"Rhythm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we danced to the waltzes of the Debain, and were obliged to tread a very spasmodic measure. The Prince Imperial asked me for a polka, and I had to clutch his shoulder with one hand and beat time with the other on his arm to keep any kind of rhythm in his evolutions. It is nice to see him circulating about and ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... but it had had an attentive listener. It was a long speech, but it had been diversified by the varying modulations of Susanna's voice, the varying expressions of her face, by little pauses, hesitations, changes of time and of rhythm, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... may be the basis of a winter afternoon's or evening's entertainment, in its outdoor form it may take whole communities and schools into the freedom of the open. It should rouse patriotic ardor, and be of benefit ethically, esthetically, and physically. It should wake in its participants a sense of rhythm, freedom, poise, and plastic grace. It should bear its part in developing clear enunciation and erectness of carriage. To those taking part it should bring the exercise of memory, patience, and inventiveness. It should kindle ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... the house from a short distance, as though he feared Monica might have some project of escape. His look was very bilious; trudging mechanically hither and thither where fewest people were to be met, he kept his eyes on the ground, and clumped to a dismal rhythm with the end of his walking-stick. In the three or four months since his marriage, he seemed to have grown older; he no ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... unexpectant purposeless tenacity, watches the flickering of the flame or the sun-gleams on the wall, counts the quarries on the floor, watches even the hand of the clock, and pleases itself with detecting a rhythm in the tick. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Prison. He had hoped to loiter in a doorway there, and to empty his sailor's heart in well-practised admiration before the altar of village beauty. The sight of Guida's face the day before had given a poignant pulse to his emotions, unlike the broken rhythm of past comedies of sentiment and melodramas of passion. According to all logic of custom, the acuteness of yesterday's impression should have been followed up by today's attack; yet here he was, like another Robinson Crusoe, "kicking up the shingle of a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... has been used. According to Moll, among uncivilized races particular instruments are used to produce similar states, for example, the magic drum's sound among the Lapps, or among other races the monotony of rhythm in song, etc. Instead of these continuous, monotonous, weak stimulations of the senses, we find also that sudden and violent ones are made use of—for example in the Salpetriere, the field of Charcot's work, the loud ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of a closing summer day, And the broken lines of Hampton shore In purple mist of cloudland lay, The Rivermouth Rocks their story told; And waves aglow with sunset gold, Rising and breaking in steady chime, Beat the rhythm ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... The glow of summer was in her eyes, and though her face was still pale, she seemed to him a different creature from the grave, repressed girl of the night before. He noticed at once that she sat her horse superbly, and in her long black habit all the sinuous lines of her figure moved in rhythm ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... of an indeducible and transcendent future. This future must not be regarded as a simple development of the present, a simple expression of germs already given. Consequently we have no authority for saying that there is for ever only one order of life, only one plane of action, only one rhythm of duration, only one perspective of existence. And if disconnections and abrupt leaps are visible in the economy of the past—from matter to life, from the animal to man—we have no authority again for claiming that we cannot observe today something analogous in the very ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... it were to sweeten and cleanse his teeth. Finally came a draught of strong ale, and after a brief moment the same ingredients were mixed in the same order as before. His dinner was thus eaten in a certain order, and with a kind of rhythm, duly exciting each particular flavour like a rhyme in its proper position, and duly putting it out with its correct successor. Always the savour of meat and gravy and vegetables had to be toned down by the ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... fashion, by springing suddenly to his feet and letting out the most ear-shattering yell imaginable into the night. He could not contain himself any longer, it seemed. To make it carry even beyond an ordinary cry he interrupted its rhythm by shaking the palm of his hand before ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... away,—consumed by fire or otherwise destroyed,—but only to be reformed again. These periods are called "World-Cycles," and each World-Cycle is divided into four "Immensities,"—but we need not here consider the details of the doctrine. It is only the fundamental idea of a evolutional rhythm that is really interesting. I need scarcely remind the reader that [217] the alternate disintegration and reintegration of the cosmos is also a scientific conception, and a commonly accepted article of evolutional belief. I may quote, however, for other reasons, the paragraph expressing Herbert ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... people, old and young, for ages have been noted for their remarkable skill of giving vent, extempore, to their feelings in the form of {Schnaderhpfel} (lit., reapers [ country-people's] dancing-songs) or "Tyrolese ditties." They have all the same rhythm, are sung to the accompaniment of the cithern, the favorite musical instrument of the mountaineers, and recite in verse, more or less rude, the interests of mountain-life, such as the adventures of lovers, and the mysteries ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... poem a pleasant rhythm and a clearness of meaning that is absent from much good poetry. Chesterton has caught the wild romantic background of the time when the King of England could play a harp in the camp of his enemies; when he could, by a note, bring back the disheartened warriors to renew the fight; ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... new to the process itself, Maxwell was not ignorant of its effects; and soon he found himself distracting his attention from the strain of the muscular tension by fitting the action to the rhythm of some old sailor's chanteys he had learned at college. The effect amused the men; and then as some of them caught the beat, and others joined in, soon the whole gang was ringing the changes on the simple airs, and found it a rousing and cheerful diversion ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... of the frank blue eyes would laugh. Even when he found Witichius playing him false His anger, like a momentary breeze, Died on the dreaming deep; for Tycho Brahe Turned to a nobler riddle,—"Have you thought," He asked his young disciples, "how the sea Is moved to that strange rhythm we call the tides? He that can answer this shall have his name Honoured among the bearers of the torch While Pegasus flies above Uraniborg. I was delayed three hours or more to-day By the neap-tide. The fishermen on the coast Are never wrong. They time it by the moon. Post hoc, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... into that little room, which was fairly encumbered with coziness. She took one of the rocking-chairs. Dolly sank into the other. By keeping the same rhythm, there was space for both to swing at the same time. Dolly swayed back and forth three times, and then burst into tears. "He has left me, Auntie; Goosie is gone; ooh-ooh!" The aunt's chair ceased rocking with an abruptness that made their ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... from his writings affording him a handsome maintenance. In 1855. "The Song of Hiawatha" was given to the public, and its appearance may be styled an event in the literary history of the world. It was not only original in the story it told, and in the method of treatment, but the rhythm was new. It was emphatically an American poem, and was received by the people with delight. It met with an immense sale, and greatly increased its ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... fact he was thankful. He walked home alone with his hat in his hand, letting the cold wind of early morning blow on his hot brow. Punch and music and dancing had filled him with a delightful excitement. He felt glad of life and full of power. He could have gone on walking for hours, enjoying the rhythm of his stride and the gorgeous confusion of his thoughts, but in a remarkably short time he had covered the mile to his ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... by two principles, one positive and one negative, that is to say, connecting love and dissolving discord. Democritus (fl. 460 B.C.) embodied his extensive knowledge in a series of writings, of which only a few fragments have been preserved. Cicero compared him with Plato for rhythm and elegance of language. He derived the manifold phenomena of the world from the different form, disposition, and arrangement of the innumerable elements or atoms as they become united. He is the founder of the atomic doctrine. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... cadences of bubbling mirth Too quick for bar or rhythm! What ecstasies, too full to keep ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... were preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the pedants, according to their wont, began quarrelling about their accents and their recessions. Moreover, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... syllable-counting given above. But if in this respect the Spanish poet has less freedom than the English versifier, he has infinitely greater liberty in the arrangement of his rhythms. The sing-song monotony of regularly recurring beats is intolerable to Latin ears. The greater flexibility of Spanish rhythm can best be shown ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... emerged a deep, regular pat-pat. It was the tread of some animal—the rhythm of soft but heavy pads placed cautiously upon the ground. It stole slowly round the camp, and then halted near our gateway. There was a low, sibilant rise and fall—the breathing of the creature. Only our feeble hedge separated us from this horror of ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... interesting thesis results:—All of the actual content of speech, its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm. In other words, relations were intuitively felt and could only "leak out" with the help of dynamic factors that themselves ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... such a point as to play on the emotions of their congregation. The order of service begun with a hymn by the choir. The music for this consisted of a piano, banjo guitar and numerous tambourines. The negroes being naturally born with a great sense of rhythm the songs were not in the same tempo as the songs of the whites but were of a jazz tempo and with the banjo and tambourines it makes one think of the stories of the African jungles. The services start around 7:30 P.M. and usually break ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... forest road, he glanced casually right and left as he advanced, tapping his riding-boots in rhythm to the air he was humming in a careless undertone—something about a shepherd and the plural tastes ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... awakened some misgivings in the little town, was beyond the precincts of village scrutiny. The country road was hard, although marked by deep cuts from traffic during a rainy spell, and the horse's hoofs rang out with exhilarating rhythm. Regardless of all save the distance traversed, the rider yet forbore to press the pace, relaxing only when, after a considerable interval, he came to another road and drew rein at the fork. One way to the right ran gently through the valley, apparently terminating in the luxuriant foliage, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... they entered upon the peculiar method of their service. Round and round the room they trooped in two large circles, sister following sister, brother brother, keeping time with their hanging hands to the rhythm of the hymn. Clustered in the centre was a little knot of men and women, the high dignitaries, who seemed to lead the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... on;" after that it was easy sailing. But one awful day, while the class stopped suddenly at Miss Clara's warning finger as visitors opened the door, Emmy Lou, her eyes squeezed tight shut, her little body rocking to and fro to the rhythm, went right on, "m-a-n, man," "p-a-n, pan"—until at the sound of her own sing-song little voice rising with appalling fervor upon the silence, she stopped to find that the page in the meantime had been turned, and that the pointer was ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... seized the panting body, felt for the throat, and, expelling pity from my heart, gripped until all was still. How precious and comforting it was! And once again all my powers of will and muscle were centred on a single design and action as with machine-like rhythm the boot wore itself against the rock. Disengaged from every other theme, my mind dwelt on the one steady, inevitable purpose. Rub! Rub! Rub! And I fancied I saw leathern dust fall like filings from iron down deeper into the crevice. Before dawn the boot was working freely, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... or light) forming a most complex harmony or a display of most varied colours. In such a way the reparation of local injuries might be symbolized as a filling up and completion of an interrupted rhythm. Thus also monstrous aberrations from typical structure might correspond to a discord, and sterility from crossing be compared with the darkness resulting from the interference of ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... drop it and lose it. She gathered also the pleasure of seeing and talking with people whose manners and speech were of finer grain and tone than those about her. When Hesper Mortimer entered the shop, she brought with her delight; her carriage was like the gait of an ode; her motions were rhythm; and her speech was music. Her smile was light, and her whole presence an enchantment to Mary. The reading aloud which Wardour had led her to practice had taught her much, not only in respect of the delicacies of speech and utterance, but in the deeper matters ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hour-glass—all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors. Milton, who has done so much with his stately rhythm to mould the popular conceptions of modern Christianity, has used all the sinewy strength of his magnificent diction to surround with horror ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; (2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason—a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... the head waitress to a small table for two by a window. Rose walked with the buoyant rhythm of perfect health. Her friend noticed, as he had often done before, that she had the grace of movement which is a corollary to muscles under perfect response. Seated across the table from her, he marveled once more at the miracle of her soft skin and the peach bloom of ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... regular rhythm of the sea was broken by a slight splash out of time. Instantly my morbid ear detected it, and I listened intently. Something was splashing ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... in "The Descent of Man," remarks that we can no more explain why musical tones, in a certain order and rhythm, afford pleasure to man and the lower animals, than we can account for the pleasantness of certain tastes and odors. We know that sounds, more or less melodious, are produced, during the season of courtship, by many insects, spiders, fishes, amphibians, and ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... liberal education in muscular poesy by making the rounds of the Midway Plaisance. They may see sonnets in double-shuffle metre, doggerels in hop-skip iambics, and ordinary newspaper "ponies" with the rhythm of the St. Vitus dance. Slices of pandemonium will be thrown in by the orchestras for the one price of admission, and if the visitor objects to taking his pandemonium on the installment plan, he may get it in job lots down ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... beauty. Not a word is said about beauty in Browning's theory. The average man regards poetry as being necessarily melodious, rhythmical, tuneful, above all, pleasing to the senses; but Browning makes no allusion here to rime or rhythm, nor to melody or music of any sort. To him the bard is a Reporter of Life, an accurate Historian of the Soul, one who observes human nature in its various manifestations, and gives a faithful record. Sound, rhythm, beauty ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... where amusements are still going on; here and there, from the somber gardens, the sound of a guitar reaches our ears, some dance giving in its weird rhythm a strange ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... and thought of the strange happenings of that day. Presently the waning moon climbed reluctantly from the waters, and the stream became mottled, black and white, the trees tall blurs. The lake rose and fell with a mighty rhythm, and the little brook hurried madly over the stones to join it. One thought chased another from ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... limits of expression, of an aggressive originality, almost dripping with the unheard-of (ruissilant d'inouisme); but back of the double-horned paradoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, swoln hyperboles, and words six feet long, are the poetic feeling of the time and the harmony of rhythm." One hears much in the critical writings of that period, of the mot propre, the vers libre, and the rime brise. It was in tragedy especially that the periphrasis reigned most tyrannically, and that the introduction ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... paused, preparatory to changing the tune. It was the drummer's opportunity. "Onward, Christian Soldiers," he sang, tapping the rhythm on the drum. The fifer caught the strain. Not a voice was silent, and unconsciously hand clasped hand, and the soft afternoon air ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... of spring are on winter's traces," began Julia. With no effort of the memory, with a faultless enunciation, a natural feeling for rhythm and apparently with comprehension, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Lincoln's pressure he turned towards the archway, walking unconsciously in that rhythm, scarcely noticing his movement for the melody and stir of it. The multitude, the gesture and song, all moved in that direction, the flow of people smote downward until the upturned faces were below the level of his feet. He was aware of a path before him, of a suite about him, of guards ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... time to keep the sweat from blinding him, and every once in a while, his soggy reed would let go of a squawk that sounded like a scared chicken. But the organ groaned on unrelentingly, and the tune didn't matter so much as the rhythm which was kept up as regular as a clock, whack! whack! whack! whack! And there were two or three other fellows with badges on that went around shouting: "Select your podners for the next quadrille! One more couple wanted ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... music, the rhythm of his sentences is musical, and the organ-note of the opening words in the quotation carries a reminiscence of Tacitus which will not escape the classical reader. That is literary artifice, though a very high form of it. The real merit of the paragraph is not so much its eloquence ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... of Castel-Cuille' (L'Abuglo). It was translated into English, a few years after its appearance, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, daughter of the British ambassador at Paris,{1} and afterwards by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American poet. Longfellow follows the rhythm of the original, and on the whole his translation of the poem is more correct, so that his version is to be preferred. He begins his ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... preparations for the bridal, might have turned older and wiser heads; but what moved the boy, and set wonderful joy pictures flitting before his vision, was the rapid jingle of the frequent rhymes and the swing of the rhythm. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... steadily now, as if it would not jar the rhythm of the voice telling, with soft inflections, with long, rushing meter, the story of that other Revenge, of the men who had gone from these shores, under the great Sir ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the N. A. Review points out that this line "is quite peculiar in its possible transformations. We have made," he adds, "twenty different versions preserving the rhythm, the general sentiment and the rhyming word. Any one of these variations might be, not inappropriately, substituted for the ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... his part with James in singing the rhythm, which he had learnt long ago at Coldingham, and which thus in every note brought back the vanished aspirations and ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... kinds, are expressed by modifications of them. The earliest parts of speech, as we may call them by anticipation, like the first utterances of children, probably partook of the nature of interjections and nouns; then came verbs; at length the whole sentence appeared, and rhythm and metre followed. Each stage in the progress of language was accompanied by some corresponding stage in the mind and civilisation of man. In time, when the family became a nation, the wild growth ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... opposition between cerebral and ganglionic functions only noted when a rhythmical intermittence was introduced into the latter, and were such rhythm observed only in the phenomena of menstruation, it might indeed be possible to fix upon women a peculiar mark of physiological inferiority, almost sufficient to amount to a stigma. But rhythmical movement is characteristic of all physiological ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... governor, and the beats increase to even 150 a minute, with irregular contractions, the blood being sent through the arteries with irregular force, as evidenced by the varying volume of the pulse. At this time, with or without cardiac pain, which upsets the rhythm of the heart, the patient becomes frightened at the feeling of impending demise, and the cerebral reflexes begin to add to the cardiac difficulty. The breathing becomes nervously rapid, besides that which is due to the rapid heart. The chill of fear is added to the already ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... Ah, the wild rhythm of her dancing! Lithe with the jaguar's grace, Ah, the sweet fire of her glancing, The love-litten lure of her face! And ah, in my fierce arms to hold her This strange scarlet flower of the South. Close to my heart-beat to fold her Drinking the ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... figure across the room with perfect ease and rhythm, head beautifully poised, young seventeen as self-possessed as thirty. As much could not be said for her guests. They were all legs and gangling arms, red ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... yet," she said, slipping into his arms. She didn't care to know the name of the dance. All she knew was the ecstasy of the moment in the flowing, melting rhythm. Jo had the easy assurance of the dancer born, and she went where he willed, as if she were floating on silver wires. Finally, Sleepy Sandy, watching them in envious admiration, was aware that he had played as long as the ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... century, led first of all to the opposite extreme—balance was only reached by degrees. What chiefly made Klopstock a literary reformer was the glowing enthusiasm and powerful imagination which compelled the stiff poetic forms, clumsy as they were, to new rhythm and melodious cadence. And although his style degenerated into mannerism in the Messias, for the youthful impetus which had carried his Pegasus over the clouds to the stars could not keep it there without artificial aid, the immense value ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... just then a Polka, and the tune was so alluring, so entrancing, that the whole world rose and fell with its rhythm. ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... student who is short-sighted enough to spend hours hammering away at the keyboard developing the mechanical side of his work, a real conscious knowledge of the great saving he could effect through technic, would be a godsend. Technic properly has to do with Rhythm, Tempo, Accent, Phrasing, Dynamics, Agogics, ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... refuge from blood and iron and the pounding of the table. That weak souls, and sensitive souls, and high-pitched souls flee from the crassness and the rawness of the world to the drug-dreams of the over-world of rhythm ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... their roots, moral; it becomes accurate if the speaker desires to be true; clear, if he speaks with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has sense of rhythm and order. There are no other virtues of language producible by art than these: but let me mark more deeply for an instant the significance of one of them. Language, I said, is only clear when it is sympathetic. You can, in truth, understand a man's word only ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... night as to lose the solitude, the visible darkness, or the quietude. The hours of sleep are too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when the larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing daybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... stillness; and merely to be alive was to feel emotion. At a little stream running beside the moor under the wild stone man, the riders stopped their horses, just to listen, and, inhale the day. The far sweet chorus of life was tuned to a most delicate rhythm; not one of those small mingled pipings of streams and the lazy air, of beasts, men; birds, and bees, jarred out too harshly through the garment of sound enwrapping the earth. It was noon—the still moment—but this hymn to the sun, after his too long absence, never for a moment ceased ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... before answering a question, as though his thoughts were far away; would even hum to himself as though entirely alone; or put the cap to his insolence by taking a book from his pocket and reading, sometimes even marking the rhythm of a verse aloud. So from day to day there was growing a hatred for the duke in Danvers by reason of his jealousy and the accumulative discourtesy which he ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... her mother and hesitated. But Mrs. Barton had a way of compelling obedience, and the girl went upstairs, to return soon after with a roll of music. At the best of times she had little love of the art, but now, sick with disappointment, and weary from a long railway journey, to spell through the rhythm of the My Queen Waltz and the jangle of L'Esprit Francais was to her an odious and, when the object of it was considered, an abominable duty to perform. She had to keep her whole attention fixed on the page before her, but when she raised her eyes the picture she saw engraved ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... and all things out-of-date. After a time. But whether the centuries passed her or whether the years or whether no time at all, she did not know. If any thing indicated the passing of time it was the rhythm of elfin horns blowing upon the heights. If the centuries went by her the spell that bound her gave her also perennial youth, and kept alight for ever the lantern by her side, and saved from decay the ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... Supernatural Drama. The Irish National Theatre. The Personality of the Playwright. Themes and Stories of the Stage. Plausibility in Plays. Infirmity of Purpose. Where to Begin a Play. Continuity of Structure. Rhythm and Tempo. The Plays of Yesteryear. A New Defense of Melodrama. The Art of the Moving-Picture Play. The One-Act Play in America. Organizing an Audience. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... at Ravenna as early as the sixth century. Those of the cathedral at Lucca, of S. Michele Maggiore at Pavia, of S. Savino at Piacenza, of S. Maria in Trastevere at Rome (destroyed in the restoration of 1867), are of a later date. The image of Theseus is accompanied by a legend in the "leonine" rhythm:— ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... Lockhart's solitary original tune, harmonized by Mr. A.H. Prendergast, and set to Father Faber's Hymn to St. Joseph, "There are many saints above," is another example of tender sentiment by an amateur that outweighs any technical defect as to settled rhythm.] ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... A year or two later she was dancing in Paris to the accompaniment of the Colonne Orchestra, a good deal of the music of Gluck's Orfeo and the very lovely dances from Iphigenie en Aulide. In these she remained faithful to her original ideal, the beauty of abstract movement, the rhythm of exquisite gesture. This was not sense echoing sound but rather a very delightful confusion of her own mood with ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... is a pure Georgic—they'll dance." They were dancing already. The line, with dishevelled hair, aprons and kerchiefs askew, had formed into the square of a quadrille. A rude measure was tripped; a snatch of song, shouted amid the laughter, gave rhythm to the measure, and then the whole band, singing in chorus, linked arms and swept with a furious dash beneath the thatched ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... woods and the sparkling lake; but now he had words to tell about them—and the common tasks of his life were transfigured with the glory of song. So one might milk the cow with stirrings of wonder, and mow in the meadows to the rhythm ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... excellent imitation of Aytoun, but on the opposite side. In view of his own later developments such a line as "Drive the trembling Papists backwards" has an ironic humour. But one wonders what Aytoun himself would have made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words, turned his hero into a traitor ("false Montrose") and his traitor Argyll into a hero! I have left the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... pipe and wood-wind blend in a full, rich movement. There is no definite melody but full, powerful rhythm like soft but steady wind above forest trees. Into this, like rain, gradually ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... her birthplace and her home, if such a true cosmopolite as she can be said to have a home. In all she has written there is abounding life; her grasp of character is firm; her style has a warm, glowing plasticity, frequently a rhythm variously expressive of all the wide range of feeling which a writer must have to make his or her books living things. She does no less well in the depiction of men than in the portraiture of women. All stand out of their ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... Jim were there and saw much to please and much to disgust them. The general impression was one of barbaric splendour, weird chanting, noisy tom-toms, and hypnotic pulsation. It was mostly repellent, but sometimes the rhythm stirred them, and provoked a response which showed that the wild musicians were playing on instincts and impulses that are ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the sweetness of the rhythm seized upon him, and, almost unconsciously, he read the last stanza aloud. Looking up from the paper with a sigh of wonder and delight—there was the pale face of Ericson gazing at him from the bed! He had risen on one arm, looking like a dead man called ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the old and new memories, so that she saw the pattern of yesterday and of today, Lady Elliston's coming, the pain that Augustine had given her in his strange questionings, the meeting of her husband and her son. And the ominous rhythm of the shuttle was like the footfall of the past creeping ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... photographer, who performed his jig dance to the rhythm of "Gunga Din" when he was told he faced another adventure, Brennan and John were in Gibson's office before 10 o'clock the next morning. They found Gibson alone ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... is giving his three pupils, SPITTA, DR. KEGEL and KAeFERSTEIN instruction in the art of acting. He himself is seated at the table, uninterruptedly opening letters and beating time to the rhythm of the verses with a paper cutter. In front of him stand, facing each other, KEGEL and KAeFERSTEIN on one side, SPITTA on the other, thus representing the two choruses in Schiller's "Bride of Messina." The young men stand in the midst of a diagram drawn with chalk on the floor and separated, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... know what he has written recently," was the sullen answer, "but if the newspapers are to be believed, he is crazy. Music all color, no rhythm, no themes, and then his preaching of Nietzsche—it's all wrong, all wrong, my boy. Art was made for joy. When it is anything else, it's a dangerous explosive. Chemically separate certain natural elements and they rush together with a thunder-clap. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... a living bouquet, the fairest flowers of Asia and of Greece. I know all that the art of sculptors and painters has produced since the time of Daedalus, whose statues walked and spoke. Linus, Orpheus, Homer, have taught me harmony and rhythm. I do not look about me with Love's bandage blindfolding my eyes. I judge of all things coolly. The passions of youth never influence my admiration, and when I am as withered, decrepit, wrinkled, as Tithonus in ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... the arm of his friend. His senses caught the rhythm of the scene. His eyes stared at the dancing figures, blond heads riveted against black satin cheeks; bodies gesturing their lusts to the quick whine and stumble of the music; eyes opening ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... glances up. High on the black bosom of the storm the finger of the lightning is writing that awful name, and again and again the voice of the thunder reads it aloud in spirit-shaking accents. He shuts his dazed eyes, and even the falling rhythm of his horse's hoofs beats out, "There is a God! there is a God!" from the silent earth on which ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... as his own. I had known he would come, that was all, though I had hoped he would not, and I knew that I must do my best to send him away a little less sorrowful than he had come. I was not prepared for the extreme calm of voice and manner that marked his first words, coming with measured rhythm and even ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... "ze frront of ze face" and detach it from the throat, where the true feelings lie gripped, will continue to thrill the other children with his or her "heart in the voice!") And how she would drag the rhythm, deliciously, intentionally, and shade the downward notes, and hang a breath too long on the phrase-ends, as only Italians dare! And how the distilled essence of Italy dripped out of those luscious, tender, mocking folk-songs, till the vineyards steeped before us, and the white city-squares ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... suit a bookish clan that cannot understand The rhythm and the cadences they never can command— But what is that to him that knows and touches all the strings Of hearts responsive to his strain ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... Imperial decrees were first introduced under Trajan. (Plin. jun. Panegyr. 75.) One senator read the form of the decree, and all the rest answered by acclamations, accompanied with a kind of chant or rhythm. These were some of the acclamations addressed to Pertinax, and against the memory of Commodus. Hosti patriae honores detrahantur. Parricidae honores detrahantur. Ut salvi simus, Jupiter, optime, maxime, serva nobis Pertinacem. This ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... People know even of his? Buy a ballad in any street in Ireland, from the metropolis to the village, and you will find in it, perhaps, some humour, some tenderness, and some sweetness of sound; but you will certainly find bombast, or slander, or coarseness, united in all cases with false rhythm, false rhyme, conceited imagery, black paper, and blotted printing. A high class of ballads would do immense good—the present race demean and mislead the people as much as they stimulate them; for the sale of these ballads is immense, and printers in Dublin, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... insistent, murmured the lapping voice of the wonderful city at night. A faint rhythm of snoring beyond a thin wall somehow suggested Mrs. Johnson, and Peter laughed ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... house she could hear Alice singing, "Good mornin' to you! Howdy you do?" and through the open window the old woman could be seen busily engaged in household duties. Her broom, moving in rhythm with the song, did not miss a stroke when the tune changed to, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... and vicissitude mark time to man's footsteps as he stumbles onward toward the grave; and it is well. Without the bitter one may not know the sweet. The other day—nay, it was but yesterday—I fell before the rhythm of fortune. The inexorable pendulum had swung the counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need. The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins. From my window I could descry, at no ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... they could not touch closer on the grandeur of man. As it were in a story of the shealings, the little ones of the town and wayside houses pattered in the rear of the troops, enchanted, their bare legs stretching to the rhythm of the soldiers' footsteps, the children of hope, the children of illusion and desire, and behind them, sad, weary, everything accomplished, the men who had seen the big wars and had many times marched thus gaily and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... as recklessly intoxicated as they. Susan, in an attitude she had seen often enough but had never dreamed of taking, was laughing wildly at a coarse song, was standing up, skirts caught high and body swaying in drunken rhythm as ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... was the order, and Patty walked to the other end of the long room, while Mrs. Van Reypen seated herself on a sofa. Serenely conscious of her proficiency in the art, Patty felt no embarrassment, and, swaying gently, as if listening to rhythm, she began a pretty little fancy dance that she ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... This time, air, rhythm, words, all so chimed in with his own enthusiasm and that of his men, that the effect was inexpressible. It was, indeed, like the charm of those runes which are said to have maddened the Berserker with ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... clangor of hammerings rang out over the river. My way now wound through what was, to all purposes, one German camp, strung for miles along the Meuse. The soldiers were busy with domestic duties. Everywhere there was the cheer and rhythm of well-ordered industry in the open air. In one place thousands of loaves of black bread were being shifted from wagon to wagon. In another they were piling a yard high with mountains of grain. The air was full of the drone of a great mill, humming away at full speed, ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... soul at the injunction of the ears, possesses a natural way of measuring sounds, by this judges some longer, some shorter, and ever anticipates the completion of a measure. It feels hurt when a rhythm is maimed or curtailed as if it had been defrauded of due payment. It dislikes even more whatever is prolonged and runs on beyond the proper bounds, since too much is more offensive than too little. Not that everyone knows the metrical feet, or understands anything about rhythm, ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... falling into the hands of the broadside-printers. The present text, despite the unlucky hiatus after st. 35, is a splendid example of an English ballad, which cannot be earlier than the sixteenth century. There is a fine rhythm throughout, and, as Child says, 'not many better passages are met with in ballad poetry than that which tells of the three gallant attempts on ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... silent, like the artillery musicians. After the third band in the line came the first battalion of the Thirty-fourth—at its head Colonel North and Major Silsbee, with their respective staffs, all on horseback. And now behind them marched, with the precise, easy rhythm of the foot soldier, the four companies, A, B, C and D, all moving like so many fine, ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... commandeer the various family buckets and fiber pails. Skinny, who lived farthest from the Silvey's, came up at last with his utensil, and they set off, single file, past Neighborhood Hall and the corner grocery stores, and around to quiet, sedate Southern Avenue, beating a crude marching rhythm on the tins as they went. At the sight of the ten-foot sandhill which the excavations for the apartments had formed, John broke into ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... occupied the stage, and at one end was the hysterical scraping on strings, the muffled hammered drums, that furnished the rhythm for a ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... up in bed. When we approached him, he jumped round in his bed very violently, as though his body had been shot out of a gun, and went on staring at us, speechless and with eyes full of wild terror. We saw two soldiers in the corner of a ward, their heads wobbling in perfect rhythm, ceaselessly from side to side, like the pendulum of a clock, with dead expressionless faces. We saw men cowering beneath their bed clothes, trembling with an endless terror. We saw a man who for months had quite lost ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... each other. They reach a frenzy which communicates itself with hypnotic effect to the whole dancing circle. At times men tear their hair, cut their flesh or even mutilate their limbs for life. The "tom-tom," or Indian drum, adds to the power of monotonous rhythm and to the ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... down beside her, he could feel the throb of the diesel motor. It seemed to carry the rhythm of adventure through the walls of the cabin, giving the feeling of the unknown. For a long time there was silence while Dolores held one of Dick's hands ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... have written both addresses as the Indians would chant them. To be sure, they will not scan according to the elephantine grace of the pedant's iambics; but then, neither will the Indian songs scan, though I know of nothing more subtly rhythmical. Rhythm is so much a part of the Indian that it is in his walk, in the intonation of his words, in the gesture of his hands. I think most Westerners will bear me out in saying that it is the exquisitely musical intonation of words that ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... the hidden passion instead of finding expression by its choice among the passions of others, shows itself in the most direct way of all, that of dream. 'Last night,' he writes, at Innismaan, 'after walking in a dream among buildings with strangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music beginning far away ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... seldom children) may train the ear by reading poetry aloud, always guarding against the sing-song style, but trying to harmonize nicely the sense and the rhythm. A trained ear is absolutely necessary to reading poetry well, and the constant reading aloud of poetry cannot but afford ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... still playing the quaint, sweet dance called "The Orchid," and Hargrave was leaning on the piano beside her watching Cecil and Athalie drifting through the dusk to the music's rhythm, when the door opened ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... not need to point out the exquisite beauty of the imagery or the pathos and peace that breathe in the majestic rhythm of the words. There is something more than poetical beauty or rhetorical amplification of a single thought in those three clauses. The 'hiding-place' and 'covert' refer to one class of wants; the 'rivers of water in a dry place' to yet another; and 'the shadow of a great rock in a weary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... she would close her eyes and begin to sing the dear old carols ... with the tremble in her voice ... and tapping on the table with her finger-ends in rhythm ... and Memory's tears dropping on the wrinkled checks ... and the tremulous voice, still ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... said, and decide. Mrs. Bliss skimmed by us with nods and smiles; as she vanished our eyes followed her, and we talked vaguely on various matters, sounding ourselves and each other. When a furious redowa set in which cut our conversation into rhythm he pushed up the window and said, ...
— Lemorne Versus Huell • Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
... woman. Nothing could be more unlike the reality. The voice was indeed quite peculiar, and I do not know where any parallel to it is likely to be found unless in Lancashire. Shelley had no ear for music,—the words that he wrote for existing airs being, strangely enough, inappropriate in rhythm and even in cadence; and though he had a manifest relish for music and often talked of it, I do not remember that I ever heard him sing even the briefest snatch. I cannot tell, therefore, what was the "register" of his singing voice; but his speaking voice unquestionably was then of a high ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... walked, the other man was telling how this Castilian nobleman, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up when his father, the Master of Santiago, died and had written this poem, created this tremendous rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the world. He had never written anything else. They thought of him in the court of his great dust-colored mansion at Ocana, where the broad eaves were full of a cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters painted with arabesques in vermilion, in a suit ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... she paused as abruptly as she began, and with short, interluding snatches of song, slowly began to sway to the soft rhythm of the music and sharp click of her castanets. First slowly, then swifter and swifter she glided and whirled noiselessly in the moonlight, graceful as a wind-blown rose, or suddenly paused, languid and sensuous, according to the rhapsodic character of the dance when the music ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... and gradual differentiation of Poetry, Music and Dancing, we have another series of illustrations. Rhythm in speech, rhythm in sound, and rhythm in motion, were in the beginning parts of the same thing, and have only in process of time become separate things. Among various existing barbarous tribes we find them still united. The dances of savages are accompanied by some kind of monotonous chant, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... sentence was meshed and tangled and woven in and out with 'Punch, brothers, punch with care, punch in the presence of the passenjare.' And the most distressing thing was that my delivery dropped into the undulating rhythm of those pulsing rhymes, and I could actually catch absent-minded people nodding time to the swing of it with their stupid heads. And, Mark, you may believe it or not, but before I got through the entire assemblage ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it seemed; but that, as a young American poet has impressively said, "Paris was proclaiming to the world in it somewhat of the pent-up fire and fury of her nature, the bitterness of her heart, the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and political repression. It is an execration in rhythm,—a dance of fiends, which Paris has invented to express in license what ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... get on nicely with those viands, and supper was laid. He had no more than cut a slice when tap-tap came to the door again. The minister had already learnt that this particular rhythm in taps denoted the fingers of his enkindling landlady, and the doomed young fellow buried his first mouthful under a look of ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... condescend to accept such loans from the deanery. And there was at times a lightness of heart about the man. In the course of the last winter he had translated into Greek irregular verse the very noble ballad of Lord Bateman, maintaining the rhythm and the rhyme, and had repeated it with uncouth glee till his daughter knew it all by heart. And when there had come to him a five-pound note from some admiring magazine editor as the price of the same,—still through the dean's hands,—he had brightened ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... assuredly been seen, and something had assuredly been heard. In the night of the 12th and 13th of May—a very dark night—the observers at Yale College, in the Sheffield Science School, had been able to take down a few bars of a musical phrase in D major, common time, which gave note for note, rhythm for rhythm, the chorus of the ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... widespread usage because he has clearly and definitely described his rhythm plays so that the classroom teacher can easily make use of them without having to draw on her imagination or having to guess at the ...
— Dramatized Rhythm Plays - Mother Goose and Traditional • John N. Richards
... first about it; yet now I found I was in the grip of a habit so fixed that the attempt to put on my right boot first affected me like the scraping of a harsh pencil on a slate. The thing couldn't be done. The whole rhythm of habit would be put out of joint. I became interested. How, I wondered, do I put on my jacket? I rose, took it off, found that my right arm slipped automatically into its sleeve, tried the reverse process, discovered that it was as difficult ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... shady or sheltered as the time required, would there read to him ballads, or songs, or verse more stately, as mood or provision might suggest. The music, the melody and the cadence and the harmony, the tone and the rhythm and the time and the rhyme, instead of growing common to him, rejoiced Gibbie more and more every feast, and with ever-growing reverence he looked up to Donal as a mighty master-magician. But if Donal could have looked down into Gibbie's bosom, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... in a cafe late at night and show Wurzelmann one score after another, sing a few bars in order to bring out the quality of a song, improvise an accompaniment, praise a melody, or explain the peculiarity of a certain rhythm, he surprised the little slave, and drove him into an attitude of self-defence. All this was fundamentally new to Wurzelmann. If Daniel proved that the new was not new after all, that the trouble lay in the fact that the deranged and shattered ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... and music are alike in that both obey absolute laws of time, and that the laws of time or rhythm in poetry are just as exact as the laws of time in music. He wrote an essay entitled "The Rationale of Verse," in which he demonstrated that all the rules for scanning poetry are defective. Every one knows that the ordinary rules for meter ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... blow-pipe; he had fallen straight for what seemed like hours. And that had been through the crust of this great, hollow globe. Then the center!—but of this he dared make no estimate; he knew only that the huge leather wings were threshing the dense air in an untiring rhythm and that he was being carried for a ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin |
