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More "Lisp" Quotes from Famous Books



... The hallowed seat with listening ear; And gentle words that mother would give, To fit me to die, and teach me to live. She told me that shame would never betide, With truth for my creed and God for my guide; She taught me to lisp my earliest prayer, As I ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools

... delight. At first he had visited Ashwood as a matter of duty; but, as time passed on those visits became his dearest pleasures. The child began to know him, her lovely little face to brighten for him; she had no fear of him, but would sit on his knee and lisp her pretty stories and sing her pretty songs until he ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... the man is come when the crowds lisp his name, and the gold fills his hand, and the women's honeyed adulations buzz like golden bees about his path; but how often is the greatness of the artist gone, and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... wisp Of day's distraction thine enchantment mar; Thy soft spell lisp And lure the sweetness down of each blue star. Then let that low moan be A while more easeful, trembling remote and strange, far oversea; So shall the easeless heart of love rest then, or only sigh, ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman

... man hath been set upon thee by Athena. Foolish one, he knoweth not in his heart that no man liveth long who fighteth with the gods; no children lisp 'father' at his knees when he returneth from war and dread conflict. Therefore, albeit he is so mighty, let him take heed lest a better than thou meet him, for one day his prudent wife shall wail in her sleep awaking all her house, bereft ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... seen by comparing his portrait with that of his mother. His expression was placid, benign, but very far from inert; for his half-closed eyes twinkled with quiet mirth. His voice was soft and harmonious, with just a trace of a lisp, or rather of that peculiar intonation which is commonly described as "short-tongued." His bearing was the very perfection of courteous ease, equally remote from stiffness and from familiarity. His manners it would be impertinent ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... old melody of youth and home! Again we are around the old hearthstone. Again do we kneel at mother's knee to lisp the evening prayer. Again she takes us in her arms, and sings to her tired child the soft, low lullaby of childhood's happy days.—Oh, Music, Music! Art Divine! Thou dost move and stir the heart as nothing else can do! Yet never canst thy sweet potency be better used than ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh

... Bagstock, friends of Mrs Skewton, with the same bright bloom on their complexion, and very precious necklaces on very withered necks. Among these, a young lady of sixty-five, remarkably coolly dressed as to her back and shoulders, who spoke with an engaging lisp, and whose eyelids wouldn't keep up well, without a great deal of trouble on her part, and whose manners had that indefinable charm which so frequently attaches to the giddiness of youth. As the greater part of Mr Dombey's list were disposed to be taciturn, and the greater ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... o' the night, And he shuffles the shadows about As he gathers the stars in a nest of delight And sets there and hatches them out: The Zhederrill peers from his watery mine In scorn with the Will-o'-the-wisp, As he twinkles his eyes in a whisper of shine That ends in a luminous lisp. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... daughters, who were spoken of, not by their names, but as the eldest, the middle, and the youngest; they all had ugly, sharp chins, and they were short-sighted, high-shouldered, dressed in the same style as their mother, had an unpleasant lisp, and yet they always took part in every play and were always doing something for charity—acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and never smiled, and even in burlesque operettas they acted without gaiety ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... is sweet to know there is an eye will mark Our coming, and look brighter when we come;[u] 'T is sweet to be awakened by the lark, Or lulled by falling waters; sweet the hum Of bees, the voice of girls, the song of birds, The lisp of children, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... a wall; Answer ye rather to my call, Strong poets of a more unconscious day, When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why, Too much for softer arts forgotten since That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince, 70 And drown in music the heart's bitter cry! Lead me some steps in your directer way, Teach me those words that strike a solid root Within the ears of men; Ye chiefly, virile both to think and feel, Deep-chested Chapman and firm-footed Ben, For he was masculine ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... youth as she stood with one hand grasping the collar of her gorgeous mandarin coat. But Claire was more interested in the turquoise pendants than in her aunt. She had never seen the jewels before, but she had heard about them almost from the time she was able to lisp. ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... one tributary song The simple Muse, admiring, fain would bring; She longs to lisp thee to the listening throng, And with thy name to bid the woodlands ring. Fain would she blazon all thy virtues forth, Thy warm philanthropy, thy justice mild, Would say how thou didst foster kindred worth, And to thy bosom snatch'd Misfortune's child: Firm she would paint thee, with becoming ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... have not the means to feel and recognise them: and of such natural inclinations the body will retain a certain bent, without our knowledge or consent. It was an affectation conformable with his beauty that made Alexander carry his head on one side, and caused Alcibiades to lisp; Julius Caesar scratched his head with one finger, which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome thoughts; and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a sign of a man given to scoffing; such motions as these may imperceptibly ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... among the first that vibrate on the ear of man; it is reiterated to him incessantly; he is taught to lisp it with respect; to listen to it with fear; to bend the knee when it is reverberated: by dint of repetition, by listening to the fables of antiquity, by hearing it pronounced by all ranks and persuasions, he seriously believes all men bring the idea with them into the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... river's bank he'd stand and drink in every word that flowed from the mouth of that great divine. No Negro woman or man could lisp the name of "Brother Banks" with sweeter accent than George Howe, and no one could sing his praises more earnestly. Who can forget those early days of revivals and religious enthusiasm in Wilmington, and the three great divines who filled the three great pulpits from which the ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton

... emblematic of the straight road which the child must follow to win the favor of its gods. Thus the first object which the child is made to behold at the very dawn of its existence is the sun, the great object of their worship; and long ere the little lips can lisp a prayer it is repeated for it ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson

... several years, until, possessed of a few dollars, he went to the interior of the state and bought a small place near Waxhaw. About this time, 1767, Andrew Jackson, Jr., was born, and during the next year—by the time the infant could lisp the name of his parent—the father fell sick of fever and died. Mrs. Jackson, left with three small children, in an almost wild country, where nothing but toil of a severe and arduous kind could provide a subsistence, was indeed in a most grievous ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... beings, and, as soon as we are able to read, by the tales of genii, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, enchanted caves and castles, and monsters and monstrosities of every name. The exceedingly impressible and poetical nature of children (for all children are poets and talk poetry as soon as they can lisp) appropriates and absorbs with intense relish these fanciful myths, and for years they believe more firmly in their truth than in the realities of the actual world. And I more than suspect that this child-credulity rather slumbers in the grown man, smothered beneath superimposed skepticisms ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... few peccadilloes Alluded to), ere he lept into the billows Possess'd irreproachable morals, began To feel rather queer, as a modest young man; When forth stepp'd a dame, whom he recognized soon As the one he had seen by the light of the moon, And lisp'd, while a soft smile attended each sentence, "Sir Rupert, I'm happy to make your acquaintance; My name is Lurline, And the ladies you've seen, All do me the honor to call me their Queen; I'm delighted to see you, sir, down in the Rhine here And ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... dialect varies as far from the Castilian as, say, the Venetian varies from the Tuscan, and when spoken, more. It may then be reduced almost wholly to vowel sounds, and from the lips of some speakers it is really no more consonantal than if it came from the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft c or the z, as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the s instead, as the reader will find amusingly noted in the Sevillian chapters of The Sister of San Sulpice, which are the most charming chapters of that most ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... a moon without clammy-cold shroud on it Hitherward comes, or a flower-like star! Only the hiss of the tempest is loud on it— Hiss, and the moan of a bitter sea bar. Here on this waste, and to left and to right of it, Never is lisp or the ripple of rain: Fierce is the daytime and wild is the night of it, Flame without limit and frost without wane! Trees half alive, with the sense of a curse on them, Shudder and shrink from the black heavy gale; Ghastly, ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... she and her mother led the little choir. Amy chirped like a cricket, and Jo wandered through the airs at her own sweet will, always coming out at the wrong place with a croak or a quaver that spoiled the most pensive tune. They had always done this from the time they could lisp... ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... jarrito (little earthen jar); the portly and well-looking padre prior del Carden (the Carmelite friar), sauntering up the lane at a leisurely pace, all the little ragged boys, down to the merest urchin that can hardly lisp, dragging off their large, well-holed hats, with a "Buenos das, padrecito!" (Good-morning, little father!)—the father replying with a benevolent smile, and a slight sound in his throat intended for a Benedicite; and all that might be dull in any other climate brightened and made light ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... Venetian Story./ ROSALIND. Farewell, Monsieur Traveller: Look, you lisp, and wear/ Strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love/ with your Nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance/ you are; or I will scarce think that you have swam in a GONDOLA./ AS YOU LIKE IT, Act iv. Sc. 1./ Annotation of the Commentators./ ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... thou, my Muse! guid auld Scotch Drink, Whether thro' wimplin worms thou jink, [winding, dodge] Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink, [cream] In glorious faem, [foam] Inspire me, till I lisp an' wink, To ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... said Mrs. Meyrick. "A mother hears something of a lisp in her children's talk to the very last. Their words are not just what everybody else says, though they may be spelled the same. If I were to live till my Hans got old, I should still see the boy in him. A mother's love, I often ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... sword. Joy will spring in our bosoms, and all around will smile with approbation. — The faces of the aged will shine upon us, because we spared their sons; bright-eyed females will bless us for their surviving husbands: and even the lips of the children will lisp our praises. Thus with a heaven of delighted feeling in our hearts, and the smiles both of God and man on our heads, we shall pass the evening of our days in glorious peace. And when death shall call us to that better world, we shall ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... luck," said he, "to get picked up by a ship with a medical man aboard." He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the ghost of a lisp. ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... with Alma Montague and Nellie Harden, and grew quite familiar with the names and doings of the great society dames. She even learned—at considerable pains—a "society" tone of voice with a drawl in it and a little lisp. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner

... Poet! was not bent Towards her with the Muses in thine heart; As if the ministring stars kept not apart, 50 Waiting for silver-footed messages. O Moon! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees Feel palpitations when thou lookest in: O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din The while they feel thine airy fellowship. Thou dost bless every where, with silver lip Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine, Couched in thy brightness, dream of fields divine: Innumerable mountains rise, and ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... would do to tell her father and ask him to give her a violin. At last the secret became unbearable and on creeping into her mother's bed before daylight one morning for her regular petting she ventured to lisp to her mother that she wanted a violin—"a real one, to play ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard

... came to her, as though revealed by the lightning's flash, the vision of her mother kneeling beside her, in those dim days so long ago, clasping her tiny hands within her own, and teaching her baby lips to lisp ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... lisp from the waters: the skies were not silenter. Peace Was between them; a passionless rapture of respite as soft as release. Not a sound, but a sense that possessed and pervaded with patient delight The soul and the body, clothed round with the comfort of limitless night. Night infinite, living, ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... way in 1916. He was beginning to lisp a little along that restless line of thought in 1910. And in 1940 he may be sitting in that same sanctum with walls of heavy books on two sides of him, telling somebody just how it came to be that an economic ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... been on the stage for nothing," I assured him. "I'll change my voice very little, not enough to make it difficult to keep up—throw in a lisp or something of that kind. You can trust me to do the ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston

... thee?' why is thy countenance sad? am I not better to thee than ten friends? Then has he turned my heart to him, made me feel myself close to him; he has suffered me to lean on his bosom, hang on his arm, and lisp out, Abba. At such blest moments I have thought the whole earth but one point, and from that to heaven but one step, and the time between but as one moment; and my company here sufficient to satisfy me by the way. At such blest moments I felt perfect, full, entire satisfaction with all that God ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham

... mothers don't write for their children's first copy Dante's inscription, and teach their baby lips to lisp of the world what he says of hell. It's surprising to me that that parson is not crazed at his sense of the certain perdition into which everybody except himself is hurrying. Perhaps, after all, there is something in the question of La Rochefoucauld, 'Is it not astonishing that ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong

... which all the rest joined, and with it was sealed the bond of an enduring friendship. Then baby Don was brought down from the nursery for inspection and, before he had been contentedly curled in the newcomer's arms many minutes, he was actually trying to lisp "Mileth," which Ethel proudly pronounced to be the first articulate word in his vocabulary, if those universal sounds, which doting parents have ever taken to mean Mother and Father, be excepted. He liked it so well that he insisted upon repeating it ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... eyes in a rather unpleasant manner upon Joachim as he raised them from his books. Still he was an irresistible subject for the Mimic; for, though he learnt his lessons without a mistake, and always obtained the Master's praise, he read them with so strong a lisp, and this was rendered so remarkable by his loud, deep voice, that it fairly upset what little prudence Joachim possessed; and, as he returned one day to his seat, after repeating a copy of verses in the manner I have described, ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty

... belief grows in proportion to the body, and by the time this child has arrived at the age of maturity, she is as densely ignorant of the cunning of this doctrine as she was when she first learned to repeat the Catechism with a childish lisp. ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg

... realized that she had neglected to lisp, but Uncle Bobby was too taken up with the story to be conscious of any lapse. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster

... paid me nothing, and was not over free with the meat and the drink, though I must say of him that he was a clever fellow, and perfect master of his trade, by which he made a power of money, and bating his not being able to learn Irish, and a certain Jewish lisp which he had, a great master of his tongue, of which he was very proud; so much so, that he once told me that when he had saved a certain sum of money he meant to leave off the thimbling business, and enter Parliament; ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... is flushed and graceful. Twenty-two, with a short upper lip, a straight nose, dark hair, and glowing eyes. She wears bright colours, and has a slow, musical voice, with a slight lisp. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... from, anyway? And where did she get her chameleonlike nature? Was she an innocent child, as Flaubert represents her, who could but lisp the name of the prophet when her mother told her to ask for his head? Had she taken dancing lessons from one of the women of Cadiz to learn to dance as she must have danced to excite such lust in Herod? Was she a monster, a worse than vampire as she ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still farther advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through the live-long day, BECOME HABITUATED TO A LANGUAGE OF THEIR OWN. The more ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... roll of honour in the little grey stone church grows longer and longer. In the big house on the hill, at sunrise and at sunset, the young Lady of the Manor stands at the bedside of her little son, and hears him lisp his simple prayers to God, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... by hearing that Santa Caterina de' Ricci argued with eels in the stew-pan. But the melancholy fact remains to be told that, haranguing all day long, the wilder grew the anecdotes of Palamone, the brisker was his trade. Virginia also, I freely own, acted her part superbly, with a lisp and a trick of sucking her fingers for one batch, an "O la!" for another, which brought in showers of purchasers. She presently took a fit of bargaining—by mere caprice, I believe—in which she was so keen that she beat down Fra Palamone to half ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... had no children—could she live to be shamed by them, scorned by them? And yet—how sweet it would have been to feel clinging arms about her neck; to hear little voices lisp the sweetest word on earth to a mother's ear, if only she might have been as other mothers—as other wives! Never, never once had she breathed or hinted a wish that Philip should marry her; she had a superstitious dread that once the chain was forged his love ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... nation's vows confess, And, never satisfied with seeing, bless. Swift unbespoken pomps thy steps proclaim, And stammering babes are taught to lisp ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox

... and his apostles twelve he taught, and first he followed it himself")—the summoner with his fiery face—the pardoner with his wallet "bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot"—the lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth, and "Amor vincit omnia" graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the portly person of the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of the pestilence—the busy serjeant-of-law, "that ever seemed busier than he was"—the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... his response, or else long after Father Yakov had finished the old man would be straining his ears, listening in the direction of the altar and saying nothing till his skirt was pulled. The old man had a sickly hollow voice and an asthmatic quavering lisp. . . . The complete lack of dignity and decorum was emphasized by a very small boy who seconded the sacristan and whose head was hardly visible over the railing of the choir. The boy sang in a shrill falsetto and seemed to be trying to avoid ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... subsxtofo. Link (of chain) cxenero. Link torcxo. Lint cxarpio. Lion leono. Lip lipo. Liquefy fluidigi. Liquid fluida. Liquid fluidajxo. Liquidate likvidi. Liquidation likvido. Liquidator likvidanto. Liquor likvoro. Liquorice glicirizo. Lisp lispi. List registro. List of names nomaro. List (index) tabelo. Listen auxskulti. Listless senvigla. Litany litanio. Literal lauxlitera. Literally lauxlitere. Literary literatura. Literateur literaturisto. Literature ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... said I, "as that mock literary air which it is so much the fashion to assume. 'Tis but a wearisome relief to conversation to have interludes of songs about Strephon and Sylvia, recited with a lisp by a gentleman with fringed gloves ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... cedar pickets, forming an antique enclosure, which, I judged, must have been the first site of the Mission of St. Ignace, founded by Pierre Marquette, upwards of a hundred and eighty years ago. Not a lisp of such a ruin had been heard by me previously. French and Indian tradition says nothing of it. The inference is, however, inevitable. Point St. Ignace draws its name from it. It was afterwards removed and fixed at the blunt peninsula, or headland, which the Indians ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... seventy-five, thin, bald and clean shaven but for a pair of little white whiskers. And his grey eyes, compressed mouth and square and obstinate chin lent an expression of great austerity to his long face. The grief of his life was that, being afflicted with a somewhat childish lisp, he had never been able to make his full merits known when a public prosecutor, for he esteemed himself to be a great orator. And this secret worry rendered him morose. In him appeared an incarnation of that old royalist France which sulked and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... beauty of Adalaisa asleep at the feet of naked Christ. Arnold goes pacing a dark path; there is silence among the mountains; in front of him the rustling lisp of a river, a pool.... Then it is lost and soundless. Arnold stands under the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... feeling: should they not have known When the rich rainbow on the morning cloud Reflects its radiant dies, the husbandman Beholds the ominous glory sad, and fears Impending storms? they augur'd happily, For thou didst love each wild and wonderous tale Of faery fiction, and thine infant tongue Lisp'd with delight the godlike deeds of Greece And rising Rome; therefore they deem'd forsooth That thou shouldst tread PREFERMENT'S pleasant path. Ill-judging ones! they let thy little feet Stray in the pleasant paths of POESY, And when thou shouldst ...
— Poems • Robert Southey

... small, but he knew and appreciated better the little ones with whom he could speak of everything. The grown people behaved so foolishly and asked such absurd, dull questions about things that everybody knew, that it was necessary for him also to make believe that he was foolish. He had to lisp and give nonsensical answers; and, of course, he felt like running away from them as soon as possible. But there were over him and around him and within him two entirely extraordinary persons, at once big and small, wise and foolish, at once his own ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... the thicket of hair wrinkled above high cheek bones shone two very merry blue eyes. He was indeed an outlander, but yet a Thibetan in language, habit, and attire. He spoke the Lepcha dialect with an indescribable softening of the gutturals. It was not so much a lisp ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... your throbbing forehead crowning, The West leads on a host, to cure the drouth Only when meadow, field, and you are drowning. They gladly hearken, prompt for injury,— Gladly obey, because they gladly cheat us; From Heaven they represent themselves to be, And lisp like angels, when with lies they meet us. But, let us go! 'Tis gray and dusky all: The air is cold, the vapors fall. At night, one learns his house to prize:— Why stand you thus, with such astonished eyes? What, in the twilight, can ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... morning passed slowly in a struggle between a restless body, a restless mind, and a restless soul, all tending in different directions, and at last they stood in a row before their aunt to recite their morning's task. Even little Jamie had his verse of Scripture to lisp, and was patted on the head when ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... and was duly attacked by Madame Vestri. She began by saying that it was an author's duty to be polite to actresses, and if any of them spoke with a lisp the least he could do was to write their parts ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... over his papers, he suddenly came across the last letter written to him by Iris's mother. How she doted on their only child! He recalled one night, shortly before his wife died, when the little Iris was brought into her room to kiss her and lisp her infantile prayers. She had devised a formula of her own—"God bless father! God bless mother! God ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... Her tears fell on her lover's face, but they were tears of joy; and with them were mingled tiny bursts of laughter and a thousand endearing words without sense, like the lisp of a little child. She quite forgot that the sight of her joy might sadden the heart of ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France

... remembers and babbles at last—ere the silver cord of memory is utterly and finally loosed—one language only, and that some few words merely, in the long unspoken tongue which he first learned to lisp in his earliest infancy. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... runs through all the imitative arts. Foote's mimicry was exquisitely ludicrous, but it was all caricature. He could take off only some strange peculiarity, a stammer or a lisp, a Northumbrian burr or an Irish brogue, a stoop or a shuffle. "If a man," said Johnson, "hops on one leg, Foote can hop on one leg." Garrick, on the other hand, could seize those differences of manner and pronunciation, which, though highly characteristic, are ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... and her heart is high, For the Bassarids and the Fauns are nigh, And prosperous leaves lisp busily Over flattered brakes, whence the breezes bring Vext twittering To swell the burden ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... Here was a little fortune on the cotton he had in store at any rate, and, if he really had in his grasp all the news of the rise, he might make by it a plump ten thousand dollars out of Captain Grant's "Orion." But to this end he must be sure that not a lisp of the rise would be published in the morning papers, and he must see Captain Grant and close his bargain for the "Orion's" cargo before the wires should begin to furnish additional news by the "Africa" to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... Was Edric, Egbert's cherished heir; The plaything of the homestead he, Now fondled on his grandame's knee; Or as beside the hearth he sat, Oft sporting with his snow-white cat; Now by the chaplain taught to read, And lisp his Pater and his Creed; Well nurtured at his mother's side, And by his father trained to ride, To speak the truth, to draw the bow, And all an English Thane should know, His days had been as one bright dream— As smooth as his own river's stream! Until, at ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... kind winsome wifie, A clean canty hame, An' smilin' sweet babies To lisp the dear name; Wi' plenty o' labour, An' health to endure, Make time to row round aye ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... who loves to nod and sing, With drowsy head and folded wing, Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet Hath been—a most familiar bird— Taught me my alphabet to say— To lisp my very earliest word While in the wild wood I did lie, A ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... On all the Fians waiting there In sharp suspense and half despair ... The morn was still. A skylark hung In mid-air flutt'ring, and sung A lullaby that grew more sweet Amid the stillness, in the heat And splendour of the sun: the lisp Of faint wind in the herbage crisp Went past them; and around the bare And foam-striped sand-banks gleaming fair, The faintly-panting waves were cast By the wan deep fatigued ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... whom he was presented greeted him with an affected lisp, drooping eyes and an inane remark about ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien

... all arranged, and I'm the captain. And is it agreed that we won't lisp a word to Mr. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne

... arrangements for starting in the world together, when her cheeks were ruddier than now, when wealth and fame and happiness seemed lying just before me, ready to be gathered in, and farther away still, to a gentle, blue-eyed mother—now long gone—teaching her child to lisp his ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... with a lisp, and her accent was so outlandish that the men scarce understood what she said; but this they saw, that she wanted to go and draw water from the well, and they opened the gate to let ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson

... the life-glow fled away, Swift as a gay hour's fancy; fresh and cold As winter's shadow, with his eye-lids seal'd, Like violet-lips at eve, he lies enrobed An offering to the grave! but, pure as when It wing'd from heaven, his spirit hath return'd, To lisp his hallelujahs with the choirs Of sinless babes, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various

... a pale-faced man, with a slight lisp; and the men despised him because he had not the nerve even to handle them on church parade without priming himself beforehand. I had been vaccinated by virtue of a general order, and in a while my arm became swollen and very painful. I stuck to duty ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray

... never know the world. Philosophers are ridiculous when they take to politics, and I dare say that politicians are equally ridiculous when they take to philosophy: 'Every man,' as Euripides says, 'is fondest of that in which he is best.' Philosophy is graceful in youth, like the lisp of infancy, and should be cultivated as a part of education; but when a grown-up man lisps or studies philosophy, I should like to beat him. None of those over-refined natures ever come to any good; they avoid the busy haunts of men, and skulk in corners, whispering to a few admiring ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... parents got the name, I cannot tell—was four or five years older than Rita. He was a manly boy, and when my little friend could hardly lisp his name she would run to him with the unerring instinct of childhood and nestle in his arms or cling to his helpful finger. The little fellow was so sturdy, strong, and brave, and his dark gray eyes were so steadfast and true, ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... story of the small boy who stole a pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure with discretion and zeal. And yet my heart was free; wholly untouched ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... themselves? An' y're all s' verra delicate y're lettin' a stinkin' slanderous unclean unspoken damnable hell-spawned lie go forth unchallenged t' blacken a dead man's memory? Oh, A know y'r kind well! A've heard harlots lisp an' whisp' an' half tell and damn by a lie o' th' eye! Y' are insinuatin' this woman Calamity shot her master to avenge dishonor in her early life? 'Tis a lie! 'Tis a most damnable black an' filthy lie! ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... her alone, from day to day, to be obliged to hide his affection for her, to have to kiss her coldly like the others, and more coldly than the others, not to be able to call her the child of his heart, not to hear her lisp the tender name of father, sometimes saddened him to a point of despair. On one or two occasions he had been allowed to take her to the Grange. Then he passed hours in ecstasy, holding her on his ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... (particularly rare in the days of the dandies, who were generally sour and spiteful) of a man combining brilliant wit and repartee with the most perfect good-nature. His manner, above all, was irresistible; and the slight lisp, which might have been considered as a blemish, only added piquancy ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... first hasty look round the room, he recovered at sight of me all his habitual SANG-FROID. He saluted me, and spoke coolly, though rapidly. But he panted, and I noticed in a moment that he had lost his lisp. ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... the dye, in that rough mesh, The sea has only just o'er-whispered! Live whelks, each lip's beard dripping fresh, As if they still the water's lisp heard Through foam ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... the family, and very fond of Ellen in particular. Ellen loved, when she could, to get alone with her, and hear her talk of her mother's young days; and she loved furthermore, and almost as much, to talk to Mrs. Allen of her own. Ellen could to no one else lisp a word on the subject; and without dwelling directly on those that she loved, she delighted to tell over to an interested listener the things she had done, seen, and ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner

... figure-head of a merchantman. Occasionally, it is true, physical defects have been actually conquered, individual peculiarities have been in a great measure counteracted, by rhetorical artifice, or by the arts of oratorical delivery: instance the lisp of Demosthenes, the stutter of Fox, the brogue of Burke, and the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... both ways, one of these rolypoly boys, with dimples all over him, pink and white cheeks, and baby-blue eyes. Oh, he's cute, Benny is; but the bashfullest forty-four fat that ever carried a cane, a reg'lar Mr. Shy Ann kind of a duck. He has a lisp when he talks too, and that makes him ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford

... a florid, rather pompous man, who spoke with a faint lisp, cleared his throat and read the charge against the prisoner from the sheet with which he had been supplied—the charge of having violated the recent enactment against duelling made by the Commander-in-Chief of ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... sad shadow over his home. How handsome he was then! With his deep, dark, lustrous eyes, that you saw yourself in, and the merry mouth wreathed with laughter, and the luxuriant mass of dark hair that he wore in a sort of stack over his lofty forehead! He had a slight lisp in his pleasant voice, and ran on in rapid talk for an hour, with a shy reluctance to talk about his own works, but with the most superabounding vivacity I have ever met with in any man. His two daughters, one of whom afterward married ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... father continued, gently, with his engaging lisp, "I can quite understand that you shouldn't want me to have anything to do with it. The new generation is ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... orthodoxy. It's got Red Cloud and his acorn song skinned to death. Listen! This is the song of the little East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices of her Sunday School. She's quite young. Pay particular attention to her lisp." ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... wench, I cannot court thy sprightly eyes, With the base-viol plac'd between my thighs; I cannot lisp, nor to some fiddle sing, Nor run upon a high-stretch'd minikin; I cannot whine in puling elegies, Entombing Cupid with sad obsequies; I am not fashion'd for these amorous times, To court thy beauty with lascivious rhymes; I cannot dally, caper, dance, and sing, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... audition.[105] Born in orders other than humanity and growing old in their respective acts, even thus they become human beings that are, of course, ordained to return. Coming to sinful births and becoming Chandalas or human beings that are deaf or that lisp indistinctly, they attain to higher and higher castes, one after another in proper turn, transcending the Sudra order, and other (consequences of) qualities that appertain to Darkness and that abide in it in course of migrations in this world.[106] Attachment to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... him with his cane. John fell as if he were dead. I was looking in at the window, not thinking any harm, and saw it all. I thought he had killed John, and ran away, determined not to tell. I never breathed a lisp of it before, son, and nobody ever knew of that quarrel, only your grandfather and me. I know it troubled him greatly after John died. Oh, I can see that awful paper, as John held it up to the light, as plain as this one in my ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... where the lisp or drawl, most popular in the advanced circles, is affected with unquestionable propriety: when growing girls of susceptible sixteen, or thereabout, are meekly subjected to a rigid training and instruction by their older and more sophisticated ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... round her, entwining her waist with their long arms, pressing their faces gently against hers, and kissing her with ostentatious sympathy. "What has the naughty man been doing to our darling?" they asked in a sort of playful, mincing lisp. "Has he made our dear, dear sister miserable? ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... violent gale from the southwest. But there it stood, and there it stands as yet,—though its obituary was long ago written after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,—leafing out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp "Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October as softly as if ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... voice of great power, variety, and even melody, notwithstanding his occasional prolixity and tediousness, is an orator in every sense of the word. Macaulay, short, fat, and ungraceful, with a round, thick, unmeaning face, and with rather a lisp, though he has made speeches of great merit, and of a very high style of eloquence in point of composition, has no pretensions to be put in competition with Brougham in the House of Commons. Nor is the difference and the inferiority ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... with the thickish lisp and slurring of the consonants that distinguished his utterance when he sought to appear more ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... greeted her. "Goody! What a relief! I've been worrying about what you'd be like, and just praying you wouldn't have spectacles and talk with a lisp. Miss Todd gave me to understand you were a peach, and I might think myself in luck to room with you, but you never can trust head mistresses till you see for yourself. She's told me the truth, though, after all. Yes, I like you right straight away, and I always make ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... Paradise below! Oh Britons! if the honour still you boast, No longer purchase follies at such cost! No longer let unmeaning sounds invite To visionary scenes of false delight: 50 When, shame to sense! we see the hero's rage Lisp'd on the tongue, and danced along the stage! Or hear in eunuch sounds a hero squeak, While kingdoms rise or fall upon a shake! Let them at home to slavery's painted train, 55 With siren art, repeat the pleasing strain: While we, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... thy grey Muse grew up with elder times, And our deceased Grandsires lisp'd thy rhymes, Yet we can ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various

... to the opinion that it must have many enemies. The valves are frail and brittle, and only when they gape are they revealed, and the gape is self consciously polite. The sponge embraces the slender mollusc so maternally that rude yawning is forbidden. It may lisp only and in smooth phrases, such as "prunes" and "prisms"; and, moreover, the host further insures it against molestation by the diffusion of an exceptionally powerful odour, which, though to my sense of smell resembles phosphorus, is, I am informed on indubitable authority, derivable ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... these reasons, continued my father, that the governor I make choice of shall neither (Vid. Pellegrina.) lisp, or squint, or wink, or talk loud, or look fierce, or foolish;—or bite his lips, or grind his teeth, or speak through his nose, or pick it, or blow it with his fingers.—He shall neither walk fast,—or slow, or fold his arms,—for ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... that ditty or did I? Upon my word, I can hardly tell. I am being hypnotised by Bayly. I lisp in numbers, and the numbers come like mad. I can hardly ask for a light without abounding in his artless vein. Easy, easy it seems; and yet it was Bayly after all, not you nor I, who wrote ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... normal, healthy boy. Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to record; he did not lisp in periods. Genius was not written upon his brow, nor tied upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale fervor of precocity, or the shyness of premature conceit. He was absorbed in childish things, loved play, shirked his studies, dreamed of a life on the ocean wave, and regarded ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... Grant me pardon for my thoughts: And for my strange petition I will make Amends hereafter by some gaudy-day, When your fair child shall wear your costly gift Beside your own warm hearth, with, on her knees, Who knows? another gift of the high God, Which, maybe, shall have learned to lisp you thanks.' ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... along the line in generation after generation and appears to be an ineradicable evil. It spreads, too, as specks in a garnered fruit. We are startled by seeing it in children by the time they can lisp a lie, and we note in them, with a sickening at heart, the father's or grandfather's tendency to secretiveness or deceit, or the mother's penchant for false excuses. We can scarcely bequeath a greater sorrow to our offspring than to curse them before their ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... to say, with his inimitable lisp—"no, thuh, you can't keep a good man down. 'Tain't no use a-talkin', you jeth can't. It don't do me no harm to go back to rubbin' now an' then. It jeth nachully keepth me on good termth with ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... its locks are crisp; Your humble servant's hair is crisper, It is not that its accents lisp; I, too, affect a stammered whisper: Nor that a gorgeous bow it wears And struts with particoloured bib on; I like these macaronic airs; I'm very ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various

... wont to say, with his inimitable lisp—"no, thuh, you can't keep a good man down. 'Tain't no use a-talkin', you jeth can't. It don't do me no harm to go back to rubbin' now an' then. It jeth nachully keepth me on good termth with ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... must follow to win the favor of its gods. Thus the first object which the child is made to behold at the very dawn of its existence is the sun, the great object of their worship; and long ere the little lips can lisp a prayer it is repeated ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson

... found in their only son the vocation of their later life. He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another only son, and though the comparison may ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... court whom he thought worthy of his attention: Miss Boynton, however, thought him worthy of hers. Her, person was slender and delicate, to which a good complexion and large motionless eyes gave at a distance an appearance of beauty, that vanished upon nearer inspection: she affected to lisp, to languish, and to have two or three fainting-fits a day. The first time that Talbot cast his eyes upon her she was seized with one of these fits: he was told that she swooned away upon his account: he believed it, was eager to afford her assistance; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... giving, with a forced laugh, the lisp with which that word had been given on a now ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... hear of his ever having destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so. His first recorded piece of mischief was putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother's into the fire; but the motive, which he was just old enough to lisp out, was also his excuse: 'A pitty baze [pretty blaze], mamma.' Imagination soon came to his rescue. It has often been told how he extemporized verse aloud while walking round and round the dining-room table ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... "Come with me, and," as he dragged McNeil to the door and paused there, "if you dare lisp a word of what you've overheard, I'll fire you ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne

... to pass none could tell, but we all thought that the cot must have been fastened to a board, which became detached from the cot at the very moment when the sea threw it on the land. The babe was just able to lisp her name—'Angela,' which corresponded with the name embroidered on her clothing. This is all we know about her; and I greatly fear that those to whom she belonged perished in the storm. Even the wreckage that was washed ashore furnished no clew; it was part of two ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall

... genteelly dressed, after the English and French modes, and have generally pretty faces, but they are the most determined minaudieres in the whole world. They would think it a mortal sin against good-breeding, if they either spoke or moved in a natural manner. They all affect a little soft lisp, and a pretty pitty-pat step; which female frailties ought, however, to be forgiven them, in favour of their civility and good nature to strangers, which I have a great deal ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... can I, like that fluent sweet-tongu'd Greek, Who lisp'd at first, in future times speak plain By Art he gladly found what he did seek A full requital of his, striving pain Art can do much, but this maxima's most sure A weak or wounded brain admits ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... olive-wreath, the ivied wand, "The sword in myrtles drest," Each legend of the shadowy strand Now wakes a vision blest; As little children lisp, and tell of Heaven, So thoughts beyond their thought to those high ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble

... Save as dumb fellow-prisoners through a wall; Answer ye rather to my call, Strong poets of a more unconscious day, When Nature spake nor sought nice reasons why, Too much for softer arts forgotten since That teach our forthright tongue to lisp and mince, 70 And drown in music the heart's bitter cry! Lead me some steps in your directer way, Teach me those words that strike a solid root Within the ears of men; Ye chiefly, virile both to think and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... of which, in beautiful language and happy illustrations, he brought to the aid of a logical power, which he wielded to a very great extent. Always ready and prompt, his conceptions seemed to me almost intuitive. His voice was fine, softened, and, I think, improved, by a slight lisp, which an attentive observer could discern. The great theatres of eloquence and public speaking in the United States are the legislative hall, the forum, and the stump, without adverting to the pulpit. I have known some of my contemporaries eminently successful ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... fair-haired, blue-eyed, his cheek as smooth as a girl's. His trim little figure, clad in picturesque buckskin, suggested a pretty actor in a Wild West play. And yet this boy, Jack Stillwell, was a scout of the uttermost daring and shrewdness. He always made me think of Bud Anderson. I even missed Bud's lisp when he spoke. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... the blazing hearth shall burn Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... pants that he could not sit down in—dressed like a grasshopper. This human cricket came up to the clerk's desk just as I entered, adjusted his unseeing eye-glass, and spake in this wise to the clerk. You see, he thought it was "Hinglish, you know," to lisp. "Thir, will you have the kindness to supply me with thome papah and enwelophs!" The hotel clerk measured that man quick, and he pulled the envelopes and paper out of a drawer, threw them across the counter toward the young man, and then turned away to his books. You should have seen ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell

... afternoon, see her fresh fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. "I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under the apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down." (It was that started the curate upon ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... sickly mien, Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen, Practis'd to lisp, and hang the head aside. Faints into airs, and languishes with pride, On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe, 35 Wrapt in a gown, for sickness, and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... drinking three elacos (halfpence) worth of pulque from a jarrito (little earthen jar); the portly and well-looking padre prior del Carden (the Carmelite friar), sauntering up the lane at a leisurely pace, all the little ragged boys, down to the merest urchin that can hardly lisp, dragging off their large, well-holed hats, with a "Buenos das, padrecito!" (Good-morning, little father!)—the father replying with a benevolent smile, and a slight sound in his throat intended for a Benedicite; and all that might be dull in any other climate ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... not been quite sure before he spoke, but his lisp, though slight, betrayed the Jew. His features were coarse, almost brutal; but the restless eyes were so brilliant, the whole face so suggestive of power and character, that, taking him as a whole, the feeling he inspired was admiration, tempered by fear. His tone was one ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome

... within the sphere of her observation, her little tongue was as active as her hands. She learned to talk very early, and so speedy was her improvement in the art of prattling, that, before she was three years old, she could lisp out a tale in very intelligible language. Her parents were so unwise as to encourage her in this mischievous kind of ingenuity, not only from the pleasure they took in hearing how fast she learned to speak, but because they considered it as an infallible token that she would, in time, prove an excellent ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous

... hand in his. The gardens seemed deserted. From the palace of the Accademia came not a sound, not a voice. Clear through the silence, they heard the lisp of the fountain in the middle of the esplanade; the avenues stretched away towards the Pincio, straight and rigid as if enclosed between two walls of bronze, upon which the gilding of the sunset still lingered; ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... bread crumbs to the scarlet fish, laughing to himself in an ugly way. "I wish to punish you? Why, Alixe, only look at him!—Look at his gold wristlets; listen to his simper, his lisp. Little girl—oh, little girl, what have you done to yourself?—for you have done nothing to me, child, that can match it ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... old-fashioned, non-ritualistic, semi-Gothic, and many-galleried old village church, of which so few remain now in England, situated close to our cottage, and where our widowed mother had, in our childhood, taught us to lisp our first prayers to heaven, our dead father resting in the ivy-grown and flower-adorned graveyard adjoining. The nuptial knot was tied by Parson Goldwire, as everybody called him in the neighbourhood, assisted by Matthew Jacon, the equally elderly parish clerk, without ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson

... no more than was necessary till bedtime, but meditated on new colors and sounds and lights and music and things as far as he understood them; the deep-mouthed agony of Mr. Pepper mingling with the little girl's lisp. That night he made a new tale, from which he shamelessly removed the Rapunzel-Rapunzel-let-down-your-hair princess, gold crown, Grimm edition, and all, and put a new Annieanlouise in her place. So it was perfectly right and natural that when he came to the brushwood-pile he should ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... Muse grew up with elder times, And our deceased Grandsires lisp'd thy rhymes, Yet ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various

... which fell when Lawrence stood erect, but rose to a shrill overtone when he bent his head: sometimes one would have thought the river was going down in spate, and then the volume of sound dwindled to a mere thread, a lisp in the air. Lawrence was observing these phenomena with a mind vacant of thought when he heard footsteps brushing through the grass by the field path from the village. Val had ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... the other, balancing the letter in a careless grip between thumb and finger. 'Nobody asks you to stop to hear yourself described. You were a cad from your cradle; you were a liar as soon as you could learn to lisp, and a sponge from the happy hour when you found the first fool to lend you half a crown. You needn't wait, George, but so long as you are here I will do my best to tell you what you are. You are a fruitful theme, and I could be fluent for a week ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... myself. Ah, well, I learn To love and loathe the bonds that hold me fast, Your captive and your conquerer in turn; Am I not shamed to match my charms with those Of fair boy-beauties? gentled for your love To match the freshness of the morning rose, And lisp in murmurs like ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... about As he gathers the stars in a nest of delight And sets there and hatches them out: The Zhederrill peers from his watery mine In scorn with the Will-o'-the-wisp, As he twinkles his eyes in a whisper of shine That ends in a luminous lisp. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... audience will not pay much attention to them, the playlet writer must give peculiar individuality to every word spoken by the chief characters. By this I do not mean that, merely to show that a character is different, a hero or heroine should be made to talk with a lisp or to use some catch-word—though this is sometimes done with admirable effect. What I mean is that the words given to the chief characters must possess an individuality rising from their inner differences; ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... apostles twelve he taught, and first he followed it himself")—the summoner with his fiery face—the pardoner with his wallet "bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot"—the lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth, and "Amor vincit omnia" graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the portly person of the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of the pestilence—the busy serjeant-of-law, ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... had not so much as dreamt of poetry: indeed I scarce knew it by name; and, whatever may be said of the force of nature, I certainly never "lisp'd in numbers." I recollect the occasion of my first attempt: it is, like all the rest of my non-adventures, of so unimportant a nature, that I should blush to call the attention of the idlest reader to it, but for the reason alleged in the introductory ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various

... And turmoil of the world, retreats at length, With cares that move, not agitate the heart, To the same dwelling where his father dwelt; 5 And haply views his tottering little ones Embrace those agd knees and climb that lap, On which first kneeling his own infancy Lisp'd its brief prayer. Such, O my earliest Friend! Thy lot, and such thy brothers too enjoy. 10 At distance did ye climb Life's upland road, Yet cheer'd and cheering: now fraternal love Hath drawn you to one centre. Be ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... arms—not an easy performance for small muscles—and with a portentous frown, which puckered up my mouth even more than my eyebrows, receive from him certain awfully unintelligible passages from "Macbeth;" replying to them, with a lisp that must have greatly heightened the tragic effect of this terrible dialogue, "My handth are of oo tolor" (My hands are of your color). Years—how many!—after this first lesson in declamation, dear Charles Young was acting Macbeth for the last time in London, and I was his "wicked wife;" ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... she had no children—could she live to be shamed by them, scorned by them? And yet—how sweet it would have been to feel clinging arms about her neck; to hear little voices lisp the sweetest word on earth to a mother's ear, if only she might have been as other mothers—as other wives! Never, never once had she breathed or hinted a wish that Philip should marry her; she had a superstitious ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... for travel was at such a height that those who were unable to accomplish distant journeys, but had only crossed over into France and Italy, gave themselves great airs on their return. "Farewell, monsieur traveler," says Shakespeare; "look, you lisp, and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola." The Londoners dearly loved gossip, and indulged in exaggeration of speech and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... will spring in our bosoms, and all around will smile with approbation. — The faces of the aged will shine upon us, because we spared their sons; bright-eyed females will bless us for their surviving husbands: and even the lips of the children will lisp our praises. Thus with a heaven of delighted feeling in our hearts, and the smiles both of God and man on our heads, we shall pass the evening of our days in glorious peace. And when death shall call us to that better world, we shall obey without reluctance. Conscious of neither dread nor hate ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... the word 'prank,' just like he'd never had one single advantage of foreign travel. 'He does indeed—one of those Hammersmith twin louts was with him—the speckled devil with the lisp, I gather—and praise God his bones, at least, are broke in ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... if all dinners were as wearisome as this. Rollins finally followed Trennahan's example and devoted himself to Caro Folsom, a yellow-haired girl with babyish green eyes, a lisp, and an astute brain. On Magdalena's left was a blond and babbling youth named Ellis, who made no secret of the fact that he was afraid of his intellectual neighbour; he stammered and blushed every time she spoke ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... tragedy, which decided the point; and Mr Revel, who knows all the actors, persuaded Mr Y—- (you know whom I mean, the great tragic actor) to come here, and give his opinion of her recitation. Mr Y—- was excessively polite; declared that she was a young lady of great talent; but that a slight lisp, which she has, unfitted her most decidedly for tragedy. Of course it was abandoned for comedy, which she studied some time; and when we considered her competent, Mr Revel had interest enough to induce the great Mr M—- ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... little sailors on life's deep sea Will be the salts of this chemistry, And the lisp of the infantile A, B, C Be ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... which Pope received pleased him much. But he took it only as his due, and his great ambition was to make people believe that he had been a wonderfully clever child, and that he had begun to write when he was very young. He says of himself with something of pompousness, "I lisp'd in numbers, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... Muse! guid auld Scotch drink; Whether thro' wimplin' worms thou jink, Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink, In glorious faem, Inspire me, till I lisp an' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... no being in the world that he reverenced as he had reverenced this aged lady. In his childhood she had taught him to lisp the measures of psalm and paraphrase; in his youth she had advised him with shrewdest wisdom; in his ministerial life she had been to him a friend, always holding before him a greater spiritual height to be attained, ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall

... or the left we made out faint shadow-pictures of wooded islands that endured but a moment and then deliberately faded into whiteness. They formed on the view exactly as an image develops on a photographic plate. Sometimes a faint lisp-lisp-lisp of tiny waves against a shore nearer than it seemed cautioned us anew not to break the silence. Otherwise we were alone, intruders, suffered in the presence of a brooding nature only as long ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... Cheops was not a perfect monarch? Oh, you railer at royalty and slanderer of all that is noble and good! When this book is concluded, I shall change the jaundiced livery which my books have worn since I began to lisp in numbers, have rose-coloured coats for them with cherubs on the cover, and all the characters ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... starting in the world together, when her cheeks were ruddier than now, when wealth and fame and happiness seemed lying just before me, ready to be gathered in, and farther away still, to a gentle, blue-eyed mother—now long gone—teaching her child to lisp his first ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... like a grasshopper! Well, this human cricket came up to the clerk's desk just as I came in. He adjusted his unseeing eye-glass in this wise and lisped to the clerk, because it's "Hinglish, you know," to lisp: "Thir, thir, will you have the kindness to fuhnish me with thome papah and thome envelopehs!" The clerk measured that man quick, and he pulled out a drawer and took some envelopes and paper and cast them across the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... little fortune on the cotton he had in store at any rate, and, if he really had in his grasp all the news of the rise, he might make by it a plump ten thousand dollars out of Captain Grant's "Orion." But to this end he must be sure that not a lisp of the rise would be published in the morning papers, and he must see Captain Grant and close his bargain for the "Orion's" cargo before the wires should begin to furnish additional news by the "Africa" to the evening papers. They would not, after obtaining such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... in the air in good season that day, and knew that they must depend on a thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnacled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawse-holes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuckle of sheaves and lisp of running rigging. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... his knife and fork Levin observed a ring, with a pure white diamond in it, flash upon the Captain's hand. He was a blue-eyed man, with a blush and a lisp at once, as of one shy, but at times he would look straight and bold at some one of the group, and then he seemed to lose his delicacy and become coarse and cold. One such look he gave at Hulda, who bowed her eyes before it, and looked at him but ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... that he who holds Rimini to be the first poem, should believe the Examiner to be the first politician of the day. We admire consistency, even in folly. Hear how their bantling has already learned to lisp sedition. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... She spoke in a low, eager voice, with a curious lisp in her utterance. "But for God's sake do what I ask you. Go back and never set foot upon ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle

... art. As a "livelier iris changes on the burnished dove," and the fancy of the young man turns lightly to thoughts of his pretty cousin, so the same renewing spirit touches the "silent singers," and they are no longer dumb; faintly they lisp the first syllables of the marvelous tale. Witness the clear sweet whistle of the gray-crested titmouse,—the soft, nasal piping of the nuthatch,—the amorous, vivacious warble of the bluebird,—the long, rich note of the meadowlark,—the whistle of the quail,—the drumming ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... surprise. Then they passed into a second room, and Peggy was instantly aware that something unusual was in the air, for every one seemed flocking together in one corner and listening in charmed silence to the sound of one flute-like voice. Peggy had hardly time to catch the sound of a familiar lisp before there came a quick exclamation of surprise, and a radiant vision, all pink and white and glitter of diamonds, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... who was a small stout man, with a black cap of dubious cut, protested vehemently against such materialistic measures. Let them put their trust in Cultur! To talk Hebrew—therein lay Israel's real salvation. Let little children once again lisp in the language of Isaiah ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... to have lost her own teeth some years ago, owing to a country dentist who did not know his business. And when excited she has a way of losing her hold, as one may say, on her upper set. She then speaks in a thick tone, with a lisp. ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... pinafores. They were the schoolmates of my childhood, and many of them must have come out of their graves to run by my side that morning in Rydal. I had not thought of them for years. Little Emily R—— read from her book with a chirping lisp:— ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... the point. It was impossible to see more than a yard or two ahead, but the same dense obscurity would prevent any further range of vision from the other boat, and, if it was still at its work, the sound of its oars or of voices, Michael reflected, might guide him to it. From the lisp of little wavelets lapping on the shore below the woods, he knew he was quite close in to the bank, and close also to the place where the invisible boat had been ten minutes before. Then, in the bewildering, unlocalised manner ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... of thy declining years; No more her smile brings joy to thee, When tempest toss'd on life's rough sea. Fond mother, where's the rosy child Which once upon thy bosom smiled?— In her thou daily didst rejoice,— She caught her language from thy voice; When she had learned to lisp thy name, New love with those sweet accents came. Soon did this bud of promise bloom, But oh, it blossomed for the tomb!— Each art, which thy fond care has tried, The fell destroyer's power defied. And brothers, ye, too, ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower

... shape it into verse, extempore, too, upon occasion; and many were the jokes that rebounded from his theme, whether in hall or kitchen. It was pleasant to watch his little grey eye, and the twinkling lashes, as they rose and fell, varying the expression of his lips. A slight lisp gave an air of simplicity to his ditties, which never failed to charm his auditors. He could throw the simplest expression over his features, which made the keen edge of his rebukes infinitely more cutting and effective. But the prevailing tone of feeling in him was sad ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... mother, sharply. She had a heavy voice and a slight lisp, which seemed to make it more impressive and more distinctively her ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... have myths been as frankly transparent. To none other, save only their cousins the Persians, have fancies more luminous occurred. The Persians so polished their dreams that they entranced the world that was. Poets can do no more. The Hindus too were poets. They were children as well. Their first lisp, the first recorded stammer of Indo-European speech, is audible still in the Rig-Veda, a bundle of hymns tied together, four thousand years ago, for the greater glory of Fire. The worship of the latter led to that of the Sun and ignited the antique altars. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... with a charming affectation of a little lisp. 'I'm so glad I've caught you. I thought I should. What a ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett

... heart that you may have been visited by the new spirit of infidelity that is abroad to-day; If it is so, I pray for you. Remember, dear boy, how in your childhood, when your father was living, you used to lisp your prayers at my knee, and how happy we all were in those days. Good-bye, till we meet then—I embrace you warmly, warmly, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... "it is all arranged, and I'm the captain. And is it agreed that we won't lisp a word to Mr. Watson ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne

... and down. I would sometimes remain out late to look at the moon and the lights on board of the vessels passing; and then I would turn my eyes to the stars, and repeat the lines which I had heard my mother teach little Virginia to lisp: ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... at the same time as much surprize and emotion as possible. These arts failed not of the success she intended; and, as I grew more particular to her than the rest of her admirers, she advanced, in proportion, more directly to me than to the others. She affected the low voice, whisper, lisp, sigh, start, laugh, and many other indications of passion which daily deceive thousands. When I played at whist with her, she would look earnestly at me, and at the same time lose deal or revoke; then burst into a ridiculous laugh and cry, "La! I can't imagine what I was thinking of." To ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding

... France was drunk with the blood of her children. They led the trembling sons and daughters of faith, barefoot and blindfolded, over burning plowshares, stretched them on wheel and rack, tore them limb from limb, sparing not for the groan of age, the lisp of childhood, or the piteous cry of ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... greet thee with the father's name; 'My Lud!' they lisp. Now whence can this arise? Perhaps their mother feels an honest shame And will not teach her infant to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... language: 'What aileth thee?' why is thy countenance sad? am I not better to thee than ten friends? Then has he turned my heart to him, made me feel myself close to him; he has suffered me to lean on his bosom, hang on his arm, and lisp out, Abba. At such blest moments I have thought the whole earth but one point, and from that to heaven but one step, and the time between but as one moment; and my company here sufficient to satisfy me by the way. At such blest moments I felt perfect, full, entire ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham

... Milton, and Pope, might be said "to lisp in numbers;" and have given such early proofs, not only of powers of language, but of comprehension of things, as, to more tardy minds, seems scarcely credible. But of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no doubt, since a volume of his poems was not only ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... "Steward!" according to the terms of friendship and familiarity on which you may stand with this dignitary, who, by the way, has a vote on board worth canvassing for;—I say bawl out, because, firstly, your mincing and Clarendon-like lisp of "Waiter!" would not be heard by one used to listen to the rush of the tempest and the shriek of the scourged Atlantic; also, for that your stirring call may remind some wretched skulker of a circumstance which he is miserably dozing out of remembrance, viz. that breakfast is under weigh. ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... work-girl takes the palm by winsomeness and grace. At seven o'clock every evening you may meet her in thousands in Oxford Street, Villiers Street, Tottenham Court Road, or London Bridge, where the pavements lisp in reply to the chatter of her little light feet. The factory girl of twenty years ago has, I am glad to say, entirely disappeared. She was not a success. She screwed her hair into sausages and rolled them around her ears. She wore a straw hat tilted at an absurd ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... whose inexperienced sight Life lies extended, vast and bright, To peer into the future tries. Old age through spectacles too peers, Although the destined coffin nears, Having lost all in life we prize. It matters not. Hope e'en to these With childlike lisp will lie ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... And one by one the gathered clouds depart, Till not a shadow lies upon my path. Night, with its long and sombre shadows, treads Upon the steps that morn and noon have trod; And, as our children gather round my knee, And lisp those evening prayers thy lips have taught, I cannot but believe that thou art near. But when they speak of "mother," when they say "'T is a long time since she hath left our side," And when they ask, in their soft infant tones, When they again shall meet thee,—then I feel A sudden sadness ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... you haven't," added the captain, shaking his head—a significant gesture, which seemed to relate to the future, rather than to the present. "If you lisp a syllable of it, you will need a patch on your skull.—Now," he continued, "what ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic

... notes of wind and sea, but sweeter Sounds the song whose choral wrath of raging rhyme Bids the shelving shoals keep tune with storm's imperious metre, Bids the rocks and reefs respond in rapturous chime. Sweet the lisp and lulling whisper and luxurious laughter, Soft as love or sleep, of waves whereon the sun Dreams, and dreams not of the darkling hours before nor after, Winged with cloud whose wrath shall bid love's ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... stage: where the lisp or drawl, most popular in the advanced circles, is affected with unquestionable propriety: when growing girls of susceptible sixteen, or thereabout, are meekly subjected to a rigid training and instruction by their ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... mine, made me almost cry with a tender pain. Feeling of no kind abounded in that house; this pure little drop from a pure little source was too sweet: it penetrated deep, and subdued the heart, and sent a gush to the eyes. Half an hour or an hour passed; Georgette murmured in her soft lisp that she was growing sleepy. "And you shall sleep," thought I, "malgre maman and medecin, if they are not here ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... observe what a dear good lady I had? A thousand blessings on her beloved memory! Were I to live to see my children's children, they should be all taught to lisp her praises before they could speak. My gratitude should always be renewed in their mouths; and God, and my dear father and mother, my lady, and my master that was, my best friend that is, but principally, as most due, the FIRST, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... were about a dozen people, men and ladies, young and old, sitting at tea at the end of a long table. A group of men was dimly visible behind their chairs, wrapped in a haze of cigar smoke; and in the midst of them stood a lanky young man with red whiskers, talking loudly, with a lisp, in English. Through a door beyond the group could be seen a light room with ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... I know now, Our largest heart, our loftiest mind; Yet for the curls upon his brow And for his lisp, I could not find The helping word, the cheering touch. Ah, to be just, as well as kind,— It costs so ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... were characteristically those of the House of Cavendish, as may be seen by comparing his portrait with that of his mother. His expression was placid, benign, but very far from inert; for his half-closed eyes twinkled with quiet mirth. His voice was soft and harmonious, with just a trace of a lisp, or rather of that peculiar intonation which is commonly described as "short-tongued." His bearing was the very perfection of courteous ease, equally remote from stiffness and from familiarity. His manners it ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... the cry or laugh of a child and the clear crowing of a cock, also the smaller aerial sounds of nature, the tinkling notes of tits and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter of swallows and martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain." It was sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave it to go back to the front to face the furious blasts once more. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... echo all around, And "God's first temples" with His praise resound. And look! for now again the scene is changed; A group before that rustic altar ranged, With bended knee the throne of grace implore, On infant heads its showers of love to pour; That infant tongues may lisp the praise of God, To guide their feet in paths by Jesus trod. Sure, angels hallow scenes like this below, And holy spirits at that altar bow, Like winged messengers from Heaven, to bear These offerings, and ever guard them there, That every bud of promise reared ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

... by a penetrating eye. That gentleness is ever liable to be suspected for the counterfeited, which is so excessive as to deprive people of the proper use of speech and motion, or which, as Hamlet says, makes them lisp and amble, and nick-name ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More

... lines, and to serve a particular purpose, had probably seldom, and never but by accident, composed a smooth one. Such has been the versification of the earliest poets in every country. Children lisp, at first, and stammer; but, in time, their speech becomes fluent, and, if ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... Of common life, nor render, as it rolls, Grandeur and gloom? Sufficient for thy shoals Was Carnival: Parini's depths enshrine Secrets unsuited to that opaline Surface of things which laughs along thy scrolls. There throng the people: how they come and go, Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb,—see,— On Piazza, Calle, under Portico And over Bridge! Dear king of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that did'st love Venice so, Venice, and we who ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... in orders other than humanity and growing old in their respective acts, even thus they become human beings that are, of course, ordained to return. Coming to sinful births and becoming Chandalas or human beings that are deaf or that lisp indistinctly, they attain to higher and higher castes, one after another in proper turn, transcending the Sudra order, and other (consequences of) qualities that appertain to Darkness and that abide in it in course of migrations in this world.[106] Attachment to objects ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... sir, That Lord Rhinoceros disputes With me precedence of the brutes? That Elephantis is at war With savage hosts of Rhinocer? You know these realms, not void of fame?' 'I joy to learn them now by name,' Return'd Sir Gill, 'for, first or last, No lisp of them has ever pass'd Throughout our dome so blue and vast.' Abash'd, the elephant replied, 'What came you, then, to do?—' 'Between two emmets to divide A spire of grass in two. We take of all a care; And, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... Look you lisp, and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... hour I lingered near The hallowed seat with listening ear; And gentle words that mother would give, To fit me to die and teach me to live. She told me that shame would never betide, With truth for my creed and God for my guide She taught me to lisp my earliest prayer, As I knelt beside ...
— The Old Arm-Chair • Eliza Cook

... would have been perfectly at home; self-restrained, vigilant, and effective. But on this night it was nothing above mere inarticulateness—hoarse and ineffective fury—an almost painful exhibition. Sometimes his lisp became so strong that he was scarcely able to utter the words he desired to bring out. The Prime Minister became "The Primisther," the Chief Secretary the "Cheesesecry," and all this impotence was made the more manifest by thundering ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... Her glory fill the skies, The world be free! Let all adore Thy name, And children lisp Thy fame— Let earth and heav'n ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... he suddenly came across the last letter written to him by Iris's mother. How she doted on their only child! He recalled one night, shortly before his wife died, when the little Iris was brought into her room to kiss her and lisp her infantile prayers. She had devised a formula of her own—"God bless father! God bless mother! God bless me, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... for this idle trade; No duty broke, no father disobey'd; While yet a child, ere yet a fool to fame, I lisp'd in numbers, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... answered, less cheerfully and more authoritatively than was his manner at North Aston, speaking without a lisp and with a full Cumberland accent. "It is the best thing I can do for you—all I have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... exact statements of truth? Not always. The primitive human mind could only lisp its wonderful glimpses of truth in legend and myth. And so in fable and allegory the early Israelites sought to show the power of good over evil, and thereby stimulate a desire for right conduct, based, of course, on right-thinking. And thus it ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... Him by walking straight before us. When the happy day arrives in which you set your feet upon the Path and begin your pilgrimage, the world will know nothing of it; earth no longer understands you; you no longer understand each other. Men who attain a knowledge of these things, who lisp a few syllables of the Word, often have not where to lay their head; hunted like beasts they perish on the scaffold, to the joy of assembled peoples, while Angels open to them the gates of heaven. Therefore, your destiny is a secret between ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... But there it stood, and there it stands as yet,—though its obituary was long ago written after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,—leafing out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp "Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October as softly as if it were ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Farewell, Monsieur Traveller: Look, you lisp, and wear/ Strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love/ with your Nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance/ you are; or I will scarce think that you have swam in a GONDOLA./ AS YOU LIKE IT, Act iv. Sc. 1./ Annotation of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... Stammering. — N. inarticulateness; stammering &c. v.; hesitation &c. v.; impediment in one's speech; titubancy[obs3], traulism|; whisper &c. (faint sound) 405; lisp, drawl, tardiloquence[obs3]; nasal tone, nasal accent; twang; falsetto &c. (want of voice) 581; broken voice, broken accents, broken sentences. brogue &c. 563; slip of the tongue, lapsus linouae [Lat]. V. stammer, stutter, hesitate, falter, hammer; balbutiate|, balbucinate|, haw, hum and haw, be ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the very letter. Sidney says, writing in 1578, "I think, ere it be long, like the mountebanks in Italy, we travellers shall be made sport of in comedies." Twenty years afterwards, Shakespeare makes Rosalind say in "As You Like It", "Farewell, Monsieur Traveller. Look you; lisp, and wear strange suits. Disable all the benefits of your own country. Be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... roof, and this roof itself is a sight to see. Loftily domed over with glass, it is at once a conservatory, a vinery, and tropical aviary. Room here for trees even, for miniature palms, while birds of the rarest plumage flit silently from bough to bough among the oranges, or lisp out the sweet lilts that have descended to them from sires that sang in foreign lands. Yonder a fountain plays and casts its spray over the most lovely feathery ferns. The roof is very spacious, and the conservatory ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables

... my thoughts: And for my strange petition I will make Amends hereafter by some gaudy-day, When your fair child shall wear your costly gift Beside your own warm hearth, with, on her knees, Who knows? another gift of the high God, Which, maybe, shall have learn'd to lisp ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... to say bizarre, punishment was for buzzing lips. Many of us, studying hard to get our lessons, were very likely to make sounds with our lips, and in the silence of that schoolroom the least little lisp was sure to ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... there In sharp suspense and half despair ... The morn was still. A skylark hung In mid-air flutt'ring, and sung A lullaby that grew more sweet Amid the stillness, in the heat And splendour of the sun: the lisp Of faint wind in the herbage crisp Went past them; and around the bare And foam-striped sand-banks gleaming fair, The faintly-panting waves were cast By the ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... and crisp, Shone like a wheat-field in the sun, Its swift voice deafened to a lisp, Fell, ere the war was well begun, And waned and ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland

... with a very slight lisp, but that otherwise both his language and his intonations were better than I could ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon

... house brought him forward to present him to me. She called him Monsieur de la Tourelle, and he began to speak to me in French; but though I understood him perfectly, I dared not trust myself to reply to him in that language. Then he tried German, speaking it with a kind of soft lisp that I thought charming. But, before the end of the evening, I became a little tired of the affected softness and effeminacy of his manners, and the exaggerated compliments he paid me, which had the effect of making all the company turn round and look at me. Madame ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell

... but something less than shy, With red lip wounded in love's ardent play, On whom is bent that sweet, coquettish eye? For whom that lisp that steals the heart ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... visited Ashwood as a matter of duty; but, as time passed on those visits became his dearest pleasures. The child began to know him, her lovely little face to brighten for him; she had no fear of him, but would sit on his knee and lisp her pretty stories and sing her pretty songs ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... her happiness to be surrounded from earliest infancy with none but holy influences, and to breathe from her very cradle an atmosphere of purity. The first words which she heard, the first she tried to lisp, were the sweet names of Jesus and Mary. The first bent she received was an inclination to virtue; the first and only examples she witnessed were examples of piety. Thus passed the years preceding the dawn of reason, her beautiful soul expanding under ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... as he sipped his tea with an air of peculiar nonchalance which was meant to fascinate Fanny Dawson, who, when Furlong addressed to her his first silly common-place, with his peculiar non-pronunciation of the letter R, established a lisp directly, and it was as much as her sister, Mrs. Egan, could do to keep her countenance, as Fanny went on slaughtering the S's as fast as ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover

... DIONE, nursed beneath the waves, And rock'd by Nereids in their coral caves, Charm'd the blue sisterhood with playful wiles, 50 Lisp'd her sweet tones, and tried her tender smiles. Then, on her beryl throne by Triton's borne, Bright rose the Goddess like the Star of morn; When with soft fires the milky dawn He leads, And wakes to life and love the laughing meads;— 55 With rosy fingers, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... as though he had already abandoned and lost interest in that thought, so that the concluding words were indistinct, beneath the grey beard and mustache. Also at times there was the faintest suggestion of a lisp. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... and "society" with Alma Montague and Nellie Harden, and grew quite familiar with the names and doings of the great society dames. She even learned—at considerable pains—a "society" tone of voice with a drawl in it and a little lisp. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner

... lighted up the velvety eyes in the joy of salvation. It is doubtful if he even heard half of the program of his future existence. There was something irresistible in the softness of her eyes and the fascinating lisp. He was face to face at last with a good influence. He had met, not the type of girl that men play with lightly or madly for a month or a day, but a woman, the kind rough coarse men look up to as ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... natural inclinations the body will retain a certain bent, without our knowledge or consent. It was an affectation conformable with his beauty that made Alexander carry his head on one side, and caused Alcibiades to lisp; Julius Caesar scratched his head with one finger, which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome thoughts; and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a sign of a man given to scoffing; ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... early life the home of his fathers, to sojourn in the land of the stranger, and who remembers and babbles at last—ere the silver cord of memory is utterly and finally loosed—one language only, and that some few words merely, in the long unspoken tongue which he first learned to lisp in ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... inclined to the opinion that it must have many enemies. The valves are frail and brittle, and only when they gape are they revealed, and the gape is self consciously polite. The sponge embraces the slender mollusc so maternally that rude yawning is forbidden. It may lisp only and in smooth phrases, such as "prunes" and "prisms"; and, moreover, the host further insures it against molestation by the diffusion of an exceptionally powerful odour, which, though to my sense of smell resembles phosphorus, is, I am ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... tedious ride for the young man. The woodsmen sat jammed so closely about him that he could see only the frosty stars glimmering wanly in the moonlight. When the songs and the roaring conversations were stilled for a moment, he could hear the lisp of the runners on the smooth surface and the slashing grind of ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day

... this somewhat, for it was white and always stood gaily on end, defying brush and comb. Daniel Arker, a sturdy black-haired lad, would have done fuller justice to the passage that fell to Abraham, for the Spiker boy with his gentle lisp never shone in elocution; but our reading class is a lottery, as we go from scholar to scholar down the line. The lot falling to him, Abraham pushed himself up from the bench, grasped his book fiercely with both hands, and fixed his eyes ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd

... me—"fire it right into 'em; every canto a twenty-four-pound shot; hull the blockheads, whether they will or no. And mind you, Lemsford, when your shot does the most execution, your hear the least from the foe. A killed man cannot even lisp." ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... her birth; knew her strong-hearted mother, and her gentle father, who slipped the noose of life when Claudia was a tiny thing, too young to more than lisp his name. Yet, with his last breath he blessed her, and blessed the man into whose arms he placed her, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... pathetic and terrible thing than the prejudice of love. Both you and I have suffered from it. Six years ago, ay, and before that, I felt and resented the growing difference between us. When under your spell, it seemed that I was born to lisp in numbers and devote myself to singing, that the world was good and all of it fit for singing. But away from you, even then, doubts faced me, and I knew in vague fashion that we lived in different worlds. At first in vague fashion, I say; ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... "Verney-Montreux!" and "Territey-Chillon!" as they ran alongside the carriages at these stations; I liked the pastel portraits of mademoiselle's grandmothers on the gray walls of our pretty chamber that overlooked the lake, and overheard the lightest lisp of that sometimes bellowing body of water; I liked the notion of the wild-ducks among the reeds by the Rhone, though I had no wish to kill them; I liked our little corner fireplace, where I covered a log of the grand ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells

... she bore herself with decorum. She was not often thoughtful, and was never so without cause; after remaining silent for a time, she almost always ended by turning to some one of her elders, with a question which showed that her brain was working over a new impression. She very early ceased to lisp, and already in her fourth year she spoke with perfect distinctness. She was afraid of her father; her feeling toward her mother was undefined,—she did not fear her, neither did she fondle her; but she did not fondle Agafya either, although she loved only her alone. Agafya and ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff

... his papers, he suddenly came across the last letter written to him by Iris's mother. How she doted on their only child! He recalled one night, shortly before his wife died, when the little Iris was brought into her room to kiss her and lisp her infantile prayers. She had devised a formula of her own—"God bless father! God bless mother! God bless ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... who loves to nod and sing With drowsy head and folded wing, To him a painted paroquet Had been—a most familiar bird— Taught him his alphabet to say, To lisp ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... face which, however ugly, is full of expression, and a voice of great power, variety, and even melody, notwithstanding his occasional prolixity and tediousness, is an orator in every sense of the word. Macaulay, short, fat, and ungraceful, with a round, thick, unmeaning face, and with rather a lisp, though he has made speeches of great merit, and of a very high style of eloquence in point of composition, has no pretensions to be put in competition with Brougham in the House of Commons. Nor is the difference and the inferiority ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... bothered much with trying to pronounce foreign languages," said Dick. "I just wrestle with the words the best I can in plain American. But now—I always thought it rude to mention it before—I understand why you Spaniards seem to lisp, and hiss out your last syllables like secrets. As for the ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... dissolution! How pleasing the contemplation. How inspiring to think of our noble ancestors; our holy ministers and teachers; our fathers and mothers who led us by the hand to the house of God on the Sabbath, who early taught us to lisp the ever precious name of Jesus; who are to-day singing the song of Moses and the Lamb. Let us thank God at this solemn hour, even amid blinding tears, for pious, ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles

... They are words that have healed thousands of broken hearts, fixed the hopes of the downcast on heaven, and sent the sorrowful on his way rejoicing; and they are words that will live as long as there is a Methodist family upon earth to lisp its ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... Shaftesbury, in his Characteristicks: "The British Muses, in this Dinn of Arms, may well lie abject and obscure; especially being as yet in their mere Infant-State. They have hitherto scarce arriv'd to any thing of Shapeliness or Person. They lisp as in their Cradles: and their stammering Tongues, which nothing but their Youth and Rawness can excuse, have hitherto spoken in wretched Pun and Quibble" (1711, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith

... some sin—that has given him an unenviable immortality. Mention his name, and the huge blot by which his memory is besmirched starts up before the mind in all its hideousness. Take Cain, for example. He occupies the foremost rank as regards fame; his name is one of the first that children learn to lisp; and yet what do we know about him? Very little indeed; our knowledge, in fact, is limited to a single act—an act which is the most horrible of human crimes. His name is suggestive only of violence, murder, the shedding of innocent blood—the foulest deeds that man can possibly commit. Or take ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... me! I remember it as if it was but yesterday. And then father struck him with his cane. John fell as if he were dead. I was looking in at the window, not thinking any harm, and saw it all. I thought he had killed John, and ran away, determined not to tell. I never breathed a lisp of it before, son, and nobody ever knew of that quarrel, only your grandfather and me. I know it troubled him greatly after John died. Oh, I can see that awful paper, as John held it up to the light, as plain as this one ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... warm? Like a sunbeam, like a shadow, she flitted through the corridors and galleries of the Louvre and the Palais Royal, and whenever he had sought to point her out to some one, to discover her name, lo, she was gone! Tormenting mystery! Ah, that soft lisp of hers, those enchanting caprices, those amazing extravagances of fancy, that wit which possessed the sparkle of white chambertin! He would never forget that summer night when, dressed as a boy, she had ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... simply because they are in the world and cannot help it. With the girls especially, marriage is the chief aim, and what should be the holy relation is entered upon almost in childhood. As soon as they begin to lisp they are talking of their lovers. A little wee girl came to a teacher's home, and after answering in monosyllables the common questions as to schools and Sunday-schools, there was a lull in the conversation, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various

... earthen jar); the portly and well-looking padre prior del Carden (the Carmelite friar), sauntering up the lane at a leisurely pace, all the little ragged boys, down to the merest urchin that can hardly lisp, dragging off their large, well-holed hats, with a "Buenos das, padrecito!" (Good-morning, little father!)—the father replying with a benevolent smile, and a slight sound in his throat intended for a Benedicite; and all that ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... good and pious man, An honest man by honest parents bred, And I believe that, soon as I began To lisp, he made me kneel beside my bed, And in his hearing there my prayers I said: And afterwards, by my good father taught, I read, and loved the books in which I read; For books in every neighbouring house I sought, And nothing to my mind a ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth

... is not that its locks are crisp; Your humble servant's hair is crisper, It is not that its accents lisp; I, too, affect a stammered whisper: Nor that a gorgeous bow it wears And struts with particoloured bib on; I like these macaronic airs; I'm very fond of ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various

... "society" with Alma Montague and Nellie Harden, and grew quite familiar with the names and doings of the great society dames. She even learned—at considerable pains—a "society" tone of voice with a drawl in it and a little lisp. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner

... star! For, ever, the golden gates stand open, the transit is free For the human to mix with divine; from himself to the Highest to flee. Lo on its knees by the bedside the babe:—and the song that we hear Has been heard already in Heaven! the low-lisp'd music is clear:— For, fresh from the hand of the Maker, the child still breathes the light air Of the House Angelic, the meadow where souls yet unbodied repair, Lucid with love, translucent with bliss, and know not the doom In the Marah valley of life laid up for the sons of the womb. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... we are assuming a position beyond the capacities of learners, that the course here adopted is too philosophic. Such is not the fact. Children are philosophers by nature. All their ideas are derived from things as presented to their observations. No mother learns her child to lisp the name of a thing which has no being, but she chooses objects with which it is most familiar, and which are most constantly before it; such ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch

... with a sickly mien, Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen; Practised to lisp, and hang the head aside, Faints into airs, and languishes with pride; On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe, Wrapp'd in a gown, for sickness, and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... an aureole to illuminate it and to set it off a manner that was wholly devoid of mannerisms—of those that men and women think out and exhibit to give added charm to themselves—tricks of cuteness, as lisp and baby stare; tricks of dignity, as grave brow and body always carried rigidly erect; tricks of sweetness and kindliness, as the ever ready smile and the warm handclasp. Susan, the interested in the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... Katy's baby had been anticipated quite as much as Katy herself, Aunt Betsy bringing from the woodshed chamber a cradle which nearly forty years before had rocked the deacon's only child, the little boy, who died just as he had learned to lisp his mother's name. As a momento of those days the cradle had been kept, Katy using it sometimes for her kittens and her dolls, until she grew too old for that, when it was put away beneath the eaves whence Aunt Betsy dragged it, scouring it with soap and sand, until it was white as snow. But ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... glad that she had no children—could she live to be shamed by them, scorned by them? And yet—how sweet it would have been to feel clinging arms about her neck; to hear little voices lisp the sweetest word on earth to a mother's ear, if only she might have been as other mothers—as other wives! Never, never once had she breathed or hinted a wish that Philip should marry her; she had a superstitious ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... door leads on to the roof, and this roof itself is a sight to see. Loftily domed over with glass, it is at once a conservatory, a vinery, and tropical aviary. Room here for trees even, for miniature palms, while birds of the rarest plumage flit silently from bough to bough among the oranges, or lisp out the sweet lilts that have descended to them from sires that sang in foreign lands. Yonder a fountain plays and casts its spray over the most lovely feathery ferns. The roof is very spacious, and the conservatory occupies the greater part of it, leaving ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables

... Tuscan is the very language for such a being. Its peculiar simplicity gives even to the most forcible reasoning and the most brilliant wit an infantine air, generally delightful, but to a foreign reader sometimes a little ludicrous. Heroes and statesmen seem to lisp when they use it. It becomes Nicias incomparably, and renders all his silliness infinitely more silly. We may add, that the verses with which the Mandragola is interspersed, appear to us to be the most spirited and correct of all that Machiavelli has written ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... caused him fresh cruel torments. Never to see her alone, from day to day, to be obliged to hide his affection for her, to have to kiss her coldly like the others, and more coldly than the others, not to be able to call her the child of his heart, not to hear her lisp the tender name of father, sometimes saddened him to a point of despair. On one or two occasions he had been allowed to take her to the Grange. Then he passed hours in ecstasy, holding her on his ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... nod and sing, With drowsy head and folded wing, Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet Hath been—a most familiar bird— Taught me my alphabet to say— To lisp my very earliest word While in the wild wood I did lie, A child—with a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... Occasionally, it is true, physical defects have been actually conquered, individual peculiarities have been in a great measure counteracted, by rhetorical artifice, or by the arts of oratorical delivery: instance the lisp of Demosthenes, the stutter of Fox, the brogue of Burke, and ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... in an excited lisp spoke up little Tod Smith, the youngest pupil in the school. "He broke the desk, but—say, teacher! he did it—yes, sir, Andy did the double somersault, just like a real circus actor, and landed ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness

... of most of the other Norwegian towns I had seen, girt on three sides with lofty, rocky mountains; and on the fourth side by the blue waters of the Fiord. I looked on Bergen with the liveliest interest, because its name was familiar to me when a child, and I used to lisp the word before I could walk steadily; for in those young days of waywardness my old schoolmistress, whose peaked nose and malicious heart are still a vivid truth, would threaten to give me to the fishermen at Bergen who, she said, would take and toss me into ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... cross Between us. Grant me pardon for my thoughts: And for my strange petition I will make Amends hereafter by some gaudy-day, When your fair child shall wear your costly gift Beside your own warm hearth, with, on her knees, Who knows? another gift of the high God, Which, maybe, shall have learned to lisp you thanks.' ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... beautiful as her poets insist and her painters prove. It turns everybody who goes there into a poet, at least temporarily. Babes lisp in numbers and those of the native population who don't actually write poetry, talk it—no matter what the subject is. Take the case of Sam Berger. Sam Berger—I will explain for the benefit of my women readers—was first a distinguished amateur heavyweight boxer ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin

... if so that any be Known guilty here of incivility: Let what is graceless, discompos'd, and rude, With sweetness, smoothness, softness, be endu'd. Teach it to blush, to curtsy, lisp, and show Demure, but yet full of temptation, too. Numbers ne'er tickle, or but lightly please, Unless they have some wanton carriages. This if ye do, each piece will here be good, And graceful made by ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... the same time as much surprize and emotion as possible. These arts failed not of the success she intended; and, as I grew more particular to her than the rest of her admirers, she advanced, in proportion, more directly to me than to the others. She affected the low voice, whisper, lisp, sigh, start, laugh, and many other indications of passion which daily deceive thousands. When I played at whist with her, she would look earnestly at me, and at the same time lose deal or revoke; then ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding

... metaphysical contest our arms are too unequal; you speaking in your mother tongue, which I scarcely lisp, might bring forth huge volumes, while I could hardly oppose pages; and the public, who would read neither production, might take the weight of the books for ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... anyway? And where did she get her chameleonlike nature? Was she an innocent child, as Flaubert represents her, who could but lisp the name of the prophet when her mother told her to ask for his head? Had she taken dancing lessons from one of the women of Cadiz to learn to dance as she must have danced to excite such lust in Herod? Was she ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... the woodlands, of the streams and sunny places Where I lay me in the summer to dream all the noontide o'er, Like the child of a sweet mother lapt within her fond embraces Drawing fitness from her beauty to lisp forth in poet's lore. ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... know them, but for a reason which she did not analyze she hesitated to ask him who they were. They had rather a rude manner of staring —especially the men—and the air of deriving infinite amusement from that which went on about them. One of them, a young man with a lisp who was addressed by the singular name of "Toots," she had overheard demanding as she passed: who the deuce was the tall girl with the dark hair and the colour? Wherever she went, she was aware of them. It was foolish, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... of her ladyship's acquaintance,' replied he in a lisp, evidently enjoying my perplexity, which was every ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... what was her hidden face and bowed head? — a preaching the like of which they were never to hear from mortal voices. But not a word, not a lisp, fell from one of them. Winifred had run off; the rest hardly stirred; till Mrs. Landholm rose up, and gravely kissing one and the other ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... old, sitting at tea at the end of a long table. A group of men was dimly visible behind their chairs, wrapped in a haze of cigar smoke; and in the midst of them stood a lanky young man with red whiskers, talking loudly, with a lisp, in English. Through a door beyond the group could be seen a light ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... body, a restless mind, and a restless soul, all tending in different directions, and at last they stood in a row before their aunt to recite their morning's task. Even little Jamie had his verse of Scripture to lisp, and was patted on the head when ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... ones with whom he could speak of everything. The grown people behaved so foolishly and asked such absurd, dull questions about things that everybody knew, that it was necessary for him also to make believe that he was foolish. He had to lisp and give nonsensical answers; and, of course, he felt like running away from them as soon as possible. But there were over him and around him and within him two entirely extraordinary persons, at once big ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... Coasting vessels that had run into the bay for shelter from the North wind lay with their shadows thrown shoreward on the cold smooth water, almost to the verge of the beach, where there was neither breath nor sound of wind, only the lisp ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... crowning, The West leads on a host, to cure the drouth Only when meadow, field, and you are drowning. They gladly hearken, prompt for injury,— Gladly obey, because they gladly cheat us; From Heaven they represent themselves to be, And lisp like angels, when with lies they meet us. But, let us go! 'Tis gray and dusky all: The air is cold, the vapors fall. At night, one learns his house to prize:— Why stand you thus, with such astonished eyes? What, in the twilight, can ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... gushed at by Augustus. A little woman with light hair came and sat down at the other side of me. She looks like a young, fluffy chicken, and has a lisp and an infantile voice, and wears numbers of trinkets, and her name, "Babykins," spelled in a brooch of diamonds. I should not like to be called "Babykins," and I wonder why one should want strangers to read one's ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn

... more reason to fear Aristophanes than any fool living. Oh, that he could but hear you trying to imitate the slang of Straton (See Aristophanes; Equites, 1375.) and the lisp of Alcibiades! (See Aristophanes; Vespae, 44.) You would be an inexhaustible subject. You would console him for ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... not pay much attention to them, the playlet writer must give peculiar individuality to every word spoken by the chief characters. By this I do not mean that, merely to show that a character is different, a hero or heroine should be made to talk with a lisp or to use some catch-word—though this is sometimes done with admirable effect. What I mean is that the words given to the chief characters must possess an individuality rising from their inner differences; their speech should show them as not only ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... attention which Pope received pleased him much. But he took it only as his due, and his great ambition was to make people believe that he had been a wonderfully clever child, and that he had begun to write when he was very young. He says of himself with something of pompousness, "I lisp'd in numbers, for the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... to see more than a yard or two ahead, but the same dense obscurity would prevent any further range of vision from the other boat, and, if it was still at its work, the sound of its oars or of voices, Michael reflected, might guide him to it. From the lisp of little wavelets lapping on the shore below the woods, he knew he was quite close in to the bank, and close also to the place where the invisible boat had been ten minutes before. Then, in the bewildering, unlocalised manner in which sound ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... right hand or the left we made out faint shadow-pictures of wooded islands that endured but a moment and then deliberately faded into whiteness. They formed on the view exactly as an image develops on a photographic plate. Sometimes a faint lisp-lisp-lisp of tiny waves against a shore nearer than it seemed cautioned us anew not to break the silence. Otherwise we were alone, intruders, suffered in the presence of a brooding nature only as long as ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... French modes, and have generally pretty faces, but they are the most determined minaudieres in the whole world. They would think it a mortal sin against good-breeding, if they either spoke or moved in a natural manner. They all affect a little soft lisp, and a pretty pitty-pat step; which female frailties ought, however, to be forgiven them, in favour of their civility and good nature to strangers, which I have a great deal of reason ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... end of his sentences as though he had already abandoned and lost interest in that thought, so that the concluding words were indistinct, beneath the grey beard and mustache. Also at times there was the faintest suggestion of a lisp. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... The valves are frail and brittle, and only when they gape are they revealed, and the gape is self consciously polite. The sponge embraces the slender mollusc so maternally that rude yawning is forbidden. It may lisp only and in smooth phrases, such as "prunes" and "prisms"; and, moreover, the host further insures it against molestation by the diffusion of an exceptionally powerful odour, which, though to my sense of smell resembles phosphorus, is, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... they understand not,"—and go about asking our blind guides, whether Pope was a poet or not? It will never do. Such persons, when you point out to them a fine passage in Pope, turn it off to something of the same sort in some other writer. Thus they say that the line, "I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came," is pretty, but taken from that of Ovid—Et quum conabar scribere, versus erat. They are safe in this mode of criticism: there is no danger of any one's tracing their writings ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... with its immediate surroundings that even though you know its precise location it still eludes you. Only yesterday the last finishing-touches were made upon the nest, and this morning, as I might have anticipated from the excess of lisp and twitter of the mother bird, I find the first pretty ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... business," the younger man echoed heartily. He closely resembled his father in looks, save that he was clean shaven and of a lighter build. Both father and son had the same slight lisp in speaking. "Deuced unpleasant," he repeated. "Nobody can feel that more than ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... fellow," said he with the slight lisp which he affected, "Valentine is determined to put on a new gown. So we must be patient; we shall have an ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... that way in 1916. He was beginning to lisp a little along that restless line of thought in 1910. And in 1940 he may be sitting in that same sanctum with walls of heavy books on two sides of him, telling somebody just how it came to be that an economic cyclone on the prairies once caught up all the Grits and Tories and nothing was ever heard ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... wand, "The sword in myrtles drest," Each legend of the shadowy strand Now wakes a vision blest; As little children lisp, and tell of Heaven, So thoughts beyond their thought to those ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble

... it was not constant, nor the pitch of its note, which fell when Lawrence stood erect, but rose to a shrill overtone when he bent his head: sometimes one would have thought the river was going down in spate, and then the volume of sound dwindled to a mere thread, a lisp in the air. Lawrence was observing these phenomena with a mind vacant of thought when he heard footsteps brushing through the grass by the field path from the village. Val ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... her scorpion tongue, The march of Time shall find his fame; Where Bravery's loved and Glory's sung, There children's lips shall lisp his name. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... drew at last My life, my soul, myself. Ah, well, I learn To love and loathe the bonds that hold me fast, Your captive and your conquerer in turn; Am I not shamed to match my charms with those Of fair boy-beauties? gentled for your love To match the freshness of the morning rose, And lisp in murmurs ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... conscience, for he paid me nothing, and was not over free with the meat and the drink, though I must say of him that he was a clever fellow, and perfect master of his trade, by which he made a power of money, and bating his not being able to learn Irish, and a certain Jewish lisp which he had, a great master of his tongue, of which he was very proud, so much so that he once told me that when he had saved a certain sum of money he meant to leave off the thimbling business, and enter Parliament, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... he stood on the sand-dunes that bounded the moor and looked down upon the marbled sand, blue and gold after the retreating tide. The faint lisp and curdle of the sea sang to him. A row of sea-gulls, one and then another quivering in the light, stood at the water's edge; the stiff grass that pushed its way fiercely from the sand of the dunes was white with hoar-frost, and the moon, silver now, and sharply curved, ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole

... been friends in hopes and fears In joys and griefs the same— Since first we learned in childhood's years To lisp ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson

... days, an old, old man, sitting in a wicker-chair, out upon the lawn. He leans upon his stick, and seldom raises his bent head; but for all that his eyes are on a level with the two little fairy children who come to him in all their small joys and sorrows, and who learnt to lisp his name almost as soon as they did that of their father ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell

... at the word 'prank,' just like he'd never had one single advantage of foreign travel. 'He does indeed—one of those Hammersmith twin louts was with him—the speckled devil with the lisp, I gather—and praise God his bones, at least, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... neck until he groaned, then run away, but presently come stealing back on tiptoe. I used to listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the knock, the door flung back or opened quietly—you never could tell which; and her voice, with a little lisp, 'Are you better today, Mr. Brune? What funny things you say when you're delirious! Father says you've been in heaps ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... have to work anywhere as they do here," he fairly shouted, "here where they rob the cradle for workers, where the little voices become sad and bitter 'most as soon as they can lisp, where the brightness o' childhood fades out before its time, an' where its only world is the mill, the shop, an' the fact'ry. Their tiny bones unset, they make them stand in one position all day long until you hear the children moanin' hour after hour, moanin' and no one hears, ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... you please," went on Dick hardily, with a glance at the girl, "she hurt her hands putting out a fire just now. I expect my father gave her the money for that. But she must have burnt her hands dreffully!"—Dicky had not quite outgrown his infantile lisp—"and if she's come for stuff to put on them, please I ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... me, sister dear, parting word and parting tear Never pass'd between us;—let me bear the blame, Are you living, girl, or dead? bitter tears since then I've shed For the lips that lisp'd ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... dregs in the dead o' the night, And he shuffles the shadows about As he gathers the stars in a nest of delight And sets there and hatches them out: The Zhederrill peers from his watery mine In scorn with the Will-o'-the-wisp, As he twinkles his eyes in a whisper of shine That ends in a luminous lisp. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... again; Thine own bright smile illuminates my way, And one by one the gathered clouds depart, Till not a shadow lies upon my path. Night, with its long and sombre shadows, treads Upon the steps that morn and noon have trod; And, as our children gather round my knee, And lisp those evening prayers thy lips have taught, I cannot but believe that thou art near. But when they speak of "mother," when they say "'T is a long time since she hath left our side," And when they ask, in their soft infant tones, When they ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... so, Miss Darlin', ever sense she was little chil'. When she was five, six year old, she lisp some,—call me Thophy; that make her kin' o' 'shamed, perhaps: after she grow up, she never lisp, but she kin' o' got the way o' not talkin' much. Fac' is, she don' like talkin' as common gals do, 'xcep' jes' once ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... hath been set upon thee by Athena. Foolish one, he knoweth not in his heart that no man liveth long who fighteth with the gods; no children lisp 'father' at his knees when he returneth from war and dread conflict. Therefore, albeit he is so mighty, let him take heed lest a better than thou meet him, for one day his prudent wife shall wail in her sleep awaking all her house, bereft of her ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... glory fill the skies, The world be free! Let all adore Thy name, And children lisp Thy fame— Let earth and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... Winifred, giving, with a forced laugh, the lisp with which that word had been given on ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... Lord Petersham, famous among dandies, made a wonderful collection of snuffs and snuff-boxes, and was curious in his choice of a box to carry. Gronow relates that once when a light Sevres snuff-box which Lord Petersham was using, was admired, the noble owner replied, with a gentle lisp—"Yes, it is a nice summer box—but would certainly be inappropriate for winter wear!" The well-known purveyor who bought the Prince Regent's cellar of snuff, and who bought also Lord Petersham's stock, ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... The lisp of the wind among the branches, the faint thunder of the Atlantic, the soft sweet atmosphere showed us a side of Biarritz which we should have been sorry to miss. By rights, if music and perfume have any power, we should have fallen ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... she walks, and slightly stoops, taken from her former height. A scar extends from her chin above her mouth, completely changing the character of the lower part of her face; some of her teeth are missing, so that she speaks with a lisp, and the sober bands of her gray hair—it is nearly silver—are confined under a large and close cap. She herself tries to make the change greater, so that all chance of being recognized may be at an end, and ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... as a girl's. His trim little figure, clad in picturesque buckskin, suggested a pretty actor in a Wild West play. And yet this boy, Jack Stillwell, was a scout of the uttermost daring and shrewdness. He always made me think of Bud Anderson. I even missed Bud's lisp when ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... of something which disfigures her, and takes from her charms; though all she does, tends to a contrary effect. She has naturally a very agreeable voice and utterance, which she has changed for the prettiest lisp imaginable. She sees what she has a mind to see, at half a mile distance; but poring with her eyes half shut at every one she passes by, she believes much more becoming. The Cupid on her fan and she have their eyes full on each other, all the time ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... in the midst of the circle. The file and coil of rope lay on the ground near by. The beach-comber was talking in a high-keyed sing-song, but with a lisp. He told them partly in pigeon English and partly in Cantonese, which Charlie translated, that their men were eight in number, and that they had intended to seize the schooner that night, but that probably his own capture had delayed ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... he stopped suddenly with his fists clenched. It was completely dark, the sky was faintly marbled by a moon behind the clouds. On both sides of the road rose the tall grey skeletons of poplars. When the sound of his footsteps stopped, he heard a faint lisp of running water. Standing still in the middle of the road, he felt his feelings gradually relax. He said aloud in a low voice several times: "You are a damn fool, John Andrews," and started walking slowly and thoughtfully ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... be perfect, the London work-girl takes the palm by winsomeness and grace. At seven o'clock every evening you may meet her in thousands in Oxford Street, Villiers Street, Tottenham Court Road, or London Bridge, where the pavements lisp in reply to the chatter of her little light feet. The factory girl of twenty years ago has, I am glad to say, entirely disappeared. She was not a success. She screwed her hair into sausages and rolled them around her ears. She ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... of an amusing lisp grafted on the broadest Irish brogue ever heard outside of Killarney. It cannot be reproduced in print; therefore I shall not attempt it. But it was so comical that one could never rid one's self of a desire to laugh, ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... came with those two old Miss Blakes?" asks the youthful old woman, with a profoundly juvenile lisp. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown

... their bewilderment a sport. How small their world appears in the mirror of his ironical mind! The state-craft, the love-making, the "absurd pomp," the "heavy-headed revels," the women that "jig and amble and lisp," the nobles that are "spacious in the possession of dirt," the sovereign that is a "king of shreds and patches;" as for their opinions, "do but blow; them to their trials, and the bubbles are out;" as for their ideas of prosperity, it is to act as "sponges and soak up the king's countenance, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... eye which he no longer expected to see, no longer ventured to hope for. He saw his smiling wife with a smiling child on her lap; he saw himself smile, and felt a pride he had never known when he heard its soft childish voice lisp: "Fa-ther." Yes, Kate was right, all the other things that go by the name of happiness are nothing compared to this happiness. Only a father, a mother, knows ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig

... captured, comes often to that quiet hamlet, and the roll of honour in the little grey stone church grows longer and longer. In the big house on the hill, at sunrise and at sunset, the young Lady of the Manor stands at the bedside of her little son, and hears him lisp his simple prayers to God, and they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... into the vacated chair and strapped down the receivers. A long, faint whisper, as indistinguishable as the lisp of leaves on a distant hill, trickled into his ears. Ordinarily he would have given up such a station in disgust, and waited for the air to clear. Now he wanted to establish his ability, to demonstrate the acuteness of hearing for ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... cheeks were ruddier than now, when wealth and fame and happiness seemed lying just before me, ready to be gathered in, and farther away still, to a gentle, blue-eyed mother—now long gone—teaching her child to lisp his first ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... more pathetic and terrible thing than the prejudice of love. Both you and I have suffered from it. Six years ago, ay, and before that, I felt and resented the growing difference between us. When under your spell, it seemed that I was born to lisp in numbers and devote myself to singing, that the world was good and all of it fit for singing. But away from you, even then, doubts faced me, and I knew in vague fashion that we lived in different worlds. At first in vague fashion, I say; and when with you again, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... She is flushed and graceful. Twenty-two, with a short upper lip, a straight nose, dark hair, and glowing eyes. She wears bright colours, and has a slow, musical voice, with a slight lisp. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... not only think of those domestic duties which require manual efforts, but in the general education of her brothers or sisters, she may prove a powerful ally with their natural teacher. Having composed the infant to rest, let its childhood continue to be her care. She can aid it to lisp the first accents of its native tongue. In the rudiments of knowledge she may be an efficient instructor. For this work her age peculiarly qualifies her. As the breath of spring quickens the tender bud, so let her youthful spirit infuse vigor into these ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey

... jailer swings back the outer gate, Spunyarn grasps his friend and companion in sorrow warmly by the hand, his bronzed face brightens with an air of satisfaction, and like pure water gushing from the rude rock his eyes fill with tears. How honest, how touching, how pure the friendly lisp-good bye! "Keep up a strong heart, Tom,—never mind me. I don't know by what right I'm kept here, and starved; but I expect to get out one of these days; and when I do you may reckon on me as your friend. Keep the craft in good trim till then; don't let the devil get master. Come and see us ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... started—the envious eye-lid shrouded no more its lustrous jewel—the wondering eyes dilated, as they met her lover's—and she murmured something with that sweet Venetian lisp, in which the Greek women breathe their Italian. But, as she saw the stranger, her face and neck became suffused with crimson, and her small hand wrapped the snowy sheet ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... But she was a barren woman, and thence resulted her misery. For seven weary seasons had she lived in the lodge of her husband; and while his seven other wives had each children at her knee, crying, "My mother!" there was none to address her by that tender name, and to lisp in childish tones its delight, when she returned from the labours of the field of maize—and to bestow its innocent caresses upon her after the separations which unavoidably take place in forest life. Thence arose the extreme harshness of her husband, and the continued ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... aware that something unusual was in the air, for every one seemed flocking together in one corner and listening in charmed silence to the sound of one flute-like voice. Peggy had hardly time to catch the sound of a familiar lisp before there came a quick exclamation of surprise, and a radiant vision, all pink and white and glitter of diamonds, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... for the puny baby boy. Babies are troublesome things, anyway, where folks are awful poor and where there are no servants and the mother is not so very strong. And so Mary became the baby's own little foster-mother, and she carried him about, and long before he could lisp a word she had told him all the hopes and secrets of her heart, and he cooed and laughed, and lying on the floor, kicked his heels in the air and treated hope and love ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard

... the cabin floor as Totty ran about hunting hers and Benny's stockings, and after she had hung them up, heard her sweet voice again as she wondered over and over if Santa really would forget them. He heard the mother, in a choking voice; tell her treasures to get ready for bed; heard them lisp their childish prayers, the little girl concluding: "And, O, Lord! please tell good Santa Claus that we are very poor; but that we love him as much as rich children do, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... to nurse you, and rear you, when you are unable to help yourselves; to guide your first steps, and teach you to lisp your first syllables. For this purpose, God has given her qualities that attract sympathy and engender love. She is so constituted as to impart a charm to your lives, to share in your labors, to soothe you when you are ruffled, to smooth your pillow when you are in pain, and to cherish ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien

... of swift surprise From the depths of childish eyes, Yet my soul to judgment came, Cowering, as before a flame. Not a word, a lisp of blame: Just a look of swift surprise In the ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... more universally practised upon, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," than in Middle Georgia, fifty years ago. Filial obedience and deference to age was the first lesson. "Honor thy father and mother, that thy days may be long in the land," was familiar to the ears of every child before they could lisp their a, b, c; and upon the first demonstration of a refractory disobedience, a severe punishment taught them that the law was absolute and inexorable. To lie, or touch what was not his own, was beyond the pale of pardon, or mercy, and a solitary aberration ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... has a treasure in his wife and daughter," said Mrs. Gibbs, "they keep his secrets so well! Neither of them will lisp a word about ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... was almost always good reason for it; then she would keep silence for a time, but generally ended by addressing to some person older than herself a question which showed that her mind had been working under the influence of a new impression. She very soon got over her childish lisp, and even before she was four years old she spoke with perfect distinctness. She was afraid of her father. As for her mother, she regarded her with a feeling which she could scarcely define, not being afraid of her, but not behaving towards ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... of ethereal silver, its sky an iridescent dome, its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence, its lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations, sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour of distant motor-cars. A ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... taught, and first he followed it himself")—the summoner with his fiery face—the pardoner with his wallet "bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot"—the lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth, and "Amor vincit omnia" graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the portly person of the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of the pestilence—the busy serjeant-of-law, "that ever seemed busier than he was"—the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... at many a shrine, Of wit and beauty too; I've lisp'd light vows to all, And sworn that all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various

... about the speaker, who would have to encounter so much adverse criticism in our conservative and prejudiced city. It was certainly a most startling occurrence, that here in my very home, where there had been hardly a lisp in favor of the rights of women, this girl should speak on political subjects, and that, too, upon the invitation of the leaders of a great political party. Here was a stride, not a mere step; and a stride almost to final victory for the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... sometimes transcend belief, must yet always delight the imagination. His adventures have given a rich coloring to fable, and have stimulated its performances. The language of song and story has been employed to do them honor, and our children are taught, in lessons that they love, to lisp the deeds and the patriotism of his band. "Marion"—"Marion's Brigade" and "Marion's men", have passed into household words, which the young utter with an enthusiasm much more confiding than that which they yield to the wondrous performances ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms

... [Imperfect Speech.] Stammering. — N. inarticulateness; stammering &c. v.; hesitation &c. v.; impediment in one's speech; titubancy[obs3], traulism|; whisper &c. (faint sound) 405; lisp, drawl, tardiloquence[obs3]; nasal tone, nasal accent; twang; falsetto &c. (want of voice) 581; broken voice, broken accents, broken sentences. brogue &c. 563; slip of the tongue, lapsus linouae [Lat]. V. stammer, stutter, hesitate, falter, hammer; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... he saw her she was his one dream of delight. At first he had visited Ashwood as a matter of duty; but, as time passed on those visits became his dearest pleasures. The child began to know him, her lovely little face to brighten for him; she had no fear of him, but would sit on his knee and lisp her pretty stories and sing her pretty songs until ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... so marred. And still each lovely summer resumes that sweet regard,— The old unvexed eternal indifference to pain; The sea sings in the marshes, and June comes back again. All night the lapsing rivers lisp in the long dike grass, And many memories whisper the sea-winds as they pass; The tides disturb the silence; but not a hindrance bars The wash of time, where founder even the galleon stars. And all night long wherever ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman

... slumbered. All along The silvery field, the large leaves talked With one another, as among The spiked maize in dreams she walked. The lizard leapt: the sunlight played: She heard the callow nestling lisp, And brimful meadow-runnels crisp. In the full-leaved platan-shade. In sleep she breathed in a lower tone, Murmuring as at night and morn, "Madonna! lo! I am ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... well the tones of that soft voice, in which sounded sometimes a sort of gentle lisp, like the hissing of ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... in the trees, but at that moment Riles clutched Gardiner's arm and said something in a low voice. The two men rode through the river, and their words were drowned in the lisp ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... scarlet sash! The voice of the incompetent Sally was heard in final exhortation, "Now, mind you be good, Master Justus!" and Master Justus ran straight to the philosopher and saluted him imperatively as "Dada!" which honorable title the other little boy echoed in an imperfect lisp, with an eager desire to be taken up and kissed. The desire was abundantly gratified, and then Mr. Laurence Fairfax said, "This is Laury," and offered him to Bessie for a ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... arrival of the Lord Lieutenant, who was also Commander-in-Chief, the ambition of Sarsfield was gratified by the rank of Earl of Lucan, a title drawn from that pleasant hamlet, in the valley of the Liffey, where he had learned to lisp the catechism of a patriot at the knee of Anna O'Moore. But his real power was much diminished. Tyrconnell, Berwick, Sir Richard Nagle, who had succeeded the Earl of Melfort as chief secretary for King James, all ranked before him at the board, and when Saint ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... married Dolly shortly after my promotion to the office of general superintendent, and the little fellow that is learning to lisp 'papa,' you know, has been named after you, my old, true, and invaluable friend, to whose counsel and kindness I feel I am so ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis

... sister's love I did not ask from thee, Though that were much—oh, more than earth hath given; None live to bear that gentle name for me, Though one may lisp it now, perchance, in Heaven. I know not even, for I never felt, The quiet yearnings of such love as this; Thou should'st have known a deeper feeling dwelt In the rapt glow ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... race my feet have run, Since first I trod thy banks with alders crowned, And thought my way was all through fairy ground, Beneath thy azure sky and golden sun, Where first my Muse to lisp her notes begun! While pensive Memory traces back the round, Which fills the varied interval between; Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene. Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure No more return, to cheer my evening road! Yet still one joy remains: that not obscure Nor useless, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... twilight hour was dear to me, With murmur'd tone of evening prayer; When with hands clasp'd upon your knee, And learned to lisp "Our Father" there. ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna

... been perfectly at home; self-restrained, vigilant, and effective. But on this night it was nothing above mere inarticulateness—hoarse and ineffective fury—an almost painful exhibition. Sometimes his lisp became so strong that he was scarcely able to utter the words he desired to bring out. The Prime Minister became "The Primisther," the Chief Secretary the "Cheesesecry," and all this impotence was made the more manifest by thundering on the box with his open hand—in short, it was all inarticulate, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... his sense, Can range aright his shillings, pounds, and pence. The booby father craves a booby son; And by heaven's blessing thinks himself undone. Wants of all kinds are made to fame a plea; One learns to lisp; another not to see: Miss D——, tottering, catches at your hand: Was ever thing so pretty born to stand? Whilst these, what nature gave, disown, through pride, Others affect what nature has denied; What nature has denied, fools will pursue, As apes are ever walking upon two. Crassus, a grateful ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... experience, every lane and road within twenty miles' radius of St. Dreot's, There was the high-road that went through Gator Hill to Clinton and then to Polwint; here were the paths across the fields to Lucent, the lanes that led to the valley of the Lisp, all the paths like spiders' webs through Rothin Wood, from whose curve you could see Polchester, grey and white, with its red-brown roofs and the spires of the Cathedral thrusting like pointing fingers into the heaven. It was the Polchester View that she chose to-day, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... to scale, The cup of Circe or the Holy Grail— An actress she at home in every role, Can flout or flatter, bully or cajole, And on occasion by a stretch of art Can even speak the language of the heart, Can lisp and sigh and make confused replies, With baby lips and complicated eyes, Indifferently apt to weep or wink, Primly pursue, provocatively shrink, Brazen or bashful, as the case require, Coax the faint baron, curb the bold esquire, Deride restraint, but deprecate desire, Unbridled yet unloving, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... will be considered the highest mixture of philosophic courtesy and Christian urbanity to make the most graceful semi-lateral bow, as you pass your friend in the street, and, kissing the tip of your finger, to lisp, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... has had the temerity to attack you, and so has made a lawful target of itself. But against your friend your hands are tied. He has injured you. He has disgusted you. He has infuriated you. But it was most Christianly done. You cannot hurl a thunderbolt, or pull a trigger, or lisp a syllable, against those amiable monsters who with tenderest fingers are sticking pins all over you. So you shut fast the doors of your lips, and inwardly sigh for a good, stout, brawny, malignant foe, who, under any and every circumstance, will design you harm, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... ROSALIND. Farewell, Monsieur Traveller: Look, you lisp, and wear/ Strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love/ with your Nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance/ you are; or I will scarce think that you have swam in a GONDOLA./ AS YOU LIKE IT, Act ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... must depend on a thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnacled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawse-holes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuckle of sheaves and lisp of ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... his profits into cattle. Since Evelyn and I moved to Los Angeles we see a good deal of Tom and his wife. At least once during the winter we run across to his Arizona ranch for a week or two. His boy is just old enough to give his name proudly with a lisp as "Tham ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... around will smile with approbation. — The faces of the aged will shine upon us, because we spared their sons; bright-eyed females will bless us for their surviving husbands: and even the lips of the children will lisp our praises. Thus with a heaven of delighted feeling in our hearts, and the smiles both of God and man on our heads, we shall pass the evening of our days in glorious peace. And when death shall call us to that ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... the means to feel and recognise them: and of such natural inclinations the body will retain a certain bent, without our knowledge or consent. It was an affectation conformable with his beauty that made Alexander carry his head on one side, and caused Alcibiades to lisp; Julius Caesar scratched his head with one finger, which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome thoughts; and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a sign of a man given to scoffing; such motions ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... first I was but a poor comforter. I had never thought at all of these weighty matters, and therefore I felt myself very incompetent to reason upon them in such a way as was likely to convince and console her. I had been taught, by my excellent mother, to lisp the Lord's Prayer, the Belief, and the Catechism, before I at all knew the meaning of it, and almost before I could speak plainly; I had been bred up in the Christian faith, a strict church-goer, and, such was the force of custom, that perhaps I had not ten times in ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... for Alkibiades, gets his father into debt by buying horses, and, under the teaching of Socrates, learns both to cheat his creditors and to treat respect for his father as a worn-out notion. The beauty and the lisp of Alkibiades were imitated so as to make it quite plain who was meant by the youth; and Socrates himself was evidently represented by an actor in a hideous comic mask, caricaturing the philosopher's snub nose and ugly features. The play ended by the young man's father threatening ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... months of age the child begins to lisp, and at twelve months it is usually able to utter distinct and intelligible sounds of one or two syllables. The development of the senses and of the mind proceeds gradually. The sense of hearing is more active and further advanced than that of sight. Sounds are appreciated sooner than light ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... except the faint murmur of the sea upon the rocks. His stillness now was as complete as had been his previous activity, and in the one he was as assured as in the other. Some five minutes passed. Again and again, with a measured monotony, came to him the regular lisp of the waves. The grass rustled against his legs as the little wind of morning pushed its way through it gently, and a bird chirped above his head in the olive-trees and was answered by another bird. And just then, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... hard labour should supply; 'But should it fail, 'twill be too late to fly. 'Some Summers hence, if nought our loves annoy, 'The image of my Jane may lisp her joy; 'Or, blooming boys with imitative swing 'May mock my arm, and make the Anvil ring; 'Then if in rags.—But, O my heart, forbear,— 'I love the Girl, and why should I despair? 'And that I love her all the village knows; 'Oft from my pain the mirth of others ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield

... to toss bread crumbs to the scarlet fish, laughing to himself in an ugly way. "I wish to punish you? Why, Alixe, only look at him!—Look at his gold wristlets; listen to his simper, his lisp. Little girl—oh, little girl, what have you done to yourself?—for you have done nothing to me, child, that can match ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... She bids the Muse of History twine The chaplet of undying fame, And tell each polish'd land thy worth: The ruder natives of the earth Shall oft repeat thy honour'd name; While infants catch the frequent sound, And learn to lisp the oral tale; Whose fond remembrance shall prevail Till Time has reach'd ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... the Devil had Ubiquity. Hence 'tis they live as Rovers, and defie This or that Place, Rags of Geography. They're Citizens o' th' World, they're all in all; Scotland's a Nation Epidemical. And yet they ramble not to learn the Mode, How to be drest, or how to lisp abroad; To return knowing in the Spanish Shrug, Or which of the Dutch States a double Jug Resembles most in Belly or in Beard; The Card by which the Mariners are Steer'd. No! The Scots-Errant fight, ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid

... Fians waiting there In sharp suspense and half despair ... The morn was still. A skylark hung In mid-air flutt'ring, and sung A lullaby that grew more sweet Amid the stillness, in the heat And splendour of the sun: the lisp Of faint wind in the herbage crisp Went past them; and around the bare And foam-striped sand-banks gleaming fair, The faintly-panting waves were cast By the wan deep ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... cruel to neutralise such a prodigy—and he is just learning to walk and lisp. Khalid teaches him the first step and the first monosyllable, receiving in return the first kiss which his infant lips could voice. With what joy Najib makes his first ten steps! With what zest would he practise on the soft sands, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... roof, and that, to them, is living. Oh, those purposeless lives! They exist simply because they are in the world and cannot help it. With the girls especially, marriage is the chief aim, and what should be the holy relation is entered upon almost in childhood. As soon as they begin to lisp they are talking of their lovers. A little wee girl came to a teacher's home, and after answering in monosyllables the common questions as to schools and Sunday-schools, there was a lull in the conversation, when ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various

... profits into cattle. Since Evelyn and I moved to Los Angeles we see a good deal of Tom and his wife. At least once during the winter we run across to his Arizona ranch for a week or two. His boy is just old enough to give his name proudly with a lisp as "Tham ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... guid auld Scotch drink! Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink, Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink In glorious faem, Inspire me, till I lisp and wink To sing thy name. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... in, and pants that he could not sit down in—dressed like a grasshopper. This human cricket came up to the clerk's desk just as I entered, adjusted his unseeing eye-glass, and spake in this wise to the clerk. You see, he thought it was "Hinglish, you know," to lisp. "Thir, will you have the kindness to supply me with thome papah and enwelophs!" The hotel clerk measured that man quick, and he pulled the envelopes and paper out of a drawer, threw them across the counter toward the young man, and then turned away to his books. ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell

... faces, but they are the most determined minaudieres in the whole world. They would think it a mortal sin against good-breeding, if they either spoke or moved in a natural manner. They all affect a little soft lisp, and a pretty pitty-pat step; which female frailties ought, however, to be forgiven them, in favour of their civility and good nature to strangers, which I have a great deal of reason ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... herself with decorum. She was not often thoughtful, and was never so without cause; after remaining silent for a time, she almost always ended by turning to some one of her elders, with a question which showed that her brain was working over a new impression. She very early ceased to lisp, and already in her fourth year she spoke with perfect distinctness. She was afraid of her father; her feeling toward her mother was undefined,—she did not fear her, neither did she fondle her; but she did not fondle ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff

... offshoot of a fine old parent stock. Well, the Boer is nothing of the kind. He is not in any way degenerate. He is a good fighting man, according to his lights. He does not wear a stand-up collar, nor an eyeglass, nor spats to his veldtschoon. He does not talk with a silly lisp or an inane drawl. Therefore, the useless fellows whom Britain trusted with the important task of watching him and sizing him up counted him as a boor as well as a Boer—a mere country clod. But now, from the rocky hills, these clods, these sons of semi-white savages, laugh ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... weariness or fatigue, but waited patiently, and on the third day he passed me, running joyously along, with his silken hair streaming in the wind, and he singing - God have mercy upon me! - singing a merry ballad, - who could hardly lisp ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens

... butterfly affairs that perch on the top of the puffs and frizzes of the modern old lady, but a substantial structure that covered her whole head and was tied securely under her chin. She talked in a sweet old treble with a little lisp, caused by the absence of teeth, and her laugh was as clear and ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... EMILY—[In her lisp of hidden meanings.] Yes, the family mustn't forget—her condition. [The door from the study is opened and CURT appears. His face shows his annoyance at being interrupted, his eyes are preoccupied. ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill

... lowered itself at the end of his sentences as though he had already abandoned and lost interest in that thought, so that the concluding words were indistinct, beneath the grey beard and mustache. Also at times there was the faintest suggestion of a lisp. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... daughters all the care and affection they bestowed on Minou-Minou. There never was a child had more indulgence; but he deserved it, for his quickness and docility. At the end of a few months he began to lisp a few words of German, as well as his mother, of whom I was the teacher, and who made rapid progress. Parabery was very little with us, but he undertook to be our purveyor, and furnished us abundantly with everything necessary for our subsistence. Canda taught my daughter to make ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss

... Cowley, Milton, and Pope, might be said "to lisp in numbers;" and have given such early proofs, not only of powers of language, but of comprehension of things, as, to more tardy minds, seems scarcely credible. But of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no doubt, since a volume of his ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... the melody that slips In lazy laughter from the lips That marvel much if any kiss Is sweeter than the apple's is. Blow back the twitter of the birds— The lisp, the titter, and the words Of merriment that found the shine Of summer-time a glorious wine That drenched the leaves that loved it so, In ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley

... is a sight to see. Loftily domed over with glass, it is at once a conservatory, a vinery, and tropical aviary. Room here for trees even, for miniature palms, while birds of the rarest plumage flit silently from bough to bough among the oranges, or lisp out the sweet lilts that have descended to them from sires that sang in foreign lands. Yonder a fountain plays and casts its spray over the most lovely feathery ferns. The roof is very spacious, and the conservatory occupies ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables

... my Muse! guid auld Scotch Drink, Whether thro' wimplin worms thou jink, [winding, dodge] Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink, [cream] In glorious faem, [foam] Inspire me, till I lisp an' wink, To ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... to curtsy, whisp- er, hold your chin up, laugh and lisp, And then you're sure to take: I've known the day when brats, not quite Thirteen, got fifty pounds a night; Then ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... man he was. I remember the time when in such a scene he would have been perfectly at home; self-restrained, vigilant, and effective. But on this night it was nothing above mere inarticulateness—hoarse and ineffective fury—an almost painful exhibition. Sometimes his lisp became so strong that he was scarcely able to utter the words he desired to bring out. The Prime Minister became "The Primisther," the Chief Secretary the "Cheesesecry," and all this impotence was made the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... visage about as wooden and inexpressive as the figure-head of a merchantman. Occasionally, it is true, physical defects have been actually conquered, individual peculiarities have been in a great measure counteracted, by rhetorical artifice, or by the arts of oratorical delivery: instance the lisp of Demosthenes, the stutter of Fox, the brogue of Burke, and the burr ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... laughed more than his lips did at a humorous story. His tower-like head and thin, white hair marked him out among a thousand, while any one might swear to his voice again who heard it once, for it had a touch of the lisp and the burr; yet, as the minstrel said, of Douglas, 'it became him wonder well,' and gave great softness to a sorrowful story: indeed, I imagined that he kept the burr part of the tone for matters of a facetious or humorous kind, and brought out the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various

... records exact statements of truth? Not always. The primitive human mind could only lisp its wonderful glimpses of truth in legend and myth. And so in fable and allegory the early Israelites sought to show the power of good over evil, and thereby stimulate a desire for right conduct, based, of course, on right-thinking. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... nursed the late President through an attack of the measles which nearly ended his life. He has often said, that, were it not for my attention, he could not have lived. So you see that the General and myself were very close to one another from the time either of us could lisp until he became President. Here is a picture we had taken together," showing an old daguerreotype. "It does not resemble either of us much now. And yet they do say that we bore in our childhood, and still bear, a striking ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... such forces as these casting their influence over European civilization. {16} The new century was not long in, the Regent Philip of Orleans had not long been in power, before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control her literature. A new Rabelais with an 18th century lisp, Montesquieu, by seasoning his Lettres Persanes with a sauce piquante compounded of indecency and style, succeeded in making the public swallow some incendiary morsels. The King of France, he declared, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... three principal figures of the opening drama. "The jewels were a king's ransom. But I shall know all," he softly smiled, for every attendant of the beautiful recluse now burning to meet her advance spy was a sworn confederate of Ram Lal in a dark brotherhood whose very name no man even dared to lisp! And so the long, blazing day wore away, bringing the hunter and the hunted nearer together. The mysterious bungalow was now alive with the slaves of luxury, while Alan Hawke secretly inspected the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... whites and extremely marvellous pinks, and the skin had the exquisite, incredible softness of a baby's. Next he was struck by her candid, ingenuous, inquiring gaze, and by her thin voice with the slight occasional lisp. The splendid magnificence of her frock and jewels came into play later. Lastly her demeanour imposed itself. That simple gaze showed not the slightest diffidence, scarcely even modesty; it was more brazen than effrontery. She ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... through with the midnight, the cedars were sleeping. Their shadowy tresses outlined in the bright Crystal, moon-smitten mists, where the fountain's heart leaping Forever, forever burst, full with delight; And its lisp on my spirit Fell faint as that near it Whose love like a lily bloomed ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... her ladyship's acquaintance,' replied he in a lisp, evidently enjoying my perplexity, which was every moment becoming ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... of duty; but, as time passed on those visits became his dearest pleasures. The child began to know him, her lovely little face to brighten for him; she had no fear of him, but would sit on his knee and lisp her pretty stories and sing her pretty songs until he was ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... be acquainted with, is pretty Mrs. Toss: she is ever in practice of something which disfigures her, and takes from her charms; though all she does, tends to a contrary effect. She has naturally a very agreeable voice and utterance, which she has changed for the prettiest lisp imaginable. She sees what she has a mind to see, at half a mile distance; but poring with her eyes half shut at every one she passes by, she believes much more becoming. The Cupid on her fan and she ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... Dysarthria).—Children just beginning to form sentences stammer, not uttering the sounds correctly. They also, as a rule, lisp for a considerable time, so that the words spoken by them are still indistinct and are intelligible only to the persons most ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... apparel and glow of cheek than the Ayrshire rose or the twisted eglantine. Then suddenly the children gathered about a single portrait of remarkable rich colouring, and little Lady Margaret came running and saying with a lisp,— ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... Heavenly Teacher has given us the very words we are to take with us as we draw near to our Father. We have in them a form of prayer in which there breathe the freshness and fulness of the Eternal Life. So simple that the child can lisp it, so divinely rich that it comprehends all that God can give. A form of prayer that becomes the model and inspiration for all other prayer, and yet always draws us back to itself as the deepest utterance of our ...
— Lord, Teach Us To Pray • Andrew Murray

... yesterday. And then father struck him with his cane. John fell as if he were dead. I was looking in at the window, not thinking any harm, and saw it all. I thought he had killed John, and ran away, determined not to tell. I never breathed a lisp of it before, son, and nobody ever knew of that quarrel, only your grandfather and me. I know it troubled him greatly after John died. Oh, I can see that awful paper, as John held it up to the light, as plain as this ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... and I'm cheered again; Thine own bright smile illuminates my way, And one by one the gathered clouds depart, Till not a shadow lies upon my path. Night, with its long and sombre shadows, treads Upon the steps that morn and noon have trod; And, as our children gather round my knee, And lisp those evening prayers thy lips have taught, I cannot but believe that thou art near. But when they speak of "mother," when they say "'T is a long time since she hath left our side," And when they ask, in their soft ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... She had a heavy voice and a slight lisp, which seemed to make it more impressive and more distinctively her own. Caleb ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... and hang on to his neck until he groaned, then run away, but presently come stealing back on tiptoe. I used to listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the knock, the door flung back or opened quietly—you never could tell which; and her voice, with a little lisp, 'Are you better today, Mr. Brune? What funny things you say when you're delirious! Father says you've been ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... propagandist plays, of which the manifest and glaring untruth is working mischief to the national mind. A type of such a play is familiar enough in these days when we like to ridicule the West Briton. We are served up puppets representing the shoneen with a lisp set over against the patriot who says all the proper things suitable to the occasion. Now, such a play serves no good purpose, but it has a certain bad effect. It does not give a true interpretation of life; it enlightens ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... door. Significant as was his first hasty look round the room, he recovered at sight of me all his habitual SANG-FROID. He saluted me, and spoke coolly, though rapidly. But he panted, and I noticed in a moment that he had lost his lisp. ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... continued: 'While as many as fifty good gossipers predicted daily the marriage of Bolt to some aristocratic belle, there came along a lady of the name of Mrs. Bolt. This person, whose name Mr. Bolt had been extremely careful not to lisp, caused a desperate sensation among his admirers. My Lady Longblower was seen to cool away like liquid tallow, while not a few who had been equally fervent just before, said it was a very impertinent thing in Mr. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... him, giving him an exceedingly dispirited look. His hair relieved this somewhat, for it was white and always stood gaily on end, defying brush and comb. Daniel Arker, a sturdy black-haired lad, would have done fuller justice to the passage that fell to Abraham, for the Spiker boy with his gentle lisp never shone in elocution; but our reading class is a lottery, as we go from scholar to scholar down the line. The lot falling to him, Abraham pushed himself up from the bench, grasped his book fiercely with both hands, and fixed his ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd

... 'I would not allow her to learn lessons such as those in a land ridden by priests, and polluted by the idolatry of Rome. It is here, here in Barchester, that she must first be taught to lisp those holy words. Oh, that you could ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... is; although Shakspeare has done a good deal for the stage. James Bromley has seen the Overland line grow up from its ponyicy; and as Fitz-Green Halleck happily observes, none know him BUT TO LIKE HIS STYLE. He was intended for an agent. In his infancy he used to lisp the refrain, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne

... you ever lisp a word to any living soul till I'm safely married to CUPID, I'll kill you, dead ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various

... like this, I would go upstairs, and stand before the ikons, and say with a rapturous feeling, "God bless Papa and Mamma!" and repeat a prayer for my beloved mother which my childish lips had learnt to lisp-the love of God and of her blending strangely in a ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy

... please," went on Dick hardily, with a glance at the girl, "she hurt her hands putting out a fire just now. I expect my father gave her the money for that. But she must have burnt her hands dreffully!"—Dicky had not quite outgrown his infantile lisp—"and if she's come for stuff to put on them, please I ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... children have to work anywhere as they do here," he fairly shouted, "here where they rob the cradle for workers, where the little voices become sad and bitter 'most as soon as they can lisp, where the brightness o' childhood fades out before its time, an' where its only world is the mill, the shop, an' the fact'ry. Their tiny bones unset, they make them stand in one position all day long until you ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... place at the hour of dissolution! How pleasing the contemplation. How inspiring to think of our noble ancestors; our holy ministers and teachers; our fathers and mothers who led us by the hand to the house of God on the Sabbath, who early taught us to lisp the ever precious name of Jesus; who are to-day singing the song of Moses and the Lamb. Let us thank God at this solemn hour, even amid blinding tears, for pious, ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles

... had seen, girt on three sides with lofty, rocky mountains; and on the fourth side by the blue waters of the Fiord. I looked on Bergen with the liveliest interest, because its name was familiar to me when a child, and I used to lisp the word before I could walk steadily; for in those young days of waywardness my old schoolmistress, whose peaked nose and malicious heart are still a vivid truth, would threaten to give me to the fishermen at Bergen who, she said, would take and toss me into the Maelstrom. With an eagerness akin ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... whose rich mine of wit we here behold As porcelain earth, more precious, 'cause more old; Who, like an aged oak, so long hath stood, And art religion now as well as food: Though thy grey Muse grew up with elder times, And our deceased grandsires lisp'd thy rhymes; Yet we can sing thee too, and make the lays Which deck thy brow look fresher with thy praise. * * * * * Though these, your happy births, have silent past More years than some abortive wits shall last; He still writes new, who once so ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various

... not analyze she hesitated to ask him who they were. They had rather a rude manner of staring —especially the men—and the air of deriving infinite amusement from that which went on about them. One of them, a young man with a lisp who was addressed by the singular name of "Toots," she had overheard demanding as she passed: who the deuce was the tall girl with the dark hair and the colour? Wherever she went, she was aware of them. It was foolish, she knew, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... had been taught to lisp his simple prayers at his mother's knee, he had found strength and comfort in going to the Lord. With the growth of his knowledge of the gospel and his enlarged vision of God's providences, his prayers became a source of power. Uncle Zed had taught him that this trustful reliance ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson

... fields of corn, The living silence dwelleth, and the gray Sweet earth-mist, while afar the lisp of spray Breathes from the ocean like a Triton's horn. Open thy lattice, for the gage is won For which this earth has journeyed though the dust Of shattered systems, cold about the sun; And proved by sin, by mighty lives impearled, ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE

... Born in orders other than humanity and growing old in their respective acts, even thus they become human beings that are, of course, ordained to return. Coming to sinful births and becoming Chandalas or human beings that are deaf or that lisp indistinctly, they attain to higher and higher castes, one after another in proper turn, transcending the Sudra order, and other (consequences of) qualities that appertain to Darkness and that abide in it in course of migrations in this world.[106] Attachment ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... But, unfortunately, what with his real emotion and the intoxication of an audience, he read it extravagantly, and interpolated a child's lisp (on no authority whatever), and a simulated infantile delivery, which, I fear, at first provoked the smiles rather than the tears of his audience. Nevertheless, at its conclusion the little note was handed round the party, and then there was ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... these tremendous questions with an effeminate lisp, and harangued on them with small feeble gesticulations of pale dirty fingers covered ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... he could not sit down in—dressed like a grasshopper! Well, this human cricket came up to the clerk's desk just as I came in. He adjusted his unseeing eye-glass in this wise and lisped to the clerk, because it's "Hinglish, you know," to lisp: "Thir, thir, will you have the kindness to fuhnish me with thome papah and thome envelopehs!" The clerk measured that man quick, and he pulled out a drawer and took some envelopes and paper and cast them across the counter and turned away to his books. You should have seen that specimen ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... where the good wine is named (in the Bible), there is no lisp of warning, no intimation of danger, no hint of disapprobation, but always of decided approval. How bold and strongly ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis

... note, which fell when Lawrence stood erect, but rose to a shrill overtone when he bent his head: sometimes one would have thought the river was going down in spate, and then the volume of sound dwindled to a mere thread, a lisp in the air. Lawrence was observing these phenomena with a mind vacant of thought when he heard footsteps brushing through the grass by the field path from the village. Val had ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... many were the jokes that rebounded from his theme, whether in hall or kitchen. It was pleasant to watch his little grey eye, and the twinkling lashes, as they rose and fell, varying the expression of his lips. A slight lisp gave an air of simplicity to his ditties, which never failed to charm his auditors. He could throw the simplest expression over his features, which made the keen edge of his rebukes infinitely more cutting and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... thoughts: And for my strange petition I will make Amends hereafter by some gaudy-day, When your fair child shall wear your costly gift Beside your own warm hearth, with, on her knees, Who knows? another gift of the high God, Which, maybe, shall have learned to lisp you thanks.' ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... teacher!" in an excited lisp spoke up little Tod Smith, the youngest pupil in the school. "He broke the desk, but—say, teacher! he did it—yes, sir, Andy did the double somersault, just like a real circus actor, and landed ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness

... the habit of applying to it, in common with Englishmen, that endearing appellation "Home," and I believe you still continue to do so in the provinces. Our nursery tales, taught our infant lips to lisp in English, and the ballads, that first exercised our memories, stored the mind with the traditions of our forefathers; their literature was our literature, their religion our religion, their history our history. The battle of Hastings, the murder of Becket, the ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... imprudent to risk an indiscretion, he took care to talk "for safety." With him, a secret was a secret, and he could be as silent as an unopened Egyptian tomb. Certain diplomatic affairs he did not lisp, even to his Secretary of State. So far as appears, John Hay knew nothing about the President's interviews with the German Ambassador Holleben, which forced William II to arbitrate. And he sometimes prepared a bill for Congress with out consulting his Cabinet, for fear that the stock jobbers might ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... come to think and will and do for himself,—and let no man dream that day will never come,—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood. To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... "I thought I could make you come." The girl spoke in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her articulation of one or two consonants was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Messalina? What an unfavourable view of human nature! What? King Cheops was not a perfect monarch? Oh, you railer at royalty and slanderer of all that is noble and good! When this book is concluded, I shall change the jaundiced livery which my books have worn since I began to lisp in numbers, have rose-coloured coats for them with cherubs on the cover, and all the characters within shall ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ev'n for thy soul, to thwart me further! None of your arts, your feigning, and your foolery; Your dainty squeamish coying it to me; Go—to your lord, your paramour, be gone! Lisp in his ear, hang wanton on his neck, And play your monkey gambols o'er to him. You know my purpose, look that you pursue it, And make him yield obedience to my will. Do it—or woe ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe

... laborer, and continued to work thus for several years, until, possessed of a few dollars, he went to the interior of the state and bought a small place near Waxhaw. About this time, 1767, Andrew Jackson, Jr., was born, and during the next year—by the time the infant could lisp the name of his parent—the father fell sick of fever and died. Mrs. Jackson, left with three small children, in an almost wild country, where nothing but toil of a severe and arduous kind could provide a subsistence, was indeed in a most grievous situation. But she appears to ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... live in my billet, he was able to find two valuable fountain pens and one stylographic in no time. The exigencies of war necessitate some little irregularity now and then; but how, I asked him, did he justify this excess of zeal? J. B. is distinguished by a lisp among other things. "It'th betht to be on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various

... could manage her. Her baby training left wholly to neglected and loose-living servants, she had spent her first years in kitchens, garrets, and stables. The stables and the stable-boys, the kennels and their keepers, were loved better than aught else. She learned to lisp the language of grooms' and helpers, she cursed and swore as they did, she heard their songs and stories, and was as familiar with profanity and obscene language as other children are with nursery rhymes. Until she was five years old Sir Jeoffry never set eyes upon her. Then a strange ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... pleasures and affection. The spring was melting into summer, and you, my little companion, began to smile—that smile made hope bud out afresh, assuring me the world was not a desert. Your gestures were ever present to my fancy; and I dwelt on the joy I should feel when you would begin to walk and lisp. Watching your wakening mind, and shielding from every rude blast my tender blossom, I recovered my spirits—I dreamed not of the frost—'the killing frost,' to which you were destined to be exposed.—But I lose ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... perhaps, among the first that vibrate on the ear of man; it is reiterated to him incessantly; he is taught to lisp it with respect; to listen to it with fear; to bend the knee when it is reverberated: by dint of repetition, by listening to the fables of antiquity, by hearing it pronounced by all ranks and persuasions, he seriously believes all men bring the idea with them into the world; he thus confounds a ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... his friendship with Josephina began. Perhaps it was the contrast between himself and the little woman who hardly came up to his shoulder and who seemed about fifteen when she was already past twenty. Her soft voice with its slight lisp came to his ears like a caress. He laughed when he thought of the possibility of embracing that graceful, slender form; it would break in pieces in his pugilist's hands, like a wax doll. Mariano sought her out in the drawing-rooms which she and her mother were accustomed to frequent, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... miles. On looking about, we found in the sand the stumps of cedar pickets, forming an antique enclosure, which, I judged, must have been the first site of the Mission of St. Ignace, founded by Pierre Marquette, upwards of a hundred and eighty years ago. Not a lisp of such a ruin had been heard by me previously. French and Indian tradition says nothing of it. The inference is, however, inevitable. Point St. Ignace draws its name from it. It was afterwards removed and fixed at the blunt peninsula, or headland, which the Indians call Peekwutino, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... with the shining floors, the hooded furniture, the windows gaping without their curtains, the shadows and broad squares of light, the little whispers and rattles that doors and cupboards gave, the swirl of the wind as it sprang released from corners and crevices, the lisp of some whisper, "I'm coming! I'm coming! I'm coming!" that, nevertheless, again and again defeated expectation. How could he but enjoy the fine field of affection ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole

... I cannot court thy sprightly eyes With a base-viol plac'd betwixt my thighs, I cannot lisp, nor to a fiddle sing, Nor run upon a ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... newly discovered beauty gives me, and keeping up my dignity and coherence with an effort. My attention is constantly being distracted to note how prettily she moves, to wonder why it is I never noticed the sweet fall, the faint delightful whisper of a lisp in her voice before. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... brown eyes reverently and said, 'It is something good,' speaking, as he always did, in a baby lisp inimitable here. ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge

... autumn also. Little Jack walked now and was beginning to lisp an occasional word, making of himself a veritable fairy in the household. With the close of the warm weather he grew less and less fretful, and when the first snow fell he became as happy and active as a kitten. The mother had kept him with her ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... through the corridors and galleries of the Louvre and the Palais Royal, and whenever he had sought to point her out to some one, to discover her name, lo, she was gone! Tormenting mystery! Ah, that soft lisp of hers, those enchanting caprices, those amazing extravagances of fancy, that wit which possessed the sparkle of white chambertin! He would never forget that summer night when, dressed as a boy, she had gone with him swashbuckling along ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... grey Muse grew up with elder times, And our deceased Grandsires lisp'd thy rhymes, Yet we ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various

... camp at this time a boy named To' Muda Long, who was the eldest son of one of the great up-country Chiefs. He was returning from Singapore with the Raja, to whom he had fled after some escapade of his had excited the paternal wrath. He was a nice-looking youngster, with a slight lisp, and a manner as soft as floss-silk, and he was always smartly dressed in pretty Malay garments. We travelled together for more than three months, and I got to know him pretty well, and took something ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... in 1916. He was beginning to lisp a little along that restless line of thought in 1910. And in 1940 he may be sitting in that same sanctum with walls of heavy books on two sides of him, telling somebody just how it came to be that an economic cyclone on the prairies once ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... goddess Minerva has excited this man. Infatuate! nor does the son of Tydeus know this in his mind, that he is by no means long-lived who fights with the immortals, nor ever at his knees will sons lisp a father's name, as he returns from war and dreadful battle. Therefore, let the son of Tydeus now, though he be very brave, have a care, lest a better than thou fight with him: lest at a future time AEgialea, the very prudent daughter of Adrastus, the noble spouse of horse-taming ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... Ann, my good Ann, thou who first taught me to lisp a thanksgiving and a request, kneel here by my side—and you, too, mademoiselle; though of a different creed, we have a common God! Cousin John, you pray often, I know, though so little apt to show your emotions; there is a place for you, too, with those of your blood. I know ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... numbers of the "Well-Spring" had fallen prey to my insatiable appetite for literature. With the story of the small boy who stole a pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... of his fathers, to sojourn in the land of the stranger, and who remembers and babbles at last—ere the silver cord of memory is utterly and finally loosed—one language only, and that some few words merely, in the long unspoken tongue which he first learned to lisp in his earliest infancy. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... never even smiled, but fixed his eyes in a rather unpleasant manner upon Joachim as he raised them from his books. Still he was an irresistible subject for the Mimic; for, though he learnt his lessons without a mistake, and always obtained the Master's praise, he read them with so strong a lisp, and this was rendered so remarkable by his loud, deep voice, that it fairly upset what little prudence Joachim possessed; and, as he returned one day to his seat, after repeating a copy of verses in the manner I have described, Joachim, who was not far off, echoed the last two lines with ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty

... in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be comprehended from ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... beginning to lisp the language of Canaan, and "they that kept the fair were men of this world." What wonder if she and her thoroughly time-serving mother found it impossible ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt

... had found their proper outlet; but we do not hear of his ever having destroyed anything for the mere sake of doing so. His first recorded piece of mischief was putting a handsome Brussels lace veil of his mother's into the fire; but the motive, which he was just old enough to lisp out, was also his excuse: 'A pitty baze [pretty blaze], mamma.' Imagination soon came to his rescue. It has often been told how he extemporized verse aloud while walking round and round the dining-room table supporting himself by his hands, when he was still so small that his head ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... she greeted her. "Goody! What a relief! I've been worrying about what you'd be like, and just praying you wouldn't have spectacles and talk with a lisp. Miss Todd gave me to understand you were a peach, and I might think myself in luck to room with you, but you never can trust head mistresses till you see for yourself. She's told me the truth, though, after all. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... Union, because the law applied to all. They abolished slavery in all the Northern States—in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island; and it was expected that the whole of the states would follow the example. When I was a child, I never heard a lisp in defence of slavery. [Hear, hear, hear!] Every body condemned it; all looked upon it as a great curse, and all regarded it as a temporary evil, which would soon melt away before the advancing light of truth. [Hear, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... thinks beautiful, and repeats it, tossing up pretty eyes. Also the lover's petition: 'Give me purity to be worthy the good in her, and grant her patience to reach the good in me.' 'Tis quite taking to hear her lisp it. Be sure that I am repeating the petition! I make her read me her choice passages. She has not a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... did so there was almost always good reason for it; then she would keep silence for a time, but generally ended by addressing to some person older than herself a question which showed that her mind had been working under the influence of a new impression. She very soon got over her childish lisp, and even before she was four years old she spoke with perfect distinctness. She was afraid of her father. As for her mother, she regarded her with a feeling which she could scarcely define, not being afraid of her, but not ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... forehead crowning, The West leads on a host, to cure the drouth Only when meadow, field, and you are drowning. They gladly hearken, prompt for injury,— Gladly obey, because they gladly cheat us; From Heaven they represent themselves to be, And lisp like angels, when with lies they meet us. But, let us go! 'Tis gray and dusky all: The air is cold, the vapors fall. At night, one learns his house to prize:— Why stand you thus, with such astonished eyes? What, in the twilight, ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... driven to it, by the mad passion to find an ultimately satisfying woman. I daresay he was sincere enough. Heaven help me, I daresay he was sincere enough in his love for Mrs Maidan. She was a nice little thing, a dear little dark woman with long lashes, of whom Florence grew quite fond. She had a lisp and a happy smile. We saw plenty of her for the first month of our acquaintance, then she died, quite quietly—of ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... him to me. She called him Monsieur de la Tourelle, and he began to speak to me in French; but though I understood him perfectly, I dared not trust myself to reply to him in that language. Then he tried German, speaking it with a kind of soft lisp that I thought charming. But, before the end of the evening, I became a little tired of the affected softness and effeminacy of his manners, and the exaggerated compliments he paid me, which had the effect of making all the company ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell

... that quiet hamlet, and the roll of honour in the little grey stone church grows longer and longer. In the big house on the hill, at sunrise and at sunset, the young Lady of the Manor stands at the bedside of her little son, and hears him lisp his simple prayers to God, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... fair, Was Edric, Egbert's cherished heir; The plaything of the homestead he, Now fondled on his grandame's knee; Or as beside the hearth he sat, Oft sporting with his snow-white cat; Now by the chaplain taught to read, And lisp his Pater and his Creed; Well nurtured at his mother's side, And by his father trained to ride, To speak the truth, to draw the bow, And all an English Thane should know, His days had been as one bright dream— As smooth as his own river's stream! Until, at good ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... "Tom!" or "Steward!" according to the terms of friendship and familiarity on which you may stand with this dignitary, who, by the way, has a vote on board worth canvassing for;—I say bawl out, because, firstly, your mincing and Clarendon-like lisp of "Waiter!" would not be heard by one used to listen to the rush of the tempest and the shriek of the scourged Atlantic; also, for that your stirring call may remind some wretched skulker of a circumstance ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... earth his parents got the name, I cannot tell—was four or five years older than Rita. He was a manly boy, and when my little friend could hardly lisp his name she would run to him with the unerring instinct of childhood and nestle in his arms or cling to his helpful finger. The little fellow was so sturdy, strong, and brave, and his dark gray eyes were so steadfast and true, that she feared no ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... they are so unimportant that the audience will not pay much attention to them, the playlet writer must give peculiar individuality to every word spoken by the chief characters. By this I do not mean that, merely to show that a character is different, a hero or heroine should be made to talk with a lisp or to use some catch-word—though this is sometimes done with admirable effect. What I mean is that the words given to the chief characters must possess an individuality rising from their inner differences; their speech ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... over free with the meat and the drink, though I must say of him that he was a clever fellow, and perfect master of his trade, by which he made a power of money, and bating his not being able to learn Irish, and a certain Jewish lisp which he had, a great master of his tongue, of which he was very proud, so much so that he once told me that when he had saved a certain sum of money he meant to leave off the thimbling business, and enter Parliament, into which he said he could get at any time, through the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... beauty had as an aureole to illuminate it and to set it off a manner that was wholly devoid of mannerisms—of those that men and women think out and exhibit to give added charm to themselves—tricks of cuteness, as lisp and baby stare; tricks of dignity, as grave brow and body always carried rigidly erect; tricks of sweetness and kindliness, as the ever ready smile and the warm handclasp. Susan, the interested in the world about her, Susan, the self-unconscious, had ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... the ivied wand, "The sword in myrtles drest," Each legend of the shadowy strand Now wakes a vision blest; As little children lisp, and tell of Heaven, So thoughts beyond their thought to ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble

... dear Vanity, I whispered to you before that the poor Baboo often suffers from a slight aberration of speech which prevents his articulating the truth—a kind of moral lisp. Lord Lytton could not have been alluding to this; for it was only yesterday that I heard an Irishman speak the truth to Lord Lytton about some little matter—I forget what; cotton duty, I think—and Lord Lytton said, rather curtly, "Why, you have often told me this before." So Lord Lytton ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... illustrations, he brought to the aid of a logical power, which he wielded to a very great extent. Always ready and prompt, his conceptions seemed to me almost intuitive. His voice was fine, softened, and, I think, improved, by a slight lisp, which an attentive observer could discern. The great theatres of eloquence and public speaking in the United States are the legislative hall, the forum, and the stump, without adverting to the pulpit. I have known some of my contemporaries eminently ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... carefully taught in Delsarte's school. The professor's first care was to correct any tendency to lisp, which he did by temporarily substituting the syllables te, de, over and over again, for the faulty R. This substitution brought the organ back to the requisite position for the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... Jo wandered through the airs at her own sweet will, always coming out at the wrong place with a croak or a quaver that spoiled the most pensive tune. They had always done this from the time they could lisp... ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... his due, and his great ambition was to make people believe that he had been a wonderfully clever child, and that he had begun to write when he was very young. He says of himself with something of pompousness, "I lisp'd in numbers, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... Mr. Lee was taught it by me. To prove this farther, I have printed Bartoline's part in that manner of spelling by which I taught it Mr. Lee. They who have no teeth cannot pronounce many letters plain, but perpetually lisp and break their words, and some words they cannot bring out at all. As for instance th is pronounced by thrusting the tongue hard to the teeth, therefore that sound they cannot make, but something like it. For that reason you will often find ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... go down and talk things over with the pal when he comes," said another voice that was very smooth, and had a lisp. Clo deduced that it was the voice ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... spoke up Weil briskly. "I've got no lawyer, commissioner." His speech was the elaborated and painfully emphasized English of the self-taught East Sider. It carried in it just the bare suggestion of the racial lisp, and it made an acute contrast to the menacing Hibernian purr of Donohue's heavier voice. "I kind of thought I'd conduct ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... late as it had grown; the night wore on, and the other doctor came in the small hours. Lucetta had been much soothed by Donald's arrival; he seldom or never left her side; and when, immediately after his entry, she had tried to lisp out to him the secret which so oppressed her, he checked her feeble words, lest talking should be dangerous, assuring her there was plenty of time to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... cure a clap: All sciences a fasting Monsieur knows, And, bid him go to hell, to hell he goes. [r]Ah! what avails it, that, from slav'ry far, I drew the breath of life in English air; Was early taught a Briton's right to prize, And lisp the tale of Henry's victories; If the gull'd conqueror receives the chain, And flattery prevails, when arms are vain![G] [s]Studious to please, and ready to submit, The supple Gaul was born a parasite: Still to his int'rest ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... is so artfully merged with its immediate surroundings that even though you know its precise location it still eludes you. Only yesterday the last finishing-touches were made upon the nest, and this morning, as I might have anticipated from the excess of lisp and twitter of the mother bird, I find the first pretty ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... symbol, and the epic song, 110 (Unknown the character, forgot the tongue,) With each unconquer'd chief, or fainted maid, Sunk undistinguish'd in Oblivion's shade. Sad o'er the scatter'd ruins Genius sigh'd, And infant Arts but learn'd to lisp and died. 115 Till to astonish'd realms PAPYRA taught To paint in mystic colours Sound and Thought. With Wisdom's voice to print the page sublime, And mark in adamant the steps of Time. —Three favour'd youths her soft attention share, 120 The fond ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... mad with rage at the opposition they had encountered, had spared neither age nor sex. I cannot venture to describe the scene of horror and confusion. There were several ladies, and their attendants, and children—among them, infants in arms, or just able to lisp their parents' names. Already they were in the power of my ruffian companions. Shrieks of despair, cries for mercy rose from among them. Tables and chairs, and furniture of all sorts, lay broken on the door. Several ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston

... Wilmington, Delaware, when she was about sixteen years old. But her mind was so full of poesy that there was no room in it for ordinary matters and things, and the duties of a student soon became so irksome that she left both the institutions in disgust. Of her it may be truly said, "she lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came," for she composed verses at four years of age, and published poems at ten. Her first effusions appeared in a local paper at Reading, Pa. Being a born poetess, her success as a writer was assured from the first, and her warmth of expression ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... winsome wifie, A clean canty hame, An' smilin' sweet babies To lisp the dear name; Wi' plenty o' labour, An' health to endure, Make time to row round aye ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... barren woman, and thence resulted her misery. For seven weary seasons had she lived in the lodge of her husband; and while his seven other wives had each children at her knee, crying, "My mother!" there was none to address her by that tender name, and to lisp in childish tones its delight, when she returned from the labours of the field of maize—and to bestow its innocent caresses upon her after the separations which unavoidably take place in forest life. Thence arose the extreme harshness ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... sickly mien, Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen; Practised to lisp, and hang the head aside, Faints into airs, and languishes with pride; On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe, Wrapp'd in a gown, for sickness, and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... They all raised their hands. The Deacon then repeated a short piece of poetry, his wife followed, and then all the children one after another, even down to Bob—a little three-year-old, who just managed to lisp out, with a charming mixture ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott

... about a dozen people, men and ladies, young and old, sitting at tea at the end of a long table. A group of men was dimly visible behind their chairs, wrapped in a haze of cigar smoke; and in the midst of them stood a lanky young man with red whiskers, talking loudly, with a lisp, in English. Through a door beyond the group could be seen a light ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... deeds, who with his bow Assail'd the Gods, who on Olympus dwell. The blue-ey'd Pallas, well I know, has urg'd Tydides to assail thee; fool and blind! Unknowing he how short his term of life Who fights against the Gods! for him no child Upon his knees shall lisp a father's name, Safe from the war and battle-field return'd. Brave as he is, let Diomed beware He meet not some more dangerous foe than thee. Then fair AEgiale, Adrastus' child, The noble wife of valiant Diomed, Shall long, with lamentations ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... my notion of a reassuring appellative. And what are you to make of Odont. crisp. Sanderae, which, whomsoever "Sanderae" may be, I don't want to "crisp" him; "A sport of nature unequalled" they call him, and no doubt his name is, for I can neither clearly articulate, stutter or lisp him. I've not a doubt that, whoever he is, he is probably liked and considered by some a gem. Gyp. Chamberlainianum has a political sound, and has a strong savour of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various

... the tones of that soft voice, in which sounded sometimes a sort of gentle lisp, like the hissing of ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... child can speak he should be made to lisp the noble words of truth, and to love it, and to abhor a lie! What a beautiful character he will then make! Blessed is ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse

... good-for-nothing young man, evidently meant for Alkibiades, gets his father into debt by buying horses, and, under the teaching of Socrates, learns both to cheat his creditors and to treat respect for his father as a worn-out notion. The beauty and the lisp of Alkibiades were imitated so as to make it quite plain who was meant by the youth; and Socrates himself was evidently represented by an actor in a hideous comic mask, caricaturing the philosopher's snub nose and ugly features. The play ended by the young ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... recognition was almost impossible. The girls talked with every one in turn, but Rob and Keith were the only boys they had recognised when the signal for unmasking was given, and little Bethel Cassidy was the only girl. They knew her queer little lisp. ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston

... whom he could speak of everything. The grown people behaved so foolishly and asked such absurd, dull questions about things that everybody knew, that it was necessary for him also to make believe that he was foolish. He had to lisp and give nonsensical answers; and, of course, he felt like running away from them as soon as possible. But there were over him and around him and within him two entirely extraordinary persons, at once ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... father struck him with his cane. John fell as if he were dead. I was looking in at the window, not thinking any harm, and saw it all. I thought he had killed John, and ran away, determined not to tell. I never breathed a lisp of it before, son, and nobody ever knew of that quarrel, only your grandfather and me. I know it troubled him greatly after John died. Oh, I can see that awful paper, as John held it up to the light, as plain as this one in my ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... off and pushed it down the precipice; For who would lose his temper and his breath To keep a brute alive that's bent on death? Yet one thing more: your fate may be to teach In some suburban school the parts of speech, And, maundering over grammar day by day, Lisp, prattle, drawl, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... fresh fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. "I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under the apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down." (It was that started the curate ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... more like a little white rat than a man, and swears more than he converses—which would be very shocking if it were not for his lisp, which makes it very funny—needless to say, my diary dear, your Molly is not in love with ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... instance, in Punch? His author has never told us which one of the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell? Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the fact that he is ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... for this stranger. That he knew French was not strange. He had been well educated as a boy and had had his hour with the classics. His godmother, who had been in the household of Prince Joseph Bonaparte, taught him French from the time he could lisp, and, what was dangerous in his father's eyes, filled him with bits of poetry and fine language, so that he knew Heine, Racine and Beranger and many another. But this was made endurable to the father by ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker

... after my promotion to the office of general superintendent, and the little fellow that is learning to lisp 'papa,' you know, has been named after you, my old, true, and invaluable friend, to whose counsel and kindness I feel ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis

... please: He is wit's pedlar, and retails his wares At wakes, and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs; And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know, Have not the grace to grace it with such show. This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve; Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve: He can carve too, and lisp: why this is he That kiss'd his hand away in courtesy; This is the ape of form, monsieur the nice, That, when he plays at tables, chides the dice In honourable terms; nay, he can sing A mean most meanly; and in ushering Mend him who can: the ladies call him sweet; ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]

... he roared. "Come with me, and," as he dragged McNeil to the door and paused there, "if you dare lisp a word of what you've overheard, I'll fire ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne

... see. Loftily domed over with glass, it is at once a conservatory, a vinery, and tropical aviary. Room here for trees even, for miniature palms, while birds of the rarest plumage flit silently from bough to bough among the oranges, or lisp out the sweet lilts that have descended to them from sires that sang in foreign lands. Yonder a fountain plays and casts its spray over the most lovely feathery ferns. The roof is very spacious, and the conservatory occupies the ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables

... with the meat and the drink, though I must say of him that he was a clever fellow, and perfect master of his trade, by which he made a power of money, and bating his not being able to learn Irish, and a certain Jewish lisp which he had, a great master of his tongue, of which he was very proud, so much so that he once told me that when he had saved a certain sum of money he meant to leave off the thimbling business, and enter Parliament, into which he said he could get at any time, through the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... scorpion tongue, The march of Time shall find his fame; Where Bravery's loved and Glory's sung, There children's lips shall lisp his name. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... performance for small muscles—and with a portentous frown, which puckered up my mouth even more than my eyebrows, receive from him certain awfully unintelligible passages from "Macbeth;" replying to them, with a lisp that must have greatly heightened the tragic effect of this terrible dialogue, "My handth are of oo tolor" (My hands are of your color). Years—how many!—after this first lesson in declamation, dear Charles Young was acting Macbeth ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... midnight the cedars were sleeping, Their shadowy tresses outlined in the bright Crystal, moon-smitten mists, where the fountain's heart, leaping Forever, forever burst, full with delight; And its lisp on my spirit Fell faint as that near it Whose love like a lily bloomed out in ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley

... happy as the day was long. And Edy Boardman was rocking the chubby baby to and fro in the pushcar while that young gentleman fairly chuckled with delight. He was but eleven months and nine days old and, though still a tiny toddler, was just beginning to lisp his first babyish words. Cissy Caffrey bent over to him to tease his fat little plucks and the dainty dimple in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... and of such natural inclinations the body will retain a certain bent, without our knowledge or consent. It was an affectation conformable with his beauty that made Alexander carry his head on one side, and caused Alcibiades to lisp; Julius Caesar scratched his head with one finger, which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome thoughts; and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a sign of a man given to scoffing; such motions as these may imperceptibly happen in us. There are other artificial ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... to neet her little tongue Wor allus on a stir; Awve heeard a deeal o' childer lisp, But ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley

... Blending the human and divine, A tale of the Decameron, told In Palmieri's garden old, By Fiametta, laurel-crowned, While her companions lay around, And heard the intermingled sound Of airs that on their errands sped, And wild birds gossiping overhead, And lisp of leaves, and fountain's fall, And her own voice more sweet than all, Telling the tale, which, wanting these, Perchance may lose its ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... sorcerers, demons, ghouls, enchanted caves and castles, and monsters and monstrosities of every name. The exceedingly impressible and poetical nature of children (for all children are poets and talk poetry as soon as they can lisp) appropriates and absorbs with intense relish these fanciful myths, and for years they believe more firmly in their truth than in the realities of the actual world. And I more than suspect that this child-credulity rather slumbers in the grown man, smothered beneath ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... really long ones, with long fringes hanging down about a quarter of a yard or more. They wear them as we do a waistcoat, so that they can be seen by everyone, not as we wear them in England, tucked away out of sight. Here young and old, even little boys who can only just walk and lisp their prayers, wear them, and, what is more, take a real pleasure in wearing them. I asked some of them why they wore them so openly, and they answered: 'Because when we look at them we always remember that our chief ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager

... How soft The breezes blow! The lime leaves lisp in whisper and echo answers low; Scarce audibly the rivulet running amid the flower With murmuring ripple laps the edge of yonder mystic bower. And ever darker grows the veil thou weavest o'er the land, And ever quieter the hush—a hush ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... a silver mist, In silver silence all the day, Save for the low, soft kiss of spray, And the lisp of sands by waters kissed, As the tide draws up ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge

... pompous man, who spoke with a faint lisp, cleared his throat and read the charge against the prisoner from the sheet with which he had been supplied—the charge of having violated the recent enactment against duelling made by the Commander-in-Chief of his Majesty's forces in the Peninsula, ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... now four years of age, had changed least of all among changing things about Lagonda Ledge. A sweet-faced, quaint little fellow he was, with big appealing eyes, a baby lisp to his words, and innocent ways. He was a sturdy, pudgy, self-reliant youngster, however, who took long rambles alone and turned up safe at the right moment. All Lagonda Ledge petted him, even to Burgess, who never forgot the day in the rotunda when Bug's pitying voice ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter

... haste and stammering he perform'd his part, And look'd the rage that rankled in his heart; (So will each lover inly curse his fate, Too soon made happy and made wise too late:) I saw his features take a savage gloom, And deeply threaten for the days to come. Low spake the lass, and lisp'd and minced the while, Look'd on the lad, and faintly tried to smile; With soften'd speech and humbled tone she strove To stir the embers of departed love: While he, a tyrant, frowning walk'd before, Felt the poor purse, ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe

... speak plain. Grandma couldn't speak plain. They lisp. They talk fast. Sound so funny. Mama and auntie speak well. Plain as I do now. They was up wid Mars White's childern more. Mars White sent his childern to pay school. It was a log house and they had a lady teacher. They had a accordion. Mars Marion's ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... and his acorn song skinned to death. Listen! This is the song of the little East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices of her Sunday School. She's quite young. Pay particular attention to her lisp." ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... thou whose hand hath won The young bird from its nest away, Where, careless, 'neath a vernal sun, She gayly carolled day by day; The haunt is lone, the heart must grieve, From where her timid wing doth soar They pensive lisp at hush of eve, Yet hear her gushing song ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... gives him life Would crown a never-dying flame, And every tender babe I bore Should learn to lisp the ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various

... envious eye-lid shrouded no more its lustrous jewel—the wondering eyes dilated, as they met her lover's—and she murmured something with that sweet Venetian lisp, in which the Greek women breathe their Italian. But, as she saw the stranger, her face and neck became suffused with crimson, and her small hand wrapped the snowy ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... are!" she greeted her. "Goody! What a relief! I've been worrying about what you'd be like, and just praying you wouldn't have spectacles and talk with a lisp. Miss Todd gave me to understand you were a peach, and I might think myself in luck to room with you, but you never can trust head mistresses till you see for yourself. She's told me the truth, though, after all. Yes, I like you right straight away, and I always make up my mind about people, slap ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... Totty ran about hunting hers and Benny's stockings, and after she had hung them up, heard her sweet voice again as she wondered over and over if Santa really would forget them. He heard the mother, in a choking voice; tell her treasures to get ready for bed; heard them lisp their childish prayers, the little girl concluding: "And, O, Lord! please tell good Santa Claus that we are very poor; but that we love him as much as rich children do, for dear ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... court thy sprightly eyes With a base-viol plac'd betwixt my thighs, I cannot lisp, nor to a fiddle sing, Nor run upon a ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... led the little choir. Amy chirped like a cricket, and Jo wandered through the airs at her own sweet will, always coming out at the wrong place with a croak or a quaver that spoiled the most pensive tune. They had always done this from the time they could lisp... ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... there it stood, and there it stands as yet,—though its obituary was long ago written after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,—leafing out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp "Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October as softly as if it were ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... pens and one stylographic in no time. The exigencies of war necessitate some little irregularity now and then; but how, I asked him, did he justify this excess of zeal? J. B. is distinguished by a lisp among other things. "It'th betht to be on the thafe thide, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various

... came to dinner, and was duly attacked by Madame Vestri. She began by saying that it was an author's duty to be polite to actresses, and if any of them spoke with a lisp the least he could do was to write their ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... many as fifty good gossipers predicted daily the marriage of Bolt to some aristocratic belle, there came along a lady of the name of Mrs. Bolt. This person, whose name Mr. Bolt had been extremely careful not to lisp, caused a desperate sensation among his admirers. My Lady Longblower was seen to cool away like liquid tallow, while not a few who had been equally fervent just before, said it was a very impertinent thing in Mr. Bolt. But ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... and ungainly. She liked him for his attachment to her husband (to be sure there was very little merit in that), and she thought George was most generous and kind in extending his friendship to his brother officer. George had mimicked Dobbin's lisp and queer manners many times to her, though to do him justice, he always spoke most highly of his friend's good qualities. In her little day of triumph, and not knowing him intimately as yet, she made light of honest William—and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... weak and sickly; she loved it when it grew a pretty lively baby, and would set its little feet on her knees, and crow and caper before her face; she loved it when it began to play around her as she sat at work, to lisp out the word "Ganny," for she taught it to call her grandmother; she loved it when it would follow her into her nice garden, and pick a flower and carry it to her, as she sat in the little arbor; and she, holding the flower, would talk to it of God ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury

... he said, not without effort, and our progress gradually became smoother, till he had no need to speak at all. The only sound now was one like the gentle simmer of a saucepan away to port—the lisp of surf I knew it to be—and the muffled grunt of the rowlocks. I broke the silence once to say 'It's very shallow.' I had touched sand with ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... the host angry, and he gave Parr such a severe rebuke as sent him from the room in ill-humor. The rest walked on the lawn, amusing the Americans with sketches of the Doctor. There was a dark cloud overhead, and from that cloud presently came a voice which called Tham (Parr-lisp for Sam). The company were astonished for a moment, but thought the Doctor was calling his servant in the house, and that the apparent direction was an illusion arising out of inattention. But presently the sound was repeated, certainly ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... reason to fear Aristophanes than any fool living. Oh, that he could but hear you trying to imitate the slang of Straton (See Aristophanes; Equites, 1375.) and the lisp of Alcibiades! (See Aristophanes; Vespae, 44.) You would be an inexhaustible subject. You would console him for the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... any children have to work anywhere as they do here," he fairly shouted, "here where they rob the cradle for workers, where the little voices become sad and bitter 'most as soon as they can lisp, where the brightness o' childhood fades out before its time, an' where its only world is the mill, the shop, an' the fact'ry. Their tiny bones unset, they make them stand in one position all day long until you hear the children ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... being. Its peculiar simplicity gives even to the most forcible reasoning and the most brilliant wit an infantine air, generally delightful, but to a foreign reader sometimes a little ludicrous. Heroes and statesmen seem to lisp when they use it. It becomes Nicias incomparably, and renders all his silliness infinitely more silly. We may add, that the verses with which the Mandragola is interspersed, appear to us to be the most spirited and correct of all that Machiavelli has written ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... target of itself. But against your friend your hands are tied. He has injured you. He has disgusted you. He has infuriated you. But it was most Christianly done. You cannot hurl a thunderbolt, or pull a trigger, or lisp a syllable, against those amiable monsters who with tenderest fingers are sticking pins all over you. So you shut fast the doors of your lips, and inwardly sigh for a good, stout, brawny, malignant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... chair and strapped down the receivers. A long, faint whisper, as indistinguishable as the lisp of leaves on a distant hill, trickled into his ears. Ordinarily he would have given up such a station in disgust, and waited for the air to clear. Now he wanted to establish his ability, to demonstrate the acuteness of hearing for which ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... Fadlallah, humbled yet resolved, returned to his house, leading the ragged Halil, and entered his wife's chamber. Selima was playing with her seventh child, and teaching it to lisp the word "Baba"—about the amount of education which she had found time to bestow on each of her offspring. When she saw the plight of her eldest son she frowned, and was about to scold him; but Fadlallah interposed, and said, "Wife, speak no harsh words. We have not done our duty ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... the beauty of Adalaisa asleep at the feet of naked Christ. Arnold goes pacing a dark path; there is silence among the mountains; in front of him the rustling lisp of a river, a pool.... Then it is lost and soundless. Arnold ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... thee azure-eyed goddess Minerva has excited this man. Infatuate! nor does the son of Tydeus know this in his mind, that he is by no means long-lived who fights with the immortals, nor ever at his knees will sons lisp a father's name, as he returns from war and dreadful battle. Therefore, let the son of Tydeus now, though he be very brave, have a care, lest a better than thou fight with him: lest at a future time AEgialea, the very prudent daughter of Adrastus, the noble spouse ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... and nothing loath in any occasion that led to notice, in spite of a lisp in his speech, he played Davus in the Phormio; which he opened with singidar absurdity, as the four first words terminate in the letter s, which he, from the imperfection in his ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... whisper or lisp from the waters: the skies were not silenter. Peace Was between them; a passionless rapture of respite as soft as release. Not a sound, but a sense that possessed and pervaded with patient delight The soul and the body, clothed round with the ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... kitten found a nest. That tender boy, with tresses fair, Was Edric, Egbert's cherished heir; The plaything of the homestead he, Now fondled on his grandame's knee; Or as beside the hearth he sat, Oft sporting with his snow-white cat; Now by the chaplain taught to read, And lisp his Pater and his Creed; Well nurtured at his mother's side, And by his father trained to ride, To speak the truth, to draw the bow, And all an English Thane should know, His days had been as one bright dream— As smooth as his own river's stream! ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... no calling for this idle trade; No duty broke, no father disobey'd; While yet a child, ere yet a fool to fame, I lisp'd in numbers, for ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... a sickly mien, Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen; Practised to lisp, and hang the head aside, Faints into airs, and languishes with pride; On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe, Wrapp'd in a gown, for sickness, and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... glasses and the sick man's flannels, I gave him no unkind answer. And where was the quarreling? Nowhere. It did not exist. He taught me my bounds after the manner he did, and I accepted them and conformed my moves thereto with not a lisp of fault-finding. He never spoke a word in disapprobation of what I was doing, but that all was agreeable to his mind. Again, where was that place of quarreling? Not in the prison between the warden and chaplain. Whenever we met, it was on the ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby

... shadows about As he gathers the stars in a nest of delight And sets there and hatches them out: The Zhederrill peers from his watery mine In scorn with the Will-o'-the-wisp, As he twinkles his eyes in a whisper of shine That ends in a luminous lisp. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... my words, if so that any be Known guilty here of incivility: Let what is graceless, discompos'd, and rude, With sweetness, smoothness, softness, be endu'd. Teach it to blush, to curtsy, lisp, and show Demure, but yet full of temptation, too. Numbers ne'er tickle, or but lightly please, Unless they have some wanton carriages. This if ye do, each piece will here be good, And graceful made by ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... perceived that he would have to modify the scene if it were to represent the facts. His father did not brighten all over and demand, "Miss Pasmer, of course?" he contrived to hide whatever start the news had given him, and was some time in asking, with his soft lisp, "Isn't that rather ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... ancestor and posterity. I am today what I am because I was what I was last year; and next year I will be what I will be, because I am now what I ata. These were truths which were, very early in life, familiar to John Bright. Before he could speak without a childish lisp, his mother taught him to decide on his own actions. "I don't want to study; can't I go and wade in the brook?" once asked little John of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... hand gravely to his forehead, bowing low with a "Talaam, Mees Tahib," then snaps up the prize. I shall miss my little companion. I wonder what will become of him—little brown heir of the ages. Already he can lisp to idols, but he has never even heard of the Christ who said, ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... only listless eyes and dull faces. A big boy was preparing a pin to evoke from a smaller neighbor the attention he himself was withholding. The neighbor was Dave Dennison. Dave was of late actually trying to learn something. Dave was the only boy who was listening. A little girl with a lisp was trying in vain to divide her attention between the story and an imprisoned fly the boy next her was torturing, whilst Phrony was reading a novel on the sly. The others were all engaged in any other occupation than thinking of Hannibal or ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... better. But she was a barren woman, and thence resulted her misery. For seven weary seasons had she lived in the lodge of her husband; and while his seven other wives had each children at her knee, crying, "My mother!" there was none to address her by that tender name, and to lisp in childish tones its delight, when she returned from the labours of the field of maize—and to bestow its innocent caresses upon her after the separations which unavoidably take place in forest life. Thence ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... takes the palm by winsomeness and grace. At seven o'clock every evening you may meet her in thousands in Oxford Street, Villiers Street, Tottenham Court Road, or London Bridge, where the pavements lisp in reply to the chatter of her little light feet. The factory girl of twenty years ago has, I am glad to say, entirely disappeared. She was not a success. She screwed her hair into sausages and rolled them around her ears. She wore a straw ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... gaining piquancy from his slight lisp, "you come from England—from dear England. I love your country greatly. It has fog, and it is dark, too, for the sun forgets to shine at times; but it is beautiful—like a picture, and when it ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson

... heart is high, For the Bassarids and the Fauns are nigh, And prosperous leaves lisp busily Over flattered brakes, whence the breezes bring Vext twittering To swell the burden ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... As I said before, I did not know him very well, and I was amazed to find how bad he was at his job. A more curiously incompetent person I never met. He was a long, thin man, with a grizzled moustache and a mild sleepy eye-not an impressive figure, except on a horse; and he had an odd lisp which made even a shrewd remark sound foolish. He was the most industrious creature in the world, and a model of official decorum. His papers were always in order, his despatches always neat and correct, and I don't believe any one ever caught ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... elacos (halfpence) worth of pulque from a jarrito (little earthen jar); the portly and well-looking padre prior del Carden (the Carmelite friar), sauntering up the lane at a leisurely pace, all the little ragged boys, down to the merest urchin that can hardly lisp, dragging off their large, well-holed hats, with a "Buenos das, padrecito!" (Good-morning, little father!)—the father replying with a benevolent smile, and a slight sound in his throat intended for a Benedicite; and all that might be dull in any other climate ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... companion, began to smile—that smile made hope bud out afresh, assuring me the world was not a desert. Your gestures were ever present to my fancy; and I dwelt on the joy I should feel when you would begin to walk and lisp. Watching your wakening mind, and shielding from every rude blast my tender blossom, I recovered my spirits—I dreamed not of the frost—'the killing frost,' to which you were destined to be exposed.—But I lose all patience—and execrate the injustice of the world—folly! ignorance!—I ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... bosoms spread a throne For love at large to fill. Spare blood and sweat: We'll see Him take a private seat, And make His mansion in the mild And milky soul of a soft child. Scarce has she learnt to lisp a name Of martyr, yet she thinks it shame Life should so long play with that breath Which spent can buy so brave a death. She never undertook to know What death with love should have to do. Nor ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... They tell me that we would not be alone,— We cried when we were parted; when I wept, Her smile lit up the rainbow on my tears, Stay'd on the clouds of sorrow; that we loved The sound of one another's voices more Than the grey cuckoo loves his name, and learn'd To lisp in tune together; that we slept In the same cradle always, face to face, Heart beating time to heart, lip pressing lip, Folding each other, breathing on each other, Dreaming together (dreaming of each other They should have added) till the morning light Sloped ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... the children; and I can't wait for my ivory fan?' 'My bandanna hanky!' My two ounces of snuff!' My guitar!' My clogs!' 'My satin dancing-shoes!' My onion-seed!' My new spindle!' My fiddle-bow!' 'My powder-puff!' And some little 'un would lisp, 'I'm sure you've forgotten my blue balloon!' And then they'd cry, one-and-all, in a breath, George! what's the news?' And he'd say, 'Give a body elbow-room!' and handing the packages right and left would allus have something to tell. But on this ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... come from, anyway? And where did she get her chameleonlike nature? Was she an innocent child, as Flaubert represents her, who could but lisp the name of the prophet when her mother told her to ask for his head? Had she taken dancing lessons from one of the women of Cadiz to learn to dance as she must have danced to excite such lust in Herod? Was she a monster, a worse than vampire as she is represented by Wilde ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnacled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawse-holes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuckle of sheaves and lisp of ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... his way of cataloguing objects without selection. His single expressions arc often unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... shadow, she flitted through the corridors and galleries of the Louvre and the Palais Royal, and whenever he had sought to point her out to some one, to discover her name, lo, she was gone! Tormenting mystery! Ah, that soft lisp of hers, those enchanting caprices, those amazing extravagances of fancy, that wit which possessed the sparkle of white chambertin! He would never forget that summer night when, dressed as a boy, she had gone with him ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... As if the Devil had Ubiquity. Hence 'tis they live as Rovers, and defie This or that Place, Rags of Geography. They're Citizens o' th' World, they're all in all; Scotland's a Nation Epidemical. And yet they ramble not to learn the Mode, How to be drest, or how to lisp abroad; To return knowing in the Spanish Shrug, Or which of the Dutch States a double Jug Resembles most in Belly or in Beard; The Card by which the Mariners are Steer'd. No! The Scots-Errant fight, and fight to eat; Their Ostrich Stomachs make their Swords their ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid

... Trolling a canzonetta with an air As if he owned the villa. Why, the fop! He might have doffed his bonnet as he passed. I'll teach him better if he comes again. What does he at the villa? O! perchance He comes in the evening when his master's out, To lisp soft romance in the ready ear Of Beatrice's dressing-maid; but then She has one lover. Now I think she's two: This gaudy popinjay would make the third, And that's too many for an honest girl! I'll ask the Countess—no, ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... ruddier than now, when wealth and fame and happiness seemed lying just before me, ready to be gathered in, and farther away still, to a gentle, blue-eyed mother—now long gone—teaching her child to lisp his ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... unimportant that the audience will not pay much attention to them, the playlet writer must give peculiar individuality to every word spoken by the chief characters. By this I do not mean that, merely to show that a character is different, a hero or heroine should be made to talk with a lisp or to use some catch-word—though this is sometimes done with admirable effect. What I mean is that the words given to the chief characters must possess an individuality rising from their inner differences; ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... ray, As tapers shine their little lives away; There let her practise from herself to steal, And look the happiness she does not feel; The ready smile and bidden blush employ At Faro-routs that dazzle to destroy; Fan with affected ease the essenc'd air, And lisp of fashions with unmeaning stare. Be thine to meditate an humbler flight, When morning fills the fields with rosy light; Be thine to blend, nor thine a vulgar aim, Repose with dignity, with Quiet fame. Here no state-chambers in long line ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... it can be made to understand any thing, is taught mechanically to join its little hands in prayer. His tongue is forced to lisp a formula which it does not comprehend, addressed to a God which its understanding can never conceive. In the arms of its nurse it is carried into the temple or church, where its eyes are habituated to contemplate spectacles, ceremonies, and pretended mysteries, of which, even ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach

... island-edge, for she divined that I had gone to seek her, and she was watching for me: and when I took her hand, what did she say to me, the Biblical simpleton?—'Oh you of little Faith!' says she. And she had adventures to lisp, with all the r's liquefied into l's, and I was with her ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... these records exact statements of truth? Not always. The primitive human mind could only lisp its wonderful glimpses of truth in legend and myth. And so in fable and allegory the early Israelites sought to show the power of good over evil, and thereby stimulate a desire for right conduct, based, of course, on right-thinking. And thus it is that the most ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... fascinating when he was a boy, a youth, and a man. The saying of Euripides, that all beauties have a beautiful autumn of their charms, is not universally true, but it was so in the case of Alkibiades and of a few other persons because of the symmetry and vigour of their frames. Even his lisp is said to have added a charm to his speech, and to have made his talk more persuasive. His lisp is mentioned by Aristophanes in the verses in which he satirises Theorus, in which Alkibiades calls him Theolus, for he pronounced ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... disgraceful scandals, but he was a favorite both of his comrades and his superior officers. On arriving at twelve o'clock from the station at his flat, Vronsky saw, at the outer door, a hired carriage familiar to him. While still outside his own door, as he rang, he heard masculine laughter, the lisp of a feminine voice, and Petritsky's voice. "If that's one of the villains, don't let him in!" Vronsky told the servant not to announce him, and slipped quietly into the first room. Baroness Shilton, a ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... grew up with elder times, And our deceased Grandsires lisp'd thy rhymes, Yet we can sing ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various

... her from her birth; knew her strong-hearted mother, and her gentle father, who slipped the noose of life when Claudia was a tiny thing, too young to more than lisp his name. Yet, with his last breath he blessed her, and blessed the man into whose arms he placed her, and left her ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... gods, Gabinius!" cried Servius, forgetting to lisp his Greekisms, "don't you know me? Let me ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... Pope received pleased him much. But he took it only as his due, and his great ambition was to make people believe that he had been a wonderfully clever child, and that he had begun to write when he was very young. He says of himself with something of pompousness, "I lisp'd in numbers, for the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... give peculiar individuality to every word spoken by the chief characters. By this I do not mean that, merely to show that a character is different, a hero or heroine should be made to talk with a lisp or to use some catch-word—though this is sometimes done with admirable effect. What I mean is that the words given to the chief characters must possess an individuality rising from their inner differences; their speech should ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... a jarrito (little earthen jar); the portly and well-looking padre prior del Carden (the Carmelite friar), sauntering up the lane at a leisurely pace, all the little ragged boys, down to the merest urchin that can hardly lisp, dragging off their large, well-holed hats, with a "Buenos das, padrecito!" (Good-morning, little father!)—the father replying with a benevolent smile, and a slight sound in his throat intended for a Benedicite; ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... stockings, and after she had hung them up, heard her sweet voice again as she wondered over and over if Santa really would forget them. He heard the mother, in a choking voice; tell her treasures to get ready for bed; heard them lisp their childish prayers, the little girl concluding: "And, O, Lord! please tell good Santa Claus that we are very poor; but that we love him as much as rich children do, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... encore took effect, return immediately to his noisy and disturbing engrossment in the young ladies' society from whose impertinent whispering he had only rested for the moment, troubling all who sat near him both with his talk and his sympathetic lie. A true man will not move a finger or lisp a syllable to echo what he does not apprehend and approve. A true man never assents anywise to what is error to him. In the delicious letters of Mendelssohn we read of an application by a distinguished lady made to him to write a piece of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... Macaulay say that he would rather a boy should learn to lisp all the bad words in the language than grow up without a mother. Froude's interrupted studies were nothing compared to a childhood without love, and there was nobody to make him feel the meaning of the word. Fortunately, though his father was always at home, his brother was ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... recognised by 'eaven-sent-hinstinct, the moment you set eyes upon him. Rosemary stood by the quay for a few minutes, uncertain what to do. Two or three deep-eyed, long-lashed Monegasque men smiled at her kindly, as Monegasque men and Italians smile at all children. She had learned to lisp French with comparative fluency, during the months she and "Angel" had spent in Paris; and now she asked where the people went who had come in on those ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... laugh of a child and the clear crowing of a cock, also the smaller aerial sounds of nature, the tinkling notes of tits and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter of swallows and martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain." It was sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave it to go back to the front to face the furious blasts once more. Rut there ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... which the manifest and glaring untruth is working mischief to the national mind. A type of such a play is familiar enough in these days when we like to ridicule the West Briton. We are served up puppets representing the shoneen with a lisp set over against the patriot who says all the proper things suitable to the occasion. Now, such a play serves no good purpose, but it has a certain bad effect. It does not give a true interpretation of life; ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... perform'd his part, And look'd the rage that rankled in his heart; (So will each lover inly curse his fate, Too soon made happy and made wise too late:) I saw his features take a savage gloom, And deeply threaten for the days to come. Low spake the lass, and lisp'd and minced the while, Look'd on the lad, and faintly tried to smile; With soften'd speech and humbled tone she strove To stir the embers of departed love: While he, a tyrant, frowning walk'd before, Felt the poor purse, and sought the ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe

... beneath the waves, And rock'd by Nereids in their coral caves, Charm'd the blue sisterhood with playful wiles, 50 Lisp'd her sweet tones, and tried her tender smiles. Then, on her beryl throne by Triton's borne, Bright rose the Goddess like the Star of morn; When with soft fires the milky dawn He leads, And wakes to life and love the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... placid brow. He knelt by her side. It was his little Beatrice, this strange, cold, marble statue—his little baby Beatrice, who had leaped in his arms years ago, who had cried and laughed, who had learned in pretty accents to lisp his name—his beautiful child, his proud, bright daughter, who had kissed him the previous night while he spoke jesting words to her about her lover. And he had never heard her voice since—never would ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme

... are you to make of Odont. crisp. Sanderae, which, whomsoever "Sanderae" may be, I don't want to "crisp" him; "A sport of nature unequalled" they call him, and no doubt his name is, for I can neither clearly articulate, stutter or lisp him. I've not a doubt that, whoever he is, he is probably liked and considered by some a gem. Gyp. Chamberlainianum has a political sound, and has a strong savour ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various

... man, sitting in a wicker-chair, out upon the lawn. He leans upon his stick, and seldom raises his bent head; but for all that his eyes are on a level with the two little fairy children who come to him in all their small joys and sorrows, and who learnt to lisp his name almost as soon as they did that of their ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell

... the water washed up against the piles with a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be understood from ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... the truth," bending forward confidentially, "isn't it awfully dry and uninteresting? There! I wouldn't dare lisp it before my husband, but isn't there a good deal of—of—well, humbug, ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry

... not, ev'n for thy soul, to thwart me further! None of your arts, your feigning, and your foolery; Your dainty squeamish coying it to me; Go—to your lord, your paramour, be gone! Lisp in his ear, hang wanton on his neck, And play your monkey gambols o'er to him. You know my purpose, look that you pursue it, And make him yield obedience to my will. Do it—or ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe

... and we gaze, and, behold! one flash of one star! For, ever, the golden gates stand open, the transit is free For the human to mix with divine; from himself to the Highest to flee. Lo on its knees by the bedside the babe:—and the song that we hear Has been heard already in Heaven! the low-lisp'd music is clear:— For, fresh from the hand of the Maker, the child still breathes the light air Of the House Angelic, the meadow where souls yet unbodied repair, Lucid with love, translucent with bliss, and know not the doom In the Marah ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... got the name, I cannot tell—was four or five years older than Rita. He was a manly boy, and when my little friend could hardly lisp his name she would run to him with the unerring instinct of childhood and nestle in his arms or cling to his helpful finger. The little fellow was so sturdy, strong, and brave, and his dark gray eyes were so steadfast and true, that she feared no evil from him, though ordinarily she was a timid ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... not realize how his friendship with Josephina began. Perhaps it was the contrast between himself and the little woman who hardly came up to his shoulder and who seemed about fifteen when she was already past twenty. Her soft voice with its slight lisp came to his ears like a caress. He laughed when he thought of the possibility of embracing that graceful, slender form; it would break in pieces in his pugilist's hands, like a wax doll. Mariano sought her out ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... far away in distant lands. I did but tarry here to wait for thee And tell thee many things about thyself. I knew thee when thou wert a little babe, Smiling upon thy loving mother's breast. Thy earliest lisp still laugheth in my ear. And thy dear widowed mother, sweet Heartsrue, Although she mourned, smiled also in her joy When thou wert come, a laughing new-born love. Thy cradle was a nest of softest moss, And her ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel

... was his one dream of delight. At first he had visited Ashwood as a matter of duty; but, as time passed on those visits became his dearest pleasures. The child began to know him, her lovely little face to brighten for him; she had no fear of him, but would sit on his knee and lisp her pretty stories and sing her pretty songs ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... that of the successive sigh and vanishing of the slow waves upon the sand, no art can render to us. Perhaps the silence of early light, even on the "field dew consecrate" of the grass itself, is not so tender as the lisp of the sweet belled lips of the clear waves in their following patience. We will leave the shore as their silver fringes fade upon it, desiring thus, as far as may be, to remember the sea. We have regarded it perhaps too often as an enemy to be subdued; let us, at least this once, accept from it, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... Hence 'tis they live as Rovers, and defie This or that Place, Rags of Geography. They're Citizens o' th' World, they're all in all; Scotland's a Nation Epidemical. And yet they ramble not to learn the Mode, How to be drest, or how to lisp abroad; To return knowing in the Spanish Shrug, Or which of the Dutch States a double Jug Resembles most in Belly or in Beard; The Card by which the Mariners are Steer'd. No! The Scots-Errant fight, and fight ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid

... to-day, and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to think and will and do for himself,—and let no man dream that day will never come,—then the part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in his race-childhood. To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel: beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... fashionable Attic lisp, or careless articulation, turned the sound r into l. Colax, a flatterer; corax, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... hanging down about a quarter of a yard or more. They wear them as we do a waistcoat, so that they can be seen by everyone, not as we wear them in England, tucked away out of sight. Here young and old, even little boys who can only just walk and lisp their prayers, wear them, and, what is more, take a real pleasure in wearing them. I asked some of them why they wore them so openly, and they answered: 'Because when we look at them we always remember that our chief duty in life is to try to obey God's commands, and if ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager

... power, variety, and even melody, notwithstanding his occasional prolixity and tediousness, is an orator in every sense of the word. Macaulay, short, fat, and ungraceful, with a round, thick, unmeaning face, and with rather a lisp, though he has made speeches of great merit, and of a very high style of eloquence in point of composition, has no pretensions to be put in competition with Brougham in the House of Commons. Nor is the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... understandings, but they understand not,"—and go about asking our blind guides, whether Pope was a poet or not? It will never do. Such persons, when you point out to them a fine passage in Pope, turn it off to something of the same sort in some other writer. Thus they say that the line, "I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came," is pretty, but taken from that of Ovid—Et quum conabar scribere, versus erat. They are safe in this mode of criticism: there is no danger of any one's tracing their writings to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... I could make you come." The girl spoke in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her articulation of one or two ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... a whisper or lisp from the waters: the skies were not silenter. Peace Was between them; a passionless rapture of respite as soft as release. Not a sound, but a sense that possessed and pervaded with patient delight The soul and the body, clothed ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... white and always stood gaily on end, defying brush and comb. Daniel Arker, a sturdy black-haired lad, would have done fuller justice to the passage that fell to Abraham, for the Spiker boy with his gentle lisp never shone in elocution; but our reading class is a lottery, as we go from scholar to scholar down the line. The lot falling to him, Abraham pushed himself up from the bench, grasped his book fiercely with both hands, and fixed his ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd

... and moved towards the mill. Then one of them caught sight of the wisp of cloth on the nail, and cried out to the other. They both went back to the house, and brought two more to look at it. I saw the rotund figure of my late captor, and I thought I made out the man with the lisp. I noticed that all ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan

... who came within the sphere of her observation, her little tongue was as active as her hands. She learned to talk very early, and so speedy was her improvement in the art of prattling, that, before she was three years old, she could lisp out a tale in very intelligible language. Her parents were so unwise as to encourage her in this mischievous kind of ingenuity, not only from the pleasure they took in hearing how fast she learned to speak, but because they considered it as an infallible token that she would, in time, ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous

... deeds,—who with his bow violated the gods that dwell in Olympus. But against thee azure-eyed goddess Minerva has excited this man. Infatuate! nor does the son of Tydeus know this in his mind, that he is by no means long-lived who fights with the immortals, nor ever at his knees will sons lisp a father's name, as he returns from war and dreadful battle. Therefore, let the son of Tydeus now, though he be very brave, have a care, lest a better than thou fight with him: lest at a future time AEgialea, the very prudent daughter of Adrastus, the noble spouse of horse-taming ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... from its very excess, may be distinguished from the natural, by a penetrating eye. That gentleness is ever liable to be suspected for the counterfeited, which is so excessive as to deprive people of the proper use of speech and motion, or which, as Hamlet says, makes them lisp and ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More

... men Worked then but as a little leaven; From some more modest palace then The Soul of Dives stank to Heaven. But when they planned with lisp and leer Their careful war upon the weak, They smote your body on its bier, For surety that you could ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... up his knife and fork Levin observed a ring, with a pure white diamond in it, flash upon the Captain's hand. He was a blue-eyed man, with a blush and a lisp at once, as of one shy, but at times he would look straight and bold at some one of the group, and then he seemed to lose his delicacy and become coarse and cold. One such look he gave at Hulda, who bowed her eyes before it, and looked at him but ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... possessed, and which were one day to enrapture and electrify his countrymen. He addressed the meeting on one of the passing topics of the day; something in his manner savouring of affectation, something in the semi-Saxon lisp that struggled through his low-toned utterances, something in the total lack of suitable gesture, gave his listeners at the outset an unfavourable impression of the young speaker. He was boyish, and some did not scruple to hint conceited; he had too much of the fine gentleman ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... acorn song skinned to death. Listen! This is the song of the little East-sider, on her first trip to the country under the auspices of her Sunday School. She's quite young. Pay particular attention to her lisp." ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... sons of Rome are sitting after a full meal, and inquiring in their cups, 'What news from the divine world of poesy?' Hereupon a personage with a hyacinth-coloured mantle over his shoulders brings out some mawkish trash or other, with a snuffle and a lisp, something about Phyllises or Hypsipyles, or any of the many heroines over whom poets have snivelled, filtering out his tones and tripping up the words against the roof of his delicate ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... weep. Her tears fell on her lover's face, but they were tears of joy; and with them were mingled tiny bursts of laughter and a thousand endearing words without sense, like the lisp of a little child. She quite forgot that the sight of her joy might sadden the ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France

... and grass, and is so artfully merged with its immediate surroundings that even though you know its precise location it still eludes you. Only yesterday the last finishing-touches were made upon the nest, and this morning, as I might have anticipated from the excess of lisp and twitter of the mother bird, I find the first ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... "fashion" and "society" with Alma Montague and Nellie Harden, and grew quite familiar with the names and doings of the great society dames. She even learned—at considerable pains—a "society" tone of voice with a drawl in it and a little lisp. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner

... the "Well-Spring" had fallen prey to my insatiable appetite for literature. With the story of the small boy who stole a pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still farther advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through the live-long day, BECOME HABITUATED TO A LANGUAGE OF THEIR OWN. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, and thus, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... into the world in imbecility, in the midst of anguish and cries; to be the toy of ignorance, of error, of necessity, of sickness, of malice, of all passions; to return step by step to that imbecility whence one sprang; from the moment when we lisp our first words, down to the moment when we mumble the words of our dotage, to live among rascals and charlatans of every kind; to lie expiring between a man who feels your pulse, and another man ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... exhaustless resources of which, in beautiful language and happy illustrations, he brought to the aid of a logical power, which he wielded to a very great extent. Always ready and prompt, his conceptions seemed to me almost intuitive. His voice was fine, softened, and, I think, improved, by a slight lisp, which an attentive observer could discern. The great theatres of eloquence and public speaking in the United States are the legislative hall, the forum, and the stump, without adverting to the pulpit. I have known some of my contemporaries eminently successful on one of these theatres, without ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... of his neck. He's about five foot three, both ways, one of these rolypoly boys, with dimples all over him, pink and white cheeks, and baby-blue eyes. Oh, he's cute, Benny is; but the bashfullest forty-four fat that ever carried a cane, a reg'lar Mr. Shy Ann kind of a duck. He has a lisp when he talks too, and that makes ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford

... quite plainly, for his lisp was a very changeable one, and already he was on the way to lose ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth

... lest her own appeal might fail, taught her cooing baby to lisp the father's name, thinking that surely the Great Father's heart would not be able to resist a baby's prayer. The widowed mother prayed that if it were consistent with God's will he would spare her son. She laid her heart, pierced through with many sorrows, before Him. ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... attention: Miss Boynton, however, thought him worthy of hers. Her, person was slender and delicate, to which a good complexion and large motionless eyes gave at a distance an appearance of beauty, that vanished upon nearer inspection: she affected to lisp, to languish, and to have two or three fainting-fits a day. The first time that Talbot cast his eyes upon her she was seized with one of these fits: he was told that she swooned away upon his account: he ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... weary race my feet have run, Since first I trod thy banks with alders crowned, And thought my way was all through fairy ground, Beneath thy azure sky and golden sun, Where first my Muse to lisp her notes begun! While pensive Memory traces back the round, Which fills the varied interval between; Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene. Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure No more return, to cheer ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... the audience became more enthusiastic and clamored loudly for encores. Elfreda's imitations provoked continuous laughter, and dainty Arline Thayer, looking not more than seven years old, was a delightful success from her first babyish lisp. Her song of the goblin man who stole little children to work for him in his underground cellar, with its catchy chorus of "Run away, you little children," was immediately adopted by Overton, and when later it was noised about that Ruth had written the words ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower

... boy named To' Muda Long, who was the eldest son of one of the great up-country Chiefs. He was returning from Singapore with the Raja, to whom he had fled after some escapade of his had excited the paternal wrath. He was a nice-looking youngster, with a slight lisp, and a manner as soft as floss-silk, and he was always smartly dressed in pretty Malay garments. We travelled together for more than three months, and I got to know him pretty well, and took something of a liking to him. I knew, of course, that his manner to his own people was not always as gentle ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... delight we should introduce our young Canadians to their grandmother and aunts; my little bushman shall early be taught to lisp the names of those unknown but dear friends, and to love the lands that gave birth to his parents, the bonny hills of the north and ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill

... not bent Towards her with the Muses in thine heart; As if the ministring stars kept not apart, 50 Waiting for silver-footed messages. O Moon! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees Feel palpitations when thou lookest in: O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din The while they feel thine airy fellowship. Thou dost bless every where, with silver lip Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine, Couched in thy brightness, dream of fields divine: Innumerable mountains rise, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... not constant, nor the pitch of its note, which fell when Lawrence stood erect, but rose to a shrill overtone when he bent his head: sometimes one would have thought the river was going down in spate, and then the volume of sound dwindled to a mere thread, a lisp in the air. Lawrence was observing these phenomena with a mind vacant of thought when he heard footsteps brushing through the grass by the field path from the village. Val had ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... that to me, Miss Fenshawe," broke in the Baron, whose fluent English had a slight lisp. "Here is my card," he went on rapidly, looking at Royson with calm assurance. "Come and see me this evening, at seven o'clock, and I will make it ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... and his superior officers. On arriving at twelve o'clock from the station at his flat, Vronsky saw, at the outer door, a hired carriage familiar to him. While still outside his own door, as he rang, he heard masculine laughter, the lisp of a feminine voice, and Petritsky's voice. "If that's one of the villains, don't let him in!" Vronsky told the servant not to announce him, and slipped quietly into the first room. Baroness Shilton, a friend of Petritsky's, with a rosy little face and flaxen hair, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... because I was what I was last year; and next year I will be what I will be, because I am now what I ata. These were truths which were, very early in life, familiar to John Bright. Before he could speak without a childish lisp, his mother taught him to decide on his own actions. "I don't want to study; can't I go and wade in the brook?" once asked little John ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... then, but, ah me! I remember it as if it was but yesterday. And then father struck him with his cane. John fell as if he were dead. I was looking in at the window, not thinking any harm, and saw it all. I thought he had killed John, and ran away, determined not to tell. I never breathed a lisp of it before, son, and nobody ever knew of that quarrel, only your grandfather and me. I know it troubled him greatly after John died. Oh, I can see that awful paper, as John held it up to the light, as plain as this ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... who knows all the actors, persuaded Mr Y—- (you know whom I mean, the great tragic actor) to come here, and give his opinion of her recitation. Mr Y—- was excessively polite; declared that she was a young lady of great talent; but that a slight lisp, which she has, unfitted her most decidedly for tragedy. Of course it was abandoned for comedy, which she studied some time; and when we considered her competent, Mr Revel had interest enough to induce the great Mr M—- to come and give his opinion. Charlotte ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... terms of friendship and familiarity on which you may stand with this dignitary, who, by the way, has a vote on board worth canvassing for;—I say bawl out, because, firstly, your mincing and Clarendon-like lisp of "Waiter!" would not be heard by one used to listen to the rush of the tempest and the shriek of the scourged Atlantic; also, for that your stirring call may remind some wretched skulker of a circumstance which he is miserably dozing out of remembrance, viz. ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... not lisp their suspicions that Violet might have fled from an uncongenial marriage to a suicide's fate; but Lord Cameron, who remembered his last interview with his betrothed, had a terrible fear that such might be the case; while Lady Cameron, having told him of Violet's strange excitement ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine him, for instance, in Punch? His author has never told us which one of the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell? Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the fact that he is not strong enough to work the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... southwest. But there it stood, and there it stands as yet,—though its obituary was long ago written after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,—leafing out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp "Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October as softly as if ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... a child can speak he should be made to lisp the noble words of truth, and to love it, and to abhor a lie! What a beautiful character he will then make! Blessed is the child ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse

... freshness and frankness; her words are of the same gentleness; she seems as solicitous of his comfort as before. And yet a shadow of sadness shrouds that vivacity which had made her the welcome guest of the old slaves. He cannot resist those expressions which are ever ready to lisp forth from the negro when his feelings are excited. "Lor, missus, how old Bob's heart feels! Hah, ah! yah, yah! Looks so good, and reminds old Bob how e' look down on dah Astley, yander. But, dah ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... taught Boy when first he could lisp, roused the man as perhaps nothing else would have done. The three of them still needed him, needed him more than ever. He was there at their sides like a wall of stone, to defend, to love and protect. And whatever happened, Tess ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... man echoed heartily. He closely resembled his father in looks, save that he was clean shaven and of a lighter build. Both father and son had the same slight lisp in speaking. "Deuced unpleasant," he repeated. "Nobody can feel that more ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... healthy boy. Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to record; he did not lisp in periods. Genius was not written upon his brow, nor tied upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale fervor of precocity, or the shyness of premature conceit. He was absorbed in childish things, loved play, shirked his ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... said, his English gaining piquancy from his slight lisp, "you come from England—from dear England. I love your country greatly. It has fog, and it is dark, too, for the sun forgets to shine at times; but it is beautiful—like a picture, and when it smiles, what ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson

... double-barrelled affair took place in the quaint, old-fashioned, non-ritualistic, semi-Gothic, and many-galleried old village church, of which so few remain now in England, situated close to our cottage, and where our widowed mother had, in our childhood, taught us to lisp our first prayers to heaven, our dead father resting in the ivy-grown and flower-adorned graveyard adjoining. The nuptial knot was tied by Parson Goldwire, as everybody called him in the neighbourhood, assisted by Matthew Jacon, the equally elderly parish clerk, without whose ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson

... the empress shot fire, but instead of a reply, she bent down to the little Archduchess Josepha, who was just old enough to lisp her father's ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... this announcement, but he now perceived that he would have to modify the scene if it were to represent the facts. His father did not brighten all over and demand, "Miss Pasmer, of course?" he contrived to hide whatever start the news had given him, and was some time in asking, with his soft lisp, "Isn't ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... silver, its sky an iridescent dome, its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence, its lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations, sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... over-eloquent, nor trifle with verse, nor make yourself gay with lyric songs. And do not, out of affectation, follow the sickly taste of married ladies, who now pressing their teeth together, now keeping their lips wide apart, speak with a lisp, and purposely clip their words, because they fancy that to pronounce them naturally is ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... world, making the climb at considerable speed, but without much noise. He was the quietest man in Paris. He was so quiet that he had to have a muffler cut-out on his own great heart to keep it from drowning his voice! There is a soft lisp in his speech which might fool strangers who do not know about the steel of his nerves and the keenness of his eye. He sat in a roomy office with a clean desk, toyed with a paper knife and made quick, sure, accurate decisions in a low hesitant voice that ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... arrived to my mother at Honoragas, and I take this pen in hand to let you know that Juan Sivello, Lobarto's nephew, who has come from the South—he is one of those who lisp—'" ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr

... But her mind was so full of poesy that there was no room in it for ordinary matters and things, and the duties of a student soon became so irksome that she left both the institutions in disgust. Of her it may be truly said, "she lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came," for she composed verses at four years of age, and published poems at ten. Her first effusions appeared in a local paper at Reading, Pa. Being a born poetess, her success as a writer was assured from the first, and her warmth of expression and richness ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... As for my Part, I will shew all the World it is not for want of Charms that I stand so long unasked; and if you do not take measures for the immediate Redress of us Rigids, as the Fellows call us, I can move with a speaking Mien, can look significantly, can lisp, can trip, can loll, can start, can blush, can rage, can weep, if I must do it, and can be frighted as agreeably as any She in England. All which is humbly submitted to your Spectatorial Consideration with ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... children of pious parentage and Christian education, who from earliest years have not only been taught to lisp the Saviour's name, but to read it, pity the slave child, shut out from such advantages, and give heed to instruction, lest, having more given and unimproved, they be beaten with many stripes. Let all who have an interest at the throne ...
— Mary S. Peake - The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe • Lewis C. Lockwood

... the dead o' the night, And he shuffles the shadows about As he gathers the stars in a nest of delight And sets there and hatches them out: The Zhederrill peers from his watery mine In scorn with the Will-o'-the-wisp, As he twinkles his eyes in a whisper of shine That ends in a luminous lisp. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... the girls stopped when they had entered the garden. Ever since Virginia could remember, she had heard threats of cutting down the paulownias because of the litter the falling petals made in the spring, and ever since she could lisp at all she had begged her father to spare them for the sake of the enormous roots, into which she had loved ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... quiet hamlet, and the roll of honour in the little grey stone church grows longer and longer. In the big house on the hill, at sunrise and at sunset, the young Lady of the Manor stands at the bedside of her little son, and hears him lisp his simple prayers to God, and they always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... that you haven't," added the captain, shaking his head—a significant gesture, which seemed to relate to the future, rather than to the present. "If you lisp a syllable of it, you will need a patch on your skull.—Now," he continued, "what do ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic

... end of a long table. A group of men was dimly visible behind their chairs, wrapped in a haze of cigar smoke; and in the midst of them stood a lanky young man with red whiskers, talking loudly, with a lisp, in English. Through a door beyond the group could be seen a light ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... perfect maze of conflicting versions of Werner's cry and fall. In fact, one scene shifter insisted that Shirley, as the Black Terror, had reached Werner's side and had struck him before the cry, while an extra girl with a faint lisp described with sobering accuracy the flight of a mysterious missile through the air. I realized then why Kennedy had made no effort to question them. Under the excitement of the scene, the glamour of the lights, the sense of illusion, and the stifling heat, it would ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... on his face became even broader. "Suppose we postpone explaining how I am able to use your tongue. It will be easier for you to understand after you have been with us a while." He spoke slowly and carefully, yet with a faint lisp, much as some ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... humanity and growing old in their respective acts, even thus they become human beings that are, of course, ordained to return. Coming to sinful births and becoming Chandalas or human beings that are deaf or that lisp indistinctly, they attain to higher and higher castes, one after another in proper turn, transcending the Sudra order, and other (consequences of) qualities that appertain to Darkness and that abide in it in course of migrations in this world.[106] Attachment to objects of desire ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... to know there is an eye will mark Our coming, and look brighter when we come; 'T is sweet to be awaken'd by the lark, Or lull'd by falling waters; sweet the hum Of bees, the voice of girls, the song of birds, The lisp of ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... papers, he suddenly came across the last letter written to him by Iris's mother. How she doted on their only child! He recalled one night, shortly before his wife died, when the little Iris was brought into her room to kiss her and lisp her infantile prayers. She had devised a formula of her own—"God bless father! God bless mother! God bless me, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... tones of that soft voice, in which sounded sometimes a sort of gentle lisp, like the ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... her heart is high, For the Bassarids and the Fauns are nigh, And prosperous leaves lisp busily Over flattered brakes, whence the breezes bring Vext twittering To swell ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... everything. The grown people behaved so foolishly and asked such absurd, dull questions about things that everybody knew, that it was necessary for him also to make believe that he was foolish. He had to lisp and give nonsensical answers; and, of course, he felt like running away from them as soon as possible. But there were over him and around him and within him two entirely extraordinary persons, at once big and small, wise and foolish, at once his own ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... to share in wrong-doing or misbehaviour, unless it be that, as a running of the eyes is catching, so through companionship and intimacy he may against his will contract by infection some vice or ill habit, as they say Plato's intimates imitated his stoop, Aristotle's his lisp, and king Alexander's his holding his head a little on one side, and rapidity of utterance in conversation,[380] for people mostly pick up unawares such traits of character. But the flatterer is exactly like the chameleon,[381] ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... a moment to herself till Fay had said the Lord's prayer at her knee, and Amoret, with much persuasion, had been induced to lisp out— ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge









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