"Mellowed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon the throne for twenty-five years; and during that period, like a rich wine in the wood, monarchy had mellowed within him, permeating his system with its mild and slightly dry flavor; it had become as it were a habit, and he carried it quite naturally, almost unconsciously, though with just a suspicion of weight, much as a scholar carries his learning or a ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... of a bell, mellowed by distance, came faintly from the valley below. Rosemary took out the thin, old watch that had been her mother's and her mother's mother's before her, and set the hands at four upon the pale gold dial. Then she drew up the worn gold chain that hung around her neck, under her gown, and, with ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... though he had dropped in at a charity concert, kindly disposed to applaud the performers and to overlook mistakes. This ideal rarely succeeded in youth, and towards thirty it took a form of modified insolence and offensive patronage; but about sixty it mellowed into courtesy, kindliness, and even deference to the young which had extraordinary charm both in women and in men. Unfortunately Adams could not wait till sixty for education; he had his living to earn; and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... was one of his chief supports. The whole nature of the man mellowed under the sun of Falconer, and over the work that Falconer gave him to do. His daughter recovered, and devoted herself to the same labour that had rescued her. Miss St. John was her superior. By degrees, without any laws or regulations, a little company ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Levett, who died on January 17. But, although his health was tottering, the powers of his mind were in no ways impaired, as his letters and conversation showed. Moreover, during the last three or four years of his life he may be said to have mellowed. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... will find Fraeulein Tilde (to whom my regards), who will laugh at your German with a fine show of pearly teeth and the extreme vibration of her 195 pounds. Tilde, in these godless states, would be called fat. But observe her in the Pschorrbraeu, mellowed by that superb malt, glorified by that consummate kraut, and you will blush to think her ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... in captivity, and deliver the children appointed unto death.' But she had not reckoned on its falling on her ears in the deep full-toned melodious bass, that came in, giving body to the young notes of the choristers—a voice so altered and mellowed since she last had heard it, that it made her look across in doubt, and recognize in the uplifted face, that here indeed the freed captive was at ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... almost, but not quite ice. A sheen of frost whitened the house roofs and silvered each separate blade of grass on the lawns. But by noon the sun, rising red in the veil of smoke that hung low in the snappy air, had mellowed the atmosphere until it lay on the cheek like a caress. No breath of wind stirred. Sounds came clearly from a distance. Long V-shaped flights of geese swept athwart the sky, very high up, but their honking came faintly to the ear. And yet, when the sun, swollen to the great dimensions ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... bear life's responsibilities and to overcome its difficulties and temptations. One who meets the setbacks, griefs, bereavements and disasters of life in the right spirit becomes a strong and rich character. He becomes mellowed through experience, strong, stable, a helpful influence to all who ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... stream, singing as they walked, or exchanging jests and laughter, their soft, rich voices echoing melodiously upon the evening stillness. Even the shrill "moo" of cattle, and the deep-toned voices of men—mellowed by distance, came not inharmoniously from the smaller kraals which lay scattered along the hillside; and but for the shining spearheads and tufted shields of the armed guard in the great circle of Imvungayo, the scene was a most perfect one of pastoral simplicity ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... certain that the people of Bologna were much excited over the arrival of the picture and gloried in possessing the vision of St. Cecilia. The picture is still to be seen in Bologna, where it retains its brilliant coloring, slightly mellowed ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... pile of rose-petals in which a tiny skull is half-hidden. The "Old Man" in the Brera has the hard, narrow, but intensely sad face of one whose natural disposition has been embittered by the circumstances of his life, just as that of our Prothonotary speaks of a large and gentle nature, mellowed by natural affections and happy pursuits. We smile, as Lotto does, with kindly mischief at "Marsilio and his Bride;" the broad, placid countenance of the man is so significantly contrasted with the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... corner, where the yellow cross of the Judson Hotel shone down on Washington Square, came the shouts of children, and the strains, mellowed by distance, of the indefatigable barrel-organ which had played the same tunes in the ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... for a time, but Smyrna, obeying their foreman's adjurations, mellowed into amiable grins and ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Hannah had as his companion at extreme back Mr. A. M'Call. In some of the earlier matches in which the latter appeared he was a wild tackler and erratic in charging—rather going for the man, and never minding the ball—but by and by he mellowed down, and returned the leather beautifully from a besieged goal. I remember seeing him in several of the leading games that same year, and he showed a neatness of style which won for him golden opinions. He played ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... and feeling of this novel are intense, yet it is all mellowed by humor, and it contains perhaps the author's freshest and most sympathetic story of young love. Throughout its pages the "God be praised evil has turned to good" of the old Major rings like a trumpet call of hope. This story of to-day tells of a triumph ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... scene of more thrilling events, a long line of interesting associations being connected with the now quiet old Chateau, looking in its peaceful old age as out of keeping with its modern surroundings as would an ancient vellum missal, mellowed for centuries in a monkish cell, appear among some of the ephemeral literature ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... red walls, and the masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the floweriness and the gaiety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village—roofs and gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old manor-house, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of his command at Front Royal, there has not been so profound an expression of sorrow as that evinced in this city to-day, over the death and funeral rites of her honored citizen, patriot and gallant soldier of two wars, Major-General John G. Foster. The morning dawned foggy and heavy, but mellowed into autumnal splendor, while the populace seemed subdued in thought and mindful that one was being consigned to mother earth who had performed his duty to his country wisely and well. The mills and workshops, stores and ...
— Kinston, Whitehall and Goldsboro (North Carolina) expedition, December, 1862 • W. W. Howe
... mellowed and diminished as seen through a glass at great distance; and on the shore the men toiling to load a great treasure-chest into a long-boat looked like tiny manikins posed about a delicate model of marine life. The second chest yet stood on ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... bright shimmer of sparkling steel, which proclaimed the presence of armed men. Farther back, where the road took a sudden turn and ran along the ridge of the hill, several horsemen could be plainly seen outlined against the evening sky. So peaceful, however, was the long sweep of countryside, mellowed by the golden light of the setting sun, with a score of village steeples and manor-houses peeping out from amongst the woods, that it was hard to think that the thundercloud of war was really lowering over that fair valley, and that ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... no distemper, of no blast he died, But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years; Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more, Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, The wheels of weary life at ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... everlastingly be the risk of a keeper, who takes up with a low-bred girl. This I never did. Nor had I occasion to do it. Such a one as I, Jack, needed only, till now, to shake the stateliest tree, and the mellowed fruit dropt into my mouth:—always of Montaigne's taste thou knowest:—thought it a glory to subdue a girl of family.—More truly delightful to me the seduction- progress than the crowned act: for that's a vapour, a bubble! and most cordially do I thank thee for thy indirect ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... had perhaps "mellowed" me. I felt more tolerant of these men, since I was no longer necessarily engaged in opposing them. When President Snow died (October, 1901), I shared only the general interest in the way Joseph F. Smith set about asserting his family's title to rulership of ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... of aristocracy or leadership, government or guidance, succour or solace to millions of the people, who famish on the territorial possessions from which you derive your titles, your importance, your influence, your wealth. Has confiscation been mellowed into the legal semblance of undisputed succession, only to bring about a state of things which the most ruthless ravagers ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... "I guess you have mellowed in the sunshine," Bob said imperturbably. "Children, don't you listen to a good word about England; don't you let yourselves be spirited away by bad fairies, or ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... Verney had excused himself in order to hear the evening report from his overseers. Sir Charles Carew, very idle and purposeless-looking, lounged in a great chair, and studied the miniature upon his snuff-box. The Governor, whom the wine had mellowed into a genial softness, a kind of sunset glow, alternately puffed wide rings of smoke into the air, and paid compliments to the young ladies. The evening breeze had sprung up, rustling the leaves of the trees, and bringing ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... produces some of the world's finest coffees, of which the best known are Medellins, Manizales, Bogotas, Bucaramangas, Tolimas, and Cucutas. Old-crop Colombians of the higher grades, when mellowed with age, have many of the characteristics of the best East Indian coffees, and in style and cup are difficult to distinguish from the Mandhelings and the Ankolas of Sumatra. Such coffees are scarce on the American market, practically ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of that anon.—'T is sweet to hear At midnight on the blue and moonlit deep The song and oar of Adria's gondolier,[60] By distance mellowed, o'er the waters sweep; 'T is sweet to see the evening star appear; 'T is sweet to listen as the night-winds creep From leaf to leaf; 't is sweet to view on high The rainbow, based on ocean, span ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... I pen these lines, the picture comes back with the same intensity, but little mellowed or softened with the years. The gaunt old room that had entertained so many guests, emptied of its last one, with nothing but the faint chill that had come through the opened window to remind one of their presence—the fitful light of the two candles that had ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... palatable. In the evening the scene was lovely. The groups of elegant palms, the large cotton-trees, relieved against the golden sky, the Negro houses surrounded with orange and mango trees, the grassy bank, the noble river, and the background of eternal forest, all softened by the mellowed light of the magical half-hour after sunset formed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... country? With its kind eyes and its wary sidelong look. Toleration. In which everything mellowed and nothing was destroyed. A soft country. A country with a passion for imperfection. A ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... lacked the usual temperament and mannerisms. She seemed more determined than ever to give the public something better and finer. Her splendid dignity, reserve, humanness, high ideals, and patient study of her art had but mellowed, not hardened, a gracious personality. Merton Gill received these assurances without surprise. He knew Beulah Baxter would prove to be these delightful things. He read on for the more ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... efficacy of mere eloquence to change the world was overweening. The experience of years, however, taught him wisdom without damping his enthusiasm, refined the crudity of his first fervent speculations, and mellowed his philosophy. Had he lived to a ripe age, there is no saying with what clear and beneficent lustre might have shone that light of aspiration which during his turbid youth burned somewhat luridly, and veiled ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... comes down in the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, are noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but "retains a little of her coquettish sauciness." "Bless her, poor little dear!" one can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs. Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... as if something more wonderful than anything he had ever seen had risen before him. The girl was bareheaded, and she stood in a sun mellowed by a film of cloud. Her head was piled with lustrous coils of gold-brown hair that her hat and veil had hidden. Never had he looked upon such wonderful hair, crushed and crumpled back from her smooth forehead; nor such marvellous whiteness ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... for the preservation of antique forms and ceremonies: sometimes, indeed, pushing his fancies to lengths that fairly would lay him open to the charge of whimsicality, were not even the most extravagant of his crotchets touched and mellowed by his natural goodness of heart. In the earlier stages of our acquaintance I was disposed to regard him as an eccentric; but a wider knowledge of Provencal matters has convinced me that he is a type. ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... Montaiglon a harsh, discordant torturing of reeds when heard on the stair outside his chamber, seemed somehow more mellowed and appropriate—pleasing even—when it came from the garden outside the castle, on whose grass-grown walk the little lowlander strutted as he played the evening melody of the house of Doom—a pibroch all ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... adorable medley of forms, tints, suggestions, of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, standing in flowery grass under fruit-laden trees and wreathed about with roses. Both colour and subject were of fairyland. The golds and browns and pinks of it, the greens and ivory whites had been mellowed and pearled and warmed by age into a most glowing, delicate, and fanciful beauty. It was Italy at the great moment—subtle, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there were other sounds that came with the night, they were overcome by the complaining river which ceased not day nor night to fret among the boulders that strewed its bed. Like a shaft of light piercing the darkness a whistle sounded, mellowed by distance. The man ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... financial, police and betting news, or borrow all the newest novels—even this novel which I am writing, should the Library Sub-Committee of the Town Council (an austerely moral body) allow it to pass. In the Venables Library the books are mostly mellowed by age, even when naughtiest (it contains a whole roomful of Restoration Plays, an unmatched collection), and no newspapers are admitted, unless you count the monthly and quarterly reviews, of which The Hibbert Journal is the newest-fangled. By consequence the Venables ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... But Z—— was not yet satisfied to have him attempt compositions, and he was spending much time over the curious processes by which the perfection of skill in art is attained—productive analyses of coloring, light, shadow and the mellowed harmonies of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... have fallen so absurdly in love with the most vain and selfish and vapid girl that ever wrecked a post was more than Katie could make out. And it had been her painful experience to watch Wayne's disappointment develop, watch that happiness which had so mellowed him recede as day by day Clara fretted and pouted and showed plainly enough that to her love was just a convenient thing which might impel one's husband to get one a new set of furs. She remembered so well one evening she had been in Clara's room ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... The sunlight, mellowed to a dull straw colour by its passage through London air, slanted in at the window, falling first on Charles Sylvester's handsome face, with its eminently professional, severely cut features, and the careful limitation of whisker, which seemed so completely in harmony with his shaven upper ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... still trembling a little, and threw all his attention into his ears, determined to hear the first movement that the kneeling figure made behind him. So he sat minute after minute. The Cathedral was full of echoes—murmurous rebounds of the noises of the streets, drawn out and mellowed into long, soft, rolling tones, against which, as against a foil, there stood out detached, now and then, the sudden footsteps of someone leaving or entering a confessional, the short scream of a slipping chair—once the sudden noise of a confessional-door being ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... with an equal splendor The morning sun rays fall, With a touch impartially tender, On the blossoms blooming for all: Under the sod and the dew, Waiting the judgment day; Broidered with gold, the Blue, Mellowed ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... saffron ghost, ragged as a scarecrow—wearing a foolish smile and the cape of a cavalryman's overcoat with no coat beneath it. The apparition was a youth of about twenty, with a downy beard all over his face, and countenance well mellowed with coal-soot, as though he had ridden several days on top of a freight-car that was near ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes, Thus mellowed to the tender light Which Heaven ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... no longer tabu; witness "The Tribute," and "His Soul Goes Marching On." Touched by the patina of time and mellowed through the mellifluence of age, the war now makes an appeal dissimilar to that which caused readers two or three years ago to declare they ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... and bending his ear close to the ground, he listened attentively for several minutes. Somehow, he fancied that a strange, murmuring sound came to his ears; but he was not quite sure that it proceeded from the ruins, because it was just that sort of sound that might come from a long way off, being mellowed by distance, although, perhaps, ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... to the drawing-room and thence to the library, looking wistfully, as she passed through it, at the pleasant hall, with its old furniture, and its mellowed comfort. She would like to find a home here, if only they would put up with her. For she ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The other was not to be compared with it. The older tomato had matured and mellowed, the skin having a finer colour and lovelier gloss, the flesh possessing a firmer body and more delicate flavour; it was far in advance of any tomato we ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... things, but girls for all that, and consequently a disappointment to their father's pride of family. When the fourth child came and it proved to be a boy, the Fairfax plantation couldn't hold the Fairfax joy and it flowed out and mellowed the whole county. ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... blossom, a myriad of lamps were gleaming like so many glowworms beneath the foliage, while from a cedar grove, some slight way farther out, the melodies and overtures of the best military bands in Algiers came mellowed, though not broken, by the distance and the fall of the bubbling fountains. Cigarette looked and listened, and her gay, brown face ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Mauleverer's, the yet warmer one of that unconscious embrace, which still tingled through every nerve of his frame, all conspired with the delicious emotion which he now experienced at her presence and her contact to intoxicate and inflame him. Oh, those burning moments in love, when romance has just mellowed into passion, and without losing anything of its luxurious vagueness mingles the enthusiasm of its dreams with the ardent desires of reality and earth! That is the exact time when love has reached ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Adams, she recognised, had mastered, not escaped, his personality. The poison of bitterness was gone, but the effectiveness of power was still as great; and his temperament, in passing through the fiery waters of experience, was mellowed into a charm which seemed less a fortunate grace of aspect than the result of a peculiar quality of vision. Was it his own life that had opened his eyes until he could look into the secret chambers in the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies: And all that's best of dark and bright Meet her in aspect and in her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags fished forth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a- glow, although they had not got around to telling their real names. But their English had improved. They spoke it correctly, while the argo of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... FENELONS, its HOWARDS, as well as its CALIGULAS and NEROS. Love hath been at times a manifestation as well as a principle; and the train of its glory swept far below the stars, and its brightness has fallen in mitigated and mellowed rays from the faces of men. As the ambiguous stranger-star of Bethlehem had its interpreting angel-song to the herdsmen of the plains, so loving men in all ages have given glimpses and interpretations of the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... Unlike most of the county's spires, South Harting's is slate and red shingle, but the slate is of an agreeable green hue, resembling old copper. (Perhaps it is copper.) The roof is of red tiles mellowed by weather, and the south side of the tower is tiled too, imparting an unusual suggestion of warmth—more, of comfort—to the structure; while on the east wall of the chancel is a Virginian creeper, which, as autumn advances, emphasises this effect. Within, the church is winning, too, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus and Remus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other end I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the surface gleam of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group of departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers, each ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... miles distant, the land rose steadily, ridge on ridge. It looked like a series of giant steps blotched and chequered with dark patches of forest which contained so many secrets hidden from the eyes of man. As the distance gained the crystal of it all mellowed softly till a deep purple dominated ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... grew old with his master and mellowed, he would make believe to work close by, so that at times they might drop into talk, recalling names that had died out of the Glen, shrewd sayings that fell from lips now turned to dust, curious customs that had ceased forever, all in great ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... still unmarried, and lives with his mother. And Ruth is now happy, though that happiness is mellowed by the sorrows through which she has passed, and the memories of the loved ones she has lost; but the hope of meeting them again is the rainbow that spans the sky of her existence, shining out radiantly in her hours of mist and gloom, ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... lightly touching his hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire. Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of my hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course gave me the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had mellowed our intimacy. ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... mellowed by regret For having teased me with her talk; Then all-forgetful as she heard One step ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... pillars, and the sunshine streaming brilliantly through the open intervals. The tables bore proofs of the collation served upon them. Overhead was the soft creaminess of pure marble in protected state mellowed by friendly touches of time. At the end of the vista, the company was indistinctly visible through the verdure of obtruding branches. Voices came to him from that part, and gleams of bright garments; and to get to them it seemed ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... difference between the chatter of civilized men and the deliberations of barbarians. With La Hontan, the Baron de Saint-Castin would have led up to his business by a long prelude on other subjects. With Madockawando, he waited until the tobacco had mellowed both ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... is the hush of night, and all between Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear, Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen. Save darkened Jura, whose capt heights appear Precipitously steep; and drawing near, There breathes a living fragrance from the shore, Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear Drops the light drip of the suspended ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... more deplorable nature, that when my declining age, after a life spent in the service of the Public, should have reposed in the peaceful harbour, not of an indolent, and a total inactivity, but of a moderate and becoming retirement; and when my eloquence was properly mellowed, and had acquired its full maturity;—thus it happened, I say, that recourse was then had to those fatal arms, which the persons who had learned the use of them in honourable conquest, could no longer ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... throes. But the sad emotions have been tempered by time, and the glad ones, at each returning tide, seem tinged with brighter glow. In thy bowers, as elsewhere, roses must be plucked from thorns; but in memory's mellowed light I see not the thorns—I behold only the bright and ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... three-score and ten, of grave and majestic bearing, and a form and expression which, when once fixed in the mind, could not easily be forgotten. As I remember him, his countenance was cast in that strong mould which characterized the land of his birth, but the features were often mellowed by a quiet smile. He was a man of deep piety, and was esteemed a pillar in the Brick Church, then the leading Presbyterian church of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... ranged side by side in solemn state on the oaken shelves of some venerable repository, is apt to surprise those who expect mouldy decay; the stiff hard binding is as angular as ever,—there is no abrasion of the leaves, not a single dog-ear or a spot, or even a dust-border on the mellowed white of the margin. So, too, of those quarto civilians and canonists of Leyden and Amsterdam, with their smooth white vellum coats, bearing so generic a resemblance to Dutch cheeses, that they might be supposed to represent ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... miles of the distance. No experience in my life ever humiliated me as that one did, yet I have laughed about it since. I may have previously heard of riches taking wings, but in this instance, now mellowed by time, no injustice will be done by simply recording it as the parting of a fool and ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... motor boat's tuff-tuff had been lost in the general noise of London. Nearer at hand, above them, Jenny could hear the clanging of tram-gongs and the clatter and slow boom of motor omnibuses; but these sounds were mellowed by the evening, and although they were near enough to be comforting they were too far away to interrupt this pleasant solitude with Keith. The two of them sat in the shadow, and Jenny craned to hear the chuckle of the water against the yacht's sides. It was a beautiful moment in her life.... ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... perfect—a day that in happier circumstances Mavis would have loved. The sun reigned in a cloudless sky, the blue of which was mellowed with a touch of autumn dignity. The grasses waved gladly by the road-side, and along the ditches; patches of sunlight played delightful games of hide-and-seek on hedge-rows and among the trees. Most ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... when years have rolled away, and time has mellowed the works of thy sublime pencil, mayst thou be remembered only as their creator; may thy fame repose herself upon the tableau of the dying Socrates, and the miraculous passage of the Alpine hero, may the ensanguined records of thy ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... harmonised with the life of Venetia before their arrival, that, taking a general view of her existence, their residence at the abbey figured only as an episode in her career; active indeed and stirring, and one that had left some impressions not easily discarded; but, on the whole, mellowed by the magic of time, Venetia looked back to her youthful friendship as an event that was only an exception in her lot, and she viewed herself as a being born and bred up in a seclusion which she ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... every warm tint with sentinel oaks or walnuts, and here and there the wood-lot of the farmer. The soft browns and greens of the distant corn stubble, or the winter barley fields with the blaze of the Frost King's robes mellowed by the golden sun complete a picture common enough in this wonderful valley of the Hudson, but always a well-spring of delight ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... characters, the projecting balconies, glazed with round bull's eyes of blown glass set in heavy lead, the marvellously wrought weathercocks of iron and gold on the corners of the houses, every outward detail of the time-honoured and time-mellowed town spoke to his heart in accents he not only understood but loved. Even the modern note did not jar upon him. There were few officers in the streets, few soldiers in bright uniforms. Occasionally a troop of white cuirassiers rode slowly through the main thoroughfare, looking ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... several others, drew up a remonstrance against "the desecration by officious restoration, and the tearing down of time-mellowed structures to make room for the unsightly brick piles ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... orange sunset, and accompanied by one bright star, prolonged thus the twilight. A herd of cattle passed along in the dell below, untended, towards their watering place—the grass was rustled by a gentle breeze, and the olive-woods, mellowed into soft masses by the moonlight, contrasted their sea-green with the dark chestnut foliage. Yes, this is the earth; there is no change—no ruin—no rent made in her verdurous expanse; she continues to wheel round and round, with alternate night and day, through the sky, though man is not her adorner ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow moon—then silence, where crescendo laughter fades... the car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... guardedly those tones, or that manner. Don Andres Picardo was as clean, as honest, and as kindly as the sunshine that mellowed the dim distances behind him. The two came to their feet unconsciously and received his handclasp with inner humility. Don Andres held Dade's hand a shade longer than the most gracious hospitality demanded, while his eyes dwelt solicitously upon his ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... a hollow booming sound—a roar, mellowed and subdued by distance, with a peculiar beat upon the ear, as if a wave struck the nerve and rebounded and struck again in an infinitesimal fraction of time—such a sound as can only bellow from the mouth of cannon. Another ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... is of characteristic Philadelphia brick construction, delightfully mellowed by age, with marble and white-painted wood trim. The main building is two stories high with a decked gable roof, heavily balustraded between large, arched quadruple chimney stacks at each end, corners heavily quoined ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... that Peter scrooged down his eyebrows, and in a jerky voice said, "They might have given Him one day to Himself. Can't they see He's tired?" Do you think that likely John chimed in, with that fire in his voice which the after years mellowed and sweetened but never lost,—"Yes, how inconsiderate a crowd is!" Do you think so? I do. Because they were so much like us. But He—the most tired of them all—"was moved with compassion," and ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... was a balloon of sufficient power to take us all up with her into the serene depth of heaven, where she loved to float, far above the low details of earthly life. Earth lay beneath us as a lovely picture,—its sounds came up mellowed into music. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of the awful skies became mellowed down; the wheeling clouds began to dispart, and a gush of heavy drops came pattering from above. Moaning pitifully, the prostrate and bowed trees and undergrowth lifted their mangled boughs from the compressed state into which they had been forced—those which had survived ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... lived through a week of wizardry such as I had never dreamed of, and here was I at the very throne of Western empire. And what a place it was, and what a people—with the imperious mood of the West softened by the spell of the Orient and mellowed by the glamour of Old Spain. San Francisco! A score of tongues clamoured in her streets and in her byways a score of races lurked austerely. She suckled at her breast the children of the old grey nations and gave them of her spirit, that swift ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... one or two slips of tongue, Haney rose to the occasion. He was big enough and self-contained enough not to apologize for what he had been or what he was, and under Congdon's skilful guidance told of his experiences as amateur miner and gambler, growing humorous as the wine mellowed and lightened his reminiscences. He felt the sympathy of his audience. All listened delightedly with no accusation in their eyes—except in the case of Mrs. Crego, who still breathed, so it seemed to Bertha, a certain ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... eyes appeared, at times, a new thoughtfulness, but for no longer period than the quick passing of a summer cloud over a sunny meadow. This half-light of brief conjecture or vague retrospection only mellowed the depths of her gaze, and Barnes alone noted ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of his hymns when he was past middle age, a man of extensive learning, proved poetical ability and mature judgment, especially in spiritual things. Years of hard struggles and unjust neglect had sobered and mellowed but not aged or ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... filtering through the tiny windows of the cupola millions of dust motes illuminated by the sun danced in an ascending spiral. The altar, with its antique carving, glowed faintly in the mellowed light with reflections of old gold. Upon it lay a duster and a pail, carelessly left since the last cleaning of the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to be a dull and surly fellow, like many another cocher of Paris, but the clink of silver and the sight of it mellowed him. I began by saying that I was in search of three friends of mine whom I was to have met when the boat train came in, but whom I had unfortunately missed. I asked him to describe the men he had driven away from the station at that time, and though he did it ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... graces of innocence, producing insensibly that irregularity of features which the struggles of the understanding to trace or govern the strong emotions of the heart, are wont to imprint on the yielding mass. Grief and care had mellowed, without obscuring, the bright tints of youth, and the thoughtfulness which resided on her brow did not take from the feminine softness of her features; nay, such was the sensibility which often mantled over it, that she frequently appeared, like a large proportion of her sex, only born to ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the fateful unexpected so often begins. Children, of all ages and sizes, were playing in the street, and Saxon, by the open front window, was watching them and dreaming day dreams of her child soon to be. The sunshine mellowed peacefully down, and a light wind from the bay cooled the air and gave to it a tang of salt. One of the children pointed up Pine Street toward Seventh. All the children ceased playing, and stared and pointed. They formed ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... from Behring Strait nearly to the North Cape, we have the frozen tundra region, with a characteristic tundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into a habitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of the shrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts, and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... past, of the dreadful days on the stained battlefields of the Dardanelles, they spoke little. Some day perhaps when time had mellowed the colors, then this group of young people could talk it over. Just now the price they had paid for their experiences seemed too great. It was all too near. They tried to put it behind them, as all the world will have to do when at last this war is over, when the last gun calls ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... still and silent was the breathless night that the volume of sound raised by the insects on shore rang in my ears almost as distinctly out here as it had done when I stood upon the beach; it was, however, so far mellowed and softened by the intervening distance that it was possible to hear other sounds distinctly through it, even when they were so faint as the slight, almost imperceptible creak of the yard-parrels aloft, and the light flap of a coiled-up rope striking against ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... yet his intellectual forces had lost nothing of their power. And as a companion he was as winsome as ever. That fine quality with which he was so richly endowed, the quality which used to be called “urbanity,” was as fresh when I saw him last as when I first knew him. That sweet sagacity, mellowed and softened by a peculiarly quiet humour, shone from his face at intervals as he talked of the pleasant old days when he was my colleague on The Athenæum, and when I used to call upon him so frequently on my way to Rossetti in Cheyne Walk to ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... tell you what an atmosphere of things and relations that had grown and sweetened and mellowed there was about this old home; what a lovely repose of stability, in the midst of the domestic ferments that are all about us in the changing households of these changing days. Frendely, who had served her maiden apprenticeship in a country family of England, said it was ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to the place they purposed visiting. As they glided on, they observed the banks on either side lined with windmills; here and there were small houses painted green with red roofs—indeed, red roofs were seen everywhere, like British soldiers skirmishing, as the colour was toned down and mellowed by time and weather. On and on they went, sometimes looking down from the canal to the country below them, for the water was on a higher level than ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... official displeasure are Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Cezanne—the latter represented by two of the most veracious fruit-pieces I ever saw. The Manet is the famous Hothouse, and in the semi-darkness (not a ray of artificial light is permitted) I noted that the canvas had mellowed with the years. The Monets are of rare quality. Altogether a magnificent object-lesson for young Germany, in which tender colour, an exquisite vision (poetic without being sloppy-sentimental) of the animate and inanimate world. What a lesson for those rough ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... ride from Posharevatz; the road crosses the Morava, and everywhere the country is fertile, populous, and well cultivated. Innumerable massive turrets, mellowed by the sun of a clear autumn, and rising from wide rolling waters, announced my approach to the shores of the Danube. I seemed entering one of those fabled strong holds, with which the early Italian ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... nothing on this purified world to generate disease; hence these favored people never suffer any pain of body or of mind. The long line of sin-shadows has all vanished from this redeemed planet, and the atmosphere is all aglow with the mellowed ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... joke. "If it were ambrosia, she is worthy of a brimmer. Come, then, fill your glasses. Edward, attend to Miss Gourlay. Sam, help Mrs. Mainwaring. Here, then, my dear Martha; like two winter apples, time has only mellowed us. We have both run parallel courses in life; you, in instructing the softer and more yielding sex; I, the nobler ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... smoothest brow and smoother cheek, And eyes so full of boyhood's truth, And mouth, which closed, yet seems to speak? "Ah, sure, that lovely youth's from Heaven!" A dark-eyed maiden of the wood Sighed out upon the breath of even, As in the mellowed light she stood. And, ever from that fatal hour, This white youth's image, slight and pale, Would haunt the maiden's leafy bower, And wake her spirit's wail. In that high heart that fiercely hates, Love is as fierce and wild; And so the love is wild, that waits To mount ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... yore, they should resume the humour of sending their lovers into banishment. Distance, in truth, produces in idea the same effect as in real perspective. Objects are softened, and rounded, and rendered doubly graceful; the harsher and more ordinary points of character are mellowed down, and those by which it is remembered are the more striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty. There are mists too in the mental as well as the natural horizon, to conceal what is less pleasing ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... though by no means wholly sweet temper, of more common sense than romance, and of more simplicity than common sense. His nature and his early trials made him not exactly sour, but shy, till age and prosperity mellowed him; but simplicity was his chief characteristic in age and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the grotesque figure of Mandarin Li standing a few steps away. The shadow of death darkened his face, and without seeming movement of his lips, Felix heard these words, uttered by that shrill ringing voice so hated, now mellowed into divine music. ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... Peace; however, he did not live to make much progress in this undertaking."[341] The few faint voices of encouragement, that once in a great while reached them from the pulpit[342] and forum, were as strange music, mellowed and sweetened by the distance. The free and slave Negroes were separated by law, were not allowed to communicate together to any great extent. They were not allowed in numbers greater than three, and then, if not in the service ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... thoughtfully. Somehow she was reminded of her father. There was the same gravity, marching hand in hand with tenacity of purpose, fixity of ideas; the same grim scorn of the tonic wine of jest and laughter. But in the elder man these were mellowed and softened. In Farwell, in the strength of his prime, they were in full ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... and was happy; Soaper and Snarl eating the same, and drinking Toquay, were mellowed and mitigated into human flesh. Mr. Vane and Mrs. Woffington were happy; he, because his conscience was asleep; and she, because she felt nothing now could shake her hold of him. Sir Charles was in a sort of mental chuckle. His head burned, his ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... intelligence they have the flavor of tobacco. They have no amenities, they scratch the mellow surface of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and Lady Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed surfaces of things. Ann Veronica was one of the few young people—and one must have young people just as one must have flowers—one could ask to a little gathering without the risk of a painful discord. Then the distant relationship ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... protection of a still fussier old colonel, who disagreed with everybody because his liver disagreed with him. Twenty years of active service in Upper India had seriously damaged that physiological function, and "pegs" no longer mellowed him. The quartet greatly amused Elsa. Their nods were abrupt, and they spoke in the most formal manner. She was under grave suspicion; in the first place, she was traveling alone, in the second place, she was an American. At table there was generally a desultory conversation, and ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... works. He is, in my opinion, the most elegant, the most correct poet; and, at the same time, the most harmonious (a circumstance which redounds very much to the honour of this muse) that England ever gave birth to. He has mellowed the harsh sounds of the English trumpet to the soft accents of the flute. His compositions may be easily translated, because they are vastly clear and perspicuous; besides, most of his subjects are general, ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... charge against him, which is—want of invention. In the meantime I may affirm, in honour of this episode, that it is not only now esteemed the most pleasing entertainment of the "AEneis," but was so accounted in his own age, and before it was mellowed into that reputation which time has given it; for which I need produce no other testimony than that ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... owe the preservation of many of them. Those made two hundred years later, on a coarse, loose canvas, even now show signs of decay, while these ancient ones on linen are as perfect as when made, only being gently mellowed by Time to the colour of ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... Germans made lay in other qualities. Their artists and musicians and actors planted the first seeds of aesthetic appreciation in the raw West where the repertoire had previously been limited to Money Musk, The Arkansas Traveler, and Old Dog Tray. The liberal tendencies of German thought mellowed the austere Puritanism of the prevalent theology. The respect which these people had for intellectual attainments potently influenced the educational system of America from the kindergarten to the newly founded state universities. ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... substitutes for her unique rhymes, neither can they be added to nor imitated; for the world nowadays is seemingly too sophisticated to frame just this sort of merry, light-hearted, irresponsible verse which has mellowed with the years. "These ancient rhymes," says Andrew Lang, "are smooth stones from the brook of time, worn round by constant friction of ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... mellowed while we talked; clocks struck unheeded by me. It amazed me at last, to discover how long she had held me captive. Still, I knew nothing of her affairs, excepting that she was hard up—that, by comparison, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... luster of Sunnysides' golden hide. They stood there entrancing his artist-eye with their perfect harmony of line and color; and the last thin rays of the setting sun bathed horse and girl in a golden light—an atmosphere in which they glowed like one of Titian's mellowed canvases. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... light illuminating the opera house fell with a curious distinction in tone upon the crowd which filled the building and overflowed through darkened doors and windows. Beneath the electric jets the faces were focussed to a white hush of expectancy, which mellowed into a blur of impatient animation where the dim ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... and natural fraternal affection, which is more powerful when mellowed by virtue, Pere Augustin saw the hand of death making each day new traces on the frame of Alvira. The hectic flush, the frequent faintings, and the cold, icy grasp of her hand told the energy of the poison that gnawed at the vital cords. Sweet and gentle ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the arms of the family; the drowsy chime of the church- clocks; the barking of dogs; the lowing of cattle; the voices of herdsmen or field-labourers singing as they wended their weary way homeward after the labour and heat of the day—the sound softened and mellowed by distance; all combined to render that journey one of the most pleasant and enjoyable I had ever undertaken, notwithstanding the pain and discomfort which I experienced ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... here, once more, ye rural muses weep The ivy'd balustrade, and terrace steep; Walls, mellowed into harmony by time, On which fantastic creepers used to climb; While statues, labyrinths, and alleys pent Within their bounds, at least were innocent!— Our modern taste—alas!—no limit knows; O'er hill, o'er dale, through wood and field it flows; Spreading o'er all its unprolific ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the light are both alike' to our hope, in so far as each may become the occasion for its exercise. It is not only to be the sweet juice expressed from our hearts by the winepress of calamities, but that which flows of itself from hearts ripened and mellowed under ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... that binds them so that when the clouds begin to settle over one the other promptly sees the mist and brings all her subtle skill and solicitude to guard and fight in the other's interest. The "two hearts that beat as one" are old hearts, hearts chastened by experience and mellowed by the sorrows and joys of life, hearts that have gone through the dark spots and the deep spots of affliction, and have loved and helped each other all through the long journey to sunset's old age. God never inspired a ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... at his tragic death and transferred all the papers of value. The key hung now in a sliding panel beneath the ledge of the desk. The spirit which had kept the old room unchanged, even to the faded books of Orientalism and the old pictures strangely mellowed, had led to the hiding of the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... for some time. He appears to have early shown a preference for the model of Niccolo Amati, and laboured unceasingly in imitation of him, until he copied him with an exactness difficult to surpass. Now that time has mellowed his best works, they might pass as original Amatis with those not perfectly versed in the characteristics of the latter. Many German makers excelled as copyists of Amati; but these makers chiefly failed in their varnish, whereas Banks was most happy in ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... polluted waters, of soot-stained walls and smoke-tinged air, the green of jungle comes like a cooling bath of delicate tints and shades. I think of all the green things I have loved—of malachite in matrix and table-top; of jade, not factory-hewn baubles, but age-mellowed signets, fashioned by lovers of their craft, and seasoned by the toying yellow fingers of generations of forgotten Chinese emperors—jade, as Dunsany would say, of the exact shade of the right color. I think too, of dainty emerald scarves that are seen and lost in a flash ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... the wail of them who beneath the fierce sun toiled under the whips of relentless masters? Heard from granite colonnade or beneath cool linen awning, it was mellowed by distance, to monotonous music. Why should he question the Sphinx of Fate, or quarrel with destinies the high gods had decreed? So had it always been, for ages and ages; so must it ever be. The beetle rends the insect, and the hawk ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... by the darker more deeply colored complexion which the years had given her; the smile of her widely sweeping lips was very sweet; an almost enigmatical youth in the dewy luminosity of her brown eyes softened and mellowed everything again. And yet she also had the round fullness of cheek, the strong-willed ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... plain—undulating and abrupt, barren and verdant—all were there, and could be embraced in a single wide-sweeping glance. It seemed, to the entranced travellers, like the very garden of Eden. Water-fowl flew about in all directions, the whistling of their wings and their wild cries being mellowed by distance into pleasant music; and, far away on the right, where a clear lake mirrored each tree on its banks, as if the image were reality, a herd of deer were seen cooling their sides and limbs in the water, while, on the extreme ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... leeward. As we drew nearer, the sound of girls' laughter, the tuning of musical instruments, the hum and talk and gayety of a large company, floated over to us from the schooner's deck, wonderfully mellowed by the intervening water and (as it seemed to me) softened into a sort of ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... was not cowardice which prompted Moses' answer, but lowliness. His former impetuous confidence had all been beaten out of him. Time was when he was ready to take up the role of deliverer at his own hand; but these hot days were past, and age and solitude and communion with God had mellowed him into humility. His recoil was but one instance of the shrinking which all true, devout men feel when designated for tasks which may probably make life short, and will certainly make it hard. All prophets and reformers till to-day ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... rude rocks had assumed a flush of transient beauty; and the emerald-green patches on the hill-sides, barred by the plough lengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had borrowed an aspect of soft and velvety richness, from the mellowed light and the broadening shadows. All was solitary. We could see among the deserted fields the grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley, more desolate than that which we had left, had not even its single ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe. In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered and mellowed ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... betrayed its presence. Rather was his whole speech pervaded by this soft delight, especially when his cherubic face, his pink cheeks glistening in certain lights with a faint silvery stubble of beard, mellowed with his gentle smile. It was so now, even when he spoke of God's penalties for the souls of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... vivified and made resplendent by the fervid sun. The ashes of dead and gone harvests, even the dust of those who had for ages wrought in it, turned again and again through incessant cultivation, seemed to move and live once more in that present sunshine. All color appeared to be deepened and mellowed, until even the very shadows of the trees were as velvety as the sward they fell upon. The prairie-bred Potter, accustomed to the youthful caprices and extravagances of his own virgin soil, could not help feeling the influence of ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... from this dusky, grimy blackness of the mills and the railway the soughing of the blowers of the blast-furnaces, the sharp crack of the exploding gases in the white-hot iron, the shriek of the locomotive whistle and all night long the roar and rattle of the passing trains, but so mellowed by the distance that the harsh sounds seem almost musical—almost as pleasant and as easily endured as the voices of nature. And in the early morning a look from the chamber window perhaps may show a locomotive whirling down the valley around the sharp curves with its ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... spring bespoke its early approach. April was ushered in to the songs of birds, the greening valley, and the pollen on the willow. The frost arose, the earth mellowed underfoot, and the creek purled and sang as it hastened along. The cattle played, calves were born, while the horses, in shedding their winter coats, matted the saddle blankets and threw off great tufts of hair where they rolled on ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... of late he began to manifest a child-like cunning in many things connected with himself and family, which, though amusing from its very simplicity, afforded at the same time a certain indication that the good old grandfather whom they all loved so well, and whose benignant character had been only mellowed by age into a more plastic affection for them all, was soon to be removed from before their eyes, never again to diffuse among them that charm of domestic truth and love, and the holy influences of all those fine ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... o'clock. The day had recovered somewhat from a grey morning, as though the glow of that long hot summer were too burnt-in on the air to yield to the first assault. The sun, piercing the crisped clouds, those breast feathers of heavenly doves, darted its beams at the mellowed leaves, and showered to the ground their delicate shadow stains. The first, too early, scent from leaves about to fall, penetrated to the heart. And sorrowful sweet birds were tuning their little autumn pipes, blowing into them fragments ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hold his breath, then stopping, flapping his wings, wheeling round the bush, alighting, and after a silent interval of listening beginning to whirr again. At each brushing of Clym's feet white miller-moths flew into the air just high enough to catch upon their dusty wings the mellowed light from the west, which now shone across the depressions and levels of the ground without falling ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... grandeur. Harmonious as music is then the composition of colours and of forms. It becomes a perfect picture in memory, more and more idealised by imagination, every moment the veil is withdrawn before it; its aerial lineaments never fade; yet they too, though their being be but in the soul, are mellowed by the touch, of time—and every glimpse of such a vision, the longer we live, and the more we suffer, seems suffused with a mournful light, as if ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Mantua and the infant St John in the front, and the Marquis Ludovico of Mantua and his wife, Isabella D'Este, kneeling to return thanks—was painted by Mantegna at the age of seventy years; and, as if the art of the man had mellowed with time, it is the softest and tenderest of his pictures in execution. A beautiful Madonna of Mantegna's, still later in time, is ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... hear a few subdued sounds, the only evidences of human habitation. There is the tinkle of a cow-bell, the barking of a pariah dog, the monotonous dub-a-dub-dub of a timber-toned tom-tom, muffled and slightly mellowed by the distance. The faint, far cries, and occasional halloos of the herd-boys calling to each other, gradually cease, but the monotonous dub-a-dub-dub continues till far ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the road he stopped and gazed back. There was the wide-spread building which he knew so well, the Abbot's house, the long church, the cloisters with their line of arches, all bathed and mellowed in the evening sun. There too was the broad sweep of the river Exe, the old stone well, the canopied niche of the Virgin, and in the centre of all the cluster of white-robed figures who waved their ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... There were wooden houses where the old sod dwellings used to be, and little orchards, and big red barns; all this meant happy children, contented women, and men who saw their lives coming to a fortunate issue. The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... only picked up the violin tenderly and once more traced the almost imperceptible crack along the face of the mellowed wood. ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... interference of an editor, and justify him in selecting the text which he thought the best upon the whole; but this must be left to posterity. When editors can escape the bias of contemporary thought and feeling, when their judgments are refined by distance and mellowed by the new literary standards of the intervening years,—when in fact Wordsworth is as far away from his critics as Shakespeare now is—it may be possible to adjust a final text. But the task is beyond the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... than fifty years ago), but spires and towers and pinnacles rose before him like a dream, glowing against the dark sky, lit by the soft radiance of the streets beneath. To the right, not a hundred yards away, rose Saint Edward's tower, mellowed now to clear orange by the lapse of three-quarters of a century; to the left a flight of buildings, of an architectural design which he did not understand, but which gave him a sense of extreme satisfaction; in front towered the masses of Buckingham Palace as he seemed ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... long-strawed corn last week, and how a better week's work he had never done in all his days. Peace and abundance were on the country-side in beautiful forms and beautiful colours, and the harvest seemed even to be sailing out to grace the never-reaped sea in the yellow-laden barges that mellowed the distance. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Novel, which he says he has "read with great pleasure, though Bulwer's nature is by no means a perfect one either, which makes itself felt in his book; but his gush, his better humour, his abundant materials, and his mellowed constructive skill—all these are great things." One would give many pages of the Letters for that naif admission that "gush" is "a ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... few years of absence from his native country, and while the din of war and the cries of party-spirit "were lost over a wide and unhearing ocean," to recover from his surprise and from a temporary alienation of mind; and to return in spirit, and in the mild and mellowed maturity of age, to the principles and attachments of his ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... magic city—there were days of mists, silvery and gray, when life took on the indistinctness and indecision of a dream; as there were days less lucent, when sea and sky melted in an indistinguishable line and the chameleon tints of the marshes mellowed into a monotonous gray surface—when the wonted brilliancy of the sunset clouds, and the glittering domes and campaniles were only faint gray shadows on the gray whiteness of the waters. And gondoliers came suddenly into vision, parting the ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... I was one of them, and know the masonry." About the same time this conversation was going on at the bureau of the police, in another part of the town Morton and Gawtrey were seated alone. It is some weeks since they entered Paris, and spring has mellowed into summer. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... That faint resemblance composed Gladys, and gave her yet more loving thoughts of the old man. He had been kind when, in his own rugged way, the first harshness of his bearing towards her had swiftly been mellowed by her own sweet, subtle influence. We must not too harshly blame Abel Graham; his environment had been of a kind to foster the least beautiful attributes ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... fell through this leafy screen with a mellowed and delicious softness, and the perfume of flowers was wafted ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... that one might readily experience surprise that the trains even condescend to stop there. It squats in the sand a few miles south of Tehachapi pass, hemmed in by mountain ranges ocher-tinted where near by, mellowed by distance into gorgeous shades of turquoise and deep maroon. They are very far away, these mountains, even though their outlines are so distinct that they appear close at hand. The desert atmosphere has cast a kindly spell upon them, softening their ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... small, but the altar and pulpit were handsome, and though the windows were unstained, the light was mellowed by buff inside blinds. The seats were by no means filled, and the congregation was composed of people whose appearance denoted that many belonged to the labouring class, and none to the Brahmin caste of millionnaires, though all were neatly and ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson |
