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More "Dirge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... That first-rate singer, the Argive woman's daughter, is going to sing the Adonis hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first rate from her. She is going through her airs and graces ready ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... impossible to make her execute her lessons properly. When she should have been performing that routine duty, her eolian piano at home was half the time turned into a banjo or a harp, tinkling a serenade, or into an organ, playing some ponderous old anthem or sobbing out some dirge of a broken heart. These were all well enough, in their way, but they were not studying the piano. As a result, she could produce all those effects upon the instrument, that no one else would ever have thought of attempting; the only penalty being, that what any one ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... and was of opinion that had he lived Franck would have taken rank with the great masters. As was to be expected, my son had for Welsh music a strong natural sympathy. He held that "Men of Harlech" was one of the greatest of all battle hymns, and that "Morfa Rhuddlan," the ancient Cymric dirge, had never been surpassed as a piece of funereal music. Some of the old Welsh hymn tunes he regarded as unique in their wistfulness and devout aspiration; and as for Welsh choral singing, he thought it was matchless for richness, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... moves on to the cemetery on the outskirts of the town. The padre sheltered by a white umbrella, reads the Latin prayers aloud. A small boy swings the smoking censer, and the singers undertake a melancholy dirge. The withered body, with the hands crossed on the breast, clothed all in black, is borne aloft upon a bamboo litter, mounted with a black box painted with the skull and bones, and decked with candles. Women in black veils with candles follow, mumbling prayers, the words of which they ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... hearts my heart was one: Nor when beneath the arch of stone With dirge and candle flame The cross of ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... none will hear my failing voice, But the same language with more full appeal Shall hail thee. Many are the sons of song Whom thou hast heard upon thy native plains, Worthy to sing of thee; the hour is come; Take we our seats and let the dirge begin. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... murky sky, In the hush of desperation, not to conquer but to die. Hark! the bagpipe's fitful wailing—not the pibroch loud and shrill, That, with hope of bloody banquet, lured the ravens from the hill— But a dirge both low and solemn, fit for ears of dying men, Marshall'd for their latest battle, never more to fight again. Madness—madness! Why this shrinking? Were we less inured to war When our reapers swept the harvest from the field of red Dunbar? Fetch my horse, and blow the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... "The Welsh Rarebit Warren," there to spend the early hours of the morning, listening to sentimental songs chanted amid fumes of tobacco and spirits, to hear sorry wit, and make vapid remarks. The great feature of the evening being a melodramatic dirge, supposed to be sung by a condemned felon—a triumphant lamentation and delineation of brutal character,—so eloquent and thrilling, in its monosyllabic groans of anguish, that it is a wonder the kidneys, consumed in such numbers, are ever digested. But, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... was watching their sleeping faces he suddenly heard a soft singing; somewhere at a distance a woman was singing, and it was difficult to tell where and in what direction. The song was subdued, dreary and melancholy, like a dirge, and hardly audible, and seemed to come first from the right, then from the left, then from above, and then from underground, as though an unseen spirit were hovering over the steppe and singing. Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out where the strange song came ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper'd by ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... among old Ireland's mountains I hear the breezes sing a sad dirge, low, Wild, and yet soft, with tears from many fountains And murmuring riven wailing in ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... Pageant and dirge trip up each other often enough in the course of human life! The lives especially of sovereigns, through the strong light ever beating upon their thrones, are always exposed to vicissitudes of fortune. ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... to the trunk. About his feet dry wood was then placed, and half way up his body. When this had been accomplished, the Indians formed themselves in a circle about the unhappy man, and began to chant a slow weird dirge in the native tongue. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... experience at sea by moonlight. When she felt sure the young lieutenant must be sound asleep, like the prosaic creature he was, she got up, took her cloak, woke her maid, and went on deck. Nobody was to be seen except the sailor at the helm, who was singing a sort of dirge in the Corsican dialect, to some wild and monotonous tune. In the silence of the night this strange music had its charm. Unluckily Miss Lydia did not understand perfectly what the sailor was singing. ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... noble life, and fully justifying the brief comment of Smeton, "Surely, whatever opprobrious things profane men may utter, God hath in him given us an example of the right way as well of dying as of living." It is true, as his heartless traducer takes care to remind us, no dirge was chanted over his remains, no mass of requiem was celebrated for his soul. He and his countrymen had long ceased to believe in the worth of such priestly ceremonies, or to imagine that their eternal state could be affected by them, or by aught save Christ's finished work and their own ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... says 'Weep, this is the moment,' or 'Rejoice, the hour has come,' and we chant our dirge or kindle our bonfires accordingly. Why, it means a little martyrdom to the occasional sinner who selects his own occasion for sorrow ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... of the ocean, as it breaks in sheets of foam on the rock-bound coast—the fitful cry of curlew, as it wings over them its solitary way—or the occasional low moaning of the wind, as, stealing through amidst the rocks, it seems to pour forth a mournful dirge for the shades of departed greatness:—when we look on a scene like this, we have before our gaze all that is known of these men of the olden time. Their blood-stained rites, their solemn mysteries, are forgotten; but their simple temples still stand imperishable as the God to whom they were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... manner, her every-day clothes, her usual hat. Jones, noting these details, inwardly commended them. But at once, another detail was apparent. The entrance to the room where the Bella figlia had been succeeded by a dirge, was blocked. There was a table ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... rendezvous for the mesonuktiais horais, and my Ionides would have no ear for aught beside. Yonder, in the mountain, they would carve a Doric cave temple, to receive your urn when all was done; and you would be accompanied thither by a dirge of the surviving Ionidae. The caves of the dead are empty now, however, and their place knows them not any more among the festal haunts of the living. But, by way of supplying the choric melodies sung here in old time, one of our companions mounted ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... shore Beside the knelling surge, And sea-nymphs evermore Shall sadly chant thy dirge. They come! they come, The spirits of the deep, While near thy sea-weed pillow ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... one shore alone, whose surge Came wailing to her like a dirge; The surf, the waves of every sea, ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... rhythm which Jeannette could not understand, began to speak. General Wolfe was reciting an English poem. The strain upon his soul was more than he could bear, and he relieved it by those low-uttered rhymes. Jeannette did not know one word of English. The meaning which reached her was a dirge, but a noble dirge; the death hymn of a human being who has lived up to his capacities. She felt strangely influenced, as by the neighborhood of some large angel, and at the same time the tragedy ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of the road winding down from the Wartburg; voices are heard approaching, chanting a dirge. "Peace to the soul" the words come floating, "just escaped from the clay of the saintly sufferer!" Wolfram understands but to well. "Your angel pleads for you now before the throne of God. Her prayer is heard. Heinrich, you are ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... tent-door, giving to me the sense of strength and assurance which these simple children obtain from their Moses and the Prophets. Yet external Nature does its share in their training; witness that most poetic of all their songs, which always reminds me of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey, To bless the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell a ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... lamentation, no tearing of the hair or cutting the body; it effects no somber colors to deaden the emotions; no earth or ashes for the body — all widespread mourning customs among primitive peoples. However, when a child or mature man or woman dies the women assemble and sing and wail a melancholy dirge, and they ask the departed why he went so early. But for the aged there are neither tears nor wailings — there is only grim philosophy. "You were old," they say, "and old people die. You are dead, and now we shall place you in the earth. ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... and surge, Loud or low, shall be their dirge; And each idle wave that breaks Henceforth upon any shore, Shall be dearer for their sakes, Shall be ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... the poets sing a dirge: The year must perish; all the flowers are dead; The sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail Runs in the stubble, ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... British soldiers would have sung. It had no known author and no known composer. It sort of "growed," like Topsy. If it had had a title given to it I suppose it would have been called "I want to go home," for that was its dirge-like refrain, always sung very cheerfully indeed, or with mock earnestness. Time and again I heard its chorus taken up with terrific gusto from end to end of this trench, and the whole extraordinary composition spread to other ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... the mark is Mr. Swinburne's description of the volume as "worthless." It contains twenty-one numbers, besides that lofty dirge, so unapproachably solemn, The Phoenix and the Turtle. Of these, five are undoubtedly by Shakespeare. A sixth (Crabbed age and youth), if not by Shakespeare, is one of the loveliest lyrics in the language, and I for my part could give it to ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hours, and not a soul cared for my misery. No human footstep treads this solitary wild, for 'tis commonly believed that the ghosts of my ancestors drag clanking chains through these ruins, and chant their funeral dirge at the hour of midnight. At last I heard the door creak again on its hinges; this man opened it, and brought me bread and water. He told me that I had been condemned to die of hunger, and that his life was in danger ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the table. Presently he paused. He had taken up a sheet of paper on which Senor Perkins had evidently been essaying some composition in verse. It seemed to have been of a lugubrious character. The titular line at the top of the page, "Dirge," had been crossed out for the substituted "In Memoriam." ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Dirge—a funeral chant. The dirge is named from the first word of a chant used in the "office for the dead," which begins—Dirige Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam (Direct, O Lord, My God, my way ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... from the hall in grand and solemn state. Then thousands gathered to bow the head in reverence as the plumed hearse drove down the line. There was all the pomp of military display—drooping flags, battalions with reversed arms, and bands playing dirge-like airs. Now, the wife of the President was leaving the White House, and there was scarcely a friend to tell her good-by. She passed down the public stairway, entered her carriage, and quietly drove to the depot where we took the cars. The silence ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... as the sun rose over the bay, Still floated our flag at the mainmast head Lord, how beautiful was Thy day! Every waft of the air Was a whisper of prayer, Or a dirge for the dead. ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... the papers are full of praise for those devoted sons of the motherland, the Kundu and the Chakravarti zamindars. If only, say they, the country had a few more of such staunch patriots, the mills of Manchester would have, had to sound their own dirge to ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... The cry floated over the waves — Far over the pitiless waves; It smote on the dark and it rended the clouds; The billows below them were weaving white shrouds Out of the foam of the surge, And the wind-voices chanted a dirge: Lost! Lost! Lost! Wailed wilder the ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... their heads, beneath which their straight hair hung down to their shoulders. In their hands were gilded rods, and round their necks hung golden chains, to which were attached emblems of the god they worshipped. They walked two-and-two to the number of fifty, chanting a melancholy dirge, one hand of each priest resting upon his fellow's shoulder, and as they passed, with the exception of certain Jews, all the spectators uncovered, while some of the more pious of them even fell ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... and, wearied by the festivities, soon fell asleep. He was presently awakened by the sound of music, and, looking about the apartment, saw at the opposite end, three phantom ladies, grotesquely attired, singing a mournful dirge. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... another, others stood moaning very wretchedly, sometimes looking up to the height of Heaven, calling out with shrieks of agony, as if invoking the Father of Nature; others grovelled upon the ground, beating their foreheads with their hands, while others again made their moan in a sort of dirge, in their own way, for though one could not understand the words, the sense of all was plain in the agony of those who ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... voice of the clarion-toned captain is ringing, Above the hoarse murmuring roar of the surge, And an echoing voice, seems sepulchrally flinging, Far back o'er the waves, for the vessel, a dirge. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... curse, Unknown alike to honour and remorse. Behold the leering belle, caress'd by all, Adorn each private feast and public ball, 140 Where peers attentive listen and adore, And not one matron shuns the titled whore. At Peter's obsequies[5] I sung no dirge; Nor has my satire yet supplied a scourge For the vile tribes of usurers and bites, Who sneak at Jonathan's, and swear at White's. Each low pursuit, and slighter folly, bred Within the selfish heart and hollow head, Thrives uncontroll'd, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... upon reflection he offered no objection—he divined that the Knights and their service would be not precisely a consolation, but a satisfaction to his father. So the Knights led the procession, with their band playing a dirge part of the long way to the cemetery; and then turned back, after forming in two lines, plumed hats sympathetically in hand, to let the hearse and ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... These soldiers were mostly from Maine and New York, with a few from New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Michigan. This was another solemn place for reflection. The soldiers' grave-yard on this island differs somewhat from all others. Here their funeral dirge will never cease; the requiem of the ocean's surge will ever sound as if saying, "Sleep on undisturbed until the last trump shall wake the ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... stayed about the barn, the only time that he was willingly separated from the horses, and at intervals howled a very death dirge. I was alone, and the dog's behavior inspired me with an awful foreboding of calamity, that weighed upon use more and more ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... thrilling of the surge I saw, afar, two hosts to battle urge. The widows of the victors sang a dirge, But I wept ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... enwrapped her, As she reached the sandy margin, Reached the cold and dismal sea-shore, Sat upon the rock of sorrow, Sat alone in cold and darkness, Listened only to the music Of the winds and rolling billows, Singing all the dirge of Aino. All that night the weary maiden Wept and wandered on the border Through the sand and sea-washed pebbles. As the day dawns, looking round her, She beholds three water-maidens, On a headland jutting seaward, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... life or being, saving that she moaned at regular intervals in piteous accents:—'He has forgotten and abandoned me!' as if that one simple expression comprised in itself, her acknowledgment of the uselessness of her life, and her dirge for her ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... bird's-nest soup, guy soo main, mon goo guy pan, shark's fin and lung har made of shreds of lobster, water chestnuts, rice and the succulent shoots of the young bamboo, while three musicians in a corner sang through their nose a syncopated dirge. "Wang-ang-ang-ang!" it rose and fell as Mr. Tutt, his neck encircled by a wreath of lilies, essayed to manipulate a pair of long black chop-sticks. "Wang-ang-ang-ang!" About him were golden limes, ginger in syrup, litchi nuts, ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... house-dog bounded o'er each scene Where cisterns had so lately been: Away in frantic haste he sprung, And sought to cool his burning tongue. He howled, and to his famished cry The dreary echoes gave reply; And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim, Rolled back in sad response ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... hymn, in which their attendants, and the females who had collected, in considerable numbers, from the neighboring villages, joined. Higher and higher rose the flames, the voices rising with them; until the dirge culminated in a loud wailing cry, as the flames reached the corpse, and hid it from view. Then the hymn recommenced, and continued until the ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... let me not perish. On the day of Tammuz, play for me on the flute of lapis lazuli, together with the lyre[1187] of pearl play for me. Together let the professional dirge singers, male and female, play for me, That the dead may arise and inhale the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... take their bodies again, just as the wildflowers in the wood sprang up with their own shape and beauty, each according to the little seed that had lain dead and forgotten since autumn had sighed its dirge above their myriad tiny graves, burying the summer as sadly as men bury ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... the Islander on the Garioch, is still sung; the 'Woes of the Children of the Mist' are yet rehearsed in the ears of their children in the most plaintive measures. Innerlochy and Killiecrankie have their appropriate melodies; Glencoe has its dirge; both the exiled Jameses have their paean and their lament; Charles Edward his welcome and his wail;—all in strains so varied, and with imagery so copious, that their repetition is continually called for, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... The lovely lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief, beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane into the evening haze. His ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 400,000 pounds had been raised, found everything "swallowed up in the gulph of Chancery" under the winding-up Acts, proclaimed,—"We are almost afraid the Oswestry and Newtown is doomed to the same end." It certainly looked as if a true prophet was writing that dirge! ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... menacing gloom that frightened my soul. Sometimes, when straying alone, like an unquiet ghost among the leafless trees, when a deeper shadow swept over the earth, I would pause, pale with apprehension, listening to the many dirge-like sounds of the forest, ever prophesying evil, until in my trepidation I would start and tremble, and look to this side and to that, as if considering which way to fly from some unimaginable calamity coming, I knew not from where, to ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... pathetic and touching his reminiscence of his lost youth and the priceless boon of liberty. He commences in a quiet descriptive way, leaving one at a loss to know whether it is to be a joyful lyric a dirge he ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... and display, as was the wont of the Great Republic, with a city hung with emblems of mourning, and with the solemn strains of dirge and mass filling the air, out from the great hall of the Palazzo Cornaro, on, across the heavily draped bridge that spanned the Grand Canal from the water-gate of the palace, along the broad piazza crowded with a silent throng, and into the Church ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... the tempest, so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a hasty step. This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands, and exclaimed aloud, "William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge!" As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... and the wind blowing a dirge through the rigging—well, a man may be brave enough to fight all the Germans this side the Russian line, but if he is new to sea life he is apt to see things. Two soldiers were standing on deck when our naval officer came out ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... forgotten in England, yet gentlest and best daughters of Lancaster, lay waiting for death. Somewhere in this troublesome world the bridal is always matched by the burial, the festal song by the funeral dirge. Men and ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... a Lutheran hymn, very slowly, as if it were a dirge. Then there was a short sermon. Then another hymn. Then the manager made a little speech and called, for three cheers for the proprietor, and they gave them with a fervor that nearly split the ears ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... In my sad ears, the waves' recurrent moan, Sounds like the surges of the sea of death, Beating for evermore the shores of time With muttered prophecies, which sorrow saith Over and over, like a set slow chime Of funeral bells, tolling remote, forlorn, Dirge-like the burden—"Man was made ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... moon-whitened cliffs above him, raised his plumed hat with a courteous gesture, then bent and spoke to a cloaked and hooded figure sitting, still and silent, between him and a burlier form. This canoe was rowed by negroes, and as they rowed they sang. The wild chant—half dirge, half frenzy—that they raised was suited to that waste which they ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... sight, and for some time none spake. The solemn dirge continued, interrupted only by the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... stricken parents. Mr. Colbert was stooping by a distant tomb reading its epitaph to little Jennie, who listened with the deepest interest. There was no sound to mar the stillness of that peaceful retreat, the whispering winds went, dirge-like, through the waving grass, and the leaves rustled softly above ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... shall we do?" cried the count, despairingly; "we love each other; separated, we must be consumed with grief and sorrow. Ah! ah! shall I really suffer the fate of Petrarch, and pass my life in an eternal dirge? Is there no ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... driven away Is bold amidst the chilly spray? What good is all thy vain remorse? Thinkst thou from jaws of death to force A sacrifice so lightly thrust Upon the altar of thy lust? A host like thee could nothing urge To meet one tone of her sad dirge: ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... no dirge for thee, It should not call a tear To know that thou art free; Thy home—it was not here! Joy to thee, man of God! Thy heaven-course is begun, Unshrinking, thou has trod ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... supernatural accession of tone, was changing the music from its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It was still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre dirge, incommunicably mournful, and filled with a dark significance that touched him in his depth of rest with a secret tremor and awe. As he listened, rapt and vaguely wondering, the sense of his tranced sinking seemed to come to an end, and with the feeling of one who had been descending ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... found that the blacks could manage the canoe perfectly well without his assistance. The heat was so great on the water that we were all thankful to avoid any unnecessary exertion. The blacks as they paddled sang a low monotonous song, more like a dirge. What it was about we could not tell. By looking back we saw that we had got some distance from the land, although we appeared not to have approached nearer the opposite shore, which still remained as indistinct ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... this English clime The same sweet cry no circling seas can drown, In melancholy cadence rose to swell Some dirge of Lycidas or Astrophel When lovely souls and pure before their time Into the dusk ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... through your soul I go. With silver-tinkling feet I penetrate Sealed chambers, and a puissant incense throw Upon the smouldering braziers, love and hate: And chaunt the grieved verses of a dirge For dying gods, remembering flutes and shawms: With perverse moods I trouble you, and urge The sense to beauty. Give me some sweet alms, Some reverie, some pang of a damasked sword, Some poignant moment yet unparalleled In my dream-broidered ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... the shore Beside the knelling surge, And Sea-nymphs evermore Shall sadly chant thy dirge. They come, they come, The Spirits of the deep,— While near thy seaweed pillow My lonely ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... to the sea-shell's moaning, That strangely vibrates like the swelling sea, And fancy it an echoed storm, intoning A solemn dirge in ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... night—the lamps burnt dimly—the military band played in the minor key—the waiters stalked about with so silent, melancholy a tread, that we took their towels for pocket-handkerchiefs; the concert in the open rain went off tamely—dirge-like, in spite of the "Siege of Acre," which was described in a set of quadrilles, embellished with blue fire and maroons, and adorned with a dozen double drums, thumped at intervals, like death notes, in various parts of the doomed gardens. The divertissement was anything but diverting, when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... postillion Antipka said afterwards that he saw Gerasim through a. crack in the wall, sitting on his bedstead, his face in his hand. From time to time he uttered soft regular sounds; he was wailing a dirge, that is, swaying backwards and forwards with his eyes shut, and shaking his head as drivers or bargemen do when they chant their melancholy songs. Antipka could not bear it, and he came away from the crack. When Gerasim came out of ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... pleasure and pain, Are mingled together like sunshine and rain; And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other like ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... but she sat down by the shore, and let her head droop as she listened to the sea-dirge. She could love him, now that it was in vain. She knew now the warm yearning for his presence which at Ullswater had never troubled her, and it was too late. No tears came to her eyes; she did not even breathe a deeper breath. Most ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... into enormous evils. Think, rather, how much we have to be thankful for. The world in which we live, in spite of all the scars of sin and suffering upon it, is a happy world. It is not, as many would morbidly paint it, flooded with tears and strewn with wrecks, plaintive with a perpetual dirge of sorrow. True, the "Everlasting Hills" are in glory, but there are numberless eminences of grace, and love, and mercy below; many green spots in the lower valley, many ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... Canonbury's tower, an ancient pile To various fates assigned; and where by turns Meanness and grandeur have alternate reign'd; Thither, in latter days, have genius fled From yonder city, to respire and die. There the sweet bard of Auburn sat, and tuned The plaintive moanings of his village dirge. There learned Chambers treasured lore for men, And Newbery there his A ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... matter he should join his voice with hers. Fainter fell the harmony; then ceased altogether—a hymn destined to become interwoven with terrible memories, the tragic massacre of the Huguenots on the ill-fated night of St. Bartholomew. Again prevailed the tristful dirge of ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... a sound was stirring save the step of the soldiery, and the harsh clash of the shovel as it struck the earth. I felt sad and sick at heart, and leaned against a tree; a nightingale concealed in the leaves was pouring forth its plaintive notes to the night air, and its low warble sounded like the dirge of the departed. Far beyond, in the plain, the French watch-fires were burning, and I could see from time to time the fatigue-parties moving in search of their wounded. At this moment the clock of the convent ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... it. There is no more beautiful picture in his life than that of his following the bier where lay the bloody corpse of the man who had been his enemy ever since he had known him, and sealing the reconciliation which Death ever makes in noble souls, by the pathetic dirge he chanted over Abner's grave. We have a glimpse of his people's unbounded confidence in him, given incidentally when we are told that his sorrow pleased them, "as whatsoever the king did pleased all the people." We have a glimpse of the feebleness ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... 8. requiem. A dirge, or funeral song. "So called from the first word in the Catholic mass for the dead, Requiem ternum dona iis Domine (Give eternal rest to ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... the dirge, the knell? These were the mourner's share,— The sullen clang, whose heavy swell Throbbed through the beating air; The rattling cord, the rolling stone, The shelving sand that slid, And, far beneath, with hollow tone Rung ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... father's knitted brows and dusty face. Blackshaw was weary, and said so, as he wiped the dust, made mud with perspiration, off his cheeks. I was weary—my limbs ached with the heat and work. The poor beast stretched at our feet was weary. All nature was weary, and seemed to sing a dirge to that effect in the furnace-breath wind which roared among the trees on the low ranges at our back and smote the parched and thirsty ground. All were weary, all but the sun. He seemed to glory in his power, relentless and untiring, as he swung boldly in the sky, triumphantly ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... midnight, and the sereno had several times raised his dirge-like chaunt in the street outside, before my companion came to me. She wasted no time in preliminaries. I think she could see by my outward expression that I knew how danger threatened, and so she told in as few words ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... reverently folded over his breast, whilst entwined in his fingers was a bronze cross and rosary, that St. Peter, seeing his devotion, might, without questioning, admit him to a better world. The scene was weird beyond description. Outside, the wind moaned a sad dirge; great bats and black moths, the size of birds, flitted about in the midnight darkness. These, ever and anon, made their way inside and extinguished the candles, which flickered and dripped as they fitfully ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... and, gathering sticks, Parpon lit a sweet-smelling fire of cedar. Then he went to the hut, and came back with a spade and a shovel. At the foot of a great pine he began to dig. As the work went on, he broke into a sort of dirge, painfully sweet. Leaning against a rock not far away, Valmond watched the tiny man with the long arms throw up the soft, good-smelling earth, enriched by centuries of dead leaves and flowers. The trees waved and bent and murmured, as though they gossiped with each other over ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to the dining-room to the time of a dirge, the guests find before them plain, hearty fare; doughnuts, gingerbread, cider, popcorn, apples, and nuts honored by time. The Hallowe'en cake has held the place of honor since the beginning here in America. ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... assembly here, With marble brow, and close-shut eye, And pallid lip,—while o'er her bier, The dirge was chanted mournfully. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... mythical character was Maneros, son of the earliest Egyptian king. He seems to hold the same position as Linus, son of Apollo, among the Greeks. The first song of Egyptian music was a dirge for his untimely end, and a lament for the swift passing away of youth, spring, joy, and so on. Gradually the song itself, instead of the king's son, began to be called Maneros, and became the well-known banquet song of the social feasts, calling upon the guests to enjoy ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... creek dividing it, the bare round eminence between the house and the beach, or rather the rocky cliffs, and on either side the wide, lonely sands, with heavy foam-capped breakers rolling in upon the shore, with a sound like a solemn dirge. At a distance on the left, half hidden by the walnut-trees, lay the ruins of a mill, which had always the air of being haunted. A high, rocky hill, very nearly perpendicular on the side next the house, was covered on the ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... Sing another dirge in wailing, For another vessel sailing With the shadow-ships at sea; Shadow-ships for ever sinking — Shadow-ships whose pumps are clinking, And whose thirsty holds are drinking Pledges ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... banged Sir Peter and Sir Peter banged him back, And they banged away together as they took another tack. Then Sir Peter said politely, "You may board him, if you like"— And he played a little dirge upon the handle ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... mansion, spread the festive board; Welcome the gay, the noble, and the fair! Through the bright hall in joyous concert poured, Let mirth and music sound the dirge of care! But ask thou not if happiness be there, If the loud laugh disguise convulsive throe, Or if the brow the heart's true livery wear; Lift not the festal mask!—enough to know No scene of mortal life but teems ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... for some time the editor of College Rhymes, a Christ Church paper, in which his poem, "A Sea Dirge" (afterwards republished in "Phantasmagoria," and again in "Rhyme? and Reason?"), first appeared. The following verses were among his ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... Trojan women, weeping, Sit ranged in many a length'ning row; Their heedless locks, dishevell'd, sweeping Adown the wan cheeks worn with woe. No festive sounds that peal along, Their mournful dirge can overwhelm; Through hymns of joy one sorrowing song Commingled, wails the ruin'd realm. "Farewell, beloved shores!" it said, "From home afar behold us torn, By foreign lords as captives borne— Ah, happy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... veins. He was full of the strong joy of living. And then, in the midst of it all, came a dull, crashing blow. It was as though all his castles in the air had come toppling about his ears, the blue sky had turned to stony grey and the sweet waltz music had become a dirge. Always a keen watcher of men's faces, he had glanced for a second time at a gaunt, sallow man who wore a loose check suit and a grey Homburg hat. The eyes of the two men met. Then the blood had turned to ice in ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stories, and Mrs. Cameron could recite old ballads with the fervor of a medieval minstrel. The walls of the Italian salon seemed to melt away and change to a wild moorland or a northern castle as she declaimed "Fair Helen of Kirconnell," "The Lament of the Border Widow," "Bartrum's Dirge," or "The ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... requiem was about to be sung—a dirge full of soul-stirring reflections and sacred grandeur—Margaret's head was full of bitterness, and she failed to respond to the sympathetic sublimity of the service, or to notice its serene beauty either. To her it was nothing more ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... 5 present the advent of spring, and contrast the new life in animals and plants with the feebleness of the man dying in his chamber and unable to eat. Still another explanation is that the whole is part of a dirge, to be taken literally, and describing the mourners in house and garden. I venture, though with some hesitation, to prefer, on the whole, the old allegorical theory, for reasons which it would be impossible to condense here. It is by no means free from difficulty, but is, as I think, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to the slave who stood behind him. He was shocked, too, failing to perceive its note of defiant bitterness, by a laugh from Lucian and his careless, "My felicitations, Atticus, on your welding of dirge and exhortation into one epideictic oration! Aulus," he added, looking across the table, "don't forget to make a note of the prepositions the master used in ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... pseudo-ethical interpretations, so crafty in their word-painting, so cunning in their rational analysis, which we find in the rest. A few fierce-flung words, from the hot heart of an amorist's lust, and all the smouldering magic of the noon-day woods takes your breath. A sobbing death-dirge from the bosom of a love-lorn child, and the perfume of all the "enclosed gardens" in the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... has been compared with Webster's "Call for the robin redbreast" in The White Devil, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel's ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... clearly the expression of satisfaction which steals over every face as candle after candle of the stack of wax-lights before the altar is put out successively, at intervals of some twenty minutes. If the ceremony were reduced to one-tenth of its length, it might be impressive, but a dirge which goes on for three hours, and a chandelier which takes the same time to have its lights snuffed out, become an intolerable nuisance. The dying cadence of the Miserere is undoubtedly grand; but, in the first place, it comes when your patience ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... breeze of dawn, Fairer than the larches in their young spring glory, Brighter than the glow-worms on the dewy lawn, Hear the dirge the green trees sing to ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... of the Emperor Inkyo (A.D. 453), the Korean Court sent eighty musicians robed in black, who marched in procession to the Yamato palace, playing and singing a dirge as they went." ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... out another way, and sent a message to my Lord Shrewsbury, who knew me at court. As I waited in the courtyard, the musicians there were playing 'The Witches' Dirge,' as is done at the burnings—and all to mock at my queen! At last a halberdier was sent to ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... in the rear of this historic Burying Hill is Sleepy Hollow, the cemetery now so famous, which will be for centuries as now, the Mecca of pious pilgrims, for here Emerson sleeps beneath the giant pine of which he loved to write and which in grateful recognition ever whispers its solemn dirge over the dead poet, who will live forever in his writings. His grave is now marked by a rough rock of beautiful pink crystal-quartz, and his son Waldo lies close beside him, with no monument but the imperishable one of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... plead to remembrance for thee, Or redeem form or frame from the merciless surge, But the white foam of waves shall thy winding sheet be, And winds in the midnight of winter thy dirge. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Abbot of Westminster celebrated. All was exceedingly solemn and beautiful, in a far different style from the maimed rites that had been bestowed upon poor Queen Joanna in Scotland. The young King's face was more angelic than ever, and as psalm and supplication, dirge and hymn arose, chanted by the full choir, speaking of eternal peace, Eleanor bowed her head under her veil, as her bosom swelled with a strange yearning longing, not exactly grief, and large tears dropped from her eyes as ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... But in Breidablik, Nanna, Balder's wife, Came with the Goddesses who wrought her will, And stood by Balder lying on his bier. And at his head and feet she station'd Scalds Who in their lives were famous for their song; These o'er the corpse intoned a plaintive strain, A dirge—and Nanna and her train replied. And far into the night they wail'd their dirge. But when their souls were satisfied with wail, They went, and laid them down, and Nanna went Into an upper chamber, and lay down; And Frea seal'd her tired lids with sleep. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... place at night. A few poor old men, in tattered garments, were employed to officiate at the ceremony by holding "old torches and torches' ends" to light the gloomy precincts of the chapel during the time while the monks were chanting the funeral dirge. ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... but which then pervaded the Schwarzwald in considerable quantity—sent by some good magician, who owed the giant a grudge, to pilot her out of the forest. Nothing could exceed her joy at this discovery: she whistled a dirge, sang a Latin hymn, and preached a funeral discourse all in one breath. Such were the artless methods by which the full heart in the fifteenth century was compelled to express its gratitute for benefits; the advertising columns of the daily papers ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... One of God (St. Mark i. 24, Acts ii. 27), not, as ignorance and malice have suggested, to himself.] let the everlasting fire consume thee.' Whilst Luther with the other teachers returned to the town, some hundreds of students remained upon the scene, and sang a Te Deum, and a Dirge for the decretals. After the ten o'clock meal, some of the young students, grotesquely attired, drove through the town in a large carriage, with a banner emblazoned with a bull four yards in length, amidst the blowing of brass trumpets and other ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... about dusk, was going up the avenue on his way home, a young girl passed him, walking very briskly. She paused for a moment just ahead of him to give some money to a poor woman who, doubled up on the pavement in a black shawl, was grinding out from a wheezy little organ a thin, dirge-like strain. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... paying honor to his memory, that, among several other proposals, some were for having the funeral procession made through the triumphal gate, preceded by the image of Victory which is in the senate-house, and the children of highest rank and of both sexes singing the funeral dirge. Others proposed, that on the day of the funeral, they should lay aside their gold rings, and wear rings of iron; and others, that his bones should be collected by the priests of the principal colleges. One likewise proposed to transfer the name of August to September, because ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... moment the Sea sang a dirge at sunset for all the harm that he had done in anger and all the ruin wrought on adventurous ships; and there were tears in the voice of the tyrannous Sea, for he had loved the galleons that he had overwhelmed, and he called ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the universal woe, With solemn dirge and falt'ring tongue; For England's Lady is laid low, So dear, so lovely, and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... rain beat again with a sound like that of distant drums. Gusts of rain and the water from the roof beat against the south windows, while the wailing wind played its mournful cadences about the eaves, and the stanch timbers added their creaking notes to swell the dirge-like chorus. ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... and the serenade had been in honour of their ashes, it would have been impossible to surpass the unutterable despair expressed in that one chorus: 'Go where glory waits thee.' It was a requiem, a dirge, a moan, a howl, a wail, a lament, an abstract of everything that is sorrowful and ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... silently and noiselessly around the walls, with the queen and the dwarf at their head, and near this elevation stood a tall, black statue, wearing a mask, and leaning on a bright, dreadful, glittering axe. The music changed to an unearthly dirge, so weird and blood-curdling, that Sir Norman could have put his hands over his ear-drums to shut out the ghastly sound. The dismal room, the voiceless spectators, the black spectre with the glittering axe, the fearful music, struck a ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... Moan'd in his lifted locks. Thou, night! the while Dost listen to his sad harp's wild complaint, Mother of shadows! as to thee he pours The broken strain, and plaintively deplores The fall of Druid fame! Hark! murmurs faint Breathe on the wavy air! and now more loud Swells the deep dirge; accustomed to complain Of holy rites unpaid, and of the crowd Whose ceaseless steps the sacred haunts profane. O'er the wild plain the hurrying tempest flies, And, mid the storm unheard, the song of ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... length they had reached the scene of the struggle. There was an ominous stillness, that lasted for a moment, and then the Indian's fate was announced in the sad, wild note that came wailing up the valley. It was the dirge ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... and they parted asunder and gave place to the wain. And the others when they had brought him to the famous house, laid him on a fretted bed, and set beside him minstrel leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay, while the women made moan with them. And among the women white-armed Andromache led the lamentation, while in her hands she held the head of Hector slayer of men: "Husband, thou art gone young from life, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... dissolution (page 306, measure 11); Arkel's simple requiem over the body of the little princess, with the grave and tender orchestral commentary woven out of familiarly poignant themes (pages 308-309); the murmurous coda, with its muted trumpet singing a gentle dirge under an accompaniment of two flutes (page 310, measure 7),—these things are ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... if he was so glad, did he slink off to his study forthwith and play a dirge on his piano, and there sit listlessly in his chair for the rest of the morning staring out of the window through his glass, till Jill tripped in and fetched him ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... rising winds and swelling surge, And underflowing tidal-urge, Shall grind to dust these lethal spirits And chant in triumph their sounding dirge. ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... you'll make blots when I come to the cymbals," said Helen; and she doubled up her fists and hummed the passage, and gave so realistic an imitation of the cymbal-clashes in the great dirge that it almost upset the chair. Afterwards she laughed one of her merriest laughs and kissed her father ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... the water, and then Anne heard another sound, the deep low murmur of the Caribbean Sea. Her mind swung to Byam Warner, to the extraordinary poem which ten years ago had made his fame and interpreted this unceasing melancholy of the sea's chant into a dirge over the buried continent and its fate. With the passionate energy of youthful genius abandoning itself to the ecstasies of imagination, he had sung the lament of Atlantis, compelled the blue sepulchre ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... of themselves and make their excuses to Mr. Bast, and started for Liverpool and the U. S. in the Sirius. Storms overtook them, the women were put into the first boat, those which followed were swamped. Poor fellows, I own I can't sing a pious dirge for them. There were three days of hunger and exposure before the boat was picked up, and she was finally landed at Quebec, where she was laid up with pleurisy in the hospital. And there was a subscription for the wrecked when she ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sixteenth century, and especially in the parish of Octeville. The leper was conducted to the hospital with exactly the same ceremony as was used for the interment of the dead, and was followed by all the members of the confrerie to which he belonged, and preceded by a mourner ringing a dirge. One of the statutes of a confrerie ordaining this procession has been preserved (Arch. de la Seine Inferieure, G. 5,238):—"Le seroient tenus convoier jusques a sa malladerie le maistre et varlets portans leurs sourplis ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... o' Year Thomas S. Jones, Jr The Invisible Bride Edwin Markham Rain on a Grave Thomas Hardy Patterns Amy Lowell Dust Rupert Brooke Ballad, "The roses in my garden" Maurice Baring "The Little Rose is Dust, My Dear" Grace Hazard Conkling Dirge Adelaide Crapsey The Little Red Ribbon James Whitcomb Riley The Rosary Robert ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... hereditary bard of the tribe took his seat on a rock which overhung the place of slaughter, and poured forth a long lament over his murdered brethren, and his desolate home. Eighty years later that sad dirge was still repeated by the population of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you're whistling?" asked Lialia, gaily, as she came across the garden. "It's like a dirge ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... a dirge,— A dirge for myriad chances dead; In grief your mournful accents merge: Sing, sing the girls ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... star. So he went backwards holding it forth; and as the Leper pressed upon him, he touched him with the star; and at that the Leper cried aloud, and ran within the house; and there came forth a waft of doleful music like a dirge for the dead. ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... man hath first begun with his praise (for if he be proud you shall much better please him with a commendation than with a dirge) then, after favour won therewith, a man may little by little insinuate the doubt of such revelations—not at first as though it were for any doubt of his, but of some other man's, that men in some other places talk of. And peradventure it shall not miscontent him to say that great ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... grief, which is expressed by loud wailings, with beating of their breast and tearing their dishevelled hair. While professional wailers are rare, nevertheless friends and relatives congregate and add volume to the dirge of sorrow. The leading women mourners will often express in weird chant and appropriate words their praises of the virtues and the beauties of the departed ones. The men of the household mourn in silence, ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... dog shall bear it company; Small bathing boys shall feel its clammy prod, And think some jellyfish has fled the surge; And so 'twill win to where the tribe of cod In its own ooze intones a fitting dirge, And after that some false and impious fish Will likely have it for a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... the North wind through the top of the ancient pines was no melancholy dirge of the dying summer, but a hymn of peace and restful ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... putting an end to him at once,' said Miss Gwynne, 'and I think we had better play his funeral dirge. Lady Mary, will you give us 'The Dead March in Saul,' or something appropriate? Never mind, Netta; I daresay cousin Howel will turn out a great man by-and-by;' this last clause was whispered to Netta, whilst the young hostess went towards a grand piano that stood invitingly open, ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... another way, and sent a message to my Lord Shrewsbury, who knew me at court. As I waited in the courtyard, the musicians there were playing 'The Witches' Dirge,' as is done at the burnings—and all to mock at my queen! At last a halberdier was sent to bring ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... please me; but when the waiter was taken away to the kitchen, I found all the bird on the plate. This morning, just before daylight, I heard her playing a wild, mournful thing on the piano, that sounded like a dirge or a wail; and Ruth says when she went into the parlor to open the blinds, she found her praying, and thinks she was on her knees for an hour. Please God! sometimes I wish she was in heaven with my mother, for she will never see any peace ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... sacred earth afford thee room, Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb, Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest, And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast. Here shall the morn her earliest tears bestow— Here the first roses of the year shall blow; While angels with their silver ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... accession of tone, was changing the music from its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It was still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre dirge, incommunicably mournful, and filled with a dark significance that touched him in his depth of rest with a secret tremor and awe. As he listened, rapt and vaguely wondering, the sense of his tranced ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... I complain, in piteous strain, Grief-laden, tear-evoking, shrill; Ah woe is me! woe! woe! Dirge-like it sounds; mine own death-trill I pour, yet breathing vital air. Hear, hill-crowned Apia, hear my prayer! Full well, O land, My voice barbaric thou canst understand; While oft with rendings I assail My byssine vesture ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... deeds It buries, and the earthquake dread Whose distant thunder shook the Medes? What gulf, what river has not seen Those sights of sorrow? nay, what sea Has Daunian carnage yet left green? What coast from Roman blood is free? But pause, gay Muse, nor leave your play Another Cean dirge to sing; With me to Venus' bower away, And there ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... great gateway is forever tolling its knell, and some mournful train is forever wending its slow way under the beautiful trees. Yet the sunlight falls brightly, the birds sing their sweetest over the new-made graves, the wind sighs its dirge through the tall trees, and the "sad sea waves" blend with it all their solemn undertone ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... grave alone was peace. So she lay through the long, sweet, summer night, and the mill-stream sung her dirge. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... temperament, I suppose," he resumed. "To-night this ravishing scene of beauty and splendor makes me sad at heart, I know not why. It seems too brilliant, too dazzling. I would as soon go home and compose a dirge as anything." ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... avenue on his way home, a young girl passed him, walking very briskly. She paused for a moment just ahead of him to give some money to a poor woman who, doubled up on the pavement in a black shawl, was grinding out from a wheezy little organ a thin, dirge-like strain. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... Praxinoe! That first-rate singer, the Argive woman's daughter, is going to sing the Adonis hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first rate from her. She is going through her airs and ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... hawser strained and groaned, chocks and bitts crooned their song of stress, the wind whistled its dirge, while out from the breakers ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... on Time's remotest age, Ten thousand years, ten thousand times told o'er; Still, still with thee my onward course I urge; And now no longer hear the surge Of Time's light billows breaking on the shore Of distant earth; no more the solemn dirge— Requiem of worlds, when such are numbered o'er— Steals by: still thou art on ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... each St. Clair was buried there, With candle, with book, and with knell; But the sea caves rung, and the wild winds sung, The dirge of lovely Rosabelle." ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... rattle, they rush to the battle, (Each man in the clan a base coward disdains), They die in their glory, the trenches are gory With red blood, with shed blood of gallant McLeans. Afar on the heather, where hame folk foregather, The pibroch is wailing a dirge for the slain, The women are weeping, their lane vigils keeping, Sair, sair, are the hearts ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... which have well nigh supplanted them. Neglect—desolation is engraven on all around, and even the little wicket, as it swings slowly to and fro, seems to say, "All gone! go-ne!" The wind, how meaningly it steals through the deserted rooms, as though breathing a funereal dirge over the departed! How "eloquent of wo" is that sound! Now swelling forth, as it were, in wild and uncontrollable grief, and now sinking exhaustedly into a low and touching mournfulness which seems almost human! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... the street outside, a half-frozen clarinetist was sending up a mournful carol from the mouth of his reed. Somewhere in the distance a high-voiced child was singing. And the wind played a dirge as it marched past the windows ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... o'er him the leaves of the forest, The fays of the wild chant the dirge of his rest; And thou, little brook, still the sleeper deplorest, And moistens the heath-bell that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... such a blow,[215] was overwhelmed with discouragement. But Catharine de' Medici displayed little emotion. "Very well!" she quietly remarked, "then we shall pray to God in French."[216] But the truth was soon known, and the dirge and the miserere were rapidly replaced by the loud te deum and by jubilant processions in honor of the signal success ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... loathsome, and malodorous bodies were hustled into the carts with all possible speed. Then once more the melancholy cortege took its way adown the dark, deserted street, the yellow glare of links falling on the ghastly burden they accompanied, the dirge-like call of the bellman sounding on the ears of the living like a summons from the dead. And so, receiving additional freight upon its way, the cart proceeded to one of the great pits dug in the parish churchyards ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... standstill: two or three dogs lay on the soft green lawn fast asleep, an old gardener smoking his pipe and sitting on the edge of a wheelbarrow seemed following their example; and birds and insects only kept up a monotonous and drowsy dirge. ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... are done here by slaves in chains, who perform a kind of plaintive melancholy dirge in recitative, to sooth their unavailing toil, which, with the accompanyment of the clanking of their irons, is the real voice of wo, and attunes the soul to sympathy and compassion, more than the most elaborate piece ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... pathetic. She would sit for hours singing or rather mourning out a kind of dirge over herself: "Yesterday I was a woman, now I am a horror, a thing all people run from. Yesterday they would eat with me, now they spit on me. Yesterday they would talk to me with a sweet mouth, now they greet me only with curses and execrations. They have smashed my basin, they have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... be breaking the promise that our visit to the exhibition is not to involve us in a description of all its wonders, if we walk up-stairs and look into the Tunisian Cafe, attracted by the well-known drumming and the moaning dirge which Easterns call music. Tunis is best seen out of Tunis, for the broidered gold and bright-coloured slippers can then be enjoyed without those horrible scenes of filth—dead camels, open sewers, and maimed beggars which encase the shabby mud walls I have seen ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... bird, that by the rocky cliffs of the sea, halcyon,[144] dost chant thy mournful elegy, a sound well understood by the skilled, namely, that thou art ever bemoaning thine husband in song, I, a wingless bird, compare my dirge with thine, longing for the assemblies[145] of the Greeks, longing for Lucina, who dwells along the Cynthian height, and near the palm[146] with its luxuriant foliage, and the rich-springing laurel, and the holy shoot of the deep ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... bards! A pleasant quip! No manufactured gloom to dim that far light! Of dirge's luxury deprive my lip? So suns might say there shall be no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... the measured tramp of the jury advancing, and filing into their box, had the mournful, measured beat as of pall bearers, keeping step to a dismal dirge; and when the foreman laid upon the table the fatal brass unicorn, the muffled sound seemed ominous as the grating of a coffin lowered upon the cross bars of a gaping grave. As the roll was called, each man rose, and answered in a low but distinct tone. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... injured man, and drawing himself up to his full height, as if it were a matter with which Heaven should be acquainted at the earliest possible opportunity, he indulged, as we before said, in the melancholy consolation of a whistled death-dirge, occasionally interrupted by a long-drawn interlude half sigh, half snuffle of his ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... knew him, and they laid him by his bride; Down the aisle and o'er the threshold they were carried, side by side; While the organ played a dirge that no man ever heard before, And then softly sank to ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... defying Caesar, while the unconquerable spirit of Cato of Utica flashed from every feature; and he closed the grand appeal with the solemn words, 'or give me death!' which sounded with the awful cadence of a hero's dirge, fearless of death, and victorious in death; and he suited the action to the word by a blow upon the left breast with the right hand, which seemed to drive the ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... Patronymic Parliament Dormitory Demented Presumptuous Indent Dandelion Trident Indenture Contemporary Disseminate Annoy Odium Desolate Impugn Efflorescent Arbor vitae Consider Constellation Disaster Suburb Address Dirigible Dirge Indirectly Desperate Inoperative Benevolent Voluntary Offend Enumerate Dilapidate Request Exquisite Exonerate Approximate Insinuate Resurgence Insurrection Rapture Exasperate Complacent Dimension Commensurate Preclude Cloister Turnpike Travesty Atone Incarnate Charnal Etiquette Rejuvenate ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... northern latitude, and in addition to this, a violent storm was coming on. The wind blew in fitful gusts, howling and sighing among the huge trees with which the house was surrounded, and then dying away with a melancholy, dirge-like moan. The old tree rubbed their leafless branches against the window panes, and the fowls which had roosted there for the night, were fain to clap their wings, and make prodigious efforts to preserve their equilibrium. Mr. Cleveland grew moody and restless, ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe. Bob, with the pack on his back, had as respectful an ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... dirge-like air went on, but the player did not turn his head, playing away with grave importance, and giving himself a gentle inclination now and then to make up for the sharp twitches caused by the ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... a herd of horses. But supposing they were animals gathered by the father and brother, rode on. When near the center a mighty wail smote their ears. Some of the Indians had been killed by the Smiths, and the women were wailing a funeral dirge. One who has never heard that wail cannot imagine ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... the assembly here, With marble brow, and close-shut eye, And pallid lip,—while o'er her bier, The dirge was chanted mournfully. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... a quality that was almost ponderable, it was unpleasant to eye and nostril, he tasted and breathed the smoke that was shot through it, and he felt a sickening of the soul. He heard a wind moaning through the forest, and it was to him a dirge, the lament of ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... much colder than before, darker, too, no moon now, only the silver stars; it makes one shiver. Nature seemed to lie stark and stiff and dead, and that accursed craake her dirge. All tended to shivering and gloom. Yet a great ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the service, the firing-party in their places, six on either side of the grave, would fire three volleys into the air, while the band breathed a solemn dirge. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the room a blindly-glimm'ring gleam The dying embers scatter, far remote From Mirth's mad shouts, that thro' th' illumin'd roof Resound with festive echo, let me sit, Blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . . O come then, Melancholy, queen of thought! O come with saintly look, and steadfast step, From forth thy cave embower'd with mournful yew, Where ever to the curfeu's solemn sound List'ning thou sitt'st, and with thy cypress bind Thy votary's hair, and seal ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... great Pacific, surge! Though the mariners hear, with prophetical fear, In thy surging their deathly dirge. Still, surge, ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... scorn, or transient curse, Unknown alike to honour and remorse. Behold the leering belle, caress'd by all, Adorn each private feast and public ball, 140 Where peers attentive listen and adore, And not one matron shuns the titled whore. At Peter's obsequies[5] I sung no dirge; Nor has my satire yet supplied a scourge For the vile tribes of usurers and bites, Who sneak at Jonathan's, and swear at White's. Each low pursuit, and slighter folly, bred Within the selfish heart and hollow head, Thrives uncontroll'd, and blossoms ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... This comes out most often as a note of warning; like the motif of Ortrud in the opera of "Lohengrin," it mingles ominously in every chorus of Hellenic enterprise or paean of Hellenic victory, and finally swells into a national dirge at the Turkish conquest of the peninsula. It comes out in the legendary history of the Argonautic Expedition and the Trojan War; in the arrival of Phoenician Cadmus and Phrygian Pelops in Grecian lands; in the appearance of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... go to the street indicated, and they had hardly secured a good place before they heard martial music, playing a solemn dirge. ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... up the mansion, spread the festive board; Welcome the gay, the noble, and the fair! Through the bright hall in joyous concert poured, Let mirth and music sound the dirge of care! But ask thou not if happiness be there, If the loud laugh disguise convulsive throe, Or if the brow the heart's true livery wear; Lift not the festal mask!—enough to know No scene of mortal life but teems with mortal ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... she reached the sandy margin, Reached the cold and dismal sea-shore, Sat upon the rock of sorrow, Sat alone in cold and darkness, Listened only to the music Of the winds and rolling billows, Singing all the dirge of Aino. All that night the weary maiden Wept and wandered on the border Through the sand and sea-washed pebbles. As the day dawns, looking round her, She beholds three water-maidens, On a headland jutting seaward, Water-maidens ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... caves that none of the men dared enter—vast, gloomy tunnels into the mountain through which the chill wind whistled like a dirge. Yet the caverns were warmer than the wind, and not bad camping-places if we could have persuaded the boys ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Mr Clarke tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine that we must ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... of the wandering musicians who had, at the open grave, played as a dirge, or, rather, as a ringing hymn of resurrection and deliverance, the chant of the fatherland-that dark girl to whom he had said: "Bring me this jewel, and come and live in peace with the Zilahs"—was the mother of this beautiful, fascinating creature, whose every word, since he had first ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... possession of me, a heavy weight to settle down upon my spirits. I played on dreamily, until suddenly I was stopped by a cry from Constance, 'Do for pity's sake stop that wail, Hilda; one would think you were playing our funeral dirge!' ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... wind and heaving surge, A fevered foot and a running sore, The siren's shriek for a funeral dirge, And a hobble to death on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... the ripples on the stream—when, from one of the white dwellings on the beach in whose casement a light was yet burning, came a low, sad strain of sorrow. I had heard that sound once before, and knew now it was the wail of Irish grief. Strange that mournful dirge of Erin sounded in that distant land. Grace knew the language of her country, and ere the "keen" had died upon the breeze, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... your heart on your halfpenny,[1] or are you saying a dirge for your father's soul? ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... Mirabelle wailed, "And one grows by the knife. I shall grow in my soul In that awful strife. Let me go, let me grow," Was the theme of her dirge; "Let the sobbiest of ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... could not be guessed. With eyes fixed on the marble tomb of her first husband, the woman tremblingly awaited the solution of the mystery, until the door was darkened by something that made her catch her breath—a funeral. The organ began a solemn dirge as a black-cloaked cortege came through the aisle, and it was with amazement that the bride discovered it to be formed of her oldest friends,—bent, withered; paired, man and woman, as in mockery—while ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... half-formed scarf from her hand; and listened, without daring to draw her breath, to the deep-toned lamentations. She thought that she had never before heard the dirge of her country so piercing, so thrillingly awful. Her head fell on the armor and scarf. "Sweet lady," sighed she to herself, "who is it that dares thus invade thy duties? But my gratitude-gratitude to the once-loved lord, will ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... his face as he glared, first, on the noisy mourners, and then looked down on the white face on the pillow. At the fireplace sat his honour, buried in thought, and not heeding the talk of the jovial priest who sat and stirred his cup beside him. There, too, among the crowd of dirge- singing, laughing, whisky-drinking neighbours, I could see the ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... summer hours Make to my heart a dirge-like sound, The spring's sweet boughs of bridal flowers Lie bright across a smooth-heaped mound. What care I that I sing to-day Where sound not the old plaintive hymns, And where the mountains hide away The sunset maple's ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... flying Over the sullen waves; A dirge on the night winds sighing Up from the cold sea caves Where sea-nymphs white arms lifting Wreaths for a pall entwine For a still white face is drifting On the wave-crest—blossom ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... with a moaning of wind instruments punctuated by the roll of drums, the band struck into a dirge. The procession moved. And all of a sudden Sammy found that Scalawag was marking time just as he had been taught to do in the circus ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... 100 yds. away at the moment when the pressure upon the ship was at its climax. They walked a little way towards us, halted, and after a few ordinary calls proceeded to utter weird cries that sounded like a dirge for the ship. None of us had ever before heard the emperors utter any other than the most simple calls or cries, and the effect of this concerted ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... moan, The dirge's melancholy monotone, The measured march, the drooping flags, attest A great man's progress to his place of rest. Along broad avenues himself decreed To serve his fellow men's disputed need— Past parks he raped ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... the finished product and the purpose it will serve depends upon the arrangement of the raw materials, which is subject to the constructor's design. Building materials may be formed to prison or palace; notes may be arranged as fanfare or funeral dirge; words may be indited to inspire passion or peace, all according to the will of the designer. So also the majestic rhythm of the Word of God has wrought the primal substance: arche, into the multitudinous forms which comprise the phenomenal world, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... fifty men and women. They seated themselves in ranks in one of the courtyards of the pa, stripped to the waist. An old chieftainess, who moved along the ranks with regular steps, brandishing an ornamental spear in time to her movements, now recited the first verse of a song in a monotonous, dirge-like measure. This was joined in by the others, who also kept time by quivering their hands and arms, nodding their heads and bending their bodies in accordance with each ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... naught in the heaven above, whence the hail and the levin are hurled, But the wind that is swept around us by the rush of the rolling world? The wind that shall scatter my ashes, and bear me to silence and sleep With the dirge, and the sounds of lamenting, and voices of ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... name in oblivion—I am dead to my kindred, dead to the world; the caves of ocean are yawning for the body of the pirate-chief, and there will he sleep with the howling ocean and the shrieking storm to sing his requiem and his dirge. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... be compared to that which would be felt, if we should detach the songs of the artificial drama from their original impulse and feeling, (for instance, the willow dirge of Desdemona, and the fantastic moans of Ophelia,) and produce them in a parlor. Not but that these lyrics have a universal fitness, and a value which no time can change or circumstance diminish; but as we are looking at them simply ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... easy to be seen that terror and confusion filled it. Whimpering, white-faced women and wailing bairns ran hither and thither blindly. Somewhere in the back part of the house the bagpipes were soughing a dismal kind of dirge. Fierce-eyed men with mops of shock hair were gathered into groups of cursing clansmen. Through them all I pushed my way ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... fifth paddle with which to steer, but he soon found that the blacks could manage the canoe perfectly well without his assistance. The heat was so great on the water that we were all thankful to avoid any unnecessary exertion. The blacks as they paddled sang a low monotonous song, more like a dirge. What it was about we could not tell. By looking back we saw that we had got some distance from the land, although we appeared not to have approached nearer the opposite shore, which still remained as indistinct as before. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the Dejection, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that time gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but the cradle-cry of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... properly. When she should have been performing that routine duty, her eolian piano at home was half the time turned into a banjo or a harp, tinkling a serenade, or into an organ, playing some ponderous old anthem or sobbing out some dirge of a broken heart. These were all well enough, in their way, but they were not studying the piano. As a result, she could produce all those effects upon the instrument, that no one else would ever have thought of attempting; the only penalty being, that what any one else could have ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... procession bearing lighted tapers and carrying biers, upon which they placed the inanimate forms of the warriors. Slowly they paced about, chanting in low tones, and constantly accompanied by the funeral dirge of the musicians. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... and clearing the whirlpools where hidden reefs threatened destruction. There were sharp turns and angles too, where the yellow water roared into fretful and vehement menace. With night-fall the heights seemed to draw in and huddle close and the dirge of flood and wind mounted into a ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... of the Senor. He listlessly began to turn over the papers on the table. Presently he paused. He had taken up a sheet of paper on which Senor Perkins had evidently been essaying some composition in verse. It seemed to have been of a lugubrious character. The titular line at the top of the page, "Dirge," had been crossed out for the substituted "In ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... soule-ales, called also dirge-ales, and heathenish rioting at bride-ales." (HARRISON, Description of ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... little church upon the windy height Is grey as sky or sea. But there hath he that woke the sleepless Love Slept through these fifty years, There is the grave that has been wept above With more than mortal tears. And far below I hear the Channel sweep And all his waves complain, As Hallam's dirge through all the years must keep Its ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... sees me, God, who took my heart And drowned it in life's surge. In all your wide warm earth I have no part— A light song overcomes me like a dirge. Could Love's great harmony The saints keep step to when their bonds are loose, Not weigh me down? am I a wife to choose? Look in ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... watched the tempest, so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a hasty step. This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands, and exclaimed aloud, "William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge!" As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... we did. Then the diligence caught up with them. From a distance I saw in a pool of moonlight on the yellow road the black irregular mass of the convoy. Then I heard a weary dirge; the wretches were singing. One, in a sad and gutteral voice, gave the couplet, which trailed dismally through the depths ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... Shakespeare, and Milton scarcely mention it. It holds almost no place in the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but, at the close of the eighteenth century, it has the good luck to be uprooted by Burns's plough, and he at once sings its dirge and its beauties; and then the flower at once becomes a celebrity. Wordsworth sings of it in many a beautiful verse; and I think it is scarcely too much to say that since his time not an English poet has ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... course they urge, A passing bell, a solemn dirge; Hoarse ravens join the strain. They see a coffin on a bier, A priest and mourners too appear, Slow moving ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... exultation, like a huge volcano's roar! There they stand, the batter'd columns, underneath the murky sky, In the hush of desperation, not to conquer but to die. Hark! the bagpipe's fitful wailing—not the pibroch loud and shrill, That, with hope of bloody banquet, lured the ravens from the hill— But a dirge both low and solemn, fit for ears of dying men, Marshall'd for their latest battle, never more to fight again. Madness—madness! Why this shrinking? Were we less inured to war When our reapers swept the harvest from the field of red Dunbar? Fetch ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... are passages of pure cantilena in this poem, where sense is absolutely swallowed up in sound, and words become the mere vehicle for rhythmic melody. Of this verbal music the dirge of the nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples (xix. pp. 358-361). Note ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... morning a long account from my uncle of a ball given by Lady Collingwood at Newcastle, where 450 people sat down to supper. Unfortunately the Mayor instead of giving Lord Collingwood's health, gave The Memory of Lord Nelson, with a solemn dirge, which so affected Lady Collingwood that she fainted, and was obliged to leave the room. She had not heard from Lord Collingwood for some time which made it the ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... something, she could not for a moment remember what. Then it came to her. Of course!—Leslie's wedding. They had discussed precedence and pews just that way. Music, too. Hendrick was making a note of music—Alice's favourite dirge was to be played, and "Come Ye Disconsolate" which had been sung at Theodore's funeral, thirteen years ago, and at his father's, seven years before that, was to be sung by ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... sad harp's wild complaint, Mother of shadows! as to thee he pours The broken strain, and plaintively deplores The fall of Druid fame! Hark! murmurs faint Breathe on the wavy air! and now more loud Swells the deep dirge; accustomed to complain Of holy rites unpaid, and of the crowd Whose ceaseless steps the sacred haunts profane. O'er the wild plain the hurrying tempest flies, And, mid the storm unheard, the song of ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... gold and silver he had with him; and when they were in mid Aegean, the sailors rose against him. As I was swimming alongside, I heard all that went on. 'Since your minds are made up,' says Arion, 'at least let me get my mantle on, and sing my own dirge; and then I will throw myself into the sea of my own accord.'—The sailors agreed. He threw his minstrel's cloak about him, and sang a most sweet melody; and then he let himself drop into the water, never doubting but that ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... hath befallen, the night and the blight of your sin Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome therein; And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are wet, And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the gateway are met, Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her lips, And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... matter of his own music were not very definite. In 1903, when he had finished all that he was to write, he expressed a preference for the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite above anything that he had composed. "Of all my music," he confessed at this time, "the 'Dirge' in the 'Indian' suite pleases me most. It affects me deeply and did when I was writing it. In it an Indian woman laments the death of her son; but to me, as ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... dismissed the work as it bordered on fatigue. My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet! None of the rhymes of those days are in print, except "Winter, a Dirge," the eldest of my printed pieces; "The Death of Poor Maillie," "John Barleycorn," and Songs First, Second, and Third. Song Second was the ebullition of that passion which ended the forementioned ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... too dear! My words are few, And shortly none will hear my failing voice, But the same language with more full appeal Shall hail thee. Many are the sons of song Whom thou hast heard upon thy native plains, Worthy to sing of thee; the hour is come; Take we our seats and let the dirge begin. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... should like to stick his fingers in his ears, but he dared not,—as if he should like to rush down the stairs, but he could not. For the old man fixed him with his eyes, and, keeping his head turned towards his prisoner, began to march up and down the broken stone floor, and blew so wild a dirge that in a few moments it ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... rerum natura that the QUEEN'S Most Excellent Majesty, being constitutionally partial to poetry, should desire to have constant private supply from respectable tip-top genius, to be kept snug on Royal premises and ready at momentary notice to oblige with song or dirge, according as High Jinks or Dolorousness are the ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... through a wood on a rough winter day, and hear the storm howling among the leafless trees, exalted the poet's thoughts. "In such a season," he said, "just after a train of misfortunes, I composed Winter, a Dirge."] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... bounded o'er each scene Where cisterns had so lately been: Away in frantic haste he sprung, And sought to cool his burning tongue. He howled, and to his famished cry The dreary echoes gave reply; And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim, Rolled back in sad ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... through the crevices between the shingles, and the cracks in the walls, and behold the stars gleaming from the unfathomable spaces. He wondered how far they were away. He listened to the wind chanting a solemn dirge, filling his soul with longings for he knew not what. He thought over his grandfather's stories, and the words he had spoken about courage, truth, and honor, till a shingle clattering in the wind took up the refrain, and seemed to say, Truth and honor,—truth ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... setting sun had now departed. The last tones of the dirge had died away. Everything was still and deserted, as if there ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... swelling surge, And underflowing tidal-urge, Shall grind to dust these lethal spirits And chant in triumph their sounding dirge. ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... wide-open ears of Jacob his father's words sounded like a doom, giving an awful finish to the dirge-like effect of the whole announcement. His face had been gathering a wondering incredulous sorrow at the notion of Mordecai's going away: he was unable to imagine the change as anything lasting; but at the mention of "hard times for Jacob" there was no further suspense of feeling, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... swan in her watery nest Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending: 'Few words,' quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass best, Where no excuse can give the fault amending: In me more woes than words are now depending; And my laments would be drawn out too long, To tell them all with one poor ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... hoping still, a fresh outbreak of the malady occurred. He, poor soul, weary of his existence, put an end to his sufferings: he was found lifeless in the New River. Lucy Aikin quotes a Dirge found among her aunt's ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... up the trail over the mesa to the north. Their high notes of a song came back to him,—one of those wailing chants of a score of verses dear to the Mexican heart. In any other place he would have deemed it a funeral dirge with variations, but with Indian women at sunrise ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the priests, to the number of about one hundred and fifty, clad in white robes and turbans edged with turquoise blue, filed out through the portals of the building, walking with slow and measured steps, and playing a kind of dirge upon their queer-looking musical instruments, of which the most numerous consisted of long curved trumpets formed of a kind of terra-cotta. Zorah, the high priest, marched in the van bearing aloft a pole surmounted ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... the nave they buried the lad Godwin, with chant and dirge; and when the funeral was done Hereward went up toward the high altar, and bade Winter and Gwenoch come with him. And there he knelt, and vowed a vow to God and St. Guthlac and the Lady Torfrida his true love, never to leave ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... far among old Ireland's mountains I hear the breezes sing a sad dirge, low, Wild, and yet soft, with tears from many fountains And murmuring riven ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... wrought her will, And stood by Balder lying on his bier. And at his head and feet she station'd Scalds Who in their lives were famous for their song; These o'er the corpse intoned a plaintive strain, A dirge—and Nanna and her train replied. And far into the night they wail'd their dirge. But when their souls were satisfied with wail, They went, and laid them down, and Nanna went Into an upper chamber, and lay down; And Frea seal'd her tired ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... intended to bridge over the gap between the nominal shepherds and the real poets, viewed as inspired singers: for this purpose he has adopted a bold verbal expedient, but not I think an efficient one. It may be noticed that the 'uncouth swain' who is represented in Lycidas as singing the dirge (in other words, Milton himself) is spoken of as having a mantle—it is a 'mantle blue' (see the ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... 'A Hebrew Dirge, chaunted in the Great Synagogue, St. James's Place, Aldgate, on the day of the Funeral of her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte. By Hyman Hurwitz, Master of the Hebrew Academy, Highgate: with a Translation in English Verse, by S. T. Coleridge, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... although I am past my sportive days, the sound of a street organ, if any, would inflame me to a fox-trot. Even a surly tune—if the handle be quickened—comes from the box with a brisk seduction. If a dirge once got inside, it would fret until it came out ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... spontaneous combustion, and the serenade had been in honour of their ashes, it would have been impossible to surpass the unutterable despair expressed in that one chorus: 'Go where glory waits thee.' It was a requiem, a dirge, a moan, a howl, a wail, a lament, an abstract of everything that is ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... unaccountable reason—could I escape, before he touched me on the shoulder with one of his icy cold hands, and then commenced playing. Up and down the floor he paced, backwards and forwards, never taking his hateful glance off my face and ever piping the same dismal dirge. At last, unable to stand the strain of it any longer, and convinced he was a madman, bent on murdering me—for who but a lunatic would behave in such a way?—I gave way to a violent fit of hysterics, and fainted. Now ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... death of the Emperor Inkyo (A.D. 453), the Korean Court sent eighty musicians robed in black, who marched in procession to the Yamato palace, playing and singing a dirge as they went." ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... on and on he went, Till he attained the forest's verge, The garish day was well-nigh spent, Birds had already raised its dirge. Oh what a scene! How sweet and calm! It soothed at once his wounded pride, And on his spirit shed a balm That ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... had made ten of these by nightfall. The remaining fifteen were the most difficult. In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep and soft. Frequently he plunged through drifts in which for a few moments he was buried. Three times during the early part of the night Baree heard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild paean of triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was repellent—a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... were moving across the roofs or winging through the air. The sad sound of their flapping wings rose and fell like a solemn dirge. Most of them were appareled all in white, like his captors; but others had markings of red or blue or yellow slashed across ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... wistful through your soul I go. With silver-tinkling feet I penetrate Sealed chambers, and a puissant incense throw Upon the smouldering braziers, love and hate: And chaunt the grieved verses of a dirge For dying gods, remembering flutes and shawms: With perverse moods I trouble you, and urge The sense to beauty. Give me some sweet alms, Some reverie, some pang of a damasked sword, Some poignant moment yet unparalleled In my dream-broidered chronicles, some chord ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... that Miss Oliver said once, when they were coming home in the darkness and heard a dog howl, "When a dog cries like that the Angel of Death is passing." Rilla listened with a curdling fear at her heart. It was Dog Monday—she felt sure of it. Whose dirge was he howling—to whose spirit was he sending that ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and I repaired to my stateroom, very moved by this scene. All day long I was aquiver with gruesome forebodings. That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge. Was it a prayer for the dead, murmured in that ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... roses well, Mademoiselle," said she; "in three days I shall be here for a bouquet, and in less than thrice three days I promise you there shall be a dirge sung for ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... said Binnie, "and I would fain have converse with the Wuffle. That 'gilded subaltern' bit was ringing in my head like a dirge the other night when I was wearily trudging the seven kilometres from St. Denis camp because there was no one to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... I am done. Fidelio, play me a dirge To put me in good spirits. Merry music Is sure to make ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... were over; the azure of the sky had changed to a dead grey; the moon was appearing just over the trees; the water of the Gombe was like a silver belt; hoarse frogs bellowed their notes loudly by the margin of the creek; the fish-eagles uttered their dirge-like cries as they were perched high on the tallest tree; elands snorted their warning to the herds in the forest; stealthy forms of the carnivora stole through the dark woods outside of our camp. Within the high inclosure of bush and thorn, which we had raised around our camp, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and sullen roar of the ocean, as it breaks in sheets of foam on the rock-bound coast—the fitful cry of curlew, as it wings over them its solitary way—or the occasional low moaning of the wind, as, stealing through amidst the rocks, it seems to pour forth a mournful dirge for the shades of departed greatness:—when we look on a scene like this, we have before our gaze all that is known of these men of the olden time. Their blood-stained rites, their solemn mysteries, are forgotten; but their simple temples still stand imperishable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and shows ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... her eyes to the man beside her; her whole being vibrated with the menace of a dirge, and in the roar of traffic around her she divined the imprisoned thunder of the organ pealing for ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... devoted sons of the motherland, the Kundu and the Chakravarti zamindars. If only, say they, the country had a few more of such staunch patriots, the mills of Manchester would have, had to sound their own dirge to the tune of ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... stood amidst the poisonous dog-mercury, under the hanging ivy and the hart's-tongue ferns, watching the stream glitter on the edge of everlasting darkness, and listening to its death-dirge, I pictured awful shadows issuing from the infernal passage and seizing the terror-stricken ghost of the guilty horseman, of whom I had ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... indignation against crime; let the Devil color it with personal passion, and you have a mighty race of true and tender-hearted men living for centuries in such bloody feud that every note and word of their national songs is a dirge, and every rock of their hills is a gravestone. Take the love of beauty, and power of imagination, which are the source of every true achievement in art; let the Devil touch them with sensuality, and they are stronger than the sword or ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... the mysterious solemnity which ever broods over the ocean, Felix slowly repeated that dirge of Tennyson's, "Break, break, break!" and when he commenced the last verse, Edna's voice, low and ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Before the door a circle was formed by about twenty women, all in their best clothes, sitting on the ground, and swaying their bodies to and fro, while they sung in chorus the wild dirge already mentioned, the words of which I could not make out; in the centre of the circle sat four men playing on gumbies, or the long drum formerly described, while a fifth stood behind them, with a conch—shell, which he kept sounding at intervals. Other three ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... we change at once the moral and artistic atmosphere. The lyrical element, except for one most lovely dirge, is absent. Imagery and description are alike sternly excluded. Instead of soaring to the empyrean, our feet are firmly planted on the earth. In exchange for radiant visions of future perfection, we are brought into the sphere of dreadful passions—all ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
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