|
|
|
More "Halcyon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is like an apple tree Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these, Because my ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the preference to the present Summer season that has but recently commenced, a season so rich in enjoyment. For now Unceasing are the charms of halcyon days, When the cool bath exhilarates the frame; When sylvan gales are laden with the scent Of fragrant Patalas; when soothing sleep Creeps softly on beneath the deepening shade; And when, at last, the dulcet calm of eve Entrancing steals o'er ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... of his nature, the man wonders why it was that, in the halcyon days of courtship, he never beheld his beloved in the midst of a gunny—no, a dressing-sack. Of course, then, she didn't have to keep house, and didn't have so many cares to tire her. Poor little thing! Perhaps she ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... howl of more than wintry storms, The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours Already on ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the storms that shake the pole Can e'er disturb thy halcyon soul, And smooth th' unaltered brow." —Day's Gram., p. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... But this halcyon period was yet afar off, and the colonel roused himself to the duty of the hour. With the best intentions he had let loose upon the community, in a questionable way, a desperate character. It was no less than his plain duty to put the man under restraint. To rescue from Fetters a man whose life ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Vig. and Horsf. Podargus brachypterus, Gould. Eurostopodus guttatus, Gould. Halcyon sanctus, Vig. and Horsf. Merops ornatus, Lath. Hirundo pacifica ? Lath. Collocalia ? leucosterna, Gould. Cotyle pyrrhonota. Cotyle familiaris, Gould. Seisura volitans, Vig. and Horsf. Microeca assimilis, Gould. Rhipidura albiscapa, Gould. Rhipidura ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Christmastides, when he should be a prosperous silversmith and live in one of the houses in the College Green, as his uncle did, with Bryda its mistress, with all she liked best about her—plenty of books, and music, and everything she asked for. Lost in the contemplation of that halcyon time, Jack forgot the present, and was only awoke to it by the old man's exclamation of wonder as Mr Bayfield laid the gifts of which he spoke on ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... on the day of my ordination, and in those halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential friend in a hundred families in the town—cutting the social trifle, as my friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped-syllabub to the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation"—to keep abreast ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... in the little alleys off Cornhill and Lombard Street. I agree, too, with Georgie in deploring the passing of the public-house mid-day ordinary. From his recollections, I learn that the sixties and seventies were the halcyon days for feeding—indeed, the only time when Londoners really lived; and an elderly uncle of mine, who, at that time, went everywhere and knew everybody in the true hard-up Bohemia, tells me that there were ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the Captain, "takes one back, suh, to the halcyon days of American history. I refeh, suh, to those times when the plantahs of the black prairie belt of Alabama lived like princes, in the heart ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... the 'poor man's steak' I believe it is commonly called. When I was younger, Mrs. Wilkins, they were cheaper. For twopence one could secure a small specimen, for fourpence one of generous proportions. In the halcyon days of youth, when one's lexicon contained not the word failure (it has crept into later editions, Mrs. Wilkins, the word it was found was occasionally needful), the haddock was of much comfort and support to me, a very present help in time of trouble. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... notes, dear master. You send me "halcyon" to replace the word, "dragonfly." Georges Pouchet suggested gerre of the lakes (genus, Gerris). Well! neither the one nor the other suits me, because they do not immediately make a picture ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Almost due south of the Ilha do Boi is the Zunga chya Kampenzi, whence our word chimpanzee: in the hydrographic chart it is miswritten Zoonga Campendi, and in Tuckey's map, which contradicts his text, "Zoonga Casaquoisa." His "Zoonga Kampenzey," also named "Halcyon Island," appears to be the Draper's Island or the "Monkey Island" of Mr. Maxwell: the latter in modern charts is more to the north-east, that is, above Porto da Lenha, than the former. The Simiads have been killed out; Captain Tuckey going up the river saw upwards of twenty which, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... day, Which, like thee, to those in sorrow Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow To the rough year just awake In its cradle on the brake. The brightest hour of unborn Spring Through the winter wandering, Found, it seems, the halcyon morn To hoar February born; Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kiss'd the forehead of the earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... not remember the Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast in the halcyon days of their childhood? These toyful trifles, "light as air," doubtless suggested the Emperor's Rout. Do not start, expectant reader; this is no downfall of a royal dynasty, no burning of palaces, or muster of rebel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... halcyon dreams they were startled one morning, at daybreak, by a savage yell, and jumped for their rifles. The yell was repeated by two or three voices. Cautiously peeping out, they beheld, to their dismay, several Indian warriors among the trees, all armed and painted in warlike ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... like this. "Well, that alone ought to settle it. Under the circumstances, it would be flying in the face of Providence to leave Boston. The mere fact of a brilliant opening like that offered me on 'The Microbe,' and the halcyon future which Fulkerson promises if we'll come to New York, is as dust in the balance against the advantages of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... at once, though she was eager to ask about the promised journey, but the habit of repression was strong upon her, and obedience to the letter was exacted from children at that period. It must have been a halcyon time for mothers when a child never ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Those halcyon days were too serene to last long. When his honour the Laird of Gandercleugh, with his wife and three daughters, the minister, the gauger, mine esteemed patron Mr. Jedediah Cleishbotham, and some round ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... inexpressible magic for the man wandering on the moor. So did the movements of birds—the rise of a couple of startled grouse, the hovering of two kestrels, a flight of wild duck in the distance. Each and all reminded him of the halcyon times of life—adventures of his boyhood, the sporting pleasures of his manhood. By George!—how he ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... throughout the dinner that followed betimes—during which Mr. Graham's pleasantries and Louise's gay spirits and mirth evoked in Lee a blitheness to which he long had been a stranger and in Dave a state of joyous bliss—they luxuriated in halcyon well-being. After the meal Louise, at her father's suggestion, went to the piano and sang while the men were smoking their cigars. And then followed an hour at cards, High Five, at which Mr. Graham and Dave won the most games; and then a maid, a Mexican girl, Rosita, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... legitimately be considered as one of the outstanding features in the recent history of the institution. It is the one product of our day which will bear actual comparison with the publications of the departed "Halcyon" period. A July Vagrant, of equal quality though lesser size, may be expected in the near future. A newcomer to our list of journals is The Silver Clarion, issued by Mr. John Milton Samples of Macon, Ga., a promising poet, essayist, and editor, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... misguided supporter of the '15 and left it with sufficient means for its upkeep to his grandson William, the second baron and first viscount, who built on sure foundations. Common sense and a certain practical alertness in the halcyon days of the Enclosure Acts did nothing to diminish the patrimony of Charles, fourth baron, third viscount and first earl, though the estate came to be temporarily encumbered when the good fellowship of John, the second earl, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... But such halcyon days could not last long. Even Paradise might pall on such a restless temperament as that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He began to sigh for the outer world in which he felt that it was his destiny to shine, for an arena in which he could do justice to the gifts which were clamouring for scope ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... there of gayety and halcyon days that give brightness to the story so full of tragedy. There was in the very heart of the valley (near the site of St. Louis, where a great world's fair was held a few years ago), Fort Chartres, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... chemists found out that from a cheap substance known as beef suet, an imitation butter could be made, which was in composition and appearance the same as butter made by the ordinary process, and was exactly as nourishing a food. There has been much talk of the halcyon days to come when the progress of science will be so great that food will be made in the laboratory. Well, here was an important practical step in that direction. A cheap product worth three or four cents ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... was a terror in the joy. The wide vacancy of the air dazed them,—a glance downward made their brains reel. But when a great wind filled their wings, and Icarus felt himself sustained, like a halcyon-bird in the hollow of a wave, like a child uplifted by his mother, he forgot everything in the world but joy. He forgot Crete and the other islands that he had passed over: he saw but vaguely that winged thing in the distance before him that was his father Daedalus. He longed ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... career,—had obtained some reputation as a preacher in London, and had moved,—if not in fashionable circles,—at any rate in circles so near to fashion as to be brought within the reach of Lady Eustace's charms. They were married, and for some few months Mr. Emilius enjoyed a halcyon existence, the delights of which were, perhaps, not materially marred by the necessity which he felt of subjecting his young wife to marital authority. "My dear," he would say, "you will know me better soon, and then things will be smooth." In the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... who have ice-cream, Life is a glowing, halcyon dream, While Tom stands empty by; And says, "Gee! fellers, ain't it prime? Say, I had ice-cream too, one time, And it ...
— Children of Our Town • Carolyn Wells
... known as "the field of honor," Tiltock kept the lieutenant in his eye, and took him finally aside and demanded a meeting in the name of Utie. The naval officer answered that he had simply relieved a lady from a drunken boy; but Tiltock, in the dramatic way common to halcyon old times, refused to accept either "drunken" or "boy" as terms appropriate to "the code," and pressed for an answer. In five minutes the naval officer replied, through his naval companion, that having ascertained Mr. Utie to be a gentleman's son, and he as ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... It was a halcyon day, and as they neared the shore and the salt breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long, level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea. Then they hurried through the little town ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... last doubts. It was my intention to invite you to dine with me to-day but you have quite discouraged me. I live quite en garcon, you know, and have no Chateau Yquem nor pheasant a la Sainte Alliance, and whatever else your halcyon days at the Cafe Anglais may have accustomed ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... All this Jefferson Hope was able to tell him, and in a style which interested Lucy as well as her father. He had been a pioneer in California, and could narrate many a strange tale of fortunes made and fortunes lost in those wild, halcyon days. He had been a scout too, and a trapper, a silver explorer, and a ranchman. Wherever stirring adventures were to be had, Jefferson Hope had been there in search of them. He soon became a favourite with the old farmer, who spoke eloquently of his ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... saw of Billy was during one of my engagements at the Palace Theater, New York. He was then soliciting orders for some photograph firm, the halcyon days of his big money having faded to a memory. But he had been a good showman and his was one of the best liked working acts in the Curio, as the dime-museum profession ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... napkin, and staff) of the grand chamberlain, whose government only lasted for a day, when he was supplanted by another; of their dinners in the sunshine amid the corn-fields; of their boats, banners, and music on the water; of their gentleness, simplicity, and honest, hearty enjoyments. These halcyon days soon came to an end. The infamous Captain Argall, hearing that a number of white people had settled in this hyperborean region, set sail from Jamestown for the colony, in a ship of fourteen guns, in the midst of a profound peace, to burn, pillage, and slaughter the intruders ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... and buxom, Nor change but what ten years may bring, Her hair still of the glossy flaxen, Her eyes still blue as halcyon's wing. He traced the lines, he knew each feature Of all her still unfaded charms; And now this long lost, worshipped creature Is locked fast in his ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... experience was a forerunner of the unexpected in this wandering life, but another time the mishap might not be turned to diversion. The coach would not always traverse sunny byways; the dry leaf floating from the majestic arm of the oak, the sound of an acorn as it struck the earth presaged days less halcyon to come. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... have these opinions sitting on the throne of the Caesars. Now, one would suppose the intellect of that whole realm would have fair play. There was no Bible there to fetter or to annoy. This ought to be the halcyon age for "the liberty of man, woman and child." These rulers have the same dignified abhorrence for all kinds of religion. The skeptic Lucretius says: "The fear of the lower world must be sent headlong forth. It poisons ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... carried them back to many scenes connected with past experiences; and they lived again in the various happenings marking those halcyon days. ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... Turmister, in which Scott places some of the concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe. Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a dishonest historian tells with no effect against the honest "maker," ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... reached me; but it is necessary for you to know that the Interprovincial Loan & Savings Company is vitally interested in the recovery of this money, or at least in the identity of the thief. And when we speak of the Interprovincial in these halcyon days we speak of J. Cuthbert Nickleby, its astute president. A thing like this could never have happened if Nat Lawson had been ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... my soul With more unrest, and Hebe-like, the bowl Of festal comfort for a moment raise To my poor lips, and then avert thy gaze? Wouldst make me mad beyond the daily curse Of thy displeasure, and in wrath disperse That halcyon draught, that nectar of the mind, Which is the theme I ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... be smooth and bright, Sparkling with the stars of night, And my ship's path be ablaze With the light of halcyon days, Still I know my need of ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... it was with an agreement to meet again that evening, and in the twilight they spent a halcyon hour ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... country-folk got in with baskets, and talked in an unfamiliar dialect, an English which to us sounded almost like a foreign tongue. Then the first glimpse of the sea; the excitement of noting whether tide was high or low—stretches of sand and weedy pools, or halcyon wavelets frothing at their furthest reach, under the sea-banks starred with convolvulus. Of ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... as great a furore among the musical public of that day as would an opera from Gounod or Verdi in the present. The principal airs were sung throughout the land, and published as harpsichord pieces; for in these halcyon days of our composers the whole atmosphere of the land was full of the flavor and color of Handel. Many of the melodies in these now forgotten operas have been worked up by modern composers, and so have passed into modern music unrecognized. It is a notorious fact that the celebrated song, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... men, but the remark is as true of confidence in predictions of future occurrences. Many Whigs see before us a prospect of more power, and a better chance to serve the country, than we now possess. Far along in the horizon, they discern mild skies and halcyon seas, while fogs and darkness and mists blind other sons of humanity from beholding all this bright vision. It was not so that we accomplished our last great victory, by simply brooding over a glorious Whig future. We succeeded in 1840, but not without an effort; and I ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year—one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon (*1),—I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... (then enthusiastic about a Repeal of the Legislative Union) said that the picture of Irish misery drawn by Lord John Russell was the result of forty-seven years of union with England. Halcyon days were promised to Ireland at the time of the Union, but he called on the House to contrast the progress of Ireland from 1782 to the Union, with the state of Ireland since. He expressed his opinion that the loss in ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... islands, obtained nearly a hundred species of terrestrial and fluviatile mollusca. The scarcity of birds during our walk surprised me, for the only one which I saw on shore was a solitary kingfisher (Halcyon vagans): during our ascent of the Keri-Keri, however, many ducks (Anas superciliosa) flew past the boat, and gulls, terns, and two kinds of ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... of the field by Mr. Peter Finnerty, old "Taeping," as Gordon's ex-marine engineer had been promptly nicknamed, arrived with his crushing battery, and then indeed were halcyon days for the Flat. From early morn till long past midnight, the little bar of the "Digger's Best" was crowded with diggers, packhorsemen and teamsters; a police trooper arrived and fixed his tent on the ridge overlooking the creek, and then—the very zenith ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... packed to its fullest capacity. The cantata was given to the unbounded delight of Mr. Badger, and the audience cheered us all to the utmost. Enthusiasm was at the highest pitch and encomiums of praise were showered upon us. Those were halcyon days for fine singers. We had no lack of voices to call ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... that by the rocky cliffs of the sea, halcyon,[144] dost chant thy mournful elegy, a sound well understood by the skilled, namely, that thou art ever bemoaning thine husband in song, I, a wingless bird, compare my dirge with thine, longing for the assemblies[145] of the Greeks, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... passed to the heart of the Hills, For a season of halcyon hours, 'Mid the music of murmurous rills, And the delicate odours ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... travellers a short distance out of Isfahan, and bring them by nightfall to the governor's secret apartments or (as others say) to one of the royal palaces. There the Bāb had still to spend a little more than four untroubled halcyon months. ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... went by, days that were halcyon under love's own sunshine. What matter if the mere skies were clouded, the mere material sun shut out, the wind bitter? Love can build a shelter for his votaries, and has a sun-shine of his own. Still let me sing thy praises, gracious Love, though I am entering on the days of fogeydom, ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... of the wise and the good were filled with sadness, as they listened to the low murmurs of popular discontent, which seemed to be gradually swelling into strength for some terrible convulsion; and they looked back with fond regret to the halcyon days, which they had enjoyed under the temperate rule of Ferdinand ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... been definitely pledged to one throw of the dice. Imagine one of those contests which you find in the pages of Turgenieff or Tolstoi, which perchance you may have seen at Monte Carlo, which in the last few days may have been observed at Epsom Downs—in which life or death, ruin or halcyon fortune, depended on one throw—and you can have some sense of all that passed through the imagination of the House and that made it almost audibly shiver when Mr. Gladstone made this slight and terse interruption. Mr. Morley's face—serious, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... kitchen eminent for mouldiness and proposed to secrete me there for life and feed me on what he could hide from his meals when he was not at home for the holidays and on dry bread in disgrace which at that halcyon period too frequently occurred, would it be inconvenient or asking too much to beg to be permitted to revive those scenes and walk ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... sycamore trees, and there, gently swaying to and fro, she watched her husband reading the various European journals that had arrived for his host by that day's mail. Beautiful always, she had grown lovelier than ever in these halcyon days of rest, when 'Love took up the harp of Life and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.' To her native grace she now united a distinctive ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of halcyon days at Echo Lodge in the golden prime of August. While there she incidentally contrived to hurry Ludovic Speed in his leisurely courting of Theodora Dix, as related duly in another chronicle of her history.(1) ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... waves are strown beneath your prow, Like carpets for a victor's feet; You call slow zephyrs to your brow, In listless luxury complete: Love, the true Halcyon, guides your ship; Oh, might his ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... his old greasy book, till he would turn into bed, to forget another day's woes, and dream of punctual tenants and unembarrassed properties. Alas! it was only in his dreams he was destined to meet such halcyon things. What could such a man have to say to a young girl that would attract or amuse her? Poor Thady had little to say to any one, except in the way of business, and on that subject Feemy would not listen to him. She constantly heard her father growling about his Carrick foes, ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... tolerable anchorage under a small island and stayed for the night, and I shot a large fruit-pigeon new to me, which I have since named Carpophaga tumida. I also saw and shot at the rare white-headed kingfisher (Halcyon saurophaga), but did not kill it. The next morning we sailed on, and having a fair wind reached the shores of the large island of Waigiou. On rounding a point we again ran full on to a coral reef with our mainsail up, but luckily the wind had almost ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... one another so tenderly that when the male becomes enfeebled by age, his mate carries him on her outspread wings whithersoever he will; and the gods, desiring to reward such faithful love, cause the sun to shine more kindly, and still the winds and waves on the "Halcyon days" during which these birds are building their nest and brooding over their young? There can surely have been no lack of romantic love in days when a used-up man of the world, like Antony, could desire in his will that wherever he died his body might be laid by the side ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... stood that domestic drama of love and its entanglements, which was destined to be deeply interwoven with the other principal incidents of this singular story? All on the surface seemed as bright and unruffled as the halcyon waters of the sleeping ocean before the days of storm have come to move and vex it. But how was it within the vail of the heart and teeming mind, where the currents and counter-currents of that subtle but powerful passion ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... was taught by the manner of his friend Poppins that he could not now expect to receive that high deference which was paid to him about the time that Johnson of Manchester had been in the ascendant. Those had been the halcyon days of the firm, and Robinson had then been happy. Men at that time would point him out as he passed, as one worthy of notice; his companions felt proud when he would join them; and they would hint to ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... lover-like caress, had worlds of charms. Ellis Pritchard was a tenant on the Bodowen estate, and therefore had reasons in plenty for wishing to keep the young Squire's visits secret; and Owen, unwilling to disturb the sunny calm of these halcyon days by any storm at home, was ready to use all the artifice which Ellis suggested as to the mode of his calls at Ty Glas. Nor was he unaware of the probable, nay, the hoped-for termination of these repeated days of happiness. He was quite conscious ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... your laurels now; None rises, singing, from your race like you. Dark melodist, immortal, though the dew Fell early on the bays upon your brow, And tinged with pathos every halcyon vow And brave endeavor. Silence o'er you threw Flowerets of love. Or, if an envious few Of your own people brought no garlands, how Could Malice smite him whom the gods had crowned? If, like the meadow-lark, your flight was low Your flooded ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... visiting him at his beautiful residence at Elleray, on the banks of Lake Windermere, where for years previously he had lived in Utopian health and happiness, "surrounded by the finest of scenery, and varying his poem-writing and halcyon peace, with walking excursions and jovial visits from friends that, like himself, entered with zest into the hearty enjoyment of life." But, as between Bell and Wilson, there was a fellow-feeling that ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... enmity with the northern kingdom, and records scarcely anything of Asa's reign except the war which, as it says, was between him and Baasha of Israel 'all their days.' But, according to 2 Chronicles xvi. 1, Baasha did not proceed to war till Asa's thirty-sixth year, and the halcyon time of peace evidently followed immediately on the religious reformation at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... were halcyon days, when I returned to spend the vacations at the Lodge, and found myself ever a welcome visitor at the Hall. With a proud heart I recounted to Sir Alexander, all my boyish triumphs at school, and the good baronet listened to my enthusiastic details with ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... Georgy, these halcyon days were broken by intervals of storm and cloud. The weak little woman was afflicted with that intermittent fever called jealousy; and the stalwart Thomas was one of those men who can scarcely give the time ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Margaret, and in the corn-fields with Raby; now nutting in the copse or gathering brier roses in the lanes; setting out our strawberry feast under the great elm-tree on the lawn or picking up fir-cones in the Redmond avenue. Spring flowers and autumn sunsets—bright halcyon days of my ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... for revolutions are admirable,(685) and yet it is natural for an historian to like to describe times of action. Halcyon days do not furnish matter for talents; they are like the virtuous couple in a comedy, a little insipid. Mr. Manly and Lady Grace, Mellefont and Cynthia, do not interest one much. Indeed, in a tragedy where they are unhappy, they give the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... to be one of many firsts was not altogether agreeable. With the new home and new associates more like those to which she had been accustomed, Ethelyn had resumed her training process, which was not now borne as patiently as in the halcyon days of the honeymoon, when most things wore the couleur de rose and were right because they came from the pretty young bride. Richard chafed under the criticisms to which he was so frequently subjected, and if he improved on ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His father must have been a youth at the time when Geneva passed into the power of the French republic, and would seem to have married and settled in the halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese independence in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height, when the little state was administered by men of European reputation, and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to avoid the sharp ascent from the town, as well as the still sharper and highly dangerous descent into the valley again, where the little mediaeval village lay nestled. Thus it was enabled to gather to itself a strangely beautiful halcyon calm on the Lord's Day,—and in fair Spring weather like the present, dozed complacently under the quiet smile of serene blue skies, soothed to sleep by the rippling flow of its ribbon-like river, and receiving from hour to hour a fluttering halo of doves' wings, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... sweet love, with her luring smile, The mystic charm-light of halcyon hours, Shall no more with her witch'ry our souls beguile, As the leaves grow seer on Life's fading bowers, And the blushes are pale ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... hearing a deep sigh, he shrugged his shoulders, and looked as pitiable as a prime minister with a rebellious cabinet. At length he ventured to lift up his head; there was not a wrinkle on the face of ocean; a halcyon fluttered over him, and then scudded before his canoe, and gamesome porpoises were tumbling at his side. The sky was cloudless, except in the direction to which he was driving; but even as Popanilla observed, with some misgivings, the mass of vapours which had ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... Well, well, girl, Thou wilt know it yet. I fetter not thy choice, But if thou couldst by loving bind together Not two hearts only, but opposing peoples; Supplant by halcyon days long years of strife, And link them in unbroken harmony;— Were this no glory for a woman, this No ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... brook that circled along the foot of the descent; and here, turning joyfully to the left, we rode in luxury and ease over the white pebbles and the rippling water, shaded from the glaring sun by an overarching green transparency. These halcyon moments were of short duration. The friendly brook, turning sharply to one side, went brawling and foaming down the rocky hill into an abyss, which, as far as we could discern, had no bottom; so once more we betook ourselves ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... For two halcyon months Yuki San lived in a dream. The ample compensation Merrit insisted upon making for the hospitality extended to him more than met the modest needs of the little household, and once again, as in the earlier days, they went on jolly excursions, visited ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... parlor of the house. In that densification of population which proceeds so incessantly on Manhattan Island this old house, like many another, was modernly compelled to hold more people than it had been meant for in the halcyon days when Second Avenue was a fashionable thoroughfare. The second floor of the house had been let, without board, to a gentleman and his wife, and the rooms above to single gentlemen. The parlor floor and ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... over the treeless plateau seems to take all superfluous moisture out of the men of Madrid. But it is, like Benedick's wit, "a most manly air, it will not hurt a woman." This tropic summer-time brings the halcyon days of the vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after all, when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants of our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman says, they loaf and invite their souls. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... South. When he left Monte Alloro the land had worn the bleached face of February, and it was amazing to his northern-bred eyes to find himself, on the sea-coast, in the full exuberance of summer. Seated by this halcyon shore, Genoa, in its carved and frescoed splendour, just then celebrating with the customary gorgeous ritual the accession of a new Doge, seemed to Odo like the richly-inlaid frame of some Renaissance "triumph." But the splendid ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... in two, was shared between Blake and his faithful sergeant. Behind these three rode another set. Sandwiched between two troopers was a man whom Sancho's people well remembered as Nevins' clerk and assistant, despite the fact that a bushy beard now covered the face that was smooth-shaven in the halcyon days of the supply camp. Then came some thirty horsemen in long, straggling column of twos, while, straight from the flank to the gate of the corral, silent and even somber, rode the engineer, Lieutenant Loring. To him Sancho whipped off ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Now while the halcyon broods through the Sabbath-days of winter, and, looking from her nest, sees the waves of a summer calm and brightness,—now while she meditates, with the eggs under her wings, of a fast-approaching time when she shall teach her song to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprising, more snarl'd with unintelligible Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountered; an Attempt so Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell trodden under our feet." In sound and structure Mather's style is what the critics call "archaistic." It is all untouched by the influences of another world, and though "the New Englanders ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... the majority, the strawberry season brings the halcyon days of the year. They look forward to it and enjoy it as a prolonged picnic, in which business and pleasure are equally combined. They are essentially gregarious, and this industry brings many together during the long bright days. The light work leaves their tongues free, and families and ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... for thee. The green glens of ocean, created by swelling and subsiding storms, or by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known but that she perished. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... failure since she became its hostess. The Premier of South Australia has announced that the Governor's salary will in future be reduced by two thousand pounds; his reasons are obvious. The other Colonies will follow suit for a certainty, so the halcyon days of an Australian Governor may fairly ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... Hall—to students; and their rabbis instructed even Christian students in their synagogue. Jews took care of vacant benefices for the king. In the reign of Henry I. the Jews began to make proselytes, and monks were sent to several towns to preach against them. Halcyon times! With the reign of Stephen, however, began the storms, and, with the clergy, the usurper persecuted the Jews, exacting a fine of L2,000 from those of London alone for a pretended manslaughter. The absurd story of the Jews murdering young children, to anoint Israelites ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... divinity, are? What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its choice, like the halcyon on the wave; and the air of heaven is ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... Those were halcyon days which Robert passed at Silverton, but one stood out prominently before him, whether sitting by his camp-fire or plunging into the battle, and that the one when, casting aside all pride and foolish theories, Bell Cameron freely acknowledged her love for the man to whom she had been so ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... respects the dead, except profligate editors, prostitutes, and political clergymen. Besides, his life was such a hard one,—so full of clouds, with so few gleams of sunshine,—so agitated by storm,—so bereaved of halcyon days,—'twould be most cruel to deny him the grave's dearest privilege, peace and quiet. Amen! Amen! with all my heart to thy benediction and prayer, O priest! as, aspersing his lifeless remains with holy-water, thou sayest, Requiescat! So mote it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... might punish, the assassin; and the repetition of murder rendered him less willing, and less able, to forgive. [1018] A horrid narrative of the victims whom he sacrificed by poison or the sword, by the sea or the flames, would be less expressive of his cruelty than the appellation of the halcyon days, which was applied to a rare and bloodless week of repose: the tyrant strove to transfer, on the laws and the judges, some portion of his guilt; but the mask was fallen, and his subjects could no longer mistake the true author of their calamities. The noblest of the Greeks, more especially ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Clapp, were expected after tea. And a pleasant, good-natured evening it proved to be. Miss Patsey's coffee was excellent; the little black girl, engaged for the occasion, performed her duties to admiration. Mrs. Taylor thought that she had scarcely passed such a quiet, pleasant afternoon, since the halcyon days before her husband was a rich man; she was much interested in discussing with Miss Patsey, and Miss Wyllys, and Mrs. Van Horne, various recipes for making bread, hoe-cake, and other good things. As for Elinor, she told Charlie she had left her work at home, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... paintings were kept to the last; and Watts, high though his expectations were, was overwhelmed at what he saw. 'Michelangelo', he said, 'stands for Italy, as Shakespeare does for England.' So the four years went by till in 1847 this halcyon period came to an end. The Royal Commission of Fine Arts was offering prizes for fresco-painting, and Watts felt that he must put his growing powers to the test and utilize what he had learnt. This time he chose for ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... for the penniless, halcyon days for the toady and the sycophant. There was still much of the old oriental munificence about the court, and sovereigns like Mazarin and Louis XIV. granted pensions for a copy of flattering verses, or gave away places as the reward of a judicious speech. Sinecures were legion, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... She did not in the days of courtship assume the privilege of imposing rigorous commands, or resenting slight offences. If I forgot any of her injunctions, I was gently reminded; if I missed the minute of appointment, I was easily forgiven. I foresaw nothing in marriage but a halcyon calm, and longed for the happiness which was to be found in the inseparable society of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Peace her softest balm infuse, Into his once too world-disturbed breast: There did he find a deep and quiet rest: The mockbird sang his vespers, while the star Shone sweetly o'er the rippling river's crest; There no rude sound the halcyon calm did mar, And Grief was absent still, and ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... now knew, loved her well, and for whom she had always felt at any rate the warmest friendship? Such were not her thoughts, nor were they in any way akin to this. They ran back instantly to years gone by,—over long years, as her few years were counted, and settled themselves on certain halcyon days, in which she had dreamed that he had loved her, and had fancied that she had loved him. How she had schooled herself for those days since that, and taught herself to know that her thoughts had been over-bold! And now it had all come ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... think too hardly of the man who thus lays bare the secret thoughts of his heart for you. 'Twas but a passing gust of the tempest of disloyalty, and I was not swept wholly from my moorings. Nay, when she came to sit on the hassock at my feet, as she used to do in that other halcyon-time of convalescence, I was myself again and could look upon her sweet face with eyes that saw beyond her to the camp or battle-field where my ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... Oh, that those halcyon days of the little wars would come again, when a captain could ride out almost any time at the held of his band of mercenaries and see honest fighting and divide honest spoils! There was much knocking ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... motionless, undisturbed, unruffled, pacific, placid, tranquil, halcyon; sedate, collected, imperturbable, unmoved, cool, composed, dispassionate. Antonyms: excited, stormy, agitated, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... occasion, might secure to itself such predominance as to dwarf into inefficiency her religion of culture. It was exquisite misery to conceive, as, from inner observation, she so well could, some demand of life which would make her ideals appear the dreams of bygone halcyon days, useless and worse amid the threats of gathering tempest. An essentially human apprehension, be it understood. The vulgarities of hysterical pietism Emily had never known; she did not fear the ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... account it among our most precious heritages that our sires and grandsires kept stations on that same road, and many an escaped bondsman looking back from his safe asylum in Canada called them "blessed." Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-nine was in the halcyon days of "Fugitive Slave Law" lovers. If John Wesley considered Slavery the "sum of all villainies," I wonder what terse definition he would have given to this the vilest enactment that ever rested ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... than wine, and did not dislike his temperance. There was about him at all hours an air which seemed to say, "There; I told you all that I could do it as soon as there was any necessity." And in these halcyon days he could shoot for an hour without his pony, and he liked the gentle, courteous badinage which was bestowed upon his courtship, and he liked also Julia's beauty. Her conduct to him was perfect. She was never pert, never exigeant, never ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... saintly repose from strife and sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, the profounder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude continually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were nearing the sea; which also must, under the present circumstances, be repeating the general state of halcyon repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight and the first timid tremblings of the dawn were by this time blending; and the blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity by a ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... and socks: greys and blacks for times of grave political crises; fawn, buff, pearl, moose—I am not sure that this is a colour, but it sounds quite possible—for brighter hours; and colours familiar to every student of spectroscopy for halcyon days of rejoicing—the opening of the Royal Academy, the Handel Festival, the return of HARRY LAUDER, or the elevation of Mr. BERNARD ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... in June in the ninth year of King Edward VII's reign—that halcyon period when nobody who was anybody felt particularly happy, because no such person had actually experienced what unhappiness was. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne had not, unless she had shown really exceptional fortitude and self-control over ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... in the very zenith of their strength, while others again looked as if they were making but their last feeble efforts at existence, though it was evident, from the heaps of consolidated geyserite surrounding them, that they had but recently passed through halcyon days of youthful energy and manhood power. Every here and there again we came upon others from whose wide open empty mouths came forth neither a puff of steam nor a drop of water. They were dead, and not a few of them were so completely eviscerated as to allow ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... held to expel him from the Church, for "professing, against God and his own soul, so perverse and wicked a doctrine." To the ancients all beyond the region they had traversed was an unknown land, clothed in darkness, crowded with mystery and allurement. Across the weltering wastes of brine, in a halcyon sea, the Hindu placed the White Isle, the dwelling of translated and immortalized men.8 Under the attraction of a mystic curiosity, well might the old, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... wrangling, by giving us all an agreeable object to worship, while for mental demands and social purposes generally we could fall back on Philosophy. Had not our fathers tried Philosophy? When had society a better well being than in the halcyon ages of Plato and Pythagoras? Yet there was a term of indecision with us—or rather incubation. To what school should we attach ourselves? A copy of the Enchiridion of Epictetus fell into our hands, and after studying it faithfully, we rejected Stoicism. The Cynics ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... unaccustomed affluence, look with great tranquillity upon the distresses of Austria, and, in their indolence of gluttony, stand idle spectators of that deluge, by which, if it be suffered to roll on without opposition, their own halcyon territories must at last ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... fiercely that a number of days elapsed before the flames could be extinguished. More often the tankage provided is insufficient, and thousands of barrels escape. Two or three years ago, at the height of the oil production of the Bradford region, 8,000 barrels a day were thus running to waste. But those halcyon days of Bradford have gone forever. Although nineteen-twentieths of the wells sunk in this region "struck" oil and flowed freely, most of them now flow sluggishly or have to be "pumped" two or three times ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... to whose firm I had given a good deal of business in the old days. He is now connected with the Chicago branch of one of the trusts. He returned my letter after writing across it in red ink: "Had you not held your head so d—n high in your halcyon days, I might respond. You should look to ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... bloomed on Gertrude's cheek:— What though these shades had seen her birth, her sire A Briton's independence taught to seek Far western worlds; and there his household fire The light of social love did long inspire; And many a halcyon day he lived to see, Unbroken but by one misfortune dire, When fate had reft his mutual heart—but she Was gone;—and Gertrude climbed a ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... and a bargain struck with a farmer to bring from Greenwood such supplies of clothes as Mrs. Meredith wrote to Sukey to pack and send. To most the prospect would not have been a cheering one, but after the last few days it seemed truly halcyon, and Janice was scarcely able to contain her happiness. She poured her warmest gratitude and thanks out in a letter to Washington, which would have surprised him not a little had he ever received it, but the mail in which it went was captured, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... me back the halcyon days Of grateful rest; the week of leisure, The journey lapped in autumn haze, The sweet fatigue that seemed a pleasure, The morning ride, the noonday halt, The blazing slopes, the red dust rising, And then—the dim, brown, columned vault, ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... of a certain stratum of society, Carrie was comfortably established—in the eyes of the starveling, beaten by every wind and gusty sheet of rain, she was safe in a halcyon harbour. Drouet had taken three rooms, furnished, in Ogden Place, facing Union Park, on the West Side. That was a little, green-carpeted breathing spot, than which, to-day, there is nothing more beautiful in Chicago. It afforded a vista pleasant to contemplate. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... thought who rest in darkness find. My heart Love prostrates, Fortune more unkind No comfort grants, until its sorrow vast Impotent frets, then melts to tears at last: Thus I to painful warfare am consign'd. My halcyon days I hope not to return, But paint my future by a darker tint; My spring is gone—my summer well-nigh fled: Ah! wretched me! too well do I discern Each hope is now (unlike the diamond flint) A fragile mirror, with ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... still pools with scattered sequins of sunshine, where light winnowed through the dome of the leaves; and at one spot, on a wrinkled root that wound crookedly from the alder into the river, there glimmered a halcyon, like an opal on a miser's bony finger. From above the tree-tops there sounded cynic bird-laughter, and gazing upwards Martin saw a magpie flaunt his black and white plumage across the valley; while at hand the more musical merriment ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the halcyon hours. During the day time Aristide in a corner of the Mayor's office, drew up flamboyant circulars in English which would have put a pushing Land and Estate Agent in the New Jerusalem to the blush, and in the evening played piquet with Madame Coquereau, while Mademoiselle Stephanie, ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... cousin to the halcyon of the ancients. If, when next you go to sea, you take its feathers with you, you need have no ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... intrusion of a new stipulation. They would then, being alone, go great lengths in picturing to themselves and each other the pending reappearance of Mrs. Picture and Mrs. Burr, and the delights of resuming halcyon days of old. For this strangely compounded clay, Man, scarcely waits to be quite sure he is landed in existence, before he inaugurates a glorious fiction, the golden Past, which never has been; between which and its resurrection into an equally golden Future—which ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... faith which leads to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the divine order of our lives. In autumn come for spirits rightly attuned these pellucid halcyon ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... had a stranger adventure than that of the Halcyon Stream, as they named the mysterious brook. They had been walking in the woods; and Rose, being tired, had stopped to rest, while Hildegarde pursued a "yellow swallow-tail" among the trees. Rose ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... equilibrium Great error of despising their enemy Great battles often leave the world where they found it Guarantees of forgiveness for every imaginable sin Habeas corpus Hair and beard unshorn, according to ancient Batavian custom Halcyon days of ban, book and candle Hanged for having eaten meat-soup upon Friday Happy to glass themselves in so brilliant a mirror Having conjugated his paradigm conscientiously He did his best to be friends with all the world He came as a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... after his punch, he spent his hours in totting and calculating, adding and subtracting at his old greasy book, till he would turn into bed, to forget another day's woes, and dream of punctual tenants and unembarrassed properties. Alas! it was only in his dreams he was destined to meet such halcyon things. What could such a man have to say to a young girl that would attract or amuse her? Poor Thady had little to say to any one, except in the way of business, and on that subject Feemy would not listen ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... her softest balm infuse, Into his once too world-disturbed breast: There did he find a deep and quiet rest: The mockbird sang his vespers, while the star Shone sweetly o'er the rippling river's crest; There no rude sound the halcyon calm did mar, And Grief was absent still, and ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... the dinner that followed betimes—during which Mr. Graham's pleasantries and Louise's gay spirits and mirth evoked in Lee a blitheness to which he long had been a stranger and in Dave a state of joyous bliss—they luxuriated in halcyon well-being. After the meal Louise, at her father's suggestion, went to the piano and sang while the men were smoking their cigars. And then followed an hour at cards, High Five, at which Mr. Graham and Dave won the most ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... Halcyon nights those, and then on Sunday morning we always breakfasted at old Martin's on University Place eggs a la Martin and that wonderful coffee and pain de menage. And what a wrench it was when I tore myself away from the delights of the great city and scurried back to my desk in sleepy ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... artistic charm which characterized everything she selected. It was a straggling, hilly, leafy village, full of archaic relics—human as well as architectural—sloping down to a gracefully curved bay, where the blue waves broke in whispers, for on summer days a halcyon calm overhung this magic spot, and the great sea stretched away, unwrinkled, ever young. There were no neutral tones in the colors of this divine picture—the sea was sapphire, the sky amethyst. There were dark-red houses nestling amid foliage, and green-haired ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... into a chaos of equal sadness, universal strife. It is the relation of the immediate isthmus on which we stand ourselves to a past and (prophetically speaking) to a coming world of calamity, the relation of the smiling and halcyon calm which we have inherited to that darkness and anarchy out of which it arose, and towards which too gloomily we augur its return—this relation it is which enforces the other impulses, whether many or ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... So passed the halcyon hours. During the day time Aristide in a corner of the Mayor's office, drew up flamboyant circulars in English which would have put a pushing Land and Estate Agent in the New Jerusalem to the blush, and in the evening played ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... household eaves." Io Aegien! Peace! "And the skylark at poise o'er the bended sheaves," Io Aegien! Peace! Here and there, everywhere, hear we Peace, Hear her, and see her, and clasp her—Peace! The grasshopper chaunts in the bells of thyme, And the halcyon is back to her nest ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... laurels now; None rises, singing, from your race like you. Dark melodist, immortal, though the dew Fell early on the bays upon your brow, And tinged with pathos every halcyon vow And brave endeavor. Silence o'er you threw Flowerets of love. Or, if an envious few Of your own people brought no garlands, how Could Malice smite him whom the gods had crowned? If, like the meadow-lark, your flight was low Your flooded lyrics half the hilltops ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... Lowin, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare and associated with several of Shakespeare's greater characters (his range was so wide, indeed, that it included Falstaff, Henry the Eighth, and Hamlet), that, having survived the halcyon days of "Eliza and our James" and lingered into the drab and russet period of the Puritans, when all the theatres in the British islands were suppressed, he became poor and presently kept a tavern, at Brentford, called The Three Pigeons. Lowin was born in 1576 and he died in 1654—his ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... mists of morning—we can fairly "smell" the river, as Huck himself would say, and we know that it is because the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... artistic ideals. This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it, hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... Our halcyon days must end, I fear, as all such days do eventually, and we must meet the more prosaic side of life. Let us hope it will assume a pleasing form. I am loth to hand in my resignation as Dominie Exactus, however," he ended ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... moderate; lenient &c 740; gentle, mild, mellow; cool, sober, temperate, reasonable, measured; tempered &c v.; calm, unruffled, quiet, tranquil, still; slow, smooth, untroubled; tame; peaceful, peaceable; pacific, halcyon. unexciting, unirritating^; soft, bland, oily, demulcent, lenitive, anodyne; hypnotic &c 683; sedative; antiorgastic^, anaphrodisiac^. mild as mother's milk; milk and water. Adv. moderately &c adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and, scarcely daring to try a sense, immediately shut them; then hearing a deep sigh, he shrugged his shoulders, and looked as pitiable as a prime minister with a rebellious cabinet. At length he ventured to lift up his head; there was not a wrinkle on the face of ocean; a halcyon fluttered over him, and then scudded before his canoe, and gamesome porpoises were tumbling at his side. The sky was cloudless, except in the direction to which he was driving; but even as Popanilla ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... eight-hour clause in this first factory law met with much less opposition in the Legislature than was anticipated, and was enforced for a year before it was pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Illinois. During the halcyon months when it was a law, a large and enthusiastic Eight-Hour Club of working women met at Hull-House, to read the literature on the subject and in every way to prepare themselves to make public sentiment in favor of the measure ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... days of calm between the storms; halcyon days, as they have well been named, in which genius had sufficient freedom in determining its own direction to devote itself with all ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... must pass quickly over that time of my life on which I should most love to linger, those halcyon hours when, with Marian by my side and the prospect bright before us, we voyaged through those Indian seas, down the long coast of Malabar and up the long coast of Coromandel, past the Isle of Serendib, and the reefs and foaming seas, to where the tangled banyan roots ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... produced its pension: to be a poet, or reputed so, was to be—eligible for all things; and the fortunate possessor of a rhyming dictionary might have governed Europe with his metrical protocols. But these halcyon times are of the past—and so, verily, are their heroes. Farewell, a long farewell, children of oblivion! farewell, Spratt, Smith, Duke, Hughes, King, Pomfret, Phillips, and Blackmore: ye who, in that day of very small things, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... answered, "and cousin to the halcyon of the ancients. If, when next you go to sea, you take its feathers with you, you need ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... of the great World-Powers Lion and bear and eagle sullenly brood, Whether the slow folds flap o'er halcyon hours Or stream tempestuously o'er ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... preacher in London, and had moved,—if not in fashionable circles,—at any rate in circles so near to fashion as to be brought within the reach of Lady Eustace's charms. They were married, and for some few months Mr. Emilius enjoyed a halcyon existence, the delights of which were, perhaps, not materially marred by the necessity which he felt of subjecting his young wife to marital authority. "My dear," he would say, "you will know me better soon, and then things will be smooth." In the meantime he drew more largely upon her money ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... east wind, when the morning's breast Gleams like a bird's that leaves the nest, A fledgeling halcyon's bound on quest, Drives wave on wave on wave to west Till all the sea be life and light, So time's mute breath, that brings to bloom All flowers that strew the dead spring's tomb, Drives day on day on day to doom Till all ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... her heart: that azure eye, That shone through sunny tresses, waving by; The brow, the cheek, that blush'd of fire and snow, Both blending into one ethereal glow; And that same breathing radiancy, that swam Around her, like a pure and blessed calm Around some halcyon bird. And, as he kiss'd Her wormy lips, he felt that he was blest! He felt her holy being stealing through His own, like fountains of the azure dew, That summer mingles with his golden light; And he would clasp her, till the weary ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... embattled lines, Back to the Past one glance be cast— The Age of the Antonines! O summit of fate, O zenith of time When a pagan gentleman reigned, And the olive was nailed to the inn of the world Nor the peace of the just was feigned. A halcyon Age, afar it shines, Solstice of ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... the way, during those halcyon days (the halcyon was there, too, chattering above every creek, as he is all over the world) we fought another battle. It has not got into history, but it had a real objective existence although by a felicitous afterthought called by us who were defeated a "reconnaissance ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... signature and date were added by the painter after exhibiting it, and probably while he worked on it, with the advantage of having compared the painting with others in the Royal Academy. The landscape recalls that glimpse of halcyon country of which we caught sight in The Infant Academy—its trees, its glowing sky, are equally adaptable to both subjects. The picture was exhibited at the British Institution in 1843, and was then the property of Sir James Cockburn, Bart., ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... had it all to themselves," said the young man; and he laughed. "Well, it was a halcyon period. What sort of a man is ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... but the pigeons are dearer than in London. Rabbits are very rare; and there is scarce a goose to be seen in the whole county of Nice. Wild-ducks and teal are sometimes to be had in the winter; and now I am speaking of sea-fowl, it may not be amiss to tell you what I know of the halcyon, or king's-fisher. It is a bird, though very rare in this country about the size of a pigeon; the body brown, and the belly white: by a wonderful instinct it makes its nest upon the surface of the sea, and lays its eggs in the month of November, when ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... more. It is a halcyon day, and with a companion I leave the train and push on for a view of the country. Away we gallop, my Indian companion and I, over the country toward a great plateau which we can see in the distance. The Salahkai is covered with a beautiful forest. We have an exhilarating ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... himself without a rival in the Queen's good graces, continued steadily to carry on within and without the realm the system of his predecessor, and royalty, as well as France, reckoned upon a succession of halcyon years, thanks to the re-union of the Princes of the blood with the Crown, to the tactics and personal conduct of the Prime Minister, and to his political sagacity, seconded by the military genius of the Duke d'Enghien. The imprudence of Madame de Montbazon and her lover Beaufort in the ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... supporter of the '15 and left it with sufficient means for its upkeep to his grandson William, the second baron and first viscount, who built on sure foundations. Common sense and a certain practical alertness in the halcyon days of the Enclosure Acts did nothing to diminish the patrimony of Charles, fourth baron, third viscount and first earl, though the estate came to be temporarily encumbered when the good fellowship of John, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... see another such cabin as this—its great fireplaces, and the loft heaping full of pumpkins? O, Yosemite! O, halcyon days, and bed-time at eight P.M., tucking in for ten good hours and up again at six; good eatings and drinkings day by day, mugs of milk and baked squash forever, plenty of butter to our daily bread; letters at wide ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... a long and somewhat anxious day. While we were bowling along in the sweet sunshine and sweeter moonlight of the halcyon time, Uncle Sam might be dethroned by somebody in buckram, or Baltimore burnt by the boys from Lynn and Marblehead, revenging the massacre of their fellows. Every one begins to comprehend the fiery eagerness of men who live in historic times. "I wish I had control of chain-lightning for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... did not speak; but Leonora pressed his hand. The passing thought of the orderly, multifarious existence of the house behind her, of the warmed and lighted rooms, of the preoccupied lives, only increased the felicity of her halcyon dream. And in the dreamy and brooding silence all things retreated and gradually lapsed away, and the pair were left sole amid the ineffable spaces of the universe to listen to the irregular beatings of their own hearts. ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... while ecclesiastical abuses are thus augmenting, ecclesiastical power is diminishing in the Netherlands. The Church is no longer able to protect itself against the secular aim. The halcyon days of ban, book and candle, are gone. In 1459, Duke Philip of Burgundy prohibits the churches from affording protection to fugitives. Charles the Bold, in whose eyes nothing is sacred save war and the means of making it, lays a heavy impost upon all clerical ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been International Copyright in the more halcyon days of my "Proverbial" popularity, when, as reported (see the New York World on p. 124), a million and a half copies of my book were consumed in America, I should have been materially rewarded by a royalty of something like a hundred thousand ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of art inspected. During those halcyon years, before the invasion of Charles VIII., it seemed as though the peace of Italy might last unbroken. No one foresaw the apocalyptic vials of wrath which were about to be poured forth upon her plains and cities through the next half-century. Rarely, at any period of the world's ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... weather, we found ourselves colliding with an enormous halcyon's nest; it was full seven miles round. The halcyon was brooding, not much smaller herself than the nest. She got up, and very nearly capsized us with the fanning of her wings; however, she went off with a melancholy cry. When it was getting ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... gave her positive happiness to see Michael so tranquil and content, and carrying himself with the air of a man who knows himself to be anchored in some fair haven after stress of weather; and, indeed, these were halcyon days to Michael. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... while the vine twists about the ribs of the cast-iron Pallas, And, on the zephyr afloat, the halcyon soul of the borax Blends with the scent of the soap, the brush of the white-washer's flying E'en as the chicken-hawk flies when ready to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... concern," said Watson, "and take to stagging in Surrey." This was supposed to be the bitterest piece of satire that could be uttered in regard to the halcyon country in which their operations were ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... for here flocked the people to see the Discoverer. If they heard his voice they were happy; if some bolder one had a moment's speech with him that fortunate went off with the air of, "My children's children shall know of this!" There returned in this springtide travel sunniness, halcyon weather, bright winds of praise. The last health of the present body was his upon this journey. Health and strength harked back. All noted it. Jayme de Marchena held it for the leap of the flame before sinking, before ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... This halcyon period of our autumn will always in some way be associated with the Indian. It is red and yellow and dusky like him. The smoke of his camp-fire seems again in the air. The memory of him pervades the woods. His plumes and moccasins and blanket of skins form just the costume the season ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... harvested my first crop of filberts from my experimental garden here in town and my bushes at Halcyon Frunut Gardens (this is the name of my nut farm) are growing nicely and some have catkins for next year's crop. The filberts that I have just harvested were borne from three Cosford bushes of the French strain. I have some German strain that I received ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... Hope was able to tell him, and in a style which interested Lucy as well as her father. He had been a pioneer in California, and could narrate many a strange tale of fortunes made and fortunes lost in those wild, halcyon days. He had been a scout too, and a trapper, a silver explorer, and a ranchman. Wherever stirring adventures were to be had, Jefferson Hope had been there in search of them. He soon became a favourite with the old farmer, who spoke eloquently of his virtues. On such occasions, ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I lingered, by unseen hands fast bound, My willing fancy captive to the magic of sweet sound, And eagerly I listened to the whispering voices tell Of happy days of childhood, and the tear unbidden fell, As were pictured to the mind again the halcyon scenes of yore, And loved ones that no more I'll meet till on the ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... war. To suppress these sporadic disorders a small professional army was incomparably the best instrument, and it was, of course, best secured and maintained by the system of voluntary enlistment. Thus in the halcyon Georgian and Victorian days the right inherent in every sovereign Government to call upon its subjects for national service sank into forgetfulness, the ancient military obligations of Englishmen fell into desuetude, ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... Schwirtz was away Una was happy by contrast. Indeed she found a more halcyon rest than at any other period since her girlhood; and in long hours of thinking and reading and trying to believe in life, the insignificant good little ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year—one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon (*1),—I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But, uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... did the dolphin mourn beside the sea-banks, nor ever sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs, nor so much lamented the swallow on the long ranges of the hills, nor shrilled so loud the halcyon o'er his sorrows; ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... of a Golden Age before the Fall, when man was free and happy, and which through the application of masonic principles is to return once more, finds an exact counterpart in the Socialist conception of a past halcyon era of Liberty and Equality, which is to return not merely in the form of a regenerated social order, but as a complete Millennium from which all the ills of human life have been eliminated. This idea has always haunted the imagination of Socialist writers from Rousseau to William ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Oh, surely Job himself never suffered such a trial of his patience! In fact, his troubles were scarcely worth mentioning, for he was never cursed with learned servants!" Saying this, the doctor retired, lamenting his hard fate in not having been born in those halcyon days when cooks drew nothing but their poultry; whilst the gentle Celestina's breast panted with indignation at his complaint. An opportunity soon offered for revenge; and seeing the doctor's steam ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... as thyself alone, But as the meaning of all things that are; A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon; Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone; Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar, Being of its furthest fires oracular;— The evident heart of all life sown ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... rose of England bloomed on Gertrude's cheek:— What though these shades had seen her birth, her sire A Briton's independence taught to seek Far western worlds; and there his household fire The light of social love did long inspire; And many a halcyon day he lived to see, Unbroken but by one misfortune dire, When fate had reft his mutual heart—but she Was gone;—and Gertrude climbed a ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... period of halcyon weather. A kinder, more discerning and more helpful chief than Edmund Yates no aspiring young journalist ever had. He was as genial and as quick to recognise honest effort as Dawson himself, and he knew ten times better what he wanted, and a thousand times more ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... occasion like this. "Well, that alone ought to settle it. Under the circumstances, it would be flying in the face of Providence to leave Boston. The mere fact of a brilliant opening like that offered me on 'The Microbe,' and the halcyon future which Fulkerson promises if we'll come to New York, is as dust in the balance against the advantages of the Friday ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... keep Dan in complete ignorance of the whole situation. Dan, to be sure, took his unconscious revenge. His kind, puzzled eyes haunted her dreams, and the thought of him proved the one disturbing element in these halcyon days. In vain she told herself that he was an old fogy, that he had Sunday-school notions, that he wouldn't be able to see anything but wrong in a harmless flirtation that would end with Mac's return to college. But would it end? That was a question ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the hotel kitchen. I had a deal of ado to make them wait till after breakfast, but I managed, somehow; and when we had finished—it was a mighty good Pennsylvania breakfast, such as we could eat with impunity in those halcyon days: rich coffee, steak, sausage, eggs, applebutter, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup—we got their out-door togs on them, while they were all stamping and shouting round and had to be caught and overcoated, and fur-capped and hooded simultaneously, and managed to get ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... House," and what a suitable and lovely name for one in his business, and one who had settled here after his service in the Revolution. For the halcyon was a fabled bird, whose nest floated upon the sea. It had the power of charming winds and waves, hence, "halcyon days" are days of tranquillity and peace. He had married Rebecca Loundes, the daughter of Christopher Loundes, of Bladensburg. ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... with a farmer to bring from Greenwood such supplies of clothes as Mrs. Meredith wrote to Sukey to pack and send. To most the prospect would not have been a cheering one, but after the last few days it seemed truly halcyon, and Janice was scarcely able to contain her happiness. She poured her warmest gratitude and thanks out in a letter to Washington, which would have surprised him not a little had he ever received it, but the mail in which it went was captured, and it was a British officer ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... anticipation, saw himself welcomed as a contrast and received more than his usual meed of applause. This satisfied, for the time, his singer's vanity which he professed so greatly to despise. They entered on a spell of halcyon days. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... replies the lady to this compliment, "that hemlocke wheresoever it bee planted, will be pestilent [and] that the serpent with the brightest scales shroudeth the most fatall venome." Is there anything more certain? But that does not prevent the halcyon from hatching when the sea is calm, and the phoenix from spreading her wings when the sunbeams shine on her nest. This is what the husband remarks, and, guided by the onyx, the alexander, &c., after a mock ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... that on all I cast An envied thought who rest in darkness find. My heart Love prostrates, Fortune more unkind No comfort grants, until its sorrow vast Impotent frets, then melts to tears at last: Thus I to painful warfare am consign'd. My halcyon days I hope not to return, But paint my future by a darker tint; My spring is gone—my summer well-nigh fled: Ah! wretched me! too well do I discern Each hope is now (unlike the diamond flint) A fragile mirror, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... lingered in the seventh and eighth centuries, when the arts were fostered in monasteries—the arts of gold-work and illuminated missals—'Ireland's halcyon days,' he said; a deep peace brooded, and under the guidance of the monks Ireland was the centre of learning when England was in barbarism. The first renaissance was the Irish, centuries before a gleam showed in Italy or in France. But in the middle of the eighth century the Danes ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... joyously—all nature seemed to be in such perfect tune with the deep ease and satisfaction of his own soul, that every breath he took was more or less of a thanksgiving to God for having been spared to enjoy the beauty of such halcyon hours. By the willing away of all his millions to one whom he knew to be of a pure, noble, and incorruptible nature, a great load had been lifted from his mind,—he had done with world's work for ever; and by some ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... once he dared the watery world, O'er wild or halcyon waves, And saw his snow-white sails unfurled Above ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... velvet grounds; As hand in hand along the flowery meads His blushing bride the quiver'd hero leads; Charm'd round their heads pursuing Zephyrs throng, And scatter roses, as they move along; Bright beams of Spring in soft effusion play, And halcyon Hours ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... lessening the labours of the next. Everything must be recommenced; and therefore,—so said these hopeless ones,—the penny with five farthings, the penny of which a hundred would make ten shillings, the halcyon penny, which would make all future pecuniary calculations easy to the meanest British capacity, could never become the law of the land. Others, more hopeful, were willing to believe that gradually the thing would ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... upon air. That she who seemed to be so much above him should have owned that she was all his own seemed then to be world enough for him. For a few weeks he lived a hero to himself, and was able to tell himself that for him the glory of a passion was sufficient. In those halcyon moments no common human care is allowed to intrude itself. To one who has thus entered in upon the heroism of romance his own daily work, his dinners, clothes, income, father and mother, sisters and brothers, his ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... her, when the gentleman had the opportunity of making his "best genteel-comedy bow." Now it was on the younger generation of the Kembles that the Queen bestowed her gracious countenance. These were halcyon days for society as well as for the stage, when, in Mrs. Oliphant's words, "the Queen was in the foreground of the national life, affecting it always for good, and setting an example of purity and virtue. The theatres to which she went, and which both she and her husband ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... was interrupted on the honest man's account. He has been here these two hours—courting the mother for the daughter, I suppose—yet she wants no courting neither: 'Tis well one of us does; else the man would have nothing but halcyon; and be remiss, and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... coachman, Nancy the laundress, of a gentleman residing at the capital. Their master had the happy eccentricity of getting more amiable with every rum-toddy; and as he never for any length of time discontinued rum-toddies, the days of Sol and Nancy at Judge Q.'s were halcyon. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... presence contrive to nestle into its buoyant and pure existence. If youth will enjoy itself virtuously with gymnastics, with music, with friendship, with poetry, there will come no hours of lamentation and repentance. They attend the imbecile and thoughtless. These halcyon days will return to temper and grace the period of old age; as upon the ripened peach reappear the hues of its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... us, emerging into the channel of a brook that circled along the foot of the descent; and here, turning joyfully to the left, we rode in luxury and ease over the white pebbles and the rippling water, shaded from the glaring sun by an overarching green transparency. These halcyon moments were of short duration. The friendly brook, turning sharply to one side, went brawling and foaming down the rocky hill into an abyss, which, as far as we could discern, had no bottom; so once ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... advantage to Prussia. They clutched eagerly, however, at his proposal that Prussia should form a league of the North German States, and made overtures to the two most important States, Saxony and Hesse-Cassel. During a few halcyon days the King even proposed to assume the title Emperor of Prussia, from which, however, the Elector of Saxony ironically dissuaded him. This castle in the air faded away when news reached Berlin at the beginning of August that Napoleon ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... knew on the day of my ordination, and in those halcyon moments of our first housekeeping! To be the confidential friend in a hundred families in the town—cutting the social trifle, as my friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped-syllabub to the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation"—to keep abreast ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... Forester, the then Prior, with the stipulation that in the event of a war with France the King should receive a sum of money equal to that which in time of peace would be paid to the Abbey of St. Denis. With halcyon days like these the Priory set about rebuilding what had been destroyed, and works were undertaken—much of which is standing ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... of the infuriated girl were plainly audible all over the flats whereon were huddled the little cabins of log and adobe assigned as quarters to the few married men among the soldiery. These were the halcyon days of the old army when each battery, troop, or company was entitled to four laundresses and each laundress to one ration. Old and young, there were at least fifty pairs of ears within easy range of the battle that raged forthwith, the noise of which reached even to the shaded precincts ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... present age has perhaps fallen somewhat in estate. It was natural that it should rush to a high perfection in the halcyon days of its growth. It is easy to make mournful predictions of decadence. The truth is the symphony is a great form of art, like a temple or a tragedy. Like them it has had, it will have its special eras of great expression. Like ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... its first dramatic appearance, was one of the most astonishing things that we saw in the whole course of our adventures. It was not a cerulean vault like that which covers the earth in halcyon weather, but an indescribably soft, pinkish-gray concavity that seemed nearer than the sky and yet farther than the clouds. Here and there, far beneath it, but still at a vast elevation, floated delicate gauzy curtains, tinted like sheets of mother-of-pearl. The sun was ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... They made as great a furore among the musical public of that day as would an opera from Gounod or Verdi in the present. The principal airs were sung throughout the land, and published as harpsichord pieces; for in these halcyon days of our composers the whole atmosphere of the land was full of the flavor and color of Handel. Many of the melodies in these now forgotten operas have been worked up by modern composers, and so have passed into modern music unrecognized. It ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... there, even in the most responsible and glorious days of his administration; over and over again has the great President stolen an hour ... from his life of anxious care to live over again those bygone exhilarating and halcyon days ... with Sweet or me."—Henry C. Whitney in his Life ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... between Blake and his faithful sergeant. Behind these three rode another set. Sandwiched between two troopers was a man whom Sancho's people well remembered as Nevins' clerk and assistant, despite the fact that a bushy beard now covered the face that was smooth-shaven in the halcyon days of the supply camp. Then came some thirty horsemen in long, straggling column of twos, while, straight from the flank to the gate of the corral, silent and even somber, rode the engineer, Lieutenant Loring. To him ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... And now ensued a halcyon season, dewy dawns wherein I bathed and sparred with Jessamy, long, sunny days full of labour and an ever-growing joy of Diana's radiant loveliness, nights of healthful, dreamless slumber ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Hampton Court to lay the matter before his Grace of Newcastle:" "Please your Grace, it is hardly three months since the illustrious Treaty of Vienna was signed; Dutch and we leading in the Termagant of Spain, and nothing but halcyon weather to be looked for on that side!" Grace of Newcastle, anxious to avoid trouble with Spain, answers I can only fancy what; and nothing was done upon ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "make his head" early in life, and to acquire the gentle art of pistolling his friends, when now he would be studying Greek under Professor Jowett, or "coaching" for a civil-service examination. It was in bad taste in those halcyon days for a man to leave a pleasant social party in a state of sobriety, and he was liable to be challenged by his aggrieved companions if he did it frequently. The custom of locking the dining-room door and putting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... fair day, Which, like thee, to those in sorrow Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow To the rough year just awake In its cradle on the brake. The brightest hour of unborn Spring Through the winter wandering, Found, it seems, the halcyon morn To hoar February born; Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kiss'd the forehead of the earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed upon the frozen ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... Government House in Adelaide has been voted a distinct failure since she became its hostess. The Premier of South Australia has announced that the Governor's salary will in future be reduced by two thousand pounds; his reasons are obvious. The other Colonies will follow suit for a certainty, so the halcyon days of an Australian Governor may fairly be said to ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... constantly preached caution lest strength should be over-taxed, could find no fault with Francis' progress during these halcyon days ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... ourselves with exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of atmosphere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was called Nelson's, for no very definite reason, and the room in which the ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate foreground—it was as ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... love, with her luring smile, The mystic charm-light of halcyon hours, Shall no more with her witch'ry our souls beguile, As the leaves grow seer on Life's fading bowers, And the blushes are pale on ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... beautiful chapter on humming birds, and the names which in various languages these exquisite little creatures bear.] The amount is very large of curious legendary lore which is everywhere bound up in words, and which they, if duly solicited, will give back to us again. For example, the Greek 'halcyon,' which we have adopted without change, has reference, and wraps up in itself an allusion, to one of the most beautiful and significant legends of heathen antiquity; according to which the sea preserved a perfect calmness for all the period, the fourteen ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... what holy ground May Domestic Peace be found? Halcyon daughter of the skies, Far on fearful wings she flies, From the pomp of Sceptered State, 5 From the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with the situation in which she was placed. She succeeded beyond her hopes. Miss Warwick determined to accept of her unknown friend's invitation to Angelina Bower—a charming romantic cottage in South Wales, where, according to Araminta's description, she might pass her halcyon days in tranquil, elegant retirement. It was not difficult for our heroine, though unused to deception, to conceal her project from Lady Diana Chillingworth, who was much more observant of the appearance of her protegee in public, than interested about what passed in her mind in private. ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... fetters and cast-iron forms of this rigid and wrinkled Old World. Doubtless, those struggles will long be arduous and trying: doubtless, the dictates of Duty will there often bear sternly away from the halcyon bowers of Popularity; doubtless, he who would be singly and wholly right must there encounter ordeals as severe as those which here try the souls of the would-be champions of Progress and Liberty. But Political Freedom, such as white men enjoy in the United States, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... resignedly to every glowing line of his, . . no, not his, but Sah-luma's poem, . . the lovely, gracious, delicate, entrancing poem he remembered so well! And by and by, as each mellifluous stanza sounded softly on his ears, a strangely solemn tranquillity swept over him,—a most soothing halcyon calm, as though some passing angel's hand had touched his brow ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and took him finally aside and demanded a meeting in the name of Utie. The naval officer answered that he had simply relieved a lady from a drunken boy; but Tiltock, in the dramatic way common to halcyon old times, refused to accept either "drunken" or "boy" as terms appropriate to "the code," and pressed for an answer. In five minutes the naval officer replied, through his naval companion, that having ascertained Mr. Utie to be a gentleman's son, and ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... ought to give the preference to the present Summer season that has but recently commenced, a season so rich in enjoyment. For now Unceasing are the charms of halcyon days, When the cool bath exhilarates the frame; When sylvan gales are laden with the scent Of fragrant Patalas; when soothing sleep Creeps softly on beneath the deepening shade; And when, at last, the dulcet calm of eve Entrancing steals ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... old days,—the halcyon days of youth,—after the sap was gathered, and the fuel piled high beside the arch, then it was that we sat down by the blazing fire and watched it burn; heaped on the logs, filled up the kettle, and again sat down ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... On halcyon wings our moments pass, Life's cruel cares beguiling; Old Time lays down his scythe and glass, In gay good-humour smiling: With ermine beard and forelock gray, His reverend part adorning, He looks like Winter turn'd to May, Night soften'd into Morning. How ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to kid when he trekked from his farm; but the kids, which in halcyon times represented the interest on his capital, were now one by one dying as fast as they were born and left by the roadside for the jackals and vultures to ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... less true in fact, that reams of paper, and above a square mile of skins of vellum have been employ'd to no purpose, to settle peace among those sons of violence. Pray, who is he that will say unto them, Go and disband yourselves? But lo! by this transformation it is done at once, and the halcyon days of publick tranquillity return: For neither the military temper nor discipline can taint the soft sex for a whole age to come: Bellaque matribus invisa, War odious to mothers, will not grow immediately ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... a cheap substance known as beef suet, an imitation butter could be made, which was in composition and appearance the same as butter made by the ordinary process, and was exactly as nourishing a food. There has been much talk of the halcyon days to come when the progress of science will be so great that food will be made in the laboratory. Well, here was an important practical step in that direction. A cheap product worth three or four cents a pound could be easily converted by a chemical ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... London in the stage coach "Commodore", at the age of nine, were divided from a strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate all the powers of recollection upon them with a desperate kind of intensity. It was the realization of a childish ambition conceived in that halcyon era which drew him to Gadshill, and he returned again and again to the contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from Gadshill of his old nurse—the original, it can ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... resumes his old Reinsberg Program of Life; probably with double relish, after such experiences the other way; and prosecutes it with the old ardor; hoping much that his History will be of halcyon pacific nature, after all. Would the mad War-whirlpool but quench itself; dangerous for singeing a near neighbor, who is only just got out of it! Fain would he be arbiter, and help to quench it; but it will not quench. For a space of Two Years or more (till ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... northernmost one. While we were at lunch, the breeze freshened so much that we were all glad to add some wraps to our light and airy costumes. A little later, a summer gale was blowing ahead, making some of us feel very uncomfortable and long for the halcyon days of the past, even with the accompaniment of the inevitable heat. Such is mankind, and womankind too for that matter, 'never blessed but always to be blessed.' The gale freshened, the screw was raised, the yacht pitched ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... enthusiastic about a Repeal of the Legislative Union) said that the picture of Irish misery drawn by Lord John Russell was the result of forty-seven years of union with England. Halcyon days were promised to Ireland at the time of the Union, but he called on the House to contrast the progress of Ireland from 1782 to the Union, with the state of Ireland since. He expressed his opinion ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... cannot know. He knows only what was and is, and his soul is overwhelmed with pity. In that moment those who are most deeply injured forgive and forget. They remember the time when all was well,—the sweet childhood, the blooming youth, the first love, the halcyon days ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... The days of the Triumvirate had come, and the quarrel with Clodius—of Cicero's exile and his return, together with the speeches which he had made, in the agony of his anger, against his enemies. And all this had taken place since those halcyon days in which he had risen, on the voices of his countrymen, to be Quaestor, AEdile, Praetor, and Consul. He had first succeeded as a public man, and then, having been found too honest, he had failed. There can be no doubt that he had failed because he had been too ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... W.G.—in those halcyon days when Gloucester was worthy of the cheese whereof she is now so chary a producer—used to score with that heavy cut between point and cover, I too, greatly daring, cut it and laid it (the ball, not the cheese) dead. De mortuis ... ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... depths of his nature, the man wonders why it was that, in the halcyon days of courtship, he never beheld his beloved in the midst of a gunny—no, a dressing-sack. Of course, then, she didn't have to keep house, and didn't have so many cares to tire her. Poor little thing! Perhaps ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... ancient falchion, Which once flashed as freedom's star! Till sweet peace—the bow and halcyon, Stilled the stormy strife of war. Listen! now thy country's calling On her sons to meet her foe! Sweet is love in moonlight bowers! Sweet the altar and the flame! Sweet the spring-time with her flowers! Sweeter far ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... but bent on seeking ways and means for the safety and protection of nations,—as bent as Roger Seaton was on a force for their destruction. So the hours passed swiftly, and no interruption or untoward obstacle hindered the progress of the "White Eagle" as it careered through the halcyon blue of the calmest, loveliest sky that ever made perfect weather, till late afternoon when it began to glide almost insensibly downward towards earth. Then she roused herself from her long abstraction and looked through ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... our movements. She slept through all that day and the following night; and I watched over her with as much jealousy of all that might disturb her, as a mother watches over her new-born baby; for I hoped, I fancied, that a long— long rest, a rest, a halcyon calm, a deep, deep Sabbath of security, might prove healing and medicinal. I thought wrong; her breathing became more disturbed, and sleep was now haunted by dreams; all of us, indeed, were agitated by dreams; the past pursued me, and the present, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... verses in Nature, it is essential to every Chivalry and Nation and Man. "Polite Polish Society for the last thirty years has felt itself to be in a most halcyon condition," says Rulhiere: [Rulhiere, i. 216 (a noteworthy passage).] "given up to the agreeable, and to that only;" charming evening-parties, and a great deal of flirting; full of the benevolences, the philanthropies, the new ideas,—given up especially to the pleasing ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a lover," and we elderly people are always pleased to note the progress of young folks' love affairs, especially if either of them is a relative of ours. In them we seem to renew our youth, for their entrancements seem to carry us back to the halcyon days when we ourselves were young. When "Love took up the glass of time and turned it in his glowing hands" everything seemed of a roseate hue, and we dwelt in the seventh heaven of delight, at peace with all the world and envying no one—for were we not the ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Thou wilt know it yet. I fetter not thy choice, But if thou couldst by loving bind together Not two hearts only, but opposing peoples; Supplant by halcyon days long years of strife, And link them in unbroken harmony;— Were this no glory for a woman, this No ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... Rome. When that fear was allayed, and the menace that hung over the very existence of the nation removed by the defeat of the Armada, the differences within the Church broke out afresh, and waxed fiercer every year. Shakespeare grew to manhood during the halcyon years between the Marian persecutions and the Marprelate pamphlets—a kind of magic oasis, which gave us our English Renaissance. Milton's youth breathed a very different air. The Church, as it was, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Horsf. Podargus brachypterus, Gould. Eurostopodus guttatus, Gould. Halcyon sanctus, Vig. and Horsf. Merops ornatus, Lath. Hirundo pacifica ? Lath. Collocalia ? leucosterna, Gould. Cotyle pyrrhonota. Cotyle familiaris, Gould. Seisura volitans, Vig. and Horsf. Microeca assimilis, Gould. Rhipidura albiscapa, Gould. Rhipidura isura, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Apennine which encircles "gentile Firenze." In due time, one of the largest and brightest of those comets whose return is so accurately calculated and eagerly expected by the Florentine dealers in ancient art made his appearance in the Tuscan sky—no less than a buyer for the Louvre. Those were the halcyon days of the Empire, and money was plenty. Poor Bastianini's bust was brought out with all due mystery, duly admired by the infallible French connoisseur, and eventually purchased by him for the imperial collection for, I think, five thousand francs—at all events, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... of the concert made Chopin forget his sorrows. There is not one complaint in the letter in which he gives an account of it; in fact, he seems to have been enjoying real halcyon days. He had a full house, but played with as little nervousness as if he had been playing at home. The first Allegro of the Concerto went very smoothly, and the audience rewarded him with thundering applause. Of the reception of the Adagio and Rondo ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the state of Israel in spite of the halcyon days it enjoyed under Jeroboam II. From the indirect results of war, from changes in the tenure and in the culture of the soil, from defective administration of justice, the humbler classes had much to suffer; they found that the times ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... reputation of a particularly "hanging judge," ended by hanging himself, as the coroner's jury found, under an impulse of "temporary insanity," with a child's skipping-rope, over the massive old bannisters) resided there, entertaining good company, with fine venison and rare old port. In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms were hung with gilded leather, and, I dare say, cut a good figure, for ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Calico become in these halcyon days. His back and flanks were like the surface of a well-upholstered sofa. His coat of motley told its own story of daily rubbings and good feeding. The white was dazzlingly white and the carrot-red patches glowed like the inside of ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... while embracing her, the cool deliberation which marked his exit—offered a picture of calm stoicism just on the point of tumbling over the precipice of destruction not to be equalled—not, at least, since those halcyon dramatic days when Osbaldiston leased ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... cry: The Bible is to be cast out. We look and behold men who have these opinions sitting on the throne of the Caesars. Now, one would suppose the intellect of that whole realm would have fair play. There was no Bible there to fetter or to annoy. This ought to be the halcyon age for "the liberty of man, woman and child." These rulers have the same dignified abhorrence for all kinds of religion. The skeptic Lucretius says: "The fear of the lower world must be sent headlong forth. It poisons life to its lowest depths; it spreads over all things the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... by the manner of his friend Poppins that he could not now expect to receive that high deference which was paid to him about the time that Johnson of Manchester had been in the ascendant. Those had been the halcyon days of the firm, and Robinson had then been happy. Men at that time would point him out as he passed, as one worthy of notice; his companions felt proud when he would join them; and they would hint to him, with a mysterious reverence that was very gratifying, ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... southward, always down the stream and never up. The first keen blasts up in the northland have given them a warning and they are going steadily, happily, but for the most part silently, on down the stream, giving rare beauty to these halcyon days of late summer; on past the farthest point of your vision, where the silver gray mist softens the outline of the forest-crowned headlands, and lavender shadows hang gently across the valleys; always on and on towards the land where all is light ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... intention was to have announced his determination to "give England ONE MORE trial"—to place Repeal once more in abeyance—in order to see whether England would really, at length, do "justice to Ireland;" in other words, restore the halcyon days of Lord Normanby's nominal, and Mr O'Connell's real, rule in Ireland, and enable him, by these means, to provide for himself, his family, and dependents; for old age is creeping rapidly upon him—his physical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... must be up and away, not wait till it should be too late. She, too, saw how many lovers plan under the June honeymoon to sail away after a year or two and see the great world, and, when they wearily die, know that it will still be a year or two before they can flee to the halcyon isles. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... without a sou in the locanda at Venice," said Mistigris. "And I had to get from Venice to Rome by painting portraits for five francs apiece, which they didn't pay me. However, that was my halcyon time. I ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... understanding between the citizens and their sovereign existed under Henry V., and the City, in consequence, increased in opulence, population, and influence. Guildhall was built, and the streets were lighted at night by public lanterns. The halcyon days, however, of the City of London must be referred to the reign of the fourth Edward. The citizens never wavered in their attachment to his fortunes, nor did that gay and gallant monarch ever exhibit any coldness of feeling—at least, towards their ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... the York, and three light cruisers, the Kolberg, the Graudenz, and the Strasburg. They were mainly fast vessels and the battle cruisers carried eleven-inch guns. Early in the morning they ran through the nets of a British fishing fleet. Later an old coast police boat, the Halcyon, was shot at a few times. About eight o'clock they were opposite Yarmouth, and proceeded to bombard that naval station from a distance of about ten miles. Their range was poor and their shells did no damage. They then turned swiftly for ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... be the English scourge— This night the siege assuredly I'll raise: Expect St. Martin's Summer, halcyon days, Since I have entered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... pay of Britain, and, while they fatten in plenty, and unaccustomed affluence, look with great tranquillity upon the distresses of Austria, and, in their indolence of gluttony, stand idle spectators of that deluge, by which, if it be suffered to roll on without opposition, their own halcyon territories must at last be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... Carson lads. They planned for it far in advance, and enjoyed this' part of the excursion almost as much as the thing itself. Max Hastings knew so many things in connection with the woods; and they had also picked up such a world of information when spending those halcyon days up with old Trapper Jim, that it made it unusually pleasant when they were in camp, trying out new ideas, and copying others which they had watched the ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... The halcyon weather held for two weeks, the delicate weather of Indian summer. Day by day the forest dropped its leaves under a blue windless sky; but the nights sharpened their frosts. Ruth, stealing early to her bathing-pool, found it edged with thin ice, and paused, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Mrs. M.R. Blake, Hamen's wife. The old Platt's hall was packed to its fullest capacity. The cantata was given to the unbounded delight of Mr. Badger, and the audience cheered us all to the utmost. Enthusiasm was at the highest pitch and encomiums of praise were showered upon us. Those were halcyon days for fine singers. We had no lack of voices to ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... of Riversford, in order to avoid the sharp ascent from the town, as well as the still sharper and highly dangerous descent into the valley again, where the little mediaeval village lay nestled. Thus it was enabled to gather to itself a strangely beautiful halcyon calm on the Lord's Day,—and in fair Spring weather like the present, dozed complacently under the quiet smile of serene blue skies, soothed to sleep by the rippling flow of its ribbon-like river, and ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... opposition, Bruno enjoyed fair weather, halcyon months, in England. His description of the Ash Wednesday Supper at Fulke Greville's, shows that a niche had been carved out for him in London, where he occupied a pedestal of some importance. Those gentlemen of Elizabeth's Court did not certainly exaggerate the value of their ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... alleys off Cornhill and Lombard Street. I agree, too, with Georgie in deploring the passing of the public-house mid-day ordinary. From his recollections, I learn that the sixties and seventies were the halcyon days for feeding—indeed, the only time when Londoners really lived; and an elderly uncle of mine, who, at that time, went everywhere and knew everybody in the true hard-up Bohemia, tells me that there were then twenty or thirty taverns within fifty yards of Ludgate ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... enjoyment. Despair, therefore ill becomes one who has follies to bewail, and a God to trust in. Johnson and Goldsmith, with numerous others, at some seasons were plunged deep in the waters of adversity, but halcyon days awaited them: and even those sons of merit and misfortune whose pecuniary troubles were more permanent, in the dimness of retrospection, only stand out ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... was billeted with a French family, just around the corner from the Hospice. The head of the family had been, in the halcyon days before the war, the village butcher. There was now Madame, the little Marie, a sturdy boy about twelve, and the old Grand'mere. The husband was away, of course,—"dans les tranchees," explained Madame ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... the various centres of Canada, according to the practice of his predecessors, soon gave him an understanding of popular opinion and feeling; and, although he was expected by the extreme Conservatives to bring back the old, halcyon, ante bellum days, he was most careful to follow the lines of Sydenham's policy. Towards the French he was amiable and conciliatory and made several appointments of French Canadians to positions of trust and emolument. Ever ready to meet courtesy half-way, ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... instinct he ought to be,) appearing at that uncertain season before the rigs of old Michaelmas were yet well composed, and when the inclement storms of winter were approaching, began to flicker over the seas, and was busy in building its halcyon nest, as if the angry ocean had been soothed by the genial breath of May. Very unfortunately, this auspice was instantly followed by a speech from the throne in the very spirit and principles ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not as thyself alone, But as the meaning of all things that are; A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon, Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone; Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar, Being of its furthest fires oracular, The evident heart of all ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... loose Fishermen and river raftsmen become ocean adventurers For myself I am unworthy of the honor (of martyrdom) Forbids all private assemblies for devotion Force clerical—the power of clerks Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland Guarantees of forgiveness for every imaginable sin Halcyon days of ban, book and candle Heresy was a plant of early growth in the Netherlands In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats Invented such Christian formulas as these (a curse) July 1st, two Augustine monks were burned at Brussels ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... now travelled through that part of Dr. Johnson's life, which was a perpetual struggle with difficulties. Halcyon days are now to open upon him. In the month of May, 1762, his majesty, to reward literary merit, signified his pleasure to grant to Johnson a pension of three hundred pounds a year. The earl of Bute was minister. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... countenance bore all the traces of mental alienation. Methought I was inspired by the grand master-spirit; my pirogue bounded along the troubled waters of the ocean as if it possessed wings. One would have said that I had twenty rowers at my disposal, and I cleft the waves with the same rapidity as the halcyon's flight, when wafted away by the hurricane. After a short time's laborious and painful rowing I at last came in view of the corsairs who were carrying away my treasure. At the sight my strength was renewed again, and ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... or two there was halcyon weather. On Saturday afternoon Louise hired a carriage and took her friends for a drive into the country; at her special request the child accompanied them. Nothing could have been more delightful. She had quite made up her mind to have a house, some day, ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... late in June in the ninth year of King Edward VII's reign—that halcyon period when nobody who was anybody felt particularly happy, because no such person had actually experienced what unhappiness was. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne had not, unless she had shown really exceptional fortitude and self-control over her ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... those for the penniless, halcyon days for the toady and the sycophant. There was still much of the old oriental munificence about the court, and sovereigns like Mazarin and Louis XIV. granted pensions for a copy of flattering verses, or gave away places as the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... there ever such a dawn? Did ever song of birds sound so like the voice of eternal youth? Whence had come this air like the fumes from the winepresses of the gods? And the light! What colors, what tints, upon mountain and valley and halcyon lake! And the man asleep in the next room—yes, there WAS a Joshua Craig whom she found extremely trying at times; but that Joshua Craig had somehow resigned the tenancy of the strong, straight form there, had resigned it to a man who was the living expression of all ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... occupied a peculiar position in Louisiana, especially in New Orleans. There were distinct grades of society. The caste system was almost as strong as that of India. Free people of color from other states poured into Louisiana in a steady stream. It was a haven of refuge. Those were indeed halcyon times both for the Creole and the American, who found in the rapidly growing city a commercial El Dorado. For the people of color it was indeed a time of growth and acquisition of wealth. Three famous streets in New Orleans bear testimony to the importance of the colored people in the life of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... A few years ago some chemists found out that from a cheap substance known as beef suet, an imitation butter could be made, which was in composition and appearance the same as butter made by the ordinary process, and was exactly as nourishing a food. There has been much talk of the halcyon days to come when the progress of science will be so great that food will be made in the laboratory. Well, here was an important practical step in that direction. A cheap product worth three or four cents a pound could be easily converted by a chemical treatment into a valuable ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... a quart d'heure, Sir Paul. Helas! It was not so in the old days. It was always gay then at this time of the night, with the band playing and all the guests chattering like mad." The maitre d'hotel breathed a gentle sigh for the halcyon ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... agitation, carry with them too certain a promise of sooner or later revolving into a chaos of equal sadness, universal strife. It is the relation of the immediate isthmus on which we stand ourselves to a past and (prophetically speaking) to a coming world of calamity, the relation of the smiling and halcyon calm which we have inherited to that darkness and anarchy out of which it arose, and towards which too gloomily we augur its return—this relation it is which enforces the other impulses, whether many or few, connecting our ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... his place as Secretary of State, thus becoming all but the supreme ruler of Spain. I do not believe that there was ever in Spain a Minister so highly favoured by the reigning Prince, so powerful as I became. Not Eboli himself in his halcyon days had been so deeply esteemed of Philip, or had wielded such power as I now made my own. All Europe knows it—for it was to me all Europe addressed itself for affairs that concerned the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... but also of so beautifully hiding from us the want of Thought! Paper is made from the rags of things that did once exist; there are endless excellences in Paper.—What wisest Philosophe, in this halcyon uneventful period, could prophesy that there was approaching, big with darkness and confusion, the event of events? Hope ushers in a Revolution,—as earthquakes are preceded by bright weather. On the Fifth of May, fifteen years hence, old Louis will not be sending ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of olla podrida. One of the bags of provisions was beside him unpacked. He had lighted over his head an iron lantern, glazed with talc, which swung on a hook from the ceiling. By its side, on another hook, swung the weather-cock halcyon. There was a popular belief in those days that a dead halcyon, hung by the beak, always turned its breast to the quarter whence the wind was blowing. While he made the broth, the Provencal put the neck of a gourd into his mouth, and now and then ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... and away, not wait till it should be too late. She, too, saw how many lovers plan under the June honeymoon to sail away after a year or two and see the great world, and, when they wearily die, know that it will still be a year or two before they can flee to the halcyon isles. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... they had a stranger adventure than that of the Halcyon Stream, as they named the mysterious brook. They had been walking in the woods; and Rose, being tired, had stopped to rest, while Hildegarde pursued a "yellow swallow-tail" among the trees. Rose established herself on the trunk ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... anything stronger than wine, and did not dislike his temperance. There was about him at all hours an air which seemed to say, "There; I told you all that I could do it as soon as there was any necessity." And in these halcyon days he could shoot for an hour without his pony, and he liked the gentle, courteous badinage which was bestowed upon his courtship, and he liked also Julia's beauty. Her conduct to him was perfect. She was never pert, never ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... formerly kept behind the closed doors of the home. The details of a dinner or a social company at the fireside become the topics for the gossip of strangers. I sometimes think that the young people of the present day lose much of the romance that used to belong to the halcyon period of courtship. In the somewhat primitive days of my youth, young lovers kept their own secrets, and were startled if their heart affairs were on other people's tongues; but now-a-days marriage engagements are matters of public announcement—not infrequently ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... last, one eventful day—a day far back in that happy, halcyon age when ships sailed as freely across the ocean as ferry-boats across the North River and men roved at will among the nations of the earth—one sunny August morning, eight years after the day of our coming, we locked the old house behind us and drove away in the ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... no home for thee. The green glens of ocean, created by swelling and subsiding storms, or by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known but that she perished. He, too, the grave and thoughtful English boy, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... forest, in the blue distance, deer were seen; bears began to approach the corn-cribs, and in the unbroken wilderness wolves were heard at night. Early and late the air struck cold, but each midday was a halcyon time. In the last of October, on a still and coloured morning, Rand and Jacqueline, having shaken hands with the overseer and the slaves they were leaving, caressed the dogs, and said good-bye to the cat, quitted the house on the Three-Notched ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... on what holy ground May Domestic Peace be found? Halcyon daughter of the skies, Far on fearful wings she flies, From the pomp of Sceptered State, 5 From ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 1726; "Admeto," 727; "Siroe," 1728; and "Tolommeo," 1728. They made as great a furore among the musical public of that day as would an opera from Gounod or Verdi in the present. The principal airs were sung throughout the land, and published as harpsichord pieces; for in these halcyon days of our composers the whole atmosphere of the land was full of the flavor and color of Handel. Many of the melodies in these now forgotten operas have been worked up by modern composers, and so have passed into modern music unrecognized. ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... their testimony to the advantages of trial by jury, allowance must be made for the bias of office and for the bias of interest. In the idolatrous throng which drowned the voice of St. Paul with their halcyon and vociferous shouts, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" there was no one who shouted louder than the thrifty silversmith, Demetrius, who added the naive remark, ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... patience! In fact, his troubles were scarcely worth mentioning, for he was never cursed with learned servants!" Saying this, the doctor retired, lamenting his hard fate in not having been born in those halcyon days when cooks drew nothing but their poultry; whilst the gentle Celestina's breast panted with indignation at his complaint. An opportunity soon offered for revenge; and seeing the doctor's steam valet ready to be carried to its master's chamber, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... booth to witness the effects of the mandarine's folly. At times a ray of reason penetrates her diseased brain, and then the sight of her anguish would soften a heart of stone. Enter, and for the small sum of ten sous you shall hear sobs such as the Odeon never echoed in its halcyon days. The unhappy woman has waked up to the absurdity and inanity of her blind passion; she confesses to herself that she is madly pursuing a phantom. She knows but too well that he, in the vigor and beauty of youth, cannot love a faded old woman like herself, who vainly makes pitiable efforts to ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... hallucination To grudge our hymns their halcyon harmonies, When in just homage our rapt voices rise To celebrate our heroes in meet fashion; Whose hosts each heritage and habitation, Within these realms of hospitable joy, Protect securely 'gainst humiliation, When hostile foes, like harpies, would annoy. Habituated to the sound of h In ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... future occasion; for I could not but feel, that being an officer of the Company, it was robbing me of a part of my pay under the pretext of an indulgence. Availing myself, however, of this ungenerous grant of freedom, I spent some halcyon days in the company of relatives most dear to me, and expected no interruption to my enjoyment until the time appointed for the embarkation: but a few days after I had joined my relatives in the vicinity of Montreal, I received a letter, commanding me, in the most peremptory manner, to repair ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... her luring smile, The mystic charm-light of halcyon hours, Shall no more with her witch'ry our souls beguile, As the leaves grow seer on Life's fading bowers, And the blushes are ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... mind By pity or grief, already felt too long! Nor let my words import more blame than needs. 100 The tumult rose and ceas'd: for Peace is nigh Where Wisdom's voice has found a list'ning Heart. Amid the howl of more than wintry storms The Halcyon hears the Voice of vernal Hours, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... seeking ways and means for the safety and protection of nations,—as bent as Roger Seaton was on a force for their destruction. So the hours passed swiftly, and no interruption or untoward obstacle hindered the progress of the "White Eagle" as it careered through the halcyon blue of the calmest, loveliest sky that ever made perfect weather, till late afternoon when it began to glide almost insensibly downward towards earth. Then she roused herself from her long abstraction and looked through the window of her ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... side, and moving to the garden wall, looked out over the far-away downs to the far-away sea—the sea that, for weary months had called and-thundered in his ears. Now he saw it all halcyon, stretching fair and mute to the boundless west, the sinking sun, the lovers' star. They two—could they two, lying with closed eyes, but drift out over bar, floating away through golds and purples towards the kiss of heaven and ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... movement of the horse? If the lady be not mistress of her seat, and be unable to maintain a proper position of her limbs and body, so soon as her horse starts into a trot, she runs the risk of being tossed about on the saddle, like the Halcyon of the poets ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous
... this fair day, Which, like thee, to those in sorrow Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow To the rough year just awake In its cradle on the brake. The brightest hour of unborn Spring Through the winter wandering, Found, it seems, the halcyon morn To hoar February born; Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kiss'd the forehead of the earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed upon the frozen mountains, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... inhabited by lizards and a species of rat. Besides the usual waders on the reef, I found great numbers of doves and honeysuckers, and, among the mangroves, fell in with and procured specimens of a very rare kingfisher, Halcyon sordida. Among the mangroves a rare shell, a species ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... rounded cheeks, the dewy light of hope in their trusting eyes, exulting confidence in their springing step, themselves blithe and radiant with the glory of the dawn. Today, and here, we meet ourselves. Not to these familiar scenes alone—yonder college-green with its reverend traditions; the halcyon cove of the Seekonk, upon which the memory of Roger Williams broods like a bird of calm; the historic bay, beating forever with the muffled oars of Barton and of Abraham Whipple; here, the humming city of the living; there, the peaceful city of the dead;—not to these only or chiefly ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... hundred pounds, gold—was secured, and a bargain struck with a farmer to bring from Greenwood such supplies of clothes as Mrs. Meredith wrote to Sukey to pack and send. To most the prospect would not have been a cheering one, but after the last few days it seemed truly halcyon, and Janice was scarcely able to contain her happiness. She poured her warmest gratitude and thanks out in a letter to Washington, which would have surprised him not a little had he ever received it, but the mail in which it went was captured, and it was a British officer in New York who ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... so joyously—all nature seemed to be in such perfect tune with the deep ease and satisfaction of his own soul, that every breath he took was more or less of a thanksgiving to God for having been spared to enjoy the beauty of such halcyon hours. By the willing away of all his millions to one whom he knew to be of a pure, noble, and incorruptible nature, a great load had been lifted from his mind,—he had done with world's work for ever; and by some inexplicable yet divine compensation ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... short halcyon days of his opening independence, however, he was able to make himself the centre of such a world as he would have loved to live in. He was not, of course, generally popular, either at college or at home; nor yet in town, except among that small set in whose midst ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Riversford, in order to avoid the sharp ascent from the town, as well as the still sharper and highly dangerous descent into the valley again, where the little mediaeval village lay nestled. Thus it was enabled to gather to itself a strangely beautiful halcyon calm on the Lord's Day,—and in fair Spring weather like the present, dozed complacently under the quiet smile of serene blue skies, soothed to sleep by the rippling flow of its ribbon-like river, and receiving from hour to hour a fluttering halo of doves' wings, as these traditional ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... wife. The old Platt's hall was packed to its fullest capacity. The cantata was given to the unbounded delight of Mr. Badger, and the audience cheered us all to the utmost. Enthusiasm was at the highest pitch and encomiums of praise were showered upon us. Those were halcyon days for fine singers. We had no lack of voices to call upon ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the meanwhile, stood that domestic drama of love and its entanglements, which was destined to be deeply interwoven with the other principal incidents of this singular story? All on the surface seemed as bright and unruffled as the halcyon waters of the sleeping ocean before the days of storm have come to move and vex it. But how was it within the vail of the heart and teeming mind, where the currents and counter-currents of that subtle but powerful passion flow and clash unseen, often gaining their full height and ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... angry. Teacher professed herself too grieved and surprised to continue the interrupted story, and Patrick was held responsible for the substitution of a brisk mental arithmetic test in which he was easily distanced by every boy and girl in the room. But Isaac was still silent. No halcyon suggestion beginning, "Suppose I were to give you a dollar and you spent half of it for candy," no imaginary shopping orgie, ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... falchion, Which once flashed as freedom's star! Till sweet peace—the bow and halcyon, Stilled the stormy strife of war. Listen! now thy country's calling On her sons to meet her foe! Sweet is love in moonlight bowers! Sweet the altar and the flame! Sweet the spring-time with her flowers! ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... the warmest friendship? Such were not her thoughts, nor were they in any way akin to this. They ran back instantly to years gone by,—over long years, as her few years were counted, and settled themselves on certain halcyon days, in which she had dreamed that he had loved her, and had fancied that she had loved him. How she had schooled herself for those days since that, and taught herself to know that her thoughts had been over-bold! And now it had all come round. The only man that she had ever liked ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... length, the gods Commisserating, chang'd to feather'd birds. The same their love remains, and subject still To the same fates; and in the plumag'd pair The nuptial bond is sacred; join'd in one Parents they soon become; and Halcyon sits Sev'n peaceful days 'mid winter's keenest rule Upon her floating nest. Safe then the main: For AEoelus with watchful care the winds Guards, and prevents their egress; and the seas Smooths for the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Despond (Too soon!) at flouted faith and fond, Soon tempests halcyon tides above Shall wreck this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... inevitable struggles, than is allowed them among the heavy fetters and cast-iron forms of this rigid and wrinkled Old World. Doubtless, those struggles will long be arduous and trying: doubtless, the dictates of Duty will there often bear sternly away from the halcyon bowers of Popularity; doubtless, he who would be singly and wholly right must there encounter ordeals as severe as those which here try the souls of the would-be champions of Progress and Liberty. But Political Freedom, such as white men enjoy in the United States, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... a singing bird Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is like an apple tree Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these, Because my love ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... disappointed one is relegated to the condition of life which he would otherwise have filled a little earlier. He has been wounded, but not killed, or even maimed. But he who has a little success, who succeeds in earning a few halcyon, but, ah! so dangerous guineas, is drawn into a trade from which he will hardly escape till he be driven from it, if he come out alive, by sheer hunger. He hangs on till the guineas become crowns and shillings,—till some sad record of ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of art inspected. During those halcyon years, before the invasion of Charles VIII., it seemed as though the peace of Italy might last unbroken. No one foresaw the apocalyptic vials of wrath which were about to be poured forth upon her plains and cities through the next ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the Past one glance be cast— The Age of the Antonines! O summit of fate, O zenith of time When a pagan gentleman reigned, And the olive was nailed to the inn of the world Nor the peace of the just was feigned. A halcyon Age, afar it shines, Solstice of Man and ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... the close of the war, having been among the most extensively read annals of the war. The "Sword and Pen" gives a sketch of the early life and adventures of the soldier-author, his school-boy days, and the incidents of that halcyon period of youth, all of which reads like a romance. His academic life is then detailed, after which the stern realities of life are encountered. His military life follows, and his capture by the Confederate troops. Then follows a recital of the dreary ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry. Those were days when steers, to speak in the cow language, had "jumped to seventy-five." The wilderness grew light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful are the tales still told about those fat years in cattle-land. It was in those halcyon days of the Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the range, white with the dust of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than those procurable at ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... cannot describe the joy, any more than I could describe the taste of a peach to one who has only eaten apples: it was satisfying, divine. I opened my shirt wider, but the feeling only spread faintly, and indeed this halcyon sunny hour terminated in a restlessness that sent me walking into ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... middle islands, obtained nearly a hundred species of terrestrial and fluviatile mollusca. The scarcity of birds during our walk surprised me, for the only one which I saw on shore was a solitary kingfisher (Halcyon vagans): during our ascent of the Keri-Keri, however, many ducks (Anas superciliosa) flew past the boat, and gulls, terns, and two kinds of ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... Cecilia's hand as he went, indicating his feeling that he had before him an affair of some magnitude, and then, of course, had a word or two to say to Florence in private on the landing. Oh, those delicious private words, the need for which comes so often during those short halcyon days of one's lifetime! They were so pleasant that Harry would fain have returned to repeat them after he was seated in his cab; but the inevitable wheels carried him onward with cruel velocity, ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... a family servant—an indoor domestic, and handmaiden to a white mistress. This in the days of youth—the halcyon days of her girlhood, in "Ole Varginny"—before she was transported west, sold to Ephraim Darke, and by him degraded to the lot of an ordinary outdoor slave. But her original owner taught her to read, and her memory still retains a trace of this early education—sufficient ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... three rode another set. Sandwiched between two troopers was a man whom Sancho's people well remembered as Nevins' clerk and assistant, despite the fact that a bushy beard now covered the face that was smooth-shaven in the halcyon days of the supply camp. Then came some thirty horsemen in long, straggling column of twos, while, straight from the flank to the gate of the corral, silent and even somber, rode the engineer, Lieutenant Loring. To him Sancho whipped off his silver-laced sombrero and bowed, while two jaded-looking ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... to the heart of the Hills, For a season of halcyon hours, 'Mid the music of murmurous rills, And the delicate ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... little cherub-looking child, with a head so like as if, after the fashion of Danaee's, it had been powdered by Jupiter with gold dust, and a pair of blue eyes, as if the said god, in making them, had tried to emulate the wing of the Halcyon in a human orb, and intended, moreover, the light thereof to calm the storm ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... oppress my soul With more unrest, and Hebe-like, the bowl Of festal comfort for a moment raise To my poor lips, and then avert thy gaze? Wouldst make me mad beyond the daily curse Of thy displeasure, and in wrath disperse That halcyon draught, that nectar of the mind, Which is the theme I yearn to in ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... the pecuniary transactions of mankind, and little reconcilable with the usual sharp-sightedness of avarice. Reflections of this kind may have trifling weight with men who hope to see realized in America the halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age; but to those who believe we are likely to experience a common portion of the vicissitudes and calamities which have fallen to the lot of other nations, they must appear entitled to serious ...
— The Federalist Papers
... of the inner ones with a night-key, and made her way to what had been the back parlor of the house. In that densification of population which proceeds so incessantly on Manhattan Island this old house, like many another, was modernly compelled to hold more people than it had been meant for in the halcyon days when Second Avenue was a fashionable thoroughfare. The second floor of the house had been let, without board, to a gentleman and his wife, and the rooms above to single gentlemen. The parlor floor and the basement were made to accommodate ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... time the mishap might not be turned to diversion. The coach would not always traverse sunny byways; the dry leaf floating from the majestic arm of the oak, the sound of an acorn as it struck the earth presaged days less halcyon to come. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... afternoon we found a tolerable anchorage under a small island and stayed for the night, and I shot a large fruit-pigeon new to me, which I have since named Carpophaga tumida. I also saw and shot at the rare white-headed kingfisher (Halcyon saurophaga), but did not kill it. The next morning we sailed on, and having a fair wind reached the shores of the large island of Waigiou. On rounding a point we again ran full on to a coral reef with our mainsail up, but luckily the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... were given; and had the shade of the Duchess of Richmond waltzed from the heavens to the waxed floor of the hall, it would have assumed flesh and blood again on beholding the picturesque costumes of every age and court presented to its spectral view. I will not prolong a description of those halcyon days of Municipal splendour in these of common khaki. Let it suffice to add that the "lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men." The "cannon's opening roar" was soon to be heard in the land; but all unmindful of the nation of farmers ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... on the honest man's account. He has been here these two hours—courting the mother for the daughter, I suppose—yet she wants no courting neither: 'Tis well one of us does; else the man would have nothing but halcyon; and be remiss, and saucy ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... that halcyon hour when the Angelus falls like a benediction upon the waning day. Far off the notes were sounding gently, and nature, now that she listened, seemed to have paused also. A scarlet-breasted robin was hopping in ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... gentleman residing at the capital. Their master had the happy eccentricity of getting more amiable with every rum-toddy; and as he never for any length of time discontinued rum-toddies, the days of Sol and Nancy at Judge Q.'s were halcyon. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... Never had England generally been more prosperous, more secure, more comfortable. The heavens of international politics were as serene as the evening sky; not yet was the storm-cloud that hung over Ireland bigger than a man's hand; east, west, north and south there brooded the peace of the close of a halcyon day, and the amazing doings of the Suffragettes but added a slight incentive to the perusal of the morning paper. The arts flourished, harvests prospered; the world like a newly-wound clock seemed to be in for a spell of serene and orderly ticking, with an occasional chime just to show ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... its eager breast Springing and singing to its halcyon rest; Going, going, all the ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... Wretch! to whom untried thou seemest fair! By me, who late thy halcyon surface sung, [1]The walls of Neptune's fane inscrib'd, declare That I have dank and dropping garments hung, Devoted to the GOD, whose kind decree Snatch'd me to shore, from ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... kid when he trekked from his farm; but the kids, which in halcyon times represented the interest on his capital, were now one by one dying as fast as they were born and left by the roadside for the jackals and vultures ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... An envied thought who rest in darkness find. My heart Love prostrates, Fortune more unkind No comfort grants, until its sorrow vast Impotent frets, then melts to tears at last: Thus I to painful warfare am consign'd. My halcyon days I hope not to return, But paint my future by a darker tint; My spring is gone—my summer well-nigh fled: Ah! wretched me! too well do I discern Each hope is now (unlike the diamond flint) A fragile mirror, with its ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... soul, strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much vapour and sunshine and wind and water, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... but thoroughly genial, and quite the monopoly of their race. They insist on the whole of Christmas week for a holiday. 'Missus' must manage how she can. To insist on chaining them down in the kitchen during that halcyon time would stir up blank rebellion. Dancing and music are their favourite Christmas recreations; they manage both with a will. In the city suburbs there are many modest little frame-houses inhabited by the blacks; ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of the party at Lynstones before returning to their native town of Grovebury. The six weeks by the sea seemed a kind of oasis between the anxious period of the war that was past and gone, and the new epoch that stretched ahead in the future. To Ingred they were halcyon days. To have her father and brothers safely back, and for the family to be together in the midst of such beautiful scenery, was sufficient for utter enjoyment. She did not wish her mind to venture outside the charmed circle of the holidays. Beyond, when she thought ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the erstwhile schoolboy game and the amateur pastime of later years is being rounded out into a full-grown business. The professional clubs of the country begin to rival in number those of the halcyon amateur days; and yet the latter class has lost none of its love for the sport. The only thing now lacking to forever establish base-ball as our national sport is a more liberal encouragement of the amateur element. Professional base-ball may have its ups and downs according as its directors ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, the philosopher, the historian and the humble listener, there has been a divine melody running through the song, which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.' ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... profounder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude continually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were nearing the sea; which also must, under the present circumstances, be repeating the general state of halcyon repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight and the first timid tremblings of the dawn were by this time blending; and the blendings were brought into a still more exquisite state of unity ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... these committees, and yet I get always jamm'd into them. They take up a cruel deal of time in a way very unsatisfactory. Dined at home, and wrought hard. I shall be through the Bruce's reign. It is lengthy; but, hang it, it was our only halcyon period. I shall be soon done with one-half of the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... elderly people are always pleased to note the progress of young folks' love affairs, especially if either of them is a relative of ours. In them we seem to renew our youth, for their entrancements seem to carry us back to the halcyon days when we ourselves were young. When "Love took up the glass of time and turned it in his glowing hands" everything seemed of a roseate hue, and we dwelt in the seventh heaven of delight, at peace with all the world and envying no one—for were we ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... drew on. But first November came, with its 'saint Martin's summer, halcyon days' and the old man revived a little. He stood one morning and looked from his window on the garden behind the house, all glittering with molten hoar-frost. A few leaves, golden with death, hung here and there on a naked bough. A kind of sigh was ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... midst of a torment of wind, March 15 came as a beautiful, sunny, almost calm day. I remarked in my diary that it was "typical Antarctic weather," thinking of those halcyon days which belong to the climate of the southern shores of the Ross Sea. In Adelie Land, we were destined to find, it was hard to number more than a dozen ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Patience, in order that she might give her opinion, in private, as to some domestic arrangement, some piece of furniture, or some new carpet; but this privacy was always invaded. What Mr Oriel's parishioners did in these halcyon days, I will not ask. His morning services, however, had been altogether given up, and he had provided himself with a very ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... appetite demanded fresh meat or fish, white bread, vegetables freshly gathered, and ale of the best. As long as his store lasted, he worked as little as possible, and grumbled at the fortune that made him a laborer. But these halcyon days were few, and soon passed away, to be followed by decreasing allowances of the commonest food, fierce pangs of hunger, and miserable destitution. A bad harvest inflicted untold wretchedness on the poor. Ill lodged, ill fed, and scantily clothed, disease cut them down like grass before ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... the charms of halcyon days, When the cool bath exhilarates the frame; When sylvan gales are laden with the scent Of fragrant Patalas[6]; when soothing sleep Creeps softly on beneath the deepening shade; And when, at last, the dulcet calm of eve Entrancing steals o'er ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... of state, retired to his castle at Bruckenau, picturesquely situated in the Fulda Forest; and Lola, attended by a squadron of Cuirassiers, accompanied him to this retreat. There, as in the Nymphenburg Park, Ludwig dreamed dreams, while Lola amused herself with the officers of the escort. Halcyon days—and nights. They inspired His ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... excursions toward the north and toward the south, in the halcyon weather that had seldom failed since the withdrawal of the nebula, they arrived at the place (or above it) which had stood during centuries for a noon-mark on ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... recommendation. Wells, having known the applicant less than a fortnight, was pleased with him and said what he could. Allison was impressed by the applicant's fluency and apparent frankness, and in less than a week the erudite Elmendorf found himself in halcyon waters. Then came the foreign trip, another thing to rejoice in; but before he sailed Elmendorf had had an opportunity of doing good to his kind, as he conceived it. Seeking an inexpensive lodging on his arrival in Chicago, he had found a neat, cheerful home under the roof of an elderly ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... happiness, and prosperity, properly the seven days before and the seven after the winter Solstice, days of quiet, during which the halcyon, or kingfisher, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... master as he has for her. And would she be so docile, so smiling, so happy under my instructions if she had not? would she sit at my side when I dictate or correct, with such a still, contented, halcyon mien?" for I had ever remarked, that however sad or harassed her countenance might be when I entered a room, yet after I had been near her, spoken to her a few words, given her some directions, uttered perhaps some reproofs, she would, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... lake. It is the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of the concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe. Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a dishonest historian tells with no effect against the honest ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... long and somewhat anxious day. While we were bowling along in the sweet sunshine and sweeter moonlight of the halcyon time, Uncle Sam might be dethroned by somebody in buckram, or Baltimore burnt by the boys from Lynn and Marblehead, revenging the massacre of their fellows. Every one begins to comprehend the fiery eagerness of men who live in historic times. "I wish I had control of chain-lightning for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the eve of a Jubilee Year, when the halcyon shall plume his wing, and we shall hear much oratorical trash and hebetude about the peacefulness of this ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... these halcyon days, When earth's a paradise rose-petalled, For you to chill us with a phrase: ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... that witch the lyre— Greenland has its mountain icebergs, AEtna has its heart of fire; Calculation has its plummet; Self-control its iron rules; Genius has its sparkling fountains; Dulness has its stagnant pools; Like a halcyon on the waters, Burns's chart disdain'd a plan— In his soarings he was heavenly, In his sinkings he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... close and faint of atmosphere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was called Nelson's, for no very definite reason, and the room in which the ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate foreground—it was as much earth as water that lapped the shore—a ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... little alleys off Cornhill and Lombard Street. I agree, too, with Georgie in deploring the passing of the public-house mid-day ordinary. From his recollections, I learn that the sixties and seventies were the halcyon days for feeding—indeed, the only time when Londoners really lived; and an elderly uncle of mine, who, at that time, went everywhere and knew everybody in the true hard-up Bohemia, tells me that there were then twenty or thirty taverns within fifty yards of Ludgate Circus, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... mine, however, and I would hold them: the halcyon breakfast, the queer hat, the pebble in her small shoe, the gold bag with the broken chain—the bag! Why, it was in my ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a nation's architecture was the exponent of its national character, growing with and out of its social, civil, and religious peculiarities, and modified by climate, habit, and taste. In those early ages, the halcyon days of the art, men built with a purpose, built what they wanted in a natural and appropriate way, and—built successfully. So true was this, that to this day, most of their relics proclaim their own origin, just as fossils determine the relative positions ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... a fortnight of halcyon days at Echo Lodge in the golden prime of August. While there she incidentally contrived to hurry Ludovic Speed in his leisurely courting of Theodora Dix, as related duly in another chronicle of her history.(1) Arnold Sherman, ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... take the pay of Britain, and, while they fatten in plenty, and unaccustomed affluence, look with great tranquillity upon the distresses of Austria, and, in their indolence of gluttony, stand idle spectators of that deluge, by which, if it be suffered to roll on without opposition, their own halcyon territories must at last be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... the picturesque valley, with its olive and orange groves and along shaded avenues of palms, with pebbly brooks of crystal waters on either side. The pure air and semi-tropical skies stimulated our buoyant spirits, and made these the halcyon days of my existence. My first dreams of love when we met in the Cordilleras were now ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... prophetic vision is required of us. We are told that all perils which seem to threaten the first stages of our course are entirely illusive—that they will vanish as we approach—that we shall soon arrive in halcyon waters, and regions where wisdom, peace, and purity reign supreme. If we cautiously inquire after some assurance of such results, we are told that to those sailing under the flag of progress triumph is inevitable, failure is impossible; ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... be presented to her, when the gentleman had the opportunity of making his "best genteel-comedy bow." Now it was on the younger generation of the Kembles that the Queen bestowed her gracious countenance. These were halcyon days for society as well as for the stage, when, in Mrs. Oliphant's words, "the Queen was in the foreground of the national life, affecting it always for good, and setting an example of purity and virtue. The theatres to which she went, and which both she and her husband ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... tell you what that bird was—a kingfisher, the celebrated halcyon of the ancients, about which so many tales are told. It lives on fish, which it catches in the manner you saw. It builds in holes in the banks, and is a shy, retired bird, never to be seen far from the stream where ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... well, girl, Thou wilt know it yet. I fetter not thy choice, But if thou couldst by loving bind together Not two hearts only, but opposing peoples; Supplant by halcyon days long years of strife, And link them in unbroken harmony;— Were this no glory for a woman, this No worthy price of ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... latitudes and halcyon seas of Asia and the Mediterranean had failed to develop the sneeze, save that the immortal Montaigue, a friend in need to every reader, will point you that Aristotle told why the people bless a man who sneezes. "The ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... the pigeons are dearer than in London. Rabbits are very rare; and there is scarce a goose to be seen in the whole county of Nice. Wild-ducks and teal are sometimes to be had in the winter; and now I am speaking of sea-fowl, it may not be amiss to tell you what I know of the halcyon, or king's-fisher. It is a bird, though very rare in this country about the size of a pigeon; the body brown, and the belly white: by a wonderful instinct it makes its nest upon the surface of the sea, and lays its eggs in the month of November, when the Mediterranean ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... breeze freshened so much that we were all glad to add some wraps to our light and airy costumes. A little later, a summer gale was blowing ahead, making some of us feel very uncomfortable and long for the halcyon days of the past, even with the accompaniment of the inevitable heat. Such is mankind, and womankind too for that matter, 'never blessed but always to be blessed.' The gale freshened, the screw was raised, the yacht pitched and rolled, and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast in the halcyon days of their childhood? These toyful trifles, "light as air," doubtless suggested the Emperor's Rout. Do not start, expectant reader; this is no downfall of a royal dynasty, no burning of palaces, or muster of rebel ranks—no scamper "all on the road from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... my beloved girl, in your style and expressions: and the affectionate things you say of me are inexpressibly obliging; and again, with this kiss, said he, do I confirm for truth all that you have promised for my intentions in this letter.—O what halcyon days are these! God continue them!—A change would kill ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... found the moment of indecision to be the moment of completest anguish. When our resolutions are taken with determined firmness, they engross the mind and close the void of misery. Yes, my friend, save the pang of sympathy, I am happy. These are my halcyon days. Let us taste them together. We shall mutually heighten their relish. Let us rescue some moments of rational enjoyment from the wreck of impetuous time. Friendship shall smooth the rugged path of science, and virtue cheer ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... from the ground, and shelters a row of mangers, running back half the length of the stable, and serving in former times for the baiting of such beasts as could not be provided for within. But the halcyon days of the cattle-market are past (though you may still see the white horns tossing above the fences of the pens, when a newly arrived herd lands from the train to be driven afoot to Brighton), and the place ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the scene was of even a more sumptuous character than at our former "stopping place." Here swelled the river in its boldest course, interspersed by halcyon isles on which nature had lavished all her prodigality in tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs, three hundred feet high, their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their summits adorned ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... from some ghostly wind of space that had caught them up on its awful shoreless sweep. November came, 'chill and drear,' with its heartless, hopeless nothingness; but as if to mock the poor competitors, rose, after three days of Scotch mist, in a lovely 'halcyon day' of 'St. Martin's summer,' through whose long shadows anxious young faces gathered in the quadrangle, or under the arcade, each with his Ainsworth's Dictionary, the sole book allowed, under his arm. But when the sacrist appeared and unlocked the public school, and the black-gowned ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... prescient of the storm, as by his instinct he ought to be,) appearing at that uncertain season before the rigs of old Michaelmas were yet well composed, and when the inclement storms of winter were approaching, began to flicker over the seas, and was busy in building its halcyon nest, as if the angry ocean had been soothed by the genial breath of May. Very unfortunately, this auspice was instantly followed by a speech from the throne in the very spirit ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... at first it was hardly noticeable. But it swiftly developed, and the shrewd mind of the watcher in the hills realized that the days of halcyon were passing all too swiftly. Men were no longer satisfied ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Dream]. Adj. moderate; lenient &c 740; gentle, mild, mellow; cool, sober, temperate, reasonable, measured; tempered &c v.; calm, unruffled, quiet, tranquil, still; slow, smooth, untroubled; tame; peaceful, peaceable; pacific, halcyon. unexciting, unirritating^; soft, bland, oily, demulcent, lenitive, anodyne; hypnotic &c 683; sedative; antiorgastic^, anaphrodisiac^. mild as mother's milk; milk and water. Adv. moderately &c adj.; gingerly; piano; under ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... suggestion that the abolition of the old Empire must be an advantage to Prussia. They clutched eagerly, however, at his proposal that Prussia should form a league of the North German States, and made overtures to the two most important States, Saxony and Hesse-Cassel. During a few halcyon days the King even proposed to assume the title Emperor of Prussia, from which, however, the Elector of Saxony ironically dissuaded him. This castle in the air faded away when news reached Berlin at the beginning ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... by the rocky cliffs of the sea, halcyon,[144] dost chant thy mournful elegy, a sound well understood by the skilled, namely, that thou art ever bemoaning thine husband in song, I, a wingless bird, compare my dirge with thine, longing for the assemblies[145] of the Greeks, longing for Lucina, who dwells ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... Let us enjoy the halcyon wave; Sometimes impending peril lowers Beyond the seaman's skill to save, The Wisdom, infinitely wise, That gives to human destinies Their foreordained necessity, Has made no law more fixed below, Than the alternate ebb and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of to-day account it among our most precious heritages that our sires and grandsires kept stations on that same road, and many an escaped bondsman looking back from his safe asylum in Canada called them "blessed." Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-nine was in the halcyon days of "Fugitive Slave Law" lovers. If John Wesley considered Slavery the "sum of all villainies," I wonder what terse definition he would have given to this the vilest enactment that ever rested on our Statute Book. Not satisfied with ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... and Watts, high though his expectations were, was overwhelmed at what he saw. 'Michelangelo', he said, 'stands for Italy, as Shakespeare does for England.' So the four years went by till in 1847 this halcyon period came to an end. The Royal Commission of Fine Arts was offering prizes for fresco-painting, and Watts felt that he must put his growing powers to the test and utilize what he had learnt. This time he ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... From cares exempt, he dwells in perfect peace. His heart is light as boy's on holiday. He walks abroad and joys in his release. The cat is gone, the frisky mouse doth play. The fox remote, walk forth the wandering geese. So he, delivered, thinks his troubles past, O halcyon ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... difficulty of raising six millions of dollars in the limited period at our disposal. Times have changed since 1896. Then six millions was quite a large sum, larger than sixty millions now. That was before the halcyon period of ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... in which scarce a worthy disciple of the learned patriarchs of ancient days is to be found. Received with open arms, persecuted, patronized, smiled upon, tolerated, it with the last phase of its existence, has reached, not the halcyon days of peace and rest, but its final stage, foreshadowing its decay from rottenness and corruption."[40] So also, in a like report, agree many witnesses. The common people of China are to-day Taoists ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... fortnight of halcyon days at Echo Lodge in the golden prime of August. While there she incidentally contrived to hurry Ludovic Speed in his leisurely courting of Theodora Dix, as related duly in another chronicle of her history.(1) Arnold Sherman, an elderly friend of the Irvings, was there at ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was mature when Arthur—confirmed habit—Mr Clennam—took me down into an unused kitchen eminent for mouldiness and proposed to secrete me there for life and feed me on what he could hide from his meals when he was not at home for the holidays and on dry bread in disgrace which at that halcyon period too frequently occurred, would it be inconvenient or asking too much to beg to be permitted to revive those scenes and walk ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Agnes slept away unconscious of our movements. She slept through all that day and the following night; and I watched over her with as much jealousy of all that might disturb her, as a mother watches over her new-born baby; for I hoped, I fancied, that a long— long rest, a rest, a halcyon calm, a deep, deep Sabbath of security, might prove healing and medicinal. I thought wrong; her breathing became more disturbed, and sleep was now haunted by dreams; all of us, indeed, were agitated by dreams; the past pursued me, and the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... poet wears your laurels now; None rises, singing, from your race like you. Dark melodist, immortal, though the dew Fell early on the bays upon your brow, And tinged with pathos every halcyon vow And brave endeavor. Silence o'er you threw Flowerets of love. Or, if an envious few Of your own people brought no garlands, how Could Malice smite him whom the gods had crowned? If, like the meadow-lark, your flight was low Your flooded lyrics half the hilltops drowned; A wide world heard you, ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... ever such a dawn? Did ever song of birds sound so like the voice of eternal youth? Whence had come this air like the fumes from the winepresses of the gods? And the light! What colors, what tints, upon mountain and valley and halcyon lake! And the man asleep in the next room—yes, there WAS a Joshua Craig whom she found extremely trying at times; but that Joshua Craig had somehow resigned the tenancy of the strong, straight form there, had resigned it to a man who was the living ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... faith, "is now making one Attempt more upon us; an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprising, more snarl'd with unintelligible Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountered; an Attempt so Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell trodden under our feet." In sound and structure Mather's style is what the critics call "archaistic." It is all untouched by the influences of another world, and though "the New Englanders were," in Mather's view, "a ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... go inside of the booth to witness the effects of the mandarine's folly. At times a ray of reason penetrates her diseased brain, and then the sight of her anguish would soften a heart of stone. Enter, and for the small sum of ten sous you shall hear sobs such as the Odeon never echoed in its halcyon days. The unhappy woman has waked up to the absurdity and inanity of her blind passion; she confesses to herself that she is madly pursuing a phantom. She knows but too well that he, in the vigor and beauty of youth, cannot love a faded old woman like herself, who ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... the days of calm between the storms; halcyon days, as they have well been named, in which genius had sufficient freedom in determining its own direction to devote itself with all its ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... his course begun; When, lo! his disk burst forth—his beams of gold Seem'd earth as with a garment to enfold, And from his piercing eye the loose mists flew, And heaven with arch of deep autumnal blue Glow'd overhead; while ocean, like a lake, Seeming delight to take In its own halcyon-calm, resplendent lay, From Western Kames to far Kilchattan bay. Old Largs look'd out amid the orient light, With its grey dwellings, and, in greenery bright, Lay Coila's classic shores reveal'd to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... in foreign capitals, a fruitful source of jealousy and discord is found in the necessary selection of those to be presented at the court of the reigning sovereign. But this, as far as I remember, was avoided in those halcyon days by the simple expedient of presenting all who desired it. And that Lord Holland was the right man in the right place as regards this matter ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of these halcyon days of early summer Rose Macleod was re-reading a letter from her friend Helene; which, though a mere elegant scrawl in the first place, and now yellow and worn with age, has been with some difficulty deciphered by the writers ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... not be turned to diversion. The coach would not always traverse sunny byways; the dry leaf floating from the majestic arm of the oak, the sound of an acorn as it struck the earth presaged days less halcyon to come. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... times of myths and fables, kingfishers or halcyons were said to build a floating nest on the sea, and to possess some mysterious power that calmed the troubled waves while the eggs were hatching and the young birds were being reared, hence the term "halcyon days," ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... furore among the musical public of that day as would an opera from Gounod or Verdi in the present. The principal airs were sung throughout the land, and published as harpsichord pieces; for in these halcyon days of our composers the whole atmosphere of the land was full of the flavor and color of Handel. Many of the melodies in these now forgotten operas have been worked up by modern composers, and so have passed into ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... trusting eyes, exulting confidence in their springing step, themselves blithe and radiant with the glory of the dawn. Today, and here, we meet ourselves. Not to these familiar scenes alone—yonder college-green with its reverend traditions; the halcyon cove of the Seekonk, upon which the memory of Roger Williams broods like a bird of calm; the historic bay, beating forever with the muffled oars of Barton and of Abraham Whipple; here, the humming city of the living; there, the peaceful city of the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... have passed to the heart of the Hills, For a season of halcyon hours, 'Mid the music of murmurous rills, And ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... I took his place as Secretary of State, thus becoming all but the supreme ruler of Spain. I do not believe that there was ever in Spain a Minister so highly favoured by the reigning Prince, so powerful as I became. Not Eboli himself in his halcyon days had been so deeply esteemed of Philip, or had wielded such power as I now made my own. All Europe knows it—for it was to me all Europe addressed itself for affairs that ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate all the powers of recollection upon them with a desperate kind of intensity. It was the realization of a childish ambition conceived in that halcyon era which drew him to Gadshill, and he returned again and again to the contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from Gadshill of his old nurse—the original, it can hardly be ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... knew he could retire to some monastery when too old and feeble for further usefulness; but the desecration of his secret was like a painful stab. The robbery had the effect, also, of calling forcibly to mind, once again, the life and love of other days—those halcyon days of youth, when all was sunshine and hope. During the rest of the day the Father was unable to control himself for any work whatsoever. He paced back and forth the length of his room; walked up and down the cloister surrounding the patio; wandered ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... an epigram produced its pension: to be a poet, or reputed so, was to be—eligible for all things; and the fortunate possessor of a rhyming dictionary might have governed Europe with his metrical protocols. But these halcyon times are of the past—and so, verily, are their heroes. Farewell, a long farewell, children of oblivion! farewell, Spratt, Smith, Duke, Hughes, King, Pomfret, Phillips, and Blackmore: ye who, in that day of very small things, just ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... In the halcyon days of Cartagena's greatness, when, under the protection of the powerful mother-country, her commerce extended to the confines of the known world, her streets and markets presented a scene of industry and activity wholly foreign to her in these latter days of her decadence. From her port ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and sat on the bench in the sun with his wife beside him. To the prosperous passerby they would have seemed a sorry pair—a skeleton man with uncertain feet and powerless hands, a worn woman, ragged and unkempt. To them it was the halcyon hour, the highest point of their mutual adventure. The cabin was their palace, the soaked prospect a pleasance decked for their delight. And from this rude and ravaged outlook their minds reached forward in undefined and unrestricted visioning ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... wind, when the morning's breast Gleams like a bird's that leaves the nest, A fledgeling halcyon's bound on quest, Drives wave on wave on wave to west Till all the sea be life and light, So time's mute breath, that brings to bloom All flowers that strew the dead spring's tomb, Drives day on day on day to doom Till ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... France, it seemed that this campaign of ours in German East Africa was a mere side-show. It appeared to be a Heaven-sent opportunity to escape the cold wet misery of the trenches in Flanders. To some it spelt an expedition of the picnic variety; they saw in this an opportunity of spending halcyon days in the game preserves, glorious opportunities for making collections of big game heads, all sandwiched in with pleasant and successful enterprises against an enemy that was waiting only a ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... also in a statistical way, and perchance may serve future historians as a document proving the moderate cost of wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. Pepys' diary is more interesting than his meticulous record of what his amusements cost him. Mayhap some future economist will pore upon these guileless confessions. For in the black memorandum ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... beneath your prow, Like carpets for a victor's feet; You call slow zephyrs to your brow, In listless luxury complete: Love, the true Halcyon, guides your ship; Oh, might ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... there was a terror in the joy. The wide vacancy of the air dazed them,—a glance downward made their brains reel. But when a great wind filled their wings, and Icarus felt himself sustained, like a halcyon-bird in the hollow of a wave, like a child uplifted by his mother, he forgot everything in the world but joy. He forgot Crete and the other islands that he had passed over: he saw but vaguely that winged thing in the distance before ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... of the scene was of even a more sumptuous character than at our former "stopping place." Here swelled the river in its boldest course, interspersed by halcyon isles on which nature had lavished all her prodigality in tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs, three hundred feet high, their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their summits adorned with those ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... struggles, than is allowed them among the heavy fetters and cast-iron forms of this rigid and wrinkled Old World. Doubtless, those struggles will long be arduous and trying: doubtless, the dictates of Duty will there often bear sternly away from the halcyon bowers of Popularity; doubtless, he who would be singly and wholly right must there encounter ordeals as severe as those which here try the souls of the would-be champions of Progress and Liberty. But Political Freedom, such as white men enjoy in the United States, and the mass do ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Thought, but also of so beautifully hiding from us the want of Thought! Paper is made from the rags of things that did once exist; there are endless excellences in Paper.—What wisest Philosophe, in this halcyon uneventful period, could prophesy that there was approaching, big with darkness and confusion, the event of events? Hope ushers in a Revolution,—as earthquakes are preceded by bright weather. On the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... infuriated girl were plainly audible all over the flats whereon were huddled the little cabins of log and adobe assigned as quarters to the few married men among the soldiery. These were the halcyon days of the old army when each battery, troop, or company was entitled to four laundresses and each laundress to one ration. Old and young, there were at least fifty pairs of ears within easy range of the battle ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... eaters of olla podrida. One of the bags of provisions was beside him unpacked. He had lighted over his head an iron lantern, glazed with talc, which swung on a hook from the ceiling. By its side, on another hook, swung the weather-cock halcyon. There was a popular belief in those days that a dead halcyon, hung by the beak, always turned its breast to the quarter whence the wind was blowing. While he made the broth, the Provencal put the neck of a gourd into his mouth, and now and then swallowed a draught of aguardiente. It ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... on jackass Hill. Jim Gillis, a lovable, picturesque character (the Truthful James of Bret Harte), owned mining claims. Mark Twain decided to spend his vacation in pocket-mining, and soon added that science to his store of knowledge. It was a halcyon, happy three months that he lingered there, but did not make his fortune; he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... reached Kingston, the seat of his government, in January 1842. Visits to the various centres of Canada, according to the practice of his predecessors, soon gave him an understanding of popular opinion and feeling; and, although he was expected by the extreme Conservatives to bring back the old, halcyon, ante bellum days, he was most careful to follow the lines of Sydenham's policy. Towards the French he was amiable and conciliatory and made several appointments of French Canadians to positions of trust and emolument. Ever ready to meet courtesy half-way, ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon period of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went on in the missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The people passed their time in their semi-communistic ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... and for whom she had always felt at any rate the warmest friendship? Such were not her thoughts, nor were they in any way akin to this. They ran back instantly to years gone by,—over long years, as her few years were counted, and settled themselves on certain halcyon days, in which she had dreamed that he had loved her, and had fancied that she had loved him. How she had schooled herself for those days since that, and taught herself to know that her thoughts had been over-bold! And now it had all come round. The only man that she ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... is a young thrifty orchard, and at the base of the hill is a finely cultivated piece of land, and there is nothing but the everlasting hills to tell us of the dear spot where we wandered in the halcyon days of childhood; we cannot ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... Flamborough it was not so. No crisis arose to demand his presence; no business went amiss because of his having to work so hard at love. There came, as there sometimes does in matters pressing, tangled, and exasperating, a quiet period, a gentle lull, a halcyon time when the jaded brain reposes, and the heart may hatch her own mares'-nests. Underneath that tranquil spell lay fond Joe and Bob (with their cash to spend), Widow Precious (with her beer laid ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... England generally been more prosperous, more secure, more comfortable. The heavens of international politics were as serene as the evening sky; not yet was the storm-cloud that hung over Ireland bigger than a man's hand; east, west, north and south there brooded the peace of the close of a halcyon day, and the amazing doings of the Suffragettes but added a slight incentive to the perusal of the morning paper. The arts flourished, harvests prospered; the world like a newly-wound clock seemed to be in for a spell of serene and orderly ticking, with an occasional chime just ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... of all, however, and considerably to the disappointment of the party of Dubs, Fite Folp, and the rest, the next day was as peaceful as if Scaurnose had been a halcyon nest floating on the summer waves; and it was soon reported that, in consequence of the punishment he had received from Malcolm, the factor was far too ill to be troublesome to any but his wife. This was true, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... by swelling and subsiding storms, or by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known but that she perished. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the honest man's account. He has been here these two hours—courting the mother for the daughter, I suppose—yet she wants no courting neither: 'Tis well one of us does; else the man would have nothing but halcyon; and be ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... their one common interest, although even here they soon found themselves out of sympathy. Hubert's instincts were scholastic and lawful, Hadria was disposed to daring innovation. Her bizarre compositions shocked him painfully. The two jarred on one another, in great things and in small. The halcyon period was short-lived. The dream, such as it was, came to an end. Hubert turned to his sister, in his bewilderment and disappointment. They had both counted so securely on the effect of experience and the pressure of events to teach Hadria the desirable lesson, and they were dismayed ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the far North. A towsled woman or child drifted now and then into the meson shop to buy a Mexican cent's worth of firewood. The woman who kept the shanty fonda down the street boasted of having lived nineteen months in California in her halcyon days, but was obliged to borrow enough of me in advance to buy the ingredients of the scanty supper she finally prepared. By eight the corral was snoring with arrieros and I ascended to my ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... But first November came, with its 'saint Martin's summer, halcyon days' and the old man revived a little. He stood one morning and looked from his window on the garden behind the house, all glittering with molten hoar-frost. A few leaves, golden with death, hung here and there on a naked bough. A kind of sigh was in ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... Fairer far than this fair day, Which, like thee, to those in sorrow Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow To the rough year just awake In its cradle on the brake. The brightest hour of unborn Spring Through the winter wandering, Found, it seems, the halcyon morn To hoar February born; Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kiss'd the forehead of the earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed upon the frozen mountains, And like a ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... New Orleans. There were distinct grades of society. The caste system was almost as strong as that of India. Free people of color from other states poured into Louisiana in a steady stream. It was a haven of refuge. Those were indeed halcyon times both for the Creole and the American, who found in the rapidly growing city a commercial El Dorado. For the people of color it was indeed a time of growth and acquisition of wealth. Three famous streets in New Orleans bear testimony to the importance of the colored people in the life ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... to Manhood's thought, In all the changes of our lives, unmoved— That young affection no regret has brought: Beloved one! when I seem Fortune's slave, Reckless and wrecked upon the wayward wave, Bright Hope, the Halcyon, rises o'er the sea, Calming the troubled wave—bearing my ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... away, with a contempt bred of ignorance, from the whole subject. But if it were only as a mental and intellectual tonic the contemplation of these sixty stately folios, embracing about a thousand pages each, would be a most healthy exercise for the men of this age. This is the halcyon period of primers, introductions, handbooks, manuals. "Knowledge made Easy" is the cry on every side. We take our mental pabulum just as we take Liebig's essence of beef, in a very concentrated form, or as hom[oe]opathists ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... sucking dove [Midsummer-Night's Dream]. Adj. moderate; lenient &c 740; gentle, mild, mellow; cool, sober, temperate, reasonable, measured; tempered &c v.; calm, unruffled, quiet, tranquil, still; slow, smooth, untroubled; tame; peaceful, peaceable; pacific, halcyon. unexciting, unirritating^; soft, bland, oily, demulcent, lenitive, anodyne; hypnotic &c 683; sedative; antiorgastic^, anaphrodisiac^. mild as mother's milk; milk and water. Adv. moderately &c adj.; gingerly; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... idle eye. One atrocious murder, a political crisis, an incautious or heady continental statesman, the mere catarrh of a king, would have wiped out the significance of our message, as a passing cloud annuls the urgent helio. But it was halcyon weather in every respect. Ollyett and I did not need to lift our little fingers any more than the Alpine climber whose last sentence has unkeyed the arch of the avalanche. The thing roared and pulverised and swept beyond eyesight all by itself—all by itself. And once well ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... quickly over that time of my life on which I should most love to linger, those halcyon hours when, with Marian by my side and the prospect bright before us, we voyaged through those Indian seas, down the long coast of Malabar and up the long coast of Coromandel, past the Isle of Serendib, and the reefs and foaming seas, to where the tangled banyan ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... Sue, who have ice-cream, Life is a glowing, halcyon dream, While Tom stands empty by; And says, "Gee! fellers, ain't it prime? Say, I had ice-cream too, one time, And it was great! ...
— Children of Our Town • Carolyn Wells
... a "hornbill" by foreigners in the Philippines, is probably the halcyon kingfisher (Ceyx euerythra) of the islands. The ground hornbill is confined to Africa; and the tree hornbill of the Philippines does not make its nest at the foot of trees, as in ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... vine twists about the ribs of the cast-iron Pallas, And, on the zephyr afloat, the halcyon soul of the borax Blends with the scent of the soap, the brush of the white-washer's flying E'en as the chicken-hawk flies when ready to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... in the blue distance, deer were seen; bears began to approach the corn-cribs, and in the unbroken wilderness wolves were heard at night. Early and late the air struck cold, but each midday was a halcyon time. In the last of October, on a still and coloured morning, Rand and Jacqueline, having shaken hands with the overseer and the slaves they were leaving, caressed the dogs, and said good-bye to the cat, quitted the house on the Three-Notched ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... most for valour by his foes, He lived a stranger in a foreign land. She, too, that maiden, 'twas her fate to share Her husband's troubles for her beauty rare. Still 'twas a little heav'n their new home where The halcyon days of mutual love were spent. 'Tis sweet to love and sweeter to be loved; And thus in their new home their life of joy They spent in undisturbed solitude; But ah! this even was not long to be. One day the news ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... well, well! I must not linger On those glorious halcyon days; Time with his relentless finger Brings me to the second phase; Politics were always creeping Like a ghost across my view— I contested Market Sleeping In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... approximans, Vig. and Horsf. Collocalia arborea. Podargus humeralis, Vig. and Horsf. Podargus phalaenoides, Gould. Eurostopodus guttatus. Merops ornatus, Lath. Dacelo Leachii. Dacelo cervina, Gould. Halcyon macleayii, Jard. and Selb. Alcyone azurea. Dicrurus bracteatus, Gould. Colluricincla cinerea, Gould. Pachycephala gutturalis. Pachycephala melanura, Gould. Pachycephala pectoralis, Vig. and Horsf. Pachycephala lanoides, Gould. Artamus sordidus. Cracticus destructor. Cracticus ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... asked for delay, which was grudgingly granted him. Then he and his mother and friend fled over seas: he feverishly determined to get well and cheat the fates. But, after a halcyon time in Palestine and Constantinople, a whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on their way home, acting on a low constitutional state, settled matters. Robert was laid up for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled out again into ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pieces of crested plate, which he had neither the temerity to use nor the hardihood to melt or sell. He could but gloat over them behind locked doors, as I used to tell him, and at last one afternoon I caught him at it. It was in the year after that of my novitiate, a halcyon period at the Albany, when Raffles left no crib uncracked, and I played second-murderer every time. I had called in response to a telegram in which he stated that he was going out of town, and must say good-by to me before he went. And I could only think that he was inspired by the ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... taught by the manner of his friend Poppins that he could not now expect to receive that high deference which was paid to him about the time that Johnson of Manchester had been in the ascendant. Those had been the halcyon days of the firm, and Robinson had then been happy. Men at that time would point him out as he passed, as one worthy of notice; his companions felt proud when he would join them; and they would hint to him, with a mysterious reverence that was very gratifying, their assurance that ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... wife fair Cleopatra, who was daughter of Marpessa daughter of Euenus, and of Ides the man then living. He it was who took his bow and faced King Apollo himself for fair Marpessa's sake; her father and mother then named her Alcyone, because her mother had mourned with the plaintive strains of the halcyon-bird when Phoebus Apollo had carried her off. Meleager, then, stayed at home with Cleopatra, nursing the anger which he felt by reason of his mother's curses. His mother, grieving for the death of her brother, prayed the gods, and beat the earth ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... bring from Greenwood such supplies of clothes as Mrs. Meredith wrote to Sukey to pack and send. To most the prospect would not have been a cheering one, but after the last few days it seemed truly halcyon, and Janice was scarcely able to contain her happiness. She poured her warmest gratitude and thanks out in a letter to Washington, which would have surprised him not a little had he ever received it, but the mail in which it went was ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... of that art, to his natural gifts for which he had now added the wholesome tonic of experience, Peace passed from a poor and obscure lodging in a slum in Lambeth to the state and opulence of a comfortable suburban residence in Peckham. These were the halcyon days of Peace's enterprise in life. From No. 25 Stangate Street, Lambeth, the dealer in musical instruments, as Peace now described himself, sallied forth night after night, and in Camberwell and other parts of South London reaped the reward of skill and vigilance in entering other people's ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... plausible; it would at least put an end to wrangling, by giving us all an agreeable object to worship, while for mental demands and social purposes generally we could fall back on Philosophy. Had not our fathers tried Philosophy? When had society a better well being than in the halcyon ages of Plato and Pythagoras? Yet there was a term of indecision with us—or rather incubation. To what school should we attach ourselves? A copy of the Enchiridion of Epictetus fell into our hands, and after studying it faithfully, we rejected ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... but not gaudy"?—Soon Despond (Too soon!) at flouted faith and fond, Soon tempests halcyon tides above Shall wreck this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... mixed and melted The beautiful children of Morn, whose bodies are opal-belted; The beautiful daughters of Dawn, who, over and under, and after The rivered radiance, wrestled; and rainbowed heaven with laughter Of halcyon sapphire.—O Dawn! thou visible mirth, And hallelujah ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... describe the joy, any more than I could describe the taste of a peach to one who has only eaten apples: it was satisfying, divine. I opened my shirt wider, but the feeling only spread faintly, and indeed this halcyon sunny hour terminated in a restlessness that sent me walking into town to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... maintain the compact into which they had voluntarily entered, the obligation, if any one State chose to repudiate it, could not be legally enforced. Their ideal was a Union based upon fraternal affection; and in the halcyon days of Washington's first presidency, when the long and victorious struggle against a common enemy was still fresh in men's minds, and the sun of liberty shone in an unclouded sky, a vision so Utopian perhaps seemed capable of realisation. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... said the grandmother, "two great fairies—the Fairy of the Water and the Fairy of the Woods. Ten years ago I had gone out at daybreak to catch the crabs asleep in the sand, when I saw a halcyon flying gently towards the shore. The halcyon is a sacred bird, so I never stirred for fear I should scare it away. And at the same time from a cleft in the mountain I saw a beautiful green adder appear and come gliding along the sands ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... it took time; but a beginning was made in those halcyon, summer days, and the art of working by the hand gradually brought to some perfection. No little of this dog's gladness in life was centred eventually in this accomplishment, and he was never happier than when at practice. The education began by teaching him ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... an industrious collector from Sydney, who spent nine months on the northern and middle islands, obtained nearly a hundred species of terrestrial and fluviatile mollusca. The scarcity of birds during our walk surprised me, for the only one which I saw on shore was a solitary kingfisher (Halcyon vagans): during our ascent of the Keri-Keri, however, many ducks (Anas superciliosa) flew past the boat, and gulls, terns, and two ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... he replied apologetically. "I rode over to the race track to see the new trotter. I've called him Halcyon, Jinny," he continued, with enthusiasm. "And he'll ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... flocked the people to see the Discoverer. If they heard his voice they were happy; if some bolder one had a moment's speech with him that fortunate went off with the air of, "My children's children shall know of this!" There returned in this springtide travel sunniness, halcyon weather, bright winds of praise. The last health of the present body was his upon this journey. Health and strength harked back. All noted it. Jayme de Marchena held it for the leap of the flame before sinking, before leaving the frame of this world. But his sons and Don ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... suet, an imitation butter could be made, which was in composition and appearance the same as butter made by the ordinary process, and was exactly as nourishing a food. There has been much talk of the halcyon days to come when the progress of science will be so great that food will be made in the laboratory. Well, here was an important practical step in that direction. A cheap product worth three or four cents a pound could be easily converted by a chemical treatment ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... know. He knows only what was and is, and his soul is overwhelmed with pity. In that moment those who are most deeply injured forgive and forget. They remember the time when all was well,—the sweet childhood, the blooming youth, the first love, the halcyon days ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... my kindred. Well! the amiable conjecture does no harm, and may therefore be safely left uncontradicted. Far from saying nay, indeed, I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years, as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass—the steersman stretched on the little deck, his face up to heaven, his eyes closed: buried, if you will, in a long prayer. A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... When he left Monte Alloro the land had worn the bleached face of February, and it was amazing to his northern-bred eyes to find himself, on the sea-coast, in the full exuberance of summer. Seated by this halcyon shore, Genoa, in its carved and frescoed splendour, just then celebrating with the customary gorgeous ritual the accession of a new Doge, seemed to Odo like the richly-inlaid frame of some Renaissance "triumph." But the splendid houses ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... years. All this Jefferson Hope was able to tell him, and in a style which interested Lucy as well as her father. He had been a pioneer in California, and could narrate many a strange tale of fortunes made and fortunes lost in those wild, halcyon days. He had been a scout too, and a trapper, a silver explorer, and a ranchman. Wherever stirring adventures were to be had, Jefferson Hope had been there in search of them. He soon became a favourite with the old farmer, who spoke eloquently of his virtues. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... before them, spread that halcyon sea, fair as at this moment, seventeen centuries from that date, I behold it rippling on the same divinest shores. Clime that yet enervates with a soft and Circean spell—that moulds us insensibly, mysteriously, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... of the halcyon?" said Athelny: Philip was growing used to his rapid leaping from one subject to another. "When the kingfisher, flying over the sea, is exhausted, his mate places herself beneath him and bears him along upon her stronger wings. That is what a man wants in a wife, the halcyon. I lived with my first ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... years, when loneliness and disappointment pressed heavily upon her heart, she looked back to the three weeks that succeeded Dr. Grey's return as the halcyon days, as the cloudless June morning of her life; and, in ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... gracious, delicate, entrancing poem he remembered so well! And by and by, as each mellifluous stanza sounded softly on his ears, a strangely solemn tranquillity swept over him,—a most soothing halcyon calm, as though some passing angel's hand had ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... surrounds, Swells in the breeze, and sweeps the velvet grounds; As hand in hand along the flowery meads His blushing bride the quiver'd hero leads; Charm'd round their heads pursuing Zephyrs throng, And scatter roses, as they move along; Bright beams of Spring in soft effusion play, And halcyon Hours invite them ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... hide in some byway of memory, there to remain for ever and ever. It was such a week that tumbled unexpectedly out of Quin's calendar about the first of June, and lived itself in terms of sunshine and roses, of moonshine and melody, seven halcyon days between the time that Eleanor returned from school and the Bartletts went away for the summer. For the first time since he met her, she seemed to have nothing more demanding to do than to emulate "the innocent moon, who nothing ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... soul With more unrest, and Hebe-like, the bowl Of festal comfort for a moment raise To my poor lips, and then avert thy gaze? Wouldst make me mad beyond the daily curse Of thy displeasure, and in wrath disperse That halcyon draught, that nectar of the mind, Which is the theme I yearn to in ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... heart: that azure eye, That shone through sunny tresses, waving by; The brow, the cheek, that blush'd of fire and snow, Both blending into one ethereal glow; And that same breathing radiancy, that swam Around her, like a pure and blessed calm Around some halcyon bird. And, as he kiss'd Her wormy lips, he felt that he was blest! He felt her holy being stealing through His own, like fountains of the azure dew, That summer mingles with his golden light; And he would clasp her, till the weary night ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... fish, white bread, vegetables freshly gathered, and ale of the best. As long as his store lasted, he worked as little as possible, and grumbled at the fortune that made him a laborer. But these halcyon days were few, and soon passed away, to be followed by decreasing allowances of the commonest food, fierce pangs of hunger, and miserable destitution. A bad harvest inflicted untold wretchedness on the poor. Ill lodged, ill fed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Statue. Dryope and Iole. Lotus Tree. Venus and Adonis. Anemone or Wind Flower. Apollo and Hyacinthus. Game of Quoits. Flower Hyacinthus. Ceyx and Halcyone. Palace of the King of Sleep. Morpheus. Halcyon Birds. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... hostess. The Premier of South Australia has announced that the Governor's salary will in future be reduced by two thousand pounds; his reasons are obvious. The other Colonies will follow suit for a certainty, so the halcyon days of an Australian Governor may fairly be said ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... this, he meant something more, which gives the real spice to his writings. It was something not quite easy to put into formulas; but characteristic of the vague discomfort of the holders of sinecures in those halcyon days arising from the perception that the ground was hollow under their feet. To understand him we must remember that the period of his activity marks precisely the lowest ebb of political principle. Old issues had been settled, and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the man wandering on the moor. So did the movements of birds—the rise of a couple of startled grouse, the hovering of two kestrels, a flight of wild duck in the distance. Each and all reminded him of the halcyon times of life—adventures of his boyhood, the sporting pleasures of his manhood. By George!—how ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... employ'd to no purpose, to settle peace among those sons of violence. Pray, who is he that will say unto them, Go and disband yourselves? But lo! by this transformation it is done at once, and the halcyon days of publick tranquillity return: For neither the military temper nor discipline can taint the soft sex for a whole age to come: Bellaque matribus invisa, War odious to mothers, will not grow immediately palatable in ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... the country for a week or two. Those two weeks are never halcyon days with him. There is a smell about a restaurant that eloquently pleads the sweetness of home, and there is a lack of confidence expressed in a pewter spoon and a general disinclination to believe that anyone is careful molded in with the thickness of the teacup, which startle him ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... ascent from the town, as well as the still sharper and highly dangerous descent into the valley again, where the little mediaeval village lay nestled. Thus it was enabled to gather to itself a strangely beautiful halcyon calm on the Lord's Day,—and in fair Spring weather like the present, dozed complacently under the quiet smile of serene blue skies, soothed to sleep by the rippling flow of its ribbon-like river, and receiving from hour to hour a fluttering halo of doves' wings, as these traditional messengers ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... had joined the rest of the party at Lynstones before returning to their native town of Grovebury. The six weeks by the sea seemed a kind of oasis between the anxious period of the war that was past and gone, and the new epoch that stretched ahead in the future. To Ingred they were halcyon days. To have her father and brothers safely back, and for the family to be together in the midst of such beautiful scenery, was sufficient for utter enjoyment. She did not wish her mind to venture outside the charmed circle of the holidays. ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... savoury and nourishing dish, the 'poor man's steak' I believe it is commonly called. When I was younger, Mrs. Wilkins, they were cheaper. For twopence one could secure a small specimen, for fourpence one of generous proportions. In the halcyon days of youth, when one's lexicon contained not the word failure (it has crept into later editions, Mrs. Wilkins, the word it was found was occasionally needful), the haddock was of much comfort ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Unhappily for Georgy, these halcyon days were broken by intervals of storm and cloud. The weak little woman was afflicted with that intermittent fever called jealousy; and the stalwart Thomas was one of those men who can scarcely give the time of day to a feminine acquaintance ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... eaves." Io Aegien! Peace! "And the skylark at poise o'er the bended sheaves," Io Aegien! Peace! Here and there, everywhere, hear we Peace, Hear her, and see her, and clasp her—Peace! The grasshopper chaunts in the bells of thyme, And the halcyon is back to her ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... abolition of the old Empire must be an advantage to Prussia. They clutched eagerly, however, at his proposal that Prussia should form a league of the North German States, and made overtures to the two most important States, Saxony and Hesse-Cassel. During a few halcyon days the King even proposed to assume the title Emperor of Prussia, from which, however, the Elector of Saxony ironically dissuaded him. This castle in the air faded away when news reached Berlin at the beginning of August that Napoleon was seeking to bring the Elector of Hesse-Cassel ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... with glass and beads There is, that to the Chapel leads; Whose structure, for his holy rest, Is here the Halcyon's curious nest; Into the which who looks, shall see His Temple of Idolatry; Where he of god-heads has such store, As Rome's Pantheon had not more. His house of Rimmon this he calls, Girt with small bones, instead of walls. First in a niche, more black than jet, His idol-cricket ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... suppose the gentle latitudes and halcyon seas of Asia and the Mediterranean had failed to develop the sneeze, save that the immortal Montaigue, a friend in need to every reader, will point you that Aristotle told why the people bless a man who sneezes. "The gods ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... and thus at the age of fifteen years he entered the most cultured house in Italy and there acquired that distinction of style that he kept all through his life, both in his art and his manner. In these halcyon days at this hospitable table Michael Angelo met such men as Massilio Ficino, the interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of erudition; Luigi Pulci and Angelo Poliziano—the latter is supposed to have incited Michael Angelo to carve the bas-relief(66) now in the Casa Buonarroti, ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... hostelry, close and faint of atmosphere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was called Nelson's, for no very definite reason, and the room in which the ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate foreground—it was as much earth as water that lapped the shore—a ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes, which must be beautiful as a poet's dream when they are covered with their great bunches of pale blue blossom. That will not be until Christmas-tide, and, alas! I shall not be here to see, for already my three halcyon days of grace are ended and over, and this very evening we must steam away from a great deal yet unvisited of what is interesting and picturesque, and from friends who three days ago were strangers, but who have made every moment since we landed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... glowed with unaccustomed feeling. And throughout the dinner that followed betimes—during which Mr. Graham's pleasantries and Louise's gay spirits and mirth evoked in Lee a blitheness to which he long had been a stranger and in Dave a state of joyous bliss—they luxuriated in halcyon well-being. After the meal Louise, at her father's suggestion, went to the piano and sang while the men were smoking their cigars. And then followed an hour at cards, High Five, at which Mr. Graham and Dave won the most games; and then a maid, a Mexican girl, Rosita, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... an unfamiliar dialect, an English which to us sounded almost like a foreign tongue. Then the first glimpse of the sea; the excitement of noting whether tide was high or low—stretches of sand and weedy pools, or halcyon wavelets frothing at their furthest reach, under the sea-banks starred with convolvulus. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... age has perhaps fallen somewhat in estate. It was natural that it should rush to a high perfection in the halcyon days of its growth. It is easy to make mournful predictions of decadence. The truth is the symphony is a great form of art, like a temple or a tragedy. Like them it has had, it will have its special eras of great expression. Like ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... undisturbed, unruffled, pacific, placid, tranquil, halcyon; sedate, collected, imperturbable, unmoved, cool, composed, dispassionate. Antonyms: excited, stormy, agitated, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... as she was, the price of the Sofala took up pretty near all the lottery-money. He had left himself no capital to work with. That did not matter so much, for these were the halcyon days of steam coasting trade, before some of the home shipping firms had thought of establishing local fleets to feed their main lines. These, when once organized, took the biggest slices out of that ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... date were added by the painter after exhibiting it, and probably while he worked on it, with the advantage of having compared the painting with others in the Royal Academy. The landscape recalls that glimpse of halcyon country of which we caught sight in The Infant Academy—its trees, its glowing sky, are equally adaptable to both subjects. The picture was exhibited at the British Institution in 1843, and was then the property of Sir James Cockburn, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Vertot's passion for revolutions are admirable,(685) and yet it is natural for an historian to like to describe times of action. Halcyon days do not furnish matter for talents; they are like the virtuous couple in a comedy, a little insipid. Mr. Manly and Lady Grace, Mellefont and Cynthia, do not interest one much. Indeed, in a tragedy ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... introduction and recommendation. Wells, having known the applicant less than a fortnight, was pleased with him and said what he could. Allison was impressed by the applicant's fluency and apparent frankness, and in less than a week the erudite Elmendorf found himself in halcyon waters. Then came the foreign trip, another thing to rejoice in; but before he sailed Elmendorf had had an opportunity of doing good to his kind, as he conceived it. Seeking an inexpensive lodging on his arrival ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
