"Tuneless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deeper way For the warm shore, within the shallows play; Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud, Slope their slow passage to the fall'n flood: Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace How side-long crabs had crawled their crooked race; Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye; What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come, And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home, Gave from the salt ditch-side the bellowing boom: He nursed the feelings these dull ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... curse. It throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony. What was it that silenced Sheridan, the English orator, and shattered the golden scepter with which he swayed parliaments and courts? What foul sprite turned the sweet rhythm of Robert Burns into a tuneless babble? What was it that swamped the noble spirit of one of the heroes of the last war, until, in a drunken fit, he reeled from the deck of a Western steamer, and was drowned. There was one whose voice we all loved to hear. He was one ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... to be mistaken on subjects of this kind that generalizing is dangerous. Many great authorities have liked tuneless music. One of the most telling arguments in its favor was recently advanced by a foreigner. The Chinese ambassador told us last winter in a club at Washington that Wagner’s was the only European music that he appreciated and enjoyed. “You see,” he ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... came from any of the stores or houses along the street, but from behind the closed door of the cafe came the sound of voices and laughter mixed with the metallic banging of a very old piano beating out tuneless accompaniment to a bull-voiced singer roaring through the many verses of "Hinkey ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... and waited he began, of a sudden and at unawares, to sing to himself. It was the same tuneless chant that had taken possession of him by Harvington-on-Avon; but more instant now and more confident, breaking from him now upon the open sea, with moon and stars above him. Tilda did not hear it, for she slept. He himself was hardly conscious of it. His thoughts ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the road Durham saw a horse and rider. The horse was making its own way, the rider having as much as he could do to keep in the saddle. He was swaying from side to side, occasionally waving his arms in the air and howling out a tuneless ditty in ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... not see as did other men, were doing these things; straightway, the old street corner, the selling of matches and shoelaces, the street strolling singing in a cracked voice while twanging some tuneless instrument, vanished. Other men had risen above this crowning infirmity; why could not I. Boulogne and this meeting with Captain Towse had saved me. Gloom vanished, for the moment at any rate, and my whole being was animated by a great resolve—the ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... was, "Every child should be taught singing—for its health, if for nothing else." And perhaps he was right! At any rate, he made his forty to fifty thousand a year—and on days when he had a succession of the noisy, tuneless squawkers, he felt that he more than ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... and had a moment's leisure to examine them before the echo of Ethan's blast returned from the hill. Not one, but many echoes had caught up the harsh and tuneless sound, untwisted its complicated threads, and found a thousand aerial harmonies in one stern trumpet tone. It was a distinct yet distant and dreamlike symphony of melodious instruments, as if an airy band had ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... life even Kant's giant intellect left him. Do you suppose that in these various archetypes of intellectual man the soul was worn out by the years that loosened the strings, or made tuneless the keys, of the perishing instrument on which the mind must rely for all notes of its music? If you cannot distinguish the operations of the mind from the essence of the soul, I know not by what rational inductions you arrive at the conclusion that ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... home. He drifted to the station aimlessly; he had ceased to be self-determined. His compartment happened to be empty; so, free to behave as he liked, he yelled music-hall snatches in a tuneless voice, hammering with his feet on the wooden floor. The noise pleased his sodden mind, which had narrowed to a comfortable stupor—outside of which his troubles seemed to lie, as if they belonged not to him but to somebody else. With the same sodden interest he was staring through ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... and later in one volume (1911). The appreciative English critic, Edmund Gosse, in his Introduction to the 1907 collection, calls Cawein "the only hermit thrush" singing "through an interval comparatively tuneless." W. D. Howells's (p. 373) Foreword in the 1911 volume emphasizes Cawein's unusual power of making common things 'live and glow thereafter with ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... sometime; his life was valuable now. But he wasn't going to hurry about it, if a sound leg meant his being taken and ordered off to this dam-fool War. Nicky-Nan pursed up his lips as he worked, whistling to himself a cheerful, tuneless ditty. Some one tapped on ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... and, what was sillier, Easy and Friendly was Familiar. Or, if he tuned his lofty lays, With solemn air to Virtue's praise, Alike abusive and erroneous, They call'd it hoarse and inharmonious. Yet so it was to souls like theirs, Tuneless as Abel to the bears! A Rook[5] with harsh malignant caw Began, was follow'd by a Daw;[6] (Though some, who would be thought to know, Are positive it was a crow:) Jack Daw was seconded by Tit, Tom Tit[7] could write, and so he writ; A tribe of tuneless praters follow, The ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... passed up and down, and heard him speaking once or twice, but he "had the Gaelic," and the sing-song voice and mysterious words sounded weirdly in her ears. Sometimes, as he put the final polish on the boots, he would break into song,—a strange, tuneless song which quavered up and down, and ended on long-sustained notes. Once even she saw the slippered feet move in jaunty dance-step to and fro, but at the sound of a clatter of saucepans from the kitchen close at hand he retired into his corner, ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... benediction was given, the second Gospel was read, the priest and the people repeated the Bohemian prayers, and all was over. The countless heads began to move onward, the shuffling of innumerable feet sent heavy, tuneless echoes through vaulted space, broken every moment by the sharp, painful cough of a suffering child whom no one could see in the multitude, or by the dull thud of some heavy foot striking against the wooden seats in the press. The Wanderer moved forward with ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... if to keep them balanced. Whenever anything of which she did not approve was being said to Miss Salmon or was being done before Miss Salmon, she maintained throughout it, moving about in pursuit of her pince-nez, a rather loud, constant, tuneless humming. When her moment came she would always begin "Well, now" and then swallow forcibly as though the swallowing gave her pain. "Well, now" (gulp). This introduction was always precedent to speech by Miss Salmon, whether after humming or not. Rosalie frequently went to Sunday church service ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... table under the quiet trees the first part of the waltz movement of Weber's "Invitation" sounded out through the upper window. The brilliant tuneless passages bounding singly up the piano, flowing down entwined, were shaped by an ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson |
