"Reverberation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passed my lips than—as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled, reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured, rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But as I placed my hand ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... The effect of her laugh is an extravagance, though the effect of the reverberation of voices in some parts of the mountains is very striking. There is, in 'The Excursion', an allusion to the bleat of a lamb thus re-echoed, and described without any exaggeration, as I heard it, on the side of Stickle Tarn, from the precipice that ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... his theses upon the door of his native state, and mighty was the reverberation. In a few weeks Page's Greensboro address had made its way all over the Southern States, and his melancholy figure, "the forgotten man" had become part of the indelible imagery of the Southern people. The portrait etched itself deeply into the popular consciousness ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... laws common to all human nature; that it perceives, however darkly, things which are for all ages true; that we can only understand it so far as we have some perception of the same truth; and that its fulness is developed and manifested more and more by the reverberation of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, in succeeding ages. You will understand Homer better by seeing his reflection in Dante, as you may trace new forms and softer colors in a ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... local needs three thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the wood-echoes and the reverberation of ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the ore stratum, the Wiley gallery took several twists. Laboriously he and Manuel advanced with the gas tube. It was stiflingly close. He counted the turns, one, two, three. Now the roar of machinery was a steady reverberation that shook the tunnel. He whispered ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... cannot find the smallest part of the personal weight of Washington in the narrative of his exploits. The authority of the name of Schiller is too great for his books. This inequality of the reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not accounted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap; but something resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran all their performance. The largest part of their power was latent. This is that which we call character,—a reserved force which acts directly by presence, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... first, one battery followed another with continuous reverberation, till all the air was filled with the roar of artillery. The other was more awful. The explosion was fearful. The smoke rose in form like a gigantic umbrella, and from its midst radiated every kind of murderous missile—shells were thrown and burst in all directions, muskets ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... branches of the trees to menacing and gloomy arms which appeared to hover with clawlike talons above the dark and forbidding road. The wind soughed with gloomy and increasing menace, a sudden light flared across the southern sky followed by the reverberation of distant thunder. ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sudden chill. The influence exercised by the voice of public scandal is a force which acts in opposition to the ordinary law of mechanics. It is strongest, not by concentration, but by distribution. To the primary sound we may shut our ears; but the reverberation of it in echoes is irresistible. On his way back, Midwinter's one desire had been to find Allan up, and to speak to him immediately. His one hope now was to gain time to contend with the new doubts and to silence the new misgivings; his one present anxiety was ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... simultaneously inept, I must say the spot broadcast and later newspaper and magazine accounts were uniformly disappointing. It was like the hundredth repetition of an oftentold story. The flash, the chaos, the mushroomcloud, the reverberation were all in precise order; nothing new, nothing startling, and I imagine the rest of the country, as I did, turned away from the radio with a distinct feeling of having ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... a race. He swept by like a mighty river: at the mercy of chance and natural obstacles, perhaps, but ever rolling on. So was he, both in life and in speech. Neither was his voice merely individual, it had in it the reverberation of a torrent—a melancholy, ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... settlement under the hill. Their particular brand of patriotism manifested itself in beating with small bars of iron on a large circular saw, suspended on a stick thrust through the hole in its centre and borne triumphantly between two youths. The reverberation, the deafening clangour of this, cannot possibly be described, or appreciated by one that has never heard it. Suffice it to say, that the fish-horns, even the cannon, ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... dread, he once more leaned for support against the wall, wondering, listening to the pounding of his heart, to the murmur of the muddy James, and the fall of a flake of plaster loosened by the dull reverberation of a distant gun; then suddenly his eye was caught by the kettle simmering on the fire, and he sighed in ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... suggestions in a man's ear). We may accordingly delude ourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates habit indicates feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, if conceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is only a sort of reverberation or penumbra ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... observation goes, the farther one penetrates the sombre solitudes of the woods, the more seldom does he hear the voice of any singing-bird. In spite of Chateaubriand's minuteness of detail, in spite of that marvellous reverberation of the decrepit tree falling of its own weight, which he was the first to notice, I cannot help doubting whether he made his way very deep into the wilderness. At any rate, in a letter to Fontanes, written ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... lower to the upper lake, the surpassing beauty of the "Eagle's nest" burst on their view; and as they hovered under its stupendous crags, clustering with all variety of verdure, the bugle and the cannon awoke the almost endless reverberation of sound which is engendered here. Passing onward, a sudden change is wrought; the soft beauty melts gradually away, and the scene hardens into frowning rocks and steep acclivities, making a befitting vestibule to the bold and bleak precipices of "The Reeks," which ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... missiles of destruction were hurled from the destroyers as they combed the waves for miles and miles around the spot where danger threatened. Each discharge of depth-bomb raised an avalanche of water; the deadly bombs blasting the depths for great distances, while the reverberation shook the transports, creating the impression that the transport was in direct ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... one of the most timid of our followers, who to save himself from wet feet had mounted an overladen pony, and was now in imminent danger both of Scylla and Charybdis, added to the interest of the picture; but, occasionally, the reverberation caused by the fragments of rock, which, detaching themselves from the upper regions, came tumbling down, not far from where we stood, warned us not to dwell upon the spot. We took the hint, and hastily extricating man and beast, though ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... with them the idea of the self—I come to feel myself as joyous or despairing in the sounds. The extent to which the idea of the self thus follows the objectified feelings depends largely upon the amount of their reverberation throughout the organism. When this is small, and the feelings are vague and tenuous, as in color appreciation, there is little or no definite projection of the idea of the self; when, on the other hand, it is large and the emotions are strong, as oftentimes ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... trumpets of Victory won by the Angel in this last trial. The reverberation passed through space as sound through its echo, filling it, and shaking the universe which Wilfrid and Minna felt like an atom beneath their feet. They trembled under an anguish caused by the dread of the mystery about to ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... a cavern by the sea-side, remarkable for the powerful reverberation of sounds. After dinner we took a boat, to explore this curious cavity. The boatmen, who seemed to be of a rank above that of common drudges, inquired who the strangers were, and being told we came one from Scotland, and the other from England, asked ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... afternoon, and this idea brought a cold sweat to her forehead, because he would certainly kiss her on her ear as he had often teased her by doing in the years gone by. It was this kiss she dreaded. Its dull reverberation deafened her to all outside sounds, and she could hear only the beatings of her own heart. When these terrors assailed her the forge was her only asylum, from whence she returned smiling and serene, feeling that Goujet, whose sonorous hammer ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... miles away, an ice-floe split with the prolonged reverberation of thunder. The aurora was gone. ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... the jollity by suggesting that Alfred "give Sammy's mewel a dose the next time he kicks you." This reference to the "mewel" was only a reverberation of the town talk as Lin had predicted. In fact, the reference to the "mewel" kicking Alfred became, and is still, a by-word in ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... giving back a piece of poetry, whose every word is a poem in itself, and by whose rhyme and accentuation a feeling of indescribable awe is instilled into the most fastidious reader's mind,—Dr. Bowring's version is but a feeble reverberation of the holy fire pervading our Dutch poet's anthem. But still there rests enough in his copy to give one a high idea of the original. I borrow the same Englishman's words when ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... black with age, and heard the smothered sound of a cracked bell and the barking of an asthmatic little dog. By the way the sounds echoed from the interior he knew that the rooms were encumbered with articles which left no space for reverberation,—a characteristic feature of the homes of workmen and humble households, where space and ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... teams to fetch the goods of the migrating families; for it was always by the vehicle of the farmer who required his services that the hired man was conveyed to his destination. That this might be accomplished within the day was the explanation of the reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim of the carters being to reach the door of the outgoing households by six o'clock, when the loading of their ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... with such a meal as I had been dreaming of for days past. For days, you are to remember, I had been skulking in the covered cart, a prey to cold, hunger, and an accumulation of discomforts that might have daunted the most brave; and the white table napery, the bright crystal, the reverberation of the fire, the red curtains, the Turkey carpet, the portraits on the coffee- room wall, the placid faces of the two or three late guests who were silently prolonging the pleasures of digestion, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there, as early as the sixteenth century, we begin to see thinkers endeavouring to modify or oppose these methods. At that time Paracelsus called attention to the reverberation of cannon as explaining the rolling of thunder, but he was confronted by one of his greatest contemporaries. Jean Bodin, as superstitious in natural as he was rational in political science, made sport of the scientific theory, and declared thunder to be "a flaming exhalation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... central aisle. As they did so, a tremendous weight of thunder seemed to descend solidly on the roof with a thudding burst as though a thousand walls had been battered down at one blow, . . the whole edifice rocked and trembled in the terrific reverberation, and almost simultaneously, the doors were violently jerked open, wrenched from their hinges, and hurled, all burning and split with flame, against the forward-fighting crowds! Several hundred fell under the fiery mass, a charred heap of corpses,—the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen, and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in his way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes intent upon the facade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself in ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... voice and tone, which gave a richness even to the foolish things she said. They were of an excellent insular tradition, full both of natural and of cultivated sweetness, and they puzzled him when other indications seemed to betray her—to refer her to more common air. They were like the reverberation of some ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... in this new England, the church, empty of the Divine Presence, was emptying, too, of its human visitors. She could hear great doors somewhere crash together, and the reverberation roll beneath the stone vaulting. It would empty soon, desolate and dark; and so it would be all night.... Why did not the very ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... I ever experienced in America. Last year at this time I was upon the Catskill Mountains, and was aroused at an unearthly hour by the discharge of a cannon, whose reverberation was something appalling, and made me doubt if I was not shot. The hotel was graced with the presence of some thirty or forty children, whose fond parents had invested largely in fire-crackers and toy cannon for them, and no place ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... this fact of the reverberation of the nervous structures after the removal of a stimulus, that whenever two discontinuous stimulations follow one another rapidly enough, they will appear continuous. This fact is a fruitful source of optical illusion. The appearance of a blending of the stripes of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... this hesitation he rang the bell, told Sarah that he was going out, and left the house. The three women in the drawing-room upstairs, already nervous and overstrained from long suspense, all started when the reverberation of that closing door made itself heard. Lesley felt her mother's hand close on hers with a quick, ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... making all speed. It was easy to judge by the reverberation of the blows that his men were attacking the last door but one, the door that gave access to ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... We partake of the lead of Saturn, the activity of fire, the forgetfulness of water. His academic praises console him, maugre his depreciation of them. His little fame, the homage of his little world, have in them the same sweetness as the reverberation of ages. Heaven would show him his capacity for those things to which he aspires by giving him an early and representative realization of them. It is a happy confidence. Reality is tyrannous. Let him construe everything in the poet's mood. He shall dream, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... polar lights. The works are full of the gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full of shattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling of drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering of harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely realized recall the ruggedness and hardiness and starkness of things that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... smoke of the bivouac fires came tranquilly up into the still air. The respite was very brief, and the bombardment began again with greater fierceness than before. The 75's drummed unceasingly. The reverberation of the 125's and of the howitzers shook the observation post. Over the Kereves Dere, and beyond, upon the sloping shoulders of Achi Baba, the curtain became a pall. The sun climbed higher and higher. All that first mirage of beauty had disappeared, and there was ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. "Perhaps he is," I admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly loud reverberation made me lower my voice directly; "but I am sure you are." With his head dropping on his breast and the light held high he began to walk again. "Well—I ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... intermediate expression between obligation and restraint and reverberation is such that the mornings could ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... of night was upon the house. As Mrs. Hood seated herself with murmured bewailing of such wretchedness, there sounded a heavy crash out on the staircase; it was followed by a peculiar ringing reverberation. Emily rose ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... the King's huntsmen. As shot after shot passed in quick succession, the sounds fell chiefly on the ears of those among the crowd—and they were the fewer number—who had hearts within them, and to British feeling each reverberation brought a mingled sensation. In England, and in most other nations, whether civilized or savage, when an animal is hunted, some chance at least of escape is given. The reader will bear in mind that the enclosed space around the stand was surrounded by a kind of chevaux de frize, six feet in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... His first incurious thought that the clangour arose from the town band, engaged in an attempt to round off a memorable day in a burst of evening harmony, was contradicted by certain peculiarities of reverberation. But inexplicability did not rouse him to more than a cursory heed; his sense of degradation was too strong for the admission of foreign ideas; and he leant ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... the middle of the eighties had, like the great strike of 1877, a political reverberation. Although the latter was heard throughout the entire country, it centered in the city of New York, where the situation was complicated by court interference in the ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... would naturally be connected either with borrowed money or with bad women. She became conscious that after all she knew almost nothing about either of those interests. The worst woman she knew was Mrs. Churchley herself. Meanwhile there was no reverberation from Seymour Street—only ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... aroused by a crashing noise at my elbow, and glancing round saw that an old man near me had merely dropped his cane. A heavy cudgel it was that falling on the stone flagging sent a thundering reverberation through the vaulted chambers. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... overmasters her apprehension of danger. The lightning's flash may rend the oak but, even so, she stands in mute admiration at this wondrous manifestation of life. Her quickened spirit responds to the roll and reverberation of the thunder because she has grown to womanhood through the ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... bath of a skin of water, taken in our drawing-room, we got our artist to work at breakfast, and shortly after found, with considerable satisfaction, that we were in for the first of the rains. This welcome fact first proclaimed itself by the reverberation of distant thunder from among the mountains to the north; then an ominous black cloud gradually spread itself over us, and, with a storm of dust, down came the rain in torrents, making the air, in a few minutes, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it may be, by reception and reverberation, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... from the blast-station two miles to the west. First the low reverberation, rattling the windows, then the rising growl as the sleek beast knifed skyward on a column of blue-white hell. It grew and grew until it drowned the distant traffic sounds and dominated ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... augury."—The daughter of a voice meant an echo, the original sound being viewed as the mother, and the reverberation, or secondary sound, as the daughter. Analogically, therefore, the direct and original meaning of any word, or sentence, or counsel, was the mother meaning but the secondary, or mystical meaning, created by the peculiar circumstances for one separate and peculiar ear, the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... since last night. She was willing to cast him off because he could not love where she loved. How deeply the roots of hope still knotted themselves in him he was now to realize. He felt his heart and mind rock with the reverberation of the shattering, the pulverizing explosion, and he saw his life lying in a wilderness ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... several times around to strengthen the leather, and I was let down, suspended by the rope in the blackness of the crevasse. I extended my arms to the right and the left, as the guardian had told me to do, and even then I got my elbows scraped. At first I thought that the noise I heard was the reverberation of the echo of the blows of the wooden shoes against the edges of the crevasse, but suddenly a frightful din filled my ears: successive firings of cannons, strident ringings, crackings of a whip, plaintive howls, and repeated monotonous cries as of a hundred fishermen drawing up a net filled ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... human impression of the worn out prisoner before her judges. "And immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more, the cause was concluded," says the record, so formal, sustained within such purely abstract limits, yet here and there with a sort of throb and reverberation of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the Inquisitor too all words seemed to have been taken. It is as when amid the excited crowd in the Temple the officers of the Pharisees approaching to lay hands on ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... boom of the gun seeming to echo with a hollow, long-drawn-out reverberation between sea and sky; and within a minute the boats, with seeming reluctance, had turned and were pulling ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... neither ammunition works nor the ownership of war material of any description, could not be at once realized. But here was the cyclonic fact, hideously real, appallingly actual; and there in the heavens was the buoyant Zeppelin maneuvering for further mischief. The reverberation of the first explosion was still grumbling back in Epping Forest when all Walthamstow, rubbing its eyes, tumbled out into the black streets. Men, women, children, all ludicrously clotheless, swarmed aimlessly like bees in an overturned hive. Stark ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... came from the right, but not from the opposite side, the former effect being simply reverberation. Another thirty yards or so brought them to where the hollow-sounding voice seemed to come up from straight below them; and they lay ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... performers better known to fame. They had brought in no money; they had been delivered only for the good of the cause. If it could only be known that she spoke for nothing, that might deepen the reverberation; the only trouble was that her speaking for nothing was not the way to remind him that he had a remunerative daughter. It was not the way to stand out so very much either, Selah Tarrant felt; for there were plenty of others that ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... shameful act and not to be defended," cried the girl, with moist eyes and quivering lip, the sympathetic reverberation of her voice again arresting the impatient steps of the young man, causing him to pause and view her with a feeling that he could not understand, and which he found some difficulty in controlling. Suddenly all desire for restraint left him, he sprang forward, clasped the girl in his arms and drew ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... house utterly dark. He rang the bell furiously, but there was no response. He walked around under the window and shouted, but the place remained as dark and silent as a tomb. He pounded on the door, but its massive thickness scarcely admitted of a reverberation. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the murder, Jim looked up from the book, thinking that he had heard indeed the shrieks of Charity in a death-agony. The walls seemed to quiver still with their reverberation. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... from the pine forests to the sea, is filled with a light tremor, and the intermitting beats of sound are strong enough to jar a delicate ear. Their constant repetition at last produces a feeling something like terror. A spirit worn and weakened by some scathing sorrow could scarcely bear the reverberation. ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... worked with all the reserve strength that was in him. He seized great chunks of rock that he could not even have budged at an ordinary time and threw them far behind him. His pick struck again and again with a vicious, clanging reverberation; the hole widened. Once more Fairchild leaned ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... particularly after periods of much autogenous mirth, Sir Joseph Bullion dropped an H. But he never noticed it. It was a sort of unconscious reverberation of former days; as if his lowly past, especially that portion of it which had been spent with the first and ungrammatical Mrs. Bullion, insisted on revealing itself to the world, to be acknowledged and congratulated ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... a gong, the beater for which was too hard and, unless very carefully manipulated, produced a jangle. My hall was paved with hexagonal stone sections called "quarries," which appeared to intensify the discordance. Chips felt it keenly, and would stand quite rigid for some minutes until the last reverberation and its effect had passed off. He was uncertain in temper and disliked some of the villagers. An old man complained that he had been bitten, and told me with great feeling, "Folks say that if ever the dog goes mad, I shall go mad too." I had much difficulty ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... successive studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly to his romances. He possesses, and has more than once displayed, a true romantic—almost a true epic—instinct. Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen Brice and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession and reverberation of stirring days. Nearer a Walter Scott than a Bernard Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing to take the memories of his nation as they have come down to him and to work them without question or rejection into ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... instruments, as if an airy band had been hidden on the hillside and made faint music at the summons. No subsequent trial produced so clear, delicate, and spiritual a concert as the first. A field-piece was then discharged from the top of a neighboring hill, and gave birth to one long reverberation, which ran round the circle of mountains in an unbroken chain of sound and rolled away without a separate echo. After these experiments, the cold atmosphere drove us all into the house, with ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tried it with a silk thread as a plumb-line, some with spun-yarn threads, and various other materials and contrivances. It has even been tried by exploding petards and ringing bells in the deep sea, when it was supposed that an echo or reverberation might be heard, and, from the known rate at which sound travels through water, the depth might thus be ascertained. Deep-sea leads have been constructed having a column of air in them, which, by compression, would ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... lies partly in the form, but more especially in the timbre and reverberation of the words themselves. In other cases, it is the form that is the chief ingredient in the effect produced. In Alfred Noyes's "The Barrel Organ," apart from the meaning, it is the rhythmic form that is of chief ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... being carried beneath the surface. I glanced hurriedly about for something to which to cling. My eyes were directed toward the point at which the liner had disappeared when there came from the depths of the ocean the muffled reverberation of an explosion, and almost simultaneously a geyser of water in which were shattered lifeboats, human bodies, steam, coal, oil, and the flotsam of a liner's deck leaped high above the surface of the sea—a watery column momentarily marking the grave of another ship in this greatest ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... door banged behind her. A minute later the street door, four flights down, rang out in jarring reverberation. A minute after that it seemed as though every door in every house on the street slammed shrilly. Then the charred fire-log sagged down into the ashes with a sad, puffing sigh. Then a whole row of books on a loosely packed shelf toppled ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... insensibility to the suffering of others, the uncompromising pursuit of his own interests, cold culture, manners without humanity: these he had looked for, these he still thought he saw. But to find the whole machine thus glow with the reverberation of religious zeal surprised him beyond words; and he laboured in vain, as he walked, to piece together into any kind of whole his odds and ends of knowledge—to adjust again into any kind of focus with itself his picture of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my mind the wreck-scene from the play of "David Copperfield," I don't know; but there it came, and in my dream I was sitting in the balcony at Booth's, and taking a proper interest in the scene, when it occurred to me that the thunder had less of reverberation and more woodenness than good stage thunder should have. The mental exertion I underwent on this subject disturbed the course of my nap, but as wakefulness returned, the sound of the poorly simulated thunder ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... if convened, 355 Must not the magic power that charms together Millions of men in council, needs have power To win or wield them? Better, O far better Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains, And with a thousand-fold reverberation 360 Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air, Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick! By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power, To deepen by restraint, and by prevention Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood 365 In its majestic channel, is man's task And the true ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hotter the sun burned; more and more blinding became his reverberation. Maximilien's black skin suffered least; but both lads, accustomed as they were to remaining naked in the sun, found the heat difficult to bear. They would gladly have plunged into the deep water to cool themselves, but for fear of sharks;—all they ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... understand this extravagant distrust of the army, we have to take into account another incident of the summer of 1783, which gave rise to a discussion that sent its reverberation all over the civilized world. Men of the present generation who in childhood rummaged in their grandmothers' cosy garrets cannot fail to have come across scores of musty and worm-eaten pamphlets, their yellow pages crowded with italics and exclamation points, inveighing in passionate ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... great mass was still out of sight. The pace was a deliberate trot. "They moved in profound silence," says Mercer, and the only sound that could be heard from them, amidst the incessant roar of battle, was the low, thunder-like reverberation of the ground beneath the simultaneous tread of so many horses, through which ran a jangling ripple of sharp metallic sound, the ring of steel on steel. The British gunners, on their part, showed a stern coolness fully equal to the occasion. Every man stood steadily at ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the right hand may eke out the weakness of the left is only for the timid and the small of fist. But I do not counsel following his two variants in the fifth and twenty-third bars. Chopin's text is more telling. Like the vast reverberation of monstrous waves on the implacable coast of a remote world is this prelude. Despite its fatalistic ring, its note of despair is not dispiriting. Its issues are larger, more impersonal, more elemental than the other preludes. It is a veritable Appassionata, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... scream had done what Chris's whistle failed in, drawn attention to something being wrong, while directly after a little puff of smoke darted from the upper terrace, followed by its report and the reverberation of echoes. Then another shot, and another, and no more arrows fell, though Chris in his slow progress suffered as much agony as if they had still been dropping ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... dull, unmistakable reverberation rolled forth like the smothered sound of a subterranean explosion; it was followed by another and another—gunshots fired within ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... man's life comes out, flashes out sometimes, and dribbles out at other times, into visibility in his actions; and, just as the thunder follows on the swift passage of the lightning, so my acts are neither more nor less than the reverberation and after-clap ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... about the robbery committed on you by the fund-holders and the placemen, and are praising the infernal Pitt system at the same time, ... you say they are receiving, the fund-vagabonds in particular, more than they ought." It is evident that Byron's verse is a reverberation ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... about her sexual organs and the effects on the sexual organism of men may also have as one of its results a certain theoretical willingness to avoid social dangers. But the far stronger immediate effect is the psychophysiological reverberation in the whole youthful organism with strong reactions on its blood vessels and on its nerves. The individual differences are extremely great here. On every social level we find cool natures whose frigidity would inhibit ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... head in beagles has been much misunderstood. They have, or should have, large heads, decidedly round, and thick rather than long; there will then be room for the expansion of the nasal membrane, that of smell, and for the reverberation of the sound, so peculiarly pleasant in ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... yet our most precious heritage. We are not yet involved in a social knot which only red revolution can sever: our humanity, the ancient gift of nature to us, is still fresh in our veins: our force is not merely the reverberation of a past, an inevitable momentum started in the long ago, but is free for newer life to do what we will ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... of Webster's, it is simply by right of kinship and equality of power with the most vivid and sonorous verse that rings from the lips of Coriolanus or of Timon, of Brachiano or the Duchess of Malfy; not by any servility of discipleship or reverberation of an imitative echo. It is so rich and full and supple, so happy in its freedom and so loyal in its instinct, that its veriest audacities and aberrations have an indefinable harmony of their own. Even if we admit that Tourneur is ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of the melody came a great shell, exploding just outside the door and causing everyone at the table to spring to his feet. The singers stopped for a second, wavered, as the reverberation of the shock died away, and then went on with their song; and the officers, abashed, wondering, dropped back into their seats marvelling at the calmness of these frail women in the face of death. Surely they had something that other women did not have to enable them to sing ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... this time come into the very place where the echo had most astonished Edwy, because each reverberation which it had made seemed to sound from opposite sides; and here he heard the cry again, and heard it distinctly. It was the voice of a child first, crying, 'No! no! no! Papa! mamma! Oh, come! Oh, come!'—and ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... great drawback to one unbroken casting is in the vibratory ring inseparable from any metal system that has no resting places to break the uniform reverberation proceeding from metal. We have already seen how readily the strings take up vibrations which are only pure when, as secondary vibrations, they arise by reversion from the sound-board. If vibration arises from imperfectly elastic wood, we hear a dull wooden thud; if ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... succession nine war chariots, the greatest and strongest in Emain. When he broke the ninth the horses of Macha neighed from their stable. Great fear fell upon the host when they heard that unusual noise and the reverberation of it in ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... barred window. Superstition had surrounded the Vier Prison with horrors. As carts passed under the great archway, its depth multiplied the sounds so powerfully, the echoes were so fantastic, that folk believed them the roarings of fiendish spirits. If a mounted guard hurried through, the reverberation of the drum-beats and the clatter of hoofs were so uncouth that children stopped their ears and fled in terror. To the ignorant populace the Vier Prison was the home of noisome serpents and the rendezvous of the devil and his witches ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... reverberation, the audience started up, panic- stricken. Hitherto, the last act had been regarded as a badly-played comedy; now tragedy was ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... water, having their origin in the surrounding hills; they all terminate northerly. We could accomplish but seven miles on a north-east by east course. In the evening we had an awful storm of thunder and lightning, accompanied with torrents of rain. The reverberation of sound among the hills was astonishing. The natives continue in our vicinity unheeded, and unheeding: even the noise of their mogo upon the trees is a relief from the otherwise utter loneliness of feeling we cannot help experiencing in ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... There is something very impressive in the abrupt bursting in of this second voice, all unnamed. It is the reverberation, as it were, of the former, giving the preparation on the side of man for the coming of Jehovah. Israel in bondage in Egypt had been delivered by Jehovah marching through the wilderness, a wilderness stretched between Babylon and Jerusalem; these supply the scenery, so to speak; but the scenery ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... hour later that he was aroused from a doze by the sharp reverberation of the telephone bell. Dizzily he sprang to his feet and stood stupid and inert in the middle of the floor. Again the signal rang and this time he was broad awake. He rushed forward to grasp ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... enemy's line and were mown down by machine-gun fire—the Germans were very strong in machine-guns, and we were very weak—in the usual way of those early days. The first shell fired by our monster howitzer was heralded by a low reverberation, as of thunder, from the field below us. Then, several seconds later, there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a tall, black column of smoke which stood steady until the breeze clawed at it and tore it ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... profitably read "On Taxation" (1774) and "On Conciliation" (1775), in which Burke presents the Whig argument in favor of a liberal colonial policy. The Tory view of the same question was bluntly presented by Johnson in his essay "Taxation No Tyranny"; while like a reverberation from America, powerful enough to carry across the Atlantic, came Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," which was a ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a low, solemn murmur of the invisible sea, singing like a lullaby about the peaceful dwelling, and hushing it into a more profound quiet than even utter silence; for utter silence is irksome and fretting to the ear, which needs some slight reverberation to keep the brain behind it still. A perfume of violets, and the more dainty scent of primroses, pervaded the garden. It seemed incredible that any man should be allowed to live in such a spot; but then ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton |
