the Chancellor I have thought was declining, and however that the esteem he has among them is nothing but for a jester or a ballad maker; at which my Lord laughs, and asks me whether I believe he ever could do that well. Thence with Mr. Creed up and down to an ordinary, and, the King's Head being full, went to the other over against it, a pretty man that keeps it, and good ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Keats's Belle Dame sans Merci?" asked Mrs. Tristram. "You remind me of the hero of the ballad:— ...
— The American • Henry James
... of Ancient Ballad Poetry of Great Britain, Historical, Traditional and Romantic; with Modern Imitations, Translations, Notes, and Glossary, &c. Edited by J.S. Moore. New and Improved Edition, 8vo. Half-bound, 14s. Antique ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... talked of music; of songs—Italian, French, and English; of American nigger melodies. Would Miss Deyncourt sing? Might he accompany her? Ah! she preferred the simple old English ballads. He loved the simple English ballad. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... white stones, peeping from the golden pools, made a passage to the other side, and the trim lassie began to pick her way daintily across. Gilbert watched her with amused pleasure. He seemed to have stepped into some old rustic ballad. What was that song the boys used to sing at college? Something about the pretty, dainty maiden, going a-haying, or a-Maying, or a-something, all of a bright May morning, tra la la! This one was just like her, only she should be in her bare feet, and carry a pail and a stool, and be coming down ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... tendency of German literature. For the "Sorrows of Werther", the Italians had the "Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis"; for the brood of poets who arose in the fatherland to defy the Revolution, incarnate in Napoleon, with hymn and ballad, a retrospective national feeling in Italy found the same channels of expression through the Lombard group of lyrists and dramatists, while the historical romance flourished as richly as in England, and for a ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... grumble not a little at the new system, and the endless exercises which she, Morgiana, was made to go through. It was very different in HER time, she said. Incledon knew no music, and who could sing so well now? Give her a good English ballad: it was a thousand times sweeter than your ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heroine is a characteristic Celtic touch. See "Connla" here, and other examples given by Mr. Nutt in his notes to MacInnes' Tales. The trees growing from the lovers' graves occurs in the English ballad of Lord Lovel and has ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... he turns novelist late in life when the success of his poetry seems to be over. His early experiments in verse are queerly suggested and full of hazard. It needs a foreign language—German—to encourage him to rhyme. The fascination of Buerger's Lenore is a reflection from English ballad poetry; the reflected image brought out what had been less remarkable in the original. The German devices of terror and wonder are a temptation to Scott; they hang about his path with their monotonous and mechanical jugglery, their horrors made all the more intolerable ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... of the young men in the college in hunting, as they called it, the servitor who was thus diligent in his duty, and this they did with the noise of pots and candlesticks, singing to the tune of Chevy Chase the words in the old ballad,— ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... lack of costumes and scenery was not felt in the force of the reality that she managed to throw into her part. Covered with glory, she gave place to her successor, who, while bewailing the hardness of her luck in having to follow so smart a performance, recited a humorous ballad which won peals of applause. Mrs. Arnold again dipped her hand into the bag and unfolded ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... incidents are a key to the working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had the rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use a song of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole symphony of transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain. To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and a memory which retained and developed powerfully year by year ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... substance. What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one didn't keep fresh, and cram one's life with all sorts of views and experiments? Thus she always gave herself a little shake, as she turned the corner, and, as often as not, reached her own door whistling a snatch of a Somersetshire ballad. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... first time I saw my father manifestly disconcerted. The little maid's life might be worth no more than a torn ballad if Duke Casimir happened to be in evil humor or had repented him of his mercy of the past night. I saw the Red Axe look aimlessly about for a hiding-place. There was a niche round which certain cloaks and coverlets ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... necessarily were so, and everybody was wild to be there. There were one or two tracasseries growing out of the thing, agitating for the moment, but very uninteresting in themselves. The pieces were 'Glenfinlas,' taken from Walter Scott's ballad, and 'Lalla Rookh,' from Moore's poem; the principal performers were James Wortley, my brother Henry, Mitford, Mrs. Bradshaw, Miss Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris); and the chorus was composed of Mrs. Baring, Mrs. Hartopp, Miss Gent, Miss Paget, Lady Mary ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... corpse with him. Unfortunately, the story of Bernardo ends here. None of the ballads tell what he did for revenge. We may imagine that he joined his power to the Moors and harried the land of Leon during his after life, at length reaching Alfonso's heart with his vengeful blade. But of this neither ballad nor legend tells, and with the pathetic scene of the dead ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... interrupted sound, as that proceeding from any liquid confined in a cask, when shaken, if the cask be not full;" and to guggle, as a "straight-necked bottle, when it is emptying;" and yet I am inclined to believe that the word also signifies to swallow, as in England. In the humorous ballad of "Rise up and bar the door," clunk seems to be used in the sense ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... stoics, bearskin-capped shepherd-priests,—and as for brahmins, they are without number; they abound wherever you look. Besides these, shops, cocoa-nuts, plantain bunches, and bundles of betel leaves, innumerable mountebanks, ballad-singers, tumblers, companies of stage-players; all these, a great gathering, Sir. Then worshipping god, presenting flowers, lighted wave offerings, offerings of money, of ornaments, votive offerings, and consecrated cattle; persons who give their hair, cocoa-nut scramblers, lamp bearers, offerers ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson
... the sound of a guitar, and a female voice singing. He drew near cautiously, and listened. It was a plaintive Moorish ballad, and he recognized in it the lamentations of one of the Abencerrages on leaving the walls of lovely Granada. It was full of passion and tenderness. It spoke of the delights of early life; the hours of love it had enjoyed on the banks of the Darro, and among the blissful ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... charge of the boys while they listened to the harper's songs. There were not many people in the castle now, but all that were there assembled in the hall to make merry with the new comer, except Lady Clifford herself, and the little Lady Elizabeth. The minstrel sang a long ballad all about the warlike achievements of the De Cliffords in former times, filling up the pauses with the animated strains of his harp, and when the song was done, and the servants were preparing to dance, the boys returned to their mother, highly ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Reviewers, From his Republic banished without pity The Poets; in this little town of yours, You put to death, by means of a Committee, The ballad-singers and the troubadours, The street-musicians of the heavenly city, The birds who make sweet music for us all In our dark hours, as ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus, and Bryan of Brittany. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it were, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world of the imagination. Of human passions he sang little. He wrote oftener of amorousness than of ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... wish to deceive you as to symptoms, Doctor; I really have something like a pain in the back of my head." He ignored the symptom and examined my heart carefully with a latest-popular-air-penny-in-the-slot ear-trumpet. I felt like a ballad. ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... the hill and descending into the town I met my fate in the form of a woman who was playing a hurdy-gurdy, and singing to its strains a Provencal ballad. I stopped at once, and asked her to let me investigate the instrument. I have a fancy for ancient musical instruments. A handle is turned that grates on one catgut string, and the fingers of the left hand, passed under the hurdy-gurdy, touch notes that stop the string at ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... rapture it would yield, When cook sent up the salad, To find within its depths concealed A touching little ballad. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... ballad concert, at which the most sentimental of contraltos, helped by other first-class throats, was to minister wholesale to the insatiable secret sentimentality of the north, had been arranged ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... disposition, drink never served me worse than to develop that quality in me. No man could ever say that I was quarrelsome in my cups. My progress was marked by stupid smiles, terminating in unmeaning laughter. The Frenchman sang a ballad about love and Picardy, and the like, and I gave him "Hearts of Oak," the sentiments of which song kept him shrugging his shoulders and drunkenly ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... wandering Prince of Troy," an old ballad, printed in the "Reliques of Ancient Poetry," in which the ghost of queen Dido thus ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... from going to the well of the pump; it is always (especially if the ship does not leak) of a dirty colour and disgusting penetrating smell. It seems to have been a sad nuisance in early voyages; and in the earliest sea-ballad known (temp. Hen. VI.) it ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... I would accounted be True brother of that company, Who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong, Ballad and story, rann ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... dead at the Nine-Stone Rig" (Vol. viii., p. 78.).—Your correspondent the BORDERER will find the fragment of the ballad he is in search of commencing with the above line, in the second volume of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, p. 114. It is entitled "Barthram's Dirge," and "was taken down," says Scott, "by Mr. Surtees, from the recitation of Anne Douglas, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... rail, road, or canal. The road passes St. Keyne, where the waters of the well are said to possess a remarkable property, according to Thomas Fuller, who says, "whether husband or wife came first to drink thereof, they get the mastery thereby". The well has been immortalized in Southey's well-known ballad, ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... men, Sir Andrew sayes, A little Ime hurt, but yett not slaine; He but lye downe and bleede awhile, And then Ile rise and fight againe." Ballad of ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... possibly admit one exception—Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,' which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present day, however, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... not going to abuse "these same metre ballad-mongers," for the obvious reason that, as all The Teacups know, I myself belong to the fraternity. I don't think that this reason should hinder my having my say about the ballad-mongering business. For the last thirty years I have been in the habit of receiving a volume of poems or a poem, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ballad over and over again until he was tired, then sat still, smiling and stroking the fox skin. He had learned the song when he was a child from his mother, who had sung it all day long one spring while she was shearing the ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... The endless ballad had come to an end at last, and the whole diminished company about the campfire had broken into the chorus I ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... at our leisure, passing out from Lamia over the Spercheios on the bridge of Alamana, at which Diakos, famous in ballad, resisted with a small band a Turkish army, until he was at last captured and taken to Lamia to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... 'where he has a very extensive property and a very fine place of which there is a view and description in Grose's Antiquities of Scotland.' The conclusion of the sketch relates how, at the last Lord Mayor's day, he sang with great applause a state-ballad of his own composition, entitled The Grocer of London. This was the last shot in the political locker. At a Guildhall dinner, given to Pitt by the worshipful company of grocers, Boswell contrived to get himself called upon for a song. He rose, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... among so much of the wreckage of battle. The snow will soon cover us, and when the spring comes there will only be a few bleached bones. Upon my soul it is the kind of death I always wanted.' And he quoted softly to himself a verse of an old Scots ballad: ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... stage was a new thing; and those who had to supply its demands laid their hands upon whatever came within their reach: they were not particular as to the means, so that they gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old ballad; Othello on an Italian novel; Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition: one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last in Hollingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, are authenticated ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... his portfolio and found another ballad which he thought might figure with advantage in the Spring Annual, and consigning these two precious documents to Warrington, the pair walked from the Temple to the famous haunt of the Muses and their ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and pipes filled and lighted, some one would strike up a "chantey"—one of those interminable, monotonous ballad-songs which are ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... turn round and face a few land-going problems not quite so easy of solution. So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the sloop's bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each of which ended ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and fairy land, there is a ballad called 'Finn ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... lot, God wot,] There was an old ballad entitled the song of Jephthah, from which these lines are probably quotations. The story of Jephthah was also one of the favourite subjects ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... miniature stage supporting the orchestra and, temporarily, the gyrations of a lady in a vivacious scarlet costume—mistress of the shopworn contralto—who was "vamping with the feet" the interval between two verses of her ballad. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... than death, She wept her lover's sullied fame, And, fired with all the pride of birth, She wept a soldier's injured name. BALLAD. ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... If any young lady, being prevailed upon to sing, become nervous afterwards, Mr. Mincin leads her tenderly into the next room, and restores her with port wine, which she must take medicinally. If any gentleman be standing by the piano during the progress of the ballad, Mr. Mincin seizes him by the arm at one point of the melody, and softly beating time the while with his head, expresses in dumb show his intense perception of the delicacy of the passage. If anybody's self-love is to be flattered, Mr. Mincin is at hand. If anybody's overweening vanity ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... for instance, he would write a chanson; In England a six canto quarto tale; In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on The last war—much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he 'd prance on Would be old Goethe's (see what says De Stael); In Italy he 'd ape the 'Trecentisti;' In Greece, he sing some sort of hymn like ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... heard of him being called the King of Thule," said Mrs. Lorraine, turning with a smile to Sheila, "and of his daughter being styled a princess. Do you know the ballad of the King of Thule in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... hesitation she seated herself before it, and the slender fingers grasped the strings of the instrument with a masterly touch, running through a soft, sweet prelude of tender chords. Her voice at last trilled forth in the charming strains of the old Scotch ballad, ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... vanished City of the Cactus Rock. Could such a work of enchantment be performed, however, our first feeling would doubtless be one of ineffable horror and disgust, like that of the knight in the old English ballad, who, folding in his arms a damsel of radiant beauty, finds himself in the embrace of ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Norwich ever produced, the early and intimate friend of Southey, and who was the first, according to Lockhart's Life of Scott, to give that great writer a taste for poetry by his (Taylor's) spirited and inimitable translation of Burger's well known ballad beginning,— ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... he shelved his office dignity long enough to whistle a popular ballad that had been running through his mind of late. All too gladly had he recommended Matt Peasley for that tugboat job! He would have employed anything, short of dishonorable methods, to rid the ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... bag, he takes out the half suffocated ducks or geese, which are glad enough to find themselves once more on their favourite element; and the intelligent birds have scarcely regained their liberty when the peasant commences his ballad, and immediately the anchor is apeak and they are off; he sings, he whistles, and they turn, like two well-manned frigates, and come back to him without a moment's delay. The act is so natural, so simple, that no one ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... Shrovetide revelry, and not a much worse Abbot of Unreason. I defy the Old Enemy to unmask me when I choose to keep my vizard on. What the devil brought the Knight on us before we had the game out? You would have heard me hollo my own new ballad with a voice should have reached to Berwick. But I pray you, Master Roland, be less free of cold steel on slight occasions; since, but for the stuffing of my reverend doublet, I had only left the kirk to take ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... our favourite diversion is the game of 'chevy,' so called from the engagement famed in ballad and history (I allude to the battle of Chevy Chase), and indeed, my dear parents, in the rapid alternations of its fortunes and the diversity of its incident, the game (to my mind) bears a striking resemblance to the accounts of ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... woman only has to listen, and can always hear "the tale" without losing her dignity. She merely begins to talk when a man comes "down to earth." While his "soul" had soared verbally she enjoyed him as she enjoys a "ballad concert," those love songs which say so much and mean so ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... one of its author's greatest gifts, is frequently finely revealed. After reading A Tramp-woman's Tragedy, one unhesitatingly accords Mr. Hardy a place among the English writers of ballads. For this is a genuine ballad, in story, in diction, and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... answer. From it we learn in language, whose truthfulness constitutes its only claim to be poetry, that the moon was new at one o'clock in the morning of the day of the battle of Corunna (16th January, 1809). The ballad evidently implies that the funeral took place on the night following the battle. We are therefore assured that the moon can hardly have been a day old when the hero was consigned to his grave. But the moon in such a case is practically invisible, and yields no appreciable moonbeams at all, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... is no historical authority for the events of the celebrated Ballad on which this Tragedy is founded, I have fixed upon the thirteenth century for the period of their occurrence. At that time the kingdom of Castille had recently obtained that supremacy in Spain which led, in a subsequent age, to the political integrity of the country. Burgos, its capital, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... smiting himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend, and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of the German ballad of Leonora? ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Wemyss, the young Englishman. He played his own accompaniment, his fingers, stiffened though they were with hard work, ran lightly over the keys. Every person sat still to listen. Even Martha Perkins forgot to twirl her fingers and leaned forward. It was a simple little English ballad he sang: ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... the girl paused, coffee pot in hand, in the act of preparing breakfast, and listened. Distinct and clear above the sound of sizzling bacon, floated the words of an old ballad: ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... Greek songs illustrate the conversion of the Armatole into the Klepht in the age preceding the Greek revolution. Thus, in the fine ballad called "The Tomb of Demos," which Goethe has translated, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... breaks down when the apparition causes some change in the relations of material objects. If there be a physical effect which endures after the phantasm has vanished, then there was an actual agent, a real being, a 'ghost' on the scene. For instance, the lady in Scott's ballad, 'The Eve of St. John,' might see and might hear the ghost of her lover by a telepathic hallucination of ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang |
