"Sonorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coach, and Kovno was hardly worse than scores of other towns; within a day's ride from St. Petersburg a woman begged piteously for means to keep soul and body together, and finished the refutation of that sonorous English theory, for she had been discharged from her master's service in the metropolis as too feeble, and had been sent back to his domain, afar in the country, on foot and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... with the easy grace of a person speaking his mother-tongue. They are a gifted people, and a patriotic—at least they tell us so, and the Irish, they say, is the queen of languages, the softest, the sweetest, the most poetical, the most sonorous, the most soul-satisfying. And yet the patriot members speak it not. William O'Brien is said to know a little, but only as you know a foreign language. He could not address the people on the woes of Ireland, could ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... many fashions of speech. Broad Yorkshire contended with the thin nasal tones of the cockney; the man from the banks of the Tweed thrust cautious sarcasms at the man from Galway. A mulatto, the color of pale amber, spoke sonorous Spanish to an olive-hued piece of drift-wood from Florida. An Indian indulged in a monologue in a tongue of a faraway tribe ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... dignitaries of the Empire, the generals, were formed in a circle to receive and salute Pius VII. He was welcomed with the utmost reverence. His fine, noble face, his air of angelic kindness, his soft, yet sonorous voice, produced a deep impression. Josephine was especially moved by the presence of the Vicar of Christ. After resting a few moments in his private apartment, to which he had been conducted by M. de Talleyrand, High Chamberlain, by General Duroc, Grand Marshal of the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... function. At birth her mamma were well developed and her axillae were slightly covered with hair. At the age of thirty-two months she was three feet ten inches tall, and her genitals and mammae resembled those of a girl of thirteen. Her voice was grave and sonorous; her moral inclinations were not known. Deever records an instance of a child two years and seven months old who, with the exception of three months only, had menstruated regularly since the fourth month. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody,"—a lament not unworthy of comparison with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... first saw him at Downhill Church, where he made a most dignified appearance, in a very full surplice, with his Doctor of Divinity's red hood over it. The clerk, small, grey-haired, and consequential, bustled up to open the pulpit door for him, and he preached, in a fine, sonorous voice, a very learned sermon, that might have been meant for his ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... promptly replied, with a fine sonorous English accent, "a mug of 'alf an' 'alf,—with a head ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of the sonorous exhortation was water in her ears. The sound of it reached her confusedly, in a jumble. She was drowning and it was unconsciously, in this condition, that poked by Paliser, she heard herself uttering the consenting words that are so irrevocable and ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... folks," he said, "wouldn't quite understand that. We done got the idea that sometimes there's such a thing as a quarrel that is right and just." The President's melancholy face lit up with animation and his voice rose to the sonorous vibration of the negro preacher. "We learn that out of the Bible, we coloured folks—we learn to ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... might wash away the bloody gore from Patroclus. They then placed a bathing tripod on the blazing fire, and poured water into it, and taking fagots, lighted them under it. The fire indeed encircled the belly of the tripod, and the water was warmed. But when the water boiled in the sonorous brass, then they both washed him, and anointed him with rich oil. And they filled up his wounds with ointment nine years old; and laying him upon a bed, they covered him with fine linen from head to foot; and over all, with a white mantle.[589] All night then the Myrmidons, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... into three genera, of which the Howlers form one. They are so denominated from their habit of assembling in troops, and uttering the most terrible howlings, so loud that the forest is filled with their sonorous voices. Their cries can be heard at a half-league's distance, and produce upon a stranger unaccustomed to such sounds a very disagreeable impression. The unusual strength of voice is accounted for by a peculiar ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... has destroyed the classical dominie, and the intrusion of science, falsely so-called, has well-nigh asphyxiated the Napaeae of the dells. It was formerly possible for the teacher to develop to the full his literary taste and declaim the sonorous tit-bits of Virgil till the tears started from his eyes. Now the instructors of youth seem to regard the works of the tuneful Mantuan as composed for the purpose of illustrating the use of the Latin subjunctive. Youths cannot get at the Aeneid, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... easily to the ground in front of the testing shed and the wanderers leaped out, to be greeted by the half-hysterical Jap. Shiro's ready vocabulary of peculiar but sonorous words failed him completely, and he bent himself double in a bow, his yellow face wreathed in the widest possible smile. Crane, one arm around his wife, seized Shiro's hand and wrung it in silence. Seaton swept Dorothy off her feet, pressing her slender form against his powerful body. Her arms ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... words in slow, measured tones, and with deathly impressiveness. Although he was a little man, his voice was deep, almost sonorous, and thus when the chaplain followed him with a thin, piping voice, "Amen!" there was something so incongruous in the contrast that many who had been wrought up to a high state of excitement felt like giving way to hysterical laughter. Nevertheless, ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... a voice habitually deep and sonorous, yet capable of becoming very low and gentle at the right moment. About his ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of success, a confidence in his own powers and integrity much fortified by contempt for petty obstacles ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the church, in the thicker shadows, lay its dead beneath a colony of staggering gray stones. Upon one grave, I remember, where the clay was freshly turned, there was a bouquet of flowers—love's protest against the sonorous sentence—"earth to earth and dust to dust"—which the other graves confirmed. The pine needles lay thick above them, and not a flower distinguished them from the common sod. They had the look of deeper peace, the long, untroubled peace of sleepers who have passed ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... wandering but diligent life on the Continent he conceived the idea of writing a history of the persecutions of the church from the earliest days to his own. The part relating to England and Scotland was published, in Latin, in 1559 under a title as sonorous and impressive as the Roman office for the dead,—Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum Maximarumque per Europam Persecutionum Commentarii. On his return to England Foxe translated this work, calling it the Acts and Monuments; but it soon became known as the Book of Martyrs, and so it will always ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and is not unfrequently drawn by nine horses. A cavalry charge, therefore, could scarcely make more noise. Hence, and from the other circumstance, its association in the second stanza with the triune sonorous ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs. Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room, as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table she observed, in the curiously tentative detached manner which always gave her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot to another, "D'you know, Mr. Denham, you remind me so much of dear Mr. Ruskin.... Is it his tie, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... repulse, to violate the laws of prudence, and even of justice. The triumph of the party, which he deserted and opposed, has fixed a stain of infamy on the name of Julian; and the unsuccessful apostate has been overwhelmed with a torrent of pious invectives, of which the signal was given by the sonorous trumpet of Gregory Nazianzen. The interesting nature of the events which were crowded into the short reign of this active emperor, deserve a just and circumstantial narrative. His motives, his counsels, and his actions, as far as they are connected ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... trees, and your pyramid oaks? "He was a good man, for he loved his garden"—that is the epitaph I would have put on his monument, because it gives one a far clearer sense of his goodness and explains it better than any amount of sonorous Latinities. How could he be anything but good since he loved a garden—that divine filter that filters all the grossness out of us, and leaves us, each time we have been in it, clearer, ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... voice, at first faint and fearful, gradually lost its quaver, grew under her control and subject to her modulation; it rose on long swells, it fell in subtile cadences, now and then its tones pealed out like bells from distant belfries on fresh sonorous mornings. She sung the song through, and, wondering lest his name of Indian Devil were not his true name, and if he would not detect her, she repeated it. Once or twice now, indeed, the beast stirred uneasily, turned, and made ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... purposely or otherwise, stops short to cough and blow a sonorous note upon his nose. All eyes are fixed upon him; some, even more curious or eager than the others, are leaning forward in their chairs. Even Philip has turned from the window and ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... describes with wood-wind and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the same work figures the "sheep" against which Don Quixote battles so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously, malevolently petty than that ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... McCabe—and I stepped into the parlor. We were not even offered a seat, and in a short time the music ceased and the lady at the piano left it. Chaplain McCabe at once seated himself at the piano, and, to the amazement of the ladies, commenced singing, with his extraordinarily strong, sonorous voice, "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more." The ladies stood their ground courageously for a time, but while the Chaplain, playing his own accompaniment, was singing My Maryland, with words descriptive of Lee's invasion and retreat ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... into the presence of colossal mountains, whose rugged peaks rose like inaccessible fortresses. On turning round, I could see nothing in the direction of Interlachen but gloomy vaporous depths, impenetrable to the eye. Nearer and nearer drew the thunder, filling space with its sonorous voice. The wind whistled, the Luetschina rolled its groaning waters. The spectacle was sublime. Night gathered in all around, and the vicinity of Grindelwald I could make out only by the lights in the chalets ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... conducted with a keen eye to effect. Members who had a sense of beauty made their speeches beautiful, and even those to whom it was denied did their best. Grace of ample gesture was cultivated, and sonorous elocution, and lucid ordering of ideas, and noble language. In fact, there was a school of oratory. This is no mere superstition, bred of man's innate tendency to exalt the past above the present. It is a fact ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... and strolled back to where the voices of the contending men of science rose in a prolonged duet, the high, strident note of Summerlee rising and falling to the sonorous bass of Challenger. I should have thought no more of Lord John's remark were it not that once again that night I heard him mutter to himself: "Blue clay—clay in a volcanic tube!" They were the last words I heard before I dropped into ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... haw!" at which all the males roared with laughter, and the females hid their faces in their handkerchiefs, and tittered and giggled, and tried to be shocked. "ORDER! ORDER!" cried Mr. Jorrocks, in a loud and sonorous voice, which had the effect of quelling the riot and drawing all eyes upon himself. "Ladies and gentlemen," said he, taking off his cap with great gravity, ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... finances is not the worst about this congregation. The congregation has fallen off. Other churches in this village has good congregations. Why shouldn't we? The truth is, Mr. Chairman,"—Mr. McFettridge's voice rolled deep and sonorous over the audience—"we want a popular preacher—a preacher that ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... no annexation, but of Mind, Heart, Spirit. True, thy clear, sonorous voice At Freedom's class-call, would make us rejoice, For, then, close-coasting thrall would fail to find In the new world, one truant to mankind, Swimming out to the foreigners' decoys, Or fast asleep amid his infant toys, Instead of at the task, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... but not that which she knew, and in front of this Temple the same black rock. On the rock, where once the lad had been bound, was an altar, and before the altar a glorious man clad in priestly robes, who offered sacrifice of lambs and oxen and in a sonorous voice gave praise to Jehovah in the presence of a countless host of people. This she knew was the vision of ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... the defenders must have fallen. But now a strange diversion occurred. On the balcony appeared General Baker, noted as the city's greatest orator. In his rich, sonorous tones, he began a political speech. It rang even above the excited shouts of the mob. Instantly there was a pause, an almost imperceptible let-down of the tension. Those who could not see asked eagerly of others, "What's the matter ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... ancient of languages, since the a is the most natural and easy to pronounce of all the letters. It seems to me very mistaken to call such words as Achald, Ayanda, Almanda, Acard, Agracaramba, Alcantara, etc., barbarous, for the sonorous ring with which they are pronounced renders the Castilian the richest of all modern languages. Spanish is undoubtedly one of the finest, most energetic, and most majestic languages in the world. When it is pronounced 'ore rotundo' it is susceptible of the most ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... march," and in perfect silence until beyond hearing by the inmates of the Hospital, the cortege would proceed. Anon the band would call heaven and earth to mourn with the sonorous dreadful strains of the Dead March; whereafter the ordinary "quick march" would bring the funeral party to the cemetery, in sight of which the "slow march" would be resumed, and the Chaplain, surpliced, book-bearing, come forth to put himself ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... of Homer, too. He liked the diapason of those sonorous hexameters, that roll on, sinking and swelling with the ebb and flow of a stormy sea. I hear his voice—deep-toned and powerful even at that early age—finishing the story of Poseidon and his beautiful prize—their bridal-bed laid in the hollow ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... gay, not to say a noisy one. Toasts were given and replied to. They drank to the earth and her satellite, to the Gun Club, the Union, the Moon, Diana, Phoebe, Selene, "the peaceful courier of the night." All the hurrahs, carried up by the sonorous waves of the immense acoustic tube, reached its mouth with a noise of thunder; then the multitude round Stony Hill heartily united their shouts to those of the ten revellers hidden from sight in the depths of ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... human life is at stake—he is dying. You must come with me and let the doctor be free to do his work. I command you to come!" she added, in a stern, ringing, sonorous voice that seemed to thrill the other to her very heart's core and fascinate her—ay, fairly paralyze her will-power. "Come!" repeated Bernardine, laying a hand on her shoulder—"come out into the grounds with me, Mrs. ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... friends wiped away the furtive tears that are always as sure to fall in the presence of a great happiness, as when the occasion is one of grief. But she had no tears to shed. Weeks of silent suffering had bereft her of that relief. Her sensitive face grew a trifle more wistful as she listened to the sonorous voice intoning the sacred words, but her brooding gray eyes remained dry. She alone knew the agony of dull pain which clutched persistently at ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... music stirred the savages to action. Solemnly they formed a circle around the fire, arms extended, lightly touching each other's finger-tips. To and fro they swayed in time to the crude music, and when the drums thundered out a sonorous crescendo, they crouched to the earth, springing up in unison, uttering fearful yells. When the individual dancing commenced, exhausted members began to fall out, leaving the youth and vigor of the tribe to compete for the honors. A maiden must prevent ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... is more elastic and resonant than impure, and as easy, melodious speaking or singing requires atmospheric elasticity, so school-rooms and singing-halls should be well ventilated, if we would be entertained with soft intonations in reading, or sonorous singing. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... were thus pleasantly engaged, a sonorous trumpet sound was heard behind the clump of small trees near us. A moment later and two magnificent wild swans sailed over the tree-tops and above our heads. They made a tumultuously wild swoop to one side on discovering the near proximity of their enemy ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the gloom of coming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see the lantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spirit of the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pass, and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towers of Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing window squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, or mining stock promoters planning ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... come at last, my children—the prophecy is fulfilled!" he began at length. Then, raising the staff which he held in his right hand and pointing directly upward to where the eagle continued to soar in great circles, he cried in a deep sonorous voice that all might hear: "Behold the sacred bird, God's sign and symbol; the sacred witness to the consecration of His chosen ones! For was it not written in the ancient runes that, after the coming of the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Anthem," he yelled. The player, chilly and terrified, raised the mouthpiece of the tuba to his lips and, looking fearfully about like the target of a test-your-skill ball-throwing game, puffed out the sonorous opening notes. One by one the other players, a flute behind an elm tree, a trumpet hidden in the back seat of a parked limousine, a snow-damaged snare-drum, joined in; gravitating towards one another through the suddenly quiet crowd. Winfree, like the other men, civil ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... England was in a panic by this, and knew itself to lie before the Bruce defenceless. The all-powerful Countess of Salisbury had compounded with King David; now Hastings, too, their generalissimo, compounded. What the devil! loyalty was a sonorous word, and so was patriotism, but, after all, one had estates in ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... indulged overmuch in alliteration, but it was with humorous intent; and critics forgave it in him when they would have reprehended it in another. He had no notion that it was fine. Taken, however, in connection with his emphatic manner and sonorous voice he produced a decided and original effect. Meeting the Squire's wife after a considerable interval, I asked whether her husband had been behaving well. She replied 'As usual.' Whereupon the Bibliotaph said, 'You mean that his conduct in these days is characterized by a plethora of intention ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... fast; So but the suppliant at my feet implore." Then of that hallow'd gate he thrust the door, Exclaiming, "Enter, but this warning hear: He forth again departs who looks behind." As in the hinges of that sacred ward The swivels turn'd sonorous metal strong, Harsh was the grating, nor so surlily Roar'd the Tarpeian, when by force bereft Of good Metellus, thenceforth from his loss To leanness doom'd. Attentively I turn'd, Listening the thunder that first issued forth; And ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... their friends to abet the parents in a custom which assuredly did not err on the side of ugliness. Concha had a larger vocabulary than other Californians of her sex, for she had read many books, and if never a novel, she knew something of poetry. Sturgis had filled the sala with the sonorous roll of his favorite masters and it had pleased her ear; but the language of passion had been so many beautiful words, neither vibrating nor lingering in her consciousness. But the rude expression of the miserable woman at her feet, whose sobs grew more ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... us. I don't know what we shall do without your fun and the music of your laugh at the pleasure parties. In addition to being the best wrestler in the parish you are also its most able and sonorous laugher." ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... music between, however, has a fervor that justifies the title. This etude is, like those of Chopin, at the same time a technical study and a mood. The second, a "Lamentation," begins with a most sonorous downward harmony, with rushes up from the bass like the lessening onsets of a retreating tide. Throughout, the harmonies and emotions are remarkably profound and the climaxes wild. I should call it one of the best ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... mentioned, he was speedily brought to grief. At supper, the first evening of his arrival, one of our circle having asked him with incautious politeness "how he was?" the new arrival opened on us with a sonorous discourse filled with chronic afflictions mixed up with pious reflections. I think he would have established his claims to high rank had not a consumptive-looking boarder with a haggard face taken advantage of a pause in the speech, and without looking up from his plate, remarked ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... blood, which causes every member of the herd to lift its head and hasten to the spot—the native cry of the clan. When she is gored or in great danger she bawls also, but that is different. And lastly, there is the long, sonorous volley she lets off on the hills or in the yard, or along the highway, and which seems to be expressive of a kind of unrest and vague longing—the longing of the imprisoned Io for her lost identity. She sends her voice forth so that every god on Mount Olympus can hear ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... sonorous lines filled the humble roof with music. Tears stood in the eyes of Clarisse as she listened. Without noticing them, Zenaide spoke abruptly as the voice of the ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... was set forth interestingly and with emphasis, insomuch that things almost spoke for themselves, and wherein they failed to do so the Doctor supplemented in a satisfactorily sonorous voice. ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... often had to face masked batteries, and my soul—I won't say my body—never quailed; but if I had to stand there," said the old soldier, pointing to the tea-table, "and face forty bourgeois gaping at me, their eyes fixed on mine, and expecting sonorous and correct phrases, my shirt would be wringing wet before I could get ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... "Sententiae Excerptcae" for the use of his own School; and 3d, his best work, a Critical Latin Grammar, in the Preface to which he proposes a bold innovation in the names of the cases. My Father's new nomenclature was not likely to become popular, although it must be allowed to be both sonorous and expressive. "Exempli gratia", he calls the ablative case "the quare-quale-quidditive case!" He made the world his confidant with respect to his learning and ingenuity, and the world seems to have kept the secret very faithfully. His various works, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Defoe's life. His services to the Government did not absorb the whole of his restless energy; He still had time for private enterprise, and started a manufactory of bricks and pantiles at Tilbury, where, Mr. Lee says, judging from fragments recently dug up, he made good sound sonorous bricks, although according to another authority such a thing was impossible out of any material existing in the neighbourhood. Anyhow, Defoe prospered, and set up a coach and a pleasure-boat. Nor must we forget what is so much to his honour, that he set himself to pay ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... different language from mine; they belong to another world. They are such jolly good fellows that they are prepared to accept me as a comrade without question, but as for my message, I might as well be trying to cure smallpox by mouthing sonorous Virgil—only it is worse than that, for they no longer even believe that the diagnosis is what I say. And what gets over me is that they are, on the whole, decent chaps. There's Harold—he's probably immoral and he certainly drinks too much, but he's as unselfish as possible, and I feel in ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... he said, "is like women. The earth does not wish one to treat it with either timidity or brutality." The Ave Maria rang in all the campaniles, seeming to make of the sky an immense instrument of religious music. "Darling," said Miss Bell, "do you observe that the air of Florence is made sonorous and silvery at night by ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... be called musical; in fact, it was harsh and strident; but this evening the hills, and the trees, and the wide open spaces, Nature's mighty modulator, subdued the harshness, so that the voice rolled up to the people clear, full, and sonorous. Nor was the preacher possessed of great learning nor endued with the gift of eloquence. He had, however, a shrewd knowledge of his people and of their ways and of their needs, and he had a kindly heart, and, more than all, he had the preacher's ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... was raging outside! What a wild night it was! The snow drifted in great white mountains against the window-panes, and as far as her eyes could reach, the great white snow-drifts greeted her sight. The bronze clock on the mantle struck the hour of eight in loud, sonorous strokes. With a guilty thrill of her heart, she thought of Jessie Bain. Hastily excusing herself, she hurried to ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... consent to this excellent proposal, and moreover agreed to the engagement of a Mlle. Sax, a still unspoiled young singer with a very beautiful voice, as well as of an Italian baritone, Morelli, whose sonorous tones, as contrasted with the sickly French singers of this class, had greatly pleased me during my visits to the Opera. When these arrangements were concluded, I thought I had done all that was really necessary, though I did not cherish any very firm conviction ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... psycho-analytic basic aroma which pervades the entire scenario. The absence of a Coda in the Funeral March which concludes the ballet is an exquisitely pathetic touch which could only have occurred to a composer of genius. The orchestration is sumptuous and sonorous, the usual instruments being supplemented by two Glory Quayle-horns, a quartet of Laxey-phones with rotating C and C sharp crooks, a Manx harp with three strings, and a Miaowola, which gives out the Death Motive of the Princess at the various crises of the drama in tones ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... extract passages to illustrate Marlowe's fondness for classical allusions, his use—Miltonic, if we may anticipate the term—of the sonorous effect of names, his introduction of sustained similes, his trick of repeating a sound at intervals (a trick borrowed by Greene later), his habit of letting a speaker refer to himself in the third person (Tamburlaine loves to boast the greatness of Tamburlaine), ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... drive me to it!' at last burst out a deep sonorous voice. 'They will drive me to it.... Their blood be on their own head! It is not enough for them to blaspheme God and His church, to have the monopoly of all the cheating, fortune-telling, usury, sorcery, and coining of the city, but they must deliver my clergy into ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... actively opposing it. In this sense I wrote him various letters. For a time they seemed successful; but at last, under these attacks, he broke all bounds and became the bitter opponent of the movement. In his powerful manner and sonorous voice he from time to time expressed his contempt for it. The most striking of his utterances on the subject was in one of the State conventions, which, being given in his deep, sonorous tones, ran much as follows: "When Doctor-r-r Ja-a-awnson said that patr-r-riotism-m was the l-a-w-s-t r-r-refuge ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... atheists on all sorts of occasions, going out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute their neighbour's, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly did with debt, with drink, with all sorts of bad behaviour, they got up on their knees, and cried "Peccavi" with a most sonorous orthodoxy. Yes; poor Harry Fielding and poor Dick Steele were trusty and undoubting Church of England men; they abhorred Popery, atheism, and wooden shoes, and idolatries in general; and hiccupped "Church and State" ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the beautiful, stately hexameters, which, whatever cavilling critics may say, are delightfully adapted for epic narrative in any fairly polysyllabic language. And Swedish, which is the most sonorous of all Germanic tongues, and full of Gothic strength, produces the most delectable effects in the long, rolling line of slow-marching dactyls and spondees. The tempered realism of Tegner, which shuns all that is harsh and trite, accords well with the noble classical verse. He employs it, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... black patch over one eye; her attention was attracted by the creature's ugliness. Evidently he knew he was no beauty, for, after uttering a short yelp or two in the attempt to join in the chorus of sonorous barks, he had crept humbly behind Richard, and sat on his haunches, looking up at him with a ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in his sonorous, musical voice, "you will proceed at once to the island of Lobau to make preparations for the great bridge-building which must be commenced at once and completed within a week. The restoration and strengthening of the bridges which connect the island of Lobau and ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... behind our hands,—small pipings most of them of club and social gossip, now became public property, some being bowled along the table straight at the new boarder, who sent his own rolling back in exchange, his big, sonorous voice filling the room as he replied with accounts of his life in Poland among the peasants; of his experiences in the desert; of a shipwreck off the coast of Ceylon in which he was given up for lost; of a trip he made across the Russian steppes in a sleigh—each adventure ending in ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... their feet along the pavement; the long robes gather in harmonious folds; busy merchants hurry to the Chalcidicum; the statues look proudly down from their re-peopled pedestals; the noble language of the Romans resounds on all sides in scanned, sonorous measure; and the temple of Jupiter, seated at the end of the vista, as on a throne, and richly adorned with Corinthian elegance, glitters in all its splendor ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... a mockery,—angers me like an insolence. But only for a moment!... With the utterance of the syllables "to-day," that deep, grim voice suddenly breaks into a quivering tenderness indescribable;—then, marvelously changing, it mellows into tones sonorous and rich as the bass of a great organ,—while a sensation unlike anything ever felt before takes me by the throat... What witchcraft has he learned? what secret has he found—this scowling man of the road?... ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... the people cried, "Go on! go on!" and some applauded. Dennis, still confused, but flattered by the applause, to which neither he nor I are used, rose again, and this time tried No. 2: "I am very glad you liked it!" in a sonorous, clear delivery. My best friends stared. All the people who did not know me personally yelled with delight at the aspect of the evening; the Governor was beside himself, and poor Isaacs thought he was undone! Alas, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... head of the Chatham party, and it was reinforced at this moment by the entry into Parliament of the second and youngest son of Chatham himself. William Pitt had hardly reached his twenty-second year; but he left college with the learning of a ripe scholar, and his ready and sonorous eloquence had been matured by his father's teaching. "He will be one of the first men in Parliament," said a member to Charles Fox, the Whig leader in the Commons, after Pitt's earliest speech in that house. "He is so already," replied Fox. Young as he was, the haughty self-esteem ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... hoariest years one paean Rang rapture through the fluctuant roar of fight, From Nestor's tongue in accents Achillean On death's blind verge dominant over night For voice as hand and hand As voice for one fair land Rose radiant, smote sonorous, past the height Where darkling pines enrobe The steel-cold Lake of Gaube, Deep as dark death and keen as death to smite, To where on peak or moor or plain His heart and song and sword were one to strike ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... written in a great variety of song-measures, which seem scarcely as solemn and religious as the more dignified and even metres used by the early English writers. Some are graceful and smooth, however, and are canorous though never sonorous. They are pleasing to read with their ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... utterly obliterated as with a sponge by nature herself from Lamb's organization. It was a corollary, from the same large substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... better fitted to injure than to serve the sacred cause of freedom." This judgment is undoubtedly severe; but, though exaggerated in its condemnation, it, like all Shelley's criticisms on his own works, expresses the truth. We cannot include "Queen Mab", in spite of its sonorous rhetoric and fervid declamation, in the canon of his masterpieces. It had a succes de scandale on its first appearance, and fatally injured Shelley's reputation. As a work of art it lacks maturity and ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... great deal of applause.... Kupfer, in particular, distinguished himself: he brought his hands together in a peculiar manner, in the form of a cask, when he clapped, thereby producing a remarkably sonorous noise. The Princess gave him a large, dishevelled bouquet, which he was to present to the songstress; but the latter did not appear to perceive Kupfer's bowed figure, and his hand outstretched with the bouquet, and she turned and withdrew, again without waiting for ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... willow. Here would he smoke his pipe of a sultry afternoon, enjoying the soft southern breeze and listening with silent gratulation to the clucking of his hens, the cackling of his geese, and the sonorous grunting of his swine; that combination of farmyard melody, which may truly be said to have a silver sound, inasmuch as it conveys a certain assurance ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... person: therefore, transfer him to the personal staff of some native dignitary, where he will be appreciated. If my model does not suit you, there are many types to choose from. We have the lofty and sonorous Purdaisee, the Rajpoot, son of kings, the Bhundaree, or hereditary climber of palm trees, the Israelite, the low caste, useful, intelligent Mahar, and many more. Even the Brahmin in this iron age becomes a Chupprassee. ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... some stunt all right!" And then Jim began with his sonorous "Ladies and gentlemen!" He stated that the young fire-eater would show his familiarity with, and mastery over, fire by setting himself ablaze and leaping into the tank to extinguish the flames. The ringmaster added that there would be no danger to either the audience ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... and solar god Khonsu, is "the healer", and Agni "drives away all disease". Tammuz is the god "of sonorous voice"; Agni "roars like a bull"; and Heimdal blows a horn when the giants and demons threaten to attack the citadel of the gods. As the spring sun god, Tammuz is "a youthful warrior", says Jastrow, "triumphing over the storms of winter".[121] ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... the peculiarities of Mr. Gladstone's budget addresses that they roused curiosity in the outset, and, being delivered in a musical, sonorous, and perfectly modulated voice, kept the listeners interested to the very close. This financial statement of 1860 was admirably arranged for the purpose of awakening and keeping attention, piquing ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... nothing; he drowns all other sounds with his own sonorous phrases; private interest he replaces by devotion to the public welfare; for competition he substitutes emulation and rewards. After having posited industrial hierarchy as a principle, it being a necessary consequence of his faith in God, authority, and genius, he abandons himself to mystic powers, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... in Simla, and neither of the voices that mingled with Lady Bassett's was familiar to her. It did not take her long to decide that she had no desire for a closer acquaintance with their owners. One was a man's voice, sonorous and weighty, that sounded as if it were accustomed to propound mighty problems from the pulpit. The other was a woman's, high-pitched as the wail of a cat on a windy night, that caused the listening girl to nestle back on her pillow with the instant resolution to remain where she was until ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... to repay the enemy for the expense of shells and round shot; but the quantity of grape and musketry aimed at our particular heads, made a good concert of first and second whistles, while the more sonorous voice of the round shot, travelling to our friends on the left, acted as a thorough bass; and there was not a shell, that passed over us to the trenches, that did not send back a fragment among us as soon as it burst, as if to gratify a curiosity that I ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... recourse to a professor. He advised the pointage given later. This change became traditional, and has since been followed, except, it is said, in the case of Massol, who succeeded Dabadie. He, being possessed of a very sonorous voice of exceptional compass, was able to give the phrase as written. This change, or pointage, must have been heard by Rossini, and so must have been tacitly approved by him. This is ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... a voice behind her, the voice of the Abbe, sonorous and important. "Mademoiselle, permit me the honor to present to you the ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... that! No; these vibrations are due to the effervescence of the central fire. The crust of the earth is simply the shell of a boiler, and you know that such a shell, under the pressure of steam, vibrates like a sonorous plate. It is this effect which is being produced ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... the Selenite One of them more retarded than the other Recompounding of the two Systems of Waves by the Analyzer Interference thus rendered possible Consequent Production of Colours Action of Bodies mechanically strained or pressed Action of Sonorous Vibrations Action of Glass strained or pressed by Heat Circular Polarization Chromatic Phenomena produced by Quartz The Magnetization of Light Rings surrounding the Axes of Crystals Biaxal and Uniaxal Crystals Grasp of the Undulatory Theory The Colour ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... is extremely grateful to the ear, being in many instances expressive and sonorous. It certainly has no analogy with any other known language (at least so far as my knowledge of any other language extends), one or two instances excepted, which will be noticed in the specimen. The ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... contemplating her with astonishment, as she was addressing the Irish, now that she was about to turn towards him, recollected that some of his men were not exactly in a costume to meet a lady's eye. He raised his call to his mouth, and, with a sonorous whistle, cried out, "All you without trousers behind shealing, hoy!" an order immediately obeyed by the men who had been deprived ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the Scriptures in Latin, and the marked place was in the letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians,—the passage where he describes the preparation of the Christian as the arming of a warrior for glorious battle. The young voice rang out clearly, rolling the sonorous words, without slip or stumbling, to the end of ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... said at last, his sonorous voice carrying his words distinctly to the crowd without, "we are now ready to proceed with the investigation. I wish to state, for the information of those present, that after the prisoners were placed here under guard, I went to get a statement from the wounded man, Mr. Texas ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... application and study, for this sacred duty. The fashions of the day were rapidly running into the attainment of accomplishments among the young of her own sex, and the piano forte was already sending forth its sonorous harmony from one end of the Union to the other, while the glittering usefulness of the tambour-frame was discarded for the pallet and brush. The walls of our mansions were beginning to groan with the sickly green of imaginary fields, that caricatured ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... young girl with passionate attention. Proud and generous himself, he admired this proud and generous character. After a moment's meditative silence, he answered, in his sweet, sonorous voice, in an almost solemn tone: "Like you, I hold in detestation, falsehood and perjury. Like you, I think that man degrades himself, by accepting the right of being a cowardly tyrant, even though resolved never to use the power. Like you, I could ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... whom we write is dust and less than dust below the fertile soil of her so beloved Prussia—Furstin Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber! Can you not rise from the grave once more to charm us with the magic of your voice? Are those deep, mellowed tones, so sonorous and appealing, never to be heard again? Ah, me! Why, indeed, should such divinity be so short lived? Who could play Juliet as she could? Nobody! Her enemies laughed and said that her chronic adenoids utterly destroyed all the beauty of the part. Jealousy! Vile jealousy! Genius always ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... was told to this Fisherman by a certain Grand Old Voice, vague but sonorous, and voluble exceedingly, that if he would only make a complete change in his nets, and in the fashion of his fishing, miraculous draughts would become as common as minnows in a brook. This Voice visited our Fisherman often in his visions. And, behold, the Fisherman essayed the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... apparently basaltic, the whole seeming to have been shot up in points. the angles of which are complete. The stones are very heavy and compact, and when dashed against each other were extremely sonorous. ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... tempests have set in with a vengeance. The wind howls though the hole in the roof, and rude gusts sweep through the forest of pillars producing sonorous sounds, so sonorous, so deep, that one might sometimes almost fancy they were produced by the firing of the guns of a squadron. Flocks of seabirds take refuge in the cavern from the gale, and at intervals, when it lulls, almost deafen ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... pored over the sanguinary scrawl, and glanced from it with a shudder at the glittering knife. And, while he was in this state of temporary collapse, the works filled, the Power moved, the sonorous grindstones revolved, and every man worked at his ease, except one, the best of them ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... great poems in dramatic form it is perhaps the most remarkable for absolute singleness of aim and simplicity of construction; yet is it wholly free from all possible imputation of monotony or aridity. "Tamburlaine" is monotonous in the general roll and flow of its stately and sonorous verse through a noisy wilderness of perpetual bluster and slaughter; but the unity of tone and purpose in "Doctor Faustus" is not unrelieved by change of manner and variety of incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labor as of relish, are for the most part ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the "flaming" kind of prominence can be tested in a very remarkable manner. Christian Doppler,[627] professor of mathematics at Prague, enounced in 1842 the theorm that the colour of a luminous body, like the pitch of a sonorous body, must be changed by movements of approach or recession. The reason is this. Both colour and pitch are physiological effects, depending, not upon absolute wave-length, but upon the number of waves entering the eye or ear in a given interval of time. And this number, it is easy to see, must ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... trimmer dairy, I had not seen, and I stretched out my body upon the dry slabs, to drink from one of the milk-bowls. The cream was sweet, rich, and nourishing, and I was so absorbed directly, that I did not heed the footfalls of a tall, broad, vigorous man, who said in a quiet way, but with a deep, sonorous voice, and a ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... zenith. In this cumbre, or upper region, the stars did not surprise us by their brightness. At 6 P.M. the thermometer showed 32 degrees F.; the air was delightfully still and pure, [Footnote: We had no opportunity of noticing what Mr. Addison remarks, the air becoming sonorous and the sound of the sea changing from grave to acute after sunset and during the night. He attributes this increased intensity to additional moisture and an equability of temperature in the atmospheric strata. Perhaps the silence of night may tend to exaggerate the impression.] ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... enormous odds, but, on the testimony of Nelson himself, a better fleet never carried the fortunes of a great country than that under Sir John Jervis. The mere names of the ships or of their commanders awaken more sonorous echoes than the famous catalogue of the ships in the "Iliad." Trowbridge, in the Culloden, led the van; the line was formed of such ships as the Victory, the flagship, the Barfleur, the Blenheim, the Captain, with ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... draft of the Sonnet among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge is to be taken as the true text; and there the word is "talks." Phillips had doubtless the echo of "rings" in his ear from the Sonnet to Fairfax. The more sonorous reading, however, has found such general acceptance that an editor hardly ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... With this sonorous bit of character reading still ringing in his ears, Canby emerged from the cream-coloured apartment to find the stoop-shouldered figure of the also hypocritical son leaning wearily against the wall, waiting for a delaying elevator. ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... watered them, and, as it was impossible to leave till they were rested, lay down to snatch a brief sleep on the ground. We were invited to use the floor of a hovel for a couch, but after glancing at it, declined with great politeness and many sonorous words of thanks. ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... as became the new order he now professed. So, after having devised, altered, lengthened, curtailed, rejected, and again framed in his imagination a variety of names, he finally determined upon Rozinante, a name in his opinion lofty, sonorous, and full of meaning; importing that he had only been a rozin—a drudge horse—before his present condition, and that now he was before all ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Lecointre, how he shut his cloth-shop hard by, and stepped forth, one need hardly speak. Nor of Santerre, the sonorous Brewer from the Faubourg St. Antoine. Two other Figures, and only two, we signalise there. The huge, brawny, Figure; through whose black brows, and rude flattened face (figure ecrasee), there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet furibund,—he ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... sonorous tones ceased; he shut his lips tightly, as though clinching the testimony, and the life of the bedroom was suspended ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... boy? The ship is as quiet as the Quaker meeting in the Jerseys, before your good old grandfather used to break the charm of silence with his sonorous voice." ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper |
