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Gamut   /gˈæmət/   Listen
Gamut

noun
1.
A complete extent or range:.
2.
The entire scale of musical notes.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Gamut" Quotes from Famous Books



... and glamour of the nutmeg aisles, the exquisite foliage and contours of the spice-bearing trees, the wealth of delicate blossom and peach-like fruit, and the flickering emerald light from hues shading through the whole gamut of colour, from the tender verdure of spring to the glossy darkness of winter evergreen. Colossal kanari-trees, veritable monarchs of the forest, tower over the nutmegs, and form an unbroken roof of interlacing boughs, for the nutmeg, needing shelter to bring ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... to compress into the space of about two hours and a half a great number of different acts which run the gamut of the entertainment forms, and therefore it cannot afford more than an average of twenty minutes to each. This time limit makes it difficult for a playlet to present effectively any story that does not occur in consecutive minutes. ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... large impartiality. His men and women are cast in the same mould of grandeur, inspired with equal strength and sweetness, antiphonal notes in dual harmony. Praxiteles leans to the female, Lysippus to the male; and so, through all the gamut of the figurative craftsmen, we discover more or less affinity for man or woman. One is swayed by woman and her gracefulness, the other by man and his vigour. Few have realised the Pheidian perfection of ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... invariably the woman who did it.... Yet there comes in every married woman's existence that time when she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life—as a life which had run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she ever came into that life. A woman never realizes that of her lover, somehow. But ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... whose photograph is reproduced above, says she believes she is the most adventuresome of New York's society women, but is tired of the humdrum existence of Mother Earth in general and New York in particular. She says she thinks she has run the entire gamut of worldly thrills, but is still on the lookout for something new. Mrs. Dows declares she has ridden the most fiery of steeds and taken them over the most dangerous jumps. She has driven auto racing cars at blinding speed. Once she captured a burglar single-handed. She has piloted all manner ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... listen, when, after having sounded every note in the wide gamut of Nature, after reading the story of life as it stands written in the long series of records reaching from Cambrian fossils to ovarian germs, after tracing the divine principle of order from the starlike flower at his feet to the flower-like circle of planets which spreads its fiery corolla, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... uniforms, guns and equipment of every description to increase the limited supply on hand to the necessary point. The quantity and variety of supplies required by an army division seems mountainous to the civilian. They ran the entire gamut from shoe laces to motor trucks, and these had to be purchased at the high prices caused by sudden demand wherever it was possible to obtain them in quantities with the ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall

... stimuli, in one form or another, creative work is impossible, nor indeed the spirit of kindliness and generosity. The fact that some great geniuses have seen their reflection in the goblet too frequently, does not justify Puritanism in attempting to fetter the whole gamut of human emotions. A Byron and a Poe have stirred humanity deeper than all the Puritans can ever hope to do. The former have given to life meaning and color; the latter are turning red blood into water, beauty ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations, though it forms the staple of the "Divan." He has run through the whole gamut of passion,—from the sacred, to the borders, and over the borders, of the profane. The same confusion of high and low, the celerity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him. From ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... trapped thing had a special appeal to his commiseration that a creature ruthlessly slaughtered in the open was not privileged to claim. He did not accurately and in words discriminate the differences, but he felt that the captive had sounded all the gamut of hope and despair, shared the gradations of an appreciated sorrow that makes all souls akin and that even lifts the beast to the plane of brotherhood, the bond of emotional woe. He had often with no other or ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... life of the moment, we are given an interesting idea of how a bride a la mode was arrayed, in what manner a gay young lord dressed himself on his wedding morning, and how a young mother draped her proud brocade. The colouring is that of ancient stained glass, simple, rich, the gamut of colours limited, but the manner of their combining is infinite in its power to please. The conscientiousness of the ancient dyer lives after him through the centuries, and the fresh ruby-colour, the golden yellow of the large-figured brocades, glow almost as richly now as they did when the Burgundian ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... canoe, sifting the night sounds and smells of the wilderness, when all harsher cries are hushed and the silence grows tense and musical, like a great stretched chord over which the wind is thrumming low suggestive melodies, a sudden rush and flapping in the grasses beside you breaks noisily into the gamut of half-heard primary tones and rising, vanishing harmonics. Then, as you listen, and before the silence has again stretched the chords of her Eolian harp tight enough for the wind's fingers, another sound, a cry, comes floating down from the air—Quoskh? ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long

... a commercial people; but whereas in England a commercial life may not offer scope for any intellectual activity and may even have a necessary tendency to stunt the mentality of any one engaged in it, business in the United States offers exercise to a much larger gamut of abilities and, by its mere range and variety, instead of dwarfing has a tendency to keep those abilities trained and alert. A business in England has not approximately the same large theatre ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... a master in the science of delicate compliments. There was, I confess, a time when, with youthful vanity, I did esteem myself possessed of some skill, and could step along the gamut with any Don or Signor of them all; but that is long since, and I fear me that the gutturals of Northern Germany have quite driven out of my throat the liquids and vowels of Italy. However, to pleasure me, thou hast sung with ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... breath. Besides gowns and sashes of dazzling brilliance, the men wear on their heads all the types of covering one learned to know in the pictures of ancient Cathay, from the high-peaked hat of yellow and black—through the whole, strange gamut—to the helmet with streaming peacock plumes. But were I to tell about them all I would leave none of my poor descriptive ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... gentleman so characterized, he emerged, a moment later, from the portals of the club, still chuckling mildly to himself as he struggled into a light evening overcoat. His temper, having run the gamut of boredom, interest, perturbation, mystification, and plain amusement, was now altogether inconsequential: a dangerous mood for Maitland. Standing on the corner of Twenty-sixth Street he thought it over, tapping the sidewalk gently with his ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... them to experiment," said he, leaving the last standing upon the glass insulator. "To the world it would seem an expensive demonstration which cost two thousand pounds, but our standard, you see, is a different one. Now you will see me run through the whole gamut of metallic nature." ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle

... so few American speakers have, a voice that sounded the gamut. I heard him once in Exeter Hall say, "Americans, I send my voice careering across the Atlantic like a thunderstorm, to tell the slave-holders of the Carolinas that God's thunderbolts are hot, and to ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... fury. The frost bared its teeth. The clouds still volleyed, but their discharge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stung bare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked its whole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses of snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there in swirling clouds. And above the treble voices of the storm Hollister, from the warm security of the cabin, could hear the intermittent rumbling ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... to know is success in locking one's self outside of knowledge, and all that can be said of the most learned man that lives—if he is learned in this way—is that he knows more things that he does not know, about more things, than any man in the world. He runs the gamut of ignorance. ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... down to the present time, there has been no figure in German literature comparable to Heine. His prose was exquisite. His poetry ran through the whole gamut of humanity and of the sensations that come to us from the outer world. In his poems are sweet melodies and passionate cries of revolt, stirring ballads of the sea and tender love-songs—strange as these last seem ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... called to West Point. I shall not see you again. I am walking now into the sunset. Soon the shadows will enfold me and I shall sleep the long sleep. I am content. I have lived. I have loved. I have succeeded and failed. I have swept the gamut of human passion and human emotion. I have no right to more. Yet I envy you the glory of manhood in the crisis that is coming. May the God of our fathers keep you and teach you and bless ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... sixpence was put to Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention—it might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the reverse—but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case, and left nothing else connected with ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... constrainedly as she tousled his head; there was a missing note somewhere in this gamut of happiness; perhaps it was because he was ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... cold; rejoiced to be on the trail, rejoiced to work. When we made ready to depart after a few days at a mission or in a town, Nanook was beside himself with joy. He would burst forth into song as he saw the preparations in hand, would run all up and down the gamut of his singular flexible voice, would tell as plainly to all around as though he spoke it in English and Indian and Esquimau that the inaction had irked him, that he was eager to be ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... morning at Office. At noon with W. Pen to Duke of York, and attended Council. So to piper and Duck Lane, and there kissed bookseller's wife, and bought Legend. So home, coach. Sailor. Mrs. Hannam dead. News of Peace. Conning my gamut. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... Oswego, on Lake Ontario; I was pleased with the journey, although, what with ducking to bridges, bites from mosquitoes, and the constant blowing of their unearthly horn with only one note, and which one must have been borrowed from the gamut of the infernal regions, I had had ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... drills is such a roaring and jangling that I must bellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire gamut of sound-waves surrounds and enfolds me, and with it all the powerful Atlantic breeze sweeps deafeningly through the channel. Down in the bottom of the canal if one step behind anything that shuts off the breeze it is tropically hot; yet up ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... Quennebert. It was an evening of adventures. It was written that in the space of two hours Angelique was to run the gamut of all the emotions, experience all the vicissitudes to which a life such as she led is exposed: hope, fear, happiness, mortification, falsehood, love that was no love, intrigue within intrigue, and, to crown ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... boy was clever, shrewd, quick to learn, secretive as castaway children ever are, can well be understood. He became a secretary, an engineer, a valet, a waiter, working life's gamut backward, thus proving that in human service there is no high nor low degree, only this: he, at this time, knew nothing about human service—he was fighting ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by use, in its nest of tarnished silk slept the golden thimble. There, too, in the corner, near a music-stand piled high with musical compositions of various schools and graduated complexity from "lessons for beginners" to the most arduous gamut of a German oratorio, slunk pathetically a poor lute-harp, the strings long since broken. There, too, by the window, hung a wire bird-cage, the bird long since dead. In a word, round the woman gazing on Jasper Losely, as he complacently drank his brandy, grouped the forlorn tokens of an early ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... carry that faculty of an honest laugh with him wherever he goes,—why shouldn't he? The "order of things," as he calls it, from which hilarity was excluded, would be crippled and one-sided enough. I don't believe the human gamut will be cheated of a single note after men have done breathing this fatal atmospheric mixture and die into ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... dash, that sends a delicious warm shiver through every nerve; then, with milder applications, lessening the temperature of the water by semi-tones, until, from the highest key of heat which we can bear, we glide rapturously down the gamut until we reach the lowest bass of coolness. The skin has by this time attained an exquisite sensibility, and answers to these changes of temperature with thrills of the purest physical pleasure. In fact, the whole frame seems purged of its earthy nature and transformed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... the door, fretting and fuming inwardly. He knew better than that. Nevitt's consummate mastery of his chosen instrument was but of a piece, after all, with the way he could play on all the world, as on a familiar gamut. It was the very skill of the man that made him so dangerous and so devilish. Guy felt that under the spell of Nevitt's eye he himself was but as clay in the hands of ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... through the widest possible gamut of moods. They had their moments of rapturous love—passionate attempts at self-surrender. They had long hours of cool discussion, as impersonal as if they had been talking about the characters out of a hook instead of about themselves. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... home of a pair of birds, the bushes parted to admit light, and clinging to them I found a creature, often having the bird's sweep of wing, of colour pale green with decorations of lavender and yellow or running the gamut from palest tans darkest browns, with markings, of pink or dozens of other irresistible combinations of colour, the feathered folk found a competitor that often outdistanced them in my affections, for I am captivated easily by colour, ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... accustomed to flattery, to importunity, to the ordinary variety of masculine solicitation; to the revelation of genuine feeling, too, in its various modes of expression—sentimental, explosive, insinuating—the entire gamut. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers

... intersect each other so as to produce the whole gamut of Chinese lattice-work decoration, and all the Celtic and Scandinavian entwined patterns, from which so many of the embroideries in the Italian pictures of the fourteenth and fifteenth ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... projects of the Great War followed the same course. Under Napoleon's directions they ran the whole gamut of every scheme that ever raised delusive hope before. Beginning from the beginning with the idea of stealing his army across in flat-boats, he was met with the usual flotilla defence. Then came his only new idea, which was ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... fact that he was first a traveller over most of the educational world of his time, then a professor at the University of Salerno who attracted many students, and finally a Benedictine monk in the great abbey at Monte Cassino, shows how his life ran the gamut of the various phases of interest in the intellectual world of his time. It was his retirement to the famous monastery that gave him the opportunity, the leisure, the reference library for consultation that ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones, —touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance. Married life is the school in which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... inconsistencies, but she did not perceive it herself, otherwise she must also have observed that she was running up the whole gamut of her past moods and experiences, only to find how unsatisfactory in its unstableness and futility was each. And she might still further have perceived how fatal the habit of living from day to day without any settled purpose, a mere cork of a creature on the waters of life ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... The entire gamut of the view's changes should have been known to her; its winter aspect, spring, summer and autumn; how storms came up from the sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over; she should have noted the red spot where the villas were building; and the criss-cross of lines where ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... objective (i. e. seated in the inherent imperfections of the art itself, and not removeable therefore by any future improvements to be anticipated from a more matured psychology); viz. that the human mind transcends or overflows the gamut or scale of the art; in other words, that the qualities—intellectual or moral, which ought to be expressed, are far more in number than the alphabet of signs or expressions by which they are to be enunciated. Hence it follows as ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... one of the numerous deep easy chairs which were placed about the room, trying hard to force myself into at least the semblance of quietude. But, after all, what was the use of even assuming composure when the man I had come to meet probably had the power to gauge the whole gamut of a human being's emotion at a moment's notice? Instinctively I pressed my hand against my heart and felt the letter my 'lover' had given me—surely that was ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... do, against all the rules, and in defiance of gamut. Therefore, to come to the point, O treasure of my soul! I am going to take her with me for a short time, perhaps to Cheltenham or Brighton. We ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... play of Ivan the Terrible, the interest centers around one man, the Czar Ivan. If anybody but Richard Mansfield played the part, there would be nothing in it. We simply get a glimpse into the life of a tyrant who has run the full gamut of goosedom, grumpiness, selfishness and grouch. Incidentally this man had the power to put other men to death, and this he does and has done as his whim and temper might dictate. He has been vindictive, cruel, quarrelsome, tyrannical and terrible. Now that he feels the approach of death, he would ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... Methodist parson and the sincerity of a maiden lady with a mission to obtain good situations for deserving girls; a man, so please you, who had gone into the holes and corners of the Continent of Europe in search of Truth, who had come face to face with human nature naked and unashamed, who had run the gamut of femininity from our rare princess Joanna to the murderer's widow of Prague; a man who ought to have had so sensitive a perception that the most subtle and elusive harmonies of woman were as familiar to him as their providential ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... powerfully and yet subtly told. It sweeps the whole gamut of the moral law. Many stories develop the same theme but none just like this. Stevenson himself is drawn again to the same problem a little later in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Hawthorne tried it in "Howe's Masquerade," in which the cloaked figure is the phantom or reduplication ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... stood over him while he stripped their wrappings from the jars which showed the dark blue, dark green, light brown, dark brown, and black, with the dark crimson, forming the gamut of colour of the Lapham paint. "Don't TELL me it's paint that I can ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... everybody had work; that there were no poor people in this country, that there was no problem of the unemployed. I was disillusioned in the first few weeks, for I tramped the streets night and day. I ran the gamut of the employment agencies and the "Help Wanted" columns of the papers. It was while looking for work that I first became acquainted with the Bowery. It was in the current of the unemployed that I was swept there first. It was there that I first discovered the dimensions of the problem ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... miracles of melody such as Auld Lang Syne, with one little finger; but such undue precocity, madly stimulated by ambitious mamma and nurse Nell, resulted fatally in the total destruction of my marvellous talent, which died of cerebro-musical excitement when confronted with the gamut. Except as the language in which Strauss appeals to my waltzing genius, I have no more use for it than for ancient Aztec. Thank Heaven! this is a progressive age, and girls are no longer tormented as formerly by piano fiends, who once persisted ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... "is an emanation due to this new force, protodyne, which I use. It is a manifestation of energy, sir, that may run changes not only through the whole gamut of the elements, but is capable of transforming the ether itself into matter, matter into life, and life into mind. It is the outward sign of the ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... tropical birds. They will have something to do with flowers and with bright butterflies, and we shall know why our "favorite color" is more than a whim, and why the Greeks may not have been able to distinguish the full gamut of our spectrum, and why rainbows are so narrow to our eyes in comparison ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... arriving. But success with Balzac never meant leisure, or relief from a heavy burden of debt; it merely gave scope for enormous prodigies of labour. His passion for work amounted to a disease; and who can measure the gamut of emotion, ranging from rapture down to straining effort, which was gone through in those silent hours of darkness, when the man, the best part of whom lived only in solitude and night, sat in his monk's habit, before a ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... dinner," and a horse that enables you to say, "I am thar." That's all I ask. Now just look at the different sorts of love-making in this world. First, there is boy and gall love; they are practising the gamut, and a great bore it is to hear and see them; but poor little things, their whole heart and soul is in it, as they were the year before on a doll or a top. They don't know a heart from a gizzard, and if you ask them what a soul is, they will say it is the dear sweet soul they ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... well that spring. He was threatened successively with typhoid fever, appendicitis, consumption, and cholera, and only escaped a serious illness in each case by the prompt application of remedies prescribed in his books. His wife ran the whole gamut of emotions from terror, worry, and sympathy down to indifference and good-natured tolerance, reaching the last only after the repeated failure of Jason's ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter

... the world is a very subjective thing, and what makes life worth living to one person is not necessarily what makes it worth living to another. Certain fundamental things everybody is apt to want: enough to eat (but what a gamut that "enough" can run!); a mate (the range and variety of mates who do seem amply to satisfy one another!); a shelter to retire to nights (what a bore if we all had to live complacently on the Avenue!); children to love and fuss over—but one child does some parents and ten children ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... of wheels as messengers sped back and forth with questions and replies. The nature of this correspondence shows how perfectly the government of France was centralized in Napoleon's person, even in his absence at such a distance: the whole gamut of administration was run, from state questions of the gravest importance down to the disposition of trivial affairs connected with the opera and its coryphees. As to reviving the finances, the Emperor was at his wit's end, and in a sort ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... stood and stared a moment longer. His face showed a gamut of emotions—horror, conviction, then furious incredulity. Suddenly he began hastening hither and thither about the room. He moved the furniture with fierce jerks, turning ever to see the effect upon the shadow on the wall. Not a line of its ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... Her heart's sweet gamut is cracking and breaking For a look, for a touch—for such slight things But he's such a very great musician Grimacing and fing'ring ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... said, astounded. Nineteen! Johnny? "Why, I was nineteen, when—" He paused. She was silent. Suddenly Maurice felt pity. He had run the gamut of many emotions in the last four years—love, and fright, and repentance, and agonies of shame, and sometimes anger; but he had never touched pity. It stabbed him now, and its dagger blade was sawtoothed with remorse. He looked at his wife, lying there with closed ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... years you have pretty well run the whole gamut of mockery, humiliation and failure. You understand the stammerer's feelings, his mental processes and ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

... be passing the door of the village school, momentarily opened for the admission of one, creeping along somewhat tardily with satchel on back, and "shining morning face." What a sudden burst of sound was emitted—what harmonious discord—what a commixture of all the tones in the vocal gamut, from the shrill treble to the deep under-hum! A chord was touched which vibrated in unison; boyish days and school recollections crowded upon me; pleasures long vanished; feelings long stifled; and friendships—aye, everlasting friendships—cut ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... and not a high note in the gamut. But you should hear Clarissa; I only ask you to hear her once, and let those glorious accents play upon your crass heart for a moment or two. O Jasper, Jasper, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... unconcern. He could now see all too clearly what a fool's dream he had cherished, and the awakening was painfully abrupt. He divined that something was amiss, something of which he had no knowledge or right to a knowledge. During that afternoon he had passed through the whole gamut of a lover's emotions, only to strike at last the lowest note of all, and he watched her hurrying up the walk as if she were going out ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... publication (No. 23. p. 374.). There was a custom however, connected with this impost, the origin of which I should be glad to learn. After the claim was made, the person from whom it was sought to be exacted had the power to summon the youngest chorister before him, and request him to "repeat his gamut," and if he failed, the spur-bearer ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various

... fall'n." And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find Their wildest wailings never out of tune With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave Returning, while none mark'd it, on the crowd Broke, mixt with awful light, and show'd their eyes Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson

... left them and returned no more; But whispers passed from Vimy to Verdun, Where'er the fields ran thickliest with gore, Of some stray bomber that belonged to none, But none more fierce or flung a fairer bomb, Who ran unscathed the gamut of the Somme And followed Freyberg up the Beaucourt mile With uncouth cries and streaming muddy hair; But after, when they sought his name and style And would have honoured him—he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various

... knows almost no limit. His wealth of theatrical experience runs the gamut from his own first appearance as an amateur actor and coach to a succession of triumphs as producing director of the most gorgeous theatrical presentations both ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... would tell him that evening would be whispered so low that not even the nesting birds could hear. She imagined the tenderness with which he'd clasp her in his arms, and thrilled, visualizing the darkening of his eyes. Tessibel was painting pictures—her exalted soul running the gamut of joy. ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... political witches' revel; nor is it of any moment to enumerate all the deeds of murder, besiegings of houses, acts of incendiarism and other scenes of violence within a great capital, and to reckon up how often the gamut was traversed from hissing and shouting to spitting on and trampling down opponents, and thence to throwing stones ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... that reached Lewes from time to time during the winter and spring sent the hearts of all that heard it through the whole gamut of emotions. At one time fierce hope, then despair, then rising confidence, then again blank hopelessness—each in turn tore the souls of the monks; and misery reached its climax in the summer at the news of the execution at Tyburn of the Abbots of Jervaulx and Fountains, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... as Paul Savelli, a romantically visaged, bright-natured, charming, intellectual, and execrably bad young actor. But there was only one Jane who knew him as little Paul Kegworthy. No woman he had ever met—and in the theatrical world one is thrown willy-nilly into close contact with the whole gamut of the sex—gave him just the same close, intimate, comforting companionship. From Jane he hid nothing. Before all the others he was conscious of pose. Jane, with her cockney common-sense, her shrewdness, her outspoken criticism of follies, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... enough, when the measure of their discontent was filled to overflowing this morning by a bombardment fiercer than ever. It opened with the barking of "Pom-Poms" as early as half-past five, and ran through the whole gamut from lowest bass of a big gun's boom to the shrillest scream of smaller projectiles and the whip-like whistle of shrapnel bullets lashing the air with so little intermission that within two hours no less than seventy-five shells had burst in and about Ladysmith camp. ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... states. By Quality we mean that subtle element in the voice by which is expressed at one time tenderness, at another harshness, at another awe, and so on through the whole gamut of feeling. The teacher now knows that emotion affects the quality of tone. Let him then use this knowledge as he has learned to use his knowledge of the other criteria. We recognize instinctively the qualities that express sorrow, tenderness, joy, and ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... educational enterprise he plucked her in her prime, I never knew, but she used to mention that my Father's ministrations had 'opened her eyes', from which 'scales' had fallen. She had accepted, on their presentation to her, the entire gamut of his principles. Miss Marks was accustomed, while putting me to bed, to dwell darkly on the incidents of her past, which had, I fear, been an afflicted one. I believe I do her rather limited intelligence no injury when I say that it was prepared to swallow, at one ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... habits of "the Indian inhabitants of these islands," a letter which was widely circulated and which has been extensively used by other writers. In it the writer with senile querulousness harped up and down the whole gamut of abuse in describing and commenting upon the vices of the natives, very artlessly revealing the fact in many places, however, that his observations were drawn principally from the conduct of the servants in the conventos and ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... laughable are the instances of such perplexity and mistake among the aged pieces of mechanism who have for years been sounding the same tune to generations of unquestioning ears, and who, not having an extra note in their gamut, can by no means bear to be played upon by strange hands. Age has its exemptions and immunities, however; might makes right, and one who has long been a dictator comes to be deemed an infallible authority. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... stairs, and into her chamber, where, secreting herself, she fastens the door. He looks wistfully after her, stamping his foot, but he will not follow. Too much of a polished gentleman, he will merely amuse himself by running over the gamut of his strongest imprecations. The noise creates general alarm among his companions, who, gaining their uprights, commence remonstrating with him on his rude conduct, as if they ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... voice, so sweet and true and full of expression; there was such tenderness and depth in it, that it seemed in some mysterious way to touch the very recesses of the heart, and to play on the whole gamut of human feeling. Malcolm found himself thinking of his lonely childhood, and of his father, then he recalled his youthful aspirations and his old ideals. "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts," ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... we were boys together," the other replied, with a slight dry cough, which was the highest note of his limited emotional gamut. "Your mother, Ezra, died upon the very day that Harston's wife gave birth to this daughter of his, seventeen years ago. Mrs. Harston only survived a few days. I have heard him say that, perhaps, we should also go together. We are in the hands of a higher ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... legend. And the rank and file of Morgan's resembled them—brave to a fault, innately lawless, of scant education save what the forest had taught them, headstrong, quick to anger, quick to forgive, violent in every emotion through the entire gamut from ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... Jerrold before, but had heard of him often during the last three or four months since the Englishman "blew into" Lucky Star City. He was a boaster as well as a waster, no doubt; for according to himself, he knew "everybody at home," from the King down the whole gamut of the British peerage. Also he "claimed" to be an Oxford man, and it was that which, in this emergency, had focused Nick's ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... through opposition—extremely irascible men; like farmers. Urbanity was the last note in their gamut, the City—urbs quam dicunt Romam—the last of places in their ken. There was no engaging them in dialectic, an Athenian art which they frankly despised. If you happened to disagree with them, their answer was a sturdy Anglo-Saxon brick. If you politely ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... first with its melody, the novelty wore off; and when, night after night, there were three or four of these birds waking the echoes beneath my bedroom window, trying in jealous rivalry each to outdo the other in compassing the whole gamut, “in the rich mazes of sound,” my admiration considerably abated, and I became rather disposed to vote the performance a veritable surfeit of song, to the utter banishment of much-needed slumber. Before, however, I had arrived at this prosaic way of viewing the “Queen of Song,” ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... events, she found it not at all objectionable that Prince Koltsoff was apparently enamoured of her. Of this she was quite certain. He had a way of looking his devotion. His luminous blue eyes were wonderful in their expressiveness. They could convey almost any impression in the gamut of human emotions, save perhaps kindliness, and among other things they had told her he ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... of tactics. The monotony of character and action is superficial, in most cases, rather than real, and he who fathoms the eyes of others, who catches the subtle quality of tones and interprets the flexible mouth that utters them, will discover that the whole gamut of human nature exists in those that appear only like certain musical instruments, made by machinery to play a few well-known tunes. Conventional restraint often, no doubt, produces dwarfed and defective human nature. I suppose that if souls could be put under a microscope, the undeveloped ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... dealing with men. There are cases enough when all the wheels are set in motion after a clue to the truth, i. e., when there is danger that the person under suspicion is innocent; appeals to honor, conscience, humanity and religion fail;—but run the complete gamut of self-love and the whole truth rings clear. Egoism is the best criterion of the presence of veracity. Suppose a coherent explanation has been painfully constructed. It is obvious that the correctness of the construction is studied with reference ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... intense, a new suffocation pressed about his temples—the suffocation of too much life. In an hour he had run the gamut of the seasons. The cold of everlasting winter descended and stung his senses. Up and up and up they went—then suddenly down, with the half-breed guide and the tireless mule always at the same distance before him; and again began the insistent mechanical ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... to have several sounds not heard in the other; and, 3. The erroneous impression is made upon the casual and superficial observer that in the aggregate of all Languages there must be an immense number of sounds; whereas, in fact, the total Alphabet of Vocal Sounds in nature, like the Gamut of Colors or Musical Tones, is quite limited, if we attend only to those which distinctly differ, or stand at appropriate and appreciable distances from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... round aghast. The bride shrieked; the bride-maids echoed the bride in every note of the gamut—all save Mollie; and she, like the bridegroom, had recognized ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming

... in 1888 and from that time gave her the deepest affection and truest allegiance. While the years went by she became nearer and dearer to Miss Anthony and was loved by her beyond all others. As an orator she played upon the whole gamut of human emotions, lifting her audiences to intellectual heights, touching their sentiment with her exquisite pathos, convincing them with her keen logic and winning their hearts with her irresistible humor. People ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... difficult to assign the motive that induced Father Amiot to observe, that "the Chinese, in order to obtain their scale of notes or gamut perfect, were not afraid of submitting to the most laborious operations of geometry, and to the most tedious and disgusting calculations in the science of numbers;" as he must have known, that they ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls—the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father's knees ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... fortnight later came the pig-killing, toward which my feeling remained exactly the same as on that occasion when, hardly seven years of age, I had fled from the city toward Alt-Ruppin, in order to escape, not only the spectacle, but a whole gamut of ear-and-heart-rending sounds. But I had meanwhile grown out of childhood into boyhood, and a boy, whether he will or no, feels honor-bound manfully to take everything that comes along, even if his own deepest nature revolts ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... indisputable source of feminine culture and development in France was the influence of the salons, which, as all the world knows, were reunions of both sexes, where conversation ran along the whole gamut of subjects, from the frothiest vers de societe to the philosophy of Descartes. Richelieu had set the fashion of uniting a taste for letters with the habits of polite society and the pursuits of ambition; and in the first quarter of the seventeenth century there ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... said with tears) on the platform at prayer-meetings. It resulted in defeat. Without any decency of delay he changed his colours, abjured the errors of reform, and, with the support of the Catholics, rose to the chief power. In a very brief interval he had thus run through the gamut of religions in the South Seas. It does not appear that he was any more particular in politics, but he was careful to consult the character and prejudices of the late king, Kalakaua. That amiable, far from unaccomplished, but too ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and woof of life under fire. It is the parade of the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears playing hide and seek with each other. The tragedy and the comedy follow close on each other's heels. Deep calls not only to deep but to shallow as well, and in the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... It is not unusual to see the hawk looking out of the human countenance, and one may see or have seen that still nobler bird, the eagle. The song-birds might all have been brooded and hatched in the human heart. They are typical of its highest aspirations, and nearly the whole gamut of human passion and emotion is expressed more or less fully in their varied songs. Among our own birds, there is the song of the hermit thrush for devoutness and religious serenity; that of the wood thrush for the musing, melodious thoughts of twilight; the song sparrow's ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... contradictions, shadows of Montfaucon shot through by glories from Notre Dame. Perhaps some day a clearer knowledge than ours will straighten out the tangles," and with a laugh, which had little joyousness in it, Villon plunged afresh into memories which seemed to strike the whole gamut of a soul's experience from ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... you could imagine. Most of the transformed crowd ya-hooing on the beach had felt the weight of his shoulder-of-mutton fist, yet so utterly had prudence forsaken them that, before we came near them, they were abusing him through all the varied gamut of filthy language they possessed. My democratic sentiments are deeply seated, but I do believe in authority, and respect for it being rigidly enforced, so this uncalled-for scene upset me, making me feel anxious that the gibbering fools might ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... first cross-country flights, I remember them now with a delight which, at the time, was not unmixed with other emotions. Indeed, an aviator, and a fledgling aviator in particular, often runs the whole gamut of human feeling during a single flight. I did in the course of half an hour, reaching the high C of acute panic as I came tumbling out of the first cloud of my aerial experience. Fortunately, in the air the sense of equilibrium usually compels one to do the right thing, and so, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... beautiful, so filled that ten folio volumes could not hold the description of them, and I have left out the meadows, the brooks, and hills. Often in writing about these things I have felt very earnestly my own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and many-sided colours. My gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would not give a note to one in a thousand of those I saw. At last I said, I will have more words; I will have more terms; I will have a book on colour, and I will find and use the right technical name for each one of these lovely tints. I was told that ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... might as well arise from the manner of noting as from my own dulness, being sensible it was an art which most people find difficult to understand. By examining the formation of the signs, I was convinced they were frequently very ill devised. I had before thought of marking the gamut by figures, to prevent the trouble of having lines to draw, on noting the plainest air; but had been stopped by the difficulty of the octaves, and by the distinction of measure and quantity: this idea returned again to my mind, and ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... magnificent as that which represents him with his hands closed, and his eyes turned to that heaven with which he holds communion? But imagine the man so placed, and holding no such communion! You will at once have run down the whole gamut of humanity from St. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... down upon the sea And finds no mate in all the realms of earth. I, too, have look'd on Nature in its worth And found no resting-place in all the spheres, And no relief beyond my sonnet-tears,— The soul-fed shudderings of my lonely harp That knows the gamut now of all ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay

... camp was writing its feverish annals, had undergone emotions in the whole varied order of the gamut. She had felt herself utterly deserted and utterly unhappy. She had hoped against hope that Van would come, that something might explain away his behavior, that she herself might have an opportunity of ascertaining what ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... infinite scale of colour, and an infinite gradation of sound, both above and below what the eye and the ear can apprehend, and that mortal apprehension can only appropriate to itself but a tiny fragment of the huge gamut. He ought to believe that if he is faithful to the best that he can apprehend, a door may be opened to him which may lead him into regions which are at present closed to him. To accept the artistic conscience, the artistic aim, as the highest ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... autumn was one of unusual drought. In the channel of the Quah-Davic rocks appeared which the old woodsman had never seen before. The leaves fell early, before half their wonted gamut of colour was run through. They wore a livery of pallid tones—rusty-reds, cloudy light violets, grayish thin golds, ethereal russets—under a dry, pale sky. The only solid, substantial colouring was that of the enduring hemlocks and the sombre, serried firs. Then there came ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... this direction once given from outside, whether by a 'programme' read by the listener or by the action and accessories of the stage, the force of feeling can be conveyed with overwhelming power, and the whole gamut of emotion, from the subtlest hint or foreshadowing to the fury of inevitable passion, is at the command of him who knows how to wield the means by which expression is carried to the hearer's mind. And in this fact—for a fact it is—lies the completest ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... been said by casual critics that Maupassant lacked one quality indispensable to the production of truly artistic work, viz: an absolutely normal, that is, moral, point of view. The answer to this criticism is obvious. No dissector of the gamut of human passion and folly in all its tones could present aught that could be called new, if ungifted with a viewpoint totally out of the ordinary plane. Cold and merciless in the use of this point de vue De Maupassant undoubtedly is, especially ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant

... was waiting, after having run the gamut of publicity. He was a celebrity. "Stanley Martin, the greatest detective in the Solar System," they'd called him. Fine stuff, that. Stanton wondered what the asteroids were like. What would it be like to live out in space, where ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... which to buy presents for her sisters, besides a well-filled purse for her own use. She and Mabel could choose their summer clothes together, amid the bewildering fascinations of Parisian fashions; and there was absolutely no limit in the amount of sight-seeing permissible. She could run the whole gamut, from the Louvre to the Catacombs, and get to know her Paris almost as well as she knew her London. What girl of twenty-three would not feel her woes assuaged by such a programme, especially in the company of a bosom friend to whom she had been ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... house, at the time, a cascade of musical emotion was gushing forth day after day, hour after hour, its scattered spray reflecting into our being a whole gamut of rainbow colours. Then, with the freshness of youth, our new-born energy, impelled by its virgin curiosity, struck out new paths in every direction. We felt we would try and test everything, and no achievement seemed impossible. We wrote, we sang, we acted, we poured ourselves out ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... Kate's little Kardiometer, or heart-measurer, graduated emotion, and pinched by scale. At its best it was by no means a high-pressure engine. But all is relative. Denys soon learned the tender gamut; and when to water the suspense, and extract the thrill as far as possible. On one occasion only he cannily indemnified his narrative for this drawback. Falling personally into the Rhine, and sinking, he got pinched, he Denys, to his ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... on these principles; and sank from danger to danger, from disaster to disaster, and having touched the whole gamut of human suffering, and disappointment, and shame, died a death in which no element of disgust, and terror, and ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson

... and she sometimes wondered if there could be a keener suffering, in the whole gamut of human pain, than that which a woman bears whose high pride in her lover has been ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... candles, followed by choir-boys in similar dresses who chanted as they walked along. Such sounds! Greek chanting is a horrible nasal caterwauling. Get a dozen boys to hold their noses, and then in a high key imitate the gamut performed by several festive cats as they prowl over the housetops on a quiet night, and you have Greek, Armenian or Turkish chanting and singing to perfection. There is not the first conception of music in the souls of these barbarians. Behind this choir came four men carrying the open ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... himself slighted for that woman he had so long despised. One and all, women and men alike, they slid by him as rapidly as decency would permit, nor cared to notice him again, though, from far corners and discreet retreating-places, they bestowed on him glances that ran the gamut from curiosity to open horror. Not so did Sophia fare. There was for her at least one hour when the immediate past was blotted out, and her heart warmed and thrilled again as it had in that long-past, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... tall for a woman. Her hair, to-night unpowdered, had the color of amber and something, too, of its glow; her eyes, though not profound, were large and in hue varied, as the light fell or her emotions shifted, through a wide gamut of blue shades. But it was her mouth you remembered: the fulness and brevity of it, the deep indentation of its upper lip, the curves of it and its vivid crimson—these roused you to wildish speculation as to its probable softness when Lady Allonby and Fate were beyond ordinary lenient. Pink ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... difficult to acquire the amenities of conversation. How much more this difficulty must be augmented in the case of those who are both deaf and blind! They cannot distinguish the tone of the voice or, without assistance, go up and down the gamut of tones that give significance to words; nor can they watch the expression of the speaker's face, and a look is often the very soul ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... Lerma's service.' He reviewed several ladies, certainly not very witty when malignant, as I remembered my father to have said of him. 'The style of your Englishwoman is to keep the nose exactly at one elevation, to show you're born to it. They daren't run a gamut, these women. These Englishwomen are a fiction! The model of them is the nursery-miss, but they're like the names of true lovers cut on the bark of a tree—awfully stiff and longitudinal with the advance of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... even a few drinks, and the elder man was forcibly reminded of Gus Briskow's statement that his son had a streak of the Old Nick in him. It was true; Buddy was indeed like a wild horse. Artificially stimulated, he became a creature of pure impulse, and those impulses ran the entire gamut of hilarity: he played the drum; he wrestled with a burly doorman; he yelled, whenever he found what he called a good "yelling place"; he demonstrated his ability to sing "Silver Threads Among the Gold" to the accompaniment ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach



Words linked to "Gamut" :   range, compass, music, scale, ambit, orbit, scope, reach, musical scale



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