"Rhythmical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the beam the greatest degree of pendulous swing is brought about in a series of waves so timed, and of such a length, that the duration of the swing coincides with the period required for one wave to succeed another. The increasing slope of the ship's decks, due to the inertia of this continuous rhythmical motion, often amounts to far more than the angle made by the declivity of the wave as compared with the sea level; and it is, of course, a source of serious danger in the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... treasure. "His story flows in a calm, clear, sparkling current, with every charm which simplicity and ease can give." He delineates character with great clearness and power; his speeches are noble rhetorical compositions; his sentences are rhythmical cadences. He was not a critical historian, like Herodotus, for he took his materials secondhand, and he was ignorant of geography; nor did he write with the exalted ideal of Thucydides, but as a painter of beautiful forms, which only a rich imagination ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... when Medenham was able to take his first drive in the open air, the Mercury awaited him and Cynthia at the door of the hotel. It positively sparkled in the sunlight; never was car more spick and span. The brasswork scintillated, each cylinder was rhythmical, and a microscope would not have revealed one speck of dust ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... solitude prevailing in the avenue several market gardeners' carts were climbing the slope which led towards Paris, and the fronts of the houses, asleep behind the dim lines of elms on either side of the road, echoed back the rhythmical jolting of the wheels. At the Neuilly bridge a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas had joined the eight waggons of carrots and turnips coming down from Nanterre; and the horses, left to themselves, had continued plodding along ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... follow his lead. And after his great resonant voice had rolled out the first few notes of the tune, they caught him up with a vigor and enthusiasm that carried him along, and inspired him to his mightiest efforts. Wonderful singing it was, full toned, rhythmical ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... "Phyllises," "nymphs," "swains," "lyres," and other tinsel elegancies in which it delights, will be—nay, are already—the abomination of a discerning world. But if by "poetry" is meant what should be meant—the vivid, impassioned and rhythmical expression of rare emotions and exquisite thoughts, the revelation by genius of the ideal and spiritual side of things, the crystallizing of the floating and fugitive sentiments and aspirations of the contemporary mind into clear aim ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... further that night, and in any case could have done but little good in the dark. The poor camels were too dry to eat the mulga we cut for them, too dry even to chew the cud; and lay silent, tied down beside us—the stillness of the night being unbroken by the rhythmical "crunch" of ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... devoid of all real rhythmical life; it may have the metre of poetry, but it has not often got its music, nor can there be any true delicacy in the ear that tolerates such rhymes as 'chord' and 'abroad.' Even the claim that Mr. Sharp puts forward for him, that his muse takes her impressions directly ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... as made him the envy and despair of all other fiddlers in the vicinity. Indeed, he could rarely get away from a great house without a sample of his powers in this direction, and then blending with the rhythmical cadence of feet, the rustle of garments, would be evoked ripples of mirth and bursts of laughter that were echoed back from the dim pine-groves without. Finally, when with his great foot beating time on the floor and every muscle of his body in motion, he ended ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... nomad has not above three or four fenjeyns, wrapt in a rusty clout, with which he scours them busily, as if this should make his cups clean. The roasted beans are pounded amongst Arabs with a magnanimous rattle—and (as all their labor) rhythmical—in brass of the town, or an old wooden mortar, gaily studded with nails, the work of some nomad smith. The water bubbling in the small dellal, he casts in his fine coffee powder, el-bunn, and withdraws the pot to simmer a moment. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... ceremony of peace, now about to take place, were repeated. Then along a white path of moonlight, in their Indian costumes, the five girls led by Polly, swaying her pipes of peace slowly above her head, came dancing with a queer, rhythmical movement of their bodies, arms ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... of rhythm simplifies greatly the problem of enunciation. It is easier, not only to make good tone, but also to speak words, in the reading of verse than of prose. It is much easier to read a rhythmical piece of prose than one lacking in rhythm. All prose, then, should be rendered with as much rhythmical flow as is allowed consistently with its spirit and meaning. Care must be taken of course that no singsong effect occurs; that the exact meaning receives first attention. In case ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into the play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the same rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the natural colors. Much can be said both for and against this. I have no desire to see the Venus ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... between two remote, half-submerged dunes on which stood slender sentry light. houses, the steamer began to roll with a gentle insinuating motion. Passengers in their staterooms saw at rhythmical intervals the spray racing fleetly past the portholes. The waves grappled hurriedly at the sides of the great flying steamer and boiled discomfited astern in a turmoil of green and white. From the tops of the enormous funnels streamed level masses of smoke ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... syllabic in character; in other [27] words, one note was not held over several syllables, though several notes might be sung upon one syllable. The system of musical time in the age of the troubadours was based upon the so-called "modes," rhythmical formulae combining short and long notes in various sequences. Three of these concern us here. The first mode consists of a long followed by a short note, the long being equivalent to two short, or in 3/4 time . The second mode is the reverse ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... the buccal cavity. The passage quoted—expressing Tell's bitterness at the recollection of his past sufferings in prison, "Well I know the weight of galling chain"—has to be declaimed with great energy. So far as the relative value of the notes is concerned, it is entirely ad libitum, the rhythmical figure in the orchestra having ceased one half-bar before. It is said that Dabadie, a basso cantante rather than baritone, to whom was entrusted the role of Tell on the first production of the work at the Opera, Paris, on August 3, 1829, finding it impossible ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... and youthful, disjointed but well-written; descriptions of sand-hills and ostriches sandwiched with doubts concerning a future state, and convictions regarding the moral and physical superiority of women: but of art nothing; that is to say, art as I understand it,—rhythmical sequence of events described with rhythmical sequence ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... with stealthy eyes in a kind of aboriginal reconnoitring. Melinda Cree's black hair and dark masses of wrinkles showed through a sashless shed window where she stood at her ironing-board. Her stoical eyelids were lowered, and she moved with the rhythmical motion of the smoothing-iron. Whether she had overheard the talk, or was meditating on her own matrimonial troubles, was impossible to gather from facial muscles rigid as carved wood. Melinda Cree was one of ...
— The Mothers Of Honore - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... rhythmical form, Ihave endeavored to preserve two accents to each half-line, with csura, and while not seeking alliteration, have employed it purposely wherever it readily presented itself. Iconsidered that it mattered little whether the feet were iambi or ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... was the only answer. For a minute that other door remained open, but the rhythmical snoring continued, and at last the latch ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... philosophy on his own account. I should have described him more briefly as a 'master-builder,' had my ear been able to endure a sentence ending with two consecutive trochees, and each of those trochees ending with the same syllable er. Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labors in the evasion of cacophon. Phil. has a general dislike to the Puseyites, though he is too learned to be ignorant, (as are often the Low-Church, or Evangelical, party in ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... zeal of newly organized drum and fife corps, if not, indeed, of a full band. A richly dressed drum-major generally marched at the head of these displays, and his gaudy uniform, bearskin shako with its plume, glittering baton, with its incessant twirling and rhythmical movement, excited the greatest enthusiasm and admiration among the throngs of observing negroes. To them the tambour major was by far the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... a Styrian country-dance—a musical recitative accompanied by the cithern and set to a tune sufficiently rhythmical to act as one of the original purposes of a ballad, namely a ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... suddenly softened to the strength of no more than a moderate breeze; there were no repetitions of those sickening lee lurches as the ship was flung aloft on the steep breast of a mountainous, swift-running sea, but, in place of it, a gentle, rhythmical, pendulum-like swinging roll, and a long, easy, gliding rush forward, with an acre of foam seething and hissing about our bows as those same steep, mountainous seas caught us under the quarter and hurled us headlong forward with our bow-wave roaring and boiling ahead of us, glass-smooth, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... venture to quote from a contemporary his praise of the Philippics. Mr. Forsyth says: "Nothing can exceed the beauty of the language, the rhythmical flow of the periods, and the harmony of the style. The structure of the Latin language, which enables the speaker or writer to collocate his words, not, as in English, merely according to the order of thought, but in the manner ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... takes the ground in the bay a few yards from the beach, and in the midst of a constellation of "jelly-fishes" spherical in form and varying in size. The larger are so many pale blue orbs floating lazily in a luminous mist, the only visible manifestation of life being a delicate but rhythmical deepening of the central hue. The wash of my wading seems not to affect them. I become conscious of the sudden appearance and swift disappearance of lesser spheres of startling brilliance. They emerge from nothingness, pause for a moment, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of the suggestion of supple strength conveyed by the rippling play of muscle beneath the white skin of his arms, bared to the elbow, and by the pliant swing of his body to each sure, rhythmical stroke. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... differences in respect to high and low, sharp or flat, —was utterly obliterated as with a sponge by nature herself from Lamb's organization. It was a corollary, from the same large substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... is the speech of feeling. Even the prose of emotion always wanders into the rhythmical. Hence, as well as for other reasons belonging to its nature, it is one chief mode in which men unite to praise God; for in thus praising they hold communion with each other, and the praise ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... sort of dim, mental twilight, so obscure that I was not even certain of my own identity. Gradually, however—very gradually,— the twilight brightened with returning life and reason, and I found myself beginning to identify my surroundings. I became conscious of a rhythmical rising and falling and swaying movement, accompanied by a creaking, grinding sound, and the wash and gurgle of water outside the planking that formed two of the three walls of the triangular apartment in which I found myself, and I somehow recognised ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... of taking nourishment is excluded. A part of the lip itself, the tongue, which is another preferable skin region within reach, and even the big toe—may be taken as objects for sucking. Simultaneously, there is also a desire to grasp things, which manifests itself in a rhythmical pulling of the ear lobe and which may cause the child to grasp a part of another person (generally the ear) for the same purpose. The pleasure-sucking is connected with an entire exhaustion of attention and leads to sleep or even to a motor reaction in the form of an orgasm.[10] Pleasure-sucking ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... antiquated ring" (of the imperfect and mutilated "Boulak edition," unwisely preferred by the translator) "that Lane has succeeded in preserving" "The measured and finished language Lane chose for his version is eminently fitted to represent the rhythmical tongue of the Arab" (Memoir, p. xxvii.). "The translation itself is distinguished by its singular accuracy and by the marvellous way in which the Oriental tone and colour are retained " (ibid.). The writer has taken scant trouble to read me ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... her curiously, the hag chanted a rhythmical verse in words which no one understood, and bent her lean body seven times back and forth over the fire. And now the incantation seemed complete, for the Witch stood upright and cried the one word "Yeowa!" in ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest,' But why—if the joy be not increased? 'For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood: but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.' Granted the rhythmical antithesis, where is the real antithesis, the difference, the improvement? If a battle there must be, how is burning better than garments rolled in blood? And, in fine, what is it all about? Now let us turn to the ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... "for ill lyvynge expellyd secular clerks, and by the counsell of Wolstane (Wulfstan), Bysshope of Wurcestar, bringethe in monkes." The monks introduced by Cnut were of the Benedictine rule, or Black monks, as Parker calls them in his "Rhythmical History of the Abbey." ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... astonished and delighted on hearing him. He possesses the fluency, volubility, and copiousness for which the Wrens are noted, and besides these qualities, and what is rarely found conjoined with them, a wild, sweet, rhythmical cadence that holds you entranced. I shall not soon forget that perfect June day, when, loitering in a low, ancient Hemlock, in whose cathedral aisles the coolness and freshness seemed perennial, the silence was suddenly broken by a strain so rapid and gushing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose. The merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way "sounding always the increase of his winning." Every prose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who, when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... stillness were oppressive. Once I heard footsteps coming, rhythmical steps that neither hurried nor dragged, and seemed to mount endless staircases without coming any closer. I realized finally that I had not quite turned off the tap, and that the lavatory, which I had circled to reach, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... altogether gratuitous description of a spot celebrated in America for its picturesque situation and horrors, I resume the rhythmical tale of the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... healthful, peaceful spot, and not unpicturesque. North and south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness, with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the mountain, it looked not ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... emissary regularly carried them away, but they were never again heard of. The unjust and cruel gains of the profligate laird were dissipated by his extravagance, and the ruins of his house seem to bear witness to the truth of the rhythmical prophecies denounced against it, and still current among the peasantry. He himself died an untimely death; but the agent of his amours and crimes survived to extreme old age. When on his death-bed, he seemed much oppressed in mind, and sent for a clergyman ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... river, Santa Maria, at whose banks young girls and women were wont to wash their linen and beat it out on the large, smooth stones which lay strewn along the water's edge. The notes of the wood-dove and oriole mingling with the silvery voice of the river, fell in rhythmical cadences upon the ears of the inhabitants who rested in the shady seclusion of their patios and gardens during the hour of the siesta; rolling and smoking cigarillos as they leisurely discussed the latest bit of news or gossip ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... monotonous rub-a-dub, instead of tune; no trace of music deeper than that of a well-beaten drum; to which limited range of excellence the substance also corresponded; being intrinsically always a rhymed and slightly rhythmical speech, not a song. ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... for forty years. He is an Hawaiian poet; and, besides translating some of our best hymns, has composed enough to make up the greater part of a bulky volume, which is said to be of great merit. He says that the language lends itself very readily to rhythmical expression. He was indefatigable in his youth, and was four times let down the pali by ropes to preach in the Waimanu Valley. Neither he nor his wife can mount a horse now, and it is very dreary for them, as the population has receded and dwindled from about them. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... blackness the ship was thrashing along at a speed of fully ten knots, with a continuous crying and storming of wind aloft through the rigging and in the hollows of the straining canvas, and a deep hissing and sobbing sound of water along the bends, to which was added the rhythmical thunderous roaring of the bow wave, and a frequent grape-shot pattering of spray on the fore deck as the fabric plunged with irresistible momentum into the hollows of the short, snappy Channel seas. It was black and blusterous, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... old enough, you'll wake up some day with the feeling that the world is much more beautiful than it was when you were young, that a landscape has a closer meaning, that the sky is more companionable, that outdoor colour and motion are more splendidly audacious and beautifully rhythmical than you had ever thought. That's true. The gently snow-clad little pines out my window are more to me than the whole Taft Administration. They'll soon be better than the year's dividends. And ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... external style are such as these: Is it good or bad, careful or careless, clear and easy or confused and difficult; simple or complex; terse and forceful (perhaps colloquial) or involved and stately; eloquent, balanced, rhythmical; vigorous, or musical, languid, delicate and decorative; varied or monotonous; plain or figurative; poor or rich in connotation and poetic suggestiveness; beautiful, or only clear and strong? Are the sentences mostly long or short; periodic or loose; ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... whose laws have hidden the One Law, You whose searchings obscure the goal, You whose systems from chaos begun, Chance-born, order-less, hark, they are marching, Hearts and tides and stars to the One Law, Measured and orderly, rhythmical, whole, Multitudinous, welded ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... place in front of the church. The young people were formed into groups, standing near the musicians, who occupied low seats. The drummer, with his round instrument resting on one knee, beat the parchment with rhythmical strokes, while his companion blew on a long, wooden flute, carved with primitive designs. The Little Chaplain was flipping castanets as enormous as the shells ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... is suddenly ablaze with its sunshine, with its opulent colour, luminous and soft; I think of the cities, the white cities bathed in light; of the desolate wastes of sand, with their dwarf palms, the broom in flower. And in my ears I hear the twang of the guitar, the rhythmical clapping of hands and the castanets, as two girls dance in the sunlight on a holiday. I see the crowds going to the bull-fight, intensely living, many-coloured. And a thousand scents are wafted across my memory; I remember the cloudless nights, the silence of sleeping towns, and the silence ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the expression of inward feelings by means of rhythmical movements of the body. Usually these movements are in measured step, and ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... former. We do not intend to say that Mr. Taylor is without fancy. Far from it—he has fancy, but it never leads him to be fanciful. His versification is polished, correct and various, but more harmonious than melodious; that is to say, the whole rhythmical flow of his verse is more striking than the sweetness of particular lines. We have not mentioned all the phases of Mr. Taylor's genius. Some of the smaller poems in his volume border on the sensuous; and in "Hylas" he has paid a tribute to ancient fable worthy ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... yo," which has been thus translated: "May Our Gracious Sovereign reign a thousand years, reign till the little stone grow into a mighty rock, thick velveted with ancient moss." And finally the orphans would raise their shrill voices with the rhythmical national shout, "Tei-koku Ban-zai, Tei-koku Ban-zai"; "Imperial-land, a myriad years, Imperial-land, a myriad years." This thoughtful farewell was maintained for the four or five days during which the troops were embarking ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... brave troopers. On and on, for hours and hours, facing the biting storm, feeling the pelting rain, staring with straining eyes into the black night, striving to see when nothing was visible to the keenest vision, listening with pricked up ears for the sound of the well-shod hoofs which with rhythmical ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... is rhythmical, with a slight rise of the abdomen and chest during inspiration and a slight falling during expiration. Watch a sleeping baby, and you will understand what is meant. The ratio of breathing to the beating of the heart is about one to four or five. Whatever ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... easy to understand," put in the doctor. "What did they want with dancing? The directness of their customs made such artificial devices for personal contact quite unnecessary. It's only our Victorian austerity which makes these rhythmical embraces so attractive. Puritan America loves ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... and of the lower animals seem to be so constituted that brilliant colours and certain forms, as well as harmonious and rhythmical sounds, give pleasure and are called beautiful; but why this should be so we know not. It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body. It is, however, possible that certain tastes may in the course ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... this. The phagocytes wont eat the microbes unless the microbes are nicely buttered for them. Well, the patient manufactures the butter for himself all right; but my discovery is that the manufacture of that butter, which I call opsonin, goes on in the system by ups and downs—Nature being always rhythmical, you know—and that what the inoculation does is to stimulate the ups or downs, as the case may be. If we had inoculated Jane Marsh when her butter factory was on the up-grade, we should have cured her arm. But ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... The rhythmical, accustomed chug of the engines had fallen to quarter speed, leaving an uncanny stillness throughout the ship. Silently we slipped between the long piers, drew up on the waterside town, seized the buoy, and came to rest. All around ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... air, his wife having already sped upstairs to pacify Master Smith by a rhythmical and monotonous thumping on the back. Also she lifted up a thin and not particularly sweet voice and sang to him. Mr. Billing, finishing his supper in indignant silence, told himself grimly that he was "beginning to ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... the wide stretch of sand. The spur track was banked with desolate wastes of slag and rubbish; beyond them, like an enfolding arm, was the river, dark in the darkening twilight. From under half-shut dampers flat sheets of sapphire and orange flame roared out in rhythmical pulsations, and above them was the pillar of smoke shot through with flying billions of sparks; back of this monstrous and ordered confusion was the solemn circling line of hills. It was all hideous and fierce, yet in the clear winter dusk ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... all, what is art but rhythm? Corot knew that art is nature made rhythmical, and so he was never known to take out a six-foot canvas to copy nature on. Being an artist, he preferred to observe nature, and he lay down and dreamed his fields and trees, and he walked about in his landscape, selecting ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... slumber, All softly in ear, The musical number They slumber'd to hear— For what can awaken An angel so soon Whose sleep hath been taken Beneath the cold moon, As the spell which no slumber Of witchery may test, The rhythmical number Which lull'd him ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... instinct which he brought to the task of creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth but pleasure—the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. Hence the musical ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... ROMA WHITE (INNES & CO.), is a pretty little book, prettily written, prettily illustrated by LESLIE BROOKE, and prettily bound," he continues. "Miss WHITE has a charming knack of writing musical verse, simple, rhythmical, delightful. To children and their parents, I say, take my tip (the only one parents will get at this season), and read ROMA WHITE's dainty, delicate, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... possible with the other combinations, but hiatus is preferable even with the above combinations, in a syllable on which the rhythmical accent falls ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... door a policeman paced the broad passage, a man taken from the mounted detachment and whose scabbard and spurs clattered and jingled, hour after hour, as he walked. The sound produced something half rhythmical, like a broken tune in search of itself, and the change of sentinels made no perceptible difference in the regular nature of ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... one of repetition: it dealt immensely in committing Latin to memory.... Nothing is easier to boys than such learning, even when the thing learned is uninteresting... yet... means should be taken of making it interesting and instructive and rhythmical.... It seems to me that we want what I may call a Latin novel or romance; that is, a pleasing tale of fiction, which shall convey numerous Latin words, which do not easily find a place in poetry, history, or philosophy.... ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... say, there would be difficulty in passing the barrier of ice which lay between the ships and the whaling-grounds; and yet these must be reached before June, or the year's expedition would be of little avail. Every blacksmith's shop rung with the rhythmical clang of busy hammers, beating out old iron, such as horseshoes, nails or stubs, into the great harpoons; the quays were thronged with busy and important sailors, rushing hither and thither, conscious of the demand in which they were held at this season of ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... absolute dominion over either verse or prose; its laws, never to be disregarded, prohibit rather than prescribe. Beyond the simple ordinances that determine the place of the rhyme in verse, and the average number of syllables, or rhythmical beats, that occur in the line, where shall laws be found to regulate the sequence of consonants and vowels from syllable to syllable? Those few artificial restrictions, which verse invents for itself, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... and, for checking purposes, with non-metals as well. With some ingenuity he fixed up an arrangement, rather like that of an electric bell, whereby the limbs in contracting broke contact and in relaxing restored it, and so he managed to keep the frog in continuous rhythmical movement. ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... standard, in default of anything more satisfactory: the English critics, generally sustaining the translator in his views concerning the secondary importance of form in Poetry, practically discouraged any further attempt; and no one, familiar with rhythmical expression through the needs of his own nature, had devoted the necessary love and patience to an adequate reproduction of the great work ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... would not be at his back. But he recalled his duty, and feeling that this was a case of emergency, where he ought to obey, he ordered out the two boats; lines were made fast, and soon after the men were bending well to their work, while the stout ash blades bent as they dipped in rhythmical motion, and sent the clear water plashing and sparkling back ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... "Blazne!" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let him out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land, where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band of faint color that lingered in the west. This horse and rider, with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the last sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as an inevitable detail ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... and culture, all air of literary intention and decoration,—and puts his spirit frankly and immediately to his readers. The verse does not seem to have been shaped; it might have grown: it takes no apparent heed of externals, but flows on like a brook, irregular, rhythmical, and always fluid and real. A cry will always be raised against the producer in any field who discards the authority of the models and falls back upon simple Nature, or upon himself, as Millet did in painting, and Wagner in music, and Whitman ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... of languors. And Charmian thought of the yacht. Had Mrs. Shiffney received Claude Heath's answer yet? He was to make up his mind on Sunday. Rades was singing. His accompaniment was almost terribly rhythmical, with a suggestion of the little drums that the black men love. She saw fierce red flowers while he sang, strange alleys with houses like huts, trees standing stiffly in a blaze of heat, sand, limbs the color of slate. The sound of the curious voice had become Eastern, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... express the exact shade of his thought; every phrase must be of due length and cadence; every sentence must be perfectly balanced before it left his lips. Exact precision characterized his style. He was easily the first legal orator America has produced. The rhythmical fullness and poise of his ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... design are yet of a higher nature than we have so far considered. There is not only Creative Intelligence at work in the pollen of flowers, the breathing of sponges, and the eagle's orb of vision; Mind dominates the universe as a whole. Everywhere there is law and periodic, rhythmical motion. The Lord, speaking to Job, refers to the "measures" of the earth, the "lines" which He has stretched upon it. He asks, concerning the heavenly bodies: "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... light, adds no lustre to his own." "As the lotus floats in water, the heart rests in a pure body." "Ye cannot take riches to the grave, but he who succoureth the poor in this world shall find a better wealth hereafter." A babad or rhythmical ballad of semi-religious character belongs to every province, but though many details of temple worship—Buddhist, Hindu, and Mohammedan—may be gathered from the lengthy scroll, heroic and princely exploits, myths and traditions, encumber the sacred text, which Eastern imagination transforms into ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... by his own words and perhaps by something rhythmical in the moving mass of men McGregor became feverishly anxious that the dapper young man should understand. "Do you remember—when you were a boy—some man who had been a soldier telling you that the men who marched ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... the 'voltes and courantes' also are 'like unto this,' but are 'danced after sundrie fashions' [he means, with different steps, but occupying the same rhythmical time, so that the same tune would do], 'the volte rising and leaping, the courant travising and running, in which measure also our Countrey dance is made, though it be danced after another form than any ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... the road of salvation. The dramatis personae of this first Hebrew drama are abstractions, devoid of dramatic life, mere allegorical personifications, but the underlying idea is poetic, and the Hebrew style pure, euphonious, and rhythmical. Yet it is impossible to echo the enthusiasm which greeted the work of the seventeen year old author in the Jewish academies of Holland. Twenty-one poets sang its praises in Latin, Hebrew, and Spanish verse. The following couplet may serve as ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... places. Artificial as this arrangement sounds when analyzed, it is a natural procedure for one who wished to impress on his hearers a series of philosophic propositions without the aid of writing, and I can imagine that these rhythmical formulae uttered in that grave and pleasant voice which the Buddha is said to have possessed, seemed to the leisurely yet eager groups who sat round him under some wayside banyan or in the monastery ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... lymphatic duct. The duct or ducts may be displaced by a tumour or a mass of enlarged glands, and may be accidentally wounded in dissections at the root of the neck; jets of milky fluid—chyle—may at once escape from it. The jets are rhythmical and coincide with expiration. The injury may, however, not be observed at the time of operation, but later through the dressings being soaked with chyle—chylorrhoea. If the wound involves the only existing ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... There was a wilder, dreamier air with it, than anything Waldteufel had ever written. And, while every one was wondering whose music it could be, a woman glided out from behind a screen, and stood for a second swaying herself slightly in the centre of the drugget. Even that slight rhythmical motion of her body seemed to bring her into perfect sympathy with the curious melody which was filling the hushed room. And while the people watched her, already, in varying degrees, under the spell of that curious fascination which her personality and the exercise of her art seldom ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Signor Grasso is quite different; his appearance is unpleasant, he is an ugly man, often with a fatuous air, but his grace of movement is quite extraordinary; occasionally he gives snatches of dance so exquisitely rhythmical that one longs for more. His pantomime is larger in movement than hers; his passion less terrible. He too has tricks; he is over-fond of playing with the chairs; in Malia one might say that he plays ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... positive want. It was the season of lovers, days of bright sunshine, evenings of a surpassing tenderness. She went to the station with him in the pony-cart alone. She sat like a statue in the trap while the train puffed its way slowly up the gradient and its noise died away in a rhythmical rumble. When she awoke to the fact that he had gone she felt a sudden impulse to do something desperate, if only she could think of anything desperate to do. She felt that she would like to shock Considine and the Halbertons and the whole county, to be, for one moment, outrageous ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... there had to be ample space for the dancers. Merry groups hovered around the flaming logs, while within the house a fiddle sang its simple and ravishing tunes. Everybody talked and laughed; it was a lively racket of clashing voices and rhythmical feet. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... be in the hands of the wholesale professional dealers in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a moment, and you pass out of the individual life you were living into the rhythmical movements of their horrible machinery. Do the worst thing you can, or suffer the worst that can be thought of, you find yourself in a category of humanity that stretches back as far as Cain, and with an expert at your elbow who ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... behind drawn curtains, a window glowed, telling of intimate drama gallant or mournful within. The wide grey pavements were deserted; the place arrestingly quiet, save for the occasional heavy tread of a passing policeman on beat, and the rhythmical trot of the horse. And the Lady of the Windswept Dust was quiet likewise, looking straight before her, sitting stiffly upright, her hands clasped in her lap, the shifting lights and shadows playing queerly over her face and her bare neck, causing her to appear unsubstantial and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... see that a flute kindles certain emotions in its hearers, rendering them almost beside themselves and full of an orgiastic frenzy, and that by starting some kind of rhythmical beat it compels him who listens to move in time and assimilate his gestures to the tune, even though he has no taste whatever for music; when we know that the sounds of a harp, which in themselves have no meaning, by the change of key, by ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... whom he embraces and holds with his two pairs of hind-legs, the male sways his head and corselet up and down, all in a piece. This oscillatory movement has not the fiery precipitation of that of the Cantharides; it is calmer and as it were rhythmical. The abdomen moreover remains motionless and seems unskilled in those slaps, as of a washerwoman's bat, which the amorous denizen of the ash-tree so vigorously distributes ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... the King and the troops. Torches were waved hither and thither. In the open space in front of the palace a huge bonfire had been lit. Everywhere was the pleasant murmur of cheerful voices. Further down the street they were singing in a low rhythmical chant the National Anthem. Now the King was in sight, and a roar of voices welcomed him. The front of the palace blazed out in a fire of illuminations, a shower of rockets shrieked upwards from the park. The King was ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... turned over in her sleep, leaving him free to rise, and stretch himself exhaustedly; and as he stood looking down upon the night's achievement, upon the rhythmical rise and fall of his wife's breast beneath its light covering, new fires were kindled in the man's deep heart; new intimations of the height and depth, and power of that 'grand impulsion,' which men call Love; and with these, a new humility that forced him down upon his knees ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... noon, when the reflection of the sun on the calcareous soil burned their shoulders and made the landscape dimly waver before their eyes, the monotonous, rhythmical moan of the wounded rose in unison with the ceaseless cry of the locusts. They stopped to rest at every small hut they found hidden between ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... address which even the hostile London Times pronounced to be the most sublime state paper of the century. This second address—his last great production—contained some of the best illustrations of his fondness for balanced antithesis and rhythmical measurement. There is one sentence which may be rendered ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... therefore inconceivable; but they have been shown to be diverse, but interchangeable modes of molecular motion, omnipresent, ceaselessly active. The wondrous phenomena of light, heat, and electricity are seen to be due to the rhythmical vibration of atoms. There is thus no such thing as rest: from the planet to the ultimate particle, all things are endlessly moving: and the mystic song of the Earth-Spirit in "Faust" is recognized as the expression of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Four months or so had generally elapsed between his bouts—sometimes six; it all depended on the length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed before he felt even an inclination to look at the rum cask, that tiny dark spot away on ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... spoken of the purely rhythmical nature of the pre-drum period, and pointed out, in contrast, the musical quality of the drum. This may seem somewhat strange, accustomed as we are to think of the drum as a purely rhythmical instrument. The sounds given out by it seem ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... is suggestive enough, but not in MacDowell's finest style. It does not compare favourably with the forest pieces in his delightful Woodland Sketches, Op. 51, or with the deeply inspired and mature New England Idyls, Op. 62. Its technical object is the development of delicate rhythmical playing. ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... preliminary symptoms of mumps to have leisure to bestow much attention on this phenomenon. The discomfort it caused was not sufficient to keep him awake, and presently he turned on his side and began to fill the room with a rhythmical snoring. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... is derived fluency of words; from it also the combination and rhythm of sentences derives a freer licence. For great indulgence is shown to neatly turned sentences; and rhythmical, steady, compact periods are always admissible. And pains are taken purposely, not disguisedly, but openly and avowedly, to make one word answer to another, as if they had been measured together and were equal to each other. ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... high and expanded nostrils quivering in readiness to catch scent of danger, they came on very slowly yet not without a great deal of high stepping and of prancing, with a sort of rhythmical dancing motion. Every now and then they threw their heads down, then up, and then held them rigid again. They were brave enough to come within sixty or seventy paces and even a little closer. But as ill luck ordained, while I was waiting for a better chance ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the girl was too heart-broken to talk. He listened to the rhythmical chorus of that witches' cauldron in the heart of the defile, and watched the gray light slowly etching a path through the trees, until it touched the fast-running water with a ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... there and then I delivered my first lecture! I shall never forget the feeling of power and of delight which came upon me as my voice rolled down the aisles, and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences, and never paused for rhythmical expression, while I felt that all I wanted was to see the church full of upturned faces, instead of the emptiness of the silent pews. And as though in a dream the solitude became peopled, and I saw the listening faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences came unbidden from my lips, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... golden orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend, having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of this plant, was soon snoring—another senile trait—snoring in a rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes, and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied myself trying to count up the number ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... was drawn up in the midst of a veritable tempest, bird cries, cat-calls, and a heavy rhythmical refrain of "Ruy Blas! Ruy Blas! Victor Hugo! ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... in place against her round, girlish throat that Gaites felt a lump in his own larger than his Adam's-apple would account for to the spectator; the delicately arched wrist of the hand that held the bow, and the rhythmical curve and flow of her arm in playing, were means of the spell which wove itself about him, and left him, as it were, bound hand and foot. It was in this helpless condition that he rose at the urgence of a friendly young fellow who had chosen himself master of ceremonies, and took part in the ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... silence—mere specks upon the emptiness of earth and sky—keeping their horses to the long-distance canter that kills neither man nor beast. A detachment of forty sabres followed in their wake; and the rhythmical clatter rang ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... a name of such distinction as the late Laureate's formally opposed to Tyrwhitt, and committed to the opinion which may seem to have been Dryden's, that the verse of Chaucer is "rhythmical, not metrical." This hardly self-explicating distinction of Dr Geo. Fred. Nott's, Southey in his Life of Cowper has explained in set terms—a verse for which the number of beats or accents is ruled is rhythmical—for example, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... words only in their natural order, and admit no inversions whatever for the sake of the line; and it should set a value on expression, never for its own sake, but solely for the sake of the dramatic purpose to be accomplished in the scene. Verse such as this would permit of every rhythmical variation known in English prosody, and through the appeal of its rhythm would offer the dramatist opportunities for emotional effect that prose would not allow him; but at the same time it could be spoken with entire naturalness by actors as ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... well-governed States, as far back as the memory of Figures can reach. It is considered a disgrace to any state that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be, and is in every respectable female, a natural instinct. The rhythmical and, if I may so say, well-modulated undulation of the back in our ladies of Circular rank is envied and imitated by the wife of a common Equilateral, who can achieve nothing beyond a mere monotonous swing, like the ticking of a pendulum; and the regular tick of the Equilateral is no less admired ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... they are really alive (for in most real things there is presumably some defect of rhythm tending to stoppage of life), there is bound to be this organic interdependence and interchange. Natural selection, the survival of such individuals and species as best work in with, are most rhythmical to, their ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... prefer the sunniest exposures, and like to bask in the light and warmth. They assume every variety of attitude, but move always by the regular contraction and expansion of the disk, which rises and falls with rhythmical alternations, the average number of these movements being from twelve to fifteen in a minute. There can be no doubt that they perceive what is going on about them, and are very sensitive to changes in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various |
