"Lilt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grey pavement went beside the palisade. A woman in a pink frock, with a scarlet sunshade, crossed the road, a little white dog running like a fleck of light about her. The woman with the scarlet sunshade came over the road, a lilt in her walk, a little shadow attending her. Ursula watched spell-bound. The woman with the scarlet sunshade and the flickering terrier was gone—and ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... her from feeling fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer's brain. Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively masculine; women neither practice them nor know how to value them; and one's husband's proficiency in ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... brewing To the lilt of his lyric wiles: The fiddler knows what rueing Will come of this ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... from the moon, Seen with their eyes Eldorado, Sat in the Bo-tree's shadow, Wandered at noon In the valleys of Van, Tented in Lebanon, tarried in Ophir, Last year in Tartary piped for the Khan. Now it's the song of a lover; Now it's the lilt of a loafer,— Under the trees in a midsummer noon, Dreaming the haze into isles to discover, Beating the silences into a croon; Soon Up from the marshes a fall of the plover! Out from the cover A flurry of quail! Down ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... wondering wherein consists the true lyrical magic. In that line of Burns's, clearly, it lies in the harmony of lyric thought and lyric lilt. In— ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... through sound of bees and river. The notes fell, round and starred, between young leaves, Trilled to a spiral lilt, stopped on a quiver. The Lady Eunice listens and believes. Gervase has many tales of her dear Lord, His bravery, his knowledge, his charmed life. She quite forgets who's speaking in the gladness Of being this man's wife. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... however, I had no fault to find with the very pleasant little circle into which he insisted on ushering me, at one end of the glazed veranda, and should have enjoyed my evening but for an inquisitive anxiety to get in touch with the unsuspecting pair. Meanwhile the lilt of a waltz had mingled with the click of billiard balls and the talking and laughing which make a summer's night vocal in that outpost of pleasure on the silent heights; and some of our party had gone off to dance. In ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... to the boathouse landing to the lilt of a familiar rowing song. Wyn's camping days were over; the outing of the Go-Ahead Club ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... boy, burrowed among the manuscripts of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, making himself an able antiquary at a time when most youth are idling or philandering. Moreover, he was himself the son of a border chief and knew minstrelsy almost at his nurse's knee: and the lilt of a ballad was always like wine to his heart. It makes you think of Sir Philip Sidney's splendid testimony to such an influence: "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... clothed thy life with hopes and sins and fears, And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears; Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire, When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar, Villon, our sad ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... hands, and turning about in a little space like an animal in a cage, over the hedge through the apple-boughs a boy's clear voice rose suddenly, singing a rollicking tune, with a snapping of fingers and tapping of feet in time to its merry lilt. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... developing a state of mind, a consistent attitude, and then having got it thoroughly established does something in distinct contradiction to it. Martin had never cared for music, but when one evening, a little more than a week after Rose's arrival, she suggested, with a laughing lilt, her fondness for it, he agreed that he had missed it in his home and, to Bill's and Mrs. Wade's unbelieving surprise, dwelt at length upon his enjoyment of Fallon's band and his longing to blow a cornet. A little later, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... he doesn't care." Paul whistled a lively lilt. His manner seemed offensive. She flushed and scowled. He moved about the room still whistling and made much noise. Ellenora regarded ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt, which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... The old lilt died on his lips. With a startled oath he reined in sharply and, shielding his eyes from the sun-glare, remained staring straight in front of him. They had just topped the crest of the rise. The eastward slope showed a low-lying, undulating ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... hae layen three herring a' sa't, Bonny lass, gin ze'll take me, tell me now, And I hae brew'n three pickles o' ma't And I cannae cum ilka day to woo. To woo, to woo, to lilt and to woo, And I cannae ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... habitation, came the dynamite explosions blowing up the city in blocks. When the muffled roar was over, the gathering quiet was pierced by the thin, high notes of gramophones. From the shadow of trees Caruso's voice rose in the swaggering lilt of "La Donna e Mobile," to be answered by Melba's, crystal-sweet, from a machine stored in a crowded cart. There were ragtime melodies, and someone had a record of "Marching Through Georgia" that always drew forth applause. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... in the order in which it had arrived, and to the lilt of the gay music of the powerful band, the volatile spirits of the multitude revived, and the loud "huzzahs" rent the air as Apleon—the Anti-christ—passed through the ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... him utterly, relented, and graciously acquiesced. When they left the office Matt Peasley was stepping high, like a ten-time winner, for he had suddenly made the discovery that life ashore was a wonderful, wonderful thing. There was such a lilt in his young heart that, for the life of him, he could not forbear doing a little double shuffle as he waited at the elevator with Cappy and his daughter. ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... of all days, Cappy would not have missed luncheon with the Bilgewater Club for a farm. As he breezed along there was a smile on his ruddy old face and a lilt in his kind old heart, for he was rehearsing his announcement to his youthful friends of how he had but recently tanned the hide of a brother! He almost laughed aloud as he pictured himself solemnly relating, in the presence ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... that of a never-ending band. Playing all the way, too, but silently. Yet, the music was there. The pity was that one could not hear it. The pomp, the swagger, the swing of the Guards, the shifting movement, the bright array—all these were unmistakable. The very lilt of the air made itself felt. Very cheery. Certainly, the river was ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... be the little harp of Jesus. But no concert is complete without singing, and if Jesus plays, must not Celine make melody with her voice? When the music is plaintive, she will sing the songs of exile; when the music is gay, she will lilt the airs of her ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... and in matter these last two lines are pure Shakespeare, and Shakespeare speaks to us, too, when Prince Henry gives up Douglas to his pleasure "ransomless and free." But not only does the poet lend the soldier his own sentiments and lilt of phrase, he also presents him to us as a shadowy replica of Hotspur, even during Hotspur's lifetime. We have already noticed Hotspur's admirable answer when Glendower brags that he can call spirits from ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... From drawing-room and library and dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she drew a breath ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... shouldered like a musket. But it was the face of him that most compelled attention for it revealed a multitude of emotions. His fancy ran far ahead of the tramping force thudding the dust on the highway. He was now the Army's child indeed, stepping round the world to a lilt of the bagpipes, with the currachd—the caul of safety—as surely his as it was Black Duncan the seaman's. There were battles in the open, and leaguering of towns, but his was the enchanted corps moving from country to country through victory, and always ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... collie before the slope could be traversed. A fast-running dog is not an easy mark for a bullet—especially if the dog be a collie, with a trace of wolf—ancestry in his gait. A dog, at best, does not gallop straight ahead as does a horse. There is almost always a sidewise lilt to ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... hymn, chant, lay, ditty, ballad, onody, chansonnette, lyric, lilt, lied, paean, cantata, aria, sonnet, strain, round, rhapsody, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and their escort reached the village, Jessie could hear the gay lilt of the chantey that ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... more synthetic, more of a poet, than other birds,—has a duet in his throat. He bursts from the grass and sings in bursts—plays his own obligato while he goes. One can never see him in his eager flurry, between his low heaven and his low nest, without catching the lilt of inspiration. Like the true poet, he suits the action to the word in a weary world, and does his flying and singing together. The song that he throws around him, is the very spirit of his wings—of all wings. More beauty is always the putting of more things together. They were created to be together. ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... crossed the Cupar road and travelled the one leading to the ferry when they heard the whirlwind sound of horsemen coming after them, at which the honest man of Crail darted aside and lay flat on his grouff ayont a bramble bush, while my grandfather began to lilt as blithely as he could, "The Bonny Lass of Livingston," and the spring was ever after to him as a hymn of thanksgiving, but the words he then sang was an auld, ranting, godless and graceless ditty of the grooms and serving-men that sorned about his father's smiddy, and the closer that ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... pulley on the large end of the receiving cone as to remain stationary while the wind is on or near the base of the bobbin. When the cone of the bobbin diminishes so as to materially increase the pull on the traveler, the conical drums are started by a belt shipper attached to the lilt motion. By the movement of the belt on these drums a continually accelerated motion is given to the rings, their maximum speed being about one-twentieth the number of revolutions per minute as the spindle ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... their harvestry. The wind gossiped with the grasses along our way, and over them the buttercups danced, goldenly-glad. Waves of sinuous shadow went over the ripe hayfields, and plundering bees sang a freebooting lilt in wayside gardens. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... castle at the dawn of the morning, and with many a knight to bear him company rode, not eager and swift, like a prince who went to find a treasure, but steady and slow, as we should go to meet sorrow. Not one of the hundred men who followed dared to lilt a lay or fling a laughing jest from his mouth. All rode silent among their gay trappings, for ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... my flushed hours I dream (High thought) instead of armour gleam Or warrior cantos ream by ream To load the shelves - Songs with a lilt of words, that seem To ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a salve for all external ills that flesh is heir to. It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering. It could not fail. He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt. It was his own discovery. An obscure chemist's assistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... case, as in the other, there is a certain family resemblance, in the melody as in the theme, that to the untrained and unaccustomed ear may convey an impression of monotony. But to each ballad, as to each psalm, there belongs a peculiar strain or lilt, touched, as a rule, with a solemn or piercing pathos, often cast in the plaintive minor mode, that alone can bring out the full inner meaning of the words, and that is endeared and hallowed by centuries of association. As ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... shaking herself, gravely composing her face, and clearing her throat, she began, in a high, shrill, piercing voice, rocking her head to the peculiar lilt of the words, and interpolating short explanatory ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... piquant, and also something more. Even in its playful moments there is delicate irony, a spiritual sporting with graver and more passionate emotions. Those broken octaves which usher in each time the second theme, with its fascinating, infectious, rhythmical lilt, what an ironically joyous ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... sail of Cornwall, whither Tristan is bearing Isolde to be the wife of his king Marke. The cheery song of a sailor who, unseen, at the masthead, sings to the winds which are blowing him away from his wild Irish sweetheart, floats down to us. It has a refreshing and buoyant lilt, this song, with something of the sea breeze in it, and yet something, as it is sung, which emphasizes the loneliness of ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... declamation, 'King Charles, the Young Hero'. Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' is technically a finer poem than anything Tegnr has written, but it lacks the deep, virile bass, the tremendous volume of breath and voice, and the captivating martial lilt which makes the heart beat willy nilly to the rhythm of the verse" (Essays ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... circulation in the literary world" (Medwin, Conversations, 1824, p. 261), and he may have heard without heeding this and other passages quoted by privileged readers; or, though never a line of Christabel had sounded in his ears, he may (as Koelbing points out) have caught its lilt at second hand from the published works of Southey, or ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... did not suppose that our reverend Brother Gunsaulus ever attempted poetry. His verses have that grace and lilt that are the prime essentials to successful comic-opera libretto writing. When I want a collaborateur, I shall know ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... hobble-chains' rattle, The calling of birds, The lowing of cattle Must blend with the words. Without these, indeed, you Would find it ere long, As though I should read you The words of a song That lamely would linger When lacking the rune, The voice of the singer, The lilt of the tune. ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... poets as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines To Get the Final Lilt of Songs indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See My Prologue.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See The Mage.] were not ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... lilt, a go, a flourish. To employ a vulgarism of the hour, it had the punch. It landed you and between the eyes. It required neither commentaries nor explanation. It was all there. It was tangible as a brickbat, self-evident ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech. And the natural art that they say these with, My soul would sing of beauty and myth ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... wy the bairns were ta'en in wi' him. Man, a've seen him tak a wee laddie on his knee that his ain mither cudna quiet, an' lilt 'Sing a song o' saxpence' till the bit mannie wud be lauchin' like a gude ane, an' pooin' ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... hands. One agent had brought in a big steel safe and a tent and was buying coal lands right and left. More young men drifted in from all points of the compass. A tent-hotel was put at the foot of Imboden Hill, and of nights there were under it much poker and song. The lilt of a definite optimism was in every man's step and the light of hope was ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... it, is, of course, more (but not much more) than a natural dogma of shifted accents, or a mixture of shifted and minus accents. It is something like wearing a derby hat on the back of the head, a shuffling lilt of a happy soul just let out of a Baptist Church in old Alabama. Ragtime has its possibilities. But it does not "represent the American nation" any more than some fine old senators represent it. Perhaps we know it now as an ore ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... polka tune. The very first bar put Madame Ewans on her mettle. She drew Jean to her, settled his hands in hers and lifting him off the ground with a jerk of the hip, began dancing with him. She swung and swayed to the lilt of the music; but the boy was awkward and embarrassed, and only hindered his partner, dragging back and bumping against her. She threw him off roughly and ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... But with the seemingly lesser women, the women of seemingly no vast account—with those whose whole individuality depends upon the invaluable possession of their virtue, no great epic can well be sung, no loud paean sounded. You may find just a lyric here, a rondel there, set to the lilt of a phrase in an idle hour and sung in a passing moment to send a tired heart asleep. But that is all. Yet they are the women upon whom the world has spent six thousand years in the making; they are the women at ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Italian for a woman who works with her brain—with the hate of an Italian who sees another taking the bread out of his mouth. All this, coupled with the fact that your Italian is a natural-born hater, may indicate that the life of Mary Gowd had not the lyric lilt that life is commonly reputed to have ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... instead of that silly "Rilla"? She did not mind Walter's version, but nobody else was allowed to call her that, except Miss Oliver now and then. "Rilla-my-Rilla" in Walter's musical voice sounded very beautiful to her—like the lilt and ripple of some silvery brook. She would have died for Walter if it would have done him any good, so she told Miss Oliver. Rilla was as fond of italics as most girls of fifteen are—and the bitterest drop in her cup was her suspicion that he ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... peculiar catch of its lilt, would suddenly make me start up, wide awake, with every nerve in my body dancing to ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... LILT-PYPE, s. a musical instrument, the upper part of which was in the form of a flageolet, terminating below in a kind ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... in Manx to make more noise in a given time than any other two human brethren in Christendom, not excepting two Irishmen. Also I think the Manx must be capable of notes of sweet feeling, and I observe that a certain higher lilt in a Manx woman's voice, suggesting the effort to speak about the sound of the sea, and the whistle of the wind in the gorse, is lost in the voices of the younger women who speak English only. But apart from tangible loss, I regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of sentiment. In ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... Nor did either of them speak again till the music ceased. A vaudeville turn followed. A disgustingly clad, bewigged soubrette murdered a rag time ditty in a rasping soprano, displaying enough gold in her teeth to "salt" a barren claim. No one gave her heed. The lilt of the orchestra elicited a fragmentary chorus from the audience. For the rest the people pursued the prescribed purpose of these intervals in ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... And all the doubts and fears that from time to time had assailed her were banished by this impulse to go to him, to be with him. He loved her! The words, as she sat in the trolley car, ran in her head like the lilt of a song. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Cardigan strode, and there was a lilt in his heart now. Already he had forgotten the desperate situation from which he had just escaped; he thought only of Shirley Sumner's face, tear-stained with terror; and because he knew that at least some of those tears had been inspired by the gravest ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... jolly humour of the one and the refined sentiment of the other, is a point worth noticing. The easy flow, the careless charm of their versification, is by no means the artless matter it may seem to a careless reader. Nor is it the easiest of metrical tasks to poise perfectly the loose lilt ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... a dogged silence, and Elspeth's cheery whistling was the only sound in that sullen morning. It fairly broke my heart. She was whistling the old tune of "Leezie Lindsay," a merry lilt with the hill wind and the heather in it. The bravery of the poor child was the hardest thing of all to bear when I knew that in a few hours' time the end might come. The others were only weary and dishevelled and ill at ease, but on me seemed to have fallen ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... the young man, though with a lilt of dubiety, and a frown of excogitation, as if he weren't sure that he had quite ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... Camarade Duclos, another old-eyed youngster. There was amiable adventure with an amiable "blonde" (oh, if you could have seen your son); another with a "jolie brune" (oh, ma mere, ma mere); and still another lecon d'amour. The refrain had a catchy lilt to it, and ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... aestheticism. And he has succeeded within the limits of a tiny panel, a slight but charming intention. "The Great Cloud" rolls over a strip of lowland, lowering in a vast imperial whiteness, vague and shadowy as sleep or death. Ruysdael would have stopped for a moment to watch it. But its lyrical lilt would trouble a mind that could only think in prose; Shelley would like it better, and most certainly it would not fail to recall to his ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... powerful lungs and the wind was blowing their way but they heard it distinctly. It was a quaint syncopated tune, but not one of the Invincibles had any doubt that it came from some daring detachment of the Union Army. The notes with their odd lilt seemed to swell through the forest, but it was strange ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Force Stead Spinning in April Josephine Preston Peabody Song: On May Morning John Milton A May Burden Francis Thompson Corinna's Going a-Maying Robert Herrick "Sister, Awake" Unknown May Edward Hovell-Thurlow May Henry Sylvester Cornwell A Spring Lilt Unknown Summer Longings Denis Florence MacCarthy Midsummer John Townsend Trowbridge A Midsummer Song Richard Watson Gilder June, from "The Vision of Sir Launfal" James Russell Lowell June Harrison Smith Morris Harvest Ellen Mackay Hutchinson ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... lilt on hedge or bush: Poor things! they suffer sairly; In cauldrife quarters a' the nicht, A' day they feed but sparely. Now, up in the mornin's no for me, Up in the mornin' early; A pennyless purse I wad rather dree, Than rise ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... something fine!" said Dud to Jim, as they made their way through the chatting, laughing throng, and caught the lilt of the music on the beach beyond, where bathers, reckless of the church bells' call, were disporting themselves in the sunlit waves. "It's tough, with a place like this so near, to be shut up on a desert island for a whole vacation. ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... hasn't she?" he said to Mihul. He made vague curving motions in the air with one hand, more or less opposing ones with the other. "That sort of an up-and-sideways lilt ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... shadowy corner of the crowded room, and listened to the singing, wild and strong, and with no hint of coming battle in its full rolling lilt. He noted with satisfaction how the "Long, Long Trail," and "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag" gradually gave place to "Tell Mother I'll Be There," and "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder," growing ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... comforting lilt, indeed, with its promise of plenty. Much superior to the next, which bears in its bosom the hollow and unwelcome ring of a "toom girnal"—a sound no child should ever know. It is yet a lilt familiar to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... of Dromore' again that night with its queer haunting lilt. And when she had gone up, and he was smoking over the fire, the girl in her dark-red frock seemed to come, and sit opposite with her eyes fixed on his, just as she had been sitting while they talked. Dark red had suited her! Suited the look on her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... four interlusive lyrics the freer music is in the unique chant, "Over the sea our galleys went:" a song full of melody and blithe lilt. It is marvellously pictorial, and yet has a freedom that places it among the most ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... her soft, deep, loving eyes and her smiling mouth. Every now and then she burst into song; and then her thrilling voice, so sweet and fresh, had tones in it that only birds and good women full of love may compass. Mostly the song was a lilt or a verse which spoke for her own heart and love; but just as the clock struck three, she broke into a low laugh which ended in a merry, mocking melody, and which was evidently the conclusion of her argument concerning Sophy's behaviour as ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... be a singer without fault, And his large rough-hewn rhythm did not chime With dulcet daintiness of time and rhyme. He was no neater than wide Nature's wild, More metrical than sea-winds. Culture's child, Lapped in luxurious laws of line and lilt, Shrank from him shuddering, who was roughly built As cyclopean temples. Yet there rang True music through his rhapsodies, as he sang Of brotherhood, and freedom, love and hope, With strong wide sympathy which dared to cope With all life's phases, and call nought unclean. Whilst hearts are generous, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... interestingly near in these last days; the Marchesino (strutting from the hips and making his bold eyes round), Peppina, Ruffo. They went by and returned, gathered about her, separated, melted away as people do in our musings. Her eyes were fixed on the low roof of the cave. The lilt of the water seemed to rock her soul in a cradle. "Madre—Ruffo! Madre—Ruffo!" The words were in her mind like a refrain. And then the oddity, the promiscuity of life struck her. How many differences there were in this small group of people by whom she was surrounded! What would ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... lovingly across the strings, and swung into the Irish dance the old, common tune with the little gay lilt to it that grips the heart and makes the feet beat time, and has the power to wake old memories across the years. There were no memories to wake in the happy young hearts in the loft at Billabong that night. But Andy looked ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... get the final lilt of songs, To penetrate the inmost lore of poets—to know the mighty ones, Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespere, Tennyson, Emerson; To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt— to truly understand, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... its grandest prime, The earth is green and the skies are blue; But where is the lilt of the olden time, When life was a melody set to rhyme, And dreams were so real they ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... time, but it is questionable whether the huge popular success of their works, such as The Princess and The Angel in the House, was due to their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of Whitman, to thrive ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... life and lilt went out of them, and they were again maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and, when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... tavern ditty, and not too nice in its sentiments, as, indeed, why should it be, to please its hearers? There was a lilt in its chorus which even Stefan's unmusical voice could not hide, and it set the men's heads nodding in time as they roared it out together, waking the echoes with the declaration that—"The eye of a maid may sparkle, And the fools may for love repine, ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... being of her own land, one of the highlands, with the perfume of the gorse and the heather in the lilt of it, and the second, by demand of Sandy, the gipsy song which had been handed down from woodland mother to woodland child for hundreds of years; a song which sent Nancy's lawless blood to her cheeks and set her heart beating with an ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... The lilt of the joyous words had often been with him as he sped through the sleeping fields to his ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... must carry memorial jewel. No maiden fair shall wreathe her neck with noble ring: nay, sad in spirit and shorn of her gold, oft shall she pass o'er paths of exile now our lord all laughter has laid aside, all mirth and revel. Many a spear morning-cold shall be clasped amain, lifted aloft; nor shall lilt of harp those warriors wake; but the wan-hued raven, fain o'er the fallen, his feast shall praise and boast to the eagle how bravely he ate when he and the wolf ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... rare as the gift of music, or of poetry. But until men come to understand that Style is an art, and an amazingly difficult art, they will continue with careless presumption to tumble out their sentences as they would lilt stones from a cart, trusting very much to accident or gravitation for the shapeliness of the result. I will write a passage which may serve as an example of what I mean, although the defect is purposely kept within very ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... plentiful feast in the maple-tree shade, The lilt of a song to an old-fashioned tune, The talk of a friend, or the kiss of a maid, To sweeten the cup that we drink to the noon. Oh, the deep noon, the full noon, Of all the day the best! When the blue ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... and smiting of that perfectness?— The lily-thrust of those ecstatic feet Unpityingly sweet?— Sweet beyond all the blurred blind dreams that grope The upward paths of hope? And who could guess The dulcet holiness, The lilt and gladness of those jocund feet, Unpityingly sweet? Ah, for your coolness that shall change and stir With every glee of her!— Under the fresh amaze That drips and glistens from her wiles and ways; When the endearing air That everywhere Must twine and fold and follow ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody
... canty bards ayont the Tweed, Your skins wi' claes o' tartan cleed, An' lilt alang the verdant mead, Or blithely on your whistles blaw, An' sing auld Scotia's barns an ha's, Her bourtree dykes an mossy wa's, Her faulds, her bughts, an' birken shaws, Whare love ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... sped away, leaving Phil standing bareheaded in the sunshine, staring after it. The mocking silver lilt of Carlotta Cressy's laughter drifted back to him. He shrugged, jammed on his hat and strode off in the direction of ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... Lilt thy song, and lute away In the wildest fashion:— Pour thy rippling roundelay O'er the heights of passion!— Flash it down the fretted strings Till thy mad lips, missing All but smothered whisperings, Press this ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... earth with a quite deceitful innocence, as if they knew nothing of more to come and were only idling through the air, the blood of Charming Billy rioted warmly through his veins and his voice had a lilt which it had long lacked and he sang again the pitifully foolish thing with which he was wont to ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... that Saturday morning, radiated no doubt from the head of the concern himself. He flitted about restlessly, tugged at his whiskers continually, and his voice, as he rattled off his correspondence to Miss Brown, had a happy boyish lilt. Occasionally, chancing to catch Miss Summers' eye, he would nod with ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... into the sea. Now this, you may imagine, was the most surprising event of all that eventful night. So quickly did it come upon us, so little did we look for it, that when Kess Denton, the yellow man, stood at the open gate and uttered a loud and piercing yell of defiance, not one among us could lilt a rifle, not one thought of plan or action. There the fellow was, laughing like a maniac. Why he came, whence he came, no man could tell. But he leaped into the seas and the night engulfed him, and only his mocking laugh told us ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... upon her—an agonizing sense of youth's futility. Rackingly above the crash and lilt of music, the quick, wild thud of dancing feet, the sharp, staccato notes of laughter—she heard the dull, heavy, unrhythmical tread of the oncoming years—gray years, limping eternally from to-morrow on, through unloved lands, ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... ceaseless wagons clattered; Listened we for an English voice ever, ever in vain; Far in the west, year out, year in, terrible thunders battered, Drumming the doom of whom—of whom? Hope in our hearts lay shattered.... Then we heard the lilt of Highland pipes and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... Lav'rock, lark. Lear, learning. Leel, loyal. Lee-lang, live-long. Leeze me on, commend me to. Leglen, leglin, milk-pail. Lemes, gleams. Leugh, laughed. Leuk, look. Levynne, lightning. Lift, sky. Lilt, sing merrily. Limitour, begging friar. Linkan, tripping. Linket, tripped. Linn, waterfall. Lint, flax. Loan, loaning, lane, path. Loo'ed, loved. Loof, palm. Loot, let. Loun, clown, rascal. Loup, leap. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... that his mother always sang him this song when he had been a good boy; I replied that mine had done the same. How many French mothers have sung the merry little lilt, I wonder? We sang one snatch and another, and I could not see that the marquise had had the advantage of the little peasant girl, if it ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... was written to music or at least written that it might be set to music, but now it must sing itself. It may dress in sober iambics if it pleases, but there must be a lilt and go to the words to suggest music. Among the best examples of this form open to the reader are the songs of Robert Burns. Though written to fit old Scotch airs the words themselves suggest a melody to any one with the slightest ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... every side; For they knew their Gipsy Joe of old, His free wild words and his laughter bold: So high and low all gathered together By the village well in the autumn weather, Lured by the gipsy's bargain-chatter And the reckless lilt of his hare-brained patter. And there the Revd. Salvyn Bent, The parish church's ornament, Stood, as it chanced, in discontent, And eyed with a look that was almost sinister The Revd. Joshua Fall, the minister. And the Squire, it ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... law to fleg us a', An' schedule richt frae wrang, The man o' the cave had got the crave For the lichtsome lilt o' sang. Wife an' strife an' the pride o' life, Woman an' war an' drink; He sang o' them a' at e'enin's fa' By aid ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... have observed the housewives lingering at their windows—for my window also looks upon the park—I have wondered that these melodious street cries are not used generally for calling the wares of wider sale. If a radish can be so proclaimed, there might be a lilt devised in praise of other pleasing merceries—a tripping pizzicato for laces and frippery—a brave trumpeting for some newest cereal. And should not the latest book—if it be a tale of love, for ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the light was nimble, flinging itself about in rich waves, warming to dazzling yellow-green and rose. These were the nights when "curtains" hung festooned in the heavens, alive, rippling, dancing to the lilt of lightning music. Up from the horizon they would mount, forming a vortex overhead, soundless within the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... opened the windows when they heard it. I think it made the very heart of our Lord glad. What a surprise it was to those in that gloomy old prison. They had heard the walls ring with groans and shrieks. They had heard bitter oaths in the night, but songs with the lilt of an irrepressible joy in them—they had never heard anything like ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... than any Negro poet writing in the dialect to-day, summons to his work the lilt, the spontaneity and charm of which Dunbar was the supreme master whenever he employed that medium. It is well to say a word here about the dialect poems of James Edwin Campbell. In dialect, Campbell was a precursor of Dunbar. ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... guitars and banjos were playing some wailing tune, with a note of sadness in the core of it so keen and penetrating that it made the water come to Harry's eyes. But it changed suddenly to something that had all the sway and lilt of the rosy South. Men sprang to their feet and clasping arms about one another began to sway back and forth in the waltz ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... stir, there was a bustle in the court; a sparkle in the eyes of some as they glanced slyly and under their lashes at the house, a lilt in the tread of others as they stepped to and fro. He divined that hands would fly to caubeens and knees seek the ground if a certain face showed at a window: moreover, that that at which he merely guessed was no secret to the barefooted colleens ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... hear how the sound is held up on the word take, because the k is followed by the t in to; and what a wonderful musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were to denote the tones the syllables should be—shall I say sung on? Now French is an example of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... lilt in her voice Mollie, at her end of the wire, sat up and stared inquiringly into the black ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... the apparently unpremeditated lyrical flights of the Elizabethan dramatists that one meets with anything like the lilt and liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no degree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallen from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline." This delicate epicede would ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... "The Passing of the Gael" is known wherever there are Irish emigrants, but there are other verses of "Ethna Carberry" (Mrs. Anna Johnstone MacManus) that are as fine as this. Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is a balladist of stark power, and Miss Eva Gore-Booth a lyric poet whose natural lilt no preoccupation with mysticism can for ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... and dark her window is In the dark house on the hill, But I have come up through the lilac walk To the lilt of the whippoorwill, With the old years tugging at my hands And my heart which is her ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... with fire Cynthia heedlessly spoke these words. They had no deeper significance to her than the lilt of a world-old song. Marriage was the end-all and consummation of her magic stories and, in this case, it had simply been a trifle more difficult to consider on account of the social difference between Sandy ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... coast on business. Shon had won the reputation of being a "white man," to say nothing of his victories in the region of gallantry. He made no wealth; he only got that he might spend. Irishman-like he would barter the chances of fortune for the lilt of a voice or the clatter of a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... grass, puris naturalibus, are basking in the sun, or regaling themselves on buns and cocoa. The whole place is vibrant with the intense zest the young feel in life, and with the whole-hearted powers of enjoyment of boyhood. A school-song set to a captivating waltz-lilt record the charms of Ducker. One verse ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... might just as well look over them at once," said Lancelot firmly, uncoiling them. "It won't take you five minutes—just let me play one to you. The tunes are rather more original than the average, I can promise you; and yet I think they have a lilt that——" ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... mien and laughing voice I followed, followed the swing of her white dress That rocked in a lilt along: I watched the poise Of her feet as they flew for a space, then paused to press The grass deep down with the royal burden of her: And gladly I'd offered my breast ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... quivering lip in a corner of the mean chamber. Then he laughed again, and in a hoarse voice, sorely suggestive of the bottle, he broke into song. He lay back in his chair, his long, spare legs outstretched, his spurs jingling to the lilt of his ditty whose ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to be as deadly dull as a British Sunday—not dull as other men are dull, but dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was when ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... fitting calyx for the fine upward flow of her high white chest into firm, smooth throat; the enormous puff sleeves of the period ending above the elbow where her arm was roundest; the ardent, rather upward thrust of face as if the stars were fragrant; the little lilt to the eyebrows; the straight gray eyes; the complexion smooth as double cream, flowing in cleanest jointure into the shining brown hair, worn in an age of Psyche or Pompadour, so swiftly and shiningly drawn back that it might have been ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... canoes paddled by, and as they passed, the hum of voices and laughter and the cheery lilt of island melody died away, and the paddlers looked shoreward to the motionless figure of Prout, who, with the child by his side, seemed to heed naught but the wide sweep of ocean that ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... of khaki uniforms, and many young men stand in groups laughing and talking in voices pitched shrill with crates excitement. In the brown light of the wharf, full of rows of yellow and barrels and sacks, full of racket of cranes, among which winds in and out the trivial lilt of the Hawaiian tune, there is a flutter of gay dresses and coloured hats ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos |
