"Unmusical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Highway through the Nations afforded a prolific source for sight-seeing, and furthermore, was a sore trial to our organs of hearing. Musical and unmusical instruments of every description were in operation—from the Javanese salendon and pelog to the tuneful instruments, masterly handled by ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... latterly also Browning, with protests against his obscurity and his occasionally most unmusical English. The inspiration of his brave and optimistic philosophy she felt strongly. She was extremely fond of reading Dante, and she was better acquainted with German and Italian poetry than most cultivated women. But though she read much and often in the works of famous writers, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... approach, small boats are seen putting off from the shore and rowing or sculling toward her with almost indecorous rapidity. Lean over the rail for a minute with me, and watch the freight being unloaded into one of these bobbing little craft. The hatch of the steamer is opened, a most unmusical winch commences operations—and a sewing machine emerges de profundis. This is swung giddily out over the sea by the crane and dropped on the thwarts of the waiting punt. One shudders to think of the probably fatal shock received by the vertebrae of that ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... They also give rise to asthma, and like enlarged tonsils—with which they are often associated— they impart to the child a vacant, stupid expression, and hinder his physical and intellectual development. They cause his voice to be "stuffy,'' thick, and unmusical. Though, except in the case of a cleft palate, they cannot be seen with the naked eye, they are often accompanied by a visible and suggestive granular condition of the wall at the back of the throat. Their presence ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... expression of mind and soul than a physical expression or a physical force. It is true, the body is the medium through which the soul, the real man, gives expression to thought and feeling; and yet voice that is simply mechanical or physical is always common and meaningless and as a rule unmusical. The normal condition of true artistic voice is emotional ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... times! You are a lovely correspondent. You don't write your letters with your pen, or with your tongue, you write them with your heart. Hearts are different; some, I suppose, are born sound and musical, others are born uncertain and unmusical, and are at best a mere tinkling cymbal. Yours, I have no doubt, has blessed and cheered and delighted the soul of the mother who bore you from the very first opening of your eyes upon the world, and that dear heart has gone on with that cheering influence from ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... and not unmusical, and what he lacked of finer qualities he made up in volume and force. His visitors joined in the singing, Kalman following the air in a low sweet ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... the peasantry in Mallorca seem to know one tune and one only, in a minor key, with a compass of three whole tones. It is not unmusical, but, like the sereno's chant, it is hard to catch." As I happened to know the air, the least I could do was to dot it down in her note-book when she asked me to. The book flew open as she passed it across the deal table-top, and showed the name "Hortensia ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... he had rung off, he sat down weakly and laughed, his laugh unmusical and sad. The dreadful, dreadful irony of it! How could he deny her? How could he? He who had surrounded her with women friends, talented and independent, who believed in the gospel of work! He liked her generosity. He liked her willingness to work. He blessed the dear, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... make you feel quite one of the performers," said the Herr Professor genially. "It is a great pity that the English nation is so unmusical. Never mind! To-night you shall hear something—we have discovered a nest ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... prayer four hours long on a Fast Day. Many prayers were two hours long. The doors were closed and watched by the tithing-man, and none could leave even if tired or restless unless with good excuse. The singing of the psalms was tedious and unmusical, just as it was in churches of all denominations both in America and England at that date. Singing was by ear and very uncertain, and the congregation had no notes, and many had no psalm-books, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... the Southern continent Columbia." He then proposed, in irony, a list of a few "Cabotian words"—happify, gunning, belittle, quiddle, composuist, sot, etc. Lengthy he stigmatizes as "a foolish, flat, unauthorized, unmusical Indian word".[12] In conclusion (Port Folio, I, page 370), "let then the projected volume of foul and unclean things bear his own Christian name and ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... many singular habits and tastes. Whenever he experienced any vexation, or when any unpleasant thought occupied his mind, he would hum something which was far from resembling a tune, for his voice was very unmusical. He would, at the same time, seat himself before the writing-table, and swing back in his chair so far that I have often been ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... in arranging my papers; an immense amount of patience is required for such an affair as putting them in order, but having once summoned it to our aid we must persevere, or the matter would never be completed. My papers, both musical and unmusical, are nearly arranged at last; it was like one of the ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... a cuspidor with long-range accuracy. He beamed with cheerful malevolence awhile upon his tormentors; then, uplifting a cracked falsetto in an unmusical wail, to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... learned accompaniments. The Italian opera was killed, not so much by the fact that The Beggar's Opera made its conventions ridiculous (for its conventions could at that time have been ridiculous only to quite unmusical people), as by the incontestable attraction of the new work itself. It was witty and outspoken, with abundance of topical satire; its music consisted of the tunes that everybody knew, and it presented the public with ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... adjusted, Mr. Sikes proceeded to drink brandy at a furious rate, and to flourish the crowbar in an alarming manner; yelling forth, at the same time, most unmusical snatches of song, mingled with wild execrations. At length, in a fit of professional enthusiasm, he insisted upon producing his box of housebreaking tools: which he had no sooner stumbled in with, and opened ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... successively. These last are said to have a tone; the others are not allowed to have any. If we wish to give nonelastic bodies a tone, it will be necessary to make them continue their sound, by repeating our blows quickly upon them. This will effectually give them a tone; and an unmusical instrument has often by this means a fine effect in concerts. The effects of a drum depend upon this principle. Gold, silver, copper, and iron, which are elastic metals, are sonorous; but lead, which possesses scarcely any elasticity, produces little or no tone. Tin, which ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... same changelessness of expression in the other dark faces as he had seen in Silvertip's. It struck him forcibly. When they spoke in their soft, guttural tones, or burst into a low, not unmusical laughter, or sat gazing stolidly into the fire, their faces seemed always the same, inscrutable, like the depths of the forest now hidden in night. One thing Joe felt rather than saw—these savages were fierce ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... to Lady Dorothy or Lady Sophia. Wither's song, "Shall I wasting in Despair," is certainly superior to the SONG TO ALTHEA. Wither was frequently equal to Lovelace in poetical imagery and sentiment, and he far excelled him in versification. The versification of Lovelace is indeed more rugged and unmusical than that of any other writer of the period, and this blemish is so conspicuous throughout LUCASTA, and is noticeable in so many cases, where it might have been avoided with very little trouble, that we are naturally led to the inference that Lovelace, in writing, accepted from ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... returned to the fire and stood beside the chief. It was evident to them that his end was imminent. He sang in a low, not unmusical tone the death-chant of the Hurons. His companions silently bowed their heads. When he had finished singing he slowly rose to his great height, showing a commanding figure. Slowly his features lost their stern pride, his face softened, and his dark eyes, gazing straight into the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... dray, on a gigantic pair of wheels, drawn by a long string of white Normandy horses in single file, with blue harness and jangling bells, filled up the roadway. Costermongers trundled their barrows along with strange, unmusical cries. Now and again an empty cab returning to its stable, with weary horse and semi-somnolent ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... was speaking, but her eye wandered away the moment he had finished and rested searchingly on the other gentlemen. Evidently she missed a face she had expected to find there, for her colour changed and she drew back behind the other ladies with the light, unmusical laugh women sometimes use to hide ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... is a beauty in the grey twilight, Which minds unmusical can never know, A holy quietude, that yields to woe A pulseless pleasure, fraught with pure delight: The aspect of the mountains huge, that brave And bear upon their breasts the rolling storms; And the soft twinkling of the stars, that pave Heaven's highway with their bright and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... he has at hand for carrying on his work. But knowledge of voice is no more evolved from one's inner consciousness than is knowledge of musical notation, or of the Greek alphabet; therefore, if regular teachers in the school permit singing which is unmusical and hurtful, it is chiefly because they are following the usual customs, and their ears have thereby become dulled, or it may be that even if the singing is unpleasant to them, that they do not know how to make it better. As before said, all energies have so far been directed to ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... was, that the owl had alighted upon a branch not twenty feet from where they were all sitting round the fire, by the blaze of which they now had a full view of this singular creature. The moment it alighted, it commenced uttering its hideous and unmusical cries, at the same time going through such a variety of contortions, both with its head and body, as to cause the whole party a fit of laughter. It was, in fact, an odd and interesting sight to ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... goldfinch, but he is by no means a mere duplicate of that bird; he has an individuality of his own. While his flight is undulatory, the waviness is not so deeply and distinctly marked; nor does he sing a cheery cradle-song while swinging through the ether, although he often utters a series of unmusical chirps. One of the most pleasingly pensive sounds heard in my western rambles was the little coaxing call of this bird, whistled mostly by the female, I think. No doubt it is the tender love talk of a young wife or mother, which may account for its ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... pauses and confusion of mind. Mr. Pericles was almost abusive at the impotent efforts of the sisters to revive in his memory that particular delicious melody, the composition of the fair singer herself. At last he grew so impatient as to arrest their opening notes, and even to interrupt their unmusical consultations, with "No: it is no use; it is no use: no, no, I say!" But instantly he would plunge his forehead into the palm of his hand, and rub it red, and work his eyebrows frightfully, until tender humanity led the sisters to resume. Adela's, "I'm sure it began low down—tum!" ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... should speak, that a small piping voice would come struggling up from below. Baba looked up with alarm, but the goblin greeted him with a smile, and said, "Merry Christmas, Nick," in a deep, strong and not unmusical voice, which came boldly up and ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... the privilege of creeping into a shell of my own. To any one who has been accustomed in travelling, to be addressed with, "Do sit here, you will find it more comfortable," the "You must go there, I made for this place first," sounds very unmusical. ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... for hours, and, as he said, with inexpressible delight. It was perhaps for this reason that he was fond of Shenstone's pastorals, and some parts of PARADISE LOST. The author has heard his most unmusical voice repeat the celebrated description of Paradise, which he seemed fully to appreciate. His other studies were of a different cast, chiefly polemical. He never went to the parish church, and was therefore suspected of entertaining heterodox opinions, though his objection was probably ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... unfeeling, unmusical, penurious old ladies and gentlemen back into the lounge, glaring at them as belligerently and offensively as a gentleman could and maintain his self-respect. Then he went into the waiting-room and embarked upon ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "Though unmusical, German is the most expressive of all languages," he observed when Von Bork had stopped from pure exhaustion. "Hullo! Hullo!" he added as he looked hard at the corner of a tracing before putting it in the box. "This should put another bird in the cage. ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... While Emerson's verse is frequently unmusical, in his prose we often find passages like this ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and the moving figures of our attendants gave animation to the picture. Amongst ourselves there were a few snatches of song, and from up the hill where the Wallacks were camped came a chorus of not unmusical voices. One after another of our party dropped off, betaking himself to his natural rest. I was not the last, and must have slept as soon as I pulled the plaid over my ears, ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... one's notions of the delicacy and tenderness of woman. Few of them are even passably well-looking. All the natural playfulness of the gentler sex seems to be crushed out of them; and while their manners are uncouth, their voices are the wildest and most unmusical that ever fell upon the ear from a feminine source. When dressed in their best attire they usually wear a profusion of red handkerchiefs about their heads and shoulders; and from an unpicturesque habit they ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... boat seen for a moment, and the water flashed in the rays of the stars as he turned; then his voice was heard muttering, and the splash of his pole came more faintly, while Dave secured and stepped out of the boat, to burst out suddenly in his grating unmusical laugh. ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... put their toes into holes and niches in the rocks and kept talking all the while. Every now and then they would stop, sway their heads about and sing a kind of low chant in not unmusical tones. As we crept up slowly behind, with difficulty finding the rude steps in the uncertain light, the last of the string of dwarfs kept turning to us bowing and crooning. I confess I began to be anxious, fearing ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Ordinarily it is a very quiet, demure sort of bird. It walks about over the leaves, moving its head like a little hen; then perches on a limb a few feet from the ground and sends forth its shrill, rather prosy, unmusical chant. Surely it is an ordinary, common-place bird. But wait till the inspiration of its flight-song is upon it. What a change! Up it goes through the branches of the trees, leaping from limb to limb, faster and faster, till it shoots from the tree-tops fifty or more feet into the air above ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... less raucous and a louder, more sustained and far- reaching sound. There was always very great variety in the tones; and while some continued deep and harsh—the harshest sound in nature— others were clearer and not unmusical; and in a large number there were always a few in the scattered choir that out-soared all the others in high, long-drawn notes, almost ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... David's recital of the travails and triumphs of ancient Israel. Certain it is that profound gratitude to God and devotion to duty characterized the lives of most of these men and women who sang the praises of their Maker in this halting and unmusical fashion. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... back bow-window of the Phoenix, there pealed forth—faint in the distance and rain—a solemn royal ditty, piped by the tuneful Aldermen of Skinner's Alley, and neither unmusical nor somehow uncongenial with the darkness, and the melancholy object of the doctor's walk, the chant being rather monastic, wild, and dirge-like. It was a quarter past ten, and no other sound of life or human neighbourhood was stirring. If secrecy were an object, it was well secured by ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and the bandoliers thrown on the ground. There were a couple of hammocks for the patients' use, and in these two of them passed the night. Before retiring to rest, they produced their pipes and foul-smelling Boer tobacco, proceeding to light up just under my windows, meanwhile talking their unmusical language with great volubility. At length, about ten, they appeared to slumber, and a chorus of snoring arose, which generally sent me to sleep, to be awakened two or three hours later by renewed conversations, which now and then died away into hoarse whispers. ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... front of the orchestra the slaves drew off my veil and there I stood. The chorus retired, and I began my song. I had had only one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before; but the humming accompaniment to my solo, that the unmusical slaves had to learn, had taken a week ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... be unmusical; but without dwelling on the patronage extended to the organ-grinder, without seeking to found any argument on the prevalence of the jew's trump, there is surely one instrument that may be said to be national in the ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Pilot-man Mark Twain Tim Keyser's Nose Max Adeler The Lost Expression Marshall Steele A Night Scene Robert B. Brough Karl the Martyr Frances Whiteside The Romance of Tenachelle Hercules Ellis Michael Flynn William Thomson A Night with a Stork William G. Wilcox An Unmusical Neighbour William Thomson The Chalice David Christie Murray Livingstone Henry Lloyd In Swanage Bay Mrs. Craik Ballad of Sir John Franklin G. H. Boker Phadrig Crohoore J. S. Le Fanu Cupid's Arrows Eliza Cook The Crocodile's Dinner ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... respect; the severity of the form imposes upon poetry a simplicity which contrasts with the breadth and complexity of prose. As Schopenhauer remarked, every good poem is short; long poems always contain stretches either of unmusical verse or unpoetic music. Yet, in comparison with prose, the tempo of music is slow; we have to linger in the medium in order that its rhythmic and tonal beauties may impress us, and this slowness of movement is imparted to the thought; ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... been raised as to the reason of Paderewski's remarkable hold on an audience; wherein lay his power over the musical and unmusical alike. Whenever he played there was always the same intense hush over the listeners, the same absorbed attention, the same spell. The superficial attributed these largely to his appearance and manner; the more thoughtful looked ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... every Tuesday morning, with Leopold Ballman, were tiresome unmusical periods of diaphragm exercises and an entire tearing down and reconstruction process of the previous methods taught her. It was tedious, standing before the long gold-and-black pier glass in the front parlor, watching the tendinous rise and fall of her lower thorax when her forbidden ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... practice, we had mastered, as we thought, those three famous melodies, "Home, Sweet Home," "Juanita," and "God Save the Queen." The orchestra was equal to them, anyhow, we considered. Neither of our two unmusical associates cared to be left out of the proposed excursion, so a drum was manufactured for Old Colonial, by stretching a sheepskin over the open ends of a cask; O'Gaygun was found incompetent to play on any other instrument but the ancient ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... life that prospered. We had, indeed, few birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called a song. My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous, but friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which properly followed another. This is the only bird I ever knew with a wrong ear; ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was within hearing, was warbling lustily to himself. Austin immediately pricked up his ears, for he had had no idea that Lubin was a vocalist. Away he carolled blithely enough, in a rough but not unmusical voice, and Austin was just able to catch some of the words of the quaint old west-country ballad that ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... available funds, to say nothing of all that I've left in Tunis, my two palaces on the Bardo, my vessels in the harbor of La Goulette, my diamonds and my jewels, which are certainly worth more than twice that. And you know," he added, with his genial smile, in his hoarse, unmusical voice, "when it's all gone, there will still be ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... like his, the most terrible is to belong to a minority. No person that looked at his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous, though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a belief which made him a passenger on board ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ovations. No other pianist ever achieved such a wonderful success, not only among musicians, but among the people of all classes. Musicians were astounded at his remarkable knowledge, while musical and unmusical people alike were carried off their feet by the whirlwind-style of his playing. It was full of grace, nobility, breadth, and dignity; but it combined with these qualities a fire, an intensity, and a passion which ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... great variety of sun birds flitting from flower to flower like living gems. It is to be admitted that the cries of those birds were not always in accord with the splendour of their plumage, being for the most part distinctly harsh and unmusical; but there was one exception that startled us not a little when we first heard it. Its cry was an exact reproduction of the sound of a sweet-toned bell, so exact, indeed, that for the moment I felt fully persuaded that, hidden somewhere in the heart of that vast ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... seemed to be that now they faced the brilliant northern lights flashing up the sky, and that either this appearance or some of the whaling narrations of Kinraid had stirred up Daniel Robson's recollections of a sea ditty, which he kept singing to himself in a low, unmusical voice, the burden of which was, 'for I loves the tossin' say!' Bell met them ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and form in an orderly line. But the quartette is as unmusical as ever. Louder than before there arose among them squabbling and wrangling as to how they ought to be seated. It happened that a Nightingale came flying that way, attracted by their noise. At once they all entreated it to ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... his surroundings he was cramped and cold, and hungry as a wolf. From below two deep, unmusical snores rose comfortingly. There was but one thing to do—and Billy must prepare ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... style as peculiarly suited to the Latin language, which, being scanty and unmusical, requires more redundancy than the Greek. The simplicity of the Attic writers would make Latin composition bold and tame. To be perspicuous, the Latin must be full. Thus Arnold thinks that what Tacitus gained in energy he lost in elegance and perspicuity. But Cicero, dealing with a barren and unphilosophical ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... one word being spoken in behalf of her feathered vocalists. Nay, I consider her very frogs have been belied: if it were not for the monotony of their notes, I really consider they are not quite unmusical. The green frogs are very handsome, being marked over with brown oval shields on the most vivid green coat: they are larger in size than the biggest of our English frogs, and certainly much handsomer in every respect. Their note ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... down, thought vaguely that I never could ride with the stirrups so short, but that there was not time to lengthen them; took my feet peevishly out of them altogether, and dashed down, that winding way between King's sheds and corrals while the Ragged H boys kept King's men at bay, and the unmusical medley of shots and yells followed us far in the darkness of the pass. At the last fence, where we perforce drew rein to make a free passage for our horses, I looked back, like one Mrs. Lot. A red glare lit the whole sky behind us ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... hour the boy wandered about the well-kept little estate of his father before beginning to return towards the villa embowered in flowers that had been carefully trained over the stone walls, when, going round to the back, he heard a burring sound as if someone with a very unmusical voice were trying to sing; and, hurrying along a path, after muttering impatiently, the boy made for an open window, grasping the fact that he had had all his walk and search for nothing, and that, if he had gone round to the two rooms set apart for the old soldier's ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... was a noisy and rather inconsequential effort. The preacher had little to say, but he roared that little out in a harsh, unmusical voice accompanied by much slapping of his hands and pounding of the table. Towards the end he lowered his voice and began to play upon the feelings of his willing hearers, and when he had won his meed of sobs and tears, when he had sufficiently probed old wounds and made them ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... things that constitute practical honesty that some of his opinions would have considerably astonished St. Paul. He liked reading the prayers, for the making of them vocal in the church was pleasant to him, and he had a not unmusical voice. He visited the sick—with some repugnance, it is true, but without delay, and spoke to them such religious commonplaces as occurred to him, depending mainly on the prayers belonging to their condition for the right ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... the girls' school at Cetinje. The Scotchman had suggested the gusla as a substitute, and had been met with derisive laughter, for he had made the suggestion in all good faith. He was one of the most unmusical men I have ever met. The professor had followed this up with a learned discourse on the gusla, and the lesson to be learnt from it in the origin and development of modern music, when suddenly the sounds of a violin, being tuned in the room behind us, arrested his ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... his not elegant person; and a complexion rather pale. She thought he had quite a careless, if not a slightly rakish look; but I believe a man, even in that light, would have seen in him something manly and far from unattractive. He had a rather gruff but not unmusical voice, with what some might have thought a thread of pathos in it. He always reminded certain of his friends of the portrait of Jean Paul in the Paris edition of his works. He was hardly above the middle height, and, I am sorry to say, wore his hat on the back of his head, which ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... climb! The sun had set, and the long twilight was giving way to darkness when they came down the trail into the upper end of the camp. Some embryo artist was painfully overworking an accordion, while a dog rendered melancholy by the unmusical noise, occasionally accompanied him with prolonged howls. A belated ore trailer, with the front wagon creaking under the whine of the brakes and the chains of the six horses clanking, lurched down from a road on the far side of the long, straggling street, and passed them, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... color, and eyes that were cold and lusterless, but searching—these were the salient characteristics of a countenance that once seen, was never forgotten. His voice had a peculiar, piercing quality, though it was not unmusical in sound. In giving commands he spoke in brusque tones and in an imperious manner. It was not long till every man in the division had seen him and knew him well. In a few days he had fairly earned the soubriquet "Kill Cavalry," which clung to him ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... dollars which we brought from Mourzuk are now nearly all gone—I have only eight or ten left. Friend Sidi Jalef Waled Sakertaf—how unmusical the name sounds!—will get little money from us, and must content himself with our baggage, if he will play the robber. For the cousin ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... calico-engravers', and others have to exclude qualified women from those branches, though peculiarly fitted for them; but not more so than they are for the practice of medicine, God having made them, and not men, the medical, and unmusical, sex. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... has been wasted in trying to teach music to unmusical people would pay our national debt twice over, and leave a competency for every orphan in ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as well as one's slops, and to cling to one's bones as it clung to the ship's gear. The deck was slippery and cold, everything, except the funnel, was sticky and cold, and the fog-horn made day and night hideous with noises like some unmusical giant trying in vain to hit the note Fa. The density of the fog varied. Sometimes we could not see each other a few feet off, at others we could see pretty well what we were about on the vessel, but could see ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... so much fervor, that, although it was so unmusical, I felt more like crying than laughing, to think it was for one of those Chinese women who have been so badly spoken of; the papers often saying that they are all prostitutes, that there are no families among them, and that the California people must purify their State by getting rid of them. ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... loaves. Behind her, with an amusing show of dignity, stalked a large heron, an elegant bird, with long, scarlet legs, gray plumage, and a gracefully curved neck. When the bird reached the threshold it stopped, and without warning gave vent to a prolonged series of shrill, unmusical sounds. The startled priest sat up in his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring; it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more than ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... more toward decadence. And the pity of it is, that the English get judged abroad chiefly by what their own journalists say of them,— thus, if Sarasate is coldly criticised, foreigners laugh at the 'UNmusical English,' whereas, the fact is that the nation itself is NOT unmusical, but its musical critics mostly are. They are very often picked out of the rank and file of the dullest Academy students and contrapuntists, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... that All are Praising." She is as far from it as Susan B. Anthony was when pushing her ballot into the box. And all the difference between the musical saint spilling the precious liquid and the unmusical saint offering her vote is, that the latter tried to kill several birds with one stone, and the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to believe in an England where music was perhaps the dominant passion of the people as it is to understand how this should have been forgotten in a more musical age than ours. Until the time of Handel's arrival in this country there was ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... problem of the morning came to him. These sounds—he realized now how he loved them. Verily they were a part of his life. Mid them he had been bred; of them as of food he had grown. That whistle, thin and unmusical; that elusive, indescribable call of prairie male; all these homely sounds that meant so much to ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... the Diary is started, chatty, full of gossip and incident. She writes, October 30th: "A ballad-singer was this morning singing beneath my window in a strain most unmusical and melancholy. My own name caught my ear, and I sent Thomas out to buy the song. Here ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... the bait whole. "Unworldly" put the match, and he flamed up. He possessed, it seemed, the other necessary qualifications; for a thin tenor voice, not unmusical, was his, and also a smattering of Hebrew which he had picked up at Cambridge because he liked the fine, high-sounding names of deities and angels to be found in that language. Courage and imagination he lumped ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... what I would more especially point out is that the religious and the musical developments proceed side by side. Just as the stricter purists in the one field are, in the other, generally inclined, even if themselves unmusical, to uphold plain-song and the Elizabethans and only such modern work as is inspired by something like a similar spirit, aloof and strong, so those whose religious mentality is of a more pliable type are, if musically indifferent, generally ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... birthday, Bryce divined that his father was closer to him than motherly Mrs. Tully or the half-breed girl, albeit the housekeeper sang to him the lullabys that mothers know while the Digger girl, improvising blank verse paeans of praise and prophecy, crooned them to her charge in the unmusical monotone of her tribal tongue. His father, on the contrary, wasted no time in singing, but would toss him to the ceiling or set him astride his foot and swing him until he screamed in ecstasy. Moreover, his father took him on wonderful journeys which no other member of the household had ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the set formula with which Kazmah opened all interviews. He spoke with a slight and not unmusical accent. He lowered his hand again. The gaze of those brilliant eyes remained fixed upon the woman's face. Moistening her ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... father, Lord of Stoutenburg, was of a far different mould. We have seen him at an earlier period of this narrative attached to the embassy of Francis Aerssens in Paris, bearing then from another estate the unmusical title of Craimgepolder, and giving his subtle and dangerous chief great cause of complaint by his irregular, expensive habits. He had been however rather a favourite with Henry IV., who had so profound ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to her. With an unmusical laugh she stood up, shaking the letter to the floor. Romance! She was no longer a girl; she was a woman of five and twenty; and what should a woman know of romance? Ah, there had been a time when ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... thanks to God among the nations. God's mercies bind, and, if rightly felt, will joyfully impel, the receiver to spread His name as far as his voice can reach. Love is sometimes silent, but gratitude must speak. The most unmusical voice is tuned to melody by God's great blessings received and appreciated, and they need never want a theme who can tell what the Lord has done for their souls. 'Then shall... the tongue of the dumb sing.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... formidable-looking intervals resolve themselves into something quite natural and generally not difficult of apprehension by a musical ear. Unfortunately we are compelled to learn music through the medium of a keyed instrument, generally through the most unmusical of instruments, the piano, and we learn theory largely through the eye and the reason instead of through the ear. The problems of harmony will seem much simpler if we remember that its basis is the interval—music does not know "notes" as such, but only intervals—that the number ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight |
