"Mellowed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grossness and the fumes of earth, purify themselves as they ascend to heaven. And from the village (when other sounds, which I shall note presently, were for an instant still) came the whoop of children, mellowed by distance into a confused yet thrilling sound, which fell upon the heart like the voice of our gone childhood itself. Before, in the far expanse, stretched a chain of hills on which the autumn sun ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... time in June, in rich land, well mellowed by cultivation. Very large crops are obtained, sown as late as the middle of July, or the first of August, on an inverted sod. The Michigan, or double-mould-board plow leaves the land light, and in admirable condition ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... Pawsey, a thought mellowed by the ale of Dover, deplored with tears the instability of a nation whose pilots were ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... her—she has lost the airy grace And mantling bloom that won his boyish duty; And yet a winning charm pervades her face, In the calm radiance of its mellowed beauty. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... wooden erection, by which he was fenced from more ordinary mortals, the learned Judge leaned forward. The electric light, just turned on above his head, fell on his face, and mellowed it to an orange hue beneath the snowy crown of his wig; the amplitude of his robes grew before the eye; his whole figure, facing the comparative dusk of the Court, radiated like some majestic and sacred body. He cleared his throat, took a sip of water, broke the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the landscape signs of twilight creep, And sounds that tell of night—sounds that I love: The hooting of the owl, the tree-frog's cry By distance mellowed; and—more distant still— I hear the barking of the village dogs. The breath of evening whispering 'mid the pines, And deepening shadows, bid me homeward turn; And yet I linger—for I seem a part Of lake and mountain, ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... the dreadful days on the stained battlefields of the Dardanelles, they spoke little. Some day perhaps when time had mellowed the colors, then this group of young people could talk it over. Just now the price they had paid for their experiences seemed too great. It was all too near. They tried to put it behind them, as all the world will have to do when at last this war is over, when the ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... in March or April, and given the same treatment as other Cabbage. Its flavour is much improved if the plants are mellowed by frost before ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... squalid section of town known as "railroad end," Cable's rising influence carried him to the well-earned luxury. The lines of care and toil mellowed in the face of his pretty wife, as the years rolled by; her comely figure shed the cheap raiment of "hard, old days," and took on the plumage of prosperity. Trouble, resentment, and worry disappeared as if by magic, smoothed out by the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... of night, and all between Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear, Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen, Save darkened Jura,[329] whose capt heights appear Precipitously steep; and drawing near, There breathes a living fragrance from the shore, Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear Drops the light drip of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... which the Sahara and its prolongation produce is something evil, or at least to us evil. There is in the idea running through the mind of the Desert an intensity which may be of some value to us if it be diluted by a large admixture of European tradition, or if it be mellowed and transformed by a long process of time, but which, if we take it at its source and inspire ourselves directly from it, warps and does hurt to our ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... rejoined the Doctor. "Sweet Claudia Peckham: How she used to scrap with my little brothers when she came to visit us! She had a disposition like the bubonic plague when she was little, and by all the signs she doesn't seem to have mellowed any with age." ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... of characteristic Philadelphia brick construction, delightfully mellowed by age, with marble and white-painted wood trim. The main building is two stories high with a decked gable roof, heavily balustraded between large, arched quadruple chimney stacks at each end, corners heavily quoined with marble and ends without fenestration ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... useful than of the pleasing; while a background of modest receding hills offers little beyond the verdant swales of the country. In this respect England itself has the fresh beauty of youth, rather than the mellowed hues of a more advanced period of life; or it might be better to say, it has the young freshness and retiring sweetness that distinguish her females, as compared with the warmer tints of Spain and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... leafy screen with a mellowed and delicious softness, and the perfume of flowers was ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... proved to be a dull and surly fellow, like many another cocher of Paris, but the clink of silver and the sight of it mellowed him. I began by saying that I was in search of three friends of mine whom I was to have met when the boat train came in, but whom I had unfortunately missed. I asked him to describe the men he had driven away from the station at that time, and ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... in the service of the Public, should have reposed in the peaceful harbour, not of an indolent, and a total inactivity, but of a moderate and becoming retirement; and when my eloquence was properly mellowed, and had acquired its full maturity;—thus it happened, I say, that recourse was then had to those fatal arms, which the persons who had learned the use of them in honourable conquest, could no longer employ to ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... day saw me again at the side of your mother, who received me with the same artless demonstrations of affection. There was a mellowed softness in her countenance, and a tender languor in her eye, I had not remarked the preceding day. Then there was more of the vivacity and playfulness of the young girl; now, more of the deep fervour and the composed ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... hand Has dared to sever from its parent stalk; A gem of priceless water, just released Pure and unblemished from its glittering bed. Or may the maiden haply be compared To sweetest honey, that no mortal lip Has sipped; or, rather, to the mellowed fruit Of virtuous actions in some former birth[37], Now brought to full perfection? Lives the man Whom bounteous heaven has destined to ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... of this remarkable church, locally so called, though in reality it is only a detached gateway, far from the church building itself, is a wonderful Italian suggestion, now mellowed and weathered and undeniably charming in colour in spite of its being so manifestly out of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... they should resume the humour of sending their lovers into banishment. Distance, in truth, produces in idea the same effect as in real perspective. Objects are softened, and rounded, and rendered doubly graceful; the harsher and more ordinary points of character are mellowed down, and those by which it is remembered are the more striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty. There are mists too in the mental as well as the natural horizon, to conceal what is less pleasing in distant objects, and ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and the gaiety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village—roofs and gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... smoke-tinged air, the green of jungle comes like a cooling bath of delicate tints and shades. I think of all the green things I have loved—of malachite in matrix and table-top; of jade, not factory-hewn baubles, but age-mellowed signets, fashioned by lovers of their craft, and seasoned by the toying yellow fingers of generations of forgotten Chinese emperors—jade, as Dunsany would say, of the exact shade of the right color. I ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... upon his moralisings, 'if I am so dreadfully young, at least I'll have the benefit of my immaturity. If I am to be treated as a child, I must have a child's freedom from conventionality.' She dragged forward a heavy armchair lined with the soft, mellowed, dull red leather which one sees made into cushions and sofa-pillows in the shops of Nuremberg's more artistic upholsterers, and then at its side on the carpet she planted a footstool of the same material and colour. 'There,' she said, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... destroyer of Sequoia, also furnishes bare virgin ground, one of the conditions essential for its growth from the seed. Fresh ground is, however, furnished in sufficient quantities for the constant renewal of the forests without fire, viz., by the fall of old trees. The soil is thus upturned and mellowed, and many trees are planted for every one that falls. Land-slips and floods also give rise to bare virgin ground; and a tree now and then owes its existence to a burrowing wolf or squirrel, but the most regular supply of fresh soil is furnished ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... circling through the room, and every one seemed to enjoy the rich beverage. It was not the ghost of coffee, nor coffee robbed of its delicate aroma; but clear, strong, fragrant, and mellowed by the most delicious cream. Having elected to serve coffee, Mrs. Eldridge was careful that her entertainment should not prove a failure through any lack of excellence in this article. And it was very far from proving a failure. The first surprise being over, ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... Concord's fortunes slowly and contentedly revolved. He was at this time between forty-five and fifty years old, in the prime of his beneficent powers. He had fulfilled the promise of his unique youth—obeyed the voice at eve, obeyed at prime. The sweet austerity of his nature had been mellowed by human sorrows—the loss of his brothers and of his eldest son; he had the breadth and poise that are given by knowledge of foreign lands, and friendships with the best men in them; he had the unstained and indomitable independence of a man who has always avowed his belief, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... suddenly deprived of Mr. Levett, who died on January 17. But, although his health was tottering, the powers of his mind were in no ways impaired, as his letters and conversation showed. Moreover, during the last three or four years of his life he may be said to have mellowed. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... quality of voice which it is desired to produce for any given emotional state. Forward production—vibration appearing to centre a little back of the upper front teeth—is, as a general thing, the best. Yet a voice brilliant to the point of hardness can be mellowed by middle or backward production. These are matters of judgment. But when I am told, as I was by a young girl, that she was being taught to centre the tone-vibrations "back of her eyes," all I can do is to throw up my hands and exclaim, "O voice-production, what crimes are committed ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... quickly elapsed, and she gave him her hand—the struggle was almost more than she could endure. She tried to appear calm; time mellowed her grief, and mitigated her torments; but when her husband would take her hand, or mention any thing like love, she would instantly feel a sickness, a faintness at her heart, and wish, involuntarily, that the earth would open and ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... hillside, played upon the deep yellow gorse and purple heather of the moorland, and, further away still, flashed upon a long silver streak of the German Ocean. In the old-fashioned gardens of the court it shone upon luscious peaches hanging on the time-mellowed red-brick walls; lit up the face and gleamed upon the hands of the stable clock, and warmed the ancient heart of the stooping, grey-haired old gardener's help who, with blinking eyes and hands tucked in his trousers pockets, was smoking ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Genji, his temper mellowed by sake, was tempted to take a stroll to see what he could see. He first sauntered round Fuji-Tsubo (the chamber of Wistaria) and came up by the side of the corridor of Kokiden. He noticed a small private door standing open. It seems that the Niogo was in her upper chamber at the Emperor's quarters, ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... preservation of antique forms and ceremonies: sometimes, indeed, pushing his fancies to lengths that fairly would lay him open to the charge of whimsicality, were not even the most extravagant of his crotchets touched and mellowed by his natural goodness of heart. In the earlier stages of our acquaintance I was disposed to regard him as an eccentric; but a wider knowledge of Provencal matters has convinced me that he is a type. Under his genial guidance it has been my privilege ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... bravely put her brother's house in order at his tragic death and transferred all the papers of value. The key hung now in a sliding panel beneath the ledge of the desk. The spirit which had kept the old room unchanged, even to the faded books of Orientalism and the old pictures strangely mellowed, had led to the hiding of the key away from ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... He who made Pleiades, and Arcturus and his sons, has united them in eternal fellowship with their departed loved ones, through faith in Christ. This, while it hallows the remainder of life with the rich, mellowed beauty of the changing leaf, and ripening grain, and shortening days, lays the foundation of that perfect happiness for which our homes are intended to prepare us; their joys alluring, their ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... "O'Neill got mellowed up till he thought Mac was his best friend. He was ready to eat out of his hand. So Mac works him up to sign a contract—before witnesses too; trust Mac for that—exchanging his half-interest in the claim ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... leave of local municipal life and went up higher, Mr. Collings was not long in following him, and now both have been for some years very familiar figures in Parliament. Since they first entered public life both men have in some ways mellowed down. Compared with what they once were, their foes at any rate say, they have both lost colour. They were once ripe, full-bodied Radicals, and now they are tawny Liberals, who ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... of the road he stopped and gazed back. There was the wide-spread building which he knew so well, the Abbot's house, the long church, the cloisters with their line of arches, all bathed and mellowed in the evening sun. There too was the broad sweep of the river Exe, the old stone well, the canopied niche of the Virgin, and in the centre of all the cluster of white-robed figures who waved their hands to him. A sudden mist swam up before the young man's eyes, and ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to cornice and parapet, give surely the sharpest and most delicate sense that it is possible to conceive of the contrast on which the essence of so much beauty depends. To pass through one of these dark and smoke-stained courts, with every line mellowed and harmonised, as if it had grown up so out of the earth; to find oneself in a sunny pleasaunce, carpeted with velvet turf, and set thick with flowers, makes the spirit sigh with delight. Nowhere in the world can one see such a thing ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... grammars in Christminster? He might slip a letter inside the case of the instrument, and it would be sure to reach the desired eyes. Why not ask him to send any old second-hand copies, which would have the charm of being mellowed by the university atmosphere? ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... estuary where she lay at anchor. So still and silent was the breathless night that the volume of sound raised by the insects on shore rang in my ears almost as distinctly out here as it had done when I stood upon the beach; it was, however, so far mellowed and softened by the intervening distance that it was possible to hear other sounds distinctly through it, even when they were so faint as the slight, almost imperceptible creak of the yard-parrels aloft, and the light flap of a coiled-up rope striking against ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Los Angelos, further south; with the oranges, plantains, and pine-apples of San Diego. And, alongside these productions of the tropical and sub-tropical clime, are Newtown pippins, that have been imported into California from the far Eastern States, mellowed by a sea voyage of several thousand miles, around the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... vulgar blood is very shocking," answered Mary, with a smile; "but observe how this is mellowed by time into a tint that could not offend the most fastidious fine lady; besides," added she in a graver tone, "I own I love to believe in things supernatural; it seems to connect us more with another world than when ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... building of three stories, although the flattish red-tiled roofs took away somewhat from its height, and spread over an amazing quantity of land. As Darby thought, it could have housed a regiment, and must have cost something to keep up. As wind and weather and time had mellowed its incongruous parts into one neutral tint, it looked odd and attractive. Moss and lichen, ivy and Virginia creeper—this last flaring in crimson glory—clothed the massive stone walls with a gracious mantle of natural beauty. Narrow stone steps, rather chipped, led down from the blue door to ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... The age-long life of the South stands for much in modern France, correcting the cruder blood which has poured in these last fifteen hundred years. As one blends wine of very old stock with newer brands, so has France been blended and mellowed. A strange cosmic feeling one had, on the top of the great building in that town older than Rome itself, of the continuity of human life and the futility of human conceit. The provincial vanity of modern ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... recognised, had mastered, not escaped, his personality. The poison of bitterness was gone, but the effectiveness of power was still as great; and his temperament, in passing through the fiery waters of experience, was mellowed into a charm which seemed less a fortunate grace of aspect than the result of a peculiar quality of vision. Was it his own life that had opened his eyes until he could look into the secret chambers in the lives ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... that are good in design and arrangement will stand this without loss of distinction, but those in which everything has been sacrificed to this striking lifelike quality will suffer considerably. This particular quality depends so much on the freshness of the paint that when this is mellowed and its vividness is lost, nothing will remain of value, if the quieter qualities of design and arrangement have ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... mellowed to a dull straw colour by its passage through London air, slanted in at the window, falling first on Charles Sylvester's handsome face, with its eminently professional, severely cut features, and the careful limitation of whisker, which seemed so completely ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... of the Prodigal Son, but was evidently by no amateur, the face of both father and son were admirably portrayed. The strong Syrian faces were mellowed by the ruddy gleams of sunset. A tame kid was gambolling behind them, and two women were grinding corn, with the millstone between them. On the flat white roof of the house, another woman had just laid aside her distaff in a hurry. The father's ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... origins as any faithful portraiture of the Midwestern landscape could be; you could not mistake the source of the poem or the picture. In a certain tenderness of light and coloring, the poems would recall the mellowed masterpieces of the older literatures rather than those of the New England school, where conscience dwells ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... perpetual sight Consists the only comfort and relief Of our unwieldy age: for what delight, What joy, what comfort, have we in this world; Now grown in years, and overworn with cares, Subject unto the sudden stroke of death, Already falling, like the mellowed fruit, And dropping by degrees into our grave? But what revives us, what maintains our soul Within the prison of our wither'd breast, But our Gismunda and her cheerful sight? O daughter, daughter! what desert of mine, Wherein have I been so unkind to thee, Thou shouldst ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... interview that he at last lifted his head above an atmosphere of perjury and bilge-water and came on deck. The sun and wind were ruffling and glinting on the broadening river beyond the "measured mile"; a few gulls were wavering and dipping near the lee scuppers, and the sound of Sabbath bells, mellowed by a distance that secured immunity of conscience, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... natural fraternal affection, which is more powerful when mellowed by virtue, Pere Augustin saw the hand of death making each day new traces on the frame of Alvira. The hectic flush, the frequent faintings, and the cold, icy grasp of her hand told the energy of the poison that gnawed at the vital cords. Sweet and gentle words of encouragement ever flowed ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... years of pruning, and sifting, and discipline. Shall we spell that word discipline with a final g instead of e—discipling, so the love of it may be plainer to our near-sightedness? And out of those years and experiences there came a new woman. A woman with vision broadened, with spirit mellowed, with strength seasoned, with will so sinewy supple as to yield to a higher will, to sacrifice the dearest personal pleasure for the world-wide purpose; willing that he who was her dearest treasure should be ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... calabash on head, were wending up from the stream, singing as they walked, or exchanging jests and laughter, their soft, rich voices echoing melodiously upon the evening stillness. Even the shrill "moo" of cattle, and the deep-toned voices of men—mellowed by distance, came not inharmoniously from the smaller kraals which lay scattered along the hillside; and but for the shining spearheads and tufted shields of the armed guard in the great circle of Imvungayo, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... all the while fussing about his style in the exhausting Flaubert manner, the rich dim reek of all this time-mellowed humanity would never strike our senses as it does. Thus much one can see quite clearly from reading de Maupassant, Flaubert's pupil, whose stark and savage strokes of clean-cut visualisation never attain the imaginative atmosphere or Rabelaisian ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... mild and bright, with a promise of summer in the air. The sunlight slanted joyously down Lily's street, mellowed the blistered house-front, gilded the paintless railings of the door-step, and struck prismatic glories from the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... around the room crying, "Out with the water and in with the wine!" We all paid tribute to this joke, but Agamemnon in particular, for he well knew what strings to pull in order to secure another invitation to dinner. Tickled by our flattery, and mellowed by the wine, Trimalchio was just about drunk. "Why hasn't one of you asked my Fortunata to dance?" he demanded, "There's no one can do a better cancan, believe me," and he himself raised his arms above his head and ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... produces some of the world's finest coffees, of which the best known are Medellins, Manizales, Bogotas, Bucaramangas, Tolimas, and Cucutas. Old-crop Colombians of the higher grades, when mellowed with age, have many of the characteristics of the best East Indian coffees, and in style and cup are difficult to distinguish from the Mandhelings and the Ankolas of Sumatra. Such coffees are scarce on the American market, practically all the shipments coming to the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... either with antiquities in brass, ivory, silver, or gold, or with finished specimens of his own and his brother's skill, all disposed with the utmost taste, and with all the advantages to be derived from the architecture of the room, from a soft and mellowed light resembling moonlight which came through alabaster windows, from the rich cloths, silks, and other stuffs, variously disposed around, and from the highly ornamented cabinets in which articles of greatest perfection and value were kept and exhibited. Here stood the enthusiast, applying ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... no signs of being mellowed by these glowing vintages. Instead of his drinking them, they might have been poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face. Neither was his manner influenced. But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for Edwin; ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... Distance mellowed the harshness of the voices and the words sounded like a message from heaven. Their distress was that neither Allan's voice nor my own was distinguishable. Glad they were when we emerged from the trees and joined them round the fire that had been made to blaze as a guide ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... leaves give place To tints of rich and mellowed glow; As close the shortening autumn days, Whilst summer lingers, loth to go; Quick rises each familiar scene, And fancy homewards turns her gaze; Such are the hues in Oakford seem, And such a light o'er Iddesleigh plays— Methinks the oaks of dear old Pynes ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant Medici Venus who smiled from the frame. He was seized by a desire to turn the gazing picture to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... talk was leading up to a "touch." Alfred had mellowed in his feelings. He had sympathy for the outcast but felt he did not care to waste any charity on the man. He was figuring rapidly mentally: "I will buy him clothing and give him a small sum ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... the Rectory grounds the thatched roofs of the village bobbed into view, some gleaming golden in all the pride of recent thatching, others with their crown of straw mellowed by sun and rain to a deeper colour and patched with clumps of moss, vividly green as ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... government or guidance, succour or solace to millions of the people, who famish on the territorial possessions from which you derive your titles, your importance, your influence, your wealth. Has confiscation been mellowed into the legal semblance of undisputed succession, only to bring about a state of things which the most ruthless ravagers of nations never ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... length, hands under heads, brains mellowed by brandy, the men summed up the situation. Arved was the first to speak. He was tall, blond, heavy of figure, and his beard hung upon his chest. His dissatisfied eyes were cynical when he rallied his companion. A man of brains this, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... she of whom we write is dust and less than dust below the fertile soil of her so beloved Prussia—Furstin Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber! Can you not rise from the grave once more to charm us with the magic of your voice? Are those deep, mellowed tones, so sonorous and appealing, never to be heard again? Ah, me! Why, indeed, should such divinity be so short lived? Who could play Juliet as she could? Nobody! Her enemies laughed and said that her chronic adenoids ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... up to the distant hills on either hand, fields of every warm tint with sentinel oaks or walnuts, and here and there the wood-lot of the farmer. The soft browns and greens of the distant corn stubble, or the winter barley fields with the blaze of the Frost King's robes mellowed by the golden sun complete a picture common enough in this wonderful valley of the Hudson, but always a well-spring of delight ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... a fine December evening; the sharp air of morning had mellowed until it was as mild as autumn. There had been no snow, and the long fields, sloping down from the homestead, were brown and mellow. A weird, dreamy stillness had fallen on the purple earth, the dark fir woods, the valley rims, the sere meadows. Nature seemed ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in Aguas Calientes which are well worth visiting, some of which contain fine old paintings, though they are mostly hung in a very poor light. There is an unmistakable atmosphere of antiquity within these walls, "mellowed by scutcheoned panes in cloisters old." The church facing the Plaza Mayor has a remarkable bell, celebrated for its fine tones; and when this sounded for vespers, Millet's Angelus was instantly recalled, the poor peons, no matter how engaged, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... boyish awe for the old autocrat of Paradise had mellowed into an affection that was almost filial, and there was plenty to talk about: the final dash in the technical school; the outlook in the broader world; the great strike which was filling all mouths; the business prospects for ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... prairie land, as we call the level or slightly rolling fields in America. There was not a spot from first to last visible in Japan, as seen from the water, or in an excursion on the land, where there is room to turn around a horse and plow. The ground is necessarily turned up with spades and mellowed with hoes and cakes, all, of course, by human hands. This is easy compared with the labor in constructing terraces. The mountains have been conquered to a considerable extent in this way, and it is sensational to see how thousands of steep places have been cut and walled ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the sense of his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been. Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as he had done all along with the passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with the fortitude and dignity of one who had learned that contentment and peace are gifts the world cannot give, and, if he haply find them in his own heart, which it ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... electric light illuminating the opera house fell with a curious distinction in tone upon the crowd which filled the building and overflowed through darkened doors and windows. Beneath the electric jets the faces were focussed to a white hush of expectancy, which mellowed into a blur of impatient animation where the dim gas ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... in the whirl of news that poured in day after day borne by splashed riders and panting horses;—this was very different to the slow round of country life, with rumours and tales floating in, mellowed by doubt and lapse of time, like pensive echoes from another world. For example, morning by morning, as she came downstairs to dinner, there was the ruddy-faced Alderman with his fresh budget of news of the north;—Lords Northumberland and Westmoreland ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the river winding its sluggish way through the broad level marshes like a ribbon of molten gold, and the few great fleecy bundles of white clouds sailing across the deep blue of the sky like froth upon some placid stream. Imagine a sound of fresh voices, mellowed by a little distance, from where, to and fro, walking, trotting, darting, but ever moving like the particles in a kaleidoscope, many squads of players were practicing on the football field. Such, then, is the picture that would have rewarded your gaze had you passed ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... at a meal with Mary across the table. It made me feel that she was really mine, and not a pixie that would vanish at a word. To Blenkiron she bore herself like an affectionate but mischievous daughter, while the desperately refined manners that afflicted him whenever women were concerned mellowed into something like his everyday self. They did most of the talking, and I remember he fetched from some mysterious hiding-place a great box of chocolates, which you could no longer buy in Paris, and the two ate them like spoiled children. I didn't want ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... and thy blessed Son made it, when he delivered up his soul at his death: declare thou thy will upon me, O Lord, for life or death in thy time; receive my surrender of myself now; into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. And being thus, O my God, prepared by thy correction, mellowed by thy chastisement, and conformed to thy will by thy Spirit, having received thy pardon for my soul, and asking no reprieve for my body, I am bold, O Lord, to bend my prayers to thee for his assistance, the voice of whose bell hath called me to this devotion. Lay hold upon his ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... utility in the planning of a house is forethought for beauty. It is well to have an artistic imagination in visualizing, as it were, the "hominess" of the house as it will appear after its rawness has been mellowed by time, and its forms have been endeared by association. This imagination is specially essential in the planting of trees, arrangement of flower gardens, the choice of the kind of enclosure, whether hedge or fence, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... talking companionably. When persons of wide reading and reflection, and of philosophic bent, who have lived long and been mellowed by life, come together, the interchange of thought is bound to be valuable; things are so well said, so inevitably said, that the listener thinks he cannot forget the manner of saying; but thoughts crowd thick and fast, comments on men and measures, on books and events, are ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... fair Rowena would have been altogether satisfied with the species of emotion with which her devoted knight had hitherto gazed on the beautiful features, and fair form, and lustrous eyes, of the lovely Rebecca; eyes whose brilliancy was shaded, and, as it were, mellowed, by the fringe of her long silken eyelashes, and which a minstrel would have compared to the evening star darting its rays through a bower of jessamine. But Ivanhoe was too good a Catholic to retain the same class of feelings towards a Jewess. This Rebecca had foreseen, and for this ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... one sharp, severe glance at the boy's eager face. But even as he looked, his face mellowed into what his son Alec to this day thinks may have been the ghost of a smile. But this he mentions to no one, for, after all, Saunders ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... National Navy. He sailed where he would under letters of marque from the Presidents. He is the most interesting and the most original personage of the South African War: and when its history is mellowed by time, and its epic is written by some Walter Scott or Homer of the future, De Wet will be the central figure, and ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... things connected with himself and family, which, though amusing from its very simplicity, afforded at the same time a certain indication that the good old grandfather whom they all loved so well, and whose benignant character had been only mellowed by age into a more plastic affection for them all, was soon to be removed from before their eyes, never again to diffuse among them that charm of domestic truth and love, and the holy influences of all those fine old virtues which ancestral integrity sheds over the heart, ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... of a bell, mellowed by distance, came faintly from the valley below. Rosemary took out the thin, old watch that had been her mother's and her mother's mother's before her, and set the hands at four upon the pale gold dial. Then she ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... several others, drew up a remonstrance against "the desecration by officious restoration, and the tearing down of time-mellowed structures to make room for the unsightly ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... development of a comprehensive system "which was to combine, to conciliate, and to supersede them all."[496] The knowledge he had derived from travel, from books, from oral instruction, he fused and blended with his own speculations, whilst the Socratic spirit mellowed the whole, and gave to it a unity and scientific completeness which has excited the admiration and wonder ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... alongside of a dark jungle of clustering brakes that hung their luxuriant foliage upon the bosom of the stream. The captain sat upon a little box near the quarter, apparently contemplating the scene, for there was a fairy-like beauty in its dark windings, mellowed by the shadowing foliage that skirted its borders in mournful grandeur, while stars twinkled on ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... more pleasing of the two; but it must be remembered that he was writing long after the time he mentions, and that his recollections were no doubt somewhat mellowed by Jane Austen's subsequent fame; whereas Philadelphia Walter's is an unvarnished contemporary criticism—the impression made by Jane on a girl a few years older ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... between the chatter of civilized men and the deliberations of barbarians. With La Hontan, the Baron de Saint-Castin would have led up to his business by a long prelude on other subjects. With Madockawando, he waited until the tobacco had mellowed both their spirits, and ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... breathed in the resinous, balsamic perfume which wafted across the mighty river from the forests and the river-rush; as his eye traveled up the glorious promontory, now mellowed in sunshine, to the summit bristling with cannon; as his gaze swept the broad reaches of the river, and returned to rest upon the joyous faces around him, joyous even in the face of daily peril, the Chevalier threw back his shoulders, as if bracing himself for the battle ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... prompted Moses' answer, but lowliness. His former impetuous confidence had all been beaten out of him. Time was when he was ready to take up the role of deliverer at his own hand; but these hot days were past, and age and solitude and communion with God had mellowed him into humility. His recoil was but one instance of the shrinking which all true, devout men feel when designated for tasks which may probably make life short, and will certainly make it hard. All prophets and reformers till to-day have had ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... last week, and how a better week's work he had never done in all his days. Peace and abundance were on the country-side in beautiful forms and beautiful colours, and the harvest seemed even to be sailing out to grace the never-reaped sea in the yellow-laden barges that mellowed the distance. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... standing place on one of the great skins that gave a sense of security to the polished surface. A huge fireplace—an extravagant fireplace, she deemed it—yawned in the farther wall. A flood of light, mellowed by stained glass, fell across the room, and from the far end came the white gleam of a ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... tender grass was covered with marguerites—'such that men called DAISIES in our town'—thick as stars on a summer's night. The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds. The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a cloud streaked the calm aether; only round the horizon's edge streamed ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... awful, prolonged bellow, as of some giant ox in sore distress, and when it would stop, occasionally, faint and far would come another bellow, mellowed by distance, but sounding unspeakably eerie and frightsome. A bell, too, seemed to be tolling a knell for something, and there was a constant rush of feet on deck, mingled with trumpeted orders and the rattle of cordage. Yet the steamer did not seem to be pitching about at all, as it ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... chair beside the table. Here, taking off his hat and putting it in his lap, he fixed a look on Burrage that might have been the deep gaze of a sage or the vacant one of a child. The green-shaded lamp sent a bright, downward gush of light over his legs, its mellowed upper glow shining on his forehead, high and bare to his crown. He had the curious, sexless appearance of elderly Chinamen; might have been, with his tapering hands, flowing coat, and hairless ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... what nature has done. But man has added his deepening touch in one direction and his enlivening touch in another. The early fathers—Spanish—erected Missions from one end of the State to the other. These are time-mellowed, mediaeval structures with bell-towers, cloisters and gardens, sunbaked, shadow-colored; and in spots they make California as old and sad as Spain. Later emigrants—French—have built in the vicinity of San Francisco many tiny roadside ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... quibblers or schoolmen; but the two united, and together animated by a strenuous faith, made them theologians. In such intellects the seventeenth century abounded, but we question if in dialectic skill, guided by sober judgment, and in extensive acquirements, mellowed by a deep spirituality, it yielded ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... their treatment. Men who rejoiced in making clear things obscure, and plain things the reverse, he could not abide, and spoke with some contempt of those who were original merely from their standing on their heads, and tall from walking upon stilts. As you have truly said, his character mellowed and toned down in his later years, without in any way losing its own individuality, and its clear, vigorous, unflinching perception of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of spring bespoke its early approach. April was ushered in to the songs of birds, the greening valley, and the pollen on the willow. The frost arose, the earth mellowed underfoot, and the creek purled and sang as it hastened along. The cattle played, calves were born, while the horses, in shedding their winter coats, matted the saddle blankets and threw off great tufts of hair where they rolled on ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... expected to believe that most of our poor unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble here by suffering exquisite torments for ever after, world without end, Amen. But indeed those curly flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long before my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood I have forgotten it, it was not so terrible as the giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it all now as a setting for my poor ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... in a meadow about a mile and a half up the river, and thither he was bound, extremely enjoying the summer evening walk, as the fresh dewy coolness sunk on all around, and the noises of the town were mellowed by distance, and the sun's last beams slanted on the green meadows, and the May-flies danced, and dragon-flies darted, and fish rose or leaped high in the air, or showed their spotted sides, and opened and shut their gills, as they rested in the clear water, and the evening breeze ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... thought, his star-lost aspiration. Indeed, he is worthy to close the brilliant winter; a calm planet fading from us, but with a mild, steady lustre that condemns sorrow. How invisible, insensibly proceeds his fame! My character must needs be strengthened and mellowed by such men, and so my influence upon others is moulded, till perhaps it meets him again. Surrounded by these intimate relations, we cannot touch one but all thrill. In such a subtle shrine is the influence ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... and more sober intelligence harked back to New England, whence his mother had come in her bridal days, and although the Puritan characteristics showed less plainly in his nature than she wished, having been much warmed and mellowed by their transplantation to southern soil, no Puritan of them all could have outdone this tall Texan in dogged adherence to what he believed to be his rights. His mother had kept faith with the land of her nativity, and as part of her worship from afar at the shrine of its great sage had given ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of the matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more secular history than can be associated with it; but not till the end of the thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... reasons why Washington exercised such a beneficial influence upon the destinies of his country. In a confidential letter to his wife in 1797, he expressed an opinion that the father of his country was not a good-natured and amiable man, but time had mellowed these recollections and softened the asperity of this judgment. Washington had not, he said (in 1843), 'an extraordinary amount of acquired knowledge; he was neither a classical scholar nor a man of science, nor was he endowed with the powers of eloquence, ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens |
