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More "Minstrel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flame, The Day-king came, And bore me away in a cloudy frame; And I sailed in the air, Till the zephyrs bare Me hither to hear thy minstrel-prayer. ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... in another village, that other great peasant, Mistral, the singer of Provence, the poet of love and joy, the minstrel of rustic labour and antique faiths, was pursuing, amid the homage of his apotheosis, the incredible ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... was tremendously urging himself to play the mouth-organ there, to skip and be nimble, and gain a minstrel's meed. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... the Baltic," "The Bay of Biscay," "Nelson," under various vocal aspects, as exhibited by the late Braham—these were the songs in which the roaring concertina and strident tenor of Gustus Junior exulted together. "Tell me when you're tired, ladies and gentlemen," said the minstrel solicitor. "There's no conceit about me. Will you have a little sentiment by way of variety? Shall I wind up with 'The Mistletoe ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... century had, through the 'Trovatori,' its share in the poetry of the courts and of chivalry. To them is mainly due the 'Canzone,' whose construction is as difficult and artificial as that of the songs of any northern minstrel. Their subject and mode of thought represents simply the conventional tone of the courts, be the poet a burgher or ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... strain and exertion it had so recently undergone. Slowly he moved off towards his own sleeping apartment, in case the Queen, when she awoke, should send to inquire after him. And on his way, as a short cut, he crossed the minstrel gallery, which divided one from the other the two state drawing-rooms,—a broad half-story colonnade, with central opening and corners ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... native land need not grudge old Rome her "pictures of the world"; she has pictures of her own, "pictures of England"; and is it a new thing to toss up caps and shout—England against the world? Yes, against the world in all, in all; in science and in arms, in minstrel strain, and not less in the art "which enables the hand to deceive the intoxicated soul by means of pictures". {137} Seek'st models? to Gainsborough and Hogarth turn, not names of the world, maybe, but ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Musician. [Performance of Music.] — N. musician, artiste, performer, player, minstrel; bard &c. (poet) 597; [specific types of musicians] accompanist, accordionist, instrumentalist, organist, pianist, violinist, flautist; harper, fiddler, fifer[obs3], trumpeter, piper, drummer; catgut scraper. band, orchestral waits. vocalist, melodist; singer, warbler; songster, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... office of Scavenger was again made a distinct office, to which James Shepherd was appointed at 6s. a week. Shortly after this the office became a thing of the past, and John Ward, Beadle, disappears from our view, to join the company of the last minstrel, the last fly wagon, the last stage ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... altered. The Lydian measures ceased, those who had attuned them gave way to musicians of loftier aspect and simpler garb; in whom might be recognized, not indeed the genuine Spartans, but their free, if subordinate, countrymen of Laconia; and a minstrel, who walked beside them, broke out into a song, partially adapted from the bold and lively strain of Alcaeus, the first two lines in each stanza ringing much to that chime, the two latter reduced into briefer compass, as, with allowance for the differing laws of national rhythm, we thus seek ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... tresses. There were youths dancing and maidens of costly wooing, their hands upon their waists." "And now would they run round with deft feet exceedingly lightly"—"and now would they run in lines to meet each other." "And a great company stood round the lovely dance in joy; and among them a divine minstrel was making music on his lyre; and through the midst of them, as he began his strain, two tumblers whirled. Also he set therein the great might of the River of Ocean, around the utmost rim ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... not that the minstrel's art, The pleasant gift of verse, Though his hopes decay, though his friends depart, Can ever be a curse;— Though sorrow reign within his heart, And ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... eyes, but it will be safe with you. If you had seen how he used to waylay us, and ask for our tidings from you after the fire, you would see I cannot doubt who the "madchen" is. Is there no hope for him? The other affair was so long ago, and who could help longing to have such minstrel-love rewarded?' ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... may even be said that they enjoyed some of the pleasures of life, for though the discipline was harsh and the food scanty and poor, man's love of enjoyment is not easily to be repressed, and what with occasional minstrel and theatrical entertainments among themselves, fencing exercises with wooden swords, games of cards, checkers and chess, study of languages, military tactics, etc., and other entertainments and pastimes, they managed somewhat to overcome the monotony of prison life ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Betty the young gentleman gave a hearty assent; adding, at the same time, a hope that her want of practice since she left Edinburgh would be no obstacle to her success. To which Miss Devine replied, by asking him to name the window out of which she was to present her compliments to the English minstrel. "As to that, Betty," said he, "I leave you to select your own ground; but take care that you don't miss fire"—an observation which took the stable-boy, Bill Mack, by the greatest surprise, as, from Betty's ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... a large collection of Anglo-Saxon poems on very different subjects. To give some idea of their variety, it may be mentioned that, amongst other poems of an entirely distinct character, there are religious pieces, many riddles, the legends of two saints, the Scald's or Ancient Minstrel's tale of his travels, and a poem on the 'Various ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... said Brother Pratt to me, "go in front of the curtain and make a rip-staving speech—I know you can do it. Say that at the urgent solicitation of the manager, you have consented to appear to-morrow night as Jem Baggs, in the Wandering Minstrel." ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... Gift[FN224] to the minstrel-race; Folk attest my worth, rank and my pride of place, While Fame, merit ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... ye shall hand to the minstrel. You will see him with his harp, standing in the hall. It may be he will play goodwill to my bonny wee son who has ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... if he had been a bolster, and bore him away. At first the men of the place wanted to hang him on the spot, but Gurnet claimed him as his prisoner, and would not allow this. He gave him his liberty, and the poor wretch maintained himself for many a day as a wandering minstrel. At last he managed to get on board of a Spanish vessel, and was never more heard of, but he left his guitar behind him. It was picked up on the shore, where he left it, probably, in ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... she looks she hears the voice of a roving minstrel who is approaching. She conceals herself. He comes near, and not venturing to enter the hotel, lies down to sleep on a bench. He is soon asleep; and Silvia comes near to see him. She recognizes in him her ideal; and at once loves him. ...
— Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana • Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci, and Pietro Mascagni
... nobility nowadays that I find it more distinguished to be the simple commoner. Dull at the Chateau! Good Lord! don't I know it!" He paused, lifting his head with a quick, bird-like motion: a cunning smile wrinkled his face and he smote the table with his open hand. "Dull, are they? There, my hedge-minstrel from Valmy, is your welcome ready made. Bring your lute and make pretty Ursula's grey eyes dance to a love song, prude ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... Diodorus associates two other religiously influential classes amongst the Britons, the Bards [[Greek: bardos]] and the Seers [[Greek: manteis]]. The former present the familiar features of the cosmopolitan minstrel. They sing to harps [[Greek: organon tais lurais homoion]], both fame and disfame. The latter seem to have corresponded with the witch-doctors of the Kaffir tribes, deriving auguries from the dying struggles of their victims (frequently ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... arose within the hall the din of voices and the sound of song; the instruments also were brought out and Hrothgar's minstrel sang a ballad for the delight of the warriors. Waltheow too came forth, bearing in her train presents for Beowulf—a cup, two armlets, raiment and rings, and the largest and richest collar that could be found in all ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... glowed with pleasure. His new-found friend was making a favorable impression. He at once urged Oliver to sing one of his own Southern songs as the darkies sung them at home, and not as they were caricatured by the end men in the minstrel shows. ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... first line of defense against the Oriental deluge is endangered. The Slav individually and in his primitive culture is altogether charming. He is a son of the soil, picturesque in life and creative; he is minstrel and poet, seer. But so far he is the carrier of a low civilization, the prophet, priest, and king of autocracy and absolutism. Never has there been a time in history when the higher civilization was not in a savage struggle for ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Eddic poem survives on the battle of the Hjathnings, the story of which is told in prose by Snorri. It must, however, be an ancient legend; and the hero Hedin belongs to one of the old Germanic heroic races, for the minstrel Deor is a dependent of the Heodenings in the Old English poem to which reference will be made later. The legend is that Hild, daughter of Hoegni, was carried away by Hedin the Hjathning, Hjarrandi's son. Hoegni pursued, and overtook them near the Orkneys. Then Hild went ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... appear Reclothed in fresh and verdant diaper; Thaw'd are the snows; and now the lusty Spring Gives to each mead a neat enamelling; The palms put forth their gems, and every tree Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry. The while the Daulian minstrel sweetly sings With warbling notes her Terean sufferings. —What gentle winds perspire! as if here Never had been the northern plunderer To strip the trees and fields, to their distress, Leaving them to a pitied nakedness. And look how when a frantic ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... fire when feasters roared And minstrels waited turns, Of the might of the men that Troy adored, Of the valor in vain of the Trojan sword, With the love that slakeless burns, That caught and blazed in the minstrel mind Or ever the age of pen. So maids and a minstrel rebuilt Troy, Out of the ashes they rebuilt Troy To live in ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Mons. Duval. "Tim Luker, what used to do our first tribble, was took sick this morning. What d'ye say, youngster, to being blacked up, and singing this evening to the circus along o' our minstrel troupe?" ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... houseless; welcomed the wanderer; and rich and poor, and learned and illiterate, alike received shelter and hospitality. Under her roof the scholar completed his education; the historian sought and found the materials for his history; the minstrel chanted lays of mingled piety and love for his loaf and raiment; the sculptor carved in wood, or cast in silver, some popular saint; and the painter gave the immortality of his colours to some new legend or miracle."—All ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... long, Although for bread the Minstrel sings, Ah, still for you he pipes the song, And thrums upon ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... fortunes of all books! Benign Ceruleans of the second sex! Who advertise new poems by your looks, Your 'imprimatur' will ye not annex? What! must I go to the oblivious cooks, Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks? Ah! must I then the only minstrel be, Proscribed ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... yet—for there my steps have been; These feet have pressed the sacred shore; These limbs that buoyant wave hath borne— Minstrel! with thee to muse, to mourn, To trace again those fields of yore, Believing every hillock green Contains no fabled hero's ashes, And that around the undoubted scene Thine own "broad Hellespont" still dashes,— ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... round the stage, a dozen finely formed and good-looking negroes, caused the spectator to fancy himself in the presence of the famous band of Christy, or some other company of white Ethiopian serenaders. Soon, the opera glass revealed the amusing fact, that, although every minstrel was by nature as black as black could be, yet all the performers had given their faces a coating of burnt cork, in order that their resemblance to Yankee minstrels might be in every respect complete. There were excellent voices ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... In order to give himself this pleasure he will often forsake the sunniest Broadway corner between Thirty-fourth and Forty-fourth to attend a matinee offering by his less gifted brothers. Once during the lifetime of a minstrel joke one comes to scoff and remains to go through with that most difficult exercise of Thespian muscles—the audible contact of the palm of one hand against the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... alone fail to recognise the magnetic influence." Chopin's place among the great pianists of the second quarter of this century has been felicitously characterised by an anonymous contemporary: Thalberg, he said, is a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... offspring of a knightly minstrelsy, and indeed is scarcely less artificial or conventional than the Italian eclogue. Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed. The narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success. This is the simple framework on which the majority are composed. A few, on the other hand, depart from the type and depict purely rustic scenes. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... who erst the Muse did ask Her deepest notes to swell the Patriot's meeds, Am now enforst a far unfitter task For cap and gown to leave my minstrel weeds," For yon dull noise that tinkles on the air Bids me lay by the lyre and go ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... the same disguise. It was also said of Aldhelm, one of the leading scholars of the eighth century: "He was an excellent harper, a most eloquent Saxon and Latin poet, a most expert chanter, or a singer, a doctor egregius, and admirably versed in scriptures and liberal sciences." The minstrel was a regular and stated officer of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Poetry is always the earliest form of literature; song the earliest form of poetry. The Muse adapts her lessons to the nation's infancy and adds the charm of melody to verse. No nation is destitute of lyric poetry. Even the North American ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... too shall be gone, but my name shall be spoken, When Erin awakes and her fetters are broken Some minstrel shall come in the summer's eve gleaming, When Freedom's young light on his spirit is beaming, And bend o'er my grave with a tear of emotion, Where calm Avonbui seeks the kisses of ocean, Or plant a wild wreath from ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... equally unfortunate, but more stalwart of heart. He had greedily fallen upon the depleted water-supply, drinking deep and never pausing to consider that the tongue of the wayfarer who offered him a flask was more parched than his own. He was a minstrel and a troubadour who held himself immune from the need of meeting stress with combat. His mission in life was to sing and accept, and now it pleased him ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... heaven. I never overheard in camp a profane or vulgar song. With the trifling exceptions given, all had a religious motive, while the most secular melody could not have been more exciting. A few youths from Savannah, who were comparatively men of the world, had learned some of the "Ethiopian Minstrel" ditties, imported from the North. These took no hold upon the mass; and, on the other hand, they sang reluctantly, even on Sunday, the long and short metres of the hymn-books, always gladly yielding ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... up, explained the situation, and saw that the necessary matter was produced. He was not ambitious to write—not then. He wanted to be a journeyman printer, like Pet, and travel and see the world. Sometimes he thought he would like to be a clown, or "end man" in a minstrel troupe. Once for a week he served as subject for a traveling hypnotist-and ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... better prayer, and this was the true explanation of the Talmudical saying: "If speech is worth one piece of silver, silence is worth two." And this, likewise, was the meaning of the verse in 2 Kings ch. iii. v. 15: "When the minstrel played, the spirit of God came upon him." That is to say, when the minstrel became an instrument and uttered music, it was because the spirit of God played upon him. So long as a man is self-active, he cannot receive the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... distinguished place. We, on the contrary, have scarcely any slang songs of merit. With a race of depredators so melodious and convivial as our highwaymen, this is the more to be wondered at. Had they no bards amongst their bands? Was there no minstrel at hand to record their exploits? I can only call to mind one robber who was a poet,—Delany, and he was an Irishman. This barrenness, I have shown, is not attributable to the poverty of the soil, but to the want of due cultivation. Materials are ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... given it as his opinion, that a disinclination to athletic sports and exercises will be, in general, found among the peculiarities which mark a youthful genius. In support of this notion he quotes Beattie, who thus describes his ideal minstrel:— ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... between forty-five and fifty years of age, is the type of the semi-broken-down showman. In the evolution of the theatrical business in America, the old circus and minstrel men have gradually been pushed aside, while younger men, with more advanced methods, have taken their place. The character is best realized by the way it ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... afterwards together: the man holding down his head as he struck the chords of his harp with a bold and vigorous hand. I learnt that they were uncle and niece. I shall not readily forget the effect of these figures, or of the songs which they sang; especially the sonorous notes of the mastersinger, or minstrel. He had a voice of most extraordinary compass. I quickly perceived that I was now in the land of music; but the guests seemed to be better pleased with their food than with the songs of this old bard, for he had scarcely received a half florin since ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the Dante Alighieri face, guided by the pressure of Sam's knees, bore that wandering minstrel sixteen miles southeastward. Nature was in her most benignant mood. League after league of delicate, sweet flowerets made fragrant the gently undulating prairie. The east wind tempered the spring warmth; wool-white clouds flying in from the Mexican Gulf ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... Odyssey—were composed by different persons, and that all the parts were afterwards put together in the form in which they now appear. The opinion of most scholars at present, however, is that Homer did really exist, that he was a wandering bard, or minstrel, who sang or recited verses or ballads composed by himself, about the great deeds of heroes and warriors, and that those ballads, collected and arranged in after years in two separate books, form the poems known as the Iliad ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... minstrel show that sent them all into gales of laughter. Joel Banks and Aunty Bixby were as sorry as the young folks ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... give the author's name—Touroude (Latinised "Turoldus")—but this may have been the name of the jongleur who sang, or the transcriber who copied. The date of the poem lies between that of the battle of Hastings, 1066, where the minstrel Taillefer sang in other words the deeds of Roland, and the year 1099. The poet was probably a Norman, and he may have been one of the Norman William's followers ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... a wild hermit of the clan, to ascertain the issue of the impending war; and this oracle is obtained—that the party shall prevail which first sheds the blood of its adversary. The scene then shifts to the retreat of the Douglas, where the minstrel is trying to soothe Ellen in her alarm at the disappearance of her father by singing a fairy ballad to her. As the song ends, the knight of Snowdoun suddenly appears before her, declares his love, and urges her to put herself under his protection. Ellen throws herself on his generosity, confesses ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... more testimony. But the testifiers were, to use the old minstrel joke, backward in coming forward that evening. At an ordinary meeting, by this time, the shouts and enthusiasm would have been at their height and half a dozen Come-Outers on their feet at once, relating their experiences and proclaiming ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... my pretty fledgling," he said, half jesting, half in scorn. "But knowest thou, to fight in very earnest is something different than to read and chant it in a minstrel's lay? Better hie thee back to Florence, boy; the mail suit and crested helm are not for such as thee—better shun them now, than after ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... all the desolateness of the world, all the exiledom of man upon it. There was no lure, no temptation in that. The Aeolian harp of the heart does not always discourse battle music, and on this night it was as if an old sad minstrel sat before me and played unendingly one plaint, the story of a lost throne, of a lost family, lost children, a lost world. Thus a thought came to me: "We are all the children of kings; on our spiritual bodies are royal seals. Sometime or other we were abandoned on ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... them, and to suggest palliative thoughts about Diocletian. Finally, there were the romances of Arthur and his knights, which later, by means of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and edifying; every one who listened to them paying the minstrel his money, and having his choice whether he would take them as song or sermon. In the heroes of some of these certain Christian virtues were typified, and around a few of them, as the Holy Grail, a perfume yet ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... and smeared her head and face with it, so that she was all black and stained. And she got a coat made, and cloak and shirt and breeches, and attired herself in minstrel guise; and she took her viol, and went to a mariner, and so dealt with him that he took her in his ship. They set their sail, and sailed over the high sea till they arrived at the land of Provence. And Nicolette ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... "Little minstrel-bard of Coneri The son of the King has come with two or three— Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets, Crimson, silver, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... that George Washington told the truth, a word must be said, of course. It is the principal jewel in the crown of America, and it is but natural that we should work it for all it is worth, as Milton says in his 'Lay of the Last Minstrel.' It was a timely and judicious truth, and I should have told it myself in the circumstances. But I should have stopped there. It was a stately truth, a lofty truth —a Tower; and I think it was a mistake to go on and distract attention from ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fancies where one would wish to rest after life's fitful fever: and I have hardly ever been more deeply impressed than by certain lines which I cut out of an old newspaper when I was a boy, and which set out a choice far different from that of The Minstrel. They are written by Mr. Westwood, a true poet, though not known as he deserves ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... this enthusiasm was arriving at the Terrace, she was chiefly conscious that Sir Roland was sinking down on the ramparts of Acre, desperately wounded in the last terrible siege; and she was considering whether palmer or minstrel should carry the tidings of his death to Adeline. It was her refuge from the unpleasant feelings, with which she viewed the experiment of the Northwold baths upon Louisa's health. As the carriage stopped, she cast one glance at the row of houses, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wilderness of Moab in pursuit of the enemy, they could find no water for three days, and were like to die of thirst, they and the beasts of burden. In this emergency the prophet Elisha, who was with the army, called for a minstrel and bade him play. Under the influence of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in the sandy bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the line of march. They did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the water that had drained down into them ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... with "Establishers," for the Kers would not come within such a tainted building as a parochial school—except to a comic nigger minstrel performance, which in Howpaslet levels and composes all differences. So instead they waited at the windows and listened. One prominent and officious stoop of the Kirk tried to shut a window. But he ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... song ceased the fair form of May MacLeod appeared at the casement overhead, she waved a fond farewell to her mountain minstrel and closed the window; but the light deprived of her fair face had no charm for him—he gazed once more at the pane through which it beamed like a solitary star, amid the masses of foliage, and was turning away when he found a heavy hand ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... other things in his sack, then, with his usual agility, mounted one of the overhanging trees, and concealed it amid the branches. As he resumed his journey, he might have been taken for a gipsy minstrel, for suspended round his neck was a small cracked gittern, retaining only two strings. This, as if in mockery of his assumed misfortune, he had rested on the hump, while the riband, which was of bright scarlet, encircled, like a necklace, his swarthy neck, that ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... as a super in the sensational drama She, by H. Rider Haggard. Two Englishmen were penetrating the mysterious jungles of Africa, and I was their native guide and porter. They had me all blacked up like a negro minstrel, but this wasn't a funny show, it was a drama of mystery and terror. While I was guiding the English travelers through the jungle of the local stage, we penetrated into the land of ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... not so," answered Froda, his eyes sparkling with happiness. "For well I know that she scorns not my service; she has even deigned sometimes to appear to me. Oh, I am in truth a happy knight and minstrel!" ...
— Aslauga's Knight • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... On the four winds are sped my couriers, For thee the towered trees are hung with green; Once more for thee, O queen, The banquet hall with ancient tapestry Of woven vines grows fair and still more fair. And ah! how in the minstrel gallery Again there is the sudden string and stir Of music touching the old instruments, While on the ancient floor The rushes as of yore Nymphs of the house of spring plait for your feet— Ancestral ornaments. And everywhere a hurrying ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... spoke with awe of his genius; Keats dedicated one of his poems to his memory; and Coleridge copied some of his rhythms. One of his best poems is the Minstrel's Roundelay— ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... in this," replied Lucie; "but I will confess nothing,—except that I danced away my spirits last evening, and was most melodiously disturbed afterwards, by some strolling minstrel. Were you not annoyed by unseasonable ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... song even unto the mute, he owes all his power and all his fame. It is the gift of Heaven that he is pointed out by the finger of the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, that he breathes the divine fire and pleases men. But he is as perfectly appreciative of the fact that poets are born and also made, and condemns the folly of depending upon inspiration unsupported by effort. He calls himself the bee of Matinum, industriously flitting with ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... and the Comet, The. Magic Mirror, The. Meeting of the Ships, The. Meeting of the Waters, The. Melologue. Memorabilia of Last Week. Merrily Every Bosom boundeth. Millennium, The. Mind Not Tho' Daylight. Minstrel-Boy, The. Missing. Morality. Moral Positions. Mountain Sprite, The. Mr. Roger Dodsworth. Musical Box, The. Musings of an Unreformed Peer. Musings, suggested by the Late Promotion of Mrs. Nethercoat. My Birth-Day. My Gentle Harp. My Harp has One Unchanging Theme. My Heart and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and we talked too of our old girls and the early days of good hunting in this semi-civilized land, and of Woodrow Wilson and H. G. Wells and Emerson and Henry George, and of Billy Emerson, the negro minstrel, and William Keith our great artist. And we planned houses, adobe houses, that should be built up above, over the manzanita bushes, and the swimming-pool that should just naturally lie between the two live-oaks hidden behind the natural screen of mountain laurel, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... cabinet had left little except a burglar's tool or two here and there to mark its operations, and, with the aged and infirm General Scott at the head of a little army, and no encouragement except from the Abolitionists, many of whom had never seen a colored man outside of a minstrel performance, the President stole incog. into Washington, like a man who had agreed to ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... mighty impulse moves; Art plies his tools, arid Commerce spreads her sail, And wealth is wafted in each shifting gale. The sons of Odin tread on Persian looms, And Odin's daughters breathe distilled perfumes; Loud minstrel Bards, in Gothic halls, rehearse The Runic rhyme, and "build the lofty verse:" The Muse, whose liquid notes were wont to swell To the soft breathings of the' olian shell, Submits, reluctant, to ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... mossy course, And, looking up, the eye beholds it flash Beneath the incumbent gloom, from ledge to ledge Shooting its silvery foam, and far within Wreathing its curve fantastic. If the harp 210 Of deep poetic inspiration, struck At times by the pale minstrel, whilst a strange And beauteous light filled his uplifted eye, Hath ever sounded into mortal ears, Here I might think I heard its tones, and saw, Sublime amidst the solitary scene, With dimly-gleaming harp, and snowy stole, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Robert, with harp-stringing numbers, Raise a flame in the breast, for the war laurell'd wreath, Near Askalon's Towers John of Horiston[1] slumbers, Unnerv'd is the hand of his minstrel by death. ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... summoned there from all corners of Europe to cut the trees; to build and launch boats; to sail them, finally, across the strip of water to that England he was to meet at last, to grapple with, and overthrow, even as the English huscarles in their turn bore down on that gay Minstrel Taillefer, who rode so insolently forth to meet them, with a song in his throat, tossing his sword in English eyes, still chanting the song of Roland as he fell. None of the inn features were in the least informed with this great, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... sources. The songs heard on Venetian gondolas must have had their effect, as many examples show. There are also distinct traces of folk-songs which the sailor would have learnt ashore in his native fishing village, and the more familiar Christy Minstrel song was frequently pressed into the service. As an old sailor once said to me: 'You can make anything ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... character. Not only was he a perfect knight on horseback, but in wrestling and running, throwing the hammer, and "putting the stane," he had scarcely a rival, and he was skilled in all the learned lore of the time, wrote poetry, composed music both sacred and profane, and was a complete minstrel, able to sing beautifully and to play on the harp and organ. His queen, the beautiful Joan Beaufort, had been the lady of his minstrelsy in the days of his captivity, ever since he had watched her walking on the slopes of Windsor ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... language: but they have no scientific grammar, no definitions of nouns and verbs, no names for declensions, moods, tenses, and voices. Rude societies have versification, and often versification of great power and sweetness: but they have no metrical canons; and the minstrel whose numbers, regulated solely by his ear, are the delight of his audience, would himself be unable to say of how many dactyls and trochees each of his lines consists. As eloquence exists before syntax, and song before prosody, so government may exist in a high degree of excellence long before ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... played several selections the musicians moved up before a hastily constructed stage. Plays or musical farces, written and acted by cadets, are often presented. In Dick's plebe summer, however, the choice had been for a minstrel show. ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... outburst of Christmas joy in a popular tongue is found in Italy, in the poems of that strange "minstrel of the Lord," the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (b. 1228, d. 1306). Franciscan, in that name we have an indication of the change in religious feeling that came over the western world, and |37| especially Italy, in the thirteenth ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Hercules at once, Nursed in effeminate arts from youth to manhood, And rushes from the banquet to the battle, As though it were a bed of love, deserves That a Greek girl should be his paramour, And a Greek bard his minstrel—a Greek tomb His monument. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... th' door oppen, flew aght, catchin poor Mally fair ith' face wi' its wings as it passed, an sendin her onto her back ith' gutter, wi' her bonnet off, an her face blackened like a female christy minstrel! ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... succession of more or less historic playhouses. At Eighth Street was the Old New York Theater; a few doors away was Lina Edwins's; almost flanking the cigar-store and ranging toward the south were the Olympic, Niblo's Garden, and the San Francisco Minstrel Hall. Farther down was the Broadway Theater, while over on the Bowery Tony ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Congo The Santa Fe Trail The Firemen's Ball The Master of the Dance The Mysterious Cat A Dirge for a Righteous Kitten Yankee Doodle The Black Hawk War of the Artists The Jingo and the Minstrel I Heard Immanuel Singing ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... that are gone," he said, "love was more fortunate. Grief was our minstrel of things that endure. Now, ashes and dust and this world grow importunate. Time has no sorrow that time cannot cure. Once, we could lose, and the loss was worth cherishing. Now, we may win, but, O, where is the worth? Memory and true love," he whispered, "are perishing, With Marian, our ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... of Scott's poems is not great but the human and emotional content in them is great. A great minstrel of the border speaks in them. The best that Emerson could say of Scott was that "he is the delight of generous boys," but the spirit of romance offers as legitimate a field for the poet as does the spirit of transcendentalism, though yielding, of course, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... ride, and he didn't have spunk enough to hit back. If 'Zeke had jined in with me we'd had him out o' town lively. And then the way he butted in at my concert and turned a high-class musical entertainment inter a nigger minstrel show by whistling a tune vas enough to make ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... fashion, and letters of the Scottish metropolis. He writes to his daughter 12th February, 1809: "Among the literary men of Edinburgh I have met M'Kenzie, author of the Man of Feeling, and Scott, author of the Minstrel. I met both frequently, and from both received civilities and hospitality. M'Kenzie has twelve children—six daughters, all very interesting and handsome. He is remarkably sprightly in company, amiable, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... dear, to her fine-tuned ear, On the midnight breezes float; Than the sounds that ring From the minstrel's string, When the mighty deeds of some warrior king Inspire each ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... one end of the room is the crowd of American students singing in a chorus. The table is full now, for many have come from dinners at other cafes to join them. At one end, and acting as interlocutor for this impromptu minstrel show, presides one of the best fellows in the world. He rises solemnly, his genial round face wreathed in a subtle smile, and announces that he will sing, by earnest request, that popular ballad, "'Twas Summer and the Little Birds ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... rusty from dust and wear, did not fit him. The sleeves escaped his wrists by several inches; his trousers had hitched up as he sat down, so that one half of his shanks was exposed to view, leaving his monstrous feet, like the slap-boots of a negro minstrel, for ludicrous inches over the floor. His neck was long and feminine, and stuck up grotesquely much above a sort of Byronic collar held together by a black stock tie. I had never seen a ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... stories and to listen to them. The most primitive and unlettered peoples and tribes have always shown and still show this universal characteristic. As far back as written records go we find stories; even before that time, they were handed down from remote generations by oral tradition. The wandering minstrel followed a very ancient profession. Before him was his prototype—the man with the gift of telling stories over the fire at night, perhaps at the mouth of a cave. The Greeks, who ever loved to hear some new thing, were merely ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... lyceum-audience to suppose that it can have a strong and permanent interest in a trifler; and it is a gross injustice to every respectable lecturer in the field to introduce into his guild men who have no better motive and no higher mission than the stage-clown and the negro-minstrel. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... extreme austerity St. Modan, finding his end approaching, retired to the solitude of Rosneath, where he died. Devotion to him was very popular in Scotland. Scott alludes to it in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel": ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... with poetry and song, Music and books led the glad hours along; Worlds of the visioned minstrel, fancy-wove, Tales of old time, of chivalry and love; Or converse calm, or wit-shafts sprinkled round, Like beams from gems, too light and fine to wound; With spirits sparkling as the morning's sun, Light as the dancing wave he smiles upon, Like his own course—alas! ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... sister. The song had been composed by the poet attached to his house; it was graven in the stone of the second rock-room of the tomb, and Neferhotep had left a plot of ground in trust to the Necropolis, with the charge of administering its revenues for the payment of a minstrel, who every-year at the feast of the dead should sing the monody to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that helped to make this common subject and spirit of mediaeval literature was the minstrel, who was attached to every well-appointed castle. This picturesque poet—gleeman, trouvere or troubadour sang heroic stories and romances of love in the halls of castles and in the market places of towns. He borrowed from ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... Donna of old Castile And a Troubadour were I, I'd sing at night beneath your room And weave you dreams in a minstrel's loom With rainbow tears and the roses' bloom And star-shine out of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... real thing! Just as it sounded to the rude crowd of Greek peasants who sat in a ring and guffawed at the rhymes and watched the minstrel stamp it out into "feet" as he ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... a Minstrel's Song, on the Restoration of Lord Clifford the Shepherd, which is in a very different strain of poetry; and then the volume is wound up with an 'Ode,' with no other title but the motto, Paulo majora canamus. This is, beyond all doubt, the most illegible and unintelligible ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... since, while strolling through the woods, my attention was attracted to a small densely-grown swamp, hedged in with eglantine, brambles, and the everlasting smilax, from which proceeded loud cries of distress and alarm, indicating that some terrible calamity was threatening my sombre-colored minstrel. On effecting an entrance, which, however, was not accomplished till I had doffed coat and hat, so as to diminish the surface exposed to the thorns and brambles, and, looking around me from a square yard of terra firma, I found myself the spectator of a loathsome yet fascinating scene. Three ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... Meistersingers, or minstrel tradesmen of Germany. An association of master tradesmen to revive the national minstrelsy, which had fallen into decay with the decline of the minnesingers, or love minstrels (1350-1523). Their subjects ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... dryflies whizzed sleepily in the sunlight, of the world he would live in when he grew up. He had planned so many lives for himself: a general, like Caesar, he was to conquer the world and die murdered in a great marble hall; a wandering minstrel, he would go through all countries singing and have intricate endless adventures; a great musician, he would sit at the piano playing, like Chopin in the engraving, while beautiful women wept and men with long, curly ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... burlesques, concerts, minstrel entertainments, never lacked audiences, especially when the proceeds were destined for the Union Defence Committee; the hotels, Bancroft, St. Nicholas, Metropolitan, New York, Fifth Avenue, were all brilliantly thronged at night; cafes and concert halls like the Gaieties, Canterbury, and American, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... modern Englishman Handel is almost a contemporary. Paintings and busts of this great minstrel are scattered everywhere throughout the land. He lies in Westminster Abbey among the great poets, warriors, and statesmen, a giant memory in his noble art. A few hours after death the sculptor Roubiliac took a cast of his face, which he wrought into ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... said gayly, "I cannot lay claim to any distinguished relationship, even to that 'Nelly Bly' who, you remember, 'winked her eye when she went to sleep.'" He stopped in consternation. The terrible conviction flashed upon him that this quotation from a popular negro-minstrel song could not possibly be remembered by a lady as refined as his hostess, or even known to her superior son. The conviction was intensified by Mrs. Brooks rising with a smileless face, slightly shedding the possible ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... poets, or bards, were legion, and possessed a marked influence over the imaginations of the people. They excited the Gael to deeds of valor. Their compositions were all set to music,—many of them composing the airs to which their verses were adapted. Every chief had his bard. The aged minstrel was in attendance on all important occasions: at birth, marriage and death; at succession, victory, and defeat. He stimulated the warriors in battle by chanting the glorious deeds of their ancestors; exhorted them to emulate those distinguished ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... has caught this sentiment and plays upon it skillfully. His setting is in keeping with his story. The wandering minstrel, the turreted castle, the festive board, the high-vaulted hall with its oaken rafters, the chase, the wide reaches of the forests of Franconia, the beetling ramparts of old feudal castles by the Rhine or the lovely shores of the Lake of Constance, the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... Minstrel, as were all those in the island who sang original verses at dances and serenades. He was a tall young man, slender, and narrow shouldered, a youth not yet eighteen. As he sang he coughed, his slender neck swelled, and his face, of a transparent whiteness, flushed. His ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown—the Air is our robe of state—the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel playing before it. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... long-lost sister that they propose to keep her with them, but Nicolette assures them she will never be happy until she rejoins Aucassin. Meantime she learns to play on the viol, and, when she has attained proficiency on this instrument, sets out in the guise of a wandering minstrel to seek her beloved. Conveyed by her brothers to the land of Biaucaire, Nicolette, soon after landing, hears that Aucassin, who has recently returned, is sorely bewailing the loss of his beloved. Presenting herself before Aucassin,—who does not recognize her owing ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... The Buchanan cabinet had left little except a burglar's tool or two here and there to mark its operations, and, with the aged and infirm General Scott at the head of a little army, and no encouragement except from the Abolitionists, many of whom had never seen a colored man outside of a minstrel performance, the President stole incog. into Washington, like a man who ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... cried the King, "that won't do! I do know better than that. It was Richard's minstrel ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... O'Reillys from the great houses, O'Reillys in tophats and O'Reillys in tam o' shanter. He was assured, and came near believing it, that in both looks and wisdom, he was the spitting image of the Great O'Reilly, one of the many last rightful Kings of Ireland. A minstrel composed a lay about him, "The Golden Judge of Ireland"; he was smothered in shamrock, and could have swum in the gifts of potheen. Secretly he much preferred Scotch whisky to Irish, but the swarming O'Reillys made the disposal of the potheen ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... a minstrel. Offspring of a race, and not the inheritor of a formula, he narrated to his contemporaries, bewildered by the lyrical deformities of romanticism, stories of human beings, simple and logical, like those which ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... no dream, or fairy tale, Or minstrel's strain of music rare; But ever foremost in its train, Walk duty stern, ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... eye of Jonathan Oldbuck, who was himself once in love but has come to see that he was a fool for his pains. Certainly, somehow or other, they are apt to be terribly wooden. Cranstoun in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' Graeme in the 'Lady of the Lake,' or Wilton in 'Marmion,' are all unspeakable bores. Waverley himself, and Lovel in the 'Antiquary,' and Vanbeest Brown in 'Guy Mannering,' and Harry Morton in 'Old Mortality,' ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Poetical literature is akin to music. Poetry was originally sung by the minstrel, and the thought and feeling were communicated to the audience solely by the ear. The study of poetry by the eye is artificial, modern, and contrary to our hereditary instincts. We should not argue that the best way to appreciate music is found in following the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... good practical joke; as the garland adorning The hair of a maiden it shines, as the balm that is shed On the brain of a wandering minstrel; it comes without warning, Transmuting to gold an existence that once was as lead. It glads, it rejoices the soul; recollecting it after One well-nigh explodes; but I say there are seasons for laughter, And, like ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... the man holding down his head as he struck the chords of his harp with a bold and vigorous hand. I learnt that they were uncle and niece. I shall not readily forget the effect of these figures, or of the songs which they sang; especially the sonorous notes of the mastersinger, or minstrel. He had a voice of most extraordinary compass. I quickly perceived that I was now in the land of music; but the guests seemed to be better pleased with their food than with the songs of this old bard, for he had scarcely received a half ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... After ten years the City was taken by the Kings and Princes of Greece and the thread of war was wound up. But still Odysseus did not return. And now minstrels came to Ithaka with word of the deaths or the homecomings of the heroes who had fought in the war against Troy. But no minstrel brought any word of Odysseus, of his death or of his appearance in any land known to men. Ten years more went by. And now that infant son whom he had left behind, Telemachus, had grown up and was a young man ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... once when Meadow Green got too small for you, years ago, you started out with a minstrel show—'The Darktown Merrymakers,' they ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... did not have such large, handsome show- bills to draw the crowds (to the bill-boards, I mean) in those days, as they have now; but this young showman knew a thing or two, so he adopted the plan that is largely practiced by our minstrel troupes at this late day. He got some of us ordinary-looking chaps to show him the town—I don't mean like it is done in these days. He wanted us to walk around all the nice streets, so he could see the people, and so the girls could see him. We did ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... seemed perennial, the silence was suddenly broken by a strain so rapid and gushing, and touched with such a wild, sylvan plaintiveness, that I listened in amazement. And so shy and coy was the little minstrel, that I came twice to the woods before I was sure to whom I was listening. In summer, he is one of those birds of the deep Northern forests, that, like the Speckled Canada Warbler and the Hermit-Thrush, only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... the wife is set at the upper end of the table, and the husband next unto her. They fall then to drinking, till they be all drunk; they perchance have a minstrel or two. And two naked men, who led her from the church, dance naked a long time before all the company. When they are weary of drinking, the bride and the bridegroom get them to bed (for it is in the evening always when any of them ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... the Minnesingers, as already intimated, were less fiery than those of the Troubadours. While the Provencal minstrel allowed his homage to his chosen lady to proceed to extreme lengths, his German brother paid a less excessive but far purer tribute to the object of his affections. Very often, too, the German poets rose to a still higher level, and sang praises of the ideal qualities ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... epigram: "A woman who writes, commits two sins: she increases the number of books, and she decreases the number of women;" for they were content, for the most part, to be the source of inspiration for their minstrel knights. Violante's gay court was looked upon with questioning eye, however, by the majority of her rude subjects, and, finally, when the sum demanded from the Cortes each year for the maintenance of this brilliant establishment continued to increase in a most unreasonable manner, the ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... name he went by, though he had been christened Dominick. And he came from Borgo San Sepolcro—far cry from windy Chioggia—a place among the brown Tuscan hills, just where they melt into Umbria; and he was by trade a minstrel, and going to Ferrara. Of so much, with many bows, he informed the two girls, being questioned by Olimpia. But he looked at Bellaroba as he spoke, and she listened the harder and looked the longer ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... a greeting for me, Heaven's own happy minstrel-bird'? Thou whose voice, like some sweet angel's, Viewless, in ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... that the mountain's shelt'ring bosom shields, And all the dread magnificence of heaven; O how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven! ..... These charms shall work thy soul's eternal health, And love, and gentleness, and joy, impart. THE MINSTREL ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... of duty to the living-room of the barrack in Ballymoy for a whole morning, he had accomplished a series of runs and trills through which the air of "The Minstrel Boy" seemed to struggle for expression. His attention was fixed on this composition, and not at all on the newspaper ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... part in the battle. It was a mournful beginning for a young warrior. Harald beheld the fall of his noble brother, and was himself severely wounded. He was led from the field by a faithful bonder, who hid him in his house; but the spirit of the young minstrel warrior was undaunted, and, during his recovery, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... eager feet the forest carpet springs, We march through gloomy valleys, where the vesper sparrow sings. The little minstrel heeds us not, nor stays his plaintive song, As with our brave coureurs de bois we swiftly ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... tell-tale incidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body, reveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction or beauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and pious minstrel carries it with him ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... approach the thrush Or blackbird's accents in the hawthorn bush? Or with the lark dost thou poor mimic, vie, Or nightingale's unequal'd melody? These other birds possessing twice thy fire Have been content in silence to admire." "With candor judge," the minstrel bird replied, "Nor deem my efforts arrogance or pride; Think not ambition makes me act this part, I only sing because I love the art: I envy not, indeed, but much revere Those birds whose fame the test of skill will bear; I feel no hope arising to surpass, Nor with their charming songs ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... returning with the baggage-checks, and he discovered both Eileen and Professor Hodgson examining him with the frank curiosity that one might bestow upon some wandering minstrel, a foreigner, an alien. He felt, as the odd member of any triangle is sure to feel, that he was a lone bird; that Eileen and her glowering professor were drawn together by some bond unknown to him, but whose nature ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... began, in due time signed. And long years thence, when Age had scared Romance, At some old attitude of his or glance That gallery-scene would break upon her mind, With him as minstrel, ardent, young, and trim, Bowing ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... born some years earlier you would have been even as these unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan— verses retained only by Memory. You would have been but the minstrel of your native valley: the wider world would not have known you, nor you the world. Great thoughts of independence and revolt would never have burned in you; indignation would not have vexed you. Society would not have given and denied her caresses. You would have been happy. ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... peering at her under his thoughtfully knitted brows, "you do belong to another era. You don't remember the old negro minstrel song." ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... nature of this American Poem was known to the proprietor of the Quarterly Review. So far as it was a burlesque on the Lay of the Last Minstrel, I know it was; yet was he as a publisher so anxious to get it, that he engaged Lord Byron to use his utmost influence with me to obtain it for him, and his Lordship wrote a most pressing letter upon the occasion. He asked me to let Mr. Murray, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the true explanation of the Talmudical saying: "If speech is worth one piece of silver, silence is worth two." And this, likewise, was the meaning of the verse in 2 Kings ch. iii. v. 15: "When the minstrel played, the spirit of God came upon him." That is to say, when the minstrel became an instrument and uttered music, it was because the spirit of God played upon him. So long as a man is self-active, he cannot receive the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Notes on the Months, p.418, the Song "Bryng us in good ale," copied from the MS. song-book of an Ipswich Minstrel of the 15th century, read by Mr Thomas Wright before the British Archological Association, August, 1864, and afterwards published in The Gentleman's Magazine. P.S.—The song was first printed complete ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... obediently responsive to rhythm, and in that composite blending of races each in his dancing brought some of the poetry of his own far land. The scene was amazing in its beauty and simplicity, like the strong, inspirational power and rugged rhythm of some old border minstrel. One by one the dancers glowed with better understanding; discordant elements, alien nations were fused to harmony in this ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... a lark in a cage, and heard him trilling out his music as he sprang upwards to the roof of his prison, but we felt sickened with the sight and sound, as contrasting, in our thought, the free minstrel of the morning, bounding as it were into the blue caverns of the heavens, with the bird to whom the world was circumscribed. May the time soon arrive, when every prison shall be a palace of the mind—when we shall seek to instruct and cease to punish. PUNCH ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... should be as careful of Lloyd's comfort as her own. She trudged along, taking no part in the conversation. It was a general one, extending all along the line, for Rob at the tail and Ranald at the head shouted jokes and questions back and forth like end-men at a minstrel show. Laughing allusions to the maid of honor and Ca'line Allison were bandied back and forth, and when the line grew unusually straggling, Kitty would bring them into step with ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... high deas, and feasting amid his high vassals and Paladins, eating blanc mange, with a great gold crown upon his head, or else charging at the head of his troops like Charlemagne in the romaunts, or like Robert Bruce or William Wallace in our own true histories, such as Barbour and the Minstrel. Hark in thine ear, man—it is all moonshine in the water. Policy—policy does it all. But what is policy, you will say? It is an art this French King of ours has found out, to fight with other men's swords, and to wage his soldiers out of other men's purses. Ah! it ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... is up, Piercing the dazzling sky beyond the search Of the acutest love: enough for me To hear its song: but now it dies away, Leaving the chirping sparrow to attract The listless ear,—a minstrel, sooth to say, Nearly as good. And now a hum like that Of swarming bees on meadow-flowers comes up. Each hath its just and yet luxurious joy, As if to live were to be blessed. The mild Maternal influence of nature thus Ennobles both the sentient and the dead;— The human heart is as an altar wreathed, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... is o'er," said all; "Silent now the bugle's call. Love should be the warrior's dream,— Love alone the minstrel's theme. Sing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... revival of his original plan. If he could have made a fortune with his great inventions in 1876, what might he not accomplish by the same means in 1598! He pictured to himself the delight of the ancient worthies when they heard the rag-time airs and minstrel ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... Roy; "but you'd better trot down to the river now and wash your face. You look like the end man in a minstrel show. Then come on back and we'll reel ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, "This is my own, my native land!" Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd, As home his footsteps he hath turn'd From wandering on a foreign strand! If such there breathe, go mark him well; For him no Minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim; Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concent'red all in self. Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... not follow is, that he ever sat down and said: "Now let us write an epic." Conditions would be against it. A wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law applies: that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single sitting. The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of spirit; and the chances ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... be to become a hermit on some far mountain side, wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the stars—or, maybe,—more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling minstrel—in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world—to have come to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in the world, one who was innocent of what ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... be a north-country gentleman," said the persevering minstrel, "whilk I wad judge from your tongue, I can play 'Liggeram Cosh,' and 'Mullin Dhu,' and ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... pretty phrase, Some poeesy for woe it wins, Commemorating roundelays And troubadours and mandolins: We seem to view some minstrel-boy Beside his shattered music mute, The shattered string, the ruined joy— The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... be a drink of forgetfulness which you speak of, then have I also charmed myself with it. I have fared as the minstrel who learned the nixie's songs in order to charm his sweetheart;—he charmed and charmed so long that at length the magic wove itself round his own soul too, and he could never win ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... disguise as a minstrel?" said Denham banteringly—"like King Alfred did when he went to see about the Danes? Have you ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... clerks, but on becoming better acquainted you would notice certain peculiarities, a looseness of mouth, a restless, nervous inquietude of manner, an indescribable gleam of the eye. They were very fond of performing and singing at amateur minstrel shows and developed a certain comic vein they thought original, though it reminded me of professional corner-men. However, I enjoyed their singing and drinking habits and went to their lodgings several ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... office, to which James Shepherd was appointed at 6s. a week. Shortly after this the office became a thing of the past, and John Ward, Beadle, disappears from our view, to join the company of the last minstrel, the last fly wagon, the last stage coach, and ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... well served by his spies in Ferrara, received news of what was going on and immediately informed his brother Alfonso. This was in July, 1506. The conspirators sought safety in flight, but only Giulio and the minstrel Guasconi succeeded in escaping, the former to Mantua and the latter to Rome. Count Boschetti was captured in the vicinity of Ferrara. Don Ferrante apparently made no effort to escape. When he was brought before the duke he threw himself ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... bracken was like elfin plumes; each stone, wrapped in moss, was a lump of silver coated with verdigris; distant cliffs seen between the trees were cut out of gray-green jade, against a sea of changing opal; and in the high minstrel-galleries of the latticed beeches a concert ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Rev. Thomas Percy, fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, and afterwards Bishop of Dromore. "The reviver of minstrel poetry in Scotland was the venerable Bishop of Dromore, who, in 1765, published his elegant collection of heroic ballads, songs, and pieces of early poetry under the title of 'Reliques Of Ancient English Poetry.' The plan of the work was adjusted in concert ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the North! that mouldering long hast hung On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan's spring And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung, Till envious ivy did around thee cling, Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,— O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep? Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring, Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep, Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... as well as other monkeys in cap and jerkin. You're a minstrel or a mountebank, I'll be sworn; you look for all the world as silly as a tumbler when he's been upside down and has got on his heels again. And what fool's tricks hast thou been after, Tessa?" she added, turning to her daughter, whose frightened face was more ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... emulate The Minstrel Boy, and we shall find you Storming its barred and bolted gate With reams of lyrics ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... Humbly as a minstrel might enter the court of his king, I went before the editor, and stood expectantly while he said: "That was an excellent article. I have sent it to Mr. Howells. You should know him and sometime I will give you a letter to him, but not now. Wait awhile. War is being made ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... frock coat, rusty from dust and wear, did not fit him. The sleeves escaped his wrists by several inches; his trousers had hitched up as he sat down, so that one half of his shanks was exposed to view, leaving his monstrous feet, like the slap-boots of a negro minstrel, for ludicrous inches over the floor. His neck was long and feminine, and stuck up grotesquely much above a sort of Byronic collar held together by a black stock tie. I had never seen a man ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... in the history of the minstrel king David gives us a more warm and personal feeling towards him than his longing for the water of the well of Bethlehem. Standing as the incident does in the summary of the characters of his mighty men, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Scott, speaking with a pronounced accent, "ye ken the auld proverb, sirs, 'Ower mony cooks,' or as the Border minstrel sang— ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... whose visionary brain Holds o'er the past its undivided reign. For him in vain the envious seasons roll Who bears eternal summer in his soul. If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay, Spring with her birds, or children with their play, Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart, - Turn to the record where his years are told, - Count his gray ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... matter was produced. He was not ambitious to write—not then. He wanted to be a journeyman printer, like Pet, and travel and see the world. Sometimes he thought he would like to be a clown, or "end man" in a minstrel troupe. Once for a week he served as subject for a traveling hypnotist-and was dazzled ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... her that his silence was eloquent of the inherent generosity of the man, even as his poetic outburst of a few minutes before had been eloquent of the minstrel in him. She rode in silence, regarding him critically from time to time, and when they came to the tree where the panther hung he gave her the calf to hold while he deftly skinned the dead marauder, tied the pelt behind his saddle, relieved her of the calf and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... practising songs, sacred and secular, and our friend the street minstrel produces an old flute and plays an obbligato, whilst the quivering voice of his poor old wife again wants to know the ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... as classics of our prose, and hailing with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Fr. huissier, door-keeper, Fr. huis, door, Lat. ostium. I conjecture that Lusher is the French name Lhuissier, and that Lush is local, for Old Fr. le huis; cf. Laporte. Wait, corruptly Weight, now used only of a Christmas minstrel, was once a watchman. It is a dialect form of Old Fr. gaite, cognate with watch. The older sense survives in the expression "to lie in wait." Gate is the same name, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... with her glorious pencil, than a generation of monk-describers and ruined-castle-builders sprang up, until the very name of convent or castle became an abhorrence. Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," rich and romantic as it was, was nearly buried under an overflow of heavy imitations, which drove his genius to other pursuits, and which filled the public ear with such enormities of octo-syllabic ennui, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... that those who sing or say the geste of Sir Tristram do not repeat the story exactly as Thomas made it.[64] Even though one must recognize the probability that sometimes the immediate oral source of the minstrel's tale may have been English, one cannot ignore the possibility that occasionally a "translated" saint's life or romance may have been the result of hearing a French or Latin narrative read or recited. A convincing example of reproduction from memory appears ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Orfeo, as a minstrel, so charms the Fairy King with the music of his harp, that he promises to grant him whatever he should ask. He immediately demands his lost Heurodis; and, returning safely with her to Winchester, resumes his authority; a catastrophe, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... reaction against his genius; he died in the fulness of a happy age and of renown. This full-orbed life, with not a few years of sorrow and stress, is what Nature seems to intend for the career of a divine minstrel. If Tennyson missed the "one crowded hour of glorious life," he had not to be content in ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... In the vernacular of the farm, the mulatto girls are called "strawberry blondes," and one that would have attracted attention anywhere was led out by a droll, full-blooded negro, who would have made the fortune of a minstrel troupe. She was tall and willowy. A profusion of dark hair curled about an oval face, not too dark to prevent a faint color of the strawberry from glowing in her cheeks. She wore neither hat nor shoes, but was as unembarrassed, apparently, in her one close-fitting garment, as could be any ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... chin, sir? Needs Must she be fair: thou, wrapt in age's weeds, Whose blood, if time have touched it not and stilled, The sun's own fire must once have kindled,—thou Sing praise of soft-lipped women? doth not shame Sting thee, to sound this minstrel's note, and gild A girl's proud face with praises, though her brow Were bright as dawn's? And had her grace no name For men ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to be the simple commoner. Dull at the Chateau! Good Lord! don't I know it!" He paused, lifting his head with a quick, bird-like motion: a cunning smile wrinkled his face and he smote the table with his open hand. "Dull, are they? There, my hedge-minstrel from Valmy, is your welcome ready made. Bring your lute and make pretty Ursula's grey eyes dance to a love song, prude ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... hair fell down over his shoulders like a shower of gold. His heart was as light as a bird's, and no bird was fonder of green woods and waving branches. He had lived since his birth in the hut in the forest, and had never wished to leave it, until one winter night a wandering minstrel sought shelter there, and paid for his night's lodging with songs of love and battle. Ever since that night Fergus pined for another life. He no longer found joy in the music of the hounds or in the cries of the huntsmen in forest glades. ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... headaches in the morning. Punch was too sweet, you see. Sweet punch is sure to make your headache. He! he! But I'm done with clubs and Delmonico's, you know. I'm going to settle down and be a steady family man." Walking to the door, he sang in capital minstrel style: ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... no scientific grammar, no definitions of nouns and verbs, no names for declensions, moods, tenses, and voices. Rude societies have versification, and often versification of great power and sweetness: but they have no metrical canons; and the minstrel whose numbers, regulated solely by his ear, are the delight of his audience, would himself be unable to say of how many dactyls and trochees each of his lines consists. As eloquence exists before syntax, and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Muenster, translated into the old Norse language, and no doubt somewhat modified by the influence of Scandinavian legends on the mind of the translator. In its present form it is not a poem but a prose work, and though the flow of the ballad and the twang of the minstrel's harp still often make themselves felt even through the dull Latin translation of Johan Peringskiold, there are many chapters of absolutely unredeemed prose, full of genealogical details and the marches of armies, as dry as any history, though ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... all that the minstrel has told, When two that are linked in one heavenly tie, With heart never changing and brow never cold, Love on through all ills, and love on till they die. One hour of a passion so sacred is worth Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss; And oh! if ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... than the Italian eclogue. Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed. The narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success. This is the simple framework on which the majority are composed. A few, on the other hand, depart from the type and depict purely rustic scenes. Others—and the fact is at least ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... "Minstrel," whose last lay was o'er, whose broken harp lay low, And with him glorious "Waverley," with glance and step of wo; And "Stuart's" voice rose there, as when, 'midst fate's disastrous war, He led the wild, ambitious, proud, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... he, and consented to being blacked up like a negro minstrel, in order to pose as a prince?" asked Ned. "I reckon, however, that the credit does not all belong to the lad. He seems to have had a ...
— The Boy Scout Camera Club - The Confession of a Photograph • G. Harvey Ralphson
... financial successes of the stage today are built upon music and dancing. We find these two essential elements in opera, revue, musical comedy, pantomime and vaudeville, while the place of the dance in moving pictures may well be recognized. Should the old-time minstrel show come back, as it is certain to do, there will be added another name to the list of active entertainments that call for a union of music and ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... County children and their parents was not discontinued, but half an hour before recess was given up to some secular choruses, patriotic or topical, in which the little ones under Twing's really wonderful practical tuition exhibited such quick and pleasing proficiency, that a certain negro minstrel camp-meeting song attained sufficient popularity to be lifted by general accord to promotion to the devotional exercises, where it eventually ousted the objectionable "Hebrew children" on the question of melody alone. Grammar was still taught at Pine Clearing School in spite of the Hardees ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the child of some minstrel or troubadour," said the Prince. "We will send in search of him as soon as we ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... medieval Europe the wandering poet or minstrel went from place to place repeating his wondrous narratives, adding new verses to his tales, changing his episodes to suit locality or occasion, and always skilfully shaping his fascinating romances. In court and cottage he was listened to with breathless attention. He might be compared ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... having seen the Rose of Sharon, shall we cease to admire the humbler flowers of spring? The wood thrush's song today is divine, yet, the simpler ditty of the wren has a sweetness not found in the larger minstrel's song. Here one is not bored with the "ohs" and "ahs" of gasping tourists, who scream their delights in tones that drown the voice of the falls. You can at least grow intimate with them, and their beauty although not awesome, grows upon you like a river into the life of childhood. It ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for relief to the epistle "Studiosus" addresses to "Alcander." If the lines of "The Minstrel" who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from "The District of Main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "R.T. Paine, Jr., Esq.," of tameness ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... never troubadours: and though a good knight held his education to be imperfect unless he could write a sonnet and sing it, he did not esteem his castle to be at the mercy of the "editor" of a manuscript. He might indeed owe his life to the fidelity of a minstrel, or be guided in his policy by the wit of a clown; but he was not the slave of sensual music, or vulgar literature, and never allowed his Saturday reviewer to appear at table without ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... are at the sleepless slit of light which is her window in the armoured stone of her fortified bridal tower. The only news of her husband she can hope for in a full year or more will be the pleasing lies of some flattering minstrel, or broken soldier, or imaginative pilgrim. On such rumours she must feed her famishing heart—and all the time her husband's bones may be whitening unepitaphed outside the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Denmark comes, the Royal Bride! O loveliest Rose! our paragon and pride— Choice of the Prince whom England holds so dear— What homage shall we pay To one who has no peer? What can the bard or wildered minstrel say More than the peasant who on bended knee Breathes from his heart an earnest prayer for thee? Words are not fair, if that they would express Is fairer still; so lovers in dismay Stand all abashed before ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... expected to respond, though this by no means was the rule. The host might wish first to call out more of his own intellectual treasures. This he would do by having other occupants of the castle speak further words of welcome, or would call upon a minstrel to sing a song or relate ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... brought for them, Dennis drank in a loud voice the health of Lord George Gordon, President of the Great Protestant Association; which toast Hugh pledged likewise, with corresponding enthusiasm. A fiddler who was present, and who appeared to act as the appointed minstrel of the company, forthwith struck up a Scotch reel; and that in tones so invigorating, that Hugh and his friend (who had both been drinking before) rose from their seats as by previous concert, and, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... build and launch boats; to sail them, finally, across the strip of water to that England he was to meet at last, to grapple with, and overthrow, even as the English huscarles in their turn bore down on that gay Minstrel Taillefer, who rode so insolently forth to meet them, with a song in his throat, tossing his sword in English eyes, still chanting the song of Roland as he fell. None of the inn features were in the least informed ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... beneath our eager feet the forest carpet springs, We march through gloomy valleys, where the vesper sparrow sings. The little minstrel heeds us not, nor stays his plaintive song, As with our brave coureurs de bois ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... touched the old monasteries with her glorious pencil, than a generation of monk-describers and ruined-castle-builders sprang up, until the very name of convent or castle became an abhorrence. Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," rich and romantic as it was, was nearly buried under an overflow of heavy imitations, which drove his genius to other pursuits, and which filled the public ear with such enormities of octo-syllabic ennui, that it hates ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... knight and celebrated minstrel, led away by an exaggeration of healthy human desires, has left his friends and gone to live with Venus in the Hoerselberg. He soon tires of her; she tries to keep him; he calls on the Virgin; the hallucinatory dream is ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... blended— Ripe age begun, yet golden youth not ended;— Even as his song the willowy scent of spring Doth blend with autumn's tender mellowing, And mixes praise with satire, tears with fun, In strains that ever delicately run; So musical and wise, page after page, The sage a minstrel grows, the bard a sage. The dew of youth fills yet his late-sprung flowers, And day-break glory haunts his evening hours. Ah, such a life prefigures its own moral: That first "Last Leaf" is now a leaf of laurel, Which—smiling ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... is an universal rule that voluntary offences are punished and involuntary ones are excused. This, too, the poet shows, in what the minstrel says (O. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... must abide 1060 Of lief and of loth, he who here a long while In these days of the strife with the world shall be dealing. There song was and sound all gather'd together Of that Healfdene's warrior and wielder of battle, The wood of glee greeted, the lay wreaked often, Whenas the hall-game the minstrel of Hrothgar All down by the mead-bench tale must be making: By Finn's sons aforetime, when the fear gat them, The hero of Half-Danes, Hnaef of the Scyldings, On the slaughter-field Frisian needs must he fall. 1070 Forsooth never Hildeburh needed to hery The troth of the Eotens; she all unsinning ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... and Poetry of James Beattie The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius Miscellaneous Poems Ode to Hope Ode to Peace Ode on Lord Hay's Birthday The Judgment of Paris The Triumph of Melancholy Elegy Elegy, written in the year 1758 Retirement The Hermit On the Report of a Monument ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... loyal Americans as these volumes may reach they will give a heart not to be found in Dr. Russell's pictorial neutrality, in the dashing effects of popular Mr. Trollope, nor even—making all allowance for the sanative influence of counter-irritation—in the weekly malignity of that ex-Moral Minstrel whom the London "Times" has sent to the aid of our insurgent slave-masters. For, instead of gloating over objections and picking out what petty enigmas may not be readily soluble, Mr. Dicey has a manly, English way of accepting the preponderant evidence concerning the crisis ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of what Fate ordains for times to be Jove gave me vision. Therefore, minstrel dear! Receive what my unerring lips ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, As home his footsteps he hath turned, From wandering on a foreign strand! If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim: Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... he had taken his place, Sweyn called out: "Let us have a song. Odoacre the minstrel, do you sing to us the song ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... the death of Churchill, at first published without his name, underwent the same fate. The Wolf and the Shepherds, a Fable, and an Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Thomas Blacklock, which appeared in the second edition, he also discarded from those subsequently published. He now projected and began the Minstrel, the most popular of his poems. Had the original plan been adhered to, it would have embraced a ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... so," answered Froda, his eyes sparkling with happiness. "For well I know that she scorns not my service; she has even deigned sometimes to appear to me. Oh, I am in truth a happy knight and minstrel!" ...
— Aslauga's Knight • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... they passed, They heard strange voices on the blast, And through the cloister galleries small, Which at mid-height thread the chancel wall, Loud sobs and laughter louder ran, And voices unlike the voice of man, As if the fiends kept holiday. Scott, LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him. As I was swimming alongside, I heard all that went on. 'Since your minds are made up,' says Arion, 'at least let me get my mantle on, and sing my own dirge; and then I will throw myself into the sea of my own accord.'—The sailors agreed. He threw his minstrel's cloak about him, and sang a most sweet melody; and then he let himself drop into the water, never doubting but that his last moment had come. But I caught him up on my back, and swam to shore with ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... you this second volume of "THE MODERN SCOTTISH MINSTREL," as a sincere token of my estimation of your long continued and most disinterested friendship, and of the anxiety you have so frequently evinced respecting the promotion of my professional views ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... bronzed hair, which, as she brushed it, she had tenderly stroked with her hands; often kissing the bronzed face ardent and friendly to the world and thinking to herself of the double blue in his eyes, the old Saxon blue of battle and the old Saxon blue of the minstrel, also. ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... the great champion of Ireland. He had many warriors, who were called Fenians. He had a son, Oisin, who was a great warrior, too, and besides that a poet and a minstrel. Some of his poems are left to us yet. One day the Fenians were hunting, when they met a beautiful girl riding on a white horse. She called to Oisin, and he went apart from the ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... down by infirmities; and my final recollection of the beautiful old man presents him arm in arm with, nay, partly embraced and supported by, if I mistake not, another beloved and honored poet, whose minstrel-name, since he has a week-day one for his personal occasions, I will venture to speak. It was Barry Cornwall, whose kind introduction had first made me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... they were always made welcome. The noblest and most gallant of all these bards was Walter of the Vogelweid; his voice was the sweetest and his songs the most beautiful. We looked on each other and loved, but a foreign prince sought my hand and my stern father bade me wed him and forget the wandering minstrel. I refused to be the bride of any other than Walter. 'Either you obey me,' said my father, 'or you shall become a nun and die unwed.' That very night I secretly left the castle and stole away with my lover. We went swiftly on horseback through the forest, but ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... of nouns and verbs, no names for declensions, moods, tenses, and voices. Rude societies have versification, and often versification of great power and sweetness: but they have no metrical canons; and the minstrel whose numbers, regulated solely by his ear, are the delight of his audience, would himself be unable to say of how many dactyls and trochees each of his lines consists. As eloquence exists before ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and slaved from morning till night, made him get his lessons and be careful of his clothes, and kept him out of bad company; and now I'm not allowed to say a word, but just stand by while you let him go to ruin. The next thing we'll have him in a nigger minstrel band, or playing on ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... noiseless, cautious flight round some wide-spreading oak, "scanning each branch as he slowly passes by—now rising to a higher circle, and then perchance descending to the lower branches, until at length, detecting the unfortunate minstrel, it darts suddenly into the tree, and snatching the still screaming insect from its perch, bears ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... songster, songstress, minstrel, chanter, cantatrice, cantor, prima donna, precentor, bard, troubadour, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... "'Bring me,' (said Elisha), 'a minstrel'; and it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him." Here is the farce of the conjurer. Now for the prophecy: "And Elisha said, [singing most probably to the tune he was playing], Thus saith the Lord, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... land which was so much a woodland, that a minstrel thereof said it that a squirrel might go from end to end, and all about, from tree to tree, and never touch the earth: therefore was that ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... care! I've put our names down for a mandoline and guitar duet, and said we'd be ready to help with any accompaniments they like. Meg Howell just jumped at that. It seems Patricia Marshall and Clarice Nixon are going to sing a Christy Minstrel song, and she thought our instruments would add to the effect no end. I tell you we shall score. Did you write ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... pamphlets, facetioe, and philosophic diatribes, Beranger did in songs. He gave a refrain, and with it popular currency to the anti-clerical attacks and mockeries of Voltaire; he set them to his violin and made them sing with the horsehair of his bow. Beranger was in this respect only the minstrel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... melody comes wafted on the gale— Oh! 'tis "Fenella's" sighing lute, in notes of woe and wail: "Claud Halero" catches at the strain, and mourns the minstrel gone, "His spirit rest in peace where sleeps the shade ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... huissier, door-keeper, Fr. huis, door, Lat. ostium. I conjecture that Lusher is the French name Lhuissier, and that Lush is local, for Old Fr. le huis; cf. Laporte. Wait, corruptly Weight, now used only of a Christmas minstrel, was once a watchman. It is a dialect form of Old Fr. gaite, cognate with watch. The older sense survives in the expression "to lie in wait." Gate is the same name, when not local ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... a new fire, was not content with the old hackneyed variety of "programme." It was she who conceived the idea of giving the first minstrel show ever presented upon the auditorium boards. It is a tribute to Missy's persuasiveness when at white heat that the faculty permitted the show to go beyond its first rehearsal. The rehearsals Missy personally conducted, with Raymond aiding as her first lieutenant-and he would not have played second ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... finding voice through the very extremity of his danger; "heard man ever such a demand? Who ever heard, even in a minstrel's tale, of such a sum as a thousand pounds of silver? What human eyes were ever blessed with the sight of so great a mass of treasure? Not within the walls of York, ransack my house and that of all my tribe, wilt thou find the [v]tithe ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... feelings,—a desire to preserve the RELICS, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS of PAST AGES. Normandy is fertile beyond conception in objects which may gratify the most unbounded passion in this pursuit. It is the country where formerly the harp of the minstrel poured forth some of its sweetest strains; and the lay and the fabliaux of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which delight us in the text of Sainte Palaye, and in the versions of Way, owed their existence to the combined spirit of chivalry and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Gaetano," said the count to one of the keepers; then turning to me, he said, "Teresa is also one of our violent patients, and she sometimes gives us a great deal of trouble. Gaetano was a teacher of the guitar, and some time ago he became deranged. He is the minstrel of our establishment." In a few minutes, Teresa, a pretty looking young woman about twenty years of age, was conducted into the room by two men, who held her by the arms, while she struggled to escape, and endeavored to strike them. Gaetano, with his guitar slung round his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... richness of romantic incidents or details, any more than the love-making of the unfortunate spider who is devoured by his spidery Cleopatra at the end of his first sexual embrace could furnish any incidents for one of Amelie Rives's spirited novels; so that neither minstrel nor bard have recorded the details of the first emasculating tragedy, which from all accounts was a kind of an Olympian Donnybrook-fair sort of a ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... more distinguished to be the simple commoner. Dull at the Chateau! Good Lord! don't I know it!" He paused, lifting his head with a quick, bird-like motion: a cunning smile wrinkled his face and he smote the table with his open hand. "Dull, are they? There, my hedge-minstrel from Valmy, is your welcome ready made. Bring your lute and make pretty Ursula's grey eyes dance to a love song, prude ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... emerged from the hut, a minstrel appeared, who played upon a species of harp, and sang praises of myself and Rionga; and, of course, abused Kabba Rega ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... Hugh," chattered the other, for his teeth were rattling together in a way that reminded Hugh of the "Bones" at the end of a minstrel line; if he had ever seen a Spanish stage performance he would have said they made a sound like castanets in the hands of the senorita who gave the national ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... reciting the heroic ballads of Lachlin, the Raid of Dermid, the Battle of the Boyne, and in singing "My Pretty, Pretty Maid," or woodmen's "Come all ye's." His voice was unusually good, except at the breaking time; and any one who knew the part the minstrel played in Viking days would have thought the bygone times come back to see him among the roystering crowd ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 'That's mere minstrel leasing, Malcolm,' said Patrick. 'I have both seen and heard the bird in France—Rossignol, as we call it there; and were I a lady, I should deem it small compliment to be likened to a little russet-backed, homely fowl such ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which bore a sign reading, "How to Make Your Trousers Last," occupied a prominent position in the grounds and attracted much attention, says "Harper's Weekly." A countryman who stood gaping before it was told by the exhibitor, a person with a long black mustache, a minstrel-stripe shirt, and a ninety-four-carat diamond in a red cravat, that for one cent deposited in the slot the machine would dispense its valuable sartorial advice. The countryman dug the required coin from the depths of a deep pocket and dropped it in the slot. Instantly ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various
... ate, slept, and did all the duties of life for many months. It may even be said that they enjoyed some of the pleasures of life, for though the discipline was harsh and the food scanty and poor, man's love of enjoyment is not easily to be repressed, and what with occasional minstrel and theatrical entertainments among themselves, fencing exercises with wooden swords, games of cards, checkers and chess, study of languages, military tactics, etc., and other entertainments and pastimes, they managed somewhat to overcome ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... have set in, and our ancestors in hall or cottage assemble round the blazing hearth, and listen to the minstrel's lays, and recite their oft-told tales of adventure and romance. Sometimes they indulge in asking each other riddles, and there exists at the present time an old collection of these early efforts of ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... nuptial feast; {90b} He sooner became the raven's prey, than approached the altar; {90c} He had not raised the spear ere his blood streamed to the ground; {90d} This was the price of mead in the hall, amidst the throng; Hyveidd Hir {90e} shall be celebrated whilst there remains a minstrel. ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... tale of King Harold being shot through the eye at the Battle of Hastings may have arisen from a reporter's using the figurative expression that William the Conqueror "put his eye out." Nor, after reading the account of the landing of the Austrian children, can I believe the tale of the minstrel Taillifer who sprang into the water to lead the Normans in landing. And as for the time-honoured phrases, "Take away that bauble!" and "England expects every man to do his duty," I don't believe they were ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... it has given to these "days of liberty" announces the ending of the feasts, and the month of fasting which should follow; carn-ival means, literally, "farewell to flesh!" It is a forty days' farewell to the "blessed pullets and fat hams," so celebrated by Pantagruel's minstrel. Man prepares for privation by satiety, and finishes his sin thoroughly before ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... poem was printed in London in the same year, and shortly afterwards in 'The Sydney Gazette', the first Australian newspaper. In 1826 there was printed at the Albion Press, Sydney, "Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel" by Charles Tompson, Junior, the first verse of an Australian-born writer published in this country. There was also published in Sydney in 1826 a book of verses by Dr. John Dunmore Lang, called "Aurora Australis". Both Lang and Wentworth afterwards conducted newspapers ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... a weary rood of, to him, before untrodden ground, the venerable minstrel of the house of Wallace, exhausted by fatigue, sat down on the declivity of a steep craig. The burning beams of the midday sun now beat upon the rocks, but the overshadowing foliage afforded him shelter, and a few berries ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... household service, the ritual of our feastings and mournings; and often it rehearsed for us the tales of many lands, or, best of all, the legends of our own. I see him, a silver-haired minstrel, touching melodious keys, playing and singing in the twilight, within sound of the rote of the sea. There he lingers late; the curfew-bell has tolled and the darkness closes round, till at last that tender voice is silent, and he ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... woodland solitude. For I often listened to this tinkling music, and it had suggested the idea that the place was frequented by a tribe of fairy-like troubadour monkeys, and that if I could only be quick-sighted enough I might one day be able to detect the minstrel sitting, in a green tunic perhaps, cross-legged on some high, swaying bough, carelessly touching his mandolin, suspended from his neck ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... on Redcliffe tow'rs, To muse in tears on that mysterious youth, Cruelly slighted, who, in evil hour, Shap'd his advent'rous course to London walls! Complaint, be gone! and, ominous thoughts, away! Take up, my Song, take up a merrier strain; For yet again, and lo! from Avon's vales, Another Minstrel[2] cometh. Youth endear'd, God and good Angels guide thee on thy road, And gentler fortunes 'wait the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was long, the sun was hot, the minstrel (as surely he may be called who carries a musical box) was more than once in two minds about turning back. He perspired under his ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... has left behind him one of the purest of names, encountered the rebels with a considerable force, composed entirely of his own men; these the rebels were the less able to withstand, as they knew that still more troops were on the march. As the ballad of a northern minstrel says, the gold-horned bull of the Nevilles, the silver crescent of the Percies, vanished from the field: the chiefs themselves fled over the Scotch border, their troops dispersed, their declared partisans underwent the severest punishments. ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... attends the fair with his guard, decides trifling disputes, and punishes on the spot any petty delinquencies. His attendants are usually armed with halberds, and sometimes, at least, escorted by music. Thus, in the "Life and Death of Habbie Simpson," we are told of that famous minstrel,— ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... observed a cattle-path. And the sight of it suggested ascertaining the identity of the doleful minstrel. No doubt this man could give him the information he needed. He turned off the road and plunged into scrub. And at the river bank he came upon a curious scene. There was a sandy break in the bush, and the bank sloped gradually to the water's ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... blessed calm,— Deep dying melodies of even,— Those Nyack Bells; like some sweet psalm, They float along the fields of heaven. Now laden with a nameless balm, Now musical with song thou art, I tune thee by an inward charm And make thee minstrel of my heart. ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... One could hardly think it so; But that human mortals, all, Lie like serpents, great and small, Had another certified it, I, for one, should have denied it. He who lies in Aesop's way, Or like Homer, minstrel gray, Is no liar, sooth to say. Charms that bind us like a dream, Offspring of their happy art, Cloak'd in fiction, more than seem Truth to offer to the heart. Both have left us works which I Think unworthy e'er to die. Liar call not him who squares All ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... "Venus Mountain," and the story goes that the "Lady Venus," one of the heathen goddesses, keeps house there. She is also called "Lady Halle," as every child round Eisenach well knows. She it was who enticed the noble knight, Tannhauser, the minstrel, from the circle of singers ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... table at one end of the room is the crowd of American students singing in a chorus. The table is full now, for many have come from dinners at other cafes to join them. At one end, and acting as interlocutor for this impromptu minstrel show, presides one of the best fellows in the world. He rises solemnly, his genial round face wreathed in a subtle smile, and announces that he will sing, by earnest request, that popular ballad, "'Twas Summer and the Little Birds were Singing ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... down his head as he struck the chords of his harp with a bold and vigorous hand. I learnt that they were uncle and niece. I shall not readily forget the effect of these figures, or of the songs which they sang; especially the sonorous notes of the mastersinger, or minstrel. He had a voice of most extraordinary compass. I quickly perceived that I was now in the land of music; but the guests seemed to be better pleased with their food than with the songs of this old bard, for he had scarcely received a half ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Hastings the minstrel Taillefer, as we have elsewhere told, rode before the advancing Norman host, singing the "Song of Roland," till a British hand stilled his song and laid him low in death. This ancient song is attributed, though doubtfully, to Turold, that abbot of Peterborough who was so detested by Hereward ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... all this enthusiasm was arriving at the Terrace, she was chiefly conscious that Sir Roland was sinking down on the ramparts of Acre, desperately wounded in the last terrible siege; and she was considering whether palmer or minstrel should carry the tidings of his death to Adeline. It was her refuge from the unpleasant feelings, with which she viewed the experiment of the Northwold baths upon Louisa's health. As the carriage stopped, she cast one glance at the row of houses, they struck her as dreary ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... old Robert, with harp-stringing numbers, Raise a flame in the breast, for the war laurell'd wreath, Near Askalon's Towers John of Horiston[1] slumbers, Unnerv'd is the hand of his minstrel by death. ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... of the North! that mouldering long hast hung On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan's spring And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung, Till envious ivy did around thee cling, Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,— O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep? Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring, Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep, Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... none here, nor here! Where is the cask? I pray thee, minstrel, save me, else I'll lose The tongue that has till now ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the negro minstrel shows came to town, and made a sensation. Tom and Joe Harper got up a band of performers and were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... organization of a boys' department in the local Y. M. C. A. When the lads realized what was being done for them, they joined in the movement with vigor and did all they could to help the good cause. To raise funds they gave a minstrel show and other entertainments, and a number of them did their best to win a gold medal offered by a local minister who was greatly interested in the work of upbuilding ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... this year guarded with unusual vigilance. Hitherto visitors have been allowed to pass hours in the ruin, at their leisure, and read the wizard scene of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' in the very locality where it is supposed to have occurred. At present, however, a sable widow, of the most unimpeachable respectability, casts a melancholy gloom over the place by the dejected yet resigned manner in which she unlocks the wooden gate and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... orbs sparkled and gleamed like fairy lamps of fire; and the bowers, in which the "Sultana of the Nightingale" inspired a song from her minstrel lover, assumed the dream-like repose which pervaded the surrounding scenes, and extended its influence to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... that strange, old city, which might veritably be called a city of the dead. He turned aside into the cloisters, and listened mechanically while an old man discoursed to him in crabbed German concerning Fastrada's tomb and the carved face of the minstrel Frauenlob upon the cloister wall. Presently, however, the guide showed him a little door, and led him out into the pleasant grassy space round which the cloisters had been built. He was conscious ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of the Spring prepares: On the four winds are sped my couriers, For thee the towered trees are hung with green; Once more for thee, O queen, The banquet hall with ancient tapestry Of woven vines grows fair and still more fair. And ah! how in the minstrel gallery Again there is the sudden string and stir Of music touching the old instruments, While on the ancient floor The rushes as of yore Nymphs of the house of spring plait for your feet— Ancestral ornaments. And everywhere a hurrying to and fro, And whispers ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Roman, letters, and down to the ninth century this version was held in high esteem and seems to have been in general use. For nearly four hundred years after Ulphilas, no trace of literature is discovered among the Teutonic tribes. They, however, had their war-songs, and minstrel skill seems to have been highly prized by them. These lays were collected by Charlemagne, and are described by Eginhardt as "ancient barbarous poems, celebrating the deeds and wars of the men of old;" but they have nearly all disappeared, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... of the mountain-streams, Most tuneful minstrel of the forest-choirs, Bird of all grace and harmony of soul, Unseen, we hail ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... your suit and to break a bank; to glide from the apartment of rapture into the chamber of chance. Thus a noble Venetian contrived to pass the night, in alternations of excitement that in general left him sufficiently serious for the morrow's council. For more vulgar tastes there was the minstrel, the conjuror, and the story-teller, goblets of Cyprus wine, flasks of sherbet, and confectionery that dazzled like diamonds. And for every one, from the grave senator to the gay gondolier, there was an atmosphere in itself a spell, and which, after all, has more to do with human happiness than ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... words sufficed of explanation: joy took the place of despair, exultation of tears, and the minstrel, Anselm, heard, with feelings of emotion difficult to describe, that the wretched man whom he had saved from starvation was the rich ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... school was Xenophanes, born in Colophon, an Ionian city of Asia Minor, from which, being expelled, he wandered over Sicily as a rhapsodist or minstrel, reciting his elegiac poetry on the loftiest truths; and at last came to Elea, about the year 536, where he settled. The great subject of his inquiries was God himself—the first great cause—the supreme intelligence of the universe. "From ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... I'm Choice Gift[FN224] to the minstrel-race; Folk attest my worth, rank and my pride of place, While Fame, merit and praises ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Dido entertained the chiefs of Troy and of Carthage, with the god of love seated beside her on her golden couch. A hundred maids and as many pages attended upon the guests. After the viands were removed, I-o'pas, the Tyrian minstrel and poet, played upon his gilded lyre, and sang about the wondrous things in the heavens and ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... Quest, And Minstrel of the Unfulfilled Desire; For ever tuning thy frail earthly lyre To some unearthly music, and possessed With painful passionate longing to invest The golden dream of Love's immortal fire In mortal robes of beautiful attire, And fold perfection to ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... disputes, and severance of relationship between husband and wife, internal dissensions, disloyalty to the king,—these and all paths that are sinful, should, it is said, be avoided. A palmist, a thief turned into a merchant, a fowler, a physician, an enemy, a friend, and a minstrel, these seven are incompetent as witness. An Agnihotra performed from motives of pride, abstention from speech, practised from similar motives, study and sacrifice from the same motives,—these four, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... they sat round the stage, a dozen finely formed and good-looking negroes, caused the spectator to fancy himself in the presence of the famous band of Christy, or some other company of white Ethiopian serenaders. Soon, the opera glass revealed the amusing fact, that, although every minstrel was by nature as black as black could be, yet all the performers had given their faces a coating of burnt cork, in order that their resemblance to Yankee minstrels might be in every respect complete. There were excellent voices among the singers, and some ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was a bluish grey—they 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 lisp part in those of tenderness or woe. When I add, that in a meeting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... further edge of this region, that as they went one night belated along a green riding, which in the old time had been a spacious paved causeway between rich cities, they heard the music of a harp, more marvellously sweet and solacing than any mortal minstrel may make; and sweet dream-voices sighed to them "Follow, follow!" and they felt their feet drawn as by enchantment; and as they yielded to the magical power, a soft shining filled the dusky air, and they saw that the ground was covered with soft deep grass and brilliant flowers, ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... and yield uncomplaining to my fate." This prayer, like the others, would have been unheeded,—they thought only of their booty,—but to hear so famous a musician, that moved their rude hearts. "Suffer me," he added, "to arrange my dress. Apollo will not favor me unless I be clad in my minstrel garb." ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... must listen to this." Suddenly he chuckled to himself: "And do you think he really imagines he is doing any good to his form by giving that nigger minstrel entertainment up there?" ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... In timber house on lightsome knoll; Upon four wooden columns proud Mounteth his mansion to the cloud; Each column's thick and firmly bas'd, And upon each a loft is plac'd; In these four lofts, which coupled stand, Repose at night the minstrel band; Four lofts they were in pristine state, But now partitioned form they eight. Tiled is the roof, on each house-top Rise smoke-ejecting chimneys up. All of one form there are nine halls Each with nine wardrobes ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... to have been introduced to this dandy in one's capacity of teacher of the mixed primary that very morning, when he had been given permission by Mr. Garvan to make an announcement at the school concerning special privileges granted school-children at the "high-class minstrel performance" given at Lally's Opera House. To be unhampered now by the timidities of office, and ready to pick up the gage of coquetry his saucy glance threw down. And so, after the smallest second's hesitation,—the woman in one stifling both the child's and the substitute's hesitation,—to allow ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... other hymn I'd choose, nor gentler requiem dear Than Tweed's, that through death's twilight dim, Mourned in the latest Minstrel's ear! ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... no one could afford to be absent, for entertainments were entirely infrequent at Backley; the populace was too small to support a course of lectures, and too moral to give any encouragement to circuses and minstrel troupes, but a temperance meeting was both moral and cheap, and the children might all be ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... toying with a sword, Nor minstrel's, laid across a lute; Chiefs, uplifted to the Lord When all the kings ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... touched a pistol, try the feel of it now, great satrap of Egypt. As to the little minstrel, he probably prefers encountering the Philistines with no other weapon than his flute.—Get their hats, Peter. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... impulse moves; Art plies his tools, arid Commerce spreads her sail, And wealth is wafted in each shifting gale. The sons of Odin tread on Persian looms, And Odin's daughters breathe distilled perfumes; Loud minstrel Bards, in Gothic halls, rehearse The Runic rhyme, and "build the lofty verse:" The Muse, whose liquid notes were wont to swell To the soft breathings of the' olian shell, Submits, reluctant, to the harsher tone, And scarce believes the altered voice her own. And now, where Csar saw with ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... with the English Admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a long cruise up the Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English books from an officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a windfall. Among them, as the Devil would order, was the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," which they had all of them heard of, but which most of them had never seen. I think it could not have been published long. Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of anything national in that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... that, oft at summer midnight, there, When all is hushed and voiceless, and the air, Sweet, soothing minstrel of the viewless hand, Swells rippling through the aged trees, that stand With their broad boughs above the wave depending, With the low gurgle of the waters blending The rustle of their foliage, a light boat, Bearing two shadowy forms, is seen to float ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... opens before Sordello; he is discovered to be—not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great Ghibelline chief, Salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by Palma, in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the kingdoms of power and glory, or ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... accompanied their instruments with extempore recitatives in praise of those chiefs whom they knew. I was, of course, included, as they expected that I would be inclined to reward them handsomely. Each minstrel of any repute had a person attached to him by way of fool or jester, several of whom acted their parts very well, and strongly reminded ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... when, loitering in a low, ancient hemlock wood, in whose cathedral aisles the coolness and freshness seems perennial, the silence was suddenly broken by a strain so rapid and gushing, and touched with such a wild, sylvan plaintiveness, that I listened in amazement. And so shy and coy was the little minstrel, that I came twice to the woods before I was sure to whom I was listening. In summer he is one of those birds of the deep northern forests, that, like the speckled Canada warbler and the hermit thrush, only the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... with the sun, Like him to drive the wain, And, ere my work is done, I sing a song or twain. I follow the plough-tail With a bottle of ale. On every saint's day With the minstrel I'm seen, All footing away With the maids on the green. But oh, I wish to be more great, In ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Pottery was manufactured of excellent but simple patterns. Metal work was, of course, thoroughly understood, and the Anglo-Saxon swords and knives discovered in barrows are of good construction. Every chief had also his minstrel, who sang the short and jerky Anglo-Saxon songs to the accompaniment of a harp. The dead were burnt and their ashes placed in tumuli in the north: the southern tribes buried their warriors in full military dress, and from their tombs ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... glisten We'll sometimes stop and listen To tales a gray old hermit tells, or wandering minstrel's song. We'll loiter by the ferries, And pluck the wayside berries, And watch the gallant knights spur by in haste to right a wrong. Oh, little 'Trude and Teddy, For wonders, then, make ready, You'll see a shining ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... silent. The beauteous princess, as the minstrel finished, rose slowly and tremulously from her cushions, and taking the blossom of a nettle from her bosom, placed it in the hands of the happy Acota, saying, with a great deal of piety, "It ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... the sort to Judith, after she had resumed her seat and I had opened the window, the minstrel having wandered to the next hostelry, where the process of converting "Love's Sweet Dream" into a nightmare was still faintly audible. Judith looked at me whimsically, as I stood breathing the comparatively fresh air and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... at that. Discharging cargo in the furnace of Coco Inlet, if my thoughts went back to Taai, it was almost with the deprecating amusement a man will feel who has been had by a hoax. If those minstrel husbands were murdered and buried; if that Broadway imp sweated under the red-hot roof of the godown; if that incomparable, golden-skinned heiress of cannibal emperors sat staring seaward from the gilded cage of the Dutchman, awaiting (or no longer waiting) ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Buchanan cabinet had left little except a burglar's tool or two here and there to mark its operations, and, with the aged and infirm General Scott at the head of a little army, and no encouragement except from the Abolitionists, many of whom had never seen a colored man outside of a minstrel performance, the President stole incog. into Washington, like a man who ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon—save the harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tents, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was paid to minstrels hired to sing and play the harp at the feast of the installation of an abbot of St. Augustine's, Canterbury (1309). When the bishop of Winchester visited the cathedral priory of St. Swithin or Old Minster, a minstrel was hired to sing the song of Colbrond the Danish giant—a legend connected with Winchester—and the tale of Queen Emma delivered from the ploughshares (1338). Payments to minstrels were commonly made by monks: at Bicester Priory, for example (1431), ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... frequently the song was touched with a plaintive pleasant melancholy. The minstrel told how he had gone into the woods and heard the nightingale, and she had confided to him that lovers are often unhappy. The story of La Belle Francoise was repeated in minor cadences—how her sweetheart sailed away to the wars, and ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... this bank, where daisies grow, The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast. Her only mate is now the minstrel lark, Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed A ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... dream at the midnight deep, When fancies come and go To vex a man in his soothing sleep With thoughts of awful woe— I dreamed that I was a corner-man Of a nigger minstrel show. ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... the second quarter of this century has been felicitously characterised by an anonymous contemporary: Thalberg, he said, is a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned As home his footsteps he hath turned, From wandering on a foreign strand? If such there breathe, go, mark him well. For him no minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim; Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch concentered all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... to that poem). It is perhaps not unworthy of note that Wrangham, whose French stanzas on "The Birth of Love" Wordsworth translated into English, was in the same year—1789—third Wrangler, second Smith's prizeman, and first Chancellor's medallist; while Robert Greenwood, "the Minstrel of the Troop," who "blew his flute, alone upon the rock" in Windermere,—also one of the characters referred to in the second book of 'The Prelude',—was sixteenth Wrangler in Wordsworth's year, viz. 1791. William Raincock was at St. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the author's name—Touroude (Latinised "Turoldus")—but this may have been the name of the jongleur who sang, or the transcriber who copied. The date of the poem lies between that of the battle of Hastings, 1066, where the minstrel Taillefer sang in other words the deeds of Roland, and the year 1099. The poet was probably a Norman, and he may have been one of the Norman William's followers in the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the Mantuan minstrel owns Long lur'd her Trojan from the main: And bleeding Arria, in such tones, Assur'd her lord she ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... a succession of more or less historic playhouses. At Eighth Street was the Old New York Theater; a few doors away was Lina Edwins's; almost flanking the cigar-store and ranging toward the south were the Olympic, Niblo's Garden, and the San Francisco Minstrel Hall. Farther down was the Broadway Theater, while over on the Bowery ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... young warrior. Harald beheld the fall of his noble brother, and was himself severely wounded. He was led from the field by a faithful bonder, who hid him in his house; but the spirit of the young minstrel warrior was undaunted, and, during his recovery, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... lays of our minstrel, surely never could have emanated from the heart of WOMAN. SHE is ever loyal to love—that tender and yearning principle in the bosom of the Father, from which and by which the feminine ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... earlier years, Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears; Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who Blew them not naively, but as one who knew Full well why ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... handsome fellow, so glistening that he looked rather purple when he walked in the sunshine; and he had a voice so sweet and mellow that any minstrel might have been proud of it, though he seldom sang, and it is possible that no one but Corbie's grandmother heard it at its best. He was, moreover, a merry soul, fond of a joke, and always ready to dance a jig, with a chuckle, when anything ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... Music.] — N. musician, artiste, performer, player, minstrel; bard &c (poet) 597; [specific types of musicians] accompanist, accordionist, instrumentalist, organist, pianist, violinist, flautist; harper, fiddler, fifer^, trumpeter, piper, drummer; catgut scraper. band, orchestral waits. vocalist, melodist; singer, warbler; songster, chaunter^, chauntress^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is not delighted at the sound Of rural song, of Nature's melody, When hills and dales with harmony rebound, While Echo spreads the pleasing strains around, Awak'ning pure and heartfelt sympathy! Perchance on some rude rock the minstrel stands, While his pleased hearers wait entranced around; Behold him touch the chords with fearless hands, Creating heav'nly joys from earthly sound. How many voices in the chorus rise, And artless notes renew the failing strains; The honest boor his vocal talent tries, Approving ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... lake!— His course, whom Hardship urges on, Through cheerless waste and thorny brake. For, ah! each pleasing scene he loves, And peace is all his heart's desire; And, ah! of scenes where Pleasure roves, And Peace, could gentle minstrel tire? ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... English critics heap their honours on its brave old Simplicity: our national literary flag, which signalizes us while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows. One may sigh for it. An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with distinctness, that man is not as much comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at the best they'd be soaked through and through. It's no fun to feel that way all night. You start to shivering, and then like as not your teeth rattle together like you've heard the minstrel end-man shake his bones when he sings. I've had a little experience, and I know what ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... and his wife were always among the most welcome visitors at Lord Ulswater's. In his extreme old age, the ex-king took a journey to Scotland, to see the Author of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." Nor should we do justice to the chief's critical discernment if we neglected to record that, from the earliest dawn of that great luminary of our age, he predicted its meridian splendour. The eldest son of the gypsy-monarch ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... visitors the most distinguished in rank, fashion, and letters of the Scottish metropolis. He writes to his daughter 12th February, 1809: "Among the literary men of Edinburgh I have met M'Kenzie, author of the Man of Feeling, and Scott, author of the Minstrel. I met both frequently, and from both received civilities and hospitality. M'Kenzie has twelve children—six daughters, all very interesting and handsome. He is remarkably sprightly in company, amiable, witty—might pass for forty-two, though certainly much older. Scott, with ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... the other the burning heart of Dante. He wished that the sonnet he wrote should be answered by "all the faithful followers of love," and was gratified by the prompt reply of Guido Cavalcanti, who had won renown as a knight and minstrel. ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... his new-found wisdom to the test, All-Father Odin now disguised himself as a wandering minstrel and went to visit the Most Learned of all the Giants save Mimir, who, of course, knew everything in the whole world. And the Most Learned Giant received him graciously, and consented readily to enter into a contest of wit, and it ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... sound, Sylvans and Fauns the Cot surround, And curious crowd the Minstrel to behold: The Wood-nymphs haste the spell to prove; Eager They run; They list, they love, And while They hear the strain, forget the ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the price. The music that pleases them is not always the best, for the simple reason they do not know what is best. As fast as they learn better, they drop whatever is before them and at once take up something else. The sudden disappearance of negro minstrel music is an evidence of this. The people outgrew it, and it passed away, as it were, ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
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