"Symphony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... justification set forth thoroughly and comfortingly in a particular article, but throughout the discussions it remains the dominant note, its heavenly strain returning again and again as the motif in the grand symphony of divine truths—a strain with which the Apology also breathes, as it were, its last, departing breath. For in its Conclusion we read: "If all the scandals [which, according to the Papists, resulted from Luther's teaching] be brought together, still the one article concerning ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... literary—women who are born readers, to whom a new poem is as great an excitement as a new toilette, a treatise of philosophy (we shall see the Countess devouring Kant long before he had been heard of out of Germany) more exquisitely delightful than a symphony. And this woman, thus educated, with this immense fund of intellectual energy, was living, not a normal life with the normal distracting influences of an endurable husband, of children and society, but ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... concert at the Queen's Hall. I think you will recollect," he added pretentiously, "when I tell you that it included a performance of the Fifth Symphony ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... light touches on the strings of a guitar followed, and then a symphony was rapidly and beautifully executed, by one in the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... an amusing account of the musical examinations described by my father in his 'Recollections." Mr. Herbert speaks strongly of his love of music, and adds, "What gave him the greatest delight was some grand symphony or overture of Mozart's or Beethoven's, with their full harmonies.' On one occasion Herbert remembers "accompanying him to the afternoon service at King's, when we heard a very beautiful anthem. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was the organist. It was a most impressive occasion with many evidences of deep feeling, and, although it was a church service, the audience responded with warm applause as Mrs. Catt closed her eulogy with this beautiful comparison: "A significant ceremony is performed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... when we frown'd or smiled, Rose from the cradle, Imitation's child; Next to each thought associate sound accords, And forms the dulcet symphony of words; The tongue, the lips articulate; the throat With soft vibration modulates the note; Love, pity, war, the shout, the song, the prayer Form quick ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, with all her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchange of gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. In his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind is biographical, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the brain is but my instrument. If we compare it to a violin then "I" am the unseen violin player behind it. The musician cannot produce violin music without a violin, but also the violin cannot produce a musical note, much less take part in a complex symphony without the musician behind it. If the strings of the violin be injured, or if they be smeared with grease, the result is discords and crazy sounds. If the brain be physically injured or disordered the result is ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... singing-boy, 'array yourself for a journey, and wait with my equipage at the garden-gate. I shall require you to accompany me in my expedition to Aricia. But first, oh! gifted and valued songster, let me reward you for the harmonious symphony that has just awakened me. Of what rank of my musicians are you ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... ye crystal spheres! Once bless our human ears, If ye have power to touch our senses so; And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow; And with your ninefold harmony Make up full concert to the angelic symphony. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... offices. The construction of a huge calculator for the Project in Arizona. Motors and materials, all for Arizona—something caught his mind, brought a frown to his large bland face, some off-key note in the monstrous symphony of production and intrigue that threw up a red flag in his mind, screamed ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... beverages and regalias of Vuelta Abajos' best leaf. The human mob is dense. Wailing, passionate music beats upon the air. There is the cry of lost souls in its under-toned pathos. Villany and sentiment go hand in hand at the El Dorado. The songs of old, in voice and symphony, unlock the gates of memory. They leave the lingerers, disarmed, to the tempting allurements ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were the first. To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except by studying it as a whole, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... aspens. A still softer and more beautiful shade of silver gray is seen in the big hornet's nest of last year which still hangs suspended from a low sugar maple. On all of these the sunlight plays and makes a wondrous color symphony. "Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." To be sure, this colorful arrangement of the stems and twigs is not brilliant, like the flaming vermilion blossoms of the Lobelia cardinalis in August, the ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... They have a full tone between each first and second note, and a semitone between each third and fourth, and yet the same feelings are awakened in them by their music as in us by ours, so that harmony itself is simply a matter of education after all, and the glorious Fifth Symphony itself, "Lohengrin," or "Scots wha hae," played or sung as I have heard them, would convey no more meaning to these people than so much rattling of cross-bones; but imagine the Fifth Symphony on any scale ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... romance are exactly that order of literature, which not only will bear to be read many times, but that of which the true value can only be gained by frequent, and indeed habitual reading. A man can hardly be said to know the twelfth Mass or the ninth Symphony, by virtue of having once heard them played ten years ago; he can hardly be said to take air and exercise because he took a country walk once last autumn. And so he can hardly be said to know Scott, or Shakespeare, Moliere, or Cervantes, when he once ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... whether good or ill he could not say: change, he knew no more—change with inscrutable veiled face, approaching noiseless. With the feeling came the vision of a concert-room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the loud voice of the symphony. "Destiny knocking at the door," he thought; drew a stave on the plaster, and wrote in the famous phrase from the Fifth Symphony. "So," thought he, "they will know that I loved music and had classical tastes. They? He, I suppose: the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of them, obeying blindly the ancient custom, must follow like musicians the same directing wand, the laws of Manu. This is the point where they all meet and form a unanimous, single-minded community, a strongly united mass. And woe to the one who breaks the symphony by a single discordant note! The elders and the caste or sub-caste councils (of these there are any number), whose members hold office for life, are stern rulers. There is no appeal against their decisions, and this is why expulsion from the caste is a calamity, entailing truly formidable consequences. ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... long we steam past ever-varying scenes of loveliness whose component parts are ever the same, yet the effect ever different. Doubtless it is wrong to call it a symphony, yet I know no other word to describe the scenery of the Ogowe. It is as full of life and beauty and passion as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote: the parts changing, interweaving, and returning. There ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... weighed heavily upon Andras. His nerves were shaken by the memories which the czardas of the Tzigani musicians had evoked; and it seemed to him that the place was deserted now that they had departed, and Varhely had gone with them. In the eternal symphony of the sea, the lapping of the waves upon the shingle at the foot of the terrace, one note was now lacking, the resonant note of the czimbalom yonder in the gardens of Frascati. The vibration of the czimbalom was like a call summoning up the image of Marsa, and this image took invincible ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... may be precise or not. To rhyme moon with June is not unforgivable. The success of a popular song depends on entirely different bases. Nevertheless, a finely turned bit of rhyming harmony may strike the ear and stand out from its fellows like a lovely symphony of fancy. If you have given any attention to this point of rhyming you can recall many instances of just ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... delicacy and fine shading; scarcely a score of his lyrics are of the highest order. He gives us often the blaring music of a military band or the loud, swelling volume of an organ, but very seldom the softer tones of a violin or symphony. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of the master, in which Passion, aroused by Pain as its original ground-tone, raises itself upward on the stepping-stone of conciliation and exaltation to an outburst of Joy conscious of Victory." Paul loved to play the Fifth Symphony as well as to hear it performed by an orchestral band. When playing it he seemed to lose touch with earth and to be transported to celestial heights. In his marginalia he compares the methods of expression of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... me that it would be useless. And so I drifted, living in a careless sort of lotos dream, which I could have wished would last forever. Now there were scented, joyful days, when we strolled through dales and wooded hollows, listening to Nature's great orchestra as it played its never-ending symphony. Perfect nights, when the heavy air would be redolent of the honeysuckles' wafted souls and the breath of sleepy roses. From the cabins in the locust grove would float the tinkling of the banjo, the untrained guffaw of the negro men, and the wild, half-barbaric notes of an old-time ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... house looked mellow and beautiful; the Japanese garden was a symphony of green plush sod and brilliant color—the Bougainvillaea almost smothering the little summerhouse and a mocking-bird who must be a grandson of the one of her betrothal night was singing his giddy heart out. Kada was waiting in the doorway, bowing ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... discussed the origin of evil with great volubility, and what seemed to her, however it might have impressed metaphysicians, astounding erudition and profundity. She had assisted at that sacred rite of musical devotees, the Saturday night Symphony concert, where a handful of people gathered to hear the music, and all the rest of the world crowded for the sake of having been there. She had been taken by Miss Mott to a select sewing-circle—that peculiar institution by means of which exclusive ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... the first four notes of the opening movement, Beethoven said, some time after he had finished the Fifth Symphony: "So pocht das Shicksal an die Pforte" ("Thus Fate Knocks at the Door"); and between that opening knock, and the tremendous rush and sweep of the Finale, the emotions which come into play in the great conflicts of life ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... associated with almost every hour of the day. They had lain upon my writing-table the entire summer, and it was my habit whenever I laid down my pen for a moment to take up one book or the other, and glance at a page of Ehlert's criticisms upon opera, symphony, or song, or Madame de Stael's profound essays upon art, morals, ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... shudder, we draw a long sigh of despair, and feel that it could not have been otherwise. But in the opera, Othello is a ruffian, without excuse for his crime. We have suddenly a beautiful woman running distracted about the stage to a symphony—and a very noisy symphony—of violins, and butchered before our eyes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... oldest of Mr. Punch's young men thought he would like to hear some orchestral music on Monday week last, so he dropped in at the Queen's Hall to assist at a concert of the new British Symphony Orchestra. The name of the founder and conductor, Mr. RAYMOND ROZE, was already familiar, for Mr. Punch's young man was old enough to remember Mr. ROZE'S mother, MARIE ROZE, in her brilliant prime as prima donna of the Carl Rosa ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... flowing of the stream; and over them the deep flood of his longing and his misery rose and broke and mingled with the tumult. And through it, and high above it all, it was as if his soul made music with her; turning the Sonata Appassionata into a singing of many voices, a symphony ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the clear, unruffled waters that fill the chambers of the sea. She floated forth with the serene grace of a frail bubble ascending through the still atmosphere of a June day. The perfect roundness of her limbs formed suave and enchanting curves. It was like listening to the most spiritual symphony of Beethoven the divine, to watch the harmonious flow of lines. This, indeed, was a pleasure cheaply purchased at any price. What cared I if I had waded to the portal of this wonder through another's blood? I would have given my ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... me see," said Joe Dumsby, assuming the air of one who endeavoured to recall something. "Could you come Beet'oven's symphony on ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... fancy, but that involves one of the truths of inequality, to say that each race is endowed with peculiar talents; that the negro has aptitudes and capacities which the world needs, and will lack until he is normally trained. In the grand symphony of the universe, "there are several sounds not yet brought out, and the feeblest of all is that hitherto produced by the negro; but he alone can furnish it."—"When the African shall come forward with his peculiar gifts, they will fill a place never ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... but early in 1804 the Theater an der Wien passed out of his hands into those of Baron von Braun. The intervening summer had been passed by the composer at Baden and Unter Dobling in work upon the "Eroica" symphony. The check upon the operatic project was but temporary. Baron von Braun took Schikaneder into his service and renewed the contract with Beethoven. This accomplished, the composer resumed his lodgings in the theatre and began energetically to work upon the opera. ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... The symphony, incidentally, was so successful at its first performance that a strange-looking man rushed to the platform, saluted the composer, and sent him a more substantial token in the shape of twenty thousand francs. The ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... though I knew next to nothing of the art. There was a professor of law in the town who was an amateur of music, and held concert parties in his house; to this man I had the effrontry to propose a symphony of my own. I worked a fortnight at this production, wrote out the instrumental parts, and on the appointed evening stood up before the orchestra and audience, tapped my desk, raised by baton, and—never since music began has there been such an orgy of discords. The musicians could hardly sit ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... discords; and, at last, Their exquisite solution. Then darkness breaks Into diviner light, love's agony climbs Through death to life, and evil builds up heaven. Have you not heard, in some great symphony, Those golden mathematics making clear The victory of the soul? Have you not heard The very heavens opening? Do those fools Who thought me an infidel then, still smile at me For trying to read the stars in terms of song, Discern their orbits, measure their distances, By musical proportions? ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... in Boston. Valuable help at this time was rendered by Governor Walsh and the favorable opinions of the Governors of equal suffrage States were published at length in the Boston papers by the Men's League. At the last moment mass meetings were held in Boston at Symphony Hall and in the largest halls of many other cities. A symbolical and picturesque flag-raising took place on Boston Common. A last-minute circular was sent to each of the State's 600,000 registered ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... the cadence of sermon and prayer, and the brethren spur the spokesman to still greater efforts by their well timed ejaculations. There not only would the quaint melody of the negro "spirituals" swell instead of the more sophisticated airs of the hymn book, but every successful sermon would be a symphony and every prayer a masterpiece ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... of flowers and ornamental trees, under which I stood when conducting, and when to suit my taste for musical effect we concluded, not with a loud, but with a deeply soothing piece, like the Adagio from the Ninth Symphony, we felt that Zurich society had indeed witnessed something quite unique, and my friends on whom I had bestowed this mark of distinction ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... a sweet glance at Sir Robert, who immediately led her to the piano-forte, followed by the Scottish merchant of the Baltic, whither the noble symphony of "The Douglas," "hound and horn," soon gathered the rest of the company. The remainder of the evening passed away delightfully in the awakened harmony. Mrs. Montresor joined Lady Albina in some touching Italian duets; Pembroke ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... pleasant evening," said Oaky, "amid the wild splendor of nature's wonderland. And now the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Otter Krug brings you 'The Upland Glades,' by Ernesto Nestrichala, recorded by the National North American Broadcasting Company. This is your friendly oak tree ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... felicitation. This rash challenge had consequences merely dreadful; the wretched volumes, imperturbable and impeccable, with their shyer secrets and their second line of defence, were like a beautiful woman more denuded or a great symphony on a new hearing. There was something quite sinister in the way they stood up to me. I couldn't however be dumb—that was to give the wrong tinge to my disappointment; so that later in the afternoon, taking my courage in both hands, I approached with a vain tortuosity poor Limbert's door. ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... and often produces the most astonishing effects of sounds, however, did not find entire approbation with the public, and did not succeed in popularizing themselves. But that fact can be recorded in his favor that every programme containing Liszt's "Dante," or Faust Symphony, or "Mazeppa," receives more than ordinary attention from the public. The same is the case with his solo songs with piano accompaniment, in which, however, ingenious details often tend to drown the original melody. Of his quartets, some have become highly popular with singing societies and form ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... the dazzle of day is gone, Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars; After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band, Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true. ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... its way, it is as finely imaginative as Mr. Pyle's wonderfully spiritualized and moralized conception of the other world which he has realized on such terms as he alone can command; or as Mrs. Wynne's symphony of thrills and shudders, which will not have died out of the nerves of any one acquainted with it before. Mr. Millet's sketch is of a quality akin to that of Mr. McVickar's slighter but not less impressive fantasy: both are "in the midst of men and day," ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... darting like swallows in the shrapnel puffs of anti-air-craft fire. The roar of motors that are being tested, is punctuated by the staccato barking of machine guns, and at intervals the hollow whistling sound of a fast plane diving to earth is added to this symphony ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... mother, however, was not in her boudoir; only a screaming cockatoo, and a capuchin monkey that grimaced a welcome. Through the folding-doors which opened into an adjoining room came the melancholy tones of a harmonium; and M. Cambray recognized a favorite air—Beethoven's symphony, "Les adieux, l'absence, et le retour." He paused a ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Confederate batteries, I sprung down behind my rock as a perfect storm of iron swept over and around me, and my heart stood almost still at the deep reverberations which followed. This was but the prelude to the infernal symphony that followed. With remarkable rapidity and precision of aim the enemy continued firing, not irregularly, but in immense thundering volleys, all together. There would be a moment's pause, and then would come such a storm of iron that ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... reverberations among the hills were deep, long, and grand, and the fainter echoes had not died away before there was another flash—another thunderous report, which, though less loud than the one that preceded it, maintained the symphony with scarcely diminished grandeur. ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the English university towns, it has been largely from among those who are seriously interested in a literary drama that the audiences have been drawn. It was such people as do not habitually go to the theatre, but that are to be found at revivals of old English comedy and Ibsen plays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences of the Irish Players in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago. These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the fact that they were constant in attendance at all the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... poems, but not hymns. "It is no love-symphony we hear when the lion thinkers roar," some blunt writer has said. "The moles of Science have never found the heavenly dove's nest, and the Sea of Reason touches no shore where balm ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... at times as to whether anything would ever induce Aileen to leave him; but this was more or less idle speculation. He rather fancied they would live out their days together, seeing that he was able thus easily to deceive her. But as for a girl like Antoinette Nowak, she figured in that braided symphony of mere sex attraction which somehow makes up that geometric formula of beauty which rules the world. She was charming in a dark way, beautiful, with eyes that burned with an unsatisfied fire; and Cowperwood, although at first only in the least moved by her, became by degrees interested ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... magnificently into summer. The grass upthrust. The waterfowl passed on to the northern lake-region. The morning symphony of the prairie-chickens died out, but the whistle of the larks, the chatter of the sparrows, and the wailing cry of the nesting plover came to take ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... told himself it was probably an heirloom; it was too massive, too ornate for a betrothal ring; still he moved uneasily and set the cup down untasted. His eyes returned to her face, questioning, doubting. He was like a musician surprised to detect in a beautiful symphony the first ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... lot it would be to know the ecstasy of whispered vows, to give and to receive that happiness which is not to be named lest the gods become envious. Voices singing together in the class practice which had ever been a weariness, stirred her to a passion of delight; it was the choral symphony of love's handmaidens. Did they see a change in her? Emily fancied that the elder girls looked at each other and smiled and exchanged words in an ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity between ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or features, you can say something like: "Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle." See {double bucky}, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... contradiction to the agitation of nerves. It would have been better to have known only the simple life, the life of these Arabs! Now they were singing about the camp fires. Queer were the intervals, impossible of notation, but the rhythms might be gathered... a symphony, a defined scheme.... The monotony of the chant hushed his thoughts, and the sleep into which he fell must have been ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... marshal themselves into shapes befitting his triumph: castles rose and fell; faces grew, smiled, and faded away smiling; roses and lilies and palms glowed ruby red, turned to silver, and paled into spiritual gray. The silence of the night seemed resonant with a very symphony of joy. Still Sally and Raby slept on. The boy's sweet face took each hour a more healthful tint; and, as Doctor Eben watched the blessed change, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... will unite as one instrument; seeming discords and dissonances will blend into harmony, and the wail and blare and thrum of humanity's orchestra will sound in your ear the sublime melody of that great symphony ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... poet. Soon the solemn mood Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame A permeating fire; wild numbers then She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs Subdued by its own pathos; her fair hands 165 Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp Strange symphony, and in their branching veins The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale. The beating of her heart was heard to fill The pauses of her music, and her breath 170 Tumultuously accorded with those fits Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose, As if her heart impatiently ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... When people who are not musicians have accused Handel and Beethoven of not being simple, I have always said, 'Is Gothic architecture simple?' A cathedral expresses one idea, but it is indefinitely varied and elaborated in its parts; so is a symphony ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... through the encumbering brush and vines. His arms were senseless below the elbows, swollen almost to bursting of veins and skin by the gorged blood. There was no choice in directions, only to avoid the town. He faced up the river and trudged on, the cottonwood leaves beginning their everlasting symphony, that is like the murmur of rain, as the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... Filippo and Pollaiuolo,—and his employers!—would permit. The representative element was for him a mere libretto: he was happiest when his subject lent itself to translation into what may be called a lineal symphony. And to this symphony everything was made to yield; tactile values were translated into values of movement, and, for the same reason—to prevent the drawing of the eye inward, to permit it to devote itself to the rhythm of the line—the backgrounds were either entirely suppressed or kept as simple ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... and as far as I can at present see, the virtue of temperance has more of the nature of harmony and symphony than the preceding. ...
— The Republic • Plato
... violence to its own nature. Sometimes they twinkled shrewdly, comprehendingly; sometimes they glowed with a steady splendor that seemed to dominate the world. There were nights when the separate stars were blended, to his apprehension, in one great symphony of meaning; again certain ones stood out among the others, individual and apart. There was Jupiter up there. He did not look as if he were revolving with lightning speed about the sun, and the moons revolving about him were not even visible. That was the kind of roulette wheel a man ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... light, like the love of the blue sky, is lavished upon the earth ... Why cannot I sing? The water of the distant river is shimmering with light; the leaves are glistening; the rice- fields, with their fitful shivers, break into gleams of gold; and in this symphony of Autumn, only I remain voiceless. The sunshine of the world strikes my heart, but is ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... while a baby rolling on the floor in a state of perfect ecstasy, was keeping up a sort of crowing duet with her. She seemed delighted to see these ladies, who belong to the Junta, and led us into a large hall where a score of nurses and babies were performing a symphony of singing, hushing, crying, lullabying, and other nursery music. All along the room were little green painted beds, and both nurses and babies looked clean and healthy. The ——-s knew every baby and nurse and directress by name. Some of the babies were remarkably pretty, and when ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... he went on, "It cuts me to the heart that minor," and so he liked the mixed mode to the Psalm In exitu Israel, and was much affected by the slow movements in Beethoven's Ninth Quartet and C minor Symphony, and the Allegretto of the ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... already heard this symphony rendered by the court musicians in Belgium. I had no heart to practice my lessons for ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... musical taste. George Peabody left money to found a Conservatory of Music, and a few music lovers spent time and money to keep alive an Oratorio Society. Later, the visits of Thomas' Orchestra and of the Boston Symphony Orchestra added to the strength of these local musical centres; but for many years the Peabody Conservatory was ridiculed and misunderstood, and the Oratorio Society was usually in financial straits. I mention these facts, because persons who are dependent upon the Conservatory ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... precursory genius—the first who endowed an orchestra with an individual voice; and those two will live mostly because they created Beethoven. Ah, Beethoven! power and strength amidst serene suffering, Michael Angelo at the tomb of the Medici! A heroic logician, a kneader of human brains; for the symphony, with choral accompaniments, was the starting-point of all the great ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... are the story is not all told when we are dead. The huge procession goes on and shall go on, till the secret of the grand symphony of life ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... frog's symphony dominated all other sounds, then lagoon and forest and cypress branch awoke; and through the steadily sustained tumult of woodland voices I could hear the dry bark of the fox-squirrel, the whistle of the raccoon, ducks softly ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... its height, and, as I listened, rain and wind and thunder became merged and blended into awful music—a symphony of Life and Death played by the hands of God; and I was an atom—a grain of dust an insect, to be crushed by God's little finger. And yet needs must this insect still think upon its little self for half drowned, deafened, blind, and half stunned though I was, still ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... northward, stretched the park lagoon calm and dark in the uncertain morning light. Fronting him rose the stately columns and porticoes of the park museum, once a member of an exposition whose glories are almost forgotten, which now veiled its need of repair in the kindly dawn and formed a symphony in gray with the willow-studded, low-lying lagoon banks. The air throbbed with the subdued noises of awakening animal life. In a shrub near them, a catbird cleared his throat in a few harsh notes as a prelude to a morning of tuneful parody, and on the slope below, ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... for my own pleasure. There was a Work upon which I spent only special hours of delicious leisure and infinite labor. It held all that was forbidden to popular compositions; depth and sorrow and dissonances dearer than harmony. I called it a Symphony Polynesian, and I had spent years in study of barbaric music, instruments and kindred things that this love-child of mine might be more richly clothed by a tone or a fancy. Aunt Caroline had interrupted, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... Holz thus parodies Przybyszewski: "In our soul there is surging and singing a song of the victorious bacteria. Our blood lacks the white corpuscles. On the sounding board of our consciousness there echoes along the frightful symphony of the flesh. It becomes objective in Chopin; he alone, the modern primeval man, puts our brains on the green meadows, he alone thinks in hyper-European dimensions. He alone rebuilds the shattered Jerusalem of our souls."All ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... swished and merrily swayed to the trade wind, now hung limp and motionless, as if they had suffered from a long tropical drought instead of merely a few hours' cessation of the brave, cool breeze, which for nine months out of twelve for ever made symphony in ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... send those Symphony tickets to somebody," he said, impatiently, to his wife; "I sha'n't be able to go. Ten to one I shall be late to dinner, and I doubt if I get home ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... nevertheless, it cannot be denied, the aspect of that Parlement is questionable. Already among the Notables, in that final symphony of dismissal, the Paris President had an ominous tone. Adrien Duport, quitting magnetic sleep, in this agitation of the world, threatens to rouse himself into preternatural wakefulness. Shallower but also louder, there ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base. The Keeper bent; angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the rods some unknown symphony of power. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... restlessly across the room, then stops, and remains standing, lost in thought. A guitar lies on the table, she seizes it as by a sudden emotion, and after she has played a while an irregular and melancholy symphony, she falls gradually into the music ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... round-shouldered; he had short-sighted, rather prominent brown eyes, untidy black hair and dark eyebrows which came near to meeting. He wore a knickerbocker suit of bluish-grey tweed, a pale blue shirt, a pale blue collar, and a dark blue tie—a symphony of colour which seemed too elaborately considered to be quite natural. Dickson had set him down as an artist or a newspaper correspondent, objects to him of lively interest. But now the classification ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... shadows; curling smoke ascended from the surrounding cottages. A thick fog crept along the vallies; a gray mist hovered over the tops of the mountains. The glassy surface of the sound glittered to the sun's departing ray. The solemn herds lowed in monotonous symphony. The autumnal insects in sympathetic wafting, plaintively predicted their approaching fate. "The scene is changed since we last visited this place, said Melissa; the gay charms of summer are beginning to decay, and must soon yield ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... full extent of what they considered to be its value; and his wealth is no more than fairy gold if he does not go on benefiting others in the same way. A thousand men may enjoy the pleasure derived from a picture, a symphony, or a poem, without lessening the happiness of the most devoted connoisseur. The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground, where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... that cold state he oft maintains. But soon the silence seem'd to say, "Fair mourner, reassume thy lay!" And in the chords her fingers stray'd; For aching Memory found relief In mounting to the source of grief; A tender symphony she play'd, Then ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... objective when, affected only by the purely physical sensation of sound, we listen to it passively, and it suggests to us impressions. A march, a waltz, a flute imitating the nightingale, the chromatic scale imitating the murmuring of the wind in the "Pastoral Symphony," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... piercing shriek of the shells speeding to their fatal mark, and below the crash of the exploding shells of the enemy, which toss the earth in dark waves into the air in the black surf of war. Gun after gun now joins the great chorus, swelling and falling in a hideous symphony of discordant sounds. The whole horizon is lit up and aflame. The sky quivers and reflects the flash of the great guns, as with the constant vibration of heat lightning. Flares and Verey lights of greenish yellow and white turn the night into ghastly ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... their persons behind. The movement seems to be difficult of execution, as it causes them to perspire profusely; they, however, keep excellent time, and the blending of the voices of the men and women in symphony ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... road with a red house upon it where his friend resided, he thanked me and walked off with such speed as his years had left him. Birds sang delightfully on the fences and in the field, yet I knew not their names. Shall one not enjoy a symphony without precise knowledge of the instrument that gives the tune? If an oboe sound a melody, must one bestow a special praise, with a knowledge of its function in the concert? Or if a trombone please, must one know the brassy creature by its name? Rather, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... how, while obtaining local colour for his new Choral Symphony, he was attacked by a gorilla in Central Africa, but tamed the mighty simian by the power ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... singer, Miss Stephens (afterward Countess of Essex). She had a curious nervous trick of twitching her dress before she began to sing; this peculiarity was well known to all her friends, and Liston, who certainly was one of them, used to agonize the poor woman by standing at the side scene, while the symphony of her pathetic ballads was being played, and indicating by his eyes and gestures that something was amiss with the trimming or bottom of her dress; when, as invariably as he chose to play the trick, poor Miss Stephens used ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... dedicated one of his symphonies to Napoleon. But he lived to regret the hour. When he died in the year 1827, Napoleon was gone and the French Revolution was gone, but the steam engine had come and was filling the world with a sound that had nothing in common with the dreams of the Third Symphony. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... formed behind the town band, whose symphony suffered somewhat from the effort of the musicians to keep one eye on the music and throw the other eye backward at ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... curling tails and a face like Beelzebub. When the sun rises, the oldest of the band, with an imposing and mysterious voice, sings a monotonous psalm. It is the baritone of the troop. The young tenors repeat after him the morning symphony. The Indians say then that the "gueribas" ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... audience to them: it was not a mere "concert," which in England is another word for so much expense and so much vanity—it was a gathering of friends. We knew the music in which the Kapelle was most at home; we knew their strong points and their weak ones; the passage in the Pastoral Symphony where the second violins were a little weak; that overture where the blaseninstrumente came out so well—the symphonies one heard—the divine wealth of undying art and beauty! Those days are past: despite ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... of the Cicada, whose bellies sway and rustle with increasing frenzy as the temperature rises. The strident scrapings of the Cicada of the Ash, the Carcan of the district, lend their rhythm to the one note symphony of the common cicada. This is the moment: come along! And, for five or six weeks, oftenest in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, I set myself to ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... individuality to the general purpose. Without this method a play when acted is at best a disjoined and incoherent piece of work, instead of being a harmonious whole like the fine performance of an orchestral symphony. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... existed: he lifts it out of the mass, and holding it up where others can see it, the discerning cry, "Yes, yes—we recognize it!" The musician takes the sound he needs from the winds blowing through the forest branches, constructs a harp strung with Apollo's golden hair, and behold, we have a symphony! The wrongs of a race in bondage never touched the hearts of men until a woman lifted out a single, solitary black man and showed us the stripes upon the quivering back of Uncle Tom. One human being nailed to a cross reveals the concentrated woes of earth; and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... and Strife, In sacred Thoughts and Deeds, he spends his Life, To mo'drate Bounds, his Wishes he confines, All views of Grandeur, Pow'r and Wealth resigns, With Pomp and Pride can cheerfully dispense, Dead to the World, and empty Joys of Sense, The Symphony of heav'nly Song he hears, Celestial Concord vibrates on his Ears., Which emulates the Music of the Spheres The Band of active Youths and Virgins fan, Rank'd in due Order, by their Teacher's Care, The Sight of all Beholders ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... quite a different fragrance from any I had ever known before in any garden; not so richly heavy as on the Riviera, though penetrating; as delicate, Maida said, as a Beethoven symphony, and as individual. I believe if I were to go blind, and somebody should lead me into the garden of the Villa Serbelloni without telling me where I was, I should know by that wonderful perfume. I can't imagine its being the ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... required to travel to obtain the best scenery of the country." From now on the whole trip is one of carefully engineered surprises and revelations. Colwell's Moana Villa, and Pomin's new and beautiful place are passed and then we ascend, and suddenly Meek's Bay is revealed to us, a glorious symphony in blues, deepening and richening into pure amethyst, with lines, patches and borders of emerald and lapis lazuli. Beyond rise hill-studded slopes leading the eye higher and higher until, anchored in a sky as blue as is the Lake below, are the snowy-white crowns of ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... head or my ear. I am not for forcing my tastes or no-tastes on other people. Let every man enjoy himself in his own way, while he does not annoy others. I would not deprive you of your enjoyment of a brilliant symphony, and I hope you would not deprive me of my enjoyment of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... obeyed, stationing his slight form so much in shadow, that the expression of his working countenance was not visible to those who sat within the stronger light of the lamp. The instruments then commenced a gentle symphony, which was soon ended; and twice had they begun the air, but still no voice was heard to mingle in ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... close beside the criminals which bore them; or better still, from their point of view, float downstream to found new colonies afar. When the beautiful jewelweed - a conspicuous sufferer - is hung about with dodder, one must be grateful for at least such symphony ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... conversation on the weather and things in general, till every subject they can think of has been exhausted, when Lippa finds that Dalrymple is looking at her, she fiddles with her teaspoon in her cup and then raises her eyes to his, and finding them still fixed on her, returns to the teaspoon symphony, but he rises and ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... is not, as good critics of painting and music often affirm, different from the other arts; in all of them the content is one thing with the form. What Beethoven meant by his symphony, or Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but what meaning can be uttered in no language but their own: and we know this, though some strange delusion makes us think the meaning has less worth, ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... Court Palace and the National Gallery (on free days) and enjoy Mantegna and Michael Angelo whilst millionaires were yawning miserably over inept gluttonies; because I could suffer more by hearing a movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony taken at a wrong tempo than a duchess by losing a diamond necklace, I was indifferent to the repulsive fact that if I had fallen in love with the duchess I did not possess a morning suit in which I could reasonably have expected ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... The composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries practised their elaborate artifices upon it. The supreme genius of Sebastian Bach made it the subject of study.7 And in our own times it has been used with conspicuous effect in Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony, in an overture by Raff, in the nobleFestouverture of Nicolai, and in Wagner's Kaisermarsch; and is introduced with recurring emphasis in ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... Decamps's splendid picture of an African about to sling a stone at a vulture sitting on some ruins, and the superbly painted dogs of Troyon's "Gardechasse." Dr. H. C. Angell's fine Jules Dupre, "Symphony," ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... have power to touch our senses so— And let your silver-chime Move in melodious time, And let the base of heaven's deep organ blow; And with your ninefold harmony Make up full consort to the angelic symphony. ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... another!... Here I pace up and down, rejoicing in the spacious sunlit prospect, and endeavouring to disentangle from one another the multitudinous street-cries that climb to this hanging garden in confused waves of sound. Harsh at close quarters, they weave themselves into a mirthful symphony up here. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the ensuing silence. "You can say with equal truth that every human being has the right to run a four-minute mile or to compose a great symphony. It isn't a matter of right at all, but of ability. In this case the mental qualities are even more necessary than the physical. You as a Board did a very fine job of selecting the BuSci personnel for Project ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... condition of the Connecticut. The dull din of battle, the crashing and rumbling of the hostile shells, the suffocating smoke which penetrated even here below, the rhythmic groaning of the engine and the noise of the pumps were united here into an uncanny symphony. The ventilators had to be closed, as they sent down biting smoke from the burning deck instead of fresh air. The nerves of the officers and crews were in a state of fearful tension; they had reached the point where nothing matters and where destruction is looked forward ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... of horns, the neighing of mules, the braying of donkeys, the singing of women, the squalling of children, and the banging of the huge rattan, wielded by the jemadar or leader of the caravans, who beats time to this pastoral symphony. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... is a kind of symphony that cannot be described;{1} which comes from the pouring forth and diffusion of the thoughts and affections from which speech flows, in accordance with the form of heaven, and all affiliation and all communication in heaven is in accordance with that form. That angels are affiliated in ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... father's house, or sing with too much boisterousness at the dinners of the St. Andrew's Club, for which the Leith frigates had made special provision of the Scottish wine. Anon the fingers strayed upon an Italian symphony full of languors and of sun, and once at least a dance gave quickness to ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... I said, was both third base and umpire (after a run they always reverted to their original positions). Her voice rang out in a symphony like this: "Wan stri'! Wan ball! Fou' ball! Ilapog! ilapog sa acon! Hindi! Ilapog sa firs' ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with singing:—not steam-piston labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with steam-whistling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied by that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do you know that lately, in Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of England—in Wordsworth's own home—a procession of villagers on their festa day provided for themselves, by way of music, a steam-plough whistling at ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the advantage over us others: they can dock their productions and tinker at them. Even to the musician comes this useful chance, and Schumann can reform the proclamation which opens his B-flat Symphony. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... a young girl of very exalted ideas; she works herself into enthusiasm for the poetry of one writer or the prose of another. You have only to judge by the impression made upon her by that scaffold symphony, 'The Last Hours of a Convict'" (the saying was Butscha's, who supplied wit to his benefactress with a lavish hand); "she seemed to me all but crazy with admiration for that Monsieur Hugo. I'm sure I don't know where such ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... no doubt heard how the wife of a well-known Norwegian composer, in a fit of raging jealousy excited by her husband's prolonged absence from home, burnt the manuscript of a symphony which he had just finished. The circumstances under which Hedda burns Lovborg's manuscript are, of course, entirely different and infinitely more dramatic; but here we have merely another instance of the dramatisation or "poetisation" of the raw material of life. Again, a still ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... and roar grew into a symphony—full, rich, magnificent, and then, with a rush, came a stirring musical ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... however, agree in stating that he wrote in the style of the modern Italians, that is to say, what were called the modern Italians in the later part of the last and the earlier part of this century. Elsner tried his strength and ability in all genres, from oratorio, opera, and symphony, down to pianoforte variations, rondos, and dances, and in none of them did he fail to be pleasing and intelligible, not even where, as especially in his sacred music, he made use—a sparing use—of contrapuntal devices, imitations, and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the noise when they left the gun and when they burst, reminded him of the passage with cymbals in the divine scherzo of the Ninth Symphony. When he heard overhead as from an airy music-box the buzzing of these steel mosquitoes, mischievous, imperious, angry, treacherous, or simply full of amiable carelessness, he felt like a street boy rushing out to see a fire. No more fatigue; mind and body on the alert; and when came the long-awaited ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... Holy Ghost that this Man became the symbol of the Most High, the sacrament of His Being and Presence, the sacred shrine of Deity. As when the long-drawn travail of instrumentation labors through the opening movements of the ninth symphony, with a strain too fine for any voicing save by man, there bursts at length upon the tumultuous storm of sound the clear, high, song of joy from human lips; so from the mounting efforts of a nation's insufficient utterance ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... us several days to run Bouchalka down, but when we did find him Cressida promptly busied herself in his behalf. She sang his "Sarka" with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at a Sunday night concert, she got him a position with the Symphony Orchestra, and persuaded the conservative Hempfstangle Quartette to play one of his chamber compositions from manuscript. She aroused the interest of a publisher in his work, and introduced him to people ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... she then added, "there be other matters wherein certain of us do differ from other. To wit, some of us do love to sing unto symphony [music] the praise and laud of God; the which othersome (of whom am I myself) do account to be but a vain indulgence of the flesh, and a thing unmeet for its vanity to be done of God's servants dwelling in this evil world. Some do hold that childre ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Here she attended the Symphony Concerts (on twenty-five cent tickets), and prattled knowingly of Mozart and Beethoven; and here she listened to Patti or Bernhardt from the third balcony of the Boston Theater. If she attended an exhibit of modern paintings she saw no beauty in pictured face or flower, but ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... the prairies than the prairie chicken's melodious booking that echoes afar like the low notes of a vast organ; the dusky grouse's booming call, that may seem to come from a distance even when the bird is near by, has its place in the great symphony of nature, yet these musical sounds are being steadily and relentlessly silenced by the gun of the sportsman. By this silencing that costs the lives of countless hundreds of innocent and harmless birds, the agriculturist is being robbed of one of his most powerful allies in the endless battle ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... private and particular situation, and must choose a point of view, common to him with others; he must move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string to which all mankind have an accord and symphony. If he mean, therefore, to express that this man possesses qualities, whose tendency is pernicious to society, he has chosen this common point of view, and has touched the principle of humanity, in which every man, in some degree, concurs. While the human heart is compounded of the ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... The unity of his work is derived from the effect of light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremulous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies the whole. It was enough for him to produce a gleeful symphony by the play of light and colour, by the animation of his figures, and by the intoxicating beauty of his forms. His angels are genii disimprisoned from the chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic Paradise, elemental sprites ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... time when the Symphony was perfected by Haydn, who, following the steps of Bach, brought this branch of the art to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown. The influence of this composer on the progress of the Violin cannot be over-estimated. ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... The notion was sometimes alluded to by my mother in after-years with unfading horror.] I should like much to hear something about yourselves; what the genius loci says, whether through voice of ghost, or rat, or winter wind, or kettle-singing symphony to the happy duet; and whether by any chance you sometimes give ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... weather-bulwarks, and with one arm round a mizzen-backstay, there is a capital place to watch all this and feel the glorious thrill of the sea,—to look down the sloping deck into the black billows, with here and there a white patch of foam, and while the organ-harp overhead is sounding its magnificent symphony. It is but wood and iron and hemp and canvas that is doing all this, with some thirty poor, broken-down, dissipated wretches, who, being fit for nothing else, of course are fit for the fo'castle of a Liverpool Liner. Yet it is, for all that, something ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... make of it in America. It is extremely interesting; and I always think that your Theory of the Intuitive versus the Analytical and Philosophical applies to the other Arts as well as that of the Drama. Mozart couldn't tell how he made a Tune; even a whole Symphony, he said, unrolled itself out of a leading idea by no logical process. Keats said that no Poetry was worth [anything] unless it came spontaneously as Leaves to a Tree, etc. {79} I have no faith in your Works of Art done on Theory and Principle, like ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... the organ fugue in C as they ought to have done. They skipped not in answer to the adagio movement in the May-day Symphony. The oratorio conjured no money from their pockets—for the most part, they declined to open the wrapper which surrounded it, or to see it opened. Poor Christopher, in short, experienced all the scorn which patient merit of the unworthy takes, and found his own appreciation of himself of little ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... showing our respect for what the man in the street says or thinks, and the woman in the street thinks and says, are we not losing sight of a leading phrase of the symphony, sonata, cantata—whatever you like to call it—of Mrs. Nightingale's life? A phrase that steals in, just audibly—no more, in the most strepitoso passage of the stormy second movement—a movement, however, in which the proceedings of the Divorce Court are scarcely more audible, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... entered the concert-hall, the orchestra had already begun the programme of the day with Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony. The house was crowded to excess; numbers of people were standing, apparently willing to endure a whole afternoon's fatigue, rather than miss hearing the Orpheus of Andalusia,—the "Endymion out of Spain," as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... If the art of today has made no progress in fugue, song, sonata, symphony, quartet, oratorio, opera [who has improved on Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Name! name! I say], what is the use of talking about "the average of today being higher"? How higher? You mean more ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... notes in that great symphony Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres, And all the live world's throbbing heart shall be One with our heart; the stealthy, creeping years Have lost their terrors now; we shall not die— The universe ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... crystallization and mind's interpretation of these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them, an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us how far we are yet from ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... your grateful homage to your Queen, the ROSE, for that is the name I give her.' Then taking a crown in her hand, that had been made on purpose in heaven, she placed it on the head of the new-made majesty; while to complete the ceremony, the attending gods sung joyful Io Paeans, amidst a symphony of flutes, harps, and all other tuneful instruments, with which the air resounded, while Flora and her bright celestial train ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... see that it is so obvious. This suit is a kind of Bridal Symphony, composed at Cologne when I got the telegram telling me of Svava's engagement. Just think of it! At Cologne—not ten hours' journey from Paris! But I could not wait ten hours; I had risen too much in my own estimation in view of my approaching relationship with the richest family ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... powerful voice From ancient darkness call'd the morn, Of jarring elements composed the noise; When Chaos, from his old dominion torn, With all his bellowing throng, Far, far was hurl'd the void abyss along; And all the bright angelic choir To loftiest raptures tune the heavenly lyre, Pour'd in loud symphony the impetuous strain; And every fiery orb and planet sung, And wide through night's dark desolate domain Rebounding long and ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... of the sugared sap of tender bark, and is silent only at night, sated with light and heat. The song, which forms part of the majestic symphony of the harvest-tide, announces merely its delight in existence. Having passed years underground, the cigale has only a month to reign, to be happy in a world of light, under the caressing sun. Judge whether the wild ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... without meaning, though in truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and original a work as Euclid's "Elements" or a symphony of Beethoven. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... health failed and he was forced to return home where he practised law with his father till 1873. Then deciding to devote himself to music and poetry, he went to Baltimore where he was engaged as first flute in the Peabody Symphony Concerts and in 1879 as lecturer on English Literature in Johns Hopkins University. His dread disease never relaxed and he was often obliged to quit work and go to Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... because he could not manipulate the old. It seems hardly possible to us that musicians could ever have been found to deny that the composer of 'Die Meistersinger' was a consummate master of counterpoint. Fortunately the discovery of his Symphony in C finally put an end to all doubts relative to the thoroughness of Wagner's musical education. In this work, which was written at the age of eighteen, the composer showed a mastery of the symphonic form which many of his detractors might ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... have brought a pleasant little surprise for us; but, Mr. Pfeiffer, won't you explain the Children's Symphony to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE DE RENE, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to their facility. Musicians, for instance, often become intoxicated by their own sweet sounds, and are lured on to unseemliness, making much discord in life's symphony. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard |
