"Trilling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was grand to hear her trilling out the pretty love speeches of Juliet, declaring the wrongs of Constance or Katherine, moaning out the woes of Desdemona. She had Shakespeare almost by heart, and she loved the ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... his "Ideal," in the incense of the perfumes "which are softly exhaled from the shapely flowers, from their censers of gold," in the heart of all creatures, "chaffinch and siskin, skylark and goldfinch, tiny choristers" piping and trilling, "elaborating their motets" to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis. He fraternizes with all, with his dogs and his cats, his tame tortoise, and even the "slimy and swollen ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... suppose that seven months of imprisonment had so broken my spirit, as well as my health, that I would be an easy prey to his blandishments? Did he dream that the prospect of liberty which newspaper rumour and semi-official information held out to me was too dear to be forfeited for a trilling forfeiture of honour? Did he believe that by an act of secret turpitude I would open my prison doors only to close them the faster on others who may or may not have been my friends—or did he imagine he had found in me a Massey to be moulded and manipulated into ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... rapids, where their interesting motions never fail to attract the angler and bird-student;" and this of their voices: "In early spring, the male birds may be seen perched on some moss-covered stone, trilling their fine clear notes;" and again: "I have stood within a few yards of one at the close of a blustering winter's day, and enjoyed its charming music unobserved. The performer was sitting on a stake jutting from a mill-pond in the midst of a cold and cheerless Forfarshire ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... towards the horizon where the great blue of the sky stooped to earth. There was the laughter of soldiers, and from an adjoining meadow came the neighing of a restive horse. The sunlight deepened, and from a hundred branches birds were trilling welcome to the promise ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... clouds the lark has sprung, Still trilling as he flies; The linnet sings as there he sung; The ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... will blossom ere long, And gay robin redbreast be trilling a song: But, always before them, I'm sure to be here: 'Tis first Pussy Willow says, ...
— The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 100, April, 1875 • Various
... spontaneous rhapsody of song as she went, trilling and warbling in sweet, untaught cadences, unconsciously like a bird singing to its mate in the springtime. She had a wonderful voice. The young man was sorry when she was out of hearing, but glad, too, for the water was beginning ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... dexterity that one sometimes sees in stupid persons. His head was quite empty of all thought, and he did not whistle over his work as another man might have done. The canary made up for his silence, trilling and chittering continually, splashing about in its morning bath, keeping up an incessant noise and movement that would have been maddening to any one but McTeague, who seemed to have no nerves ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... momentarily louder, there came the clear trilling of a mysterious bell. It floated out from the dark by-ways whence they had themselves just emerged, and something eerie and uncanny in its clamor brought a thrill of terror to the young knight's nerves ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... trilling snatches of her topical song as she creamed off her make-up, came to them through the sulky gloom of the corridor. Behind the closed door of Miss De Voe's dressing room, the gabble of the pink satin ponies was like hash in the chopping. Overhead, moving scenery created a remote ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... glad summer is here! O hark! 'tis to you I am singing: The sun is all gold in a heaven of blue, The birds in the forest are trilling for you, The flies 'mid the grasses are winging; The little brook babbles—its secret is sweet. The loveliest flowers would circle your feet,— And you to your work ever clinging!... Come forth! Nature loves you. Come forth! Do not fear! Fair summer is here, glad summer is here, Full measure ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... in C major, in the concluding movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. First sounded by the shrill sweet winds, it had suddenly been given out by the strings, in magnificent unison, and had mounted up and on, to the jubilant trilling of the little flutes. There was such a courageous sincerity in this theme, such undauntable resolve; it expressed more plainly than words what he intended his life of the next few years to be; for he was full to the brim of ambitious intentions, which he had never yet had a chance of putting ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... hushed accompaniment, she sang, at my suggestion, that same wild gipsy air which had so stirred me once before in the wood. But to-day, confined within these surrounding walls, her voice seemed to me even more glorious, so softly pure and plaintively sweet, anon soaring in trilling ecstasy—until the swelling glory sank, languished to a sigh and was gone; and I for one lost in awed wonder and delight. For to-day she sang with all that tender, unaffected sweetness, all that passionate intensity that was ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... window of her bower, slightly indisposed; she had not gone down to the priory, but sat inhaling the rich fragrance of the night as the gentle breeze wafted it from a thousand flowers. Star after star peeped out; one sweet-voiced nightingale began her song, trilling through the air; another enviously took up the strain. Hilda thought the earth had never seemed so much like heaven, and she imagined the tuneful birds sang their vesper song in union with the monks, whose solemn and plaintive chant awoke the ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... and there a bird, startled from its hiding place, sought refuge in the higher branches. A pensive quail piped an answer to the trilling call from the meadows. A tree toad uttered his lonely, guttural exclamation. The air, freshening with a coming covey of clouds, swayed the tops of ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... and now he pushed its head on to the bank, where straightway "George of Denmark" began chewing of such a salad as grew there. And now the Captain slid off stealthily; and smiling comically, and hitching up his great jack-boots, and moving forward with a jerking tiptoe step, he, just as she was trilling the last o-o-o of the last no in the above poem of Tom D'Urfey, came up to her, and touching her lightly ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... their testy pet, for I dread the cannibal temptation of those soft fair fingers, when brought into collision with Polly's hook and eye; gigantic Newfoundlanders dragging their perpetual chains, larks and linnets trilling the faint song of liberty behind their prison bars, cold green snakes stewing in a school-boy's pocket, and dormice nestling in a lady's glove, summon my antipathies; a cargo of five hundred pigs, with whom I ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... finished the delivery of this sentiment, and held the open hymn-book in his hand, he reached over to administer a blow on the ears of a child who was peeping through the window at a little bird trilling joyously on the deep-splayed ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... sunshine lay warm and bright and still over Las Plumas and the sky bent low and blue and cloudless above the town. Bright feathered birds were darting through the orchards and trilling their nesting songs, the peach tree buds were showing their pink noses, and the promise of spring was everywhere. In the big, wide hall of Pierre Delarue's house Marguerite stood beside the door of her room, talking with Emerson Mead, ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... horses cropping the dewy grass near by. Lewis's riding crop and gloves lay on his knee. He cast his hat upon the grass. Little birds hopped about on the ground and flitted here and there in the trees, twittering. A mocker, trilling in sudden ecstacy of life, spread a larger melody through ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... the room like an intoxicated bird, waving the letter, and trilling and running joyful chromatic scales, for the most part ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ordered, nodding her head, "A song of the rippling Spring that is gone— A song that's different from songs that are dead— Different as sunset is from the dawn. Sparkling with happiness, heavy with dew, Trilling and thrilling, all the way through; Fill it with heaven's own laughing blue— Write it!" she said. ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... not even hear the question. Trilling a gay song, he had rushed off where the stir and lively spectacle of ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... Trojan Ripheus in this round was set Fifth of the saintly splendours? now he knows Enough of that, which the world cannot see, The grace divine, albeit e'en his sight Reach not its utmost depth." Like to the lark, That warbling in the air expatiates long, Then, trilling out his last sweet melody, Drops satiate with the sweetness; such appear'd That image stampt by the' everlasting pleasure, Which fashions like itself all ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... of wood and field, these birds of sea and shore, and their interesting habits, you will wish to protect them from stone or gun, and their nests from the egg collector. You will listen to the lark and linnet, and be glad that the happy songster trilling such sweet notes is free to fly where he wishes, and is not pining in a cage. And you, little girl, will not encourage the destruction of these pretty creatures by wearing a sea-gull or part of some dead bird ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... the woods, the birds are trilling among the trees. It is their merry morning lay, but it gives him no gladness. There is still ringing in his ears that harsh monosyllable, "no." The wild-wood songsters appear to echo it, as if mockingly; the blue jay, and red cardinal, seem scolding him for intrusion ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... on his right hand, from which the mist was curling away, and in the glory of the dawn overhead the larks were trilling. A patch of scarlet poppies was almost startling in its vividness, and beyond the poppies a long ribbon of yellow mustard was backed by a ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... the city, was not dense, but the girls thought they had never seen foliage so vividly green nor grass so soft and luxuriant. The beckoning shadows of the trees, the fragrance of the dew-drenched flowers, the trilling music of a thousand carefree, joyous little songsters, all combined in one ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... the Semiquaver friar, who happened to be by, dear bumbasting, shaking, trilling, quavering cod, what thinkest thou of this fellow? Is he a ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... well out of his mouth when from the recesses of the hut a rollicking French voice was heard, trilling out merrily: ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... these birds—and frequently many of them would be trilling at the same time—they sang in several different keys, some of them striking the treble and others dropping almost to the alto. Occasionally two birds in different parts of a field would sing responsively, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... carpet of green grass in both directions, dotted with clumps of sagebrush. It had rained a few days before—the last rain of many, it chanced—and there were damp spots in the road in places and the grass and the sage were fresh in color. Meadow-larks were trilling, and the whole scene was one of peace—provided the beholder could blot out the memory of the tenantless clay ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... with the annunciator at the principal's desk was trilling in IV. English, as it was in all the other recitation rooms. IV. English rose, the boys waiting until the girls had passed from the room. A study-hour in the big assembly room followed for Dick & Co. Yet, had anyone watched Dan Dalzell, it would have been found that young ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... found fault with me, and that, too, almost before the servants, because I chose to go out again to-night, and angrily informed me that you would like to see me here before I left the house—surely you did not expect to find me trilling a love-song for you in heart-broken accents! Still, I must say that I wish you had not made it necessary for me ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... as very injurious to morality. For first, they conceive it to be great presumption in men to summon God as a witness in their trilling ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... upon Cayuga lake. Ben Letts said it put him in mind of listening to the wild cry of a lost soul, while Myra Longman could hear only the songs of angels in the exquisite tones which fell, pure and sweet, from the red lips. Tess knew nothing of breath power, nothing of trained trilling tones, but nature had given her both and like the birds of the air she ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... of the old fir, bearing its heavy mantle of ivy from base to topmost twig, and not twenty yards from the window, a thrush sits and sings. You must watch him carefully ere you assure yourself that those sweet, trilling notes of peerless music come from that tiny throat. A rare lesson in voice production he will teach you. Deep breathing, headnotes clear as a bell and effortless, as only three or four singers in Europe can produce them, without the slightest sense of strain or throatiness—such ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... about eleven in the morning, a stranger passing the church would have heard through the open doors and windows the exquisitely sweet voice of Alice Page, clear as a bell and melodious as a bird's, toying and trilling through "Coronation," or some other easily recognized hymn; and had that stranger awaited the close of service he or she would have seen among the congregation filing out one petite and plump little lady, with ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... had done enough in pointing out to him the path which would conduct him to success, if he had deserved it, she did not think it worth while to enter into any farther explanation; since he refused to cede, for her salve, so trilling an objection: from this instant she resolved to have ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Byng would probably get over his disappointment—he'd only feel that he hadn't been used fairly, and he's used to that; but Jigger wouldn't sleep to-night, and it's essential that he should. Think of how much happiness and how much pain you can give, just by trilling a simple little song with your little voice ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... spectacle of its sudden passing: a seeming drawing down behind the sea of the whole vast flare of light.... Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with vapor; frogs commence to make a queer bubbling noise; and some unknown creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high, keen, as of a thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents, aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees of our hotel I hear a continuous dripping sound; ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... voice, for she awoke, like a bird, with song. He heard her trilling, in and out through open windows, all down the long wing that was hers. And he heard her singing in the patio garden, where, also, she desisted long enough to quarrel with her Airedale and scold the collie pup unholily attracted by the red-orange, divers-finned, and many-tailed Japanese goldfish ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... 'Tis that enamoured nightingale Who thus gives me the reply:— To his partner in the vale Listening on a bough hard by Warbling thus his tuneful wail. Cease, sweet nightingale, nor show By thy softly witching strain Trilling forth thy bliss and woe, How a man might feel love's pain, When a bird can feel his so. No: it was that wanton vine That in fond pursuit has sought The tall tree it doth entwine, Till the green weight it hath brought Makes the noble trunk decline. Green entwining ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... on, he at last filled the quiet night with the strenuous sweep of his chant. Surprised at his own fervor, he paused for a moment, listening, half frightened, half ashamed of his outbreak. But there was only the trilling of the night wind in the leaves, or the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... to the old traditions, ranging from the simple monotone to the exuberance of Old Testament cadences. My wife, who has not the slightest suspicion that I am a Jew, is not a little astonished by this peculiar musical wail, this trilling and cadencing. When Weill sang for the first time, Minka, the poodle, crawled into hiding under the sofa, and Cocotte, the polly, made an attempt to throttle himself between the bars of his cage. 'M. Weill, M. Weill!' Mathilde cried terror-stricken, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... usually rose with the robins, when there were any in the neighborhood. There were plenty on the lawn around the Sagamore Club that dewy June morning, chirping, chirking, trilling, repeating their endless arias from tree and gate-post. And through the outcry of the robins, the dry cackle of the purple grackles, and the cat-bird's whine floated earthward the melody of ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... ends here, shall grow pure enough To love them, brave enough to strive for them, And strong to reach them though the roads be rough: That having learnt—by no mere apophthegm— Not just the draping of a graceful stuff About a statue, broidered at the hem,— Not just the trilling on an opera-stage Of "liberta" to bravos—(a fair word, Yet too allied to inarticulate rage And breathless sobs, for singing, though the chord Were deeper than they struck it) but the gauge Of civil wants sustained and wrongs abhorred, The serious sacred meaning and full use Of freedom for ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the song the dancers who are to represent the Daisies give a trilling shout and appear from the rear of the open space, skipping; their leader holds the end of a long green rope, which is caught hold of by each dancer who ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... tiresome way around the boys at leap-frog, and the mothers and babies and baby-carriages. She did not notice the smells, or feel the bumps she got from those who ran against her. She thought she was in the blue drawing-room at Newport, where a famous Hungarian count was trilling the soft prelude to a csardas on the piano, and Mr. Stuyvesant had just introduced her to the future Mayor, who was spellbound by her charms, and was by her side, a captive. She reached out her hand, and it touched Mr. Fletcher's ...
— Different Girls • Various
... up, too, and faced her with the first bolt she flung. They were quite alone, for the trilling notes of a two-step had swiftly emptied the veranda. He still wore a smile on his lips, but its singularly heart-warming quality had gone from it. His red-brown face had grown a shade less red-brown, and his grey, whimsical, good-natured eyes looked suddenly hard as rock. He addressed her as if she ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... hold on, you have got all mixed up," said the old man. "She does not gargle. That is called warbling, or trilling, or trolling, or something. And no girl has a tenor voice. She must be ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... was a lightness, there was brightness in the clear eyes. The intense youth of her heart was evanescent; it seemed constantly rising upwards like the breath of a spring morning—a morning when the birds are trilling. The face sharpened to a tiny chin, and the face was pale, although there was bloom on the cheeks. The forehead was shadowed by a sparkling cloud of brown hair, the nose was straight, and each little nostril was pink ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... subscriber's tier. Indeed the jewellery was so plentiful and of such expensive quality that the whole row of boxes shone like a vast coronet set with thousands of precious stones. When the music did not amuse society, the diamonds and rubies twinkled and glittered uneasily, but when Cordova was trilling her wildest they were quite still and blazed with a steady light. Afterwards the audience would all say again what they had always said about every great lyric soprano, that it was just a wonderful instrument ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... feeling his oats," flung back Chunky. The boy hugged himself delightedly. What he had done was to give a trilling tongue movement accompanied by a hiss. It was a perfect imitation of the trilling hiss of the rattlesnake. When Stacy had first given the imitation he did not realize what he was doing. He had fooled ...
— The Pony Rider Boys with the Texas Rangers • Frank Gee Patchin
... body of reserve forces—were ready along the whole line. Jacquelin, Mariette, and Josette received orders to appear in full dress. The garden was raked. The old maid regretted that she couldn't come to an understanding with the nightingales nesting in the trees, in order to obtain their finest trilling. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... the lore of antiquity, with its accumulating glosses and commentaries, and the last will be light and trivial in the balance. Greek poetry has been likened to the song of the nightingale as she sits in the rich, symmetrical crown of the palm-tree, trilling her thick-warbled notes; but even this is less sweet and tender than the music of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... only in keeping with the magnificent proportions of the singer. A voice which has no grate, no strain, which flows without effort,—which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but alights on it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and trilling,—a voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich, sombre depths of soft, heavy chest-tone,—can come only with a physical nature at once strong, wide, and fine,—from a nature such as the sun of Italy ripens, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... they started on their walk, and her face looked flushed and warm. But through the park-like district to the wood she raced with Don, and made him leap over her sunshade and roll over and over on the bright green grass. The larks were trilling overhead, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... to yon thrush's trilling; Phyllis, Phyllis, are you willing, When love speaks from cave and tree, Only we should ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... influence, the man of Old Japan found himself truly in a world of spirits and demons. They spoke to him in the sound of tides and of cataracts in the moaning of wind and the whispers of leafage, in the crying of birds, and the trilling of insects, in all the voices of nature. For him all visible motion—whether of waves or grasses or shifting mist or drifting cloud—was ghostly; and the never moving rocks—nay, the very stones by the wayside—were informed with ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... of the eye; while others even crossed themselves. But late in the night the fear of death somehow subsided, grew bearable. All the rooms were occupied, while in the drawing room a new violinist was trilling without cease—a free-and-easy, clean-shaven young man, whom the pianist with the cataract had searched out somewhere and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... appealing in the trilling of their notes: It is innocence that's pouring from their little baby throats; And I gaze at them enraptured, for my joy's a real thing Every evening when the kiddies and their mother start ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... the fourth division are a very important accompaniment to the anthem of dawn, their notes, though short, serving agreeably to fill up the pauses made by the other musicians. Thus, the hair-bird (Fringilla Socialis) has a sharp and trilling note, without any modulation, and not at all melodious, when heard alone; but in the morning it is the chief harmonizer of the whole chorus, and serves, more than any other voice, to give unity and symphony to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... difficult of all vocal exercises, unless the singer is blessed with a natural trill, which is a rare gift. We begin with quarter notes, then add eighths and sixteenths. This exercise, if practiced daily, will produce the desired result. It is taken on each tone of the voice—trilling ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... you are poaching on somebody else's preserves. The best results can be obtained about the midnight hour, when the dew is on the rose, the jasmine bud drunken with its own perfume and the mock- bird trilling a last good night to his drowsy mate. You entice your best girl into the garden to watch Venus' flaming orb hanging like the Kohinoor pendant from the crescent moon. You pause beneath the great gnarled live oak, its myriad leaves ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... appear, oddly enough, to have doubted its complete suitability to the tastes and demands of the reading public in the present century; for they invariably replied to Ernest's inquiries that they would be happy to undertake its production for the trilling sum of one hundred guineas, payable in advance; but that they did not see their way to accepting the risk and responsibility of floating so speculative a volume on their own account. In the end, the unhappy manuscript, after many refusals, was converted ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... melody of wrangling voices blent With liquid laughter, and with rippling calls Of piping lips and trilling echoes ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... trilling laugh, and the other girls joined in so heartily that, for a moment, or so, work came to a standstill. Hippy then briskly attacked the packs, while Tom secured them to the backs of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... be guessed that the music of the gray morn when we started found a ready echo in my heart. The whistle of a plover cut the breaking day, the meadow larks piped clear above us in chorus with the trilling of the thrush, the wimpling burn tinkled its song, and the joy that took me fairly by the throat was in tune with all of them. For what does a lover ask but to be one and twenty, to be astride a willing horse, and to be beside the one woman ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... sacredness, it had come to stand for something of pain. On his walk that morning he had noted many things with new eyes—the flowers gladdening the face of nature; the trees rearing their proud heads and standing each in his own place—each doing his own work; the birds trilling their songs of praise and stirring in the soul those holy aspirations whose feet scarce touch the earth and whose face is set toward heaven—all these doing the Father's work and answering with the quick response of perfect obedience, ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... alone seemed to revel in the luxuriance of this tropical paradise. A brace of pea-fowl stalked over the parterre in all the pride of their rainbow plumage. In the fountain appeared the tall form of a flamingo, his scarlet colour contrasting with the green leaves of the water-lily. Songsters were trilling in every tree. The mock-bird, perched upon the highest limb, was mimicking the monotonous tones of the parrot. The toucans and trogons flashed from grove to grove, or balanced their bodies under the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... meeting holy Is like the woodbirds' trilling, Is like a sea-song thrilling, When red the sun sinks slowly,— Is like a horn on mountain, That wakes time's sleep thereunder And summons to life's fountain To ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... was strolling along under the hedge, heard a Blackbird trilling on a branch. Quick as thought she jumped and seized the little fellow, and was about to gobble him down then and there. But the Blackbird began ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... bludgeon, I set off along the stream incontinent, following a path I had trodden many a time when but a lad; a path that led on through mazy thickets, shady dells and green coppices dappled with sunlight and glad with the trilling melody of birds; but ever as I went, before my eyes was a man who twisted in my grasp and died, over and over again, and in my ears the sounds of his agony. And ever as I went trees reached out arms as if to stay ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... is called the tresillo, from its shape, it being an old form of the figure three, reversed, thus, . It is the only true guttural in the language, being pronounced forcibly from the throat, with a trilling sound (castaneteando). ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... nearer by, and under that cover quicken to a gallop. Away, away; splash, splash, through the coolees, around the maraises, clouds of wild fowl that there is no time to shoot into rising now on this side, now on that; snipe without number, gray as the sky, with flashes of white, trilling petulantly as they flee; giant snowy cranes lifting and floating away on waving pinions, and myriads of ducks in great eruptions of hurtling, whistling wings. On they gallop; on they splash; heads ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... aroused by strange music; at first I could not tell whence it came. Bells were ringing a lively chime with silvery notes, now breaking slowly on the ear, as if they could scarcely detach themselves from each other; now blending in groups, in strange flourishes; now trilling, and swelling sonorously. The music was merry and fantastic, although of a somewhat primitive character, it is true, like the many-colored town over which it poured its notes like a flight of birds; indeed, it seemed to harmonize so well with the character of the city ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... said last year Sounds yet in my ear,— Birdlike at the window sitting, Tapping, trilling there, Singing, in would bear Joy the warmth ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... for adjustment between the two countries were, after all, of no particular importance and were easily arranged. The days seemed to have gone by for that over-strained sensitiveness which was continually giving rise to senseless bickerings, when every trilling breeze seemed to fan the smouldering fires of jealousy. The two great English-speaking nations appeared finally to have realized the absolute folly of continual disputes between countries whose destiny and ideals were so completely in accord ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that he felt no difference. He felt the limpness and dejection in Nelly. He saw that her roses had faded, that she walked without the old joyous spring. He heard her no longer talking to the dogs, trilling to the canary. It was January now, and raw, cold weather. It seemed as though the sunshine had vanished from the house for good. The General had been wont to say that the cheerfulness of his house was ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... counteractive of inward excitement, but with a chill at her heart which made the outward chill only depressing. The golden sunlight beamed through the dripping boughs like a Shechinah, or visible divine presence, and the birds were chirping and trilling their new autumnal songs so sweetly, it seemed as if their throats, as well as the air, were all the clearer for the rain; but Caterina moved through all this joy and beauty like a poor wounded leveret painfully dragging its little body through the sweet ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... describe them well. But music calls me; I hear it trilling, and sobbing, and whispering everywhere; and sometimes it is so loud and so beautiful that I wonder why every one else doesn't stop to listen. They never do. So I sing back my answer. It is silent singing. You would only wonder why I was so quiet ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... more than a dream, and a dream of unutterable folly. Mrs. Frothingham's unconscious intervention availed him nothing; he had spoken, and must speak again. For a man of sensitive honour there could be no trilling in such a matter as this with a girl in Alma Frothingham's position. And did he not rejoice that wavering was no ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... upper gate, they ran pell-mell northwards, and the knights and fighting men of Arthur kept up with them for many miles, and there was a running fight and much wounding and slaying all through the fresh green countryside, where the hedges were laden with May-blossoms, and in the sky the larks were trilling. ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... weeks having thus been wasted in diplomatic trilling—Barneveld was admitted to his Majesty's dressing-room. The Advocate at the king's request came without his colleague, and was attended only by his son. No other persons were present in the chamber save Buzanval and Beringen. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... these, from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme! For you! for you, I am trilling these songs, In the love of comrades, In ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Then the flashing, changing, whirling colors of the dancers struck Lane as oriental, erotic, bizarre—gorgeous golds and greens and reds striped by the conventional black. Suddenly the blare ceased, and the shrill, trilling laughter had dominance. The rapid circling of forms came to a sudden stop, and the dancers streamed in all directions over ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... amateurishly ridiculous, while, on the contrary, the most admired rapid trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called "false shakes" a hundred and fifty years ago. Incidentally it may be remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear it has become an absolute abomination ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... take life seriously,' she said to her one morning after breakfast, as they were waiting for the postman in the garden, and Elfie had seated herself on the top bar of the gate, swinging herself to and fro, and trilling out an old English ditty as she ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... the ecstasy of the elbow that pressed against hers, and the ecstasy of her child's voice still trilling on the black silence, Lilly was conscious of movement. The gray silhouette marching down the aisle of gloom. A group up about the piano. Another chord struck out. Zoe's voice skipping ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... laughed the pie lady as she whistled again, this time just like a canary trilling when it swings at the top of its cage in the sunshine. Curly laughed, too, and then the lady went to the oven to take ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis
... leo. A singing or trilling sound, a tinnitus aurium, a sign that the deity Kaulanaula was making some communication to the one ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... "Here! Here! Here!" At this ringing command, every bird, as far as the river carried his voice, came to investigate and remained to admire. Over and over he rang every change he could invent. He made a gallant effort at warbling and trilling, and then, with the gladdest heart he ever had known, he burst into ringing song: "Good Cheer! Good ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Bob-o-link, Whose trilling song above the meadow floats; The eager air speeds tremulous to drink The bubbling sweetness of the liquid notes, Whose silver cadences arise and sink, Shift, glide and shiver, like the trembling motes In the full gush of sunset. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... can remember. It was in the month of May, and not likely to be otherwise than fine. The sun was shining brightly, and the birds filled the air with joyous music. The thrush and blackbird mingled their strong vigorous voices, with the mellowed trilling of the skylark, and over the fields could be heard almost continuously the call of the cuckoo—now here, now there, as the active creature plied her restless wing from one hedge-tree to another. There was a strong sweet perfume in the air like the scent of almonds, for the white thorn was ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... but even as he reflected, the spring regained its sway. All around was golden green, all—trees, bushes, grass—shone and stirred gently in wide waves under the soft breath of the warm wind; from all sides flooded the endless trilling music of the larks; the peewits were calling as they hovered over the low-lying meadows, or noiselessly ran over the tussocks of grass; the rooks strutted among the half-grown short spring-corn, standing out black against its tender green; they disappeared in the already whitening rye, only from ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... - Willis's sometime named - In those two smooth-floored upper halls For faded ones so famed? Where as we trod to trilling sound The fancied phantoms stood around, Or joined us in the maze, Of the powdered Dears from Georgian years, Whose dust lay in sightless sealed-up biers, ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... looked at one another in amaze. Were their ears deceiving them? But no; the trilling notes came nearer. Involuntarily they pressed forward a few paces, and then came to a dead stop. What ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... is a pleasant reflection that one has made a smart reply-one sleeps comfortably after it. And they both went to sleep; but the Poet could not sleep. His thoughts welded forth like the tones from the violin, trilling like pearls, rushing like a storm through the forest. He recognized the feeling of his own heart-he perceived the ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... know the soft trilling whistle of the common Hoptoad in May? The call of the Cat's-eye is of the same style but very loud and harsh, and heard early in April. If on some warm night in springtime, you hear a song which sounds like a cross between a Toad's whistle and a Chicken's squawk, get a searchlight and go ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... murmured gently to herself two or three times, as if enjoying her own native trilling of the r's. "It's a pretty name. It sounds like a song. Don Carroll, eh! El Capitan ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... several hours; otherwise the carriage would not have driven away. In confirmation of this theory, he heard voices, cheery voices, in laughing talk, and one of them made him prick up his ears. He heard the piano crisply trilling a response to light, skilful fingers. He longed for a peep within, and regretted that he had dropped Mr. Hayne from the list of his acquaintance. He recognized Hayne's shadow, presently, thrown by the lamp upon the ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... the shrine, they knelt down in a semicircle, and very gently began to strike the short, responsive strings. The murmur of a lazy rivulet among whispering reeds, . . the sighing suggestions of leaves ready to fall in autumn,—the low, languid trilling of nightingales just learning to sing,—any or all these might be said to resemble the dulcet melody they played; while every delicate arpeggio, every rippling chord was muffled with a soft pressure of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the head of the line came the shrill trilling of a whistle. At once the foreman nearest Vanamee repeated it, at the same time turning down the line, and waving one arm. The signal was repeated, whistle answering whistle, till the sounds lost themselves in the distance. At once the line of ploughs lost its immobility, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... splendour of the brilliants on her bracelet—I, of course, said the lustre of the arm itself—was so great as to obstruct my view of the stage. She smilingly complied. The last long-drawn note of the overture was over, the curtain had risen, and the prima donna Schenkelmann was just trilling forth that exquisite aria with which the opera of the Gasthaus begins, when the door of the box immediately adjoining the imperial one opened, and a party entered in the gay Wallachian costume. The first who took her place, in a sort of decorated chair in front, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... it was "The Rising of the Lark." Heavens! what a bitter contrast to his own thoughts! But he stood rooted, as if spell-bound, to hear it to the end. The lark's upward flight was over; and Elsley heard him come quivering down from heaven's gate, fluttering, sinking, trilling self-complacently, springing aloft in one bar, only to sink lower in the next, and call more softly to his brooding mate below; till, worn out with his ecstasy, he murmured one last sigh of joy, and sank into the nest. The picture ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... he was to meet Wetzel at sunset. A smoky haze like a purple cloud lay upon the gently waving grass. He could not see across the stretch of prairie-land, though at this point he knew it was hardly a mile wide. With the trilling of the grasshoppers alone disturbing the serene quiet of this autumn afternoon, all nature seemed in harmony with the declining season. He stood a while, his thoughts becoming the calmer for the silence and loneliness of this ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... o'clock in the morning Florent almost fancied that Leon was giving a supper-party; for he heard low whispering followed by a sound of munching jaws and rustling paper. And then a rippling girlish laugh would break faintly on the deep silence of the sleeping house like the soft trilling ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... those unuttered words beating on the silence of the woods. There was nothing else to break that silence but the faint constant murmur in the tree-tops, and once, beyond that leafy curtain, the sudden trilling of a solitary bird. Again, the tremendousness of this high isolation swept over her. The camp and its gay party might have been on ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and that her eyes were swimming with a new mischief which she was trying to hide from him. In that laugh there was something which was not like Melisse. Slight as the change was, he noticed it; but instead of displeasing him, it set a vague sensation of pleasure trilling like a ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... happily; she loved it and tended it, and the gay little prisoner tried to reward her by the most marvellous trilling in his power, but her heart was the sorer for ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea- tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aside, walked to the side-table, took his handsome flute from its case, set up a piece of music on a stand, and began to run through a few preliminary flourishes that were peculiarly bird-like in their trilling, when there was a tap at the door and Jerry ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... arrived at Windsor, and at the coming home from his shop of Enoch, Ben always said: "Messes Enos-Harries has been singing the piano. Like the trilling of God's feathered choir is ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... The trilling of his cabin phone startled him to attention. He entered, took the receiver and heard Leclair's ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Robert's side. It was Tayoga trilling forth a melody, wonderfully clear and penetrating, a melody that carried far up the still ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... The words sounded like a rally call. With that the girl fled down the hall, trilling the merriest sort of a ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... minutes neither spoke, and from the garden there came loud and clear the joyous trilling of ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... is trilling Songs of love to lovers' ears, Which, to hearts with sorrow thrilling, Seem ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... where he joined the conversation for a time. Then there was a diversion, the new soprano having consented to sing. The murmur of voices subsided for the most part, save from a party of elderly people, hard of hearing, who continued their absorbing conversation throughout. Miss Trilling sang a love song with much expression, and responded to an encore with a humorous selection. The young people applauded loudly, and their elders smiled with indiligent pleasure. Hubert continued his search, now rather despairing, for that for which he had come. This time he proceeded under ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... a whip-poor-will this morning for the first time this year, and would be very glad if others would inform me if they have heard the bird this spring. I heard a cat-bird trilling its notes about a week ago, and bluebirds, martins, and other birds have made their appearance. Pewits are building their nests. Brother Le Verne gets YOUNG PEOPLE, and we have all the numbers published. We all like it very much. I like the articles on natural history best, and as I ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... funnelling whirl of clouds eddied over the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil of cloud rolled ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... sees him on his autumn and winter travels, and knows his Sparrow-like call-note, while his summer home is so far north or so high on mountains that few visit him in the tangled woodlands where he sings a pretty trilling song ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... again, I think she forgot even me for the moment. She ran gaily up the steps, trilling ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... the gentle pieman in the road behind me trilling, "'Tira, lira!' stop him, stop him! 'Tra! la! la!' ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... clear away and wash her dishes, that she might creep to her own room under the eaves. Through her open casement came up to her the sounds of the April night: a heightened chorus of little frogs in a rain-fed branch; nearer in the dooryard a half-dozen tree-toads trilling plaintively as many different minors; with these, scents of growing, sharpened and sweetened by the dark. And all night the cedar tree which stood close to the porch edge below moved in the wind of spring, and, chafing against the shingles, spoke through the miniature music ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... though slow to notice such things, remarked it wonderingly; and with one accord we threw ourselves upon the grass and drank in the bounteous melody. It was not different in quality so much as in quantity. Such a flood of it! Such magnificent copiousness! Such long, trilling, deferring, accelerating preludes! Such sudden, ecstatic overtures would have intoxicated the dullest ear. He was really without a compeer, a master artist. Twice afterward I was conscious of having heard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... charm with a kind of fear. He shrank away from the priest, and at the table he left the talk to him and his host. They supped in a room opening into a sort of wing; beyond it was a small kitchen, from which an elderly woman brought the dishes, and where that girl whom he heard singing kept trilling away as if she were excited, like a canary, by the sound ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... off rapidly. Its lights disappeared, and in a minute or two the sound of it was lost, as though everything were agreed to put an end to this sweet, oblivious madness. Left alone on the platform, looking into the darkness, Gomov heard the trilling of the grasshoppers and the humming of the telegraph-wires, and felt as though he had just woke up. And he thought that it had been one more adventure, one more affair, and it also was finished and had left only a memory. He was moved, sad, and filled with a faint remorse; surely the young ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... of the country in them to endure the passages of political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come. Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short, the vast extent of common ground ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... seemed bending in worship, the birds trilling hymns of joy, and the flowers wafting offerings of incense! There are times when earth seems heaven and all nature worshipers. Ishmael was divinely happy; even the lost image of Claudia reappeared now surrounded with a halo of hope, for to-day aspirations seemed prophecies, will seemed power, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the damp raffia sad willow sticks after Miss Edith had left her, she so far forgot her trouble that the old, familiar laugh bubbled up to her lips, and once she paused in her work to answer a trilling bird in the branches overhead. She was all alone on the wide, shady lawn, and so engrossed in her own thoughts that she never heard the chug-chug of a motor-car gliding up the river road, nor saw the black-frocked figure leap nimbly from the machine and scurry up the walk to the kitchen ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown |
