"Ballad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forbore to ask any more questions respecting the person to whom they belonged. And Jemima gave her a new subject for contemplation, by describing the person of a lovely maniac, just brought into an adjoining chamber. She was singing the pathetic ballad of old Rob with the most heart-melting falls and pauses. Jemima had half-opened the door, when she distinguished her voice, and Maria stood close to it, scarcely daring to respire, lest a modulation should escape her, so exquisitely sweet, so passionately wild. She began with sympathy to pourtray ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... play-rhymes, originating from the "call" and "response," are really little dramas when presented in their proper settings. "Caught By The Witch" would not be ineffective if, on a dark night, it were acted in the vicinity of a graveyard! And one ballad—if I may be permitted to dignify it by that name—called "Promises of Freedom" is characterized by an unadorned narrative style and a dramatic ending which are associated with the best English folk-ballads. The singer tells ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... skill as an architect may be seen in the church and campanile of All Saints, Oxford, and in three sides of the so-called Peckwater Quadrangle of Christ Church, which were erected after his designs. He bore a great reputation for conviviality, and wrote a humorous Latin version of the popular ballad— ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... occupied the imagination of the most widely different races. A certain analogy we can easily explain by the affinity of human hearts and human minds. But when we find that exactly the same tradition is reechoed by the mountains of Norway and Sweden in the ballad of "Sir Olaf and the Erl-king's Daughter," which the milkmaid of Brittany sings in the lay of the "Sieur Nann and the Korigan," and in a language radically different from the Norse,—when, here and there, the same forms of superstition meet us in the ancient popular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... understand nor resist. The tramping of many feet made a dull bass to the sound of many human voices, high and low, crying out lustily for 'Arnold, a Senate, and the Roman Republic'; and then taking up the song of the day, which was a ballad of liberty, in a long minor chant that broke into a jubilant major in the burden—the sort of song the Romans have always made in time of change, the kind of ballad that goes before the end of a kingdom, like ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... word more, yet this shall go, I am determined. Only consider how it is a matter of necessity that I should have nothing to say. If you could see this place of Boulge! You who sit and survey marble palaces rising out of cypress and olive. There is a dreadful vulgar ballad, composed by Mr. Balfe, and sung with the most unbounded applause ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... feminine, and jealousy is one of its inherent attributes. Of course there are all degrees of jealousy, but the woman who can sit serenely by and behold her charms ignored for those of another, by one who yesterday sat at her feet making ballad to her eyebrow and sighing like a furnace, does not exist ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... Fliegender Hollander, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin. I had greater trouble in trying to train them for a chorus, but this too turned out very satisfactorily. There was nothing in the way of solo-singing, except the Ballad of Senta from the Hollander, which was sung by the wife of the conductor Heim in a good though untrained voice, and with an amount of spirit that left nothing to be desired. As a matter of fact, the performances could hardly be called public concerts, but were rather of the nature of family ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... you, Miss Davis, if de people had a song in de old days, dey would put it down on a long strip called a ballad, but honey, I been through de hackles en I can' think of nothin like I used to could. Is anybody sing dis one for you, Miss Davis? It a old one, too, cause I ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... rate, he was the handsomest man she had seen in the desert, and the desert was just then her sphere of society. You could see in his figure how strong he was, and in his face how brave he was. He was a good fellow, too; "tendir and trew" as the Douglas of the ballad; sincere, frank, thoroughly truthful and honorable. Every way he seemed to be that being that a woman most wants, a potential and devoted protector. Whenever Clara looked in his face her eyes said, without her knowledge, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Gascony, to be the greatest poet of modern times. We had heard much of him before we arrived, and a friend of mine had given me some lines of his with the music, in England; one song I published in a recent work;[18] but I was not then aware of the history of the author, of whom the ballad "Mi cal mouri!" was one of the earliest compositions, and that which first tended to make him popular. My friend, who possesses very delicate taste and discrimination, was much struck with the grace and beauty of this song; though the reputation ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... seventeenth century, I met with the following satirical effusion upon "James's infamous prime minister," George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. As an echo of the popular feelings of the people at the time it was written, it merits preservation; and although I have seen other manuscript copies of the ballad, it has never yet, as far as I ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 49, Saturday, Oct. 5, 1850 • Various
... this ballad, contemporary with Kidd's execution, there is a unique copy in the famous collection of pamphlets belonging to the Earl of Crawford, from which it is reprinted in Professor Firth's Naval Songs and Ballads, pp. 134-37, published by the Navy Records ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... cannot help saying that if you were to ask me candidly (taking the question in an all-round way) who was the best back you ever saw, I should have no hesitation in answering that it was Walter Arnott. In the words of the old English ballad, "he feared no foe," and never in the history of football of the present time has such a brilliant man arisen. He has so many remarkable points that I cannot tell them in a brief notice, but as he is still playing well, spectators are at one in admitting ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... one, or some queer fantastic ditty about impossible birds and beasts and fishes and what not, I did not let the opportunity slip; while Keene, who had a very fine falsetto on the top of his chest register, would now and then warble, pianissimo, some little ballad of ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... candle to a map of the globe, determined to set the world on fire, though she perish in the conflagration! A fourth is undressing. The fellow bringing in a pewter dish, as part of the apparatus of this elegant and Attic entertainment, a blind harper, a trumpeter, and a ragged ballad-singer, roaring out an obscene song, complete ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... informed, but he certainly did not grow rich by it; although he is credited with one engagement with the enemy, in which his ship came off with honor, though perhaps not with a decisive victory. This exploit was celebrated in a rude ballad of the time, which has been preserved in "Griswold's Curiosities of American Literature," and has at least the merit of plain unvarnished language. [Footnote: Also in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... anyhow, one sighs for a song, and my heart-quaking carried me to a ballad, very familiar in our countryside, which tells of an unbridled lover laying siege to a woman he covets. Her men were absent, and she and her domestics were the only garrison of the castle when he knocked roysterously at ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... romance that you shall hardly find between Tweed's silver stream and where the ocean billows break in thunder on Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of Scotland was vocal—melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers played ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Young children, pray take heed to my little ballad, which shall lead you into all virtues. My mistakes I ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... Saturday the weather will be bad during the month. On the other hand, in Suffolk the old moon in the arms of the new one is accounted a sign of fine weather; contrary to the belief in Scotland, where, it may be remembered, in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, it is taken as a ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... tale—"Lady Lucy's Petition," an historiette—"the Restless Boy," by Mrs. Opie, and the "Passionate Little Girl," by Mrs. Hofland—all sparkling trifles in prose. Among the poetry is "the African Mier-Vark," or Ant-eater, by Mr. Pringle, and "the Deadly Nightshade," a sweetly touching ballad, dated from Florence; "the Vulture of the Alps" is of similar character; and we are much pleased with some lines on Birds, by Barry Cornwall, one set of which we copy, the best prose papers being ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... Charlton, Fairlop Oak, and Barnet; there were also lotteries. Besides these amusements, which were all for the lower orders as well as for the rich, they had their mug-houses, whither the men resorted to drink beer, spruce, and purl; and for music there was the street ballad-singer, to say nothing of the bear-warden's fiddle and the band of marrow-bones and cleavers. Lastly, for those of more elevated tastes, there was the ringing of the church bells. Now, with the exception of the last named, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... the first toll-house, while the toll-keeper was changing some money, I experienced the envy of the gods which hitherto I had known only in Schiller's ballad. A pedestrian passed—the teacher whom I had offended by playing all sorts of pranks during his French lesson. Not one of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... songs, entitled, Sammlung Deutschen Volkslieder, Berlin, 1807; published by Messrs. Busching and Von der Hagen. The song is supposed to be extracted from a manuscript chronicle of Nicholas Thomann, chaplain to St. Leonard in Wissenhorn, and dated 1533. The ballad, which is popular in Germany, is supposed from the language, to have been composed in the fifteenth century. The Noble Moringer, a powerful baron of Germany, about to set out on a pilgrimage to the land of St. Thomas, with the geography of which we ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... ever), one might curl one's hair and dye it black, and cock a dirty slouch hat over one ear and take a guitar and sit on a flat stone by the roadside and cross one's legs, and, after a few pings and pongs on the strings, strike up a Ballad with the refrain— ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of this play, except the episode of Edmund, which is derived, I think, from Sidney, is taken originally from Geoffry of Monmouth, whom Hollinshed generally copied; but perhaps immediately from an old historical ballad. My reason for believing that the play was posterior to the ballad, rather than the ballad to the play, is, that the ballad has nothing of Shakespeare's nocturnal tempest, which is too striking to have been omitted, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... 651, when one of the least popular of the four Tartar-born brethren was, with the assistance of the Ts'in ruler (who had been over-persuaded against his own better judgment), reigning in Tsin, the children of this latter state sang a ballad in the streets, prophesying the ultimate success of the self- sacrificing elder brother, then still away on his wanderings in Tartarland. This song was apparently never included among the 3000 odes generally known in China; but it illustrates how ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... brave martial ballad of a famous battle, which was fought on those coasts for the hand of the beautiful Taise Taobhgheal. And the clear music of her voice, to which the rowers lent a chorus, helped charm away the sadness of Ludar's tale, and while away the time till, having ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... and the anointed children of education have been too powerful for the tribes of the ignorant. Here and there a stricken few remain; but how unlike their bold, untamable progenitors. The Indian of falcon glance and lion bearing, the theme of the touching ballad, the hero of the pathetic tale is gone, and his degraded offspring crawls upon the soil where he walked in majesty, to remind us how miserable is man when the foot of the conqueror is ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the starlight beautiful and dim, there came, borne to me by the night wind, a gay young voice, blithely carolling the sweet strains of a well-remembered song, familiar to me long years ago in another and distant clime. It was a simple ballad, one heard most frequently in my youth, old when I was young; it was like a voice from the dead—a thought from the shrouded past appealing to my soul. There was something so solemn and strange, so mystically spiritual in the fact that a stranger in a strange land should possess the power to conjure ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and breeder of Arab horses, who is a descendant of the Gales, has a long poem entitled "Worth Forest," wherein old Leonard Gale is a notable figure. Among other poems by the lord of Crabbet is the very pleasantly English ballad of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Allison's productions he runs across many odd conceits as in "The Ballad of Whiskey Straight" which he declares was "prepared according to the provisions of the Pure Food Law, approved 1906." Whatever quarrel one might have with the subject itself, or the sentiment, he cannot fail to fall a victim to the soft ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... from the inside of the door, locked it, and with the key in his pocket descended to the drawing-room. The young lady who had sat on Major Jones's right was singing a ballad. Suddenly she paused in the middle of her song. The four people who were playing bridge looked up. Mrs. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nobleness; something Epic or Homeric, without the metre or the singing of Homer, but with all the sincerity, rugged truth to nature, and much more of piety, devoutness, reverence for what is forever High in this Universe, than meets us in those old Greek Ballad-mongers. Singularly visual all of it, too, brought home in every particular to one's imagination, so that it stands out almost as ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... round and face a few land-going problems not quite so easy of solution. So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the sloop's bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... believed by the commonalty to the east of London. In the church at Stepney is a tomb to the memory of Lady Rebecca Berry, who died 1696, in whose coat-of-arms a fish and an annulet appear. She has hence been supposed the heroine of a once popular ballad, the scene of which is laid in Yorkshire; it is entitled, "The Cruel Knight, or Fortunate Farmer's Daughter," and narrates how one of knightly rank in passing a village heard the cry of a woman in travail, and ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... seldom sounds a natural note, but when he does it is extremely sweet. That little ballad in the minor ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... fanciful authors and writers of epigram. Homer, Virgil, or Milton, so far as the language of their poems is understood, will please a reader of plain common sense, who would neither relish nor comprehend an epigram of Martial, or a poem of Cowley; so, on the contrary, an ordinary song or ballad that is the delight of the common people cannot fail to please all such readers as are not unqualified for the entertainment by their affectation of ignorance; and the reason is plain, because the same paintings of nature which recommend it to ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... harder. The words were strange and meant nothing. But there was a familiarity to the tune. That at least needed no interpreter. The old ballad of troubadours, the French war song of old, the song of raillery, the song of Revolution, this that had been a folk song of the Crusader, a Basque rhyme of fairy lore, the air known in the desert tents of Happy Arabia, known to the Jews coming out of Egypt, known to the tribes in the days without ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... disposed to overlook them, was the perfect silence they preserved. They walked side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty by the hand that was passed through the basket strap. Whether this apparent cause were the real cause, or whether it were an assumed one to escape an intercourse that would have been irksome to him, nobody but himself could have said precisely; ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... cleared spot has lain still enough for the trees to look friendly, with their exposed sides cultivated by the light, and the grass to look velvet warm, and be embroidered with flowers. These Western woods suggest a different kind of ballad. The Indian legends have often an air of the wildest solitude, as has the one Mr. Lowell has put into verse in his late volume. But I did not see those wild woods; only such as suggest to me little romances of love and ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... poems; there is the deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else beside. These poems are straws, showing the ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... artistic rule; and thus, as we are now beginning to discover from experience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to use those forms of verse which have been always held to be the highest— tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, even the subjective lyrical ode. For they, too, to judge by every great lyric which remains to us, require a groundwork of consistent self-coherent belief; and they require also an appreciation of melody even more delicate, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... to bear upon her by her friend Mrs. Johnson, of the Woman's Prison, and would go to read to the sad-eyed audience at Sherborn. Even those hearts dulled by wrong and misery awakened at the sound of her voice. It was not altogether this or that verse or ballad that made the tears flow, or brought a laugh from her hearers; it was the deep sympathy which she carried in her heart and which poured out in her voice; a hope, too, for them, and for what they might yet become. She could not go frequently,—she ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... done, another began in something of the same strain, but singing more of a song than a story ballad; and thus much I ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... heavens and the earth fashioned by this wonderful being in eighteen thousand years. With regard to him we may adapt the Scandinavian ballad: ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... possess a remarkable property, according to Thomas Fuller, who says, "whether husband or wife came first to drink thereof, they get the mastery thereby". The well has been immortalized in Southey's well-known ballad, The Well ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... watched its shadows, the music must have taken hold of him too; for when Robert ceased, he sang a wild ballad of the northern sea, to a tune strange as itself. It was the only time Robert ever heard him sing. Mysie's eyes grew wider and wider as she listened. When ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the history of the British monarchy, leaving a deep impression on the public mind, gave rise to this generally diffused ballad, is exceedingly probable; but the style and wording of the song are evidently of a period much later than the age of Henry VIII. Might not the madcap adventure of Prince Charles with Buckingham into Spain, to woo the Infanta, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... the ballad (for Mr. Collier thinks that both entries relate to one production) was merely one of those metrical ditties sung about the streets of London depicting the woes and sufferings of some unfortunate lady. The question ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... reveal to his countrymen once more the divine attributes of the soul. But now that the romance was to be set to music he feared that his art might have deserted him, so long had it remained unused. However the work progressed rapidly enough. He had in his mind as the main motive of the work, Senta's ballad, and around it clustered at once the whole musical arrangement of the material. The Sailor's Chorus and the Spinning Song were popular melodies, for the "Freischuetz" continually kept them humming in his ears. In seven weeks ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... several favorite melodies which we had often sung in camp, when, as on a pleasant Sunday evening, we were met together in little knots, to mingle our emotions in plaintive song, thinking of dear friends at home. One of these was a simple ballad describing the following incident—one of the most touching of the war. A youthful soldier from the state of Maine died in New Orleans, with none but strangers—as has been the lot of many—to watch over him in his dying hours, ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... had not yet been appropriated to the purposes of poetry or the drama. The stage was a new thing; and those who had to supply its demands laid their hands upon whatever came within their reach: they were not particular as to the means, so that they gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old ballad; Othello on an Italian novel; Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch tradition: one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last in Hollingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, are authenticated in the old Gothic ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Rain Allie Loving Henry Brittle Bones Apples and Water Manticor in Arabia Outlaws Baloo Loo for Jenny Hawk and Buckle The "Alice Jean" The Cupboard The Beacon Pot and Kettle Ghost Raddled Neglectful Edward The Well-dressed Children Thunder at Night To E.M.—A Ballad of Nursery Rhyme Jane Vain and Careless Nine o'Clock The Picture Book ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... ballad of the Armada. The lines have helped to perpetuate a popular error—one of the many connected with the story as it is generally told in our English histories. It somehow became the fashion at a very early ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... his young friend writing. He asked him if he were working on the Aristophanic comedy. Mr. Falconer said he got on best with that in the doctor's company. 'But I have been writing,' he said, 'on something connected with the Athenian drama. I have been writing a ballad on the death of Philemon, as told by Suidas and Apuleius.' The doctor expressed a wish to hear it, and Mr. Falconer read ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... borrowed the money with which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them a good education, and improved his land in every way year by year, and this without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robin Hood ballad: ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... songs illustrate the conversion of the Armatole into the Klepht in the age preceding the Greek revolution. Thus, in the fine ballad called "The Tomb of Demos," which Goethe has ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... and all customs, with intituling their beginnings from princes, great soldiers, and strange nations. He dare speak more than he understands, and adventures his words without the relief of any seconds. He relates battles and skirmishes as from an eyewitness, when his eyes thievishly beguiled a ballad of them. In a word, to make sure of admiration, he will not let himself understand himself, but hopes fame and opinion will be ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... qualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the infection of which lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion to all his other compositions. The form in both is that of the ballad, with some of its terminology, and some also of its quaint conceits. They connect themselves with that revival of ballad literature, of which Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way, Macpherson's Ossian are monuments, and which afterwards ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... ballad was sung to commemorate the life and death of Kidd, who, for some reason, was always called Robert Kidd by the populace. It consists of no less than twenty-four verses, and we here give ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... dinner and reserve all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... author's masterpiece. To these may be added the "Marionettes" and the national song, "Helvetie." Serious purpose and intention disguised in gentle gayety and childlike badinage, feeling hiding itself under a smile of satire, a resigned and pensive wisdom expressing itself in rustic round or ballad, the power of suggesting everything in a nothing—these are the points in which the Vaudois poet triumphs. On the reader's side there is emotion and surprise, and on the author's a sort of pleasant slyness which seems to delight ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of burning them there. As the story runs, he called them "rats who ate the corn." Numberless mice swam to the tower which he had built in the midst of the stream, and devoured him. Southey has put the tale into a ballad,—"God's Judgment on ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Rufus Smith, and he lived 'by Dudley Wood side, where the wind blows cold,' as the local ballad puts it His mother had dealt in the black art before him, and was ducked to death in the Severn by the bridge in the ancient town of Bewdley. He was a lean man, with a look of surly fear. It is likely enough that he half expected some of his invocations to come true one fine ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... fluttering skirts which Greuze would have found to his taste, amid peals of laughter, the Toulousan Tholomyes, who was somewhat of a Spaniard, Toulouse being the cousin of Tolosa, sang, to a melancholy chant, the old ballad gallega, probably inspired by some lovely maid dashing in full flight upon a rope ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... male carousers. Men and women are figured together, but it would be very hard to find a woman in one of these rough cuts with a pipe in her hand or at her mouth. An example, in the "Shirburn Ballads" lies before me. The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called "A Knotte of ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... him a knight. Such is the wonderful history of Tom Thumb, who did much good when he grew older, and thus proved that however small people are, they may be of use in the world. He was good and kind to his parents, and to everybody; and the old ballad says,— ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... who can say?—certainly his living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the Book of Odes, Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over men so buried alive with ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... it was possible to perform his task, excused his frail and desponding body from attendance in his little summer-house, morning and afternoon, until his forty lines of Homer were arrayed in English dress. The ballad of "John Gilpin" originated during one of his illnesses. With the hope of diverting his mind during an unusually severe attack of gloom, Lady Austen related to him the history of the renowned citizen, which she had heard in her childhood. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... of one of the automobiles—that, while you will be responsible for the 'shoving' of Ping, these delicate hands will flick Pong across France. Very good. Let the Press be informed; call forth the ballad-mongers. What would have been a somewhat sordid drive will become a ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... is, not to run your own present humor and disposition indiscriminately against everybody, but to observe, conform to, and adopt them. For example, if you happened to be in high good humor and a flow of spirits, would you go and sing a 'pont neuf',—[a ballad]—or cut a caper, to la Marechale de Coigny, the Pope's nuncio, or Abbe Sallier, or to any person of natural gravity and melancholy, or who at that time should be in grief? I believe not; as, on the other hand, I suppose, that if you were in low spirits or ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... though you were the maid, and all the while you rebuff me and suffer so that I fear to look on you. Men say you are no better than a highwayman; you confess yourself to be a thief: and I believe none of your accusers. Perion de la Foret," said Melicent, and ballad-makers have never shaped a phrase wherewith to tell you of her voice, "I know that you have dabbled in dishonour no more often than an archangel has pilfered drying linen from a hedgerow. I do not guess, for my hour is upon me, and inevitably ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... elevates and develops the moral nature of men at the same time that it amuses them and stirs them deeply. We have just seen what oaths were taken by the knights and administered by the priests; and now, here is an ancient ballad by Eustache Deschamps, a poet of the fourteenth century, from which it will be seen that poets impressed upon knights the same duties and the same virtues, and that the influence of poetry had the same aim as that ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... intolerable in the several branches of education of female infants, water rates in Bloomsbury, the cutlery industry, and ballad-singing. ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... shooting on the 2nd of January 1663. This arbitrary act angered Charles II. and his advisers; the deemsters and others were punished, and some reparation was made to Christian's family. Christian is chiefly celebrated through the Manx ballad Baase Illiam Dhone, which has been translated into English by George Borrow, and through the references to him in Sir Walter Scott's Peveril of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... literary merit of these Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, it strikes one key with their political quality. One exquisite ballad of "The Stolen Child," by W. B. Yeats, might have been sung in the moonlight on a sylvan lake by the spirit ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... if you can, sir," replied James. "But 'ware the tynes!—'ware the tynes!—'If thou be hurt with hart it brings thee to thy bier,' as the auld ballad hath it, and the adage is true, as we ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Olney and its neighbourhood are not ended, for, it was within five miles of this town—at Easton Maudit—that Bishop Percy {37} lived and prepared those Reliques which have inspired a century of ballad literature. Here the future Bishop of Dromore was visited by Dr. Johnson and others. What a pity that with only five miles separating them Cowper and Johnson should never have met! Would Cowper have reconsidered the wish made when he read Johnson's ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... Scandinavian mind. The beautiful ballads and songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn have perhaps had a similar power over German minds; but, as far as I am aware, no German poet has has ever succeeded in inventing a metre suitable for dramatic purposes, which yet retained the mediaeval ballad's sonorous swing and rich aroma. The explanation of the powerful impression produced in its day by Henrik Hertz's Svend Dyring's House is to be found in the fact that in it, for the first time, the problem ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... was a little, round man, who in the days of the Empire had been a charming ballad-singer; it was this accomplishment that had won him the high position of Paymaster-General of the forces. Having mixed himself up in certain important matters in Spain with generals at that time in opposition, he had made the ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... refrain of a familiar old ballad, and he continued to hum this as he straightened up and set his hands on his hips, regarding the twins through wickedly narrowed eyes. He was flushed with drink and inclined, as always at such times, to swagger with a ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... that we have just seen, the tax is the reaction of society against monopoly. Upon this point opinions are unanimous: citizens and legislators, economists, journalists, and ballad-writers, rendering, each in their own tongue, the social thought, vie with each other in proclaiming that the tax should fall upon the rich, strike the superfluous and articles of luxury, and leave those of prime ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Hohenstiel-Schwangau' were published, respectively, in August and December 1871. They had been preceded in the March of the same year by a ballad, 'Herve Riel', afterwards reprinted in the 'Pacchiarotto' volume, and which Mr. Browning now sold to the 'Cornhill Magazine' for the benefit of the French sufferers by ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... A grand ballad concert, at which the most sentimental of contraltos, helped by other first-class throats, was to minister wholesale to the insatiable secret sentimentality of the north, had been arranged for ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the patience of mortal born to bear; at last she declared it quite finished, and seems to think it fine. I told her it was Johnson's grimly ghost. It is to be engraved, and I think in glided, &c., will be a good inscription.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 302. Johnson is quoting from Mallet's ballad of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the sound of hammering. Peeping over the edge of the stack, she recognized Tom McHale. McHale was putting a strand of wire around the stack, and as she looked he began to sing a ballad of the old frontier. Clyde had never heard "Sam Bass," and she listened to ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... on with its accompaniment of song, its suggestion of regret. Once in the middle of a ballad a funeral passes in the street below. The mourner's chant sounds above the bourdon of the tom-tom, the wail of the saringis. "Hush, hush" cries Nur Jan, "let the dead pass in peace. It is not meet that the song of the dancing-girl should ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... volume of the Poems, and send me it by the man who brings you this; let it be a neat one, well-bound: pray tell me what people say of the book. Your currant-jelly is good, has a delicious flavour, and tastes much of the fruit, as my aunts say. I did not make out all the names in your Race-Ballad cleverly. ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... from mine heart. I remember he alleged many a Scripture, but those I valued not; the Scriptures, thought I, what are they? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings' price.[39] Alas! What is the Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables;[40] but for the holy Scriptures I cared not. And as it was with me then, so ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the morning and last thing at night; harped upon it until in despair his companion threw books and music at him, and he, dodging them, laughed, begged pardon, was silent for five minutes, and then the March da Capo set in a halting kind of measure to the ballad. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... All Saints' Day in 1825, when the dykes were broken and the water rushed in to the height of five feet. Such must be great times of triumph for the floating population, who, like the sailor in the old ballad of the sea, may well pity the unfortunate and insecure dwellers in houses. What the number of Friesland's floating population is I do not know; but it must be very large. Many barges and tjalcks are both the birthplace and deathplace of their owners, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... the newspapers. And then he fought the attendant at the Municipal Lodging House who tried to give him a bath. When Murray first saw him he was holding the hand of an Italian woman who sold apples and garlic on Essex street, and quoting the words of a song book ballad. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... extravagances of expression and questionable taste, the numerous stories which Southey delighted to versify on themes demoniac and diabolical, from the Devil's Walk to the True Ballad of St Antidius, are fraught with farcical import, and have an individual ludicrousness all their own. That he could succeed tolerably in the mock-heroic vein, may be seen in his parody on Pindar's ariston ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... prove our wisdom," said Christina, "to run away with thy mother like a lover in a ballad. Nay, let me first deal gently with thine uncle, and speak myself with Sir Kasimir, so that I may show him the vanity of his suit. Then will we back to Adlerstein without ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it from going to the well of the pump; it is always (especially if the ship does not leak) of a dirty colour and disgusting penetrating smell. It seems to have been a sad nuisance in early voyages; and in the earliest sea-ballad known (temp. Hen. VI.) it is thus ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... quiet in the very midst of turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to the banners of liberty—the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who—as the ballad runs—had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for King Monmouth's army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they were fools rushing in wicked ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... there are other musicians who write and rewrite, work and rework, study and restudy, and yet what they finally offer the public has not the quality or the force or the inspiration of a common gutter-ballad. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... an oaken block attached to one of the pillars, and which was denominated, from the use it was put to, the "serving-man's log." Some of the crowd were smoking, some laughing, others gathering round a ballad-singer, who was chanting one of Rochester's own licentious ditties; some were buying quack medicines and remedies for the plague, the virtues of which the vendor loudly extolled; while others were paying court to the dames, many ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... personal experience, and I have told this story often in the German ballad form to girls of ten and twelve in the high schools in England, I have never found one girl who sympathized with the lady or who failed to appreciate the poetic justice meted out to her in the end by the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... money for Cocksmoor, and after persuading papa, I got leave to send a ballad about a little girl and a white rose to that school magazine. I don't think papa liked it, but there were some verses that touched him, and one had seen worse. It was actually inserted, and I was in high ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... here portrayed with wonderfully graphic pen, whilst the metre is, so far as technical correctness is concerned, all that might be desired. However, we wish that Miss Ronning were less fond of unusual rhyming arrangements. The lines here given are of regular ballad length. Were they disposed in couplets, we should have a tuneful lay of the "Chevy Chase" order; but as it is, our ear misses the steady couplet effect to which the standard models have accustomed us. "With the Assistance of Carmen" is a clever short story by Gladys Bagg, derived from the same ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... old popular poetry will recognize, in the principal incident of this story, the subject of the well-known ballad, "The ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... letter of Mr. C. dated from Stowey, Mr. Coleridge also says, "I have written a Ballad of three hundred lines, and also a plan of general study." It appeared right to make these statements, and it is hoped the productions named ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... on this trip that they had, so the legend says, that strange interview with Judas Iscariot, out of which Matthew Arnold has made a ballad. Sailing in the wintry northern seas at Christmas time, St. Brandan saw an iceberg floating by, on which a human form rested motionless; and when it moved at last, he saw by its resemblance to the ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... historical authority for the events of the celebrated Ballad on which this Tragedy is founded, I have fixed upon the thirteenth century for the period of their occurrence. At that time the kingdom of Castille had recently obtained that supremacy in Spain which led, in a subsequent age, to the political integrity of the ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... and to clothe their surroundings with a higher and holier significance than can arise from the events and associations of the work-day life. In art the missing link is found, and whether it be the simple ballad in the evening circle or the modest print that graces the humble cottage walls—and the humbler the habitation the deeper the manifestation, because the more touching—it is but the expression of the people's appreciation of the needs, the capacities, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... very beautiful picture in the manner of a great English Pre-Raphaelite. This was called "Thomas the Rhymer, meeting with the Faerie Queen," but it did not follow the description of the ballad. The Faerie Queen, a figure of a Botticellian grace, was coming, with all her fellowship, out of a wonderful pinewood, while Thomas the Rhymer, handsome and young and lean and brown, his harp across his back, had just crossed a mountain-stream by a rough bridge. He appeared suddenly to have beheld ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... powerful and original ballad, let us turn to something more genial. The three following poems are exquisite specimens of the varied genius of our author; and we hardly know whether to prefer the plaintive beauty of the first, or the light and sportive brilliancy of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... a hermit's life differ from those generally held," said Graeme, vexed at the personal turn of the conversation, and more vexed still with Mrs Grove's interference. "What does the ballad say? ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... all reports of the famous gatherings, but of the members who really used and made the Club. Few of the outside public recollect, for instance, the name of Arthur Mathieson, who wrote and sang that pathetic ballad, "The Little Hero"; who also was an actor and writer of ability,—in fact, he was what is fatal to men of his class—a veritable Crichton. Being in appearance not unlike Sir Henry Irving, he was engaged by our leading actor to play his double in "The Corsican ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... knowledge of naval and of military history also would have saved their readers from a belief in their accusations. In 1727 the fleet in the West Indies commanded by Admiral Hosier, commemorated in Glover's ballad, lost ten flag officers and captains, fifty lieutenants, and 4000 seamen. In the Seven Years' war the total number belonging to the fleet killed in action was 1512; whilst the number that died of ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... seeing the Picture of AEolus, by Peligrino Tibaldi, in the Institute at Bologna Sonnet on Rembrant; occasioned by his Picture of Jacob's Dream Sonnet on the Luxembourg Gallery Sonnet to my venerable Friend, the President of the Royal Academy The Mad Lover at the Grave of his Mistress First Love: a Ballad The Complaint Will, the Maniac: ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... behalf of a gentleman who has risked his mistress's favour for my poor cheek's sake?" And she fell to laughing again, her mirth growing greater as I turned red in the face. "You mustn't blush when you come to town," she cried, "or they'll make a ballad on you, and cry you in ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... fixed. He accepted her judgments almost instantly. He bragged of her skill as a cook, as an artist and as a musician, quite shamelessly; but as this only amused her I saw no reason for interfering—I even permitted him to boast of my singing. He believed me to be one of the most remarkable ballad singers in the world, and to hear me sing "The Ninety and Nine" with all the dramatic modulations of a professional evangelist afforded him the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the songs, but I gathered that they were all legendary or historical. To those who could understand, as I was informed by my tutelary young friend, who stayed beside me the whole of this memorable day, we were listening to the history of the Land of the Blue Mountains in ballad form. Somewhere or other throughout that vast concourse each notable record of ten centuries was ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... not here, I thought if we could find the sea We should be sure to meet him there, And once again might happy be.-Ballad. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... conspicuously in the 'Lays of Ancient Rome,' which, whatever we might say of them as poetry, are an admirable specimen of rhymed rhetoric. We know how good they are when we see how incapable are modern ballad-writers in general of putting the same swing and fire into their verses. Compare, for example, Aytoun's 'Lays of the Cavaliers,' as the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... kind you can't put down till you've finished. But just now we hardly looked at them. For who with a spark of manly spirit would think twice about a book with a new free-wheel champing the oil like a charger in a ballad? ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... the following ballad has its foundation about the year 1660. Thomas Macy was one of the first, if not the first white settler of Nantucket. The career of Macy is briefly but carefully outlined in James S. Pike's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... all right. What I need is a good refined ballad voice. Understand? The kind that can sing 'The Suwanee River' as if the only thing in the world that mattered is that old plantation ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Their social degeneracy may be traced in the dictionary. The chanter of the "gests" of kings, gesta ducum regumque, dwindled into a gesticulator, a jester: the honored jogelar of Provence, into a mountebank; the jockie, a doggrel ballad-monger. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... are the ruins of the most extensive of the Scotch abbeys, scanty indeed, but still enough to show its state and importance in the "days of faith." Here once reigned the good abbott celebrated by Southey in his ballad of Ralph the Rover, familiar to every schoolboy. Ten miles off the ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... all the wide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, except the sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels of thought- movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism, to which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has recently proposed should be made the basis for a final and unanimous effort on the part of our second-rate poets to make themselves really romantic. Each new school, as it appears, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... at least. This is life in a Border ballad. Such a life as you knew in France but beautiful in a wild—hawk sort of way. Don't the Khyber Rifles bewilder you? They are drawn from these very Hill tribes, and will shoot their own fathers and brothers in the way of duty as comfortably as if they ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... Britomarte The Sick Stockrider The Song of the Surf The Swimmer The Three Friends Thick-headed Thoughts Thora's Song To a Proud Beauty To My Sister "Two Exhortations" Unshriven Visions in the Smoke Whisperings in Wattle-Boughs Wolf and Hound Wormwood and Nightshade Ye Wearie Wayfarer, hys Ballad ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... nearly all with one accord, repeat the remark that it is a "barren" period, with nothing admirable about it, at any rate in England; that it shows us the works of Hoccleve and Lydgate near the beginning, The Flower and the Leaf near the middle (about 1460), and the ballad of The Nut-brown Maid at the end of it, and nothing else that is remarkable. In other words, they neglect its most important characteristic, that it was the chief period of the lengthy popular romances and of the popular plays ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... have been running in my head at intervals through nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless ballad—sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly monotonous the burden, which ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... to The Children in the Wood by no means satisfies my judgement. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Roydon, Florio, Marston, and Jonson attacked Shakespeare in published or acted plays that he invariably answers them in kind. We have only inferential evidence that he answered Greene's and Nashe's reflections at this time by writing a ballad against them. Ralph Sidley, in verses prefixed to Greene's Never Too Late, published in the following year (1590), defends Greene from the attack of a ballad or jig maker, whom ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson |
