"Ballad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... infernal Snob-worship, might not every one of these people be happy? If poor Polly's happiness lay in linking her tender arms round such a heartless prig as the sneak who has deceived her, she might have been happy now—as happy as Raymond Raymond in the ballad, with the stone statue by his side. She is wretched because Mr. Serjeant Shirker worships money and ambition, and is ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... chieftain Cuthulf, in the year 571, became the scene of the great victory of Offa, the Mercian king, over Cynewulf of Wessex in the year 777. One of Elfric's ancestors had fought on the side of Offa, and the exploits of this doughty warrior had formed the subject of a ballad often sung in the winter evenings at Aescendune, so that Elfric explored the scene with great curiosity. Inferior to Dorchester, it was ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Limes, what a country! And I went back and forth twice within two steps of Croisset and I sent you some big kisses; always ready to return with you to the seaside or to talk with you at your house when you are free. If I had been alone, I should have bought an old guitar and should have sung a ballad under your mother's window. But I could not take ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... from Hell, gives us a broad hint of this. "The Scriptures, thought I then, what are they? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings price. Alack! what is Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on Horseback or Bevis of Southampton. Give me some book that teaches curious Arts, that tells old Fables." In The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven there is a longer list of such romances as these, including Ellen of Rummin, and many others. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... his father, and look at its inmates and the situation from safe harborage there. He found that Donovan in his roving sailor's life had played the crippled sea beggar in the streets of British cities, tying up his natural leg and fitting a wooden leg to the knee—a trick well known to British ballad singers. That leg was in Donovan's sea-chest, as it had been left in this city, and also the crutch necessary to walk with it. Mr. Zane and Donovan had exchanged the leg and crutch, and the former ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... been led round in an exact triangle, for through the green meshes of the trees he caught a glimpse of the lake and a thin blue column of fire-smoke, and then in the surrounding silence he heard Kiddie's well-known voice singing a snatch of a Scots ballad— ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... that surrounded it. For was it not with the daughter of his foe that the lover of Verona fell in love at first sight? And is not that a common type of us all—as if Passion delighted in contradictions? As the Diver, in Schiller's exquisite ballad, fastened upon the rock of coral in the midst of the gloomy sea, so we cling the more gratefully to whatever of fair thought and gentle shelter smiles out to us in the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... behind the trees, and gentle twilight steals on with her starry train ere he 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
... verse in imitation of Prior and Swift, which have not been traced to an earlier source. To the same year belongs the first version of a poem which he himself regarded as his best work, and which still retains something of its former popularity. This was the ballad of 'Edwin and Angelina', otherwise known as 'The Hermit'. It originated in certain metrical discussions with Percy, then engaged upon his famous 'Reliques of English Poetry'; and in 1765, Goldsmith, who through his friend Nugent ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... expression of Sir Henry Hawkins when on the Bench, "I should be surprised at nothing;" and after the long and strange experiences which these reminiscences indicate, the literal truth of the observation is not to be doubted. This clever ballad, which was written in 1895, seems sufficiently appropriate to find a place in these memoirs, and I wish I knew the name of the writer, that my thanks and apologies might be conveyed to him for this appropriation ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... sometimes a bell rang and there was comparative silence, while a curtain drew up at the further end of the room, opposite to the entrance, and where there was a theatre, the stage raised at a due elevation, and adorned with side scenes from which issued a lady in a fancy dress who sang a favourite ballad; or a gentleman elaborately habited in a farmer's costume of the old comedy, a bob-wig, silver buttons and buckles, and blue stockings, and who favoured the company with that melancholy effusion called a comic ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... asleep (as I dare say my reader has during this little homily), for suddenly Laurie's ghost seemed to stand before her, a substantial, lifelike ghost, leaning over her with the very look he used to wear when he felt a good deal and didn't like to show it. But, like Jenny in the ballad... ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... brought into the household—one of those poor little creatures consigned by their mothers to the river, as in the case of Shargani, according to the ancient legend; or who had been exposed at the cross-roads to excite the pity of passers-by,** like the foundling whose story is given us in an old ballad. "He who had neither father nor mother,—he who knew not his father or mother, but whose earliest memory is of a well—whose entry into the world was in the street," his benefactor "snatched him from the jaws of dogs—and took him from ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... crowned with a glory of 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
... Lower him to the mould below; With the well-known sailor ballad, Lest he grow more cold and pallid At the thought that Ocean's child, From his mother's arms beguiled, Must repose for countless years, Reft of all her briny tears, All the rights he owned by birth, In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... primitive poetry. One spontaneous element they preserve, which has been quite discarded from modern poetry, and of which the other traces are few. I mean the poetry of derision. The light and shade of the ballad is glory and scorn. The most popular subject of this species of poetry is a battle. Whether your ballad is of victory or of disaster, these two elements, not indeed with the same intensity or the same proportions, but still these two, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... instance, is a puzzling case to be tried in foro conscientiæ. In the first edition of ‘Goblin Market,’ published in 1862, appeared three poems of more breadth of treatment than any of the others: ‘Cousin Kate,’ a ballad, ‘Sister Maude,’ a ballad, and ‘A Triad,’ a sonnet. In subsequent issues of the book these were all omitted. Mr. W. M. Rossetti, speaking of ‘Sister Maude,’ says: “I presume that my sister, with overstrained scrupulosity, considered its moral ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the sensational part of the ballad, the place where a real gentleman would quit, but Lightfoot only tossed ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... and the spiritual part of their lives, and to clothe their surroundings with a higher and holier significance than can arise from the events and associations of the work-day life. In art the missing link is found, and whether it be the simple ballad in the evening circle or the modest print that graces the humble cottage walls—and the humbler the habitation the deeper the manifestation, because the more touching—it is but the expression of the people's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hats, at five or seven guineas apiece, swelled the account. Parasols and fans were of fabulous price, as it seemed to Lesbia; and the shoes and stockings to match her various gowns occurred again and again between the more important items, like the refrain of an old ballad. All the useless and unnessary things which she had ordered, because she thought them pretty or because she was told they were fashionable, rose up against her in the figures of the bill, like the record of forgotten sins ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... described in a ballad, made upon the quarrel between George the First and the Prince of Wales, at the christening recorded at p. 83 when the Prince and all his household were ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... departure, gingerly picking our way down the rickety steps. The last we heard of Uncle Robert was a snatch of Negro ballad sung in a ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... 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 story ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... 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
... Arthur 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
... consider how it is a matter of necessity that I should have nothing to say. If you could see this place of Boulge! You who sit and survey marble palaces rising out of cypress and olive. There is a dreadful vulgar ballad, composed by Mr. Balfe, and sung with the most unbounded applause ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... See Campbell's ballad of "The Brave Roland," in one of the numbers of the New Monthly Magazine; and Southey's tale of Manuel and Leila, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... note here the euphemistic tendency to call powerful spirits by propitiatory names. Just as the Greeks called the Furies "Eumenides," the benevolent ones, so is Robin called Good-fellow; the ballad of Tam Lin[38] refers to them as "gude neighbours"; the Gaels[39] term a fairy "a woman of peace"; and Professor Child points out the same fact in relation to the neo-Greek nereids.[40] Hence also "sweet ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... "Cool-Wort" and "Bead-Ruby"; there is no conceivable reason why these should not be the familiar appellations, except the irresistible fact that they are not. It is impossible to create a popular name: one might as well attempt to invent a legend or compose a ballad. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... tails. His manners were those of his blood, but a freer and heartier and more harum-scarum fellow never lived. It is a pleasant remembrance, after many years, to see again a group of lads round the big fire in the winter time, and to hear Duncan Robertson read the stirring ballad, "How Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old," till Peter can contain himself no longer, and proposes that a select band shall go instantly to McIntyre's Academy and simply compel a conflict. Dunc went into his father's regiment and fell at Tel-el-Kebir, and there is one Seminary ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... founded on Hindu lore, followed. In 1803, after some years of wandering, the poet went to live at Greta Hall, near Keswick, which remained his home until his death. Besides a long line of prose works, Southey wrote innumerable short poems. Famous among them is the ballad of the battle of Blenheim, with its ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... settled. Daniel had acquired title to lands from the Transylvania Company and things looked promising. Rebecca too must have been happy in their security. The children could safely play inside the stockade even if they did squabble with the neighbors' children. Rebecca must have sung a ballad betimes as she cooked venison or wild turkey at the hearth, or swept the floor with her rived oak broom. For Daniel could whittle a broom for her while he sat meditating aloud on his past adventures. Daniel was satisfied. Rebecca could see that. Now with the colony established ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... opinion of many scholars that the Iliad and the Odyssey, as they stand today, are not, either of them, the creation of a single poet. They are believed to be mosaics; that is, to be built up out of the fragments of an extensive ballad literature that grew up in an age preceding the Homeric. The "Wrath of Achilles," which forms the nucleus of the Iliad as we have it, may, with very great probability, be ascribed to Homer, whom we may believe to have been the most prominent of a brotherhood of bards who flourished ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... had fancied that he was alone in the house. It seemed not, however. There was a primeval piano in his sitting-room, and on the second morning it suited his mood to sit down at this and sing 'Asthore', the fruity pathos of which ballad appealed to him strongly at this time, accompanying himself by an ingenious arrangement in three chords. He had hardly begun, however, when Mr Dorman appeared, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... and piano; hummed it first thing in the morning and last thing at night; harped upon it until in despair his companion threw books and music at him, and he, dodging them, laughed, begged pardon, was silent for five minutes, and then the March da Capo set in a halting kind of measure to the ballad. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... lolls in petticoats, and idle stupidity struts in trousers. But, class for class, woman does her share of the world's work. Among the poor, of the two it is she who labours the longer. There is a many- versed ballad popular in country districts. Often I have heard it sung in shrill, piping voice at harvest supper or barn dance. ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... her shoulders. "Now you sing some soft little thing for them, my girl," he commanded—and looking up at him again, Azalea obeyed. She chose an old ballad, one with no chance in it to show the range of her voice. She sang it exquisitely, and the Cashier stood by and turned her music as if he considered it a high privilege. Yet, half-way through, the little Dot woke up. Azalea ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... of Northern Antiquities (p. 379), preserved a cante-fable called Rosmer Halfman, or The Merman Rosmer. Mr. Motherwell remarks (Minstrelsy, Glasgow, 1827, p. xv.): "Thus I have heard the ancient ballad of Young Beichan and Susy Pye dilated by a story-teller into a tale of remarkable dimensions—a paragraph of prose and then a screed of rhyme alternately given." The example published by Mr. Motherwell gives us the very form of Aucassin and Nicolete, surviving ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... that night, calmed my agonies; and being ashamed to acquaint the mistress of the inn that I had no friends to apply to in town, I proposed to myself to proceed, the very next morning, to an intelligence office, to which I was furnished with written directions on the back of a ballad, Esther had given me. There I counted on getting information of any place that such a country girl as I might be fit for, and where I could get into any sort of being, before my little stock should be consumed; and as to a character, ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... e.g. Elmer is Anglo-Sax. AElfmaer, and Beecher is Anglo-Fr. bechur, digger (Fr. beche, spade). Neither Pitman nor Collier had their modern meaning of coal-miner. Pitman is local, of the same class as Bridgeman, Pullman, etc., and Collier meant a charcoal-burner, as in the famous ballad of Rauf Colyear. Not much coal was dug in the Middle Ages. Even in 1610 Camden speaks with disapproval, in his Britannia, of the inhabitants of Sherwood Forest who, with plenty of wood around them, persist in ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... when suddenly I was attracted by the sound of the sweetest voice I ever heard. I turned to the stage, and there stood a young girl, but little more than a child, holding her piece of music in her hand, and singing, to the thrumming accompaniment of a wheezy piano, a sweet old ballad. The girl was slight of frame and small, not more than about five feet high. She was timid, for that was her first appearance, as the play-bills stated; and the hand trembled that held the music. I did not infer that she had had much training as a musician; but ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... his education was not finished, for he had missed the "delectable ballad of the Waller lot" and Eugene Field's account of the dignities that were "heaped upon Clow's noble yellow pup," else he would have understood. The pigeonhole contained most of the "honors" that have come to me of late years,—the ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... This tender and passionate ballad, executed by a great artiste, suddenly reminded all these women of their first love; of their first fall; of a late leave-taking at a dawn in the spring, in the chill of the morning, when the grass is ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... The bread of the Lord grows everywhere, and He will grant ears to listen to my music. Yes! we will fly and leave all behind. I will set the story of your sorrows to the lute, and sing of the daughter who rent her own heart to preserve her father's. We will beg with the ballad from door to door, and sweet will be the alms bestowed by the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... name Heaulmiere is said to be derived from a head-dress (helm) worn as a mark by courtesans. In Villon's ballad, a poor old creature of this class laments her days of youth and beauty. The last stanza of the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Euphemia for so willingly undertaking (the whispered menaces of Lady Grouts being heard by nobody but the young lady herself) to do all that could be done under such untoward circumstances. She would endeavor to accompany herself through a little ballad; ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... well-known Scotch ballad "Edom o' Gordon" the Lady Rodes is represented as being shut up by Gordon in her burning castle. The smoke was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the theory that we have just seen, the tax is the reaction of society against monopoly. Upon this point opinions are unanimous: citizens and legislators, economists, journalists, and ballad-writers, rendering, each in their own tongue, the social thought, vie with each other in proclaiming that the tax should fall upon the rich, strike the superfluous and articles of luxury, and leave those ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... difficulty Blondel and Cuthbert restrained themselves from an extravagant exhibition of joy. They knew, however, that men on the prison wall were watching them as they sat singing, and Blondel, with a final strain taken from a ballad of a knight who, having discovered the hiding place of his ladylove, prepared to free her from her oppressors, shouldered his lute, and they ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... griffins and monsters dire, Born of water, and air, and fire, Or nursed, like the Python, in the mud And ooze of the old Deucalion flood, Crawl and wriggle and foam with rage, Through dusk tradition and ballad age. So from the childhood of Newbury town And its time of fable the tale comes down Of a terror which haunted bush and brake, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... November, 5 & 6 Philip and Mary, 1558, a bill "That no man shall print any book or ballad, &c., unless he be authorized thereunto by the king and queen's majesties licence, under the Great Seal of Englande," was read for the first time in the House of Lords, where it was read again a second time on the 14th. On ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 56, November 23, 1850 • Various
... fellow who exhibits himself for a shilling, to flatter his queen?" At another time Boswell suggested that we might respect a great player. "What! sir," exclaimed Johnson, "a fellow who claps a hump upon his back and a lump on his leg and cries, 'I am Richard III.'? Nay, sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things: he repeats and he sings; there is both recitation and music in his performance—the player ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Thomas Campion, a physician who composed both words and music for several song-books, and in Michael Drayton, a voluminous poet and dramatist who is known to most readers only for his finely rugged patriotic ballad on the battle of Agincourt. Sir Henry Wotton, [Footnote: The first o is pronounced as in note.] statesman and Provost (head) of Eton School, displays the Elizabethan idealism in 'The Character of a Happy Life' and in his stanzas in praise of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... no ascetic, and was ever willing to drink the king's health, but, as his worst enemies used grudgingly to admit, cared neither for wine nor women. Silence falls for a little on the company. Claverhouse looking into the fire and seeing things of long ago and far away, hums a Royalist ballad to the honor of King Charles, and the confounding of crop-eared Puritans. Among the company was that honest gentleman, Captain George Carlton, who was afterwards to tell many entertaining anecdotes of the War in Spain under ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... October, arriving at Quebec on the 5th. Frontenac, then Governor of New France, was taken almost by surprise, yet, when summoned to surrender, he haughtily refused to do so, using the words attributed to him in the ballad. Phipps was beaten off, leaving with the French the cannon of his troops and this flag, which had been shot away, and which was picked up by a Canadian, who swam out after it. A medal was struck in France, and a church erected in Quebec, ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... her face is tanned by labour. The bleating and affrighted sheep are plunged, unwillingly, into the pool, and now by the sturdy hand stripped of their fleecy coats. The bottle quickly passes, the simple tale goes round, the ballad purchased at the fair is sung; the mower whets his scythe, and the grass and the wild-flowers fall before it; the waggon, heavily laden, removes the odoriferous hay; and the neat-mown fields display a brighter green. The cuckoo, with his never-varying note is heard; but let us, when the day is ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... participated in had been a desperate defence of a convoy in the 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 ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... cannon-soot. When Loveliness and Valor meet Beneath the trees to dance, and eat, And sing, and much beside, behold My golden glories all unfold! There formidably are displayed The useful horrors of my blade In time of feast and dance and ballad, I am ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Phil," said Reuben at last, breaking in upon his host's ecstasy over a ballad he had been reciting, with what he counted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... above all in that most poetic of all qualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the infection of which lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion to all his other compositions. The form in both is that of the ballad, with some of its terminology, and some also of its quaint conceits. They connect themselves with that revival of ballad literature, of which Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way, Macpherson's Ossian are monuments, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... an old fashion ballad that was sung during the period of slavery and which was very common throughout the Purchase Region: "Jeff Davis rode a big white horse, but Lincoln rode a mule—Jeff Davis was a fine, smart man, and Lincoln was a fool. Jeff Davis had a fine white; Lincoln only ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... laughing. This was as it should be. Fun, youth, gaiety. She went to her easel in the north room, humming Joan's old ballad, and never did better work in her life ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... followed into the street; and coming near enough to distinguish his profile reflected on a wall, she continued to keep him in view from a short distance. The light-hearted young cavalier whistled, as he went, an old Portuguese ballad of romance; and in a quarter of an hour came up to an house, the front door of which he began to open with a pass-key. This operation was the signal for Catalina that the hour of vengeance had struck; and, stepping hastily up, she tapped the Portuguese on the shoulder, saying —'Senor, you are a ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... cannot resist transcribing that ballad, which cost poor College, the protestant joiner, so extremely dear. It is extracted from Mr Luttrell's collection, who has marked it thus. "A most scandalous libel against the government, for which, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... from that day, and discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded this piece of luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed him. If it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a mere recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out this bubble from your ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... at its far end, a 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
... Time was when king, lords, and commons hailed May-day morning with delight, and bowed homage to her fair and brilliant queen. West end and city folks united in their freaks, ate, drank, and joined the merry dance from morning dawn till close of day. Thus in an old ballad of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... the drunken masters, and the slaves entered and stole the silver. All the while songs were being sung in various parts of the room, and three Englishmen, three of those gloomy figures for whom the Continent is a hospital, kept up a most sinister ballad that must have been born of the fogs ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... trumpeters, heralds, hey!" "Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, gone—who knows where?—on the wind. "'Dead and gone'—a sorry burden of the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his Death's Jest Book. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... that advantage," replied Sam stiffly. "But anyone can sing a drawing-room ballad. Now something funny, something that will make people laugh, something that really needs putting across ... that's a ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... who, in the midst of pain and weakness, cries out, not for death, not for the repose of forgetfulness, but for strength to fight; for more power, more consciousness of being, more God in him; who, when sorest wounded, says with Sir Andrew Barton in the old ballad:— ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... to sing a little ballad which she used to sing years before, when she was nursing him wrapped up in swaddling-clothes in this same little upholstered chair. But a shiver ran all over his frame, just as when a wave is agitated by the wind. The balls of his eyes protruded. She thought he was going to die, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... a great tenor in 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 appeal ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... an excessive surprise. My grandmother had been esteemed a great beauty in her day and had been sung by the ballad-singers. Was it possible that my looks could be like hers? I had not thought about them hitherto any more than my cousin had about his. It was with almost a sense of relief that I heard my ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... called the remembrance goblet. Sigurd the earl was an open-handed man, who did what was very much celebrated; namely, he made a great sacrifice festival at Hlader of which he paid all the expenses. Kormak Ogmundson sings of it in his ballad of Sigurd:— ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... as the writer of "Auld Robin Gray" is familiar to every one who knows that most pathetic ballad, spent five years with her husband at the Cape (1797-1802). Her journal letters to her sisters are most amusing, and full of interesting observations.[11] After describing "Musquito-hunting" with her husband, she writes:—"In return, I endeavoured to effect a treaty of ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... authorities and complained that he was "tormented" 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, and thus ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... Appetite can find Any good minstrels after his mind, Doubt not we shall have good sport. IGN. And so shall we have for a surety; But what shall we do now, tell me, The meanwhile for our comfort? HU. Then let us some lusty ballad sing. IGN. Nay, sir, by the Heaven King! For methinketh it serveth for nothing, All such peevish prick-eared song! HU. Peace, man, prick-song may not be despised, For therewith God is well pleased, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... deliver his sermons in his sleep, and was afterwards discovered to be an imposter; the last benefaction in the parish church, for two poor Irish gentlewomen on their journey home, recommended by letters from the Council; the last new ballad. ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... the Martyr Frances Whiteside The Romance of Tenachelle Hercules Ellis Michael Flynn William Thomson A Night with a Stork William G. Wilcox An Unmusical Neighbour William Thomson The Chalice David Christie Murray Livingstone Henry Lloyd In Swanage Bay Mrs. Craik Ballad of Sir John Franklin G. H. Boker Phadrig Crohoore J. S. Le Fanu Cupid's Arrows Eliza Cook The Crocodile's Dinner Party E. Vinton Blake "Two Souls with but a Single Thought" William Thomson A Risky Ride Campbell Rae-Brown On Marriage Josh Billings The Romance of Carrigcleena ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... matter of dramatic entertainments as London. New works produced in the English capital were heard in New York as soon as the ships of that day could bring over the books and the actors. Especially was this true of English ballad operas and English transcriptions, or adaptations, of French, German, and Italian operas. New York was five months ahead of Paris in making the acquaintance of the operatic version of Beaumarchais's "Barbier ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the semitone above or below, when it ceases altogether. Even so do our emotions increase in exact proportion as the exciting cause approaches perfection—according as the beauty heard or seen or felt approaches the heavenly keynote. A simple ballad awakens a quiet pleasure, while the magnificent symphonies of Beethoven or Mozart fill the soul with a rapture with which the former feeling is no more to be compared than the brooklet with the ocean; for the latter is inexpressibly nearer to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... German ballad, long ago a favorite in the highest musical circles, but now cast aside for something newer and more brilliant. A simple, touching little song of love ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... began to work, he dashed carelessly into another stanza of his favourite ballad. I know not if you are acquainted with German; but I cannot resist the desire of gratifying my own ears with a repetition of the sounds of the thrilling consonants which produced so great an effect on me on that occasion. His voice was rough ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... and in story this book holds first place in the hearts of children. "A Book of Ballad Stories," ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... all means, I'll only have a Ballad made of't, sung to some lewd Tune, and the name of it shall be Justice Trap; it will sell rarely with your Worships name, and ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... upon him, should now remain quiet in the very midst of turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to the banners of liberty—the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who—as the ballad runs—had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for King Monmouth's army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they were fools rushing in ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... necessary. You need only take a sheet of paper and write at the top "A Ballad," then begin like this, "Heigho, alack, my destiny!" or "the Cossack Nalivaiko was sitting on a hill and then on the mountain, under the green tree the birds are singing, grae, voropae, gop, gop!" or something of that kind. And the thing's done. Print it and publish it. The Little Russian ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... "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" ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... venture," Felicia murmured, bending over her sewing. "But it wouldn't have been so happy if the defender of his kindred hadn't slaved on the high seas 'for to maintain his brither and me,' like Henry Martin in the ballad." ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... for fight without wages, accepted the passports proffered by Parma. They revenged themselves for the harsh treatment which they had received from Casimir and from the states-general, by singing, everywhere as they retreated, a doggerel ballad—half Flemish, half German—in which their wrongs were expressed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... both in the drama and in hymns. Her play, 'Vivia Perpetua' (1841), tells of the author's rapt aspiration after an ideal, symbolized in a pagan's conversion to Christianity. She published also 'The Royal Progress,' a ballad (1845), on the giving tip of the feudal privileges of the Isle of Wight to Edward I.; and poems upon the humanitarian interests which the Anti-Corn-Law League endeavored to further. Her hymns are the happiest expressions of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... woman, evidently—was pacing the floor of the room to which this window belonged, and that she was repeating poetry, either to herself or to some silent listener. As she came near the window, Stretton heard the words of an old ballad with ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... sledge-hammer of my criticism, that, by the Ship of the Sun! ... for once Al-Kyns shall be moved to laughter at thee! Mark me, good tuner-up of tinkling foolishness! ... I will so choose out and handle thy feeblest lines that they shall seem but the doggerel of a street ballad monger! I will give so bald an epitome of this sickly love-tale that it shall appeal to all who read my commentary the veriest trash that ever poet penned! ... Moreover, I can most admirably misquote thee, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the attic ladder (they called it the 'mainmast tree' out of the ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, and Dan 'swarved it with might and main,' as the ballad says) they saw a man sitting on Duck window-sill. He was dressed in a plum-coloured doublet and tight plum-coloured hose, and he drew busily ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... the lamp. Light steps approached the door. The two women leaned one against the other; for they both were near falling. Someone tapped gently. The queen asked who was there, and Little Douglas's voice answered in the two first lines of an old ballad— ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... damsel ran to 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 Sir ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... Ballad The Pathway of Black Leaves I-IV Elegy Sequence I-X Disillusion November Afternoon Yareth at Solomon's Tomb Argolis St. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... His death His eccentric and unsocial habits BYRON, John (father of the poet), his elopement with Lady Carmarthen His marriage with Miss Catherine Gordon His death at Valenciennes ——, Mrs. (mother of the poet), descended from the Gordons of Gight Vehemence of her feelings Ballad on the occasion of her marriage Her fortune Separates from her husband Her capricious excesses of fondness and of anger Her death Lord Byron's Letters to See also ——, Honourable Augusta (sister of the poet) ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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
... quote that old Roxburghe ballad, "The Great Boobee," in which a country yokel is made to tell how he was made to look foolish when he resolved to plough no more, but to ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... ballad she had sung at Christmas—in what different mood! Then her voice had been as carefree as a bird's carol, but now it lent to the limpid simplicity of the air a sobbing, shuddering sweetness—an almost weird intensity that strangely ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... that almost all attempts to treat any part of our history poetically or dramatically are miserable failures. Among the verse books before us two are of this kind; one by Mr. George L. Raymond,[24] who has written in what he supposes is the ballad form some things which are not at all ballad-like, and which are dreary stuff under whatever name; and the other a thing which Mr. Martin F. Tupper[25] seems to suppose is a drama in blank verse upon ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... historic back-ground of the ballad from which this selection is taken? Narrate briefly the events as told by Macaulay in Horatius. Where is the scene of the dramatic events here portrayed? Who are the chief actors? Who ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Christian was executed by shooting on the 2nd of January 1663. This arbitrary act angered Charles II. and his advisers; the deemsters and others were punished, and some reparation was made to Christian's family. Christian is chiefly celebrated through the Manx ballad Baase Illiam Dhone, which has been translated into English by George Borrow, and through the references to him in Sir Walter Scott's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... full many people Who with evil voice assail me, And with tongue of poison sting me, Saying that my lips are skilless, That the ways of song I know not, Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings. Ah, you should not, kindly people, Therein seek a cause to blame me, That, a child, I sang too often, That, unfledged, I twittered only. I have never had a teacher, Never heard the speech of great men, Never learned a word unhomely, Nor ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... history of the British monarchy, leaving a deep impression on the public mind, gave rise to this generally diffused ballad, is exceedingly probable; but the style and wording of the song are evidently of a period much later than the age of Henry VIII. Might not the madcap adventure of Prince Charles with Buckingham into Spain, to woo the Infanta, be its real origin? "Heigho! for Antony Rowley" is the chorus. Now "Old ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth,—running the primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... appreciative manner, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. James McPherson published what he claimed to be translations from the poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal. Whether genuine or not, these poems indicated the tendency of the time. In Scotland, the old ballad spirit, which had continued to exist with a vigor but little abated by the influence of the artificial, mechanical school of poetry, was gathered up and intensified in the songs of him "who walked ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... put me into both fear and hope. On the one hand, I began to think my uncle was perhaps insane and might be dangerous; on the other, there came up into my mind (quite unbidden by me and even discouraged) a story like some ballad I had heard folk singing, of a poor lad that was a rightful heir and a wicked kinsman that tried to keep him from his own. For why should my uncle play a part with a relative that came, almost a beggar, to his door, unless in his heart he had some ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... embroiderers the foremost figure is that of the Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine, claimed in Wales and in the Welsh ballad of "The Dream of Maxen Wledig" as being a Welsh princess married to the Emperor Constans. She is said to have embroidered an image of the Virgin, which Muratori speaks of as existing in the Church of Vercelli in the seventeenth ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... brought to bear upon her by her friend Mrs. Johnson, of the Woman's Prison, and would go to read to the sad-eyed audience at Sherborn. Even those hearts dulled by wrong and misery awakened at the sound of her voice. It was not altogether this or that verse or ballad that made the tears flow, or brought a laugh from her hearers; it was the deep sympathy which she carried in her heart and which poured out in her voice; a hope, too, for them, and for what they might yet become. ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... The following Ballad is merely a versification of one of the many feats of Waldemar, the famed phantom hunter of the North, an account of whom, and of Palnatoka and Groon the Jutt, both spectres of a similar character, may be ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... warbling of his Muse was not neglected.' On Wednesday, Sept. 6th, about five in the morning, says The Scots Magazine for that month in its leading article, the performers from Drury Lane paraded the streets of Stratford, and serenaded the ladies with a ballad by Garrick, beginning ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask |
