"Rhythm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where amusements are still going on; here and there, from the somber gardens, the sound of a guitar reaches our ears, some dance giving in its weird rhythm ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... bells, the merry Christmas bells, Their music all our pleasure tells. (Repeat, singing tra la la whenever necessary to give the rhythm. They pause in groups in center, right, and left; some sit, others stand, and change their positions ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... hanging about a cottage in the Place du Vier Prison. He had hoped to loiter in a doorway there, and to empty his sailor's heart in well-practised admiration before the altar of village beauty. The sight of Guida's face the day before had given a poignant pulse to his emotions, unlike the broken rhythm of past comedies of sentiment and melodramas of passion. According to all logic of custom, the acuteness of yesterday's impression should have been followed up by today's attack; yet here he was, like another Robinson Crusoe, "kicking ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... composed, and to which I have attached a great many emotions and extraneous incidents known to nobody but myself. My old poetic favourites have been lying in various corners of my brain for forty or fifty years; I know every turn, rhyme and rhythm of them; and as they have served my need and alleviated my sorrow so long, I do not intend to give them many fellow-lodgers more. I do not know at what particular time literary nausea sets in, but Solomon had ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... For example, the dance of the Furies, so represented, would create complete terror among those who witnessed them. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, ranked dancing with poetry, and said that certain dancers, with rhythm applied to gesture, could express manners, passions, and actions. The most eminent Greek sculptors studied the attitude of the dancers for their art of imitating the passions. In a classical Greek song, Apollo, one of the twelve greater gods, the son of ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... his classics. The process is one not of surface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even the vibration of the style passing from one intelligence to the other; the nervous and copious speech of Montaigne awakening Shakspere to a new sense of power over rhythm and poignant phrase, at the same time that the stimulus of the thought gives him a new confidence in the validity of his own reflection. Some cause there must have been for this marked species of development in the dramatist at that particular time: ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Wright and Walter Thornbury, have courageously attempted to do him justice in prosody. In this little book no such effort has been made, chiefly for the reason that, for any but the unusually gifted, to snatch at rhythm and rhyme is often to let drop the apt and ready word as AEsop's mastiff dropped his dinner. But there is a further excuse for the present writer. Verse has little attraction for children unless it jingles ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... moved by the jests of Yorick when he pleases! I detect this seriousness also in our own Wieland: even the wanton sportiveness of his humor is elevated and impeded by the goodness of his heart; it has an influence even on his rhythm; nor does he ever lack elastic power, when it is his wish, to raise us up to the most elevated planes of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of his people. For more than three-score years he had roamed about Hawaii, esteemed for his virtues and his wisdom by those who knew him, tolerated as harmless by those who did not. He wandered about the vast and desolate lava fields and talked with spirits there. He learned rhythm and music from the swing of the waves. The "little people" in the wood were his servants when he needed help. In his closing years he occupied a cabin alone near Kauhola. Though not churlish, he cared little for human society,—it seemed so small to him after daily contemplation ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... without disassociating the sounds, the ping, pang, ping, pang, of the violin he so condemned. He drew up at last, and strained his ear to listen. It did not become more distinct, always intermingled with the recurrent rhythm of the falling water, but always vibrating in subdued throbbings, now more acute, now less, as the undiscriminated melody ascended or descended the scale. It came from the earth, of this he was sure, and thus he was reminded anew of the caves which Hide-and-Seek Creek threaded ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... been growing every minute. It was an exquisite autumn afternoon. From where they sat he could behold the line of shore on either side with its background of dark green woods. Below the wavelets lapped the shingle with melodious rhythm. As far as the eye could see lay the bosom of the ocean unruffled, and lustrous with the sheen of the dying day. Accustomed to prevail in buying his way, he could not resist saying, after a ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... that he had recognized her from a distance by the rhythm of her figure and her movements, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... their blank verse character more to the courtesy of the printer than to the genius of the poet, for without rhythm and melody there is no verse at all; and the attempt to fit Greek forms of construction to our English language often gives the work the air of an awkward translation; however, there is a great deal that is pleasing in Helena in Troas and, on the whole, the play was worthy of its pageant ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... religious ballads have no rhyme; and, unlike the epic songs, no fixed rhythm. The presence of either rhyme or rhythm is an indication of comparatively recent origin or of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... our spirit that its judgment is just, and bids us recognise a master in him who delivers it. As the expression on a face speaks to a delicate sense, often communicating more, other, and better than can be seen, so the proportion, harmony, rhythm of a painting may beget moods and joys that require the full resources of a well-stored mind and disciplined character in order that they may be fully relished—in brief, demand that maturity of reason which is the mark ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... successes. Gradually, however, that pet coon song of yours will begin to pall on you a little. The very jingle to the tune that made it catch your fancy so quickly causes you to tire of it, and so it goes with the other pieces whose rhythm is so marked and continued with such great precision and whose tunefulness was so obvious that they made an instantaneous impression upon your musically untrained sense of hearing. You are beginning ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... pronunciation involving speech-rhythm. The literary taste of the eighteenth century, as typified in Dr. Johnson, consciously discredited idioms which it held to be ungrammatical; and this error persists. A simple instance is the growing loss of our enclitics. ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... thinking, now, just the way you are." Her Majesty's eyes unfocused slightly and a long time passed, while Malone tried to keep on thinking. But it was difficult, he told himself, to think about things without having any things to think about. He felt his mind begin to spin gently with the rhythm of the last sentence, and he considered slowly the possibility of thinking about things when there weren't any things thinking about you. That seemed to make as much sense as anything else, and he was turning it over and over in his mind when ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the full swing of babbling to himself, it slowly purged itself into pure English. The sentences grew longer and were enunciated with a rhythm and ease that was reminiscent of ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... example, the medium is at its lowest value, the imagination at its highest. In architecture, on the other hand, material is most important. Musicians use the vibration of string and atmosphere, sculptors use bronze and marble, painters use color and canvas, poets use rhythm and rhyme, as vehicles to express their ideas. The architect's ideas are for the sake of his material. He takes his material as such, and embellishes it with his ideas—creates beauty merely by disposing its masses and enriching its surface. But in all and each of these processes, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... cheeks flushed with the excitement of the dance; like a little girl playing dance music for other people and moving about herself as she watches them. She swung her shoulders, her form swayed as though she were being guided along, while her whole body marked the rhythm and her attitude seemed to indicate the step she was dancing. Then she turned towards the piano again and her eyes followed her hands over the black and white keys. Bending over the music she was playing, she ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... you to be pleasant in company, then to know what is meant by oenoplian rhythm[532] and ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... eight francs for her whole resources. It was the edge of the precipice at last. It was that precipice, overhanging depths unseen and terrible, which she was contemplating as she sat, feet swinging gently in the rhythm of meditation, her face serious and quiet. For six weeks she had seen it afar off; now it was at ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... expression, and strangers often thought he was blind. His mouth alone gave character to his face. His sensitive lips expressed in turn a child-like joy and strange sufferings. The sound of his voice was clear and charming. When he recited his lessons he gave the verses their full harmony and rhythm, which made us laugh very much. During recreation he willingly joined our games, and he was not awkward, but he played with such feverish enthusiasm, and yet he was so absent-minded, that some of us felt an insurmountable aversion ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... deck, both port and starboard sides, was in use each day accommodating group after group for half-hour periods of physical exercise. The tossing of the vessel lent itself in rhythm to the enjoyment of the calisthenics, or else it was physical exercise enough in trying to maintain an equilibrium while the arms and legs were raised alternately ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... become a very delightful spot populated by a squadron of nimble footed misses, who, booted, spurred, helmet-crowned and costumed in horizon blue, sing of the heroism and the splendid good humour of the poilu while keeping time to a martial rhythm. ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... matchless Rhythm of Bernard de Morlaix, and in these words she finds the highest expression that human words can give of the thoughts and desires of her soul. They tell me that the first time they sang it, as they came to this passage ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... triumph appeared to be to use a set of terms, appropriate to one art, of the effects produced by the others; thus in music we went in search of colour and light, of atmospheric effect and curve; in painting it seemed we were in search of harmony, rhythm, and tone. I should not have minded if I had felt that these words really meant anything in the minds of those who used them; but it seemed to me that the critics were more in love with their terminology than with the effects themselves; and still more, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... heart that for an enemy was black with hate, red with revenge, though for the stranger, white and kind; that in an eagle's isolation had kept strung hard and fast to God, country, home; that ticking clock- like for a century without hurry or pause was beginning to quicken at last to the march-rhythm of the world—the heart of the Southern hills. Now the prophecy from the flaming tongue of that red-headed orator was coming to pass, and the heart of the Kentucky hills ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... cunning ones. It may be so; and, at any rate, he probably wished to act the King in such matters, and not grudge a little money. He really loved music, even opera music, and knew that his people loved it; to the rough natural man, all rhythm, even of a Barberina's feet, may be didactic, beneficial: do not higgle, let us do what is to be done in a liberal style. His agent at Venice—for he has agents everywhere on the outlook for him—reports that here is a Female Dancer ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... handsome youth, his golden hair standing up straight, en brosse, round his open brow and laughing eyes, seemed, as dancers, made for each other. They were absorbed in the poetry of concerted movement, the rhythm of ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... green and good!" she told herself over and over again till the words made a song with the rhythm of the blundering ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... fit into the metre," replied Pollux. "I inherit from my father—who, when he is not gate-keeping, sings and recites—a troublesome tendency whenever anything incites me to drift into rhythm." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... paving-stones. A cold wind off the Sierra shrilled through clattering streets. As they walked, the other man was telling how this Castilian nobleman, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up when his father, the Master of Santiago, died and had written this poem, created this tremendous rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the world. He had never written anything else. They thought of him in the court of his great dust-colored mansion at Ocana, where the broad eaves were full of a cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters painted with arabesques in vermilion, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... not yield until nearly every man was wounded and many were killed. Even then they retreated yard by yard, still flinging grenades almost with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his seed, each motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel pomegranates which burst with the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... was plainly affected at the pitiful sight. Her maid had knelt and was following the sing-song rhythm of the chant, with prayers in a language that Rafael recognized at last. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... he had said "dear." The rhythm of it remained in her ears, that, and the deep gentleness of his tone. He had been sorry for her, so sorry! And he was so much older, and he was Stanor's uncle. Why should ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... swung into the home-stretch, his white face and white front legs rising and falling with the strong, steady rhythm of the horse whose stout heart refuses to acknowledge defeat, the horse who still has something left for a ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... excellent short stories, and a historical novel, Lichtenstein (1826), in the manner of Scott. His Trooper's Song is a variation of an old theme and is of great metrical interest in that here, as in Uhland, one may observe how the subtle handling of rhythm, the lengthening or shortening of a line, or the shift of stress, brings with it a corresponding shift of emotion. Lichtenstein is the story of the struggle of Ulrich of Wuertemberg against the Suabian League and gives us a Romantic picture of the Duke which is not justified by the facts. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... song are addressed to the god; but the music, in its swaying rhythm, suggests the mother's memory of the days when ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... knowledge of Nature developed by Wordsworth—the lofty melody and mysterious beauty of Coleridge's poetry—and the wild fantastic machinery and gorgeous scenery adopted by Southey—composed his favourite reading; the rhythm of "Queen Mab" was founded on that of "Thalaba", and the first few lines bear a striking resemblance in spirit, though not in idea, to the opening of that poem. His fertile imagination, and ear tuned to the finest sense of harmony, preserved him from imitation. Another of his favourite ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in its costume. But if a man's legs are pendulums, then a short man's legs will swing quicker than a tall man's, and he will take more steps to a minute, other things being equal. Thus there is a natural rhythm to a man's walk, depending on the length of his legs, which beat more or less rapidly as they are longer or shorter, like metronomes differently adjusted, or the pendulums of different time-keepers. Commodore Nutt is to M. Bihin in this respect as a little, fast-ticking mantel-clock ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... admirable place to make verses, tuning the rhythm to the breezy symphony that so often stirred among the vine leaves; or to meditate an essay for "The Dial," in which the many tongues of Nature whispered mysteries, and seemed to ask only a little stronger puff of wind to speak out the solution of its riddle. Being so pervious ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... begun to murmur. At the first murmur she had decided that he was nothing but a college boy—Edith was twenty-two, and anyhow, this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else—of another dance and another man, a man for whom her feelings had been little more than a sad-eyed, adolescent mooniness. Edith Bradin was falling in love with her ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... pleased to hear you say these words." She gave me a quick look. Quick, not stealthy. If there was one thing of which she was absolutely incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity was expressed in the very rhythm of her walk. It was I who was looking at her covertly—if I may say so. I knew where she had been, but I did not know what she had seen and heard in that nest of aristocratic conspiracies. I use ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... modulated voice that had the rhythm of music and the hush of veneration in it, he quoted: "'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall ...
— The Song of our Syrian Guest • William Allen Knight
... south, to the great admiration of children in the opposite schoolhouse. The wild-flowers of the prairie were supplanted by luxuriant fields of wheat and rye, forever undulating in wave-like motion, as if Nature loved the rhythm of the sea, and breathed it to the inland grasses. Neat little Bessie was a married woman now, and presided over the young Squire's establishment, in a large white house with green blinds. Charley had taken to himself a wife, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... a pleasant rhythm and a clearness of meaning that is absent from much good poetry. Chesterton has caught the wild romantic background of the time when the King of England could play a harp in the camp of his enemies; when he could, by a note, bring ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... —Versification, defined —Versification, POE'S (E. A.) notions concerning; his censure of BROWN'S former definition of; his rejection of the idea of versif. from the principle of rhythm; his unfortunate derivat. of rhythm from [Greek: hurithmos,] and vain attempts to explain the term: the farrago summarily disposed of by BROWN —EVERETT'S "System of Eng. Versification," account ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this habit of movement goes with thinking. Montaigne says: "Every place of retirement requires a Walk. My thoughts sleep if I sit still; my Fancy does not go by itself, as it goes when my Legs move it." What Montaigne seems to mean is that we love rhythm. Body and mind must move together in harmony. So it is with the Mohammedan over the Koran, and the Rabbi over the Talmud. Jews sway at prayer for the same reason. Movement of the body is not a mere mannerism; it is part of the emotion, like the instrumental accompaniment ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... obscenity, His satyr's dance, with laughter in his eye, And cruelty along the scarlet line Of his bright smiling mouth. All uncontrolled, Love's rebel servant, he delights to beat The maddening quick dry rhythm of goatish feet Even in the sanctuary, and makes bold To mime himself the godhead of the place. He turns in terror from her trance-calmed face, From the white-lidded languor of her eyes, From lips that passion never ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... men grow calmer. Then what are they looking at, hour after hour, under the hot sun? Nothing. They are letting the rhythm of water and sky lull them into a sleep—a surcease from living. This is a very poetical thing for a hundred battered-looking men to attempt. Yet life may be as intimidating to honest, unimaginative ones as to ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... of hexameters and pentameters I have not shirked the metre although it is strangely out of favour in English literature while we read it and enjoy it in German. There is little valid reason for our aversion; the rhythm has been made familiar to our ears by long courses of Greek and Latin and the rarity of spondaic feet is assuredly to be supplied by ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... The rhythm here demands the dissyllable a-ches, as used by the older writers, Shakspeare particularly, who, in his Tempest, makes Prospero ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a specially happy vein that night, and the background of the mountains added impressiveness to his words. To Harley, again the analyst, and seeking to put himself in the Indian's place, there was a rhythm and power in what Jimmy Grayson said, although he, as an Indian, might not understand a word. He could interpret it as a chant of battle or victory, and such, he had no doubt, was ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... be sung, and hence rhythm and accent or stress are important. Stress and the length of the line are varied; but we usually find that the four most important words, two in each half of the line, are stressed on their most important syllable. Alliteration usually ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... differences which separate us from one another—refuse to give up the secrets of their quality save at the magical summons of what we call "style." Mr. Pepys was a quaint fellow and no Goethean egotist; but he managed to put a peculiar flavour of style—with a rhythm and a colour all its own—into ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image will rise into a semblance of poetry if ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... but are highly idiosyncratic. The designer had a distinct thought about this window or that door,—and when he would use his thought to ornament these features, he idealized it with his Greek lines to make it architectural, just as a poet attunes his thought to the harmony and rhythm of verse. Antique prejudices, bent into rigid conformity with antique rubrics, are often shocked at the strange innovations of these new Dissenters from the faith of Palladio and Philibert Delorme,—shocked at the naked humanity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... aloud. Rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, vowel coloring, the effect of enjambement, to name only the more obvious phenomena, appeal solely to the ear. Looking at a page of verse is like looking at a page of music. Unless the symbols are translated into ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Farquhart, "to change that last song I wrote for Sylvia into a song for Barbara! The rhyme and the rhythm go the same, I think." He stood up and sang the words out loud, repeating the verses several times, inserting sometimes ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... were akin to the goat-skin pipes of Lower Brittany; the music wild, weird, appealing to the passion if not melodious to the ear. At any rate the effect was inspiriting. First, the men danced, the maidens seating themselves round the dancers and chanting the following words, to the rhythm of which they swayed ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... is sentiment; sentiment in its infinite and indefinite degrees, its relation to the aspects of nature—in a word, that poetic faculty which is akin to the musical, proceeding as they both do from the primitive ground-work of our being, and uniting in the inflexions of rhythm and of song. I have already named Shelley in connexion with the poet we are considering. And it is a Shelleyan union with the most intimate, the most inexpressible things in nature that is revealed in such a note as the following: 'A nameless day, a day ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... canoe gliding out from the shore, containing perhaps a man, a woman, and a child or two, all paddling together in natural, easy rhythm. They are going to catch a fish, no difficult matter, and when this is done their day's work is done. Another party puts out to capture bits of driftwood, for it is easier to procure fuel in this way than to drag it down from the outskirts ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... his reach, jeering at him. "Old Father Smither!" they cried, as often as their peals of laughter would let them cry anything at all. But it struck me as very strange that their sing-song derision was not going to the right tune and rhythm; for there is a genuine folk-tune which I thought indissolubly wedded to this derisive formula. Beginning in a long drawl, it throws all the weight on the first and fourth syllables: "Old Father Smith-er." But these children, apparently ignorant of it, had invented a rhythm of their ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic. But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no conception of what ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... style at Chevenix the next ball they have. Think of the face of the County!) But in spite of their funny holding, or perhaps on account of it, there is a peculiar movement of the feet, perfect grace and rhythm and glide, which I have never seen at a real ball. One could understand it was a pure delight to them, and they felt every note of the music. They treated Octavia and me with the courtesy fit for queens, and some of them told us ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... took up the rhythm of the rails as the delayed train plunged forward once more into the night. Again the clack of tongues, set free from fear, buzzed eagerly. The glow of the afterclap of danger was on them, and in the warm excitement each forgot the paralyzing fear that had but now padlocked ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... "I was really astonished," he said, "(1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; (2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the "Age of Reason,"—a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... silence; returned, word and phrase pouring forth disconnected, with a curious and turbulent rhythm, like rushing wave crests linked by half-seen threads of the spindrift, vocal fragments of thought swiftly assembled by some subtle faculty of the mind as they fell ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... playing the quaint, sweet dance called "The Orchid," and Hargrave was leaning on the piano beside her watching Cecil and Athalie drifting through the dusk to the music's rhythm, when the door opened ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... was white-scrubbed, the American oil-cloth on the table had a gay pattern, there was a warm fire, the water in the boiler hissed faintly. And in front of him, beneath him as he leaned forward shaving, a drop of water fell with strange, incalculable rhythm from the bright brass tap into the white enamelled bowl, which was now half full of pure, quivering water. The war was over, and everything just the same. The acute familiarity of this house, which he had built for his marriage twelve ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... was quite naked, save for a girdle of eagle-claws about his thighs. Shrieking and yelling, his long black hair flying like a blot of night, he leaped frantically about the circle. A certain rude rhythm characterized his frenzy, and when all were under its sway, swinging their bodies in accord with his and venting their cries in unison, he sat bolt upright, with arm outstretched and long, talon-like finger extended. ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... maintenance, or as a creative power whose function is not merely to receive what nature supplies, but to re-shape nature's materials and create a new spiritual world. Receptivity and activity are inseparable, and form together the harmonious rhythm of life. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... old favourite after another when she first returned, but her attention wandered from her best beloved, and all that were solid came somehow to be set aside and replaced, the nourishing fact by inflated fiction, reason and logic by rhyme and rhythm, and sense by sentimentality, so far had her strong, simple, earnest mind deteriorated in the unwholesome atmosphere of London drawing rooms. It was only a phase, of course, and she could have been set right at once had there been anybody ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and at present sojourning there for purposes of board, lodging, education, and incidentally such discipline and chastening as might ultimately produce moral excellence,—Rebecca Randall had a passion for the rhyme and rhythm of poetry. From her earliest childhood words had always been to her what dolls and toys are to other children, and now at twelve she amused herself with phrases and sentences and images as her schoolmates played with the pieces of their ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to drag itself into supernatural length. Facing the preacher, and immediately beneath Reuben's feet, was a clock of old-fashioned and clumsy structure, and the measured tick, tick of its machinery communicated a faintly perceptible jar to a square foot or so of the gallery flooring. The mechanical rhythm got into Reuben's brain and nerves until every second seemed to hang fire for a phenomenal time, and the twenty minutes' discourse dragged into an age. Even when the vicar at last lifted his eyes from the neatly ranged ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... I thought at first, rather by the fact that it flowed, than by any peculiarity of substance, colour, or form, from the stretches of empty space that formed its banks. But presently, as I looked more closely, I saw, rising from its surface, dipping, rising, and dipping again, in a regular rhythm, without change or pause, what I can only compare to a shoal of flying fish. Not that they looked like fish, or indeed like anything I had ever seen, but that was the image suggested by their motion. As soon as I saw them I knew what they were: they were souls; and the river down which ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm, (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their contents), on reciting it with an accented of. It was not, I say, till after three weeks' labor, that my mother got the accent lightened on the "of" and laid on the "ashes," to her mind. But had it taken three years she would have done ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... asleep soon and soundly—and he awakened to a storm indeed. The wind was moaning and swishing, the spray was pelting the bottom of the boat like shot, the rain was pouring in a perfect deluge, with a steady, thunderous rhythm, and the boat swayed and shook as the big waves struck the steamer's sides. Underneath the canvas all was pitch dark. At first Charley was a little bewildered and frightened; but after a few minutes he settled back to enjoy himself. He ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... hands of the broadside-printers. The present text, despite the unlucky hiatus after st. 35, is a splendid example of an English ballad, which cannot be earlier than the sixteenth century. There is a fine rhythm throughout, and, as Child says, 'not many better passages are met with in ballad poetry than that which tells of the three gallant attempts on the ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... or the practice of rhythmical accent, should be introduced, as the sense of rhythm is an important element ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... there hung an iron pot, which evidently contained the professor's supper. As for the professor himself, he clearly stood revealed in the person of the strange character who now, taking off his sombrero, waved it three times around his head in solemn rhythm, and then, raising a ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... unemphatic words in accented positions, and words usually accented in unaccented ones, which licence can also be found in Early English verse.... While the reader of modern English verse may sometimes be offended by the ruggedness of the rhythm, it is hoped that the Anglo-Saxon scholar will make allowances for the difficulty of reproducing, even approximately, the rhythm of the original. The reproduction of the sense as closely as possible had to be kept constantly in view, even to the detriment of the smoothness ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... changed to a rhythmic, cadenced chant that was almost a song. Her face became rapt and introspective as she rocked slowly from side to side. The rhythm was familiar and then he recognized it—the unintelligible music he had often heard coming from the barracks late at night when no men were around—the voiceless humming that ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... discomposed, Lord Tybar, his body in perfect rhythm with her curvettings, laughed at Sabre over his shoulder. "She thinks you're up to something, Sabre. She thinks you've got designs on us. Marvellous how I know! Whisper and I shall hear, loved one. You'll hurt ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the rhythm of her words, like an echo of his voice in her own, bringing a sudden sharp, sweet, reminiscence of her father, so that the tears had risen to her eyes in hearing herself. And again, for all reply, her mother once more said only: ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... must not be ignored. Frances E. Willard would never have made a dressmaker. It is said she did not know when her own dress fit, or whether becoming; she depended upon Anna Gordon to decide for her. But by the music of her eloquence and the rhythm of her rhetoric, she could send the truth echoing through the hearts of her hearers like the strain of a sweet melody. Worth, of Paris, France, would not have made an orator, but he could design a robe to please a princess and make a dress to fit "to ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... no thought. And, as conscious thought and conscious memory are functions one of another, so also are unconscious thought and unconscious memory. Memory is, as it were, the body of thought, and it is through memory that body and mind are linked together in rhythm or vibration; for body is such as it is by reason of the characteristics of the vibrations that are going on in it, and memory is only due to the fact that the vibrations are of such characteristics as to catch on to and be caught on to by other ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... better. He delighted in the swell and subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,—not, perhaps, where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the awakening spell might ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was made for every effect, however apparently casual it may have seemed. His Discourses were obviously based upon classic models; for their full periods, sonorously and deliberately arranged, have a rhythm that attends to the whole period, and not merely, as is often the way with English speakers, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... well, and seemed greatly devoted to each other. The man was good-looking, and a fine specimen of physical strength. His partner was of medium height, neatly dressed, and remarkably pretty. Her eyes danced with pleasure, and her whole body moved in a graceful rhythm to the music, and occasionally she cast a grateful glance toward the player. She evidently enjoyed good music when she heard it. Everywhere there seemed to be perfect peace and harmony, and to Douglas the dancers appeared like one big ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... as well as anybody that singing is one of the most entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of "Parsifal" anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody; one person performed at a time—and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in, which allayed everybody's excitement and went through Frederick's muscles and nerves like a soothing stream. The walls and floors of the Roland began to quiver faintly, a sign that her heart and pulse were beating again. It was the rhythm of its strength, the rhythm of its race to its goal. Ingigerd shouted with joy, like a child, and Frederick set his teeth. Renewed life, renewed prospects and hopes, the reassumption of system, the relaxation of his nerves made him so weak that the tears almost started ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... down the tunnel, roughening skin and shortening breath. A few moments later the low rhythm as of distant water came to their ears. Roldan and Adan recognised that familiar music, and set ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... manifestations of pleasure and displeasure, but that their criterion of taste was solely the amount of amusement derived from the performance and that they bothered themselves little about niceties of rhythm. To the Roman, the scenic and histrionic were the vital features of a production. Again we reiterate, only the bold brush could ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... etc. The principles of all the arts being identical, how simple would it be to apply those governing the arts which one knows to what is unknown. The musician and poet make use of contrast, light and shade, gradation, antithesis, balance, accent, force by opposition, isolation and omission, rhythm, tone-color, climax, and above ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... beside her, he could feel the throb of the diesel motor. It seemed to carry the rhythm of adventure through the walls of the cabin, giving the feeling of the unknown. For a long time there was silence while Dolores held one of Dick's hands ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... myself the fear has grown, And the shadow is my own. Well I know that all things move To the spheral rhythm of love,— That to Thee, O Lord of all! Nothing can of chance befall: Child and seraph, mote and star, Well Thou knowest what we are; Through Thy vast creative plan Looking, from the worm to man, There is pity in Thine eyes, But no hatred ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rhythm. Eating, sleeping, working, playing, loving, thinking—everything. And when we live so that each activity comes at the right interval, we gain power. When one interrupts another, we lose. Weakness is merely the thrust of one impulse against another, instead of their combined ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... had an organized rhythm that rejected Neel. He finally realized he could help best by standing back out of the way while the crewmen grav-lifted the heavy cases out through the cargo port, into the blackness of the rain-lashed ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... of fellows were playing on a drum and a little banjo. They were singing a chorus, which was not only singular, and perfectly marked in the rhythm, but exceeding sweet in the tune. They danced in a circle; and performers came trooping from all quarters, who fell into the round, and began waggling their heads, and waving their left hands, and tossing up and down the little thin rods which they each carried, and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... behind its music, solemn and inevitable, like a natural phenomenon. Who that has seen it can forget the drum-major pacing in front, the drummers' tiger-skins, the pipers' swinging plaids, the strange elastic rhythm of the whole regiment footing it in time—and the bang of the drum, when the brasses cease, and the shrill pipes take up the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... blue or violet, sometimes green-olive or gray. The backwash tugs at his boots, hollowing out little channels under his feet. The sun wraps him round like a mantle; the salt crusts and thickens in his hair. And then, when he has forgotten everything save the rhythm of the falling waves, there ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... sure, to be discovered, both in the prose, as well as among the doggerel and uncouth rhymes, in which the text has been more adhered to than rhythm; but I shall feel satisfied with the result, if I succeed, even in the least degree, in affording a helping hand to present and future students of the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... which gives character to the picture and produces the impression of motion which is so striking. It is almost as if a modern photographer had taken a snap shot of a figure in the act of walking. But in no such photograph, it is safe to say, would the lines chance to flow in such perfect rhythm. ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... short distance, as though he feared Monica might have some project of escape. His look was very bilious; trudging mechanically hither and thither where fewest people were to be met, he kept his eyes on the ground, and clumped to a dismal rhythm with the end of his walking-stick. In the three or four months since his marriage, he seemed to have grown older; he no longer held ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... saw it sitting close by my fallen hand. Its tiny paws were waving. I could see its breast, for which a rose leaf would have been a giant buckler, pulsing and beating above its throbbing heart. Its eyes were shining.... A rhythm came into the swing of the pink-tinted paws. And then, so high and thin and sweet that at first I looked above to trace the sound, there came the singing of the Singing Mouse.... Dreams ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... resistance as had already been made. I drew an accurate picture of a tall and dangerous instrument on which piratical gentlemen have sometimes been known to terminate their lives; and finally, I attempted to improve the rhythm of my oratory by a couple of golden ounces to each combatant, and the promise of a slave apiece at the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is unequalled by any other English poet. Heine alone is his peer in this; but even Heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. In older women, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... according to the strictest laws, and to "narrow it down" to some extent, such was his aim. Following the example of one of his comrades of Medan, being readily carried away by precision of style and the rhythm of sentences, by the imperious rule of the ballad, of the pantoum or the chant royal, Maupassant also desired to write in metrical lines. However, he never liked this collection that he often regretted having published. His encounters with prosody had left him with that monotonous weariness that ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... great surprise, who had just read some verses to her, the sewing-girl, with smiles and blushes, timidly communicated to him also a poetic composition. Her verses wanted rhythm and harmony, perhaps; but they were simple and affecting, as a non-envenomed complaint entrusted to a friendly hearer. From that day Agricola and she held frequent consultations; they gave each other mutual encouragement: but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's poetical ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... in the past often enough; they had, with the odd irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchanged ideas about it and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... had a tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short—so short that when he put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows. He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... as far as the eye could reach the streets were black with a sea of heads. The glistening of bayonets, the waving flags, the uniforms, the mad shouts and derisive groans, and above the tumult the drums beating in full rhythm, made an exciting scene. But all was lost upon Mary. Her eye had singled out John Dacre, and she was gazing down at him in speechless agony. He appeared to her wan and sick. His clothes were torn and covered with mud. But he bore himself ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... betrayed no unkingly haste, he spread his wings to their full splendid width and launched himself from the brink. For a few seconds he flapped heavily, as if his wings had grown unused to their function. Then he got his rhythm, and swung into a wide, mounting spiral, which Horner watched with sympathetic joy. At last, when he was but a wheeling speck in the pale blue dome, he suddenly turned and sailed off straight towards the northeast, with a speed which carried him out ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... visioned a plan that he might work out, after he had seen Aunt Jane and Uncle Frank again. Meanwhile, the sun was shining, the road wound among the ragged hills, and Filaree and Joshua stepped along briskly, their hoof-beats suggesting the rhythm of a song. ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... they alternately reflected the glow of the fire within them and of the fire without. Her hands were clasped nervously together, with a grip like iron, and lay in her lap, while her dainty foot marked the rhythm of the tragical thoughts that swept like a song of doom through ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... pressed like buds to hold The guarded heart against excess of rain. Hands spirit tipped through which a genius plays With paints and clays, And strings in many keys— Clothed in an aura of thought as soundless as a flood Of sun-shine where there is no breeze. So is it light in spite of rhythm of blood, Or turn of head, or hands that move, unite— Wind cannot dim or agitate the light. From Plato's idea stepping, wholly wrought From Plato's dream, made manifest in hair, Eyes, lips and hands and voice, As if the stored up thought From ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... me the perfection of pith and poetry. What could be more terse? Not a word to spare, and yet everything fully expressed. Rhyme and rhythm faultless. It was a delightful poet who made those verses. As for the beer itself—that, I think, must have been made from the root of all evil! A single glass of it insured an ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... roar of wind is changed to the swing of marching feet, the tread of a mighty host whose step is strong and free; and lo! they are singing, as they march, and the song is bold and wild, wild, wild. Again and again, beneath the song, beneath the rhythm of marching feet, the melody rises, very sweet but infinitely sad, like a silver pipe or an angel's voice tremulous with tears. Once again the theme changes, and it is battle, and death, sudden, and sharp; there is the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... verse is, charming as is the sound of the lines, nonsense. The picture of the snowdrops pleading for pardon and pining from fright would have been impossible to a poet with the realizing genius of the great writers. Swinburne's sense of rhythm, however, was divorced in large measure from his sense of reality. He was a poet without the poet's gift of sight. William Morris complained that Swinburne's poems did not make pictures. Swinburne had not the necessary ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... walls. Again he heard the rattling of the window-panes, bare and exposed to every gust of wind; the far-off thunder of the sea, like a deep, continuous undernote; and, from an almost unseen corner of the chamber, the monotonous, broken rhythm of sad prayers for the dying, mumbled by that dark, curious-looking priest. And then, when the background of the picture had formed itself in his memory, he saw the deed itself. He saw the white, stricken face suddenly ablaze with that last effort of passionate life; he ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... spell of the Mariposa's "woven paces and weaving hands," Mrs. Hampton appeared a mere Dresden statuette, the tapestried and frescoed walls became a pale and evanescent background, and Ydo alone, dancing, focused in herself all light and beauty; nay, she herself was the pride of life, the rhythm of motion, the ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow |
