"Aeolian harp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to take down what fell from his lips. And just as it fell it would have been literature. He was urged to write these things. But Leamy had not readily the will or the power to compel his spirit when the favoured moment had passed. He was mostly passive, like an AEolian harp, under the visitation. Ill-health, too, extreme and distressing, burdened him. He bore his trials cheerfully, and strove manfully to write, especially in his later days when the power and the will seemed to come to him just as illness ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... was very intimate with Laurier thinks he was a man of deep emotions. This may be doubted. A man who talked so easily and was so exquisitely conscious of himself could scarcely be considered spiritually profound. Other men and events played upon him like the wind on an Aeolian harp. He was tremendously impressionable; and by turns grandly impressive. A personal friend relates how a man with some experience as a critic of drama—probably himself—went to see Laurier by request for a talk on the political situation; how Laurier invited him to a chair and immediately took ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study, which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an AEolian harp, and an old sofa, half-bed, etc.; and all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. What a night! Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... long I had been sleeping when I was wakened by a voice that seemed to fill the room, low, soft, and musical as the tones of an Aeolian harp. I groped my way noiselessly in the dark to Max's bed and aroused him. Placing my hand over his mouth to insure ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... sometimes lightened on his face, made him cautious, and restrained his eagerness; while excessive consciousness kept her cheeks dyed with blushes, and her nerves vibrating sweet, wild music, like the strings of some aeolian harp when swept ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Under this disguise he looked upon himself as the spokesman of the Idea of the Omnipresence of the Deity. In order to appreciate the following beautiful letter, one of the finest Coleridge ever wrote, the reader should peruse Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp", "Lines written on leaving a Place of Retirement", "The Lime-Tree Bower", and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Wordsworth's sonnet, "It is a beauteous evening", and Coleridge's own "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni", also belong to the same feeling ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... the Duke of Buckleuch's hunters. A gentleman went toward them in the field, but they were shy of his approach, as he was a stranger, and slowly retreated, till he sounded a small musical instrument, called a mouth AEolian harp. On hearing this, they immediately erected their heads and turned round. On his sounding it again, they approached nearer, when he began to retreat, and they to advance. Having gone over a paling, one of the horses came up to him, ...
— Minnie's Pet Horse • Madeline Leslie
... on the heart-strings is followed by a strong stroke on conscience. The heart vibrates most readily in answer to gentle touches: the conscience, in answer to heavier, as the breath that wakes the chords of an Aeolian harp would pass silent through the brass of a trumpet. 'Wherefore art thou come?'—if to be taken as a question at all, which, as I have said, seems most natural, is either, 'What hast thou come to do?'—or, 'Why hast thou come to do it?' Perhaps it maybe fairly taken as including both. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... given him permission to accompany her, they took their way up Willoughby's Lane, whence it was possible to pass into the woodland stretches of the hillside. The day was clear and cold, with just enough wind to wake the aeolian harp of the forest into sound. Once in the woods, they advanced warily. "Listen to the red-polls," ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... talked on and on about him, with admiration, gratitude, devotion. And Miss St. John was glad of the veil of the twilight over her face as she listened, for the boy's enthusiasm trembled through her as the wind through an AEolian harp. Poor Robert! He did not know, I say, what he was doing, and so was ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the violin to her shoulder, and began to play. At first her chords were light and airy as the sounds from an AEolian harp; then the melody swelled until it broke into a gush of harmony that vibrated through every chord of the archduke's beating heart. As he stood breathless and entranced, she seemed to him like that picture by Fiesole, of the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... intervals when he could not dance with her he retired to the loggia, and thought about her. She was not only the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, but the most adorably responsive. He likened her poetically to an AEolian harp and himself ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... night long in the North region, where the light does not leave the sky, I looked out at the strange beauty of the white night and felt all the desolateness of the world, all the exiledom of man upon it. There was no lure, no temptation in that. The Aeolian harp of the heart does not always discourse battle music, and on this night it was as if an old sad minstrel sat before me and played unendingly one plaint, the story of a lost throne, of a lost family, lost children, a lost world. Thus a thought came to me: "We are all the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... her letter, leaned back, and murmured a long, trembling, "Farewell!" that was like a low, mournful vibration of an Aeolian harp, when the night-breeze breathes upon it. Then she pressed her right hand over her eyes, shuddered, and tremblingly put out her left for that which would end all. But, instead of the phial which she had placed there but a little before, her hand rested upon a book. Startled, she ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe |
