a. Chiefly poet. or rhet. [f. VOICE sb. + -FUL.]
1. Endowed with, or as if with, a voice; having voice or power of utterance; vocal.
c. 1611. Chapman, Iliad, XVIII. 459. The Seniors then did beare The voicefull Heralds scepters.
1842. Faber, Styrian Lake, etc., 100. And for the voiceful Church and poor mute world Doth he not keep his potent Cross unfurled?
1869. Farrar, Fam. Speech, i. 11. As they supposed that Song had been learned by man first, and by all voiceful creatures.
transf. 1842. Faber, Styrian Lake, etc., 43. Man’s voiceful destinies, Like the surge of meeting seas, Are to them but a wild song.
1860. Ruskin, Mod. Paint., V. IX. ix. § 24. 301. Death, not silent or patient, waiting his appointed hour, but voiceful, venomous.
b. Of a stream, the sea, etc.
Also in the sense of ‘full of sound or sounds.’
1613–6. W. Browne, Brit. Past., II. iii. 70. To take the kinde ayre of a wistfull morne Neere Tauies voycefull streame.
1818. Coleridge, Fancy in Nubibus, 14. That blind Bard, who … Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea!
1859. Sala, Gas-light & D., xxviii. 316. Our green lanes and voiceful woods.
1891. Miss Dowie, Girl in Karp., 202. The trumpeters … blew long notes of inconsequent music, which the Czeremosz caught in its voiceful waters.
c. Vocal with, expressive of, something.
(a) 1856. Ruskin, Mod. Paint., III. IV. xiv. § 10. The mountains were thus voiceful with perpetual rebuke.
1863. Goulburn, Office H. Comm., I. 79. A law … every statute of which … is voiceful with condemnation.
1879. Farrar, St. Paul, I. 520. He sailed along shores of which every hill and promontory is voiceful with heroic memories.
(b) 1868. Contemp. Rev., IX. 76. Blake’s poems … run on a sort of parallel of contrast—the one creative, the other voiceful of revolt and self-consciousness.
2. Of or pertaining to the voice; uttered by the voice or voices.
1821. L. Hunt, Indicator, No. 75 (1822), II. 177. He has less of the oracular or voiceful part of his art.
1867. Howells, Ital. Journ., 62. In clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her guardian Alps.
1876. Farrar, Marlb. Serm., xxxi. 303. Every silent, every voiceful appeal to that which each of us has in him of purest and sweetest.
3. Involving much speech or argument; contentious. rare–1.
1879. Meredith, Egoist, II. vi. 137. Dr. Middleton assented and entered on the voiceful ground of Greek metres.
Hence Voicefulness.
1849. Ruskin, Sev. Lamps, vi. § 10. 172. That deep sense of voicefulness … which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.
