"Trilling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... birds are trilling, tra-la, tra-la, Their glad songs are filling, tra-la, tra-la, The wood and dale, the meadow and vale, The Springtime ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... agree that it is all damned nonsense. There is something very melancholy and very ludicrous in all this, and though that great bull calf the public does not care about such things, and is content to roar when he is bid, there are those on the alert who will turn such trilling and folly to account, and convert what is half ridiculous into something all serious. Winchelsea and Newcastle after all did not vote the other night; they said they wanted no evidence, that they would have no such Bill, and would not meddle with the discussion at all except to oppose it point-blank. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... and chants Judah's desert songs according to the old traditions, ranging from the simple monotone to the exuberance of Old Testament cadences. My wife, who has not the slightest suspicion that I am a Jew, is not a little astonished by this peculiar musical wail, this trilling and cadencing. When Weill sang for the first time, Minka, the poodle, crawled into hiding under the sofa, and Cocotte, the polly, made an attempt to throttle himself between the bars of his cage. 'M. Weill, M. Weill!' Mathilde cried terror-stricken, 'pray do not carry the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the plain, the yellow moon soared up and touched the river and the meadows with mystic light; while far off, in the rose-thickets of the gardens, the first notes of a single nightingale floated upon the scented breeze, swelling and trilling, quivering and falling again, in a glory of angelic song. The faint air fanned her cheek, the odours of the box and the myrtle and the roses intoxicated her senses, and as the splendid shield of the rising moon cast its ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... this answer; and as she thought she had done enough in pointing out to him the path which would conduct him to success, if he had deserved it, she did not think it worth while to enter into any farther explanation; since he refused to cede, for her salve, so trilling an objection: from this instant she resolved to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... gently to herself two or three times, as if enjoying her own native trilling of the r's. "It's a pretty name. It sounds like a song. Don Carroll, ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... reading all my letters. Now listen: I'm coming back to Wanhope before tonight and so is Mrs. Clowes. I'm not going to run away with her, as Major Clowes gave you all to understand. What you think is of no importance whatever to any one, what you say is equally trilling, but I don't choose to have my servant say it: so, if you continue to drop these interesting hints, I shall not only boot you out, but" —he turned "I shall give you such a thrashing in the rear, Gaston—in this direction, ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... where the great blue of the sky stooped to earth. There was the laughter of soldiers, and from an adjoining meadow came the neighing of a restive horse. The sunlight deepened, and from a hundred branches birds were trilling welcome to the ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... most appealing in the trilling of their notes: It is innocence that's pouring from their little baby throats; And I gaze at them enraptured, for my joy's a real thing Every evening when the kiddies and their mother start ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... the woods, the birds are trilling among the trees. It is their merry morning lay, but it gives him no gladness. There is still ringing in his ears that harsh monosyllable, "no." The wild-wood songsters appear to echo it, as if mockingly; ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... everywhere delight in deep linns and brawling rapids, where their interesting motions never fail to attract the angler and bird-student;" and this of their voices: "In early spring, the male birds may be seen perched on some moss-covered stone, trilling their fine clear notes;" and again: "I have stood within a few yards of one at the close of a blustering winter's day, and enjoyed its charming music unobserved. The performer was sitting on a ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... The words sounded like a rally call. With that the girl fled down the hall, trilling the merriest sort ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Jacquelin, Mariette, and Josette received orders to appear in full dress. The garden was raked. The old maid regretted that she couldn't come to an understanding with the nightingales nesting in the trees, in order to obtain their finest trilling. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... complete suitability to the tastes and demands of the reading public in the present century; for they invariably replied to Ernest's inquiries that they would be happy to undertake its production for the trilling sum of one hundred guineas, payable in advance; but that they did not see their way to accepting the risk and responsibility of floating so speculative a volume on their own account. In the end, the unhappy manuscript, after many refusals, was converted into cock-boats, hats, and ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... the Hall, gazing with wistful eyes at the still ice-covered lake, and occasionally consulting an open letter in his hand with frowning looks of meditation. The sweet voice of Jessie Lumley came from the interior of the Hall, trilling a tuneful Highland air, which, sweeping over the lawn and lake, mingled with the discords of the plover and geese, thus producing a species of ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... tenderly and sharply and imperiously. "Here! Here! Here!" At this ringing command, every bird, as far as the river carried his voice, came to investigate and remained to admire. Over and over he rang every change he could invent. He made a gallant effort at warbling and trilling, and then, with the gladdest heart he ever had known, he burst into ringing song: "Good Cheer! Good ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of the morn, of the morn of the year, Chanting your lays in the bosky dell, Higher and fuller your round notes swell, Till the Fauns and the Dryads peer forth to hear The trilling lays of your feathery band: Ye came not, alas, from my ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... trilling laugh greeted the panic of his first words. Then the clear, sweet voice, serious again, replied, "So you swam ashore from ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... dull sleep from your pillow, Young dreamer arise, On the leaves of the willow The dew-drop still lies, And the mavis is trilling His song from the brake, And with melody ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... become Solicitors-General. The pet Orpheus of the hour, the young tragic actor who was thought to have a real Hamlet within him, the old painter who was growing rich on his reputation, and the young painter who was still strong with hope, even the little trilling poet, though he trilled never so faintly, and the somewhat wooden novelist, all had tongues of their own, and certain modes of expression, which might assist or injure the Palliser Coalition,—as the Duke's ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... a spontaneous rhapsody of song as she went, trilling and warbling in sweet, untaught cadences, unconsciously like a bird singing to its mate in the springtime. She had a wonderful voice. The young man was sorry when she was out of hearing, but glad, too, for the water was beginning to pucker his cuticle ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... and with one accord we threw ourselves upon the grass and drank in the bounteous melody. It was not different in quality so much as in quantity. Such a flood of it! Such magnificent copiousness! Such long, trilling, deferring, accelerating preludes! Such sudden, ecstatic overtures would have intoxicated the dullest ear. He was really without a compeer, a master artist. Twice afterward I was conscious of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... the creatures whose overlord he was. Pan meant the richness of the sap in the trees, the lushness of grass and of the green stems of the blue hyacinths and the golden daffodils; the throbbing of growth in the woodland and in the meadows; the trilling of birds that seek for their mates and find them; the coo of the doves on their nests of young; the arrogant virility of bulls and of stags whose lowing and belling wake the silence of the hills; the lightness of heart that ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... powerful rival some seven miles farther on—there were country lanes and by-ways, sleepy-looking farms, and picturesquely careless houses. Below them there was a great fish entrepot, with fishing-boats plying up and down, brawny fishermen trilling their musical half-chant, half-song, as they ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... accompany her on her morning's walk, she tripped lightly along, humming a farewell to the last altheas, as they nodded their shrivelled heads, in view of their departure; but their words of adieu were made brief, by a voice as of one in distress; and coming near, it proved to be the musical Vingo, trilling the wild melodies of ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... dexterity that one sometimes sees in stupid persons. His head was quite empty of all thought, and he did not whistle over his work as another man might have done. The canary made up for his silence, trilling and chittering continually, splashing about in its morning bath, keeping up an incessant noise and movement that would have been maddening to any one but McTeague, who seemed to have no nerves ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Larks are trilling; pouter-pigeons cooing; noiselessly the swallows dart to and fro; horses are neighing and munching; the dogs do not bark and stand peaceably wagging ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... even hear the question. Trilling a gay song, he had rushed off where the stir and lively spectacle of the ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... room, and trilling some blithe air, Opened my wardrobe, wondering what to wear. Momentous question! femininely human! More than all others, vexing mind of woman, Since that sad day, when in her discontent, To search for leaves, our fair first mother went. All undecided what I should put on, At length I made selection ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... down on the huge-limbed elms whose myriad leaves kept fluttering ceaselessly. In the dense green covert, formed by the multitude of interlacing branches, several wee brown songsters had built their nests, and they kept flitting to and fro and trilling joyously as the light breeze stirred ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... not a difficult selection, merely a bit from a current light opera, with a closing passage that ranged a trifle too high for the ordinary untrained voice to take with ease. Stella sang it effortlessly, the last high, trilling notes pouring out as sweet and clear as the carol of a lark. Benton struck the closing chord and looked up at her. Fyfe leaned forward in his chair. Jack Junior, among his pillows on the floor, waved ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... upon a lark in a cage, and heard him trilling out his music as he sprang upwards to the roof of his prison, but we felt sickened with the sight and sound, as contrasting, in our thought, the free minstrel of the morning, bounding as it were into the blue caverns of the heavens, with the bird to whom ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... Of the tree-cricket, Frailest of creatures, Green as the young grass, 25 Mark with his trilling Resonant bell-note, How ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... seek her in the ray— Let us track her by the rill— Wending ascending The slopings of the hill. Where the robin from the copses Breathes a love-note, and then drops his Trilling, till, willing, His mate responds his lay— We shall find ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... just heard that her father's vessel would be at the dock in a trifle over an hour and her heart was light and happy. Somehow all her misgivings seemed to flee away, now that he was coming. She flew from one room to another like a wild bird, trilling snatches of song, and looking ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... arrived were taking refreshments. Others, preparing for departure, buckled on their knapsacks, wrote their names in the album, and received Brocken bouquets from the housemaids. There was pinching of cheeks, singing, springing, trilling; questions asked, answers given, fragments of conversation such as—fine weather—footpath—prosit—luck be with you!—Adieu! Some of those leaving were also partly drunk, and these derived a twofold pleasure ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... branch at dawn Is trilling forth a joyful note, Or hopping o'er the frozen lawn, In ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... close of the song the dancers who are to represent the Daisies give a trilling shout and appear from the rear of the open space, skipping; their leader holds the end of a long green rope, which is caught hold of by each dancer ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... water; they quivered and were broken up on the surface—and from that alone it could be seen that the river was flowing rapidly. It was still. Drowsy curlews cried plaintively on the further bank, and in one of the bushes on the nearest side a nightingale was trilling loudly, taking no notice of the crowd of officers. The officers stood round the bush, touched it, but the nightingale ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Birds," the songsters of the woods are frequently heard trilling their lays. As they were only befeathered men, this must have been a somewhat comic performance. The king of birds, transformed from Tereus, King of Thrace, twitters in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... high when they started on their walk, and her face looked flushed and warm. But through the park-like district to the wood she raced with Don, and made him leap over her sunshade and roll over and over on the bright green grass. The larks were trilling overhead, everything was humming ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... magnificent voice is only in keeping with the magnificent proportions of the singer. A voice which has no grate, no strain, which flows without effort,—which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but alights on it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and trilling,—a voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich, sombre depths of soft, heavy chest-tone,—can come only with a physical nature at once strong, wide, and fine,—from a nature such as the sun of Italy ripens, as he does her golden grapes, filling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... arrived at Windsor, and at the coming home from his shop of Enoch, Ben always said: "Messes Enos-Harries has been singing the piano. Like the trilling of God's feathered choir is ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... bank, where straightway "George of Denmark" began chewing of such a salad as grew there. And now the Captain slid off stealthily; and smiling comically, and hitching up his great jack-boots, and moving forward with a jerking tiptoe step, he, just as she was trilling the last o-o-o of the last no in the above poem of Tom D'Urfey, came up to her, and touching her lightly ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... finny tribes from their element, Anne in weaving in wreaths the gorgeous tinted wild flowers, sweet scented violets, and glossy green of the running pine. The children heeded not time, nor the distance they were placing between themselves and the camp, but wandered on. The wild birds were trilling the most delicious music, which burst on the ear enchantingly, and was the only sound that broke the solemn stillness that reigned around, save the soft gurgling of the water, as it glided over its pebbly bed. The forest ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... murderers, by catching some fish which we broiled to satisfy our carnivorous appetites. It was delightful to float in that tiny boat, gazing through the green canopy of leaves at the great white clouds sailing over like ships upon the sea, listening to the ecstatic trilling of the orioles, and the flute-like melodies of the ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... Misses Fairland were obliged to relinquish the opportunity of charming by their united voices; the only music in which they were practised, and which they thought worth listening to, being of the flourishing, trilling, running, quavering, shrieking kind; and this they could not attempt without their "notes" and the "instrument." Mr. Harrington then proposed to Agnes to sing some sweet old-fashioned airs; and laying down his oars, he took a seat beside her, and joined his rich tenor to the strangely-melodious ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... gave out little arpeggios, then chromatic scales. A milky vapor hung tremulous over the surface of the waters. The stars quivered. The cocks called to each other from either bank, and sometimes in the depths of the sky they heard the trilling of larks ascending from earth, deceived by the light of the moon. They were silent. Gottfried hummed a tune. Jeremy told strange tales of the lives of the beasts—tales that gained in mystery from the curt and enigmatic manner of their telling. The moon hid herself behind ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... wheatfield on his right hand, from which the mist was curling away, and in the glory of the dawn overhead the larks were trilling. A patch of scarlet poppies was almost startling in its vividness, and beyond the poppies a long ribbon of yellow mustard was ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... army, I started to write literary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... calling for his more earnest attention. Bass are leaping in every direction; far up on the hillside sounds the bell of a cow; nearer still calls "Bob White;" robins are piping; the wrens are chirping; a hungry crow dismally cawks, and all these sounds mingle with the music of the millions of trilling nameless tiny insects concealed in the deep grasses below me and ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... everybody sees him on his autumn and winter travels, and knows his Sparrow-like call-note, while his summer home is so far north or so high on mountains that few visit him in the tangled woodlands where he sings a pretty trilling song to his mate. ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... many miracles. Passing on, we crossed a wild torrent by an arch called the "Devil's Bridge." The lofty, elevated plains were covered with scanty patches of grain and potatoes, and the boys tended their goats on the grassy slopes, sometimes trilling or yodling an Alpine melody. An hour's walk brought us to Einsiedeln, a small town, whose only attraction is the Abbey—after Loretto, in Italy, the most celebrated resort for ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... and field, these birds of sea and shore, and their interesting habits, you will wish to protect them from stone or gun, and their nests from the egg collector. You will listen to the lark and linnet, and be glad that the happy songster trilling such sweet notes is free to fly where he wishes, and is not pining in a cage. And you, little girl, will not encourage the destruction of these pretty creatures by wearing a sea-gull or part of some ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... the incense of the perfumes "which are softly exhaled from the shapely flowers, from their censers of gold," in the heart of all creatures, "chaffinch and siskin, skylark and goldfinch, tiny choristers" piping and trilling, "elaborating their motets" to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis. He fraternizes with all, with his dogs and his cats, his tame tortoise, and even the "slimy and swollen frog"; the "Philosopher" of the Harmas, whose murky eyes he loves to interrogate ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... Robert's side. It was Tayoga trilling forth a melody, wonderfully clear and penetrating, a melody that carried far up ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... called the tresillo, from its shape, it being an old form of the figure three, reversed, thus, . It is the only true guttural in the language, being pronounced forcibly from the throat, with a trilling sound (castaneteando). ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... were not yet in leaf—only some tiny green shoots. "We shall not have any lilac this year till the middle of May. Was there ever such a season?" Larks were everywhere, ascending in short flights, trilling as they ascended; and Evelyn listened to their singing, thinking it most curious—quaint cadenzas in which a note was wanting, like in the bagpipes, a sort of aerial bagpipes. But on a bare bough a thrush sang, breaking out ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... feeding-place in the grass, soars up, bubbling forth his melody in globules of silvery sound, and settles upon some tall tree, and waves his wings, and sinks to the swaying twigs. I hear too a quail piping from the meadow fence, and another trilling his answering whistle from the hills. Nearer by, a tyrant king-bird is poised on the topmost branch of a veteran pear-tree, and now and then dashes down, assassin-like, upon some homebound, honey-laden bee, and then with a smack of his ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... pieman in the road behind me trilling, "'Tira, lira!' stop him, stop him! 'Tra! la! la!' the soup's ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... words well out of his mouth when from the recesses of the hut a rollicking French voice was heard, trilling out merrily: ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... iron-horns, ripping, racking, Listen to the quack-horns, slack and clacking. Way down the road, trilling like a toad, Here comes the dice-horn, here comes the vice-horn, Here comes the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... looked at one another in amaze. Were their ears deceiving them? But no; the trilling notes came nearer. Involuntarily they pressed forward a few paces, and then came to a dead stop. What was it ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... beginning himself by leading out the lady who had played the guitar in the arbor. Thereupon he began to dance with extraordinary artistic skill, and describe all sorts of letters on the grass with the points of his toes, really trilling with his feet, and now and then jumping pretty high in the air. But he soon had enough of it, for he was rather corpulent. His jumps grew fewer and clumsier, until at last he withdrew from the circle, puffing violently, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... to lament that our mountain barometers were broken at an early stage of the expedition; the height however of some principal points had been previously obtained, and is marked on the chart; these in two instances were verified by geometrical measurement, and the difference was found to be too trilling to be noticed. The conveyance of such delicate instruments is always attended with great risk, and in our case peculiarly so, our means being only those of horseback. I am afraid that a method of constructing ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... slightly indisposed; she had not gone down to the priory, but sat inhaling the rich fragrance of the night as the gentle breeze wafted it from a thousand flowers. Star after star peeped out; one sweet-voiced nightingale began her song, trilling through the air; another enviously took up the strain. Hilda thought the earth had never seemed so much like heaven, and she imagined the tuneful birds sang their vesper song in union with the monks, whose solemn and ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Amos finished the delivery of this sentiment, and held the open hymn-book in his hand, he reached over to administer a blow on the ears of a child who was peeping through the window at a little bird trilling joyously ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... wrangling voices blent With liquid laughter, and with rippling calls Of piping lips and trilling echoes sent To ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... first, but growing momentarily louder, there came the clear trilling of a mysterious bell. It floated out from the dark by-ways whence they had themselves just emerged, and something eerie and uncanny in its clamor brought a thrill of terror to the young knight's nerves for the ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... "lullilooing" the trilling cry, which is made by raising the voice to its highest pitch and breaking it by a rapid succession of touches on the palate with the tongue-tip, others "Ziraleet" and Zagaleet, and one traveller tells us that it began at the marriage-festival of Isaac and Rebecca ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... green o'erspread, with groves o'erhung! Where musing now, now trilling her sweet lay, Most like what bards of heavenly spirits say, Sits she by fame through every region sung: My heart, which wisely unto her has clung— More wise, if there, in absence blest, it stay! ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... above the strange, discordant music. Then the flashing, changing, whirling colors of the dancers struck Lane as oriental, erotic, bizarre—gorgeous golds and greens and reds striped by the conventional black. Suddenly the blare ceased, and the shrill, trilling laughter had dominance. The rapid circling of forms came to a sudden stop, and the dancers streamed in all directions over ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the ruffled temper of his companion. But an entirely different effect resulted. As soon as she was amid the leaves and grass she began to sing at the top of her lungs snatches from operas which had stuck in her frivolous mind, warbling and trilling, passing from "Robert le Diable" to the "Muette," lingering especially on a sentimental love-song, whose last verses she sang in a voice as piercing as ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... was a bright, trilling laugh, and filled the large, low room with its sudden music. It almost seemed like a light ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... as hung with diamonds of the purest water. Larks were trilling, pouring forth in song the ecstasy that swelled their hearts. The sky was blue as ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... development of animism, under Chinese and Korean influence, the man of Old Japan found himself truly in a world of spirits and demons. They spoke to him in the sound of tides and of cataracts in the moaning of wind and the whispers of leafage, in the crying of birds, and the trilling of insects, in all the voices of nature. For him all visible motion—whether of waves or grasses or shifting mist or drifting cloud—was ghostly; and the never moving rocks—nay, the very stones by the wayside—were informed with ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... been heard upon Cayuga lake. Ben Letts said it put him in mind of listening to the wild cry of a lost soul, while Myra Longman could hear only the songs of angels in the exquisite tones which fell, pure and sweet, from the red lips. Tess knew nothing of breath power, nothing of trained trilling tones, but nature had given her both and like the birds of the ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... his blood. Heavens! what melodious strains! how beat our hearts Big with tumultuous joy! the loaded gales Breathe harmony; and as the tempest drives From wood to wood, through every dark recess The forest thunders, and the mountains shake. The chorus swells; less various, and less sweet The trilling notes, when in those very groves, 70 The feathered choristers salute the spring, And every bush in concert joins; or when The master's hand, in modulated air, Bids the loud organ breathe, and all the powers Of music in one instrument combine, An universal ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... eddied over the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... country in them to endure the passages of political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come. Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short, the vast extent of common ground between The ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... pitched the little leather-covered book aside, walked to the side-table, took his handsome flute from its case, set up a piece of music on a stand, and began to run through a few preliminary flourishes that were peculiarly bird-like in their trilling, when there was a tap at the door and Jerry ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... moss-hidden Mayflowers will blossom ere long, And gay robin redbreast be trilling a song: But, always before them, I'm sure to be here: 'Tis first Pussy Willow says, ...
— The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 100, April, 1875 • Various
... trees were trilling audibly. Then came a sudden gust that swept the fronds of the taller ferns into their faces, and laid the thin, lithe whips of alder over their horses' flanks sharply. It was followed by the distant ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... of modern times the case is the same. Genius, which is plenitude of power, adapts itself to all facts. It will receive the outline of a story and weave upon it a wonderful web, which the story shall interpret. But an opera of Mozart's reveals to the voiceless player its whole magnificence. Trilling Prima Donnas and silvery Italian are the addenda and vocabulary. They are the "this is the man, this the beast" written under the picture. The severe beauty of the art is immediately injured by any ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... sitting there, very busy plucking the feathers off a bird and dropping them on a sheet placed for that purpose on the floor. She is trilling to herself in the lightness of her heart. We may remember that Tweeny, alone among the women, had dressed wisely for an island when they fled the yacht, and her going-away gown still adheres to her, though ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... her voice, for she awoke, like a bird, with song. He heard her trilling, in and out through open windows, all down the long wing that was hers. And he heard her singing in the patio garden, where, also, she desisted long enough to quarrel with her Airedale and scold the collie pup unholily attracted by the red-orange, divers-finned, and many-tailed Japanese ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... are visible far stretches of clover field and meadow. Between them meanders a brook whose course is marked by alders and willows. A single mountain peak towers on the horizon. All about, larks have begun their song, and their uninterrupted trilling floats, now from near, now from ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... mortal weeks having thus been wasted in diplomatic trilling—Barneveld was admitted to his Majesty's dressing-room. The Advocate at the king's request came without his colleague, and was attended only by his son. No other persons were present in the chamber ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... maidenhair sprays of bamboo, and a wandering pattern of pink foot-paths. Slowly along one of these, a bright-gowned merchant rode a white pony, his bells tinkling in the stillness of sea and land. Everywhere, like other bells more tiny and shrill, sounded the trilling ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... year Sounds yet in my ear,— Birdlike at the window sitting, Tapping, trilling there, Singing, in would bear Joy the warmth of ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... remain several hours; otherwise the carriage would not have driven away. In confirmation of this theory, he heard voices, cheery voices, in laughing talk, and one of them made him prick up his ears. He heard the piano crisply trilling a response to light, skilful fingers. He longed for a peep within, and regretted that he had dropped Mr. Hayne from the list of his acquaintance. He recognized Hayne's shadow, presently, thrown by the lamp upon the curtained window, and wished that his visitor would come similarly into view. He ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... Then she brought them straight to the bed, and stooping down gave me the only kiss with which she has honored me—her show kiss, I call it—saying, 'My darling' (how soft she said it, too, with a little trilling cadence upon the sweet old word!)—'My darling, you are not to speak, or even look, save this once: now I must cover up my dearie's eyes;' and she laid her cool hand over my eyes and held it there while they stayed. 'These are some kind ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... finally arranged. Tom Bingham was to build them a house in the neighborhood favored by Roger, and was to find an architect for them—a reversal of the usual procedure which afflicted Jane with grave doubts. And on the morning of the earliest day of spring, when the piano-organs were trilling through the side streets, and the flower-men were offering hurried shoppers their earliest verbenas and fuchsias from the tail ends of their carts, Jane walked down to the store to look at the signatures on the contracts for ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... Bob-o-link, Whose trilling song above the meadow floats; The eager air speeds tremulous to drink The bubbling sweetness of the liquid notes, Whose silver cadences arise and sink, Shift, glide and shiver, like the trembling motes In the full gush of sunset. One might think Some potent charm had turned the auroral flame Of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... into laughter again, quivering from head to foot, repeating and singing her age. She laughed at her sixteen years with a fine-drawn laugh that flowed on with rhythmic trilling like a streamlet. Serge scanned her closely, amazed at the laughing life that transfigured her face. He scarcely knew her now with those dimples in her cheeks, those bow-shaped lips between which peeped the rosy moistness of her mouth, and those eyes ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... glad summer is here! O hark! 'tis to you I am singing: The sun is all gold in a heaven of blue, The birds in the forest are trilling for you, The flies 'mid the grasses are winging; The little brook babbles—its secret is sweet. The loveliest flowers would circle your feet,— And you to your work ever clinging!... Come forth! Nature loves you. ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... sick earth revives, and in the sun The wet soil gives a fragrance to the air; The days of many colours are begun, And early promises of meadows fair With starry petals, and of trees now bare Soon to be lyric with the trilling choir, And lovely with new leaves, spread everywhere A subtle flame that sets the heart on fire With thoughts of other springs and dreams of ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer |
