"Babble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Babble of comment and argument! It was a picked fight—anybody could see that. Why should Lapierre come north in the Flagg interests? Lapierre had never worked in a Flagg crew. It was begun so suddenly and was ended so soon! A minute's flash of drama ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... jumble in company, two lights of altogether a different nature; but the party get into a rattling conversation, in which the noisy babble of the College Cubs is ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... maidens, in ornaments and good vestments, in sacrifices, in clouds charged with rain, in full-blown lotuses, and in those stars that bespangle the autumnal firmament. I reside in elephants, in the cow pen, in good seats, and in lakes adorned with full-blown lotuses. I live also in such rivers as babble sweetly in their course, melodious with the music of cranes, having banks adorned with rows of diverse trees, and restored to by Brahmanas and ascetics and others crowned with success. I always reside in those rivers ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Cairns, looking down from the height of his great soberness and the dignity of possessing the oracles and the ordinances, do other than contemn the enthusiasms and excitements of ignorant repentance? How could such as he recognize in the babble of babes the slightest indication of the revealing of truths hid from the wise and prudent; especially since their rejoicing also was that of babes, hence carnal, and accompanied by all the weaknesses and some of the vices ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... A babble of voices told of pursuit,—shouts and gutturals that strung out from the camp all through the gorge and were beginning to flow with ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Of banqueters beside the meats and wine. They, lifting in their hands the beakers brimmed, Recklessly drank, till heavy of brain they grew, Till rolled their fluctuant eyes. Now and again Some mouth would babble the drunkard's broken words. The household gear, the very roof and walls Seemed as they rocked: all things they looked on seemed Whirled in wild dance. About their eyes a veil Of mist dropped, for the drunkard's sight is dimmed, And the wit dulled, when rise the fumes to the brain: ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... gallant lad babble as he pleased, without giving him much in the way of a reply. I was concerned about Captain Nemo's absence during our session the previous afternoon, and I hoped to see him ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... come back to the farm, they play by Saco Water as their mothers and their fathers did before them. The paths through the pine woods along the river's brink are trodden smooth by their restless, wandering feet; their eager, curious eyes search the waysides for adventure, but their babble and laughter are oftenest heard from the ruins of an old house hidden by great trees. The stones of the cellar, all overgrown with blackberry vines, are still there; and a fragment of the brick chimney, where swallows build their nests from year to year. ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of a bounteous year of fruit. The smell of peaches and grapes piled in barrows and barrels scented the air, as it scents the memory still. The odour of a peach brings back to me all the magic-lantern impressions of a stranger—memories of dazzling, dancing, tropical light, bustle, babble, and gayety; they made me feel that I had never been alive before, and the people of the old seaport, active as I had thought them, became in a bewildered retrospect as slow and quiet as snails. But far sweeter to me than ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... her husband, a tall, fine-looking man of Jewish type, was only thirty-two years old, but his life since the age of twenty-one had been passed in captivity either in Russian prisons or as an exile in Siberia. Abramovitch and his wife were shortly to be released, and it was pathetic to hear them babble like children about their approaching freedom, and of how they would revel in the sight of Warsaw, and enjoy its restaurants and theatres, and even a ride in the electric cars! I visited them next day in their dark and miserable home, which, however, was scrupulously ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... superior power; And though not mortal, yet a cold shuddring dew Dips me all o're, as when the wrath of Jove Speaks thunder, and the chains of Erebus To som of Saturns crew. I must dissemble, And try her yet more strongly. Com, no more, This is meer moral babble, and direct Against the canon laws of our foundation; I must not suffer this, yet 'tis but the lees And setlings of a melancholy blood; 810 But this will cure all streight, one sip of this Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight Beyond the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... their tea, Adele tried over and over again to lead the conversation into a pleasant channel, but all to no purpose. The inmates of the "Prenoms" had to be taught to converse properly before they could do so. Mrs. Soher began to babble in her ordinary way. Her daughter supported her foolish statements. Adele made no remark. Her aunt noticed this, and after a most scornful remark about Mrs. B.'s character, she said to her niece: "Don't you ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... little boys, aged perhaps four and six, who had been ladling the messy contents of specially deep plates on to their bibs, dropped their spoons and began to babble about grea'-granny, and one of them insisted several times that he must wear his ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... cloud-built scheme, Dark creed, and mournful eastern dream Of power, impersonal and cold, Controlling all, itself controlled, Maker and slave of iron laws, Alike the subject and the cause; From vain philosophies, that try The sevenfold gates of mystery, And, baffled ever, babble still, Word-prodigal of fate and will; From Nature, and her mockery, Art; And book and speech of men apart, To the still witness in my heart; With reverence waiting to behold His Avatar of love untold, The Eternal ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... great silence that the occasional babble of a delirious person emphasizes in an otherwise empty house, began to think of things that must be done. Fortunately there was a telephone in the room. He would not have to leave his patient alone. He called up Will French and told him in a few ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... shown, In which one man, alone, Upon the ground had thrown A lion fully grown. Much gloried at the sight the rabble. A lion thus rebuked their babble:— 'That you have got the victory there, There is no contradiction. But, gentles, possibly you are The dupes of easy fiction: Had we the art of making pictures, Perhaps ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... subject, but yielded willingly to the attractions of pleasure. Bonaparte, who was delighted at having provided a diversion for the gossiping of the Parisian salons, said to me one day, "While they are chatting about all this, they do not babble upon politics, and that is what I want. Let them dance and amuse themselves as long as they do not thrust their noses into the Councils of the Government; besides, Bourrienne," added he, "I have other reasons for encouraging this, I see other advantages in ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... memorandum-book alluded to—on the first leaf of which he had written in his neatest hand (as if to encourage himself to begin) "Affectation"— contains, besides the names of three of the intended personages, Sir Babble Bore, Sir Peregrine Paradox, and Feignwit, nothing but unembodied sketches of character, and scattered particles of wit, which seem waiting, like the imperfect forms and seeds in chaos, for the brooding of genius to nurse them into system ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... have I known thee, Hogarth, weak and vain, Thyself the idol of thy awkward strain, Through the dull measure of a summer's day, In phrase most vile, prate long, long hours away, 460 Whilst friends with friends, all gaping sit, and gaze, To hear a Hogarth babble Hogarth's praise. But if athwart thee Interruption came, And mention'd with respect some ancient's name, Some ancient's name who, in the days of yore, The crown of Art with greatest honour wore, How have I seen thy ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... graces of Constance, and their future prospects, calling my attention to his captain's shoulder-straps, and the triple gold arabesque on his sleeve and fatigue cap. I believe I listened as much to the music of his spurs and sabre as I did to his boyish babble, and at last we stood under the elms on the Fourth Street corner of the square opposite the Lethal Chamber. Then he laughed and asked me what I wanted with him. I motioned him to a seat on a bench under the electric light, and sat down beside him. He looked at me curiously, with that same searching ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... chain of Alps from mound to mound, And o'er th' eternal snows, like Echo, bound; Like Echo, when the hunter-train at dawn Have rous'd her from her sleep; and forest-lawn, Cliffs, woods, and caves her viewless steps resound, And babble ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... kept up a constant babble of, "Three men to be set aboard Thames... three men to be set ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... if she must suffocate if she did not get out into the air, and rising quickly she stole from the room, and out of the house unobserved. But the babble of voices seemed to pursue her. She stood for a moment on the steps and felt as if the people were all preparing to stream out of the drawing room after her, to surround her, and keep up the distracting buzz in her ears by their idle inconsequent talk. Their horses were prancing about the drive; ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... came more bustle than ever; a great running hither and thither, a rapping of hammers and a babble of voices sounded everywhere through the place, for the folk were building great arches across the streets, beneath which the King was to pass, and were draping these arches with silken banners and streamers ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... the Courts of Justice (Chancery and King's Bench) were held here, and as the hall was also lined with shops, and the babble and walking to and fro were incessant, it is not wonderful that justice was sometimes left undone. It would be difficult—nay, impossible—to tell in detail all the strange historic scenes enacted in Westminster Hall in the limited space at disposal, and as they ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... made his way to the door, and Roddy, frowning gravely, sank back into his chair, the long silence was broken by a babble of whispered questions and rapid answers. Even to those who understood no English the pantomime had been sufficiently enlightening. Unobtrusively the secret agents of Alvarez rose from the tables and stole into the night. A half-hour ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... My window glimpses larch and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... Argument seemed child's babble indeed under the smile of Night. And the face of the woman, left alone at her window, was a little like the face of this warm, sweet night. It was sensitive, harmonious; and its harmony was not, as in some faces, cold—but seemed to tremble and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Such a babble of voices and questions asked, would have deafened any one not concerned in the meeting. But every one, even Sary, had a heart interest in the returned scouts, and no one took the trouble to bottle ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... her handwriting," exclaimed Evelyn, and then there ensued such a babble of wonder and delight and excited speculation as to its contents that Lucile was finally obliged to shout, "If you will only sit down, girls. I'll see what's inside, and please stop making such an ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... although prompted by the best feeling. The rector and his wife, ignoring their own sentiments, made haste to smooth away the little difficulty that had thus unexpectedly arisen, and in a few minutes all was in a pleasant clatter and babble with the pouring of tea, cutting of huge three-decker cakes, and passing of large, solid plates holding pyramids of equally large and solid sandwiches. Ringfield, devoting himself to the English visitors and the person in black silk, who was the widow ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, 40 I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... over you, and binds you for weary days and nights,—in which life hovers doubtfully, and the lips babble secrets that you cherish. It is astonishing how disease clips a man from the artificialities of the world! Lying lonely upon his bed, moaning, writhing, suffering, his soul joins on to the universe of souls by only natural bonds. The factitious ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... opened, somewhere. The next moment brought a new whiff of cold, fresh air and the sound of a motor, then silence again, sudden and profound, from the street-side. A deep, almost dramatic voice silenced the confused babble. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Phyllis denied. "She's a thousand times nicer. She is so quiet when there are people around that it looks as though she were bashful, but she really isn't a bit. She just never says anything unless it's worth saying, and I wish you could see her look at me when I babble on." ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... pre-eminence of the work you have just heard? I can explain it in a few words. There are two kinds of music: one, petty, poor, second-rate, always the same, based on a hundred or so of phrases which every musician has at his command, a more or less agreeable form of babble which most composers live in. We listen to their strains, their would-be melodies, with more or less satisfaction, but absolutely nothing is left in our mind; by the end of the century they are forgotten. But the nations, from the beginning of time ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... Nature's—night and noon He sits upon the great white throne, And listens for the creature's praise. What babble we of days and days? The Dayspring he, whose days ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... through the village, crossed the dark bridge and approached a ramshackle house from which a babble of voices rose in strident argument. The excited chorus abated at Terry's sharp knock and the door was thrown open to disclose the belligerent figure of Tony Ricorro, the leader of the Italian colony. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... babble that every low-caste native must raise on every occasion. It died down, and Kim lay out behind the little knot of Mahbub's followers, almost under the wheels of a horse-truck, a borrowed blanket for covering. Now a bed among brickbats ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... save for the babble of the brook, and there I lay, bound, and heard only the stream in the ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... hands, seize their secrets, compromise them completely, in such a way that retreat becomes impossible for them, so as to make use of them in bringing about disturbances in the State." (Sec. 19.) "The fifth category is composed of doctrinaires, conspirators, revolutionists, and of those who babble at meetings and on paper. We must urge these on and draw them incessantly into practical and perilous manifestations, which will result in making the majority of them disappear, while making some of them genuine revolutionists." ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... the big brown one. I sat down on a fallen pillar and held her in my arms . . . Silent after the first babble was over. And after a little while the lizards came out and ran about again, as though nothing unusual was going on, as though nothing had changed . . . It was tremendously still there, the sun high and the shadows ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... again at Bourne, and tried to bring forgetfulness by drink—and drink brought boastfulness; for that he had no more the spirit left to do great deeds, he must needs babble of the great deeds which he had done, and hurl insult and defiance at his Norman neighbours. And in the space of three years he had become as intolerable to those same neighbours as they were intolerable to him, and he was fain to keep up at Bourne the same watch and ward that he had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... "any one who knows you would be rash indeed to excite your ceaseless babble. I do not think that Ireneus, who has more than once proved his courage, is bold ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... dearest friend, Lucy Grafton cares very little about the babble of the million, provided it do not obstruct him in his objects. Would to Heaven I could proceed in the summary and effectual mode you point out; but that I much doubt. There is about Afy, in spite of all her softness and humility, a strange spirit, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... to get away from the babble of sound, and they went down the first set of steps and joined the procession that was picking its way over the ties toward ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... own lips as more than mere feminine folly, and Dame Idonea's real experience of knights thus saved, and on the other hand of the fatal consequences of rude surgery in such a climate, were disregarded as an old woman's babble. Her voice waxed shrill and angry, and her antagonists' replies in Lingua Franca, mixed with Arabic, Latin, and Greek, rang through the tent, till the Prince could bear ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Gladys off to a place they called the grove. The farmhouse was painted in light yellow and white. It was built on a grassy slope, and at the foot of a gentle hill a pretty pond lay, and out from this flowed a brook. If one kept quite still he could hear the soft babble of the little stream even from the piazza. Nearer by was a large elm-tree, so wide-spreading that the pair of Baltimore orioles who hung their swaying nest on one limb scarcely had a bowing acquaintance with the robins who lived on the other side. The air was full ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... friend to rejoice at such news; yet I am ashamed to say that selfishness took me by the soul, and that my heart turned as heavy as lead within me. I stammered out some few halting words of congratulation, and then sat downcast, with my head drooped, deaf to the babble of our new acquaintance. He was clearly a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack nostrums, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... random, and drinking one after the other from the same one, they talked. A babble of lovers, a chattering of sparrows! Child's talk, worthy of Mother Goose or of Homer! With two loving hearts, go no further for poetry; with two kisses for dialogue, go no ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... The highest truth, being incomprehensible to the man of realities, as the highest man is, and largely above his level, will be a great unreality and falsehood to an unintellectual man. The profoundest doctrines of Christianity and Philosophy would be mere jargon and babble to a Potawatomie Indian. The popular explanations of the symbols of Masonry are fitting for the multitude that have swarmed into the Temples,—being fully up to the level of their capacity. Catholicism was a vital truth in its earliest ages, but it became ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... his moderation. The conviction that the duke's government would only cease with the termination of his public career was so general, that the moment he was installed in office, the whigs smiled on him; political conciliation became the slang of the day, and the fusion of parties the babble of clubs and ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... man," quoth Umslopogaas, "or if you must babble, speak those words which you would say ere you ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... The babble continued, but diminished gradually in volume. Through the trees, as I waited, I caught a glimpse of the sea. I wished I was out on the Cob, where beyond these voices there was peace. My head was beginning to ache, and I felt faint ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... beginning to ramble and babble incoherently, her memories of her own and the experiences of others all confused in her mind. When she had about finished a story about how one of the slave women, "bust de skull" of the head of her marster,'" 'cause she was nussin a sick baby an' he tell her ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Tennessee Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... Flowers and lights and crystal cups, whereof the price for each Might have brought back from Potter's Field some bloodless, starving baby. I heard the Leaders' speeches, the turgid oratory, The well-turned phrases of the Captains, the rotund babble of prosperity, (Prosperity for whom? Nay, ask not troublesome questions!) The Captains' vaunting I heard, their boasts of glory and victory, While red, red, red their hands dripped red with the blood of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the kings had feared the wars of Napoleon, kingcraft was now confronted by an enemy more deadly. The babble of the bondsmen about to break their chains portended far greater disaster to dynasties than ever did bullets on the battlefield ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... cease thy loathsome cant! Day-labourer, slave of toil and want! I hate thy babble vain and hollow. Thou art a worm, no child of day: Thy god is Profit—thou wouldst weigh By pounds the Belvidere Apollo. Gain—gain alone to thee is sweet. The marble is a god! ... what of it Thou count'st a pie-dish far above it— A dish ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... well! Where was I, then?—From childhood I was wont To dream and dream, and babble foolishly Of things that were not and could never be. That habit clung to me, and mocks me now. For, as the youth lives ever in the future, So the grown man looks alway to the past, And, young or old, we know not how to live Within the present. In my dreams I was A mighty hero, girded for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... like a man in two minds about returning and demanding compensation. Then he seemed to think better of it, and we moved forward; but twice again before we reached dry land he turned and addressed the soldiers in furious Spanish across the babble of the ford. ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... every vein; Chirrup of robin and blue-bird in the white-blossomed apple and pear; Carpets of green on the meadows spangled with dandelions; Lowing of kine in the valleys, bleating of lambs on the hills; Babble of brooks and the prattle of fountains that flashed in the sun; Glad, merry voices, ripples of laughter, snatches of music and song, And blue-eyed girls in the gardens that blushed like the roses ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... be busy and fill your pitcher, come, O come to my lake. The water will cling round your feet and babble its secret. The shadow of the coming rain is on the sands, and the clouds hang low upon the blue lines of the trees like the heavy hair above your eyebrows. I know well the rhythm of your steps, they are beating in my heart. Come, O come to my lake, ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... Father Lamson or Abby Folsom were borne by main force from an antislavery meeting, and the non-resistants pleaded that these protestants had as good right to speak as anybody, and that what was called their senseless babble was probably inspired wisdom, if people were only heavenly minded enough to understand it, it was but another sign of the impending anarchy. And what was to be said—for you could not call them old dotards—when ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... through the darkness pouring out on the still air the scent they withheld during the sunlight. Sometimes the lightning and the thunder, sometimes the moon-rainbow, sometimes the aurora borealis, is busy. And the streams are running all night long, and seem to babble louder than in the day time, for the noises of the working world are still, so that we hear them better. Almost the only daylight thing awake, is the clock ticking with nobody to heed it, and that sounds to me very dismal. But it was the look of the night, ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... Consistory sees a little leisure before him and squares off at his desk for a solid forenoon's work. He begins by ordering his man to shave him. Then he is interrupted by a procession of callers,—Schiller, in various roles, and Minna, and Dorchen, and Professor Becker and others—who keep the stream of babble flowing until one o'clock. Koerner is too late for the consistory and all that he has accomplished is to get shaved. The piece is a slight affair, but there is enough of solemn fun in it to make one wish that its author had seen fit to ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... from the crowded benches on our deck a strange and marvelous babble of sound. Some burst into tears of thankfulness and relief, some howled like wild beasts because of their chains, some cursed and blasphemed because there was small chance of the English ship's folk knowing our condition. ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... going out of my way to find something to babble," she declared now. "There's plenty of things goes on I could be running to you with every day in the week, did I so mind; but I believe in letting folks have their own heads, as long as they don't ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... clear and strong above the babble of Mammon, asked, in the closing chapters of his ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the one authoritative voice of his own soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man. It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk straight before us by what light we have. They may be right; but so, before heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or fall. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... husband of his wife. I'm not telling you what you don't know; only why I have no patience with this rotten pride of Mrs. Deford. I've been Lily's dump. Into my ears she's poured oceans of lamentations, and I've let her babble on because it gave her such tearful satisfaction. I like Billy, and stand ready to help any time he can squeeze out courage to take ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... call it out. The planets shone benignantly through the leaves of maple and elm; and the young grass was irregular, untouched as yet by the mower—as we like it best who love our Madison! A week-old moon hung in the sky—ample light for the first hay-ride of the season that is moving toward Water Babble to the strains of guitar and banjo and boy and girl voices. It's unaccountable that there should be so much music in a sophomore—or maybe that's a fraternity affair—Sigma Chi or Delta Tau or Deke. Or mayhap those lads wear a "Fiji" pin on their waistcoats; I seem to recall ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... well, these addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... expense of the abbots. With the exception of the potentates among the high clergy with whom Madame Imperia managed to accommodate her little tempers, she ruled everyone with a high hand in virtue of her pretty babble and enchanting ways, which enthralled the most virtuous and the most unimpressionable. Thus she lived beloved and respected, quite as much as the real ladies and princesses, and was called Madame, concerning which the good Emperor Sigismund replied to a lady who complained ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... itself in manly tears, perhaps, and certainly in womanly tears. But really is it any such emotion? Honestly is not it a cruel embarrassment, which all the hypocritical pretences cannot hide? The old friends smile and laugh, and babble incoherently at one another, but are they genuinely glad? Is not each wishing the other at that end of the earth from which he came? Have they any use for each other such as people ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... great physicist, unable to share amusement, wrote: "It is sad to see a municipality giving credence to the babble of the vulgar in a protocol, and to see authentic testimonies to an occurrence which ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... upon him; he inquired as to what Sparta and Greece were, and having been informed, he ironically begged the Lacedaemonian envoy to thank his compatriots for the good advice with which they had honoured him; "but," he added, "take care that I do not soon cause you to babble, not of the ills of the Ionians, but of your own." He confided the government of Sardes to one of his officers, named Tabalos, and having entrusted Paktyas, one of the Lydians who had embraced his cause, with the removal of the treasures of Croesus to Persia, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... "O, don't babble in that hypocritical tone!" said the man. "I did not leave you so destitute; and I took the child off your hands that no incumbrance might ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Talfourd, author of "Ion." I had very charming conversations with him. He was a perfect gentleman, with an ease of manner so fascinating and rare, showing high breeding, and a voice rich and full. Whenever he spoke, his words came out clear from the surrounding babble and all the noise of the ship, so that I could always tell where he was. He is one of the primitive men, in contradistinction to the derivative (as Sarah Clarice once divided people). He seemed never at a loss on any subject soever; and when the passengers were ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... own water-steps it became apparent that some one—a man—was standing at the top in an attitude of expectancy. Constance's heart gave a sudden bound and the next instant sank deep. A babble of frenzied greetings floated out to meet them; there was no mistaking Gustavo. Moreover, there was no mistaking the fact that he was excited; his excitement was contagious even before they had learned the reason. He stuttered in his ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... on the necks and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter nothing can withstand, no seniority of age, no gravity of character; uncles, aunts, grandsires, grandams, fall an easy prey: he conforms to nobody, all conform to him; all caper and make mouths, and babble, and chirrup to him. On the strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Babble Beem, Sie schtehn wie Brieder dar; Un uf'm Gippel—g'wiss ich leb! Hockt alleweil 'n Schtaar! 'S Gippel biegt sich—guk, wie's gaunscht— 'R hebt sich awer fescht; Ich seh sei' rothe Fliegle plehn, Wann er ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... a dream the grey buildings drew nearer, The babble rose louder and the organ's whine clearer, The hurdle came closer, he rushed through its top Like a comet in heaven that ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... with them, or find someone on the spot to do what is necessary. When there are no mineral waters or sea baths to give a place importance, Germans say they have come there to do a Luftkur. A delightful Frenchwoman who has written about England lately is amused by our everlasting babble about a "change." This one needs a change, she says, and that one is away for a change, and the other means to have a change next week. So the Germans amuse us by their eternal "cures." One tries air, and the other water, and the next iron, and the fourth sulphur, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... at present was anything but monotonous. In Fraeulein von Schoenau's room, this bright morning, there were sounds of gay chatter, and many a clear, good-natured laugh. Marietta Volkmar had come for a little gossip with her old friend, and as usual during such visits, the laughter and the babble knew no end. Toni sat in the window-seat, and near her stood Willibald, who, by his mother's special orders, was to ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... another God with vows to gain, To Him for succour I would surely go: Nor could I be called impious, if I turned In this great agony from one who spurned, To one who bade me come and cured my woe. Nay, Lord! I babble vainly. Help! I cry, Before the temple where Thy reason burned, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... the steady hissing of rain on the shrubs outside his window. But suddenly that silence was shattered and shredded into fragments by a scream from somewhere close at hand outside in the black garden, a scream of supreme and despairing terror. Again and once again it shrilled up, and then a babble of awful words was interjected. A quivering sobbing voice ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... animal life has unfortunately survived that of mental intelligence. He gazed a moment at me, but then seemed insensible of my presence, and went on—he, once the most courteous and well-bred—to babble unintelligible but violent reproaches against his niece and servant, because he himself had dropped a teacup in attempting to place it on a table at his elbow. His eyes caught a momentary fire from his irritation; but ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... he has a long tongue. Besides, he'll see the Westerleys and my other friends in Paradiso, and babble to them." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... stopped and looked around him. Suddenly above the musical babble of the brook and the rustle of the leaves by the breeze came a repetition of the sound. He crouched close by the trunk of a tree and strained his ears. All was quiet for some moments. Then he heard the patter, patter of little hoofs coming down the stream. ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... to babble to Anna. "You know, I just thought I never would get this old thing on." She was speaking of her dress. "Aileen ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Erotion dear. Now was her sixth year ending, and melting the snows of the winter, Only a brief six days lacked to the tale of the years. Young, amid dull old age, let her wanton and frolic and gambol, Babble of me that was, tenderly lisping my name. Soft were her tiny bones, then soft be the sod that enshrouds her, Gentle thy touch, mother Earth, gently she rested on thee! ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... watch. Heat waves were shimmering in the hollow and mosquitoes singing. Occasionally Houck's voice rose in delirious excitement. Sometimes he thought the Utes were torturing him. Again he lived over scenes in the past. Snatches of babble carried back to the days of his turbulent youth when all men's cattle were his. In the mutterings born of a sick brain Bob heard ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... that had been little more than begun. The fact that the man who had first proposed the races which were to be run off in the Spring, was a fugitive, accused of a grave crime, had aroused much sensational talk and newspaper babble, but it had increased rather than lessened interest and new entries were being daily arranged. Big Bill assured those who cared to ask that the race would be run, that Shandon would have come in and been cleared of any charges against him long before June, and that there would be no change in plans. ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... Mekran Kot for so long a sojourn in Belait.[14] And to her incitements and his own inclination and desires was added that which made revenge and my brother's death the chiefest things in all the world to Ibrahim Mahmud, and it happened thus.... But do I weary the Sahib with my babble?" ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... which all the polished artificialities and recherche arrangements of man utterly failed to supply. While dazzled by the glitter and splendor of "Le Bocage," she shivered in its silent dreariness, its cold, aristocratic formalism, and she yearned for the soft, musical babble of the spring-branch, where, standing ankle-deep in water under the friendly shadow of Lookout, she had spent long, blissful July days in striving to build a wall of rounded pebbles down which the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... him he could almost hear the rustle of the dry undergrowth, parched by the past fortnight of exceptionally hot weather; but, above all, rose the eternal babble of the rapids. High in air, a vulture wheeled its untiring spirals. At sight of it he frowned. It reminded him of the Pauillac, now wrecked far beyond the horizon, where the Horde had trapped him. He shuddered, for the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... still more in the African jungles composed mainly of thorny plants. As, however, she felt sorry for the honest giant, without any thought, having squatted near his foot, she began to extract delicately at first the bigger splinters and afterwards the smaller, at which work she did not cease to babble and assure the elephant that she would not leave a single one. He understood excellently what she was concerned with, and bending his legs at the knee showed in this manner that on the soles between the hoofs covering his toes there were also ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the unconscious fashion in which the sonorous phrases of convention rolled off from her son's baby lips. And then, one day, Scott's memory failed him in his invocation. There came a familiar phrase or two, and then a babble of meaningless syllables, ending in a long-drawn and relieved Amen. An instant later, Scott lifted ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... "Don't babble like a fool!" Kennon said with disgust. "How could I land a spacer here without being spotted? You sound like a two-credit novel. And even if I did—would it be a can like this?" Kennon played the torch over the blue-black durilium protruding from ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... up, too, staring out at her husband; and a quick babble of talk and exclamations from behind made itself audible in spite of the roaring ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... deep-mouthed pack of fox hounds opened loud and wild, far in the ringing woods, and it was like the music of a hundred chiming bells. There was a tremor of the bow, and I heard a flute play, and a harp, and a golden-mouthed cornet; I heard the mirthful babble of happy voices, and peals of laughter ringing in the swelling tide of pleasure. Then I saw a vision of snowy arms, voluptuous forms, and light fantastic slippered feet, all whirling and floating in the mazes of the misty dance. The flying fingers now tripped ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... none other, the best waye to live honestlye and quiettly in the court. [d] Carrye noe tales, be noe co{m}mon teller of newes, be not inquisitive of other menn's talke, for those that are desirous to heare what they need not, co{m}monly be readye to babble what they shold not. [e] Vse not to lye, for that is vnhonest; speake not everye truth, for that is vnneedfull; yea, in tyme and place a harmlesse lye is a greate deale better then a hurtfull truth. [f] Use not dyceing nor carding; the more yow use them the lesse yow wilbe esteemed; the cunninger ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... Babble babili. Babe infaneto. Baboon paviano. Baby infaneto. Bachelor frauxlo. Back (of body) dorso. Back (reverse side) posta flanko. Back (behind) poste. Backbite kalumnii. Backbone spino. Backslider rekulpulo. Backward (slow) mallerta. Bacon lardo. Bad, ly malbona, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... about the door of the gatehouse some three-score archers and arquebusiers stood to their arms; not in array, but in disorderly groups, from which the babble of voices, of feverish laughter, and strained jests rose without ceasing. The weltering sun, of which the beams just topped the farther side of the quadrangle, fell slantwise on their armour, and heightened their exaggerated ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... a low voice, whose quality fended him from her almost as much as the conditional look she gave him. The excited babble of the sick woman overhead, mixed with Mrs. Newton's nasal attempts to quiet her, broke ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... so long as he cared, and by the time he had ceased to care for anything it had also lost itself in the rest of the vain babble of home. After his wife's death, during his year of mortal solitude, it awoke again as an echo of far-off things—far-off, very far-off, because he felt then not ten but twenty years older. That ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... squeaking of the brake, had made them all enemies. She had sat tense and averted, seeing the general greenery, feeling that the cool flowing air might be great happiness, conscious of each form and each voice, of the insincerity of the exclamations and the babble of conversation that struggled above the noise of their going, half seeing Pastor Lahmann opposite to her, a little insincerely smiling man in an alpaca suit and a soft felt hat. She got down the steps without ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... with her stereotyped cat-smile, sat near by in a corner. Milly had carefully planted the old lady where she would be conspicuous and harmless and had impressed upon her the danger of moving from her eminent position. For once the little old lady was stirred to genuine emotion as the babble of tongues surged over her. A becoming pink in her white cheeks betrayed the excitement within her withered breast over the girl's triumph. For even Grandma Ridge possessed traces of a feminine nature.... And Horatio! He came in ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... to the soul that knows thy love, O Purest, There is a temple peaceful evermore. And all the babble of life's angry voices Dies hushed in stillness at its ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims—ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others—would babble maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical data on the house after listening, ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... medicine-man, he had a voice that dinned upon the ear of night and dominated all other sounds, from guttural grunt of assent to frantic yell of applause, as the roar of Niagara in the Cave of the Winds drowns the futile babble of the guides. Once in early boyhood Geordie had heard an Indian orator of whom his father and fellow-officers spoke ever in honor and esteem—a chief whose people wellnigh worshipped him—"Rolling-Thunder-in-the-Mountains," they called ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... above the babble, from the car ahead ever the shrill voice, "Gentlemen, a well-dressed young man ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... out and joined the group. He stood near Ferguson, mingling his voice with the others. For a little time the talk flowed easily and much laughter rose. Then suddenly above the good natured babble came a harsh word. Instantly the other voices ceased, and the men of the group centered their glances upon the range boss, for the harsh word had come from him. He had been talking to a man named Tucson and it was to the latter that he ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... had just begun to appear midway in the pale sky—a beautiful sky, all gray and rose—and all this babble about baptism seemed strangely out of his mind. 'And to think that men are still seeking scrolls in Turkestan to prove—' The sentence did not finish itself in his mind; a ray of western light falling across the altar steps in the stillness of the church awakened a remembrance in him of the music ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... Saturday or other a Caine or a Barclay; to have it restored to me a moment later by a courteous fellow-passenger—courteous, but with a smile of gentle pity in his eye as he glimpsed the author's name. "Thanks very much," I would stammer, blushing guiltily, and perhaps I would babble about a sick friend to whom I was taking them, or that I was running out of paper-weights. But he never believed me. He knew that he would have ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... and cocked an ear toward the door. A faint hubbub was now percolating through from the receptionist's lobby. It grew louder. Suddenly the door opened, letting in a roaring babble, as Geraldine ... the usually poker-faced secretary ... leaped through and slammed it shut again. Her eyes, behind their thick lenses, were ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... a pleasant afternoon musing over these papers. Their variety is endless, and the dispositions of mind displayed by these librarians are wide as the poles asunder. Some of them babble like babies, others are evidently austere scholars; some are gravely bent on the best methods of classifying catalogues, economizing space, and sorting borrowers' cards; others, scorning such mechanical details, bid us regard libraries, and consequently librarians, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... eternity; in actual time it was exactly ten minutes. Then a cavalcade tramped down the hall. He heard their voices, and Hal Dozier was among them. About him flowed a babble of questions as the men struggled for the honor of a word from the great man. Perhaps he was coming to his room to form the posse and issue general instructions ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... ask, What Belleisle or France and Louis XV. had to do there? the answer is rigorously, Nothing. Their own windy vanities, ambitions, sanctioned not by fact and the Almighty Powers, but by phantasm and the babble of Versailles; transcendent self-conceit, intrinsically insane; pretensions over their fellow-creatures which were without basis anywhere in Nature, except in the French brain alone: it was this that brought Belleisle and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Hordedef said, "Thy state is that of one who lives to good old age; for old age is the end of our voyage, the time of embalming, the time of burial. Lie, then, in the sun, free of infirmities, without the babble of dotage: this is the salutation to worthy age. I come from far to call thee, with a message from my father Khufu, the blessed, for thou shalt eat of the best which the king gives, and of the food which those have who follow after him; that he may bring thee in good estate to thy fathers ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... pour, spout, roll, jet, well, issue; drop, drip, dribble, plash, spirtle[obs3], trill, trickle, distill, percolate; stream, overflow, inundate, deluge, flow over, splash, swash; guggle[obs3], murmur, babble, bubble, purl, gurgle, sputter, spurt, spray, regurgitate; ooze, flow out &c. (egress) 295. rain hard, rain in torrents, rain cats and dogs, rain pitchforks; pour with rain, drizzle, spit, set in; mizzle[obs3]. flow into, fall into, open into, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... godless, and brought forward all the comforting arguments which a pious Christian can command for the edification and encouragement of those who mourn a beloved friend; but to Gorgo all this well-meant discourse was as the babble of an unknown tongue; and it was only when, at length, Marianne went up to her and drew her to her motherly bosom, to kiss her, and bid her be welcome under Clelnens' roof till Porphyrius should be at home again, that she understood that the good woman meant kindly, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fragrance on them; the night-hawk churred softly round their path; the stately mountains smiled above them in the moonlight, and seemed to keep watch and ward over their love, and to shut out the noisy world, and the harsh babble and vain fashions of the town. The summer lightning flickered to the westward; but round them the rich soft night seemed full of love,—as full of love as their own hearts were, and, like them, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... improbable, That weak men found it easier to believe Than the invention; while the bad in heart, By true worth most offended, felt relief, Protesting still they wish'd it were not so, With that lean babble, custom's scant half-mask, Worn uselessly by hatred. Think me not Of these—nor yet too rash in sympathy. I would reflect well ere I draw the sword To fling the sheath away; I bid you ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... was the year '92—the year of leanness—the scene a spot between Sukhum and Otchenchiri, on the river Kodor, a spot so near to the sea that amid the joyous babble of a sparkling rivulet the ocean's deep-voiced thunder ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... it's essential in the long run. They have their ways of doing things here. I encourage it, of course; Yulia Mihailovna, in the first place, Gaganov too.... You laugh? But you know I have my policy; I babble away and suddenly I say something clever just as they are on the look-out for it. They crowd round me and I humbug away again. They've all given me up in despair by now: 'he's got brains but he's dropped from the moon.' Lembke invites me to enter the service so that I may be ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to you whether she has a soul or not," says the voice, "provided she can babble pleasantly at dinner and play cribbage ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... or the smoke Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness, Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy, 40 Horribly massacred, ascend to Heaven In honour of His name; or, last and worst, Earth groans beneath religion's iron age, And priests dare babble of a God of peace, Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, 45 Murdering the while, uprooting every germ Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all, Making ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... anxiety; and in the past twelve years these two had stood shoulder to shoulder through both many times over. But their zeal produced no manifest results. Denvil's temperature rose steadily, and his stress of mind broke out in a semi-coherent babble of remorse and self-justification, of argument and appeal, of desperate reckonings in regard to ways and means. Desmond left his station by the bed and crossed over to his friend, who was noiselessly washing a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... always up, and the top was always receding. And when we reached camp, the Head, who had been on an excursion of his own, refused to be thrilled, and spent the evening telling how he had been climbing over the top of the world on his hands and knees. In sheer scorn, we let him babble. ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... certain that a peculiar style of gossip, of babble, and of miniature intriguing, invests the atmosphere of little 'townishness,' such as often entangles the more thoughtful and dignified of the residents in troublesome efforts at passive resistance or active ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... doomed to close confinement in a capital city; but all his tastes were rural, and, as he said, he feared he should expose himself to the ridicule Dr. Johnson throws on those "who talk of sheep and goats, and who babble ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... of that day he left his post by the landau, and went for a solitary ramble; not amongst the tents, where black-eyed Bohemians saluted him as "my pretty gentleman," or the knock-'em-downs and weighing-machines, or the bucolic babble of the ring, but away across the grassy slope, turning his back upon the racecourse. He wanted to think it out again, in his own phrase, just as he had thought it out the day before ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... with the little group of black nuns, with discreet babble, with puerile and lifeless laughter, Gracieuse, at all hours, went to church. Hastening their steps under the frequent showers, they went together through the graveyard, full of roses; together, always together, the little clandestine betrothed, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... strange meanings from them—sometimes even received wondrous hints for the direction of celestial inquiry, from what, to any other, and it may be to the fool himself, was but a ceaseless and aimless babble. Such power lieth in words. It is not then to be wondered at, that the sounds I have mentioned should fall on the ears of Elsie, at such a moment, as a message from God Himself. This then—all this dreariness—was but a passing ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... diaries for as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy, the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure. The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... selected and told with the tact of a raconteur, so as to leave the maximum impression of each incident unimpaired by needless details. Some of these stories were little short of miraculous; but they were dignified by the manner of telling, which never for an instant degenerated into the babble of a mere wonder-monger. ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... might have beaten the wood pretty thoroughly, and yet have failed to find it. The gorse was so thick in all the outer part of the clump that dogs would leave its depths un-searched. Yet, lying there in the shelter one could hear the splashing babble of the brook only fifty yards away, and the singing of a girl at the mill a little ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... much more discussion. If most of the talk seems to be futile, if it seems as if everyone were talking and nobody doing, it does not follow that things are not quietly slipping and sliding out of their old adjustments amidst the babble and because of the babble. Multitudes of men must be struggling with new ideas. It is reasonable to argue that there must be reconsideration, there must be time, before these millions of mental efforts can develop into a new collective purpose and ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... her she had lost her wits, and said her babble should not stand in the way of their ride ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... passively, but when he offered her his arm, merely shook her head and pursed up her lips. The sun shone clearly and pleasantly; the wind was fresh and brisk upon their faces, and smelt racily of woods and meadows. As they went down into the valley of the Thyme, the babble of the stream rose into the air like a perennial laughter. On the far-away hills, sun-burst and shadow raced along the slopes and leaped from peak to peak. Earth, air and water, each seemed in better health and had more ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Fate grudges that even these few poor hours, which make the sum of it, should be spent together. Think how long a man and woman can live side by side at best. Yet every Sunday of your life you go to church and babble about a watchful, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... believe in them when that bit of worm-eaten cloth is all I have to show for them; but to convince you, to enchant and astound the world, I need only the hand of Raphael. His brain I already have. A pity, you will say, that I haven't his modesty! Ah, let me boast and babble now; it's all I have left! I am the half of a genius! Where in the wide world is my other half? Lodged perhaps in the vulgar soul, the cunning, ready fingers of some dull copyist or some trivial artisan, ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... are to meddle with none but the Prince's subjects:—You shall also make no noise in the streets; for, for the watch to babble and talk, is most tolerable and not ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... opening on the village street let in a noise as tumultuous as the sea was silent. The hubbub of a perpetual babble, all the louder for being compressed within narrow space, was always to be heard; it ceased only when the village slept. There was an incessant clicking accompaniment to this noisy street life; a music played from early dawn to dusk over the pavement's rough cobbles—the click ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... a plan," exclaimed Nevill. "I don't think De Mora can have got home yet from the palace. I saw him having supper. Suppose I dart back, flutter gracefully round him, babble 'tile talk' a bit—he's a tile expert after my own heart—then casually ask what Arabs he's got staying with him. If Maieddine's in his house it can't be a secret—incidentally I may find out where the fellow comes from and ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... friends of mine, whose kindly words come to me Voiced only in lost lisps of ink and pen, If I had power to tell the good you do me, And how the blood you warm goes laughing through me, My tongue would babble baby-talk again. ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... as I did from her babble! The letters have told us the same thing, but they were like the histories of other times. Camps, prisoners, barracks, mutilation, widowhood, death, sudden gains, social upheavals,—it is the old, hideous story of war come true of our day and ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... Indeed, wherever Monna Vittoria went she seemed to carry with her an atmosphere of subtle seclusion, of a cloistered lusciousness, of dim, green, guarded gardens, where the sighs of love's novices are stifled by the drip of stealthy fountains and the babble of fantastic birds. I suppose it was no more than my fancy, or a trick of my memory confusing later things with earlier, that makes me now, as I write, seem to recall what seemed like a smile on the face of the pagan effigy of Love as Madonna Vittoria swam into her company, as if the Greekish ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... and there was a sound as if his companion had given his mouth a pat, for from pretty close at hand there was the low babble of voices. ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... devil. They were still forbidden to honour the memory of Hus. They were still forbidden to print books without the consent of the Archbishop. But the King snapped them short. He told the estates to end their babble, and again closed ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... sunthin' here, but it was entirely unbeknown to me; though I thought I heard the murmur of his voice makin' a sort of a tinklin' accompinment to my thoughts, sunthin' like the babble of a brook a runnin' along under forest boughs, when the wind with its mighty melody is sweepin' through 'em. Great emotions was sweepin' along with power, and couldn't be stayed. And I went right on, not sensin' a thing ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... The babble of voices sounded strange as the oars dipped fast, and for a time they were allowed to pursue their way in peace, but at last it was seen that the wounded had all been transferred to certain of the canoes, and with ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... came in quest of them, bringing food and bedding, and by exorbitant fees to the jailers obtained for them shelter in the gloomy cells. Mothers could not come, for a proclamation had gone out that none were to babble, and men were to keep their wives at home. And though there were more material comforts, prospects were very gloomy. Ambrose came when Kit Smallbones returned with what Mrs. Headley had sent the captives. He looked sad and dazed, and clung ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... not even the French, which in recent decades has administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began. The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our babble about it. ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... in the room; then a babble of exclamations broke out as Sylvester, his expression of dumb surprise giving place to one of fury, struggled to free himself ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... own. She did not live with her people: she had rooms of her own and she was a black-and-white artist. But she was often at the Hibbaults. Peter probably knew her accustomed days. She used to speak of her faiths. It was like one note of gold in the discordant babble. Men came and listened to her and she never knew it was not for her words but for her magnetic wonderful unknown self that they came. She might, and probably did, impress men who were dreamers or fanatics already, but those to whom all her beliefs were childish nonsense ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... shallow Duke of Alencon," responded Perrotte coldly. "False, hollow ambition all! And ye call that the cause of religion—Mockery! Yes, I know you well, Philip de la Mole, who in the hour of bloodshed," she continued, growing more and more excited, "could approve the hellish deed, and who now can babble of sacrifice and self-offering in the cause of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various |
