"Psalm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be added to those already given for the other festivals of the Church, &c.? It {640} would be an advantage in those churches where the Prayer Book Psalms are used, and might avoid the necessity of having separate Psalm and Hymn Books; a custom much to be objected to, differing as they do in different churches, as well as preventing strangers from taking ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... home. They were dressed in dark-blue, and each sailor appeared in his Sunday suit. A small table was brought up from the cabin, and the flag of our country spread upon it. A Bible was brought. We stood around the captain with uncovered heads, while he read the twenty-seventh Psalm. Beautiful ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... requirements of the Law were attended to. The festival proclaimed the full restoration of the worship of Jehovah, and kindled enthusiasm for his service. So great was this event that Ezekiel dates the opening of his prophecies from it. "It seems probable that we have in the eighty-fifth psalm a relic of this great solemnity.... Its tone is sad amidst all the great public rejoicings; it bewails the stubborn ungodliness of the people ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... 'What is left worth living for?' This was not a sacrifice to the Manes of Nicholson. The sacrifice of the mourner's hair, as by Achilles, argues a similar indifference to personal charm. Once more, the text in Psalm cvi. 28, 'They joined themselves unto Baal-Peor, and ate the sacrifices of the dead,' is usually taken by commentators as a reference to the ritual of gods who are no gods. But it rather seems to indicate an acquiescence in foreign burial rites. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... deliverance; and I trust that my prayers were not wanting amongst them at the same time. This mercy of the Lord quite melted me, and I recollected his words, which I saw thus verified in the 107th Psalm 'O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever. Hungry and thirsty, their souls fainted in them. They cried unto Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... dose de words ob de good book. Now will you please sing de twenty-third Psalm, an' den ask de Lord Jesus keep fas' hold dis ole niggah, till Jordan am past, an' ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... prayed in silence, and said, "Have mercy of me, Lord God, have mercy of me; for my soul trusteth in thee; and under the shadow of thy wings I shall hope till wickedness overpass. I shall cry to the highest God; to God that did well to me," and the rest of the psalm. ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... sing no song of the futile fir— No song of the tranquil teak, Nor the chestnut tree, with its bristling burr, Or the paw-paw of Posey creek; But fill my soul with a heavenly calm, And bring sweet dreams to me By singing a psalm of the itching palm And the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... to dinner, and he came to tea; and he drove out with the widow in the carriage with the lozenge on it; and at church he handed the psalm-book; and, in short, he paid her every attention which could be expected from so ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... the proceedings, which were so different from those we had been accustomed to in England, the people standing while they prayed and sitting down while they sang. The service began with the one hundredth Psalm to the good old tune known as the "Old Hundredth" and associated in our minds with that Psalm ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Psalm Miserere Domine (li.) also speaks: "Sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be clean." It refers to the law of Moses, from which St. Peter has derived it, and he discloses Moses to our view, while he brings in the Scripture. When ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... ruled over the powerful and wealthy cities of Tyre and Sidon. Ahab was caught by her beauty, and by the attractive political alliance of which she was the pledge. Some think that the forty-fifth Psalm had reference to her, which speaks of the daughter of Tyre coming with gold of Ophir, splendidly arrayed, and bringing a handsome dowry with her. Ahab thought he was marrying wealth and dignity, and providing for the greatness of his house, and, as often happens in such ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... and third psalm. Then Principal Haime, in his long "Prince Albert" and a ridiculously inadequate collar that emphasized his scrawny neck, reminded us of the sacred associations we had formed, of the peculiar responsibilities that rested ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... graceful model than that of Corston. The situation was very beautiful, cut out, as it were, of the pine plantation on a rising ground above the road to Romsey, so that when the first stone was laid by Gilbert Vyvyan, Sir William's third son, the Psalm, "Lo, we heard of the same at Ephrata, and found it in the wood," sounded most applicable. St. Mark was the saint of the dedication, which fell opportunely on 21st April 1841, very near Mr. Keble's birthday, St. Mark's day, and to many it was a specially ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the old castle, as nothing was heard but the eternal murmur of the waves—that immense breaking of the ocean—with her pure, harmonious, and powerful voice, she began the first couplet of the psalm then in great favor with ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... girls, singing wretched doggerel rhymes, and going away well pleased with the guerdon of a penny or two. Last evening came two or three older choristers at pretty near bedtime, and sang some carols at our door. They were psalm tunes, however. Everybody with whom we have had to do, in any manner of service, expects a Christmas-box; but, in most cases, a shilling is quite a satisfactory amount. We have had holly and mistletoe stuck up on the gas-fixtures ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Canterbury colonists and those of Otago, which local feeling intensified in a manner always paltry, though sometimes amusing. When the stiff-backed Free-Churchmen who were to colonize Otago gathered on board the emigrant ship which was to take them across the seas, they opened their psalm-books. Their minister, like Burns' cottar, "waled a portion wi' judicious care," and the Puritans, slowly chanting on, rolled out the appeal to ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... further consider that all wise, all honest, all ingenuous persons have an aversion from ill-speaking, and cannot entertain it with any acceptance or complacence; that only ill-natured, unworthy, and naughty people are its willing auditors, or do abet it with applause. The good man, in Psalm xv., non accipit opprobrium, doth not take up, or accept, a reproach against his neighbour: "but a wicked doer," saith the wise man, "giveth heed to false lips, and a liar giveth ear to a naughty tongue." And what reasonable man will do that which is disgustful to the wise and good, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... the reader's mouth and carry them to the hills that matched them in grandeur, they cut the last link between us and our selfish thoughts and fears, imparting a sense of world-without-end, making us one with our feathered clerk who, his red-brown wings folded, wove a thread of song into the Psalm. In that texture of admonition and prayer are many seizing pictures: man walking in a vain shadow and disquieting himself in vain, heaping up riches, ignorant who shall gather them: man turned to destruction: ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... Bible. How precious that Bible seemed to him now—the light for his feet, the lamp for his path. With reverence he turned the sacred pages until he found the fifty-first psalm, which he read with solemn earnestness, making its humble petitions truly ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... then Amos, and then Father. Father thinks it is jest as well to have one o' the girls set in between me an' Amos. The meetin'-house is full, for everybody goes to meetin' Thanksgivin' day. The minister reads the proclamation an' makes a prayer, an' then he gives out a psalm, an' we all stan' up an' turn round an' join the choir. Sam Merritt has come up from Palmer to spend Thanksgivin' with the ol' folks, an' he is singin' tenor to-day in his ol' place in the choir. Some folks ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... for the child thinks much in images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm, "The Lord is my Shepherd": and from the places employed in its illustration, which are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a house then occupied by my father, I am able to date it before the seventh year of my age, although it was probably earlier in fact. The "pastures ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... priests and to excite the people, but he is not heard, and the enemy is able to kill the psalm-singing soldiers like lambs. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... then the grotto was so delightful and natural as life, and the little bridge, and the gold fish hopping about underneath it, made it quite like a terrestrial paradise{2}; but about that time Dr. Whitfield and the Countess of Huntingdon undertook to save the souls of all the sinners, and erected a psalm-singing shop in Tottenham Court Road, where they assembled the pious, and made wry faces at the publicans and sinners, until they managed to turn the heads without turning the hearts of a great number of his majesty's ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Binney. He was the leader of Congregationalism, as Melvill was of the Church of England. On that warm evening the audience was small, but the discourse was prodigiously large. Binney had a kingly countenance, and a most unique delivery. His topic was Psalm 147th, 3d and 4th verses. "God is the Creator of the universe, and the comforter of the sorrowing." He thrust one hand into his breeches pocket, and then ran his other hand through his hair, and began his sermon with the stirring words: ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... to," Keith said, breaking the silence. "We have often heard the psalm singing of Cromwell's Ironsides spoken of, with something like contempt; but we can understand, now, how men who sing like that, with all their ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... me, that the true interpretation of this device, and the introduction of the lion and the lizard-like animal under the horse's feet, may be found in the 13th verse of Psalm xci.: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... special tokens and signs of God's favour and presence, above any other people in the world. Hence the tribes went up to Jerusalem to worship; there was God's house, God's high-priest, God's sacrifices accepted, and God's eye, and God's heart perpetually; Psalm lxxvi. 1, 2; Psalm cxxii.; 1 Kings ix. ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... big world like? His knowledge was so very limited. There had been people at the Home, who exchanged a stilted, perfunctory kindness for their salaries. The visitors who called on receiving days he had divided into three classes: the psalm-singing kind, who came with a tear in the eye and hypocrisy in every feature of their faces; the kind who dressed in silks and jewels, and handed to those poor little mother-hungry souls worn toys that their children no ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... more surprised him that he should have nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe. By the time he came to a corner of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so lingered by the way that the first psalm was finishing. The nasal psalmody, full of turns and trills and graceless graces, seemed the essential voice of the kirk itself upraised in thanksgiving, "Everything's alive," he said; and again cries it aloud, "thank God, everything's alive!" He lingered ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... support, so long as he could avoid doing so. One day, entering my room and seeing a manuscript lying on the bed, he asked me what I had been writing, and wished me to read it. I had written a meditation on part of the last verse of the 73rd Psalm: "it is good for me to draw near to God." When I read to him what I had written my Father rose with a sigh, remarking: "Egerton, I don't think you will ever return home again," and he never afterwards mooted the subject, except ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... modernize so lofty an Ode as the 104th Psalm, the Choice of Metaphors shou'd, methinks, have been considered, as one of the most remarkable Difficulties. There seems to have been a Necessity, that they shou'd be noble, as well as natural; and yet, if too much rais'd, they ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... schoolmaster appeared, and we were informed that it being the first Sunday in the month, the pastor had to do duty in an adjoining parish, according to custom, and that the schoolmaster would read the prayers and lessons instead. A psalm was sung, portions of Scripture and short prayers were read, another straggler or two joining the little congregation as the service went on. The schoolmaster, who officiated, played the harmonium and sang exceedingly well, finally read a brief exposition ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of escape presented itself. To remain where they were during the coming night meant death. There were only two log houses in the district and they were miles away. Finally Mrs. Godfrey assembled her shivering children about her and read aloud the twenty-third psalm, and closing the old service book she said to her husband, let us no longer tarry here, let us make haste towards the sloop. As they were about to start, it suddenly occurred to Mrs Godfrey that Old Mag was missing. ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... could, instead of their cold and fruitless sermons about penitence, give a specimen upon earth of these horrid cries, sinners would quickly turn a deaf ear to the voluptuous warblings of castrati, and join in some pious psalm: but, alas, hell is distant, and pleasure close at hand. After the banquet a great stage was erected, and various plays were performed, founded on the heroic deeds of Satan; for example, the Fall of Man, the Betrayal of ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... first actual body, a good nine hundred strong, [Buchholz, i. 156.] got to Halle; where they were received with devout jubilee, psalm-singing, spiritual and corporeal refection, as at Nordlingen and the other stages; "Archidiaconus Franke" being prominent in it,—I have no doubt, a connection of that "CHIEN DE FRANKE," whom Wilhelmina used to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... this stout Daniel, the "Lion-bearder," as we used to dub him, became a doddering old man, even as thy old tale-teller is now; that he put off all his roistering ways and might be found any Lord's Day shouting, not curses, as of yore, but psalm tunes, in the church whereof he was a pillar! But 'twas the other Daniel we knew; the bluff, hearty man of his two hands, who could pummel the best boxer in his own regiment of fisticuffers; who could out-curse, out-buffet and ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... shining Over fields of frozen calm; I can hear the chapel organ, And the singing of the psalm. ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... old airs. Music continued to be represented by the songs of immemorial attraction, the woodnotes wild of nameless minstrels, pure utterance of the soil. Perhaps the absence of music, except in the kindred shape of psalm tunes, which was but another form of popular song, in the Church, was one great prevailing cause of the national insensibility to all more lavish and elaborate strains. But this peculiarity and insensibility had at least one advantage—they kept in constant cultivation a distinct branch of national ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... a psalm. When I want you, I'll call you. Closer still, if you can, helmsman, and we will try a short ship against a long one. We can sail two points nearer the wind ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... too had bells on. The street boys were screaming and hooting, and shouting and shooting, with devils and detonating balls:—and there came corpse bearers and hood wearers,—for there were funerals with psalm and hymn,—and then the din of carriages driving and company arriving:—yes, it was, in truth, lively enough down in the street. Only in that single house, which stood opposite that in which the learned foreigner lived, it was quite still; and yet some one lived there, for there ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... face may sometimes mask a foul mind,—and unless I can see the SUBSTANCE of Soul looking through the SEMBLANCE of Body, then I know that the beauty I SEEM to behold is mere Appearance, and not Reality. Hence, unless your beautiful Duchess be like the 'King's daughter' of David's psalm, 'all glorious WITHIN'—her APPARENT loveliness will have no charm for me!—Now"—and he smiled, and spoke in a less serious tone.. "if you have no objection, I am off to my room to scribble for an hour or so. Come for ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... queen. . . . Vera incessu patuit—Corona; walked, too, without airs or minauderies, unconscious of all but the solemn glory. This was the pageant of her beloved England, and hers for the moment was this proud part in it. Brother Copas brushed his eyes. In his ears buzzed the verse of a psalm— ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I received a letter, containing a check for 50l. with these words: "1 Peter iv. 12-14. The enclosed draft is for Mr. Mueller, to be disposed of according to his own need, and the need of the Orphans under his care. May the 37th Psalm continue to be his solace in the fiery trial through which he is passing." I took the whole of this sum towards fitting up and furnishing the ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... says, in the 51st Psalm, "I acknowledge my faults, and my sin is ever before me." Now, think of this! If any man had occasion to boast it was King David. He had been a poor sheep-boy attending the flocks of his father, a farmer at Bethlehem, ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... feeble folk were of the company; but some three hours after noon of the third day, having toiled long through a wilderness of stony hills, they saw the city. Men and women kissed the ground, weeping and crying aloud. The priests in charge of the pilgrims struck up a psalm of thanksgiving. ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... nest in the grass, we rise easily to every height. Gladness becomes uncontainable, a pain of fulness, for which, after all effort, there is no complete relief; for language breaks under it in delivery, and Art falls to the ground. The psalm of David, the statue of Angelo, the chorus of Handel, are inarticulate cries. These men have not justified to us their confidence. It will be shared, not justified. They have divined what they cannot orderly publish, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... old. I knew him to be one Master Jeremy Sparrow, a minister brought by the Southampton a month before, and as yet without a charge, but at that time I had not spoken with him. Without word of warning he thundered into a psalm of thanksgiving, singing it at the top of a powerful and yet sweet and tender voice, and with a fervor and exaltation that caught the heart of the riotous crowd. The two ministers in the throng beneath took up the strain; Master Pory added a husky tenor, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... the joint purposes of amusement and devotion. The women were ranged at one end of the room, and the men at the other. Their bishop presided: he was an old man, dressed in the plainest manner, and possessed a countenance singularly mild and placid. He gave out a psalm, and led the choir; and the singing was alternately in German ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... visiting. Yet sometimes we get a trace of them, by a happy chance, and often their influence remains with us in that spiritual refreshment with which we awake from profound slumber. This is the meaning of that verse in the old psalm: "He giveth to ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... and both were dressed in some little white robes with evergreen girdles like the Monks. Then the Prince was set to sowing Noah's ark seed, and Peter picture-book seed. Up and down they went scattering the seed. Peter sang a little psalm to himself, but the Prince grumbled because they had not given him gold-watch or gem seed to plant instead of the toy which he had outgrown long ago. By noon Peter had planted all his picture-books, and fastened up the card to mark them on the pole; but the Prince had ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... night before he died, Mr. Hargrove repeated them, asking me afterward to select some sweet solemn sacred tune with an organ accompaniment, and sing them for him. But what music is there that would suit a poem, which henceforth will seem as holy as a psalm to me?" ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... bones, and made a shallow grave for them in the rosary. We had no spades, but a stake did well enough to dig a resting-place for those few poor remains. I said over them the Twenty-third Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... share by seeing that every thought is expressed within the intelligence of even the younger members, that is, of those who desire to have a share. This does not mean descending to "baby-talk." Just read the Twenty-third Psalm; that is not baby talk, but a child of seven can understand what is meant up to the measure of his experience; the language is essentially simple though the ideas ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... an ancient English custom for the malefactors to sing a psalm at their execution at Tyburn; and no less customary to print elegies on their deaths, at the ...
— English Satires • Various
... has been made this year with marked results. This is the practice of scourging, not as hitherto on three days in Lent, but every Friday throughout the year, in our church. There is a great concourse of people at that time to hear the fiftieth psalm, Miserere, by the melancholy harmony of which they are most moved to devotion and to doing penance. Not infrequently the royal auditors and the governor himself have been present, as ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... the charge of all he had gained. He had tried to be a good man, and though his attack on France was really wrong, and caused great misery, he had meant to do right. So he was not afraid to face death, and he died when only thirty-four years old, while he was listening to the 51st Psalm. Everybody grieved for him— even the French—and nobody had ever been so good and dutiful to poor old King Charles, who sat in a corner lamenting for his good son Henry, and wasting away till he died, only three weeks later, so that he was buried the same day, at St. Denys Abbey, near Paris, ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with its dulness and its complete isolation from the intellectual world. At Weimar, in the evening, they could see Egmont or hear Fidelio, or talk with friends about the last utterance upon the Leben Jesu; but the Fenmarket Egmont was a travelling wax-work show, its Fidelio psalm tunes, or at best some of Bishop's glees, performed by a few of the tradesfolk, who had never had an hour's instruction in music; and for theological criticism there were the parish church and Ram Lane ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... receive of Him, because we keep His Commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight." Again: "Whosoever is born of God, that is, whoever believes and trusts God, doth not commit sin, and cannot sin." Again, Psalm xxxiv: "None of them that trust in Him shall do sin." And in Psalm ii: "Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him." If this be true, then all that they do must be good, or the evil that they ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... and although the wave may sprinkle them, it cannot swallow them up. Only they are deafened as well as blinded, and Bee feels that she is losing her senses. Surely her brain is wandering, else she could never hear the notes of the anthem again, and Tim's voice singing the words of the old psalm in such exulting tones,— ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... breviary has been in some degree taken to pieces, and their time has been distributed in small slices, so that, for instance, they may be obliged to recite the psalms for Matins at hours when there is no psalm." ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... the service had been gone through on this particular Sunday without anything remarkable happening. It was at the end of the psalm which preceded the sermon that Sanders Elshioner, who sat near the door, lowered his head until it was no higher than the pews, and in that attitude, looking almost like a four-footed animal, slipped out of the church. In their eagerness to be at the sermon many of the congregation did not ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... progenitor in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice not five years since; and again I have heard it far away in mid- Atlantic upon a grey sea-Sabbath in June, when neither winds nor waves are stirring, so that the emigrants gather on deck, and their plaintive psalm goes forth upon the silver haze of the sky, and on the wilderness of a sea that has sighed till it can sigh no longer. Or it may be heard at some Methodist Camp Meeting upon a Welsh hillside, but ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... declaration of the divine favor. He marched from Paris; and as he proceeded with decent reverence through the holy diocese of Tours, his anxiety tempted him to consult the shrine of St. Martin, the sanctuary and the oracle of Gaul. His messengers were instructed to remark the words of the Psalm which should happen to be chanted at the precise moment when they entered the church. Those words most fortunately expressed the valor and victory of the champions of Heaven, and the application was easily transferred to the new Joshua, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... some such sudden illumination of the mind as Buddha obtained under the shadow of the fig-tree and the author of the 73rd Psalm among the ruins of the kingdom of Juda, it is impossible to account for Job's unforeseen and entire resignation, or to bring his former defiant utterances into harmony with the humble sentiments to which he now gives expression. For nothing but ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... with God's help," came the roar of response, followed by a great shout and wild clanging of arms. Immediately the advance began, the men singing the verse of a psalm written for the occasion. It was ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... she opened her book, plunged into the work, and gave in the hearing of Mrs. Eldridge a few of its wonderful sentences. Maybe those words would reach her, thought Matilda. She read slowly the twenty-third psalm, and then went back to the opening verse and read ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... lies Babylon, the mighty; Faint echoes of her songs come drifting by; Within there is a hymn of consecration, A psalm that lifts the fervent soul on high; And yet, sometimes, where bows the hooded choir, There comes the old call of the World's Desire: "The rose's dust is ashen Be petals white or red, And vain the sighs of passion When summer's light is fled; The garden's fruitful measure ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... the congregation within. Curious to see this phoenomenon, we squeezed into the place with much difficulty; and who should this preacher be, but the identical Humphry Clinker. He had finished his sermon, and given out a psalm, the first stave of which he sung with peculiar graces — But if we were astonished to see Clinker in the pulpit, we were altogether confounded at finding all the females of our family among the audience — There was lady Griskin, Mrs Tabitha ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... larger body of non-church-goers, who were delighted at a possible exposure of the weakness of religious rectitude. "I've allus had my suspicions o' them early candle-light meetings down at that gospel shop," said one critic, "and I reckon Deacon Hotchkiss didn't rope in the gals to attend jest for psalm-singing." "Then for him to get up and leave the board afore the game's finished and try to sneak out of it," said another. "I suppose that's what ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... of state, judges, and foreign ambassadors. The procession entered the cathedral amidst the peal of organs and the voices of five thousand children of the city charity schools, who were placed between the pillars on both sides, and singing that old melody, the hundredth psalm. The king was much affected; and turning to the dean, near whom he was walking, he said with great emotion, "I now feel that I have been ill." His emotion almost overpowered him; but recovering himself be proceeded to the chair, where the humility with which he at first ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hatchets to Winchcomb Wood, And they glorified the Pope. And after many a night of toil, They struck at the infant's bone, Beneath a tree, where an awful owl Was screeching a midnight groan. They bore the bones by the moonlight ray, To the convent's holy shrine, And from the psaltry sang a psalm, The psalm one hundred and nine. The queen, she hearken'd the pious tones, As they pass'd the palace by, It seem'd the saints and the morning stars Were chorussing in the sky. But when she hearken'd the deed was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... Mr. Clement took y'e Pistoller's place at y'e reading-desk; and insteade of continuing y'e subject in hand, read a paraphrase of y'e 103rde Psalm; ye faithfullenesse and elegant turne of which, Erasmus highlie commended, though he took exceptions to y'e phrase "renewing thy youth like that of y'e Phoenix," whose fabulous story he believed to have been unknown to y'e Psalmist, and, therefore, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... they seemed to be preparing for something new and solemn, and I also perceived several musical instruments. The clergyman now stopped, and the clerk then said in a loud voice, "Let us sing to the praise and glory of God, the forty-seventh psalm." ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... a large Bible lying open on a table. "Listen, then," he said, "to the Word of God"; and with intense solemnity he read aloud to her the wonderful verses in the one-hundred-and-thirty-ninth Psalm, between the twelfth and seventeenth, laying particular stress on the sixteenth verse, "'Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... from man; a scowling tempest hurls Our world into a chaos, and still it whirls and whirls. It is the Boreal blast of sin, else all were meek and calm, And Creation would be singing still its old primeval psalm. Woe for the leaf of human life! it flutters in the sere, And what avails its dance in air, with dust and down-come near? That airy dance, what signifies the madness that inspires? The king, the clown, alike is borne along, alike expires. Come ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... lines of four and three accented syllables. In the one case, as in the other, there is a certain family resemblance, in the melody as in the theme, that to the untrained and unaccustomed ear may convey an impression of monotony. But to each ballad, as to each psalm, there belongs a peculiar strain or lilt, touched, as a rule, with a solemn or piercing pathos, often cast in the plaintive minor mode, that alone can bring out the full inner meaning of the words, and that is endeared and hallowed by centuries of association. As easily ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... "Save us," and was a cry of welcome. They shouted the words of a psalm: "'Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in ...
— The King Nobody Wanted • Norman F. Langford
... to the mercy of our Heavenly Father, and prayed for all our dear friends who were exposed to the fury of the Chinese. Then we sat and waited. Miss Woolley, who had only been three months in Sarawak, read aloud a psalm from time to time to comfort us; but the hours seemed very long. At five o'clock in the morning the kunsi, having possessed themselves of the Chinese town, sent us word that they did not mean to harm us—"the Bishop was a good man and cared for ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... the Plymouth woods John Alden went on his errand; Saw the new-built house, and people at work in a meadow; Heard, as he drew near the door, the musical voice of Priscilla Singing the hundredth Psalm, the grand old Puritan anthem, Full of the breath of the Lord, consoling and comforting many. Then, as he opened the door, he beheld the form of the maiden Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle, While with ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... boy, don't it beat hell?" he cried gleefully. "While all them psalm-smiters were busy to death sweepin' the cobwebs out o' their muddy souls upstairs, the old wash-tub o' sins was full to the bung o' good wholesome rye underneath 'em. Was it a bright notion? Well, I'd smile. If it don't beat the whole blamed circus. Is there a p'liceman ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the sheltered ledge where he and Hazel had been, and as he lay down to sleep he repeated the psalm they had read together that night, and felt a sense of the comfort of abiding under the ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... produced some translations rendering the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his brochure, printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass," "Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"—pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night" (Psalm cxxi. 6). Easterns still believe in the blighting effect of the moon's rays, which the Northerners of Europe, who view it under different conditions, are pleased to deny. I have seen a hale and hearty Arab, after sitting an hour in the moonlight, look like a man fresh ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... in all directions to hunt the Protestants. "It was," writes Voltaire, "a chase in a grand cover." If the voice of prayer or of a psalm were heard in any wild retreat, the soldiers opened fire upon the assembly of men, women, and children, and hewed them down without mercy with their blood-stained swords. In several of these encounters, three or four hundred men, women, and young children were left dead ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... him!' said Alfred; 'don't you know how the Psalm says, "God careth for the stranger, and provideth for ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... afternoon Arthur Channing was seated at the organ in pursuance of his duty, when a message came up from the dean. He was desired to change the selected anthem, taken from the thirty-fifth Psalm, for another: "O taste, and see, ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Edward were handfasted. How, then, could she have any lover but Edward? Why should she work the charm? She puzzled over this during prayers, but no answer came to her questioning. Life is a taciturn mother, and teaches not so much by instruction as by blows. Edward was reading the twenty-third Psalm, which always affected his mother to tears, and in reading which his voice was very tender, '... And lead thee forth beside the waters ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... his treasure. "I remember," said he, "my mother used to sing this one, 'When the Eye saw Her, then it blessed Her;' and parts of this one, 'Hear my Prayer;' and, let me see, she used to sing this psalm, 'Praise the Lord,' by Jackson. I am ashamed to say I used to ask for 'Praise the Lord Jackson,' meaning to be funny, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... from eleven o'clock till midnight. They then went up and serenaded Mr. and Mrs. Luke, two new missionaries, whose subsequent pioneer work up-river was a record of toil and heroism. Mr. Luke entered into the spirit of the innovation. He gave out the 2nd Paraphrase and read the 90th Psalm. Prayer was uttered, and the company separated, singing the evening ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... might please the Lord by being patient. I remember what a lull the thought of Him brought; and yet how difficult it was not to be impatient, till I fixed my mind on some Bible words—they were the words of the twenty-third Psalm—and began to think and pray them over. So good they were, that by and by they rested me. I dropped asleep and forgot my aches and weariness until the train arrived ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of sleep, Soft sleep, sweet sleep; a little soothing psalm Of slumber from thy sanctuaries of calm, A little sleep—it matters not how deep; A little falling feather from thy wing, Merciful Lord,—is ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... aesthetic value' of these South American utterances, Dr Gummere asks in a footnote, 'how far is it inferior to the sonorous commonplaces of our own verse—say "The Psalm of Life?"' I really cannot answer that question. Which do you prefer, Gentlemen?—'Life is real, life is earnest,' or 'Now we have something to eat'? I must leave you to settle ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... out and Allison Bain was called in from the kitchen. The minister asked God's blessing on the reading of the Word and then he chose a Psalm instead of the chapter in Numbers which came in course. It was ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... candlelight, beneath the stars, I read, from the same Testament I used in 1903, the fourteenth of John and the thirteenth of First Corinthians, the chapters which I read to Hubbard on the morning of our parting. Judge Malone read the Fiftieth Psalm. We sang some hymns and then knelt about the withered couch of boughs, each of us three with the feeling that Hubbard was very close ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... at such a conviction? How had I come, from praying and fasting and Psalm-singing, to extreme impiety? Alas! my backsliding had cost me no travail of spirit. Always weak in my faith, playing at sanctity as I played at soldiers, just as I was in the mood or not, I had neglected my books of devotion and given ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... it opened and the chances it held, dominated my mind, and Jonah Wall, my servant, was kept busy in preparing me for the great event. I had made a discovery concerning this fellow which afforded me much amusement: coming on him suddenly, I found him deeply engaged on a Puritan Psalm-book, sighing and casting up his eyes to heaven in a ludicrous excess of glum-faced piety. I pressed him hard and merrily, when it appeared that he was as thorough a Ranter as my friend Phineas himself, and held the Court and all in it to be utterly given over to Satan, an opinion ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... conditional, and such like is with the Hebrews a common usage."[178] The men concerned in the preparation of the Bishops' Bible discuss the rendering of tenses in the Psalms. At the beginning of the first Psalm the Bishop of Rochester turns "the preterperfect tense into the present tense; because the sense is too harsh in the preterperfect tense," and the Bishop of Ely advises "the translation of the verbs in the Psalms to be used uniformly ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... anointed and crowned, and having received all her royal ornaments, the choirs sing an anthem, commonly from Psalm xlv. ver. 1, "My heart is inditing of a good matter," &c. As soon as this is begun, the queen rises from her faldstool, and, being supported by the two bishops, and attended as before, goes up to the ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... did stand the Queen in gold of Ophir: her clothing is of wrought gold: she shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework: the Virgins her companions that follow her shall enter into the king's palace.' Psalm xlv. 9-16." Lastly they asked, "Is it not expedient that a priest be present and minister at the marriage ceremony?" The wise one answered, "This is expedient on the earth, but not in the heavens, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... my friend, Who taught me first to God's great will resigned, Before his shining altar-steps to bend; Who poured his word upon my soul like balm, And on mine eyes what pious fancy paints— And on mine ear the sweetly swelling psalm, And all the sacred knowledge of ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... conquer the savage pain of heart and desolation of spirit which arise from heroic human grief,—Oedipus and Antigone, Iphigenia, Perseus, Prometheus, King Lear, Samson Agonistes, Job, and David in his penitential psalm. And there are the Victors in the yet deeper strivings of the soul—in its inner battles and spiritual conquests—Milton's Adam, Paracelsus, Dante, the soul in The Palace of Art, Abt Vogler, Isaiah, Teufelsdroeckh, Paul. To read of such men and women is to be thrilled by the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown |
