"Gondolier" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... travels in the East, Mr. Disraeli was attended by Lord Byron's faithful gondolier, who had accompanied his master to Missolonghi, and remained with him ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... general assistant in the kitchen, and a good gondolier to boot. When our little family is increased by more than three guests at dinner, Cecco is pressed into dining- room service, and becomes under-butler to Peppina. Here he is not at ease. He scrubs his tanned ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... under the Georges, walked the maiden reared in the air blowing off the lagoons within the shadow of the grim lion of St. Mark, to such sentimental accompaniments as the dipping oar and the gondolier, and finished off with the peculiar whims of Betty Lumley. She wore a fair, flowered brocade, for which William Hogarth might have designed the pattern and afterwards prosecuted for payment the unconscionable weaver; ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... reflects itself in the waters below, until one feels as if he were floating in the air between sea and sky. In the heart of the city, with throngs of people moving to and fro, all is yet silence, save the cry of the gondolier, the confused echo of voices from the people who pass, and here and there the faint call of a bird. No whir and rush of electric cars and motors; no click of the horses' feet on the asphalt pavement—no pavement, indeed, and no horses, no twentieth-century ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... preventing the soft sounds of the singers in the gondolas moored to the poles beneath from reaching their ears. And above the music now and then would come the faint splash of water, and the "Stahi"—"Preme" of some moving gondolier. ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... have been out in the gondola belonging to this modest establishment, with our magnificent gondolier, Piero, and his boy to convey us to the Lido. I got Miss Bretherton to talk to me about her Jamaica career. She made us all laugh with her accounts of the blood-and-thunder pieces in which the audiences ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in Venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast friends with their gondolier, who taught them some Italian words; then a week in Florence and a fortnight in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... platform of the station, a score or two of light gondolas await you. The gondolier is the cabman. He waits for you, with his hand toward you, and the true "Keb, Sir!" tone and smile. A double-sized gondola is here called an "omnibus," and the name is painted on the side in huge letters. And these are the substitutes for ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... in the stern, like a gondolier, and when willing hands had shot the boat out into the current he leaned his weight upon the after oars; beneath his and Pierce's efforts the ash blades bent. Out into the hurrying flood the four men sent their craft; then, with a mighty heave, the pilot ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the Mandolin Club had played its lovely "Gondolier's Song," and the Banjo Club its amusing and inevitable "Frogville Echoes," the Glee Club girls came out to sing "The Fames of Miss Ames," which a clever junior had written and a musical sophomore had set to a catchy melody. A little, short-haired ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... a picture of some sky, some beach, and a face of rock, would murmur a somewhat bewildered appreciation, looking out of the corner of his eye, at the same time, at the attractive gondolier singing to his pretty lady passengers, on the right, or the nice young peasant nursing her baby in a sunny window while her mother ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali," [Footnote: Appendix I, "The Gondolier's Cry."] struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... returned one night from the Theatre Goldini, when I found a note from Lucia and a gondola waiting. She prayed me to come to her at once as she was in trouble. To a Frenchman and a soldier there was but one answer to such a note. In an instant I was in the boat and the gondolier was pushing out into ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soft night, And jealousy was hushed, and hope led on My dancing heart. In vain I strove to curb My glad impatience—I must see him then, At once, that very night; I could not wait The tardy morning—'twas a year away. I only gave the gondolier his name, And said, "You know him?" "Yes." "Then row me quick ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... to be told about him. He was a skilful gondolier, and it was the daily row back and forth from the Lido that gave him that face of bronze. Folks said he ate no meat and drank no wine, and that his food was simply ripe figs in the season, with coarse rye bread and nuts. Then there was that funny old hunchback, a hundred years old at least, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... echoes are no more,[2.H.] And silent rows the songless Gondolier;[381] Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And Music meets not always now the ear: Those days are gone—but Beauty still is here. States fall—Arts fade—but Nature doth not die, Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear, The pleasant place of all festivity,[le] The Revel ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... to find out the gondolier, but he is not one of those with whom he associates. The mendicants, whom he questioned, could give him no further information than that the signora had come to the church for the last few Saturdays, and had each time divided a gold-piece among them. It was a Dutch ducat, which Biondello changed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... being, that Byron on one occasion thrashed, on another challenged, a man who tried to cheat him, was a frequent rider, and a constant swimmer, so that he came to be called "the English fish," "water-spaniel," "sea-devil," &c. One of the boatmen is reported to have said, "He is a good gondolier, spoilt by being a poet and a lord;" and in answer to a traveller's inquiry, "Where does he get his poetry?" "He dives for it." His habits, as regards eating, seem to have been generally abstemious; but he drank a pint of gin and water over his verses at night, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the gondoliers know by heart long passages from Ariosto and Tasso, and often chant them with a peculiar melody. Goldoni, in his life, notices the gondolier returning with him to the city: "He turned the prow of the gondola towards the city, singing all the way the twenty-sixth stanza of the sixteenth canto of the Jerusalem Delivered." The late Mr. Barry once chanted to me a passage of Tasso in the manner of the gondoliers; and I have listened ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... summer night; it was the time of the full moon, when its transcendent beauty led the young folks to wander over the farm from house to house, to sit a while on the doorsteps or on the knoll at the Hive; to sing "Das Klinket" or such part songs as "Row gently here, my gondolier," or "The lone starry hours give me Love, when calm is the beautiful night," or anything else to let out the joyousness of their hearts. They were not wild, for they labored enough to take away the wildness that indolence ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... was struck by the resemblance between the mode of life and thought their talk betrayed, and that of the same class of girls at La Chatre; and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of the rippling waters stirred by the gondolier's oar, of guitar and serenade, and within sight of the marble palaces, her thoughts flew back to the dark and dirty streets, the dilapidated houses, the wretched moss-grown roofs, the shrill concerts ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... dream from out the wave, I see a city rise, I stand entranced, as by a spell, Upon the Bridge of Sighs. The low and measured dip of oars Falls softly on my ear Blent with the tender evening song, Of some swart gondolier. ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... sweet to hear At midnight on the blue moonlit deep, The song and oar of Adria's gondolier, By distance mellowed o'er the water's sweep. 'Tis sweet to see the evening star appear; 'Tis sweet to listen to the night winds creep From leaf to leaf; 'tis sweet to view on high The rainbow, based on ocean, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent |
