"Minuet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prettiest and deservedly popular little works in the modern repertory is the Paderewski "Minuet," Op. 14, No. 1. Modern minuets are echoes of the classical period. Compositions of this kind are to be found in the sonatas and symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and even further back in the suites of Bach. Accordingly the Paderewski "Minuet," in keeping with the form, is simple ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... was performed in pantomime and the bride and groom received the congratulations of their friends. The groom bowed low over the bride's hand and led her to the center of the hall. The other couples formed in line behind them and a stately minuet ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... has studied at Luneville, and has been to Paris, he has certainly an excellent foundation for the beginning of his career. Every one feels quite sure that his manners will be irreproachable, that he can speak French, and dance the minuet and quadrilles. All the gentlemen who have been in France are very successful in society, and very pleasing to ladies.... Really, I am exceedingly curious to see the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... merry-making for three days! Such cheer prevailed, in fact, that even Miss Dorcas Culpeper, spinster, and Lawrence, the happy father, became completely reconciled. Soothed by the grateful influences of barbecued meats and draughts of rum and sugar, Lawrence led Miss Culpeper through the minuet. ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... used to imagine that the great cases were swaying and dancing a minuet, and she fully expected the tomes would all come a-toppling down and smother her—and she didn't care much if they would; but they never did. She was the mother of two children—the boy Robert, born the year after her marriage; and in a little ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... among the children, bad luck to them—I that was near dyin' of it when I was an infant; and I was the only officer in the regiment, when we were at Athlone, that was prevented going to the race ball—and I would not for a hundred pounds. I was to dance the first minuet, and the first country dance, with that beautiful creature, Miss Rose Cox. I was makin' a glass of brandy punch—not feelin' quite myself—and I dhressed and all, in our room, when Ensign Higgins, a ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Quackery, and were received with loud laughter: they danced a minuet, to which Death clinked the music with ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... into line!" He heard the calls that followed—"Eyes front!" "Steady," "Quick march," "Halt, dress "—and felt, rather than saw, the whole elaborate manoeuvre; the rear ranks locking up, the covering sergeants jigging about like dancers in a minuet—pace to the rear, side step to the right—the pivot men with stiff arms extended, the companies wheeling up and dressing; all ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mirth than their decorum. There was no sort of frolic in which Goldsmith would not indulge for the amusement of his guests; he would sing them songs; he would throw his wig to the ceiling; he would dance a minuet. And then they had cards, forfeits, blind-man's-buff, until Mr. Blackstone, then engaged on his Commentaries in the rooms below, was driven nearly mad by the uproar. These parties would seem to have been of a most nondescript character—chance gatherings ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... of a minuet, and swept a low curtsy, coming up to the recover with the prettiest little foot in the world pointed out. Her mother came in as she was in this attitude; my lady had been in her closet, having taken poor Frank's conversion in a very ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... every minute since we left Colombo was laid bare to its minutest detail. Lascars slipped by me in the half-darkness, the voices of two lovers near alternated with their expressive silences, and from the music saloon there came the pretty strains of a minuet, played very deftly. Under the influence of this music my thoughts became less exact; they drifted. My eyes shifted to the lights of the 'Porcupine' in the distance, and from them again to the figures passing and repassing me on the deck. The "All's well" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Court is rolling towards Choisy, through the summer afternoon: the royal tears still flow; but a word mispronounced by Monseigneur d'Artois sets them all laughing, and they weep no more. Light mortals, how ye walk your light life-minuet, over bottomless abysses, divided from ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... terrible. Mons was arrested the same night in his rooms, and dragged fainting into the Tsar's presence, where he confessed his disloyalty. A few days later he was beheaded, at the very moment when the Empress was dancing a minuet with her ladies, a smile on her lips, whatever grief was in her heart. The following day she was driven by her husband past the scaffold where her lover's dead body was exposed to public view—so close, in fact, that her dress brushed against ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... Not at all. And not like Madame Anybody's finished pupils. Not the least. It was not quadrille dancing, nor minuet dancing, nor even country-dance dancing. It was neither in the old style, nor the new style, nor the French style, nor the English style: though it may have been, by accident, a trifle in the Spanish style, which is a ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... was not the only custom they revived that evening. After the banquet was over, and the ladies had got some light shawls and gone out into the mild summer night, and when the long marquee was cleared, and the band installed at the farther end, then there was a murmured talk of a minuet. Who could dance it? Should they ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... himself into the dance with the greatest heartiness. The music was played rather slowly, to give Aunt Ruth time to get about, and the result was almost the stately effect of a minuet. Never had he put more grace and finish into his steps, and when he bowed to Aunt Ruth it was as a courtier drops knee before a queen. His unfamiliarity with the figures gave him excuse to keep his eyes upon ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... lips, was full of compensation; she had auburn hair of a hue that could be qualified as nothing less than gorgeous, and she seemed to move through life with a stately grace, as she would have walked through an old-fashioned minuet. Gentlemen connected with the navy have the advantage of seeing many types of women; they are able to compare the ladies of New York with those of Valparaiso, and those of Halifax with those of the Cape of Good Hope. Eaymond ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... and "Planchette," tripped it respectively with the "barkeep" of the White Elephant Saloon and a Minneapolis shoe-drummer. In the centre of the floor the new plasterer and his wife moved through the figures of the French minuet with the stiff-kneed grace of two self-conscious giraffes, while Mrs. Percy Parrott, a long-limbed lady with a big, white, Hereford-like face, capered with "Tinhorn Frank," the oily, dark, craftily observant proprietor of the "Walla Walla Restaurant and Saloon." ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... exquisite felicity of Adelaide Neilson's acting of Juliet that she glided into harmony with that tragical undertone, and, with seemingly a perfect unconsciousness of it—whether prattling to the old nurse, or moving, sweetly grave and softly demure, through the stately figures of the minuet—was already marked off from among the living, already overshadowed by a terrible fate, already alone in the bleak loneliness of the broken heart. Striking the keynote thus, the rest followed in easy sequence. The ecstasy ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... played such dangerous tricks Their own heresiarchs called them heretics, (Strange that one term such distant poles should link, The Priestleyan's copper and the Puseyan's zinc); Poems that shuffle with superfluous legs A blindfold minuet over addled eggs, Where all the syllables that end in ed, Like old dragoons, have cuts across the head; Essays so dark Champollion might despair To guess what mummy of a thought was there, Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, Looks like ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... saw for the first time the strange dance of the Native Companion. To and fro, and up and down beneath their scraggy gum-tree, the two great cranes footed it in a sort of grotesque minuet. There was a strange sort of angularity about all their movements, but, withal, a certain grace, bizarre and notable. And while the Native Companions solemnly paced through what was really a dance of death for them, Finn and Black-tip and Warrigal stalked them as imperceptibly as shadows lengthen ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... of all writers are, to my mind, those whose mastery of their art grows as the initial impulse declines. But my young friend appeared to me to value only prodigal and fantastic vigour, and to prefer the sword-dance to the minuet. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dictated treaties. She had subjugated great cities and provinces. She had forced the Castilian pride to yield her the precedence. She had summoned Italian princes to prostrate themselves at her footstool. Her authority was supreme in all matters of good breeding, from a duel to a minuet. She determined how a gentleman's coat must be cut, how long his peruke must be, whether his heels must be high or low, and whether the lace on his hat must be broad or narrow. In literature she gave law to the world. The fame of her great writers filled Europe. No other country ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... slow, slow ascending, as the smoke-wreaths Rise from the hearthstones of our native hamlets, Their music strikes the ear like Gascon patois!. . . (The old man seats himself, and gets his flute ready): Your flute was now a warrior in durance; But on its stem your fingers are a-dancing A bird-like minuet! O flute! Remember That flutes were made of reeds first, not laburnum; Make us a music pastoral days recalling— The soul-time of your youth, in country pastures!. . . (The old man begins to play the airs of Languedoc): Hark to the music, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... Don Diego walked a minuet with Madam Clement; for whom, by this time, he had contracted an extraordinary degree of affection. Valentine had the honour to dance with the incomparable Serafina, whose beauty and attractions dazzled the eyes of the new-comers, and struck her bashful partner with awe and confusion; ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... Miss Mirvan danced a minuet; but I had not the courage to follow her example. In our walks I saw Lord Orville. He was quite alone, but did not observe us. Yet, as he seemed of no party, I thought it was not impossible that he might join us; and though I did not wish much to dance at all-yet, as I ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... distribute them with as much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony. Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel truth, worthily to crown this sublime production, I tacked to the end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the streets.... I gave it as my own just as resolutely as though I had been speaking ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... furs and shot bears. George, who never cared for field sports, and whose health was still delicate, was a special favourite with the French ladies, who were accustomed to see very few young English gentlemen speaking the French language so readily as our young gentleman. He danced the minuet elegantly. He learned the latest imported French catches and songs and played them beautifully on his violin; and to the envy of poor Harry, who was absent on a bear-hunt, he even had an affair of honour with a young ensign, whom he pinked on the shoulder, and with ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... since the greatest thing in it seemed to be this hateful, miscalled love that preceded sorrow and shame and death. Was love always loathsome to look upon? Not in pictures or on the stage, where it was represented as a kind of minuet in which the man makes graceful advances to a woman who smiles as she draws away, but ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattlemarket, cocks, hens don't crow, snakes hissss. There's music everywhere. Ruttledge's door: ee creaking. No, that's noise. Minuet of Don Giovanni he's playing now. Court dresses of all descriptions in castle chambers dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating dockleaves. Nice that is. Look: look, look, look, look, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... bar, or slow, 3 in a bar. "Three o'Clock in the Morning," a ballroom waltz is in the slow tempo, while "In the Good Old Summertime" is more rapid, adapted for fast movements and waltz clogs. "Valse Coppelia," played one in a bar, is the type for dainty Ballet work. The stately Minuet ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... of the lanterns above, her long train caught, woman-fashion, over her arm. Then, with a low word to the pin-headed young man, followed by a downward wave of his palm to denote the time, and the child's fingers firm in his own, Felix led her through an old-fashioned, stately minuet, telling her in an undertone just what steps ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that was! It began like a minuet and ended something like the haymakers. Griselda had not the least idea what the figures or steps were, but it did not matter. If she did not know, her shoes or something about her did; for she got on famously. ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... neither of us had any exact notions on the subject. Ashatea sometimes joined us, and moved about very gracefully, performing figures of her own invention, which I have since discovered greatly resemble those of the minuet of Europe. ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... fencing, riding the great horse, and music, came into my head: but, as they required expense and time, I comforted myself, with regard to dancing, that I had learned a little in my youth, and could walk a minuet genteelly enough; as to fencing, I thought my good-humour would preserve me from the danger of a quarrel; as to the horse, I hoped it would not be thought of; and for music, I imagined I could easily acquire the reputation of it; for I had heard some of my schoolfellows ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... grass plot before the door, burnished pigeons cooed, and trod their stately minuet, their iridescent plumage showing every opaline splendor as the sunlight smote them; and on a buttress of the clock tower, a lonely hedge-sparrow poured his heart out in that peculiarly pathetic threnody which no ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... judgment (for a hasty sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while Jean-Baptiste and my youngest sister danced a minuet on the grass, to the notes of some strolling lutanist who had found us out. He is visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he discoursed ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... When they all went in I do not know, for I was watching the sky. By and by I looked back at the pasture and the open places in the wood, and all alike were filled with a wavering crowd that seemed to trip lightly and noiselessly as if in a minuet. Little by little they blotted out familiar outlines till only the tallest of pines looming dark against the lighter horizon had form. All else was a void, not that of chaos but a soft cosmos ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... jerk and a spring, Very long was his Leg, though but short was his Wing; He took but three leaps, and was soon out of sight, Then chirp'd his own praises the rest of the night. With step so majestic the Snail did advance, And promised the Gazers a Minuet to dance; But they all laughed so loud that he pulled in his head, And went in his own little chamber to bed. Then as Evening gave way to the shadows of Night, Their Watchman, the Glowworm, came out with a light. "Then Home let us hasten while yet we can see, For no Watchman is waiting for you ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of dancing, baskets of peaches, china oranges (a little out of season), biscuits, ices, and wine-and-water were presented to the royal family and dancers. The ball lasted just two hours. The monarch did not dance, but for the first two rounds of the minuet even the queen does not turn her back to him. Yet her behavior is as easy ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... dear, that grandmamma danced a minuet with General Lafayette; it looks out, you know, upon a white thorn planted by the General himself, and one of the windows has not been opened for fifty years, because the spray of English ivy your Great-aunt Emmeline set out with her own hands ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... "choker," and upon all occasions of ceremony, black shorts and silks, with gold buckles. Remarkably upright and somewhat pompous in his gait, and abominating the free-and-easy manners of the modern school, his bow would have graced the court of Versailles, and his step was a subdued minuet. Equipped with somewhat more than his wonted care, the rev. junior bursar of Oriel was introduced into Mrs Phillips's little drawing-room, accompanying, and strongly contrasting with, three gentlemen in scarlet and gold. Hurriedly did the good old lady seize her spectacles, and rising to receive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... goodness and greatness are synonymous words;' and when his sister marries, she complains that her brother 'has long made all other men indifferent to her. Such an infinite difference!' In the evening, according to custom, she dances a minuet with her bridegroom, but whispers a friend that she would have performed better had she danced with ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the fourth lesson to-day, and, as far as the rules of composition go, am tolerably satisfied with her; she put the bass to the first minuet which I placed before her, very correctly. We now commenced writing in three parts. She tried it, and fatigued herself in attempts, but it was impossible to help her; nor can we move on a step further, for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... a jig with mirth than a minuet with melancholy," laughed the girl; "and yet it would take a great deal to make me miserable if I were with you, and you loved me, my dear aunt. Still, I own I like to be rich, so as to have everything I want, and give everybody what they want; ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Ombre, of Macao. She spent hours over the tambour-frame. She rode out on horse-back, with a riding-master. She had a music-master to teach her the spinet; a dancing-master, too, to teach her the Minuet and the Triumph and the Gaudy. All these accomplishments she found mighty hard. She was afraid of her horse. All the morning, she dreaded the hour when it would be brought round from the stables. She dreaded her dancing-lesson. Try as she would, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... quadrille, waltz, reel, fandango, polka, two-step, polonaise, mazurka, schottische, allemande cancan, minuet, courant, bolero, gavot. Associated Words: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... persons at Sir Thomas's, and yet was it so well conducted that nobody felt a crowd. He had taken off all his doors, and so separated the old and the young, that neither were inconvenienced with the other. The ball began at eight; each man danced one minuet with his partner, and then began country dances. There were four-and-twenty couple, divided into twelve a@d twelve: each set danced two dances, and then retired into another room, while the other set took their two; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... craftsmanship who complain of its difficulties. Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet, although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance music. We must allow for the infinite variety of creative intention, technique and result. The true defence of rhyme and stanza against the arguments of extreme ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... look for in the best prose writers, and occasionally one feels the justice of Johnson's stricture, that "he sometimes talked partly from ostentation", or of Hazlitt's criticism that he seemed to be "perpetually calling the speaker out to dance a minuet with ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... minuet had been paced to the gentle music of the lute and clavichord, a schottische succeeded to the martial ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... dances," said Dorothy, "only the two-step and minuet. I think the minuet is the prettiest of ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... with the logs they were to saw. There a girl sat sleeping. Could it be Femke? The linen danced about her to the music of the wind, the shirts making graceful bows and extending their sleeves. Nightcaps, dickeys and drawers danced the minuet; stockings, skirts, collars, handkerchiefs waltzed thicker and thicker around the sleeping girl. Her curls began to flutter—a smile, a sigh, and she sprang to her feet. A whirlwind ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... courtesy to gay dandies and jovial squires arrayed in coats of many colors, broidered vests, knee breeches and silken hose, brilliant buckles at knee and on slippers, their long hair worn ringleted and curled, or tied in queues. In stately measure the graceful minuet would open the ball. Then the gayer strains of the old Virginia reel would cause even the dignified dame or sober squire to relax; and in laughter and merry-making the hours would speed, till the gradual paling of the stars and a flush in the east would warn the merry ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... knew his toes to be tender.) But, really, at my time of life and at Jarber's, it is too much of a good thing. There is an orchestra still standing in the open air at the Wells, before which, in the presence of a throng of fine company, I have walked a minuet with Jarber. But, there is a house still standing, in which I have worn a pinafore, and had a tooth drawn by fastening a thread to the tooth and the door-handle, and toddling away from the door. And how should ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... balanced against a rival fragment of blue; the whole a court-ball, in which the nation had no more share than if it had been danced in the saloon of Windsor; a masquerade in which the political minuet was gravely danced by the peerage in character, and of which the nation heard scarcely even the fiddles. But those times have passed away, and, for the honour of common sense, they have passed never ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... dab-chick's." A lady has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... crowning glory, the very clasp or aigrette of Shepperton church-adornment—namely, an organ, not very much out of repair, on which a collector of small rents, differentiated by the force of circumstances into an organist, will accompany the alacrity of your departure after the blessing, by a sacred minuet ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... question; but we know no way of answering it but by asking in return why an Esquimaux Indian should not compose an overture equal to any of Handel's, or a Dutch boor dance a pas seul as well as Vestris, or a minuet as well as the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... little beauties encased in a slipper of blue silk, clasped close to the shape by a buckle of brilliants. The trooper caught himself sighing as he thought, though it was good for nothing in the stirrup, how enchantingly it would grace a minuet. ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... capacity houses at Dreamland. Then there was a pretty boy who could do things to the piano, a funeral-faced duck that could tell funny stories, and a bunch of six or eight likely-lookin' ladies and gents who'd laid themselves out to prance through what they called a minuet. Lastly there ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... from her. The air was close and heavy with strange smells. She felt as though she were swaying like a pendulum. The old, familiar objects grew grotesquely large and hazy; the deep shadows in the corners multiplied, and began to dance a solemn minuet, advancing, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... three weeks and then resigned. He went back to the garret and sweet liberty—having had his taste of luxury, but miserable in it all—wondering how a gavotte or a minuet could make a man forget that he was living in a city where thirty thousand human beings were constantly only one meal beyond the sniff ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... accident, to make good his retreat home. He shakes hands with nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on, and leads "his Vashti" forth to public view with a look of consciousness and attention to etiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out to dance a minuet. He is delicate to fastidiousness, and glad to get back, after a romantic adventure with crazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child on a common, to the drawing room and the ladies again, to the sofa and the tea-kettle—No, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the favorites will the king throw his handkerchief? With which of the two will he converse most? Will he feel at ease as he treads the minuet under the eyes of the devotee? Or will he venture to recognize HER in presence ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... the fellow who danced the minuet so well in our show; and Dr. Edward Watkins is coming out with Tom ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... hymn; song &c (poem) 597; canticle, canzonet^, cantata, bravura, lay, ballad, ditty, carol, pastoral, recitative, recitativo^, solfeggio^. Lydian measures; slow music, slow movement; adagio &c adv.; minuet; siren strains, soft music, lullaby; dump; dirge &c (lament) 839; pibroch^; martial music, march; dance music; waltz &c (dance) 840. solo, duet, duo, trio; quartet, quartett^; septett^; part song, descant, glee, madrigal, catch, round, chorus, chorale; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... old, who at once gave tokens of a degree of genius far surpassing all experience, and really bordering on the marvellous. In his fourth year he could play all sorts of little pieces on the piano. He only required half an hour to learn a minuet, and one hour for a longer movement; and in his fifth year he actually composed some pretty short pieces, several of which are ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... We commenced with a minuet. I led out one lady after another, and precisely those who were the most disagreeable could not bring themselves to leave off. Charlotte and her partner began an English country dance, and you must imagine my delight when it was their turn to dance the figure with us. You ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... bow to Minos, and then threw himself into an erect attitude, and imitated the motion of taking snuff with his right hand. Minos asked him what he had to say for himself. He answered, he would dance a minuet with any spirit in Elysium: that he could likewise perform all his other exercises very well, and hoped he had in his life deserved the character of a perfect fine gentleman. Minos replied it would be great pity to rob the world of so fine a gentleman, and therefore desired him to take the ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... mount through pine woods, I took in my right hand the unhallowed staff, and with a quaking spirit applied it to the donkey. Modestine brisked up her pace for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into her former minuet. Another application had the same effect, and so with the third. I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience to lay my hand rudely on a female. I desisted, and looked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... later Jean-Christophe, with the chairs arranged about him, was playing a comedy in music, which he had made up of scraps that he remembered from the theater, and he was making steps and bows, as he had seen them done in a minuet, and addressing himself to the portrait of Beethoven which hung above the table. As he turned with a pirouette he saw his grandfather watching him through the half-open door. He thought the old man was laughing at him; he was abashed, and stopped dead; he ran to the window, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... face, suggesting that of a grandfather clock, was quaintly decorated with garlands of red roses. It had beautifully pierced hands, small brass cherub's heads at the corners, and at the top a single small hand pointed to its musical repertoire which consisted of: cotillion, jig, minuet, song, air, ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... established himself in an old mansion in Whitehall Garden where belles and beaux had danced the stately minuet. It became a dynamo of energy whose wires radiated everywhere. "More Munitions" was the creed that ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... him how to throw confetti; and that he and Lady F. had given a dance at the Embassy for her coming-out, when Connie, at seventeen, and His Excellency—still the handsomest man in the room, despite years and gout—had danced the first waltz together, and a subsequent minuet; which—though Connie did not say so—had been the ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... invisible band-playing, and was trying to catch hold of the buttercups. I lay down at full length and looked off through the stems, and then I saw for the first time how close they were, and that they constantly swayed and touched, and sometimes locked fast together for a second. Stately as a minuet it looked, but joyous and loving as the wildest waltz I ever danced in your arms, my darling. Oh, how dare we presume to be so sure that the flowers are not glad as we are glad! On such a day as to-day I never doubt it; and I picked one as reverently ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... of Schifanoja came back to the lovers, a reflected gleam from those fair autumn days illumined their thoughts. Mendelssohn's Minuet called up before them a vision of the villa by the sea, of rooms filled with the perfume of the terraced garden, of cypresses lifting their dark heads into the soft sky, of flaming sails upon a ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Minimum minimumo. Minister (religious) pastro. Minister (polit.) ministro. Ministry ministraro. Minor (age) neplenagxa. Minor (mus.) molo, mola. Minority (age) neplenagxo. Minority malplimulto. Minstrel bardo, kantisto. Mint mento. Minute menueto. Minuet (time) minuto. Minute (note) noto. Minute malgrandega. Minuti detaleto. Miracle miraklo. Miraculous mirakla. Mire sxlimo, koto. Mirror spegulo. Mirth gajeco, kun—. Miry sxlimhava. Misapply eraralmeti. Misapprehend malkompreni. Misapprehension ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... promotion of civilization have engaged Mr. Tom Matthews to teach the Hottentots the minuet-de-la-Cour and tumbling. He departs with the other missionaries when the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... being resumed, the master of ceremonies and the sedan chair lady arose: he led her to the centre of the room, Foote's minuet struck up, when the pair commenced the movements with an attention to time. They performed the crossings and turnings, the advancings and retreatings, and obeisances, during which there was a perfect silence; and they concluded the ...
— Minnie's Pet Dog • Madeline Leslie
... let us hasten to find our hostess. They will be forming for the minuet directly, and you must dance it with me, sweet wife,—unless ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... Half-moon Regiment, asked me to walk a minuet," observed Cecile, tossing her head. "I'm sure I don't know what to say. He's ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... seated at the piano that she could watch Patty's dance, and in a moment the two were in harmony, and Patty was gliding and bowing in a charming minuet, while Mrs. Van Reypen played in ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... Mr Prompter, I expect to dance first goddess; I will not dance under Miss Minuet; I am sure I shew more to the audience than any lady upon ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... laced, would become you wonderfully well?—and a grey hat with a blue feather—and a pretty nag to ride on—and all the soldiers to present arms as you pass, and say, "There goes the Captain's lady"? What do you think of a side-box at Lincoln's Inn playhouse, or of standing up to a minuet with ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were talking of the minuet, and Kenneth rose to illustrate a step and bow that he ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... by Atalanta. Three more new operas were ready, or nearly so; Handel seems to have prepared himself for the winter in better time than usual. But neither Arminio (January 12, 1737), nor Giustino (February 16), nor even Berenice, with its famous minuet (May 18), could save Handel from ruin. The rival opera-house was in no better case. Handel was obliged to close Covent Garden on June 1, and the Haymarket followed suit ten days later. Opera at both houses had been killed, mainly by the folly of ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... an unusually elaborate grooming. Finn had an exciting sense of impending change and adventure, and even Tara seemed moved to a stately kind of restlessness which kept her pacing the den as though performing a minuet, instead of sitting or lying at her ease. Tara seemed to be a good deal moved and excited when two bright nickel chains, with queer little tin medals attached to them, were produced, and fitted on two new green collars for Finn and Kathleen. She nosed these chains with great ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... the Snail did advance, And he promised the gazers a minuet dance; But they all laughed so loudly, he pulled in his head, And went, in his own ...
— The Butterfly's Ball - The Grasshopper's Feast • R.M. Ballantyne
... will have to back up against a fence sometime to hide his patches from you," laughed Roxanne in such merriment that anybody with any sense of pleasant humor would have joined her at the thought of the Idol and me dancing a minuet to keep ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and big rosette, The slender shoe adorning, Of curtseying through the minuet With laughter, love, or scorning. And 'tis O! for the shout Of the roustabout, As he hies ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... dance where the dancers of the different sexes stand opposite each other, instead of side by side, as in the minuet, rigadoon, louvre, &c. and now corruptly ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... sentence there is an argument. No man in England influenced his time more than Bolingbroke. He was the inspirer of writers. Burke devoured Bolingbroke, and when he took up his pen, wrote with the same magnificent, stately minuet step. Finally he was full of the essence of Bolingbroke to the point of saturation, and then he began to criticize him. Had Bolingbroke been alive Burke would have quarreled with him—they were so much alike. As it was, Burke contented ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... more solid and unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in the field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the composer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... it in the light of a recreation to have my ears teased with measured noises," said Mr. Casaubon. "A tune much iterated has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort of minuet to keep time—an effect hardly tolerable, I imagine, after boyhood. As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... unformed melodies rustle in quick gusts along the keys as if wavering shadows, yet with all the familiar rhythm and family likeness, filling the mind of the hearer with the atmosphere and necessity of what is to follow, while gradually the full harmonies unfold themselves. The introduction of the minuet is one of the most striking portions. The scene of the minuet in the opera is a vision of rural loveliness and repose, whispering of flowers, fields, and happy flying hours. All this becomes poetized, and the music seems to imply rich ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... that night that Ellis drew Mary Philipse aside and told her the tale that grew passionate in the telling. Fortune was kind, for he told it to the soft accompaniment of wine glasses ringing, and the slow music of the stately minuet. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... I forget," said old Lady Storms, "seeing the pretty thing look after him when he bowed and left her after they had danced a minuet together. Her look set me to watching her, and she gazed on him through every dance with her large heaven-blue eyes, and when at last she saw him turn and come towards her again her breast went up and down and her breath fluttered, and she ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the minuet and quadrilles, teaches us to walk and courtesy gracefully. To tell the truth, I was so ignorant when I came, that I knew but one mode of making a salutation; but there are several kinds, which must be employed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... talk with delight of the royal family, and the beauty of the young princes and princesses. She cannot be brought to think of the present king otherwise than as an elegant young man, rather wild, but who danced a minuet divinely; and before he came to the crown, would often mention him ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... away her Senses; and that is the best Excuse for her. Ah! how often hath she cast a jealous Eye on some Heifer! and cried out, Why should that vixen please my Love? Behold, says she, how the Slut dances a Minuet on the Grass before him: Let me die, but she is silly enough to think her Airs become her in my Love's Eyes. At length she resolved to punish her Rivals. One Heifer she ordered barbarously to be yoked to the Plough; another she condemned to be sacrificed, and ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... power would disarm the vengeance of the savages. The event was so grossly unjust that it not only aroused the Raritans, but all neighboring tribes, and they prepared for war. The hitherto peaceful Raritans killed the whites whenever they found them alone in the forest. Fifteen years before some of Minuet's men murdered an Indian belonging to a tribe seated beyond the Harlem River. His nephew, then a boy, who saw the outrage and made a vow of vengeance, had now grown to be a lusty man. He executed his vow by murdering a wheelwright while he was examining his tool-chest for a tool, ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... with him.[88] He was absolutely without verbal memory, and he pronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything from masters. Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself up in his room, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... inseparable. Dancing is the poetry of motion, and its connection with music, as the poetry of sound, occurs at all times. In our own day musical themes are marked by forms originally dance times, as waltz time, gavotte time, minuet time, etc. ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... to find him an admirer of the classical in music and recommending it to his people as the best form of musical education. He holds that there is much in common between it and the folk-songs of Germany. At Court he revived classical dances like the minuet and the gavotte. He is devoted to opera and never leaves before the end of the performance. Concerts frequently take place in the royal palaces at Potsdam and Berlin, items on the programme for them being often suggested ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... vice-reine of the Chateau St Louis, she helped her consort to settle nice points of etiquette and maintain a dignity befitting His Majesty's chosen representative. How did the seigneurs rank among themselves and with the leading English-speaking people? Who were to dance in the state minuet? Should dancing cease when the bishops came in, and for how long? Was that curtsy dropped quite low enough to her viceregal self, and did that debutante offer her blushing cheek in quite the proper way to Carleton ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... world had been all shaken up and everything was confused and no one could put it to rights. All those dames whose ancestors had sailed unknown waters were in the front row of the chorus, and all the chorus girls were dancing a stately minuet at Old Point Comfort. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was trying to commit suicide by becoming a biological freak, and the Madonna of the Chair was wearing a ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... in this way with you for two weeks, but every day with some slight change. After a short time, I would combine with this practice the study of two or three pieces, suitably arranged for the piano; for example, Mozart's minuet in E flat, arranged by Schulhoff, and his drinking-song, or similar pieces. We will, at present, have nothing to do with Beethoven. You are, perhaps, afraid that all this might be tedious; but I have never been ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... Sir Harry, to be thus receiv'd, rewards the Soldier's Toils; and, faith, we have maul'd the fancy French-men, near Twenty Thousand we left fast asleep, taught the remaining few a new Minuet-step, and sent 'em home to sing ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... forest way. In many directions were tolerably smooth rides cut, and along them they had good gallops, to the great delight of Florimel after the restraints of Rotten Row, where riding had seemed like dancing a minuet with a waltz in her heart. Malcolm, so far as human companionship went, found it dull, for Lady Clementina's groom regarded him with the contempt of superior age, the most contemptible contempt of all, seeing years are not the wisdom ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... universally popular of the serious authors of a generation—and Macaulay was nothing less than this—affects style coupe or style soutenu. The critic of style is not the dancing-master, declaiming on the deep ineffable things that lie in a minuet. He is not the virtuoso of supines and gerundives. The morality of style goes deeper 'than dull fools suppose.' When Comte took pains to prevent any sentence from exceeding two lines of his manuscript ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... September, and it is told that upon their arrival the wonderful boy-musician saved his father the payment of customs duties. He made friends with the custom-house officer, showed him his harpsichord, played him a minuet on his little fiddle, and the thing was done,—"Pass—free ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... and the royal family. His royal highness condescended to honour a ball in the evening; and often did young Saumarez hear his aunt (a sister of his mother, married to Major Brabazon of the 65th regiment,) relate her having opened the ball in a minuet with his ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... trembling hands. 'Come, come, ma'am,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'I can't let you cut an old friend in this way. I have come down expressly to have a long talk, and another rubber with you; and we'll show these boys and girls how to dance a minuet, before they're ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Butterfield came by, tripping it lightly, holding each other's hands, he in a bob wig with a sword by his side, she in high-heeled red shoes and a cap decked with flowers and ribbons. She smiled and ogled, as if about to dance a minuet. I almost laughed as I saw them, they appeared so vivid and real. Then Captain Longfleet came upon the scene as I fancied him, dressed in a cocked-hat and feathers, a long sword buckled to his side, high boots, a red coat, and a waistcoat ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... horsemen accustomed to the measured paces of the manege, whose highest art consisted in consuming a whole hour in achieving at a gallop the length of the terrace of St. Germain. The professors of this equestrian minuet, as solemn and formal in the saddle as was the dancer Dupre in the ballets of the period, predicted the speedy decay of the old system of horsemanship and the extinction of the native breed of horses if France should allow her soil to be invaded by foreign ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... an art to be acquired only with long study. It was a necessity that a gentleman should dance, and dance well, and the stately minuet required accuracy, grace, and dignity. Dancing in those days was an art; it has fallen grievously from that ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... of the army, navy, or diplomatic corps; the light of a thousand wax-candles flashing from a myriad of sconces,—made the scene one of the utmost splendor. All at once, in the midst or the stately measures of the old-fashioned minuet, a murmur rose near the entrance to the hall, and spread until every one was whispering, that news had come of a great naval battle, a victory. Word was brought to the Secretary of the Navy. He ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Caroline was not going to live long after the marriage of her brother was "greatly exaggerated"—she lived to be ninety-eight, a century lacking two years! Her mind was bright to the last—when ninety she sang at a concert given for the benefit of an old ladies' home. At ninety-six she danced a minuet with the King of Prussia, and requested that worthy not to introduce her as "the woman astronomer, because, you know, I was only the assistant of my brother!" William Herschel died in his eighty-fourth year, with his fame at full, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... rise at sight of the soft brocade whose bodice once throbbed with the happy heartbeats of this Virginia maiden, making pretty curtsy in rosy pleasure, the admiration of the English Court. Perhaps in this very gown she danced the stately minuet with young Charles Mordaunt; perhaps hid beneath its fluttering laces his first love sonnet. So, in those far colonial days it knew the life of her. The grace of the young body seems still to linger in the pale, shimmering folds; and the clinging touch of the old court gown ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... friends he greets with careful etiquette, Permits his well-poised tail-tip to vibrate, Then treads with them the solemn minuet That antique custom and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... the public pulse," replied Carley. "The graceful waltz, like the stately minuet, flourished back in the days when ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... timbre of her voice that left him with the odd sensation that she was out of place in the room—that her real sphere was in the expanse of unbridled nature. He could see her wealth of copper-hued hair blown by the western wind; he could picture her joining in Spring's minuet of swaying rose-bushes. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... finding them. The second movement, if played in a very singing but not dragging manner, will be found enjoyable, although by no means sensational. The ideas are musical and the spirit earnest. The finale, in the tempo of a minuet, is very pleasing indeed. Here, also, the purely musical idea rules everything. The problem with the composer is to treat an idea which pleased him, and to carry it through all the changes and modifications which occurred to ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... sweeps the clothes together into a neat pile and stands waiting by the door. There enters Lord Eglantine, the Beau. A trifle pale, disordered, calm. He has been gambling all night. To the rhythm of a minuet Harlequin takes his cloak, hat, and cane, takes off his coat and gets him into a gorgeous dressing-gown, and so into his chair. And there he sits looking for all the world like the bundle ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker |
