United States or Namibia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Quick, lively, jocund, to the clashing of her cymbals, there bounded forth an Italian maiden in the garb of a Bacchante. Her feet agile as the roe's, her eyes lustrous and defiant, her hair dishevelled, her bosom heaving, her arms symmetrical as sculpture, but glowing with the roseate warmth of youth, the virgin still rejoiced, as it were, in the tumult of the dance.
Her attendants, clinging to the throne and to each other, seemed a heap of dead women. At last a crash of music was heard in the vestibule drums, cymbals, and trumpets in blatant flourish.
Theory aside, the fact was not to be blinked that she knew how to clash cymbals to the unregenerate and drum up in the name of culture such a varied company as no other woman could muster short of a silver wedding. In the winning of the cultivated, Mrs. Hilliard took no pride.
Shouting and screaming, they bade the Christians come on "like drowned hens" and be slaughtered; then they danced and stamped and clanged their arms; they blew trumpets, clashed cymbals, and fired volleys of useless musketry.
Then came Urquiza, like a Pasha of two tails, who granted two sorts of credit, viz. unlimited and none at all, bearing two wax- lights, one in each hand, and wanting only cymbals and kettle-drums to express emphatically the pathos of his Castilian strut. Next came the bride, a little in advance of the clerk, but still turning obliquely towards him, and smiling graciously into his face.
Then came strange lights, and darkness, and sounds like the clashing of cymbals, and voices; and after those things a long sleep, from which he opened his eyes to find himself in a bed, and a face very near, with shining eyes that looked at him through a sea of tears. And a voice whispered to him, sweetly, softly, joyously, "Alan!" He tried to reach up his arms.
From the lucid quiet of his mountain haunts he had descended into a vale where antiquated cymbals clashed in wild discordance above the confusing clatter of an intricate machinery machinery too complicated to be readjusted by a passing dreamer.
This amid the deafening, maddening noise of the gong, drum, cymbals, and horn; insulted, spat upon by the crowd, and with Nerba holding me so tight by my hair that he tore handfuls of it from my scalp. All I could do was to remain calm and composed, and to await with apparent unconcern the preparations for the next sufferings to be inflicted upon me. "Miumta nani sehko!"
Another clash of cymbals! ... this time stormily persistent and convincing! ... another! ... yet another! ... and then, a chime of bells, a steady ringing, persuasive chime, such as brings tears to the eyes of many a wanderer, who, hearing a similar sound when far away from home, straightway thinks of the village church of his earlier years, . . those years of the best happiness we ever know on earth, because we enjoy in them the bliss of ignorance, the glory of youth!
It was a time when “the beauteous damsel Poesy, honourable and retired,” whom Cervantes described, dared still roam the English Parnassus, “a friend of solitude,” disturbed by no clash of Notoriety’s brazen cymbals, “where fountains entertained her, woods freed her from ennui, and flowers delighted her”—delighted her for their own sakes.
Word Of The Day