"Ballad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... face to that broken pane to keep the wind from me, are you?" "Yes, sir, I am." "Why do you do that?" "God bless you, sir! I owe everything I have in the world to you." "But I never saw you before." "No, sir; but I have seen you. I was a ballad-singer once. I used to go round with a half-starved baby in my arms for charity, and a draggled wife at my heels half the time, with her eyes blackened; and I went to hear you in Edinburgh, and you told me I was a man; and when I went out of that house I said, 'By the help of God, I'll ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... would sing some little twopenny love-ballad or sentimental nigger melody so touchingly that one had the lump in the throat; poor Snowdrop ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... there be full many people Who with evil voice assail me, And with tongue of poison sting me, Saying that my lips are skilless, That the ways of song I know not, Nor the ballad's pleasant turnings. Ah, you should not, kindly people, Therein seek a cause to blame me, That, a child, I sang too often, That, unfledged, I twittered only. I have never had a teacher, Never heard the speech of great men, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... saw so many things with such clearness of vision, brought out the charm of the popular ballad for readers of a later day in his remark that the value of these songs of the people is to be found in the fact that their motives are drawn directly from nature; and he added, that in the art of ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... the drawing-room, and Richard had sung a ballad so as almost to make lady Ann drop a scale or two from her fish-eyes, Arthur went out of the room stung with envy, and not ashamed of it. The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity, is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... to work, he dashed carelessly into another stanza of his favourite ballad. I know not if you are acquainted with German; but I cannot resist the desire of gratifying my own ears with a repetition of the sounds of the thrilling consonants which produced so great an effect on me on that occasion. His voice was rough ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... importance), heaven would indeed be there." These MAY be compositions of artistic worth, in which case financial gain and true musical interest consort together: but on the other hand they may NOT. Which, then, is to receive the first consideration? Is the artist to refuse the guineas because the ballad possesses no intrinsic worth, or is he to pocket the cash and deck out with all the devices of his Art the twopenny-ha'penny shop-tune, and make it sound something like the real thing? No doubt under these circumstances the song may achieve a certain measure ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... an ox-team behind us, began to sing that melancholy ballad called "St. Clair's Defeat." The entire company joined in the chorus, bewailing the late disaster at Ticonderoga, till Jack Mount, nigh frantic with disgust, leaped up into the cart ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... Campbell's ballad of "The Brave Roland," in one of the numbers of the New Monthly Magazine; and Southey's tale of Manuel and Leila, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... Seven Gables is now about forty-five years of age. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and is of a family which for several generations has "followed the sea." Among his ancestors, I believe, was the "bold Hawthorne," who is celebrated in a revolutionary ballad as commander of the "Fair American." He was educated at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... knockers in my time, but Estelle is the original leader of the anvil chorus. She just put everybody in town on the pan and roasted them to a whisper. She could build the best battleship Dewey ever saw with her little hammer. Estelle's friend, after much urging, then sang a pathetic ballad entitled, "She Should Be Scolded, but Not Turned Adrift," and I sat there with one eye shut, so that I could see single, and kept saying, ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... The Mexican returned with the salt and they sat down together under the tree, chatting sociably. Presently Mead's voice came floating out from behind the wall in the stirring first lines of the old Scotch ballad: ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... others leaned back to listen, there followed the beautiful ballad which celebrates the fashion in which Martha Hilton, a kitchen maid, became "Lady ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... The ballad entitled "The Black Shawl" has obtained a degree of popularity among the author's countrymen, for which the slightness of the composition renders it in some measure difficult to account. It may, perhaps, be explained by the circumstance, that the verses are in the original exceedingly well ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... who, while acting as bailiff for the Duke of Austria, put down two revolts of the inhabitants in his district, one in 1284 and another in 1302. Finally, there was the tyrant bailiff mentioned in the ballad of Tell, who, by the way, a chronicler, writing in 1510, calls, not Gessler, but the Count of Seedorf. These three persons were combined, and the result was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... poems, not translations, we notice "Parsenlied," dating from the year 1819, when Goethe's Divan appeared, and it is quite possible that the Parsi Nameh of that work suggested to Platen the composition of his poem.[143] His best known ballad, "Harmosan," written in 1830, has a Persian warrior for its hero. The source for the poem is probably Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... speak the word, I will make you a good syllabub of new verjuice; and then you may sit down in a haycock, and eat it; and Maudlin shall sit by and sing you the good old song of the " Hunting in Chevy Chace, " or some other good ballad, for she hath store of them: Maudlin, my honest Maudlin, hath a notable memory, and she thinks nothing too good for you, because you be ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... timidly from her lips was in harmony with her appearance. There was no attempt at execution, and the poor child was too frightened to succeed in imparting much expression to the simple ballad which she warbled; but there was an inherent richness in the tones of her voice that entranced the ear, and dwelt for weeks and months afterwards on the memory of those who ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... is too true that the voice of God never speaks so articulately to man, as when it speaks in the desperate calm of a soul to which life or death has done its worst. The same solemn thought with which the sonnet concludes, forms the moral of her ballad entitled the "Lay of the Brown Rosary." It is thus that the heroine of that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... "Lyric Declamation: Recitative, Song and Ballad Singing," will be discussed the practical application of these basic principles of Style to the vocal music of the German, French, Italian and other ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... other side, there is the reminder and exhortation: 'He is thy Lord, worship thou Him.' The beggar-maid that, in the old ballad, married the king, in all her love was filled with reverence; and the ragged, filthy souls, whom Jesus Christ stoops to love, and wash, and make His own, are never to forget, in the highest rapture of their joy, their lowly adoration, nor in the glad familiarity ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... JIG, merry ballad or tune; a fanciful dialogue or light comic act introduced at the end or during an interlude ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... pleased to learn, that on making search at the Society of Antiquaries for Robin Hood Ballads, he found in a folio volume of Broadsides, &c., one of the much interest and considerable length in relation to that school. The Ballad must also be rare, as it is not among those in the two large volumes which have been for many years in the British Museum, nor is it in the three volumes of Roxburgh Ballads recently purchased for that noble ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... with Equipages of Show and Vanity; when I resolved to walk it out of Cheapness; but my unhappy Curiosity is such, that I find it always my Interest to take Coach, for some odd Adventure among Beggars, Ballad-Singers, or the like, detains and throws me into Expence. It happened so immediately; for at the Corner of Warwick Street, as I was listening to a new Ballad, a ragged Rascal, a Beggar who knew me, came up to me, and began to turn the Eyes ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... more so. He is the author of many aphorisms; 'that three military bands would be necessary to give the impression of silence in music' is one. He comes every night to the Nouvelle Athenes, and is a sort of rallying-point; he will tell you that his ballad of 'The Salt Herring' is written in a way that perhaps Wagner would not, but ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... people who have much in common with children. Even now, after the lapse of more than fifty years, the natives of India still talk of him as the greatest of the English, and nurses sing children to sleep with a gingling ballad about the fleet horses and richly-caparisoned elephants ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... mistress of the inn that I had no friends to apply to in town, I proposed to myself to proceed, the very next morning, to an intelligence office, to which I was furnished with written directions on the back of a ballad, Esther had given me. There I counted on getting information of any place that such a country girl as I might be fit for, and where I could get into any sort of being, before my little stock should be consumed; and as to a character, Esther had often repeated to me, that I ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... cracked; I hear her trying out of her window a schrecklich. English ballad, called ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... zeal, there grew up in all their wild beauty such a profusion of the flowers of song, of poetry, and of romance that you shall hardly find between Tweed's silver stream and where the ocean billows break in thunder on Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of Scotland was vocal—melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers played at weddings and christenings; ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... epaulets were walking quickly along, while post-chaises came driving in bringing Admiralty officials or Captains to join their ships. Groups were collected in front of the different inns, and Jews were looking out for customers, certain of obtaining a ready sale for their trumpery wares. Ballad singers, especially those who could troll forth one of Dibdin's new songs, were collecting a good harvest from eager listeners, and the apple-stall women were driving a thriving trade; as were the shopkeepers of high and low ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... last to have recourse to King James." [460] Trade was not prosperous; and many industrious men were out of work. Accordingly songs addressed to the distressed classes were composed by the malecontent street poets. Numerous copies of a ballad exhorting the weavers to rise against the government were discovered in the house of that Quaker who had printed James's Declaration. [461] Every art was used for the purpose of exciting discontent in a much more formidable ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ballad over and over again until he was tired, then sat still, smiling and stroking the fox skin. He had learned the song when he was a child from his mother, who had sung it all day long one spring while ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... of witchcraft on the north side of the Merrimac. One other aged woman in this village was imprisoned, and would have been put to death, but for the timely collapse of the persecution. She was the wife of Judge Bradbury, and lived on the Salisbury side of the Powow. In his ballad Whittier traces the path he used to take towards the Goody Martin place, as was his custom in many of his ballads. One who desires to take this path can enter upon it at the Union Cemetery, where the poet is buried. Follow the "level tableland" he describes towards ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... hours of brain-wringing effort—a price that few in a generation would be willing to give or capable of giving for fame. The labor had been in proportion to the success; it always is! I doubt if there is one word in his ‘duel’ ballad that has not been changed again and again for a more fitting expression, as one might assort the shades of a mosaic until a harmonious whole is produced. I have there in my desk whole scenes that he discarded because they were not essential to the action of the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... given a version of it in my English Fairy Tales, and there is a ballad on the subject entitled The ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... The ballad went on to tell how next day Robin saw this fine bird, whose name was Allan-a-dale, with his feathers all moultered; because his bonnie love had been snatched from him and was about to be wed to a wizened old knight, at a neighbouring church, against her will. And then how Robin ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... source of amusement in observing the various personages that daily passed and repassed beneath my window. The character which most of all arrested my attention was a poor blind fiddler, whom I first saw chanting a doleful ballad at the door of a small tavern near the gate of the village. He wore a brown coat, out at elbows, the fragment of a velvet waistcoat, and a pair of tight nankeens, so short as hardly to reach below his calves. A little foraging cap, that had long since seen ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads — "Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of Burdens" — which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad. It was singular that his most appreciative listener should have been the author only of pretty verses like "We wandered by the brook-side," ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... husband nor wife considered money when it was a question of giving pleasure to their child, from whom they had never been willing to separate. Imagine the happiness of the poor parvenu peasant as he listened to his charming Cesarine playing a sonata of Steibelt's on the piano, and singing a ballad; or when he found her writing the French language correctly, or reading Racine, father and son, and explaining their beauties, or sketching a landscape, or painting in sepia! What joy to live again in a flower so pure, so lovely, which had never left the maternal stem; an ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... in the world. That is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and revolutionary reconstructions ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... a word written except interlocutors. But this won't do. I have tow on the rock, and it must be spun off. Let us see our present undertakings. 1. Napoleon. 2. Review Home, Cranbourne Chase,[492] and the Mysteries. 3. Something for that poor faineant Gillies. 4. Essay on Ballad and Song. 5. Something on the modern state of France. These two last for the Prose Works. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... highly trained, exquisitely soft. She sang an old English ballad with a throbbing sweetness that held her hearers with its charm. And behind her Dick leaned against the table with his banjo and very ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... hath soft brown hair (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) And I met with a ballad I can't say where, That wholly consisted of lines like these, (Butter and eggs and a ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... one who frequently changes his principles, always siding with the strongest party: an allusion to a vicar of Bray, in Berkshire, commemorated in a well-known ballad for the pliability of ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... drinking the health of the man and his wife that is to be, and it was nigh twelve o' the clock ere I minded it was time to go home. Well, so I puts on my cloak, and the moon was up, an' I goes along by the wood, and up by Fairlegh Field, an' I was singing the ballad on Joe Wrench's hanging, for the spirats had made me gamesome, when I sees somemut dark creep, creep, but iver so fast, arter me over the field, and making right ahead to the village. And I stands still, an' I was not a bit afeared; but sure ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Rosalynde": "The Tale of Gamelyn." Lodge did not invent the plot of "Rosalynde." The story is based upon "The Tale of Gamelyn." This is a narrative in rough ballad form, written in the fourteenth century and formerly attributed to Chaucer. Indeed all the copies of it that have been preserved occur in the manuscripts of the "Canterbury Tales" under the title "The ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... quicksilver. Whether his evil deeds were interred with his bones, who can say?—certainly his living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the Book of Odes, Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over men so buried alive with ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... summer. During this second visit (September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroism, Herve Riel, was written, though its publication belongs to four ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... in the prime of life; so that he was specially susceptible to the notion of being immortalised. 'The design is already settled, and the canvas stretched'; and I have no doubt that in the original German these words ring like the opening of a ballad. 'The anchor's up and the sail is spread,' as I (and you, belike) recited in childhood. The ship in that poem foundered, if I remember rightly; so that the analogy to Goethe's words is all ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... to our own day, and is still related and believed by the commonalty to the east of London. In the church at Stepney is a tomb to the memory of Lady Rebecca Berry, who died 1696, in whose coat-of-arms a fish and an annulet appear. She has hence been supposed the heroine of a once popular ballad, the scene of which is laid in Yorkshire; it is entitled, "The Cruel Knight, or Fortunate Farmer's Daughter," and narrates how one of knightly rank in passing a village heard the cry of a woman in travail, and was told by a witch that he was pre-doomed ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... Haggis of Private McPhee The Lark The Odyssey of 'Erbert 'Iggins A Song of Winter Weather Tipperary Days Fleurette Funk Our Hero My Mate Milking Time Young Fellow My Lad A Song of the Sandbags On the Wire Bill's Grave Jean Desprez Going Home Cocotte My Bay'nit Carry On! Over the Parapet The Ballad of Soulful Sam Only a Boche Pilgrims My Prisoner Tri-colour A Pot of Tea The Revelation Grand-pere Son The Black Dudeen The Little Piou-piou Bill the Bomber The Whistle of Sandy McGraw The Stretcher-Bearer Wounded Faith The Coward Missis Moriarty's ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... consequence of Lord Byron's charge, which he, who despises and defies, and has lampooned the Whigs all round, only invented out of wantonness, and for the sake of annoying me—and he has certainly succeeded, thanks to your circulating this filthy ballad. As for his Lordship's vulgar notions about the mob, they are very fit for the Poet of the Morning Post, and for nobody else. Nothing in the ballad annoyed me but the charge about the Cambridge club, because nothing else had the semblance of truth; ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... to the castle and brought the harp thence, and the Lady Loise took the harp and tuned it and struck it and played upon it. And the lady sang very sweetly a ballad that she knew ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... songs—tunes not worthy of him—but ended with a ballad called "Fair Springtide," by MacDowell—a song so stern, so strange, so inexorably sad that the singer himself grew grave at last and rose to his best. Bertha was thrilled to the heart, saddened yet exalted by his voice. Her horizon—her emotional horizon—was of a sudden extended, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... made one of his finest ballads from the tragic fate of the two lovers. The following verses are a translation from the latter part of the ballad: ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... at our leisure, passing out from Lamia over the Spercheios on the bridge of Alamana, at which Diakos, famous in ballad, resisted with a small band a Turkish army, until he was at last captured and taken to Lamia to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... witnessing. Everything seemed pitched in a minor key, save now and then there swelled forth splendid notes of manly heroism and womanly courage, as boldly contrasting with the dead level of life as do the full rich notes of Wagner's grandest strains with the plaintive melody of a simple ballad sung by a shepherd lad. I was accompanied in this instance by the Rev. Walter Swaffield, of the Bethel Mission, and his assistant, Rev. W. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... defence of a convoy in the Mediterranean against seven Sallee rovers, in which, after a hard engagement lasting four hours, the Mary Rose triumphed decisively without losing a single sail of her convoy. A rude song was made about the action, and the two lines of the ballad, summing up the results, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... unto you, That whereas in the course of our care and watchings over the order and police of all and sundry the manufacturers, retainers, and vendors of poesy; bards, poets, poetasters, rhymers, jinglers, songsters, ballad-singers, etc., etc., etc., etc., male and female—We have discovered a certain nefarious, abominable, and wicked song or ballad, a copy whereof we have here inclosed; Our Will therefore is, that Ye pitch upon and appoint the most execrable individual of that most execrable species known by the appellation, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the fact of being the hero of that romantic affair. "Sir Urian Legh was knighted by the Earl of Essex at the siege of Cadiz, and during that expedition is traditionally said to have been engaged in an adventure which gave rise to the well-known ballad of 'The Spanish Lady's Love.' A fine original portrait of Sir Urian, in a Spanish dress, is preserved at Bramall, which has been copied for the family at Adlington." So that between these two chivalrous knights it is difficult to decide which is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... Mariner" is a re-reading of the familiar ballad- metre, in which nothing of the original force, swiftness or directness is lost, while a new subtlety, a wholly new music, has come into it. The metre of "Christabel" is even more of an invention, and it had more immediate consequences. The poem was begun in 1797, and not published ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... detail the romance and the poetry, the writings and the imaginations, of the Scandinavian races, interspersed with abundant and well-selected specimens of the historical, romantic, legendary, chivalric, ballad, dramatic, song, and critical literature of Northern Europe. They have brought to light the treasures of the illustrious poets, historians and bards of Scandinavia, in a work of ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... the lane I went with lazy feet, This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat; And it seemed, as I retraced the ballad line by line, That but half of it was hers and one half of ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... was a popular ballad of the day that Bumpus gave them; but more often a school chorus, or it might be some tender Scotch song like "Comin' Through the Rye," "Annie Laurie," or "Twickenham Ferry;" for boys can appreciate such sentiments more than most folks believe; and especially when in an ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... not, were the outlaws his tyranny had driven to the forests, the forerunners of the Robin Hoods and Little Johns of later days, whose exploits against the Norman race awoke the enthusiasm of so many minstrels and ballad ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Shortcomings Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Love hath a Language" Helen Selina Sheridan Song, "O, let the solid ground" Alfred Tennyson Amaturus William Johnson-Cory The Surface and the Depths Lewis Morris A Ballad of Dreamland Algernon Charles Swinburne Endymion Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Fate Susan Marr Spalding "Give all to Love" Ralph Waldo Emerson "O, Love is not a Summer Mood" Richard Watson Gilder "When will Love ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... rang in mine ears, but I kept them from mine heart. I remember he alleged many a Scripture, but those I valued not; the Scriptures, thought I, what are they? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings' price.[39] Alas! What is the Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables;[40] but for the holy Scriptures I cared not. And as it was with me then, so it is with my brethren now, we were all of one spirit, loved all the same sins, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a feast desired. An arbour of boughs was erected in the churchyard on these occasions called Robin Hood's Bower, where the maidens collected money for the "ales," and "all went merry as a marriage bell"—rather too merry sometimes, for the ale was strong and the villagers liked it, and the ballad-singer was so merry, and the company so hearty—and was it not all for a good cause, the support of the poor? The character of these festivals deteriorated so much, until at last "church ales" were prohibited altogether, on account of the excess ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... sea-mysteries as those of any fish. Some think that the legend dates from Frederick II, to whom he brought up from the foaming gulf that golden goblet which has been immortalized in Schiller's ballad. But Schneegans says there are Norman documents that speak of him. And that other tale, according to which he took to his watery life in pursuit of some beloved maiden who had been swallowed by the waves, makes one think of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Hid in gleaming piles of stone; On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilacs sweet; Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square; Let statue, picture, park and hall, Ballad, flag and festival, The past restore, the day adorn, And make to-morrow a new morn. So shall the drudge in dusty frock Spy behind the city clock Retinues of airy kings, Skirts of angels, starry wings, His fathers shining in bright fables, His children fed at heavenly tables. ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... his cabin he murmured to himself "There's the devil to pay: now I wonder who pays?" Because he was planning things of moment, he took a native drum down to Fielding's cabin, and made Fielding play it, native fashion, as he thrummed his own banjo and sang the airy ballad, "The Dragoons of Enniskillen." Yet Dicky was thinking hard all ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for denying the superiority of Wasson's poetry. Many of his sonnets are gems, unsurpassed in any language, and the one called "Pride" seems to me in its grand simplicity to be without a rival. If there is any American poem which sings itself like "All's well," it is Longfellow's ballad of "Mary Garvin." "The Plover" has a pensive grace which is as rare as its subtile and elevated thought. They are however few in number and he did not think there was enough of them to publish in a volume. They were ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... dare—how should they dare—to touch them, coming from the musket and the hand of heretics? Dear Caballuco, seeing you, seeing your bravery and your nobility, there come to my mind involuntarily the verses of that ballad on the conquest of ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... any rate with a strong sprinkling of boys, amongst whom he was quite at his ease, and who were even more eager to hear than he to sing and talk. And of both songs and talk he had a curious and ample store. Of songs his own special favorites, I remember, were a long ballad in which a faithful soldier is informed on his return to his native village that his own true love "lives with her own granny dear," which he, his mind running in military grooves, takes for "grenadier," with temporarily distressing results—though all comes right at last—and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... Hixon. At times, the moon struggled out and made the shadows black along the way. At other times, it was like riding in a huge caldron of pitch. When he passed into that stretch of country at whose heart Jesse Purvy dwelt, he raised his voice in song. His singing was very bad, and the ballad lacked tune, but it served its purpose of saving him from the suspicion of furtiveness. Though the front of the house was blank, behind its heavy shutters he knew that his coming might be noted, and night-riding ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... restraint, to which Roman comedy in particular was subjected by the stern and narrow-minded censorship of the stage. Nor was this form of literary activity placed from the outset under the ban of good society by the stigma which attached to the "ballad-singer." Accordingly the prose literature, while far less extensive and less active than the contemporary poetical authorship, had a far more natural growth. While poetry was almost wholly in the hands of men of humble rank ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... virtues exhibited in the lives of even wholly irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral principles which they that know not God nevertheless acknowledge and obey. It was so in Christ's time; it is so still. The popular American ballad, "Jim Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching story of the Drumtochty postman, are familiar illustrations of self-sacrificing virtues revealed by men of coarse and vicious lives. Nor ought we to deny the reality of such virtues; still less ought we to follow the bad example of St. Augustine ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... drives the hoop, or tosses the ball, and then adds, that father Thames had no better means of knowing than himself; when he compares the abrupt beginning of the first stanza of the bard, to the ballad of Johnny Armstrong, "Is there ever a man in all Scotland;" there are, perhaps, few friends of Johnson, who would not wish to blot ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... the familiar shapes of mountains, forests, and buildings around. Up in the bunk-house some man was wailing a verse of "Ella Re," accompanied by a guitar, and the doleful drone of the hackneyed chorus was caught up by the other men "off shift." But, nauseating as it was to him, this piebald ballad of the hills, it contained one shrieking sentence: "Lost forevermore!" That was ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... read Keats's Belle Dame sans Merci?" asked Mrs. Tristram. "You remind me of the hero of the ballad:— ...
— The American • Henry James
... manse kitchen, the bairns were exceptionally fortunate in their daily fare. For though she seemed to go about in a maze, like the man in the ballad, as Robin said, "whose thoughts were other-where," she never burned the porridge, nor singed the broth, nor put off the weekly baking of "cakes," till they were obliged to content themselves, now and then, with less than ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... fairy tale—"Lady Lucy's Petition," an historiette—"the Restless Boy," by Mrs. Opie, and the "Passionate Little Girl," by Mrs. Hofland—all sparkling trifles in prose. Among the poetry is "the African Mier-Vark," or Ant-eater, by Mr. Pringle, and "the Deadly Nightshade," a sweetly touching ballad, dated from Florence; "the Vulture of the Alps" is of similar character; and we are much pleased with some lines on Birds, by Barry Cornwall, one set of which we copy, the best prose papers being too ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... Quinze library; Mrs. Seely-Hardwicke, as beautiful as the moon and clever to sinfulness; and Billy, their child, aged seven-and-a-half. To-day their whereabouts would be as difficult to find as that of the boy in Mrs. Hemans's ballad. You jump to the guess that they have lost their money. You ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... read with as much ease as in English, and took delight in such as came to him, when he would 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 ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... productions, circulated in manuscript, or in print, display no proofs of high scholarship, or of polished writing, but there is a truthful earnestness in some of them, and cogency of reasoning more effective than the skill of the mere rhetorician. Sometimes they appeared in ballad form, and sometimes as simple narrative. The rough poet of the period (the American Revolution can boast of many) was Rednap Howell, who taught the very children to sing, in doggerel verse, the infamy of the proud officials who were trampling on ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... of horror in an English prison, Oscar Wilde gave to the world his great masterpiece, THE BALLAD ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... with the utmost frankness of disposition, he sympathized fully with Arnauld and Pascal in the war against the Jesuits; and it would seem, from his Ballade sur Escobar, that he had read and relished the "Provincial Letters." This ballad, as it may be a curiosity to ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... New Zealand shall take her, Thrice blest to possess such a matron, And give thanks to its first ballad-maker, Who found it a ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... yellow band firmly on his head, he stepped forward, grasping in each hand a serried pyramid of brass bells, which chimed merrily as he squatted, leaped, and executed eccentric steps with his feet, while his arms beat time and his fine voice rolled out the solo of a rollicking ballad, to which the rest of the company furnished the chorus as well as their laughter and delighted applause of his efforts permitted. His tightly fitting dark green trousers, tall boots, and jacket of white ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... in the Appendix, I claim to have discovered a new ballad, which has not yet been treated as such, though I make bold to think Professor Child would have included it in his collection had he known of it. I trust that the publicity thus given to it will attract the attention of experts more competent than myself to annotate ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... lively Christmas ditty which is a kind of reply to the preceding ballad. It is preserved in the collection formed by Samuel Pepys, some time Secretary to the Admiralty, and author of the famous diary, and by him bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge. The full title and first verse of the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... musicians in her ladyship's household—youths who played lute and viol, and sang the dainty, meaningless songs of the latest ballad-mongers very prettily. The warm weather, which had a bad effect upon the bills of mortality, was so far advantageous that it allowed these gentlemen to sing in the garden while the family were at supper, or on the river ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... in 1862. The Essay on the Invention of Printing, by Mr. John Bagford, in vol. XXV. of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was, Dibdin says, drawn up by Wanley. The collection of ballads has been edited by the Rev. J.W. Ebsworth for the Ballad Society. ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... me than you've yet found out. Now, then! Give us your hand that you'll chuck art, and we'll drink to your popular ballad—hundredth thousand edition, no ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... "I suppose not. But you will come sometimes, won't you? I have a perfectly lovely idea for a ballad and I want to ask ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... attending such inquiries as arise out of matters so trivial as an old ballad, are curiously illustrated by the answers already printed respecting the "wooing frog." In the first place, it was attributed to times within living memory; then shown to exceed that period, and supposed to be very old,—even as old as the Commonwealth, or, perhaps, as the Reformation. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... us a tune," said Chubbins to the king. His Majesty didn't seem to like being addressed so bluntly, but he was very fond of playing the fiddle, so he graciously obeyed the request and played a pretty and pathetic ballad upon the spun sugar strings. Then, begging to be excused for a few minutes while the chariot was being made ready, the king left them and ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... mercenaries, who had little stomach for fight without wages, accepted the passports proffered by Parma. They revenged themselves for the harsh treatment which they had received from Casimir and from the states-general, by singing, everywhere as they retreated, a doggerel ballad—half Flemish, half German—in which their wrongs were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the gentle and somewhat sickly minister of Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At its best it has a trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... rule at Versailles or Quebec. But with this difference: in Quebec you may be virtuous; at Versailles you must not. It is a pity that you may not meet Mademoiselle Duvarney. She would astound you. She was a simple ballad a year ago; to-morrow she may ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... unusual enough: but it is still more unusual to find the stern Justiciar, avenger of blood and redresser of wrong, the reconstructer of a distracted country, capable not only of the broad fun of the rustic ballad-maker, but of so tolerant and humorous a view of the humble commons, the underlying masses upon which society is built. For the first aspect of affairs in Scotland could not be a cheerful one: although it was rather with the nobles and gentlemen, the great proprietors of the country, who had to ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... superstition is, that if the new moon happens on a Saturday the weather will be bad during the month. On the other hand, in Suffolk the old moon in the arms of the new one is accounted a sign of fine weather; contrary to the belief in Scotland, where, it may be remembered, in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, it is taken as a presage of storm ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... learning, his education was not finished, for he had missed the "delectable ballad of the Waller lot" and Eugene Field's account of the dignities that were "heaped upon Clow's noble yellow pup," else he would have understood. The pigeonhole contained most of the "honors" that have come to me of late years,—the nominations to ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Home, with Neighbour Flamborough and the Piper."—"These harmless people had several ways of being good company; while one played, the other would sing some soothing ballad." The happy father, with his children climbing up his chair, and clinging to him, is a beautiful group, and quite worthy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... of Chaucer prefixed to the Aldine edition of his poetical works, there is published, for the first time, "a very interesting ballad," "addressed to him by Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary French poet," of which I beg leave to quote the first stanza, in order to give me the opportunity of inquiring the meaning of "la langue ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... connecting the name with Welsh foawr, "giant" (Gaelic famhair), derives the name from fo, "under," and muir, and regards them as submarine beings.[175] Dr. MacBain connected them with the fierce powers of the western sea personified, like the Muireartach, a kind of sea hag, of a Fionn ballad.[176] But this association of the Fomorians with the ocean may be the result of a late folk-etymology, which wrongly derived their name from muir. The Celtic experience of the Lochlanners or Norsemen, with whom the Fomorians are associated,[177] would aid the conception of them ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... started many legends; and the poem remains, and if there is a livelier, I should like to know of it. I have been at the agreeable pains of reconstructing the verses as they were probably written, so that there are two more than the Nilghai sang. The whole is a very curious haunting ballad, leaving us with the desire to know much more of the lives of both men—Job Charnock the frontiersman, and Joseph Townsend, "skilful and industrious, a kind father and a useful friend," who could navigate not only the Ganges but the shifting Hooghli. Rarely can so much ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... prime literary gift in all sort of subjects. It may be shown in a fable of AEsop, in Robinson Crusoe, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's Esmond, in Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his Hamlet, in a sonnet of Dante's Vita Nuova or in his Inferno. AEsop's communication of his point of view is final. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... his equal in the land. But enough of these sad subjects. Pausin' only to explain that me an' Sam got off the iceberg on a homeward bound chicken coop, landed on Tierra del Fuego, walked to Valparaiso, and so got home, I will proceed to enliven the occasion with "The Ballad of the Bo'sun's Bride".' ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... not your opening fierce, in accents bold, Like the rude ballad-monger's chaunt of old; "The fall of Priam, the great Trojan King! Of the right noble Trojan War, I sing!" Where ends this Boaster, who, with voice of thunder, Wakes Expectation, all agape with wonder? The mountains labour! ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... silent man's real and only means of expression, and one could have listened forever, and have asked for more and more songs of old Scotch and English inheritance and the best that have lived from the ballad music of the war. Mrs. Todd kept time visibly, and sometimes audibly, with her ample foot. I saw the tears in her eyes sometimes, when I could see beyond the tears in mine. But at last the songs ended and the time ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... introduction to Selma from Mrs. Earle, who read from her own poems. The dinner was given for her, and her seat was between Wilbur and Mr. Dennison, the magazine editor. Selma had attended a dinner-party at the Williamses a fortnight earlier where there had been music in the drawing-room by a ballad-singer at a cost of $100 (so Flossy had told her in confidence). A poetess reading from her own works, a guest and not invited in after dinner on a business footing, appealed to Selma as more American, and less expensive. She, in her ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... youth the drama was the popular means of amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time to time on the stage. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... "There has hardly been written later so excellent a continuation of the old Norwegian humorous ballad as this poem (from the winter of 1856-57),written originally in the Romsdal dialect with which Bjrnson wished 'to astonish the Danes.'" (Collin, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... town this minute and buy a copy and read one ballad entitled 'Tommy,'" Cappy barked. "For the good of ...
— The Go-Getter • Peter B. Kyne
... boat and clung to it, but was quickly pursued. One hand was soon cut off with a hatchet, and as he still continued to steer the boat down the stream, he was "quieted" by a musket-shot. One Puviaut, or Pluviaut, who met with a similar fate, became the subject of a ballad. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... [An ancient Scottish ballad written in America in 1870, to show how much may be said by the judicious and economical use of a very ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... was so rich. Mrs. Boffin wore velvet dresses, and Mr. Boffin, thinking that now he was rich he ought to know a great deal about books, bought a big volume of the History of the Roman Empire and hired a man with a wooden leg who kept a ballad shop near by to come and read ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... were chiefly divided between the nursery and the village. "A Bit of Green" came out in the Monthly Packet in July 1861; "The Blackbird's Nest" in August 1861; "Melchior's Dream" in December 1861; and these three tales, with two others, which had not been previously published ("Friedrich's Ballad" and "The Viscount's Friend"), were issued in a volume called "Melchior's Dream and other Tales," in 1862. The proceeds of the first edition of this book gave "Madam Liberality" the opportunity of indulging in her favourite virtue. She and her eldest sister, who illustrated the stories, ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... into the door a short time afterwards, he saw nothing that need have caused such a frown to wrinkle up his manly brow, for Lancy was only playing a simple ballad, and Dexie was seated in a low rocker some distance from the piano, her hands clasped behind her head, singing softly, her whole appearance seeming to suggest rest and contentment. Perhaps that ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... activity in the making and distribution of ballads. The best of these are Sir Patrick Spens, Edom o' Gordon, The Nut-Brown Mayde, and some of those written about Robin Hood and his exploits. The ballad was everywhere popular; and minstrels sang them in every city and village through the length and breadth of England. The famous ballad of Chevy Chase is generally placed after the year 1460, though it did not take its present ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... usual courtesies he produces the Wai, a book written in his own crabbed hieroglyphics or in those of his father, which contains the descent of the house from its founder, interspersed with many a verse or ballad, the dark sayings contained in which are chanted forth in musical cadence to a delighted audience, and are then orally interpreted by the bard with many an illustrative anecdote or tale. The Wai, however, is not merely a source ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... cheering as never was. Ipsie Frost, who of course was present, no village revel being considered complete without her, was dancing recklessly all by herself on the grass, chirping in her baby voice a ballad of her own contriving which ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... franks into the country. From one it spread to another, till it travelled almost over the whole island. Falling at length into the hands of the musician, it was set to music; and it then found its way into the streets, both of the metropolis and of the country, where it was sung as a ballad; and where it gave a plain account of the subject, with an appropriate feeling, to ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... rendition of this affecting ballad the two cow-men remained draped uncomfortably over the barbed-wire barrier, lost in rapturous enjoyment. When the last note had died away, Stover ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... successful he was in this line of business we have not been informed, but he certainly did not grow rich by it; although he is credited with one engagement with the enemy, in which his ship came off with honor, though perhaps not with a decisive victory. This exploit was celebrated in a rude ballad of the time, which has been preserved in "Griswold's Curiosities of American Literature," and has at least the merit of plain unvarnished language. [Footnote: ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Dolly Blackwood The Irishman Blackwood A Catalectic Monody Cruikshank's Om. A New Song Gay Reminiscences of a Sentimentalist Hood Faithless Nelly Gray Hood No! Hood Jacob Omnium's Hoss Thackeray The Wofle New Ballad of Jane Roney and Mary Brown Thackeray The Ballad of Eliza Davis Thackeray Lines on a Late Hospicious Ewent Thackeray The Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch Thackeray The Crystal Palace Thackeray The Speculators Thackeray A Letter from Mr. Hosea Biglow, etc. Lowell ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... L. are the first two (a little altered) in the opening stanza of a ballad entitled The Berkshire Lady. The correct version (I speak on the authority of a copy which I procured nearly thirty years ago in the great ballad-mart of those days, the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... his paws, as if guarding it for her; and there I left him patiently waiting, in spite of his hunger, till his mate could share it with him. As I took a last look at his fine old face, I named him Douglas, and walked away, humming to myself the lines of the ballad,— ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... lads would be footing it and snapping fingers on the landing. And such was the eagerness of the brother to display all the acquirements of his idol, and such the sleepy indifference of the performer, that the tune would as often as not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad before the dancers had cut ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Heaulmiere is said to be derived from a head-dress (helm) worn as a mark by courtesans. In Villon's ballad, a poor old creature of this class laments her days of youth and beauty. The last stanza ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... and, besides, do you think I would go back to Woodstock with your worshipful cods-head, when, by good management, I may get a peep of fair Rosamond, and see whether she was that choice and incomparable piece of ware, which the world has been told of by rhymers and ballad-makers?" ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... of Mrs. Ratsey, the nurse of her Royal Highness; a lady equally anxious with ourselves to instil into the infant mind an utter contempt for everything English, except those effigies of her illustrious mother which emanate from the Mint. The original of this exquisite and simple ballad is too well known to need a transcript; the Italian version, we doubt not, will become equally popular with aristocratic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... behind those brass-nailed doors and wrought-iron balconies, the Cherub said; and malefactors famed in history and ballad had swung from that tall gallows which caught the eye before Ecija's eight church towers. There had been famous fighting, too, by the river bank; but now the place slept, dreaming of peace, and the whirr of the mill-wheels sounded ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... churchyard at Bonchurch, about a mile from our Inn at Ventnor, is the grave of John Stirling—the friend of Emerson—of whom Carlyle wrote a memoir. Sterling is the author of some beautiful hymns and other poems, including what I think is the most splendid and spirited ballad in English literature, "Alfred the Harper." Yet the sexton who exhibited the church and the churchyard did not seem to know anything about him, and the booksellers near by never had heard of him. The sexton showed, with great pride, the grave of Isaac Williams, author of the "Shadow ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... took place while Agnes was in the garden picking oranges and lemons, and filling the basket which her grandmother was to take to the town. The silver ripple of a hymn that she was singing came through the open door; it was part of a sacred ballad in honor of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... writes, 'a jovial heap of contradictions. She was familiar with the mob, while stifled with diamonds; and yet was attentive to the most minute privileges of her rank, while almost shaking hands with a cobbler.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 419. Dr. Percy showed her Goldsmith's ballad of Edwin and Angelina in MS., and she had a few copies privately ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... successful as usual. Mr. Pemberton's recitation from Tennyson, and Tab's humorous account of Father Neptune's visit to the 'Sunbeam,' were the novelties on this occasion. There were also some excellent songs by the crew, a pretty ballad by Muriel, and a reading by Tom; Mabelle being as usual the backbone and leader of the whole affair. I managed to sit through it, though in great pain, but was obliged to go to bed ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey |
