"Tuneless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Infant fair, Fondling of a happy pair, Every morn and every night Their solicitous delight, Sleeping, waking, still at ease, Pleasing, without skill to please Little gossip, blithe and hale, Tattling many a broken tale, Singing many a tuneless song. Lavish of a heedless tongue; Simple maiden, void of art, Babbling out the very heart, Yet abandon'd to thy will, Yet imagining no ill, Yet too innocent to blush, Like the linnet in the bush To the mother-linnet's note ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... unearthly consideration. But his thoughts were sad, for he knew that he was to leave her, and he knew also that he must tell her so. It was no easy matter, and his walk slackened, till, at the corner of the great thoroughfare, he stood still, looking at a poor woman who ground a tuneless hand-organ. The instrument of tympanum torture was on wheels, and to the back of it was attached a cradle. In the cradle was a dirty little baby, licking its fist and listening with conscientious attention to the perpetual trangle-tringle-jangle of the ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... mistress to come out of the nursery where her voice could be heard talking imperiously to her baby's ayah. He had already waited some minutes, and he would probably have waited much longer, for his patience was inexhaustible, had it not been for that sudden irresponsible and wholly tuneless burst of song. But the second line was scarcely ended before she came hurriedly forth, nearly running into his stately ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... fourth, was a lovely chubby baby of eight months, so full of sunshine and content and blessed good health, that although her two first teeth were just grumbling through, she would sit in her high chair by the window or roll and wriggle about on the floor, singing tuneless songs and telling herself wordless stories, an hour at a time, without making any demands on anybody, so that grandma and the aunties declared that half the time they would not know there was a baby in ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... 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)
... aught we could see. Not a light showed anywhere; and to make things worse the moon had abandoned us. For one good hour we swept through chaos to the tuneless lamentations of Sheepshanks, who declared that his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... something—but there was nothing there. And out on the side porch Mynie would be sitting, her head thrown back against the wooden column of the porch, her hands clasped about her knees, smiling, smiling, always smiling. Sometimes she would hum a sort of low tuneless chant—it sounded like a pagan ritual of some sort, all repetitions, rising and falling in a monotonous, haunting drone. And once, as I stood watching her curiously, the word for that noise flashed suddenly into my mind—incantation. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... soapy hand. The heat and bustle of the little kitchen seemed to work some miraculous change in her. Her eyes brightened. Her lips smiled. Once, Emma McChesney and Ethel Morrissey exchanged covert looks when they heard her crooning one of those tuneless chants that women hum when they wring out ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... little waves rippled up over the sand, the birds were singing, and the dew-drops hung on the yellow gorse; but that joy in her own being which lent a charm to these was wanting, and the songs seemed tuneless, the scent oppressive, the sea all sameness, the land a waste, and the sun itself a glaring garish baldness of light, that accentuated her own disconsolation, the length of a life that is not worth living, and the size of a world which ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... military comes. It's a famous tune to walk to, And I wonder where they're off to. Step-step-stepping to the beating of the drums. But the rhythm changes as though a mist Were curling and twisting Over the landscape. For a moment a rhythmless, tuneless fog Encompasses her. Then her senses jog To the breath of a stately minuet. Herr Altgelt's violin is set In tune to the slow, sweeping bows, and retreats and advances, To curtsies brushing the waxen floor as the Court ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... for a minute or two as she 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 ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... most part and sipped Mokha from little cups. A girl was performing a wriggling dance upon the square carpet occupying the centre of the floor, accompanied by a Nubian boy who twanged upon a guitar, and by most of the assembled company, who clapped their hands to the music or droned a low, tuneless dirge. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the adverse fates Gave thy lyre to Mr. Yates[2], I have melted at thy strain When Bunn reign'd o'er Drury-lane; For the music of thy strings Haunts the ear when Romer sings. But to me that voice is mute! Tuneless kettle-drum and flute I but hear one liquid lyre— Kettle bubbling on the fire, Whizzing, fizzing, steaming out Music from its curved spot, Wak'ning visions by its song Of thy nut-brown streams, Souchong; Lumps of crystal saccharine— Liquid pearl distill'd from kine; Nymphs whose gentle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... song of bird and bee, The chorus of the breezes, streams, and groves, All the grand music to which Nature moves, Are wasted melody To her; the world of sound a tuneless void; While even Silence hath ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... up a song, which, being deficient in taste, while its execution was defective as well as tuneless, did not seem to produce much effect on Quintal. He bore it with equanimity, until McCoy came to a note so far beyond his powers that he broke ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... tuneless humming began again. "Yes, fond of horses," he said vaguely, his eyes quick ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... linger long, Far from his listening throng,— Nor lute nor lyre his trembling hand shall bring; Here no frail Muse shall imp her crippled wing, No faltering minstrel strain his throat to sing! These hallowed echoes who shall dare to claim Whose tuneless voice would shame, Whose jangling chords with jarring notes would wrong The nymphs that heard ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this the avant-courier of the Hudson's Bay, delayed, like ourselves, by the storm? I had hardly spelled out my own suspicion, when to the measured beatings of the tom-tom, gradually becoming faster, and with a low, weird, tuneless chant, like the voices of the forest, the Indians began to tread a mazy, winding pace, which my slow eyes could not follow, but which in a strange way brought up memories of snaky convolutions about the naked body of some Egyptian serpent-charmer. The drums beat faster. The suppressed ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... 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 ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... beyond the glass partitions of her little private office left her unaffected. It was incessant. She would have missed it had it not been there. She would have lost that sense of rush which the tuneless chorus of modern commercialism inspired. And, to a woman of her temperament, that would have been ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... in a tuneless voice that hopped gayly up and down. He had invented words and music years ago as a lullaby and the ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... DAY!—Nature performs Its obsequies with darkness, wind, and rain; But Man is jocund.—Hark! th' exultant strain From towers and steeples drowns the wintry storms! No village spire but to the cots and farms, Right merrily, its scant and tuneless peal Rings round!—Ah! joy ungrateful!—mirth insane! Wherefore the senseless triumph, ye, who feel This annual portion of brief Life the while Depart for ever?—Brought it no dear hours Of health and night-rest?—none that saw the smile On lips belov'd?—O! ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... sentinels the fitful song Begun and died upon the gentle wind.[168] Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach 20 Appeared to skirt the horizon, yet they stood Within a bowshot. Where the Caesar's dwelt, And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst A grove which springs through levelled battlements, And twines its roots with the imperial hearths, Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth; But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands, A noble wreck in ruinous perfection, While Caesar's chambers, and the Augustan ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... are they? and where art thou My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more. And must thy lyre, so long divine, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... and Sunday. They have all been to church. They have struggled manfully through their prayers. They have chanted a depressing psalm or two to the most tuneless of ancient ditties. They have even sat out an incomprehensible sermon with polite gravity and ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... And where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now,— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... under the pilotage of Ma, and Ma said, 'Georgiana, Mr Grompus,' and the Ogre clutched his victim and bore her off to his castle in the top couple. Then the discreet automaton who had surveyed his ground, played a blossomless tuneless 'set,' and sixteen disciples of Podsnappery went through the figures of - 1, Getting up at eight and shaving close at a quarter past - 2, Breakfasting at nine - 3, Going to the City at ten - 4, Coming home at half-past five - 5, Dining at ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... which, much clothed, and indeed much muffled, lay on the bench beside him. For there were benches, and a desk, and even a blackboard and primers down in the deep wild gulch, where the music of living waters, and the thunderous roll of the Pacific, accompanied the children's tuneless voices as they sang an Hawaiian hymn. I shall remember nothing of the scholars but rows of gleaming white teeth, and splendid brown eyes. I thought both teacher and children very apathetic. There ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird |
