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ballad
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  • In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love.†   (source)
  • Some were popular ballads; some were long pieces from Kabuki theater telling a story; others were something like a short musical poem.†   (source)
  • In thin, weak little voices they sang the ballad of the young soldier wounded in battle; abandoned by all on the battlefield, he cries out, 'Mother!' as he dies.†   (source)
  • A good hymn tune or ballad is uplifting to the spirits.†   (source)
  • All they ever play is mopey ballads.†   (source)
  • Nana scratched his back, patted him gently, spoke to him in the half-language that she used to put the littlest ones to sleep, and sang him one of her peasant ballads until he had calmed down.†   (source)
  • After any major battle, I liked to get a group photo—along with exclusive rights to compose epic ballads about their exploits.†   (source)
  • Theresa had always loved her music, but when Linda later walked to the microphone to perform a dreamy ballad, Theresa nonetheless began to cry.†   (source)
  • The only rituals that accompanied the process were lines recited from certain ballads and a death feast held afterward for relatives and friends.†   (source)
  • The next number was a slow ballad in which a woman sang about her lover on death row.†   (source)
  • Then, for nearly two hours, Adam's friends, teammates, and spiritual mentors took their places at the podium to share verses from the ballad that was Adam Brown's life.†   (source)
  • She and the musicians were beginning to enjoy each other and to egg each other on as they bounced through this ballad of cupidity, treachery, and death; and Ida had created in the room a new atmosphere and a new excitement.†   (source)
  • The music spoke to what I was feeling; in the tight structure of a twelve-bar blues or in Dylan's haunting ballads, order was imposed.†   (source)
  • He knew the lyrics of some two hundred hymns and ballads-a repertoire ranging from "The Old Rugged Cross" to Cole Porter-and, in addition to the guitar, he could play the harmonica, the accordion, the banjo, and the xylophone.†   (source)
  • Three or four Ayorthaians at a time occupy the stage in tan and sing long, sad ballads or happy tunes or funny ones, joined by the whole throng in the choruses.†   (source)
  • Then he shifted to a ballad—and the mountains are full of old ballads of Scotland and England, come down from the time of the first settlers, and with local names quaintly substituted for the originals here and there.†   (source)
  • And a woman sang a ballad about a chapel in the moonlight, vaguely familiar to me, and I turned to see if the man with the oxygen tank was still singing along.†   (source)
  • It was going to be a tragic ballad.†   (source)
  • Without warning, and without mechanical AIDS, Vice Minister Kalinin himself began to sing, in a deep baritone so clear it sounded trained, a lovely, slow, and mournful-sounding ballad, and all the generals and colonels joined in.†   (source)
  • Shorter because Aunt J was already up and singing a Garth Brooks ballad, accompanied by the paw of horses, an occasional moo, and the goodnatured yip-yip of dogs.†   (source)
  • Old poems, ballads, books he had read many times over, gave greater pleasure than ever.†   (source)
  • Robin Hood and the Monk (Child's Ballads, No.†   (source)
  • These ballads were infused with a love enchantment so powerful they didn't merely reduce the listener's inhibitions but eliminated them altogether.†   (source)
  • The fiddlers are playing a lilting ballad, and at my nod, the boy takes my hands as confidently as if we've been friends for years.†   (source)
  • The chorus of Hey Jude had petered out, and the piano was plinking some other old ballad.†   (source)
  • Mi querido Gustavo, There was a three-person band in the Parque Central today that played their ballads with such heart that many people lingered to hear them.†   (source)
  • He sang marching songs and nursery ballads.†   (source)
  • Misty could quote every single word of "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde," and it seemed the tune stayed in my head for weeks after.†   (source)
  • From the tavern below a man improvised a ballad about "poor Mack Parker...overcome with passion ...his body in the creek."†   (source)
  • They had a repertoire of ballads and country songs and rousing hymns.†   (source)
  • "I doubt it," she said, "for the ballads of Corwin do touch upon the strings of the heart."†   (source)
  • With a name like that he ought to have come straight out of an old Russian ballad, complete with a bushy beard, a smock, and a studded belt.†   (source)
  • He sang it like a Trappist chant without life or humor, just a long, long ballad with piles and piles of verses—like Moolak with piles and piles of salmon.†   (source)
  • The Chervil boy was showing off for the lawyer's girl, singing a love ballad and paralleling it with a visual parody.†   (source)
  • ...write a ballad of this dream.   (source)
  • Ben turns on the radio finally and finds a rock station with ballads we can sing along to.†   (source)
  • I used a different trick to learn the ballads and other songs we studied at the school.†   (source)
  • They'd sing dwarf love ballads night and day if you asked them to.†   (source)
  • Several people had collaborated to write "The Ballad of Ben, Brewer Supreme."†   (source)
  • He decided he didn't like that ending to the Epic Ballad of Leo.†   (source)
  • It's got that kind of cheesy, power-ballad feel.†   (source)
  • They joust and have festivals and sing ballads.†   (source)
  • A lay for your eyes, a ballad for your lips, a duet to your breasts.†   (source)
  • He anagrammed: Call Dana for blow; Ballad for a clown).†   (source)
  • This speech is longer than a marcher ballad, and I don't think he's stopped for breath.†   (source)
  • I was sitting in the presence of something special; that ballad confirmed my choice to return.†   (source)
  • He led her in and out of pairs of bodies ghost-floating to the tune of an old ballad from his youth.†   (source)
  • As she talked, she bobbed her head back and forth to the MTV music, even though the song was the kind of manufactured pop ballad she professed to hate.†   (source)
  • Experience had taught them that in the end the fox always eats the hens, despite the subversive ballads that were traveling from mouth to mouth preaching just the opposite.†   (source)
  • "Singer," Tyrion said, turning to Marillion, "when you make a ballad of this, be certain you tell them how Lady Arryn denied the dwarf the right to a champion, and sent him forth lame and bruised and hobbling to face her finest knight."†   (source)
  • There's a large rose bush filling almost the whole of Nancy's enclosure — the old broadsheet ballad, then, was prophetic — but no vine in Thomas Kinnear's.†   (source)
  • When he heard other people humming the song about the hens and fox, he would smile at the thought that his son had made more converts with his subversive ballads than with the Socialist Party pamphlets he so tirelessly distributed.†   (source)
  • If this were some heroic ballad, I would tell you how she clasped my hand firmly and pulled me to safety.†   (source)
  • Later, while Sansa was off listening to a troupe of singers perform the complex round of interwoven ballads called the "Dance of the Dragons," Ned inspected the bruise himself.†   (source)
  • No court ballads survive, and, if you speak truly, nor does most of your history or art, except for fanciful tales Galbatorix has allowed to thrive.†   (source)
  • However, "Sir Savien" was a ballad, and the vocal part was a counter melody that ran against the timing of the lute.†   (source)
  • He played a ballad, then a light, quick drinking song, then a slow, sad melody in a language that I didn't recognize but suspected might be Yllish.†   (source)
  • She sang an Irish ballad a cappella.†   (source)
  • At Clary's puzzled look he said, "Faeries don't like their secrets to get out, but sometimes human musicians have been able to encode faerie secrets into ancient ballads.†   (source)
  • What kind of ballad would that make?†   (source)
  • Il y a longtemps queje t'aime jamais je ne t'oublierai—it's the old French ballad I used to sing to Alec and Isabelle.†   (source)
  • Another night we had dinner in a restaurant said to have been one of Hemingway's favorites—there were probably almost as many of those in Havana as in Key West—men with guitars surrounding the table to sing "El Comandante," the mournful ballad of Che.†   (source)
  • Then he shifted to a ballad—and the mountains are full of old ballads of Scotland and England, come down from the time of the first settlers, and with local names quaintly substituted for the originals here and there.†   (source)
  • A haunting ballad of two dying lovers amidst the Doom of Valyria might have pleased the hall more if Collio had not sung it in High Valyrian, which most of the guests could not speak.†   (source)
  • Leaning against the podium behind the casket was the wooden paddle SEAL Team TWO had presented Adam four years earlier, "The Ballad of Adam Brown" inscribed on its blade.†   (source)
  • Misty had also memorized every single word of "The Ballad of the Green Berets" and quoted it while I sat there on her bright orange-and-yellow swirled bedspread.†   (source)
  • It was an elegant room filled with celebrities excitedly focused on the sensational new star rendering his famous, backed-by-violins version of "I'll Be Seeing You" and encoring with his latest self-composed ballad: Every April flights of parrots Fly overhead, red and green, Green and tangerine.†   (source)
  • Eddie Lazzutti lay face-up on a cot, hands linked behind his head, singing nursery ballads in a voice smooth like night.†   (source)
  • Lem can't carry a tune, and our longbow lad only knows marcher ballads, every one of them a hundred verses long.†   (source)
  • "Now," she said, looking at us keenly, "if I can sing a ballad a cappella at eight-thirty in the morning, you can come to class on time.†   (source)
  • And that was the Ballad of Louis Bakey told to a thousand airmen on wind-howling bases through the short days and long years of constant alert in the dark and stoic heart of cold war winters.†   (source)
  • The following month, as he prepared for his transfer to Green Team, the SEALs from Team TWO presented him with a wooden paddle that had a brass plaque on the blade engraved with "The Ballad of Adam Brown."†   (source)
  • She had read and reread them—cullings from Chaucer, from Spenser, from the Elizabethan lyrists, the border balladry, fierce, tender, oh, so human—till she knew pages of them by heart, and their vocabulary influenced her own, their imagery tinged all her leisure thoughts.†   (source)
  • I heard music in the deep distance, a crooner doing lost songs, the kind of ballad that sometimes included a verse or two in slurred Italian, and it was all nicely subdued, I thought, unaffected, without patronizing humor.†   (source)
  • ...He smiled faintly, as he would at his mother, and at Hazel, and at the singing women in his life, now all one young girl standing up to sing under the trees the oldest and longest ballads there were.†   (source)
  • Upon the couch, I gave her her ballad.†   (source)
  • I envisioned him being an afternoon troubadour in the school, telling the history of America and the black experience through songs, ballads, and spirituals.†   (source)
  • I'll give you a ballad one day.†   (source)
  • I was reciting "The Ballad of the Water-Crossers," and Random listened until I had finished and asked me, "It has often been said that you composed that.†   (source)
  • But I wrote music, composed ballads, and he'd picked up a lute somewhere and had taught himself how to use it.†   (source)
  • Have you written any new ballads?†   (source)
  • Papa came in singing his favorite ballad, "Molly Malone.†   (source)
  • A beautiful old New England folk ballad which I picked up at Harvard amid the debris of education.†   (source)
  • Lancelot said: "I heard it in a ballad."†   (source)
  • I pass from house to house like the friars in the Middle Ages who cozened the wives and girls with beads and ballads.†   (source)
  • Our old English ballads, for instance, were not created by the "folk," but by the post-feudal squirearchy of the English countryside, to survive in the mouths of the folk long after those for whom the ballads were composed had gone on to other forms of literature.†   (source)
  • I shall give him that old bent salad fork with the turquoise in it, and he will bring me a copy of the new ballad that everyone is singing about the d—q—a of Ol—v—s.†   (source)
  • But now I got proof from the most reliable sources — which I have checked on I [Blanche is singing in the bathroom a saccharine popular ballad which is used contrapuntally with Stanley's speech.†   (source)
  • Nightly the dark tree-lined streets resounded with dancing feet, and from parlors tinkled pianos where soprano voices blended with those of soldier guests in the pleasing melancholy of "The Bugles Sang Truce" and "Your Letter Came, but Came Too Late"—plaintive ballads that brought exciting tears to soft eyes which had never known the tears of real grief.†   (source)
  • The son of the Bishop, Justin Raper, a tall thin boy of thirteen, with black hair, a thin dark bumpy face, and absurdly petulant lips, typed copies of a dirty ballad and sold them among the students at five cents a copy.†   (source)
  • Well, my man Scathelocke, or Scarlett, as they call him in the ballads, happened to be woodcutting a little way off, and he says that they vanished, just vanished, including the dog.†   (source)
  • It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.†   (source)
  • Even the irrelevancies that litter every one of his plays-the puns and riddles, the lists of names, the scraps of "reportage" like the conversation of the carriers in HENRY IV the bawdy jokes, the rescued fragments of forgotten ballads-are merely the products of excessive vitality.†   (source)
  • I am a traveller, a pedlar, paying for my lodging with a ballad; I am an indiscriminate, an easily pleased guest; often putting up in the best room in a four-poster; then lying in a barn on a haystack.†   (source)
  • the heat of the day is spent in reading or working and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow's and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare their voyces and Beauty's to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vaste difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee.†   (source)
  • They looked like figures that had strayed there from some remote country, or out of an old ballad, that had not yet learned the new language and had not yet found any friends.†   (source)
  • There were few printing presses in the New World and the boys soon made a fair living transcribing comedies for the theater, ballads for the crowds, and advertisements for the merchants.†   (source)
  • Now as he sat among the guitarists and watched this awkward girl singing ballads, imitating every inflection of the more experienced singers who had preceded her, the determination entered his mind to play Pygmalion.†   (source)
  • A ballad singer, in a dress of flaming scarlet, sang in the inevitable voice of brass.†   (source)
  • To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire.†   (source)
  • It's a volume of poems, 'Lyrical Ballads.'†   (source)
  • She passed into another ballad, this time a really doleful one.†   (source)
  • In merry England there is no end of popular ballads on this theme.†   (source)
  • 'Because even in the ballads unequal matches are always unlucky.'†   (source)
  • In his lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occasions for caricature.†   (source)
  • I'd rather have a ballad, though: begin.'†   (source)
  • 'And listen,' she continued, provokingly, commencing a verse of an old ballad in the same fashion.†   (source)
  • [23] "A ballad, a ballad," said the hermit, "against all the 'ocs' and 'ouis' of France†   (source)
  • English ballad, called 'De Rose upon de Balgony.'†   (source)
  • HE (with the pathos of one of his native ballads).†   (source)
  • No gentleman, out of a ballad, could marry a farmer's niece.†   (source)
  • We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land.†   (source)
  • Thanks to this change of position, he was able to listen to the ballad with far less embarrassment than before.†   (source)
  • Thus it happened that at three in the morning Martin was singing to a commendatory audience the ballad he had learned from Gustaf Sondelius: She'd a dark and a roving eye, And her hair hung down in ringlets, A nice girl, a decent girl, But one of the rakish kind.†   (source)
  • He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad "Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo" as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.†   (source)
  • He declared it was like a ballad; that he would do his best to help me; that I should have paper, pen, and ink, and write one line to Mr. Campbell and another to Mr. Rankeillor; and that if I had told the truth, ten to one he would be able (with their help) to pull me through and set me in my rights.†   (source)
  • An apparent chase around the furniture, the crash of an upturned chair, a grab, an embrace, slaps and kisses—and then, of all things to accompany the invisible scene, a waltz was struck up in the distance, the tired melody of a popular ballad.†   (source)
  • You, who are ballad-maker to Court and City alike, can tell me better than any who the lady is for whom I die of love.†   (source)
  • Bertha Sampson and Pearl Clay of the White Sands Baptist choir had been asked to sing a duet; Milton Clark of Newbridge was to give a violin solo; Winnie Adella Blair of Carmody was to sing a Scotch ballad; and Laura Spencer of Spencervale and Anne Shirley of Avonlea were to recite.†   (source)
  • All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his secret.†   (source)
  • The endless ballad had come to an end at last, and the whole diminished company about the camp-fire had broken into the chorus I had heard so often: "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest— Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!†   (source)
  • At the time, on the gun decks of the Indomitable, the general estimate of his nature and its unconscious simplicity eventually found rude utterance from another foretopman, one of his own watch, gifted, as some sailors are, with an artless poetic temperament; the tarry hands made some lines which after circulating among the shipboard crew for a while, finally got rudely printed at Portsmouth as a ballad.†   (source)
  • This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad TURPIN HERO which begins in the first person and ends in the third person.†   (source)
  • What a genius we should think Swinburne if he had perished on the day the first series of Poems and Ballads was published!'†   (source)
  • She knew long portions of the "Frithjof Saga" by heart, and, like most Swedes who read at all, she was fond of Longfellow's verse,—the ballads and the "Golden Legend" and "The Spanish Student."†   (source)
  • Some, who seemed to be better informed than the rest, declared that the "row" would begin with the ballad of the KING OF THULE and rushed to the subscribers' entrance to warn Carlotta.†   (source)
  • That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.†   (source)
  • All the affectation of manner which she had displayed at the beginning disappeared as the ballad proceeded.†   (source)
  • That she had not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the preference of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies; and she was not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the wonders of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads she would collect and sing to a delighted public—if only she learned how to sing.†   (source)
  • It don't bind no more'n a ballad-book.†   (source)
  • When Margarita had finished singing the ballad of the KING OF THULE, she was loudly cheered and again when she came to the end of the jewel song: "Ah, the joy of past compare These jewels bright to wear!†   (source)
  • So the beggar in the ballad had come home; and when I lay down that night on the kitchen chests, I was a man of means and had a name in the country.†   (source)
  • Yet Aglaya had brought out these letters N. P. B. not only without the slightest appearance of irony, or even any particular accentuation, but with so even and unbroken an appearance of seriousness that assuredly anyone might have supposed that these initials were the original ones written in the ballad.†   (source)
  • Tess's female companions sang songs, and showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry green wood and came back a changed state.†   (source)
  • Of all deaths, I would truly like least to die by the gallows; and the picture of that uncanny instrument came into my head with extraordinary clearness (as I had once seen it engraved at the top of a pedlar's ballad) and took away my appetite for courts of justice.†   (source)
  • When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around him, one of the male milkers said— "I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind!†   (source)
  • A moment back and I had seen myself knocking at Mr. Rankeillor's door to claim my inheritance, like a hero in a ballad; and here was I back again, a wandering, hunted blackguard, on the wrong side of Forth.†   (source)
  • That it was a jest there was no doubt whatever; he knew that well enough, and had good reason, too, for his conviction; for during her recitation of the ballad Aglaya had deliberately changed the letters A. N. B. into N. P. B. He was quite sure she had not done this by accident, and that his ears had not deceived him.†   (source)
  • On the one hand, I began to think my uncle was perhaps insane and might be dangerous; on the other, there came up into my mind (quite unbidden by me and even discouraged) a story like some ballad I had heard folk singing, of a poor lad that was a rightful heir and a wicked kinsman that tried to keep him from his own.†   (source)
  • Alone, she stood for a moment before the glass looking at the effect of her silk attire; and then there came into her head her mother's ballad of the mystic robe— That never would become that wife That had once done amiss, which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a child, so blithely and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to the tune.†   (source)
  • Sighs were expended on the wish that she had taken more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that she had inquired more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads among those the country-girls sang.†   (source)
  • Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood.†   (source)
  • She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate; till, recollecting the psalter that her eyes had so often wandered over of a Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree of knowledge, she chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ...O ye Stars ...ye Green Things upon the Earth ...ye Fowls of the Air ...Beasts and Cattle ...Children of Men ...bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever!"†   (source)
  • I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men * have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it.†   (source)
  • Some sang ballads about Mme. d'Aguillon, his mistress, and Mme. Cambalet, his niece; while others formed parties and plans to annoy the pages and guards of the cardinal duke—all things which appeared to d'Artagnan monstrous impossibilities.†   (source)
  • Bob Coggan was sent home for his ill manners, and tranquility was restored by Jacob Smallbury, who volunteered a ballad as inclusive and interminable as that with which the worthy toper old Silenus amused on a similar occasion the swains Chromis and Mnasylus, and other jolly dogs of his day.†   (source)
  • When we rejoined him in the drawingroom he said he would give us a little ballad which had come into his head "apropos of our young friend," and he sang one about a peasant boy, "Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam, Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home."†   (source)
  • But, like Jenny in the ballad... "She could not think it he," and lay staring up at him in startled silence, till he stooped and kissed her.†   (source)
  • In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;-mild compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity of style and the weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria of sentimental realities.†   (source)
  • She sang a French song, which Joseph did not understand in the least, and which George confessed he did not understand, and then a number of those simple ballads which were the fashion forty years ago, and in which British tars, our King, poor Susan, blue-eyed Mary, and the like, were the principal themes.†   (source)
  • Once she asked for a particular ballad, which she said her Ury (who was yawning in a great chair) doted on; and at intervals she looked round at him, and reported to Agnes that he was in raptures with the music.†   (source)
  • You remind me of the hero of the ballad:— 'Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?'†   (source)
  • Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James—no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy.†   (source)
  • The rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmith's treasures, pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food, hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass—an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.†   (source)
  • To relieve the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather's old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while.†   (source)
  • As Fagin stepped softly in, the professional gentleman, running over the keys by way of prelude, occasioned a general cry of order for a song; which having subsided, a young lady proceeded to entertain the company with a ballad in four verses, between each of which the accompanyist played the melody all through, as loud as he could.†   (source)
  • The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy.†   (source)
  • An epic, indeed a dozen of them, was converted to white ashes before the single sheet of an old ballad was half consumed.†   (source)
  • What did all this portend, and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of the German ballad of Leonora?†   (source)
  • They walked side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty by the hand that was passed through the basket strap.†   (source)
  • But besides plays there were all sorts of legends and ballads scattered about the world, in which the saints and angels and all the powers of Heaven took part when required.†   (source)
  • It was too dark to betray the color that deepened on the weather-burnt features of the guide; for he felt the consciousness of having lingered in the fort that night, listening to the sweet tones of Mabel's voice as she sang ballads to her father, and gazing at the countenance which, to him, was radiant with charms.†   (source)
  • As he swung these beauties, one after the other, producing folds in the fluttering skirts which Greuze would have found to his taste, amid peals of laughter, the Toulousan Tholomyes, who was somewhat of a Spaniard, Toulouse being the cousin of Tolosa, sang, to a melancholy chant, the old ballad gallega, probably inspired by some lovely maid dashing in full flight upon a rope between two trees:— "Soy de Badajoz, "Badajoz is my home, Amor me llama, And Love is my name; Toda mi alma, To my eyes in flame, Es en mi ojos, All my soul doth come; Porque ensenas, For instruction meet A tuas piernas.†   (source)
  • Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.†   (source)
  • Now, I think no longer of anything rude in my dreams; but the very last night we stayed in the garrison I imagined I had a cabin in a grove of sugar maples, and at the root of every tree was a Mabel Dunham, while the birds among the branches sang ballads instead of the notes that natur' gave, and even the deer stopped to listen.†   (source)
  • 'Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a little when they're out of spirits,' said Traddles.†   (source)
  • The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,—no, not by the strongest party,—neither then could king, prelate, or puritan,—alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch,[530] and library, at the same time.†   (source)
  • The shearers reclined against each other as at suppers in the early ages of the world, and so silent and absorbed were they that her breathing could almost be heard between the bars; and at the end of the ballad, when the last tone loitered on to an inexpressible close, there arose that buzz of pleasure which is the attar of applause.†   (source)
  • He hoped to awaken his son's sympathy one day by beginning a propos of the approaching emancipation of the peasantry, to talk about progress; but the latter responded indifferently: 'Yesterday I was walking under the fence, and I heard the peasant boys here, instead of some old ballad, bawling a street song.†   (source)
  • This ballad, he informs Mrs. Bagnet, he considers to have been his most powerful ally in moving the heart of Mrs. Bucket when a maiden, and inducing her to approach the altar—Mr.†   (source)
  • Sit quite still and don't talk: but you may sing a song, if you can sing; or you may say a nice long interesting ballad — one of those you promised to teach me; or a story.†   (source)
  • "I will assay, then," said the knight, "a ballad composed by a Saxon glee-man, whom I knew in Holy Land."†   (source)
  • And the truth is, that of all the delights of the Gardens; of the hundred thousand extra lamps, which were always lighted; the fiddlers in cocked hats, who played ravishing melodies under the gilded cockle-shell in the midst of the gardens; the singers, both of comic and sentimental ballads, who charmed the ears there; the country dances, formed by bouncing cockneys and cockneyesses, and executed amidst jumping, thumping and laughter; the signal which announced that Madame Saqui was about to mount skyward on a slack-rope ascending to the stars; the hermit that always sat in the illuminated hermitage; the dark walks, so favourable t†   (source)
  • The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;—show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges i†   (source)
  • But that is Nature's way: she will allow a gentleman of splendid physiognomy and poetic aspirations to sing woefully out of tune, and not give him the slightest hint of it; and takes care that some narrow-browed fellow, trolling a ballad in the corner of a pot-house, shall be as true to his intervals as a bird.†   (source)
  • But there I always found her, the same bright housewife; often humming her Devonshire ballads when no strange foot was coming up the stairs, and blunting the sharp boy in his official closet with melody.†   (source)
  • The knight in the meantime, had brought the strings into some order, and after a short prelude, asked his host whether he would choose a "sirvente" in the language of "oc", or a "lai" in the language of "oui", or a "virelai", or a ballad in the vulgar English.†   (source)
  • All I know of the rest of the evening is, that I heard the empress of my heart sing enchanted ballads in the French language, generally to the effect that, whatever was the matter, we ought always to dance, Ta ra la, Ta ra la!†   (source)
  • In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,—in the Cyclopean architecture[631] of Egypt and India; in the Phidian sculpture;[632] the Gothic ministers;[633] the Italian painting;[634] the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,[635]—the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new, which sees the works, and ask in vain for a history.†   (source)
  • After tea, we discussed a variety of topics before the fire; and Mrs. Micawber was good enough to sing us (in a small, thin, flat voice, which I remembered to have considered, when I first knew her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite ballads of 'The Dashing White Sergeant', and 'Little Tafflin'.†   (source)
  • —And making his way through the ring, amidst the laughter of all around, he appeared in majestic triumph, his huge partisan in one hand, and in the other a halter, one end of which was fastened to the neck of the unfortunate Isaac of York, who, bent down by sorrow and terror, was dragged on by the victorious priest, who shouted aloud, "Where is Allan-a-Dale, to chronicle me in a ballad, or if it were but a lay?†   (source)
  • Or is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are so wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?†   (source)
  • The youngest reader of romances and romantic ballads, must recollect how often the females, during the dark ages, as they are called, were initiated into the mysteries of surgery, and how frequently the gallant knight submitted the wounds of his person to her cure, whose eyes had yet more deeply penetrated his heart.†   (source)
  • And then privily he wrote unto her letters and ballads of the most goodliest that were used in those days.†   (source)
  • This stichic verse, a single unit repeated row on row, corresponds better to epic hexameters than the rhymed stanzas of lyrics or ballads that were first tried in vernacular epics.†   (source)
  • Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal.†   (source)
  • They were wretched stuff, in the Grub-street-ballad style; and when they were printed he sent me about the town to sell them.†   (source)
  • In New York and Philad'a the printers were indeed stationers; they sold only paper, etc., almanacs, ballads, and a few common school-books.†   (source)
  • And I have the satisfaction of knowing that it has been communicated to many hundreds of people who would never have heard of it, had it not been narrated as a Ballad, and in a more impressive metre than is usual in Ballads.†   (source)
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