"Dirge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Pocket-handkerchief 2. The Poet expatiates on the Beauty of Delia's Hair 3. The Poet relates how he stole a lock of Delia's Hair, and her anger The Baby's Debut James Smith Playhouse Musings James Smith A Tale of Drury Lane Horace Smith Drury's Dirge Horace Smith What is Life? Blackwood The Confession Blackwood The Milling Match between Entellus and Darcs Moore Not a Sous had he Got Barham Raising the Devil Barham The London University Barham Domestic Poems Hood 1. Good-night 2. A Parental Ode to my Son 3. A Serenade ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... half-hearted kind of way; the girls struck the palms of their left hands with their fans. The boys were in clean working dress. Some had towels wound round their heads, some wore caps and others hats. The girls were got up in all their best clothes with fine obi and white aprons. The music was dirge-like. It was not at all what Western people understand to be singing. The performers emitted notes in a kind of falsetto, and these five or six notes were repeated over and over and over again. The only word I can ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... stateroom, very moved by this scene. All day long I was aquiver with gruesome forebodings. That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge. Was it a prayer for the dead, murmured in that ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Pigeons, and, gathering sticks, Parpon lit a sweet-smelling fire of cedar. Then he went to the hut, and came back with a spade and a shovel. At the foot of a great pine he began to dig. As the work went on, he broke into a sort of dirge, painfully sweet. Leaning against a rock not far away, Valmond watched the tiny man with the long arms throw up the soft, good-smelling earth, enriched by centuries of dead leaves and flowers. The trees waved and bent and murmured, as though they gossiped with each other ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pride, crown of the Salisbury Press? Now when the negligent Public, in search of a subject for dinner, Asks for the names of your books, Lord! what a boom there will be! Hoarse in Penbryn are the howlings that rise for the hope of the Cymri; Over her Algernon's head Putney composes a dirge; Edwin anathematises politely in various lingos; Davidson ruminates hard over a Ballad of Hell; Fondly Le Gallienne fancies how pretty the Delphian laurels Would have appeared on his own hairy and passionate poll; I, imperturbably careless, untainted of ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... her dying, parted hearts chant weary dirge, But we feel death is but seeming in ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... high, and, they too look down upon Callista, as if they were funeral lights in her honour. Next the moon rises up to see what has been going on, and edges the black hangings of the night with silver. Yet mourning and dirge are but of formal observance, when a brave champion has died for her God. The world of ghosts has as little power over such an one as the world of nature. No evil spirit has aught to say to her, who has gone in her baptismal white before the Throne. No penal fire ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... pass, and they that bide can but make the dirge. But I'll be obliged if you'll say to Mr. Alexander that if there is aught—" He gathered up the reins. "It will be snowing presently. I always thought that I'd like to part on a day like this, gray and quiet, with all the color ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... day In the rich house that late was full of pride; Then the sun fell, and all the paths were grey, And Menelaus from the mountain-side Came, and through palace doors all open wide Rang the wild dirge that told him of the thing That Helen, that the Queen had strangely died. Then on ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... the choir is chanting a dirge. Gamba goes and closes the door on the sound: then creeps to the foot of the couch. The dying woman gently motions aside the cross a priest is holding to her, and looks up ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... of the clarion-toned captain is ringing, Above the hoarse murmuring roar of the surge, And an echoing voice, seems sepulchrally flinging, Far back o'er the waves, for the vessel, a dirge. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... with thee till time shall be no more, I stand with thee on Time's remotest age, Ten thousand years, ten thousand times told o'er; Still, still with thee my onward course I urge; And now no longer hear the surge Of Time's light billows breaking on the shore Of distant earth; no more the solemn dirge— Requiem of worlds, when such are numbered o'er— Steals by: still thou art ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... existence. One went so far as to declare it "the happiest part of a negro's life." They aver that the Africans, on their way to slavery, are so merry, that they dance and sing. But upon a careful examination of witnesses, it was found that their singing consisted of dirge-like lamentations for their native land. One of the captains threatened to flog a woman, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful to him. After meals they jumped up in their irons for exercise. This was considered so necessary for their health, that they ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... whilst entwined in his fingers was a bronze cross and rosary, that St. Peter, seeing his devotion, might, without questioning, admit him to a better world. The scene was weird beyond description. Outside, the wind moaned a sad dirge; great bats and black moths, the size of birds, flitted about in the midnight darkness. These, ever and anon, made their way inside and extinguished the candles, which flickered and dripped as they fitfully shone on the shrunken ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... she was hoping still, a fresh outbreak of the malady occurred. He, poor soul, weary of his existence, put an end to his sufferings: he was found lifeless in the New River. Lucy Aikin quotes a Dirge found among her ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... showing more and more of savage grandeur, as the green, smiling valleys are no longer seen, but in their place appear barren and rugged rocks and slopes, with the marks of the ravages wrought by storm, landslide and avalanche. The wind has fuller play and seems to moan in a mournful, dirge-like manner, accentuating the characteristics of bleakness and desolation which obtain at the top of the pass, all the more noticeable if the traveler arrives at dusk, just as the sun has ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the long-expiring gardens. It was a wet night—the lamps burnt dimly—the military band played in the minor key—the waiters stalked about with so silent, melancholy a tread, that we took their towels for pocket-handkerchiefs; the concert in the open rain went off tamely—dirge-like, in spite of the "Siege of Acre," which was described in a set of quadrilles, embellished with blue fire and maroons, and adorned with a dozen double drums, thumped at intervals, like death notes, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the spot which was to be their tomb. Her graceful hull, lofty spars, and snowy canvas gleamed refulgent in the last rays of the setting sun as he sank to his rest through a bank of rainbow-tinted clouds, and the rising wind sobbed and moaned dirge-like ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Brothers, stout and strong! Let us cheer the way we tread on, With a soldier's song! Faint we by the weary road, Or fall we in the rout, Dirge or Paean, Death or Triumph!— ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... sometimes looking up to the height of Heaven, calling out with shrieks of agony, as if invoking the Father of Nature; others grovelled upon the ground, beating their foreheads with their hands, while others again made their moan in a sort of dirge, in their own way, for though one could not understand the words, the sense of all was plain in the agony of those ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... elephant, etc., to take care of themselves and make their excuses to Mr. Bast, and started for Liverpool and the U. S. in the Sirius. Storms overtook them, the women were put into the first boat, those which followed were swamped. Poor fellows, I own I can't sing a pious dirge for them. There were three days of hunger and exposure before the boat was picked up, and she was finally landed at Quebec, where she was laid up with pleurisy in the hospital. And there was a subscription for the wrecked when she came out, which ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... [4], league on league, shall follow The death-dirge of the Lucy once so dear; From yonder steeple dismal, dull, and hollow, Shall knell the warning horror on thy ear. On thy fresh leman's lips when love is dawning, And the lisped music glides from that sweet well— Lo, in that breast a red wound ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it were so! But hear me on, and restrain your rage! There I lay for twenty hours, and not a soul cared for my misery. No human footstep treads this solitary wild, for 'tis commonly believed that the ghosts of my ancestors drag clanking chains through these ruins, and chant their funeral dirge at the hour of midnight. At last I heard the door creak again on its hinges; this man opened it, and brought me bread and water. He told me that I had been condemned to die of hunger, and that his life was in danger should it be discovered that he fed me. Thus has my ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... excitement were all in his veins. He was full of the strong joy of living. And then, in the midst of it all, came a dull, crashing blow. It was as though all his castles in the air had come toppling about his ears, the blue sky had turned to stony grey and the sweet waltz music had become a dirge. Always a keen watcher of men's faces, he had glanced for a second time at a gaunt, sallow man who wore a loose check suit and a grey Homburg hat. The eyes of the two men met. Then the blood had turned ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... silent, the miserable youth rushed frantically to his lodgings, without any definite intentions, but more than half inclined to sink on his knees before his desk, and look up to the moon, or stars, or; failing these, to the floating light for inspiration, and pen the direful dirge of something dreadful and desperate! He had even got the length of the first line, and had burst like a thunderbolt into his ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... Funebre, which had the immediate effect of scattering his audience, since many of his listeners, not caring for so melancholy a piece of music, deserted the room for the garden. Lucky indeed were those persons driven forth by the strains of Chopin's dirge, for a few moments later came the earthquake, when in a trice the whole hotel was swallowed up in the yawning chasm of the earth. Everybody inside the walls was killed, and the body of the poor pianist ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... more, which is, not paying a proper regard to the present temper of the company, or the occasion of their meeting, in introducing a topic of conversation, by which as great an absurdity is sometimes committed, as it would be to sing a dirge at a wedding, or an epithalamium ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... threw vague ghostly beams across the willow-lined swamp, out beyond the little cabin that stood on its border. Through the dense undergrowth and high among the skeleton treetops ugly shadows played with each other, while a sepulchral orchestra of wind and bough shrieked a dirge that flattened in Bonner's ears; but it was not the weird music of the swamp that sent the shudder of actual terror through the ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... all fall within the dates of April and May of 1784) I shall note briefly one remaining print, "For the Benefit of the Champion," in which Fox and Lord North, in female attire, and the Duchess in her large picture hat, but decollettee, and with bare arms, are busy singing a dirge on the defeated opponent. Georgina, a figure of delicious sprightliness and beauty, points to the tombstone marked "Here lies poor Cecil Ray," while the spectacled profile of Burke peeps into the door. And here I may remark again how astonishingly ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... the Greek epos, a saying or oracle, the term "epic" is generally given to some form of heroic narrative wherein tragedy, comedy, lyric, dirge, and idyl are skilfully blended to ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... before the last fluttering rags had vanished, transmuted into fiery dust. The clock on the landing had many times chanted its dirge since I had heard below the footsteps of the servants carrying away the lamps from the sitting-rooms and the hall. Later still came the far-off sound of Atherley's door closing behind him, like the final good-night of the waking day. Over all the unconscious household had stolen that ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... for justice, and the natural sense of indignation against crime; let the Devil color it with personal passion, and you have a mighty race of true and tender-hearted men living for centuries in such bloody feud that every note and word of their national songs is a dirge, and every rock of their hills is a gravestone. Take the love of beauty, and power of imagination, which are the source of every true achievement in art; let the Devil touch them with sensuality, and ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... supernatural gazelle—a variety now extinct, but which then pervaded the Schwarzwald in considerable quantity—sent by some good magician, who owed the giant a grudge, to pilot her out of the forest. Nothing could exceed her joy at this discovery: she whistled a dirge, sang a Latin hymn, and preached a funeral discourse all in one breath. Such were the artless methods by which the full heart in the fifteenth century was compelled to express its gratitute for benefits; the advertising ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... at this funereal dirge, Where grief for a lost lifetime stands confessed, I wore a clerk's costume of sable serge, Though not gold eye glasses ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... front seats are, a man in full evening dress, which he tries to conceal under a caped cloak, and two Ladies in plush opera-cloaks. Fog is hanging about in the rafters, and the gas-stars sing a melancholy dirge. Each casual cough arouses dismal echoes. Enter an intending Spectator, who is conducted to a seat in the middle of an empty row. After removing his hat and coat, he suddenly thinks better—or worse—of it, puts them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... no objection—he divined that the Knights and their service would be not precisely a consolation, but a satisfaction to his father. So the Knights led the procession, with their band playing a dirge part of the long way to the cemetery; and then turned back, after forming in two lines, plumed hats sympathetically in hand, to let the hearse ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... grotesque with the stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... staircase lined with peach-colour and yellow marble, into the shadows below. Carl himself, disguised as a strolling musician, had followed it across the square through a drenching rain, on which circumstance he overheard the old people congratulate the "blessed" dead within, had listened to a dirge of his own composing brought out on the great organ with much bravura by his friend, the new court organist, who was in the secret, and that night turned the key of the garden entrance to the vault, and ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... had fallen in the defence of the house; and to the father, who followed the coffins, and the mother, who hid herself in the thicket, there was something like pleasure in the roll of the drum, and the measure of the dead march, and the warlike tone of the shrill dirge which was sung round the open graves, and the discharge of firearms over them—a satisfaction like that of fulfilling the last wish of their boy. This done, and the graves fenced and planted, the childless pair departed, wishing, perhaps, in their own hearts, that they could weep their ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... light, passing away, as their fathers had passed away, listening to the sound of the North Sea restlessly beating against the breakwater. That sound was never out of their ears while they lived, and it was the dirge to which they died. Such was their life, but they knew no ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... made a pretence of eating the wing, just to please me; but when the waiter was taken away to the kitchen, I found all the bird on the plate. This morning, just before daylight, I heard her playing a wild, mournful thing on the piano, that sounded like a dirge or a wail; and Ruth says when she went into the parlor to open the blinds, she found her praying, and thinks she was on her knees for an hour. Please God! sometimes I wish she was in heaven with my mother, for she will never see any peace in ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the long lanes on misery's verge, Find out their dark dens, and list to their dirge; Where want and famine, and by ourselves made, Forgive our frail follies, and ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... body was borne to the grave under military escort, the soldiers marching to the mournful strains of the funeral dirge and muffled drums; the corpse was lowered to its last resting-place; the burial service read with a trembling voice by the chaplain,—for the missionary had taken his place among the mourners by the side of the widow,—the usual salute was fired, ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... the QUEEN'S Most Excellent Majesty, being constitutionally partial to poetry, should desire to have constant private supply from respectable tip-top genius, to be kept snug on Royal premises and ready at momentary notice to oblige with song or dirge, according as High Jinks or Dolorousness are the Court orders ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the shout of hosts mid-sea; until, as the last line of the Israelites have gained the beach, the shields clang, and the cymbals clap; and as the waters whelm the pursuing foe, the swift-fingered winds on the white keys of the foam play the grand march of Israel delivered, and the awful dirge of Egyptian overthrow. ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... to the game, he puffed out his cheeks and began to chant the De profundis. When he had got to the end of it, he began it all over again. The game came to a conclusion in the midst of this dirge. It was he who was beaten, but his defeat did not seem to vex him in ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... indication of pity crossing his composed features, but it would immediately revert again to its former gaze, as if already looking into the womb of futurity. Much of the time he was chanting a kind of low dirge in the Delaware tongue, using the deep and remarkable guttural ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... one star on the bosom of the night The cowslip and the yellow primrose,—they Are gone, my sad Leontia, to their graves, And April hath wept o'er them, and the voice Of March hath sung, even before their deaths The dirge of those young children of the year But here is hearts ease for your woes. And now, The honey suckle flower I give to thee, And love it for my sake, my own Cyane It hangs upon the stem it loves, as thou Hast clung to me, through every joy and sorrow, It ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... by the fitful glare of the dying embers, those two silent men and that pale woman seemed to be keeping a vigil in an abode of death. And the pattering rain and moan of the night-wind sounded like a dirge. ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which The Four Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, were published; and also a Dirge (Daphnaida) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges, the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (Prothalamion), on the marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... measured tramp of the jury advancing, and filing into their box, had the mournful, measured beat as of pall bearers, keeping step to a dismal dirge; and when the foreman laid upon the table the fatal brass unicorn, the muffled sound seemed ominous as the grating of a coffin lowered upon the cross bars of a gaping grave. As the roll was called, each man rose, and answered in a low but distinct tone. Then the clerk of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Gilbert Burns, 'a juvenile production.' To walk by a river while flooded, or through a wood on a rough winter day, and hear the storm howling among the leafless trees, exalted the poet's thoughts. "In such a season," he said, "just after a train of misfortunes, I composed Winter, a Dirge."] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... There they stand, the batter'd columns, underneath the murky sky, In the hush of desperation, not to conquer but to die. Hark! the bagpipe's fitful wailing—not the pibroch loud and shrill, That, with hope of bloody banquet, lured the ravens from the hill— But a dirge both low and solemn, fit for ears of dying men, Marshall'd for their latest battle, never more to fight again. Madness—madness! Why this shrinking? Were we less inured to war When our reapers swept the harvest from the field of red Dunbar? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Thomas S. Jones, Jr The Invisible Bride Edwin Markham Rain on a Grave Thomas Hardy Patterns Amy Lowell Dust Rupert Brooke Ballad, "The roses in my garden" Maurice Baring "The Little Rose is Dust, My Dear" Grace Hazard Conkling Dirge Adelaide Crapsey The Little Red Ribbon James Whitcomb Riley ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief, beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane into the evening haze. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said she; "in three days I shall be here for a bouquet, and in less than thrice three days I promise you there shall be a dirge sung for ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Coleridge knew that in being deserted by the poetic spirit, he was leaving a high artistic realm for one of lesser glory; and hence his letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, and, later on, his dirge ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... roams at vanity fair, In robes that rival the tulip's glare, Think on the chaplet of leaves which round His fading forehead will soon be bound; Think on each dirge the priests will say When his ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... papers are full of praise for those devoted sons of the motherland, the Kundu and the Chakravarti zamindars. If only, say they, the country had a few more of such staunch patriots, the mills of Manchester would have, had to sound their own dirge to the ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... century and a half was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality (1807), to be rising again towards the level of inspiration which it had once attained in Lycidas. And in the development of the Miltonic genius this wonderful dirge marks the culminating point. As the twin idylls of 1632 show a great advance upon the Ode on the Nativity (1629), the growth of the poetic mind during the five years which follow 1632 is registered in Lycidas. Like the L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Lycidas is laid out on the lines ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... seem to have a natural proclivity for quoting the appropriate dirge when sorrow shows itself. The Book of Lamentations—Shakespeare's sadder lines—roll off their tongues majestically and seem to give them consolation—as it were to lay a sound, unjoyous basis for the proper enjoyment of the songs of ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... whom thou hast driven away Is bold amidst the chilly spray? What good is all thy vain remorse? Thinkst thou from jaws of death to force A sacrifice so lightly thrust Upon the altar of thy lust? A host like thee could nothing urge To meet one tone of her sad dirge: ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... singing their song, with two others, a few steps off, singing another, a dirge—a clashing of sleepiness, health, and vague melancholy. But they did not feel dull, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... a song to sing, O! [SHE] Sing me your song, O! [HE] It is sung to the knell Of a churchyard bell, And a doleful dirge, ding dong, O! It's a song of a popinjay, bravely born, Who turned up his noble nose with scorn At the humble merrymaid, peerly proud, Who loved that lord, and who laughed aloud At the moan of the merryman, moping mum, Whose soul was sad, whose glance was glum, Who sipped ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... tightened just a little—just sufficiently to keep the fakir cognizant of its position. The fakir howled out a sort of singsong dirge, which plainly had imperatives in every line of it. At each short pause for breath he added something in an undertone that made the ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... down to their shoulders. In their hands were gilded rods, and round their necks hung golden chains, to which were attached emblems of the god they worshipped. They walked two-and-two to the number of fifty, chanting a melancholy dirge, one hand of each priest resting upon his fellow's shoulder, and as they passed, with the exception of certain Jews, all the spectators uncovered, while some of the more pious of them even fell upon ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... the "Dirge of Valencia," composed by one of its Arab inhabitants during the siege, gives us a picture of the wretched state ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... eat only once a-day, washing himself all over before this single meal, and devoting certain hours of every day to prayer. After the expiry of the year, he uses a certain ceremony for the soul of the king his predecessor, much like our solemn dirge; at which 100,000 persons are often assembled, among whom he distributes large alms. When this ceremony is ended, the prince is confirmed as inheritor of the kingdom, and all the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... they think of their humiliated Emperor. Up speaks one suffering with a deadly hurt to the other: "Friend, when I am dead, bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side." Until this time the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key. The old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor's squadrons passing over his grave, and the minor ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... was terribly cut up at the premature death of his follower; Lizzie, having smothered her head with fluffy feathers from some cockatoos that had been roasted for supper, employed herself in chanting a most weird kind of dirge over the body, to which she beat a species of accompaniment on the bottom of a pint pot; while Ferdinand, by Dunmore's directions, had set to work to strip a sheet of bark off a tea-tree, to act as a rude coffin. A great difficulty now ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... like a charnel ship through the dark, cold voids of space—the sun a burned-out char, a dead cinder, and the world one dismal silence, cold beyond measure, and dead beyond consciousness. The philosopher has wailed a dirge without [Page 261] hope, a requiem without grandeur, over the world's future. But nature herself, to all ears attuned, sings paeans, and shouts to men that the highest energy, that ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... presence felt, tho' greeted not; Knows that no foot, save hers, unbidden; Had dared to tread the living tomb, No other hand had waked, unchidden, The echoes of that sullen gloom; And now her voice's gentle tone Blends with the harp, in dirge-like moan: ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... is," he goes on. "Haven't I pitied the poor victims who had to go through with it? Think of having to run that gauntlet—morbidly curious old women, silly girls, bored men—and trying to keep step to that confounded dirge. Wedding march, indeed! They make it sound more like the march of the condemned. Tum-tum-te-dum! Ugh! I tell you, Marjorie, I'm not going to have it. Nor any of this stodgy, grewsome fuss. I mean to have a ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... personal experience an instance of this kind. I had been reading with some children of about ten years old the story from "Cymbeline" of Imogen in the forest scene, when the brothers strew flowers upon her, and sing the funeral dirge, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... sees me, God, who took my heart And drowned it in life's surge. In all your wide warm earth I have no part— light song overcomes me like a dirge. Could love's great harmony The saints keep step to when their bonds are loose, Not weigh me down? am I a wife to choose? Look in ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... house-dog bounded o'er each scene Where cisterns had so lately been: Away in frantic haste he sprung, And sought to cool his burning tongue. He howled, and to his famished cry The dreary echoes gave reply; And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim, Rolled back in sad response ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... of Fear and Falsehood hear no more 500 The voice that once waked multitudes to war Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond To the death dirge of the melancholy wind: It were a sight of awfulness to see The works of faith and slavery, so vast, 505 So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing! Even as the corpse that rests beneath their wall. A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death To-day, the breathing marble glows ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... was going up the avenue on his way home, a young girl passed him, walking very briskly. She paused for a moment just ahead of him to give some money to a poor woman who, doubled up on the pavement in a black shawl, was grinding out from a wheezy little organ a thin, dirge-like strain. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... him up while he was being securely bound with his back to the trunk. About his feet dry wood was then placed, and half way up his body. When this had been accomplished, the Indians formed themselves in a circle about the unhappy man, and began to chant a slow weird dirge ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... be a nice thing to sing about. Thus, if one were a modern fool one might write a dirge with 'Huit francs et dix centimes' all chanted on one low sad note, and coming in between brackets for a 'motif, and with a lot about autumn and Death—which last, Death that is, people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Speaking of Josquin's treatment of effects, it is recorded of him that a single word is sometimes scattered through a whole page of notes, showing that he attached no importance to the words whatever. One of the most beautiful of his pieces was a dirge written upon the death of Okeghem. Owing to the good fortune of the invention of music printing from movable types, in 1498, when Josquin was at the height of his powers, a large number of his works have come down ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... save the distant and sullen roar of the ocean, as it breaks in sheets of foam on the rock-bound coast—the fitful cry of curlew, as it wings over them its solitary way—or the occasional low moaning of the wind, as, stealing through amidst the rocks, it seems to pour forth a mournful dirge for the shades of departed greatness:—when we look on a scene like this, we have before our gaze all that is known of these men of the olden time. Their blood-stained rites, their solemn mysteries, are forgotten; but their simple temples still stand imperishable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the laborers' chorus, "Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non e piu come era prima," it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge with the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean, and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy of France, and of the world, by men whose conduct you yourself have exposed in ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Wish, has been brilliantly paraphrased by Liszt. This pretty mazurka is charmingly sung and played by Marcella Sembrich in the singing lesson of "The Barber of Seville." There are several mazurkas in the list. Most of these songs are mediocre. Poland's Dirge is an exception, and so is Horsemen Before the Battle. "Was ein junges Madchen liebt" has a short introduction, in which the reminiscence hunter may find a true bit of "Meistersinger" color. Simple in structure and sentiment, the Chopin lieder ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... matter of his own music were not very definite. In 1903, when he had finished all that he was to write, he expressed a preference for the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite above anything that he had composed. "Of all my music," he confessed at this time, "the 'Dirge' in the 'Indian' suite pleases me most. It affects me deeply and did when I was writing it. In it an Indian woman laments the death of her ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... 'Weep, this is the moment,' or 'Rejoice, the hour has come,' and we chant our dirge or kindle our bonfires accordingly. Why, it means a little martyrdom to the occasional sinner who selects his own occasion for sorrow ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... this sad end will be a warning to all young wives who go out walking with handsome young men. Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. He sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The music is a dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball's son. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... I hear the loud Hosanna chanted for a soul which dies in the Lord. I will repeat the strain. No. My voice refuses to fall back upon the ear. Where is my heart that it beats not swelling to the anthem's measure? Cold! cold! cold! Nay; I will rise. I will respond unto the funeral dirge. I will shout. Oh! my trunk is hardened, and my tongue is glued. Silence! they pause. Say, do they hear me? No. Silence, horrible and awful. Hark! they mourn with lamentation on my fate. O, Heaven! must I endure all this? Must the living weep for the dead, and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... pieces by the furious Muscovites. She wandered a long time through extensive quarters, the solitude of which astonished her, when a distant and doleful sound thrilled her with terror. It was like the funeral dirge of this vast city: fixed in motionless suspense, she beheld an immense multitude of persons, of both sexes, in deep affliction, carrying their effects and their sacred images, and leading their children along with them. Their priests, laden with the sacred symbols of religion, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... kept sinking until it was buried in a region of darkness. When the last fiery speck of it disappeared the sky broke into an evensong of color so solemn, so pensive that my wretched mood interpreted it as a visible dirge for the dead sun. Rose lapsed into purple, purple merged into blue, the blue bordering on a field of hammered gold that was changing shape and hue; all of which was eloquent of sadness. It seemed as though the heavens were in an ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... wandered where the brooks were dry, While memory wove a dismal song, And to my God I raised my cry, And sang my dirge the whole day long;— For I was in the desert drear, And, ah! my ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... upon his back!' Do, then, in turn, tell me, If joy Thy heart as well as voice employ Why dost thou now most Sable, shine In plumage woefuller far than mine? Thy silence is a sadder thing Than any dirge I sing!" ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... country was gowned like a bride in white. But the white on this occasion was not the emblem of purity; rather was it the pallor of icy death. The rigorous storms seemed to prophesy of trouble; the very winds were rehearsing a dirge to be plaintively sung over mountains and ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... Pageant and dirge trip up each other often enough in the course of human life! The lives especially of sovereigns, through the strong light ever beating upon their thrones, are always exposed to vicissitudes of fortune. The Papal Mission had scarcely passed out ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... it's the divil himself couldn't hold me, whether it's the short, sharp war-cry of the Irish or the sweet, deep bell-notes of these Yankee hounds that to me ever seem chantin' a mournful dirge for the quarry. Sure, it's the faster Irish hounds that make the grandest runnin', but it's the deep-throated mellow chorus of a Yankee pack ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... ends with him. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton scarcely mention it. It holds almost no place in the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but, at the close of the eighteenth century, it has the good luck to be uprooted by Burns's plough, and he at once sings its dirge and its beauties; and then the flower at once becomes a celebrity. Wordsworth sings of it in many a beautiful verse; and I think it is scarcely too much to say that since his time not an English poet has failed to ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... that Scott was easily deceived by a modern imitation, if he liked the poetry. Surtees hoaxed him not only with Barthram's Dirge and Anthony Featherstonhaugh, but with a long prose excerpt from a non-existent manuscript about a phantom knight. Scott made the plot of Marmion hinge on this myth, in the encounter of Marmion with Wilfred as the phantasmal cavalier. He tells us that in The Flowers of the Forest "the manner of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... across the river and mark the route by sticking in the sand long willow branches, with which we were laden for that purpose. The route staked, we returned and the train lined up. It need not require any great feat of imagination on the part of the reader to hear how dirge-like the first hoofs and wheels sounded as they parted the waters and led the way. Every man except the drivers waded alongside the horses to render assistance if it should be required. Mrs. Wadsworth was remarkably brave, sitting her wagon with white, but calm face. Scarcely a word was spoken ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... and (to a Shakespearian critic) the importance of these forgeries obscures the humble merit of Surtees, with his ballads of the 'Slaying of Antony Featherstonhaugh,' and of 'Bartram's Dirge.' Surtees left clever lacunae in these songs, 'collected from oral tradition,' and furnished notes so learned that they took in Sir Walter Scott. There are moments when I half suspect "the Shirra himsel" (who blamelessly forged so many extracts from 'Old Plays') of having composed ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... mutter, "and so 'Twas to rescue my life, gentle spirit! and, oh, For this did I doubt her?... a light word—a look— The mistake of a moment!... for this I forsook— For this? Pardon, pardon, Lucile! O Lucile!" Thought and memory rang, like a funeral peal, Weary changes on one dirge-like note through his brain, As ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... particular jolly mood the next morning, for he had spent the night bidding against Pierrepont Morgan at an auction sale of old masters; but he listened patiently while Sowers called off the figures in a sort of dirge-like singsong, and until he had wailed out his final note of despair, a bass-drum crash, which he thought would bring Foreman to a realizing sense of ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... priest; beside him sat the deacon driving; behind the cart four peasants, bareheaded, carried the coffin, covered with a white cloth; two women followed the coffin. The shrill wailing voice of one of them suddenly reached my ears; I listened; she was intoning a dirge. Very dismal sounded this chanted, monotonous, hopelessly-sorrowful lament among the empty fields. The coachman whipped up the horses; he wanted to get in front of this procession. To meet a corpse on the road is a bad omen. And he did succeed in galloping ahead beyond this path ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... thought flashed into his mind—this was, perhaps, some sort of mourning for the dead! He was right. The duty of the father of the poor youth who had been killed was, for several days after the funeral, to sit alone in his house and chant from sunset till daybreak a death-dirge, or, as it is called, the tjerita bari. It was not till next day that this was told to him, but meanwhile the surmise afforded him ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... moved in his arms, never petitioned for mercy. She gave no sign of life or being, saving that she moaned at regular intervals in piteous accents:—'He has forgotten and abandoned me!' as if that one simple expression comprised in itself, her acknowledgment of the uselessness of her life, and her dirge for ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... and despondency, pleasure and pain, Are mingled together like sunshine and rain; And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... so glad, did he slink off to his study forthwith and play a dirge on his piano, and there sit listlessly in his chair for the rest of the morning staring out of the window through his glass, till Jill tripped in and fetched him down ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... eyes, O hapless One, my humble offerings Will not appear like thy wrath's threats, nor like The joyful trumpetings of thy reveille, Nor like an image of thy passion's cross, Nor like thy sorrow's dirge, nor like glad hymns; But like soft songs and trembling lights and fondlings Of lily hands, black birds, ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... another dirge in wailing, For another vessel sailing With the shadow-ships at sea; Shadow-ships for ever sinking — Shadow-ships whose pumps are clinking, And whose thirsty holds are ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... me not perish. On the day of Tammuz, play for me on the flute of lapis lazuli, together with the lyre[1187] of pearl play for me. Together let the professional dirge singers, male and female, play for me, That the dead may arise and inhale ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... them the wild wail of the poet over his own misfortunes, and the vanishing of the dreams of glory which haloed his life. The chorus with which the tragedy winds up—"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"—the words appropriately carved upon his tombstone at St. Onofrio—is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words are changed, the spell is lost, and the way ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the dirge of the people of the Long House," said Paul, upon whose sensitive mind the scene made ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in her watery nest Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending; 'Few words,' quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass best, Where no excuse can give the fault amending: In me moe woes than words are now depending; And my laments would be drawn out too long, To tell them all with one ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... part and sipped Mokha from little cups. A girl was performing a wriggling dance upon the square carpet occupying the centre of the floor, accompanied by a Nubian boy who twanged upon a guitar, and by most of the assembled company, who clapped their hands to the music or droned a low, tuneless dirge. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the dance, and arose a weird dirge of compassion over what might have been! So moving was it, the player himself was melted. His dark nature showed its fairest side,—sensitive refinement, grace of expression, flowing ease of manner. Quick was ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the service, the firing-party in their places, six on either side of the grave, would fire three volleys into the air, while the band breathed a solemn dirge. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... character was Maneros, son of the earliest Egyptian king. He seems to hold the same position as Linus, son of Apollo, among the Greeks. The first song of Egyptian music was a dirge for his untimely end, and a lament for the swift passing away of youth, spring, joy, and so on. Gradually the song itself, instead of the king's son, began to be called Maneros, and became the well-known banquet song of the social feasts, calling upon the guests to enjoy ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... way ahead, immediately behind the coffin, they were chanting a dirge, and Peter Ilitsch's long-drawn, quavering notes ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead: Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart; Which epitaph containeth, "Her eyes were once his dart." From so ungrateful fancy; From ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... feeble steps, and the assumed tranquillity of Emily, gave her involuntary tears. She shed none, but walked, her face partly shaded by a thin black veil, between two persons, who supported her, preceded by the abbess, and followed by nuns, whose plaintive voices mellowed the swelling harmony of the dirge. When the procession came to the grave the music ceased. Emily drew the veil entirely over her face, and, in a momentary pause, between the anthem and the rest of the service, her sobs were distinctly audible. The holy father began the service, and Emily again commanded her ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the poor girl. Not hers the hovering sense of marriage bells Tuning the air with fragrance of sweet sound; But the low dirge that ever rose and died, Recurring without pause or any close, Like one verse chaunted aye in sleepless brain. Down to the shore it drew her from the heights, Like witch's demon-spell, that fearful moan. She knew that somewhere in the green ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... on the French farm became locally famous. Within a year two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic Indian dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer boys, who had been for an evening in town and were returning late at night to lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they came to the farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely. Although he continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... temperament, I suppose," he resumed. "To-night this ravishing scene of beauty and splendor makes me sad at heart, I know not why. It seems too brilliant, too dazzling. I would as soon go home and compose a dirge as anything." ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a dirge for their martyr hero. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Factory. The men drew the sledges on which their provisions were loaded and went in advance, clearing the way for the women. In the midst of the company strode a solemn-visaged piper. At one moment, as a dirge wailed forth, the spirits of the people drooped and they felt themselves beaten and forsaken. But anon the music changed. Up through the scrubby pine and over the mantle of snow rang the skirl of the undefeated; and as they heard the gathering song of Bonnie Dundee {63} or the summons ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... ringing. Dirge-like your melody swells; But Hope wipes the tears that are springing, Mournful-toned memory-bells! Above your deep knelling Her soft voice is swelling, Sweeter than angel-tones, silvery clear, Singing:—in Heaven above, All is unchanging love, Mourner, look upward, ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... recent date, & recolecting that I had seen a coffin put on the ferryboat that day I came over I supposed this to be the same, deposited here, & that the noise I heard them making the following night, was the funeral dirge. There was one old grey headed indian here, but on approach, he wraped his blanket around him, & without speaking, or seeming to take notice of us, walked off into the thickets, & disappeared. I looked after him as he turned away, & felt ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... Dusk fell swiftly, and the pines began their nightly dirge for the many dead who died under them five and thirty years ago. They had a new and ominous chant now to Crittenden—a chant of premonition for the strong men about him who were soon to follow them. Camp-fires ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... there arose a melancholy chant from the old hags around—a dreadful strain, that sounded like a funeral dirge, sung in shrill, discordant voices, led by the nightmare hag, who as she sang waved in her hand a kind of club. All the time I held Almah in my arms, regardless of those around us, thinking only of her from whom I must soon again be separated, and whom I must leave in this ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... before we did. Then the diligence caught up with them. From a distance I saw in a pool of moonlight on the yellow road the black irregular mass of the convoy. Then I heard a weary dirge; the wretches were singing. One, in a sad and gutteral voice, gave the couplet, which trailed dismally through the ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... burial, sepulture^; inhumation^; obsequies, exequies^; funeral, wake, pyre, funeral pile; cremation. funeral, funeral rite, funeral solemnity; kneel, passing bell, tolling; dirge &c (lamentation) 839; cypress; orbit, dead march, muffled drum; mortuary, undertaker, mute; elegy; funeral, funeral oration, funeral sermon; epitaph. graveclothes^, shroud, winding sheet, cerecloth; cerement. coffin, shell, sarcophagus, urn, pall, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the rock-hewn cemetery. Men bore the coffin on their shoulders, and on the coffin lay the dead man's sword, crowned with garlands, and his shako pierced with a bullet-hole. Leading the procession marched a student chorus singing a dirge, while weeping women brought up the rear. When the family vault was reached, the seven brothers of the deceased took the coffin and laid it in the niche prepared to receive it; then they rolled a great stone before the opening, came out of the ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... called also dirge-ales, and heathenish rioting at bride-ales." (HARRISON, Description of ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... he did not come out of it. The postilion Antipka said afterwards that he saw Gerasim through a crack in the wall, sitting on his bedstead, his face in his hand. From time to time he uttered soft regular sounds; he was wailing a dirge, that is, swaying backwards and forwards with his eyes shut, and shaking his head as drivers or bargemen do when they chant their melancholy songs. Antipka could not bear it, and he came away from the crack. When ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... matter he should join his voice with hers. Fainter fell the harmony; then ceased altogether—a hymn destined to become interwoven with terrible memories, the tragic massacre of the Huguenots on the ill-fated night of St. Bartholomew. Again prevailed the tristful dirge ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... no one at home within but a woman and a few bairns. The odd thing is that as I get a look of the woman between the door-post and the wall, she sits with her back to the cruisie-light, patching clothes and crooning away at a dirge that's broken by her tears. If it had been last week, and our little adventures in Glencoe had brought us so far up this side of the glen, I might have thought she had suffered something at our hands. But we were never near ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... for an effort, he opens his arms, and stoops as to take up the body. Just then the hound, for some time silent, again gives out its mournful monotone—continuing the dirge the runaway ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... came the Fourth of July, when, in obedience to the old custom which I had known so well in my student days, the American colony visited the cemetery of the Rue Picpus and laid wreaths upon the tomb of Lafayette,—the American band performing a dirge, and our marines on duty firing a farewell volley. It was in every way a warm and hearty tribute. A week later was the unveiling of the statue of Camille Desmoulins in the garden of the Palais Royal,—this being the one-hundredth ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... This woeful dirge of the mother's heart, and the wife's sorrow, had almost every eye in tears; and, indeed, it was impossible that the sympathy for her should not be deep and general. They all knew the excellence and mildness of her husband's character, and that every word ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... babels; wretched souls bearing up dead bodies, that they may not have their fall so soon: even as it is in that common dirge song. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... putting an end to him at once,' said Miss Gwynne, 'and I think we had better play his funeral dirge. Lady Mary, will you give us 'The Dead March in Saul,' or something appropriate? Never mind, Netta; I daresay cousin Howel will turn out a great man by-and-by;' this last clause was whispered to Netta, whilst the young hostess went towards a grand piano that stood invitingly open, and begged ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale |
