"Dirge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... orchestra of shot and shell braces up the mind of the soldier and attunes it up to receive new sensitiveness. The bullets play strange dirges on the strings of life before they break them, and each dirge has its theme, some song of spiritual things. His gaze is towards the sky line and he sees strange things, a whole battery of lights each of which is in its way a revelation. The battle chorus crying to the night of long silence ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... of wilderness And ruins thou first openest thine eyes, O hapless One, my humble offerings Will not appear like thy wrath's threats, nor like The joyful trumpetings of thy reveille, Nor like an image of thy passion's cross, Nor like thy sorrow's dirge, nor like glad hymns; But like soft songs and trembling lights and fondlings Of lily hands, black ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... incarnation perhaps, or in the "dim backward" of pre-natal dreaming. It all comes back to us as we give ourselves up to the whispered cadences of this faint sweet music; while those reiterated syllables about "the great water-lilies among the rushes" fall upon us like a dirge, like a requiem, like the wistful voice of what we have loved—once—long ago—touching us suddenly with a pang that is well-nigh more than we ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of way; the girls struck the palms of their left hands with their fans. The boys were in clean working dress. Some had towels wound round their heads, some wore caps and others hats. The girls were got up in all their best clothes with fine obi and white aprons. The music was dirge-like. It was not at all what Western people understand to be singing. The performers emitted notes in a kind of falsetto, and these five or six notes were repeated over and over and over again. The only word I can think of which approximately describes what I heard, but it seems harsh, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... while it often does succeed in distressing the ear and so obscuring the sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them. A dirge may be in racing anapaests, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work, indeed, variety of structure may ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... listen to his sad harp's wild complaint, Mother of shadows! as to thee he pours The broken strain, and plaintively deplores The fall of Druid fame! Hark! murmurs faint Breathe on the wavy air! and now more loud Swells the deep dirge; accustomed to complain Of holy rites unpaid, and of the crowd Whose ceaseless steps the sacred haunts profane. O'er the wild plain the hurrying tempest flies, And, mid the storm unheard, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... a litter or bier, the former being used by the wealthy, the latter by the poor, was carried out preceded by instrumental musicians, and female singers, who chanted the dirge. These hired attendants, whose noisy sorrow was as genuine as the dumb grief of our mutes, were succeeded, if the deceased were noble, or distinguished by personal exploits, by numerous couches containing the family effigies of his ancestors, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the lodges pour a motley throng, Slow measures chanting of a dirge-like song. In one great circle dizzily they swing, A squaw and chief alternate in the ring. Coarse raven locks stream over robes of white, Their deep set orbs emit a lurid light, And as through pine trees moan the winds refrains, So swells and dies ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... players arranged themselves within a square roughly drawn in the middle of the road; then to the strains of a bamboo fiddle, bamboo flute, bamboo drum, the melodrama was begun. The hero pranced into the open square to the tune of a minor dirge, not knowing a single sentence of his part; the prompter, kneeling down before a flaring candle, told him what to say; he repeated in parrot-like fashion, and then pranced off the square to slow dirge-like music. Now ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... a snatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.—What are "Luke's iron crown", the brazen bull of Perillus, Procrustes' bed, to the waxen images which counterfeit death, to the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification by degrees! To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... display, as was the wont of the Great Republic, with a city hung with emblems of mourning, and with the solemn strains of dirge and mass filling the air, out from the great hall of the Palazzo Cornaro, on, across the heavily draped bridge that spanned the Grand Canal from the water-gate of the palace, along the broad piazza crowded with a silent throng, and into the Church of the Holy Apostles, ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... hast thou, what part have ye herein? But you, with sweet shut eyes, Heart-hidden memories, Dreams and dumb thoughts that keep what things have been Silent, and pure of all words said, Praise without song the living, without dirge the dead. ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... thrilling of the surge I saw, afar, two hosts to battle urge. The widows of the victors sang a dirge, But ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... going up the avenue on his way home, a young girl passed him, walking very briskly. She paused for a moment just ahead of him to give some money to a poor woman who, doubled up on the pavement in a black shawl, was grinding out from a wheezy little organ a thin, dirge-like strain. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... melancholy love-maker is not on public exhibition. To see it we must trace the a-coo-o, coo-o, coo-oo, coo-o to its source in the thick foliage in some tree in an out-of-the-way corner of the farm, or to an evergreen near the edge of the woods. The slow, plaintive notes, more like a dirge than a love-song, penetrate to a surprising distance. They may not always be the same lovers we hear from April to the end of summer, but surely the sound seems to indicate that they are. The dove ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Death of Featherstonhaugh" naturally excited uneasiness about the touching ballad of "Barthram's Dirge," also contributed to the Minstrelsy as the fruit of the industrious investigations of Surtees. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... continued then, in altered tones, the magnificent series of sonnets dedicated to her and which read still like a love-drama of real life, a love-drama which is all summarized in the beautiful and well-known dirge: ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... tho' no sacred earth afford thee room, Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb, Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest, And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast. Here shall the morn her earliest tears bestow— Here the first roses of the year shall blow; While angels with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... a moment silent and motionless. They both listened to the dirge of their love and their happiness, and this simple, hearty song sounded to them horrible and awful in the boundless desolation of their hearts. At last the song ceased, and a voice, too well known and loved, cried, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... after he had tried, with that strange Greek pertinacity that understands no refusals, all the hotels and tourist agencies he had called at the day before, he became weary and disconsolate. The march had become a dirge; no longer it suggested happiness to be, but failure. An Englishman threw him a piastre, and he turned into a cafe. Calling for a glass of wine, he flung himself down on the wooden bench and tried to think. But really logical thinking was impossible. For ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... gained the recess where he had stood several nights before with Helen, and, dizzy with want of food, and worn out for want of sleep, he sank down into the dark corner; while the river that rolled under the arch of stone muttered dirge-like in his ear,—as under the social key-stone wails and rolls on forever the mystery of Human Discontent. Take comfort, O Thinker by the stream! 'T is the river that founded and gave pomp to the city; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was easily deceived by a modern imitation, if he liked the poetry. Surtees hoaxed him not only with Barthram's Dirge and Anthony Featherstonhaugh, but with a long prose excerpt from a non-existent manuscript about a phantom knight. Scott made the plot of Marmion hinge on this myth, in the encounter of Marmion with Wilfred as the phantasmal ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... music be a dirge: Caesar is dead. [NERO pauses wondering. Claudius is dead. Reign thou. ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... vigorously on his Jew's harp, Diana followed him beating a little drum, and Iris, with long black ribbons fastened to her flowing chestnut locks, was walking behind, carrying the tiny coffin. Iris, as she walked, rang an old dinner bell in a very impressive manner, and also sang a little dirge to the accompaniment of the bell and the two other children's music. These were ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... in the darkness and heard a dog howl, "When a dog cries like that the Angel of Death is passing." Rilla listened with a curdling fear at her heart. It was Dog Monday—she felt sure of it. Whose dirge was he howling—to whose spirit was he sending ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... piteous strain, Grief-laden, tear-evoking, shrill; Ah woe is me! woe! woe! Dirge-like it sounds; mine own death-trill I pour, yet breathing vital air. Hear, hill-crowned Apia, hear my prayer! Full well, O land, My voice barbaric thou canst understand; While oft with rendings I assail My byssine ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... riding high from cloud to cloud, That sees and sees not, glimmering far beneath, Hell's children revel along the shuddering heath With dirge-like mirth and raiment like a shroud: A worse fair face than witchcraft's, passion-proud, With brows blood-flecked behind their bridal wreath And lips that bade the assassin's sword find sheath Deep in the heart whereto love's heart was vowed: A game ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of verses one may choose out of Villon. It follows and completes the epitaph which in his will he orders to be written in charcoal—or scratched—above his tomb: the sad, sardonic octave of "the little scholar and poor." It is a kind of added dirge to be read by those who pass and to be hummed or chaunted over him dead. But ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... were over; the azure of the sky had changed to a dead grey; the moon was appearing just over the trees; the water of the Gombe was like a silver belt; hoarse frogs bellowed their notes loudly by the margin of the creek; the fish-eagles uttered their dirge-like cries as they were perched high on the tallest tree; elands snorted their warning to the herds in the forest; stealthy forms of the carnivora stole through the dark woods outside of our camp. Within the high inclosure of bush and thorn, which we had raised around our camp, all ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... so, at such and such a door; this detachment is to fall-in here, that there, in the attitude of "cover arms" (musket inverted under left arm); and the band is to play, with all its blackamoors, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (O Head, all bleeding wounded); a Dirge his Majesty had liked, who knew music, and had a love for it, after his sort. Good Son of Nature: a dumb Poet, as I say always; most dumb, but real; the value of him great, and unknown in these babbling times. It ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... voice of the clarion-toned captain is ringing, Above the hoarse murmuring roar of the surge, And an echoing voice, seems sepulchrally flinging, Far back o'er the waves, for the vessel, a dirge. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... fair retir'd; Here lov'd from gayer scenes withdrawn, To breathe, what harmony inspir'd— A dirge to memorize ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... in the cold custody of the tomb! Think of the Marys and Marthas who are now "going to some grave to weep there," perhaps with no Saviour's smile to gladden them—or the desolate chambers that are now resounding to the plaintive dirge, "O Absalom, Absalom, would God I had died for thee; O Absalom, my son! my son!" Think of all these scenes at that moment vividly suggested and pictured to the Redeemer's eye—the long and loud miserere, echoing dismally from ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... 'Prosnachadh Catha,' or battle-song, that led on the raid of Donald the Islander on the Garioch, is still sung; the 'Woes of the Children of the Mist' are yet rehearsed in the ears of their children in the most plaintive measures. Innerlochy and Killiecrankie have their appropriate melodies; Glencoe has its dirge; both the exiled Jameses have their paean and their lament; Charles Edward his welcome and his wail;—all in strains so varied, and with imagery so copious, that their repetition is continually called for, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a room upstairs, where Miss Mills and Dora were. Jip was there. Miss Mills was copying music (I recollect, it was a new song, called 'Affection's Dirge'), and Dora was painting flowers. What were my feelings, when I recognized my own flowers; the identical Covent Garden Market purchase! I cannot say that they were very like, or that they particularly resembled any flowers that have ever come under my observation; but I knew from the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... none but British soldiers would have sung. It had no known author and no known composer. It sort of "growed," like Topsy. If it had had a title given to it I suppose it would have been called "I want to go home," for that was its dirge-like refrain, always sung very cheerfully indeed, or with mock earnestness. Time and again I heard its chorus taken up with terrific gusto from end to end of this trench, and the whole extraordinary composition spread to other trenches like a contagion. Its ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... touching sight, and for some time none spake. The solemn dirge continued, interrupted only by the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... him. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton scarcely mention it. It holds almost no place in the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but, at the close of the eighteenth century, it has the good luck to be uprooted by Burns's plough, and he at once sings its dirge and its beauties; and then the flower at once becomes a celebrity. Wordsworth sings of it in many a beautiful verse; and I think it is scarcely too much to say that since his time not an English poet has failed to pay his homage to the humble beauty of the ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the battle field, and the cold pale moon Look'd down on the dead and dying, And the wind pass'd o'er with a dirge and a wail, Where the young and the brave ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... her creatures, and from the sounds of inanimate objects, she has provided that all seasons should pour into his ear some pleasant intimations of heaven. In autumn, when the harvest-hymn of the day-time has ceased, at early nightfall, the green nocturnal grasshoppers commence their autumnal dirge, and fill the mind with a keen sense of the rapid passing of time. These sounds do not sadden the mind, but deepen the tone of our feelings, and prepare us for a renewal of cheerfulness, by inspiring us with the poetic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... when his lodger entered the kitchen, but his was no joyful ditty. It was a dirge, which he was intoning as he bent over the cookstove. A slow and solemn and mournful wail dealing with death and burial of one "Old Storm Along," whoever ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... brave', the beautiful', How dreamless' is their sleep, Where rolls the dirge-like music' Of the over-tossing deep'! Or where the surging night winds Pale Winter's robes have spread Above the narrow palaces, In the cities of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... their attention was roused by the sounds of the natives, and it was at length discovered, that they had lighted a chain of small fires between the sand-hill Captain Barker had ascended and the opposite side of the channel, around which their women were chanting their melancholy dirge. It struck upon the ears of the listeners with an ominous thrill, and assured them of the certainty of the irreparable loss they had sustained. All night did those dismal sounds echo along that lonely shore, but as morning dawned, they ceased, and Mr. Kent and his companions were again ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... strength and assurance which these simple children obtain from their Moses and the Prophets. Yet external Nature does its share in their training; witness that most poetic of all their songs, which always reminds me of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... then looked down on the white face on the pillow. At the fireplace sat his honour, buried in thought, and not heeding the talk of the jovial priest who sat and stirred his cup beside him. There, too, among the crowd of dirge- singing, laughing, whisky-drinking neighbours, I could see the ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... cheerful is thy day! What joys, what raptures, in thy bosom play! How bright the sunshine, and how pure the air! There's no difficulty of breathing there. With willing steps a pilgrim at thy shrine, To dew it with my tears the task be mine; 130 In lonely dirge, to murmur o'er thy urn And with new-gather'd flowers thy turf adorn: Nor shall thy image from my bosom part; No force shall rip thee from this bleeding heart. Oft shall I think o'er all I've left in thee, Nor shall oblivion blot thy memory; But grateful love its energy express ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... upon one another, others stood moaning very wretchedly, sometimes looking up to the height of Heaven, calling out with shrieks of agony, as if invoking the Father of Nature; others grovelled upon the ground, beating their foreheads with their hands, while others again made their moan in a sort of dirge, in their own way, for though one could not understand the words, the sense of all was plain in the agony of those who ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... dirge of the people of the Long House," said Paul, upon whose sensitive mind the scene made ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the nightingales warble when one veils their eye." "Every noble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of thorns," says Carlyle "Sorrow", says Haunay, with rare knowledge, "turns all the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge." Sometimes all nature seems to condole with ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... old Cattaneo, battered with storms, walked heavily, swinging his long arms and looking into the day's face as if he would try another fall with Death yet. Priests and acolytes, tapers, banners, vestments and a great silver Crucifix, they drifted by, chanting the dirge for Simonetta; and she, as if for a sacrifice, lifted up on her silken bed, lay couched like a white flower ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... at nearly the same age, almost as completely as if the man himself had passed "within the twilight chamber ... of white Death"; and "Dejection" is that poet's dirge. The remaining years need therefore ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to her spouse. Hence, oft as darkness shrouds the world from sight, Voices she hears, and accents of affright, As though Sychaeus told aloud his wrong, Hears from the roof-top, through the livelong night, The solitary screech-owl's funeral song, Wailing an endless dirge, the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the last few tones of the instrument were following, like a dirge, the death of the song, we all sprang to our feet. For, through one of the little windows of the tower, towards which I had looked as I sang, I saw, suddenly rising over the edge of the slope on which our tower stood, three enormous heads. The brothers knew at once, by my looks, what ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... his reminiscence of his lost youth and the priceless boon of liberty. He commences in a quiet descriptive way, leaving one at a loss to know whether it is to be a joyful lyric a dirge he ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... vagabonds, players,[195] etc., noted their "fashions commonly used at the Bank, and such like naughty places, where they much haunt"; and in 1547 the Bishop of Winchester made complaint that at a time when he intended to have a dirge and mass for the late King, the actors in Southwark planned to exhibit "a solemn play, to try who shall have the most resort, they in game or I in earnest."[196] The players, therefore, were no strangers ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... The dirge in c. 101 shows that Catullus, on his way to Italy, visited his brother's tomb in the Troad, and paid the last rites to it. C. 4, written soon after his return to Sirmio, tells us how he made his way home again. About the same time was composed the address to Sirmio ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... from the weir—now grown hideous—and out of hearing of its wailing dirge for the unfortunate. I drifted past more barges coming up, and more steam-tugs; past river lawns, where gay parties were now sipping claret-cup or playing tennis. By-and-by, I began to meet pleasure-boats and to admire their manner of progress. First there came ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... brother, let me not perish. On the day of Tammuz, play for me on the flute of lapis lazuli, together with the lyre[1187] of pearl play for me. Together let the professional dirge singers, male and female, play for me, That the dead may arise and inhale the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... measured tramp of the jury advancing, and filing into their box, had the mournful, measured beat as of pall bearers, keeping step to a dismal dirge; and when the foreman laid upon the table the fatal brass unicorn, the muffled sound seemed ominous as the grating of a coffin lowered upon the cross bars of a gaping grave. As the roll was called, each man rose, and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... while he was being securely bound with his back to the trunk. About his feet dry wood was then placed, and half way up his body. When this had been accomplished, the Indians formed themselves in a circle about the unhappy man, and began to chant a slow weird dirge in the ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... no vain dream of moody mind, That lists a dirge i' the blackbird's singing; That in gusts hears Nature's own voice complain, And beholds her tears in the gushing rain; When low clouds congregate blank and blind, And Winter's snow-muffled arms are clinging ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... Forego the dirge; let no one raise the cry, Or make unseemly show of grief and gloom, Nor think o'er me, who shall not really die, To rear the empty honor ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... small grave were her fragile bones to rest for twenty-four months under three feet of Christian law. Interest tempered the fright which Romulus and Moses felt when from the forward carriage came the sound of rasping oboes, belly-less fiddles, brazen tom-toms, and harsh cymbals, playing a dirge for little Wang Tai; playing less for godly protection of her tiny soul than for its exemption from ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... is pacing the hall in his castle. Outside, on the castle terrace, appear four phantom shapes clothed as women in dusky robes. They are Want, Guilt, Care, and Need. The four grey sisters make halt before the castle. In hollow, awe-inspiring tones they recite in turn their dirge-like strains: they chant of gathering clouds and darkness, and of their brother—Death. They approach the door of the castle hall. It is shut. Within lives a rich man, and none of them may enter, not even Guilt—none save only ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... That first-rate singer, the Argive woman's daughter, is going to sing the Adonis hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first rate from her. She is going through her airs and graces ready ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... voice that made those sounds more sweet[ag] Is hushed, and all their charms are fled; And now their softest notes repeat A dirge, an anthem o'er the dead! Yes, Thyrza! yes, they breathe of thee, Beloved dust! since dust thou art; And all that once was Harmony Is worse ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... dismal service which was held, for some reason or other, at ten o'clock at night. Rain was falling, and we marched off into the woods by the light of two smoky lanterns to the place selected as a military cemetery. To add to the weirdness of the scene two pipers played a dirge. In the dim light of the lanterns, with the dropping rain over head and the dripping trees around us, we laid the poor boy to rest. The whole scene made a lasting impression on those ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... The only people in the front seats are, a man in full evening dress, which he tries to conceal under a caped cloak, and two Ladies in plush opera-cloaks. Fog is hanging about in the rafters, and the gas-stars sing a melancholy dirge. Each casual cough arouses dismal echoes. Enter an intending Spectator, who is conducted to a seat in the middle of an empty row. After removing his hat and coat, he suddenly thinks better—or worse—of it, puts them on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... threw it in the face of the goddess: 'Thou also I will conquer, and I will treat thee like him: I will fasten the curse upon thy sides.' Ishtar assembled her priestesses, her female votaries, her frenzied women, and together they intoned a dirge over the limb of the celestial urus. Gilgames assembled all the turners in ivory, and the workmen were astonished at the enormous size of the horns; they were worth thirty mimae of lapis, their diameter was a half-cubit, and both of them ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... his attention to the game, he puffed out his cheeks and began to chant the De profundis. When he had got to the end of it, he began it all over again. The game came to a conclusion in the midst of this dirge. It was he who was beaten, but his defeat did not seem to vex him in ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... stone, Dirge and song and shoutings low, In thy heart Dwell serene,—and sorrow? No, It has ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell a weeping ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... it all. Go and get me Gabriel Henning. [Exit MILLER.] This owner has played the traitor; we have been poisoned. [Springing up.] And this is the feast of the Borgia! Presently the misericordia will enter and sing our dirge. Do me the favor at least to eat up the oysters ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... spine backwards lest he should tumble over his drum, there was majesty in the passage of the band. The boom of the drum, desolating the interruptions of the melody, made sick the heart, but with a lofty grief; and the dirge seemed to be weaving a purple ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the crevices between the shingles, and the cracks in the walls, and behold the stars gleaming from the unfathomable spaces. He wondered how far they were away. He listened to the wind chanting a solemn dirge, filling his soul with longings for he knew not what. He thought over his grandfather's stories, and the words he had spoken about courage, truth, and honor, till a shingle clattering in the wind took up the refrain, and seemed to say, Truth and honor,—truth ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... baleful anthem, loud and long, Rose in full chorus from the passing throng; And Love's sad name, the cause of all their woes, In execrations seem'd the dirge to close.— But who the number and the names can tell Of those that seem'd the deadly strain to swell!— Not men alone, but gods my dream display'd— Celestial wailings fill'd the myrtle shade: Soft Venus, with her ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... deceased. A reverential feeling protects these sacred spots from robbery or insult. The friends of the deceased, especially the women, repair here at sunrise and sunset for some time after his death, singing his funeral dirge, and uttering ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... trembling, she sinks to the floor in a corner of the room, and weeps for me as the Russian peasants weep for their dead, mingling with her sobs memories of our common past, praises of my good qualities, and so forth. All this, uttered in a low sing-song, is like a sort of funeral dirge. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hoping for a blessed reunion in the hereafter: this is the typical elegy. On the one side it shades off into the ode, some poems being susceptible of classification in both groups; on the other it may take the form of sonnets, many of which answer every requirement of the dirge. Many poems are therefore elegiacal that are not strictly elegies. A rigid classification is never necessary, but an association of these beautiful pieces, all thoroughly impregnated with the personal grief of the author, gives to each ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... seemed to be at a standstill: two or three dogs lay on the soft green lawn fast asleep, an old gardener smoking his pipe and sitting on the edge of a wheelbarrow seemed following their example; and birds and insects only kept up a monotonous and drowsy dirge. ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... surge Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge For the one whelming wave to spring aloof. She, tenderness, is pitiless to them Resisting in her godhead nature's truth. No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem; Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth. These miserably disinclined, The lamentably unembraced, Insult the Pleasures Earth designed To people and beflower the waste. Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by: For death they live, in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... twenty-three years had gone by; she had become a wife and the mother of seven children, but the wound still festered; the old sorrow still sang its mournful dirge within a heart which to-day beat as wildly as ever, and felt a pang as keen as when it first grew jealous, and learned that not she, but Marie, had become the ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... When she should have been performing that routine duty, her eolian piano at home was half the time turned into a banjo or a harp, tinkling a serenade, or into an organ, playing some ponderous old anthem or sobbing out some dirge of a broken heart. These were all well enough, in their way, but they were not studying the piano. As a result, she could produce all those effects upon the instrument, that no one else would ever have ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... tomb of coral, the dirge of bee, The grey apes' guttural groan For Alliolyle, for Lallerie, ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... Death Mingled their accents; and, amidst the rush Of many thoughts, the listening poet cried, O! thou art mighty, thou art wonderful, Mysterious Nature! Not in thy free range Of woods and wilds alone, thou blendest thus The dirge note and the song of festival; But in one heart, one changeful human heart,— Ay, and within one hour of that strange world,— Thou call'st their music forth, with all its tones To startle and to pierce!—the dying Swan's, And the glad ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... of the wandering musicians who had, at the open grave, played as a dirge, or, rather, as a ringing hymn of resurrection and deliverance, the chant of the fatherland-that dark girl to whom he had said: "Bring me this jewel, and come and live in peace with the Zilahs"—was the mother of this beautiful, fascinating creature, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... swimming vapours cast their shroud, wrapping in their chilling folds the homes of the hunger-stricken prostrate race that sat by their fireless hearths. The autumn gale swept over the desolate land as if moaning at the ruin and misery that cursed it, and wailing the dirge of the high hopes and ardent purposes that a few short weeks before had gladdened the hearts of its people. Calmly and deliberately with folded arms O'Brien walked through the streets, and entered the Thurles Railway Station. He wore ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... Maistre, though not, perhaps, in the volumes he had already published. It was less original than he at first imagined, for the English divines commonly held it from the seventeenth century, and its dirge was sung only the other day by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol.[404] A Scottish professor would even be justified in claiming it for Reid. But of course it was Lamennais who gave it most importance, in his programme and in his life. And his theory of the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... much more liberally than I surrendered him. He filled his lungs, for the most part; with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy was in the spectacles through which I chose to look. He was conscious of inconvenience, and above all of a great renouncement; but how could he have heard a mere dirge in the bells of his accession? The sagacity and the jealousy were mine, and his the impressions and the harvest. Of course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I was worsted in my encounters, for wasn't the state of his health the very reason for his coming to her at Prestidge? Wasn't it precisely ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... immortality,"[370]—the immortality of independence. And when we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the labourers' chorus, "Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non e piu come era prima!"[371] it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge with the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean,[372] and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy, of France, and of the world, by men whose conduct you ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Onward, with chant and dirge, they swept out through the Sun-gate, upon the harbour esplanade, and wheeled to the right along the quay, while the torchlight bathed in a red glare the great front of the Caesareum, and the tall obelisks before it, and the masts of the thousand ships which lay ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... could ever disturb the even rhythm of Beaumont's pulse. He tried to show his sympathy by turning his mind to all that was mournful and sombre in art and literature. One day he brought to her from New York what he declared to be the finest arrangement of dirge music for the piano extant, and she quite surprised him by declaring with sudden passion that she could not and would not play a ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Fear and Falsehood hear no more 500 The voice that once waked multitudes to war Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond To the death dirge of the melancholy wind: It were a sight of awfulness to see The works of faith and slavery, so vast, 505 So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing! Even as the corpse that rests beneath their wall. A thousand ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 8. requiem. A dirge, or funeral song. "So called from the first word in the Catholic mass for the dead, Requiem ternum dona iis Domine (Give eternal rest ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... compared with Webster's "Call for the robin redbreast" in The White Devil, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel's Fourth Song,—"Where the bee sucks"? Dowden saw in Ariel the imaginative ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... stood. They beheld there the Ruler of heaven; and they halted a while to rest, 65 Tired after the terrible struggle. A tomb then they began to make, His friends in sight of his foes. Of the fairest of stone they built it, And set their Savior upon it. A sorrowful dirge they chanted, Lamented their Master at evening, when they made their journey home, Tired from their loved Lord's side. And they left him with the guard. 70 We crosses stood there streaming with blood, And waited long after the wailing ceased Of the brave company. ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... carpet occupying the centre of the floor, accompanied by a Nubian boy who twanged upon a guitar, and by most of the assembled company, who clapped their hands to the music or droned a low, tuneless dirge. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... ceremony involving such consequences without the deepest emotion. The scene produced an effect upon the spirit of Jane which was never effaced. The wreath of flowers which crowned the beautiful victim; the veil enveloping her person; the solemn and dirge-like chant, the requiem of her burial to all the pleasures of sense and time; the pall which overspread her, emblematic of her consignment to a living tomb, all so deeply affected the impassioned child, that, burying her ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... and threw himself back into the corner of his brougham. Mr Harding said nothing more, but commenced playing a dirge, with an imaginary fiddle bow upon an imaginary violoncello, for which there did not appear to be quite room enough in the carriage; and he continued the tune, with sundry variations, till he arrived ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... never a stain On the fair White Rose of Renown, To have fallen, fighting in vain, For thy father, thy faith, and thy crown! More than thy marble pile, With its women weeping for thee, Were to dream in thine ancient isle, To the endless dirge of the sea! But the Fates deemed otherwise, Far thou sleepest from home, From the tears of the Northern skies, In the secular dust ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... death of the Emperor Inkyo (A.D. 453), the Korean Court sent eighty musicians robed in black, who marched in procession to the Yamato palace, playing and singing a dirge as they went." ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... to be thankful for. The world in which we live, in spite of all the scars of sin and suffering upon it, is a happy world. It is not, as many would morbidly paint it, flooded with tears and strewn with wrecks, plaintive with a perpetual dirge of sorrow. True, the "Everlasting Hills" are in glory, but there are numberless eminences of grace, and love, and mercy below; many green spots in the lower valley, many ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... that the QUEEN'S Most Excellent Majesty, being constitutionally partial to poetry, should desire to have constant private supply from respectable tip-top genius, to be kept snug on Royal premises and ready at momentary notice to oblige with song or dirge, according as High Jinks or Dolorousness are the Court ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... twice, for fear of being thought shy, led off with a pathetic ballad. She sang in a thin, quavering voice, staring into, vacancy with glassy eyes like the blind beggars at the corner, dragging the tune till it became a wail—a dirge ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... charm crushed once, as they might be again, as the voice of that pale girl in black, with her air of coming from lights and cigarette smoke, and of these simple mothers rose above the noise of the street, half dirge, half battle-cry, while out beyond somewhere the little soldiers in red breeches were fighting, and the fate of France hung in the balance, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... have a song to sing, O! [SHE] Sing me your song, O! [HE] It is sung to the knell Of a churchyard bell, And a doleful dirge, ding dong, O! It's a song of a popinjay, bravely born, Who turned up his noble nose with scorn At the humble merrymaid, peerly proud, Who loved that lord, and who laughed aloud At the moan of the merryman, moping ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Dirge of the Monks: Earth to earth, and dust to dust, Ashes unto ashes go. Judge not. He who judgeth just, Judgeth merciful also. Earthly penitence hath fled, Earthly sin hath ceased to be; Pile the sods on heart and ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... headed a procession bearing lighted tapers and carrying biers, upon which they placed the inanimate forms of the warriors. Slowly they paced about, chanting in low tones, and constantly accompanied by the funeral dirge of the musicians. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... dirge on the pipes, Ashiel was laid in his rocky grave, and the throng of black-garmented people was ferried back the way it had come. Gimblet, wrapped to the ears in a thick overcoat, and with a silk scarf wound high round his neck, shivered in the ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... when conspicuous my name By absence shall appear; When I have lost all hopes of fame, Which once I held so dear; When 'plucked' I seek a vain relief In plaintive dirge or sonnet; Thou wilt have caused that bitter grief, Thou beautiful ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... despondency, pleasure and pain, Are mingled together like sunshine and rain; And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other like ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... But the fittest dirge is his own last lay, written on the day he completed his thirty-sixth year, soon after his arrival at Missolonghi, when his hopes of obtaining distinction in the Greek cause were, perhaps, brightest; and yet it breathes of dejection almost ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... do rejoice, and to weep with them that weep." When, therefore, the soul of another is exultant, and the wedding-bells are ringing, love's kindred bells ring a merry peal. When the soul of another is depressed, and a funeral dirge is wailing, love's kindred chords wail in sad communion. So love can enter another's state as though it were ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... himself all over before this single meal, and devoting certain hours of every day to prayer. After the expiry of the year, he uses a certain ceremony for the soul of the king his predecessor, much like our solemn dirge; at which 100,000 persons are often assembled, among whom he distributes large alms. When this ceremony is ended, the prince is confirmed as inheritor of the kingdom, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... sad end will be a warning to all young wives who go out walking with handsome young men. Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. He sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The music is a dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball's son. He ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... on The Vital Powers; but I should like to write a dirge on them, since their lavish use in the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about has made the whole of my life a daily torment. Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at this, because they are not ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... overcharged with thought. It abounds in noble imagery. There is pathos as well as dignity. Its author, had he lived in the nineteenth century, in default of new worlds to explore, or Armadas to fight, might have written an In Memoriam. In previous English poetry no such dirge is to be found as his Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney. A couple of stanzas will indicate ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... man continued to go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, declaring the woes that were to come upon the city. By day and by night he chanted the wild dirge, "A voice from the east! a voice from the west! a voice from the four winds! a voice against Jerusalem and against the temple! a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides! a voice against the whole people!" This strange being was imprisoned and scourged, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... sing a dirge,— A dirge for myriad chances dead; In grief your mournful accents merge: Sing, sing the girls ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... with regret, The deep dirge of the sunset: how should one Soft star be missed in ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of Philip Sparrow interesting is that it is the original of our nursery rime Who Killed Cock Robin? It is written in the form of a dirge, and many people were shocked at that, for they said that it was but another form of mockery that this jesting priest had chosen with which to divert himself. But I think that little Jane Scoupe at school in the nunnery ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... to the sea-shell's moaning, That strangely vibrates like the swelling sea, And fancy it an echoed storm, intoning A solemn dirge in memory of thee?" ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... sound like that of distant drums. Gusts of rain and the water from the roof beat against the south windows, while the wailing wind played its mournful cadences about the eaves, and the stanch timbers added their creaking notes to swell the dirge-like chorus. ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... four peasants, bareheaded, carried the coffin, covered with a white cloth; two women followed the coffin. The shrill wailing voice of one of them suddenly reached my ears; I listened; she was intoning a dirge. Very dismal sounded this chanted, monotonous, hopelessly-sorrowful lament among the empty fields. The coachman whipped up the horses; he wanted to get in front of this procession. To meet a corpse ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... soldiers were mostly from Maine and New York, with a few from New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Michigan. This was another solemn place for reflection. The soldiers' grave-yard on this island differs somewhat from all others. Here their funeral dirge will never cease; the requiem of the ocean's surge will ever sound as if saying, "Sleep on undisturbed until the last trump shall wake the ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... The text of this version of the "Lyke-wake Dirge" follows, with slight variations, that found in Mr. Richard Blakeborough's Wit, Character, Folklore, and Customs of the North Riding (p. 123), where the following account is given: "I cannot say when or where the Lyke Walke dirge was sung for the last time in the North ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... solemn dirge from the steeple rang out upon the night air, the king stood at the window of the palace trembling in every nerve. Hardly had the first tones of the alarm-bell fallen upon his ear when the report of a musket ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... come and join in solemn dirge, while tapers shine Around the grape-embowered shrine Of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... old peacock, who chooses to bivouac apart from his lady, and sit below my bedroom window, to keep me awake with his screeching lamentation. Only I own he is not equal in melody to Lord Byron, for Fare-thee-well—and if for ever, etc., is a very sweet dirge indeed. After all, C'est genie mal loge, and that's all that ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... home. How tenderly the Lady Ruth The cruel dart withdrew! "False Tirrell shot the bolt," she said, "That my Sir Morven slew!" Deep in the forest lurks the foe, While gayly shines the morn: Hang up the broken spear, and blow A dirge ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various |
