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Harp   /hɑrp/   Listen
Harp

verb
(past & past part. harped; pres. part. harping)
1.
Come back to.  Synonym: dwell.  "She is always harping on the same old things"
2.
Play the harp.



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"Harp" Quotes from Famous Books



... will conduct them to a hill-side where he will point out to them "the right path of a virtuous and noble education, laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds on every side, that the Harp of Orpheus was not more charming." The rest of the tract is a redemption of this promise. To represent it by mere continued quotation would be of small use, and is perhaps unnecessary. We will, therefore, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... hang my harp upon a tree, A weeping willow in a lake; I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt For ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... Princess. He was a person gigantic in stature, and was slain by Suetonius in the battle which terminated the liberties of Britain. From him descended directly the Princes of Pontydwdlm, Mogyn of the Golden Harp (see the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest,) Bogyn-Merodac-ap-Mogyn, (the black fiend son of Mogyn,) and a long list of bards and warriors, celebrated both in Wales and Armorica. The independent Princes of Mogyn long held out against the ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and you'll hear and feel the far-away roar of the wires. But then the oaks are not connected with the distance, where there might be wind; and they don't ROAR in a gale, only sigh louder and softer according to the wind, and never seem to go above or below a certain pitch,—like a big harp with all the strings the same. I used to have a theory that those creek oaks got the wind's voice telephoned to them, so to speak, through ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson

... glances that sometimes lightened on his face, made him cautious, and restrained his eagerness; while excessive consciousness kept her cheeks dyed with blushes, and her nerves vibrating sweet, wild music, like the strings of some aeolian harp when swept by the ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... afternoon had touched all the air to gold, when the shadows of chestnut and cypress and gnarled olive lay long on the grass, other sounds floated down to Daphne, music from some instrument that she did not know. It was no harp, surely, yet certain clear, ranging notes seemed to come from the sweeping of harp strings; again, it had all the subtle, penetrating melody of the violin. Whatever instrument gave it forth, it drew the girl's heart after it to wander its own way. When it was gay it won her ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood

... the two girls had finished their education and were living in luxury and enjoyment. The days and hours passed merrily by. They would read in the shade, play and sing on the harp, would paint or work at wool, and in the afternoon, when the burning sun had left the world to the shade of evening, they would drive out in a magnificent attelage to ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... Jesus! at thy holy feet I should have lien, sainted with listening; My pulses answering ever, in rhythmic beat, The stroke of each triumphant melody's wing, Creating, as it moved, my being sweet; My soul thy harp, thy word ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... outer compartments of the lowest tier contain doors leading to a platform behind the reredos; between them stands an oak altar, the gift of A. N. Welby Pugin in 1831. Above the altar in the central compartment Jesse lies asleep, on the left hand David plays upon his harp, on the right sits Solomon deeply meditating. Above Jesse we have in one carving an amalgamated representation of the birth of Christ and the visit of the Wise Men. On the left hand sits the Virgin Mary with her Child, fully clothed in a long garment, not ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins

... who can wrestle with wethers ten hours a day (no light task on the muscles) and yet have spirit to dance and play all night. So, at evening, the jacals—the little farms and settlements on the creek—are likely to send forth a contingent bound for the cook-house and a night of it. A harp and an accordion are found, and to the sharply-marked music produced by this combination an impromptu baile forms itself. The swarthy sombreros clutch each other, and hop about, their spurs gleaming and jangling, their pistols sticking out behind like incipient tails; and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... 1766 a life of unceasing activity, which continued. In 1768 he published in London a symphony (in C) for two violins, viola, bass, two oboes, and two horns, and in the same year two military concertos for two oboes, two horns, two trumpets, and two bassoons.[8] He wrote pieces for the harp, glees, "catches," and other songs for the voice. One of these, the Echo Catch, was published and ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden

... was opened a flood of music floated out. A divinely sweet mezzo-soprano voice was singing to the accompaniment of a harp. As the master of the house flung wide the sitting-room door and announced the visitor, the sounds ceased, but the musician sat with her hands resting upon the gilded strings for a moment, her eyes turned in inquiry toward ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... reputedly, a tavern of consequence. There choice spirits met on occasion, and dark souls, like Boyne, planned adventures. Outwardly it was a tavern of the old class, superficially sedate, and called the Harp and Crown. None save a very few conspirators knew how great a part it played in the plan to break the government of Ireland and to ruin England's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... country, which I hated; I was not fitted for managing my land, nor for the public service, nor for literature, nor anything; my neighbours I didn't care for, and books I loathed; as for the mawkish and morbidly sentimental young ladies who shake their curls and feverishly harp on the word "life," I had ceased to have any attraction for them ever since I gave up ranting and gushing; complete solitude I could not face.... I began—what do you suppose?—I began hanging about, visiting my neighbours. As though drunk with self-contempt, I purposely ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... as they traveled they had talked and sung hymns together, like Pilgrim and his friends, and Joe's voice was the loudest and sweetest among them; but now he hanged his harp upon the willows, and could sing the Lord's ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford

... veneration of a city whose history was one of constant devotion to its Kings. In the evening Madame gave a soiree at which the hereditary Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt was present. Rossini was at the piano and sang with his wife and with Balfe; Nadermann played the harp. ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... record his approval of the place. 'It is very pleasant and cheap going thither,' he writes in 1667, 'for a man may go to spend what he will or nothing, as all one. But to hear the nightingale and the birds, and here fiddles and there a harp, and here a Jew's-trump and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising.' Since the Pepys period, however, the gardens had fallen into disrepute; had indeed been closed during many seasons. Mr. Tyers took the place in hand, bent upon ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... tells a similar story of Anlaf, a Danish king, who, he says, just before the battle of Brunanburh, in Northumberland, entered the camp of king Athelstan as a gleeman, harp in hand; and so pleased was the English king that he gave him gold. Anlaf would not keep the gold, but ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... Howe had seen what the steam-engine might do for his native province, and in 1835 he had advocated, in a series of articles in the Nova Scotian, a railway from Halifax to Windsor. Judge Haliburton was an early convert; and in 1837 he makes 'Sam Slick' harp again and again on the necessity of railways. 'A railroad from Halifax to the Bay of Fundy' is the burden of many of Sam's conversations, and its advantages are urged in his most racy dialect. But the world laughed at Haliburton's jokes and neglected his wisdom. Though in 1844 the ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... each evening gathered around the cottage, the shadow over my life seemed to deepen and grow more gloomy. Outside the door I could hear the hum of the bees as they flew homeward, the wind-harp played in the yellow pines its softest, sweetest music, and I scented the odor of honeysuckles and roses far away. The rushing of the waters over the stones in the creek tinkled dreamily, but ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson

... the thought of leaving Saxony on another visit to Bohemia, and especially Prague, had had quite a romantic attraction for me. The foreign nationality, the broken German of the people, the peculiar headgear of the women, the native wines, the harp-girls and musicians, and finally, the ever present signs of Catholicism, its numerous chapels and shrines, all produced on me a strangely exhilarating impression. This was probably due to my craze for everything theatrical and spectacular, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... words. And both of them were beginning to assume other forms besides the religious. Facts having like implications might be cited from the histories of later times and peoples; as the practices of our own early minstrels, who sang to the harp heroic narratives versified by themselves to music of their own composition: thus uniting the now separate offices of poet, composer, vocalist, and instrumentalist. But, without further illustration, the common origin and gradual differentiation of Dancing, Poetry, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... sitting on the Culpepper veranda the next night but one, said: "Colonel, your harness-maker friend is a musical artist. The other night when I came in I heard him twanging his lute—'The Harp that once through ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with his dew On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat Were now raging to ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... climbing woods,—woods that crept into the bosom of the hills, the closely growing trees tipped with tender greens melting into the softest of indeterminate greys as the breeze rippled through their tops like fingers across a harp. The darker line of moorland in the background, scant as ever of herbiage, had yet lost its menacing bareness and seemed touched with the faint colour of the earth beneath, almost pink in the generous sunshine. The avenue into which he presently ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... discipline of conventual life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings of the nerves are once thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord sometimes utterly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... the gathering gloom. Her words haunted me. A strange feeling came over me. A voice within me cried: "Do not play to-night. Study! study! Perhaps in the full fruition of your genius your music, like the warm western wind to the harp, may bring life ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa

... lesser men—never without the same kind of comfort that one returning from the presence feels when he doffs respectful attitude and dress of ceremony, and subsides into old coat, familiar arm-chair, and slippers. After long-continued organ-music, the jangle of the jews-harp is felt as an exquisite relief. With the volumes on the special shelf I have spoken of, I am quite at home, and I feel somehow as if they were at home with me. And as to-day the trees bend to the blast, and the rain comes in dashes against my window, and as I have nothing ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... There is not a moment in your life that is not charged with the significance of memory. You cannot hear the blackbird singing in the low bough in the evening without the secret music of summer eves long past being stirred within you. It is that response of the inner harp of memory that gives the song its beauty. And so everything we do and see and hear is touched with a thousand influences which we cannot catalogue, but which constitute our veritable selves. An old hymn tune, or an old song, a turn of phrase, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... accepted the situation with trust, and felt responsibility shifted on to "Mister Jan's" shoulders with infinite relief. He was very wise and knew everything and loved the truth. It is desirable to harp and harp upon this ever-recurring thought: the artist's grand love for truth; because all channels of Joan's mind flowed into this lake. His sincerity begat absolute trust. And, as John Barren and his ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... material part of music may be compared to the body in which man's spirit is housed. It is the vehicle which conveys the message of music from soul to soul through the medium of the human ear with its matchless harp of nerve-fibres and its splendid sounding-board, ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... Temple of Apollo, habited like a Bride in Garments as white as Snow. She wore a Garland of Myrtle on her Head, and carried in her Hand the little Musical Instrument of her own Invention. After having sung an Hymn to Apollo, she hung up her Garland on one Side of his Altar, and her Harp on the other. She then tuck'd up her Vestments, like a Spartan Virgin, and amidst thousands of Spectators, who were anxious for her Safety, and offered up Vows for her Deliverance, [marched[1]] directly forwards to the utmost Summit of the Promontory, where after having repeated a ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... foreground of Berenice's affairs, Mrs. Carter was foolish enough to harp on the matter in a friendly, ingratiating way. Braxmar was really interesting after his fashion. He was young, tall, muscular, and handsome, a graceful dancer; but, better yet, he represented in his moods lineage, social ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... the City is full of splendour, And a voice in my soul breaks into song. Yes, a passionate love, as fair as tender, Creeps out of the grave where it slept so long. As the strings of a harp by winds are shaken, To endless music my heart is stirred, When my name is breathed and my hand is taken, Though I cannot ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... return from following after you, for where you pray there will I pray, where you worship there will I worship. Your Church shall be my Church, your people shall be my people and your God my God. By the waters of Babylon am I to sit down and weep and leave thee, O my Church! and hang my harp upon the trees that grow therein? No. One thing have I desired of the Lord that I will require even that I may dwell in the House of the Lord and to visit His temple. More to be desired of me, O my Church, than gold, yea than fine gold, sweeter ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... of the banquet, the minstrel strung his ancient harp, and soon the company tripped lightly on the oaken floor, till the rafters rang with the merry sounds of their midnight revelry. For three days and nights the hunt and the feast continued, and as, at last, the revelries drew to a close, still four dark chieftains remained in the inner chamber ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... duodecimos; some of which were carefully preserved in Russia or morocco backs, with water-tabby silk linings, and other appropriate embellishments. In the midst of his book-reverie, he heard, on a sudden, the thrilling notes of a harp—which proceeded from the further end of the library!—it being Lorenzo's custom, upon these occasions, to request an old Welch servant to bring his instrument into the library, and renew, if he could, the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... temples, he declared that the man could never fail whose chest was replenished by the gods themselves. When the Delphic priests reported to him that they were afraid to send the treasures which he asked, because the harp of the god emitted a clear sound when they touched it, he returned the reply that they might now send them all the more readily, as the god evidently approved his design. Nevertheless he fondly flattered himself ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... in the course of business, for each family." But, in consideration of the want of silver, I would allow five shillings to each family, which would amount to 2,500l.; and, to help this, I would recommend a currency of all the genuine undefaced harp-halfpence, which are left, of Lord Dartmouth's and Moor's patents under King Charles II.; and the small Patrick and David for farthings. To the rest of the kingdom, I would assign the 7,50l. remaining; reckoning Dublin to answer one-fourth of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... must make all animals feel, and also slaves and boys, but more. It is therefore plain what instruments they should use; thus, they should never be taught to play upon the flute, or any other instrument which requires great skill, as the harp or the like, but on such as will make them good judges of music, or any other instruction: besides, the flute is not a moral instrument, but rather one that will inflame the passions, and is therefore rather to be used when the soul is to be animated than when ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle

... chronology, but all else, out of countenance. It is the marriage of Jesus Christ with Saint Catherine of Sienna. But who marries them? St. Dominic, the patron of the church. Who joins their hands? Why, the Virgin Mary. And to crown the anachronism, King David plays the harp ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various

... Manicamp," replied the young man, in a voice whose tones were as harmonious and sweet as the notes of an Aeolian harp. ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... magnificence of this delicate feast, he had provided vast quantifies of strong beer, flip, rumbo, and burnt brandy, with plenty of Barbadoes water for the ladies; and hired all the fiddles within six miles, which, with the addition of a drum, bagpipe, and Welsh harp, regaled the guests ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... its effect differing with the differing temperaments on which it acts. In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man, warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and, with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed, saturnine, meditative, not indeed dull to the influences of external Nature, but deeming them ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... more generally accomplished never existed; he was a first-rate mechanic, an expert navigator, a great musician, both in theory and practice, and a poet of singular excellence. Of him it was said, and with truth, that he could build a ship and sail it, frame a harp and make it speak, write an ode and set it to music. Yet that saying, eulogistic as it is, is far from expressing all the vast powers and acquirements of Lewis Morris. Though self-taught, he was confessedly ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... George Sand, instead of being engaged with a problem, was like an AEolian harp breathed upon ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne

... for my private amusement, as anecdotes of the times, would have been continually exposed to be examined, and tortured into any meaning that the rage of party might fix upon it; and as to softer subjects, my heart was in distress at the fate of my friends, and my harp ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... in us of the speaking voice. But in writing prose nowadays, while always recollecting that prose has its origin in speech—even as it behoves us to recollect that Homer intoned the Iliad to the harp and Sappho plucked her passion from the lyre—we have to take things as they are. Except Burns, Heine, Beranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will find it hard to compile in all the lyrical poetry of the last 150 ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... doubt that he was very kind to her, introduced her to his wife, and found her a lodging. Better still, he bought her book (we are not told the price), and paid her for it at once. The first purchases that she made with her own earnings were a small Irish harp, which accompanied her thereafter wherever she went, and a black 'mode cloak.' After her return to Ireland, Phillips corresponded with her, and gave her literary advice, which is interesting in ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... was the famous hundred-thousand-dollar harp of Sara, his daughter, that the papers used to talk so much about, you remember?" asked the girl, stirring with her foot a few mournful bits of rubbish that ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... words were written! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once, like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the one playing the harp, you mean? I might have known that! A rare beauty, isn't she? I thought you would ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various

... these regrets. What, is he so soon weary of the marvels with which her love surrounds him? Discontented so soon with being a god? Has he so soon forgotten the old unhappiness? "My minstrel, up! Take your harp! Sing the praise of love, which you celebrate so gloriously that you won the Goddess of Love herself." Tannhaeuser, thus bidden, seizes the harp and warmly entones a hymn of praise to her, which from its climax of ardour, suddenly—as if his lips were tripped by the word "mortal" ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... let thy face brighten with gladness, and thine ear delight in the harp. Dreadful as the storm of thine ocean thou hast poured thy valor forth; thy voice has been like the voice of thousands ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... W. was really very gloomy; in fact it created a sinister, uncomfortable feeling. The walls, which were crumbling away here and there, and which were covered with dark ivy; the round towers, which harbored jackdaws, owls, and hawks; the AEolian harp, which complained and sighed and wept in the wind; the stones in the castle yard, which were overgrown with grass; the cloisters, in which every footstep re-echoed; the great ancestral portraits which hung on the walls, coated as it were with dark, mysterious veils by the centuries ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... was dancing to merry music, in others flowed ale and beer, and in others yet again sweet cakes and barley sugar were sold; and sport was going outside the booths also, where some minstrel sang ballads of the olden time, playing a second upon the harp, or where the wrestlers struggled with one another within the sawdust ring, but the people gathered most of all around a raised platform where ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... into a tall and charming maiden. She learned to read and write, and to play on the harp. She could even speak a little French, which was the fashionable language of the Court in those days. So that with these accomplishments she was considered a fine lady, far above the village children, who ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt

... the nightingale—of the geranium blazing in scarlet beauty,—till, on approaching the place of promise, he caught a glance of the maid he loved—and, lo! she sate there in the sunlight, absorbed in thought; a book was on her knee, and at her feet lay the harp whose chords had been for his ear ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... Hairbrained sencerba. Harem haremo. Haricot-bean fazeolo. Harlequin arlekeno. Harm malutili. Harm malutilo. Harmonica harmoniko. Harmonious harmonia. Harmonize harmoniigi. Harmony harmonio. Harness jungi. Harness jungajxo. Harp harpo. Harpoon harpuno. Harpy harpio. Harrier leporhundo. Harrow (to rake) erpi. Harrow erpilo. Harsh (rough) maldolcxa. Harsh (severe) severega. Harsh (of voice) rauxka. Hart cervo. Harvest (crop) rikolto. Harvest-time ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... "but all true at the same time. There was a mess-mate of mine in the 'Roscommon' who never paid car-hire in his life. 'Head or harp, Paddy!' he would cry. 'Two tenpennies or nothing.' 'Harp, for the honor of ould Ireland!' was the invariable response, and my friend was equally sure to make head come uppermost; and, upon my soul, they seem to know the trick ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... which is one of the characteristics of his countrymen—susceptibility to immediate impulse—susceptibility to fleeting impressions. It was a key to many mysteries in his character when he owned his subjection to the influence of music, and in music recognised not the seraph's harp, but the siren's song. If you could have permanently fixed Victor de Mauleon in one of the good moments of his life—even now—some moment of exquisite kindness—of superb generosity—of dauntless courage—you would have secured a very rare specimen ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... "let purvey a fair vessel, well victualled," and sent him to Ireland to be healed. There the Irish King's daughter, La Beale Isoud, "the fairest maid and lady in the world," nursed him back to health, while Sir Tristram "learned her to harp." ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... this wholesale slander of the female mind. When a little girl she has been paralyzed with the thought of her inferiority. All through her youth it has been a dead weight on her mental activity. Through her life it has ever muffled the harp of her heart and weighed down the wings of her aspirations. It has been an incubus of discouragement in all intellectual pursuits. How could woman be any thing with the whole world against her? with even those she loved best, and in ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver

... even in point of speed, say, between the Cape and Australia, when, in running her easting down with a living gale on her quarter, she spurned the foam from her streaming sides to the tune of a steady fourteen to fifteen knots in an hour; 'snoring along,' as seamen say, with all her cordage taut as harp-strings, and her clouds of canvas soaring heavenward tier on tier, strained to the extreme limit of the ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... have built the city, They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand; And built it to the music ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... and elegance; plays the harp and piano with skill and taste; is a thorough artiste in drawing and painting; and is, moreover, very handsome—though beauty, I admit, is an attribute which in a governess might ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... a lot of fun? Only it wouldn't seem empty by the time we had put up a lot of flags and bunting and goldenrod and balsam branches. That long drawing-room of yours, with crash on the floor—and a harp and violins behind a screen—and Chinese lanterns all over the rooms and on the porch and ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond

... having been once accomplished, little time is required to keep in tune this harp of the soul; while the broader culture and the higher realization of all meanings that can be expressed are constantly sought in such discipline of the mind itself as shall secure the activity of its highest powers. The whole aim is to secure the development of character by the ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick

... that I may go unto the altar of God, even unto the God of my joy and gladness: and upon the harp will I give thanks unto thee, ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England

... one hundred common totems used in our streets today. Among the familiar ones seen are the American eagle, with white head and tail, the Austrian eagle with two heads, the British lion, the Irish harp, the French fleur de lis, etc. Among trades the three balls of the pawnbroker, the golden fleece of the dry-goods man, the mortar and pestle of the druggist, and others are well known. Examples of these and others are given in the illustration ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... "You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold. You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a year do you, if you had not begun by winning ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... stirred As by a mourner's sigh; and, on yon cloud, That floats so still and placidly through heaven, The spirits of the Seasons seem to stand— Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form, And Winter, with his aged locks—and breathe In mournful cadences, that come abroad Like the far wind harp's wild and touching wail, A melancholy dirge o'er the dead year, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... how, when her prow broke through the waves, the sailors could see white-faced Nereids dance and beckon, and of how she bore within her hold many heroes dedicated to a great quest. It was the first time Catullus had heard the magic tale of the Golden Fleece and in his mother's harp-like voice it had brought him his first desire for strange lands and the wide, grey spaces of distant seas. Then he had felt his mother's arm tighten around him and something in her voice made his throat ache, as she went ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... caressing; with the double-bass, full-bodied, solid and dark as the old bitters. If one wished to form a quintet, one could even add a fifth instrument with the vibrant taste, the silvery detached and shrill note of dry cumin imitating the harp. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... sole power of ministering to popular wants. Nothing which could strike the mind through the senses was neglected. They offset tournaments by religious shows and pageantry, rivalled the attractions of the harp by sacred music, and to wean their flocks from the half dramatic entertainments of the minstrels, they invented the Miracle Play and the Mystery. The church forced herself on the attention of every man without doors or within, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... to steal, Unthanked, away, to weep beside the harp, Dejected, prayerful, while the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and their life renew, Suspended just to pleasure you Who brought against their will together These objects, and, while day lasts, weave Around them such a magic tether That dumb they look: your harp, believe, With all the sensitive tight strings Which dare not speak, now to itself 170 Breathes slumberously, as if some elf Went in and out the chords, his wings Make murmur wheresoe'er they graze, As an angel may, between the maze Of midnight ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning

... next day I called; and on the third Asked them if I might go,—but no one heard. Then, sick with longing, I arose at last And went unto my father,—in that vast Chamber wherein he for so many years Has sat, surrounded by his charts and spheres. "Father," I said, "Father, I cannot play The harp that thou didst give me, and all day I sit in idleness, while to and fro About me thy serene, grave servants go; And I am weary of my lonely ease. Better a perilous journey overseas Away from thee, than this, the life I lead, To sit all day in the sunshine like a weed That ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... heavy snows of a recent winter, a child harper trudged wearily down the Fifth avenue, on his way to the Five Points, where he was to pass the night. It was intensely cold, and the little fellow's strength was so exhausted by fatigue and the bleak night wind that he staggered under the weight of his harp. At length he sat down on the steps of a splendid mansion to rest himself. The house was brilliantly lighted, and he looked around timidly as he seated himself, expecting the usual command to move off. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... the trees and throwing them to the village children as they sauntered at the orchard gate—whose graver joys consisted in revelling in every poet that her mother permitted her to read, or making her harp resound with wild, sweet melody—whose laugh was still so unchecked and gay—that such a being could think of love, of that fervid and engrossing passion, which can turn the playful girl into a thinking woman, ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar

... blue with the flag of the UK in the upper hoist-side quadrant and the Montserratian coat of arms centered in the outer half of the flag; the coat of arms features a woman standing beside a yellow harp with her ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... despatch myself; And long ere this I [74] should have done the deed, Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair. Have not I made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander's love and Oenon's death? And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then, or basely despair? I am resolv'd; Faustus shall not repent.— Come, Mephistophilis, let us dispute again, And reason of divine astrology. Speak, are there many spheres above the moon? Are all celestial bodies but one ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe

... with him all the time, and he let it out that the old fellow's about ready to tune up his eternal harp." ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... far journey; only an afternoon's drive through the woods and by the river, in an April, long ago; Miss Betty's harp carefully strapped behind the great lumbering carriage, her guitar on the front seat, half-buried under a mound of bouquets and oddly shaped little bundles, farewell gifts of her comrades and the good Sisters. In her left hand she clutched a small lace handkerchief, with which she ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... have these words in your mouth, 'be honest.' Now, as, between ourselves, I do not think that either you or I are leading very honest lives, allow me to ask you why you continually harp upon honesty when we are alone? I can easily understand the propriety of shamming a ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... there was a composer named Stradella, and that he was an opera composer to the Venetian Republic, as well as a frequent singer upon the stage to his own harp accompaniments. He occupies a position in musical history of some importance. The following story of his adventures is no more improbable than many a story we read in the daily newspapers—and surely no one could question the credibility of the daily newspapers. But here is the story as ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes

... animal preservation which interest me most are: The rapid decline in numbers of harp seals which we Northern people can get for our boots and clothing. This food and clothing supply, formerly readily obtainable all along the Labrador, helped greatly to maintain in comfort our scattered population. It is scarcely ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... my sighs; the music of my harp contents me not; neither does any milk please me, it is this that brings me into ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy

... as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... sitting here in solitude listening to the music of one of Nature's mighty harp-strings. Her grand symphonies peal forth through the endless ages of the universe, now in the tumultuous whirl of busy life, now in the stiffening coldness of death, as in Chopin's Funeral March; and we—we are the minute, invisible vibrations of the strings in this ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... the North American savijis of Utah, led my wide circle of friends and creditors to think that I had bid adoo to earthly things and was a angel playin' on a golden harp. Hents my ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne

... "Carol, Brothers, Carol," is to be sung behind the curtains, just before they are drawn for the second picture. A harp, violin, and triangle would assist the piano in making an orchestral effect. A solo voice supplies the closing air, "My Ain Countree." The piano may be played very softly whenever the reader pauses and the tableaux ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg

... Andrews hotel, or a long men's dinner, where everybody but yourself is a member of an Amateur Dramatic Society." The present writer is not far from agreeing with B, while he has for A a respect which disguises no shadow of a sneer. Crebillon does harp far too much on one string, and that one of no pure tone: and even the individual handlings of the subject are chargeable throughout his work with longueurs, in the greater part of it with sheer tedium. It is very curious, and for us of the greatest importance, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... sale at a cent each. They were political in nature, often in verse, insulting in treatment, and mixed with a crass obscenity at which the dismal multitude laughed bestially. Three musicians, one with a rude harp, a boy striking a triangle steel, sang mournful dirges similar to those of Andalusia. The peons listened to both music and reading motionless, with expressionless faces, with never a "move on" from the policeman, who seemed ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... my harp, and my wreath, and my halo, and my hymn-book, and my palm branch—I lack everything that a body naturally ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain

... the ladder and straight on. He lies between those two cloth bales." Ephraim Savage looked up with a smile playing about the corners of his grim mouth. The wind was whistling now in the rigging, and the stays of the mast were humming like two harp strings. Amos Green lounged beside the French sergeant who guarded the end of the rope ladder, while Tomlinson, the mate, stood with a bucket of water in his hand exchanging remarks in very bad French with the crew of ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... convey to us the sensations of the sunshine and the dancing brine. One of the blank-verse pieces of Men and Women rebukes a youthful poet of the transcendental school whose ambition is to set forth "stark-naked thought" in poetry. Why take the harp to his breast "only to speak dry words across the strings"? Better hollo abstract ideas through the six-foot Alpine horn of prose. Boys may desire the interpretation into bare ideas of those thronging objects which obsess their senses and their feelings; men need art for the delight of it, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... was turning of keys, and creaking of locks, As he took forth a bait from his iron box. Many the cunning sportsman tried, Many he flung with a frown aside; A minstrel's harp, and a miser's chest, A hermit's cowl, and a baron's crest, Jewels of lustre, robes of price, Tomes of heresy, loaded dice, And golden cups of the brightest wine That ever was pressed from the Burgundy vine. There was a perfume ...
— English Satires • Various

... adorations in man; . . . when our young women shall ask themselves for any serious reason why they should all, with one accord, devote themselves to the piano instead of to the flute, the violin, the hautboy, the harp, the viola, the violoncello, the horn instruments which pertain to women fully as much as to men, and some of which actually belong by nature to those supple, tactile, delicate, firm, passionate, and ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... but she'd been at Bob to get this scroll-work done and fitted that the King might see it. I made him the picture, in an hour, all of a heat after supper—one great heaving play of dolphins and a Neptune or so reining in webby-footed sea-horses, and Arion with his harp high atop of them. It was twenty-three foot long, and maybe ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling

... universe is, he says, the expression of the divine desire for holy sport and play. The Heart of God enjoys this myriad play of created beings, all tuned as the infinite strings of a harp for contributing to one mighty harmony, and all together uttering and voicing the infinite variety of the divine purpose. Each differentiated spirit or light or property or atom of creation has a part to play in the infinite sport or game or harmony, "so that in God there might be a holy ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones



Words linked to "Harp" :   chordophone, free-reed instrument, pick off, aeolian lyre, ingeminate, music, restate, iterate, support, tweak, pull off, reiterate, lyre, retell, repeat, play, pluck



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