"Tuneless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to hold That here, where sang he, more of him Remains than where he, tuneless, cold, Passed ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... volumes of verse, the best of which he collected in five volumes (1907) and later in one volume (1911). The appreciative English critic, Edmund Gosse, in his Introduction to the 1907 collection, calls Cawein "the only hermit thrush" singing "through an interval comparatively tuneless." W. D. Howells's (p. 373) Foreword in the 1911 volume emphasizes Cawein's unusual power of making common things 'live and glow thereafter with ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... curse. It throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony. What was it that silenced Sheridan's voice and shattered the golden sceptre with which he swayed parliaments and courts? What foul sprite turned the sweet rhythm of Robert Burns into a tuneless ballad? What brought down the majestic form of one who awed the American Senate with his eloquence, and after a while carried him home dead drunk from the office of Secretary of State? What was it that crippled the noble spirit of one of the heroes of the last war, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... ensconced comfortably in his little rock niche, hidden from the men in the valley below, but with a perfect view of everything that went on. The wind whistled around the cliffs, ceaselessly moaning a tuneless song. He felt like standing up and shouting wildly, "Here I am! Here I am!" but he ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... for he knew that he was to leave her, and he knew also that he must tell her so. It was no easy matter, and his walk slackened, till, at the corner of the great thoroughfare, he stood still, looking at a poor woman who ground a tuneless hand-organ. The instrument of tympanum torture was on wheels, and to the back of it was attached a cradle. In the cradle was a dirty little baby, licking its fist and listening with conscientious attention to the ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... if to keep them balanced. Whenever anything of which she did not approve was being said to Miss Salmon or was being done before Miss Salmon, she maintained throughout it, moving about in pursuit of her pince-nez, a rather loud, constant, tuneless humming. When her moment came she would always begin "Well, now" and then swallow forcibly as though the swallowing gave her pain. "Well, now" (gulp). This introduction was always precedent to speech by Miss Salmon, whether after ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... ice dissolving on the silent side 40 Of some white precipice, with paly gleam Descends, while the cold hills a slanting beam Faint tinges: till, ascending in his pride, The great Sun from the red horizon looks, And wakes the tuneless birds, the stagnant brooks, And sleeping lakes! So on my mind's cold night The ray of Fancy shone, and gave delight And hope past utterance. Thy cheering voice, O Warton! bade my silent heart rejoice, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... at the second changin'-station, Suffered sudden dislocation, fled before the tuneless jar Of a Wagner obbligato, scherzo, doublehand staccato, Played on either pony's saddle by the ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... the judge had a peculiarity. It made no difference what the words might be or the theme—he sang every song and all songs to a fine, high, tuneless little tune of his own. At this moment Judge Priest, as Jeff gathered, was showing a wide range of selection. One second he was announcing that his name it was Joe Bowers and he was all the way from Pike, and the next he was stating, for the benefit of all who might ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... lark, when they welcome the dawn, Make a chorus of joy to resound through the lawn: But the mavis is tuneless, the lark strives in vain, When my beautiful charmer renews her ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the tipsy singing she had heard in the morning; it was jumpy, tuneless singing; she guessed that it was assisting in the process of shaving, for she heard a few "damns" peppering the song, which suggested that his shaky hand was wielding the razor badly. And with the song came pity that swamped disgust and disillusion. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... FINAL DAY!—Nature performs Its obsequies with darkness, wind, and rain; But Man is jocund.—Hark! th' exultant strain From towers and steeples drowns the wintry storms! No village spire but to the cots and farms, Right merrily, its scant and tuneless peal Rings round!—Ah! joy ungrateful!—mirth insane! Wherefore the senseless triumph, ye, who feel This annual portion of brief Life the while Depart for ever?—Brought it no dear hours Of health and night-rest?—none that saw ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... adverse fates Gave thy lyre to Mr. Yates[2], I have melted at thy strain When Bunn reign'd o'er Drury-lane; For the music of thy strings Haunts the ear when Romer sings. But to me that voice is mute! Tuneless kettle-drum and flute I but hear one liquid lyre— Kettle bubbling on the fire, Whizzing, fizzing, steaming out Music from its curved spot, Wak'ning visions by its song Of thy nut-brown streams, Souchong; Lumps of crystal saccharine— Liquid pearl distill'd ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... so easy to be mistaken on subjects of this kind that generalizing is dangerous. Many great authorities have liked tuneless music. One of the most telling arguments in its favor was recently advanced by a foreigner. The Chinese ambassador told us last winter in a club at Washington that Wagner’s was the only European music that he appreciated and enjoyed. “You see,” he added, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... scented summer morning; the air was balmy, the sun was shining, the little waves rippled up over the sand, the birds were singing, and the dew-drops hung on the yellow gorse; but that joy in her own being which lent a charm to these was wanting, and the songs seemed tuneless, the scent oppressive, the sea all sameness, the land a waste, and the sun itself a glaring garish baldness of light, that accentuated her own disconsolation, the length of a life that is not worth living, and the size of a world which contains no corner of comfort in all ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... on earth has, we should like to know, bewitched ornithologists to designate the great, coarse, tuneless bird, that visits us in the earliest dawn of spring, in this far off America, "the robin?" Neither in throat nor plumage is it even a thirty-first cousin of the sweet, timid, little, brown bunch of melody that haunts ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... empty safe, the child that cries, The kittens on the coat, The good-wife with her patient eyes, The milkmaid's tuneless throat; ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... with something—but there was nothing there. And out on the side porch Mynie would be sitting, her head thrown back against the wooden column of the porch, her hands clasped about her knees, smiling, smiling, always smiling. Sometimes she would hum a sort of low tuneless chant—it sounded like a pagan ritual of some sort, all repetitions, rising and falling in a monotonous, haunting drone. And once, as I stood watching her curiously, the word for that noise flashed suddenly into my mind—incantation. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... whistled up the village street, whistled up the stairs, whistled into the sitting—room. Then stopped his tune. The buoyant notes of triumph dwindled to a tuneless squeak, to a noiseless breathing—Bill Wyvern, seated at a table, sprung to ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... o'clock, and Sunday. They have all been to church. They have struggled manfully through their prayers. They have chanted a depressing psalm or two to the most tuneless of ancient ditties. They have even sat out an incomprehensible sermon with polite gravity and many ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... the night, a new feature was added to the entertainment. One of the Marathas had somehow possessed himself of a tom tom, and proved himself an excellent performer on that weird instrument. While he tapped its sides, his fellow Maratha, in a strange hard tuneless voice, chanted a song, repeating its single stanza again and again without apparently wearying his hearers, and clapping his hand ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... little city, Hastings, with its fisher men and women, its fish-market and the ruined castle-crowned height, has some quaintness and character; but as a resort where the chief amusements are scrappy, tuneless hurdy-gurdies, blatant brass bands, living picture shows, or third-rate repetitious of a last year's London theatrical successes, it is about the rankest boring proposition which ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... where were they? and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... street organ than such abominations; and, indeed, some of the itinerant music is, to our unsophisticated ears, sweet beyond expression, especially when accompanied, as it is sometimes, by a rich Italian or reedy German voice; for whose sake we can forgive the tuneless squalls that too often greet our ears from ambulatory minstrels, be they of the Madonna, or fishy, Dutch-swamp style of beauty. A sweet-toned street organ, heard in the distance, when all around is still, is not a thing to be despised, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Among the number, I think, we may reckon blank verse. Nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render such a measure pleasing; however, we now see it used upon the most trivial occasions.' On the same page he speaks of 'the tuneless flow of our blank verse.' See post, 1770, in Dr. Maxwell's Collectanea and the beginning of 1781, under The Life of Milton, for ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... among the ivy or creeper on a wall, burst out suddenly into a confused rapturous chorus of chirruping sounds, mingled with others of a finer quality, liquid and ringing. At such times one is vexed to think that there are writers on birds who invariably speak of the sparrow as a tuneless creature, a harsh chirper, and nothing more. It strikes one that such writers either wilfully abuse or are ignorant of the right meaning of words, so wild and glad in character are these concerts of town sparrows, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... They stopped and strove to remember the location of the boat, and then followed the lane. The fog was amber-hued now and the morning was fast losing its chill. Perry broke into song and Han into a tuneless whistle that seemed to give him a deal of satisfaction. They soon found a main-travelled road and, after fixing the turn-off in their minds, ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... saw a horse and rider. The horse was making its own way, the rider having as much as he could do to keep in the saddle. He was swaying from side to side, occasionally waving his arms in the air and howling out a tuneless ditty in ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... of the nursery where her voice could be heard talking imperiously to her baby's ayah. He had already waited some minutes, and he would probably have waited much longer, for his patience was inexhaustible, had it not been for that sudden irresponsible and wholly tuneless burst of song. But the second line was scarcely ended before she came hurriedly forth, nearly running into his stately person in ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... slight intervals between their meals!) at the monstrous, many-mouthed iron tube in the cellar; while I chafed and scolded at the delays, unwilling to leave the men, weary of my dear Island now its chief jewel was gone, irritated by the tramping feet and tuneless whistling where I had heard so much the patter of petite Marie's slippers and the rich melody ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Down from heaven by prayer, Though man's vain desire Hang faith's wind-struck lyre Out in tuneless air. ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... there sighing and groaning, prayerless, tuneless, hopeless, a thought flashed into his mind. What he had done for the poor and the wayfarer, he would do for himself. He would fill his den of despair with the name of God and the magic words of holy writ, and the pious, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... operations—comprised the entire furniture of the room. The bees were humming among a few flowers placed in pots outside the window; the birds were singing in the garden, and the faint intermittent jingle of a tuneless piano in some neighbouring house forced itself now and again on the ear. In any other place, these everyday sounds might have spoken pleasantly of the everyday world outside. Here, they came in as intruders on a silence which nothing but human suffering had the privilege ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... torso of a Hercules. His coat, black, threadbare, shining, and unpleasantly spotted, seemed on the point of giving way here and there to a system of restless and enormous muscles. But that these should serve no better purpose than ceaselessly to turn the handle of an unusually diminutive and tuneless street-organ might have roused in the observer's mind doubts as to the wisdom and vigilance of that divine providence which is so much better understood and trusted by the healthy and fortunate than by the wretched, the maimed, ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... once or twice, but he "had the Gaelic," and the sing-song voice and mysterious words sounded weirdly in her ears. Sometimes, as he put the final polish on the boots, he would break into song,—a strange, tuneless song which quavered up and down, and ended on long-sustained notes. Once even she saw the slippered feet move in jaunty dance-step to and fro, but at the sound of a clatter of saucepans from the kitchen ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in to the curb in front of the cafe. The shutters were closed, no light came from any of the stores or houses along the street, but from behind the closed door of the cafe came the sound of voices and laughter mixed with the metallic banging of a very old piano beating out tuneless accompaniment to a bull-voiced singer roaring through the many verses of "Hinkey Dinkey ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or cherishing ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... shield me from the dire disgrace, That haunts our wild and visionary race; Let me not draw my lengthen'd lines along, And tire in untamed infamy of song, Lest, in some dismal Dunciad's future page, I stand the CIBBER of this tuneless age; Lest, in another POPE th' indulgent skies Should give inspired by all their deities, My luckless name, in his immortal strain, Should, blasted, brand me as a second Cain; Doom'd in that song to live against my will, Whom all must scorn, and yet whom none could kill. The youth, resisted ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... on the platform at King's Cross, alternately smoking a large pipe and singing tuneless songs. They told him that the next train from York would not arrive until three ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... of pleasure followed this verse, and a tuneless chorus thundered the refrain, "Oh, such a knave's a Roundhead," with the most evident relish for the sentiments of the song. Brilliana looked with some impatience at the unruffled face of her adversary, and when the immediate clamor dwindled ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... bench beside him. For there were benches, and a desk, and even a blackboard and primers down in the deep wild gulch, where the music of living waters, and the thunderous roll of the Pacific, accompanied the children's tuneless voices as they sang an Hawaiian hymn. I shall remember nothing of the scholars but rows of gleaming white teeth, and splendid brown eyes. I thought both teacher and children very apathetic. There were lamentably few, though the pretty rigidly enforced ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... and broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye! The harp of strained and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply! To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill, And Araby's or Eden's bowers Were ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... club somebody who was being thrown out into the street was shouting in a gurgling voice, "Let go o' my throat or I'll corpse ye!" And farther on two or three girls in their teens, with their arms about the necks of twice as many men, were reeling along the pavement and singing in a tuneless wail. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... could see. Not a light showed anywhere; and to make things worse the moon had abandoned us. For one good hour we swept through chaos to the tuneless lamentations of Sheepshanks, who declared ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for a moment at Aunt Anne and saw her in an ecstasy, singing in her cracked tuneless voice, a smile about her lips and in her eyes, that gazed far, far beyond that Chapel. Maggie felt the approach of tears; she stopped singing—softly the refrain ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... occupied in thoughtfulness he became aware of the monotony of a tuneless chant, as if, it struck him, an insane young chorister or canon were galloping straight on end hippomaniacally through the Psalms. There was a creak at intervals, leading him to think it a machine that might have run away ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the hastily converted hospitals and into dim prison cells came almost daily a little woman with a big smile, always with her hands full of flowers or delicacies, a basket swinging from her arm. As she walked she hummed tuneless airs, and her expression was such a dazed and meaningless one that the prison guards and other soldiers paid little heed to the coming and going of "Crazy Bet," as she was called. "Mis' Van Lew—poor creature, she's lost her balance since the war broke out. She'll do no harm to the poor ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... from noises audible through the bolted door that communicated with the adjoining bed-chamber, the business of a sleuth seemed to comprise going to bed. Lanyard, shaving and dressing, could distinctly hear a tuneless voice contentedly humming "Sally in our Alley," a rendition punctuated by one heavy thump and then another and then by a heartfelt sigh of relief—as Roddy kicked off his boots—and followed by the tapping of a pipe against grate-bars, the squeal of a window lowered for ventilation, the ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... fair, Fondling of a happy pair, Every morn and every night Their solicitous delight, Sleeping, waking, still at ease, Pleasing, without skill to please Little gossip, blithe and hale, Tattling many a broken tale, Singing many a tuneless song. Lavish of a heedless tongue; Simple maiden, void of art, Babbling out the very heart, Yet abandon'd to thy will, Yet imagining no ill, Yet too innocent to blush, Like the linnet in the bush To the mother-linnet's ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... wrote was almost worthless. He has none of the haunting sense of the beauty of words in perfect order that marks the greatest poets. He has no passion for the correct use of words, and often his song seems tuneless and sometimes vulgar. For in Byron's undisciplined, turgid soul there is a strain of coarseness and vulgarity which not seldom shows itself in his poetry, spoiling some of his most beautiful lines. His poetry is egotistical too, that is, it is full of himself. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... it had won its slow recognition in England, it was probably tuneless, and the compilers of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) discovering the fact just as they were finishing their work, asked Dr. William Henry Monk, their music editor, to supply the want. "In ten minutes," it is said, "Dr. Monk composed the sweet, pleading chant ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... England with an equivalent as suitable to their requirements as the Salvation Army was to the requirements of the foolish, the hysterical, the unthinking people who played the tambourines and brayed on the tuneless trombones. Thus it is that one man says to another nowadays, when he has got nothing better to talk about, "Are you a man of intelligence, or ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... stratagems, sometimes recruiting his finances by the acquisition of small sums proposed in the foreign universities to public disputants; at others, securing himself a hospitable reception by the exercise of a moderate share of skill in playing the flute—his "tuneless pipe," as he calls it, in that passage of The Traveller, where he alludes to this method ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... nothing to die of; not just yet anyway. Well, he would have it attended to, sometime; his life was valuable now. But he wasn't going to hurry about it, if a sound leg meant his being taken and ordered off to this dam-fool War. Nicky-Nan pursed up his lips as he worked, whistling to himself a cheerful, tuneless ditty. Some one tapped on the ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... mark'd each face receding from the view, 'Twas grief to nature honourably true. And long, poor wand'rers o'er th' ecliptic deep, The song that names but home shall bid you weep; Oft shall ye fold your flocks by stars above In that far world, and miss the stars ye love; Oft, when its tuneless birds scream round forlorn, Regret the lark that gladdens England's morn. And, giving England's names to distant scenes, Lament ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... action came. The singing died away, the benediction was given, the second Gospel was read, the priest and the people repeated the Bohemian prayers, and all was over. The countless heads began to move onward, the shuffling of innumerable feet sent heavy, tuneless echoes through vaulted space, broken every moment by the sharp, painful cough of a suffering child whom no one could see in the multitude, or by the dull thud of some heavy foot striking against the wooden seats in the press. The Wanderer moved forward with the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... were looking over some English photographs, and she was enthusiastically praising the beauties of Gothic architecture, while Isaacs was making the most of his opportunity, and taking a good look at her as she bent over the album. After we came in, she made a little music at the tuneless piano—there never was a piano in India yet that had any tune in it—playing and singing a little, very prettily. She sang something about a body in the rye, and then something else about drinking only with the eyes, to which her brother sang a sort of second very nicely. I ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford |
