She allowed, therefore, half an hour to pass away; and as at that moment all was silence in the old castle, as nothing was heard but the eternal murmur of the waves--that immense breaking of the ocean--with her pure, harmonious, and powerful voice, she began the first couplet of the
psalm then in great favor with the Puritans:
On the other hand, the Puritans affirmed that, when a
psalm was pealing from their place of worship, the echo which the forest sent them back seemed often like the chorus of a jolly catch, closing with a roar of laughter.
Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. Though he read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.
By the time they had swung in an irregular way from prayer to psalm, from psalm to history, from history to poetry, and Mr.
And all the people in the church looked at Karen's red shoes, and all the pictures, and as Karen knelt before the altar, and raised the cup to her lips, she only thought of the red shoes, and they seemed to swim in it; and she forgot to sing her psalm, and she forgot to pray, "Our Father in Heaven!"
Within sounded a psalm; a coffin, decked with flowers, was borne forth.
The coins abstracted and the missive written, he could not be gone too soon from the scene of these transgressions; and remembering how his father had once returned from church, on some slight illness, in the middle of the second
psalm, he durst not even make a packet of a change of clothes.
Irwine's reading a special service for her husband; and besides, she knew the funeral psalm was going to be sung for him.
Still more to-day: it was a special occasion, for an old man, familiar to all the parish, had died a sad death--not in his bed, a circumstance the most painful to the mind of the peasant--and now the funeral psalm was to be sung in memory of his sudden departure.
When the ceremony of plighting troth was over, the beadle spread before the lectern in the middle of the church a piece of pink silken stuff, the choir sang a complicated and elaborate
psalm, in which the bass and tenor sang responses to one another, and the priest turning round pointed the bridal pair to the pink silk rug.
but without clouds: riddles which can be guessed: to please such maidens I then composed an after-dinner
psalm."
His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or drive away evil spirits, was to sing
psalm tunes and the good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with awe at hearing his nasal melody, "in linked sweetness long drawn out," floating from the distant hill, or along the dusky road.
The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious
psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time.
"It is a fatted calf from the pastures of Bashan," said the Pharisee, "the heathen have dealt wonderfully with us let us raise up our voices in a
psalm --let us give thanks on the shawm and on the psaltery-on the harp and on the huggab-on the cythern and on the sackbut!"
Gashford, with a smiling face, but still with looks of profound deference and humility, betook himself towards his master's room, smoothing his hair down as he went, and humming a
psalm tune.
