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More "Dirge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... home, a young girl passed him, walking very briskly. She paused for a moment just ahead of him to give some money to a poor woman who, doubled up on the pavement in a black shawl, was grinding out from a wheezy little organ a thin, dirge-like strain. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... gowned like a bride in white. But the white on this occasion was not the emblem of purity; rather was it the pallor of icy death. The rigorous storms seemed to prophesy of trouble; the very winds were rehearsing a dirge to be plaintively sung over mountains and moors ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... distant and sullen roar of the ocean, as it breaks in sheets of foam on the rock-bound coast—the fitful cry of curlew, as it wings over them its solitary way—or the occasional low moaning of the wind, as, stealing through amidst the rocks, it seems to pour forth a mournful dirge for the shades of departed greatness:—when we look on a scene like this, we have before our gaze all that is known of these men of the olden time. Their blood-stained rites, their solemn mysteries, are forgotten; but their simple temples still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... at Vanity Fair In robes that rival the tulip's glare, Think on the chaplet of leaves which round His fading forehead will soon be bound, And on each dirge the priests will say When his cold corse ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... ordinary share of sensibility can witness a ceremony involving such consequences without the deepest emotion. The scene produced an effect upon the spirit of Jane which was never effaced. The wreath of flowers which crowned the beautiful victim; the veil enveloping her person; the solemn and dirge-like chant, the requiem of her burial to all the pleasures of sense and time; the pall which overspread her, emblematic of her consignment to a living tomb, all so deeply affected the impassioned child, that, burying her face in her hands, she wept ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... psalms and anthems, a dirge accompanied by trumpets was sung, "And the King said to all the people that were with him, rend your clothes and gird you with sackcloth and mourn. And the King himself followed the bier. And they buried him; and ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... rise Above thy lonely, sun-bleached frame; No epitaph of well-turned lies Shall be inscribed beneath thy name; No bells for thee a dirge shall ring, No choir beside thy grave shall sing, Yet hast thou ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... the silver streams of Eridan,[90] On either side banked with a lily wall, Whiter than both, rides the triumphant swan, And sings his dirge, and prophesies his fall, Diving into his watery funeral! But Eridan to Cedron must submit His flowery shore; nor can he envy it, If, when Apollo sings, his swans ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... Secretary Stanton and Secretary McCulloch were present. After prayer by the chaplain, the Declaration of Independence was read by Hon. EDWARD MCPHERSON, Clerk of the House. After the reading of the Declaration, followed by the playing of a dirge by the band, Hon. SCHUYLER COLFAX, Speaker of the House of Representatives, introduced the orator of the day, Hon. J. A. ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... Emperor Inkyo (A.D. 453), the Korean Court sent eighty musicians robed in black, who marched in procession to the Yamato palace, playing and singing a dirge as they went." ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... him through his career, for it may be found in Bonald, and also in De Maistre, though not, perhaps, in the volumes he had already published. It was less original than he at first imagined, for the English divines commonly held it from the seventeenth century, and its dirge was sung only the other day by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol.[404] A Scottish professor would even be justified in claiming it for Reid. But of course it was Lamennais who gave it most importance, in his programme ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... underneath the murky sky, In the hush of desperation, not to conquer but to die. Hark! the bagpipe's fitful wailing—not the pibroch loud and shrill, That, with hope of bloody banquet, lured the ravens from the hill— But a dirge both low and solemn, fit for ears of dying men, Marshall'd for their latest battle, never more to fight again. Madness—madness! Why this shrinking? Were we less inured to war When our reapers swept the harvest from the field of red Dunbar? Fetch my horse, and blow the trumpet!—Call the riders ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... On the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland; considered as the Subject of Poetry; inscribed to Mr. John Home 66 An Epistle, addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer, on his Edition of Shakespeare's Works 78 Dirge in Cymbeline, sung by Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead 87 Verses written on a Paper which contained a Piece of Bride-cake, given to the Author by a Lady 89 To Miss Aurelia C——R, on her Weeping at her Sister's Wedding 91 Sonnet 91 Song. The Sentiments borrowed from Shakespeare ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... wind brought mournful strains of the victim's dirge to our lodge. I fastened the door, with robes against it to keep the sound out. Then a smell of burning drifted through the window, and I stop-gapped that, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... in his arms, never petitioned for mercy. She gave no sign of life or being, saving that she moaned at regular intervals in piteous accents:—'He has forgotten and abandoned me!' as if that one simple expression comprised in itself, her acknowledgment of the uselessness of her life, and her dirge for her expected death. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... that, when a warrior is about to meet death, he must sing a death dirge. Hakadah thought of his Ohitika as a person who would meet his death without a struggle, so he began to sing a dirge for him, at the same time hugging him tight to himself. As if he were a human being, he whispered in ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... more, which is, not paying a proper regard to the present temper of the company, or the occasion of their meeting, in introducing a topic of conversation, by which as great an absurdity is sometimes committed, as it would be to sing a dirge at a wedding, or ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Loud lamentation; "Weep for our warrior slain, Ne'er shall we see again, Our mighty captain." Rises the harpist old, Calls for his harp of gold, Sweeps through its mournful strings, And loud the music rings, The dirge ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... is your heart on your halfpenny,[1] or are you saying a dirge for your father's soul? ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... rather a dark rim of brooding on the rough horizon seemed to thicken itself against the light under the sullen march of vapors—the muffled funeral of the year. Dry trees and naked crags stood forth, and the dirge of the wind went to and fro, and there was ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... dark shadows, as rock beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious instructions ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... contained a constantly recurring Asiatic element. This comes out most often as a note of warning; like the motif of Ortrud in the opera of "Lohengrin," it mingles ominously in every chorus of Hellenic enterprise or paean of Hellenic victory, and finally swells into a national dirge at the Turkish conquest of the peninsula. It comes out in the legendary history of the Argonautic Expedition and the Trojan War; in the arrival of Phoenician Cadmus and Phrygian Pelops in Grecian lands; in the appearance of Tyrian ships on the coast of the Peloponnesus, where they gather the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... slumber, vexed by deformed, fleeting, shapeless phantoms; and, waking, as the sun, through a veil of hazy cloud, glinted with a sickly ray across the casement, she heard her father settled back betimes to his one pursuit, and calling forth from his Familiar a low mournful strain, like a dirge ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... manner, her every-day clothes, her usual hat. Jones, noting these details, inwardly commended them. But at once, another detail was apparent. The entrance to the room where the Bella figlia had been succeeded by a dirge, was blocked. There ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper'd by ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... queen or dairymaid, but the barrier between himself and her was built of the old hurdles of low birth and iron fortune. Here anyway in his heart rang the knell 'Good-bye,' the farewell, farewell, farewell which every poet worth his salt has heard not once but many times, and, in the middle of the dirge the bell rang so remorselessly, came the exquisite chrysm of a fondling hand ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... all new to you, captain," Rovard Grauffis said sourly, "but Lucas Trask's dirge for the Decline and Fall of the Sword-Worlds is an old song to the rest of us. I have too much to do to stay here ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... earnest, quiet moonbeam looks in fixedly, marking the bars of the grated windows on the prostrate, sleeping forms. The mother and daughter are singing together a wild and melancholy dirge, common as a ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... parted asunder and gave place to the wain. And the others when they had brought him to the famous house, laid him on a fretted bed, and set beside him minstrel leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay, while the women made moan with them. And among the women white-armed Andromache led the lamentation, while in her hands she held the head of Hector slayer of men: "Husband, thou art gone young from life, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... dirge-like sound as it floated through the air, calling upon all good Christians to pray for the repose of the departed or departing soul. No prayer rose to their lips, and they soon returned to the ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... glaring upon the moon as she coursed through a cloudy heaven. The wind whistled through the leaves, and its melancholy moaning sounded like our death-dirge. Several times through the night I heard the howl of the prairie wolf, and I knew it was Lincoln; but the Jarochos had pickets all around, and the hunter dared not approach our position. He ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... Greek and French, and many of his Latin poems were published under the title 'Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum' (Amsterdam, 1637). His English poems on such themes as a 'Love Dirge,' 'The Poet Forsaken,' 'The Lover's Remonstrance,' 'Address to an Inconstant Mistress,' etc., do not show depth of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... out the incessant dirge, grown resignedly sweet now; so intense in its infinite peace, that a calm of love, beyond all human understanding and above all earthly passions, sank deep into my soul, and so permeated my whole being with ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... up the mansion, spread the festive board; Welcome the gay, the noble, and the fair! Through the bright hall in joyous concert poured, Let mirth and music sound the dirge of care! But ask thou not if happiness be there, If the loud laugh disguise convulsive throe, Or if the brow the heart's true livery wear; Lift not the festal mask!—enough to know No scene of mortal life but teems with ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... pass'd the miserable day In the rich house that late was full of pride; Then the sun fell, and all the paths were grey, And Menelaus from the mountain-side Came, and through palace doors all open wide Rang the wild dirge that told him of the thing That Helen, that the Queen had strangely died. Then on his ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast. On reaching the rock, We-no-na ran to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and dashed them in pieces ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pale swan in her watery nest Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending; 'Few words,' quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass best, Where no excuse can give the fault amending: In me moe woes than words are now depending; And my laments would be drawn out too long, To tell them all with ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... wandering musicians who had, at the open grave, played as a dirge, or, rather, as a ringing hymn of resurrection and deliverance, the chant of the fatherland-that dark girl to whom he had said: "Bring me this jewel, and come and live in peace with the Zilahs"—was the mother of this beautiful, fascinating ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a last look at the long-expiring gardens. It was a wet night—the lamps burnt dimly—the military band played in the minor key—the waiters stalked about with so silent, melancholy a tread, that we took their towels for pocket-handkerchiefs; the concert in the open rain went off tamely—dirge-like, in spite of the "Siege of Acre," which was described in a set of quadrilles, embellished with blue fire and maroons, and adorned with a dozen double drums, thumped at intervals, like death notes, in various parts of the doomed gardens. The divertissement was anything but diverting, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... parents. Mr. Colbert was stooping by a distant tomb reading its epitaph to little Jennie, who listened with the deepest interest. There was no sound to mar the stillness of that peaceful retreat, the whispering winds went, dirge-like, through the waving grass, and the leaves rustled softly above ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... Rabbits had come by just at the wrong moment! They took his impending punishment even more cheerfully than he did himself, as our friends generally do, and promised to go in a body and see the operation. One, indeed, Simmonds, lamented over his sad fate, and sang by way of a dirge— ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... each scene Where cisterns had so lately been: Away in frantic haste he sprung, And sought to cool his burning tongue. He howled, and to his famished cry The dreary echoes gave reply; And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim, Rolled back in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and the dance, and arose a weird dirge of compassion over what might have been! So moving was it, the player himself was melted. His dark nature showed its fairest side,—sensitive refinement, grace of expression, flowing ease of manner. Quick was he in fancy, emotional, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... interments? What valley of desolation is this, where the peaceful songs which follow the hard labors of the day are replaced by the death dirge? where the repose of evening is exchanged for the repose of eternity? What is this valley of the shadow, where every village mourns for its many dead, and buries them at the same hour of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... own lamentations were pathetic. She would sit for hours singing or rather mourning out a kind of dirge over herself: "Yesterday I was a woman, now I am a horror, a thing all people run from. Yesterday they would eat with me, now they spit on me. Yesterday they would talk to me with a sweet mouth, now they greet ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... deep peace within. Shirley sat at the window, watching the rack in heaven, the mist on earth, listening to certain notes of the gale that plained like restless spirits—notes which, had she not been so young, gay, and healthy, would have swept her trembling nerves like some omen, some anticipatory dirge. In this her prime of existence and bloom of beauty they but subdued vivacity to pensiveness. Snatches of sweet ballads haunted her ear; now and then she sang a stanza. Her accents obeyed the fitful impulse of the wind; they swelled as ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... works, his "Indian Suite" for full orchestra, a work that has been often performed, and always with the effect of a new and profound sensation, particularly in the case of the deeply impressive dirge. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... wakes the guests a'mornings, parading round the terraces with his bagpipes, and after dinner, as usual at the feasts of Highland magnates, he marches round the table in kilt and flying tartans with his drone-like dirge or furious slogan,—being rewarded on the spot with whisky ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... while declaring that he would never desert Ulster, nevertheless made it plain that Ulster on this occasion should take her place beside the rest of Ireland. Only Mr. GINNELL remained obdurate. In his ears the Convention sounds "the funeral dirge ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... stormy midnight, by the fitful glare of the dying embers, those two silent men and that pale woman seemed to be keeping a vigil in an abode of death. And the pattering rain and moan of the night-wind sounded like a dirge. ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... ere provision is needed for the like purpose," answered Bucklaw; "but you should not drink up the last flask at a dirge; there ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... was being securely bound with his back to the trunk. About his feet dry wood was then placed, and half way up his body. When this had been accomplished, the Indians formed themselves in a circle about the unhappy man, and began to chant a slow weird dirge in ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... rough, you trod it bravely. I saw that you had learned how doing is a nobler thing than dreaming, yet kept the holy fire burning in the holy place. But now you go, and there will be no return. The stars are faded from the sky. The leaves writhe on the greensward. The breezes wail a dirge. The summer rain is pallid like winter snow. And—O bitterest cup of all!—the golden memories of the past have vanished from your heart. I totter down to the grave, while you go on from strength to strength. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... permitted to go to the street indicated, and they had hardly secured a good place before they heard martial music, playing a solemn dirge. ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... for a few inches only. Through the gap in the dark draperies a wan white hand appeared; waved tremulously a last farewell; and vanished from my view. The curtains closed again on her dark and solitary life. The dreary wind sounded its long, low dirge over the rippling waters of the lake. The ponies took their places in the ferryboat which was kept for the passage of animals to and from the island. With slow, regular strokes the men rowed us to the mainland ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... Be brave and conquer. Be young and happy. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy! Would you know the segreto per esser felice? Here it is, in a smiling mistress and a cup of Falernian." As the boy tosses the cup and sings his song—hark! what is that chaunt coming nearer and nearer? What is that dirge which will disturb us? The lights of the festival burn dim—the cheeks turn pale—the voice quavers—and the cup drops on the floor. Who's there? Death and Fate are at the gate, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that have seen her not our whole lives long, We to whose ears her dirge was cradle-song, The dirge men sang who laid in earth her living head, Is it by such light that we live to see Rise, with rent hair and raiment, Liberty? Does her grave open ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... narrow, straggling path into the cool dusk of the woods, she began to sing. The crooning chant was as mournful as a funeral dirge. ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Miss Oliver said once, when they were coming home in the darkness and heard a dog howl, "When a dog cries like that the Angel of Death is passing." Rilla listened with a curdling fear at her heart. It was Dog Monday—she felt sure of it. Whose dirge was he howling—to whose spirit was he sending that ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sounds of inanimate objects, she has provided that all seasons should pour into his ear some pleasant intimations of heaven. In autumn, when the harvest-hymn of the day-time has ceased, at early nightfall, the green nocturnal grasshoppers commence their autumnal dirge, and fill the mind with a keen sense of the rapid passing of time. These sounds do not sadden the mind, but deepen the tone of our feelings, and prepare us for a renewal of cheerfulness, by inspiring us with the poetic sentiment of melancholy. This sombre state of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... bringers of evil tidings announced the triumph of Truth. The conviction of a burlesque on baronetcy was expected in sulky helplessness—but the overthrow of the CHAMPION of LIBERTY, the ORATOR whose eloquence was to have been the passing dirge of Justice—his overthrow was the overthrow of thousands. With his, hearts sunk, and menaces grew silent; the monster at his whetstone dropped the half-sharpened dagger at the conviction of Henry Hunt; and the tool of his excitement unscrewed ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... chair thinking. It was one of the many messages of sorrow that had winged their way through the country in the weeks following the close of the war; one of the murmurs of pain that had swelled the funeral dirge vibrating ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... am done. Fidelio, play me a dirge To put me in good spirits. Merry music Is sure to make ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... he goes on. "Haven't I pitied the poor victims who had to go through with it? Think of having to run that gauntlet—morbidly curious old women, silly girls, bored men—and trying to keep step to that confounded dirge. Wedding march, indeed! They make it sound more like the march of the condemned. Tum-tum-te-dum! Ugh! I tell you, Marjorie, I'm not going to have it. Nor any of this stodgy, grewsome fuss. I mean ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... Neglect—desolation is engraven on all around, and even the little wicket, as it swings slowly to and fro, seems to say, "All gone! go-ne!" The wind, how meaningly it steals through the deserted rooms, as though breathing a funereal dirge over the departed! How "eloquent of wo" is that sound! Now swelling forth, as it were, in wild and uncontrollable grief, and now sinking exhaustedly into a low and touching mournfulness which seems almost ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... couples promenaded in a stiff but stately manner round the room to a dirge-like march scraped upon the violin, the boys taking the parts of ladies jibbing away from their partners in a highly unlady-like fashion, and the boy burdened with the companionship of the younger Miss Mutlow walking along in a very ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... had composed a doleful poem in English in memory of her husband. It is needless to expatiate on its poetic merit or felicity of diction. As my ill-luck would have it, the composer had indicated that the dirge was to be chanted to the mode Behaga. So the widow one day entreated me to sing it to her thus. Like the silly innocent that I was, I weakly acceded. There was unfortunately no one there but I who could ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... song for the willow, the wild weeping willow, That murmurs a dirge to the rapturous days, And moans when the kiss of the breeze laden billow Entangles and dangles among the sad sprays! A musical ditty to scatter the sadness, A warble of wildness to banish its tears, Till tremulous measures of bountiful gladness Be sounding and bounding through ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... the tomb, excepting now and then the scream of a fish-hawk or the singing of a hermit-thrush that had approached the bank of the river after the firing had ceased, and seemed singing the funeral dirge of the red warriors who had already fallen. All of a sudden the thrush flew past Mayall into the forest, and the practiced ear of Mayall heard a rippling in the stream, like running water dashing against ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... of the shovel as it struck the earth. I felt sad and sick at heart, and leaned against a tree; a nightingale concealed in the leaves was pouring forth its plaintive notes to the night air, and its low warble sounded like the dirge of the departed. Far beyond, in the plain, the French watch-fires were burning, and I could see from time to time the fatigue-parties moving in search of their wounded. At this moment the clock of the convent struck eleven, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... will relate, that gives a more interesting account of this phenomenon than either of these. A war party of the Pascagoula tribe, headed by their chief, having been hotly pursued by a victorious enemy, had rushed into the bay (sooner than submit), and were drowned, while singing a melancholy dirge, which annually returns in token of the sad ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... enormous evils. Think, rather, how much we have to be thankful for. The world in which we live, in spite of all the scars of sin and suffering upon it, is a happy world. It is not, as many would morbidly paint it, flooded with tears and strewn with wrecks, plaintive with a perpetual dirge of sorrow. True, the "Everlasting Hills" are in glory, but there are numberless eminences of grace, and love, and mercy below; many green spots in the lower valley, ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... her gloved hands, but gently now, as though smoothing them and preparing them to look upon what they must see presently. She opened the little door, and was suddenly standing in the midst of the frightened herd of retainers and servants, while the last strains of the dirge came echoing under the deep archway. At that instant another sound startled the air—the deep bell-note of the great bloodhounds, chained in the courtyard from sunrise to sunset; and it sank to a wail, and ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... be owned that, anyhow for once, the Thrush was crestfallen. He almost never knew any ditties but joyous ones; but on the present occasion, with no attempt at concealment, he went away wailing to the thicket, and outpoured his wounded vanity in something very like a dirge. He then buried his beak in rather sulky fashion under his wing, and ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... the contemplation of these difficulties by a sudden change in Rory's tune. He stopped in the midst of his low, wailing dirge and struck up loudly the lively air that told again and again of the mirth produced when "Jinny banged the Weaver." Scotty raised his head and looked across the pasture-field. That tune always ushered Weaver Jimmy upon the stage, and there he was, ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... of the feelings or emotions, how the note or song of a single bird will sink into the memory, and become inseparably associated with your grief or joy! Shall I ever again be able to hear the song of the oriole without being pierced through and through? Can it ever be other than a dirge for the dead to me? Day after day, and week after week, this bird whistled and warbled in a mulberry by the door, while sorrow, like a pall, darkened my day. So loud and persistent was the singer that his note teased ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... shore Beside the knelling surge, And sea-nymphs evermore Shall sadly chant thy dirge. They come! they come, The spirits of the deep, While near thy sea-weed pillow My lonely watch ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... top thing, round and round—weird little tune! . . . Well, and what now? Only one thing certain. Sooner give up life than give her up! Far sooner! Love her, achieve her—or give up everything, and drown to that tune going on and on, that little dancing dirge of summer! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The cry floated over the waves — Far over the pitiless waves; It smote on the dark and it rended the clouds; The billows below them were weaving white shrouds Out of the foam of the surge, And the wind-voices chanted a dirge: Lost! Lost! Lost! Wailed wilder the lips of ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... dying man's cabin and I repaired to my stateroom, very moved by this scene. All day long I was aquiver with gruesome forebodings. That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge. Was it a prayer for the dead, murmured in ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... directly beneath my window. It was led by a priest, bearing the banner of the church, and followed by two boys, holding long flambeaux in their hands. Next came a double file of priests in their surplices, with a missal in one hand and a lighted wax taper in the other, chanting the funeral dirge at intervals—now pausing, and then again taking up the mournful burden of their lamentation, accompanied by others, who played upon a rude kind of bassoon, with a dismal and wailing sound. Then followed various symbols of the church, and the bier borne on the shoulders of four ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... listlessly began to turn over the papers on the table. Presently he paused. He had taken up a sheet of paper on which Senor Perkins had evidently been essaying some composition in verse. It seemed to have been of a lugubrious character. The titular line at the top of the page, "Dirge," had been crossed out for the substituted "In Memoriam." ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... he will "stoutly that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which The Four Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, were published; and also a Dirge (Daphnaida) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges, the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (Prothalamion), on the marriage of ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... cold midnight storm, That unsparingly beat on her thin fragile form; Her black eyes flash'd sternly whence reason had fled, And she glanc'd on my sight like some ghost of the dead, As she sang a loud strain to the hoarse dashing surge, That rang on my ears like the plaint of a dirge. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... drawl, like a dirge, with many a dying fall, was the vehicle in which the tender expressions of the poet were conveyed to our ears; and I was reproached by my companions for having injudiciously praised the verses of the Swan ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... prove that gentlest poetry has ever been the produce both of heathery mountain and broomy brae; but the names of the sweet singers are heard no more, and the plough has gone over their graves. And they had their music too, plaintive or dirge-like, as it sighed for the absent, or wailed for the dead. The fragments were caught up, as they floated about in decay; and by him, the sweetest lyrist of them all, were often revivified by a happy word that let in a soul, or, by a few touches of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... will be a warning to all young wives who go out walking with handsome young men. Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. He sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The music is a dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball's son. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... between the body of the church, between two little doors, they were wont to pray for the soul of the Bishop of London. William Norman, who was a great benefactor to the City, in obtaining the confirmation of their liberties from William the Conqueror, a priest saying the office De Profundis (called a dirge); and from thence they passed to the churchyard, where Thomas a Becket's parents were buried, and there, near their tomb, they said also, for all the faithful deceased, De Profundis again. The City procession ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... singing when his lodger entered the kitchen, but his was no joyful ditty. It was a dirge, which he was intoning as he bent over the cookstove. A slow and solemn and mournful wail dealing with death and burial of one "Old Storm Along," whoever he may ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... plectrum, Pettalus says, laughing, "Go sing the rest to the Stygian ghosts," and fixes the point of the sword in his left temple. He falls, and with his dying fingers he touches once again the strings of the lyre; and in his fall he plays a mournful dirge.[12] The fierce Lycormas does not suffer him to fall unpunished; and tearing away a massive bar from the doorpost on the right, he dashes it against the bones of the middle of the neck {of Pettalus}; struck, he falls to the ground, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the papers are full of praise for those devoted sons of the motherland, the Kundu and the Chakravarti zamindars. If only, say they, the country had a few more of such staunch patriots, the mills of Manchester would have, had to sound their own dirge to the ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... latitude, and in addition to this, a violent storm was coming on. The wind blew in fitful gusts, howling and sighing among the huge trees with which the house was surrounded, and then dying away with a melancholy, dirge-like moan. The old tree rubbed their leafless branches against the window panes, and the fowls which had roosted there for the night, were fain to clap their wings, and make prodigious efforts to preserve their ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... the "Procession of the Angels" took place. Figures dressed in silk and gold, with silver wings, were carried by on platforms to the sound of music. The body of the Saviour lay in a sort of glass hearse, carried by men chanting a dirge, and followed by the Virgin. This procession was really pretty, but had an odd, unnatural effect amongst the fresh green trees, the smell of incense mingling with the fragrance of the flowers, and the gaudy silk and gold and plumes of feathers gilded by the soft setting sun, as they flashed along. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the leaves from the lofty limes were falling silently across the sombre evergreens, while the lights and shadows slept side by side: there was no sound but the cawing of the rooks, which to the accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge. Lydgate, conscious of an energetic frame in its prime, felt some compassion when the figure which he was likely soon to overtake turned round, and in advancing towards him showed more markedly than ever the signs of premature age—the student's bent shoulders, the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... driven away Is bold amidst the chilly spray? What good is all thy vain remorse? Thinkst thou from jaws of death to force A sacrifice so lightly thrust Upon the altar of thy lust? A host like thee could nothing urge To meet one tone of her sad dirge: ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... a walking pace, came the priest; beside him sat the deacon driving; behind the cart four peasants, bareheaded, carried the coffin, covered with a white cloth; two women followed the coffin. The shrill wailing voice of one of them suddenly reached my ears; I listened; she was intoning a dirge. Very dismal sounded this chanted, monotonous, hopelessly-sorrowful lament among the empty fields. The coachman whipped up the horses; he wanted to get in front of this procession. To meet a corpse on the road is a bad omen. And he ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... my name By absence shall appear; When I have lost all hopes of fame, Which once I held so dear; When 'plucked' I seek a vain relief In plaintive dirge or sonnet; Thou wilt have caused that bitter ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... of Bacchus, come and join In solemn dirge, while tapers shine Around the grape-embossed ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... Pocket-handkerchief 2. The Poet expatiates on the Beauty of Delia's Hair 3. The Poet relates how he stole a lock of Delia's Hair, and her anger The Baby's Debut James Smith Playhouse Musings James Smith A Tale of Drury Lane Horace Smith Drury's Dirge Horace Smith What is Life? Blackwood The Confession Blackwood The Milling Match between Entellus and Darcs Moore Not a Sous had he Got Barham Raising the Devil Barham The London University Barham Domestic Poems Hood 1. Good-night 2. A Parental Ode to my Son 3. A Serenade ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... half-hearted kind of way; the girls struck the palms of their left hands with their fans. The boys were in clean working dress. Some had towels wound round their heads, some wore caps and others hats. The girls were got up in all their best clothes with fine obi and white aprons. The music was dirge-like. It was not at all what Western people understand to be singing. The performers emitted notes in a kind of falsetto, and these five or six notes were repeated over and over and over again. The only word I can ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... stateroom, very moved by this scene. All day long I was aquiver with gruesome forebodings. That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge. Was it a prayer for the dead, murmured in that ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Pigeons, and, gathering sticks, Parpon lit a sweet-smelling fire of cedar. Then he went to the hut, and came back with a spade and a shovel. At the foot of a great pine he began to dig. As the work went on, he broke into a sort of dirge, painfully sweet. Leaning against a rock not far away, Valmond watched the tiny man with the long arms throw up the soft, good-smelling earth, enriched by centuries of dead leaves and flowers. The trees waved and bent and murmured, as though they gossiped with each other ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pride, crown of the Salisbury Press? Now when the negligent Public, in search of a subject for dinner, Asks for the names of your books, Lord! what a boom there will be! Hoarse in Penbryn are the howlings that rise for the hope of the Cymri; Over her Algernon's head Putney composes a dirge; Edwin anathematises politely in various lingos; Davidson ruminates hard over a Ballad of Hell; Fondly Le Gallienne fancies how pretty the Delphian laurels Would have appeared on his own hairy and passionate poll; I, imperturbably careless, untainted of ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... her dying, parted hearts chant weary dirge, But we feel death is but seeming in ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... high, and, they too look down upon Callista, as if they were funeral lights in her honour. Next the moon rises up to see what has been going on, and edges the black hangings of the night with silver. Yet mourning and dirge are but of formal observance, when a brave champion has died for her God. The world of ghosts has as little power over such an one as the world of nature. No evil spirit has aught to say to her, who has gone in her baptismal white before the Throne. No penal fire ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... pass, and they that bide can but make the dirge. But I'll be obliged if you'll say to Mr. Alexander that if there is aught—" He gathered up the reins. "It will be snowing presently. I always thought that I'd like to part on a day like this, gray and quiet, with all the color ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... day In the rich house that late was full of pride; Then the sun fell, and all the paths were grey, And Menelaus from the mountain-side Came, and through palace doors all open wide Rang the wild dirge that told him of the thing That Helen, that the Queen had strangely died. Then on ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... the choir is chanting a dirge. Gamba goes and closes the door on the sound: then creeps to the foot of the couch. The dying woman gently motions aside the cross a priest is holding to her, and looks up ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... of the clarion-toned captain is ringing, Above the hoarse murmuring roar of the surge, And an echoing voice, seems sepulchrally flinging, Far back o'er the waves, for the vessel, a dirge. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... with thee till time shall be no more, I stand with thee on Time's remotest age, Ten thousand years, ten thousand times told o'er; Still, still with thee my onward course I urge; And now no longer hear the surge Of Time's light billows breaking on the shore Of distant earth; no more the solemn dirge— Requiem of worlds, when such are numbered o'er— Steals by: still thou art ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... existence. One went so far as to declare it "the happiest part of a negro's life." They aver that the Africans, on their way to slavery, are so merry, that they dance and sing. But upon a careful examination of witnesses, it was found that their singing consisted of dirge-like lamentations for their native land. One of the captains threatened to flog a woman, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful to him. After meals they jumped up in their irons for exercise. This was considered so necessary for their health, that they ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... whilst entwined in his fingers was a bronze cross and rosary, that St. Peter, seeing his devotion, might, without questioning, admit him to a better world. The scene was weird beyond description. Outside, the wind moaned a sad dirge; great bats and black moths, the size of birds, flitted about in the midnight darkness. These, ever and anon, made their way inside and extinguished the candles, which flickered and dripped as they fitfully shone on the shrunken ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... she was hoping still, a fresh outbreak of the malady occurred. He, poor soul, weary of his existence, put an end to his sufferings: he was found lifeless in the New River. Lucy Aikin quotes a Dirge found among her ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... showing more and more of savage grandeur, as the green, smiling valleys are no longer seen, but in their place appear barren and rugged rocks and slopes, with the marks of the ravages wrought by storm, landslide and avalanche. The wind has fuller play and seems to moan in a mournful, dirge-like manner, accentuating the characteristics of bleakness and desolation which obtain at the top of the pass, all the more noticeable if the traveler arrives at dusk, just as the sun has ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the long-expiring gardens. It was a wet night—the lamps burnt dimly—the military band played in the minor key—the waiters stalked about with so silent, melancholy a tread, that we took their towels for pocket-handkerchiefs; the concert in the open rain went off tamely—dirge-like, in spite of the "Siege of Acre," which was described in a set of quadrilles, embellished with blue fire and maroons, and adorned with a dozen double drums, thumped at intervals, like death notes, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the spot which was to be their tomb. Her graceful hull, lofty spars, and snowy canvas gleamed refulgent in the last rays of the setting sun as he sank to his rest through a bank of rainbow-tinted clouds, and the rising wind sobbed and moaned dirge-like ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Brothers, stout and strong! Let us cheer the way we tread on, With a soldier's song! Faint we by the weary road, Or fall we in the rout, Dirge or Paean, Death or Triumph!— ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... sometimes looking up to the height of Heaven, calling out with shrieks of agony, as if invoking the Father of Nature; others grovelled upon the ground, beating their foreheads with their hands, while others again made their moan in a sort of dirge, in their own way, for though one could not understand the words, the sense of all was plain in the agony of those ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... elephant, etc., to take care of themselves and make their excuses to Mr. Bast, and started for Liverpool and the U. S. in the Sirius. Storms overtook them, the women were put into the first boat, those which followed were swamped. Poor fellows, I own I can't sing a pious dirge for them. There were three days of hunger and exposure before the boat was picked up, and she was finally landed at Quebec, where she was laid up with pleurisy in the hospital. And there was a subscription for the wrecked when she came out, which ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... [4], league on league, shall follow The death-dirge of the Lucy once so dear; From yonder steeple dismal, dull, and hollow, Shall knell the warning horror on thy ear. On thy fresh leman's lips when love is dawning, And the lisped music glides from that sweet well— Lo, in that breast a red wound ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it were so! But hear me on, and restrain your rage! There I lay for twenty hours, and not a soul cared for my misery. No human footstep treads this solitary wild, for 'tis commonly believed that the ghosts of my ancestors drag clanking chains through these ruins, and chant their funeral dirge at the hour of midnight. At last I heard the door creak again on its hinges; this man opened it, and brought me bread and water. He told me that I had been condemned to die of hunger, and that his life was in danger should it be discovered that he fed me. Thus has my ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... excitement were all in his veins. He was full of the strong joy of living. And then, in the midst of it all, came a dull, crashing blow. It was as though all his castles in the air had come toppling about his ears, the blue sky had turned to stony grey and the sweet waltz music had become a dirge. Always a keen watcher of men's faces, he had glanced for a second time at a gaunt, sallow man who wore a loose check suit and a grey Homburg hat. The eyes of the two men met. Then the blood had turned ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... silent, the miserable youth rushed frantically to his lodgings, without any definite intentions, but more than half inclined to sink on his knees before his desk, and look up to the moon, or stars, or; failing these, to the floating light for inspiration, and pen the direful dirge of something dreadful and desperate! He had even got the length of the first line, and had burst like a thunderbolt into his ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... Funebre, which had the immediate effect of scattering his audience, since many of his listeners, not caring for so melancholy a piece of music, deserted the room for the garden. Lucky indeed were those persons driven forth by the strains of Chopin's dirge, for a few moments later came the earthquake, when in a trice the whole hotel was swallowed up in the yawning chasm of the earth. Everybody inside the walls was killed, and the body of the poor pianist ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... threw vague ghostly beams across the willow-lined swamp, out beyond the little cabin that stood on its border. Through the dense undergrowth and high among the skeleton treetops ugly shadows played with each other, while a sepulchral orchestra of wind and bough shrieked a dirge that flattened in Bonner's ears; but it was not the weird music of the swamp that sent the shudder of actual terror through the ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... all fall within the dates of April and May of 1784) I shall note briefly one remaining print, "For the Benefit of the Champion," in which Fox and Lord North, in female attire, and the Duchess in her large picture hat, but decollettee, and with bare arms, are busy singing a dirge on the defeated opponent. Georgina, a figure of delicious sprightliness and beauty, points to the tombstone marked "Here lies poor Cecil Ray," while the spectacled profile of Burke peeps into the door. And here I may remark again how astonishingly ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... the Greek epos, a saying or oracle, the term "epic" is generally given to some form of heroic narrative wherein tragedy, comedy, lyric, dirge, and idyl are skilfully blended to ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... before the last fluttering rags had vanished, transmuted into fiery dust. The clock on the landing had many times chanted its dirge since I had heard below the footsteps of the servants carrying away the lamps from the sitting-rooms and the hall. Later still came the far-off sound of Atherley's door closing behind him, like the final good-night of the waking day. Over all the unconscious household had stolen that ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... for justice, and the natural sense of indignation against crime; let the Devil color it with personal passion, and you have a mighty race of true and tender-hearted men living for centuries in such bloody feud that every note and word of their national songs is a dirge, and every rock of their hills is a gravestone. Take the love of beauty, and power of imagination, which are the source of every true achievement in art; let the Devil touch them with sensuality, and ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... supernatural gazelle—a variety now extinct, but which then pervaded the Schwarzwald in considerable quantity—sent by some good magician, who owed the giant a grudge, to pilot her out of the forest. Nothing could exceed her joy at this discovery: she whistled a dirge, sang a Latin hymn, and preached a funeral discourse all in one breath. Such were the artless methods by which the full heart in the fifteenth century was compelled to express its gratitute for benefits; the advertising ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... at this funereal dirge, Where grief for a lost lifetime stands confessed, I wore a clerk's costume of sable serge, Though not gold eye glasses ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... front seats are, a man in full evening dress, which he tries to conceal under a caped cloak, and two Ladies in plush opera-cloaks. Fog is hanging about in the rafters, and the gas-stars sing a melancholy dirge. Each casual cough arouses dismal echoes. Enter an intending Spectator, who is conducted to a seat in the middle of an empty row. After removing his hat and coat, he suddenly thinks better—or worse—of it, puts them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... no objection—he divined that the Knights and their service would be not precisely a consolation, but a satisfaction to his father. So the Knights led the procession, with their band playing a dirge part of the long way to the cemetery; and then turned back, after forming in two lines, plumed hats sympathetically in hand, to let the hearse ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... grotesque with the stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... staircase lined with peach-colour and yellow marble, into the shadows below. Carl himself, disguised as a strolling musician, had followed it across the square through a drenching rain, on which circumstance he overheard the old people congratulate the "blessed" dead within, had listened to a dirge of his own composing brought out on the great organ with much bravura by his friend, the new court organist, who was in the secret, and that night turned the key of the garden entrance to the vault, and ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... had fallen in the defence of the house; and to the father, who followed the coffins, and the mother, who hid herself in the thicket, there was something like pleasure in the roll of the drum, and the measure of the dead march, and the warlike tone of the shrill dirge which was sung round the open graves, and the discharge of firearms over them—a satisfaction like that of fulfilling the last wish of their boy. This done, and the graves fenced and planted, the childless pair departed, wishing, perhaps, in their own hearts, that they could weep their ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... light, passing away, as their fathers had passed away, listening to the sound of the North Sea restlessly beating against the breakwater. That sound was never out of their ears while they lived, and it was the dirge to which they died. Such was their life, but they knew no ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... made a pretence of eating the wing, just to please me; but when the waiter was taken away to the kitchen, I found all the bird on the plate. This morning, just before daylight, I heard her playing a wild, mournful thing on the piano, that sounded like a dirge or a wail; and Ruth says when she went into the parlor to open the blinds, she found her praying, and thinks she was on her knees for an hour. Please God! sometimes I wish she was in heaven with my mother, for she will never see any peace in ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the long lanes on misery's verge, Find out their dark dens, and list to their dirge; Where want and famine, and by ourselves made, Forgive our frail follies, and ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... body was borne to the grave under military escort, the soldiers marching to the mournful strains of the funeral dirge and muffled drums; the corpse was lowered to its last resting-place; the burial service read with a trembling voice by the chaplain,—for the missionary had taken his place among the mourners by the side of the widow,—the usual salute was fired, ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... the QUEEN'S Most Excellent Majesty, being constitutionally partial to poetry, should desire to have constant private supply from respectable tip-top genius, to be kept snug on Royal premises and ready at momentary notice to oblige with song or dirge, according as High Jinks or Dolorousness are the Court orders ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the shout of hosts mid-sea; until, as the last line of the Israelites have gained the beach, the shields clang, and the cymbals clap; and as the waters whelm the pursuing foe, the swift-fingered winds on the white keys of the foam play the grand march of Israel delivered, and the awful dirge of Egyptian overthrow. ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... to the game, he puffed out his cheeks and began to chant the De profundis. When he had got to the end of it, he began it all over again. The game came to a conclusion in the midst of this dirge. It was he who was beaten, but his defeat did not seem to vex him in ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... indication of pity crossing his composed features, but it would immediately revert again to its former gaze, as if already looking into the womb of futurity. Much of the time he was chanting a kind of low dirge in the Delaware tongue, using the deep and remarkable guttural ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... one star on the bosom of the night The cowslip and the yellow primrose,—they Are gone, my sad Leontia, to their graves, And April hath wept o'er them, and the voice Of March hath sung, even before their deaths The dirge of those young children of the year But here is hearts ease for your woes. And now, The honey suckle flower I give to thee, And love it for my sake, my own Cyane It hangs upon the stem it loves, as thou Hast clung to me, through every joy and sorrow, It ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... by the fitful glare of the dying embers, those two silent men and that pale woman seemed to be keeping a vigil in an abode of death. And the pattering rain and moan of the night-wind sounded like a dirge. ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which The Four Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, were published; and also a Dirge (Daphnaida) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges, the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (Prothalamion), on the marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... measured tramp of the jury advancing, and filing into their box, had the mournful, measured beat as of pall bearers, keeping step to a dismal dirge; and when the foreman laid upon the table the fatal brass unicorn, the muffled sound seemed ominous as the grating of a coffin lowered upon the cross bars of a gaping grave. As the roll was called, each man rose, and answered in a low but distinct tone. Then the clerk of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Gilbert Burns, 'a juvenile production.' To walk by a river while flooded, or through a wood on a rough winter day, and hear the storm howling among the leafless trees, exalted the poet's thoughts. "In such a season," he said, "just after a train of misfortunes, I composed Winter, a Dirge."] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... There they stand, the batter'd columns, underneath the murky sky, In the hush of desperation, not to conquer but to die. Hark! the bagpipe's fitful wailing—not the pibroch loud and shrill, That, with hope of bloody banquet, lured the ravens from the hill— But a dirge both low and solemn, fit for ears of dying men, Marshall'd for their latest battle, never more to fight again. Madness—madness! Why this shrinking? Were we less inured to war When our reapers swept the harvest from the field of red Dunbar? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Thomas S. Jones, Jr The Invisible Bride Edwin Markham Rain on a Grave Thomas Hardy Patterns Amy Lowell Dust Rupert Brooke Ballad, "The roses in my garden" Maurice Baring "The Little Rose is Dust, My Dear" Grace Hazard Conkling Dirge Adelaide Crapsey The Little Red Ribbon James Whitcomb Riley ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief, beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane into the evening haze. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said she; "in three days I shall be here for a bouquet, and in less than thrice three days I promise you there shall be a dirge sung for ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Coleridge knew that in being deserted by the poetic spirit, he was leaving a high artistic realm for one of lesser glory; and hence his letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, and, later on, his dirge ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... roams at vanity fair, In robes that rival the tulip's glare, Think on the chaplet of leaves which round His fading forehead will soon be bound; Think on each dirge the priests will say When his ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... papers are full of praise for those devoted sons of the motherland, the Kundu and the Chakravarti zamindars. If only, say they, the country had a few more of such staunch patriots, the mills of Manchester would have, had to sound their own dirge to the ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... century and a half was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality (1807), to be rising again towards the level of inspiration which it had once attained in Lycidas. And in the development of the Miltonic genius this wonderful dirge marks the culminating point. As the twin idylls of 1632 show a great advance upon the Ode on the Nativity (1629), the growth of the poetic mind during the five years which follow 1632 is registered in Lycidas. Like the L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Lycidas is laid out on the lines ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... seem to have a natural proclivity for quoting the appropriate dirge when sorrow shows itself. The Book of Lamentations—Shakespeare's sadder lines—roll off their tongues majestically and seem to give them consolation—as it were to lay a sound, unjoyous basis for the proper enjoyment of the songs of ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... whom thou hast driven away Is bold amidst the chilly spray? What good is all thy vain remorse? Thinkst thou from jaws of death to force A sacrifice so lightly thrust Upon the altar of thy lust? A host like thee could nothing urge To meet one tone of her sad dirge: ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... singing their song, with two others, a few steps off, singing another, a dirge—a clashing of sleepiness, health, and vague melancholy. But they did not feel dull, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... a song to sing, O! [SHE] Sing me your song, O! [HE] It is sung to the knell Of a churchyard bell, And a doleful dirge, ding dong, O! It's a song of a popinjay, bravely born, Who turned up his noble nose with scorn At the humble merrymaid, peerly proud, Who loved that lord, and who laughed aloud At the moan of the merryman, moping mum, Whose soul was sad, whose glance was glum, Who sipped ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... tightened just a little—just sufficiently to keep the fakir cognizant of its position. The fakir howled out a sort of singsong dirge, which plainly had imperatives in every line of it. At each short pause for breath he added something in an undertone that made the ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... down to their shoulders. In their hands were gilded rods, and round their necks hung golden chains, to which were attached emblems of the god they worshipped. They walked two-and-two to the number of fifty, chanting a melancholy dirge, one hand of each priest resting upon his fellow's shoulder, and as they passed, with the exception of certain Jews, all the spectators uncovered, while some of the more pious of them even fell upon ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... the "Dirge of Valencia," composed by one of its Arab inhabitants during the siege, gives us a picture of the wretched state ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... eat only once a-day, washing himself all over before this single meal, and devoting certain hours of every day to prayer. After the expiry of the year, he uses a certain ceremony for the soul of the king his predecessor, much like our solemn dirge; at which 100,000 persons are often assembled, among whom he distributes large alms. When this ceremony is ended, the prince is confirmed as inheritor of the kingdom, and all the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... they think of their humiliated Emperor. Up speaks one suffering with a deadly hurt to the other: "Friend, when I am dead, bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side." Until this time the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key. The old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor's squadrons passing over his grave, and the minor ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... was terribly cut up at the premature death of his follower; Lizzie, having smothered her head with fluffy feathers from some cockatoos that had been roasted for supper, employed herself in chanting a most weird kind of dirge over the body, to which she beat a species of accompaniment on the bottom of a pint pot; while Ferdinand, by Dunmore's directions, had set to work to strip a sheet of bark off a tea-tree, to act as a rude coffin. A great difficulty now ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... like a charnel ship through the dark, cold voids of space—the sun a burned-out char, a dead cinder, and the world one dismal silence, cold beyond measure, and dead beyond consciousness. The philosopher has wailed a dirge without [Page 261] hope, a requiem without grandeur, over the world's future. But nature herself, to all ears attuned, sings paeans, and shouts to men that the highest energy, that ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... presence felt, tho' greeted not; Knows that no foot, save hers, unbidden; Had dared to tread the living tomb, No other hand had waked, unchidden, The echoes of that sullen gloom; And now her voice's gentle tone Blends with the harp, in dirge-like moan: ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... is," he goes on. "Haven't I pitied the poor victims who had to go through with it? Think of having to run that gauntlet—morbidly curious old women, silly girls, bored men—and trying to keep step to that confounded dirge. Wedding march, indeed! They make it sound more like the march of the condemned. Tum-tum-te-dum! Ugh! I tell you, Marjorie, I'm not going to have it. Nor any of this stodgy, grewsome fuss. I mean to have a ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... personal experience an instance of this kind. I had been reading with some children of about ten years old the story from "Cymbeline" of Imogen in the forest scene, when the brothers strew flowers upon her, and sing the funeral dirge, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... sees me, God, who took my heart And drowned it in life's surge. In all your wide warm earth I have no part— light song overcomes me like a dirge. Could love's great harmony The saints keep step to when their bonds are loose, Not weigh me down? am I a wife to choose? Look in ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... house-dog bounded o'er each scene Where cisterns had so lately been: Away in frantic haste he sprung, And sought to cool his burning tongue. He howled, and to his famished cry The dreary echoes gave reply; And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim, Rolled back in sad response ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... of Fear and Falsehood hear no more 500 The voice that once waked multitudes to war Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond To the death dirge of the melancholy wind: It were a sight of awfulness to see The works of faith and slavery, so vast, 505 So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing! Even as the corpse that rests beneath their wall. A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death To-day, the breathing marble glows ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... was going up the avenue on his way home, a young girl passed him, walking very briskly. She paused for a moment just ahead of him to give some money to a poor woman who, doubled up on the pavement in a black shawl, was grinding out from a wheezy little organ a thin, dirge-like strain. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... be a nice thing to sing about. Thus, if one were a modern fool one might write a dirge with 'Huit francs et dix centimes' all chanted on one low sad note, and coming in between brackets for a 'motif, and with a lot about autumn and Death—which last, Death that is, people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Speaking of Josquin's treatment of effects, it is recorded of him that a single word is sometimes scattered through a whole page of notes, showing that he attached no importance to the words whatever. One of the most beautiful of his pieces was a dirge written upon the death of Okeghem. Owing to the good fortune of the invention of music printing from movable types, in 1498, when Josquin was at the height of his powers, a large number of his works have come down ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... save the distant and sullen roar of the ocean, as it breaks in sheets of foam on the rock-bound coast—the fitful cry of curlew, as it wings over them its solitary way—or the occasional low moaning of the wind, as, stealing through amidst the rocks, it seems to pour forth a mournful dirge for the shades of departed greatness:—when we look on a scene like this, we have before our gaze all that is known of these men of the olden time. Their blood-stained rites, their solemn mysteries, are forgotten; but their simple temples still stand imperishable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the laborers' chorus, "Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non e piu come era prima," it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge with the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean, and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy of France, and of the world, by men whose conduct you yourself have exposed in ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Wish, has been brilliantly paraphrased by Liszt. This pretty mazurka is charmingly sung and played by Marcella Sembrich in the singing lesson of "The Barber of Seville." There are several mazurkas in the list. Most of these songs are mediocre. Poland's Dirge is an exception, and so is Horsemen Before the Battle. "Was ein junges Madchen liebt" has a short introduction, in which the reminiscence hunter may find a true bit of "Meistersinger" color. Simple in structure and sentiment, the Chopin lieder ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... matter of his own music were not very definite. In 1903, when he had finished all that he was to write, he expressed a preference for the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite above anything that he had composed. "Of all my music," he confessed at this time, "the 'Dirge' in the 'Indian' suite pleases me most. It affects me deeply and did when I was writing it. In it an Indian woman laments the death of her ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... 'Weep, this is the moment,' or 'Rejoice, the hour has come,' and we chant our dirge or kindle our bonfires accordingly. Why, it means a little martyrdom to the occasional sinner who selects his own occasion for sorrow ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... this sad end will be a warning to all young wives who go out walking with handsome young men. Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. He sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. The music is a dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball's son. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... I hear the loud Hosanna chanted for a soul which dies in the Lord. I will repeat the strain. No. My voice refuses to fall back upon the ear. Where is my heart that it beats not swelling to the anthem's measure? Cold! cold! cold! Nay; I will rise. I will respond unto the funeral dirge. I will shout. Oh! my trunk is hardened, and my tongue is glued. Silence! they pause. Say, do they hear me? No. Silence, horrible and awful. Hark! they mourn with lamentation on my fate. O, Heaven! must I endure all this? Must the living weep for the dead, and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... pieces by the furious Muscovites. She wandered a long time through extensive quarters, the solitude of which astonished her, when a distant and doleful sound thrilled her with terror. It was like the funeral dirge of this vast city: fixed in motionless suspense, she beheld an immense multitude of persons, of both sexes, in deep affliction, carrying their effects and their sacred images, and leading their children along with them. Their priests, laden with the sacred symbols of religion, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... kept sinking until it was buried in a region of darkness. When the last fiery speck of it disappeared the sky broke into an evensong of color so solemn, so pensive that my wretched mood interpreted it as a visible dirge for the dead sun. Rose lapsed into purple, purple merged into blue, the blue bordering on a field of hammered gold that was changing shape and hue; all of which was eloquent of sadness. It seemed as though the heavens were in an ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... wandered where the brooks were dry, While memory wove a dismal song, And to my God I raised my cry, And sang my dirge the whole day long;— For I was in the desert drear, And, ah! my ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... upon his back!' Do, then, in turn, tell me, If joy Thy heart as well as voice employ Why dost thou now most Sable, shine In plumage woefuller far than mine? Thy silence is a sadder thing Than any dirge I sing!" ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... country was gowned like a bride in white. But the white on this occasion was not the emblem of purity; rather was it the pallor of icy death. The rigorous storms seemed to prophesy of trouble; the very winds were rehearsing a dirge to be plaintively sung over mountains and ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... Pageant and dirge trip up each other often enough in the course of human life! The lives especially of sovereigns, through the strong light ever beating upon their thrones, are always exposed to vicissitudes of fortune. The Papal Mission had scarcely passed out ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... it's the divil himself couldn't hold me, whether it's the short, sharp war-cry of the Irish or the sweet, deep bell-notes of these Yankee hounds that to me ever seem chantin' a mournful dirge for the quarry. Sure, it's the faster Irish hounds that make the grandest runnin', but it's the deep-throated mellow chorus of a Yankee pack ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... ends with him. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton scarcely mention it. It holds almost no place in the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but, at the close of the eighteenth century, it has the good luck to be uprooted by Burns's plough, and he at once sings its dirge and its beauties; and then the flower at once becomes a celebrity. Wordsworth sings of it in many a beautiful verse; and I think it is scarcely too much to say that since his time not an English poet has failed to ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... that Scott was easily deceived by a modern imitation, if he liked the poetry. Surtees hoaxed him not only with Barthram's Dirge and Anthony Featherstonhaugh, but with a long prose excerpt from a non-existent manuscript about a phantom knight. Scott made the plot of Marmion hinge on this myth, in the encounter of Marmion with Wilfred as the phantasmal cavalier. He tells us that in The Flowers of the Forest "the manner of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... across the river and mark the route by sticking in the sand long willow branches, with which we were laden for that purpose. The route staked, we returned and the train lined up. It need not require any great feat of imagination on the part of the reader to hear how dirge-like the first hoofs and wheels sounded as they parted the waters and led the way. Every man except the drivers waded alongside the horses to render assistance if it should be required. Mrs. Wadsworth was remarkably brave, sitting her wagon with white, but calm face. Scarcely a word was spoken ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... and (to a Shakespearian critic) the importance of these forgeries obscures the humble merit of Surtees, with his ballads of the 'Slaying of Antony Featherstonhaugh,' and of 'Bartram's Dirge.' Surtees left clever lacunae in these songs, 'collected from oral tradition,' and furnished notes so learned that they took in Sir Walter Scott. There are moments when I half suspect "the Shirra himsel" (who blamelessly forged so many extracts from 'Old Plays') of having composed ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... mutter, "and so 'Twas to rescue my life, gentle spirit! and, oh, For this did I doubt her?... a light word—a look— The mistake of a moment!... for this I forsook— For this? Pardon, pardon, Lucile! O Lucile!" Thought and memory rang, like a funeral peal, Weary changes on one dirge-like note through his brain, As ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... particular jolly mood the next morning, for he had spent the night bidding against Pierrepont Morgan at an auction sale of old masters; but he listened patiently while Sowers called off the figures in a sort of dirge-like singsong, and until he had wailed out his final note of despair, a bass-drum crash, which he thought would bring Foreman to a realizing sense of ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... priest; beside him sat the deacon driving; behind the cart four peasants, bareheaded, carried the coffin, covered with a white cloth; two women followed the coffin. The shrill wailing voice of one of them suddenly reached my ears; I listened; she was intoning a dirge. Very dismal sounded this chanted, monotonous, hopelessly-sorrowful lament among the empty fields. The coachman whipped up the horses; he wanted to get in front of this procession. To meet a corpse on the road is a bad omen. And he did succeed in galloping ahead beyond this path ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... thought flashed into his mind—this was, perhaps, some sort of mourning for the dead! He was right. The duty of the father of the poor youth who had been killed was, for several days after the funeral, to sit alone in his house and chant from sunset till daybreak a death-dirge, or, as it is called, the tjerita bari. It was not till next day that this was told to him, but meanwhile the surmise afforded him ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... moved in his arms, never petitioned for mercy. She gave no sign of life or being, saving that she moaned at regular intervals in piteous accents:—'He has forgotten and abandoned me!' as if that one simple expression comprised in itself, her acknowledgment of the uselessness of her life, and her dirge for ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... and despondency, pleasure and pain, Are mingled together like sunshine and rain; And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... so glad, did he slink off to his study forthwith and play a dirge on his piano, and there sit listlessly in his chair for the rest of the morning staring out of the window through his glass, till Jill tripped in and fetched him down ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... eyes, O hapless One, my humble offerings Will not appear like thy wrath's threats, nor like The joyful trumpetings of thy reveille, Nor like an image of thy passion's cross, Nor like thy sorrow's dirge, nor like glad hymns; But like soft songs and trembling lights and fondlings Of lily hands, black birds, ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... another dirge in wailing, For another vessel sailing With the shadow-ships at sea; Shadow-ships for ever sinking — Shadow-ships whose pumps are clinking, And whose thirsty holds are ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... me not perish. On the day of Tammuz, play for me on the flute of lapis lazuli, together with the lyre[1187] of pearl play for me. Together let the professional dirge singers, male and female, play for me, That the dead may arise and inhale ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... them the wild wail of the poet over his own misfortunes, and the vanishing of the dreams of glory which haloed his life. The chorus with which the tragedy winds up—"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"—the words appropriately carved upon his tombstone at St. Onofrio—is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words are changed, the spell is lost, and the way ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the dirge of the people of the Long House," said Paul, upon whose sensitive mind the scene made ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in her watery nest Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending; 'Few words,' quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass best, Where no excuse can give the fault amending: In me moe woes than words are now depending; And my laments would be drawn out too long, To tell them all with one ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... part and sipped Mokha from little cups. A girl was performing a wriggling dance upon the square carpet occupying the centre of the floor, accompanied by a Nubian boy who twanged upon a guitar, and by most of the assembled company, who clapped their hands to the music or droned a low, tuneless dirge. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the dance, and arose a weird dirge of compassion over what might have been! So moving was it, the player himself was melted. His dark nature showed its fairest side,—sensitive refinement, grace of expression, flowing ease of manner. Quick was ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the service, the firing-party in their places, six on either side of the grave, would fire three volleys into the air, while the band breathed a solemn dirge. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... character was Maneros, son of the earliest Egyptian king. He seems to hold the same position as Linus, son of Apollo, among the Greeks. The first song of Egyptian music was a dirge for his untimely end, and a lament for the swift passing away of youth, spring, joy, and so on. Gradually the song itself, instead of the king's son, began to be called Maneros, and became the well-known banquet song of the social feasts, calling upon the guests to enjoy ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... way ahead, immediately behind the coffin, they were chanting a dirge, and Peter Ilitsch's long-drawn, quavering notes ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead: Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart; Which epitaph containeth, "Her eyes were once his dart." From so ungrateful fancy; From ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... feeble steps, and the assumed tranquillity of Emily, gave her involuntary tears. She shed none, but walked, her face partly shaded by a thin black veil, between two persons, who supported her, preceded by the abbess, and followed by nuns, whose plaintive voices mellowed the swelling harmony of the dirge. When the procession came to the grave the music ceased. Emily drew the veil entirely over her face, and, in a momentary pause, between the anthem and the rest of the service, her sobs were distinctly audible. The holy father began the service, and Emily again commanded her ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the poor girl. Not hers the hovering sense of marriage bells Tuning the air with fragrance of sweet sound; But the low dirge that ever rose and died, Recurring without pause or any close, Like one verse chaunted aye in sleepless brain. Down to the shore it drew her from the heights, Like witch's demon-spell, that fearful moan. She knew that somewhere in the green ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... on the French farm became locally famous. Within a year two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic Indian dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer boys, who had been for an evening in town and were returning late at night to lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they came to the farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely. Although he continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... temperament, I suppose," he resumed. "To-night this ravishing scene of beauty and splendor makes me sad at heart, I know not why. It seems too brilliant, too dazzling. I would as soon go home and compose a dirge as anything." ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a dirge for their martyr hero. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Factory. The men drew the sledges on which their provisions were loaded and went in advance, clearing the way for the women. In the midst of the company strode a solemn-visaged piper. At one moment, as a dirge wailed forth, the spirits of the people drooped and they felt themselves beaten and forsaken. But anon the music changed. Up through the scrubby pine and over the mantle of snow rang the skirl of the undefeated; and as they heard the gathering song of Bonnie Dundee {63} or the summons ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... ringing. Dirge-like your melody swells; But Hope wipes the tears that are springing, Mournful-toned memory-bells! Above your deep knelling Her soft voice is swelling, Sweeter than angel-tones, silvery clear, Singing:—in Heaven above, All is unchanging love, Mourner, look upward, ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... recent date, & recolecting that I had seen a coffin put on the ferryboat that day I came over I supposed this to be the same, deposited here, & that the noise I heard them making the following night, was the funeral dirge. There was one old grey headed indian here, but on approach, he wraped his blanket around him, & without speaking, or seeming to take notice of us, walked off into the thickets, & disappeared. I looked after him as he turned away, & felt ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... Dusk fell swiftly, and the pines began their nightly dirge for the many dead who died under them five and thirty years ago. They had a new and ominous chant now to Crittenden—a chant of premonition for the strong men about him who were soon to follow them. Camp-fires ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... there arose a melancholy chant from the old hags around—a dreadful strain, that sounded like a funeral dirge, sung in shrill, discordant voices, led by the nightmare hag, who as she sang waved in her hand a kind of club. All the time I held Almah in my arms, regardless of those around us, thinking only of her from whom I must soon again be separated, and whom I must leave in this ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... before we did. Then the diligence caught up with them. From a distance I saw in a pool of moonlight on the yellow road the black irregular mass of the convoy. Then I heard a weary dirge; the wretches were singing. One, in a sad and gutteral voice, gave the couplet, which trailed dismally through the ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... burial, sepulture^; inhumation^; obsequies, exequies^; funeral, wake, pyre, funeral pile; cremation. funeral, funeral rite, funeral solemnity; kneel, passing bell, tolling; dirge &c (lamentation) 839; cypress; orbit, dead march, muffled drum; mortuary, undertaker, mute; elegy; funeral, funeral oration, funeral sermon; epitaph. graveclothes^, shroud, winding sheet, cerecloth; cerement. coffin, shell, sarcophagus, urn, pall, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the rock-hewn cemetery. Men bore the coffin on their shoulders, and on the coffin lay the dead man's sword, crowned with garlands, and his shako pierced with a bullet-hole. Leading the procession marched a student chorus singing a dirge, while weeping women brought up the rear. When the family vault was reached, the seven brothers of the deceased took the coffin and laid it in the niche prepared to receive it; then they rolled a great stone before the opening, came out of the ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... called also dirge-ales, and heathenish rioting at bride-ales." (HARRISON, Description of ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... he did not come out of it. The postilion Antipka said afterwards that he saw Gerasim through a crack in the wall, sitting on his bedstead, his face in his hand. From time to time he uttered soft regular sounds; he was wailing a dirge, that is, swaying backwards and forwards with his eyes shut, and shaking his head as drivers or bargemen do when they chant their melancholy songs. Antipka could not bear it, and he came away from the crack. When ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... matter he should join his voice with hers. Fainter fell the harmony; then ceased altogether—a hymn destined to become interwoven with terrible memories, the tragic massacre of the Huguenots on the ill-fated night of St. Bartholomew. Again prevailed the tristful dirge ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... no one at home within but a woman and a few bairns. The odd thing is that as I get a look of the woman between the door-post and the wall, she sits with her back to the cruisie-light, patching clothes and crooning away at a dirge that's broken by her tears. If it had been last week, and our little adventures in Glencoe had brought us so far up this side of the glen, I might have thought she had suffered something at our hands. But we were never near ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... for an effort, he opens his arms, and stoops as to take up the body. Just then the hound, for some time silent, again gives out its mournful monotone—continuing the dirge the runaway ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... came the Fourth of July, when, in obedience to the old custom which I had known so well in my student days, the American colony visited the cemetery of the Rue Picpus and laid wreaths upon the tomb of Lafayette,—the American band performing a dirge, and our marines on duty firing a farewell volley. It was in every way a warm and hearty tribute. A week later was the unveiling of the statue of Camille Desmoulins in the garden of the Palais Royal,—this being the one-hundredth ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... This woeful dirge of the mother's heart, and the wife's sorrow, had almost every eye in tears; and, indeed, it was impossible that the sympathy for her should not be deep and general. They all knew the excellence and mildness of her husband's character, and that every word ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... babels; wretched souls bearing up dead bodies, that they may not have their fall so soon: even as it is in that common dirge song. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... putting an end to him at once,' said Miss Gwynne, 'and I think we had better play his funeral dirge. Lady Mary, will you give us 'The Dead March in Saul,' or something appropriate? Never mind, Netta; I daresay cousin Howel will turn out a great man by-and-by;' this last clause was whispered to Netta, whilst the young hostess went towards a grand piano that stood invitingly open, and begged ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
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