"Lilt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sake; some of them may have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing that bewails ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he knew, as well as to keep from arousing those of others, his heart was telling a very different story all the time. He could see again the dainty grace with which she had danced for him, heard again that low voice breaking into a merry piping lilt, warmed once more to the living, elusive smile, at once so tender and mocking. He might set his will to preserve an even front to her gay charm, but it was beyond him to control the thrills ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... Willow!—Let the Waters lilt your graces,— They alone with limpid kisses lave your leaves above, Flashing back your sylvan beauty, and in shady places Peering up with glimmering pebbles, like the ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... the wind in his nervous hands, and turning about in a little space like an animal in a cage, over the hedge through the apple-boughs a boy's clear voice rose suddenly, singing a rollicking tune, with a snapping of fingers and tapping of feet in time to its merry lilt. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... The variant had a lilt, a go, a flourish. To employ a vulgarism of the hour, it had the punch. It landed you and between the eyes. It required neither commentaries nor explanation. It was all there. It was tangible as a brickbat, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... much when I tell you they were suggested by you. You must forgive the poet's license I take. Here is one verse. The metrical irregularity is intentional, because I want, as it were, to put you apart: to change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... a book in the drawing room which had caught his attention during a former visit; and now he sought it, and taking it up from the table, stood there alone in the cool shaded room turning from page to page, absorbed in comparing passages of its contents. Then a light step, a rustle of skirts, a lilt of song—which broke off short as he raised his eyes. Lilith was passing through, her tennis racket still in her hand. Slightly flushed with her recent exercise, she looked radiantly sweet, in her dark, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... through vivid concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his "unintelligible" poetry,—"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]—by a "chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of the riotous exuberance of intellect ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... not wait for his music. Dropping him a little demure, mocking curtsy she turned and ran down the box-edged path, singing as she went, and the air she sang was Stephen La Mothe's "Heigh-ho! love is my life; Live I in loving and love I to live!" and the lilt of the music ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... Jesus. But no concert is complete without singing, and if Jesus plays, must not Celine make melody with her voice? When the music is plaintive, she will sing the songs of exile; when the music is gay, she will lilt the airs of her Heavenly ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... will some ticket, When his statue's built, Tell the gazer "'Twas a cricket Helped my crippled lyre, whose lilt Sweet and low, when strength usurped Softness' place i' ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... through the heavy mist that hung above the Missouri, came a strange, new trumpet-call from Brannon. The opening notes, reiterated and smooth-flowing, were unlike the first sprightly lilt of reveille. As Dallas stilled the squeaking of the well-pulley to listen, they ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... Holloway, more than any Negro poet writing in the dialect to-day, summons to his work the lilt, the spontaneity and charm of which Dunbar was the supreme master whenever he employed that medium. It is well to say a word here about the dialect poems of James Edwin Campbell. In dialect, Campbell was a precursor ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... The lilt of this little romance, with its pretty repetitions, is delightful, and the symbolism is, of ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... the grass, and read, in a chant, or rather in a lilt, the Danish ballad of Chyld Dyring, as translated by Sir Walter Scott. Gibbie's eyes grew wider and wider as he listened; their pupils dilated, and his lips parted: it seemed as if his soul were looking out of door and windows ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... her prettiness. One saw at once that her cheeks should have been pink and white like the daisy, and that her hair, which was yellow as the primrose, should have tumbled in wavelets about them. There ought to have been sunshine in the blue eyes, and laughter on the red lips, and merry lilt in the soft voice. But the pink had faded from the girl's cheek; the shadow had chased the sunshine from her eyes; her lips had taken a downward turn, and a note of sadness had stolen ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... call attention here, once for all, to what is one of the principal charms of Vaish.nava hymns, the exquisitely musical rhythm and cadence. They seem made to be sung, and trip off the tongue with a lilt ...
— Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal • John Beames
... erstwhile the Great Spirit's children dwelt Forever hushed is the papoose's wail, and stilled the squaw's low-crooning lilt. No longer shimmers starlight from eyes of savage maids Worshippers of the fire and sun, poor dwellers of the caves— The sisters of the deer and lo, shy startled fawns of Aztec race Or coy ancestral dams of moon-eyed Toltec doe. Now Verde witches bathe in Montezuma's well And over its crystal ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... her songs being of her own land, one of the highlands, with the perfume of the gorse and the heather in the lilt of it, and the second, by demand of Sandy, the gipsy song which had been handed down from woodland mother to woodland child for hundreds of years; a song which sent Nancy's lawless blood to her cheeks and set her heart beating with ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... in a shadowy corner of the crowded room, and listened to the singing, wild and strong, and with no hint of coming battle in its full rolling lilt. He noted with satisfaction how the "Long, Long Trail," and "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag" gradually gave place to "Tell Mother I'll Be There," and "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder," growing strong and full and solemn in the grand old melody of "Abide With Me." There were fellows ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... already changed hands. One agent had brought in a big steel safe and a tent and was buying coal lands right and left. More young men drifted in from all points of the compass. A tent-hotel was put at the foot of Imboden Hill, and of nights there were under it much poker and song. The lilt of a definite optimism was in every man's step and the light of hope ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... climbed the swift plane, no faltering in its stride. The beat of the engines was as rhythmical to experienced ears as the regular swing and lilt of some perfectly rendered piece of music to the ears of ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, caught and bound in rose thickets. All was dedicated to love and a lover's madness, and there were songs in it which haunted him with their lilt and refrain. When the book was finished it replaced the loose leaves as his constant companion by day and night. Three times a day he repeated his ritual to himself, seeking out the loneliest places in the woods, or going up to his room; and from ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... tell the deeds of valour which had achieved the impossible, making and remaking that road! It should have some great poem all to itself, I thought; a poem called "The Road to Verdun." And the poem should be set to music. I could almost hear the lilt of the verses as our car slipped through the tangle of motor camions and gun-carriages on the way thither. As for the music, I could really hear that without flight of fancy: a deep, rolling undertone of heavy wheels, of jolting guns, of pulsing engines, like a million ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... From fireside lone and trampling street Let thy life garner daily wheat; The epic of a man rehearse, Be something better than thy verse; Make thyself rich, and then the Muse Shall court thy precious interviews, Shall take thy head upon her knee, And such enchantment lilt to thee, That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow From farthest stars to grass-blades low, 150 And find the Listener's science still Transcends the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... peculiar catch of its lilt, would suddenly make me start up, wide awake, with every nerve in my body dancing to its ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Christian tradition which ignored "race," and the aim of the expansive liberalism movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the world, to extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into trousers, and train the teeming myriads of India to appreciate the exquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some absurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not let the fact that the middle Victorians counted Scott, the suffrage and pantaloons among the supreme blessings of life, conceal from ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... him. Shallow as was his mental observation, there was that in the things which had happened which made his little power of analysis useless. Carrie was still with him, but not helpless and pleading. There was a lilt in her voice which was new. She did not study him with eyes expressive of dependence. The drummer was feeling the shadow of something which was coming. It coloured his feelings and made him develop those little attentions and say those little words which were mere forefendations ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... her umbrella then. And at the same moment a singing voice became audible in the trees behind them. The song came floating to them through the sunlight with a sound of wind and birds. It had a marvellous quality, very sweet and very moving. There was a lilt in it, a laughing, happy lilt, as though the Earth herself were singing of ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... forgot you," she said, with a whimsical lilt in her voice. "I was thinkin' how elegant it is when we get home ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... pipers, rising to the occasion, played "Blue bonnets o'er the Border." Behind was the sunset in a sky of brilliant crimson. In front stretched great uplands of a dim green, while we, the new Crusaders, crossed over to the lilt of the pipes, whose music astonished Palestine now heard for the first time; and with us in great columns moved guns and cavalry, camels and transport, half seen in a haze of hanging dust. These of course are after thoughts, ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... for the foolishness of foolish people. A cocktail, or several, before dinner, enabled me to laugh whole-heartedly at things which had long since ceased being laughable. The cocktail was a prod, a spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits. It recrudesced the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own imagination so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with the liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... lilt in her voice Mollie, at her end of the wire, sat up and stared inquiringly into the black mouth ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... this is how it appeared. All through that time he wore an odd look of excitement, triumph, pleasure, which lifted him away from himself. There was a sort of lilt in his very step; his eyes shone, his cheeks were flushed. When he cleared a pile of freshly-ironed, starched things from the end of a table, so as to spread out a score upon it, laid them on the floor where the cat padded them over with ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... suddenly upon her—an agonizing sense of youth's futility. Rackingly above the crash and lilt of music, the quick, wild thud of dancing feet, the sharp, staccato notes of laughter—she heard the dull, heavy, unrhythmical tread of the oncoming years—gray years, limping eternally from to-morrow on, through unloved lands, on ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... resolution. The big iron pot was now, like an honest old sailor that had done his duty, kicked aside the corner; the drummer and fifer seating themselves on the keel of the inverted dinghy, and struck up a lilt, and:— ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... dawn descends the hills, And round me, as I greet the day, I hear the lilt of laughing rills And songs of fountains at ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... court of Charlemagne. Now, Angilbert was a poet of exquisite grace, and surprisingly modern is his music, which is indeed a wonderful anticipation of the lilt of Edgar Poe. I compare it to ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... stand in groups laughing and talking in voices pitched shrill with crates excitement. In the brown light of the wharf, full of rows of yellow and barrels and sacks, full of racket of cranes, among which winds in and out the trivial lilt of the Hawaiian tune, there is a flutter of gay dresses and coloured hats of women, and ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... heart's desire. Why, then, hurt him by telling him that the shoes are not your desire? Why not, with head held high, lead the dance you speak of, and forget shoes, and remember only the movement of the dance, the lilt of the music?" ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... taken his degree from some college of venders, his call has such finesse. I cannot reproduce the lilt of it—"Here's where you get your horoscope, a dime, ten cents." It is suggestive of the midways of country fairs, shooting galleries on the Board Walk, and circuses in the springtime. "Here's where you get your horoscope, a ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to be as deadly dull as a British Sunday—not dull as other men are dull, but dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was when ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... of old Castile, Ola, Ola," Manuel sang confidentially with a subdued and gallant lilt... Obviously impracticable. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... the order in which it had arrived, and to the lilt of the gay music of the powerful band, the volatile spirits of the multitude revived, and the loud "huzzahs" rent the air as Apleon—the Anti-christ—passed through the waiting ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... that when English poetry awoke, long after the Conquest (or, as I should prefer to put it, after the Crusades) it awoke a new thing; in its vocabulary as much like Anglo-Saxon poetry as ever you will, but in metre, rhythm, lilt—and more, in style, feeling, imaginative play—and yet more again, in knowledge of what it aimed to be, in the essentials, in the qualities that make Poetry Poetry—as different from Anglo-Saxon poetry as cheese is from chalk, and as much more ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of the cathedral spires. The voice of a young girl, washing white and blue clothing in a trough of running water, sped us upon our journey. Her head was bound in a scarlet handkerchief; and smiling at us while she pounded the linen, she sang a strange song, half chant, with that wild Eastern lilt which has been handed down from the Moors to the sons ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... old-eyed youngster. There was amiable adventure with an amiable "blonde" (oh, if you could have seen your son); another with a "jolie brune" (oh, ma mere, ma mere); and still another lecon d'amour. The refrain had a catchy lilt to it, and the poilus ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... sweet, dear girl she was, too. Stop laughing at Alanna, all of you, or I'll send you upstairs until Dad gets after you. Very quiet and shy she was, but the lovely singing voice! There wasn't a tune in the world she wouldn't lilt to you if you asked her. Well, the poor child, I wish I'd never lost sight of her." She pondered a moment. "Is the boy still serving Mass at St. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... swore her laughter had the lilt Of chiming waters that are spilt In sprays of spurted melody From founts of carven porphyry, And in the billowy turbulence Of her dusk hair drowned soul and sense— Dark tides and ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... Grecian lyre; but it was long before this mad dance sobered down to regular rhythm and form. From Corinth, where Arion first laboured, we pass to Sicyon, where the taming of the dithyramb into an art form was accomplished by Praxilla, a poetess who added a new charm to the lilt of this Bacchic ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... can piper play The tune of "Hills and Far Away," For they are with them. Morn can fire No peaks of weary heart's desire, Nor the red sunset flame behind Some ancient ridge of longing mind. For Arcady is here, around, In lilt of stream, in the clear sound Of lark and moorbird, in the bold Gay glamour of the evening gold, And so the wheel of seasons moves To kirk and market, to mild loves And modest hates, and still the sight Of ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... brewing To the lilt of his lyric wiles: The fiddler knows what rueing Will come of this ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... Of Summer warmth the wine-sweet breezes hold, Fair wildings blow—bright buttercups agleam Like shining sequins scattered on the wold, And daffodills—a wealth of faery gold. The building birds their coming bliss presage With lilt and lyric brimming o'er the page Of Nature's volume bound in green and gold. Here 'mid the birds and blossoms 'neath the blue— My heart unburthened of the old regret— Let me forget long striving to forget; For life is sweet to-day and ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... harmony throughout, many pretty rustic scenes, and sufficient interest to carry the reader pleasantly over the ground. The Gentle Shepherd is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay's power than his songs alone would warrant. His lyrical pieces, though not wholly without the lilt and charm such verse exacts, are perhaps mainly of service in showing the immeasurable superiority of Burns. Ramsay was a successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man of business. He exchanged wig-making for bookselling, kept a shop in the High Street of Edinburgh, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... The lilt of the joyous words had often been with him as he sped through the sleeping fields to his ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... rigging. The passengers were all below. Then, suddenly, a burst of music came up as some one opened a saloon port-hole and as quickly closed it again—a tenor voice singing to the piano some trivial modern song with a trashy sentimental lilt. It was—in this setting of sea and sky—painful; O'Malley caught himself thinking of a barrel-organ ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... talk, in which the clock tinker indulged so freely, afforded his young friend no little amusement. His tongue had long obeyed the lilt of classic diction; his thought came easy in Elizabethan phrase. The slight Celtic brogue served to enhance the piquancy of his talk. Moreover he was really a man of wit ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... powerful lungs and the wind was blowing their way but they heard it distinctly. It was a quaint syncopated tune, but not one of the Invincibles had any doubt that it came from some daring detachment of the Union Army. The notes with their odd lilt seemed to swell through the forest, but it was strange to both ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... written 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in the same tune and key as 'Treasure Island'; and the music of 'Marxheim' differs from both. The reason is organic: the writer is inspired by his theme, and it passes through his mind with a lilt and measure of its own. It makes its own style, just as a human spirit makes its own features and gait; and we know Stevenson through all his transformations only by dint of the exquisite distinction ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... letters could reproduce Dougal's accent, and I will not attempt it. There was a touch of Irish in it, a spice of music-hall patter, as well as the odd lilt of the Glasgow vernacular. He was strong in vowels, but the consonants, especially the letter "t," were ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... forward in the brilliance, but he did not smoke; he paced restlessly about and at last crept into his bunk and lay with his face to the wall. Larry sat long before the fire. "It's the music that's got in my blood," he said. "Katherine could sing and lilt the Scotch airs like a bird. She had a ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... poetry, the translator having retained the lilt of the original, together with many of the old English words which, if they need a glossary, is only because we have gradually lost the meaning in the substitution of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... hasn't she?" he said to Mihul. He made vague curving motions in the air with one hand, more or less opposing ones with the other. "That sort of an up-and-sideways lilt ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... The old lilt died on his lips. With a startled oath he reined in sharply and, shielding his eyes from the sun-glare, remained staring straight in front of him. They had just topped the crest of the rise. The eastward slope showed a low-lying, ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... time. The auld couple were as kind as kind could be, and their twa or three young folks keepit up the fun brisk and lively. I took a hand at the cairts and sang a lilt like the rest; but I was luiking for Alick's company to fill up my cup of happiness. The time wore on, and it was getting close to the hour at which he might be expectit. I kenna what ailed me, but I felt ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... had or not, it is certain that the gallery had. All the evening they had been stewing in an atmosphere like that of the inner room of a Turkish bath, and they were ready for anything. It needed but a trifle to set them off. The lilt of that unspeakable Yankee melody supplied that trifle. Kay's malcontents, huddled in their seats by the window, were the first to break out. Feet began to stamp in time to the music—softly at first, then more loudly. The wooden dais gave ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... no attempt at dramatic impressiveness, the Chief began to speak. He touched upon the condition of Italy, and the new lilt animating her young men and women. "I have heard many good men jeer," he said, "at our taking women to our counsel, accepting their help, and putting a great stake upon their devotion. You have read history, and you know what women can accomplish. They may be trained, equally as we are, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... present. The body of the music is made up of music growing out of the passage in the sailor-song (g); this goes through a hundred transformations, and is put to a hundred uses as the action progresses; and the swing and lilt of it never fail to conjure up a vision of smooth rollers and the sea-wind filling the sail and driving the ship fast towards Cornwall. It takes one shape when Brangaena tells Isolda that they will land before evening; and in nearly the same shape it returns when ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... younkers! You "guy" "the old gang" as "played out," As fogies, and fussers, and funkers, You've over-much reason, no doubt. But, great Scott! as your rowing-rhymes rattle And lilt lyric praise of the Crews, We too sniff the air of the battle! We too have a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... boat drifted in to the boathouse landing to the lilt of a familiar rowing song. Wyn's camping days were over; the outing of the Go-Ahead Club was at ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... in its grandest prime, The earth is green and the skies are blue; But where is the lilt of the olden time, When life was a melody set to rhyme, And dreams were so real ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... offices of Radbourne & Company on that Saturday morning, radiated no doubt from the head of the concern himself. He flitted about restlessly, tugged at his whiskers continually, and his voice, as he rattled off his correspondence to Miss Brown, had a happy boyish lilt. Occasionally, chancing to catch Miss Summers' eye, he would nod with ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... feeling fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer's brain. Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively masculine; women neither practice them nor know how to value them; and ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... interesting in the original, inasmuch as it is rhymed throughout, although printed as prose. A kind of lilt is perceptible in many of the Skazkas, and traces of rhyme are often to be detected in them, but "The Mizgir's" mould is different from theirs. Many stories also exist in an artificially versified form, but their movement differs entirely from that of the ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... tell me somethin'—says he, 'Mrs. Steadman, I believe every girl is gittin' ready for her weddin' sometime. Maudie here is doin' an ocean-wave huckaback cushion now, I see. What's that for, I wonder? I suppose Edith Slater is gittin' ready. I don't see why she shouldn't,' and then he began to lilt a little foreign toon, and I was good and mad, I can tell ye; but ye can't get nothin' out, of him. He gits his livin' pretty easy, too, and he ought to be ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... song warbling through his spirit, naturally as a bird's. The whole subject is wrapped in an element of music, till it is penetrated and transfigured by it. No one else has so much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at the white heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most perfect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in Ye Banks and Braes. In the best of them the outward form ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... more dreamy; there was a cadence in it now as if some soul within were forcing her to chant it all, with almost the lilt of blank verse. ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... fine!" said Dud to Jim, as they made their way through the chatting, laughing throng, and caught the lilt of the music on the beach beyond, where bathers, reckless of the church bells' call, were disporting themselves in the sunlit waves. "It's tough, with a place like this so near, to be shut up on a desert island for a whole vacation. I say, Jim, ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... near to breaking his promise. One evening, when March was melting into April, and the pulses of spring were stirring under the lingering snow, he was walking home from school alone. As he descended into the little hollow below the manse a lively lilt of music drifted up to meet him. It was only the product of a mouth-organ, manipulated by a little black-eyed, French-Canadian hired boy, sitting on the fence by the brook; but there was music in the ragged urchin and it came out through his simple toy. It tingled over ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... through Cairo to the Pyramids, whether you spin out there in a motor, or trot on a donkey, or lilt on a camel, squatting cross-legged on a load of green bersim. Past the great swinging bridge, and the Island of Ghezireh (the word that in itself means "island") begins the six-mile dyke, which is the road made by Ismail to please ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the footsteps of the absent boys, but for a long time there was no break in the lilt of the forest. Then—it must have been two o'clock—he heard the quick beat of running feet, and directly Gastong, as Jack had fancifully named his new acquaintance, came spurting into ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... there was music, and the dances of old Ireland—the reel and the lilt. And when last of all came the Irish jig, the old woman put her basket down on ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... quite empty. From drawing-room and library and dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she drew ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... in the sun, or regaling themselves on buns and cocoa. The whole place is vibrant with the intense zest the young feel in life, and with the whole-hearted powers of enjoyment of boyhood. A school-song set to a captivating waltz-lilt record the charms of Ducker. One verse ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... vertiginous tempest of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... shingle, and then once more the words rose clearly above the dewy pines, "To win a blooming bride!" More of the ballad followed, for Johnston trolled it lustily as he strode back to the shanty, and the refrain haunted me as I swept on through the cool dimness under the conifers, for the lilt of it went fittingly with the clang of iron on quartz outcrop and the jingle of steel. It also chimed with my own thoughts the while, and the last lines broke from my lips triumphantly when we raced out of the dusky woods into the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... this day, as I may no more, The world's heart throb at my workshop door. The sun was keen, and the day was still; The township drowsed in, a haze of heat. A stir far off on the sleepy hill, The measured beat of their buoyant feet, And the lilt and thrum Of a little drum, The song they sang in a cadence low, The piping note of ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... clothed thy life with hopes and sins and fears, And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears; Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire, When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar, Villon, our sad bad glad mad ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... askit for the pipes?" old Donald whispered mysteriously; and, on receiving an answer in the negative, he looked reproachfully at the speaker. "She's waiting and retty," he would say; "and a good lilt on ta pipes would do her all ta ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... the songs was beautiful, that was allowed by even the most unappreciative of the girls. There was a joyous lilt and a true melody about them that put them high in the rank of composition, and the accompaniments played with Fraeulein's delicate touch were harmonious and suitable. The words, unfortunately, were childish in the extreme, and more fit for youngsters of five ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... in matter these last two lines are pure Shakespeare, and Shakespeare speaks to us, too, when Prince Henry gives up Douglas to his pleasure "ransomless and free." But not only does the poet lend the soldier his own sentiments and lilt of phrase, he also presents him to us as a shadowy replica of Hotspur, even during Hotspur's lifetime. We have already noticed Hotspur's admirable answer when Glendower brags that he can call spirits from ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... surprising event of all that eventful night. So quickly did it come upon us, so little did we look for it, that when Kess Denton, the yellow man, stood at the open gate and uttered a loud and piercing yell of defiance, not one among us could lilt a rifle, not one thought of plan or action. There the fellow was, laughing like a maniac. Why he came, whence he came, no man could tell. But he leaped into the seas and the night engulfed him, and only his mocking laugh ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... flute gliding along with her. And oh, how beautiful it was for her! How beautiful it was to sing the little song in the sweetness of her own spirit. How sweet it was to move pure and unhampered at last in the music! The lovely ease and lilt of her own soul in its motion through the music! She wasn't aware of the flute. She didn't know there was anything except her own pure lovely song-drift. Her soul seemed to breathe as a butterfly breathes, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... play a very good sword, and is cunning of fence, for your comfort," said Randal. So I hummed the old lilt of the Leslies, whence, they say, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... Of your brows direct and wise, Of the little lilt of your head And your dark-lashed, sky-clear eyes, Of the soft brown braids demure, The poise as of quiet light, The perfect profile, sweet and pure,— Never I ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... voice echoed, with a lilt of girlish laughter running through the words. "You mean 'bribes,' don't you? For I assure you, dear cousin, it is the metallic clink of American gold, and nothing else, that lures your great men over the sea. As for my silence, ma belle, I have been uncommunicative ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... of the book. And this discovery gave me very great delight. Of course I did not fully comprehend Jayadeva's meaning. It would hardly be correct to aver that I had got it even partly. But the sound of the words and the lilt of the metre filled my mind with pictures of wonderful beauty, which impelled me to copy out the whole of the book for my ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Sam's lilt ceased abruptly. The riders came hurrying. Sam appeared, with Mormon waddling after, too swiftly for his best ease or grace of motion, both grabbing at Sandy, swatting him on the back ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... of Dromore' again that night with its queer haunting lilt. And when she had gone up, and he was smoking over the fire, the girl in her dark-red frock seemed to come, and sit opposite with her eyes fixed on his, just as she had been sitting while they talked. Dark red had suited her! Suited the look ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... shifting his position to ease his cramped limbs after the manner of the range rider. In spite of himself, his eyes would drift toward the jaunty little figure on the pinto. The masculine in him approved mightily her lissom grace and the proud lilt of her dark head, with its sun-kissed face set in profile to him. He thought her serviceable costume very becoming, from the pinched felt hat pinned to the dark mass of hair, and the red silk kerchief knotted loosely round the pretty throat, to the ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... D'ARGENS. A volley of most rough-paced off-hand Rhyming, direct from the heart; "Ode [as he afterwards terms it, or irrepressible extempore LILT] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... not. Ragtime, as we hear it, is, of course, more (but not much more) than a natural dogma of shifted accents, or a mixture of shifted and minus accents. It is something like wearing a derby hat on the back of the head, a shuffling lilt of a happy soul just let out of a Baptist Church in old Alabama. Ragtime has its possibilities. But it does not "represent the American nation" any more than some fine old senators represent it. Perhaps we know it now as an ore before ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... silence for quite a long time after his sister had finished the story of Gerty Keane, and of her fondness for her lonesome, friendless, and unlovable father; sat gazing out upon the moonlit landscape, but seeing nothing; sat while the nightingale's lilt, plaintive and low or mournfully sweet, bubbled tremulously from the grove, but hearing nothing. And in the shadow of the old-fashioned arm-chair snuggled Flora, her eyes resting lovingly, wistfully on her brother's sad ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!"— Ah, CARROLL! it is not in fun Your song's light lilt we snatch. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.— If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech. And the natural art that they say these with, My soul would ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Lilt thy song, and lute away In the wildest fashion:— Pour thy rippling roundelay O'er the heights of passion!— Flash it down the fretted strings Till thy mad lips, missing All but smothered whisperings, Press this ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... the open window, came the tinkling of Tom's ukulele and the rollicking lilt of his voice in an Hawaiian hula. It ended in a throbbing, primitive love-call from the sensuous tropic night that no one could mistake. There was a burst of young voices, and a clamour for more. Frederick did not speak. He had sensed something ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... hear how the sound is held up on the word take, because the k is followed by the t in to; and what a wonderful musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were to denote the tones the syllables should be—shall I say sung on? Now French is an example of a language without stresses; you know how each syllable falls evenly, all ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... very opposite of this often occurs; that is, the substitution of the two-syllable foot for the three-syllable foot. The following, from "The Burial of Sir John Moore," illustrates what is done. Notice, however, that the beat is quite regular, and the lines lilt along as if there were ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... herself, gravely composing her face, and clearing her throat, she began, in a high, shrill, piercing voice, rocking her head to the peculiar lilt of the words, and interpolating short explanatory remarks, ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... salve for all external ills that flesh is heir to. It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering. It could not fail. He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt. It was his own discovery. An obscure chemist's assistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, hit ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt, and sing themselves ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through sound of bees and river. The notes fell, round and starred, between young leaves, Trilled to a spiral lilt, stopped on a quiver. The Lady Eunice listens and believes. Gervase has many tales of her dear Lord, His bravery, his knowledge, his charmed life. She quite forgets who's speaking in the gladness Of being ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... herring a' sa't, Bonny lass, gin ze'll take me, tell me now, And I hae brew'n three pickles o' ma't And I cannae cum ilka day to woo. To woo, to woo, to lilt and to woo, And I cannae ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... had the lilt, the tenderness and the rhythm that makes music in the soul. It was neither singing, nor chanting, nor speaking, but a subtle mixture of the three; and the effect upon me was one of haunting harmonies that left ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded nymph among the sedges may awaken the primal desire of Pan ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... four and three accented syllables. In the one case, as in the other, there is a certain family resemblance, in the melody as in the theme, that to the untrained and unaccustomed ear may convey an impression of monotony. But to each ballad, as to each psalm, there belongs a peculiar strain or lilt, touched, as a rule, with a solemn or piercing pathos, often cast in the plaintive minor mode, that alone can bring out the full inner meaning of the words, and that is endeared and hallowed by centuries of association. ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... boy—I loved him so!) And ah, how pleasant he made it all! And the things he knew that I should know!— The stage, the "drop," and the frescoed wall; The sudden flash of the lights; and oh, The orchestra, with its melody, And the lilt and jingle and jubilee Of "The Little Man ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... a tavern ditty, and not too nice in its sentiments, as, indeed, why should it be, to please its hearers? There was a lilt in its chorus which even Stefan's unmusical voice could not hide, and it set the men's heads nodding in time as they roared it out together, waking the echoes with the declaration that—"The eye of a maid may sparkle, And the fools may for love repine, But the wise man knows As his road he ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... Rocks to see the studious pilgrims at his pages. Stevenson haunts the gloomy inlet where the Admiral Benbow stood and where old Pew came tapping in the night. In the flesh I shall join their revels as an equal comrade. Clovelly, however, although its lilt was pleasant to the ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... they had brought a paste tiara and crowned Margot—Margot, who was in flaming red to-night, and looked a devil's daughter indeed, with her fire-like sequins and her red ankles twinkling as she threw herself into the thick of the dance and kicked, and whirled, and flung her bare arms about to the lilt of the music and the fluting ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... when the earth seemed all beauty, Before you had knowledge enough to be sad; When youth held no higher ideal of duty Than just to lilt on through the world and be glad. On harmony's river they seemed to afloat hither With all the sweet fancies that hung round that time— Life's burdens and troubles turn into air-bubbles And break on the music's swift ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... sunbeams were playing hide-and-seek through the branches that dance in the soft wind. All the air was sweet and the little girl couldn't help being light-hearted. She sang, too; not measured hymns of sorrow and repentance, but a gay lilt that followed the bird voices. And she went down to breakfast ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... ideas and vision. He liked the lilt and swing of the Lays and Ballads, and enjoyed the Essays with their superb colouring. Disputing Macaulay's dictum that neither painters nor poets are helped by the advances in civilisation, science and refinement, he wrote: "This argument ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... castanets tinkled, keeping time with the measure. She stood still and listened. No, no, not a sound save the rain on the roof. It was the music of her own heart, beating irregularly and fiercely to an intermittent lilt, like a Hungarian waltz or a ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... was a stir, there was a bustle in the court; a sparkle in the eyes of some as they glanced slyly and under their lashes at the house, a lilt in the tread of others as they stepped to and fro. He divined that hands would fly to caubeens and knees seek the ground if a certain face showed at a window: moreover, that that at which he merely guessed was no secret to the barefooted colleens ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... had begun at the end of Front Street to make a systematic search of the gambling-houses. Although it was very late they were running noisily, and at last he found the man he wanted playing "Black Jack," the smell of tar in his clothes, the lilt of the sea in his boisterous laughter. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... glory if I spoke up with a devil-may-care lilt in my voice, and shipped in the hottest packet afloat! Glory!—why, I would be the unquestioned cock of any foc'sle I afterward happened into. You know, in those days the ambitious young lads regularly shipped in the hot clippers; it was a postgraduate course in seamanship, and accomplishment of ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... to catch the sound of English voices in the clarion notes of the "Marseillaise," but, strangest of all to French ears, to listen to that new battle-cry, "Are we down-hearted?" followed by the unanswerable "No—o—o!" of every regiment. And then the lilt of that new marching song to which Tommy Atkins has ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... hearts—George and his wife—the little they need! A paper once a day for five minutes, a song to break day with, and a round of songs and piano pieces to end the day, every act one of consideration, and each word spoken with a tender look, a gay lilt to the voice, even in asking to pass the salt. "Better a dinner of herbs where love is," etc. Well, they have it, herbs and all,—beet tops and mustard leaves. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... waist and limbs, continued the symphonies of her soft, deep, loving eyes and her smiling mouth. Every now and then she burst into song; and then her thrilling voice, so sweet and fresh, had tones in it that only birds and good women full of love may compass. Mostly the song was a lilt or a verse which spoke for her own heart and love; but just as the clock struck three, she broke into a low laugh which ended in a merry, mocking melody, and which was evidently the conclusion of her argument concerning Sophy's behaviour as ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... by wind after wind of heavenly melody," he writes at another time. His best poems move to the cadence of a tune. He probably heard them as did Milton the lines of "Paradise Lost". Sometimes there was a lilt like the singing of a bird, and sometimes the lyric cry, and yet again the music of the orchestra. "He has an ear for the distribution of instruments, and this gives him a desire for the antiphonal, for introducing an answer, or an echo, or a compensating note," says Mr. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... their heads once more, bounding about with rigid necks, playing the while in perfect time and tune. It chanced that out of one of the bundles there stuck the end of what the clerk saw to be a cittern, so drawing it forth, he tuned it up and twanged a harmony to the merry lilt which the dancers played. On that they dropped their own instruments, and putting their hands to the ground they hopped about faster and faster, ever shouting to him to play more briskly, until at last for very weariness all three had ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... saw that she had destroyed him utterly, relented, and graciously acquiesced. When they left the office Matt Peasley was stepping high, like a ten-time winner, for he had suddenly made the discovery that life ashore was a wonderful, wonderful thing. There was such a lilt in his young heart that, for the life of him, he could not forbear doing a little double shuffle as he waited at the elevator with Cappy and ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... at Kootenay! I hate to think of it empty. We had such good times there twelve months ago. They have a song here to a nursery rhyme lilt, Apres le Guerre Finis; it goes on to tell of all the good times we'll have when the war is ended. Every night I invent a new story of my own celebration of the event, usually, as when I was a kiddie, just before I fall asleep—only ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... turn the Psalms of David ower, And lilt wi' holy clangor; Of double verse come gie us four, And skirl ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott |
