"Lilt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wes the wy the bairns were ta'en in wi' him. Man, a've seen him tak a wee laddie on his knee that his ain mither cudna quiet, an' lilt 'Sing a song o' saxpence' till the bit mannie wud be lauchin' like a gude ane, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... was law to fleg us a', An' schedule richt frae wrang, The man o' the cave had got the crave For the lichtsome lilt o' sang. Wife an' strife an' the pride o' life, Woman an' war an' drink; He sang o' them a' at e'enin's fa' ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and "athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees" and "palaces," "shade is" and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... on the strand, I spied ane auld man sit On ane auld black rock; and aye the waves Cam washin up its fit. His lips they gaed as gien they wad lilt, But o' liltin, wae's me, was nane! He spak but an owercome, dreary and dreigh, A burden wha's sang was gane: "Robbie and Jeanie war twa bonnie bairns; They playt thegither i' the gloamin's hush: Up cam the tide and the mune and ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... fire Cynthia heedlessly spoke these words. They had no deeper significance to her than the lilt of a world-old song. Marriage was the end-all and consummation of her magic stories and, in this case, it had simply been a trifle more difficult to consider on account of the social difference between Sandy and her. However, that had been overcome by the wand of imagination. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... only among the apparently unpremeditated lyrical flights of the Elizabethan dramatists that one meets with anything like the lilt and liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no degree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallen from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline." This delicate ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to the Latin classics, if we are unacquainted with the language there is greater difficulty; for it is next to impossible to render in English the light and vivacious lilt of the Italian poets. Our translations may be fine, scholarly, dignified and the rest of it, but they bear little semblance to the originals. Dryden's version of the 'Aeneid' may be read, not as a translation but ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... had gone to the coast on business. Shon had won the reputation of being a "white man," to say nothing of his victories in the region of gallantry. He made no wealth; he only got that he might spend. Irishman-like he would barter the chances of fortune for the lilt of a voice or the clatter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Holloway, more than any Negro poet writing in the dialect to-day, summons to his work the lilt, the spontaneity and charm of which Dunbar was the supreme master whenever he employed that medium. It is well to say a word here about the dialect poems of James Edwin Campbell. In dialect, Campbell was a precursor of Dunbar. A comparison of his ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... I hate to think of it empty. We had such good times there twelve months ago. They have a song here to a nursery rhyme lilt, Apres le Guerre Finis; it goes on to tell of all the good times we'll have when the war is ended. Every night I invent a new story of my own celebration of the event, usually, as when I was a kiddie, just before ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... Billy somewhere and made him forget his hunger. Like a sweet incense which induces pleasant daydreams they were wafted in upon him through the rich, mellow voice of the solitary camper, and the lilt of the meter ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... constant accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in—an effect of perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony. Were its metrical harmony tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's poetry ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... demure, mocking curtsy she turned and ran down the box-edged path, singing as she went, and the air she sang was Stephen La Mothe's "Heigh-ho! love is my life; Live I in loving and love I to live!" and the lilt of the music set Master Homer's ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... Suddenly Harrigan tilted his head sidewise, and the long silken ears of the dachel stirred. The Italian slowly closed his book and permitted his chair to settle on its four legs. The artist stood up from his paintbox. From a window in the villa came a voice; only a lilt of a melody, no words,—half a dozen bars from Martha; but every delightful note went deep into the three masculine hearts. Harrigan smiled and patted the dog. The Italian scowled at the vegetable garden directly below. The ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... the glory if I spoke up with a devil-may-care lilt in my voice, and shipped in the hottest packet afloat! Glory!—why, I would be the unquestioned cock of any foc'sle I afterward happened into. You know, in those days the ambitious young lads regularly shipped in the hot clippers; it was a postgraduate course ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... for pity's sake! Of course I knew her, and a sweet, dear girl she was, too. Stop laughing at Alanna, all of you, or I'll send you upstairs until Dad gets after you. Very quiet and shy she was, but the lovely singing voice! There wasn't a tune in the world she wouldn't lilt to you if you asked her. Well, the poor child, I wish I'd never lost sight of her." She pondered a moment. "Is the boy still serving Mass at St. Mary's, Dan?" ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... lilt of the waltz rippled to us, And through us the exquisite thrill of the air: Like the scent of bruised bloom was her breath, and its dew was Not honier-sweet than her warm kisses were. We stood there enchanted.—And O the delight of ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... Must blend with the words. Without these, indeed, you Would find it ere long, As though I should read you The words of a song That lamely would linger When lacking the rune, The voice of the singer, The lilt of ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... hands, and turning about in a little space like an animal in a cage, over the hedge through the apple-boughs a boy's clear voice rose suddenly, singing a rollicking tune, with a snapping of fingers and tapping of feet in time to its merry lilt. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... the lilt, the tenderness and the rhythm that makes music in the soul. It was neither singing, nor chanting, nor speaking, but a subtle mixture of the three; and the effect upon me was one of haunting harmonies that ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded nymph among the sedges may awaken the primal desire ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody," he writes at another time. His best poems move to the cadence of a tune. He probably heard them as did Milton the lines of "Paradise Lost". Sometimes there was a lilt like the singing of a bird, and sometimes the lyric cry, and yet again the music of the orchestra. "He has an ear for the distribution of instruments, and this gives him a desire for the antiphonal, for introducing ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... in a shadowy corner of the crowded room, and listened to the singing, wild and strong, and with no hint of coming battle in its full rolling lilt. He noted with satisfaction how the "Long, Long Trail," and "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag" gradually gave place to "Tell Mother I'll Be There," and "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder," growing strong and full and solemn in ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... lay, ditty, ballad, onody, chansonnette, lyric, lilt, lied, paean, cantata, aria, sonnet, strain, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... have a decided Teutonism, but he has found himself by opus 40, a volume of "Six Love Songs," containing half a dozen flawless gems it is a pity the public should not know more widely. A later book, "Eight Songs" (op. 47), is also a cluster of worthies. The lilt and sympathy of "The Robin Sings in the Apple-tree," and its unobtrusive new harmonies and novel effects, in strange accord with truth of expression, mark all the other songs, particularly the "Midsummer Lullaby," with its accompaniment as delicately ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... dulcet instrument We favour, still the lilt will stop; And with a gorgeous chalice blent Oft lurks the tiny poisoned drop. I'm not so spry myself to-night; I'll try a dose of arrowroot. You'll own that Indigestion's quite A Rift in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... starching, How neat one must be to be killed by the French, I'm sick of parading, Through wet and cowld wading, Or standing all night to be shot in a trench. To the tune of a fife They dispose of your life, You surrender your soul to some illigant lilt; Now, I like Garryowen, When I hear it at home, But it's not half so sweet when you're ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... her eyes, drew the tent flaps together modestly under her chin, and looked out upon a world which swam in the enchanted light of a dawn primeval. The eastern sky was faintly pink with the promise of a coming sun. The sweet, penetrating lilt of the lark flung ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... At the lilt in her voice Mollie, at her end of the wire, sat up and stared inquiringly into the black mouth ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... lilt on hedge or bush: Poor things! they suffer sairly; In cauldrife quarters a' the nicht, A' day they feed but sparely. Now, up in the mornin's no for me, Up in the mornin' early; A pennyless purse I wad rather dree, Than rise ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... hills and valleys earth. Shouts back the sound of mirth, Tramp of feet and lilt of song Ringing all the road along. All the music of their going, Ringing, swinging, glad song-throwing, Earth will echo still, when foot Lies numb and voice mute. On, marching men, on To the gates ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... Lilt thy song, and lute away In the wildest fashion:— Pour thy rippling roundelay O'er the heights of passion!— Flash it down the fretted strings Till thy mad lips, missing All but smothered whisperings, Press ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... screws, and a faint windy whistle the ship's speed made in the rigging. The passengers were all below. Then, suddenly, a burst of music came up as some one opened a saloon port-hole and as quickly closed it again—a tenor voice singing to the piano some trivial modern song with a trashy sentimental lilt. It was—in this setting of sea and sky—painful; O'Malley caught himself thinking of a ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... Maitland were then some five floors below. "Stop 'er at Nineteen," ordered the detective. There was a lilt of exultancy in his voice. "We got him now, all right, all right. He'll try to get down by— There!" Overhead the crash of a gate forced open was followed by a scurry of footsteps over the tiling. "Stop 'er and we'll head him ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... jazz band was in full swing. There was lilt and rhythm to the melody produced by the grinning blacks, and not a free arm or foot or shoulder or head of any of them but did not sway in ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... over the leaves, we may find ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt, and sing themselves to music of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his mother always sang him this song when he had been a good boy; I replied that mine had done the same. How many French mothers have sung the merry little lilt, I wonder? We sang one snatch and another, and I could not see that the marquise had had the advantage of the little peasant girl, if ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... became still more dreamy; there was a cadence in it now as if some soul within were forcing her to chant it all, with almost the lilt of ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... plays early and late. Their merit is of a supreme quality; some of the most famous musical composers, inspired by his works, have graced them with admirable music. One of the most attractive features in his lyrics is their spontaneous ease of expression. They seem to lilt into music of their own accord, as naturally as birds sing. The best of these are found in the comedies of the Second Period and in the romantic plays of the Fourth. "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more" in Much ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... are basking in the sun, or regaling themselves on buns and cocoa. The whole place is vibrant with the intense zest the young feel in life, and with the whole-hearted powers of enjoyment of boyhood. A school-song set to a captivating waltz-lilt record the charms of Ducker. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... of which had already changed hands. One agent had brought in a big steel safe and a tent and was buying coal lands right and left. More young men drifted in from all points of the compass. A tent-hotel was put at the foot of Imboden Hill, and of nights there were under it much poker and song. The lilt of a definite optimism was in every man's step and the light of hope was ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... bards ayont the Tweed, Your skins wi' claes o' tartan cleed, An' lilt alang the verdant mead, Or blithely on your whistles blaw, An' sing auld Scotia's barns an ha's, Her bourtree dykes an mossy wa's, Her faulds, her bughts, an' birken shaws, Whare love ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... with white face and quivering lip in a corner of the mean chamber. Then he laughed again, and in a hoarse voice, sorely suggestive of the bottle, he broke into song. He lay back in his chair, his long, spare legs outstretched, his spurs jingling to the lilt of his ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... in these last days; the Marchesino (strutting from the hips and making his bold eyes round), Peppina, Ruffo. They went by and returned, gathered about her, separated, melted away as people do in our musings. Her eyes were fixed on the low roof of the cave. The lilt of the water seemed to rock her soul in a cradle. "Madre—Ruffo! Madre—Ruffo!" The words were in her mind like a refrain. And then the oddity, the promiscuity of life struck her. How many differences ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... one, will some ticket, When his statue's built, Tell the gazer "'Twas a cricket Helped my crippled lyre, whose lilt Sweet and low, when strength usurped Softness' place ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... Dromore' again that night with its queer haunting lilt. And when she had gone up, and he was smoking over the fire, the girl in her dark-red frock seemed to come, and sit opposite with her eyes fixed on his, just as she had been sitting while they talked. Dark red had suited her! Suited the look on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stare. No mystery? That the fisherman's daughter with the Island lilt in her voice—well he recalled it!—should have turned into this apparition of furs and jewels?... And yet the metamorphosis lay not in the furs and jewels, but in her careless air of command, of reliance upon her power, beauty, ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... I wonder how it would sound to me now—the rollicking lilt of Barney Leave the Girls Alone—even if a sweet maid flung its banter at me with ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... the man should play egregiously ill, but that the effect of good music should be produced by his evil playing. The people were evidently excited to sorrow when the attempt was at a mournful strain, and to ardour when the lilt took a loftier flight. To me who stood by, the difference of intention on the part of the performer was hardly discernible; indeed to be recognised only by the occasional catching of some familiar word in the burden of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... breakfast and a breezy chat with me; and I lapsed, a lazy and shameless idler, into the window, to wonder among the models outside, the fascinating curves of ships and boats, as satisfying and as personal to me as music I know, as the lilt of ballads and all that minor rhythm which wheels within the enclosing harmonies and balance of stars and suns in their orbits. Those forms of ships and boats are as satisfying as the lines which make the strength and swiftness of salmon and dolphins, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... the Moral Matron, and the Young Person, with a love of larkiness and lilt, but a distrust of politics, pugilism, and deep potations, the following eclectic adaptation of this prodigiously popular ballad may perhaps be ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... she askit for the pipes?" old Donald whispered mysteriously; and, on receiving an answer in the negative, he looked reproachfully at the speaker. "She's waiting and retty," he would say; "and a good lilt on ta pipes would do her all ta petter ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... dancing within him. It was impossible to keep the lilt of it entirely out of his eyes. They were radiant with this ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... the hate of an Italian who sees another taking the bread out of his mouth. All this, coupled with the fact that your Italian is a natural-born hater, may indicate that the life of Mary Gowd had not the lyric lilt that life is commonly reputed ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... ditty, and not too nice in its sentiments, as, indeed, why should it be, to please its hearers? There was a lilt in its chorus which even Stefan's unmusical voice could not hide, and it set the men's heads nodding in time as they roared it out together, waking the echoes with the declaration that—"The eye ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... received them in his bottom low And lilt them up above his billows thin; The waters so east up a branch or bough, By violence first plunged and dived therein: But when upon the shore the waves them throw, The knights for their fair guide to look begin, And gazing round a little bark they ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... music-hall song, "Tipperary" was unusually fresh and original. Contrast it with the maudlin "Keep the home fires burning," which holds the field to-day, and it touches great art. I never hear it even now on the street organ without a certain pleasure—a pleasure mingled with pain, for its happy lilt comes weighted with the tremendous emotions of those unforgettable days. It is like a butterfly caught in a tornado, a catch of song ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Sam's lilt ceased abruptly. The riders came hurrying. Sam appeared, with Mormon waddling after, too swiftly for his best ease or grace of motion, both grabbing at Sandy, swatting him on the back ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... not without merit, and has a good lilt and swing. I noted it tempted me to sing it, for I knew the tune well, and in the volume of voices was an emotional attraction. I repressed the inclination even to move my lips. But some others rose and joined in. My fellow on the left did not. The sermon followed, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... followed is well known. At the end of a pleasant evening when there had been music—in which James himself was the first connoisseur in Scotland, inventing, some say, the national lilt, the rapidly rising and falling strain which is so full of pathos yet so adaptable to mirth—"and other honest solaces of grete pleasance and disport," the sound of trampling feet and angry voices broke upon the conventual stillness outside and the cheerful talk of the friendly group ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... heads and cheered him as we flew, for there was something indescribably inspiriting in the gallant and cheerful lilt of the fallen man. It was as if he flung us, from the grief of utter defeat, a soul unconquerable; and I felt the life in me strengthened by ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... Helen, quickly. Not for worlds would she have let Betty know how much she counted on that song. She had written another little verse for her theme class, and that very morning it had come back with "Good work—charming lilt," scrawled across the margin. So Helen had high hopes for ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... play a very good sword, and is cunning of fence, for your comfort," said Randal. So I hummed the old lilt of the Leslies, whence, they say, comes ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... itself like a flash from the blue; and as for the coon song, 'My Baboon Baby,' there's a chance there for a Zanzibar act that will simply make Richard Wagner and Reginald De Koven writhe with jealousy. Can't you imagine the lilt of it: ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... drive through Cairo to the Pyramids, whether you spin out there in a motor, or trot on a donkey, or lilt on a camel, squatting cross-legged on a load of green bersim. Past the great swinging bridge, and the Island of Ghezireh (the word that in itself means "island") begins the six-mile dyke, which is the road made by Ismail to please the Empress Eugenie. Since her visit, in the days when the Suez Canal ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... vigor of boyhood and morning, and the noontide's rapture of ease! Was there ever a weary heart in the world? A lag in the body's urge or a flag of the spirit's wings? Did a man's heart ever break For a lost hope's sake? For here there is lilt in the quiet and calm in the quiver of things. Ay, this old oak, gray-grown and knurled, Solemn and sturdy and big, Is as young of heart, as alert and elate in his rest, As the nuthatch there that clings to the tip of the twig And ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... is bearing Isolde to be the wife of his king Marke. The cheery song of a sailor who, unseen, at the masthead, sings to the winds which are blowing him away from his wild Irish sweetheart, floats down to us. It has a refreshing and buoyant lilt, this song, with something of the sea breeze in it, and yet something, as it is sung, which emphasizes ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... wondering wherein consists the true lyrical magic. In that line of Burns's, clearly, it lies in the harmony of lyric thought and lyric lilt. In— ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... is full of poetry, the translator having retained the lilt of the original, together with many of the old English words which, if they need a glossary, is only because we have gradually lost the meaning in the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... herself, gravely composing her face, and clearing her throat, she began, in a high, shrill, piercing voice, rocking her head to the peculiar lilt of the words, and interpolating short explanatory remarks, ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... is just in its grandest prime, The earth is green and the skies are blue; But where is the lilt of the olden time, When life was a melody set to rhyme, And dreams were so real ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... repeated the boy, with a mocking lilt in his voice. "And Lueneburg is twenty miles from Hamburg. Hadst thought of ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... lilt of a Gaelic song in these pages that brought a sorrow on me. That very sweet language will be gone soon, if not gone already, and no book learning will revive the suppleness of idiom, that haunting misty loveliness.... ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... fete calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt, which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... to the occasion, played "Blue bonnets o'er the Border." Behind was the sunset in a sky of brilliant crimson. In front stretched great uplands of a dim green, while we, the new Crusaders, crossed over to the lilt of the pipes, whose music astonished Palestine now heard for the first time; and with us in great columns moved guns and cavalry, camels and transport, half seen in a haze of hanging dust. These of course are after thoughts, at ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... white like the daisy, and that her hair, which was yellow as the primrose, should have tumbled in wavelets about them. There ought to have been sunshine in the blue eyes, and laughter on the red lips, and merry lilt in the soft voice. But the pink had faded from the girl's cheek; the shadow had chased the sunshine from her eyes; her lips had taken a downward turn, and a note of sadness had stolen the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... Macaulay lacked ideas and vision. He liked the lilt and swing of the Lays and Ballads, and enjoyed the Essays with their superb colouring. Disputing Macaulay's dictum that neither painters nor poets are helped by the advances in civilisation, science and refinement, he wrote: "This argument disproved by the examples of men like Shakespeare ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the battered swing doors, marched a company of soldiers, the tramp of their feet and the lilt of their voices filling the place with strange echoes, for, being wet and weary and British, they sang cheerily. Packs a-swing, rifles on shoulder, they tramped through shell-torn waiting room and booking hall and out again ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... his position to ease his cramped limbs after the manner of the range rider. In spite of himself, his eyes would drift toward the jaunty little figure on the pinto. The masculine in him approved mightily her lissom grace and the proud lilt of her dark head, with its sun-kissed face set in profile to him. He thought her serviceable costume very becoming, from the pinched felt hat pinned to the dark mass of hair, and the red silk kerchief knotted ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... not my fingers split the sand On the sun-flooded beach? Hath not my naked body felt the water sing When the sea hath enveloped it With rippling music? Have I not felt The lilt of waves beneath my boat, The flap of sail, The strain of mast, The wild rush Of the lightning-charged winds? Have I not smelt the swift, keen flight Of winged odours before the tempest? Here is joy awake, aglow; Here is ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... castle at the dawn of the morning, and with many a knight to bear him company rode, not eager and swift, like a prince who went to find a treasure, but steady and slow, as we should go to meet sorrow. Not one of the hundred men who followed dared to lilt a lay or fling a laughing jest from his mouth. All rode silent among their gay trappings, for so saith ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... deepest blue and flecked with summer clouds. Loud-voiced birds called gaily of the summer's ending, talked of travel in a glad, gay lilt. The bees droned on; the bullfrogs gave forth a deep wise thought or two; while softly, deeply, brownly, flowed the stream beside the path, with only a far, still fisherman here and there who noticed ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... mind, a consistent attitude, and then having got it thoroughly established does something in distinct contradiction to it. Martin had never cared for music, but when one evening, a little more than a week after Rose's arrival, she suggested, with a laughing lilt, her fondness for it, he agreed that he had missed it in his home and, to Bill's and Mrs. Wade's unbelieving surprise, dwelt at length upon his enjoyment of Fallon's band and his longing to blow a cornet. A little later, finding an excuse ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... studied. He had read parts of Homer, parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies." Those ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... catch of its lilt, would suddenly make me start up, wide awake, with every nerve in my body dancing to its ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... two metres out of many, but enough perhaps to give to any one who will read them with a pause or quasi-caesura, as marked by o in each specimen, a fair idea of the rhythmic lilt of Chinese poetry. To the trained ear, the effect is most pleasing; and when this scansion, so to speak, is united with rhyme and choice diction, the result is a vehicle for verse, artificial no doubt, and elaborate, but admirably adapted to the genius of the Chinese ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines To Get the Final Lilt of Songs indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See My Prologue.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See The Mage.] were ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, caught and bound in rose thickets. All was dedicated to love and a lover's madness, and there were songs in it which haunted him with their lilt and refrain. When the book was finished it replaced the loose leaves as his constant companion by day and night. Three times a day he repeated his ritual to himself, seeking out the loneliest places in the woods, or going up to his room; and from the fixed intentness and rapture ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... looked a devil's daughter indeed, with her fire-like sequins and her red ankles twinkling as she threw herself into the thick of the dance and kicked, and whirled, and flung her bare arms about to the lilt of the music and the fluting of ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... plush of the sward; and after the lounge upon the grass, and the cigars, and the new fish stories, and the general invoice of the old ones, it was delectable to get back to the girls again, and in the old "best room" hear once more the lilt of the old songs and the staccatoed laughter of the piano mingling with the alto and falsetto voices of the Mills girls, and the gallant soprano of ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... lilt of triumph in her voice. "I'll leave you to think, about it," she said and, looking at the high fir-wood, she added, "But I thought we were going to be such ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... Shakespeare did not prevent her from feeling fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer's brain. Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively masculine; women neither practice them nor know how to value them; and one's husband's proficiency in this direction might ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... we wince, though none deplore us, We, who go reaping that we sowed; Cities at cock-crow wake before us— Hey, for the lilt of the London road! One look back, and a ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... re-formed, in the order in which it had arrived, and to the lilt of the gay music of the powerful band, the volatile spirits of the multitude revived, and the loud "huzzahs" rent the air as Apleon—the Anti-christ—passed through the waiting masses ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... was quite empty. From drawing-room and library and dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... and with her delicate, guilty, perverted impulses he had to deal, and no longer with pulpit abstractions. But while they stood thus, another turn in the affairs which revolved around the lonely barn carried with it a new sound; a horse's trot was plainly heard, likewise the humorous lilt of a shanty song. ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... playing some wailing tune, with a note of sadness in the core of it so keen and penetrating that it made the water come to Harry's eyes. But it changed suddenly to something that had all the sway and lilt of the rosy South. Men sprang to their feet and clasping arms about one another began to sway back and forth in the ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... figure, hasn't she?" he said to Mihul. He made vague curving motions in the air with one hand, more or less opposing ones with the other. "That sort of an up-and-sideways lilt when ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and, when they did take ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... immortality with "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs," rising, as they do, right out of the depths of that Inferno, sublime from their very simplicity? Which of Charles Mackay's lyrics can compare for a moment with the Eschylean grandeur, the terrible rhythmic lilt of his "Cholera Chant"— ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the lilt of them and the keen beauty of the night, the inherited pain of the ages rose from the depths of the young girl's heart, so that she thought it must break; for what reason she could not have told, since she was without care or sorrow that she knew, except the French Revolution, yet tears shone ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... from the moon, Seen with their eyes Eldorado, Sat in the Bo-tree's shadow, Wandered at noon In the valleys of Van, Tented in Lebanon, tarried in Ophir, Last year in Tartary piped for the Khan. Now it's the song of a lover; Now it's the lilt of a loafer,— Under the trees in a midsummer noon, Dreaming the haze into isles to discover, Beating the silences into a croon; Soon Up from the marshes a fall of the plover! Out from the cover A flurry of quail! ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... of talk, in which the clock tinker indulged so freely, afforded his young friend no little amusement. His tongue had long obeyed the lilt of classic diction; his thought came easy in Elizabethan phrase. The slight Celtic brogue served to enhance the piquancy of his talk. Moreover he was really a ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... dark, and the girls could not make out what she looked like, but they could see that she was small and graceful and her voice—well, her voice had a gay lilt that made one want to laugh even though all she said was "what a pleasant day it is." No wonder, with that father and mother, Connie ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... what's brewing To the lilt of his lyric wiles: The fiddler knows what rueing Will come ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... might be multiplied indefinitely; and the reader will admit that there is as much of a lilt about those which are here quoted as there is about the majority of the ditties which he has hummed to himself in his hour of contentment. Here is Philodemus' description ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... to be replaced, doubtless, hereafter, by something better, but in the meanwhile dragging down with it in its decay but too much that can ill be spared of that old society which inspired Ramsay and Burns. Hence the later Scottish song-writers seldom really sing; their proses want the unconscious lilt and flash of their old models; they will hardly go (the true test of a song) without music. The true test, we say again, of a song. Who needs music, however fitting and beautiful the accustomed air may happen to be, to "Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch," or ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... fears, And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears; Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire, When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar, Villon, our sad bad ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... older Christian tradition which ignored "race," and the aim of the expansive liberalism movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the world, to extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into trousers, and train the teeming myriads of India to appreciate the exquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some absurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not let the fact that the middle Victorians counted Scott, the suffrage and pantaloons among the supreme blessings of life, conceal ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... lilt, indeed, with its promise of plenty. Much superior to the next, which bears in its bosom the hollow and unwelcome ring of a "toom girnal"—a sound no child should ever know. It is yet a lilt familiar ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... Borrow's songs, here or elsewhere. Knapp gives no account of it, but the Romani is evidently Borrow's own, and does not admit of our taking it for a modernization of a genuine old gypsy song. Imitating the uncouth lilt of the original, this ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... lilt of the water, Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light, Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter... Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night. Walking alone... was it splendor, or what, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... girlish voice, with just a tremble of apprehensive nervousness, giving it a lilt like a ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... chastised it. He had persistently kept faith in, and sought for, a far-away being. But she was a being of light and glory. His kernel of the husk was still a siren, but a siren with a heart, with an exquisite imagination, with a fragrance of dreams about her, a lilt of eternal music in her voice, the beaming, wonder of things unearthly in her eyes. Poor Robin! Lady Holme found it in her heart to pity him as she realised herself. But then she turned her pity aside and concentrated ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... declamation, "King Charles, the Young Hero." Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" is technically a finer poem than anything Tegner has written, but it lacks the deep virile bass, the tremendous volume of breath and voice, and the captivating martial lilt which makes the heart beat willy nilly to the rhythm ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... who in their love for the new land have not forgotten the old." There is one of these poems which is always called for whenever the author attends any public function where recitations are in order, and I do not wonder at its popularity, for it has the genuine Irish lilt and fascination: ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... said Dud to Jim, as they made their way through the chatting, laughing throng, and caught the lilt of the music on the beach beyond, where bathers, reckless of the church bells' call, were disporting themselves in the sunlit waves. "It's tough, with a place like this so near, to be shut up on a desert island for a whole vacation. I say, Jim, let's look up the Fosters after Mass, and see ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... jewel. No maiden fair shall wreathe her neck with noble ring: nay, sad in spirit and shorn of her gold, oft shall she pass o'er paths of exile now our lord all laughter has laid aside, all mirth and revel. Many a spear morning-cold shall be clasped amain, lifted aloft; nor shall lilt of harp those warriors wake; but the wan-hued raven, fain o'er the fallen, his feast shall praise and boast to the eagle how bravely he ate when he and the wolf were wasting ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... have been natural for him to have done so. And, indeed, it is probable that no great prose rhetorician has failed to pay the same homage to the charm of verbal melody and cadence. In all the most sonorous prose turned out by English authors there will be found a lilt and a swing which would without difficulty translate themselves into verse. 'Most wretched men,' says Shelley, 'are cradled into poetry by wrong.' Most literary men have been cradled into it by their irresistible feeling ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the Ark ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... in the Green Meadows rose the clear lilt of Carol the Meadow Lark, and among the alders just where the Laughing Brook ran into the Smiling Pool a flood of happiness was pouring from the throat of Little Friend the Song Sparrow. Winsome ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... my bonnie, bonnie bird, Is that a sang ye borrow? Are thae some words ye 've learnt by heart, Or a lilt o' dule an' sorrow?" "Oh, no, no, no!" the wee bird sang, "I 've flown sin' mornin' early, But sic' a day o' wind and rain!— Oh! waes me for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... young men stand in groups laughing and talking in voices pitched shrill with crates excitement. In the brown light of the wharf, full of rows of yellow and barrels and sacks, full of racket of cranes, among which winds in and out the trivial lilt of the Hawaiian tune, there is a flutter of gay dresses and coloured hats of ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... letters could reproduce Dougal's accent, and I will not attempt it. There was a touch of Irish in it, a spice of music-hall patter, as well as the odd lilt of the Glasgow vernacular. He was strong in vowels, but the consonants, especially the letter "t," were ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... not be tolerated now. It is doubtful, even, if Webster would. The public has already tired of the lilt of Ingersoll's redundant rhetoric, pleasing as was its music. The effective speech to-day is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... delight. He read more of Swinburne than was contained in the volume Ruth had lent him; and "Dolores" he understood thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not understand it, he concluded. How could she, living the refined life she did? Then he chanced upon Kipling's poems, and was swept away by the lilt and swing and glamour with which familiar things had been invested. He was amazed at the man's sympathy with life and at his incisive psychology. Psychology was a new word in Martin's vocabulary. He had bought a dictionary, which deed had decreased his supply of money and brought nearer ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... bounding about with rigid necks, playing the while in perfect time and tune. It chanced that out of one of the bundles there stuck the end of what the clerk saw to be a cittern, so drawing it forth, he tuned it up and twanged a harmony to the merry lilt which the dancers played. On that they dropped their own instruments, and putting their hands to the ground they hopped about faster and faster, ever shouting to him to play more briskly, until at last for very weariness all three ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like If this were Faith and The Woodman, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world's ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... in my flushed hours I dream (High thought) instead of armour gleam Or warrior cantos ream by ream To load the shelves - Songs with a lilt of words, that seem ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him to know that my fancy flows, With the lilt of a dear old-fashioned tune, Through "Lewis Carroll's" poemly prose, And the tale of "The ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... downcast mien and laughing voice I followed, followed the swing of her white dress That rocked in a lilt along: I watched the poise Of her feet as they flew for a space, then paused to press The grass deep down with the royal burden of her: And gladly I'd offered my breast ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... songs being of her own land, one of the highlands, with the perfume of the gorse and the heather in the lilt of it, and the second, by demand of Sandy, the gipsy song which had been handed down from woodland mother to woodland child for hundreds of years; a song which sent Nancy's lawless blood to her cheeks and set ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... of the dear old time— So full of the dear old friends I knew. And under its rhythm, and lilt, and rhyme, I am ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as well look over them at once," said Lancelot firmly, uncoiling them. "It won't take you five minutes—just let me play one to you. The tunes are rather more original than the average, I can promise you; and yet I think they have a lilt that——" ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... ceaseless wagons clattered; Listened we for an English voice ever, ever in vain; Far in the west, year out, year in, terrible thunders battered, Drumming the doom of whom—of whom? Hope in our hearts lay shattered.... Then we heard the lilt of Highland pipes and English ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... lilt from my heart of hearts, And the breath of song from my soul; And the mind of me that had once been free And buoyantly young, and whole; Grew calm and still as a barren sea, Where never a star beam shone, A sea where never a ripple danced— ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... provender: crab's love, if soothing, Is no sweeter than pincers are soft—and a new sickle Cuts no sharper than crab's claws nip, keen as boar's toothing! Yet crab's love's no less fervent than bard's, if less musical— 'Tis a new thing I'd lilt—but a true thing. ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the days when the chief riches of the world lay tossed for daring hands to grasp upon the bosom of the sea, and the sleeping spirit of the old Norse Rover stirred in their veins, and the lilt of a wild sea- song they had never heard kept ringing in their ears; and they built them ships and sailed for the Spanish Main, and won much ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... youngster. There was amiable adventure with an amiable "blonde" (oh, if you could have seen your son); another with a "jolie brune" (oh, ma mere, ma mere); and still another lecon d'amour. The refrain had a catchy lilt to it, and the poilus began ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... scaled, on my lips the lilt of an Andalusian dance, The steep redoubt under a rain of fire; I've staked my life upon a hazard of the dice Careless, as though ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... pilgrims at his pages. Stevenson haunts the gloomy inlet where the Admiral Benbow stood and where old Pew came tapping in the night. In the flesh I shall join their revels as an equal comrade. Clovelly, however, although its lilt was pleasant to the ear, was ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... irremediable loss—stands incomparably above the rest. Short, vigorous, completely rounded—it breathes that high spirit of hope and trust, held by that warrior people; and, not alone the finest war dirge of the South, it is excelled by no sixteen lines in any language, for power, lilt and tenderness! ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... start. He brought—thus the idea came unbidden to his mind—something with him that galvanised him quite absurdly, as fear does, or delight, or great wonder. There was a music in his voice too—a certain—well, he could only call it lilt, that reminded him of plainsong, intoning, chanting. Drawling was ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... The old lilt died on his lips. With a startled oath he reined in sharply and, shielding his eyes from the sun-glare, remained staring straight in front of him. They had just topped the crest of the rise. The eastward slope showed a low-lying, undulating stretch of snow-bound country, sparsely dotted ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... days, Cappy would not have missed luncheon with the Bilgewater Club for a farm. As he breezed along there was a smile on his ruddy old face and a lilt in his kind old heart, for he was rehearsing his announcement to his youthful friends of how he had but recently tanned the hide of a brother! He almost laughed aloud as he pictured himself solemnly relating, in the presence of J. Augustus Redell and Live Wire Luiz, the tale of ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne |
