"Rhapsody" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inefficiency, and even failure of character, in some officers of the Government during a period of seventy years, as is the case in all Governments, but such instances were few, if they occurred at all, and such as to afford no just pretext for the rhapsody and insinuations of Colonel Barre ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... Keats, (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody,) it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius—he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... stars, might be all very pleasant objects, even under an equatorial sun, yet the following account of some of the disagreeables, when taken in contrast, rather tends to overbalance the sum of the agreeables. Thus we find, that on the day subsequent to that on which John Lander had written his rhapsody on the agreeables of Badagry, the noise and jargon of their guests pursued them even in their sleep, and their dreams were disturbed by fancied palavers, which were more unpleasant and vexatious, if possible, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... emphatic movements of the head. His eyes were fixed intently before him, as if he could actually see and follow the shining thread of his song, as it wound away through the air. His performance had all the effect of a spontaneous rhapsody. When it was terminated, he looked down at his auditors, eager, inquisitive, as who should say, "I hope you liked it?"—and then, with a nod clearly meant as a farewell, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... would not produce or own things, he had to beg or borrow them from others who were therefore obliged to sin for him. The first corollary from the admiration of poverty was the glorification of beggary and its exaltation above productive labor.[2195] There is a rhapsody on poverty in the Roman de la Rose. If it is base and corrupting to admire wealth, it is insane to admire poverty. It never can be anything more than a pose or affectation. The count of Chiusi gave to Francis the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love, And sets a blister there; makes marriage-vows As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul; and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words: Heaven's face doth glow; Yea, this solidity and compound mass, With tristful visage, as against the doom, Is thought-sick ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of 'The Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... argument, it will be enough to dislodge the notion before it gets fixed in us." Then said I, "Which of his words has moved you most? For the fellow seemed to rampage about, in his anger and abusive language, with a long disconnected and rambling rhapsody drawn from all sources, and at the same time ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... perfume; the voice of youth was tuned to angelic hymns; and the golden sun of the morning, shining through the coloured pane, cast its purple or its verdant beam on the embroidered vestments and marble pavement." [18] Or read the extended rhapsody which closes the first volume, where, to counteract the attractions of classic lands, the author passes in long review the sites and monuments of romance in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France. Aubrey de Vere says that nothing had been so "impressive, suggestive, and spiritually ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... After uttering this rhapsody, the old gentleman snapped his fingers twenty or thirty times, and then subsided into an ecstatic contemplation of Miss La Creevy's charms. This affording Mrs Nickleby a favourable opportunity of explanation, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... only married last leave, and his description goes like a Shakspearean sonnet. I gather that I've got to look out for a combination of Titania, GLADYS COOPER and HELEN OF TROY. I tried to nail him down to externals, but he only went off into another rhapsody. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... score years,—to have fought all the devils and clasped all the angels of its delirium,—and then, just at the point when the white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of spring and temper in it. All this I thought my ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... have what may be broadly termed "orientalism," which includes the Hindu, Moorish, Siamese, and Gypsy, the latter embracing most of southeastern European (Roumania, etc.) types. Liszt's "Second Rhapsody," opening section, divested of orientalism or gypsy characteristics, is merely ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... which began to take the place of even that interrupted speech affected them more than his reasoning! Short sighs escaped them; they swayed to and fro with the rhythm of his voice and movements. They had begun to comprehend this exacerbation of emotion—this paroxysmal rhapsody. This was the dithyrambic exaltation they had ardently waited for. They responded quickly. First with groans, equally inarticulate murmurs of assent, shouts of "Glory," and the reckless invocation of sacred names. Then a wave of hysteria seemed to move the whole mass, and ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... point came a momentary lull, the chieftain's eyes rolling bloodthirstily, but the rhapsody having apparently become congested within his fiery heart. His audience, however, were not given time to recover their senses, before a striking-looking individual, adorned with tartan trews and a feathered hat, in whom ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... out of touch with all human relations, but apparently happy in the enjoyment of her own spiritual blessings. Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification—page after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group of persons who claim that entire salvation involves three steps instead of two; not only must there be conversion and sanctification, but a third, which they ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... be entirely of this opinion, for during the foregoing rhapsody of his fellow-sentinel he had been scratching his head with an air of comical uneasiness, or rather with an air that would have been very comical if he had been a dwarf or an ordinary-sized man. He winked too, and though it could not be doubted for a moment that ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... power has arisen in the world, and standing with face to the east, has drawn a sword, before the circle of which even the spectral shadow of cholera has quailed and gone back! Humanity might well break out in rhapsody and jubilee over this ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... worked for herself) she went to her cruel death, still repeating the words, "I am innocent." The funeral, at St. George the Martyr, was attended by 10,000 people. Curran used to declaim eloquently on her unhappy fate, and Mr. Charles Phillips wrote a glowing rhapsody on this victim of legal dulness. But such mistakes not even Justice herself can correct. A city mourned over her early grave; but the life was taken, and there was no redress. Gadsden, the clerk, whom she had warned not to eat any dumpling, as it was heavy ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... leave rhapsody, and may now be reminded, in explanation of allusions in the following letter, that the arm of Dr Livingstone, the African traveller, was crushed and crunched by the bite and "chaw" of a lion. He will also please to notice, that the ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... rare indeed for Miss Barfoot to be moved to rhapsody. Again Rhoda nodded, and then they laughed together, with joyous confidence in themselves and ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke." In reply to the noble passage: "The age of chivalry is gone ...," Paine shrewdly says: "In the rhapsody of his imagination he has discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are that there are no Quixotes to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... merely followed and enlarged upon the example of some of the whites. The similarity of practices, however, did not promote a permanent mingling of the two races in the same congregations, for either would feel some restraint upon its rhapsody imposed by the presence of the other. To relieve this there developed in greater or less degree a separation of the races for purposes of worship, white ministers preaching to the blacks from time to time in plantation missions, and home talent among the negroes filling the intervals. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... expansion in the development of some of its leading suggestions. But it must be judged as the earnest utterances of a poet, rather than a grave didactic treatise. With the purpose which the author had in view, a spice of rhapsody is no defect. He presents a beautiful example of the smiling wisdom of which he is such an eloquent advocate. He has an intuitive sense of the genial and joyous aspects of life, and has no sympathies to waste on the victims of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... little disappointed at being cut off in the middle of his rhapsody, but he began turning over the leaves of an order-book which lay upon a ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... In that rhapsody of the marsh there is no recognizable metrical scheme, in spite of the plainly marked rhythm, but in the following symbolic sketch the imitation of the horse's ambling introduces an element of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... now does himself is the obligation which he formerly received from her royal indulgence. Of this obligation nothing is now known, unless he alluded to her being his godmother. He is said indeed to have been engaged at a settled stipend as a writer for the Court. In Swift's "Rhapsody on Poetry" are these ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... and a special clause forbidding utterly and for ever their ownership of corporate wealth.—Every gift received must be handed to the bishop of the diocese in which it was given, who must provide them himself with necessaries of life and travel. Oh!—what could they not do?... He was off in a rhapsody. ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the wild rhapsody which I wrote to tell her how much in love I was with Elena Barry-Smith. And in the nature of things I had not written Bettie again to tell her I was, and by a deal the more, in love with Avis Beechinor. The task was delicate, the reasons for my not ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... you are to know, that this learned problematist was brother to him, who, preaching at St. Mary's, Oxford, took his text out of the history of Balaam, Numb. xxii., "Am I not thine ass?" Dear Sir, pardon this rhapsody of, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... spirit-stirring song and chivalrous story. The poet and minstrel have delighted to shed round it the splendors of fiction, and even the historian has forgotten the sober gravity of narration and broken forth into enthusiasm and rhapsody in its praise. Triumphs and gorgeous pageants have been its reward: monuments, on which art has exhausted its skill and opulence its treasures, have been erected to perpetuate a nation's gratitude and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... and the well-known sets, "Five Norman Songs," "Six Scotch Songs," "Three Songs of the Night," and "Three Songs of the East." Her piano music is also excellent, among the best examples being the Rhapsody, the Meditation, a poetic revery, the charming Spring Idyll, and her early ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... professed to be thus collected would easily pass muster with the readers of his book! A confidence of this kind is abnormal, and illustrates, we think most fully, all the special characteristics of the man. With his passion for repeating, our author tells us in continuation of a strange rhapsody on Negro felicity:— ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... looking young fellow like himself, with nothing to do but to make love to them, THAT ought to be no mean consideration, enabling him, as it would, to while away the tedium of captivity." At other times he would launch forth into some wild rhapsody, the invention of the moment, or seek to entertain his companion with startling anecdotes connected with his encounters with the Indians on the Wabash, (where he had formerly served,) in the course of which much of the marvellous, to call it by the most indulgent term, was ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... clear, if they could be used with a chance of being understood. But, unfortunately, the ability to comprehend a great work, as a whole, is even rarer in music than in poetry. The little taking bits of melody are all that is thought of or perceived; the great epos or rhapsody, the form and meaning of the entire composition,—which is a work of Art in no other sense than a poem is one, except that it uses, instead of speech, musical forms, of greater variety and symmetry,—are not at all understood. Nor is the subtile and irresistible coherence in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... did not suffer it. He not only retained that hand, but took the other also, and spoke, now the ice was broken, eloquent words of love. Not unmeaning phrases of rhapsody, about hearts and darts and dying for her, such as somebody else might have given utterance to, but earnest-hearted words of deep tenderness, calculated to win upon the mind's good sense, as well as upon the ear and heart; and it may be that, had her ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... natural Theology, revelation has no other basis than mere tradition, we have even better authority than his Lordship's for the staggering fact that natural Theology, without the prop of revelation, is a 'rhapsody of words,' mere jargon, analogous to the tale told by an idiot, so happily described by our great poet as 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' We have a Rev. Hugh M'Neil 'convinced that, from external creation, no right conclusion can be drawn concerning the moral character ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrote now—poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the barrel- organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared rooms with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised these visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as Margery ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... conclusion of the doctor's rhapsody may have been is not known; for, stamping too energetically upon the seaweed on the edge of the rock, his foot slipped, and he disappeared, with the perpendicular descent and velocity of a deep-sea lead, into the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... ekzameni. Revival revivigo. Revive revivigi. Revocable nuligebla. Revocation nuligo. Revoke nuligi. Revolt ribelo. Revolution revolucio. Revolve turnigxi, pivoti. Revulsion antipatio. Reward premio, rekompenco. Rhapsodist rapsodiisto. Rhapsody rapsodio. Rhetoric parolarto, retoriko. Rhetorical elokventa, retorika. Rheumatic reuxmatisma. Rheumatism reuxmatismo. Rhinoceros rinocero. Rhomb rombo. Rhombus rombo. Rhubarb rabarbo. Rhyme rimi. Rhythm ritmo. Rib ripo. Ribald malcxasta, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... away upon the terrace a grey shadow paused a moment ere it was swallowed in the brilliance of the ball-room; seeing which I did not mind the slightly superior smile that curved Mr. Selwyn's very precise moustache; after all, my rhapsody had not been altogether thrown away. As I ended, the opening bars of a waltz floated out to us. Mr. Selwyn glanced ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy Night Morning at the Window The Boston Evening Transcript Aunt Helen Cousin Nancy Mr. Apollinax Hysteria Conversation Galante La Figlia ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... myself may be misunderstood, I write this to explain the cause of this homicide and suicide. Last summer Clifford and I began a friendship which developed into love." He then recited the details of the friendship, and continued: "After playing a Liszt rhapsody for Clifford over and over, he said that when our time to die came he hoped we would die together, listening to such glorious music as that. Our time has now come to die, but death will not be accompanied by music. Clifford's love has, alas! turned to deadly hatred. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... less did he consult with thoroughness official records or references to Shakespeare's literary achievements in the books of his contemporaries. Such labour as that was to be undertaken later, when the practice of biography had assimilated more scientific method. Rowe preferred the straw of vague rhapsody to the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the door, startled from his rhapsody by the appearance of the intruder, who had made himself quite at home, regardless of the fact that the final words of their last meeting had given no promise of a friendship which would make his air of easy familiarity acceptable to Peter, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... Viscount Grimston (1683-1756), was created an Irish peer with the title Baron Dunboyne in 1719. The full title of the play to which Swift refers, is "The Lawyer's Fortune, or, Love in a Hollow Tree." It was published in 1705. Swift refers to Grimston in his verses "On Poetry, a Rhapsody." Pope, in one of his satires, calls him "booby lord." Grimston withdrew his play from circulation after the second edition, but it was reprinted in Rotterdam in 1728 and in London in 1736. Dr. Johnson told ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... rich widow well-known for her large charities, was addressing the audience in low, earnest tones. Her theme was taken from the poet's verses: she pleaded for the full emancipation of Woman as man's equal comrade in the advance of the race. It was a vague, poetic rhapsody, disconnected in thought, and made slight impression on Milly. The last speaker was Hazel Fredericks. Her subject was the intellectual equality of women with men and their right to do their own thinking. Milly recognized many of the pat phrases ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... the sensuous Italian strains accord with such an hour and scene! They were playing, if I remember rightly, the ever-popular Aida; other items followed later—more ambitious ones; a Hungarian rhapsody, Berlioz, a selection ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... this rhapsody of the worthy friar. The count de Cabra, being instructed in the complicated arrangements of the king, marched forth at midnight to execute them punctually. He led his troops by the little river that winds below Vaena, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... debate, and may have been the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, after answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the length of ladies' dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his contributor's 'story,' and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as justice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and the like, paused ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... they certainly will be multiplied, by means of prints—and what does Art become in my hands? A Priesthood! In what aspect do I present myself to the public? As a mere landscape painter? No! As Grand Consoler!" In the midst of this rhapsody (how wonderfully he resembled Oscar in his bursts of excitement while he was talking!)—in the full torrent of his predictions of his own coming greatness, Lucilla quietly entered the room. The "Grand Consoler" shut up his portfolio; dropped Painting on the spot; asked for Music, ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... eyes and lips reflected in the dark well of knowledge) and almost pantheistic thinkers like Master Eckhardt; but love nevertheless, love. "Amor, amore, ardo d' amore," St. Francis had sung in a wild rhapsody, a sort of mystic dance, a kind of furious malaguena of divine love; and that he who would wish to know God, let him love—"Qui vult habere notitiam Dei, amet," had been written by Hugo of St. Victor, one of the subtlest of all the mystics. "Amor ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... I knew he would come. Why should he not come?" This she exclaimed to her mother, and then went on to speak of him with a wild rhapsody of joy, as though there had hardly been any breach in her happiness. And she continued to sing the praises of her husband till Mrs. Holt hardly knew how to bear her enthusiasm in a fitting mood. For she, who was not in love, still thought that this ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... matter how—perhaps with a jest at some absurd adventure of his own, perhaps with the recitation, in his vibrating voice and full Scotch accent, of some snatch of poetry that was haunting him, perhaps with a rhapsody of analytic delight over some minute accident of beauty or expressiveness that had struck him in man, woman, child, or external nature. And forthwith the floodgates would be opened, and the talk would stream on in endless, never importunate, flood and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... answer, "I'm sure she has, but perhaps I thought it schoolgirl rhapsody—perhaps I had too many other things to ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... of forethought in this, I grant you; but such speeches as these were Dolly Crewe's mode of comforting her lover in his dark moods; at least, she was sincere,—and sincerity will excuse many touches of extravagance. And as to Griffith, every touch of loving, foolish rhapsody dropped upon his heart like dew from heaven, filling him with rapture and drawing him ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... turn to rhapsody, Who am the deathless Philomel! —The Toads, croak! croak! the Toads are ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... convinced of the truth of what he said, and I gave an order for his liberation. To avoid irritating the susceptibility of the Minister of Police I wrote to him the following few lines:—"The libel is the most miserable rhapsody imaginable. The author, probably with the view of selling his pamphlet in Holstein, predicts that Denmark will conquer every other nation and become the greatest kingdom in the world. This alone will suffice to prove to you how little clanger there ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... swaying figure of the risen Christ, and below appear the heads of the two guards, looking up, surprised and joyful. It is perhaps the very earliest example of that soft and sensuous feeling, that rhapsody of sensation which was presently to sweep like a flood over the art of Venice. "What a time must the dawn of the sixteenth century have been when a man of seventy, and not the most vigorous and advanced ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... did not share these feelings. She went to church each Sunday and read her Bible daily with a simple faith that defied derision. Once, when she was gone, Martin idly hunted out the Song of Solomon. His lips curled with contempt at the passionate rhapsody. He knew a thing or two, he allowed, about these wonderful Roses of Sharon and this Song of Songs. Lies, all lies, every word of it! Yet, in spite of himself, from time to time, he liked to reread it. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... Sarah, 'I am not sure your rhapsody has made the mystery any plainer than before. May I not, in my turn, ask if your feelings are quite Christian? Are you not afraid you entertain a species of repulsion toward ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... drawing-room, Marion was seated at the piano, playing a rhapsody of Raff's, and Mrs. Armour and Lali were seated side by side. Frank thrilled at seeing his wife's hand in his mother's. Marion nodded over the piano at the men, and presently played a snatch of Carmen, then wandered off into the barbaric ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I expect to meet with any thing resembling your charming self," cried I. This was a new text for a lover's rhapsody. It is not necessary, and might not be generally interesting to repeat all the ridiculous things I said, even if I ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... we go home," he said, and began to speak—half in earnest, half in relief from the gravity of the past council—of that returning. By degrees the fire burned, and he whose spirit the live coal touched as it touched Sidney's and, more rarely, Walter Raleigh's, bore his listeners with him in a rhapsody of anticipation. Long fronds of palm drooped without the room which held them, Englishmen in a world or savage or Spanish, but their spirits followed the speaker to green fields of Kent or Devon. They saw the English summer, saw the twilight fall, heard the lonely tinkle of far sheep-bells, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... now read Sec. 22 of 'Sesame and Lilies'? The reviewers in the ecclesiastical journals laughed at it, as a rhapsody, when the book came out; none having the slightest notion of what I meant: (nor, indeed, do I well see how it could be otherwise!). Nevertheless, I meant precisely and literally what is there said, namely, that a bishop's ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... said I, as calmly as I could, in reply to this strange rhapsody, "will ye be sae kind as tell me what a' this means?" An' first I looked at the dochter, wha was still lyin on the sofa, wi' her face buried wi' fricht in the cushions, and then at the mother, wha was sittin in a chair, starin at me, an' gaspin for ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... perfect flood of perfume that poured around and over them and came in great gusts from the garden he detected a new tone, wild and woodsy, sweet with a curious tang and haunting in its alien and insistent note in the rhapsody of odors. ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... this period, we need only say that the best of them is 'The Soul's Errand,' and that its authorship is uncertain. It has, with very little evidence in any of the cases, been ascribed to Sir Walter Raleigh, to Francis Davison, (author of a compilation entitled 'A Poetical Rhapsody,' published in 1593, and where 'The Soul's Errand' first appeared,) and to Joshua Sylvester, who prints it in his volume of verses, with vile interpolations of his own. Its outspoken energy and pithy language render it worthy ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... and the elderly gentleman whom he had called Stapleton exchanged no remarks, but they both cast curious, thoughtful glances at their small companion from time to time. They had to rouse him from his rhapsody to ask the way at last. He answered concisely and shortly with no touch of the ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... times he is almost submerged by it, and he loses the sense of outward things. In this condition of trance the sense of time vanishes, there is, he asserts, no such thing, no past or future, only now, which is eternity. In The Story of my Heart, a rhapsody of mystic experience and aspiration he describes in detail several such moments of exaltation or trance. He seems to be peculiarly sensitive to sunshine. As the moon typifies to Keats the eternal ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... to relate the conclusion of Frank's rhapsody, but he took great pains to convince me that if there was ever a high-principled, pure-minded, much-injured individual, that exemplary character was the gentleman now walking by my side; and I was convinced, but at the same time not exactly satisfied. In thinking over ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... trees grow so close together that the forest is difficult to penetrate, especially after the rains, when the undergrowth is dense and rank. Very beautiful is the Bhabar, and very stimulating to the imagination. One writer speaks of it as "a jungle rhapsody, an extravagant, impossible botanical tour de force, intensely modern in its Titanic, incoherent magnificence." It is the home of the elephant, the tiger, the panther, the wild boar, several species of deer, and of many ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... historian has ever lived." For one man who, with effort, has toiled through Freeman's ponderous but severely accurate Norman and Sicilian histories, there are probably a hundred whose imagination has been fired by Carlyle's rhapsody on the French Revolution, or who have pored with interested delight over Froude's account ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... du moins, elle ne fut pas pour le cardinal de Lomenie une manie sterile. Non seulement il aimoit, il connoissoit les livres, mais il savoit s'en servir; sans contredit il fut un des hommes les plus eclaires du Clerge de France."——To return from this pleasing rhapsody to the catalogue, the title of which is above given. It is composed by Laire, in the Latin language, with sufficient bibliographical skill: but the index is the most puzzling one imaginable. The uncommonly curious and magnificent collection, not being disposed of "en masse"—according to advertisement—was ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... precipitately undertaken a work of this nature, which required more time than he employed about it. There is nothing great or learned in his commentaries upon the Bible; every thing low and mean: and though he had studied divinity, he has rather composed a rhapsody of theological questions, than a commentary upon the scripture text: to which we may add, that he wanted understanding, and usually followed his senses ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... written a wild, rambling, unfinished rhapsody, called "The Devil's Drive" the notion of which I took ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... its grief in a moment shall cease, And the soul hush its cries in the cadence of peace, And the life with the laughter of rhapsody blest Shall rejoice through the years in the ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... Is this all rhapsody, or is it in part true report? There is evidently no answer to the question so conceived. But if it were to express my own religious feeling it would have some specific proportion of literal and metaphorical significance, according to the degree to which its detail contributes ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... school! Among other direct taxes, every quadruped that can be called a horse, above two years old, pays a dollar a year, and every dog a dollar and a half. Does not all this sound painfully civilized? If the influence of the tropics has betrayed me into rhapsody and ecstacy in earlier letters, these dry details will turn the scale in ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... sentient portion at least, to the altogether inferior and less sentient, and upon the ground of that faculty builds the vision of its redemption! If it could be so, then how should the seeming apostle's affected rhapsody of hope be to us other than a mere puff-ball of falsest rhetoric, a special-pleading for nothing, as degrading to art as objectless ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... had written a Life and Times of Captain Seth Brewster, which my publisher, and several independent critics he kept in his employ, had praised into an unprecedented sale, though it was indeed the veriest rubbish, his pent up enthusiasm gushed forth in a rhapsody of joy. I told him, too, that two sonnets which I had written, over the signature of Mary, had been published in the "New Bedford Mercury," the editor of which very excellent paper said they were charming, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... a queer, quick glance at the speaker and then at Davies. Jervis plunged into an immediate rhapsody on the subject of Mrs. Leonard's children, whom he declared to be the best little beggars he ever knew, unless it was Cranston's. "Of course," he added, diplomatically, "I can safely praise them in your presence, ladies, as you have none ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... said good-night. But when I had reached my bedroom in the Hotel de la Ville, I sat down, obstinate and unconvinced, and penned this rhapsody, which I have lately found among papers of nearly twenty years ago. I give it ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... practise on the jangling old piano, and even, at her particular request, to scrape a little on the violin; but she cared most for singing, and for hearing him play and talk. She never felt shy or timid with him, and one day, at the end of a long rhapsody about German music and German composers, she asked ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... admiration society," said Sadie, in her most mocking tone. "Did you and Dr. Douglass have a private rehearsal? You interrupted him in a similar rhapsody ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... this strange rhapsody?—Is it owing to my being here? That I am not at Sinclair's? But if there be infection in that house, how has my ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... of his. He wore a better coat, which he no longer rubbed against the wall to take the gloss from off it; he ceased to interlard all his ordinary speech with texts of Scripture; his snuffle abated audibly; he gave up his habit of extempore rhapsody, and lost, in a great measure, his aversion to Christmas tarts and plum-pudding. After a time, he might even be seen with a fishing-rod over his shoulder; then he contrived sundry improvements in gun-locks and double-barrels, for which he took out a patent, and in fact did not entirely ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... With this rhapsody Mr. Fairfield introduced the Arcadian Club of New York, an organization that for a time threatened to rival the Lotos in the latter's particular field. Writing men snatched up into the clouds in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for illustrations with ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... labour, and with a wild look and strange gesture, exclaimed, "Now, Dick! now, Harry! O, ill done, Dick! O, well done, Harry! Harry has gained the day!" His fellow-labourers in the field did not know what to make of this rhapsody; but the next day cleared up the mystery. News was brought by a messenger, in hot haste, that at the very instant when Nixon had thus ejaculated, Richard III. had been slain at the battle of Bosworth, and Henry VII. proclaimed ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... with a grim Indictment which is as eloquent in its flowerless straightforward English as is the hand-painted rhapsody of the early prophet: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... decaying. On Wednesday we expect a third she-meteor. Those learned luminaries the Ladies Pomfret and Walpole are to be joined by the Lady Mary Wortley Montague. You have not been witness to the rhapsody of mystic nonsense which these two fair ones debate incessantly, and consequently cannot figure what must be the issue of this triple alliance: we have some idea of it. Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... and never indulged in the gratuitous pain of anticipation. Today he had an additional bulwark against such self-inflicted worries, for he had spent his last two hours in town at the vocal recital of a singer who a month before had stirred the critics into rhapsody over her gift of lyric song. Up till now he had had no opportunity of hearing her; and, with the panegyrics that had been showered on her in his mind, he had gone with the expectation of disappointment. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... if from an occasion and saving it when there is a change of hymning, changing the whole escape that is not a rhapsody, it is the place of thunder. The sale and the water, the whole hating of argument and agreement these are not changing with winter, winter does not need rain, it does not need any day, it needs tunneling. ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green line of Scott's novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were the first books I ever owned—long, long before I could appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inexperienced eyes—the nurse parted the curtains, and there I saw—I saw—but my son, you will think I exaggerate—I saw the most exquisite baby in the universe. You laugh at an old bachelor's rhapsody! In reality I don't care much for children. But that child, that supreme morsel of humanity, was too much for me. I stood and stared and stood and stared, and all the while the tiny angel was smiling in my eyes, oh! such a celestial smile. From his large blue eyes, like flowers, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Babbalanja," said Media, "what have you come to in all this rhapsody? You everlastingly ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... more impressed with my companion's remarkable singleness of purpose. Everything was a pretext for some wildly idealistic rhapsody or reverie. Nothing could be seen or said that did not lead him sooner or later to a glowing discourse on the true, the beautiful, and the good. If my friend was not a genius, he was certainly a monomaniac; and I found as great a fascination in watching ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... N. discontinuity; disjunction &c. 44; anacoluthon[obs3]; interruption, break, fracture, flaw, fault, crack, cut; gap &c. (interval) 198; solution of continuity, caesura; broken thread; parenthesis, episode, rhapsody, patchwork; intermission; alternation &c. (periodicity) 138; dropping fire. V. be discontinuous &c. adj.; alternate, intermit, sputter, stop and start, hesitate. discontinue, pause, interrupt; intervene; break, break in upon, break off; interpose &c. 228; break the thread, snap ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Peruvian gold. She sounded him, as a very wise man, on the chances of Oliver Dynevor doing something for his nephew, but did not receive much encouragement; though he prophesied that James was certain to get on, and uttered a rhapsody that nearly destroyed his new reputation for judgment. Lady Conway gave him an affectionate invitation to visit her whenever he could, and summoned the young ladies to wish him good-bye. The mute, blushing gratitude of Isabel's look was beautiful beyond description; and Virginia's countenance ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as the former's Ballade et Polonaise, though I know of musical purists who disapprove of it. I consider this Polonaise on a level with Chopin's. Or take, in the virtuoso field, Sarasate's Gypsy Airs—they are equal to any Liszt Rhapsody. I have only recently discovered that Ysaye—my life-long friend—has written some wonderful original compositions: a Poeme elegiaque, a Chant d'hiver, an Extase and a ms. trio for two violins and alto that is marvelous. These pieces were an absolute find for me, with the exception ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... for another question Kilkee passed his arm within mine, and led me along the corridor, pouring out, the entire time a whole rhapsody about the practical joke of my late illness, which he was pleased to say would ring from one end of Europe to ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... first volume of poems, The Winter Hour, was published in 1891, since which time he has produced many others. Now he is his own publisher, and two attractive books "published by the author" appeared in 1917—Poems of War and Peace and Italian Rhapsody. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... I might be sure of that. One thing only was wanted to make him perfectly happy—it was that I should see his lady-love. Her name was Frances Wynn, and he assured me that it was the most poetical name in the world. Page after page of rhapsody did he write and I read, until at last I believed him, that he had found the one perfect woman in ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... Of course here Mr. Pen went off into a rhapsody through which, as we have perfect command over our own feelings, we have no reason to follow the lad. Of course, love, truth, and eternity were produced: and words were tried but found impossible to plumb the tremendous depth of his affection. This ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... desire, nor was his white forehead pencilled with the shadowy writing that is a pale warning to the libertine. And yet his speech about the spring that night, as they leaned out over Victoria Street, had evidently not been a mere reckless rhapsody. It had held a meaning and was remembered. In Valentine there seemed to be flowering a number of faint-hued wants, such wants as had never flowered from his nature before. The fig-tree that had seemed so exquisitely barren began to put forth leaves, and when the warm showers ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... know that they are but lying in the [Greek: moimeterion] (cemetery)—the sleeping place; or, as the vivid old Hebrew faith would have it, the house of the living (Bethaim). Is not this testimony for the soul's immortality worth as much as all the rhapsody written thereon, from Plato ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... picked up the pipe to keep it, as he said, as a relic of Uncle Macquart; while Clotilde, who thought she perceived a touch of bitter mockery in his eulogistic rhapsody, shuddered anew with horror and disgust. But suddenly she perceived something under the table—part of ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... child, it has waggled like a blanc-mange ever since!—and kissed it. Then, quite suddenly, he broke out into a sort of rhapsody-like 'The Song of Solomon,' only nicer—with his head bowed over my hands. (He had got hold of the other one too, by this time.) I felt perfectly helpless, so I let him run on. I shan't tell you what he said, dear, because ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... great Reffei, one of the most distinguished literati of the country. Although his eye was remarkably piercing, I perceived in it somewhat of the wildness which always characterizes a Glonglim. He was evidently impatient for discussion; and having informed himself of the subject of my rhapsody when he joined our party, he vehemently exclaimed,—"I am surprised at your falling in with that popular prejudice; while it is easy to show, that but for some feeling of love, or pity, or admiration, with which the rose ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... voice had lost its richness and sounded hard. "I should like to tell you something of myself. Oh"—she laughed rather cynically—"I'm not going to bore you with a rhapsody intended to convey to you that I am a much misunderstood woman and all the rest of it. Only, if you are to see me again, I think I should like you to know just who and what ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... all scientific periodicals, including poor "Scientific Opinion," and I think higher than you do of "Nature." Lord, what a rhapsody that was of Goethe, but how well translated; it seemed to me, as I told Huxley, as if written by the maddest English scholar. It is poetry, and can I say anything more severe? The last number of the "Academy" was splendid, and I hope it will soon ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... in his rhapsody by the approach of a pleasant faced lad of about his own age who was dressed from head to foot in white and wore a little white cap, across the front of which was printed in gold letters the ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with breastplate and light round buckler." [Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. x.] We cannot guess how he found these things out, for corslets are as common in one "rhapsody" as in another when circumstances call for the mention of corslets, and are entirely unnamed in the Odyssey (save that the Achaeans are "bronze-chitoned"), while the Odyssey is alleged to be much later than the Iliad. As for "the iron age," ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... can be formed of the whole scene, unless by those present. There was not the least order in all he stammered out (to speak sincerely) with the most inconceivable incoherence. Bonaparte was no orator. Perceiving the bad effect produced upon the meeting by this rhapsody, and the progressive confusion of the speaker, I whispered (pulling his coat gently at the same time)—'Retire, General, you no longer know what you are saying.' I made a sign to Berthier to second me in persuading him to leave the place; when suddenly, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... the poets are still shy of it. In French it has, as yet, inspired but one good poem, the "Plus haut toujours!" of Jean Allard-Meeus, a hymn of real aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's ode "In Memoriam: A.H." is equally unique, and, in its complete diversity from Allard-Meeus' rhapsody, suggests that the aeroplane has a wide field before it in the realms of imaginative writing. Major Baring's subject is the death of Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, who was killed on November 3rd, 1916. This distinguished young statesman and soldier had just been promoted, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... wrote for the Entertainment of idle People, and calculated for Persons of Education, when they are at Leisure and want Amusement; and therefore to ask Men of Business, or that have any Thing else to do, to read such an incoherent Rhapsody throughout, would be an unreasonable Request; at least, the Author himself ought to be more modest than to expect it: Yet I must beg Leave to say, that whoever has not done this, ought not to be so magisterial in his Censures, as Some have been on Passages the most justifiable in the ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's French Revolution is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is history. Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, as much as it is with Miss Austen. Ruskin would sacrifice all the pictures in the world, if society ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... by sunrise, when the mistlike lambent opals bathed the bases of the tall columns salmon in the morning light! It was a rhapsody in the pale and unearthly colors of Puvis de Chavannes vitalized and made glorious with splendid sunlight; the apotheosis of mist; a vision never before seen, never to be forgotten. It was so beautiful that the memory ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... a wild, rambling, unfinished rhapsody, called 'The Devil's Drive,' the notion of which I took from Porson's Devil's Walk."—Journal, December 17, 18, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 378. "Though with a good deal of vigour and imagination, it is," says Moore, "for the most part rather clumsily executed, wanting ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... "See how thou art shaken into thyself, man. What! No phrase of lackadaisical rapture! Why, I looked to see thee invert thine incorporate satin in an airy rhapsody—upheld and kept unruffled by some fantastical twist of thine imagination. Oh, Fancy—Fancy! Couldst not e'en sustain thy knight cap-a-pie!" and she laughed the harder as she saw her lover's ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... of May, a month after Danton's death, Robespierre delivered a long speech before the Convention, a speech that marks his apogee. It was a high-flown rhapsody on civic morality and purism. Voltaire and the Encyclopedists were bitterly attacked; Jean Jacques Rousseau was deified. The State should adopt his religious attitude, his universal church of nature. In that church, nature herself is the chief priest and there is no need of an infamous ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... things he will see that the promises contained in the Bible whether national or personal, are nothing else than statements of the universal law of Cause and Effect applied to the inmost principles of our being, and that therefore it is not mere rhapsody, but the figurative expression of a great truth when the Psalmist says '"The Lord is my Shepherd," and "Thou art my God and the Rock ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... had listened to all this rhapsody very much with the air of a prince accustomed to royal service and thinking little of it, interrupted Dougal with some words ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... of David's rather incoherent rhapsody that these words burst upon his ears. He and Clive started to their feet, and found close behind them a half dozen of those miserable beggars. Two of them were old men, whose bleary eyes and stooping frames indicated extreme age. One was a woman on, crutches. Number ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... played a long while on the piano, at first a bravura from the operas, then some classical pieces, Liszt's "Twelfth Rhapsody," and finally ended with the artless music of Oppel's "A Summer's Night in Berezovka"—a piece she used to play to Ivanov when she ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... where—and here is the point—where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody? And what are we to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with no more colour or coherence ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... writing by a few purple passages such as the famous rhapsody on the Mona Lisa, conceiving it as always thus heavy with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and particularly running water, "green fields—or children's ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne |
