"Melody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tump Pack's bravery and faithfulness to his love may very well take the place of the Congressional medal which, unfortunately, was lost on the night the soldier was killed. Between the two, there is little doubt that the accolade of fame bestowed in the buffoon's simple melody is more vital and enduring than that accorded by special act of the Congress of the United ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... air desired. And he was none too soon, for an instant later the clock struck the hour and then, after a short pause, Christopher heard the tinkle of bells, thin, clear, and sweet, beginning to play a quaint snatch of melody. It was not at all the sort of dance music the boy had expected. Instead it was a merry little tune so gay one could not but be glad that noontide had come and that the sun ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... from France were written by Coleridge when he was a little over twenty-five years old. In the combination of two gifts, music and meaning, he is hardly surpassable at his best by any poet. Not an atom of meaning is sacrificed to gain a melody: in fact the melody ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... was over Cecilia played for them in the drawing-room. Somehow or other, she wandered into the tender yet buoyant melody of the chanson she had hummed earlier in ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... versification, its adaptation to the subject, and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... fashion. Its song has a general resemblance to that of our robin, but many of the notes are far more musical, more like those of our wood thrush. Indeed, there were individuals among those we heard certain of whose notes seemed to me almost to equal in point of melody the chimes of the wood thrush; and the highest possible praise for any song-bird is to liken its song to that of the wood thrush or hermit thrush. I certainly do not think that the blackbird has received full justice ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... unkind word, one selfish thought, one cruel deed, the song would have been broken by jarring discords; but all was harmony, not one harsh note disturbed the rippling melody. ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... kneeling, in the attitude of prayer, all the time. Walk about. Go out and look at the stars. Read, if you prefer, some ennobling book. But, in whatever form thought and meditation may take, keep the key held to the divinest melody of life. In that way shall the spiritual life gather its rich strength and infinite energy." The principle is one that every life which has given to the world noble results, has acted upon, consciously or unconsciously, ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... through an aperture. Fixing their eyes thereon, they descried an underground cavernous chamber, in the forefront of which there sat a man, plunged in poverty, and clad in rags and tatters. Beside him stood his wife, mixing wine. When the man took the cup in his hands, she sung a clear sweet melody, and delighted him by dancing and cozening him with flatteries. The king's companions observed this for a time, and marvelled that people, pinched by such poverty as not to afford house and raiment, yet passed their lives in such good cheer. The king said to his chief ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... fortress turrets and was answered by some creature Kennon couldn't identify. A murmur of blended sound came from the valley below, punctuated by high-pitched laughter. Someone was singing, or perhaps chanting would be a better description. The melody was strange and the words unrecognizable. The thin whine of an atomotor in the fortress's generating plant slowly built up to a keening undertone that blended into the ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... kinds of music: and so clear His singing was, and such a heaven to hear, Men might not speak during his madrigal. Amphion, king of Thebes, that put a wall About the city with his melody, Certainly sang not half so well as he. And add to this, he was the seemliest man That is, or has been, since the world began. What needs describe his beauty? since there's none With which to make the least comparison. In brief, he was the flower of gentilesse, {21} Of honour, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... as powerless to detach his work from his past as he is to detach himself from it; and one of the saddest penalties of his misdoings is their survival in his work. The dulness of the poet's ear shows itself in the defective melody of his verse; for both metre and rhythm have a physiological basis; they represent and express the harmony which is in the body when the body is finely attuned to the spirit. Dull senses and a sluggish body are ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... exact tune of this interesting song it has not been in our power to discover—it is, however, undoubtedly a truly national melody. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... time lightly, joyously, and we re ponded to her mood like harp-strings all in accord. The room, awakened to melody after the long years of silence, seemed transformed by Una's splendid gift, a fine, clear soprano, not big nor yet thin or reedy, but rounded, full-bodied and deep with feeling. Jerry was smiling now, the shadow ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... home, the colonel subscribed to the opera, and enjoyed the music. A plantation song of the olden time, as he remembered it, borne upon the evening air, when sung by the tired slaves at the end of their day of toil, would have been pleasing, with its simple melody, its plaintive minor strains, its notes of vague longing; but to the colonel's senses there was to-night no music in this hackneyed popular favourite. In a metropolitan music hall, gaudily bedecked and brilliantly lighted, it would have been tolerable from the lips of a black-face comedian. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... their shares of him; But he was shrewish as a wayward child, And pleased again by toys which childhood please; As-book of fables, graced with print of wood, Or else the jingling of a rusty medal, Or the rare melody of some old ditty, That first was sung ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... is all mechanism to one man, all form and colour to another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody. Notwithstanding these many gifts and possibilities, the doctor's wife advised the Widow Croft to make a plumber of him, intimating delicately that these freaks of nature, while playing no apparent part in the divine economy, ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... one of the number which are packed to suit all English tastes and may be taken for a rough sample of the jumble of them, where a danceless quadrille-tune succeeds a suicidal Operatic melody and is followed by the weariful hymn, whose last drawl pert polka kicks aside. Thus does the poor Savoyard compel a rich people to pay for their wealth. Not without pathos in the abstract perhaps do the wretched machines pursue their revolutions of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... on his staff, and bringing them from Rome and Gaul new songs in a new language set to a new melody. He comes to unveil for them what lies hidden, unknown to themselves, in the depths of their hearts. He explains, by the power of one Supreme God, why it is that their mountains are so high, their valley so smiling, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... foot) of the first two lines to the a's of the last is simply miraculous, and miraculously assisted by what may be called the internal sub-rhyme of sedisti and redemisti. This latter effect can rarely be attempted without a jingle: there is no jingle here, only an ineffable melody. After the Dies Irae, no poet could say that any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and Shakespeare has ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... sensitive glances at the horizon. These two men had come and placed themselves near the group on the quarter-deck, when the last music was heard; and Ludlow had ascribed the circumstance to a sensibility to melody, when the child Zephyr stole to their side, in a manner to show that more was meant by the movement than was apparent in the action itself. The appearance of Tiller, who invited the party to re-enter the cabin, explained its meaning, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... they again burst into the melody of their national love-song. I transcribe the original words which for simple, primitive beauty are ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... astonished. The words and the simple melody which carried them were evidently an improvisation. But the voice—did that issue from a human throat? Yes, for in distant Spain and far-off Rome, in great cathedrals and concert halls, he had sometimes listened entranced to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... ghost of sadness that seemed to haunt the earth and sky. Suddenly, as I stood in the midst of it all, a cardinal flashed like a red spark into a tall pine, fluffed out his breast, and swept the forest with a defiant note of melody. It was a challenge to the long winter time, a prophecy of spring and of high green trees, and of a mate cloistered now far away in the wilderness: "You shall not hear a simple song, but you shall remember that music is the voice of love," ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... now approaching? She arises when the lark first pours his melody in air. Her dress is of a darker green, her head is adorned with full-blown flowers, her face is tanned by labour. The bleating and affrighted sheep are plunged, unwillingly, into the pool, and now by the sturdy ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... a gossamer as fine as Arachne's web in a green garden way where the lizards run, or in a crowded corner where the fruit-sellers sit against the wall;—in all its shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging melody all through ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... thither, and penetrating deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of dark, crooked lanes, but gradually edging nearer to the harbour, while, as I thought, working our way a considerable distance to the westward. Presently my guide, who had been humming some negro melody to himself, lifted up his voice in a louder key and began to chant the praises of a certain "lubly Chloe, whose eyes were like the stars, and whose 'breaf' was like the rose!" The fellow had a wonderfully melodious voice, and in listening to him as he strode easily along at a swinging ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... region, who noticed with delight its rare wild-flowers, its vigorous vegetation, and its verdure, worthy of England, the very word being common to the two languages. A few cattle gave life to the scene, already so dramatic. The birds sang, filling the valley with a sweet, vague melody that quivered in the air. If a quiet imagination will picture to itself these rich fluctuations of light and shade, the vaporous outline of the mountains, the mysterious perspectives which were seen where the trees gave an opening, or the streamlets ran, or some coquettish little glade ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... witness to abide? Then study the word of God, and live by it; sing and make melody in your heart to the Lord; praise the Lord with your first waking breath in the morning, and thank Him with your last waking breath at night; flee from sin; keep on believing; look to Jesus, cleave to Him, follow Him gladly, trust ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... small boy sat on the foremost seat— A mirthful youngster he; He beat the time with his restless feet To each new melody, And he picked me out as the brightest star Of the ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... back through the tunnel, his heart singing and making melody. Oh how lovely—how more than lovely, how divinely beautiful—she was! And so kind and friendly! Yet she seemed just the least bit fitful too. Something troubled her, he said to himself. But he little thought that he, and no one else, had spoiled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... to sing softly in Creole French, a Louisianian air. The words of this melody were soft and expressive. Although restrained, the noble contralto overpowered the noise of the torrents of rain and violent gusts of wind, which seemed to shake the old ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... himself again that the 'gipsy girl' had not in the least understood the real force of the letter. And that donkey Kupfer shouts: Rachel! Viardot! Then he went to his piano, as it seemed, unconsciously opened it, and tried to pick out by ear the melody of Tchaykovsky's song; but he slammed it to again directly in vexation, and went up to his aunt to her special room, which was for ever baking hot, smelled of mint, sage, and other medicinal herbs, and was littered up with such a multitude of rugs, side-tables, stools, cushions, and padded furniture ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... solemn assurance floated forth to be a warning, or a promise, according to the mental state of those whose ears it filled; and the mind, familiar with the phrase, continued it involuntarily, carrying the running accompaniment, as well as the words and the melody, on to the end. After the last reverberation of the last stroke of every hour had died away, and just when expectation had been succeeded by the sense of silence, they rang it out by day and night—the bells—and the four winds of heaven by day and night spread ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... cigarette, to meet who-knew-what other thoughts—for thoughts, no doubt, had little swift lives of their own; desired, found their mates, and, lightly blending, sent forth offspring. Why not? All things were possible in this wonder-house of a world. Even that waltz tune, floating away, would find some melody to wed, and twine with, and produce a fresh chord that might float in turn to catch the hum of a gnat or fly, and breed again. Queer—how everything sought to entwine with something else! On one of the pinkish blooms of the hydrangea he noted a bee—of all things, in this hidden-away ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sonatas and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings had been left, were dying a slow death in the museums. And music became a monopoly of a few ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... 8. "Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa piu, meno sa—'Who ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Black Forest, for the woodcutters and charcoal-women to dance; and yet this boy, with his long yellow curls and big blue eyes, defies all your Italian impostors. His left hand is possessed of inimitable melody, grace, and suppleness, and his right of a power to draw the bow, that the Almighty rarely ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... in them a pleasing sound rather than a living voice, and find themselves offering to God, when they join in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, rather a mere musical accompaniment than the intelligent melody of a heart ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... waltz came floating down to them. She half closed her eyes. Her head moved slowly with the melody. ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the rose which had dropped from your hair, you have not been seen at court. I never should have told you this, my best beloved, but the anguish of this hour has wrung the confession from me. It will die away from your memory like the tones of a strange melody, and be lost in the jubilant harmony ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... contains, and I will, therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit whatsoever, and very little pleasure from the reading of the great plays. The beauty of the verse! Yes; he who loved Shelley so well as I could not fail to hear the melody of— ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... parts; so that in a company of singers, which one very frequently meets with in Wales, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers, who all at length unite, with organic melody, in one consonance and the soft sweetness of B flat. In the northern district of Britain, beyond the Humber, and on the borders of Yorkshire, the inhabitants make use of the same kind of symphonious harmony, but with less variety; singing only in two parts, one murmuring ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... still obviously quivering, like a harpstring when suddenly struck by a stray finger it throbs in a last, swiftly-dying tremble; the second was followed by a third, and, gradually gaining fire and breadth, the strains swelled into a pathetic melody. 'Not one little path ran into the field,' he sang, and sweet and mournful it was in our ears. I have seldom, I must confess, heard a voice like it; it was slightly hoarse, and not perfectly true; there ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... glimmer on me, my apple-tree, Like living flakes of snow; Let odour and moonlight and melody In the old rich ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... agree with me; A commonplace production; but the joy And unction that he puts into the melody, The ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... big booming in my ears, great heavy iron bells that swung to-and-fro on either side, and sent out deafening reverberations that steeped the senses in a musical melody of sonorous sound; to-and-fro, backward and forward, yet ever receding in a gradually widening circle, monotonous, mournful, weird, suffusing the soul with an unutterable sadness, as images of wailing ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... something so deep and vague that only the sound of some rich music could convey the idea of it. I seemed to hear instruments of celestial sweetness make harmony in my old heart. With the solemn accords of a funeral chant there seemed to mingle the subdued melody of a song of love; for my soul blended into one feeling the grave sadness of the present with the familiar graces of ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... appropriate costumes by priest, deacon, sub-deacon and boys of the choir is in certain ceremonies associated with the use of melody and accent equally suited to the several roles. Each festival is an anniversary, and in the early church was celebrated with rites, chants and ornaments corresponding to its origin. The Noel, for example, was supposed to be the song which the angels sang at the nativity, ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... pursuits, think that music is a mere family pastime—an ear-gratifying enjoyment. Great popularity has its drawbacks as well as its advantages, and there is no doubt that the widespread, instantaneous appreciation and popularity of melody has detracted somewhat from the proper recognition of the higher and graver attributes of music. But that music is a power and has influenced humanity with dynamic force in politics, religion, peace, and war, no one can gainsay. Who can deny the effect in great crises of the world's ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... number of syllables in each line, but he often merely counts them off on his fingers, wrenching the accents all awry, and often violently forcing the rimes as well. In his songs, however, which are much more numerous than the sonnets, he attains delightful fluency and melody. His 'My Lute, Awake,' and 'Forget Not Yet' are still counted among the notable ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... a predicament, as I did not wish the President to believe that the band was not at all times able to respond to his wishes. Fortunately, one of the bandmen remembered the melody and played it over softly to me on his cornet in a corner. I hastily wrote out several parts for the leading instruments, and told the rest of the band to vamp in the key of E flat. Then we played the "Cachuca" to the entire satisfaction of Mr. Arthur, who came again to the door and ...
— The Experiences of a Bandmaster • John Philip Sousa
... designed, and the gardens were especially lush. Presently he heard music ahead—live music. He went on. He came to a place where strolling citizens had paused under the trees of the street to listen to the melody and the sound of voices that accompanied it. And the music and the festivity was in the house in which Nedda dwelt. She was having a party, on the very night of the day in which he'd been framed ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... lacing ferns, had so composing an effect upon his spirits, that he began to take an interest in the flowers that hung here and there, while the song of a finch sounded pleasant and homelike. Then the delicious melody of the bell-bird fell upon his ear; and while he was listening to this, he became interested in a beautiful blackbird, which ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... mind. Let them have faith in Him who feedeth the young lions, and clothes the fields with verdure—who bindeth up the broken heart, and giveth joy to the mourners. There are Words of Cheer in the air! Listen! and their melody will bring peace to the spirit, and their truths ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... a snatch of a love-song under his breath. Esther did not know what it was; she had never heard the melody before, but something in the softly sentimental notes brought the tears to her eyes; before she was aware of it they were tumbling ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... my hearers ever stood, in the calm of a summer evening, in Shelley's native land, listening to the lovely warble of the nightingale, making earth joyful with its unpremeditated strains, and the woods re-echo with its melody? Or gazed upwards with anxious ken towards the skylark careering in the "blue ether," far above this sublunary sphere of gross, sensual earth, there straining after ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... now resumed its usual melody and power, and we sat down while he turned the pages of Prof. Bain's little work entitled "Mind and Body." He read (I marked at the time the passage): "The memory rises and falls with the bodily condition; being vigorous in our ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... yes! I am a thing of joy! My tones are passing sweet; I thrill you with my melody So simple, yet complete! "Ah! there he is!" you softly cry, And breathless watch my flight— Unless, indeed, I have you there, By coming in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various
... varieties of sounds which, having broken away from their original source, are ever wandering and echoing around the rock-bound gorge. Beautiful indeed and altogether indescribable are the elements of melody which are created by the falling waters ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... going through to Plunketts and I'll call you, like this." As we came from the shadows into the moonlight beside the coach, Adam paused and gave three low weird notes, which were so lovely that they seemed the sounds from which the melody of all the world was sprung. "I'll call twice, and then you answer if you are awake. If ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving. This also shall please the Lord better than an ox or bullock that hath horns and hoofs." Psa. 69:30, 31. "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Amos 5:23, 24. If the Old Testament insists on obedience to all God's commandments as an indispensable condition of salvation, so does the New: "Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and offend in ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... (between whom and himself not much love was lost) and walked off, jauntily twirling his mustache, and whistling a few bars of a very ungainly melody, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Character modifies our life more than we think, and it is to a certain extent true that every man is the architect of his own fortune. No doubt it seems as if our lot were assigned to us almost entirely from without, and imparted to us in something of the same way in which a melody outside us reaches the ear. But on looking back over our past, we see at once that our life consists of mere variations on one and the same theme, namely, our character, and that the same fundamental bass sounds through it all. This is an ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... hadst a soul for melody to greet, When thou wert here, among the weary-hearted; And thoughts of thee are like sweet sounds departed, That visit time with echoes,—and repeat Strains that were breath'd beside my pilgrim feet; As if I heard the voice of my past years, And thou wert ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... peaceful scenes that seemed to us like a forgotten melody of love and home and peace, and the train that bore us out of the war zone seemed to carry us into another world, but though the feast to our eyes was pleasant and like "far-off forgotten things and pleasures long ago," we were not ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... O, mournfully, This midnight wind doth sigh! Like some sweet, plaintive melody Of ages long gone by; It speaks a tale of other years, Of hopes that bloomed to die— Of sunny smiles that set in tears, And ...
— Fostina Woodman, the Wonderful Adventurer • Avis A. (Burnham) Stanwood
... affected by the music, still found time to glance continually at his companion, so radiant with life and so fervently intent upon realizing to the full this, the first of its unknown joys. So with crashing of chords and thunder of melody the act went on. And when it was over, Juliet thought no more of the Cornish sea and the lullaby of the waves. A new music was stirring in ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Sheds blood of lambs, to expiate thy crimes— Crimes foul as hell—crimes which the blood of Him, Who came from heaven to die for guilty man, Alone could purge,—and innocence impart. Here holy David tuned his harp to strains Sublime as those of angels, when he sung In dulcet melody the praise of Him Who should redeem from guilt the sons of man, And rescue who in Him believed from death— That second death—of which the first is type. Here lived—here died—whom prophets long foretold, Whom angels worship and whom seraphs praise, The Son of God, mysterious God-Man: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... upon to sing, become nervous afterwards, Mr. Mincin leads her tenderly into the next room, and restores her with port wine, which she must take medicinally. If any gentleman be standing by the piano during the progress of the ballad, Mr. Mincin seizes him by the arm at one point of the melody, and softly beating time the while with his head, expresses in dumb show his intense perception of the delicacy of the passage. If anybody's self-love is to be flattered, Mr. Mincin is at hand. If anybody's overweening vanity is to be pampered, Mr. Mincin will surfeit ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... more acceptable to the little circle than this call upon young Woolwich, who immediately fetches his fife and performs the stirring melody, during which performance Mr. Bucket, much enlivened, beats time and never falls to come in sharp with the burden, "British Gra-a-anadeers!" In short, he shows so much musical taste that Mr. Bagnet actually takes his pipe from his lips to express his conviction ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... vicinity to each other, whose spectra are thus reciprocally similar to each colour, is owing to this greater ease that the eye experiences in beholding them distinctly; and it is probable, in the organ of hearing, a similar circumstance may constitute the pleasure of melody. Sir Isaac Newton observes, that gold and indigo were agreeable when viewed together; and thinks there may be some analogy between the sensations of light and sound. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... he passed his time in completing his plans of militia reform. He made in October many stirring and earnest speeches for the Republican candidates. He was very popular among the country people. His voice was magnificent in melody and volume, his command of language wonderful in view of the deficiencies of his early education, his humor inexhaustible and hearty, and his manner deliberate and impressive, reminding his audiences in Central Illinois of the earliest and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... old songs cling tenaciously to the consciousness; and memory, are retained when everything else in heart and mind has been blurred over, and of all the magic mirrors which reflect back our lives for us the most effective is a melody linked to words which moved us in our youth. When an orchestra stops playing its waltzes and mazourkas of the latest fashion and takes up the strains of "Kathleen Mavourneen," "Oft in the Stilly Night," or "Robin Adair," one may readily observe a change come over the older part ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... recommenced his tapping on an adjacent tree: the rattle of a cart in the rocky gulch below the hill came faintly up. No one was to be seen far or near. Miss Milly, re-assured, returned. She again ran her fingers over the keys, stopped, caught at a melody running in her mind, half played it, and then threw away all caution. Before five minutes had elapsed, she had entirely forgotten herself, and with her linen duster thrown aside, her straw hat flung on the piano, her white hands bared, and a black loop of her braided hair hanging upon ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Poets opened the aspiration valves, ignited the divine spark plugs, and whiz! went their motor-meters in a whirring, buzzing melody. ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... of which he had ever sung to an audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than that of a mandolin. Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St. George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody. The song, like much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the college men had loved, something—or so one might have said who took the canoe-music seriously—of the wildness and fierceness of old tribal ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... about the field in search of stray grains of corn, or early worms. It was a strange and unfamiliar silence, and struck solemnly on Sylvia's mind. Only a thrush in the old orchard down in the hollow, out of sight, whistled and gurgled with continual shrill melody. ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a third, "hearken a stave of Robin Hood; maybe that shall hasten the coming of one I wot of." And he fell to singing in a clear voice, for he was a young man, and to a sweet wild melody, one of those ballads which in an incomplete and degraded form you have read perhaps. My heart rose high as I heard him, for it was concerning the struggle against tyranny for the freedom of life, how that the wildwood and the heath, despite of wind and weather, were better for ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... into the hall the band was sending forth a tremendous volume of brilliant exhilarating sound. A vast melody seemed to ride on waves of brass. The conductor was very excited, and his dark locks shook with the violence of his gestures as he urged onward the fingers and arms of the executants flying madly through the maze of the music ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... her instrument and for mine." I gave her to-day her fourth lesson on the rules of composition and harmony, and am pretty well satisfied with her. She made a very good bass for the first minuet, of which I had given her the melody, and she has already begun to write in three parts; she can do it, but she quickly tires, and I cannot get her on, for it is impossible to proceed further as yet; it is too soon, even if she really had genius, but, alas! there appears to be none; ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... this deep, latent self-respect of the nation we find in Alfieri, whose stern muse revived the terse energy of Dante; and in our own day, this identical inspiration fired the melancholy verse of Leopardi, the letters of Foscolo, the novels of Guerrazzi, and the tender melody of Bellini. Recent literature has exhibited the conditions under which Italian Liberals strive, and the method of expiating their self-devotion. The novels of Ruffini, the letters of the Countess d'Ossoli, the rhetoric of Gavazzi, and the parliamentary reports of Gladstone, the leading reviews, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... the Levant; Jew, Turk, and Christian; traveller, adventurer, podesta, valet, avvocato, and gondolier, held their way alike to the common centre of amusement. The hurried air and careless eye; the measured step and jealous glance; the jest and laugh; the song of the cantatrice, and the melody of the flute; the grimace of the buffoon, and the tragic frown of the improvisatore; the pyramid of the grotesque, the compelled and melancholy smile of the harpist, cries of water-sellers, cowls of monks, plumage of warriors, hum of voices, and the universal movement and bustle, added to the more ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Emerson he was surprised to hear the Concord Sage refer to Poe as the "jingle man," but then Emerson himself had been treated rather contemptuously by Poe, and that, together with Emerson's lack of appreciation of melody, may account for ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... March, which we Germans, as Goethe also declares, drummed in Champagne—and I understood him. He once wanted to explain to me the word l'Allemagne (or Germany), and he drummed the all too simple melody which on market-days is played to dancing-dogs, namely, dum-dum-dum! I was vexed, but I understood him for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a good voice consecrated to the Master's service always is! Rachel's great natural ability would have made her one of the foremost opera singers of the age. Surely this audience had never heard such a melody. How could it? The men who had drifted in from the street sat entranced by a voice which "back in the world," as the Bishop said, never could be heard by the common people because the owner of it would charge two or three dollars ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... the clouds to me, On this sweet day of spring; Methinks it is a melody That angel-lips ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... morning, as James sang, my spirits rose with his soaring melody from the depths into which they had been cast in the passage of the village, and when the last note had died away and he was debating whether to light his pipe or sing another song, I asked him with quite a show ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... carried Hawthorne through the blossoming orchards of Concord," says James T. Fields, "and laid him down under a group of pines, on a hillside, overlooking historic fields. All the way from the village church to the grave the birds kept up a perpetual melody. The sun shone brightly, and the air was sweet and pleasant, as if death had never entered the world. Longfellow and Emerson, Channing and Hoar, Agassiz and Lowell, Greene and Whipple, Alcott and Clarke, Holmes and Hillard, and other friends whom he loved, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... know not; What is most like thee? From rainbow-clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:— ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... struck up another melody, and by the time it was ended the dinner was over, and speeches began to be made. The evening being calm, and the windows still open, these orations could be distinctly heard. Henchard's voice arose above the rest; he was telling a story of his hay-dealing experiences, in which he had outwitted ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... tender that night and Billy felt a strange constriction in his throat. But you never would have guessed, as Lynn Severn turned at the end of her melody to search the dimness for the presence she felt had entered, that he had been under any stress of emotion, the way he grinned at her and ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... sad air, sung there in the branches of that tree amidst the darkness and night mist, and in spite of a certain beauty in the melody the singer's voice assumed a more and more saddened tone, till he finished with the water seeming to hiss more loudly through the lower branches and the inundated trunks around, and then there was a sharp slapping noise on the surface of ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... put up in good time: then at sun-set, when every thing in nature is hushed, we were charmed with the enchanting warbling of different birds; so that one would be inclined to say, they reserved this favourable moment for the melody and harmony of their song, to celebrate undisturbed and at their ease, the benefits of the Creator. On the other hand, we are disturbed in the night, by the hideous noise of the numberless water-fowls that are to be seen ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... called the old State "Virginy" and mixing it with local dialect, in some parts had got the name so changed that it was called "Ferginey." The circus troops and negro comedians, in their annual trips through the Southern States, had songs already so catchy to our people, on account of their pathos and melody, of Old Virginia, that now it almost appeared as though we were going to our old home. Virginia had been endeared to us and closely connected with the people of South Carolina by many links, not the least being its many sentimental songs of that romantic land, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... laughed. "Hear me!" Her fingers ran up and down the keys, then settled into a soft, sweet little melody. ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... this mask proceeds a voice which, for melody and sweetness, I have never heard equaled. In speaking, its tones are of silver, but when she sings one forgets mask and every thing else to give one's-self up to an ecstacy of perfect enjoyment. She knows a vast deal of Italian, French, and Spanish music, languages that she speaks with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... know what bird thou art. Perhaps That fairy bird, fabled in island tale, Who never sings but once, and then his song Is of such fearful beauty that he dies From sheer exuberance of melody. ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... Like melody long hush'd, and lost in space, Back to its home the breathing spirit came: I look'd, and saw upon that angel face The fair love circled with the modest shame; I heard (and heaven descended on the place) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... voice was the warble of a bird, So soft, so sweet, so delicately clear, That finer, simpler music ne'er was heard; The sort of sound we echo with a tear, Without knowing why—an overpowering tone, Whence Melody descends as from ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... white and exquisitely formed as the purest statuary: an image of more perfect loveliness never glanced through a lady's lattice. She carelessly took up her cithern. A few wild chords flew from her touch. She bent her head towards the instrument, as if wooing its melody—the vibrations that crept to her heart. She hummed a low and plaintive descant, mournful and tender as her own thoughts. The tone and feeling of the ballad we attempt to ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... description, if Christianity be true, is in hell this moment. That is what they call "solace"—"tidings of great joy." LaPlace, who read the heavens like an open book, who enlarged the horizon of human thought, is there too. Beethoven, Master of melody and harmony, who added to the joy of human life, and who has borne upon the wings of harmony and melody millions of spirits to the height of joy, with his heart still filled with melody—he is in hell today. Robert Burns, poet of love and liberty, and from his heart, like ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... went forth to the spruit again, and there all day he labored earnestly. Each time that I looked towards him I saw his back bent and his arms plunging in the mud, while the rows of wet bricks grew longer and multiplied. I heard him whistling at it,—some English melody he had gathered long before at a waapenschauw,—with a light heart, the while he was up to his knees in the dirty water, with the mud plastered all ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... John, bowing. "The next time I saw you was that same afternoon. You were with Annunziata in the avenue. I carried my vision of you, like a melody, all the way to Roccadoro-and all the way ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... the skullcaps of the poor fowls, with sharp kitchen knives—a procedure, the necessity of which I have never understood—they sang all sorts of folk-songs, the text of which formed a strange contrast, as well to the murderous act as to the mournful melody. At least one had to suppose this to be the case, for the maids, who sat on the edge of the bed with their guest from the straw-loft between them, followed the folksongs with never-ending merriment, and at the passages that sounded specially mournful they even burst into cheers. Both my parents ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... the Alp is at the end of it there, if we only choose to lift our eyes and look. It is possible that not only 'into the sessions of sweet silent thought,' but into the rush and bustle of the workshop or the exchange, there may come, like 'some sweet, beguiling melody, so sweet we know not we are listening to it,' the thought that changes pettiness into greatness, that makes all things go smoothly and easily, that is a test and a charm to discover and to destroy temptation, the thought of a present Christ, the Lover ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... balmy, and laden with the perfume of the flowers. A nightingale was singing plaintively in an adjoining tree, and presently came a response equally tender from another part of the grove. Mistress Nutter could not choose but listen, and the melody so touched her that she was half suffocated by repressed emotion, for, alas! the relief of tears ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... "Philomel, with melody, Sing in our sweet lullaby; Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby; Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, Come our lovely lady nigh; So, good ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... good effect. I shall also sincerely praise the 3 Preludes (Op. 8) and the two Ballades, but with some reservation. The first Ballade appears to me somewhat cut short; it wants I know not what at the beginning and towards the middle (page 7) of something needed to make the melody stand out; and the pastorale of the 2nd Ballade (page 7) figures like a too-cheap piece of "padding."... And, since I am in the vein for criticising, let me ask why you call your "Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman"—"Caprice grotesque?" Apart from the fact that the grotesque style should ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... THAN EVER MILL-RACE, ETC.: the change in the wording of this sentence in De Quincey's revision is, as Masson remarks, particularly characteristic of his sense of melody; it read in Blackwood, "We ran past them faster than ever ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... an extraordinary combination of sounds. It seemed at first as though two people were singing a duet in different tunes and without any regard to time; there was persistent melody and yet there was utter discord, and it seemed accompanied ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... an instant, she again broke out with, "Oh, how happy I am; it seems as though my heart would break with its ecstasy!" and, springing up, she ran to the piano, and sang a song which filled the room with melody, and caused a linnet that was asleep on her perch to awaken and join her ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... virtue engender'd is the flower; When Zephyrus eke with his swoote breath Inspired hath in every holt* and heath *grove, forest The tender croppes* and the younge sun *twigs, boughs Hath in the Ram his halfe course y-run, And smalle fowles make melody, That sleepen all the night with open eye, (So pricketh them nature in their corages*); *hearts, inclinations Then longe folk to go on pilgrimages, And palmers for to seeke strange strands, To *ferne hallows ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... floating from their sleeves. The figures bent beneath a heavy burden. It was long and black and grim, but the flowers that covered it were snow-white and filled the church with a sweet smell. A white-robed figure led the way up the aisle, repeating, as he walked, some words so solemn and full of melody that they sounded almost like music. The church was dim, and quiet, and nearly empty. The organ began to play—oh, so softly! It was very beautiful, but still the boy shuddered, for he dimly realized that the grim box held the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... steps, and gazed upward, as contemplating something wonderful in the heavens. For he beheld radiant choirs of angels surrounding the place with heavenly brightness; and he heard them with unspeakable melody singing the praises of the Creator. And he, intently contemplating these wonders, was filled with inward joy; yet understood he not what meaned the angelic presence, the glittering light, the celestial psalmody. But after a short season it vanished ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... several inches with the motion of the machinery.] and lark lurking by warm springs in the woods; the familiar snow-bird culling a few seeds in the garden, or a few crumbs in the yard; and occasionally the shrike, with heedless and unfrozen melody bringing back ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... scrub of low bush decorated with a collection of white garments, evidently set out to dry. His horse shied at the unusual sight, and furthermore took exception to the raucous sound of a man's voice chanting a dismal melody, somewhere away down by the river ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... and full of hope. And as they went, the sweetness of song stirred in their souls, and at last Bow-may fell to singing in a loud clear voice, and her cousin Wood-wise answered her, and all the warriors of the Wolf who were in their band fell into the song at the ending, and the sound of their melody went down the water and reached the ears of those that were entering the pass, and of those who were abiding till the way should be clear of them: and this is some of what ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... decorative design that even Raphael ever created—the most perfect piece of design, therefore, in the world. Its subtlety of spacing, its exquisiteness of line, its monumental simplicity, rippled through with a melody of falling curves from end to end, are beyond description—the reader must study them for himself in the illustration. One thing he might miss were not his attention called to it—the ingenious way in which the whole composition is adjusted to a diagonal ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... one sank down with bowed head as if in adoration, and the invisible music, accompanied by the peals of sweet-toned bells, filled the air with melody. ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... she sang, and when she ran downstairs she whistled a plantation melody with such precision and clearness that Loftus exclaimed, "Oh, how shocking!" and Mabel rolled up her eyes, and said sagely, that no one ever could turn Kate ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... mellow, vibrant tones, whose very music would have intoxicated duller fools than I—'tis ever a comfort to know there are greater fools—broke in melody: "To my own dear love from her ever loyal and devoted knight," and she held her opened hand high. 'Twas my birch-bark message which Father Holland had carried north. I suddenly went insane with a great overcharge of joy, that ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... blink behind great foaming tankards and listen to intellectual music. No other nation had such music. It was so intellectual in itself that it relieved the listeners of the necessity of thinking. There was not much of melody in it; little of the dance movement and very little of the lighter and gayer manifestations of life. It has been described as a sort of harmonious discord, typifying mysterious, tragic and awe-inspiring things. The people sat and ate their heavy food and drank their beer, their ears engaged with ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... conceptions and by the new age; philosopher and apostle of an idea, Bruno consecrated his life to the development of it in his writings and to the propagation of his principles in Europe by the fire of enthusiasm. The one surprised the world with the melody of his songs; being, as Dante says, the "dolce sirena che i marinari in mezzo al mare smaga," he lulled the anguish that lacerated Italy, and gilded the chains which bound her; the other tried to shake her; ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... shutters as she spoke, and let a flood of light into the room where Miss Rejoice lay. The window was open, and Melody's voice came in like a wave of sound, filling the room with ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... He perches on the topmost twig of a tree, or on some long flaunting weed; and as he rises and sinks with the breeze, pours forth a succession of rich tinkling notes; crowding one upon another, like the outpouring melody of the skylark, and possessing the same rapturous character. Sometimes he pitches from the summit of a tree, begins his song as soon as he gets upon the wing, and flutters tremulously down to the earth, as if overcome with ecstasy at his own music. ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... paid to play and again they took their instruments and again tunes full of studied mirth and studied sorrow began to flow and to rise. They unfolded the customary melody but the guests hearkened in dull amazement. Already they knew not wherefore is it necessary, and why is it well, that people should pluck strings, inflate their cheeks, blow in thin pipes, and produce a bizarre, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various |
