"Wailing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There was no shutting in these sounds. People moved out of the rooms below and on either side, because they could get no sleep; and till the arrival of Nurse Swift, there was no rest for poor Mrs. Ashe, who could not keep away from her darling for a moment while that mournful wailing sounded in her ears. ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... wailing sounds were now floating all round us, and presently, making itself rapidly audible above them, we became conscious of a deep, fierce, bellowing roar that seemed to be approaching us on our starboard beam, the schooner's ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... how long the 'moment of dissolution' might really be, or how terrible. This was just such a terror as only hypochondriacs can provide for themselves. She told me long ago that a misfortune was often preceded by the dream frequently repeated which she gives to 'Jane Eyre,' of carrying a little wailing child, and being unable to still it. She described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing, lying inert, as sick children do, while she walked about in some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church. The misfortunes ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... silence fell on the house: a deep and profound stillness, as though seas and wind had hushed their wailing speech to listen for the answer to the knock. The birds, too, were silent. The house remained immutably quiet. Charles Turold bent down, and peered through the keyhole, but could see nothing within ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... tragedies, in that stern land, are common, and always the people seem steeled to meet them. And so in silence they led the way into the cabin, and in silence they sat, uttering no word, while Skipper Ed related what had happened. And though still there was no crying and no wailing from the stricken couple, Skipper Ed knew that they felt no less keenly their loss, and he knew that they had lost what was dearer to them ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... counsellor's son, and said: "You are truly the body of wisdom." And then suddenly a great wailing of grief-stricken people was heard: "Alas! Alas! The king's little son ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... one favored, Him father would not bless, not bless. But him the white one favored, He got at once his "Yes." The red one now was paling, yes, With sorrow, psalms, and wailing, yes. The white one turned so red, so red, The red one ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... brook, who taught thee The feeling in my heart a guest? Ye northern nightingales, where caught ye The wailing stolen from my breast? With evening's red the fairies playing, In clouds my Ing'borg's form disclose, But Freyja, jealousy displaying. Away ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... later, in our desperation, with bluestone. But we were dealing with the virulent gonococcus, and we neither expected nor obtained much result from these measures. In a couple of hours more the eyes were beginning to exude pus, and the poor infant was wailing ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... dictate of conscience, yield to no moral or ethical code; one who would play Rome against Wall Street, with his own unfortunate country as the stake; one who would hurl the fairest sons of Colombia at one another's throats to bulge his own coffers; and then wring from the wailing widows their poor substance for Masses to move their beloved dead through ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... night in the village, and there was wailing in Timbo when the Fullah returned with the tragic story. In fact, such was the distracted excitement both on the sea-shore and in the settlement, that none of my companions had eyes to observe an episode of the drama which had been played that ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... days later the slaughter began. At daybreak the signal was given, and at the sound of the war whoop the seemingly peaceful Indians were turned suddenly into raging demons who, with tomahawk and torch in hand, sowed destruction and death around. So the land was filled with blood and wailing, pleasant homesteads were laid in ruins, and only heaps of smouldering ashes marked where ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... was being spread that the monster had been taken, and footsteps were heard approaching, quite a little crowd hiding the reptile from the boys, and out of which crowd rose directly after a low wailing sound. ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... Stop the sunrise! The murmuring night trembled with the summons so earnestly expected, so dreaded, so desired. And as, long ago, the voice rang out at midnight along the Syrian shore, wailing that great Pan was dead, but in the same moment the choiring angels whispered, "Glory to God in the highest, for Christ is born," so, if the stern alarm of that April night seemed to many a wistful and loyal heart ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Jack waited until he came down the steps, and then called to him cheerfully. They linked arm-in-arm. The hail and rain had turned now to fine, hard snow, and the wind seemed to scurry through the deserted streets like a forlorn, wailing spirit. ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... a wailing storm, high among the tree tops, passed over them as they entered the dry woods on a run; branches crashed earthward, twig's and limbs crackled down in whirling confusion. But there was nothing in the woods ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... beef, please beef, pleasure is not wailing. Please beef, please be carved clear, please ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... set on foot by a charitable government to relieve the necessities of their starving fellow-countrymen should frequently have a diametrically opposite effect. Into the Ministerial cheers that followed the Premier's last statement broke a sound outside the House, a sound as of much wailing, the howling of innumerable newsboys, the cries of 'Woe, woe!' the dirge of an empire qui s'en va! With those now familiar noises was mingled, but at a greater distance, a strain ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... Suddenly a horrible sound sent a chill of terror through him—a gentle noise as of naked flesh touching the waxed floor—and before he could recover from the shock occasioned by the sound, the voices of many men, voices of men groaning or wailing in some hideous ecstasy, broke the stillness, crying—"Father of all sin and crime, Prince of all despair and anguish, come to us, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Grandmother take on something awful! She ordered me out of her sight up to my little bedroom till Grandfather should come home. I sat there listening to her wailing and moaning and asking the dear Mother of God what she had done that such a cruel, cruel misfortune should have befallen her. Poor Granny! Mother Roberts, I was longing to go down and comfort her, but I durs'n't. So all that I could do was ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... he presently told her where he had been, but she would not listen to the cause of his detention at the hospital. It was more than enough that he had been out walking with her,—with her, in the dead of night. That seemed the only fact she cared to grasp, and that she crooned over with bitter wailing until ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... speak she heard the little wailing cry which Estralla always gave when in trouble, and then: "Don't be skeered, Missy! It's nobuddy. I jes' ...
— Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter • Alice Turner Curtis
... A wailing cry broke from her; she rose to her feet, and stood upright. Every successive movement was made so lightly, so gracefully, so easily, that she seemed to be no human being, but one of Ossian's maids of the mist. ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... frightened cur—a sound that wrung Thyrsis' very heart. And oh, the sight of the little body—purple, a mass of eruptions, and with beads of perspiration upon it! Corydon's mother came to help her through this ordeal, and would sit for hours upon hours, rocking the wailing infant in ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... long I had been swimming—it seemed to me, in my anxiety to get well away from the ship, to have been but a very few minutes— when the tumultuous sounds of contention aboard the doomed Saturn suddenly changed to a long wailing scream, and, glancing back over my shoulder, I saw, upreared against the star-lit sky, the fore end of the ship standing almost vertically out of the water, while at the same instant another loud boom reached my ears, proclaiming ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... the broken lyres that rest Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,— But o'er their silent sister's breast The wild flowers who will stoop to number? A few can touch the magic string, And noisy Fame is proud to win them;— Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... sit round the scaffold, one of the nearest relations commences a doleful crying, when all the others join in, and continue their wailing for some time. Then for awhile their tears are wiped away. After smoking for a short time another of the family commences again, and the others join in. This is continued for a day and night, and then each one ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... having his after-dinner pipe, as he called it, one which he invariably enjoyed without lighting the tobacco and with a handkerchief over his head, Will was at liberty to go out unquestioned. Accordingly he hurried down to the harbour, where the tide was out, the gulls were squealing and wailing, and apparently playing a miniature game of King of the Castle upon a little bit of black rock which appeared above the sea a couple of ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... shuba, and leaving the inn walked across the bridge into a poor narrow street of wretched-looking houses, many of them built of wood. A man limped slowly past me, wounded in the leg, and leaving blood-spots behind him as he went. An old woman was seated in a doorway, her face buried in her hands, wailing— ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... by the open door and listened—listened to a strange, wailing chant, which rose and fell with almost ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wailing continued for a while. With his own hand he took the noose from his neck and, now that the flames had died away to nothing but spasmodic spurts above a dull red underglow, there was no one in the watching ring ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... you have seen the demon hunter, no doubt," replied the keeper at the close of the recital. "I neither saw the light, nor heard the laughter, nor the wailing cry you speak of; but Bawsey crouched at my feet and whined, and I knew some evil thing was at hand. Heaven shield us!" he exclaimed, as the hound crouched at his feet, and directed her gaze towards the oak, uttering a low ominous whine, "she is ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... moment a peculiar long-drawn wailing sound came from the open window of the west tower, and a dog lying curled up on the grass in the sun sprang up and began to bark, finishing off with a long, low howl, as it stretched out its neck towards the ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... is seen to glide, No cates ambrosial are supplied, But one poor fisher's rude and scanty store Is all He asks (and more than needs) Who men and angels daily feeds, And stills the wailing sea-bird ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... imagined, presented themselves before her mental vision, expanded till they filled the heavens with their bulk, and then shrank and shrank, and vanished into nothing. The word "wife" struck upon her ears, and seemed to go wailing away, "wife, wife, wife," through all the illimitable halls of sound, till they were filled with echoes, and sound itself fell dead against ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... former has its foundation in the scene which is present, while the latter hovers betwixt recollection and hope. Let me not be understood as affirming that everything flows in one unvarying strain of wailing and complaint, and that the voice of melancholy is always loudly heard. As the austerity of tragedy was not incompatible with the joyous views of the Greeks, so that romantic poetry whose origin I have been describing, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... wailing of that last word cannot be expressed by mere type. There were other verses, too, and as the new boys filed off into the path leading up to the Academy with their bags and other encumbrances, the uniformed boys, en masse, got ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... twelve o'clock, just as they began to think it was about time to turn in, they heard the most ghastly noise in the house. It wasn't a shriek, or a howl, or a yell, or anything they could put a name to. It was an indeterminate, inexplicable shiver and shudder of sound, which went wailing out of the window. The officer had been at Cold Harbor, but he felt himself getting colder this time. Eliphalet knew it was the ghost who haunted the house. As this weird sound died away, it was followed by another, sharp, short, blood-curdling in its intensity. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... lonely night. While they halted, the scream of a catamount broke from the woods skirting the bay between the capes, and repeated itself in the echo that wandered from depth to depth of the frozen wilderness, and seemed to die wailing away at the point where it first ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... Friday the afflicted widow took the last look at the face of the dead, and after she had left the impressive funeral ceremonies were performed. The remains were then escorted by the military, their arms reversed, their flags shrouded, and their bands wailing dirges, to the depot where the assassination took place, where they were placed on a railroad train to be conveyed to Cleveland with his family and a large number of ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We call aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death, hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... deep, dark passageway between high walls Lutorius, with some of the Emperor's aides, was waiting for them at a small door. He guided them to where they were eagerly expected. As they threaded the corridors, they heard, at first far off, then closer and closer, the sound of a child wailing, bawling, blubbering. Even in the Palace, Campia was an ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... rally the remainder of his men, which at last he succeeded in doing, and about forty of them gained our forecastle, from which they forced our weak crew, and retained possession, not following up the success, but apparently wailing till they were seconded by the Spaniard's boarding us on our lee quarter, which would have placed us between two fires, and compelled us ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... a turmoil and a wailing to speak about. Women folk crowded out of the huts and kissed the white feet of the palfrey that bore the ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... that same little, funny, freckled face into all sorts of grimaces; and when the baby laughed and crowed, and made chirrupy sounds, she was abundantly satisfied. Peter, too, was most ingenious in keeping off the fatal sounds of baby's wailing: he would blow into a paper bag, and then when the baby had screwed up her face, and was preparing to let out a whole volley of direful notes, he would clap his hands violently on the bag and cause it to explode, thereby absolutely ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... the wailing of the norther grew fainter, and towards night died away. On the fourteenth it veered round, and the coast of ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... letter had been brought to Tzazon, and he had disclosed its contents to the Vandals, they turned to wailing and lamentation, not openly, however, but concealing their feelings as much as possible and avoiding the notice of the islanders, silently among themselves they bewailed the fate which was upon them. And straightway setting in order ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... blankets at the edge. "I've had enough inside work to do since I took in a star boarder to be first-class help around some lady's home." A dead tree crashed outside. "Wow! Listen to that wind! Sounds like a bunch of squaws wailing; maybe it's a war party lost in the Nez Perce Spirit Land. Wish Slim would come." He walked to the door and listened, but he could hear nothing save the howling of ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... dog to the hitching post and as he did so a loud, long, wailing cry broke the silence of the house. It put me in mind of the complaint of the damned which I remembered hearing the minister describe years before at the little schoolhouse in ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... show of authority. Up on the little balconies at each side groups of trouble-makers performed gymnastics on the railings and banisters at seeming peril of their lives until the colored janitor ordered them down. Every now and then, the wailing of a heated, irritable infant rose above the din, to be quieted more or less angrily ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... fulfilled their office here wore masks like the divinities of the under-world. Many were the representatives of Anubis, with the jackal-head, assisted by boys with masks of the so-called child-Horus. At the head of each mummy stood or squatted a wailing-woman with the emblems of Nephthys, and one at its feet with those ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Now with the wailing of the violin her soul grew hungry and sad, and a strange, unchildish fear crept over her, a fear of the years to come—so long and endless they would be, always coming, coming, one after another; and here she was, never ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... Major, gazing straight ahead. And again Mumbles, curled in Patsy's lap, lifted his shaggy head and gave a wailing bark. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... to the door one day by the cries of children in the street, and there was Mr. Lincoln, striding by with two of his boys, both of whom were wailing aloud. 'Why, Mr. Lincoln, what's the matter ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... was unlocked, and I alone knew it. The gay-cat and I begged for mercy. I joined in the pleading and wailing out of sheer cussedness, I suppose. But I did my best. I told a "story" that would have melted the heart of any mug; but it didn't melt the heart of that sordid money-grasper of a shack. When he became convinced that we didn't have any money, he slid the door shut and latched it, then ...
— The Road • Jack London
... subsides in wailing, And, ere the dawning of day, Murmuring fainter and fainter, In the distance ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and fine linen. In the middle of the night they heard a woful outcry. "What outcry again is this?" said Owain. "The Nobleman who owned the Castle is now dead," said the maiden. And a little after daybreak, they heard an exceeding loud clamour and wailing. And Owain asked the maiden what was the cause of it. "They are bearing to the church the body of the ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... the sword after the fleeing murderer and cuts him in two. To Gudrun, who wakes from sleep by his side, he points to Brynhild as the instigator of the crime, and dies. Brynhild rejoices at the sound of Gudrun's wailing. Gudrun cannot find relief for her grief, the tears will not flow. Men and women seek to console her by tales of greater woes befallen them. But still Gudrun cannot weep as she sits by Sigurd's corpse. At last one of the women lifts the cloth from Sigurd's ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... heaped treasures together for the last days, when "miseries were coming upon them," the prospect of which might well drench them in tears and fill them with terror. If these admonitions and warnings were heeded there, would not "the South" break forth into "weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth?" What else are its rich men about, but withholding by a system of fraud, his wages from the laborer, who is wearing himself out under the impulse of fear, in cultivating their fields and producing their ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... us to account ourselves cured. It swoops down upon us when we have neither the strength nor the brains to resent it. Of course there are some superior persons in this world who never were young. Mr. Pedagog, I doubt not, was ushered into this world with all three sets of teeth cut, and not wailing as most infants are, but discussing the most abstruse philosophical problems. His fairy stories were told him, if ever, in words of ten syllables; and his father's first remark to him was doubtless an inquiry as to his opinion on the subject of Latin ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... the eternal Lord In vain would be implored For the remission of one hour of woe, Let us resign even what we have adored, And meet the wave, as we would meet the sword, If not unmoved, yet undismayed, And wailing less for us than those who shall Survive in mortal or immortal thrall, And, when the fatal waters are allayed, Weep for the myriads who can weep no more. 630 Fly, Seraphs! to your own eternal shore, Where winds nor howl, nor waters roar. Our portion is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... food, and all night long he lay moaning, partly with pain, and partly over his own folly in not having begged the doctor to make him several dozens of white slippers, so that in case of accidents he might always have one to put on. However, by-and-by he saw that it was no use weeping and wailing, and commanded that they should search for his lost treasure ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... background burns brightly, and its light grows pale only as dawn breaks slowly over the scene. The rope which the Norns are weaving then suddenly parts beneath their fingers; so they bind the fragments about them and sink slowly into the ground, to join their mother Erda, wailing a prophecy concerning the end of the ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... they entered the gate of the town. "I use my power so that Aponibolinayen will die," he said, and she truly died. "Why is Aponibolinayen dead? The mango fruit which we went to get is worthless now," they said. "Perhaps she is the one they are wailing for," said Algaba of Dagala. When they reached the ladder, "The mango fruit which you went to get is no good at all," said Aponibalagen to them. "Yes, it is. I came because I wish to see her," said Algaba of Dagala. "If it is possible for you to bring her to life, please do so," ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... military instruments stationed in the street, playing not such a festal strain as was suited to the occasion, but a slow funeral march. The drums appeared to be muffled, and the trumpets poured forth a wailing breath, which at once hushed the merriment of the auditors, filling all with wonder, and some with apprehension. The idea occurred to many that either the funeral procession of some great personage had halted in front of the Province House, or that a corpse, in a velvet-covered and gorgeously-decorated ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... away and clear, Through the dusky atmosphere, Let the wailing of the kildee be the only sound we hear: O sad and sweet and low As the memory may know Is the ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... infancy, and it may well be supposed I love you, as if you was my own, and wish as much to see you happy. M. Valancourt, to be sure, I have not known so long, but then I have reason to love him, as though he was my own son. I know how well you love one another, or why all this weeping and wailing?' Emily waved her hand for Theresa to be silent, who, disregarding the signal, continued, 'And how much you are alike in your tempers and ways, and, that, if you were married, you would be the happiest couple in the whole province—then what is ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... a dusky figure came up, caught sight of us behind the barricade, and stopped short. But our prisoner uttered a call, and the dark, pleasant-faced figure came on fearlessly, found the opening we had left, and the next moment was down upon her knees wailing softly and passing her hands over the bandages, ending by laying her face against our prisoner's breast, and ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... picture, then, the men, women, and even children, who were gathered in anxious groups around the mouth of the pit, eagerly waiting to see if any of their kindred were among the hapless victims; and when the brave rescue party would appear above the shaft, bearing in their arms the sufferers, wailing cries would rend the very air, as some poor woman recognised her son or her 'good man' in the crushed and mangled form they laid so ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... the shores of my Eastern sea, Heard over the waves the little voice, Saw the divine infant where she woke mournfully wailing, amid the roar of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of falling buildings, Was not so sick from the blood in the gutters running, nor from the single corpses, nor those in heaps, nor those borne away in the tumbrils, Was not so desperate at the battues ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... shines; Shimmering mountains, throwing downward on the slopes a mazy glare Where the noonday glory sails through gulfs of calm and glittering air; Stately mountains, high and hoary, piled with blocks of amber cloud, Where the fading twilight lingers, when the winds are wailing loud; Grand old mountains, overbeetling brawling brooks and deep ravines, Where the moonshine, pale and mournful, flows on rocks ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... in the copse," said I, for I fancied that growling, wailing sound came sweeping up to us ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... for the shore, and as he approached the lament was repeated. The sounds were very distinct, and the voice of wailing was very sorrowful for Owasso to listen to, and it touched him the more that it died away at the close, into a long-drawn howl, like that ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... guesser of riddles, reader of rebuses and universal solver of missing words—looked over the unfathomable desert and these few pages, with the worried, hopeless expression of one who is obliged at last to give it up. And then the wailing voice of a woman, toiling up the steep steps of the pyramid, was heard above the creaking of the Ibis: "'Arry Axes! Where ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... Soon the wailing strains of the familiar Irish melody were breathing through the cabin. "Kathleen Mavourneen" followed, and the stranger sat as if fascinated. At "'Way Down Upon the Suwanee River" he dropped his head in his hands and ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... at his prayers—she is dead though; for I heard her wraith wailing and shrieking up the woods that night as I stood in the priory close. It seemed like, as it were, making its way through the air from Lathom, for the smell ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... few fluttering rags. It was evident that the poor creature was in the very last stages of exhaustion, for she reeled and staggered as she came toward us with outstretched, appealing arms; and presently, when we were still a few yards apart, with a low, wailing cry she fell prone and lay huddled up in a pathetic little heap in the long grass, while the dogs dashed forward and stood alternately nuzzling her and looking up to us with plaintive whines. The next instant I swung out of my saddle, and, bending down, raised the unfortunate ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... nightingale, the nightingale whose loved ones are lost: comp. Virgil, Georg. iv. 511: "As the nightingale wailing in the poplar shade plains for her lost young, ... while she weeps the night through, and sitting on a bough, reproduces her piteous melody, and fills the country round with the plaints of her sorrow." Lorn and lost are cognate words, the former being common in the compound ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Marion had been buried and I was up at the mine attending to some last arrangements so that I could leave. I had made up my mind to take Winslow—that's what we'd named the little boy—out to Shanghai, for Tung-sha was no place for a motherless youngster. In broad daylight I heard the natives wailing and yelling, and then the mine workers began to cry out that Red Knife had swooped down from the hills. The white men who were with me pulled out their guns and we ran down to the bungalows. We were too late, however; ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... from the ravine they had descended, and march on very slowly. Something was wrong evidently; horsemen were at once despatched by the Ras to ascertain the result of the expedition. They returned with a doleful tale, and the Amba soon rang with the wailing of widows and orphans; eleven dead, thirty wounded, scores of fire-arms lost, the fugitives at large, was in sum the intelligence they brought back ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... and I took shelter. I felt calmer; I had unpacked myself of words. Rather mournfully I now looked out into the night, and, as it were, ceased to speak to it, and became a listener. A song of sorrow came from the city, the wailing of mothers uncomforted, of children orphaned, uncared for, of forsaken ones. I heard again the old reproach of the children sitting in the market. "Here surely," I said, "where so many are gathered together, there is more solitude and ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... evening passed. We rested well in large hard beds with dry rough sheets. But there was a fretful wind abroad, which went wailing round the convent walls and rattling the doors in its deserted corridors. One of our party had been placed by himself at the end of a long suite of apartments, with balconies commanding the wide sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. He confessed in the morning to having passed a restless ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... shipload of these poor creatures leaves Honolulu for the little Isle of Molokai there is great wailing by the relatives of those sent away, for they know ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... lording, honoured wight, What avails you to weep so? What your wailing, what your woe? I may ne'er your darling be, For your father hateth me; All your kin thereto agree. For your sake I'll pass the sea, Get me ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... rain outside lulled her into slumber for a few minutes, she was sure to start up in bed with a vague, singular impression that some one had called her name. After midnight, when the storm fell, the shrill wailing of the rising wind seemed to forebode disaster. Although she believed Gilbert to be safely housed in Chester, the fact constantly slipped from her memory, and she shuddered at every change in the wild weather as if he were ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... chemists, on twenty rival beanstalks, came into existence. Then, the Furies would be seen, waving their lurid torches up and down the confused perspectives of embankments and arches—would be heard, too, wailing and shrieking. Then, the Station would be full of palpitating trains, as in the day; with the heightening difference that they were not so clearly seen as in the day, whereas the Station walls, starting forward under the ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... detector, he slid up the tuning handle for high waves. Static, far removed, trickled in. Then a faint, musical wailing like a violin's E-string pierced this. The violin was the government station at Arlington, Virginia, transmitting a storm warning to ships in the South Atlantic. For five minutes the wailing persisted. Sliding the tuning handle downward, Peter ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... letters, packages. Here comes news from home, sweet, tender, tearful, hopeful, sad, distressing news; joyful news of victory and sad news of defeat; pictures of happy homes, or sad wailing over homes destroyed! But the mail has arrived and we cannot change the burden it has brought. We can only pity the man who goes empty away from the little group assembled about the mail-bag, and rejoice with him who strolls ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... country of grief. I never yet knew one family which had not lost a cherished member through the national curse; and thus at all times we are like the wailing nation whereof the first-born in every house was stricken. It is an awful sight, and as I sit here alone I can send my mind over the sad England which I know, and see the army of the mourners. They say that the calling of the wounded on the field of Borodino was like the roar of the sea: on ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... away from him. The dogs whined and slunk close to the box. Across the Barren came a low, wailing wind. ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... passionate movements, she snatched the child from her breast, carried him upstairs screaming and laid him on her bed. When the nurse came she found him writhing and wailing, and his mother on her knees beside the bed, her face hidden ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... the roar of motors just over the barracks, and, at the same time, the siren sounded the alarm in a series of prolonged, wailing shrieks. Some belated pilot was still in the air. We rushed out to the field just as the flares were being lighted and placed on the ground in the shape of an immense T, with the cross-bar facing in the direction from which the wind was coming. By this time the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... leaping down beside the wailing dog, that pushed its head into his bosom like a sick child. "Oh, God, but you shall die ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... flustered by my presence Rose the peewits, just as all those years back, wailing soft and loud, And revealing their pale pinions like a fitful phosphorescence Up ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... passing a thin, wailing sound came to the ears of both. Seated with his back to the wall was a blind fiddler with a tin cup strapped to a knee. He was out of bounds; he had no right on Broadway; but he possessed a singular advantage over the law. He could not be forced to move on without his guide—if he were honestly blind. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... content by day. It was only of the night-time she was afraid, when strange-voiced creatures were never silent an hour, weird cries from the scrub pierced the air, and there arose from the plantation below wild sounds, sometimes of revelry over a feast, the beating of tom-toms, and wailing of voices as the natives conducted their heathen worship, or indulged in noisy quarrels likely to end in ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... and he can see again her soft, bare arms, her pretty baby-neck in her white dinner-gown, and her lovely, earnest eyes. Then she is gone, and her passing seems to him "like the ceasing of exquisite music," and nothing is left to him but the wailing of the rising night-wind, and the memory of a perfect girl-face that he knows will haunt ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... stood there shivering in the dark and wondering how to free herself, she heard far away in the bog a voice calling through the night. It was a wailing cry, dying away in despair. She listened and listened, and the repeated cry came nearer; then she heard footsteps—halting, stumbling and slipping. At last, by the dim light of the stars, she saw ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... without it is the baby;" here Geraldine burst into a wailing storm of tears. "I gave them every bit," she sobbed—"every bit, sir, but the rush-lights; and them they wouldn't eat, sir, or I never would have touched them. But mother is gone off her head, and baby ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the friend of God on high; Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage With Amalek's ungracious progeny; Or how the royal bard did groaning lie Beneath the stroke of Heav'n's avenging ire; Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry; Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire; Or other holy seers that tune the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... ambush, and fasten her sharp claws in the back of a poor little ground-bird, which had been hopping from twig to twig, chirping and twittering very cheerfully. The little bird fluttered, gasped, and uttered wailing cries, as it ineffectually labored to free itself from the power of its captor, until Emma and Anna, unable longer to witness its distress, sprang out the window, and, rushing down the garden, liberated the little prisoner, ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... thirty or forty yards from the gate along the narrow lane that faced it, my presence troubled him and his mate only too much. They would flit round my head, emitting the two strongly contrasted sounds with which they express solicitude—the clear, thin, plaintive, or wailing note, and the low, jarring sound—an alternate lamenting and girding. One day when I approached the nest, they displayed more anxiety than usual, fluttering close to me, wailing and croaking more vehemently than ever, when all at once the ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... loophole Father Robineau watched his chapel burning, with its meagre enrichments, added year by year. But this was nothing, when his eye dropped to the two or three figures lying face downward on the road. He turned himself toward the wailing of a ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... strain, Haughty thought be far from me; Tones of penitence and pain, Moanings of the Tropic sea; Low and tender in the cell Where a captive sits in chains, Crooning ditties treasured well From his Afric's torrid plains. Sole estate his sire bequeathed— Hapless sire to hapless son— Was the wailing song he breathed, And his chain when life ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... of moonlight across the floor, she was once more the representative of all that is most poetical and romantic in physical beauty. Nay, more than this; as she flung her white arms above her head, or pointed to the shrinking and fainting figure of her rival while she uttered her wailing traditional prophecy of woe, her whole personality seemed to be invested with a dramatic force of which there had been no trace in the long and violent scene with the Prince. It was as though she was in some sort capable of expressing herself ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Beach there thy ship on the shore of ocean, and go thyself to the dwelling of Hades.[Footnote: Ha'-des] There is a certain rock, and near to it meet two streams, the river of fire, and the river of wailing. Dig there a trench; it shall be a cubit [Footnote: cubit, a foot and a half] long and a, cubit broad; pour out therein a drink-offering to the dead; and sprinkle white barley thereon. And as thou doest these things, entreat the dead, and promise that when thou shalt come ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... Xerxes our free shores to tread Rush'd in hot haste, and dream'd the perilous main With scourge and fetter to chastise and chain, —What see'st? Wild wailing o'er their husbands dead, Persia's pale matrons wrapt in weeds of woe, And red with gore the gulf of Salamis! To prove our triumph certain, to foreshow The utter ruin of our Eastern foe, No single instance this; Miltiades and Marathon recall, See, with his patriot few, Leonidas Closing, Thermopylae, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Why were they not with you at the Table? Are you men of love? Are you men of love, or by lack of love are you shutting the door of the Kingdom against your sons with their fightings and their quarrelings?" Then, raising his hands high, he lifted his voice in a kind of wailing chant: "Woe unto you! Woe unto you! Your house is left unto you desolate, and the voice of love is crying over you. Ye would not! Ye would not! O, Lamb of God, have mercy upon us! O, Christ, with the pierced hands, save us!" Again he paused, looking upward, ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... "The wailing of Gilles's decimated flock reaches his ears. In silence he begins an investigation and, setting spies upon the Marshal, waits only for an opportune moment to begin the combat. And Gilles suddenly commits an inexplicable crime ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... all through Holy Week, from Palm Sunday until Easter Day, and I attended all the services that I could attend, and so kept the week of our Lord's Passion in the Holy City. On Good Friday I went to the "Wailing-place of the Jews" by the west wall of the enclosure around the Mosque of Omar, an old remain of the Temple of Solomon, and listened to their lamentations, tears, prayers and chants. They bewailed their city, their Temple, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... came the tread of a returning force—too late!—and in the deepest shades of the jungle a native woman, with horror-stricken face, pressed forward through tangle and thorn, with a living, wailing bundle clasped ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... wilds, whilst lying in your hammock you will hear this goat-sucker lamenting like one in deep distress. A stranger would never conceive it to be the cry of a bird. He would say it was the departing voice of a midnight murdered victim or the last wailing of Niobe for her poor children before she was turned into stone. Suppose yourself in hopeless sorrow, begin with a high loud note, and pronounce "ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha," each note lower and lower, till the last is scarcely heard, pausing a moment ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... ceremony. The priests clad in white walked in the van of the procession pouring libations of clarified butter on the sacred fire blazing in an ornamental vessel. And Brahmanas, and Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas, and Sudras by thousands followed the deceased king, loudly wailing in these accents, 'O prince, where dost thou go, leaving us behind, and making us forlorn and wretched for ever?' And Bhishma, and Vidura, and the Pandavas, also all wept aloud. At last they came to a romantic wood on the banks of the Ganga. There they laid ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... ulla, ulla, ulla," keeping on perpetually. When I passed streets that ran northward it grew in volume, and houses and buildings seemed to deaden and cut it off again. It came in a full tide down Exhibition Road. I stopped, staring towards Kensington Gardens, wondering at this strange, remote wailing. It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice for ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... in the marisches boometh the bittern, Nicker the Soul-less sits with his ghittern, Sits inconsolable, friendless and foeless, Wailing ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... It may represent the original primitive cry of her species,—totally unmodified by centuries of domestication. It begins with a stifled moan, like the moan of a bad dream,— mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of wind,—sinks quavering into a chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... scant, no doubt, Yet to the woman looking out, Watching and waiting, no serenade, Love song, or midnight roundelay Said what that whistle seemed to say: "To my trust true, So love to you! Working or wailing, good ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... will the wailing-women come, And I go the way I shall not return. My spirit is spent, the grave is ready for me Truly I am ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of the conscripts clanked in the river villages; the wailing of the women affrighted the pigeons in a thousand dovecotes on the Nile; the dust of despair was heaped upon the heads of the old, who knew that their young would no more return, and that the fields of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... nursing him, washing him from time to time, and keeping the flies away from him; but they apparently do not attempt any measures for curing him, their offices only beginning when he is regarded as dying. In the meantime they all wail, and there are also a number of other women wailing outside the house. ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... the least attempt being made by his people for his liberation. The other Indians were then suffered to depart with the news for his tribe, that unless the goods were brought to us in twenty-four hours, their chief would be put to death. Our stratagem succeeded: soon after we heard wailing and lamentation in the village, and they presently brought us part of the guns, some brass kettles, and a variety of smaller articles, protesting that this was all their share of the plunder. Keeping our chief as a hostage, we passed to ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... wailing of the moose-bird With a plaintive note and low; And the skating of the red ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... feed on blood. Her festive bowls Should be rank gall: and round her haunted room Wild, wailing ghosts and monitory owls Should flit forever shrieking death ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... came rushing up, pushing to get closer ... and to see. They tore the poor devil's clothes open to find out where he was hurt, others ran for help, while fresh swarms of folk came crowding up and the silence died in an uproar of questions and tramping and the wailing of women. He lay there, with his peaceful face turned to one side, lay on his back, seemingly uninjured; a few drops of blood trickled from his mouth. His eyes were closed like those of ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... ready we waited for the "zero" hour. Exactly at the designated time the artillery opened. It was as though all the hounds of hell were let loose. Such a wailing and screeching and hissing as filled the air, from the eighteen-pounders ("whizz-bangs"), which seemed to just shave our own parapet, to the gigantic missiles from the "How-guns," as the Howitzers are affectionately called, each with its own peculiar noise. The ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... appreciated it all. And he did seem to, for after caressing Kate, he looked about as if in quest of the missing one. Gradually he seemed to become convinced that Richard was not there; again was heard the old wailing howl; but this time it was more prolonged, more despairing. Faithful creature! Know you not that summer's gentle gale and winter's howling storm have swept over the grave of him ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... pleasures and the fiercest delights of Mahomet's paradise, I see none but the most terrible images. I have visions of my beloved Venice full of children's faces, distorted, like those of the dying; of women covered with dreadful wounds, torn and wailing; of men mangled and crushed by the copper sides of crashing vessels. I begin to see Venice as she is, shrouded in crape, stripped, robbed, destitute. Pale phantoms ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... if no money," and she went on with her damnable singing, like a lost soul wailing for its ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... the war has thrown up the sordid passions, the hidden reserves of destructive hate and cruelty in our common human soul. In war all things are permissible. To murder, to maim, to destroy, to deceive, to make hideous waste of fertile land, to cause weeping and wailing amongst the innocent—these are the necessities of warfare. They are the commonplace incidents of war. There are others. It brings to the surface strata of human nature to which culture has never descended. It explodes our humanitarian ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... this spot to be haunted by the wailing spirit of a woman in a gray robe, who had been poisoned by a jealous lover. La Corriveau gave him sweatmeats of the manna of St. Nicholas, which the woman ate from his hand, and fell dead at his feet in this trysting-place, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... hand towards her with some unformed idea of sympathy. He murmured vague words of comfort, as he might have done to a wailing child that had hurt itself; but he had no idea how to still the tempestuous grief ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... was the sound of wailing. Casey tried not to guess what that meant. He tied William and went to the ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... died and who have been brought back again by magic. They have no tongues, the Esemkofu, for had they tongues they would cry aloud to mortals the awful secrets of the dead, therefore, they can but utter a wailing like that of a babe. Surely one may hear them in the forests at night as they wail "Ai!—ah! Ai—ah!" among ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... cabin in which we found seven or eight attenuated young creatures, with a mother who had pawned her cloak and could not venture out to beg for bread because she was not fit to be seen in the streets. Hearing the voice of wailing from a cluster of huts further up the hill, we proceeded to them, and entered one, and found several persons weeping over the dead body of a woman lying by the wall near the door. Stretched upon the ground here and there lay several sick ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... Flowed in an undertone of woe: Wailing among the moons it came, Sobbing in echoes against the stars; Smothered behind some comet's flame, Lost in the wind of the war-like Mars, —Mingling, ever and anon, With the music's ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... heard.... Then, wailing loud, they ran, Following the nimble Caoilte, man by man, Towards Knockfarrel; leaping on their spears O'er marsh and stream. MacReithin, blind with tears, Tumbled or leapt into a swollen flood That swept him to the sea. But no man stood To help or mourn him, ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie |
