"Tuneless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his own to him, correcting each shade of expression most fastidiously, and occasionally performing the more difficult passages himself, with many affected gestures and self-approving waggings of his head, though his voice was tuneless and harsh, and ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... old men playing the "lady's game" with stones set in squares of sand, women peeping from flat roofs and doorways, children driving goats. A man, like a fair and beautiful Christ, with long hair and a curling beard, beat on the ground with a staff and howled some tuneless notes. He was dressed in red and green. No one heeded him. A distant sound of the beating of drums rose in the air, mingled with piercing cries uttered by a nasal voice. And as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... knobkerry, only one degree less dangerous, he consoles himself with a wand or switch in case of coming across a snake. You never see a Kafir without something of the sort in his hand: if he is not twirling a light stick, then he has a sort of rude reed pipe from which he extracts sharp and tuneless sounds. As a race, the Kafirs make the effect of possessing a fine physique: they walk with an erect bearing and a light step, but in true leisurely savage fashion. I have seen the black race in four different quarters of the globe, and I never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... is to hold That here, where sang he, more of him Remains than where he, tuneless, cold, Passed ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... swung in to the curb in front of the cafe. The shutters were closed, no light came from any of the stores or houses along the street, but from behind the closed door of the cafe came the sound of voices and laughter mixed with the metallic banging of a very old piano beating out tuneless accompaniment to a bull-voiced singer roaring through the many verses ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... of Warren the next day, but on the day following he strode into the room, whistling in tuneless good humor. ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... splendid for the health. One of his favorite dicta was, "Every child should be taught singing—for its health, if for nothing else." And perhaps he was right! At any rate, he made his forty to fifty thousand a year—and on days when he had a succession of the noisy, tuneless squawkers, he felt that he more than earned ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... and lark, when they welcome the dawn, Make a chorus of joy to resound through the lawn: But the mavis is tuneless, the lark strives in vain, When my beautiful charmer renews her ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the night, a new feature was added to the entertainment. One of the Marathas had somehow possessed himself of a tom tom, and proved himself an excellent performer on that weird instrument. While he tapped its sides, his fellow Maratha, in a strange hard tuneless voice, chanted a song, repeating its single stanza again and again without apparently wearying his hearers, and clapping his hand to mark ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... typewriters beyond the glass partitions of her little private office left her unaffected. It was incessant. She would have missed it had it not been there. She would have lost that sense of rush which the tuneless chorus of modern commercialism inspired. And, to a woman of her temperament, that would have been ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... horribly suggestive of its connection with surgical operations—comprised the entire furniture of the room. The bees were humming among a few flowers placed in pots outside the window; the birds were singing in the garden, and the faint intermittent jingle of a tuneless piano in some neighbouring house forced itself now and again on the ear. In any other place, these everyday sounds might have spoken pleasantly of the everyday world outside. Here, they came in as intruders on a silence which nothing ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... end of three disillusionizing weeks Abe Potash and Morris Perlmutter sat in the show-room of their place of business. Abe's hat was tilted over his eyes and he whistled a tuneless air. Morris was ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... chimes arose from the city as he found to be "maddening." All Genoa lay beneath him, and up from it, with some sudden set of the wind, came in one fell sound the clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration that made his ideas "spin round and round till they lost themselves in a whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead." He had never before so suffered, nor did he again; but this was his description to me next day, and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud, Slope their slow passage to the fall'n flood: Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace How side-long crabs had crawled their crooked race; Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye; What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come, And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home, Gave from the salt ditch-side the bellowing boom: He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce And loved to stop ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... brother," Henri said to him, and left him there with a heavy heart. Never again would Rene sit and whittle on the doorstep and sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyish adoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to Gussie's for a smoke. She opened a door she had never happened to enter before—a dingy door with the glass frosted. Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen. She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping with the dirt of many and many a hard year. In a corner was the piano, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... first Newman was bewildered—almost stunned—by the strangeness of the sound; then, as he comprehended its meaning, he listened intently and his heart began to throb. He listened for Madame de Cintre's voice, and in the very heart of the tuneless harmony he imagined he made it out. (We are obliged to believe that he was wrong, inasmuch as she had obviously not yet had time to become a member of the invisible sisterhood.) The chant kept on, mechanical and monotonous, with dismal repetitions and ...
— The American • Henry James
... imperiously to her baby's ayah. He had already waited some minutes, and he would probably have waited much longer, for his patience was inexhaustible, had it not been for that sudden irresponsible and wholly tuneless burst of song. But the second line was scarcely ended before she came hurriedly forth, nearly running into his stately person in ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... for a moment at Aunt Anne and saw her in an ecstasy, singing in her cracked tuneless voice, a smile about her lips and in her eyes, that gazed far, far beyond that Chapel. Maggie felt the approach of tears; she stopped singing—softly the refrain of the last ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Folk-might. And in a moment came the hoarse tuneless sound of the horn down the wind towards them; and ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... this the avant-courier of the Hudson's Bay, delayed, like ourselves, by the storm? I had hardly spelled out my own suspicion, when to the measured beatings of the tom-tom, gradually becoming faster, and with a low, weird, tuneless chant, like the voices of the forest, the Indians began to tread a mazy, winding pace, which my slow eyes could not follow, but which in a strange way brought up memories of snaky convolutions about the naked body of some Egyptian serpent-charmer. The drums ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the tipsy singing she had heard in the morning; it was jumpy, tuneless singing; she guessed that it was assisting in the process of shaving, for she heard a few "damns" peppering the song, which suggested that his shaky hand was wielding the razor badly. And with the song came pity that swamped disgust and disillusion. It seemed so sad to her that, when hope dawned ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... presently their attention became concentrated upon their great-grandmother Freida, who stood straight up and looked attentively at the stone in the middle of the room, and then called out in her loud, tuneless whisper: ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... throng,— Nor lute nor lyre his trembling hand shall bring; Here no frail Muse shall imp her crippled wing, No faltering minstrel strain his throat to sing! These hallowed echoes who shall dare to claim Whose tuneless voice would shame, Whose jangling chords with jarring notes would wrong The nymphs that heard the Swan if ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... go home. He drifted to the station aimlessly; he had ceased to be self-determined. His compartment happened to be empty; so, free to behave as he liked, he yelled music-hall snatches in a tuneless voice, hammering with his feet on the wooden floor. The noise pleased his sodden mind, which had narrowed to a comfortable stupor—outside of which his troubles seemed to lie, as if they belonged not to him ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye! The harp of strain'd and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply! To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill; And Araby's or Eden's bowers Were barren as ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... and bee, The chorus of the breezes, streams, and groves, All the grand music to which Nature moves, Are wasted melody To her; the world of sound a tuneless void; While even Silence hath its ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Helen, and I hope you won't provide me with any. I am not in love with decay. I remember a fellow at Trinity, the merriest of all our set at a wine-party, who, alone with his ink-pot, was for ever enacting the part of the unheeded poet, complaining of the hard hearts and tuneless ears of his generation. I went into his room once, and found him with the tears running down his face, a pot of stout half empty on the table, and his den all but opaque with tobacco-smoke, reciting, with sobs—I had repeated the lines so often before they ceased to amuse ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... provide the sensible, thinking, educated people of England with an equivalent as suitable to their requirements as the Salvation Army was to the requirements of the foolish, the hysterical, the unthinking people who played the tambourines and brayed on the tuneless trombones. Thus it is that one man says to another nowadays, when he has got nothing better to talk about, "Are you a man of intelligence, or do you go ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... YEAR's FINAL DAY!—Nature performs Its obsequies with darkness, wind, and rain; But Man is jocund.—Hark! th' exultant strain From towers and steeples drowns the wintry storms! No village spire but to the cots and farms, Right merrily, its scant and tuneless peal Rings round!—Ah! joy ungrateful!—mirth insane! Wherefore the senseless triumph, ye, who feel This annual portion of brief Life the while Depart for ever?—Brought it no dear hours Of health and night-rest?—none that saw the smile On lips belov'd?—O! with as ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... 'spise him more'n ye. An' hyar she's runned off an' married old Tom Kittredge's gran'son, Josiah Kittredge's son—when our folks 'ain't spoke ter none o' 'em fur fifty year—Josiah Kittredge's son—ha! ha! ha!" He laughed aloud in tuneless scorn of himself and of this freak of froward destiny and then fell to wringing his hands and calling ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... ceremoniously to this, and handed her a cup of thick coffee, which he took from a brass tray that was placed upon a stand. As she sipped the coffee and looked at the pointed head and twisted gaze of Safti, the Princess heard some distant Arab at a street corner singing monotonously a tuneless song, and the scent, the darkness, the reiterated song, and the tall, strange creature standing silently before her gave to her, in their combination, the atmosphere of a dream. She found it difficult to speak, to explain ...
— The Princess And The Jewel Doctor - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... the party, and had a moment's leisure to examine them before the echo of Ethan's blast returned from the hill. Not one, but many echoes had caught up the harsh and tuneless sound, untwisted its complicated threads, and found a thousand aerial harmonies in one stern trumpet tone. It was a distinct yet distant and dreamlike symphony of melodious instruments, as if an airy band had been hidden on the hillside and made faint music ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of song the judge had a peculiarity. It made no difference what the words might be or the theme—he sang every song and all songs to a fine, high, tuneless little tune of his own. At this moment Judge Priest, as Jeff gathered, was showing a wide range of selection. One second he was announcing that his name it was Joe Bowers and he was all the way from Pike, and the next he ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his poems, the Hymn to Colour, he can ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the priest in and locked the door, going back to Tula with the key. She sat where he had left her, and was crooning again the weird tuneless dirge at which Marto ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... on earth has, we should like to know, bewitched ornithologists to designate the great, coarse, tuneless bird, that visits us in the earliest dawn of spring, in this far off America, "the robin?" Neither in throat nor plumage is it even a thirty-first cousin of the sweet, timid, little, brown bunch of melody that haunts the hawthorn ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... for a minute alone?" Her still, tuneless voice made the words into a command. Canon Livingstone arose and followed her into the little dining-room. "Will you tell me all you know—all you have heard about ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... passionately loved, and whose love seems to hang in the balance. It would be apt to be a piece of special pleading, for or against, as egotism or conscience happened to be strongest. Best, then, not to try to reproduce the words spoken that night—spoken in the tuneless, level voice, which, in its dull monotony, is a truer indication of pain than any other; but to repeat only the substance of all that Lucia then heard for ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... piece with a view to really playing it. There was no light-hearted hurrying on through blurred runs and false notes, slurred phrases and incomplete chords. Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was played again on Falbe's great Steinway, as a professed performance, a very ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... of stratagems, sometimes recruiting his finances by the acquisition of small sums proposed in the foreign universities to public disputants; at others, securing himself a hospitable reception by the exercise of a moderate share of skill in playing the flute—his "tuneless pipe," as he calls it, in that passage of The Traveller, where he alludes to this method ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... and the bull fiddle—they umpah ump along. Underneath the quaver and whine of the jazz they beat the time, they make the tuneless rhythm. The feet dancing on the crowded cabaret floor listen cautiously for the trombone, the bassoon and the bull fiddle. They have a liaison with the umpah umps—the feet. Long ago they danced only to the umpah umps. There were no cadenzas, glissandos, arpeggios then. There was ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Easy and Friendly was Familiar. Or, if he tuned his lofty lays, With solemn air to Virtue's praise, Alike abusive and erroneous, They call'd it hoarse and inharmonious. Yet so it was to souls like theirs, Tuneless as Abel to the bears! A Rook[5] with harsh malignant caw Began, was follow'd by a Daw;[6] (Though some, who would be thought to know, Are positive it was a crow:) Jack Daw was seconded by Tit, Tom Tit[7] could write, and so he writ; A tribe of tuneless praters follow, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... in a waiter stood by a tuneless piano, upon which a bloated "professor" was beating a tattoo of cheap syncopation accompaniment of the advantages of "Bobbin' Up An' Down," which was warbled with that peculiarly raucous, nasal tenor so popular in Tenderloin ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... many of the English birds. Several species in Great Britain, their biographers tell us, sing the winter through, except during the severest frosts; but with us, as far south as Virginia, and, for aught I know, much farther, the birds are tuneless at this season. The owls, even, do not hoot, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... And where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now,— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... fortitude that the boys forgot to be cautious, and one afternoon while Tabitha was in town on an errand, Mercedes came upon them as they were limping about the kitchen in an exaggerated fashion chanting with tuneless voices, ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... dulled by blatant praise, Awonder why the scented fumes And surplices at evensong Avail not as in other days. Shrunken and mean the spirit fails Like old snow falling from the crags And priest and pedagog compete With nostrums for the age that ails, But learn not why the spirit lags. Tuneless and dull the loose lyre thrums Ill-plucked by fingers strange to skill That change and change the fever'd chords, But still no inspiration comes Though priest and pundit labor still. Lust-urged the clamoring clans denounce ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... unapproachable the moment he appeared. But this was not the only thing that perplexed me. The whole atmosphere of Gladwyn was oppressive. I had a subtile feeling of discomfort whenever Miss Darrell was in the room; her voice seemed to have a curious magnetic effect on one; its tuneless vibrations seemed to irritate me; if she spoke loudly, her voice was rather shrill and unpleasant. She knew this, and carefully modulated it. I used to wonder ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... wanton curls peeping from the hood, the whole figure alert with youth and life—they cheered my recollection as I trod that sour moorland. I tried to remember her song, and hummed it assiduously till I got some kind of version, which I shouted in my tuneless voice. For I was only a young lad, and my life had been bleak and barren. Small wonder that the call of youth set every fibre ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... angry discord round. So one in sober mood and pale high thought Stands in a door-way, whence he sees within The riot warm of wassailing, and hears All the dwarf Babel of their common talk, As each small drunken mind floats to the top And general surface of the senseless din; Whilst every tuneless knave doth rend the soul Of harmony, the more he hath refus'd To sing; ere Bacchus set him by the ears With common sense, his dull and morning guide; And stutterers speak fast, and quick men stutter, And gleams of fitful mirth shine ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... yet anyway. Well, he would have it attended to, sometime; his life was valuable now. But he wasn't going to hurry about it, if a sound leg meant his being taken and ordered off to this dam-fool War. Nicky-Nan pursed up his lips as he worked, whistling to himself a cheerful, tuneless ditty. Some one tapped ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... come out from the shack and was seated on the threshold; even she was conscious of a certain elation, for she was humming to herself one of those endless, tuneless, barbaric Indian airs which only take on the pretence of music when they are assisted by the stamping of many feet, and the clapping of many hands. When Granger turned his head in her direction, she lowered her eyes, and her singing ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... of the Tottenham Court Road. The ground floor of the building is a public-house, and on summer evenings one can sit by the open windows, and breathe in the health-giving fumes of beer and whisky, and listen to the sweet, tuneless strains of itinerant musicians. When my new fortunes enabled me to give the dear woman just the little help that allowed her to move into a more commodious flat, she had the many mansions of London to choose from. Why she insisted ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... part and sipped Mokha from little cups. A girl was performing a wriggling dance upon the square carpet occupying the centre of the floor, accompanied by a Nubian boy who twanged upon a guitar, and by most of the assembled company, who clapped their hands to the music or droned a low, tuneless dirge. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... feet and limped across the room to his coat in an effort to recover himself, and Dick, more stirred than he cared to admit by the affection in his voice, tramped out to the little porch in front and pretended to whistle a tune, that proved tuneless. He looked at the little valley around the shoulder of the mountain at the head of the ravine, which they had so carelessly invaded that morning, and shuddered. Inside he heard Bill moving around, and then after a time ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... and let him go, smiling at the tuneless humming that accompanied his departure. Who at a casual glance would have taken Nick Ratcliffe for one of the keenest politicians of his party, a man whom friend and foe alike regarded as too brilliant to be ignored? He had even been jestingly ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... dull and tuneless ear, I linger by soft Music's cell, And in my heart of hearts would hear What to her own she ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impression that remains in our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase was associated still, in Swann's mind, with his love for Odette. He felt clearly that this love was something to which there were no corresponding external signs, whose meaning could not be proved by any but ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... a wall, burst out suddenly into a confused rapturous chorus of chirruping sounds, mingled with others of a finer quality, liquid and ringing. At such times one is vexed to think that there are writers on birds who invariably speak of the sparrow as a tuneless creature, a harsh chirper, and nothing more. It strikes one that such writers either wilfully abuse or are ignorant of the right meaning of words, so wild and glad in character are these concerts of ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... lane leading inland. They stopped and strove to remember the location of the boat, and then followed the lane. The fog was amber-hued now and the morning was fast losing its chill. Perry broke into song and Han into a tuneless whistle that seemed to give him a deal of satisfaction. They soon found a main-travelled road and, after fixing the turn-off in their minds, wheeled ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... town, a man shouting at ever shorter intervals and with superhuman energy, "Feuer—im Sachsenhausen," and the almost continuous winding of all manner of bugles and trumpets, sometimes in stirring flourishes, and sometimes in mere tuneless wails. Occasionally there was another rush of feet past the window, and once there was a mighty drumming, down between us and the river, as though the soldiery were turning out to keep the peace. This was all we had of the fire, except a great cloud, all flushed red with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... being thrown out into the street was shouting in a gurgling voice, "Let go o' my throat or I'll corpse ye!" And farther on two or three girls in their teens, with their arms about the necks of twice as many men, were reeling along the pavement and singing in a tuneless wail. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... sound of the veteran's cracked and quavering voice, singing in some distant seclusion a verse of the immortal sea-song—"Tom Bowling." Just as she stopped among the rambling stone passages on the basement story of the house, uncertain which way to turn next, she heard the tuneless old voice in the distance, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the dust until he marched, soldier-wise, in a cloud of it, that rose and grimed his moist face and added to the heavy, brown powder upon the wayside weeds and flowers, whistling a queer, tuneless thing, which yet contained definite sequences—the whistle of a bird rather than a boy—approached Johnny Trumbull, aged ten, small of his age, but accounted by ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... thou art, divinely stirred, And wailest for thyself a tuneless lay, As piteous as the ceaseless tale Wherewith the brown melodious bird Doth ever Itys! Itys! wail, Deep-bowered in sorrow, all its little ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... of pleasure followed this verse, and a tuneless chorus thundered the refrain, "Oh, such a knave's a Roundhead," with the most evident relish for the sentiments of the song. Brilliana looked with some impatience at the unruffled face of her adversary, and when the immediate clamor ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Fondling of a happy pair, Every morn and every night Their solicitous delight, Sleeping, waking, still at ease, Pleasing, without skill to please; Little gossip, blithe and hale, Tattling many a broken tale, Singing many a tuneless song, Lavish of a heedless tongue; Simple maiden, void of art, Babbling out the very heart, Yet abandoned to thy will, Yet imagining no ill, Yet too innocent to blush; Like the linnet in the bush To the mother-linnet's note Moduling her slender throat; Chirping forth thy pretty joys, Wanton in the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various |
