"Troubadour" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... France; religious festivals were celebrated with a gaiety which had its mundane side; love and malicious sport demanded an expression as well as pious joy. But in tracing the forms of lyrical verse anterior to the middle of the twelfth century, when the troubadour influence from the South began to be felt, we must be guided partly by conjecture, derived from the later poetry, in which—and especially in the refrains—earlier fragments ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the divinity. They will recount their privileges and ecstasies, and how ingeniously and wonderfully God has tried and proved them. But indeed the true God was not the lover of Madame Guyon. The true God is not a spiritual troubadour wooing the hearts of men and women to no purpose. The true God goes through the world like fifes and drums and flags, calling for recruits along the street. We must go out to him. We must accept his discipline and fight ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... comments. A pamphlet collection that Thorp privately printed at Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, was one of the first to be published. Thorp had the perspective of both range and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour himself. The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of his posthumous reminiscences, Pardner of ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... name familiar to the Don Juan story, to wit "Haidee," and opposite that name was the name of Elsie April. He waited for her—he had no other interest in the evening—and he waited in resignation; a young female troubadour (styled in the programme "the messenger") emerged from the unseen depths of the forest in the wings and ejaculated to the hero and his friend, "The Woman appears." But it was not Elsie that appeared. Six ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... Killogonsawee, "for my two childer that left me last year for foreign parts." Little Francis was Triptolemus, in the Pirate, an excellent figure, and Mrs. Carr his sister Baby. Isabella, an old lady in an old-fashioned dress, and Laura as her daughter in a court dress and powder; Anna, a French troubadour singing beautifully and speaking French perfectly; William, the youngest son, a half-pay officer, king of the coffee house; Tom, a famous London black beggar, Billy Waters, with a wooden leg; Morton, Meg Merillics; Dr. Lushington, a housemaid; ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... article then, it may be granted that Scott's excellence was superior and supreme." Without preferring any claim to epic grandeur, or to a rank among the few great poets of the first class, Scott is entitled to the highest eminence in minstrelic power. He is the great modern troubadour. His descriptions of nature are simple and exquisite. There is nothing in this respect more beautiful than the opening of The Lady of the Lake. His battle-pieces live and resound again: what can be finer than Flodden field in Marmion, and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden street, In the City as the sun sinks low; And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary feet Marking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat, And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they'll never meet, Through the meadows of the sunset, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... their whole heart—their highest and completest love. Roger looked to find a grand woman, his equal, and his empress; beautiful in person, serene in wisdom, ready for counsel, as was Egeria. Molly's little wavering maiden fancy dwelt on the unseen Osborne, who was now a troubadour, and now a knight, such as he wrote about in one of his own poems; some one like Osborne, perhaps, rather than Osborne himself, for she shrank from giving a personal form and name to the hero that was to be. The squire was not unwise in wishing her well out of the house ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian," "The Troubadour," are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron, Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the vers de societe of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this is the close ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... into the recreation room, where Miss Maitland (a stately Marie Antoinette) acted hostess, and received her guests with the assistance of Miss Parkinson (a Spanish gipsy) and Vivian Holmes (hastily attired as a troubadour). ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... office; a cabinet; a cash-box—aha! and a cash-box, golden within. A money-box is like a Quaker beauty: demure without, but what a figure of a woman! Outside gallery: an architectural feature I approve; I count it a convenience both for love and war; the troubadour—twang-twang; the craftsmen——(Makes as if turning key.) The kitchen window: humming with cookery; truffles, before Jove! I was born for truffles. Cock your hat: meat, wine, rest, and occupation; men to gull, women to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the central point of Dante's speculation. A shadow of her old sovereignty was still left her in the primacy of the Church, to which unity of faith was essential. He accordingly has no sympathy with heretics of whatever kind. He puts the ex-troubadour Bishop of Marseilles, chief instigator of the horrors of Provence, in paradise.[227] The Church is infallible in spiritual matters, but this is an affair of outward discipline merely, and means the Church as a form of polity. Unity was Dante's leading doctrine, and therefore ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Gaily the Troubadour touched his guitar, As he was hastening home from the war, Singing, "From Palestine hither I come,— ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... ROMANTIC WAY FOR PROPOSING.—In Peru they have a romantic way of popping the question. The suitor appears on the appointed evening, with a gaily dressed troubadour under the balcony of his beloved. The singer steps before her flower-bedecked window, and sings her beauties in the name of her lover. He compares her size to that of a pear tree, her lips to two blushing rose-buds, and her womanly form to that of a dove. With ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... continual food for laughter to all Asiatics, and the Greeks would have joined in it. In the golden Middle Age the practice developed into a regular and methodical service of women; it imposed deeds of heroism, cours d'amour, bombastic Troubadour songs, etc.; although it is to be observed that these last buffooneries, which had an intellectual side, were chiefly at home in France; whereas amongst the material sluggish Germans, the knights distinguished themselves rather by drinking ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... facts; but Nestie, he does not live among facts, he flies in the air, in the atmosphere of poetry. He is a raconteur. A tournament with knights on the North Meadow—good! Our little Nestie, he has been reading Ivanhoe and he is a troubadour." And the Count took off his hat in homage to Nestie's remarkable powers ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... silent when high noon Shows her tanned face among the thirsting clover And parching meadows, thy tenebrious tune Wakes with the dew or when the rain is over. Thou troubadour of wetness and damp lover Of all cool things! admitted comrade boon Of twilight's hush, and little intimate Of eve's first fluttering star and delicate Round ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... some difficulty that M. Lupot obtains silence for his daughter's song. At sight of the old neighbour and his guitar a smothered laugh is visible in the assembly. It is undeniable that the gentleman is not unlike a respectable Troubadour with a barrel organ, and that his guitar is like an ancient harp. There is great curiosity to hear the old gentleman touch his instrument. He begins by beating time with his feet and his head, which latter movement gives him very much the appearance of a mandarin ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... her morning's work. It was a Fouque-like tale, relieving and giving expression to the yearnings for holiness and loftiness that had grown up within Isabel Conway in the cramped round of her existence. The story went back to the troubadour days of Provence, where a knight, the heir of a line of shattered fortunes, was betrothed to the heiress of the oppressors, that thus all wrongs might be redressed. They had learnt to love, when Sir Roland discovered that the lands in dispute had been won by sacrilege. He met Adeline at a chapel ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... here. He was especially happy in imparting to singers the proper Auffassung (grasp, interpretation, finish) of songs, and coached many American and French artists for the operatic stage. In 1893 the restless troubadour moved on to Berlin, where he devoted himself so ardently to composition that his health collapsed, and he was exiled a year to Algiers. The early months of 1895 he spent in concert tours through this country. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... raised in song, accompanied by the strumming of a guitar. "There's your lover, Gladys," giggled Sahwah, "I recognize his voice. He plays the guitar, his brother told me so." Gladys hid her face in the pillow and the girls kept on teasing her. "Aren't you going to reward your gallant troubadour by tossing him a flower or a glove, or something?" called Nyoda from the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... edition of the "Memoires du Sire de Joinville" this passage, which is, perhaps, an interpolation from a contemporary document: "St. Louis drove from his kingdom all tumblers and players of sleight of hand, through whom many evil habits and tastes had become engendered in the people." A troubadour's story of this period shows that the jugglers wandered about the country with their trained animals nearly starved; they were half naked, and were often without anything on their heads, without coats, without shoes, and always without money. The lower orders welcomed them, and continued ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... the eyes and wooed the fingers. Fashion has asserted herself even in this particular. There have been times when the really fortunate possessor of such brown tresses as Miss Larches's would have been deemed unfortunate. No troubadour would have sung her praises; or if he did, he would either have left her hair unpraised, or else lied and called it golden, meaning red, as we know by the illuminated books of the Middle Ages. Had she lived in Venice, that great school of color, two or three ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... he was fifty-eight years old. At this age, had a private lot been his,—that of a statesman, jurist, man of science, annalist, philosopher, troubadour, mathematician, historian, poet,—he would but have entered his golden prime, rich in promise, fruitful in performance. Yet Alfonso, uniting in himself all these vocations, seemed at his death to have left ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... safe for the grave Rector of Holby to adopt the inflated style of a troubadour in addressing the Lady of Thornton Grange? Neither of them thought of it. They simply improved the shining hour after this fashion, until at length the conversation was interrupted by the opening of folding-doors, and the entrance of a servant ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... &c; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis^, antispast^, blank verse, ictus. elegiacs &c adj.; elegiac verse, elegaic meter, elegaic poetry. poet, poet laureate; laureate; bard, lyrist^, scald, skald^, troubadour, trouvere [Fr.]; minstrel; minnesinger, meistersinger [G.]; improvisatore^; versifier, sonneteer; rhymer, rhymist^, rhymester; ballad monger, runer^; poetaster; genus irritabile vatum [Lat.]. V. poetize, sing, versify, make verses, rhyme, scan. Adj. poetic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in the minds of at least two generations. Through the reminiscences of college mates, of soldiers and of frequenters of the Peabody concerts, the memory of this genius with the flute would have remained like that of some troubadour of the Middle Ages. It is unfortunate that he left no compositions to indicate a musical power sufficient to give him a place in the history of American music. It cannot be controverted, however, that he is the one man of letters in America who has had an adequate appreciation ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... troubadour of spring, trilled joyously somewhere in the pines above. The man looked up, then down at the vivid creature busy with her flowers at his feet. There was kinship between the two. She, too, was athrob with the joy note ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young. In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes up along a winding road the ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... murmur, "That's very gratifying, to be sure?" Well, yes, it is gratifying—thank you. It is at least as gratifying to be certified sober as to be certified romantic, though such certificates would not qualify one for the secretaryship of a temperance association or for the post of official troubadour to some lordly democratic institution such as the London County Council, for instance. The above prosaic reflection is put down here only in order to prove the general sobriety of my judgment in mundane affairs. I make a point of it because ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... form an item in these pleasant little excursions. He certainly was no use with an oar, but it was the 'bravo' captain's delight to dress as a troubadour and sit twanging the light guitar under the awnings, while Aileen and auntie ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... are merry, convivial, boon companions, and are never happier than when dancing, singing their war songs and love romances, or listening to the "guslar"—the national troubadour. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... sentiment as they had centred about their dear Duke of Burgundy, and the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to keep out of their neighbourhood. . . . At least, and whether he liked it or not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled as a subject of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 't is no troubadour That sings so sweetly at your door, To tell you of the joys in store— So grand and gay; But one that sings "Remember t' poor, ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... "Long live our Emperor, Arthur the Brave! Long live the good Princess!" The plaudits were echoed far and wide. The achievements of the noble Arthur, and the kind deeds of "The Good Princess," formed the theme of the fireside-tale in the humble cottage, and of the troubadour's lay in castle and banquetting-hall. Arthur, who in Britain was mourned as dead, or as lying in enchanted sleep with his good sword Excalibar at his side, ready to start up to his country's rescue in some hour ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... were creeping from one hut to another did Bakahenzie and his satellites return from the ghoulish offices of the dead. Zalu Zako, the chiefs and magicians arose to the wild beating of the drums and the wailing chant of the hereditary troubadour with the five stringed lyre. With Kingata Mata carrying a brand of the newly lighted sacred fire, was Kawa Kendi led in procession through the deserted village to his ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... either sedately idle or quietly active, even as it is with all of us during the days of weariness and restlessness after some long journey. To such a society the strongly realistic Carolingian epic had ceased to appeal: the tales of the Welsh and Breton bards, repeated by trouvere and jongleur, troubadour and minnesinger, came as a revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid, imaginative society of the later Crusades recognized in this fairyland epic of a long refined, long idle, nay, effete ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... succeeding Mercury, carries a higher type, an emotional life, though of course I am not influenced by her accidental name, in suggesting it. Here in Venus, a period perchance resembling a mixture of the pagan Grecian life and the troubadour life of Provence may prevail and again to it have flown the spirits which in our planet only touch that development, which from Venus flow to us, those adapted for the religious or intellectual phase we present. This Venus life might be called ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... PROPOSING.—In Peru they have a romantic way of popping the question. The suitor appears on the appointed evening, with a gaily dressed troubadour, under the balcony of his beloved. The singer steps before her flower-bedecked window, and sings her beauties in the name of her lover. He compares her size to that of a pear-tree, her lips to two blushing rose-buds, ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... was a social favourite; a poet and a real poet, and a troubadour, as well as a member of Parliament; travelled, sweet-tempered, and good-hearted; amusing and clever. With catholic sympathies and an eclectic turn of mind, Mr. Vavasour saw something good in everybody ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... will outblossom the rest, one rose in a bower. I speak after my fancies, for I am a Troubadour, you know, and won the violet at Toulouse; but my voice is harsh here, not in tune, a nightingale out of season; for marriage, rose or no rose, has killed the ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... song, Stephen, like a gallant troubadour from the land of the sunny south, to reward our hosts ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... only landscape, dim, undeveloped, suggestive of infinitude. Standing thus in the happiness of loving and being loved, the soft indefiniteness of the landscape and the incessant hum of the field-crickets and katydids, sounds which came out of the everywhere, soothed Charlton like the song of a troubadour. ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... present moon with flourishing grace as he named it. Juliana did not gasp, but it might have been a gasp in one less than a Whipple. But the troubadour was not to be daunted. Juliana didn't know Dave Cowan as cities ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Henry Morley. The Vision of Don Roderick The Field of Waterloo The Dance of Death Romance of Dunois The Troubadour Pibroch of Donald Dhu ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... and it is as like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him, supposing him to be no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tasty patterns; belt around the waist, with hunting-knife and pistols—revolvers. A light rifle in one hand, and in the other a bridle-rein, which guided a steed of coal blackness; one that would have been celebrated in song by a troubadour of the olden time. A deep Spanish saddle of stamped leather; holsters with bearskin covers in front; a scarlet blanket, folded and strapped on the croup; lazo and haversack hanging from the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... spirits of the troubadour and the spearman. Ivanhoe was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood that stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to tell, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... while he obeyed the King's command, saw through and despised the timid precaution which it implied, as an attempt to prevent the dispute betwixt Albany and himself. The tune, which was played upon a viol, was gay and sprightly in the commencement, with a touch of the wildness of the troubadour music. But, as it proceeded, the faltering tones of the instrument, and of the female voice which accompanied it, became plaintive and interrupted, as if choked by the painful feelings ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... in the next stage, were transformed into prose novels. Two circumstances contributed to this change,—a change which could not have been anticipated; for the Trouvere fabliaux and romans promised only epics, and the Troubadour chansons and tensons promised only lyrics and dramas. But the mind was now obliged to traverse the unbeaten paths of the Christian universe; it was overwhelmed by the extent of its range, the richness and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... (?); the Old Man of the Mountain and his Assassins; the Wars of Charlemagne; Clovis and Pepin of France; the Fall of Lucifer; Gui de Nanteuil; Oliver of Verdun; the Flight of Daedalus, and how Icarus was drowned through his vanity. The songs of Marcabrun, the troubadour, find a place in the list ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Court have come Two men—unknown their names or native home, Their rank or race; but one plays well the lute, The other is a troubadour; both suit The taste of Mahaud, when on summer eve, 'Neath opened windows, they obtain her leave To sing upon the terrace, and relate The charming tales that do with music mate. In August the Moravians have their fete, But ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... said that Christmas miracles were often wrought, and she herself knew that this was true. Had not the Fool secured his voice, so that he who had been but lightly held became the village troubadour, and slept warm and full ...
— The Truce of God • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... taking into account his temperament, for that colored every hour of his life, and every act of his career. The things that he knew seized his imagination. Even when a middle-aged man he sang, like a troubadour, of the fertility of the soil; he was stirred by the virtue and energy of what he saw and touched; his heart leaped at the thought of the power of water ready to be unlocked for man's use—most happy in that the thing that was his ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Lawn. He wanted pounds for very trivial purposes; but he wanted them desperately. A lover without pounds is the most helpless and contemptible of mankind; he is a knight-errant without his armour, a troubadour without his lute. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... never healed. These were the evil counsellors. Mahomet was there; there too was Ali. But ghastliest of sights was that of a headless trunk walking through the grim plain, holding its severed head by the hair like a lantern, and exclaiming "O me!" This was the notorious Bertrand de Born, the Troubadour, who had caused dissension between Henry II. of England and his son. Among this throng Dante recognized his kinsman Geri del Bello, who gave him a disdainful look because he had not yet avenged his ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... the illusory greatness of this world well lost so that he might win the bliss of Paradise. Similarly did I take delight in the Life, written by Tommaso da Celano, of that blessed son of Pietro Bernardone, the merchant of Assisi, that Francis who became the Troubadour of the Lord and sang so sweetly the praises of His Creation. My heart would swell within me and I would weep hot and very bitter tears over the narrative of the early and sinful part of his life, as we may weep to see a beloved ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... different fashion. But, for that matter, a hundred poetic pastimes of leisure have fled before the relentless Hurry Demon who governs this prosaic nineteenth century. The Wandering Minstrel is gone, and the Troubadour, and the Court of Love, and the King's Fool, and the Round Table, and with them ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the wilderness: "You shall not hear a simple song, but you shall remember that music is the voice of love," whispered the letter against my heart. What a brave thing is life when we have love and the hope of spring latent within us! I admit, as I listened to the little red troubadour of the pine, that, had you been as near as the dreams and fancies that wrapped me about, this fight in me for freedom would have been at an end. Do not trust these feeble moods of mine, however; not one of them would last half the length of time you ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... troubadour of the twelfth century, meets the undiscerning critic more than half-way. Let none judge, he writes, till he be capable of separating the grain from the chaff; 'for the fool makes haste to condemn, and the ignorant only pretends to know all things, and ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... John Leech, Charles Keene, Tenniel, Sambourne, Furniss, Caldecott, etc.; not to mention, also, endless little sketches in silver point of a most impossibly colossal, blackavised, shaggy-coated St. Bernard—signed with the familiar French name of some gay troubadour of the pencil, some stray half-breed like myself, and who seems to have loved his dog as ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... through the great reverence paid in the Roman Catholic Church to the Virgin Mary and other female saints, a sort of woman worship had, in the thirteenth century, spread through the south of Christendom. It was no unusual thing for a knight or a troubadour to select a certain lady, celebrate her in his songs, call on her name in the hour of danger, and wear her color in battle. The adored or the adorer might be either of them married—that made no difference; and the tender litany would ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... get it comfortably corrupted into Provencal "Busac," (whence gradually the French busard, and our buzzard,) you get from it the delightful compound "busacador," "adorer of buzzards"—meaning, generally, a sporting person; and then you have Dante's Bertrand de Born, the first troubadour of war, bearing witness to you how the love of mere hunting and falconry was already, in his day, degrading the military classes, and, so far from being a necessary adjunct of the noble disposition of lover or soldier, was, even to contempt, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... the weak, the strong, O Troubadour of love and strife, Co-Litanist of right and wrong, Sole Hymner of the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... support—tales of chivalry and of love, that all-enduring passion, where maidens and their lovers sighed for twice seven years, and all too brief a trial of their truth and constancy! As she listened, her soul seemed to hang on the minstrel's tongue; that erratic troubadour, Gaffer Gee, being a welcome and frequent ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... devoted to art, and her pretty salon is one of the most artistic interieurs in Paris, whilst the dining-room, fitted up with old Provencal furniture, looks as though it had been lifted bodily out of some fastness in troubadour land. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the least effeminate, Mr. Wyse this morning looked rather like a modern Troubadour. He had a velveteen coat on, a soft, fluffy, mushy tie which looked as if made of Shirley poppies, very neat knickerbockers, brown stockings with blobs, like the fruit of plane trees, dependent from elaborate "tops," and shoes with a cascade of leather frilling covering the laces. He might ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... slope; indeed, the fugitive seemed inspired with the strength of a wild ape. He cleared at a bound the rampart of flowers, over which Barbara had once leaned to look at her future lover, and tumbled with blinding speed down the steep path up which that troubadour had climbed. Racing with the rushing wind they all streamed across the garden after him, down the path, and finally on to the seashore by the fisher's cot, and the pierced crags and caverns the American had admired when he first landed. The runaway did not, however, make for the house ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... had mentioned something about having a special attraction: a "Mr. Fayliss", who, she insisted, was a troubadour. I didn't comment, not wanting to spend a day with Jocelyn on the ...
— The Troubadour • Robert Augustine Ward Lowndes
... in respect to him among the neighboring countries, and the conduct of the emperor, in seizing and imprisoning him, was very generally condemned. How the intelligence first reached England is not precisely known. One story is, that a celebrated Troubadour, named Blondel, who had known Richard in Palestine, was traveling through Germany, and in his journey he passed along the road in front of the castle where Richard was confined. As he went he was singing one of his songs. Richard knew the song, and so, when the Troubadour ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... But as the Troubadour nestles more warmly into the rhythm of his verse, the birds are all forgotten, and the beautiful spring, and there is a sturdy clang of battle, that would not discredit our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... his ears cocked up politely, his eyes full of tears—he wept like a cow this poor Nepomucene—they called him Nepomucene—and when Mimi looked at him he would utter little cries of the heart like a strangulated troubadour. Ah, it was hopeless this passion; but for one long year he never wavered. The Quartier respected him. Of him it was said: "Love is given to us as a measure to gauge our power of suffering." Suddenly ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... it remains, in forgotten places, For I saw a blinded boy strumming a guitar, Playing with his face a-smile, with the arts and graces Of a troubadour of old. He had ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... Horatius Flaccus, had failed to imbue me with a perception of that classic beauty felt, or pretended to be felt, by the spectacled savant. My mind was not formed to live on the ideal, or dream over the past. I delight rather in the real, the positive, and the present. Don Quixotes may play the troubadour among ruined castles, and mincing misses cover the ground of the guide-books. For my part I have no belief in the romance of old-world life. In the modern Tell I behold a hireling, ready to barter his brawny limbs to the use of whatever tyrant; and the picturesque Mazzaroni, upon closer ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid |
